Irish Stewed (An Ethnic Eats Mystery)

by Kylie Logan

  Something told me Kim had already thought of this. “I’m looking into his will,” she told me. “You know, for my story. Jack, he didn’t strike me as that stupid, but you never know, do you? If he married one wife and never took the other wife off as the beneficiary in his will—or of his life insurance policy—well, that would be a pretty good motive for murder, wouldn’t it? I mean, if that Quilligan kid really didn’t do it.”

  It would.

  But not murder in a closed train station restaurant.

  “Well, it looks like you’re going to be plenty busy tracking down suspects.” I ushered Kim to the door. “I’m sure you’ll need to look into Owen’s background, and then there are all those wives and girlfriends of Jack’s. What did you say their names were?”

  Her smile was as stiff as meringue. “I didn’t. And I’m not going to. Not until I confirm my information and my sources. And not until the cops eliminate Quilligan as a suspect. It wouldn’t be ethical, would it, to go chasing off after some grieving woman when there’s no reason.”

  Ethics and local news?

  I was stunned.

  But not as stunned as I was when Kim opened the door, stopped, and turned to me one last time.

  “You know,” she said, “if you’re looking for viable suspects, there’s one you shouldn’t eliminate from the list. In fact, I’d say his name would have to be right at the top.”

  “Somebody else?” I was thinking that it might have been easier to ask Kim who liked Jack rather than who had reason to want him dead. “Who? And for what reason?”

  “It’s my turn to be an anonymous source.” Grinning, she stepped outside. “Just ask your cook.”

  Chapter 7

  My cook was George Porter, who appeared at exactly the stroke of seven and filled the front door top to bottom and side to side. George had hands like hams and enough tattoos on his arms to cover nearly every inch of skin. Just for the record, that was a lot of inches.

  Even though I insisted on “Laurel,” he called me “ma’am,” and when we spoke, he looked at the floor, the ceiling, and the train that whizzed by on the tracks out back. Anywhere and everywhere but at me.

  I never had a chance to ask him what Kim was talking about when she dropped his name in connection with the late, great Lance of Justice because Denice Lacuzzo showed up hot on George’s heels and as soon as she did, George melted into the background and hurried into the kitchen.

  Denice watched him go. “You’re lucky to have him,” she said, though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t know that until I tasted his cooking. “He loves this place almost as much as Sophie does. Been here nearly as long as I have.”

  “And you’ve been here . . .”

  She was a short woman and so wiry, I could see the muscles bunch along her arms when she slipped out of her lightweight jacket. Denice’s brown hair was scooped up into a ponytail and she wore black pants and a yellow polo shirt with the outline of the Terminal embroidered over her heart. She took her plastic name tag out of her pocket and pinned it beneath the embroidered picture. She smelled slightly of cigarettes. Believe me, once I got my footing and established my position, she would hear about this.

  “I’ve been here twelve years,” she said, and something about the way she shifted from foot to foot told me I was disrupting the morning routine. I motioned her away from the front door and followed her through the restaurant and into the kitchen, where Denice went straight for the coffee machine.

  “Hey, you made coffee!” She poured one cup for herself and another for George and drank it while she wiped down the plastic-coated menus on the counter. Denice was quick and efficient. Done with the menus, she filled tiny cream pitchers, set them on a tray, and put them in the cooler. She looked over the recipe for the day’s special—meat loaf—and helped George get ground beef and bread crumbs and eggs out so he could start mixing.

  It wasn’t until she was done that we heard the front door open and slap shut.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The woman who scurried into the kitchen was my age, with curly dark hair that hung over her shoulders and big, dark eyes. She peeled out of her jacket and hung it on a peg next to Denice’s, then zipped over to the far end of the counter and started refilling sugar shakers even before she caught her breath.

  “Mauro had a stomachache this morning,” she said. “I had to wait to take him to day care. You know, to see if he was going to throw up. If he was really sick, I would have called my mom to come over and watch him.”

