Faye’s nose was telling her that the food at Armand’s Rib Palace was every bit as good as Jeremiah had promised, but she didn’t think that the food alone explained the huge and overflowing dining room. Armand’s Rib Palace thrived because of the expansive charm of Armand himself.
When Armand leaned down close and, in a husky whisper, asked Faye, “Do you have any questions about the menu?” she had two thoughts. The first was that she remembered hearing Laneer say that Frida had been dodging advances from her boss. And the second was that there had to be a reason that Frida had been reluctant to go out with this handsome and charismatic man. Laneer and Sylvia had said that Frida had been trying to learn from her earlier mistakes with men. The evidence suggested that Frida had seen Armand as one more mistake to be avoided. Why?
Since Faye had no intention of going out with him, she felt free to enjoy the superficial charm of a man hoping she enjoyed her meal enough to come back and bring her six employees with her. Good food was Faye’s drug of choice, so an hour spent scarfing down ribs, slaw, and beans, while having the undeniable pleasure of watching Armand be Armand, was a happy hour for Faye. She felt the fear and pain of yesterday lift a little. It would be back, but in the meantime, she intended to fully enjoy being a carnivore.
Her happy mood lasted her all the way through her plate of ribs and a slice of peach pie a la mode. When that happiness cratered, she was standing at the cash register with her back to the dining room, checking over the bill. She was also thinking that the bill would have been a lot lower if Richard hadn’t had three beers.
“Would you stop looking at me?”
Faye didn’t have eyes in the back of her head, but she knew Ayesha’s voice. The young woman was slightly built, but her pipes were strong enough to silence the rest of the packed room enough to let everybody hear Richard’s more muffled response.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
Faye felt like she was turning around in slow motion. She heard the conflict more than she saw it.
She heard “Get your hands off me!” and, again, she knew that she was hearing Ayesha’s voice. The twin female voices saying “Take your hands off her!” had to belong to Stephanie and Yvonna.
She was still turning, trying to find the conflict and focus her eyes on it. A strong male voice was saying “Settle down, everybody. Settle down,” so she knew that Jeremiah was taking charge.
Out of her own mouth, she heard, “This is unacceptable. Everyone sit down and be quiet this instant.”
This was what she said when Michael and his preschool friends fought on the playground, so it was what she naturally said in a time of conflict. The surprising thing was that it worked just as well on this group of people who were a lot older than Michael. Silence dropped over the room like a blanket.
Faye took a deep breath as her eyes focused on the overflowing restaurant. Armand’s regular customers were physically drawing away from her crew, scooching their chairs away from them and refusing to make eye contact. This thoroughly embarrassed Faye, as if she had somehow become their mother and was responsible for any childish behavior.
She moved on Richard, who sat at the center of the disruption.
“Are you drunk?” she hissed at him.
He tried to stand but staggered and fell back into his chair. Ayesha laughed and stuck out a hand to give him a stiff push. Richard couldn’t maintain his balance against even that slight force. He slumped against the wall.
Jeremiah stood over Richard. He shook his head in disgust as he turned to the others, which was his mistake.
“We’re going back to the hotel. Now. Go outside with Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth while I get this idiot—”
Richard’s hand shot out and grabbed Jeremiah by the wrist, twisting hard. He might be too drunk to sit up straight, but he was still conscious and he was still strong. Jeremiah yelped in surprise.
“Don’t ever call me an idiot.” Richard’s words were slurred, but he was able to get his point across.
Faye could see by Jeremiah’s face that Richard’s grip hurt and it hurt a lot. Richard’s other hand snaked out and put still more pressure on Jeremiah’s wrist. Faye’s hand went to her phone. She could dial 911 by feel, but she could also reach McDaniel, whose number she had on speed dial, with a single keystroke.
The noise in the room was suddenly deafening. All the bystanders backed away from the fight, dozens of chair legs dragging across the concrete floor with a groan. Yelling above that din, Ayesha, Davion, Yvonna, and Stephanie’s voices implored Richard to let their boss go. Only Richard and Jeremiah were silent, saying nothing, but eyeballing each other as if planning for an all-out fistfight.
