The Plaza, a faux Spanish shopping center built in the 1920s and ’30s, was Kansas City’s pride and joy. Long brick buildings with red tile roofs and fronted with elaborate statuary housed Gap and Barnes and Noble stores. There were European streetlights and a slightly shorter rendition of the Tower of Seville, Spain, the sister city of Kansas City. The Plaza was known nationwide for its elaborate Christmas decorations, which involved outlining every building for several blocks with lights. This year, that obviously wasn’t enough. The Plaza seemed to be recruiting Santas by the dozens.
“I’m stuffed,” Stephanie moaned as she pushed back her plate. “I can’t believe I ordered dessert after corned beef hash.”
Heaven had finished her own order, eggs Benedict. She took her fork and pointed it at Stephanie’s plate. “You’ve always had a sweet tooth and you never put on a pound, you dog. Maybe I’ll just have a bite of this chocolate bread pudding. So go on with your tale. Your new boutique, gourmet, fancy-schmancy chocolate shop is doing great, you’re so tired you can’t move because this is your first Christmas with a retail business. By the way, I’ve being meaning to ask you this and I always forget: Why did you decide to do this?”
Stephanie paused with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. She thought better of it, put down the cup and picked up her champagne glass instead. She sipped her mimosa and shook her head. “Earth to Heaven, so to speak. I got dumped by my dog of a husband, remember? Even with a hefty financial punishment for breaking my heart…”
“And running off with his receptionist,” Heaven added.
“Yes, let’s not forget that. It couldn’t be his assistant or a paralegal, God forbid. It had to be the receptionist, not that it isn’t a perfectly good job. Men really do go for the most geographically available and the easiest, don’t they?”
“What they can reach out and grab,” Heaven quipped. “No, I realize you probably couldn’t make a living just doing food styling here in Kansas City. But when faced with the inevitability of having to get a real job, why did you choose opening a chocolate shop?”
“The blimp,” Stephanie said, waving toward outside. A large pink blimp was floating over the Plaza, as large as the Goodyear blimp only shocking pink. It was painted, “Season’s Greetings from Foster’s Chocolates” on one side and “Foster’s Chocolates 50 Year Anniversary” on the other.
“Yeah,” Heaven said, not looking up. “I’ve seen it the last couple of days. It hovered over 39th street Friday at rush hour. What does Foster’s blimp have to do with you opening a chocolate shop?”
“Oh, I forget you didn’t grow up here, Heaven. I’m a member of the family that owns the number one boxed chocolate candy company in the country. The poor side of the family, as luck would have it.”
“Foster’s?” Heaven finally looked out the front glass doors of the Classic Cup, her friend Charlene Welling’s restaurant. The tail end of the blimp gracefully disappeared from view.
“Celebrating their fiftieth year,” Stephanie said with an affirmative nod.
“Well, hell then, why didn’t you go to work for your family if you wanted to be in the chocolate business?”
Stephanie was a petite blond fashion plate. Known for her incredible wardrobe and her red nails before the divorce, she now looked down at hands with dozens of little nicks and scrapes on them. No nail polish. Hardly even any nails, as Stephanie was using her hands to dip chocolates, bake brownies and clean out espresso machines. She studied her disastrous cuticles a split-second more, then looked up at Heaven and smiled wanly. “Here’s the short version. The long version we don’t have time for until Christmas is over. When the first snow falls in January, we’ll get drunk and I’ll have a ball feeling sorry for myself, telling you not only how my mother was swindled out of a fortune, but how my husband hid his assets in the Cayman Islands. I’m a second-generation patsy. The short version of my mother’s disaster is, there were five children in my mother’s family, the Foster family.”
“Did your mom grow up here in Kansas City?”
“Oh, yes. Foster’s Chocolate is a hometown company. It was started by my grandfather after the war. At first their products were sold exclusively in a department store downtown. I’m not sure which one. In those days I think the company did little more than feed my grandfather’s five kids, who were mostly already teenagers. Ten years passed and my mother’s oldest brother, Harold Foster, Jr., got involved with his dad’s company; it turned out he really had a head for business. The company was doing better. But none of the other kids knew that. Now here it comes, Heaven, pay attention.”
