Mumbo Gumbo

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  The mix of contestants was critical to Freak’s success, and Artie had a talent for mixing the right types together. Their reactions under pressure made the show unpredictable. Any home cook could relate to the stress of discovering a forgotten pan of popovers by the smell of the smoke. There have actually been fires on the set. Once the contestants are in the Kitchen Arena, anything can happen. Chef Howie calls out, “Five-four-three-two-one, blastoff!” and off the two teams scramble to make the most original, complex, and delicious dishes they can create in the time allowed. Contestants are permitted to modify the show’s recipes in any way they choose, and originality is key. Assembling the final dish and its dramatic presentation are also big components of the judging, and let’s not forget to consider how good the thing actually tastes. Celebrity judges perform the final sipping and nibbling and then the awards are presented.

  “What about talent? Who is going to judge?” Susan asked, looking up from her notebook.

  “The best,” Artie said, smiling. “We’ve got Tom Hanks, Liza Minelli, and Pink.”

  “Locked in?” Susan asked hopefully.

  “Just about. Just about,” Artie said quickly. “It will be a wonderful, wonderful show, I’m telling you. And live! Now just write me a terrific game, you two,” he said, looking at Jennifer and me. “Jennifer, you are now the head writer, okay, my dear? You have the seniority here.”

  “Really?” Jennifer looked astonished. “Thank you, Artie.”

  “It’s a long time coming,” he said. “You deserve it. Now, I’ve got to meet some network boys for a lunch. Would you believe it? I told them we were too busy. It was crazy. I couldn’t leave the office. But they have ideas for a new opening for next season’s shows, so I can’t say no. You girls stay here. Help yourselves to anything you want from the fridge. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Okay, Artie,” Jennifer said. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

  “I hope so,” he said, looking a little more worried than he had previously let show. “I hope so. Tim isn’t here, which is a real, real shame. And then Greta left us. So now we must move ahead, yes? Okay, now. I have to go to lunch.” He looked at us and smiled. “You’ll do well. And, Susan, get the finished script to me by five, will you, honey? We’ve got to send it to Pete Steele right away. He’s having a conniption fit.” And with that final instruction, Artie Herman was just about to leave us.

  “I still can’t believe Greta would walk out on the show,” I said before he got to the door.

  Susan and Jennifer became quiet instantly. Perhaps this wasn’t a comment I should have made within earshot of Artie.

  “Greta has worked for me for a lot of years,” Artie said, turning back to us from the door, “but never again. Sure, the police with their questions can upset a person. ‘What happened to Tim? When did you last see him,’ and so forth. I don’t want to think that anything terrible might have happened to our Tim any more than Greta does. But did I rush home and have to lie down?”

  My stomach sank. Greta had run out.

  “No,” Artie answered his own question. “I stayed. I talked. The policemen were out of here in five minutes flat.”

  “The detectives were here?” My voice was small.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Artie said. “I told the guard, ‘Sure, go ahead and send the cops right on up here.’ Why not? I didn’t have time to see them, of course. I’m trying my hardest here to save our show from disaster, as you three know. So I told Greta to handle it. That’s her job. But Greta had a headache. A headache. I told her, ‘If you walk out now, don’t you ever come back.’” Artie kept his voice even, but we could all tell he had to work at it as he finished his story. “You see how much Greta cared about my show? Don’t get me wrong, ladies. The thing with Tim Stock, it’s terrible. No one wants to hear bad news. No one wants to think maybe one of our dear friends might be dead.”

  Jennifer gasped. This was clearly news to her.

  “Yes, I can see that Greta would be very upset. But…but…Hell, what’s the phrase I’m looking for?”

  “ ‘The show must go on’?” I said.

  “The show must go on! Where the hell are people’s priorities anymore? Where are their values? Hell, people die every second of every day. That’s part of life. But how many times in the history of the world do we have a chance to create a game show as perfect as Food Freak?”

  Chapter 21

  The good news was, nothing at all was out of place in Tim Stock’s office when I returned. The bad news was imagining why Greta Greene would leave the show that meant more to her than anything in her life, rather than talk to the cops about Tim Stock’s death. I wasn’t going to jump to conclusions, though. There could be some simple explanation, after all. I dialed Greta’s home number and got her machine. Perhaps she just wasn’t picking up. Perhaps she was lying down. Perhaps she was at the doctor’s. Perhaps she was just about to cross the border from San Diego to Tijuana. I hung up.