And then Jeremiah brought up his free hand, snaking it between Richard’s forearms to immobilize him. Twisting his ensnared wrist, he easily yanked it out of the drunk man’s grip. Then he clapped Richard on the shoulder with a hand that looked gentle but still meant business, and he said, “We’re leaving now. Get up slowly and don’t try anything. I’ll make you regret it.”
Faye looked around the room for damage and saw none, so she threw down some extra tip money and headed for the door. As she herded her employees out, she locked eyes with Armand and telegraphed a mute apology for spoiling his restaurant’s mellow vibe.
She reached the others waiting on the sidewalk as Jeremiah guided Richard out the door. Sometimes his hand on the younger man’s shoulder steered, and sometimes it kept him from toppling over. There was no way Richard could walk all the way back to the motel under his own power.
Faye beckoned to Jeremiah, who sat Richard’s sagging form on a bench that looked sturdy enough to hold the inebriated man up while Jeremiah spoke with his client in private.
Holding the bill out for Jeremiah to see, she pointed at the line item for Richard’s beers. “It isn’t possible that he got this drunk on three beers.”
“You got a point there.” Jeremiah shrugged. “He’s twenty-one. It’s not like I searched their suitcases. Maybe he packed more liquor than clothes. It looks to me like our boy had ethanol for breakfast, then kept drinking.”
“I can’t tolerate this. I have to fire him.”
“Hold on! Don’t do anything hasty. Besides, you can’t fire him. He works for me. You can tell me not to assign him to your job, or you can terminate your contract with my organization, but you can’t fire Richard.” The expression on his face was almost insubordinate, but not quite.
“You’re his boss? Okay. So you’re his boss and he just assaulted you. Why aren’t you firing him?”
“He didn’t hit me. He grabbed my wrist. Big deal.”
“He tried to twist your hand off. He didn’t manage it because you’re big and you can apparently handle yourself in a fight. If he did that to me, I’d have a broken arm right now. Ayesha, too.”
“But not the other women?” Jeremiah’s eyes were squinched up like a man about to laugh. Faye was not amused.
“I think Yvonna and Stephanie can probably take care of themselves, but I do not want to see them try. You’re willing to risk everyone’s safety on the chance that Richard will stay sober and peaceful? Why? There are plenty of people who would love to have that job and all the training and perks that come with it.”
Jeremiah’s eyes looked less amused now. “Sure there are, but they’re not interchangeable. Richard is a human being and he deserves a chance. He’s not perfect, but I’m not ready to throw him away. Are you?”
Faye struggled to keep her voice down, because her crew definitely did not need to hear this conversation. “Who said anything about throwing human beings away? Who called them interchangeable? This is an important contract and it needs to be staffed by people who take it seriously. Why is it so important to you for Richard to stick with a job that he may not even want to do?”
“Where would I be if nobody ever gave me a chance when I screwed up? I was re
al good at that, you know. Screwing up, I mean. Everybody needs somebody to hold their feet to the fire.”
Faye didn’t know what to say, but she knew that it wasn’t, “Tell me exactly what you did to screw up, and when.” Jeremiah and his past was not her current problem. Richard was. When she weighed Richard’s future against the safety of those around him, not to mention the success or failure of her contract, she wasn’t sure what the right answer was.
“He’s staying in my room with me, right?” Jeremiah said. “That fabulous room you’re paying for because you think a murderer is out to get us?”
Faye tried to protest, but he just waved a hand and said, “Joking.”
Faye wasn’t laughing.
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll search his suitcase for liquor. I’ll watch him like a hawk,” Jeremiah promised. “I’ll tell him that I don’t give three chances to people who screw up, but I do give them two. One more screw-up, and he’s out. And I’ll tell him all those things again when he’s sober enough to understand me.”