  Behind the woman, Denice rolled her eyes.

  I stepped forward. “You must be . . .”

  The young woman’s mouth fell open. “I’m so sorry.” She wiped her hands against the yellow polo shirt that matched Denice’s. “I’m Inez Delgado and really, I’m not usually late. It was just my little Mauro. You know, because he wasn’t feeling so good.”

  Denice whizzed by with an armload of loaves of bread and took them over to the grill for George. “Sophie’s having her surgery this morning,” she reminded Inez. “This is Laurel.”

  “Sophie’s niece.” Inez grabbed my hand and pumped it. “I’m so glad to meet you. Sophie talks about you all the time. And I’m really sorry I’m late. Really. I won’t—”

  “I’m sure it won’t happen again,” I said. “You know how important it is to keep everything on schedule in a restaurant.”

  “Oh yes.” Inez nodded. “It’s just that little Mauro, he’s only three . . . and . . .” She glanced at George and Denice. “Well, I have to tell the truth. Mauro really didn’t feel good this morning, but that’s not the only reason I was late. I was up late last night and I slept in a little too long this morning. But I couldn’t help myself. I was watching the news. I bet everybody else around here was, too.”

  Denice came back the other way and said, “Jack’s murder. It’s got everybody talking, that’s for sure.”

  George grunted.

  Deep down inside, I knew I’d have to have a conversation with the staff about the Lance of Justice, but truth be told, I’d been so busy since the previous night when I arrived and made the grisly discovery, I hadn’t exactly thought about what I should say to them.

  I thought now was as good a time as any to come up with something.

  Apparently, so did my staff. Inez and Denice both stared at me, waiting to hear more. George, I noticed, kept his back turned. He grabbed a spatula and even though I’d left the grill spotless after I made eggs for Declan and me, George scraped it clean.

  “Sophie and I . . .” I reminded myself that I had nothing invested in the situation. Not in the town, not in the restaurant, and certainly not in the life and untimely death of Jack Lancer.

  Tell that to the sudden lump of emotion in my throat.

  I cleared it with a cough. “Sophie and I were here last night,” I told my staff, and though it was technically not true, since I was the one who’d rounded the corner and found Jack slumped over the table, I made the discovery plural. It helped defuse the creepy factor. “We’re the ones who found the body.”

  Denice’s cheeks paled. Inez’s eyes filled with tears.

  George grunted.

  “He was a nice man.” Inez sniffled. “For the last few weeks, he came in every afternoon.”

  “Coffee and a slice of pie.” Denice nodded.

  “Sometimes a dinner to go so he could take it back to the station with him,” Inez added. “That is, if there was a special on the menu that he really liked. George’s Swiss steak, that was one of his favorites.”

  George grunted and slammed the spatula down on the grill.

  “Well . . .” I didn’t want to pin George down about what Kim said, not in front of Denice and Inez, so I stuck with the first order of business. “I’m thinking what happened here last night might bring out the curious and the gawkers. We might be busier than usual today.”

  “So there would be another blessing to Jack Lance’s death,” George grumbled.

  I pretended not to
hear. “I’m going to ask all of you to not say anything, even if someone asks. The basic story has already been on the news; there’s really nothing any of us can add to it.”

  “Since you found the body, you could,” Denice said.

  Inez’s eyes glimmered. “Tell us!”

  “There’s nothing to tell.” Technically it was true. Nontechnically . . . well, I didn’t think this was the time to explain how, thinking about Jack, I’d tossed and turned all night and when I did fall asleep in fits and starts, I dreamed about a slim rivulet of blood, warm and wet against the back of my neck.

  I shivered and hugged my arms around myself. “The police have asked me not to say anything.” It actually might have been true. I couldn’t quite remember. “So for now, that’s all you need to know. Jack Lancer’s body was found here. If anybody gives you a hard time and presses you for information, you can tell them that. Other than that, there’s nothing any of us know about the man, right?”

