David Foster turned toward the detective. “But I thought you’d arrested my brother for the Oliver Bodden death. He’s still in jail, isn’t he?”
“No, as a matter of fact, he’s not,” Bonnie said. “He posted bail. That’s the American justice system, you know. Unless the accused is a flight risk bail must be set. And the judge and even the prosecutor didn’t believe your uncle was going to fly the coop. Strong ties to the community, they call it.”
Stephanie held up her hand dramatically. “This doesn’t make sense. Not that I believe Uncle Claude killed that man I found in the conching machine, but even if he had an argument with the victim and somehow things got out of hand and he did kill him by accident, Uncle Claude would have no reason to ruin a big batch of his own chocolate or shoot down the anniversary blimp.”
“If he wouldn’t trash his own product, how about yours?” Heaven asked.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Stephanie said again. “I’ve been open for months and I’ve lived in this town my whole life. Why would Claude wait until he was under indictment for murder to start harassing me? The man’s not stupid.”
“He’s not moral, either,” David mentioned quite caustically.
Heaven’s ears perked up from her chair on the other side of David. Even if Stephanie’s mother and aunt didn’t hold a grudge, it sure sounded like Uncle David did. “I have news, Bonnie,” Heaven announced.
“I bet you do,” Bonnie said with a weary sigh. This case was getting out of hand.
“I went to visit a friend of mine who lives in that tall condo behind Barnes and Noble on the Plaza. I was hoping he’d been home on the Sunday of the airship attack and might have seen someone up on the roof. He lives in the penthouse.”
“Gosh, Heaven, what a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that the day of the attack? Oh, wait a minute, I did think of it,” Bonnie said, pouring herself another margarita.
“I know you sent uniforms around but they didn’t talk to my friend because he wasn’t home. He went to the Nutcracker Ballet. But as he was leaving the building, there was a Santa Claus with cameras and a camera case waiting for the elevator. He thought the Santa was going to work a children’s party but then later he asked everyone in the building and no one hired a Santa that day, so I’m pretty sure it was the sniper. Those metal Halliburton camera cases could carry a gun,” Heaven said.
“You’ve involved another civilian in investigative work, haven’t you,” Bonnie said accusingly. “He didn’t ask his fellow apartment dwellers until you told him to.”
Heaven waved her hand impatiently. “Dale, my friend Dale Traver, has a natural in, living there. His neighbors were probably much more forthcoming with him than they would be with your people, the uniforms.”
A server arrived with a platter of flaky fried pockets of dough dripping with cajeta caramel sauce.
“What are those?” Iris asked.
“Chocolate-filled empanadas,” Heaven said, grabbing one. “It’s a house specialty.”
Bonnie took an empanada and pulled a legal pad out of her large tote bag and slammed it down in front of Heaven. “Now they’re ‘my people,’ eh? Bull. Write down his name and phone number. I’ll talk to this guy, one of your people. Is there any other little side investigation you’re doing that I should know about?”
Heaven thought about cousin Janie, but decided to keep her mouth shut. That really fell under the body building mysteries area anyway.
Stuart Watts, who found himself in the strange position of not being the center of attention, had been rather enjoying this state of affairs. He’d always gotten a kick out of Heaven and she had definitely not mellowed with age, that was obvious. He reached across the table and touched Iris’s hand. She was talking to Stephanie about lipstick colors. What a dear. He decided to weigh in on this chocolate matter. “Chocolate has an interesting history,” Stuart said. “The Spanish found it in Mexico and it had been used for years down there. The Dutch improved it and then of course the Brits, and others, too, exploited it to the hilt.”
“What do you mean by that?” Iris asked.
“Took it to Africa where they’ve turned it into a big business in the Ivory Coast and other parts of West Africa. But there’s a problem, just like with the other bloody crops that Europeans took a liking to.”
“Like coffee and tea?” Heaven offered.
