Cajun Kiss of Death

by Ellen Byron

  The question proved rhetorical as she and the Gator Gals launched into a Cajun two-step, and people traded their forks for the dance floor. Despite the mid-February date, the night was hot and humid, and the body heat emitted by the exuberant celebrants ratcheted up the temperature in the restaurant to uncomfortably stuffy. When perspiration dripped into Maggie’s eyes, making them burn, she decided to take a break. She exited into the alley next to the restaurant. Ash Garavant was already there, having a smoke. The two exchanged a casual greeting. “It’s nice of you to help the competition,” Maggie said.

  “There’s always been room for two places to eat in Pelican.” Ash glanced toward Chanson’s Cajun Kitchen. “Whether there’s room for three …”

  “Chanson’s does attract newcomers, which is a good thing. I hope.”

  “If the newcomers decide to try other restaurants in town. If not, somebody’s going out of business. And it better not be my dad.” Ash dropped his butt to the ground and extinguished it with his foot. He picked up the butt, made sure it was out, and placed it in the garbage.

  “Ash, I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You grew up in Ville Platte. Did you know Scooter Pitot?”

  Maggie didn’t expect Ash’s reaction to what she assumed was a simple question. He flushed, clearly taken aback. He began to stammer a response and stopped. Then he recovered. “A little, but not much. We knew some of the same people. Why do you ask?” Ash tried to sound casual but failed.

  It was Maggie’s turn to force a casual response. She had no idea why she’d triggered such an emotional response from Ash, but instinct told her to diffuse the situation. “No reason, really. I’m just kind of fascinated by what an odd guy he is. Ignore me. I’m being a gossip.”

  Her tactic worked. Ash relaxed. “He’s definitely that. Odd.” He checked his watch. “I better go. I told my dad I’d balance the register tonight.”

  Maggie thanked him again for helping, and Ash strode off at a fast clip. Someone’s gonna be doing a whole lotta of digging on the internet tonight, Maggie thought, watching him hurry away, and that someone is me.

  She went back inside. JJ waved her over to where he’d set up the trays of food. He dished out a bowl of fricassee and handed it to her. “Eat up,” he said. “I got plenty. More than I need by far. I was stress cooking.”

  Maggie inhaled the aroma of vegetables, seasonings, and crustaceans. She took a bite—heaven. “JJ, I never thought you could improve on your cooking, but stress may be your new secret ingredient. Kidding! Still, whatever you did here, keep doing it. This fricassee is beyond great.”

  “Thanks, chère. But …” The large man’s face creased with anxiety. He clenched and unclenched the edge of the canvas apron he wore, decorated with the image of a grinning crawfish and the sentence Who’s your crawdaddy? “What if people don’t come back? I been closed a while. Locals could find other eats in the parish. And visitors may rather go to Chanson’s place.”

  “We won’t let that happen.” She motioned to the volunteers taking a spin on the dance floor or relaxing at tables, eating and chatting. “The locals will come—if not on their own, then every one of us here will call in the favors we need to fill the place the first week. After that, the food’ll bring them back. Trust me on this. And we can put together a campaign to attract the tourists. I’ll design an ad and you can run a coupon in the Penny Clipper. I’ll tell you one person who owes me plenty of favors—Little Earlie—so I’ll make sure that coupon’s a freebie. And—”

  Junie’s front door opened. A hipster in his early thirties stepped into the restaurant. “Hey,” he greeted them. He glanced around. “Are y’all serving?”

  “Yes,” Maggie quickly said, before JJ could respond otherwise. He shot her a quizzical glance. “We’re having a small reopening party. Come on in.”

  “Awesome.” The man turned and called behind him, “They’re serving.”

  A half dozen fellow hipsters of assorted sexes followed him inside. “You said you had made too much food,” Maggie muttered to JJ under her breath. “Here’s a chance to impress some newcomers.”

  JJ gave a slight nod, then slapped on his sunniest smile. He held up his hands in a welcoming gesture. “Welcome to Junie’s Oyster Bar and Dance Hall. We may be sans oysters thanks to the shortage, but we are never sans fun and fabulous food. Magnolia, will you help my new friends while I change into something more festive?”

