Dying for Dinner

by Miranda Bliss

  And did he come to a bad end out there?

  When I asked, at least Norman had the decency to look embarrassed.

  He told us that he worked in a tiny bar far from the neon lights of the Strip, and as a way to make a little extra cash on the side, he rigged a couple of the countertop slot machines.

  MaryAnn the waitress was right. Norman ’s story did not have a happy ending. He was caught and did jail time for his crime, eighteen months to be exact.

  When he got out…

  Well, Norman didn’t make any apologies, and though I may have expected a few, I guess I could understand. It was hard for a guy with a record to find a decent job, so Norman did the only thing that was logical. At least in his mind.

  He became Bill Boxley. And Fred Gardner. And all the other people I’d found IDs for. And he’d run a series of scams along the east coast and the west, until that fateful day when the cooking skill he’d learned at the Nevada State Prison led him to the opportunity to own his own gourmet shop.

  “The rest…” Norman filled our wineglasses-again. “Like they say, the rest is history. I always liked cooking, and when the idea hit that I could own my own shop, well, I decided that would be like heaven on earth. I’ve established a great business, and I love doing what I’m doing. Très Bonne Cuisine is my life. This is where I belong. I’ve given up the scams… well, except for the Vavoom! I started an honest business and I want nothing more than to keep it going. I even thought about turning over a whole new leaf and letting the world know who I really am.” He shook his head, dismissing the thought just the way he must have when it first occurred to him. “How can I? Would you shop here if you knew I was a con? Would anybody pay the least attention to a guy who learned to cook in prison?”

  We’d been seated around the table for hours, and Norman got up and stretched. “I’ve never been happier,” he said. “Until-”

  “Until somebody walked in here and blew Greg away.” Even the taste of the expensive wine Norman poured couldn’t sweeten my words.

  Norman shivered. “Just thinking about it makes me sick,” he said. “I swear, I don’t know what the guy wanted. He just walked in-”

  “You saw him come into the shop?” Wine or no wine, late hour or not, I’d waited a long time to ask him these questions, and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass. “Did you recognize the man?”

  “I never got a good look at his face.” The gesture Norman made reminded me of the old Monsieur Lavoie nonchalance. Except that now, Norman didn’t look nearly as debonair as he did confused. “Tall. Dark jacket. Jeans. That’s pretty much all I could see from the back office.” This time his shrug was all about despair. “I can’t really describe him. I wouldn’t recognize him again if he walked in here right now and asked to sit down.”

  “Then how did you know he was looking for you?”

  While I asked the questions, Jim pulled out the same notepad that had been in his pocket earlier that evening (I guess technically it was the evening before now that it was Friday morning). Norman talked, and Jim took notes.

  “I was loading the car. You know, I was supposed to take stuff over to Bellywasher’s. The steel-clad roaster and the ice cream maker and…” As much as he loved food and the expensive cookware he sold to prepare it, Norman shrugged it all off as inconsequential in the face of what had happened. “I was going in and out and I heard Greg talking to someone, but hey, that’s not unusual, is it? The shop was open late that night and whatever the guy wanted, I knew Greg would take care of everything. He always did. He was-” Norman ’s voice got thick and he coughed away his emotion. “Greg was a nice guy. I hate that this happened to him. If I would have been braver. Or smarter. If I realized sooner that something was wrong-”

  “When did you realize something was wrong?”

  I could tell Norman had been avoiding thinking about the whole thing, that’s how pale and shaken he was. I couldn’t blame him. All the more reason we had to talk about it.

  “What did he say?” I asked. “The guy Greg was waiting on, how did you know he was really looking for you?”

  “I heard him…” Norman swallowed hard. “I heard the man raise his voice. He said, ‘It’s payback time, Norman.’ ”

  Twelve

  “IT’S PAYBACK TIME, NORMAN.”

  Ignoring the confused looks on Jim’s and Norman’s faces, I drummed my fingers against the table and mumbled the words. “Don’t you get it?” I said, looking from one of them to the other. “It’s a clue.”

