Hot Stuff

by Don Bruns

  I think all three of us were numb. We stood there and watched the fire spiral higher and higher as the blaze found more fuel to feed on. Thirty-foot plumes of black smoke billowed from the restaurant and the roar was almost deafening.

  An old Dodge came wheezing down the road, and the driver pulled over, window rolled down.

  “Is that L’Elfe?”

  “It was,” James said.

  “Damn.” The dark-skinned man watched with us, his car still running and sputtering like it needed a tune-up.

  “You know the place?” James asked.

  “I do, man. I was just on my way to see if I could get my old job back. I was a dishwasher there.”

  We’d finally met Juan Castro.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  “We’ll never know. They’re both gone, and the bodies incinerated. We can only guess what happened.” Conway sipped his coffee, gazing out at the bay from Em’s balcony. He’d called the meeting to finalize the information we shared. It was difficult since there was no corroboration.

  “What appears obvious is that she replaced the murder weapon with James’s knife before Chef Jean missed it.”

  “What a waste.” James shook his head. “The man had an empire, he was the king.”

  “Who couldn’t control his kingdom.” I stated the obvious.

  “When he picked Amanda to run his restaurant, Sophia knew that she was not right for the job.” Em had finally rationalized her feelings about Amanda Wright.

  “Everybody else thought the same thing, but Chef was a big celebrity and he carried the big stick,” James said.

  “He also signed the paychecks.” I waved the envelope. A check for six thousand dollars, this one signed by Bouvier’s accountant. Don’t ask me how, but we’d been one of the first in line to be paid.

  “So Sophia starts snooping.” Conway’s manufactured story. “She shows up one night when they are in the locker room, showering. That had to be a shock. Anyway, she waits until he comes out and they have a real blowup. How long has this been going on? How could you put our business relationship in jeopardy? She probably told him to fire Amanda and never see her again. Somewhere, Bouvier gets some backbone and tells her that Amanda is going to be the mother of his child. She’s pregnant.”

  “That didn’t go over so well.” It wasn’t the first time she’d made that claim.

  “So,” Conway continued, “I’m guessing she has this epiphany. She’s lost her kid to violence, her last shot at an offspring, and she certainly wasn’t going to let Jean have another child.”

  Em jumped in, “Amanda was being paid off with a fabulous new job, and when Sophia called her out to the parking lot she obviously was worried. After all, she told her it was a matter of life and death. Remember? She told me that on her voice message just before she was killed.”

  “So,” Conway went on, “she went out to meet Sophia, but Sophia wasn’t there. The chef’s wife had told her to wait by the Dumpster. Very ominous. I find it hard to believe Amanda didn’t tell Chef Jean. And maybe she did. We saw him leaving on the security camera so we know he had been in the building.”

  “And, we saw Sophia leave shortly thereafter,” James said.

  “It turns out he was getting the car. Sophia knew how long that would take, and we’d already seen her enter his office, where she probably had taken the knife from the chest. She walked over, said ‘hello’ to Amanda and stabbed her in the stomach.”

  “Over and over and over.” Em was dealing with it.

  “The object wasn’t just to kill the home wrecker,” Conway pointed out. “The object was to kill her unborn child, just like the one that had been stolen from Sophia.”

  “Only Amanda had been up to her old tricks.”

  “She wasn’t pregnant,” Em said. “She was going to tell him that she lost the baby, but not until the head chef job was solid.”

  “Sophia then hid the knife, maybe in her purse, got in the car with Jean, and they left. He had no idea. If there was blood on her, it was dark outside, and he’d never see it. If he did, she’d tell him she cut herself somewhere. The timing was such that it was almost seamless. Bouvier got the car, she came out, and got in with him. Only she took maybe ten, fifteen seconds to kill someone first.”

  We all knew that the Bouviers had an aversion to organized law enforcement. So it made sense they would hire an outside firm.

  The detective kept going, “Sophia embraced the idea of hiring you guys because she could keep tabs on the investigation. We weren’t going to tell her anything.”

  “But she didn’t. I mean, she didn’t really keep tabs on us.” The lady had very little interaction with James or myself.

  “She did. In her own way. She probably had her husband grill you, and then she’d check with him. She did confront you guys a couple of times, trying to see if anyone was investigating Bouvier.”

