An Appetite for Murder

by Lucy Burdette

  “Hayley, I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  “I’m here now,” I said cheerfully. I got up to throw out my trash and moved away from the lunch crowd toward the side of the park that bordered the ocean. Better not to have the world overhearing my conversation.

  “Allison said you have a problem with the lawyer. He came highly recommended from Sid, who attended Rutgers Law School with him. They’ve been in touch on and off since then.” He cleared his throat and his voice dropped lower. “It would surprise me very much to hear he isn’t doing the job. But we’ll find someone else if it’s absolutely necessary.”

  The thought of starting over made me sick to my stomach. “I don’t think I’ll need another name, Dad. This morning, I had a chat with the detective in charge of my case. In my opinion, they don’t have enough evidence to arrest me. Everything’s hearsay and circumstance.”

  Which was not at all what the detective said, but I knew for certain that Bransford would arrest me the minute he thought the case would stand up in court. He was not holding off in order to be nice.

  My father launched into a rant about letting the professionals do what they’re hired to do and why was it that I thought I knew enough to make this kind of decision. The more he pushed, the more sure I was that I was ready to can Attorney Richard Kane and handle my problems myself.

  I broke through. “Excuse me, Dad, but sooner or later, I will have to start making my own decisions. And some of them won’t be so hot. But I’m ready to take responsibility for my own life. And Richard Kane is out. Even though I so appreciate your input and the trouble you took to find him.”

  “It’s not a good idea—” He listed off more reasons that I should listen to Kane, and to him.

  “Is Allison around?” I asked when he seemed to be finished scolding me.

  My stepmother came on the line. “How’s the weather down there? We’ve got this awful cold rain, but they’re talking about it changing over to sleet and snow by nightfall. And it’s only November!”

  I silently blessed her for changing the subject.

  “A little chilly. Whitecaps on the water,” I said, not wanting to rub in the glorious day. People who’ve escaped to Key West tended to get a perverse pleasure out of lousy weather reports from up north. And the northerners get testy when unfavorable comparisons are made.

  “I wondered if you’d had any more ideas about the chemicals in the poisoned pie?” I asked her. “I was talking to a pastry chef this morning who thought it would be hard to suspend something foreign in the body of the pie.”

  “Unless it was ground very finely and used in a small quantity, the particulates would change the consistency of the pie,” she agreed. “I’ve done some reading. So many possible compounds could have been used. But almost all of them have a bitter aftertaste or a peculiar flavor,” Allison said. “Now I’m wondering about something crunchy that would seem like it belonged in the crust.”

  “Maybe some kind of nut? That sounds exactly/ right.” After a little more weather-related chitchat and a defensive parry about coming home for Thanksgiving, I hung up. Then I prowled the perimeter of the fort until I located the information desk that had been set back among some palmettos near the entrance.

  A silver-haired man in a Key West Garden Club T-shirt and a bright green apron manned the desk. He listened to my question about poisonous nuts grown in tropical climates. “You’re not planning to do anyone in, are you? Ha, ha, ha,” he added.

  I grinned. “No plans for that. Just plain old medical curiosity.” Whatever that was.

  “I’m not a particular expert,” he said. “But let me think.” He combed his fingers through his neat beard. “Angel Wings are grown as foliage plants in Florida—ingestion of any part of the plant causes blisters in the mouth.” He looked at me and I shook my head.

  “Then there’s the Jerusalem cherry. All parts of the plant are toxic, but especially the berries.”

  “Would they leave a sour taste?” I asked.

  “Never tried them, but I can’t imagine they wouldn’t.”

  “What I’m looking for would either taste good or have no taste at all.”

  “If you’d like to leave your phone number, I’ll call if I think of something,” he said.

  I thanked him and looped through the plants one more time to decompress. How would it help me to know what agent might have poisoned Kristen? It didn’t. I was still bubbling in the same stew.