  “Well, it’s how I knew the guy was looking for me, that’s for sure.” Now that it was morning and we didn’t need the lights, we’d opened the door that led into the main room of the cooking school. A stream of mellow sunshine poked into the room where we’d spent the night. Norman stepped through the sunlight to retrieve the waffles he’d just made. He put them down in front of us, and added a scoop of fresh strawberries and a dollop of whipped cream.

  Something told me they didn’t eat like this back at the Nevada State Prison.

  Norman sat down and cut into his own stack of waffles. “As soon as I heard him say that, I knew the guy was mixed up, that he thought Greg was me. I was in the back office and I was just about to step out front and tell him he had the wrong guy, but…” In spite of the sweetened whipped cream, Norman ’s expression soured. “That’s when I heard the first gunshot. After that, I didn’t know what to do. I guess I panicked. Instead of going out front, I called the cops.”

  “That’s exactly what you should have done.” I gave him a sympathetic smile because I could tell the memory was painful for Norman. Rather than risk losing him to it, I made sure to keep our discussion on track.

  “The killer did think Greg was you,” I said. “But not the you you are. The you you were.” That didn’t make any sense. Not even to me. I licked whipped cream from my lips and tried again. “You and Greg didn’t look anything at all alike now. But we noticed the resemblance between the young you and Greg in the pictures we found of you in the William Allen High yearbook.”

  The look on Norman ’s face told me he was anxious to hear more of an explanation, but rather than get side-tracked, I put a hand on his arm to stop him.

  “You see what this means, right?” I asked. “The killer is probably someone who knew you years ago. Or at least someone who’s seen pictures of you from back then. He did what we did when we looked at your graduation picture. We tried to imagine what the kid in the photograph would look like with a few years and a few added pounds. So when he walked into the shop and saw Greg-”

  “He thought it was me.” Norman interrupted me. Which was just fine by me. It gave me a chance to take another bite of waffle. His expression fell and he set down his fork. “What a lousy way to die. Poor Greg. He didn’t even know what the guy was talking about. He didn’t know I was Norman. Nobody did. So why kill him? Why kill me? I mean, that’s what the guy thought he was doing, right? He thought he was killing me.” His pleading look pivoted between Jim and me. Which would have been just fine-if we had any answers.

  The way it was, we sat in silence for a long while, eating our waffles and sipping the coffee Norman had brewed with just a touch of chicory. After a while, his shoulders rose and fell.

  “I know I haven’t given you guys much reason to trust me,” Norman said. “I’m sorry for that. When I started this whole crazy Jacques Lavoie thing, I never thought I’d have friends who were so wonderful that I’d feel guilty for lying to them. But I do. I have you two, and Eve, and everyone over at Bellywasher’s. Believe me when I say I thought of telling you all the truth a thousand times. I just never got up the nerve. And I loved the whole eccentric French chef thing.” He gave us that Pepé Le Pew laugh, only this time it didn’t sound as jolly as it did downright phony. I wondered how I’d never noticed before. “I loved being in the limelight, having all the D.C. foodies beating a path to my door. Now…” He sat back and raised his chin.

  “I want you to know that I’m sor
ry you had to learn the truth this way, and from now on, I’m going to be one hundred percent aboveboard with you. All of you. Always. I swear…” He raised his right hand like he would have done if he were in court. “I swear I never did anything to anyone that would make them want to kill me. I’m not a violent man. Never have been. The only thing I ever did was take some people’s money. And never a whole lot of it, either. Why would somebody want to kill me for that?”

  I interrupted him because I didn’t know if Norman knew this part of the story. “But he didn’t want to kill you. The murderer just wanted to make you talk. That’s why he shot Greg in the foot. He thought Greg was you, and he thought if he hurt him badly enough, Greg would tell him whatever it was he wanted to know. Only Greg didn’t know, of course, because Greg didn’t have any idea what the killer was talking about. And after he shot Greg-”

  “He saw me.” Norman ’s complexion was ashen. “I heard the shots and I was so startled, I knocked against something back in the office. That was the first the guy knew there was somebody else in the store. That’s when I really got scared. I took off for the back door. But not before the guy got a look at me. I saw his face. Just for a moment. And I’ve got to tell you, there was such a funny expression on it, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the guy was thinking. But now I get it. That was the first he realized he’d shot the wrong man.”