  As if they’d choreographed the move, Denice and Inez both stepped back and looked George’s way.

  So much for trying to be subtle.

  An opening like that gave me the perfect opportunity; I stared at George, too.

  He tugged at the gold stud in his left ear. “Hey, it’s not like I killed the guy,” he snapped.

  “Nobody said you did,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” Denice piped in. “They said on the news this morning that they caught the killer. Some kid who was in here stripping the copper.”

  “Well, that part’s true,” I told them. “About the copper, I mean. About him being the killer, well, I don’t know. And I don’t think the police know for sure, either. Not yet. But none of that matters,” I assured George. “No one’s saying you had anything to do with the murder, George. But I am curious. Kim Kline, she said—”

  “That reporter is still hanging around out front.” Though in the kitchen there were no windows that looked out on the front of the restaurant, George shot a look that way, and as if he could see Kim in her slightly rumpled black suit and didn’t like what he was looking at, he narrowed his eyes. “She’s gonna cause trouble. Mark my words. Reporters, that’s what they do. That’s what they live for. Causing trouble.”

  “Is that what Jack Lancer did?”

  George’s eyes snapped to mine. “I didn’t kill him.”

  I sashayed closer to the cook. “Call me crazy, but something tells me, with the way you’re talking, maybe you would have liked to.”

  “And nobody could blame you, George,” Denice put in. “You just remember that. Everybody knows what the Lance of Justice did to you. Everybody knows none of what he said was true.”

  “Do they?” George stared down at the grill.

  I made sure I kept my voice light and airy, the better to try and soften the tension that suddenly filled the kitchen like a grease fire. “Hey, everybody knows but me! Somebody want to fill me in on the details?”

  Inez waited for Denice to say something.

  Denice waited for George to speak.

  George waited for . . .

  Well, I don’t know what George was waiting for and as it turned out, I wasn’t going to find out. Not right then, anyway.

  The front door of the restaurant opened and banged shut and we all flinched and sprang into action.

  “Your turn to hostess today,” Denice told Inez.

  Inez grabbed a stack of menus and scampered out front.

  I thought it only fair to follow her. After all, I’d already warned the staff that there might be gawkers and question-askers and nosy reporters around. If there were, it was my job to head them off at the pass.

  As it turned out, the three people who stood in the waiting area weren’t just gawkers, they were question-askers and reporters, too.

  “We just need a few photos,” a young man with dark, shaggy hair was telling Inez when I strode up to stand beside her. “If there’s blood, that would make the most dramatic shot, you know? But even if there isn’t—”

  “Can Inez show you to a table?” I asked him.

  He turned away from the waitress and blinked at me for a couple seconds, as though he couldn’t quite bring me into focus, before he asked, “You mean for breakfast?”

  “Unless you’re ready for lunch. We can accommodate you if that’s the case. Today’s special is meat loaf. It might take a while since we don’t have the oven going yet, but we can serve it up for you along with mashed potatoes and green beans. If you don’t mind waiting, that is.”

  “I don’t want to . . .” He exchanged looks with his companions. “That is, we aren’t actually looking to . . . We just want to snap some pictures and get a couple good quotes to go with them. We already had our coffee and muffins over at Caf-Fiends. It’s not like we actually want to eat here.”

  It wasn’t Inez’s fault that she was standing there slack-jawed and unsure how to handle things, but it was my responsibility to set an example. I snatched the menus out of her hands and tapped them into a neat pile against the rolltop desk. “Thanks for stopping in,” I told the young man.

  “You mean—”

  “I mean, it’s like that sign you see in so many places. ‘No shirt, No shoes, No service.’ Only here, we’ve added ‘No loitering.’ If you’re not a customer, you’re loitering.”

  “So you’re going to blackmail us into buying the crummy food in this place?”

