“Now, we’ll just step in the next area where the conching takes place. This process takes up to seventy-two hours and keeps smoothing the chocolate under heat in giant troughs.” Of course someone asked why it was called conching and while Junior was explaining the term, another pair of foreign workers were opening a huge sliding metal door so the large group could move to the next room.
As the doors slowly opened, a ripple of sound started through the crowd. Sounds of concern and alarm. Before Heaven could see what had caused the oohing and ahhhing, Harold Foster cried out into the microphone, “Oh, no. How did he get there?”
The “he” was Oliver Bodden, although not many of the guests knew him from Adam. He was nattily attired in suit and tie, although not up to his usual impeccable standards. Oliver was in the conching machine, stuck like a rubber bath toy caught in the bathtub drain when the plug had been pulled on the bathwater. He bobbed silently as he was rolled over by giant metal tubes covered with melted chocolate. His eyes were closed. Right next to the giant machine stood Stephanie Simpson, holding a long piece of wire that was dripping not with blood but with the first batch of Foster’s new chocolate.
Chocolate Truffles
½ cup heavy cream
8 oz. good quality semisweet chocolate, chopped fairly fine
2 T. flavored liqueur such as Grand Marnier, Irish Cream, cognac (optional)
½ cup cocoa, sifted
Bring cream to a boil in a heavy saucepan. In a mixing bowl, pour hot cream over chocolate and let stand for 5 minutes. Whisk until smooth. Add any flavored liqueur at this time. This is called ganache. Pour the ganache onto a nonstick baking sheet and put in the freezer for 15 minutes or in the refrigerator for 30-40 minutes. When the ganache is firm, form it into teaspoonsize balls. Drop truffles into the cocoa and roll around. Chill and store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
Six
I don’t remember asking for you,” Bonnie barked.
Heaven stood at the edge of the hallway outside Junior Foster’s office door, now Bonnie Weber’s temporary command post. “You didn’t,” Heaven snapped back, “but I’ll be damned if I let you rip into Stephanie all by herself.” Standing behind Heaven was Stephanie, tears in her eyes, her hands on Heaven’s shoulders like a child hiding behind her mother. “And beside, I really need to get back to the restaurant. I told them I’d be gone for a couple of hours and it’s been four. Can’t we talk to you together?”
“Get in here. I’ll start with both of you, but just know I might have to talk to ol’ Stephanie, here, by herself.”
Heaven and Stephanie hurried in and closed the door before Bonnie changed her mind. They both started talking at once, Heaven using her hands to gesture wildly and Stephanie shaking her head for emphasis.
“Stop!” Bonnie ordered, standing up and stretching her arms. Bonnie was tall, almost six feet, and she wore high heels to push her advantage further. Now she slipped off the dark red pumps. “Shit. My feet are killing me. If I’d known this would be a day-long ordeal, I woulda worn old shoes.”
“Nice color,” Heaven offered. “Are they Manolo Blahniks?”
Bonnie gave her a look and she shrank back and shut up.
“How are the tech guys doing?” Bonnie asked as she circled the desk and sat down on the edge of it close to where Stephanie perched on a straight-backed chair. Bonnie had moved Junior’s comfortable visitor chairs back against the wall and found some uncomfortable straight-backed chairs in a storage room at the end of the hall and moved them into Junior’s office.
“Still busy,” Heaven piped up. “The chocolate is a problem for them in gathering evidence. And the poor uniforms who are taking statements. It was pretty funny watching all those reporters arguing who should be interviewed by your team first. They all wanted to get out of here and file a story in the worst way. Your guys had to threaten them all with detention time if they didn’t form an orderly line and behave.”
Bonnie chuckled. “They want to go write a big story, ‘I saw a dead body at the chocolate factory.’ Now, Stephanie, ‘ol’ buddy, do you want to tell me what made you decide to break the family feud and visit your uncles on this particular morning?”
