Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “Indeed,” Mom responded.

  “Allied Arts is renting us the restaurant for the reception, including the outside patios, from five-thirty to eleven-thirty p.m. Do you think ten cases of champagne, plus five cases each of Chardonnay and a Napa cab are enough?”

  “That sounds more than sufficient. What else?”

  I started counting off items on my fingers. “Bridal shower, next week. Richard is in charge of the bachelor party. The tuxes are ordered. The gowns arrive this afternoon and I have two seamstresses set up for the fittings. I haven’t seen a picture or rendering of the designs yet but I’ll bet they’re incredible. Mr. McFadden designed them himself, something he hasn’t done for years. He said he chose a ‘theme,’ which reminds me, I’ll have to get samples of the fabric to the florist. Don’t you own one or two of Warren McFadden’s dresses?”

  “No. I find him a little avant-garde, Liana,” Mom said.

  “I think they call it cutting-edge now, Mom,” I corrected.

  “If you say so,” she smiled and changed the subject. “Did you find a photographer?”

  “Yes, finally. I thought I was going to have to buy a camera and take pictures, myself.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Did you know that the reason the wedding got canceled that was supposed to take place at Mem Chu was because the bride came out of the closet and is now living in San Francisco with her lover, Charlene?”

  “Get to the point, dear.”

  “I thought you might be interested in hearing the lead-in.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, anyway, this guy was supposed to be their photographer, so he was available. I’ve seen his portfolio. He’s good.”

  “That sounds fine,” Lila said, somewhat mollified. “What about the rehearsal dinner? Didn’t John offer to take care of that part of the festivities?”

  “Originally, but he had to bow out due to a heavy work schedule.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yes.”

  I said nothing more. My latest love had been pulling back big-time on a lot of things but I didn’t want to admit it or deal with it yet.

  “However, Carlos took over and got us a private room at that new Japanese steakhouse for after we go through our paces.” I looked at the tattered list again with all the checkmarks indicating completion and would have done cartwheels around the room if I hadn’t been so tired.

  “Mom, I think I’ve done it. After I order the flowers and take care of the fittings, I’m done,” I said with pride. “This wedding is se fin, complete, and Good-to-Go.”

  Five hours later, I stood in front of a mirror, enveloped in what felt like eighty yards of a chartreuse moiré taffeta laughingly called “Whipped Lime.” Between the starched crinoline underskirt, ruffled hem of the overskirt and tufted bodice, all in a hideous yellow-green, I looked like a New Year’s Eve float depicting baby poo.

  I ripped open the other boxes to find matching gowns in different odious colors sporting the names of “Pineapple Fizz,” “Mango Madness,” “Orange Frappe,” and “Passion Fruit Frazzle.”

  Mr. McFadden had created a theme, all right. Jamba Juice Rejects. And in moiré taffeta. When Mom called his work avant-garde, she was being kind.

  The phone rang but I was afraid to move. On top of how I looked, any movement sounded like leaves trapped in a wind tunnel. No wonder no one wore taffeta anymore, I thought. Noise pollution. One of the seamstresses answered the phone and slapped it into my frozen hand.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Lee, it’s me,” Mira said. Her voice sounded frantic and as if she’d been crying.

  “Mira? Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m not,” she sobbed. “We need your help. Carlos is being arrested for murder.”

  “What?” I said, sinking straight to the floor, buried in a mound of taffeta. “Carlos is being arrested for murder?”

  “Yes, they say he murdered the thief that broke into our apartment last night. They’re taking him away,” she wailed.

  “Wait a minute. What thief? What murder? Mira, what’s going on?”

  She tried to tell me but between the hysteria, coughing and wheezing, I couldn’t understand her.

  “Never mind,” I interrupted. “Hold tight. I’ll be right there.” I struggled to my feet and thought that with the groom arrested for murder maybe this Good-to-Go wedding just Got Up and Went.

  ~*~

  Want to know what happens next? Click here to buy A Wedding to Die For.

