Healthy Place to Die

by Peter King

  “Most of us don’t like the bread we buy,” he began. “Steam baked, precut, plastic wrapped—modern bread typifies the mechanical approach, the output of a production line, all the non-human approaches to food that we are now finding undesirable and unacceptable.”

  Murmurs of agreement greeted this opening, and Michel went on. “Untouched by human hands—doesn’t that typify bread? Under the guises of hygiene and economy and convenience, we are being fed this inferior product. Now we are rebelling.” He thumped a fist on the table and dishes rattled. Anyone sleeping would have had a violent awakening, but no one was. “We have been making bread for eight thousand years, and we want to go back to making it properly.” Someone clapped.

  “Bread is basically a simple food. I am going to show you how to make the simplest version of all.” He waved to the ingredients in front of me and began, describing each action. “Take flour and eggs, more whites than yolks. Add yeast until the mixture thickens, add sugar and let it rest.” He pulled a doughy mound toward him. “This has been prepared in exactly that way and baked. Now I cut off the crown, pour in some melted butter, mix it well, replace the crown, and bake again.”

  He slid it into the oven and beamed at his audience.

  “That is the way bread was made a thousand years ago, and it is still the basic way. Nothing has really changed, but naturally some improvements have appeared. Beer yeast was the only kind available then, but today refined yeasts are used. Emulsifiers are added to keep the bread from going stale quickly; kneading is done mechanically and is more efficient. Perhaps the most useful improvement has been in the oven. Modern ovens hold a constant temperature—very different from the days of continually stoking a fire, which caused the temperature to go up and down.”

  A barrage of questions followed, for it seemed that despite the variety of breads on the market, many people got a certain satisfaction from baking their own. Helmut Helberg was in the audience, and I gave another star to Caroline de Witt when Helmut said she had specifically requested his presence. A good-natured altercation between Michel and Helmut developed over home-baked bread versus supermarket bread. Perhaps it was inevitable that Helmut should have the last word by pointing out that his chain of supermarkets carried all the ingredients for the home baker.

  We were late disbanding for lunch and most of the attendees at the session headed directly for the dining room, where, as Michel had told them, there were ten different kinds of bread being offered with the meal.

  I took a brief promenade by the lake to do some thinking. Janet Hargrave was the person who had me baffled. She was executive editor of a magazine, and one of her columnists who had come here to the conference had disappeared. Janet had come here to … to do what? Find her? Unusual behavior for an editor surely.

  If I had been a real investigator, I would have observed Janet going in to dinner and taken my trusty lock pick to her cabin. Inside, I would have prowled through her belongings. It wouldn’t take long, I thought, as she had arrived with only one small bag. I would have found unmistakable evidence that … Well, that was the way it was supposed to work. I wondered if it ever did. People’s motives were not usually so simple that a single piece of paper explained them fully. A photograph, that was another popular giveaway; yet if photographs were that incriminating, why did people carry them around?

  For a real investigator, it sounded as if all the conventional approaches would be a waste of time. It was a good thing I was merely a Gourmet Detective—it meant I could be unconventional. So what could I do? Well, I could talk to Janet Hargrave and get her to confide in me. Was I being unrealistic? Well, I had one big factor in my favor—I knew more about Kathleen’s most recent activities than Janet did. I would have to use that.

  The lull in the period before lunch was a suitable time to catch someone, and Janet proved easy to waylay. I had noted her cabin number when she had checked in, and I hung around in sight of it until she came out and headed for the dining room. I fell into step beside her.

  “I think we should have a chat,” I told her, putting on my disarming smile.

  She gave me a sour look. “What about?”

  “About Kathleen Evans.”

  She almost broke her stride, but that was her only reaction. Still, it was better than being ignored. We walked on, and at length she said predictably, “What about her?”

  “I didn’t tell you the whole truth before.” I had decided that throwing myself on her mercy might pry something out of her.

  “I thought not.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, startled.

  “You said you had a date with her and she was there but when you looked for her, she was gone. That sounded like a cover-up.”

  “You took me by surprise, showing up like that.”

  “Go on,” she said in a neutral tone.

  “It was true that she invited me to meet her in the Seaweed Forest.”

  “I took a look at it early this morning.”

  “Good, then you’ll have a better appreciation of what I’m telling you.” I went on to relate what had happened. By the time I finished, we had stopped walking and she was facing me.

  “So you don’t know for sure that she was dead.”

  “No,” I admitted. “She looked to be, but I didn’t have the chance to feel for a pulse. Then she was gone. She might have recovered, got out of the Seaweed Forest, and hidden out until she could take a cab to the airport.”

  “And the alternative?”

  “That’s where it gets really speculative. If she was killed, why did someone take her body?”

  She eyed me shrewdly. “You don’t ask the obvious question—why should anyone kill her?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that. I’m telling you all this because I think maybe you do.”

  She turned half away. “She’s a columnist on a food magazine, for Christ’s sake. Why would anyone want to kill her?”

  “Her column’s in your magazine—you tell me.”