Stephanie nodded her head, took a big gulp of air and started in. “Well, the other day when Heaven was at the store, she told me that Foster’s was doing this big thing with all these famous chefs and that they’d asked her to be at this super important press conference and I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
“And so you decided to crash the party,” Bonnie said, her arms crossed across her chest. “I’ve got that part. Now, how did you end up holding what I’d bet is the murder weapon over the body of poor old what’s-his-name?”
“Oliver Bodden,” Heaven said softly.
Bonnie didn’t take her eyes off Stephanie, staring at her like the cobra gazing at the mongoose. “Over the body of Oliver Bodden. According to your uncle, he’s a consultant to Foster’s. Poor Oliver, who was dead and stuck in the conching machine, or perhaps killed in the conching machine, although I doubt that. This might be the damnedest of all these ridiculous food-related murders I’ve had to deal with—most of them because of you,” she said with a look over her shoulder at Heaven.
Heaven wasn’t going to bite this time. The more she talked back, the longer this would take. And she was just as curious as Bonnie to hear what explanation Stephanie would have. What was she doing there and why would she pick up something that obviously was a prime piece of evidence? Hadn’t she learned anything about dead bodies and not touching weapons and stuff from hanging out with Heaven?
Stephanie, her usually perfect makeup job in complete disarray, dabbed at her mascara-mussed eyes with a tissue. “Well, I didn’t know they’d built a new wing so I waited until everyone else had gone around to the back, then I went in the main part of the factory. I wandered around in there until someone assumed I was a member of the press who’d gotten lost, and they pointed the way to the new building. But I came in to the new building through the old building. The conching machine and the tempering station and the machine that forms the ten-pound chocolate blocks were all in that first section of the new wing. And you were all in the second section, the farthest part from the old factory. I heard my uncle talking and I started to go toward his voice. I could hear something thumping, the engine of the conching machine was obviously straining. So I went over there and …” Stephanie sniffled. “I looked down and saw the man and I bent closer to see who it was. I didn’t recognize him, of course, but I spotted something else in the chocolate. The metal caught my eye and I just grabbed it, the wire I mean, and”—Stephanie gulped for air— “I didn’t realize that it was still attached to the, uh, person’s neck until just before the doors opened and I was face-to-face with the entire press establishment of Kansas City, plus the mayor and half the city council.”
“If you’re going to get caught, get caught big, I always say,” Bonnie said.
Stephanie sniffed. “I swear, Bonnie—”
“Bonnie,” Heaven cut in, “why in the world would Stephanie garrote some African chocolate expert she’d never laid eyes on before?”
“Why did someone kill the airship pilot? I bet the shooter had never laid eyes on him before either,” Bonnie said with a shrug. “By the way, that’s the official name for them: ‘airship.’”
Heaven hadn’t even thought about the fact that this was the second Foster’s-related death in a week. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I was so worried about Stephanie, I forgot about Sunday and the blimp.”
“I bet the reporters didn’t forget,” Stephanie said peevishly.
“I bet you’re right,” Heaven said. “The reporters that got stuck with the boring press conference at some candy factory now get another murder with operatic overtones.”
Bonnie shook her head. “Operatic overtones? Oh, brother. That’s it for you. You’re history. Get back to 39th Street right now.”
“Don’t
you want to question me about what I saw?” Heaven asked defensively.
“I know what you saw because I was right beside you and saw the same thing. And I know there is no way to stop you from calling me several times this weekend with various wild theories about what all this means. Now go.”
“Yeah, you were right next to me but did you see the puny Foster brother rush off in the middle of the tour?” Heaven asked, hoping to cast more doubt on Stephanie’s potential guilt, not that she thought for a minute that Bonnie would try to pin this on Stephanie.
“The Foster brothers are next. They have lots to explain. Now go away,” Bonnie commanded.
“Stephanie, did you call the people who work at your store? Are they okay? Do you want me to go down there and help them?” Heaven asked, doubtful that she would really be much help.