  About the Author

  After studying drama at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida, Heather Haven went to Manhattan to pursue a career. There she wrote short stories, novels, comedy acts, television treatments, ad copy, commercials, and two one-act plays, produced at several places, such as Playwrights Horizon. Once she even ghostwrote a book on how to run an employment agency. She was unemployed at the time.

  Author of the multi-award winning Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, Heather is currently working on the fifth book of the series, The CEO Came DOA.

  In the IPPY award-winning Death of a Clown, Heather brings the daily existence of the Big Top to life during World War II, embellished by her own murderous imagination. This stand-alone noir mystery was inspired by her artist/performer mother and her father, an elephant trainer. That’s even a picture of her own mother sitting atop an elephant on the cover.

  Heather lives in the foothills of San Jose with her husband of thirty-plus years, and two cats, Yul Brynner, King of Siam (Yulie) and Elphaba, Queen of the Nile, (Ellie).

  Connect with Heather at the following sites:

  Email: heather@heatherhavenstories.com

  Website: http://heatherhavenstories.com

  Books by Heather Haven

  Death of a Clown

  a noir mystery

  Alvarez Family Murder Mystery Series

  Murder is a Family Business

  A Wedding to Die For

  Death Runs in the Family

  DEAD….If Only

  Persephone Cole Vintage Mystery Series

  The Dagger Before Me

  Iced Diamonds

  The Chocolate Kiss-Off

  Corliss and Other Award-Winning Stories

  An anthology of short stories, short-shorts, and flash fiction

  Murder, Honey

  A Carol Sabala Mystery, Book One

  By Vinnie Hansen

  When the head chef collapses into baker Carol Sabala’s cookie dough, she is thrust into her first murder investigation. Suspects abound at Archibald’s, the swanky Santa Cruz restaurant where Carol works. The head chef cut a swath of people who wanted him dead from ex-lovers to bitter rivals to greedy relatives. Even Carol plotted his demise!

  ONE

  1991

  “Be careful what you wish for, Carol,” my mom always said. “It might come true.”

  What happened with Head Chef Jean Alcee Fortier was a case in point. I had wished him dead a dozen times, and I remember one of those times vividly. I’d stumbled into Archibald’s at three-thirty a.m. in a semi-somnolent state. Even after years of working as a baker at this swanky restaurant, I hadn’t adjusted to the early morning hours.

  I entered the building from the loading dock, which was on the front of the building, but well screened from the brick U where uniformed valets would later hustle to park Mercedes and BMW’s.

  A forty-watt bulb illuminated the time clock. This was one of the kitchen manager’s subtle manipulations, to make us squint, and therefore to focus, on what we were doing. People underestimated Eldon. The bumbling, mild-mannered Clark Kent exterior hid his cunning interior. He projected a sense of incompetence while all the hard evidence suggested otherwise. For one thing, he’d held on to his job for ten years in Santa Cruz, one of the most competitive towns in the world for eating establishments. Secondly, the kitchen made a profit for the conference center.

  The hall lights were off, but I knew the place like my home.

>   I was groggier than usual. Chad had awakened me at midnight with a cough he’d recently developed. Just as his deep breaths lulled me back to sleep, a cough lodged in the middle, like a skip in a record. I turned on the lamp and shook him awake. Even half asleep, he was a hunk, but that didn’t stop my irritation.

  His blue-green eyes gradually comprehended the situation and glinted with annoyance. “You woke me up to tell me that I was coughing.”

  “You’re keeping me awake.”

  “Go sleep on the couch.”

  “You go sleep on the couch,” I retorted. “You’re the one who’s choosing to commit suicide with cigarettes.”

  He fell asleep and I ended up on the couch.

  Between the hard cushions and my angry mood, I hadn’t slept at all, and I entered the fluorescent glare of the locker room in a sleepwalking state. Not that many years ago, the female employees had changed clothes in the tiny restroom, while the male employees enjoyed the convenience of the locker room. Then this last bastion of chauvinism had been converted to a unisex facility with a screened section in each of the far corners.

