Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  Eldon fluttered nervously at the perimeter of the group. He patted his hands together. “Come on, you guys. Everyone but Patsy and Todd, back to your stations. We have a kitchen to run.” Eldon was the only one among us who could manage a kitchen with a dead man on the floor. I guessed that was how a six-foot-two dumpling became an executive chef: Buzz was a better cook and Fortier was more flamboyant.

  We dispersed reluctantly. I heard the sirens shrieking up the wooded hill from the hospital, a convenient mile away.

  “Oh, good Jesus, sirens.” Eldon puttered nervously to the back line where Ray had returned to work. He lifted the lid of the lunch soup du jour—vichyssoise—that Todd had been preparing. He ladled up a sample, blew on it, and delicately slurped.

  “Todd needs to season it,” Ray said.

  “I can tell,” Eldon said.

  I stepped around the body, back to my table, and looked at the huge pan of brown, spicy dough for the lebkuchen, a Christmas honey cake that I baked as individual cookies. Fortier must have been sick. I wondered if he had sampled my dough, anyway. It would be like him to taste it and then die, his final act designed to find fault. His apparent death disconcerted me, but I didn’t feel sad. The kitchen was like a family and his death was like losing a relative one didn’t like. I felt the loss, but not any grief. My lack of compassion made me feel less than human, which increased my churlish mood.

  The body stretched behind my compact work area toward where Victor and his second cousin Abundio washed dishes. They were speaking low, rapid-fire Spanish. The only words I picked out were la chota and La Migra. The death had them worried about the police or immigration showing up.

  When the paramedics arrived, I turned to watch, but Abundio slipped out the door to the Vista Dining Room and Victor kept his thick, square back to the excitement. They acted like the INS were imminent. I hadn’t thought much before about the routine fear of their lives. No one in the kitchen would rat on them, not even Eldon with his this-is-America-speak-English attitude.

  The two paramedics looked like they doubled as lifeguards. “Good job,” one said. Todd and Patsy stood, stretched, and rubbed their joints. One of the paramedics hooked Fortier’s body to a respirator, and the other exclaimed, “Whoa, I know this dude. He’s that famous cook.”

  No one in the kitchen responded. I glanced at Buzz, but like everyone else, he was acting as if he hadn’t heard the paramedic’s comment and as if there wasn’t a dead body in our midst. He wore the same stoic, stony countenance he’d given me every time I’d prodded and pried about the cooking show.

  I looked again at the stiff, quiet workers. Maybe the kitchen crew had convinced themselves the inert mass could be revived. I knew Fortier was dead.

  I turned back to the vague shape of Fortier’s head pressed into my lebkuchen. There was nothing wrong with my dough that could have contributed to his death. It was still cold from its night in a locked refrigerator. We didn’t have ingredients for a whole new batch and the specials menu was already printed. I felt a pang of guilt about germs from Fortier, but the oven would destroy them. I shaped the dough into cookies. Then I baked them.

  FIVE

  Perched atop eighty acres of eucalyptus and redwoods, Archibald’s afforded views over Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay. The elegant, two-story main building, once a Catholic boys’ high school, now housed meeting rooms and the restaurant. The police tromped through the main entrance, below an arching facade that cried for the missing cross. They strode through the main lobby, down the hallway to Vista Dining Room and into the kitchen. Eldon was in a dither.

  “Good Jesus, what will our customers think?” He wrung his hands as he gave the officers a piece of his mind. Why couldn’t they have entered from the loading dock and side entrance like the paramedics?

  The two policemen ignored his lecture. They collected names and basic where, what, when information. One left briefly, and not more than twenty minutes later, two detectives in plain clothes arrived. This did not bode well. The appearance of the detectives confirmed the paramedics had been unable to jump start Fortier.

  The female detective, a woman of Junoesque proportions, waved to Patsy. Her smock and chef’s hat hid her mauve curls, tattoo, and muscle definition. I was surprised an acquaintance would recognize her so easily; she looked normal if one could say that about any of us in our hound’s-tooth pants.