Bonnie shook her head. “That won’t be necessary because Stephanie gets to leave too, in just a minute. Now, H, will you get?”
Heaven bent over and gave Stephanie a kiss on the cheek. “I wish I had a picture of you standing over the body with that wire in your hand, chocolate everywhere, your eyes bulging out.”
Stephanie sniffed tragically. “I’m sure you’ll see it on every station on the news tonight. The still photographers might not have been fast enough but the TV guys were already shooting film. I saw them aiming those awful cameras at me. No one will ever come to my store again.”
“Nonsense,” Heaven said. “Murder has always been good for my business. People are ghouls. You’ll see.” With that she left the office before Bonnie lost her temper.
What a morning. As she walked down the hall, trying to remember in which direction the stairs were, she heard agitated voices coming out of the office next to the one Bonnie was encamped in. She slowed down just to check it out. A few more seconds weren’t going to make any difference at this point. When she’d called the café to report the latest dead body, the day crew sounded like they had it under control. Of course, that could change in a minute at a restaurant, when the chicken order doesn’t show up or the dishwashing machine breaks again.
“Of course, I’m happy,” admitted a voice that Heaven thought belonged to Claude Foster. “The man was an animal. He loaned us money to expand so he could ruin our company and take it over. But I guess what you’re inferring is that because of all that, I killed him.”
“Look, Claude, I’m just asking you straight out.” Heaven took that voice to be Harold Foster’s. “Do we have anything to worry about? You were pretty upset last night.”
“Just because I punched my brother in the jaw for the first time in sixty some years, you think I went right on and took one of those wires we put around mailing crates—”
“Claude, calm down,” Harold interrupted. “This will all be over soon. I think I’ve found someone to loan us the money to buy out West African Cacao.”
“Who is it, someone from Columbus Park? Some mob guy?
Heaven shifted uncomfortably outside the door. That was her neighborhood he was talking about. The remaining Italians were mostly sweet little old ladies.
“Claude, you’re just going to have to get over this and trust me. Yesterday, I went downtown to the two locally owned banks that are left here. They understand the importance of keeping Foster’s control in Kansas City. They said they would have financed the addition in the first place if I’d just… Well enough of that. Don’t act dumb, Claude. You were there right beside me when we went to the Ivory Coast and you knew what we were doing.”
“What makes you think they’ll let go?”
“The so-called advisors told me they were flying home tonight, to get new instructions and take home the body of their boss. They said they wouldn’t return until after the holidays. That gives us some time. I think they’ll go for it because I’m going to offer them a premium to get out, that’s why.” Heaven could hear the resignation in Harold Foster’s voice.
“Great, just great,” his brother said bitterly, and before Heaven could get out of the way the door opened and the pale ghost, Claude Foster, stormed out, right into Heaven’s rather curvaceous chest. “What in the world?” he thundered.
“What indeed!” Heaven said with disapproval, as if Claude had been trying to cop a feel. “I was just leaving the interrogation room. Has Sergeant Weber talked to you yet?”
Claude stopped his lion act and became the invisible man again. The reminder that there was still a police investigation to cope with made him shrink even further. He continued down the hall without another word.
Heaven turned around to follow him and jumped. A stern-looking woman had appeared out of nowhere and looked like she was ready to take Heaven apart for eavesdropping.
“May I help you?” Marie Whitmer said frostily.
“No, no, just leaving,” Heaven murmered.
Heaven made a beeline for the parking lot. She knew she should tell Bonnie what she’d just heard but it was Friday and her business needed her. She’d call her from the kitchen.
Has Bonnie called me back yet?” Heaven yelled out to no one in particular.
The face of Murray Steinblatz popped up in the pass-through window from the kitchen to the dining room. “No is the answer, just like it was the answer ten minutes ago. Calm down, Heaven.”
“I should have gone back in there and told her what I heard before I left the factory. She’s going to yell at me.”