  I didn’t see Fortier at first, but he certainly had seen me, and made no attempt to cover himself. More naked than Adam, he sat on a bench in front of the lockers.

  I gasped.

  “Thank you,” he said, in a voice like black velvet and old whiskey. “I know I’m good-looking, but I don’t inspire many gasps.” He smiled, a wicked, relishing grin, his white teeth set off by olive skin. At three-thirty in the morning and stark naked, he looked impeccably groomed, his black, wavy hair recently barbered and brushed straight back. He stood, revealing the works: broad shoulders, washboard stomach, and a penis to match his ego.

  “Excuse me.” I backed out, my cheeks burning, more with anger than embarrassment. I should have known decorum was a wasted effort.

  “Hey, Carol, don’t go. My sausage needs some spice.”

  I went outside the building to cool down. The asshole. Why did all the women flip over him? Given the image only now fading from my retinas, that was a rhetorical question. I understood how his new girlfriend, the twenty-year-old Delores, mistook his low-life humor for charm, but how could mature women like Suzanne or Concepción take inconsideration as joie de vivre? With the right looks, a person could get away with murder.

  On the loading dock, I faced the grounds of the conference center and inhaled the jasmine and eucalyptus-scented darkness. Archibald’s was on a wooded hill, high above fog-shrouded Santa Cruz. The serenity soothed me.

  I wondered what Fortier was doing here so early, although he often was the second person to arrive. I begrudgingly acknowledged that he was deserving of his position as Head Chef, and wondered if a sexual harassment complaint would cost me my job. In truth, I was pissed partly because I’d been too startled to think of a snappy comeback.

  As I paced the concrete dock, waiting for someone else to arrive, I had one of those momentary epiphanies where I understood completely why my husband Chad smoked. I wanted a cigarette and I hadn’t smoked since high school.

  Looking back, I suppose I waited out there getting chilled because I expected the next arrival to be my buddy and comforter, Buzz Fraser. Instead, I heard a motorcycle roar through the night. Unlike the rest of us who parked a half-mile away and stumbled to the kitchen, Patsy drove her Harley right up to the dumpster.

  “Hey, kiddo, whatcha doing out here?” her disembodied voice said. Patsy routinely wore black leather, so I couldn’t see her, only the winking red reflector on her helmet.

  “Oh,” I said, “I’m contemplating how to kill a son-of-a-bitch.”

  Another thing my mom used to say was “hold your tongue.” When she’d say that, I’d stick out my tongue and grab it to prove that I was the impossible, incorrigible kid that she claimed.

  Little did I know that I was about to develop a keen appreciation for my mom’s clichés, especially the one about being careful what you wished for.

  TWO

  I didn’t have an opportunity to vent to Buzz until my break. I ran into him in the Employees Dining Room, or the EDR as all the employees called it. I smelled his vanilla scent come up behind me as I was getting a cup of coffee. He gave my long braid of hair a playful tug.

  When I turned around, he took one look at me and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Fortier.”

  “That explains everything.” He poured a cup of coffee for himself. Blue eyes over prominent cheekbones dominated Buzz’s face, and complete understanding registered in them as he nodded toward a table in the corner.

  We sat at the table, and I recounted the incident.

  Buzz patted my hand. He could get away with that because I knew he was too honorable to make a move on a married woman. “I can think of a few good recipes with sausage.”

  I grinned but noticed hardness in his eyes. Buzz had reasons for hating for Fortier—not that I’d had any luck persuading him to talk about it. “He certainly shafted you,” I said. “No pun intended.”

  Buzz offered a grim smile. He took a sip of coffee and glanced around the empty room. He ran his fingers along his square jaw line. He was as attractive as Fortier, although neither was conventionally handsome. “This coffee is weak.”

  He wasn’t going to bite at my gambit. His unpretentious calm could be infuriating.

