Irish Stewed (An Ethnic Eats Mystery)

by Kylie Logan

  I’m afraid my smile wasn’t nearly as broad as his. Or as genuine. I refused to look at Sophie when I said, “She’s not really my aunt.”

  “Oh.” Declan pulled his hand back to his side, not as embarrassed as he was simply curious. “I guess I’m confused because Sophie always refers to you as her niece.”

  This time, I did take a second to slide Sophie a look. I wasn’t surprised to see something like contrition in her pursed lips and her downcast eyes.

  Which didn’t mean I believed it was genuine.

  “That makes me wonder why Sophie was talking about me at all.”

  Contrition be damned! Just like that, Sophie was back to her ol’ grinning self. “You know we’re all just as proud as punch of everything you’ve accomplished.” She patted my arm. “Laurel’s famous,” she told Declan, and then, because she apparently saw the sparks shooting from my eyes, she was quick to amend the statement to, “Well, practically famous.”

  Maybe Declan was also a better actor than most of the ones I’d met out in LA. He pretended not to notice the undercurrent of annoyance and avoidance that flowed back and forth between me and Sophie. In fact, when he turned back to me, it was with a smile sleek enough to send prickles up my spine.

  Not that it mattered, I reminded myself.

  Since I wasn’t staying.

  “Well,” he said, giving me a quick once-over from toes to top of head and apparently approving of what he saw since his smile stayed firmly in place, “it’s nice to know there will be a practically famous chef holding down the fort while her aunt is in the hospital.”

  He had a short memory.

  And he smelled like bay rum and limes.

  I shook away the thought and the way the scent always made me think of tropical islands and warm sea breezes.

  “Sophie’s younger sister, Nina, was my foster mother for four years,” I told him. “So you see, Sophie and I, we’re really not related.”

  His smile never wavered. “Except you don’t have to share DNA to be family, do you?”

  “I’m just showing Laurel around,” Sophie said, and she wound an arm through mine. “You know, because I’ll be gone six weeks and someone needs to run the place.”

  “That doesn’t mean that someone is going to be me.” I untangled myself from Sophie’s grip when I said this, the better to look her in the eye so she knew I meant business.

  “We obviously need to talk, me and Laurel,” she told Declan. “There might be some rocky road ice cream in the freezer, and I don’t know about you, but I think heart-to-heart talks always go better over rocky road.”

  Declan stepped toward the doorway that led into the main part of the restaurant. The woodwork around it was painted dusty blue, like the trim on the outside of the station, and there were lace curtains in the doorway that were tied back on either side with purple ribbon. He poked a thumb over his shoulder into the darkened room. “If you like, I can take a look around before you settle down for your heart-to-heart.”

  “No need!” Sophie’s warm laugh bounced up to the ceiling fans that swirled overhead. “You know this is a safe neighborhood.”

  Declan leaned forward just enough to take a peek beyond the entryway and into the pitch-dark restaurant. “Maybe so, but it is late and—”

  “And you need to get back to whatever it was you were doing before you took the time to come over here and check on an old lady like me.” Sophie led him back to the front door. “A good-lookin’ guy like you, you must have better things to do on a warm spring night.”

  Declan tipped his head, and when he smiled, the air between us sizzled. “Then I’ll just get back to the shop. I’ve still got some work to finish. Good night, ladies.”

  “Isn’t he the dreamiest?” Sophie giggled once he was gone.

  Her back was to the door. Otherwise, I wondered if she’d still think he was dreamy when she realized that Declan didn’t go across the street to the Irish store. In fact, he walked along the front of the Terminal, turned at the far corner, and headed into the side parking lot.

  Once he was out of sight, I turned back to Sophie and was just in time to see her shuffle her sneakers. “Rocky road?” she offered.

  I let go a sigh of pure frustration. “You’re not going to bribe me with ice cream, Sophie. I told you, I don’t appreciate being lied to. All those years, you came to California to visit and you showed me and Nina—”

  “Pictures of the restaurant.” She looked up at me through those unruly bangs. “Yes, I know.”