  “It’d be my pleasure.” Maggie watched with fondness as JJ sashayed into his office to don one of the showy caftans he always kept on hand. She led the visitors to the buffet table. They took plates and filled them with hefty servings of JJ’s dishes. “This is great,” a young woman with a nose ring and hair dyed half pink and half black said. “We’re starving. We came up from New Orleans to try Chanson’s, but they had to close the place.”

  Maggie stopped in the middle of spooning shrimp étouffée onto the woman’s plate. “Really? That’s strange. Why?”

  “Whole staff got food poisoning or something.” The woman took a bite of shrimp. “Oh, this rocks.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Maggie, distracted, with a perfunctory smile and nod.

  She continued to serve the guests, but her mind was elsewhere. An entire kitchen staff incapacitated? Maggie found it hard to believe this could be written off as an accidental case of food poisoning. Someone wanted to cripple the restaurant. But who? And why?

  Chapter 21

  Maggie had assumed Bo never showed to the Junie’s let’s-put-on-a-restaurant show because he was helping Xander with homework. Now she assumed otherwise.

  She checked Find My Friend on her cell and saw her husband was at St. Pierre Parish Medical Center. Rather than disturb him with a call, Maggie texted what she’d learned from the customer about the Chanson staff being laid out by food poisoning. Bo responded with a phone call. She stepped into the alley for privacy. “You heard right,” he said. “I’m at the hospital now, seeing if anyone’s well enough to talk to me. A couple of employees didn’t get hit with throwing up and a case of the Fais Do Gotta Go’s, but they’re looking after their sick coworkers. I’m waiting on them.”

  “You don’t think it was an accident.”

  “Nope. The staff ate a different meal from what they served to the guests. The kitchen cooked up a big batch of chicken and seafood pastalaya for the employees.” Despite her full stomach, Maggie’s mouth watered at the mere mention of her favorite Cajun meal, a twist on jambalaya with pasta substituting for rice. “Officers from the State Police Toxicology Unit commandeered the pot of leftovers and trashed pastayala to run tests on. I gotta go. I see the guys who didn’t get nailed by this.”

  “Who?” Maggie couldn’t resist asking.

  “Trick Costello and Luis Alvaro. Costello wasn’t around for dinner. He was in the city.”

  “Right,” Maggie said, recalling her conversation with Kate. “What about Luis?”

  “He says he didn’t eat the dish because he’s gluten-free. He had a sandwich. With gluten-free bread.”

  Maggie heard the skepticism in her husband’s voice but wasn’t sure if it was inspired by Luis’s purported alibi or Bo’s general disdain, as a man with an iron stomach, for people claiming food sensitivities. “I’ll see you at home,” she said. “Eventually.”

  Bo snorted. “Don’t wait up.”

  The call over, Maggie went back inside Junie’s, where she found a festive atmosphere. More Chanson’s patrons had found their way there, some enjoying a meal, others twirling and two-stepping on the dance floor. JJ, who had changed into a black silk caftan decorated with red sequined hearts, was in his element. He stood behind the bar shaking a cocktail shaker in time with Gaynell’s upbeat tune. Maggie approached. “Here you go, chère,” he said to a woman in her forties with a high blond ponytail, clad in purple leggings and purple sheepskin knee-high boots. “One Ragin’ Cajun Martini, heavy on the Ragin’.” The woman walked away with her drink. J
J, beaming, clapped his hands together. “Thoughts and prayers to the Chanson staff, but dang, this is a great sign for my li’l eatery.”

  Another customer approached the bar, earning JJ’s attention. Maggie watched her friend joke and entertain him. She’d realized something that deeply pained her, something she doubted had occurred to JJ yet. Unless he had an alibi, the ebullient restauranter had just painted himself as a prime suspect in the Chanson poisoning debacle.

  * * *

  Once home, Maggie fixed herself a cup of tea, sat down at her antique secretary desk, and opened her laptop. She shot off emails to her cousin Lia and a few friends to jog their memories about Ash and ask if anyone knew Scooter. Then she searched the Pelican Penny Clipper’s archives for a story about Ash’s arrest for assault. Knowing the publication’s bend toward the salacious, she was sure they’d covered it. The search quickly proved her right. She opened the article, housed between coupons for the local Laundromat and car wash, and read it. Her eyes widened when she hit one particular sentence. She reread the sentence, then began a new search, hunting for confirmation from another source. She found what she was looking for in a short report of the incident buried deep inside an issue of the Advocate, Baton Rouge’s leading newspaper.