  Although Eldon had a couple of inches, and many pounds, over the detective, the woman treated him like a gnat, slightly annoying, but hardly a presence with which to reckon. She introduced herself to him as Detective Peters. In spite of her ordinary gray slacks and charcoal blazer, everything about her blared cop.

  Her partner was younger and more casual, dressed in Levi’s, dress shirt and tie. He had a smooth, kind face, not yet world weary or jaded. A crooked nose added the right touch of toughness. He looked like he’d become a cop out of civic duty or because his father had been one. He didn’t look the anal-retentive or power-tripping type. Standing under the mistletoe Fortier had taped to the ceiling only yesterday, he introduced himself to Eldon as Detective Carman and they shook hands.

  With pads of paper in their hands, the uniformed officers stood in the middle of the kitchen and read back the information they’d collected to the detectives.

  “Buzz?” the female asked.

  One of the officers pointed and Buzz turned, holding a small knife. He’d been cutting fresh sage from the kitchen’s herb garden. “It’s on my driver’s license,” he said.

  When Buzz decided not to talk about something, it was useless to pry, as I’d learned all too well.

  The detective seemed to sense this. She glanced warily at the knife and her eyes scanned the room, noting knives everywhere.

  The detectives asked the officers a few questions. We all listened, slack-jawed and transfixed, even as we automatically performed our tasks. I stood at the door of the bakery so I could see all the action.

  Eldon guided them toward me. “There are three ways into the kitchen from the dock,” he said, hinting that the police should use one of them. “There’s a door near the walk-in refrigerators, and, if you go through this swinging door into the hallway, there’s a door at the end. Off the hallway is the EDR—the Employees’ Dining Room—and there’s a door out from there as well.”

  Instead of taking the hint, the detectives assigned one of the uniforms to the dock to watch all the three back exits and another uniform at the passageway between the kitchen and the dining room.

  “Isn’t that overkill?” Eldon asked. He gulped, as though he immediately regretted his word choice. “I mean is all of this really necessary? People do die from influenza.”

  The two detectives nodded respectfully, but their eyes were already examining the bakery, down the metal racks, over my body. Eldon bounded off to make sure no one’s brunch would suffer just because Fortier had the bad taste to die in the kitchen.

  Peters, the female detective, took two long strides to Victor’s area, peered into the chute to the abyss of the dishwasher’s garbage disposal, inspected Victor and the tray he’d loaded for the conveyor ride through the washer, and touched the swinging straps at the other end. “Looks like a mini-car-wash,” she muttered. Peters glanced at the cheap foam cooler under Victor’s counter. “What’s that for?” Oddly, I’d wondered that a hundred times, but for all my native curiosity, had never asked.

  Victor ignored Peters, pulling into himself, his compact body dwarfed by the detective.

  She persisted, asking if he’d seen the incident.

  “No entiendo.” I don’t understand.

  Her male partner surprised everyone by asking the question in flawless Spanish.

  Victor said he hadn’t seen anything.

  Officer Peters bent down and wiggled off the squeaky top of the cooler. I tried to get a peek over her shoulder. She scowled up at me.

  “Is that blood?” she asked Victor.

  Her partner translated.

  Victor
peered into the container and said in Spanish that he didn’t know.

  I stood on my tiptoes and glimpsed a bit of pinkish liquid in the bottom of the cooler. “We cook meat,” I said. “Blood’s common in the kitchen.”

  Since Fortier had not been stabbed or shot, she seemed to lose interest in the blood. “Where’s this...” She consulted her notes. “... Abundio?”

  Nobody volunteered any information.

  Victor replaced the lid of the cooler as Eldon pressed back up behind us. Eldon gave his rendition of events. Detective Peters turned to me. “Fortier collapsed into dough?”

  She and Detective Carman both looked over my shoulders at the five rows of six cookies on each of ten sheets. Detective Carman had the graciousness to breathe in the spicy air, but the female detective widened her eyes.

  “Want one?” I asked. “Right out of the oven.”

  Detective Peters looked at me as though I were a smart ass. “You destroyed evidence?” She had sandy hair, almost as close-cropped as Carman’s. I wondered if she had a temper. My mom always associated the highlights in my auburn hair with my temper.