  “But it wasn’t this restaurant.”

  Sophie’s cheeks flushed pink, but I wasn’t about to let that keep me from saying my piece.

  “You showed us photographs of a lovely place out in the country. Linen tablecloths, soft lighting, a fabulous wine cellar. That’s the place I thought I was going to be helping out with while you were recuperating. This place—”

  “This place is all I have.”

  Yes, her comment would have tugged at my heartstrings.

  If I had heartstrings.

  Unfortunately for Sophie and lucky for me, I didn’t.

  That didn’t mean I was completely insensitive. “I said I’d take you to the hospital tomorrow morning, and I will,” I told her.

  “And you said you’d be running the restaurant after that.”

  “It’s not going to work.”

  Her shoulders drooped. “I know. I guess I knew all along. But still, you’re here. Let me show you around.” Her limp more pronounced than ever, she walked through that lace-curtained doorway and turned on the lights in the main dining room.

  What I saw was pretty much what I expected.

  Five, six, seven, eight . . . I counted . . . tables lined up against the far wall next to the windows that looked out over the railroad tracks. None of them covered with linen. Four tables to my left and two doorways, one marked KITCHEN and the other, OFFICE. To my right, six more tables, more lace, more kitsch, and once I skirted the jut-out wall that marked the back of the waiting area, windows that looked out at the street and gave a bird’s-eye view of the light that shone on that green shamrock across the way.

  And one customer.

  I froze and looked at the man lying facedown on one of the tables.

  “Uh, Sophie.” She was already shuffling back to the kitchen in search of ice cream, and when I called out, Sophie hitch-stepped back the other way. “There’s a guy here.”

  “A guy? That’s impossible. That’s—”

  She got as far as where I stood and she froze, too, looking where I did, at the table against the wall where a man in a brown jacket was slumped, his head on his arm.

  And that receipt spike of Grandpa Majtkowski’s sticking out the back of his neck.

  “Oh my goodness!” Sophie wailed.

  If I didn’t act fast, I knew I’d have another problem on my hands, so I pulled over the nearest chair and plunked Sophie down in it before I dared to close in on the man in the brown jacket.

  From this angle, there wasn’t much to see. In the light of the faux Tiffany chandelier directly above the table, his neck looked as pale as a hooked fish. Well, except for the thin river of blood that originated at the spot where the receipt spike was plunged into his spine.

  I dared to put a finger on his neck, but even before I did, I knew I wouldn’t find a pulse. His skin was ice and there were tinges of blue behind his ears and on the fingers of the hand that hung loosely at his side.

  I fumbled for the phone in my pocket and dialed 911, hoping that when the dispatcher answered, I could make the words form in a mouth that felt suddenly as if it had been packed with sand.

  And all I could think was the one thing I knew I wouldn’t dare say to Sophie or to the cops—this gave a whole new meaning to the word terminal.

  Chapter 2

  “Oh my goodness, it’s the Lance of Justice!”

  When Sophie shrieked out the words, I turned away from the cop who’d been taking my statement and toward the parame
dics just as they lifted the dead guy from his chair and placed him on his back on the floor. As if they’d choreographed the move, Sophie and everyone else standing in a half circle around the table took a step back, their mouths open and their eyes bulging.

  “It is the Lance of Justice,” one of the uniformed cops gasped. “Hey, Oberlin!” He waved toward the detective who’d cornered me as soon as he learned I was the one who found the body. “The dead guy here, it’s the Lance of Justice!”

  If the look on his doughy face meant anything, Detective Gus Oberlin was not as surprised as the rest of them. Or as impressed, either. He scrubbed a hand under his wide, flat nose and looked up from the notebook where he’d been writing down what I told him, and he narrowed his eyes and looked past me and over my shoulder. They were small, dark eyes, the kind that took in everything and revealed little. Though he didn’t say a word, I could tell he was cataloging the scene: the body bag the paramedics had set out and unzipped; the blank look on the victim’s face as he stared, unseeing, at the ceiling; the astonishment that made the cops and the paramedics and Sophie, too, look as stunned as if they’d had a camera flash go off too close to their faces.

