The Gourmet Girl Mysteries, Volume 1

by Jessica Conant-Park

  I found Hannah outside the police station and turned up “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor,” as though it were quite possibly my most favorite song ever. I pulled up in front of Josh’s ex and cooly waved to her. She must have been looking around for Josh’s bright yellow Xterra and took no notice of me. I kept waving, and Hannah kept ignoring me. I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from her, double-parked in front of a pissed-off driver in a monstrous Durango, but Hannah stood oblivious to my increasingly wild gestures. I rolled down the window.

  “Hannah!” I yelled above the music.

  Turkey Burger Girl finally walked to my car, bent down, and peered through the window as though I were some tourist asking for directions. “Oh. Chloe, it’s you. Is Josh coming?”

  Yeah, Josh was coming, and we’d taken separate cars to pick up this fool.

  “No, he’s at work. Do you want a ride or not?”

  Hannah looked around, as if to make sure nobody saw her getting into a car with me, and reluctantly opened the door. I slowly and dramatically gathered Josh’s CDs off the seat saying, “Here, let me get these out of your way.” She showed no sign of recognizing me as the coolest girlfriend in the entire world, sat down, and promptly turned off the music. “Do you have any coffee?” she demanded.

  “The coffee machine in the car is out of order today,” I said dryly.

  “Do you at least have a tissue?” Without waiting for a response, she opened the glove compartment and unleashed a flood of my hidden CDs. I hurriedly grabbed them off her lap and cast them into the backseat. Goddamn Heather and her stupid birthday gifts. Who wanted a remix of Jennifer Lopez’s greatest hits? The sound of that woman’s voice made my ears bleed, and now Hannah Banana thought I spent my time singing along to musical catastrophes.

  “No,” I said trying to control my blushing, “I don’t have any tissues.” Not that Hannah seemed to need one. She was pretty composed, especially by comparison with the way she’d sounded on the phone.

  “What took you so long? I need to go to the Whole Foods near my apartment, okay?”

  Clearly an order, not a question. She was testing my professionalism, I decided. I’d need to watch myself, especially if I wanted to hear the details of her night at the station. I was itching to learn what Detective Hurley knew about her that I didn’t.

  “Which store do you want to go to? I don’t know where your apartment is.” I was driving aimlessly around and now almost turned the wrong way onto a one-way street.

  “I go to the Whole Foods on Westland. Right by Symphony Hall. Turn here.” Hannah gestured left, visibly smug that she got to tell a Boston resident where to go. “Oliver and Barry put me up in a condo off Boylston Street.” More smugness oozed from her pores; condos around Boylston Street didn’t run cheap. Gone was the hysterical Hannah of the phone call, and back was the Hannah I’d met last night, bossy and superior.

  “So, what did the police ask you about?” I was hoping, of course, that she’d say something terribly incriminating. “Are you officially a suspect?” She was at the gallery last night and did work for Oliver, after all. Besides, she was a horrible person. And my competition. With any luck, she’d soon be arrested, convicted, and locked up for the rest of her life!

  “They wanted to know all about the Full Moon Group, how long I’ve been working for them, what kind of employers they are, stuff like that. I said I didn’t really care what kind of people they are. They pay me well, and that’s what I’m interested in. Barry and Oliver didn’t always get along, but I stayed out of their problems. I was there to do a job. Oliver runs … well, ran,” she corrected herself, “a tight, moneymaking business. He was practical, knew what made money, and he wanted to keep on doing what brought it in. That’s where I came in. I was keeping them on track and pushing ahead with what had been working for them. You should go into one of their clubs and see how packed they are.”

  Careful to voice no opinion, I said, “I have.”

  “Barry, on the other hand, is so full of himself and his grandiose ideas about fancy food and art and culture. He’s always going on about wanting them to open a fine-dining, ritzy restaurant. I mean, come on! That’s not what the Full Moon Group does. They’ve got highly successful clubs, and they make a killing. Why would they mess with that? And, actually, I don’t think Barry does want to mess with it, considering how much money he and Sarka spend.”

