Stick a Fork In It

by Robin Allen

  His eyebrows scaled his forehead. “Is that what you think?”

  “I had also allowed that you were in the witness protection program, but that’s seriously cliché and doesn’t seem likely now, seeing as you’re standing here.”

  He eased himself onto a bar stool and looked at me.

  “Well?” I said.

  He took a deep breath. “The night before I left, I got a call from a hospital in Denver. My mother was really sick. I couldn’t get a flight, so I drove all night.”

  “You couldn’t have called me?”

  “After all the calls back and forth with the airlines and the hospital, my cell phone died. I planned to call you when I got there.”

  “That’s your excuse?” I said, suddenly very angry. “A dead cell phone? I called you every day for two months.” The memory of making those calls and hearing the same cheerful voicemail greeting agitated every chamber of my heart. “You fell in love with your mom’s nurse, is that it?”

  He looked away like he always did when he was choosing his words carefully. “You still think you know everything.”

  “Just tell me so we can move on.”

  Drew’s face hardened. “Like you moved on with Jamie Sherwood, what, four months later?”

  “Don’t tell me you expected me to wait around in my wedding gown until you tired of your fling!”

  “Poppy, it wasn’t a fling.”

  “So there’s a Mrs. Drew Cooper. How nice. Are there baby Coopers, too?”

  Drew stood quickly and almost lost his balance. “Let’s talk about this another time.”

  He walked off, a slight limp and the lack of a wedding band the only indications that things had not been entirely perfect for him during his time away.

  My mind began to sizzle and spit as it cooked up choice cuts of should. I should have left the bar as soon as I saw him. I should have told him that Mitch’s forgive-and-forget gene skipped a generation. I should have said yes to Mitch—I would quit my job and manage Markham’s.

  No, not that. I love my job.

  Even though I had no clue what to do about Drew, I knew that his very presence was sure to complicate my already-complicated relationship with Jamie. Even though Ursula turning over this confusing new leaf meant that I had to rethink how to handle her. Even though I hadn’t slept in my own bed for weeks and was instead living in the guest room of two gay men. Even though I had to prove myself to Olive daily. Even after all of those things that I had not asked for and could not control, I could still follow rules, write reports, and keep Austin restaurants safe for the many thousands of diners eating meals away from home.

  And if those people were going to eat the same meals as death row inmates, Capital Punishment would need a food permit.

  x x x

  On the drive south, I kept myself from dwelling on the heat by compartmentalizing the day’s events according to color and size. I started with Ursula and her potential-famous-cookbook-author-induced sugar-and-cream routine with me and then with Trevor, which made me think about Trevor’s drink, then Drew invading my thoughts at the bar and then my space—my life!—about his return to Markham’s, and how I was glad I wasn’t there anymore because I had another job, leading to Troy’s body dangling from a rope like a Salem witch, which brought me full noose back to the Wicked Witch of the Southwest.

  The old Ursula would be too self-involved to give Drew a second thought, but with her new generous spirit, she might take notice of him as a man rather than as simply another person to bend to her will. Those two working together so closely every day and every night…well, it was none of my business what they cooked up.

  I arrived at Capital Punishment grateful to stop thinking about the motives of love and to start looking for a motive for murder.

  x x x

  Everyone responds to difficult situations in their own way, so I don’t understand how someone can say that their friend or family

  member or neighbor or coworker didn’t act normal in the aftermath of a tragedy. Because what defines normal? Movies or television shows that manipulate every bit of emotion out of our jaded hearts? Or news anchors who can narrate a story of child abduction with a somber face and then break into a smile when they announce, “Coming up after the break, a barbershop quartet…with an ice skating giraffe!”

  Todd Sharpe met me at the back door, as he had done the day before. I wouldn’t say he wasn’t acting normal, but he didn’t act as if he had lost his brother and best friend. Which was good, because if he had been gnashing his teeth and carrying around Troy’s old football jersey like a blankie, I would have felt like a jerk as I tried to discover where he landed on the suicide versus accident hypothesis. Or if he had a reason to kill his twin brother.

  “Thanks for coming,” Todd said as we walked into the kitchen. “Sorry about yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  “I can’t believe he’s going to miss the grand opening.”

  That was weird. “Is it still going to be on the eleventh?”

  He frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I thought…let me take a look at the sinks.”

  “You know where they are,” he said. “I’ll be in the office.”

  A three-compartment sink and a mop sink had been installed, so I turned on the hot water faucet. Nothing. Cold faucet. Ditto. Before I concluded that they had trouble paying their utility bills, which would explain the blackout the day before, I looked under the sink and saw the problem.

  Todd wasn’t in the office, so I went to the silver door and looked out into the dining room. Filled with busy construction workers making a lot of noise, it took me a moment to locate him. He stood in the open doorway on the other side of the dining room speaking to someone I couldn’t see.