  The dead guy was the Lance of Justice.

  “Who’s the Lance of Justice?” I asked Detective Oberlin.

  He rolled the toothpick he was chewing from one corner of his mouth to the other. Oberlin was six foot four and weighed well over three hundred pounds. The buttons on the white shirt he wore under a nondescript blue suit jacket gaped just a little and there were spits and splots of tonight’s dinner—spaghetti and meatballs, if I was any judge—on his sky blue tie.

  “The Lance of Justice!” Oberlin didn’t so much say the words as he crooned them. As if he’d just realized that what he thought was a pretty ho-hum murder (is there such a thing?) was suddenly delicious. The toothpick in his mouth twitched when he said, “Well, ain’t that just a kick in the pants?”

  “And this Lance of Justice guy, who—”

  Without giving me a chance to finish, Oberlin waved one meaty hand at the nearest cop. “Get these witnesses out of here for now. We’ll finish taking their statements when we’re done looking over the crime scene.”

  With that, Sophie and I were escorted back to the restaurant waiting area and left with the dusty teddy bear, the rolltop desk, all that lace, and—

  I looked out the front windows and blinked in astonishment, then realized I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Six years in Hollywood, remember. Somehow, though, I never associated the words paparazzi or feeding frenzy with Hubbard, Ohio.

  It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes since I’d called 911 and already, the street in front of the Terminal was packed with police cars and ambulances, their red and blue lights pulsing through the night. That, of course, was to be expected. But beyond the perimeter that the cops had established in front of the restaurant, I saw knots of people gathered as well as three trucks from TV stations in Youngstown, the area’s biggest city. One of them over on the right had a powerful light shining on the front of the restaurant and a woman in a neat black suit stood in its glow, a microphone in one hand.

  I swear, the chick must have had a sixth sense about these things. She caught sight of me and Sophie, scurried over, and tapped on the front door.

  “It’s me,” she said, and she pressed her face to the glass in a way that was supposed to make her recognizable and instead just made her blue eyes look sunken and her nose appear way too shmooshed. “Kim Kline!”

  Sophie hurried to the door and took a close look. “It is Kim Kline!”

  “Do you really think we should—”

  I was too late with my protest. Which probably didn’t matter since I was pretty sure Sophie wouldn’t have listened, anyway. She opened the door and Kim Kline slipped inside the restaurant.

  “Is it true? What can you tell me? What do you know?” Kim was a petite woman and about as big around as a strand of angel-hair pasta. Her hair was dark mahogany and it hung over her shoulders in perfectly placed and very glossy ringlets. Now that she wasn’t face-to-glass, her eyes didn’t look nearly as beady, but her nose . . .

  She’d never make it in Hollywood, that was for certain.

  Honker.

  Schnoz.

  Beak.

  Had I been pressed for a description, I would have said that Kim’s nose—there was a rather large bulge at the bridge of it—gave her otherwise average face character, but back in Hollywood, they would have had a lot to say about it, and none of it would have been complimentary.

  In one swift movement, Kim reached behind her and opened the door for the cameraman who waited outside. She cleared her throat, settled her shoulders, and signaled, and he switched on a blinding light and started rolling.

  “So, what can you tell us?” she asked, her microphone poked in Sophie’s direction. “We know there’s been a murder and we’ve heard rumors. Our viewers want to know the truth. They deserve to know the truth. Is the victim really the Lance of Justice?”

  Sophie blinked into the bright camera light. “Well, it’s . . . That is . . . We saw—”

  “What exactly did you see?” Kim was enough of a professional to realize she wasn’t going to get anything out of Sophie. She spun my way and stabbed the microphone in my direction. “You two were here first on the scene. At least that’s what we’ve been told. Take me through what happened, step by step.”

  Unlike Sophie, I am not camera shy. Paparazzi, remember. Meghan. Hollywood.