“Someone is going to get screwed,” Heaven said, as she polished off the last bite of Stephanie’s bread pudding.
“My grandfather died of a heart attack. My mother’s two older brothers, who are both working in the business by now, go to the two girls and the youngest child, my uncle David, and say, look, you two girls are married; David, you’re in college. We want to buy your shares of the company because that’s the only way we can see anyone will make a living out of this place, if the pie is divided only two ways. We’ll buy Mom’s shares too, and of course, make sure if her money runs out that she has a house and everything she needs, and David, we’ll also pay your college expenses. So they bought the three younger kids out for a pittance and then took the company public and made a fortune for themselves.”
“Wow, they were ahead of their time with the corporate greed thing,” Heaven observed. “That’s a very 1990s kind of a story. Was your mom pissed?”
“Well, as you can guess, it has divided the family. We don’t go over to Junior’s big old mansion for a festive evening of Christmas carols and eggnog, I can tell you that. My dad blames himself, of course, for not seeing it coming. But my dad is a kindly family doctor and doesn’t have a dishonest bone in his body.”
“Did your grandmother get evicted from the family home by the two evil brothers? That would really give this story a nice little kick,” Heaven said, cynical as always.
“Oh, the family home was too small for Junior and Claude to bother with, although my grandmother has a perfectly good fake Tudor near Ward Parkway, similar to mine. The brothers moved over to Mission Hills as fast as they could. No, Nana is in her late eighties and going strong in her own home, with help of course. But it has made a difference in her relationship with my mother and Aunt Carol and Uncle David. They think she should have stuck up for them more. I think she didn’t understand a thing about the business but now knows what side her bread is buttered on and doesn’t want to die in the poor house. Not that she would. My mother would always make sure she was taken care of. So would my aunt and uncle. But the brothers have power over her, financially. I think that would be scary at her age.”
Heaven put up her hand to get the waiter’s attention. “I’m buying brunch because you’re going to let me tag around and watch you with the chocolates. We haven’t even gotten around to why I need your expertise. This whole Foster’s drama is fascinating. I have two more questions, then I know you want to go back around the corner to your shop.”
Stephanie grinned at her friend and started applying lipstick and other beauty aids she’d pulled out of a huge purse. She hadn’t changed completely. “Oh, the Foster family is just like a story from Dallas, the old TV show, believe me. Question number one?”
“What about your aunt and uncle? Do they live in Kansas City? I bet your uncle was pissed to be cheated like one of the girls.”
Stephanie snapped her mirrored compact shut. “You know, I’d never thought of it like that. David’s gay. He’s a professor at Duke or somewhere like that. I rarely see him but maybe he lost that good old male bloodlust along with his company shares. My aunt Carol lives right out in Independence. She and her husband retired a couple of years ago, bought one of those motor homes, and now they travel around. I don’t think Carol or my mom give it much thought anymore. It turned out their husbands were good providers, not that that makes it okay. Then there’s my cousi
n, but that’s another story. Enough family history. Question two?”
Heaven was signing the credit card receipt when a sharp retort sounded from outside. The Plaza was noisy with tourists and Salvation Army bell ringers and Christmas carols being piped outside all over the area but this sound cut through all the normal shopping sounds. Crack. There it was again. Crack. And again. It bounded like gunfire. Heaven looked around and saw Charlene Welling leave the hostess desk and head for the door, concern on her face. “Did you hear that?” Heaven asked.
Stephanie got up and slipped her coat on, a gorgeous red wool number that set off her blond hair. She looked out the glass doors that lined the front of the restaurant. “Something’s going on because people are running down the street,” she said, pointing outside. “I hope my chocolate shop hasn’t been robbed or isn’t on fire or anything.”
