Out of the Frying Pan

by Robin Allen

“He’s golfing,” I said. “I came in here to call him and tell him about Dana, but I got interrupted by everyone and their chef coming into the storage pantry.”

  Jamie held up his phone. “You dialed me instead.”

  “That was on purpose,” I said. “I have a scoop for you. Remember how Dana’s cooks said Colin quit a couple of weeks ago? Well, Randy Dove just told me Dana fired Colin.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, but you could go ask him.” I paused. “Unless Mindy needs you for A Foodie’s Taste of Cow Patties.”

  Jamie smiled sarcastically, then said, “Michael Douglas and Brittany Murphy.”

  We play a trivia game where one of us names two actors, and the other names the movie they starred in. Jamie has an amazing memory, but I have to study movie websites to keep up. With Jamie gone the past few months, other things had distracted me.

  “You win this round,” I said.

  “Don’t Say a Word,” he said.

  “About Dana?”

  He nodded. “It’ll just cause a lot of trouble.”

  “You mean it’ll shut people up before you can get your stories,” I said. He arched a warning eyebrow at me. “You can count on me,” I said.

  Jamie shook his long curls in disappointment. “You could have said that with Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo.” He started up the gravel drive, but stopped after a few steps. “Coming?”

  “You go on,” I said. “I still need to call Mitch.” And inspect the kitchen for anything suspicious before it was lost during cleanup. If one of the most famous chefs in Austin had died from food poisoning on my watch, my boss would bust me down to septic inspections.

  As soon as Jamie passed out of turning-back-to-see-me range, I ran to my Jeep, grabbed my badge from my backpack, clipped it to my waistband, and zipped to the kitchen.

  Good Earth’s kitchen was never intended to support high-volume table service, so they don’t have a commercial electric dishwasher, and everything has to be washed by hand. When I entered, Tarzan and the other male cook were elbow-deep in a three-compartment sink of steaming water filled with bubbles and dinner plates. The two chicks stood at the prep table eating leftover skewers.

  “Y’all doing okay?” I asked.

  The girls nodded sadly. I put my hand on my hip to draw their attention to my badge. “I’m with the health department and—”

  Cheri stopped in mid-bite. “We normally don’t eat in the kitchen.”

  See? Everyone knows the rules; they just don’t abide by them.

  “I’m not here for that,” I said. “I’m investigating what happened to Dana.”

  “Was it food poisoning?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Right now, I’d like to exclude the possibility of an outbreak.”

  Technically, to be deemed an outbreak there has to be more than one case of the same illness reported by a doctor or a hospital—except in the case of botulism, which requires only one incident to be considered an outbreak—but the word is loaded and gets people’s attention.

  “Can I ask y’all some questions?” I said.

  They nodded and resumed eating. I addressed the blond one who earlier told me Dana had fallen. Kelly was her name. “You told me she made a joke, and then her eyes got wide and she dropped.” Kelly nodded, and I continued. “Did she clutch her chest like she was having a heart attack or double over like she had stomach pain?”

  The girls exchanged glances then Cheri said, “She sort of …

  crumpled.”

  That’s what happened to Mitch when he had his heart attack a few months ago, but he had strained his heart picking up a large tray stacked with dirty dishes.

  “Did she lift anything heavy during the day?” I asked.

  “The guys carried in all the catering tubs, but she could have earlier.”

  “While you were with her today, did she eat or drink anything that no one else did?”

  They both shrugged. “It’s possible,” Cheri said, “but Chef doesn’t eat while she’s working, except to taste stuff we make. We all ate the same today.”

  Kelly said, “She got really upset when—”

  “Kelly!” Cheri said. “That has nothing to do with food poisoning.”

  “It could help eliminate food poisoning,” I said. “If she had a heart attack, then being upset may have triggered it.” I addressed Kelly. “What upset her?”

  She looked at Cheri, then at the floor. “Colin … you know, her old sous … brought her a bottle of champagne. He said it was from Randy Dove.”

