Stars were spackled across the sky and I could hear the strains of country music from a houseboat a few slips away. The spooky termite-ridden boat in the next row that was covered with a red tarp labeled “Poison!” receded into the shadows. And darkness hid the cruiser two doors down that was so full of trash that passersby could no longer see in the windows. Along with Miss Gloria, many of the residents had threaded their rooflines with little white lights in anticipation of the holidays. From this perspective, it really did look like paradise.
Connie and Ray dug into their dinners, and she looked up after her first bite. “This is fantastic! Fabulous! You should open a restaurant.”
“No way,” I said. “I’d rather just eat the food. And write about it.”
She laughed. “Before I forget,” she added, “are you still on for cleaning a few apartments tomorrow? Angie called in sick.”
“Count me in.”
“Where have you been all day?” she asked.
I loaded my fork up and then put it back down on my plate. “The cops came by and invited me to the station for a chat,” I said in a hushed voice, not wishing to alert the rest of the neighbors about my business, just in case they hadn’t already seen the whole thing unfold. I poked a shrimp farther into my mound of grits. “Kristen Faulkner seems to have gotten herself murdered.”
Connie swallowed what she was chewing and sat up straight. “Kristen was murdered? What could you possibly have to say about that? And why would they even think to ask?”
“I’m not certain, but I have a bad feeling that Chad suggested they call on me.” I described the short, painful conversation I’d had with my ex.
“He’s a dick,” said Ray. “Who do they think you are, Lorena Bobbitt?”
Connie giggled. “You’re mixing your metaphors, buddy. Lorena didn’t murder her ex’s new girlfriend; she cut off his you-know-what and threw it into a field.”
“Ouch,” said Ray, shifting his plate to cover his lap. “What exactly happened to this girl Kristen?”
“The cops mostly asked me questions,” I said, “but Henri at Bad Boy Burritos told me it was something she ate.”
“Henri Stentzel? Didn’t Kristen have something to do with Henri’s restaurant in Miami folding?” asked Ray.
“Wow!” I hadn’t heard that—and Henri certainly hadn’t mentioned it—but it might explain the funny expression I’d seen on her face as she finished up my order. I didn’t like to think anything bad of Henri—she struck me as a moral and dedicated businesswoman who insisted on the freshest ingredients, made a mean sandwich, and knew when to bail out of a rat race. But what if she hadn’t chosen to leave her fancy restaurant and set up a funky burrito shop in Key West? What if she’d been forced out?
Connie was looking worried. “I hope you’re not going to butt your nose into this,” she said. “Let the police handle it. I’m sure they were just gathering information when they called you in.”
“The homeless guys said if they were just collecting information, they would have interviewed me right here.”
“I can phone my friend Matthew,” Ray broke in. “He’s the Web publisher for Key Zest. I’m sure he’s got more information than you do.”
I nodded eagerly. “Thanks.”
He whipped out his cell phone and soon was deep in conversation. We only heard his side of it—“Incredible!” “You’re kidding.” “They think that?” He hung up, wiped his forehead with his napkin, and grimaced in my direction.
“They found her in Chad’s apartment. Actually, Chad himself called it in.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “What if he killed her? And then panicked and pretended someone else did it? Like me?”
“There’s more,” said Ray. “She ate a poisoned pie. Key lime.”
6
“It’s easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don’t bring you oysters.”
—Paul Child
I stayed awake most of the night worrying. Would the cops read the Key West Citizen today? And if so, would one of them make it all the way through to the Living section? And if he did, would he make the connection between Kristen’s poisoning and my newly touted expertise in key lime pies?
Though honestly, the lovemaking noises didn’t help my sleeping either. First my housemates had a lively session; then the Renharts one boat over joined in—as if our boat’s rocking and sloshing reminded them of the possibility of their own pleasure. I finally fell asleep around two and woke from the dead at six, exhausted, when Ray and Connie left the houseboat to drive to Miami for supplies.
