A Deadly Feast

by Lucy Burdette

  “Thanks, but on Fridays, Mr. Renhart insists on meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and watching reruns of Columbo on the telly. He’s gotten too old and set in his ways to deviate.”

  Did she sound wistful, or was it more like resignation? I wondered what she’d been like as a young woman, and whether she might at some point have been happier without her husband. Some people’s marriages seemed to be such a bad fit that they’d be easy to end, while others might turn sour so slowly you would hardly notice you were no longer happy. Gloomy thoughts for two nights before my own wedding.

  I gave her a little hug and kissed Schnootie on the head before trotting up the finger to our boat. Miss Gloria had already gone to bed, but she’d left the living room light on. I poured myself an inch of white wine and went out to the porch to sit with the cats. A Rolling Stones lick floated through the night air … Pleased to meet you … and Mrs. Renhart’s wind chimes pealed a chorus.

  I couldn’t keep my mind from circling back to Nathan’s mysterious case. I felt intensely curious. Why wouldn’t he tell me more? The answer wasn’t obvious like the time last winter when he’d been in charge of security for the Havana/Key West event and its many major celebrities. As far as I knew, there was nothing coming up in the next week in Key West, no special events aside from the Thanksgiving Hog’s Breath 5K Hog Trot and our own wedding. The more secretive he acted, the more curious I got. And that was something we could probably both work on—he could tell me a little more and I could be a little less nosy.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Contrary to popular opinion, pumpkin pie-lovers are adventurous, quizzical, good in bed and voluminously communicative.

  —Kate Lebo, in “Gemma Wilson’s Eat Your Words,” City Arts Magazine, October 24, 2013

  I rose early the next morning to finish work on the pumpkin pies. I had made the dough for the crust two days earlier, cutting butter and cream cheese into the flour, moistening it, and refrigerating the lumps to be rolled out later. I let the dough warm slowly on the counter while I drank coffee and flicked through my email. Thinking about the events of the week, I rolled out the crust, then folded the pie dough in half, dropped it into the glass pans, and fluted the edges.

  While the pie shells prebaked, I whipped up the filling, which included my top-secret ingredients—maple syrup, extra vanilla, and chai spice. I had made this recipe dozens of times before, so I could let my mind wander. While the beaters hummed in the background, potential opening sentences for my article on culinary trends circled through my head. When the crusts were ready, I poured the filling into them and slid the pans into the oven.

  An hour later, I pulled the two pies out of the oven and left them cooling on the stovetop. The filling had come out a rich orange, puffed up beautifully by the whipped eggs, with only the slightest cracks. Not like the year when I’d taken the pies out too early and the pumpkin filling had collapsed into wrinkles resembling an old man’s neck. This time the crusts had turned out golden and perfect, too. Hearing Miss Gloria stir in her room, I slid two ginger scones into the oven to warm and made another pot of coffee.

  Miss Gloria and I were enjoying the scones with lots of butter and coffee out on the deck when the house phone rang. I dashed in to pick it up and recognized the UNKNOWN as likely coming from the Stock Island jail. I accepted the collect call from my roommate’s jail pal, Odom, and apologized again for hanging up on him the last time.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “Not everyone can be as kind and openhearted as your roommate.” Which felt like a slap in my face that I probably deserved. I brought the phone outside and handed it over to Miss Gloria.

  “Good morning, Odom,” she said. “Happy Thanksgiving. Hayley is here with me; do you mind if I put you on speaker phone?”

  His voice piped out of the phone. “Sure. I heard another bit of news,” he said, “and wanted to pass it along.” The volume of his voice dropped lower as though he might be worried about who else was listening. “It seems that some kind of smuggling ring has moved into town.”

  This didn’t really surprise me, because with all the water around us, the Coast Guard was often intercepting shipments of illegal drugs and sometimes immigrants.

  “Is it drugs?” Miss Gloria asked. “I’ll never forget the day my Frank and I went out puttering on the reef in his little motorboat and came back with a bale of marijuana onboard.”

