Marie Whitmer hadn’t really meant to listen in. Usually when the brothers were meeting together they didn’t even bother to close the door. It wasn’t completely closed this time. But Marie couldn’t help but notice when Junior came in that he was preoccupied, seemed worried today. Then when he’d told her about the fellow coming from Africa and others following him and to get them all hotel rooms, she could tell something wasn’t right. She’d worked for the brothers for twenty years. She knew them like the back of her hand. Yes, something was wrong. Proof of that was how Claude had just stormed out of Junior’s office, slamming the door of his own office shut. He never did that. He liked to be able to call to Marie instead of using the intercom.
Marie, feeling uneasy about what she was about to do, did it anyway. She picked up the phone and dialed, swiveling her chair to turn her body away from the brothers’ offices.
Sitting at the bar at the Fairmont Hotel, looking out at the Plaza, Oliver Bodden had to concede Kansas City was lovely. The lights on all the buildings were a nice touch. He looked down at the newspaper beside his martini glass, and smiled again at the photograph of the ruined blimp. Foster’s was already in trouble. The brothers might try to make light of this tragedy, but it wasn’t good.
“Quite a story, eh?” The woman sitting two barstools down gave him a smile and indicated the newspaper.
“Well, yes, it looks as if I’ve arrived in town one day too late for the excitement,” Oliver said in that lovely, clipped British accent of his. “Are you staying here at the hotel and did you happen to see anything?” he asked politely.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not a guest. I live here in town. I like to stop here on my way home from work for a drink, especially at Christmastime. It’s the best view of the Plaza.”
“And did it happen right over there, then?” Oliver indicated the shopping center out the window.
In twenty minutes the woman was sitting next to Oliver sipping a fresh glass of white wine, the Kistler Chardonnay. She had given him an amusing rendition of the demise of the blimp; it seemed she’d been doing some Christmas shopping on the Plaza at the time.
He looked sideways at her now. She was attractive enough and he did have the evening to kill.
“Can I tell you something without embarrassing you?” she asked suddenly and quite provocatively.
“Oh, dear, I hope so,” Oliver said with a smile.
“I love your skin. It’s so black its almost blue.”
Oliver assessed the woman again. “Well, I was born and still live in West Africa. My ancestors had the advantage over your American blacks of not having to have sex with the master, now didn’t they? Or if they did, slavery being a rather ugly part of Africa’s past as well, the master was as black as they, so we haven’t had much in the way of dilution. Thank you for the compliment, though. Would you like to have dinner with me? My business associates won’t be here for another day so I find myself without a dining companion.”
· · ·
Heaven went out into the dining room of Café Heaven and proclaimed to anyone who would listen, “I’m whipped. You all beat me up tonight.” She’d worked the saute station and now she headed for the bar. “Tony, dear, get me a glass of the Mount Veeder Cab, will you please, and Sara is going to give you the bits and pieces of what was left of the short ribs on some mashed potatoes for me. I’m starved.”
Chris Snyder and Joe Long, the two waiters who were also the producers of the Monday night open mike program came up and sat down by Heaven, one on each side. “What a great night. The place was packed,” Chris said as he worked on his check-out sheet.
“How’d you like the blimp piece?” Joe asked proudly. Joe and Chris, well known for their performance art pieces, had found some bright pink plastic plus wire from the hardware store and somehow made an outfit out of it that resembled a blimp only loosely. They walked out into the dining room in it with just their legs showing. The contraption was hooked up to a bicycle tire pump and the big pink thing then exploded, spraying a shower of Foster’s candy that the boys tossed throughout the crowd.
Heaven smiled and waited until her mouth was empty to answer. “In terrible taste but pretty damn funny, I must admit. I peeked at you guys from the pass-through.”
“I think the real blimp should have been filled with candy like ours was. It would have been a much better advertisement,” Chris said.
“Maybe the city wouldn’t let them drop objects from the blimp. Someone could get their eye put out with a peanut cluster,” Heaven said.
Joe turned around. “Oh, look, here comes ‘the city’ now.”