“Heaven,” Murray said, “from what little you’ve told me about what happened today, and what I heard on the radio in the car, Bonnie’s got her hands full. She’ll get back to you when she gets a minute. You don’t honestly think Stephanie had anything to do with this guy ending up in the, what’d you call it?”
“Conching machine, and no, of course not. I think curiosity killed the cat, or in Stephanie’s case curiosity made her a murder suspect. I don’t know what killed Mr. Bodden. Since Stephanie herself has opened a chocolate business, I’m sure she’s more interested in her mother’s family business than she was when she was a lawyer’s wife. So when I told her about this press conference, she just couldn’t resist.”
“Oh, so it’s your fault?” Murray teased.
“As usual,” Heaven said with a smile. The aroma of lemon oil perfumed the kitchen. She was intently poking a lemon with a fork, rolling it to get punctures all over it. Then she put it in the cavity of one of twenty chickens she was prepping for roasted lemon chicken.
Heaven asked the farmer she bought her poultry from to bring her pullets, hens just six weeks old, so she could serve them whole. She varied the preparation, sometimes roasting them with a sesame/soy/chili sauce glaze, sometimes with garlic and basil stuck under the skin, sometimes this way, with the flavor of lemon permeating the flesh. It was hard to find a good roast chicken in a restaurant in Kansas City so however they were presented, they sold out most nights. Heaven knew that lots of restaurants had chickens that had been precooked and then finished in the oven when they were ordered. This method usually meant that you didn’t run out, but it also wasn’t a truly fresh-roasted chicken. She took the chance on making it to the end of the evening with her fresh birds and tried to study the buying patterns of her customers to make sure she prepared enough. They usually sold thirty to forty chickens on Friday and Saturday nights. Jack was prepping the other twenty birds and they would go in the oven after Heaven’s batch was finished and moved to the warming oven.
Heaven thought about Bonnie again. She really should know that the Foster brothers had a motive for getting rid of Oliver Bodden. It wasn’t the kind of thing that the men were likely to have brought up to the detective on their own. She walked over to the phone and dialed. “Bonnie, by the time you get this I’ll be unavailable, but we need to talk. Meet me at Sal’s in the morning at nine. Okay, bye.” She wished the detective had picked up but at least she’d made an attempt. She dialed again. “I know Stephanie can’t talk but tell her to meet me at nine at Sal’s. Oh, it’s Heaven Lee,” she said and hung up. Now she’d better ge
t ready for the early guests who wanted to eat and get to a movie or the theater. She started setting up the saute station for the Friday night crowd.
Chocolate Espresso Pot de Crème
4 egg yolks, beaten and strained
1 cup half-and-half
½ cup whipping cream
3 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate
¾ cup espresso or very strong coffee
1 tsp. vanilla
pinch cinnamon
To strain the beaten egg yolks, use a wire mesh strainer, pushing the yolks through with your whisk or a spoon.
In a heavy saucepan, simmer half-and-half, cream, and chocolate until chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth. Whisk in coffee. The mixture may separate but it will become smooth again. Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Remove pan from heat, and add vanilla and cinnamon. Temper by pouring a quarter of the chocolate mixture into the eggs, whisking constantly until smooth. Return the egg mixture to the chocolate and whisk for about 3 minutes, until the pudding is no longer expelling steam.
Pour the custard in pot de crème containers, custard cups or chocolate cups, available at gourmet shops. Chill. Makes 4-6 servings.
Seven
Stephanie was finishing her news. “So, Janie, who never calls me, called to tell me that when she came in to work yesterday there were burned cocoa beans being thrown away. Janie says thousands of dollars worth.”
Heaven nodded. “I saw a burned place on the brand new concrete palette. What’s that about?”
“It was as if she was trying to tell me something that pointed to the brothers having a motive. But of course she did it in the most excruciating, roundabout way. I was so busy and she was totally unaware, as usual,” Stephanie said.
“What’s the deal on this cousin?” Bonnie asked as she carefully spread cream cheese on a bagel. Heaven had stopped for food supplies before she got to Sal’s.
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