  We all laughed, imagining the two older folks figuring out what to do with their discovery.

  “That’s always possible in this town,” Odom said. “It’s easy enough for boats to land and things to get unloaded before anyone is the wiser.”

  “What about human trafficking?” Miss Gloria asked.

  “It could be that also,” Odom said, practically whispering now. “Apparently the Joint Interagency Task Force is involved, along with the local cops and the sheriff’s office. So in other words, it’s a big deal.”

  I knew I shouldn’t get annoyed at the lack of specificity, but I could feel the anxiety gathering in my chest. After all, he was in prison and should not be expected to have much decent news from the outside.

  “Maybe you heard something more about my friend’s food tour and that awful death?” I asked.

  “Not exactly.” He paused for a minute. “But I might have heard something that’s more to do with you and your detective.”

  My heart sank with a clunk I could almost hear.

  “A man he put away ten years ago up in Miami has escaped from the Florida penitentiary.”

  “What was he put away for?” Miss Gloria asked.

  “He committed a vicious streak of home invasions and robberies that ended in a big chase all the way to Islamorada. I wasn’t in the courtroom, of course, but word has it he threatened the detective that he’d come after him first chance he got.”

  “How could they let a man like that go?” I asked. “Why would they allow a hardened criminal who hurt so many people back on the streets? Where is he now?” I was beginning to feel frantic, out of control, terrified for Nathan.

  “I can’t answer that,” Odom said. “Remember what I said, they didn’t let him go. He escaped. Besides, one thing I’ve learned in here is don’t count on fairness. Sometimes the worst criminals figure a way to get out, and the little guys who didn’t do much get trapped inside.”

  In the background I could hear voices complaining that his time was up.

  “Thank you for letting me know,” I said.

  My anxiety shot even higher as Miss Gloria ended the call and went inside to replace the phone in its cradle. Surely Nathan knew about this? Surely they were protecting him? How could I check? I convinced myself it would be best to delay worrying, put it out of my mind for the moment and ask him later at Thanksgiving dinner. He would already know about this and I’d insist that he tell me. Though he’d be furious to learn that an inmate of the Stock Island jail was phoning Miss Gloria on a regular basis. Really, did I have to say that? Maybe it wasn’t my news to tell.

  I couldn’t help myself, I picked up my open laptop and surfed to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office website, where I found the list of current inmates. The charges were terrifying: “manslaughter,” “domestic battery by strangulation,” “murder dangerous depraved with premeditation,” “cause bodily harm,” “use of two way communication device to facilitate felony,” “possession of a controlled substance without prescription,” “convicted felon failure to register.” From there I found a link to the Florida Department of Corrections and navigated to inmate escape information, aka the “Absconder/Fugitive” information list. There were, horrifyingly enough, 420 of them. However, I couldn’t go any further without a name. And studying the crimes and the names was a sure path to crazy.

  For the second time in so many days, my phone buzzed with Analise’s number popping up on the screen.

  “What’s up?” I asked, my heart pounding a little harder, anticipating more bad news. Because, honestly, she would text with the good stuff.<
br />
  “Did you see the front page of the Citizen this morning?” she asked. And then barreled on without waiting for me to answer. “They found a body in the dumpster behind the Buoys’ Club.”

  “A body? My god, who was it?”

  “They’re saying his name is Marcel Chaudoir. But they’ve posted a photo and I swear it’s the guy from my tour—Marcel Cohen. And how many Marcels could be visiting Key West?”

  Her voice trailed off. “At least they can’t say it was food poisoning that killed him. Because how would he have put himself into the trash? And why?” Her voice choked up. “Sorry. That’s gallows humor, I know, but this has been the worst week ever.”

  “Let me read the article and I’ll call you back.”

  After hanging up with my friend, I went inside and grabbed the newspaper from the coffee table in the living room where Miss Gloria had been relaxing earlier. On the first page, sure enough, was a story about a man who had been found dead in the dumpster, presumed murdered. My stomach skidded as I realized the grisly discovery must have happened last night, around the time I’d been cruising by looking for Nathan. That explained the police presence I’d noticed.