Heaven and Stephanie hurried to the door. Now the crowd was running in the opposite direction, looking behind them fearfully. The inordinate number of Santas gave the whole crowd a surrealistic look. Children were shrieking and clutching their parents.
Heaven and Stephanie stepped outside just in time to see the Foster’s Chocolate blimp come crashing into the Plaza, its giant pink mass getting hung up on the three-quarters-size replica of the Seville Tower that was a centerpiece of the shopping center. There it swayed, looking like the deflated Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a blimp instead of the real thing.
Suddenly a man dropped like dead weight out of the cockpit to the ground.
Sergeant Bonnie Weber of the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department sat on a stool in the back room of the Chocolate Queen, eating a chocolate truffle and drinking espresso. Heaven was there too, holding a huge hunk of chocolate-covered popcorn that looked like a dirty, uneven popcorn ball. She had decided on the ladylike approach to eating it and was breaking off chunks and popping them in her mouth, as opposed to just biting into it like an apple. Stephanie was assembling a gift basket for a customer.
“I can’t believe you two knew that was the sound of a high-powered rifle going off,” Bonnie said.
Heaven tossed her head, getting ready to brag, then thought better of it. “Well, maybe not exactly a high-powered rifle, but it was definitely gunshots, that part was plain. You know, Bonnie, after all the school shootings and workplace massacres, if you think you hear gunshots, it really gets your attention. Who knows, you may have time to hide. We were sittings ducks up there in the front of the Classic Cup, what with all that glass.”
Stephanie had been subdued since the accident. “I thought my shop was being robbed, of course. I never would have guessed it was a sharpshooter taking out the pilot of the Foster blimp. That’s too outrageous.” She sounded as if she still couldn’t believe what she’d seen.
“Well, it is a homicide, and that’s why I’m here, of course,” Bonnie said as she reached for another truffle. “But it remains to be seen if the shooter was actually aiming for the pilot or just shooting at the blimp in general and hit the pilot. Either way it was a lucky shot. I think the first two shots hit the body of the blimp, the gas started rushing out, forcing the blimp down, and the pilot leaned close to the window to see what the hell was going on and put himself in harm’s way, poor guy.”
“At least they don’t burst into a ball of flames anymore,” Heaven said. “That could have been a real disaster, especially if it hadn’t gotten caught up on the tower and had landed in the middle of the Christmas shoppers.”
“You have such a vivid imagination. What does your imagination think the motive for this little criminal act might be?” Bonnie asked.
Heaven shook her head. “Bonnie, what a question. You want a motive? More people get killed nowadays just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time than used to get killed on purpose. Maybe someone didn’t like pink. Maybe they were practicing up to go into their place of employment tomorrow and mow down their fellow workers. How about that?”
Bonnie ignored her friend’s all-too-true commentary on homicide today. Brilliant deductive reasoning didn’t get you anywhere anymore. Not when random violence and family troubles gave her most of her customers. “Well, thanks to Stephanie, I do know more about Foster’s Chocolates than I did when I arrived on the scene. What do think, Stephanie, did your mom and your aunt Carol pick off the Foster’s blimp?”
Stephanie smiled uneasily, knowing that Bonnie would probably check out her family. She was good at her job. “No, if those two were going to take revenge, they’d go right to my two brothers. They wouldn’t mess around with some weird dirigible and the pilot,” Stephanie said with a little laugh. “My mother, however, would have to use those heavy loaves of bread she bakes as weapons. Mom doesn’t believe in firearms. She wouldn’t allow a gun in the house and my dad was fine with that.”
Heaven looked at her watch. “It’s four and when I called and said I’d be late, I promised I’d be home around four. Hank and I are going to decorate the Christmas tree tonight.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth she knew she’d made a mistake. Both Bonnie and Stephanie whooped and whistled and made disparaging remarks about domestic bliss. Heaven actually knew that they both liked Hank and they couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just relax and enjoy the good fortune of having a really nice boyfriend. Heaven remained edgy about the whole thing. Her history of relationships with men wasn’t that good.