  “Evidence of what?”

  She didn’t want to answer that question. For all my interest in murder, I only then realized Fortier might have been killed. I’d thought the detectives had come because the death was unexpected, what they called “suspicious,” on the level of someone having a heart attack and dying at the spa—a death the police investigated, but without much rigor. The thought of actual murder, right where I was standing, lit in my gut and struggled to my brain.

  “Were you here when it happened?” Detective Peters asked me.

  “The murder?”

  She frowned. “No one’s used that word.”

  “No, I wasn’t here when it happened. I was over in pastry.”

  She gave me another one of those looks that said we weren’t hitting it off.

  She turned back to the main kitchen. She diagrammed the area and snagged Eldon long enough to confirm the names and phone numbers the uniformed cops had gathered. Detective Carman photographed.

  “Do you have anyone who saw anything?” Detective Peters asked Eldon, with a hint of weary sarcasm.

  “Patsy was over here. She’d brought some bowls for Victor and Abundio to wash.” Eldon wrinkled his fleshy forehead, and looked around, his mouth in a moue. Abundio had not returned to the dishwashing station.

  Detective Peters walked across the kitchen behind the lead line and back line chefs to the pastry department and returned talking amiably with Patsy. With Patsy’s uniform covering her shaved head and tattoos, I was struck by her prettiness. Her widely spaced green eyes were animated by the interaction with the detective. Was the cop attracted to her?

  “So what was this guy Fortier doing when he collapsed?” Detective Peters switched to business as she and Patsy reached the bakery.

  Both detectives kept using that word, as though they didn’t even want to say he died until it was official, the relatives contacted, the notice in the paper.

  Patsy gestured toward the steps, folded and set aside in the hall. “He was sitting on that stepladder, holding his stomach. He looked like he had the flu.” She turned toward the stainless steel table that occupied most of the bakery. “He was sampling Carol’s dough.”

  Both detectives glanced again at the brown, spicy cookies cooling on my counter.

  “He didn’t die from my lebkuchen,” I said. I picked up a cookie and bit into it. “Ah shit.”

  “Are you all right?” Detective Peters asked.

  “I forgot the citron.”

  She snapped on a latex glove and began to bag the cookies.

  “You’re going to take all of them?” Since, like a king’s sampler I’d eaten a mouthful of the cookie without keeling over, I felt the officer was acting out of spite.

  She didn’t bother to reply.

  I shot a look at Eldon hovering near the bakery entrance.

  “We already have the specials printed with lebkuchen listed,” he said plaintively over the detective’s shoulder.

  “This is evidence,” the woman said. “Mr. Fortier ate this stuff. Then died.” She shot a suspicious look in my direction. If someone mentioned the conversation in the sports bar, she’d probably cuff me.

  “I don’t think that’s what made Fortier sick,” Patsy said. “He was like the expression green around the gills before he came to the bakery. I couldn’t believe he was eating.”

  Eating while sick did seem implausible, but why else would he be in the bakery? “Maybe he was so sick that he just sat on the stool to rest.” Fortier usually didn’t sit in order to sample; he was more the dive-bombing type.

  “He had a finger in your dough,” Patsy said, as though she thought I’d meant to contradict her—in front of her cohort.

  “Ladies,” Eldon murmured.

  Detective Peters turned toward him with the bags full of warm cookies as though his mild rebuke included her.

  “Jean ... ehm, that’s Mr. Fortier, did say he was sick and going home,” Eldon said, trying to gain control. “I asked if he wanted me to call a cab.”

  I felt claustrophobic with two representatives of the law, plus Patsy and Eldon boxing me into the nook. I was also anxious about what I could whip up on such short notice to replace the lebkuchen.

  “So what was he doing here?” Detective Peters asked.

  Eldon lifted his big shoulders.

  “He could never stay out of the kitchen,” I said.

  I guess they heard the resentment in my voice. Detective Peters scratched one sandy eyebrow and eyed me speculatively.