  As Analise had told me, the newspaper identified the deceased as Marcel Chaudoir. And his photo looked quite a bit like the man I’d met on her food tour, though less scruffy. Police department sources mentioned that all leads were being followed, and that if anyone had information about the death, they should call. The last line mentioned that the victim’s wife had died several days earlier, possibly due to a hemorrhagic stroke.

  Before I could think too hard about it, I called Audrey’s sister. She might be able to explain the discrepancy in names, and she surely would have been informed about Marcel’s death.

  “Yes, I saw his mug in the paper,” she said as soon as she answered. “And no, I did not kill him.”

  Which honestly, I hadn’t considered, though it made a little bit of sense, as bitter as she had sounded. “Why are they calling him Marcel Chaudoir? Do you have any idea?”

  “Marcel Chaudoir was a made-up name,” she said. “He probably still had it on his driver’s license, though he changed it back to Cohen after he failed to make a go of his restaurant. That was years ago. Audrey said he once knew a man with that name and he’d always loved it, fancied it would help him become the French chef he wished he was. So she changed hers too. Audrey and Marcel Cohen became Audrey and Marcel Chaudoir.” She pronounced his name with a faux-French flourish.

  “He owned a restaurant?” I asked. This made it seem like he’d been a bigger deal in the foodie world than what she’d implied last time.

  “French fusion or some such nonsense. We ate there once when I went out to visit Audrey. The food was downright weird and there wasn’t much of it. Not for those prices. I literally left hungry.”

  “Is his family coming into town, or do you have to handle all this?” I asked.

  “I’ll have as little to do with it as your cops will allow,” she said.

  I thanked her and hung up. Both members of one couple dying on vacation struck me as way too bizarre to be coincidence. What could have happened this time? On the one hand, if Marcel had been frequenting the Buoys’ Club, he might easily have consumed too much liquor and ended up in a drunken brawl out in the parking lot.

  This was not unheard of in our town. Perhaps the police would find that the brawl was related to a fight over one of the dancers. Or possibly something else, something bigger, like drug deals or something worse—maybe even related to the gossip we’d heard from Odom. I had no idea what really went on in a place like that, aside from the dancing girls and drinking. But considering that Nathan had been staking out the establishment this week—and that he’d warned me to stay far away—it must have been something big.

  Whoever killed Marcel could not have thought things through. Tossing a body in the trash did not seem like a reliable way to dispose of it if you were trying to keep the death a secret.

  I Googled the new name, Marcel Chaudoir, adding “Chef” at the last minute.

  The first item to come up was a story written by a food critic before Marcel’s restaurant failed.

  Enter Marcel Chaudoir’s new restaurant, Sur Ma Table, and you realize at once, perusing the menu, that you may be in the presence of culinary genius. Stay long enough, and you also might notice that enough people have told him he’s a genius that it’s gone to his head.

  As this reviewer works, she tries to go to dinner without pre-established opinions. That means no reading reviews online, no listening to friends who say you must try the duck pate en croute or the beurre braised baby mushrooms and veal or even grandmother’s yellow cake with caramel icing that you need a small hammer to break into.

  But I tried them all, plus half a dozen other dishes split among my dining companions, and we all agreed here was a chef who worked on a plane higher than most restaurants could imagine. There were a few glitches—the tension of the wait staff was palpable. They crept around like dogs who’d been beaten. The hostess was wound tighter than a proverbial top. But most critical, we all suffered serious gastrointestinal distress later that night and into the next morning. One of our party ended up in the hospital.

  I adored the premise of this restaurant, which promised a meal at the chef’s table inside the kitchen for every diner. I adored every dish that we tried, sauf the pistachio-crusted sweetbreads. And I could have chosen to blame our problem on a theoretical bad clam. But my mission is to be transparent, and that means calling out the problems in the places I visit as well as the culinary masterpieces.