  I bought as many houseplants and flowers as would fit in the carton on the back of my scooter and started home. As I drove, I came to another conclusion: Time to bake my first key lime pie.

  After arranging Connie’s new plants on the houseboat deck, I drove back to Old Town and parked in front of Fausto’s Market. I’d taken a moment to skim several recipes online and decided to start with a variation of Emeril’s. The ingredients were fairly basic—graham cracker crumbs, condensed milk, eggs, sugar, key limes, and a layer of sugared sour cream over all. I also bought small containers of unsalted cashews and almonds to try in the crust. My mouth was watering just imagining it. The trick would be not eating it before the filling set.

  Back on the houseboat, I whirred the nuts into finely ground pieces, and the graham crackers into crumbs, and mixed them separately with melted butter into three different sections of crust—one plain, one with almonds, one with cashews. I patted the crust into a pie pan and popped it into the oven. Twenty minutes later, I added the lime/condensed milk filling and put it back in the oven.

  My phone rang—a 305 area code.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Jerry Touger, from the garden club sale. I thought of another possibility for your research: the Jatropha curcas. Its common name is the Physic or Barbados nut. The seeds are used to create biodiesel fuel in some countries, but the plant is dangerous because the seeds are delicious. And poisonous.”

  “Is it local?” I asked.

  “It’s found in the tropics, though we don’t have one on site. For obvious reasons. Can you imagine the liability issues if one of our customers ingested something poisonous right here in this garden?”

  I thanked him profusely and took the pie out of the oven. It was a lovely pale green—nothing like the horrid poisonous green glop that had done Kristen in. And it smelled delicious. I transferred it to the refrigerator and settled on my bed with Sparky to read my e-mail and troll for new recipes.

  After a half hour, I couldn’t take it any longer. I took the pie out of the fridge, frosted it with sweetened sour cream, and began to spoon it right out of the pan—sweet, sour, smooth, crunchy, rich. All three of the crust variations were delicious. I could imagine exactly how Kristen ate enough to do herself in.

  26

  “Never eat more than you can lift.”

  —Miss Piggy

  A loud bang startled me awake early on Monday morning. The noise came into focus as our front door rattled under a rain of forceful knocking.

  “Miss Hayley, Miss Hayley. Are you home?” More loud rapping. I pulled on my bathrobe and staggered out to the living area before the whole neighborhood called the cops.

  Peering out through the stained-glass window, I was surprised to see Tony, the homeless cowboy. He looked dirtier and more rumpled than usual and staggered under the weight of a knapsack stuffed full of who-knows-what junk. I had to admit to a moment of ungraceful recoil.

  “Miss Hayley!” he hollered. “Miss Hayley Snow! Are you home?”

  I cracked open the door with my finger to my lips. “Shhhh, you’ll wake the dead. What’s up?” I asked, clutching my robe around my waist and stepping onto the deck so I wouldn’t have to invite him in and run the risk of waking Connie and Ray.

  “Morning, ma’am.” With a big grin, he swept his cowboy hat off his head and bowed, wafting a wave of stale cigarettes and fermented booze at me. “Got any java brewin’?”

  I hesitated. First of all, I wasn’t decent. And second, Connie would not be thrilled to come
down for breakfast and find him at the table waiting for coffee. And third, why was he here?

  He watched me struggle to decide, and then settled the hat back on his greasy hair. “No worries. Came by to tell y’all that Turtle—you remember him?—red-haired guy who wears shorts on top of his jeans?”

  I nodded. “I know who Turtle is.”

  Tony pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one up, then leaned back against the railing. Settling in.

  “Anyway, he’s new this year. Came down from the north somewhere—Connecticut, I think, or Massachusetts. Anyway, he was staying out at the shelter on Stock Island, but he hated it. Too many people all jammed into one space. And some of them—pardon my French—are just crazy as crap.”