It was Sergeant Bonnie Weber coming in the door of the café. She walked up to the bar and Joe got out of his seat and bowed low to her. “Please, Detective, sit here. I’m on my way home. Heaven, don’t forget you promised to go with me to the women’s body building contest Wednesday night.”
Heaven looked up from her plate. “How could I forget? I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. ’Night, guys.” The two young men went toward the office to check out.
Bonnie looked at her quizzically. “You have? Been looking forward to a body building contest, I mean?”
“Well, I’ve never been to one so it should be fun. A friend of Joe’s is competing and he wants to support her. What’s up with you, out so late? Are you off duty yet? Can you have a beverage of your choice?”
Bonnie shook her head. “Too many questions. Yes, I’m done. I had to go give a speech at the Westport Library, how to save life and limb in this busy mugging season. And I would love a Boulevard beer, please, Tony.”
Heaven hadn’t really given her friend enough shit about passing her sergeants exam, which she’d done earlier in the year. “Now that you’re in the big time, Sergeant, you get the big-time cases, like the blimp sniper. You get to go give speeches. You’re a BFD.”
Bonnie smiled. “Everything but the big-effing-deal salary.” She looked around. “It’s nice to come here without having a dead body to deal with.”
“Oh, now, you come for social reasons sometimes. You and the family were in here just last month,” Heaven reminded her. “Why don’t I get the feeling this is just a social occasion?”
“Because you’re a cynical, with-it, new century gal, a gal who isn’t easily fooled, but a gal who will always do a favor for a friend.”
“Oh, brother. What is it?”
“Well, I seem to recall from our conversation on Sunday you’re going down to the Chocolate Queen tomorrow.”
“And?”
“By the way, I love the way Stephanie took your Barbecue Queen name and used it for the chocolate shop.”
“Yes, that way those that know her as a Barbecue Queen will already want to come to buy her chocolates,” Heaven said impatiently. “But I doubt you want me to talk marketing strategy with Stephanie. What do you want me to talk about?”
“Oh, you know, just try to get a little more information about this Foster family rift. I asked her again after you left on Sunday but she seemed spooked, not that what happened wasn’t enough to spook a person. I just thought that maybe someone on her side of the family had threatened to get even with those who had control of the hen who lays those golden eggs, or chocolate eggs in this case. They must sell millions of them at Easter.”
Heaven shook her head and pushed back her plate. “Tony, I think there’s one piece of flourless chocolate torte left back in the kitchen. Will you find it for me, please? And two forks.”
Bonnie’s eyebrows raised.
Heaven shrugged. “Beer and chocolate is a perfectly legit combination. So Bonnie, you want me to get my friend to confide some horrible family secret so I can rat it out to you?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. I need help here. I did a background check on the pilot and he led an extremely normal life. No big debt. No angry ex-wives. No known enemies. So I have to concentrate on the company angle and I just thought that if you were going to learn about chocolate, whatever that me
ans, you could be the lovable but nosy person you usually are.”
“Well, I am curious, of course,” Heaven said, rather innocently. “I’d already planned to try to find out more about how the chocolate business works. I guess that could include a few questions about Foster’s. But if she confesses to something horrible, not that I think she will, I’m not sure what my moral obligation will be.”
Bonnie huffed and made a puhttttttt sound. “Stephanie was sitting with you when the sniper fired. I doubt that she could have taken down that blimp and killed the pilot by remote control. In other words, I’m not expecting some tearful confession of guilt that you’ll then have to feel guilty about telling me. Although she acted strange on Sunday. Do you think your friend Stephanie could have hired a hit man to avenge her mother’s honor?”
“I am absolutely certain she wouldn’t do that. On the other hand, I’ve been wrong before, as we both know. A week doesn’t go by that someone who hasn’t recovered from a divorce kills another someone, although it’s usually men who react that way. Jesus, Bonnie, don’t make me discover my good buddy Stephanie has gone over to the dark side.”