  “And Dana got upset?” I said. I knew the answer, of course—saw the answer in the Field.

  Kelly nodded. “We were all happy to see Colin again. We thought he might want to come back, until Chef started yelling at him. She called him a traitor and said he’d never cook in Austin again.”

  “What did Colin do when she reacted like that?” I asked. “Was he mad?”

  “He’s used to it. He said he was sorry, then he left.”

  “Did you see where he went?” Because he didn’t return to the Field until after Dana had gone in and yelled at Randy.

  They shook their heads.

  “I’ll need to see that bottle of champagne,” I said.

  “It’s in the walk-in,” Cheri said. “She didn’t drink any.”

  After she left to fetch it, I asked Kelly to describe what happened before Dana went down.

  “It was a normal busy night, except in a different place,” she said. “It took us a little while to get the hang of things, but then we were rolling. Chef was in a really good mood, actually, even before she won the Friends president.”

  “Was that unusual? The good mood.”

  “I guess. Yeah. She’s always real serious when she’s cooking. When we first got here, she had us unpack the supplies while she talked to Mr. Vaughn. She was gone for like thirty minutes, then came back all happy.”

  I assumed Perry had given her advance notice she won the election. “So she was in a good mood,” I said, “then Colin delivered the champagne and she got upset.” Kelly nodded. “And she left the kitchen, correct?”

  “She was gone like five minutes,” Kelly said, “but I don’t know where she went.”

  “And she was in a good mood when she came back?”

  Kelly frowned.

  “You said she made a joke that y’all were laughing at right before she went down.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Cheri returned from the walk-in unwrapping two bread rolls sealed in foil. “I can’t find it,” she said. “But I know it was in there earlier. I put it on the shelf.”

  “Are you sure Dana didn’t drink it?” I asked.

  “We’re sure,” Kelly said. Cheri handed her a roll and she used her index finger to hollow out the center to make room for a couple of pieces of pork. She took a bite of the sandwich then said, “Chef was drinking a lot of water all night. We were all dying from the heat.”

  A cook’s uniform is not designed for comfort. Good coats and pants are made from heavy twill cotton, cheaper ones a cotton/polyester blend, which makes them supernova hot. Add to that an undershirt to soak up the sweat, socks and full-coverage shoes, and some sort of hair restraint, and the entire outfit becomes the opposite of comfortable. Its first job is as protection against burns, scrapes, and grease splatters. However, most cooks try to get some relief from this fabric suit of armor by rolling up their sleeves when they work, which exposes their wrists and forearms—the very body parts most susceptible to burns, scrapes, and grease splatters.

  If Dana had snacked on bad food, other people would also be sick, but the only solid lead I had was that she had been drinking water. Unless the rumor Jerry told Daisy that Dana started her day with vodka was true, which could contribute to a heart attack. But did she indulge on a night as important as
this?

  “Where is the glass she was drinking from?” I asked.

  Kelly reached under the counter of the prep table and removed a glass measuring cup from a lower shelf. Everything about her seemed guilty, and I thought she had realized she had no choice but to confess that her boss was an alcoholic, but she said, “Chef doesn’t like to drink from a straw.”

  I remembered seeing that measuring cup on the floor when I helped do CPR on Dana. Owing to the pour spout and handle, the cup hadn’t laid completely on its side and still had close to half an inch of liquid in it, which fizzed when I sloshed the cup. That explained where the champagne went.

  Jamie was looking more right, because a heart attack was seeming more likely after Dana had gone through the high of the Friends win, the low of Colin’s betrayal, and a couple of mugs of bubbly in a room as hot as a bonfire.

  “Found it!” Cheri called from the dry storage area. I met her halfway. “The guys started packing up stuff we were done with and pulled it from the walk-in.”

  The bottle still had its foil wrap and cork. “You’re sure that’s the bottle Colin brought?” I asked.

  “Positive,” Cheri said. “The label was wet and peeling off a little.”