“Exactly,” Stuart said. “We learn to love this stuff that takes the exploitation of workers to produce. Usually it grows best in nasty equatorial weather, people make little or nothing for working with it. Like the slaves who worked the cotton and sugarcane down in your South.”
“Surely chocolate has nothing to do with slaves?” Stephanie said, uncomfortable at the thought.
“Yes, it absolutely has to do with slaves. They did a big send-up in one of the London papers just a few months ago. Little boys were sold by their own parents to these middlemen who sold them to plantation owners in the Ivory Coast. Kept them locked up in bloody pens. Didn’t pay them a dime and beat them as well. Makes the old hot fudge sundae rather pricey, don’t you think, in terms of human sacrifice?”
The table fell silent. No one had thought about their chocolate in quite those terms before. Heaven was really irritated that a rock star richer than God was discussing the fate of equatorial workers. He could pay all the chocolate workers out of his own pocket if it really bothered him so much. The slave-labor angle was intriguing, though, she had to admit. “Bonnie, what if the thugs and Oliver Bodden were part of a slave labor ring and somehow the brothers had found out about it and were going to expose them? No, that doesn’t get Claude off the hook, does it. What if Oliver was going to blow the whistle on the slave labor ring back home and the thugs killed him because of that?”
For some reason, maybe the margaritas, everyone at the table thought this was a great idea. Perhaps the idea of evil slave lords from Africa was easier to take than Uncle Claude putting a packing wire around Oliver Bodden’s neck. It was Bonnie who brought the group back down to earth.
“So the slave lords from Africa shot down an airship, killed Oliver Bodden and then started playing dirty tricks on all the chocolate in Kansas City? Busy, aren’t they?” Bonnie said as she stood up and threw down two twenties on the table. “Slave labor is an awful appetite depressant, that’s for sure. But I don’t think it’s at the bottom of our problems here in Kansas City. Everything revolves around the Foster family and so I’m going to get busy on the phone and insist that everyone who’s in that family and in this town come to Café Heaven tomorrow morning at ten for a little sit down.”
“Why Café Heaven?” Stephanie asked.
“Would you rather come down to police headquarters? Or have all of us come to Heaven’s place of business?” Bonnie asked.
“Café Heaven sounds good,” Stephanie said.
Heaven was thrilled, of course. But she knew Bonnie would give her a lecture of some kind. She was right.
“Café Heaven is convenient for this meeting because it will not be open at ten in the morning and the chef/owner will be busy in the kitchen and not sticking her nose in my business. Got it?” Bonnie barked, looking hard at Heaven. “Thanks for a lovely evening,” she said as she walked out.
When you got them all together there were lots of Fosters. Uncle David. Stephanie and her mom and dad. Cousin Janie and her mom and dad, the Andersons. Junior and his wife, though none of their daughters were in attendance because they weren’t coming home for the holidays this year. Claude was by himself. His wife hadn’t been out of bed since he was arrested, having always been prone to sick headaches. No one mentioned Claude’s son but Heaven remembered hearing that he didn’t live in Kansas City. Stephanie’s grandmother was there, looking worried but also obviously happy to see her children together again.
Heaven was peeking out at this gathering in the dining room from the kitchen side of the pass-through window. She’d set out two carafes of coffee, one with caffeine, one without. She
’d also gone to Lamar’s doughnuts on her way in to work and picked up several dozen of the local favorite, left a dozen glazed in the kitchen for the crew, and put the rest out for the family.
“Things will go so much better if everyone gets revved up on coffee and sugar,” Bonnie said when she saw the spread. Bonnie had arrived early and reminded Heaven that she didn’t want to see her snooping around.
“I know you’ll be using your waitress ears to try to hear, but I don’t want to see even the top of your red head, do you understand?” Bonnie said sternly.
Heaven didn’t really know what Bonnie was thinking would happen at this family reunion. “I’ll stay out of the way, but I don’t get it. What do you hope to gain by this?”