Bonnie wasn’t going to go there. “Stop being so dramatic. Just ask the kind of snoopy questions you’d ask anyway, okay? You’ll be aware if there’s anything I should know.”
Heaven turned and threw her arm around her friend’s shoulder. “Are you saying you trust my judgment?”
Bonnie signaled the bartender for another beer. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said with a little grin.
Choc-O-Rama Brownies
8 oz. semisweet baking chocolate
2 sticks butter (1 cup)
¾ cup cocoa
2 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 ¼ cups flour
¼ tsp. salt
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-or 9-inch baking pan. In a double boiler or bain marie, melt the baking chocolate. In another saucepan, melt the butter. Combine cocoa and brown sugar, and stir in the melted butter. Beat in egg and vanilla.
Add the melted chocolate. Stir in the flour and salt and beat until smooth. Pour mixture into the pan and bake for 45 minutes or until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool before cutting. Thanks to my friend and fellow food writer, Charles Ferruza, for the recipe.
Four
Try to pay attention and don’t ask too many questions until the end,” Stephanie said.
“About what we’re doing or about chocolate in general?” Heaven asked as she stirred some chocolate that was melting in the top of a double boiler set on a Bunsen burner-like affair.
“Didn’t you just ask me to give you a brief history of chocolate?” Stephanie snapped, like a third-grade schoolteacher reprimanding a child who wasn’t sitting still.
Heaven’s eyes widened. “Yes, Mrs. Simpson.”
“Okay, then. Don’t hold me to any of this exactly. I had no idea that people would want me to come to their schools and gourmet groups and talk about chocolate but they do. So I’ve had to study up, although I know what they really want are the free samples at the end of the talk.”
“Enough with the disclaimers. I’m not going to go over to Foster’s Chocolates and tell them Stephanie said you put wax in your chocolates. This is just for me. So, I do have enough sense to know chocolate came from the New World, as they call us over here. Mexico?”
“That’s where the European adventurers found it. And who said anything about stupid old Foster’s? I don’t mention them in my speeches, just for spite. But back to Mexico. There’s a great reference to that in one of my chocolate books. It’s from a letter written by one of Cortez’s soldiers. He said the Aztec emperor Montezuma drank fifty cups of chocolate a day out of golden goblets, said it was an aphrodisiac.”
“Something I’ve never really understood,” Heaven admitted.
Stephanie looked over slyly. “Maybe you just haven’t had the right combination of chocolate and—”
Heaven cut in hurriedly. “Let’s keep on with the history lesson. Montezuma drank a lot of chocolate. The evil white guy plunderers from Europe took it back home with them. Then what?”
“I should mention that it probably originated in South America, just like the tomato. But they both got ‘discovered’ when they were cultivated in Mexico. The Indians of Mexico were obviously very evolved, cuisine-wise. Chocolate was used by both the Olmecs and the Mayans before the Aztecs. But the names ‘chocolate’ and ‘cocoa’ are both derived from Aztec. ‘Cocoa’ meant the tree it grew on and ‘chocolate’ meant bitter water. And it sure would be, bitter I mean, if you drank the stuff straight like Montezuma did.”
“I think my chocolate is melted,” Heaven said, looking down at her bowl.
“Throw in that piece of butter beside you and keep stirring,” Stephanie instructed. “So for the first hundred years or so, chocolate was just a drink in Europe, no baked goods, no candy. They added stuff to it, ground nuts and sugar and cinnamon, to flavor the drink, but no one made candy with it until they learned how to process it better.”
“And when did that happen?” Heaven asked, wondering when she could steer the conversation to Foster’s again. She’d been shut down in her first attempt.
“Eighteen twenty-eight,” Stephanie said, proud of knowing the exact year.
Shit, we’ve got one hundred and seventy something years to go, Heaven thought. “What happened in 1828?”
“Cocoa beans are more than half cocoa butter, did you know that?” Stephanie was warming to her subject. “In 1828, a Dutch man named Conrad Van Houten invented a screw press that removed most of the butter from the bean. You ended up with cocoa powder and cocoa butter.”