As she put on her coat and ate a chocolate-covered almond, she remembered. “Steph, after all this, I forgot to tell you why I wanted to know more about chocolate. And now that I know you’re really a dispossessed heir to the Foster’s fortune, you may not want to help.”
“Why?” both women asked at more or less the same time.
“To celebrate this big anniversary, Foster’s asked all these chefs from around the country to create a chocolate dessert with Foster’s chocolate. I’m one of them. I guess they’ll do a cookbook or something. They’re having a big chocolate party with all the chefs’ dishes on New Year’s Eve at the Fairmont.”
Stephanie sniffed. “I could care less how they celebrate their damn anniversary. Come over here Tuesday morning and I’ll put you to work.”
“Thanks. What an eventful Sunday on the Plaza.” Heaven hugged Stephanie, who was trying to tie a big bow on the gift basket and couldn’t hug back. “Bonnie, lend her your finger. Good luck with the shooter,” she said as she went out the door.
Bonnie Weber went over to help Stephanie with her bow. Maybe there was something that Stephanie hadn’t told her the first time, some little fact that she’d overlooked. “Okay, buddy, just go through the Foster family feud one more time.”
Why don’t they?” Hank asked. He was up on a ladder, stringing the lights at the top of the tree.
Heaven was sitting on the floor, surrounded by Christmas ornaments. She had two big boxes that she was working out of and there were dozens of smaller boxes inside the big boxes that contained different categories of decorations. She opened a box and carefully unwrapped an old German Santa ornament, and instantly she was lost in memories.
Heaven’s mother had carried on an antique business in the barn of their farm near Alma, Kansas, and through her, Heaven got interested in collecting back when she was still called Katy O’Malley.
Heaven had been collecting Christmas ornaments since she was a child. At estate auctions she attended with her mom, she had discovered at an early age that Christmas ornaments were always tucked away in boxes from the deceased’s basement. Heaven would find a good box and then ask her folks to bid on it when the time came.
Heaven’s whole house was full of interesting collections: antique quilts and beautiful antique glassware and dishes that Heaven had used in her catering business. Heaven herself had had a business buying and selling jukeboxes when she was a teenager. There was a prize Wurlitzer right across the room.
“Heaven, did you hear me?” Hank had turned from the tree to see what was going on.
Heaven was miles and
years away. She looked down at the Santa in her hand. “I was just thinking about the sale where I got this ornament. It was in Concordia, Kansas; the family had come from Germany originally and how they ever brought these glass Christmas ornaments all the way to Kansas I don’t know, but they had dozens of beautiful, elaborate ones. Mom bid on them for me and I got four of the really good ones. I still have three. I dropped the fourth one and broke it a few years ago and cried like a baby about it.”
“How old were you when you got that Santa?”
“I guess about nine or ten,” Heaven said, back in the real world now, placing the Santa carefully on the coffee table in front of her.
Hank climbed off the stepladder and came over and sat on the couch behind Heaven. He put his arm on her shoulder. “I think you’re missing your parents right now.”
Heaven looked up at Hank and smiled. “They’ve been dead more than twenty years but it just seems like yesterday I was out there in Kansas, hanging out with them, going to auctions, being a kid. Yes, Christmas is definitely a time I miss them. I wish they’d met Iris,” she said, hating herself for being so sentimental.
Hank got up and picked up the electrical cord. “Well, this is the moment of truth. I will now plug in the lights.” He bowed formally as if he were the ringmaster at a circus.
After much conferring, Heaven and Hank had decided to go with all-white lights this year, the small Italian variety. They had several choices at hand, including the antique bubble lights that Heaven loved but that made Hank nervous. Two years ago in the neighborhood, a Christmas-tree fire burned down a house, displacing a Viet family that Hank knew. Heaven was willing to give up the bubble lights this year so Hank wouldn’t get up several times a night to make sure the tree wasn’t on fire, as he’d done last year, even though the lights were completely unplugged at bed time. Hank was usually so calm and logical his nervousness about Christmas lights endeared him to Heaven even more.
Death is Semisweet Page 2