“I’m losing control. I never had control but every day some new piece of crap happens and it all revolves around this family, a family that doesn’t even speak to each other and hasn’t for years. I wanted to see if they would meet together and then I want them to understand that even though I arrested Claude for the murder of Oliver Bodden, and I think he’s the perp, there is still something dangerous going on. Now leave me alone,” Bonnie’d ordered and she’d paced around the dining room until the Fosters straggled in. By ten everyone was present and accounted for, punctuality being a desirable Kansas City trait.
“Don’t think this is going to be like one of those meetings at the end of Murder She Wrote, where Jessica has it all figured out,” Bonnie said to the group. “This is more of a warning than anything.”
“Warning of what?” Claude said suspiciously.
“I want you all to be on the alert. I think someone is seriously trying to destroy your family,” she said with as much gravity as she could muster. “And I can’t seem to protect you.”
Claude stood up, his thin body quivering with rage. “Protect us? You’ve accused and arrested me for murder. You’re the one who’s ruining our family business. You’re destroying us.”
Brother David snorted. “She can’t ruin my family business because I don’t have a family business. My brothers stole my share of it away from me a long time ago.”
With that, the grandmother started to cry, Stephanie’s mom went down to the end of the table to comfort her and everyone started to yell at everyone else. Bonnie let it go for a couple of minutes, then she whistled her ballpark whistle and yelled, “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs. “This is a real problem, folks. I want you all to be aware of what’s happened here. First, someone who knew their way around a rifle shot down the Foster’s anniversary blimp and killed the pilot.”
As some of the crowd started to speak, Bonnie whistled again. “I said shut up. Now what I’ve found out about the pilot leads me to believe he was collateral damage, that his death wasn’t the primary goal of that attack, that if his death was planned, it was planned in relation to him being the pilot of the airship you, the part of the Foster family that owns the chocolate company,” she said, staring hard at Uncle David as if daring him to pipe up again, then turning back toward Junior, “hired to celebrate your company’s anniversary. From what I’ve learned about your family rift, there are probably people in this very room who would have been happy to chip in on some kind of unhappy accident for that airship, if not for the death of an innocent man. If any of you have anything to tell me in that regard, know that I understand how these things turn bad. On paper, maybe someone in this room thought no one could get hurt, that all it would do was cause trouble for the brothers who I’m sure some of you think deserve trouble. Then something went wrong and the pilot was killed. If this is the case, please call me and I’ll go with you to the prosecutor’s office, explain some of the back history. I will help you if you come to me.”
Heaven peeked out and saw Stephanie’s mother return to her seat, lean over to her husband and pat his hand. Stephanie had kept her eyes lowered through most of Bonnie’s speech. Now she was looking down the table at her grandmother. Heaven could see tears in both of their eyes.
Heaven wondered about that hand pat. Surely Stephanie’s father hadn’t gone berserk and shot down that airship. No, it couldn’t be him, the kindly general practitioner. Stephanie said her mother didn’t even allow guns in the house. Heaven went over and checked some squash she was baking in the oven. But maybe he had a gun at the office. Maybe he had been harboring resentment all these years. Heaven rolled her neck around, trying to rid her head of paranoid thinking. No way. It was just a hand pat. She went back over to the window.
The whole group looked so unhappy and here they were together for the first time in years. What a waste. Business and families could be such a terrible combination.
Bonnie continued. “I wish I thought the whole airship mess was just a vindictive prank gone wrong. And we won’t talk about the death of Oliver Bodden because it is an active investigation involving one of you. With the things that happened yesterday, I’m afraid we have a nut on our hands who is angry at the whole Foster family, and that worries me. If we eliminate the death of Oliver Bodden from the equation, we still have quite enough coincidences to make me nervous.”
“What happened yesterday?” Stephanie’s grandmother asked.