  Maggie heard the downstairs door open, then the sound of Bo tromping up the stairs. She met him on the landing. “I found something interesting.”

  “Hello to you too. Gimme a minute. It’s pouring outside.”

  Bo shed his jacket. He shook the water off, hung it to dry on the landing’s coatrack, and came inside the apartment. Maggie gave him a towel to dry his hair, then took his hand and led him to her laptop. He pulled up a dining room chair and gazed at the laptop screen. “Here.” Maggie highlighted a line in the Advocate article. “This is about Ash’s arrest for assault. Guess who he assaulted? And who assaulted him back?”

  Bo squinted as he read the line. His face registered surprise. “Scooter Pitot. Huh. I don’t remember seeing any of this in the notes from the sheriff’s interview with Ash Garavant. But they were focused on recent events, and he’s not high up on the list of suspects.”

  “I emailed some friends to see if anyone remembers anything about Ash or Scooter from the past. Let me check my inbox and see if anyone got back to me.” Maggie tabbed to her email and scanned the messages. “Ah, here’s something from my friend Annette. She was the token popular girl and knew everyone. Especially the boys.” She read Annette’s response to Bo. “ ‘OMG, I haven’t heard either of those names in a bazillion years! Scooter went to St. Francis with Ash, the super-quiet guy you dated. Total bad boy. And totally hot! They hung together until Scooter got expelled for selling pot. Not sure where he ended up. Why?’ ”

  Bo leaned back in his chair and considered Annette’s email. “So, Ash has a history with Scooter, who has a history with prison.”

  “Scooter must have been expelled before I dated Ash; otherwise I’d have recognized him.”

  Bo leaned forward. “I need to access a database.”

  “Let me write back to Annette first. She’s a big gossip. She’ll be all over me until I respond.” Maggie typed a reply: No reason. Ash back working with his dad. Met Scooter in town. We need to get together!

  Bo nodded his approval. “Good boring answer.” Maggie traded seats with Bo so he could use her laptop. “The fact these two lunks have a history tells me they didn’t get into a fight over road rage. That was a cover story.” He tapped on the keys. “I’m accessing a confidential law enforcement database. Cover your eyes.” Maggie covered her eyes. “I’m in. You can open them.”

  Maggie blinked her eyes open. “What are you looking up?”

  “Deets on Scooter’s rap sheet. I want to compare dates to the dustup with Ash.” Bo perused the document on the screen. “Hmmm …”

  “Hmmm what?”

  “The arrest that sent Scooter to prison happened a few weeks after the ‘road rage’ incident. He tried holding up the Ville Platte Park ’n Shop. The cashier was able to trigger a silent alarm, and VPD nabbed Pitot. He was convicted of armed robbery. Only got out a few years ago.” Pensive, Bo rested an elbow on the desk and his chin on his fist. “Your friend painted Scooter as a bad boy and Ash as his sidekick. Maybe Ash was supposed to be his accomplice in the robbery and got cold feet. Let me look something else up.” Bo’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “Here we go. The arrest record for the road rage incident. Let’s see … Route 22. Pickup truck chasing older-model sedan … assault. A couple of eyewitnesses to the fight.”

  “Scooter drives a pickup,” Maggie said. “A beat-up one that looks pretty old. What if Ash told him he wanted out? They get into an argument, Ash jumps in his car and takes off, Scooter follows. They get into a fight but then lie to the police about what caused it.” Maggie sat up straight as something occurred to her. “You know what, I remember stopping off at Abel’s place during a visit home from college and asking about Ash and being surprised when Abel said he’d gone up north for college and planned to stay there. Ash didn’t seem the kind of kid who would do that. He was a huge LSU fan. You know, the kind who spells the word go in Go Tigers, g-e-a-u-x.”

  “Sounds like someone who wanted to put a lot of distance between himself and Pelican.”