A few weeks ago, when I snapped up the offer to move in with Connie, I didn’t realize I’d be seeing quite so much of Ray. He has a position as a visiting resident artist at the Studios of Key West, though it seemed to me that he spent more time hanging out with Connie than practicing art. Not that I was complaining, but, just maybe, I harbored a smallish bunch of sour grapes. Ray and Connie had been together for eight months and still acted like they were madly in love. Chad and I flamed out in less than eight weeks. And Ray was nice to Connie in a way Chad never was to me—wildly supportive of everything she did. He even chipped in to help with her cleaning service when she was down a worker.
Whereas Chad had dumped me unceremoniously—packed up my things and put them out on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building where any passing stranger could have picked them over. And I was still missing some crucial stuff. Like my best chef’s paring knife and the set of serrated steak knives I’d splurged on with my graduation money. And my cookbooks. But much worse than any of those was the box of my grandmother’s handwritten recipe cards. My mother had passed them on to me a couple years ago, crying all the way through her ceremonious bestowal of the secret recipes. She hadn’t wanted me to bring them to Key West, but I didn’t have time to make copies. She would die if she knew they were missing.
I was pretty sure it was normal to feel angry and sad about the Chad business, but I scolded myself for feeling envious of Connie. I truly didn’t wish her my kind of trouble—I only wished I could find happily ever after too. Eric’s lecture in the Green Parrot about unconscious repetition of old patterns had me more concerned than I wanted to let on—even to myself.
I forced myself out of bed and into the kitchen. Connie had left a note on the counter with the addresses of the clients who expected their homes cleaned today, either by her or Angie. She asked me to choose three and leave the others for Lydia, who would work the second shift. I filled Evinrude’s bowl with kibbles, popped a sticky bun into the toaster oven, and started a pot of coffee, grinding a cinnamon stick along with the beans for good measure.
Then I crossed the room to Connie’s desk and leafed through the binder filled with laminated pages containing her clients’ instructions. She prided herself on doing her job the way her customers wanted it done, varying the cleaning supplies, the frequency, and the approach according to their requests and peculiarities. I jotted down a few notes for the Hinand (clean and scrub the cat litter pan) and Kennedy households (sweep the lanai so the pool filter doesn’t get clogged with debris from the golden rain tree; use second sink in the pantry for mopping floors, NOT the sink in the kitchen).
I couldn’t help noticing that Chad Lutz’s apartment was also on the schedule for today, though Connie would never have asked me to take it. She’d landed him as a client after I moved out and I very much doubted he would have hired her if he’d remembered our connection. The instructions he’d given her were longer and more detailed than most of her other customers; actually, I could have recited his cleaning quirks by rote. I knew enough to use expensive organic cleaners on everything but the toilets, which were to be double-scrubbed and then swished with Clorox. The list continued:
There should be no dust anywhere, including the tops of picture frames.
No smudges or fingerprints left on mirrors or doorframes.
No dust bunnies under beds or spiderwebs in cei
ling corners.
Don’t dust around objects; pick them up and clean under and around them; then return them to their original positions.
Hospital corners on sheets are preferred when making beds.
Aside from all that, Chad would probably have left a note in the kitchen for Connie, directing her to focus on the half bathroom that had contained my cat’s litter box, even though Evinrude had vacated the premises weeks earlier.
Chad had regretted moving Evinrude and me into his place almost as soon as he’d extended the invitation. After our first week of cohabitation, he clipped out an article on kitchen cleanliness that had run in the New York Times and left it for me to read. A government food inspector had been interviewed and then come to the writer’s home to rate her kitchen’s hygiene. The inspector maintained that she would never eat in a home that had a cat in residence. Just imagining the cat’s blithe transition from litter box to kitchen counter was enough to horrify her—and Chad as well. Good sex kept his cat contamination phobia in check for a couple more weeks; then the complaints began, marching from subtle to sledgehammer by the time I moved out.