  “Are you ever going to tell me what happened with the show?”

  He sighed, crossed his left arm over his chef’s smock, and used it to prop his hoisting arm.

  My heart felt a tug and ache for Buzz Fraser. He was hands-down my favorite person at work. He rubbed aloe on my burns and told me Chad was a lucky man. All of us had expected him to star on a new cooking program on local television. And he’d been eager to share the limelight. He’d proposed that I appear to make breads and Suzanne guest star to prepare salads. But somehow Fortier had usurped Buzz’s program, and Buzz refused to discuss what had happened.

  Anger bubbled to the surface of my skin like water about to boil. “To hell with just the sausage,” I said. “We should cook up a nice hearty stew.”

  Buzz shook his head. He’d left his chef’s hat in the kitchen and powder-fine, blond hair puffed away from his scalp. He looked past me to the blank wall. “Leave it alone, Carol.”

  My anger switched toward him. “Leave it alone? How am I supposed to leave it alone? I don’t even know what it is.”

  Buzz slipped his empty cup inside mine. “I’ve moved on,” he said, standing up. “There’s nothing that can be done, anyway.”

  I snatched the sleeve of his smock. “Nothing that can be done?” My voice rose. I was not a person born to accept injustice. “There’s always something that can be done.” He twisted away so hard, my grip on his smock leveraged me out of the plastic chair. I let go of the fabric. “You could confront Fortier. You could sabotage his food prep. Blow up the TV station.” My face was hot.

  Buzz spun toward me and placed a hand on each shoulder. “Shhhhh. I love you, Carol, but let it go.”

  He gave me a peck on the cheek, wheeled, and strode into the hallway. He wasn’t quick enough. I saw the sheen of tears in his eyes.

  ~*~

  Two weeks later, on a hot summer day, which in Santa Cruz meant in the eighties, Patsy, Suzanne and I gathered and laughed over beer as we hatched progressively nastier ways to kill Fortier.

  I’d met up with my two co-workers at a sports bar with a big screen television to watch the first episode of the cooking program, Cruz’n Cuisine.

  “A cooking show?” The bartender thunked our beers on the counter. “This is a sports bar.”

  And what a stupid idea that was. People kept opening them because they were trendy and the places kept folding. No one grasped that Santa Cruz was not Cleveland or Detroit. We had no home team, no unifying mania, no fans to sit in an empty, freezing stadium to watch away-games on screens.

  “Let’s pound these and go to my house to watch,” I suggested.

  “But we’l
l miss the opening,” Suzanne said.

  Patsy planted her elbows on the bar and leaned over the dark wood into the bartender’s square face. “I know what kind of bar it is.” Patsy had a body that should have drawn an admiring glance. Jutting toward the young man were breasts one usually saw only in magazines. However, the bartender eyed her shaved head with the poof of mauve curls at the front, the ears riddled with rings, the tattoo on her bicep, and the burn scars all kitchen workers have. Biceps popped below Patsy’s black muscle shirt. These details distracted him.

  Patsy added in a gruff, but reasonable voice, “If anyone comes in and wants sports, you can put on sports.”

  The man’s dark eyes looked around the room. We were the only customers in the joint except for a man in his thirties with a conservative haircut and a tailored suit, an anomaly for Santa Cruz.

  “Customers come first,” Suzanne said sweetly.

  As the bartender inspected her, he underwent a transformation. His shoulders dropped, his mouth relaxed, his eyes softened.

  Suzanne looked like a cream puff, with golden, sun-kissed skin exposed by a sleeveless, flowered dress. Permed, frizzy blond hair was banded into the topping.

  “KRUZ channel?” he asked.

  “Thank you,” Suzanne said. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  I guess this was what my mom meant when she said, “You can get more flies with honey than vinegar.” My reply had always been, “God, Ma, who wants more flies?”

  The bartender agreed to let Suzanne buy him a Coke, and then, to his credit, drank it at the other end of the bar as he leaned over a newspaper.