  From the distant lake, voices were raised and drifted across the water. She looked that way, then said, “She’s a food columnist, not a secret agent.”

  “If you think she’s dead, that’s not an answer.”

  “We may find that she’s back in New York, at her desk and writing up a story on the spa.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said flatly. I didn’t elaborate and she said nothing. She had probably called the magazine herself already.

  “Do you have anything else to tell me?” she asked coldly.

  “No, but I hoped you’d have something to tell me.”

  She was starting to shake her head, but I think my attitude told her I was going to press for some kind of an answer. “I can tell you this,” she said. “Kathleen has been here to the spa before.”

  “On business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “If so, I don’t know what it is,” she replied.

  We both waited for the other to make a further contribution but neither of us did. At least she had told me something, though I thought she was still holding back. It would be understandable if she thought I hadn’t told all. My story sounded fishy even to me.

  “We may as well go to lunch,” she said, starting to walk briskly toward the dining room.

  “We must do this again,” I suggested. “Maybe a few more meetings like this and we’ll know enough to really find Kathleen.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WHO WAS THE BUSIEST busybody at the spa this week? Who would be the best storage house of gossip? I needed a fink and I decided it must be feminine. I acknowledged that that might well be a typically male sexist point of view, but, to me, the female of the species is the most efficient conduit for picking up tittle-tattle, rumor, hearsay, and scuttlebutt.

  Which female? Millicent Manners came to mind at once as the least abstruse of those present, and she was a good place to start. I recalled her saying that she did an hour of aerobics eac
h morning before breakfast, and with the superbly equipped gym here, that was where she would be.

  She was there, under a monstrous machine that she was heaving into the air with arms and legs. Other equipment surrounded her, all of it looking complicated and muscle jarring. Dials and panels showed how much effort she was expending and how many more agonizing moments of this torture remained. Millicent was not quite alone in her dedication to physical fitness, but almost. An elderly man was struggling with some ropes that he appeared to be trying to pull out of the wall, and a woman nearly his age was pedaling a bicycle that was not moving an inch. Otherwise, the gym was empty.

  I waited until Millicent stopped for a rest. I didn’t want to interrupt her, as from the effort she was expending it looked as if the machine might fall on her when she ceased pushing. It didn’t, though, and she crawled out, reached for a towel, and headed for the water cooler to replenish her body fluids.

  She was still breathing hard and I wanted her in top tittle-tattle shape, so I waited a little longer. She hadn’t noticed me, and when she finished her third cup she turned abruptly and went into the shower and changing rooms. That was even better. When she came out, she would be full of self-righteous health and energy.

  She did have a glow, I had to admit, and I told her so as we walked out of the gym together. “I haven’t seen you in there before,” she said.

  “I like to keep a low profile when I exercise,” I told her.

  “You didn’t even raise a sweat,” she said with a twitch of her lips.

  “I have a high threshold,” I told her. “We don’t have many exercisers, do we? Or maybe people like to come in later in the day. Kathleen Evans was telling me she liked to exercise before dinner.”

  “Kathleen Evans?” she frowned. “Oh, the food columnist. I haven’t talked to her.”

  It was not an encouraging start. Maybe she was too wrapped up in herself and her career, I thought, but as I quested further I found that she was a brighter woman than I had at first believed. She told me of the changes she had proposed in the scripts and of the studio’s willingness to go along with her on them. She had to insist on this week at the spa so that she could get a better understanding of food and cooking, and since the shooting of the first scenes had been delayed, they had agreed.

  “Anyway,” she added, “I needed a break like this. I’ve been shooting for fifteen months on Tell Me You Love Me.”

  As for Kathleen Evans, though, when I brought up her name casually, Millicent had nothing to say. She hadn’t talked to her and commented that she hadn’t seen her in the last couple of days. As we reached the dining room, I was prepared to drop that line of investigation and find another prospective informant.

  Marta Giannini was my next choice. She didn’t qualify as your typical, motor-mouthed busybody, but she was friendly and talkative, happy to chat with everyone. She was gregarious and lively; she got around and might have spotted signs or observed liaisons that a mere male would miss. Besides, I liked talking to her, though to do so I had to dawdle over my breakfast of fresh fruit, muesli, and coffee, as she was evidently sleeping late this morning.

  When she finally came in, I waved and she joined me. “Just coffee,” she ordered. “Nothing else.” Feeling some hunger pangs after her second cup, she managed to devour a couple of pear Danish, which the Swiss call Viennese, and then she had a slice of pumpernickel toast with blackberry jam. She looked refreshed and sparkling, and though she wore little makeup in the mornings, I noticed that she never neglected her eyes, which she rightfully considered her outstanding feature.

  “I need a walk after that.” She sighed, adding that now that she had more or less retired from acting, she could afford to indulge in a few occasional carbohydrates. On the lawn, we stopped to watch an impromptu volleyball game, which, as it was being played without a net or lines, was causing much good-natured argument about the score. Marta was clapping her hands and crying out in delight like a schoolgirl at every outstanding play.