  “Do you know anything about Oliver’s wife? Dora?” I asked, figuring now that I had Hannah talking, I should get what I could out of her.

  “Oh, that stupid woman. Like I told the detective, Oliver and Dora fought all the time. She is a self-entitled bitch, and I don’t blame Oliver for being fed up with her. Basically, her role in life is to be a pain in the ass and spend lots of money.”

  “So why was Hurley so interested in you?”

  Hannah practically harrumphed at me. “Because I work for them, Chloe. I have insight into who might have wanted Oliver dead. And his business partners, obviously.”

  “So was Barry being questioned last night, too?” I wondered aloud. I didn’t get an answer. By waiting for one, I almost missed the turn into Whole Foods.

  “Here! On your right!” ordered Hannah, irritated that I was not performing my chauffeur duties adequately.

  I parked in the lot and trailed into the store behind Hannah. She grabbed a shopping cart and headed into the produce section. I caught up with her as she pulled a folded piece of paper from her purse. She whipped her perfect hair around to look at me. “Josh is cooking for me this week, just so you know. He wrote me out a list of what to buy. He’s not sure what night yet because he’s so busy with the new restaurant, but he’s got it all planned out.”

  I reached out and snatched the paper from her hand. Shit, she wasn’t kidding. I saw Josh’s familiar writing on the back of a harassment flyer. Right there on the back of one of my flyers was a list of ingredients and directions in his chef slang:

  Chkn., bone in

  bunch leeks, rough chop

  mixed root veg. (pot., swt. pot., parsnip, etc.), lg. chop

  1 lg. onion, rough chop

  mixed frsh. herb, rough chop (oreg., thyme, etc.)

  Looking up from the list, I was at first ready to rough chop Hannah, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about good food. How could Josh be cooking for her? I refused to make a scene. The best thing to do when faced with bad behavior was to be a class act, right?

  “Wonderful!” I proclaimed, forcing a huge smile. “Let me help you gather all these items for your romantic dinner!” I reached next to me and started grabbing red bliss potatoes and hurling them into the cart without bothering to put them in a bag. I yanked the shopping cart from Hannah’s hands and pulled it ahead ten feet. “Look at these beautiful root vegetables! And butternut squash!” I tossed five in. “How about some rutabaga? Or parsnips?” I didn’t wait for an answer and added eight of each to the growing mountain of ingredients. At the rate I was going, there’d be enough to feed a battalion of old girlfriends. I added twelve gigantic onions to the mound and reached in to mix the whole mess up. “There. Are. Your. Mixed. Root. Vegetables!” I hollered, garnering stares from the shoppers around us. “Follow me! You’ll need fresh herbs! Lots of them!” I was just plain old shouting now.

  So much for my class act.

  Hannah at least had enough sense to keep her mouth shut during my tirade and said nothing when we got to the checkout, where she paid $86.29 for her supposed dinner for two. The four overpriced organic chickens I’d insisted on hadn’t helped with cost control.

  I leaned in to the checkout person and whispered conspiratorially, “She’s having a romantic dinner with an old boyfriend. Keep your fingers crossed!”

  Hannah watched me like I’d completely lost it. Granted, I had lost it, but for good reason, and once the crazies had kicked in, there was no stopping them. For the sake of my mental health, Detective Hurley should’ve placed Hannah in solitary confinement for the duration of her miserabl
e life.

  As we walked silently back to the car, with Hannah carrying all the bags, I tried to regroup. I was acting as badly as Hannah. I racked my brain to come up with a smooth social work way to handle this situation and heard snippets of class lectures whip through my mind. Victim of trauma … resulting defense mechanisms put in place to protect the fragile ego … compassion for troubled client … Hannah’s controlling and obnoxious behavior could be the result of finding herself in an out-of-control situation. I needed to cut her some slack.

  Oh, yes. While making her feel guilty and ashamed.

  I drove to her apartment complex and planned my words.

  “Right here.” Hannah pointed to a posh four-story building surrounded by a wrought-iron gate. I put the car in park.