  And if there was one thing I’d learned through it all, it was that sometimes it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

  Oh, I wasn’t worried about tainting evidence. Or giving out too many details before the police were ready to have them released to the public. And heck, I sure wasn’t worried about the Lance of Justice because so far, no one had bothered to tell me who he was and why everyone cared so much.

  But I did have my reasons.

  No comment meant no TV coverage. At least not of me. And no coverage meant my face wouldn’t be plastered on the news and my name wouldn’t be splashed across the screen and on the Internet if anyone bothered to search, and the people back in Hollywood who I thought were my friends until they proved they weren’t would never have to learn that I was here in Hubbard, Ohio, in a sorry excuse for a restaurant and suddenly embroiled in some flashy little local drama.

  It was too terrifying to think they’d learn how far I’d fallen.

  “No comment,” I told Kim.

  A quick hand signal from her and the cameraman stopped rolling. Her top lip curled. “You’re kidding me, right? Are you telling me you don’t want to be on the local news?”

  “I don’t want to be on the local news.” I stepped toward the door and since she was directly in front of me, she had no choice but to step back. “You’ll have to leave.”

  She tried Sophie again. “Ms. Charnowski, there’s got to be something you can tell me. Have the police demanded you keep silent? Is there some sort of cover-up involved?”

  She was slow on the uptake, so I took another step toward her.

  Kim fell back. So did her cameraman.

  “Out,” I said.

  “It’s not your restaurant. Ms. Charnowski—”

  “Out.”

  Remember what I said about the daggers from my blue eyes?

  Kim got out, and she took her cameraman with her.

  That bit of excitement over, Sophie fluttered around like a bird before she finally dropped into one of the chairs against the wall.

  I took the one next to her. “Who’s the Lance of Justice?” I asked.

  “The Lance . . . the Lance of Justice?” A hiccup punctuated Sophie’s words and a tear trickled down her cheek. She didn’t bother to wipe it away. “Jack Lancer. That’s his real name. He’s on TV. Channel WKFJ. Just like Kim Kline. He’s a real celebrity. A star. You know, one of those investigative reporters.”

  This, I did not know. But then, I’d only just ar
rived in Hubbard and had yet to have the pleasure of checking out the local news. It did explain the crowd outside.

  “So he was a reporter. What was he doing in the restaurant?” I asked Sophie.

  She pressed a hand to her heaving chest. “I . . . I can’t imagine. I . . . I don’t know. I . . . I have no idea.”

  “Especially since the restaurant was closed.”

  She nodded. “It has been. Since Saturday after the late lunch crowd left and I locked up. And now it’s . . .”

  I couldn’t hold it against her for not remembering instantly. It’s not every day you find a body in your restaurant with your grandfather’s receipt spike sticking out of the back of its neck.

  “Monday,” I reminded her. “It’s Monday.”

  “That means he could have been here . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut, no doubt trying to banish the same image of the Lance of Justice that flitted through my mind. Eyes wide open. Staring. Cold.

  Or maybe she was just trying to work out the math. “Do you think he could have been here that long?”

  Something told me this wasn’t the time to mention that if he had been, the Lance of Justice wouldn’t have been in nearly as good shape as he was when we found him. It’s not like I’m a forensic expert or anything. Far from it. But Meghan had once starred in a thriller that included espionage and murder and I’d been on the set every day to make sure the food she was served was locally grown and 100 percent organic. I couldn’t help but pick up on what the writers went through over and over in regards to the minutiae of the script. Even if I hadn’t, I’d seen enough of the crime scene shows on TV. I knew the basics. The Lance of Justice couldn’t have been dead all that long. He was well preserved, not swollen, and he didn’t smell.

  The murder had been recent.

  “So how did he get in the restaurant?” I asked no one in particular.

  But of course, Sophie was the only one there, and she assumed the question was meant for her. She shrugged. “The police will find out. He must have . . .” She swallowed her tears. “He must have broken in.”