  He blew out a stream of smoke, scratched his head, and shifted the battered backpack from one shoulder to the other. “I figgered out the same thing when I got here. Better to take my chances on the beach or a car somewhere than to sleep with all those restless souls. You just never know when someone might rise up in the night with a knife.” He thrust his head forward, slashed a finger across his neck, and then tossed the burning cigarette into the water.

  I nodded, feeling awkward in my robe, and suddenly vulnerable. Wondering why he’d come. “So anyway, Turtle’s one of the new guys . . .”

  “Turns out he spent the night camped on a boat Monday night because it poured rain and he needed somewheres dry and he couldn’t take one more freakin’ night with those loony tunes at the shelter. Actually, he and his dog slept two nights on the Danger. Then the owner found him and routed him out.”

  “The Danger?”

  “That party boat right outside the administration building. Remember you were askin’ if any guys might have been fishin’ last Tuesday mornin’?”

  I nodded again, my brain cylinders finally starting to fire. If Turtle had seen someone besides me go into the complex with a pastry box, the detective might finally believe me. I pulled my robe tighter across my chest, as if that could contain the furious beating my heart had started up.

  Tony pulled out another cigarette and rolled it between his fingers. “I couldn’t get him to come with me because he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble. He don’t trust any authorities—with plenty of reason if you believe his story. But he might talk to you if you came to him. Guaranteed he’ll be at the gay church in the sandwich line. Guar-un-teed. He’s always hungry. Ten or ten thirty,” he said, a flash of gold in his smile. “I’ll meetcha there and tell ’im it’s important.”

  He wheeled around and shambled down the dock before I could ask any more questions. Or tell him I’d start some coffee. Or even give him a couple of bucks for a con leche at the Laundromat.

  “Tony, wait!” I called out. I hurried inside to wrap up two pieces of Alvina’s crumb cake and brought it back out to him. “Thanks so much for coming by.”

  He doffed his hat again and left. I watched him step off the dock and start up the road, feeling like a heel and wondering what twists in his life had led him to this moment. And where he had spent the night on that rainy Monday.

  While the coffeepot burbled, I washed my face and brushed my teeth—even those actions would be a luxury for Tony and Turtle—and dressed quickly. Still feeling a little sick from all the pie I’d eaten yesterday, I gobbled a sliver of coffee cake and motored down Eaton toward Mallory Square. The party sailboat called the Danger was usually docked at the pier in front of Chad’s apartment complex. If it looked like it had a good angle of vision, I’d try to track Turtle down and persuade him to tell me what he might have seen last Tuesday.

  The monstrous cruise ship Norwegian Queen had just disgorged its passengers when I arrived at the red brick Customs House near the pier. I parked the scooter and wove upstream through the current of round-bellied cruisers eager for a dose of Duval Street and then turned left at the water. Most of the charter sailboats were still tied to the dock—the day was a little too chilly to appeal to adventure-seeking tourists.

  The Danger, with its tall mast and deep blue hull, bobbed gently at its mooring. A pile of lime-green ocean-

  going kayaks roosted on its deck, providing lots of nooks and crannies where a person might tuck himself away to spend a night out of the wind and rain. I sat on the bench directly in front of the boat and looked over my shoulder at Chad’s condominium. There was a perfect sight line from the boat to the main door of his building, assuming the person who delivered the pie had either entered through the water-side gate, or come in through the garage underneath the other apartments and passed by the pool to that main door. Either way, no one got through those gates without a key. Unless a resident buzzed them in or they slipped in on someone’s draft. And there were enough workers and renters and people with unauthorized keys in their possession to make this quite possible.

  Or had Kristen been expecting a food delivery? Seemed unlikely so early in the morning. And for sure the cops would have looked into that angle. It didn’t seem fair to sic them on Turtle without first trying to find out what—if anything—he’d noticed on the morning of the murder.

  27

  “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.”

  —Mother Teresa

  The Metropolitan Community Church squatted oblong and solid on a residential section of Petronia Street just a block from the major cross street, White. I stashed my scooter at the bike rack in front of the white two-story building and sat on the steps to wait, hoping that Tony would show. I felt certain that Turtle wouldn’t talk to me without his friend as buffer.