  “And that’s when you knew your life was still in danger.” It was the first thing Jim had said in a while and I looked his way to find him deep in thought, his brows low over his eyes and his jaw firm. “It’s no wonder you’ve been keeping yourself out of sight. He’s still out there. And if he finds you-”

  “That’s not going to happen.” I thought it important to point this out, mostly because I could see that the very idea was making Norman green around the gills. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” I said, not because we were, but because if I kept the conversation on our investigation, Norman wouldn’t have to think about the vicious killer who was still out there somewhere looking for him. “What we really need to concentrate on is who the guy is, and what he wants.”

  Norman didn’t look sure. “I keep wondering how he knew. I mean, about Très Bonne Cuisine. If the killer wasn’t even sure who Greg was or what I look like, how did he know to come to Très Bonne Cuisine?”

  I didn’t have the answer and I didn’t pretend I did. “What’s even more important,” I said, “was what he was trying to find out. He said, ‘It’s payback time, Norman.’ That means he thought you owed him something. Even more important-”

  “I don’t.” It was Norman ’s turn to interrupt. “I don’t have any outstanding debts. Nothing that would cause someone to come looking for me with a gun, anyway.”

  “But it’s not a debt you have now. Don’t you see?” As if it might help, I set down my fork so I could concentrate on explaining things as clearly as possible. “The guy didn’t know you as Jacques or Bill or Fred or by any of your other identities. He said Norman. He knew you back when you were the real you. And that means-”

  “It might have something to do with one of the scams you ran back in the days when you were Norman.” This came from Jim, and he so succinctly said what I’d been beating around the bush to explain, I could have kissed him. If I didn’t have a mouth full of waffle. “This bloke, he must have had a grudge for a very long time.”

  “And we’re back to square one.” So that we could set the table for our breakfast, I’d taken the list of scams Norman had written out earlier and put it over near the sink. I retrieved it and put it on the table in front of Norman, then handed him the pen.

  “Go ahead,” I instructed him. “Put a check mark next to the scams you ran back when you were Norman.”

  WHAT WITH THE SURPRISE OF FINDING MONSIEUR (I was having a hard time getting used to thinking of him as Norman), the double surprise of Jim showing up at the shop, and the wine and the waffles and the stories we exchanged and the theories we tossed back and forth, we were all pretty exhausted by the time eight o’clock rolled around. Rather than beating our brains and wasting our time, we decided to meet again later that afternoon at Jim’s, before the dinner hour at Belly-washer’s.

  We smuggled Monsieur… er, I mean, Norman… out of the shop wrapped in an oversized shawl Eve had once left there and wearing the straw gardening hat I kept in the backseat of my car on the off chance that one of these days, I might actually have a garden to wear it in. It was still early and most of the retail shops on the street weren’t open yet. As far as we could see, the coast was clear; there was no one watching us or Très Bonne Cuisine. But even though he was confident they wouldn’t be followed, Jim was no dummy. He drove the roundabout way to his house in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, bustled Norman inside, and settled him in the guest room with the miniblinds closed.

  I had other plans. I made a call, and even before I told him he deserved his very own superhero outfit, Raymond agreed to forgo his Friday beauty nap and work the shop for me that day. And me? I went home and took a nice, long nap. Between that and a shower, I was rarin’ to go by the time I got to Jim’s for our powwow.

  I, too, took the long way to Clarendon and maybe Norman’s paranoia was getting to me, because in case someone was watching me, I offered to park a couple of blocks from Jim’s house and walk the rest of the way. (Yes, I was imagining myself slipping in and out of the shadows in a very detectivelike way.)

  Jim would have none of that. His place is on a too-close-to-seedy-for-comfort street, and he insisted I park in the driveway. He met me even before I got to the front door.