  “Look, Hannah,” I started, finally calm, “I know you had a horrible night, and I apologize for the way I acted. But how would you feel if your boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend said the things that you’ve said to me? Probably not very good. I haven’t done anything to you that warrants this kind of treatment. It is unacceptable and needs to stop.” There. Simple and to the point. I had set my boundaries and made it clear that they were not to be crossed—just as Naomi had taught me to advise our sexual harassment hotline callers!

  Hannah stared at me, expressionless.

  “So,” I continued with a little less confidence, “I understand that there can be leftover emotions from past relationships, but, um …” Why was she staring at me like that? “You see … Josh … Josh has moved on from the past and is looking forward to the future, you know, with me, and …”

  “You have parsley in your hair,” announced Hannah, reaching out and plucking a green leaf off my head. “Tell Josh to call me.” She collected her bags and slammed the door before strutting up the walkway.

  I was beginning to doubt that running interference between Josh and his ex had been worth the embarrassment. But I had to keep trying: until Oliver’s murder was solved, Hannah would keep trying to persuade Josh to rescue her from supposed police persecution. The ideal solution to the murder would, of course, consist of absolute proof of Hannah’s guilt. But even if someone else turned out to be the murderer, the police would stop questioning Hannah, and she’d lose her excuse for playing on Josh’s sympathy.

  I drove a few blocks and then used my cell phone to call Adrianna, who was the only person capable of preventing me from phoning Josh at work, demanding to know why he’d ever gone out with a psychopath, and threatening that if he actually cooked for her, I’d shred his Gordon Hammersley cookbooks to paper cole slaw with his best knives.

  “Hi, Chloe. I feel like I haven’t talked to you in weeks!” Adrianna said.

  “I know. I missed you. It’s been what? Two days?” I laughed. We usually talked two or three times a day, but between holidays, murder, and Hannah, I’d been busy. I gave Adrianna a detailed account of everything that had gone on last night and this morning, and waited for her advice. With luck, she’d urge me to call in an anonymous tip to the police to pinpoint Hannah as a savage murderer.

  What she said was, “Do nothing.”

  “What? Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said, peeling a corner toward Brighton.

  “Chloe, do not say anything to Josh about this dinner. You’ll just be acting like a jealous girlfriend. Besides, aren’t you and Josh having dinner at your parents’ house tonight? He’s going to be there with you, not with her. So, you have some time.”

  “I wish she would just disappear,” I whined.

  “Do you trust Josh or not?” Adrianna answered for me. “Of course you do. The only thing you have to do is start acting more dignified and block Hannah’s moves. Let her crash and burn on her own. Girls like that always do.”

  “Fine. But I’m going to have to tell him about picking up his ex from the police station.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but he’ll thank you for saving him the hell himself. Based on what he said about her last night, he’s no big fan of Hannah’s. He’s probably mortified that he ever went out with her.”

  I agreed that if I had to see Hannah again, I would restrain myself from lobbing any more vegetables her way.

  “I want to hear more about this murder. I don’t think you know this, but I do Dora Kipper’s hair, so I’ve met Oliver a bunch of times. The Kipper Compound, as I call it, is a monstrous house. Every time I’ve been there, Dora’s had some huge renovation project going on.”

  “Really?” I was surprised, not by the information that Dora kept renovating her house, but by the news that Adrianna did her hair and makeup. Adrianna is a genius at making people look great. Her clients don’t just have fabulous hair and makeup; they have hair and makeup that make the most of their looks. Adrianna obviously hadn’t done the plastic surgery or Botox injections or whatever it was that had given Oliver’s widow, Dora, the ravaged appearance I’d noticed. But Adrianna had a knack for undoing the mistakes of doctors and nature, and I hoped she would talk to Dora about changing her foundation color.

  “Oh, yeah. Huge house, huge attitude. Dora treats me like a servant and acts like she’s some celebrity getting done up for the red carpet. She made me get separate products just for her, so whenever I go there, I have to bring my ‘Dora duffel,’ which is a bag of hair treatments and shit that have her seal of approval. The only reason I put up with her is because she’ll pay me whatever I ask. Truly, they are disgusting people. The classic money-grubbing, shallow couple.”