  If Dana hadn’t been drinking champagne, then what was fizzing in her cup? Soda water or Sprite? Neither of those would cause her to pass out, unless she had splashed in a few jiggers of vodka. I sniffed it, but didn’t detect any offensive fumes, so I dipped my pinkie into the liquid. I didn’t taste it because I felt the same burning sensation on my finger as on my mouth and knees, and then I saw white foam.

  There was only one thing in the kitchen that would cause that.

  Nine

  Food-grade hydrogen peroxide. Not the 3% or 5% percent solution anyone can buy in a brown bottle at the grocery store for first aid and hair highlights. This is a concentrated 35% solution that comes with all kinds of warnings against using it full-strength, including cautions against direct contact with skin and consuming it. It’s as clear as vodka and has no odor. It’s recommended that food-grade peroxide be diluted with water to a 3% solution before using it as a natural household cleaner or blood therapeutic, and even then, it fizzes when it comes into contact with the microorganisms on organic material like skin or raw ingredients.

  Full-strength would eat something alive.

  How did that get into Dana’s cup?

  To make sure it was what I thought it was before I violated anyone’s civil rights, I picked up a raw green bean that had fallen to the floor and broke off a piece. I dropped it into the liquid and watched it fizz. It quickly resembled a little ball of cotton. Soda water or Sprite would not have attacked the green bean like flesh-eating bacteria.

  Ingesting the stuff would have made Dana nauseated, but not immediately, and it wouldn’t have killed her, not even eventually. Well, it wouldn’t have killed a healthy woman.

  I tried to imagine myself in Dana’s place: gulping what I thought would be refreshing water, surprise at drinking something harsh and fizzy, shock that someone had filled my cup with it, and alarm that it might prove immediately hazardous to my life. The panic would have revved my healthy heart and made me flush. But Dana? It would have revved her diseased heart and made her dead.

  This was no accident. Everyone knew about her heart condition, and whether the peroxide was intended to kill her or simply incapacitate her was irrelevant. The end result was the same.

  The kitchen was a crime scene, I realized, and everyone in it was a suspect. I raised my badge into the air and yelled, “Hold it!”

  No one held anything.

  Tarzan and the other guy couldn’t hear me over the running water, and the girls must have left the kitchen while I conducted my experiment. It was just as well. In light of Dana’s death being intentional, Jamie would be more than a little unhappy that I spread the news she had died.

  I decided to keep an inspector’s eye on everyone and notice if they acted suspicious. So far, no one seemed concerned to see me handling Dana’s cup, but I had seen enough guilty restaurant employees pretend to know nothing about nothing to take that at face value.

  I clipped my badge to my skirt, then placed the measuring cup on the prep table. Had I known I was going to find malice aforethought when I asked to see Dana’s drinking cup, I would have worn gloves so as to preserve any fingerprints, but not even I possessed the ability to turn back time. Besides, you can pour anything into a cup without handling it, which Dana’s killer may well have done. And if they were safety-conscious, they followed the manufacturer’s recommendation to wear gloves while handling the stuff.

  This was a mystery I had to solve. Dana would never have won the Nicest Chef in Austin award, but she was a friend and mentor to as many people as she rubbed the wrong way, and lots of both were at the dinner.

  I covered the cup with the foil that had contained the bread rolls so the peroxide didn’t spill or evaporate, and because over time, food-grade peroxide loses its potency when exposed to air and light. By the time the police got around to testing it in a month or two, it could have lost a few molecules and reverted to nothing more dangerous than water.

  I took the evidence to the five-foot-tall upright freezer against the far right wall. Like alcohol—both rubbing and drinking—peroxide does not freeze, so because an airtight freezer is usually the consistently darkest place anywhere, that’s where most people keep it. I wanted to store the cup in a safe place, but I also wanted to check on the bottle of food-grade peroxide Good Earth kept inside, wrapped in a red plastic bag on the bottom shelf. I had seen it during inspections.