Faye hesitated, not sure that she was willing to buy into Jeremiah’s management style.
He took her hesitation as a sign that he’d won. “Now, why don’t you walk the others to the hotel and then drive back over here to get me and Mr. Can’t Hold His Liquor? I bet Armand will bring me a glass of sweet tea while I wait. Maybe one for Richard, too, but it looks to me like he’s already sloshing inside. He doesn’t need to take in anything wet for at least a week.”
Faye had just witnessed a small miracle and she was grateful.
The miracle had occurred after she’d dropped off the women and driven back for Richard and Jeremiah. After she’d successfully loaded them into her car and headed back to the motel, Richard had miraculously managed the entire five-minute ride back to the hotel without throwing up in her car. He had even managed to walk the ten steps to the trash can outside the motel’s front door before vomiting. Given the circumstances, Faye called that a win.
As for managing the aftermath of Richard’s drinking spree? Faye called that Jeremiah’s job. She was so angry at both men that she dropped them off at the hotel lobby, parked the car, then used the back entrance so that she could get to the privacy of her hotel room without looking at them. But when she finally reached the door to her room, she paused at the door for a moment and turned away. Her new roommate, Yvonna, was sitting in there with Stephanie and Ayesha. She didn’t want to be part of their conversation, not until they were thoroughly tired of talking about Richard’s behavior. They should reach that point in…oh…four or five hours.
She turned away from the door and went back to the concrete staircase that had brought her to it. Checking to make sure that she wasn’t sitting on a tarry bit of old, chewed bubble gum, she settled herself on a handy stair and pulled out her phone. It told her that the barbecue debacle had only seemed to take up the whole afternoon. It also told her that she had no missed calls.
Halfway to the motel from Armand’s, she’d remembered that she hadn’t talked to her husband in twenty-four hours. When she was away from home, her habit was to call every night at bedtime, and he really deserved to hear from her more often than that now, considering that she was surrounded by a murder investigation. Well, at bedtime the night before, she’d been having an uncomfortable conversation with the man running that investigation, so calling Joe had slipped her mind.
The fact that she’d neglected to let her husband know that she’d survived a full day without falling prey to Frida’s killer was not the thing most disturbing for Faye at that moment. She was far more disturbed to realize that Joe, a practical man who didn’t pick fights over things like forgotten phone calls, hadn’t just pulled his phone out of his pocket and called her when she failed to check in.
But what did his failure to call her really mean? She was reasonably sure that it did not mean, “Go ahead and get murdered. See if I care.”
If she had to guess, she’d say it meant, “I can’t think of anything nice to say to you and I don’t want to argue.”
She studied her phone’s face for a moment, looking at the photo of Joe and the children that she used for wallpaper. If she put a video call through, she’d be able to see his face and she needed that badly. But she would also be able to see his fear and his anger, so she opted for an audio call instead.
It went straight to voice mail, which was no surprise. Joe always spent summer Saturday afternoons at the beach with his children and it would never occur to him to take his cell phone and let it interfere with the fun. Subconsciously, or mostly subconsciously, she had known this when she picked up the phone, so the call had been strategic. She’d reached out an olive branch without actually having to talk to her angry husband. The next move was up to him. Score one for the wife.
Still holding the phone and refusing to admit it was because she was hoping Joe would dial her right back and say, “I took the phone to the beach in case you called,” she stared at a large stain on her pants leg.
Peach pie. It was definitely peach pie. She wanted to lick her pants leg, just to get one last taste of Armand’s peach pie, which had been so good that she’d wanted to kiss him. She’d also intended to buy another piece to save for Kali, because she wanted to fatten the little girl up. And also because she was pretty sure that Armand would rather have her money than a kiss from a married woman with no plans to stray. Instead of giving him that money, she’d spent the next hour trying not to let Richard vomit on her, totally forgetting to buy Kali a piece of pie.
She was already planning to check in on Kali that afternoon. Should she go get the little girl and take her to supper at Armand’s Rib Palace? No, not when the little girl’s late mother had worked there. That would have been too weird.