  “Let me guess. Two kids raised by nannies and cooped up in private schools?”

  “Are you kidding?” Adrianna said. “Dora is too selfish to even consider the possibility of ruining her body or her purse pockets with children. Anything that might intrude on her lifestyle is out.”

  “So far, I haven’t heard anything positive about those two. Not that Oliver deserved to be smashed over the head with a food processor. Listen, I’m going to the store myself now, but why don’t you and Owen come to dinner at my parents’ house tonight? They’d love to see you guys.”

  “We’d love to. If it’s okay with Bethany and Jack. What time?”

  “Sevenish. I’ll let them know you’ll be there. One thing about my parents is that they love company, and they always have twice as much food as we need.”

  “Okay. Are you feeling better now?” Ade asked me.

  “Yeah, I’m just irritated. But I’m going to bake a hazelnut tart for tonight, and that’ll take my mind off this Hannah disaster.”

  I hung up, called my parents, and left a message on their machine to say that Adrianna and Owen would be joining us for dinner. Then I ran into Shaw’s supermarket and picked up what I needed for the tart. I had a limited repertoire of things I knew how to bake, but this hazelnut tart was always delicious, and it was perfect for the winter season. Sweet, rich, gooey, syrupy filling covered the bottom of the piecrust. The chopped hazelnuts rose to the top of the tart and took on a glistening sheen from the sugary ingredients. I’d never made the dessert for Josh but felt confident that it was a surefire way to impress even a chef.

  Cooking for a chef is scary. The week before Christmas, I’d tried on three occasions to make lace cookies. I could swear that I followed all three recipes to the letter, but my globs of dough had never melted into gorgeous, bubbling, lacy disks, and each time I’d had to throw everything in the trash can. Although I know what good food tastes like, I can’t always cook it myself, so when I cooked for Josh, I usually stuck with a few dishes that I trusted myself to make. There is nothing more embarrassing than serving icky food to a chef. Take the time I concocted what I thought was going to be a wonderfully rich and flavorful pasta dish made with tagliatelle, summer squash, zucchini, grape tomatoes, Calamata olives, garlic, onions, heavy cream, a splash of chicken stock, tons of fresh herbs, and Parmesan cheese. The thing had no flavor. None whatsoever. In fact, it had an outright absence of flavor. Josh was completely nice about my failure and even rescued the meal by tossing in a little balsamic vinegar, but
I was still humiliated. Once in a while I came up with a recipe on my own that turned out to be delicious, but it never looked as attractive as Josh’s food did. My reliable consolation when I made an ugly-looking dish was a memory of a Martha Stewart Christmas special that had been on years ago, long before she was sent to Camp Cupcake. Martha and her guest, Julia Child, stood side by side erecting towers of cream puffs to form Christmas-tree-shaped desserts. Martha’s was a two-foot-tall piece of confectionary perfection, and Julia’s was so far beyond lopsided that it threatened to fall over. But Julia Child was Julia Child, and you just knew that even if her cream puffs toppled onto the floor, they’d still taste a million times better than Martha’s. I was no Julia, but I did trust myself with a hazelnut tart.

  I arrived home to find an unfamiliar car parked in my space. Just what I needed. My condo was on the third floor of a house that had been converted into individual units, each of which came with an assigned parking spot in a little paved area next to the building. Since there is practically never any on-street parking available in the neighborhood, I assumed that the strange car belonged to some desperate soul who hoped no one would notice its presence. I parked temporarily in a neighbor’s spot and headed upstairs. I was climbing the steep steps that ran up the back of my building when I ran into Noah. Ick!

  Noah lived on the second floor. I’d made the mistake of having a fling with him last summer, just before I’d met Josh. Cocky, arrogant, slick, and good-looking, Noah had somehow tricked me into thinking he might be worth my time. Our short-lived relationship, if it could even be called that, had ended when I’d discovered that Noah felt the need to share himself with every twenty-something in the greater Boston area. The pig! Today, seated on the landing reading the paper, he was wearing nothing but sweatpants. It was a warm day for December in Boston, but it was not that warm. Any excuse to show off, and he was all over it.