  With a 100 percent chance of raining tools, I wasn’t about to leave the kitchen without a hard hat, so I went back to the office. There was only one hat on the floor.

  It’s just a hat, I told myself.

  A dead guy’s hat, myself told me.

  I had no choice but to put on Troy’s hat and go out to meet Todd. As I got closer, I saw that he was conferring with Miles Archer. Both of them stopped speaking and stared at me as I walked up.

  “It was the only hat in the office,” I said. “If you have a—”

  “It’s fine,” Todd said. “What about the permit?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  “Now what?”

  “The sinks are in,” Miles said, “just like I told you.”

  “Yes, the sinks are in,” I said, “but the plumbing isn’t hooked up.”

  “My guys were just about to get to that,” Miles said.

  Todd’s eyes had voltage in them when he looked at Miles. “Get it done. Now.” I had started to think of Todd as the nice one, but today he sounded a lot like Troy. “While she’s here.” He looked at me. “Can you wait?”

  “For a little while,” I answered, as if I were doing them a favor. But they were doing me one. I now had more time to investigate Troy’s death.

  twelve

  Miles hurried off, leaving me with Todd. I followed his gaze up to the catwalk. Ribbons of yellow police tape surrounded the area where Troy had gone over.

  Todd sighed.

  I didn’t know what to say, but I had to say something. “Are the police still looking for evidence?”

  He shook his head. “There wasn’t much to find.”

  “Then I think you can take down the tape.”

  When Évariste Bontecou had been killed, the police had put tape around parts of the crime scene at Markham’s and taken pictures of little plastic numbered triangles next to evidence. They were finished within twenty-four hours and said it was up to us whether we left the tape up.

  “
It’s kind of fitting in this place, don’t you think?” Todd looked past me at nothing. “We’ve never done anything like this before.”

  Who was “we”? What had they done? I waited, but he didn’t confess to anything, so I said, “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “We’ve done some impulsive things, sure. But this…” He waved his hand around the dining room. “If only I hadn’t let him talk me into it.”

  “Couldn’t you have stopped it?” I asked. I had no idea what we were talking about.

  Todd grunted. “When he decided to do something, it got done. You joined up and manned up or you got left behind. He wanted us to be marines, and suddenly I was at boot camp. He wanted us to open a restaurant, and I was cosigning a loan. Doesn’t matter we have no idea what we’re doing.”

  “Are those things you wanted to do?”

  “Troy never asked what I wanted,” Todd said. “He always got his way.”

  I didn’t point out that they weren’t Siamese twins and he could have lived his own life. “Did you get kicked out of the marines, too?”

  He grinned. “That Ginger. No, Troy got a medical discharge and made me take early retirement.”

  “I didn’t know Troy well, but I can’t see him taking his own life.”

  Todd tensed. “Never.”

  “But the police—”

  “It was an accident.”

  I was about to ask about Troy’s medical discharge when Miles came up to us, damp and puffing from the effort of walking faster than leisurely. Miles looked down at the floor and put his hands in his jeans pockets.

  “This isn’t the army, Archer,” Todd said. “You don’t have to wait for permission to speak.”

  “My plumber took off.” Miles looked out the double doors toward the back gate, indicating that his plumber had been part of the illegal immigrant panic.

  “Then you do it,” Todd said.

  “Only if he’s licensed,” I said. Checking trade licenses is part of the building inspection, but as I was present and privy to this conversation, and as I didn’t want them to pass my permit inspection quite yet, I mentioned it.

  “Of course he’s licensed,” Todd said.

  “I’m licensed as a general,” Miles said. “I hire the plumbers and electricians.”

  Todd shook out his hands. “Figure something out,” he said, then walked away.

  Which left Miles and me looking up at the yellow tape.

  “It can’t be easy working around that,” I said.

  “Nothing about this job is easy.”

  “Besides spontaneous gurney races holding up construction?”

  He snorted. “One delay after another. And right when I think I have a handle on it, Troy up and changes ever’thing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he decides he wants a second floor right after we break ground so it’d look more like a real prison. Had to draw up new blueprints, order more materials. And all the while he wants to know how come I haven’t started building yet.”

  We both stopped talking as we worked through the irony of Troy requesting the construction of the very thing that would eventually cause his death. That’s what I was thinking about, anyway. Miles could have been thinking about Roger Staubach’s game-winning Hail Mary pass in 1975.

  “What happened with the electricity?” I asked.

  Miles looked at me as if I had asked him the square root of pi, but first he had to figure out what pi was.

  “It was off yesterday,” I said.

  “How’d you know that?”

  It was possible that Miles didn’t know I had been the one to discover Troy, and I wasn’t sure if telling him would help or hurt my investigation. So far, there was no reason he couldn’t be on the suspect list, and I needed to be careful. He would find out eventually, though. “I was here. I found Troy.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “No one was supposed to be here yesterday afternoon.”

  “When did you lose power?”

  “Right after the cops hauled off them protesters.” Miles pointed to the corner. “Thanks to Ol’ Sparky over yonder.”