  She had. Telling James that Chef Jean couldn’t possibly be the killer, when she was really fishing to see how James would respond.

  “Purely speculation here, but I’m guessing this lady didn’t think the chef had paid enough for his indiscretion. So the next day, after James was hired, she walked into the locker room, did the simple combination, and staged an apron with some catsup from the laundry basket. I think Sophia was going for the drama here, and she stuck the murder weapon through the apron. She wanted someone to find that knife with Jean’s prints and Amanda’s blood down the tang.”

  “Why James’s locker?”

  “I don’t think it had anything to do with James. He was using a house lock, and she could get the combination for that one. Everyone else had their own locks. Makes sense to me. As much as any of this makes sense.”

  “But her prints would have been on it too.”

  “She may have worn gloves. We don’t know. We’re dusting their home, and maybe we’ll pick up identical prints, but we certainly can’t print her now.”

  “Why didn’t you print her in the first place?” James asked.

  “In hindsight we obviously should have, but there was really no reason. She came and went as she pleased, and she was under everyone’s radar. Technically, she wasn’t an employee of the restaurant.”

  “So she wanted Jean to get arrested for the murder.”

  “I think so. One minute she did, one minute she didn’t. She was hot and cold, drunk and sober. She had second thoughts. She was throwing away everything she’d worked for, and she must have decided that was a bad idea, so she goes back to the locker, takes the apron and knife and hides them in the Dumpster.”

  “Did she know that the bin had already been searched?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But she lucked out, because we searched every bin in the neighborhood the night of the murder. Not the second night.”

  “She thought she’d taken care of the evidence, underestimating James’s determination to find the knife.” He lucked in to almost everything that happened to him.

  “She was so irrational.” Em stood, and walked to the railing, staring out at the cruise ships docked half a mile away.

  “You think? What’s that line, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. A cold, calculating killer would have been methodical. She was anything but methodical. She took James’s knife out of his locker while she was there, to replace the one she stole. Bouvier didn’t check his knives every day or probably even every week. So her goal was to slip it back in the red tool chest when she was alone. Bouvier would assume it was his. And apparently he did.”

  “James.” I nodded to him. “If you hadn’t pushed the idea of opening the knife chest, we’d never have figured out where your knife went. Em, I think an apology is in order.”

  She gave him a thin smile.

  “All right, you’re not an idiot all of the time.”

  “There were little things,” I said. “Like when you were pushed, James, you said someone put their hands on your waist. It hit me that a guy or even a taller woman would push you at the shoulders. Now I
get it.”

  “But, Skip, why was Sophia trying to kill James? She was in the clear at that point.”

  Conway weighed in. “Again, we have no way of knowing, but I think the constant presence of the two of you reminded her that someone was possibly going to figure it out, and in the end she decided that killing you was one way to avoid that.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Oh, yeah, we finally got a trace on those autopsy calls. They came from Bouvier’s home and the restaurant. Both of them thought Amanda was pregnant, and both of them were calling to see if there was any mention of the fetus. That’s the best guess we have.”

  Conway stood up, put his cup on the counter, and walked to the door.

  “What was Vanderfield doing at the restaurant when we broke in?” I never had figured that one out.

  “He said he couldn’t sleep and he was going to experiment with some sauces.”

  “And why wouldn’t you let us see your copies of the video? We knew the players, yet you refused. We had to steal the originals.”

  “Some evidence has to go through a procedure before it’s released. Just one of the processes that sometimes slows down an investigation. You guys found a way around it, didn’t you? At the risk of being arrested for breaking and entering.”

  “So much of it doesn’t make sense,” Em said.

  “In crimes of passion, it seldom does,” he replied. “Give me a planned, calculated murder every time. Point A leads to point B to point C. In matters of the heart, anger issues, the killer is all over the place. We got lucky on this one, if you can call it luck. The killer confessed before we solved the crime. It happens. Thank God, it happens.”

  His eyes locked on Em.

  “So, I probably won’t see you again.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  She walked over to me, putting her arm around my waist.

  “Stay away from jewelry stores and restaurant parking lots late at night, okay?”

  She smiled.

  Conway walked out of the condo, and I was never so happy to see someone leave.