Fortunately, she knew of another Memphis ritual that Kali had surely never experienced. There was no place in the world like The Peabody Hotel for a special afternoon with a child. Faye had taken her own kids to The Peabody’s Orlando branch for afternoon tea and some time with its famous in-house ducks, and it had been magical. How much better must the duck parade be here in Memphis, at the original Peabody with its Jazz Age opulence?
She looked at her watch. If she left now, she could spend a little time visiting with Laneer before taking Kali downtown. Should she do it?
Her phone told her that the Peabody didn’t serve tea on Sundays, making it a full week before she and Kali would have another chance to enjoy cream scones and cookies if they didn’t go that day. Faye decided to yield to impulse. But she’d have to hurry.
Here was a chance to sweep Kali far, far away from her problems to a place where children had tea parties and communed with live ducks, and Faye could think of no downside to that plan. As quickly as that, Faye made her decision and picked up her phone. First, she used it to make a reservation for tea. Then she dialed Laneer’s number.
“Can I borrow Kali for a while this afternoon? Yeah? Fabulous. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
Faye hung up and went back to her room. She was ashamed to admit it to herself, but she was relieved to see that Stephanie, Yvonna, and Ayesha had left. Tossing on a sundress that she hoped was Peabody-worthy, she left, and she didn’t bother with good-byes beyond a text to Jeremiah telling him she’d be back after dinner. He could deal with a sometimes-fractious group of young adults. She had a date with a little girl and some ducks.
Chapter Twenty
“I wish I knew why my sweet Frida was so dressed up when she passed.” Laneer’s hand shook as he held out a cup of coffee for Faye. “But I just don’t. I can’t stop wondering who that precious soul wanted to look so pretty for. How did she spend her last night on this Earth?”
Faye took the cup quickly, but not quickly enough to keep him from sloshing a few drops into the bone china saucer. He had offered to feed her lunch, poking around in a pantry stocked with jars of vegetables he’d canned himself, and not much else. Faye
wasn’t about to take food that he needed for himself, and for Kali.
“I had an early lunch before I came, and I’ll be eating again at The Peabody, but thank you for offering,” she’d said quickly. “I just came to pick up Kali and to check on you.”
And, apparently, on Sylvia, who had appeared at the front door before Faye had even passed through it. She must live somewhere on the same street as Laneer. Faye wasn’t sure which house was Sylvia’s, but she was pretty sure the woman spent her life at her front window, waiting for something interesting to pass by. This afternoon, Faye’s car had been the interesting thing that got Sylvia out of her house.
If Faye’s car hadn’t budged Sylvia from her window, then the car pulling into Laneer’s driveway would have. It was a 1990s-era Cadillac, as blue as the sky and well-waxed, and it moved like a barge. Faye watched out the window as Walt Walker stepped out of it, sharply dressed in khakis and a flame red shirt that clashed with the small pink backpack in his hands.
Laneer greeted him at the front door, saying, “Come in. There’s lots of coffee and it’s hot,” but his eyes said, “Why are you here?”
Ever affable, Kali’s schoolteacher smiled at the wary Laneer as he held out the pink backpack. “I hope I’m not intruding, but it occurred to me that I made a bad mistake yesterday. I stopped by because I was worried that Kali didn’t pick up her food for the weekend, but I didn’t bring her the food. That was a bit stupid.”
Laneer said, “We thank you,” and took the backpack. “Like I said, the coffee’s hot.”
As Laneer sat with Faye, Sylvia, and Walt, sipping coffee, Laneer jerked his head in the direction of a closed door. “She’s been in that bedroom all morning. I told her that if she went out the window, I’d come get her and then I’d nail it shut. So far, she’s stayed put, but she won’t come out here and talk to me. Meantime, I just had to answer the phone when Armand called to find out why Frida didn’t come to work last night. He said he’d been texting her all day. It was so hard to tell that man what happened to her.”
Undercurrents Page 12