  And I’m not complaining or anything. I mean, being welcomed to Jim’s with a hug and a kiss was just about the best way I could think of to end twenty-four hours full of shocks and revelations. But what Jim didn’t know was that usually when I get to his place, I take my time walking up the front steps and across the porch to his door.

  Time to confess: I have some fantasies when it comes to Jim.

  OK, that’s not much of a confession. Anyone who knows me knows I’m nuts about Jim.

  Truth is, though, I’ve also got some fantasies about his house, too.

  Not that it’s my kind of place. It’s got too much gingerbread outside and, thanks to the old lady who sold it to him for a song, too many rooms inside papered in too many floral prints. His front porch is a riot of potted plants. Most of them are herbs he uses at the restaurant and I can understand the appeal. Really. But I always have to control the urge to straighten and sweep and get rid of maybe just a few of those overflowing pots. Just to make things a little more orderly.

  Even with all that, I usually let my mind wander as I make my way up the front walk, and in those wanderings, I wonder what it would be like if the place was mine. Mine and Jim’s.

  Back in the day when I first met Jim, the very thought sent terror up my spine. I mean, the one man I’d sworn to love and cherish had gone and done me wrong, and after the disaster that was my marriage, I wasn’t about to jump into another relationship where there was the teeniest chance of me getting my heart smashed (again) in a couple million pieces.

  But that, as they say, is ancient history. And Jim isn’t Peter.

  It took a couple months for that truth to finally settle in, but now that it had, I was at peace with it. In fact, I liked imagining how Jim and I would spend our days together. And our nights.

  “You’re flushed.” Jim touched a hand to my cheek. “You feeling all right?”

  Since Norman was waiting inside and we had a mystery to solve, I thought it best not to confess what I was really thinking. At least not right then and there. Instead, I followed Jim into the house. It wasn’t until after the front door was closed and locked behind us that Norman stepped out of the kitchen. Now that he’d slept in a real bed for the first time in a couple weeks and had a hot shower and lunch, he looked like a new man.

  At least as new as any French chef could look now that he was just an ordinary guy
dressed in a pair of Jim’s flannel lounge pants (rolled at the hem) and a green and white soccer jersey that was way tighter around the middle than it was when Jim wore it.

  Just to be sure we were safe, Jim checked the doors and windows-again-before we gathered around the table in the dining room with its fire engine red walls.

  “So?” The look I gave Norman was expectant. “You were going to think about the scams you ran when you were Norman. Have you come up with anything that might help us figure out who’s after you?”

  Honestly, I was hoping for something a little more definitive than a shrug, but when he glanced at the written list on the table (I’d been bold enough to title it Norman Scams), a shrug was all I got from Norman. That and: “I’m drawing a blank. Honest, Annie, I’ve tried. I’ve spent all day thinking about it, and as far as I can remember, there isn’t a person in the world who hates me enough to want to shoot me. There isn’t anything at all I’ve ever done to anyone that would make them want to force me to talk. Talk? About what?”

  “What do people ever want other people to talk about?” I was hoping for more, and I’m afraid my tone betrayed my disappointment. “Sex? Money? Secrets? Any of this ringing a bell?”

  Another shrug from Norman. “Sorry to tell you, my love life has never been exciting enough for someone to want to hurt me because of it. Sure, I’ve had a few flings in my day, and a couple girlfriends here and there. Almost married one of them back when I was Fred Gardner. But hey, she was a real lady.” The way Norman ’s eyes sparkled when he talked about her, I was sure she was. “A woman like that doesn’t hold a grudge because a guy walked out on her. At least not for too long. And I hear she ended up doing pretty good for herself, anyway. She married an orthodontist and they’ve got five great kids.”

  “Then what about secrets?” Jim had gone into the kitchen and he pushed through the door, a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of muffins in the other. I tried my best to stay out of Jim’s and everyone else’s kitchens, but just before the door swung closed, I saw a glimpse of the avocado green appliances and turquoise countertops that he swore he was going to swap out for something a little more twenty-first century one day soon.