  Bo pushed back from the desk. He stifled a yawn and rubbed his eyes. Maggie felt a pang for not giving him a moment to unwind from the Chanson calamity. “I’m sorry, cher. I haven’t even asked about your night.”

  He quirked the corner of his mouth in a tired half smile. “The good news is everyone will be fine, some faster than others. The restaurant will be open for lunch tomorrow, which is a big relief to Kate Chanson, who was way more hysterical about that than the condition of her employees. Luis, the guy in charge of cold stuff—”

  “The garde-manger,” Maggie said, a little impressed with herself for knowing this.

  “Whatever. He’s moving up to executive chef while the others recover. They’re bringing in waitstaff from the city.”

  “Phew. I was afraid I’d be asked to waitress again.”

  “Which your husband would have had a big old problem with. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and I have plans for us.” Bo favored his wife with a sexy smile. He checked the time in the right-hand corner of the laptop screen. “And it’s almost midnight, so they start … right …” The number dissolved into twelve AM. “Now.” He placed an index finger under Maggie’s chin and gently lifted her lips to his.

  * * *

  Maggie and Bo agreed to put recent events aside and focus on celebrating their first Valentine’s Day as a couple. Maggie tried but couldn’t get past her fear that her stalker might be planning an unpleasant surprise. First thing in the morning, Bo scoured the B and B grounds for any sign of the interloper. “All clear,” he told his wife, who breathed a sigh of relief.

  Maggie challenged herself to up her breakfast game and succeeded by creating a meal featuring cane syrup–drenched heart-shaped pancakes she made using a mold borrowed from the Crozat kitchen, where the romantic dish was de rigueur for honeymooning guests.

  “Time for gifts,” she told her husband. They moved into the living room. She handed him a flat rectangular package wrapped in red tissue paper. Bo ripped off the paper and opened the box. He extracted a canvas. “Wow,” was all he could say as he admired it. Maggie had found a new way to artistically express the relationship between Bo and Xander. She’d painted Bo in black and white, half in silhouette, a hand on his son’s shoulder as he gazed down at the boy, who was curled up in the living room chair reading a book. Maggie had rendered Xander in vivid, bright colors. “He’s your talisman,” she said.

  “It’s … wow. Chère, I don’t what to say.” He admired the painting again. Then he rose and exchanged a heartfelt kiss with Maggie. “My gift isn’t anywhere near as good,” he said, embarrassed. “It’s, um, a couples massage at the spa.”

  Maggie laughed and wrapped her arms around Bo’s waist. “First art lessons with Vi, n
ow that? Husband o’ mine, you are the best gift giver ever. I can’t think of anything I’d like better than a long, relaxing massage.”

  Relaxing proved the word of the day. Both Maggie and Bo were lulled to sleep by the nimble ministrations of the talented masseuse and masseur tending to them. After completing their massages, they ran into Gran and Lee in the spa lobby, emerging from their own couple’s massage. “My first massage ever,” Lee announced. “All I gotta say is, where’s the time machine that’d take me back eighty years so I could book one of these every Valentine’s Day?”

  “I told you so,” Gran said, who’d dressed for the holiday in black slacks and a purposely kitschy sweater decorated with embroidered hearts and chubby cupids.

  Lee checked his watch. “I gotta go. I need all of you to be at the ferry landing in half an hour.” He wagged a finger at Gran. “Especially you, Mrs. Bertrand.”

  “My goodness, listen to you ordering me around like that.” Gran said it with a hint of delight.

  Lee gave his wife a wink and headed off. “We’re going to Junie’s for JJ’s special grand-reopening Valentine’s Day luncheon,” Gran said. “Would you like to join us?”

  “Normally, we’d jump at it,” Bo said, “but I’m taking Maggie down to New Orleans. We’re gonna spend the night there.”

  “What a wonderful idea.” Gran threw Maggie a sympathetic look. She’d immediately understood the impetus behind Bo’s plan: remove his wife from anywhere her stalker might be.

  “But we’ll make sure to stop at the ferry landing on our way out of town,” Maggie said, summoning a smile to counteract the conversation’s somber undercurrent. “It sounds like Lee has something special planned.”

  “It does indeed,” Gran said. “He’s been dropping hints that alternately excite and terrify me.”