  “He was always tasting and adding spices and suggesting. He was a pain in the ass,” I blurted. It felt refreshing to say that and not worry it’d get back to Jean and my job would be at stake. His near celebrity status had given him more power than the title Head Chef merited.

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “Nobody liked him.”

  Eldon cleared his throat. “I’m certain this unfortunate incident had nothing to do with my staff. My belief is that Mr. Fortier did leave and returned to drop off his Kris Kringle gift.”

  “Fortier,” I scoffed. “I can’t believe he participated.”

  “He got a present this morning,” Eldon said stubbornly. “A jar of honey.”

  Officer Peters drew a deep breath. “Where is that jar of honey?”

  Eldon shook his head. “I haven’t seen it since then. Another reason I think he left and returned.”

  “If he actually left, it’s most likely he came back to see Delores,” said Patsy.

  “That’s Delores Medina,” Detective Peters said. She sat the evidence bags on my stainless steel table while she checked her notes.

  “Right-o.”

  Patsy led the troop back across the kitchen, turning left before the pastry area, into the garde manger’s domain. There the lovely Dorothy Medina worked under the tutelage of the completely different, but equally lovely Suzanne Anderson, turning out salads of bulgar wheat with apricots and dates, mixed greens and spinach, and melons cut into baskets overflowing with crudités.

  I could breathe again.

  SIX

  I caught Chad on the back steps of our tiny house in the banana belt of Santa Cruz. He was smoking a Camel. He started, then quickly stubbed out the cigarette on a potted cyclamen. As much as I adored his James Dean looks, I was adamantly opposed to this detail. Even though the Christmas season told me to be giving, and even though I had exciting news, I unleashed a sarcastic, “That doesn’t look or smell like a Vantage.”

  “It’s another type,” he said. He stroked Lola, our brindle cat, who rested on a lawn chair. She stretched her front legs and yawned.

  “And I know exactly what type.” I unpinned my braid and untwisted the ropes of auburn hair.

  “Christ, Carol, I spent all morning on a slippery roof in the fog. I need to relax.”

  “Take a nap.” In spite of my tongue, Chad admire
d the loosened mane. As a kid, I’d hated the wild, thick hair. Now I considered it one of my best features.

  “You have no appreciation for how dangerous my job is.”

  After seeing Fortier dead, less than an hour ago, this remark didn’t sit well. “As dangerous as it might be, it’s not as dangerous as that thing you had in your mouth. I’m willing to bet more smokers die of cancer than roofers of falls.”

  He stood and stretched. He was gorgeous. Round buns in 501’s, brown, brawny arms exposed by a tee shirt in spite of the December chill. “Well, hello and good afternoon to you.” There might have been a wee bit of sarcasm, but basically Chad was easygoing. He meant to change the mood.

  “That’s it,” I said. “If you aren’t going to take quitting seriously, I’m buying that life insurance.”

  I harrumphed through the sliding glass door and stalked into the closet-sized second bedroom of our house. In this sanctuary, I kept my collection of murder mysteries, true crime stories, detective books, and references on guns and poisons. The first three were fine with Chad, but the last spooked him. I’d once hinted that I’d like a gun, just for target practice—there’s a gun range up in the hills above Archibald’s. Chad had been appalled.

  I rifled through hanging file folders for the insurance proposals to prove I was serious about this matter.

  Chad leaned in the doorway and watched me silently with blue-green eyes like my own, giving me time to think about how he’d moved his smoking to outdoors, how he’d reduced the quantity, and had switched (for the most part) from Camels to lower tar and nicotine brands. He’d tried Nicorette and even, occasionally, listened to the subliminal messages on the tape I’d bought him.

  “I’m trying, Carol.”

  What more could a person ask? Only a foolish woman would have persisted with a wavy-haired hunk making such an earnest plea. I was she.

  “You’re only thirty-five and you already have a terrible cough, Chad.”

  He was gazing sadly at my ringless left hand. If I wore my ring to work, I had a doughy mess at the end of the shift, but Chad didn’t seem to understand that. He looked hurt when I forgot to put it back on, as though, without it, I’d be carted off at the end of the day by some womanizer like Fortier.