  The first thing I noticed was the freezer’s combination lock on the floor, which meant that the freezer’s contents were accessible to anyone. I opened the door to find shelves of frozen dinners, coffee beans, phyllo dough, and raspberries, but no peroxide. They could have been out, but I suspected the killer had taken it. I placed Dana’s cup on the bottom shelf, then shut the door and locked the lock. Dinner had ended and I assumed that no one needed inside the freezer again.

  My stomach yelled at me as I thought through my next move. Good Earth also used food-grade peroxide to clean the office, the washing shed, the chicken coop, the bathrooms, and their homes, so the kitchen wasn’t the only place to find it. I left the cooks to their cleanup and went to the storage pantry in the washing shed. I explored the shelves, moving aside spades and trowels, pliers and seed packets, until I saw a small white bottle on the top shelf. I didn’t see any gloves on the shelves and didn’t have even a crumpled bevnap on me, so I used a pair of garden shears as tongs to gently lift the bottle and bring it down to eye level.

  It was an oxygenating plant additive called OxyGrowth. The label listed hydrogen peroxide as the first of many ingredients, so this was another possible murder weapon. Did this mixture have an odor? Would Dana have noticed if it had? When you’re that busy and that thirsty, you grab your glass and gulp. I couldn’t open the bottle and sniff without leaving my fingerprints all over it, and especially not since my prints were already on Dana’s cup, so I would have to come back later and test it.

  I noticed dirt on the bottle, which wasn’t that unusual because, as I reminded Nina earlier, we were on a farm, but my thumb slid across a smear of soft mud, which meant that it had been wet recently. Brandon and Cory wouldn’t have used it for the washing demo, but I remembered hearing something thud on the ground when Perry argued with one of them earlier. Perhaps they had handled the stuff for some reason.

  I returned it to the top shelf, hung the garden shears on their hook, then set out to tell Jamie about my discovery. I was intercepted again, however, but this time I welcomed it.

  Trevor Shaw—Ursula’s twenty-five-year-old sous chef and secret sometimes-boyfriend whom Nina would have a herd of cows over if she knew—ambled out of the Field. With his long dark blond hair, slow smile, colorfully illustrated arms, and bad-
boy vibe, he looks like the audacious flirt that he is. He wore faded blue jeans and a once-black vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt, drained to gray from many launderings.

  He stopped in front of the archway, placed his hands on narrow hips, and watched me walk up to him, his blue eyes starting at my boots, lingering on my skirt, and finally resting on my face.

  “Evenin’ sheriff,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat. “I just rode into town and want no trouble with the law.”

  I still had my inspector’s badge clipped to my waistband, and I put it in my pocket to forestall Jamie jumping to all kinds of correct conclusions about me investigating before I had a chance to tell him the facts. “Good,” I said. “I’ve got a nice, quiet farm community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet.”

  Trevor bent down and peered at my face. “Are you an extra in a horror movie?”

  “Still?” I said to the welts as I patted them with my fingertips. I looked down at my knees, and so did Trevor. “Don’t say a word,” I said. “It’s from hydrogen peroxide.”

  “Whatever you say, Popstar,” he said in that slow Texas drawl of his.

  “Where’s Nina?” I asked, wanting to establish her whereabouts to make sure I avoided her.

  He chuckled. “Tryin’ to find me a nice girl to date. She doesn’t understand why Ursula won’t help her. I thought I’d take a walk and let Ursula get her talkin’ on something else.”

  Trevor doesn’t “walk” without a cigarette. “They won’t let you smoke on the farm,” I said. “You’ll have to go to the parking lot.”

  He held up both hands. “I quit.”

  “Since when?”

  He removed his phone from his pocket and illuminated the time. “Goin’ on ten hours and thirteen minutes,” he said. “Ursula and I were preppin’ for brunch, and I misidentified mace as nutmeg, and she said my palate was polluted and suggested I quit.”

  Ursula York does not suggest. She commands, she makes, she insists, she demands. “She crushed up your pack and threw it in the trash, didn’t she?”