“So that’s why we call it Dutch chocolate?”
“Not really,” Stephanie said dismissively. She wasn’t going to be hurried. “Then you added some of the cocoa butter back in to the cocoa powder, along with sugar, and it’s much smoother, it’s ‘eating’ chocolate. It became all the rage. Did you know that in World War Two, soldiers would sometimes get just three bars of chocolate to last them a whole day in battle?”
“Boy, a bunch of troops seriously jazzed up on chocolate. No wonder we won. I remember the time Iris, she couldn’t have been more than eight, ate three Hershey’s with almonds. She didn’t come down for days.”
“Now, do you want to know how cocoa beans get to be these blocks of chocolate we have here?” Stephanie asked sweetly. She was pouring melted milk chocolate into big metal Santa Claus molds.
“You bet I do,” Heaven said. This would at least lead to Foster’s eventually. It had to.
“Well, first the cocoa pods are harvested and broken apart and the pulp and the beans set out in the sun where they ferment. Things happen,” Stephanie said as she left the molded Santas to set up and deftly tossed some popcorn in a large copper bowl of dark melted chocolate. She threw in some toasted macadamia nuts that had been broken up.
“Things happen? That’s sounds like me trying to describe blimps to Hank. What happens?”
Stephanie gave Heaven a superior smile. “It gets hot and it kills the seeds’ embryos, for one thing. The cell walls are broken down and the astringent phenolic compounds bind together. So there.”
“I’m assuming this is all good news,” Heaven tried gallantly. She really did want to know about chocolate but at this rate it would be News Year’s Eve before she got out of here.
“Yes, it is. Now the beans are cleaned up and dried out and shipped to second-tier producers.”
“Up till now, it’s been first tier?”
“That’s right,” Stephanie said with a little surprise in her voice. Heaven was obviously interested and paying attention. “The second tier is the chocolate factory where—”
“Like Foster’s?” Heaven interrupted.
Stephanie shook her head. “No, no. Foster’s is a candymaker. That’s third tier. Now listen.”
“I know, and don’t interrupt yo
u or you’ll start all over at the Aztecs,” Heaven said with a laugh. She could see there was no quick way to do this.
“The beans come into the chocolate factory. The chocolate factories are mostly in Switzerland, Belgium, and England. Callebaut and Valrhona are two kinds I use,” Stephanie said, pointing to two big blocks of chocolate sitting on the counter, “and they’re two of the best and most expensive.”
You would.” Heaven too, always used the best ingredients she could afford and it didn’t surprise her that Stephanie did the same.
“So first, the beans are roasted, then a winnowing machine cracks open the seeds. There are these little morsels inside the shells and they are called nibs. Now this is where a chocolate factory gets its distinctive style.”
“From the nibs?” Heaven asked, deciding to just be a good student for a while and not try to lead the conversation.
“From blending nibs from all over the world and from different estates from the same country, just like a wine-maker would.”
“Who grows most of the cocoa?”
“It’s called cacao until it’s broken down to the seeds, then it’s cocoa.”
“Sorry,” Heaven said quickly. “Who grows most of the cacao?”
“West Africa and Brazil. Any place within twenty degrees north or south of the equator can grow cacao trees though. So the chocolate manufacturer blends their nibs, then the nibs are ground under heat. The stuff is then called chocolate liquor.”
“Is it alcoholic?”
“No, and don’t ask me why its called liquor, it just is,” Stephanie said as she went over to the sink and washed some chocolaty popcorn chunks off her hands. “The next step is a big one,” she said dramatically. Even she was getting a little impatient. “This is where they put the chocolate liquor under hydraulic pressure and extract the cocoa butter. The other part that’s not cocoa butter is called cocoa solids. Drizzle that ganache on these, Jackson Pollack style.” She pushed a baking sheet of brownies Heaven’s way. They already had a sheen of milk chocolate frosting on top.
“I’ve got it, liquor becomes butter and solids,” Heaven recited as she drizzled her dark chocolate ganache over the tops of the brownies.
Death is Semisweet Page 4