And this got me wondering whether he’d been more welcoming to Kristen than he had to me. Had he really moved her in so quickly? And had she, for example, been given more closet space than the two feet I’d been allowed in his guest room? Would her papers and computer be spread across his second desk or would she have been required to load all her work into a briefcase stored under the guest bed, the way I had? Really, didn’t it all boil down to why he’d found her more lovable than me?
Never mind. What could be more pitiful than comparing my love life to that of a dead woman? But the longer I looked at the list, the more upset I got about my missing stuff. He’d been downright mean to keep things that meant nothing to him and everything to me.
As the last of the coffee burbled and sputtered into the pot, I hurried out onto the dock to retrieve Connie’s copy of the Key West Citizen. I smoothed the paper out on the café table in the kitchen and sat down for breakfast. Evinrude splayed out on the chair next to me, grooming his gray stripes into their morning order. I took a sip of coffee and almost spit it out when I saw Kristen’s head shot looming from the box just inside the front page reserved for the crime report.
Kristen Faulkner, a longtime native of Key West, who had plans to open a restaurant on Easter Island and recently launched Key Zest magazine, was discovered dead in the apartment of a friend yesterday morning. Police have questioned several persons of interest in the suspected murder.
My heart sank with a desperate clunk—suddenly the murder felt exquisitely real, and my so-called involvement, very scary. Feeling queasy, I stopped reading and flipped over to the living section pages and found my blaring byline: “Key West Confidential: Key Lime Pie to Die For” by Hayley Snow. Could the timing of such a headline have been any worse? I forced my thoughts away from key lime pie as murder weapon and skimmed the first paragraph to see how much the editor had cut.
Key lime pie may have been declared the official state pie by the Florida legislature, but there is no official state recipe for the confection. Nowhere is that more evident than in the restaurants of Key West. This reporter set off on a quest to taste her way across the island’s pies, and then report on the sublime to the ridiculous.
Then I’d gone on to discuss the pie as it was prepared in restaurants across town—the graham cracker crusts, the regular pie crusts, the lack of crust altogether. The pale yellow, the garish green, the use of key limes versus standard citrus, the unconventional addition of basil, the mile-high meringue topping, the whipped cream . . . If I hadn’t been already eating breakfast, I would have made myself hungry. Even though I’d sworn when I finished researching and writing the piece that I’d never eat key lime pie again.
I washed up the breakfast dishes and then moved to my mini bedroom to sort through my clean laundry, which I hadn’t yet put away in the built-in drawers. What was the point when I would almost surely be heading back to my mom’s spare bedroom in New Jersey soon enough?
At the bottom of the pile, I found the shirt Connie asked all her workers to wear. Over the front pocket “Paradise Cleaning” looped in green script. “We clean so you don’t have to” was written across the back of the shirt next to her logo, a figure in a hammock suspended between two cute little palm trees. I pulled it on, along with khaki cutoffs and red high-top sneakers, and kissed the cat.
“I won’t be gone long,” I assured him. He blinked his green eyes and curled up by my pillow. (Another horrifying realization for Chad: a cat sleeping near his precious face.)
I filled a square plastic carton with the supplies I’d need for the Hinand and Kennedy apartments. At the last second, I added extra rubber gloves and Chad’s special cleaning liquids. If I finished the other two places quickly, I’d storm through Chad’s apartment like a green tornado. This was my one and only chance to get my stuff without depending on him to cooperate. Connie would absolutely kill me if she knew I was thinking of bulling my way into his apartment. But I would clean, and clean to his exacting standards, while I was there. At least I’d be reducing her workload while snooping for the things that rightfully belonged to me. I hauled the carton down the dock to my scooter, bungee-corded it onto the backrest, and putt-putted across town.
With none of the owners home to distract me with chatting or snacks, I finished my first two assignments in record time. I loaded the cleaning stuff back into the crate and strode out to my scooter to tie it on. Did I have the nerve to do this? Yes. Was it a good idea? Maybe not. Starting up the bike, I headed over to Chad’s. I paused across from the drive leading into the condo complex to pull on a Paradise Cleaning ball cap and my biggest sunglasses. If Leona—the nosy neighbor on the second floor who came out of her apartment almost every time the elevator dinged—recognized me, she’d be on the phone to Chad’s office before I got the key turned in the lock.