  Then I scanned the history of this critic and was very interested to learn that she’d been active recently in writing about the #MeToo movement for chefs and restaurateurs. She’d be a great get for the article I would be writing after this weekend. Several minutes into her website, I realized that this woman now lived in a fifty-five-plus community in Naples. I couldn’t believe the serendipity—that she was less than a day’s travel away. But I also couldn’t see myself taking the four-hour ferry to Fort Myers and then a taxi to Naples, considering that my family was in town and I was due to cohost a Thanksgiving dinner that might rival Chevy Chase’s vacation movies, and that I was getting married on Friday.

  So I did the next best thing—tracked down her phone number and dialed her up. I explained who I was and how Marcel Chaudoir aka Cohen appeared to have been murdered in Key West.

  “My beat is food, like yours,” I said, after she expressed her shock and horror. “I’d love to write something about who he was in the food world and what happened to all that early promise, a perspective that might otherwise go unmentioned. Do you have time to chat for a few minutes about what you remember about Marcel? I found your review of the dinner after which you and your guests got sick.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear this; what a loss,” she said. “He was a remarkable talent and so entrepreneurial. He had big plans for his restaurant. I do regret that my review might have contributed to taking down his empire. Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake.” She paused and I heard a clattering noise in the background, as if she’d dropped the lid to a pot on a stone counter. “These days, it probably would have come out anyway in Yelp reviews or on OpenTable. But those things were not common even fifteen years ago—people paid attention to what was in the newspapers. And I was a big fish for a while, right after the LA Times and the New York Times.

  “I’m in the middle of preparations for a dinner for twenty. Is it possible that we could continue chatting next week? Meanwhile, I will look through my files and see if I can find any other notes from those days.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But one more quick question before you go?” I didn’t leave her the time to say no. “I realize this was a long time ago, but can you remember anything illegal that Marcel might have been involved with, anything that might have led to this awful result? His murder?”

  “I’d like to take the time to think this over
, but off the top of my head, he was a ruthless man, extremely ambitious. Now whether that would set him up to be murdered, I can’t say. Lots of people are ambitious and they don’t end up dead.”

  “Did you follow his career after your review?”

  She sighed. “A review like that, mixed as it was, was bound to have an effect on business. As I was quick to say in my write-up, his cooking could be brilliant. But to tell the truth, if the food critic and all the people accompanying her get sick as dogs after they eat at a restaurant, would you make reservations? And mind you, the prices were steep for the time.”

  “I don’t suppose I would, not right away, anyway. And as you said, these days you can read online reviews that might refute such a claim, or include a response from the owner explaining the situation. So I might watch and wait for a while.”

  Her comments reminded me of the responsibility I balanced in my job—letting diners in on my opinions while staying mindful of the effects my words could have on a restaurant. “I’ll let you go, but please stay in touch, especially if you remember anything more about him?” I read off my email address and phone number, wondering if she was bothering to write them down.

  Once off the phone, I returned to the kitchen and poured the dregs from the coffee pot into my cup, wishing I had time to zip up to the Cuban Coffee Queen for a real coffee. I tried to think about what I knew. How odd it was that two talented chefs, Martha and Marcel, had ended up in that small space in her industrial kitchen at the very same moment and did not know each other … Was the meeting really coincidental? Key West was a small town on a small island in the end, but that stretched even my powers of suspension of disbelief. I wondered if she could shed any light on the food poisoning incident. Had she ever heard of Marcel before the events of these past few days?

  My mind suddenly flashed like a warning light on Martha. Not that I could picture her killing him and disposing of the body that way, but I believed she had to know more than she’d told me so far. I considered calling her, but decided to swing by the cooking store on the off chance that she’d be there. She’d be more likely to tell me the truth in person. And she had mentioned the other day that she was hosting her own dinner on Thanksgiving but that she’d gotten so spoiled by the store’s kitchen that she preferred to do the prep work there. Eden and Bill had been very kind about letting her work in their space off hours.