  I chided myself for not noticing an assembled electric chair in the restaurant, but when I looked where Miles pointed, I saw a mound of black plastic that appeared to be Troy’s deflated stuntman pillow. It could also have been a tarp, which isn’t so unusual at a construction site and therefore not worth special notice. And then I remembered Jamie saying that everything is worth noticing.

  When my thoughts had finished with that, the impact of what he said hit me. “That thing works!”

  “Tripped ever’ breaker when Troy and them plugged it in.”

  I stared at the black blob. Troy hanging from the catwalk was nothing compared to what I could have shined my flashlight on if the chair had worked properly and Troy had been curious.

  “Couldn’t you flip the breakers back on?” I asked.

  “Took out the transformer,” Miles said. “The power company said it’d be a while ’cause of the holiday, so ever’body left. Acourse they got them lights turned on pronto when the police called.”

  “Why was Troy here?”

  Miles looked up. “Besides to do what he done, I couldn’t say.”

  We stood quietly for a moment, then I said, “Where was the dog yesterday?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I saw a German shepherd here earlier today, but not yesterday.”

  “It belongs to one of my suppliers.”

  Todd’s voice boomed through his walkie-talkie, startling both of us. “Archer! Sinks!”

  “’Scuse me, ma’am,” Miles said.

  I ’scused him, then took out my cell phone and walked around the job site until I found a signal—which was, of course, in the middle of the unshaded parking lot—then called Jamie.

  “Do twins commit…twinicide?” I asked.

  “For brothers, it’s fratricide, and it’s not common.”

  “But possible.”

  “Anything is possible,” he said. “You think it’s the brother? Have you come up with a motive?”

  “I haven’t come up with anything except a case of the creeps from wearing Troy’s hard hat…” I just stopped myself from saying “and seeing a working electric chair.” Which I hadn’t actually seen, but still.

  “Hard hat?” he asked, as if I had leaked a clue.

  “It’s a construction site.”

  “Construction site, huh?”

  I could have jostled with Jamie a little longer, but the sun had turned my hard hat into a hothouse and I wanted to get back inside. “The restaurant is under construction, and I have to wear a hard hat while I’m in the dining room.”

  “So…there’s a dining room.”

  “Oops. Don’t know how I let that slip. Please don’t quote me as your source.”

  “What else can you give me?”

  “Nothing. I wish you’d abandon these appeals.”

  “Never,” he said. “Can you meet for lunch?”

  “I’m waiting for them to hook up some plumbing, and I want to look around while no one is paying attention to me.”

  “Please be careful,” he said, dialing up his tone to the serious setting. “If you’re right and Troy was murdered…why don’t you go to the police with your theory?”

  “They can conduct their own investigation. I’ll notify them when I solve the crime.”

  “Martin Short and Annette O’Toole?”

  “Cross My Heart,” I promised.

  x x x

  Access to both metal staircases in the dining room was denied by a chain and a sign that warned Authorized Personnel Only. I figured it was part of the prison décor, and I did have a certain amount of authorization, but
since I was sneaking around, I used the stairwell in the wait station that had no such restriction. If anyone asked, I would say I had come up to inspect the bathrooms. Not that I expected anyone to ask.

  With the office door closed, I assumed that Todd had shut himself inside while he figured out how to play the fourth down without a quarterback. Miles had left through the front doors even though the sinks were in the kitchen. And I hadn’t seen Danny. Was he the only one too rattled by Troy’s death to carry on? Or was he afraid to show his guilty face because he had killed him?

  The stairs let out at the opposite end of the crime scene, but I couldn’t see anything else. A dim light came up from the first floor, which gave the second floor the illusion of being one of Dante’s circles of hell. The seventh circle of violence, perhaps, or the ninth circle of treachery.

  I pulled my flashlight out of my backpack and got my bearings. Bathrooms to my left, elevators ahead on the right, and ringing the catwalk were several individual prison cells, complete with metal bars. I always imagined that real inmates on death row spent their free time behind solid beige doors with little slits for food trays to slide through. But that wouldn’t be easy to service in a restaurant situation, and it really wouldn’t work for claustrophobic diners.

  I walked straight ahead and shined my light into a couple of cells. Each had been furnished with a large round table, a semicircular six-person booth made from shiny black vinyl, and a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Black tar paper covered the small windows I had seen from the outside, which explained the absence of light. All of the cell doors stood open, except for the one closest to the elevator, closest to where Troy went over. That cell held stacks of cinder blocks, bags of cement, masonry tools, and a couple of large brown boxes with dirty shipping labels.

  The crime scene had been taped off-limits in a pie shape from the railing to an orange pylon in the center of the walkway, which took up a lot of floor space. How long did Todd plan to leave that up? As macabre as the very idea of the restaurant was, forcing guests to dine near a memorial shrine to his dead brother increased the grisliness by a factor of about twenty-seven.