Bonnie held up her hand like a sidewalk crossing guard to indicate she was going to answer and everyone else should be quiet. “Chocolate was sabotaged at both the Chocolate Queen and the Foster’s factory. Now that Stephanie’s business has also had a problem, I have strong gut feelings that there is a person out there who is very angry at the Foster family, or one of you who is very angry at the rest of you.”
A clamor of noise broke loose again. Stephanie stood up. “But what about the information that came out last night? What if all of this has something to do with child slave labor at the cacao plantations in Africa? What if it doesn’t have anything to do with the Fosters, except as we are chocolate candymakers?”
You could tell by the looks on their faces that the child slavery issue wasn’t something Junior and Claude were up on. They looked horrified, as if they needed another negative thing concerning their business right now. Heaven, peeking out the pass-through window, couldn’t imagine what it would be like to find out that a product that your whole business was based on used slave labor.
She had been thinking about it from her restaurant’s perspective overnight. If chocolate wasn’t such a popular product, she might eliminate it from her menus. But as it was, even she, a liberal by anyone’s definition of the term, couldn’t imagine doing that. Stephanie, and certainly the brothers, didn’t have a choice. It was their entire business.
Bonnie was trying to quiet everyone down again.
“Hold on, hold on. I would imagine that if a group were going to protest your businesses because of child labor practices in the chocolate industry, they would protest publicly and let people know why they were upset, especially because this isn’t something that’s widely talked about in the United States. It wouldn’t bring any awareness of the problems in Africa if they nailed an airship in Kansas City and didn’t come out and say why they did it, or if they killed Oliver Bodden, for that matter. I think this is someone who is watching silently right here in Kansas City and is enjoying every problem he or she has created for all of you. That’s why I want to put you all on notice. You must be careful. You must be aware of what’s going on around you. If even the slightest thing seems out of place, I want you to call me right away. I’m passing out my card with my cell phone and my home phone on it as well as my office. Now why don’t you all just sit here together for a while and I’ll get us some more coffee,” Bonnie said, not asking but telling. She headed for the kitchen doors.
Heaven didn’t even attempt to act like she hadn’t been listening. She nodded at Bonnie as she came through the doors. “Good job.”
“Then why don’t I feel better?” Bonnie asked, holding up the coffee pot expectantly.
Heaven pointed back in the dining room. “It’s over in the back corner. I made you another pot.”
As Bonnie turned to
go, Heaven thought of something. She put her hand on the detective’s arm to get her attention. “Ask them to think back. If there was anyone they’ve recently fired or who had quit under negative circumstances, maybe they could put together a list of names. It could be a disgruntled employee.”
Bonnie grinned. “Yes sir, Miss Heaven. I be askin’ them,” she said as she pushed open the dining room door.
Marie Whitmer, secretary to Claude and Harold Foster, was nervous. She’d heard from Junior and he hadn’t been very forthcoming, just said they had a meeting at ten and they would be in after that.
She speculated the meeting had been with Claude’s lawyers. Everyone in the company was upset. They all came to her for information or for reassurance that everything would be straightened out and no one would lose their jobs. She, normally so on top of things, was at a loss as to what to tell them. And it was Christmas, a time when everyone wanted to spend money, enjoy their families. Instead, they were all scared to death they’d be out on the street, her included.
The phone rang and she grabbed it quickly, hoping it was the brothers. “Executive offices,” she said by way of hello.
It wasn’t the brothers. In fact, it wasn’t anyone she wanted to talk to. “Oh, it’s you. I told you not to call for a few days, that I’d call you,” she said tersely.
The expression on her face was fearful. She always carried a cloth hankie and now she twisted it around her hand.
Mexican Mole Sauce
4 dried ancho chilies, stemmed and seeded
5 dried pasilla chilies, stemmed and seeded
6 dried mulato chilies, stemmed and seeded
½ cup raisins
Water
1 onion, peeled and diced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
4 T. lard or canola oil
½ tsp. cinnamon
¼tsp. black pepper
Death is Semisweet Page 12