  “You’re a sports enthusiast,” I said. “I should have known from that movie where you trained your pet horse to run and then won the Kentucky Derby with it.”

  “I was terrified of that horse. It was so big. I kept asking for a smaller one.”

  “So now you’ve gone from horse racing to volleyball.”

  “Oh, is that what this is?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “In a way. I think I saw that food columnist playing it the other day. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her around since that day, have you?”

  “Kathleen Evans? No, I heard she’d gone back to the States.” She tossed out the comment, then groaned as the ball flew wide of what would have been the court.

  This was a promising start. Marta was more alert to the movements of the present inhabitants of the spa than I had expected. “I heard that too,” I said, “that was why I asked. I thought she was supposed to be here for the whole week.”

  “I thought she was too.” Marta’s enthusiasm for sport was waning before my eyes as she was finding a good gossip more exciting. “Perhaps she found a good story for her column here at the spa.”

  “Surely not,” I said, trying to keep her going. “Not here at the spa?”

  Marta pouted. “Are we so dull?”

  “Kathleen writes a food column. It’s not society or film scandal.”

  “The two might be combined.”

  I flashed a glance at the profile that a couple of decades ago had appeared on film posters throughout the world. Her eyes were on the volleyball game but her thoughts weren’t.

  “Come on, Marta, you know some juicy tidbit, I can tell.”

  She laughed, a short throaty laugh that had at one time devastated me. It still had an effect even if it was a little diluted by time.

  “I used to say to Hedda, ‘You tell me a story and I’ll tell you one.’”

  “And did she?”

  “Oh, yes. Hedda would do anything for a story, and swapping them satisfied us both.”

  “Your stories were always about you?” I asked.

  “Most of them.”

  “Were they true?”

  She shrugged. “Once in a while.”

  “So your story on the spa—is it about you?”

  “No.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes,” she said coyly. Few sophisticated women can be coy, but when they have appeared in fifty or so films, I suppose they have learned coyness along with all the other feigned emotions.

  “So you’re not in this story,” I said. “That’s disappointing. I was picturing the scenario … I see you in a dirndl and a bonnet, running across an Alpine meadow, arms outstretched, and toward you comes a baron in lederhosen. In the background, I hear the sound of—”

  “No, it’s not that one,” she said with an amused smile. “They already made it—mind you, I would have been much better in the part than Julie. But that’s okay, she is one of my friends now, so I won’t criticize her performance. No, there’s no music in this one—but I’ll make up for that and give you two stories.”

  “Twice as good. Carry on.”

  “I said they are not about me—they’re about Kathleen Evans.” She paused for dramatic effect, and there had been a time when no one in Hollywood could outdramatize Marta.

  When she thought a long enough pause had elapsed, she said quietly, “Kathleen likes chefs.”

  I nodded. “Probably collecting background material.” I said it dismissively and it worked.

  “In the sauna?”

  “Ah, that could be seen in a different perspective,” I conceded. “Still, journalists have to get their material wherever they can.”

  She snorted. It was elegantly done, but it was still a snort.

  “Which chef was she with?” I asked, trying to sound only semi-interested.

  “I don’t mention names,” she said haughtily, but then she reverted to coy. “This chef, though, well, he had probably left his poor dear wife cleaning up in the
kitchen.”

  Leighton Vance. Well, that was not a complete surprise. “You said two stories. You also said ‘chefs’ so a chef is in the other story too?”

  “Oh, good shot!” Marta called out, her eyes back on the game, but I knew it was only to provoke me as the ball had hit someone on the head and rocketed into the air. I looked at her until she turned to smile at me. “The other? Well, there aren’t that many chefs here, are there? What about you, for instance?”

  For a fleeting moment, I thought she was referring to my assignation with Kathleen in the Seaweed Forest, but I confined my stuttering and stammering to the inside of my head.

  “I’m not a chef anymore,” I said.

  “What are you?” she wanted to know, and her tone was more serious.

  I told her. I told her that I was called “the Gourmet Detective” and I explained what I did. I told her about Carver Armitage and how he had talked to me from his hospital bed and asked me to come to the spa to replace him.

  “So you’re a detective,” Marta said pensively. She brightened. “I was in one of the Pink Panther films!”

  “Wasn’t it the one where Colin Gordon was the murderer?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I never could follow those plots. Do you carry a gun?”

  “Certainly not, and like I keep saying, I’m not really a detective.” I went through it again, stressing foods and spices, cooking methods, my love of the history of foods and avoiding all mention of corpses and crime, mystery and murder, deceit and death.

  “You’re sure you’re not on a case?” she asked, her expression showing doubt.

  “The only reason I came here to the spa is to substitute for Carver Armitage. That’s the truth.” It was—as far as it went. This was not the time to consider sins of omission versus commission, and anyway the mysterious happenings had occurred after my arrival here.

  She nodded in satisfaction. I felt ashamed of myself for misleading her and mentally promised that I would make amends—but not just now.

  “So it’s all right for me to tell you about the other chef?” she asked.