  For all I knew, the food at Sophie’s was, indeed, crummy. In fact, I suspected crummy was putting it kindly. That didn’t excuse this guy for dissing the Terminal.

  I backstepped him and his companions toward the door. “Thanks for stopping by,” I said again. “We hope to see you another time.”

  They got the message and left.

  I turned from the door and found Inez grinning from ear to ear. “That was really cool.”

  “It was really rude is what it was.”

  “Not on your part.”

  My smile matched hers. “No, not on my part.”

  “You think we’re going to have to put up with that nonsense all day?”

  I didn’t think it, I was sure of it. I also knew one way we could at least reduce the possibility.

  I called a quick staff meeting and told George, Denice, and Inez what I had in mind. Within minutes, Inez and Denice were giving the restaurant a quick cleaning, concentrating on the little jut-out area where Jack had been killed. Once the fingerprint powder was all cleaned up, customers could speculate all they wanted about where Jack had been killed. While they were at it, I had the two waitresses get rid of a couple dozen lace doilies, three cobwebby teddy bears that were so high up on a shelf I don’t know how anybody ever saw them, and a giant china pitcher of fabric flowers that made it impossible for anybody standing in the doorway between the waiting room and the restaurant to see the people at the table in the far corner against the windows.

  Three people came in, one at a time, while they were working, and the girls took turns taking care of them. I noticed that the two Inez helped turned right around and walked out again and when they did, I gave her the thumbs-up. She’d apparently been paying attention when I sent that photographer on his way earlier; she knew how to identify the gawkers and tell them (politely, I hoped) that they weren’t welcome if they weren’t going to order.

  The third was apparently a regular and Denice got him a cup of coffee and pulled out her order pad. “Pancakes, bacon, and rye toast?”

  The man nodded.

  I just happened to be standing close by. “I’ll put the order in for you,” I offered and headed back to the kitchen. Of course I had an ulterior motive. In addition to seeing how the orders were handled and how George prepared the food, it gave me a chance to finish the conversation we’d started earlier.

  He looked up at me over the pancake batter he was whipping. “You didn’t come back here just to watch me work.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “But I do need to get used to the routine around here. It’s importan
t for me to know how orders are prepared.”

  “Not much to makin’ pancakes.” He scooped up batter and dropped it on the hot griddle, waited for precisely the right moment, then flipped the four hotcakes. He already had bacon sizzling on the grill and he turned each strip over.

  “I knew Lou would be here,” George commented. “Always here this time of day. Always orders the same thing.”

  “So that’s all taken care of, and we don’t need to talk about Lou. But we still need to talk about Jack Lancer,” I said.

  George shot a look at me over his shoulder. “Do we?”

  I shrugged like it was no big deal when actually, I was beginning to think it was. “I hate being left out of the loop. And I am the boss.”

  “Only until Sophie comes back.”

  I couldn’t agree more and I nodded to prove it. “Only until Sophie comes back. But right here, right now, I’m in charge. And today’s going to be a crazy day what with the media circus and all. Which means if I don’t know what’s going on—”

  “Nothing. Honest.” George slipped the pancakes and bacon onto a plate and rang a bell to tell Denice to come pick up the food. After she was gone, he turned to me.

  “It happened a long time ago,” he said. “Before I came to work for Sophie.”

  “Denice says you’ve been here twelve years.”

  “Nearly.” He leaned back against the counter. “Before that, I had my own place. George’s Country Diner. South of here. Over near Struthers.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear George had once owned his own restaurant and now cooked for Sophie. This is a tough business, and restaurants open and close at the speed of light. Sometimes it’s because a place stays hot for a while, then falls off customers’ radar. Other times, it’s money problems that make a restaurant close its doors. Often, people who get into the industry picture themselves meeting and greeting patrons, sipping wine in a corner, and watching the cash roll in. Long hours, staff problems, hot kitchens, and soaring food costs have a way of wiping that fantasy off the map!