I knew you shouldn’t choose a boyfriend according to where he lived, but trust me when I say it was almost worth Chad’s steady stream of low-level undercutting at the end of our relationship to live in his apartment—even for just two months. The condo complex sat at the very southern tip of the island, overlooking the harbor. His place sprawled over the upper-right-hand corner of a three-story whitewashed building that formerly served as the administration building for the U.S. Navy. He’d had the whole thing gutted and renovated before I ever laid eyes on it.
It wasn’t just the view I lusted after—a head-on one-hundred-and-eighty-degree expanse of water with an occasional cruise ship for relief from all that Caribbean blue—or the Corinthian columns marching down his entrance hallway, or the soundproofed bedroom with its king bed dressed in earth-toned Egyptian linens, or the bathtub big enough for two with pulsing jets that hit just the right point on your lower back. Best of all was the most amazing futuristic kitchen I’d ever baked a cake in: three ovens, a six-burner stove, speckled granite counters, and every piece of cooking equipment I could have ever thought about using and some that never crossed my mind. Not that a pat of butter had ever hit a frying pan while Chad lived alone. He ate to live. And he didn’t even like dessert. But I was in cook’s heaven during my short stay.
I buzzed myself into the building, lugged the cleaning supplies to the elevator in the front hall, and whisked up to the third floor without encountering any neighbors. My heart pit-patting, I dug the ring of keys out of my back pocket, found Chad’s, and eased the door open, listening. I heard nothing but the hum of his Thermador refrigerator, and outside the double-paned windows, the coarse buzz of a weed whacker from the front lawn. I stepped inside and closed the door softly behind me. My hands trembled as I crept down his hallway. I hadn’t let myself wonder exactly where Kristen had died. Or whether remnants of the disaster might still be lingering.
I stopped and stared. The apartment was every bit as gorgeous as I remembered it. Chad’s decorator had filled the place with shades of
green once he’d convinced her he wasn’t interested in the kitschy local style consisting of bright colors, lizards, palm trees, and roosters. (Though really, what was wrong with all that—he did live in Key West.)
Someone had swabbed down the counters of my dream kitchen inexpertly—they were still streaked with patches of greasy, black silt. Chad must have flipped out when he saw the police department’s work. Not that solving Kristen’s murder wasn’t much more important than any mess they’d left behind, but he loved his empire. Although none of that would have been on his mind if he’d been the one to kill her. But he couldn’t have. Could he? I rubbed the crop of goose bumps that had popped up on the length of my arms.
Setting the bucket on the floor near the double sinks, I poked my head into the living room, wondering again where the police had found her.
I desperately wanted to bolt, feeling one part voyeur, one part victim, and four parts creeped out of my gourd. But this would be the only chance to retrieve my stuff, because I surely wasn’t coming back for a second look. So I returned to the kitchen and snapped on my rubber gloves. If Chad should return home—and he absolutely shouldn’t; it was his day for back-to-back meetings—I could explain my innocence by pointing out the sparkling tile and spotless floors. After filling both of the stainless sinks in the kitchen with scalding water and Green Clean-up, I began to wipe the black gunk off the counters.
Too antsy to contain my curiosity, I dropped the sponge and opened the refrigerator. It was almost empty except for three cartons of Greek yogurt (no fat) and a bottle of white wine. I realized I was holding my breath. What had I thought I’d find? An unfinished pie and utensils with poison clinging to them? Clues revealing Kristen’s enemies? I needed to find my stuff, clean, and then get the heck out.
I tiptoed to the guest bedroom at the back of the apartment where I’d stored my things when I was there. There was nothing in the closet except for one of my steak knives, which lay on the floor beside a flattened stack of cardboard boxes. Brand new, super-sharp, and he had the nerve to use it like scissors. I picked it up and slid it into my back pocket.
An Appetite for Murder Page 5