  Sandwich-seekers began to drift down the street in groups of twos and threes, entering the gate to follow the sidewalk along the building. Most were men that I’d seen at the beach or loitering outside the grocery store or, occasionally, causing a ruckus on Duval Street. I couldn’t help wondering again what had led them here (not counting their current growling stomachs).

  I glanced at my watch. Ten thirty. I decided to go in and ask the folks working whether they’d seen Turtle or whether they expected him. A sign directed me around the side of the building to the basement entrance. A friendly older man in khaki shorts and a flowered shirt greeted me as I entered. On the table in front of him were stacks of sandwiches on white bread and piles of small paper sacks, plastic bags of peanuts and raisins, and others containing crackers or cookies.

  “Good morning,” he called out heartily. “Welcome to lunch at MCC. Today we have a choice of peanut butter and jelly or tuna salad.” The men being served on either side of me turned to stare. The helpful man began to pack saltines and a sports drink into a paper bag and waited for me to make my choice.

  “I’m not here for lunch,” I stammered, keeping my gaze pinned on the jelly leaking through the top sandwich, staining the thin white bread purple. “I live out on houseboat row and I was talking to a guy, Tony, earlier this morning and he told me that his friend Turtle often visits here about now.” I tapped my watch.

  The men around me shrank back and I realized that I probably looked like pure hassle. They’d probably picked up the odor of cops, or something worse.

  “He may have seen something that pertains to a case I’m involved with.” Now the nice man looked worried, too. “He’s not in trouble,” I added quickly, “but I am.”

  The man pushed his aviator-shaped glasses up his nose and gave me a nod. “He’s out on the back porch. Follow the walk around the corner. Can’t promise he’ll talk to you, though. He’s always quiet, but today more than usual. I let him sit back there awhile because it seemed like he needed a quiet space.” His voice dropped lower. “Possible that he ran out of his medication. Or decided he was through taking it.” He rubbed a hand across his jaw. “Just be a little careful. Don’t push.”

  I skirted around the walk to the back porch and found Turtle smoking at a plastic picnic table, a Styrofoam coffee cup in front of him, his dog at his feet. His dark red hair was long and tangled and his eyes seemed wild, like
those of a trapped animal. I stopped still so as not to spook him. The dog uttered a low growl, his snout still resting on crossed paws.

  “Turtle, I’m Hayley,” I said gently. “We met a couple days ago at the beach when Henri Stentzel sent me over with a sack of burritos. She cooks awesome food, doesn’t she? I never can make it taste the same at home in my kitchen.” I took one step closer and kept talking. “Tony told me I might find you here. I swear I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t so important. It’s possible that you might have seen something that could keep me out of jail.”

  Turtle hunched over his cigarette, sucking in air until it burned hot red down to the filter and then to his fingers. Then he dropped the glowing stub to the deck and ground it out. I swore I could smell the burned flesh.

  “Listen,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “Maybe you heard about the lady who was poisoned last week? They think I killed her and I can’t find anyone who saw me at home, even though I swear I was right there on the boat the whole morning.”

  I inched a little closer and then stopped, trying to imagine I was approaching a feral cat. “I guess I did have reason to hate her, but really I should hate my boyfriend, right? He’s the one who invited me down here and then cheated on me. I swear I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. I always think I would never cheat on someone because I know what it would feel like and I wouldn’t want to be the cause of that much hurt in someone else. But on the other hand, you fall in love or lust or whatever and it just seems like it’s the only thing that matters in the world. So I guess I’m saying I didn’t think I’d do that to someone else, but I proved I can get swept away with the best of them. After all, I’m here instead of home in New Jersey, right?”

  Turtle didn’t say anything, but how would he be expected to answer my nervous jabbering? I edged onto the bench across from him and the dog lifted his head and snarled.