  Just because Greta got a headache at a weird point in time didn’t necessarily mean she was avoiding the cops, did it? There had to be other reasons for her having fled. Maybe Greta had known more about Tim’s disappearance than she’d let on. Perhaps she knew he had been hiding out. Hiding from what, I still couldn’t figure, but Greta could have known Tim was in danger. Perhaps she was afraid of the same men who were after Tim.

  Or maybe Greta was more involved with the fire at Tim Stock’s garage last night than I’d ever suspected. I swallowed hard. That grim possibility was shocking, but could I ignore it any longer? What if instead of worrying about Tim, all this time Greta had been the one who was after Tim and wanted to see him dead? I had witnessed her manipulate situations to her own advantage before, with no one the wiser. Had she manipulated everyone again this time? Even me? Wasn’t it possible? Maybe Greta had sent an accomplice to search Tim’s office and then feigned shock when we discovered the room had been vandalized. Maybe they were searching for signs of where Tim might have been hiding. And here I’d been, helping her cover up evidence, tidying the room, throwing away papers. Helping her keep secrets. What did that make me? Some sort of idiot, obviously. Damnit. How did I get into this?

  The phone on my desk rang. I looked at it, wondering if it could be Greta, calling me back, full of simple explanations rather than an intricate web of lies.

  “Tim Stock’s office,” I said into the receiver.

  “Madeline? Is that you?”

  “Honnett?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice warm. “I must have missed you earlier this morning.”

  “At the house,” I said, recalling how I had quietly crawled out of bed, leaving him to sleep longer than the hour I’d managed to catch. “You knew I had to go out early.”

  “So what happened with that? Wild-goose chase out to Woodland Hills, or what?” Honnett had a deep, gravelly voice and it sounded wonderful, even as he teased me.

  “I learned a few things,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

  “Well, I did find those girls I was looking for. Heidi and Monica. The ones the note said might have to die, remember? And they are just fine, if you were worried about them.”

  “You did? No kidding. So, who are they?”

  “Well,” I said, trying not to admit defeat too easily, “they’re livestock.”

  “What?”

  “Sheep, actually, but the point is, they were fine. Not dead. Nothing like that.”

  “Sheep, did you say?”

  “Okay. Yes. They were sheep in a barn out at Pierce College’s school farm. But the good news is, they have not been harmed. So we don’t need to worry.”

  He let out a soft laugh. “You are too much, Maddie,” he said. “And you were too much for me last night, too.”

  “Don’t start with me, Honnett. I don’t think I can handle any sexy talk after the morning I’ve had.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s the probl
em.”

  “Tell me about it,” Honnett offered. He was taking me seriously and for that I was grateful.

  “The body that was found last night? I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t really Tim Stock. Everything about that fire seems suspicious, doesn’t it? It seems like an awfully convenient way to disfigure a body beyond recognition.”

  “Why do you think someone would want to do that?”

  “I had this notion, based on how hard Tim had been trying to disappear last week, that it might have been helpful if some people believed Tim was dead. I have tried to ask around here and I’ve gotten exactly nowhere. No one wants to tell me anything.” I knew I sounded angry.

  “That’s usually the way it is, Maddie,” Honnett said in his soothing tone. “I was out at your office this morning, by the way. I asked a few questions. But I got nothing. That’s the way it works.”

  “So I’m left with this hunch,” I said, “but there’s really no way to prove the fire victim wasn’t Stock since all the evidence was conveniently destroyed in the fire.”

  “Not necessarily,” Honnett said. I heard him pause.

  “What’s that?”

  “Here’s the thing about a fire,” Honnett said. “Some folks would think you could have a body in a fire and there’d be nothing left to identify, like after a cremation. But that’s not exactly true. It’s got to do with the temperature of the fire. A simple garage or house fire would likely leave behind a great deal. Teeth, bones, even tissue and clothing. The kindling temperature of wood is low enough that the body may not be completely consumed by the time the fuel is exhausted. Also, if the structure collapsed, as is often the case, pockets where there is less fire damage might occur. If the body were in such an area, the ME might be left with a great deal of evidence. Unfortunately for us, that wasn’t the case in Tim Stock’s garage.”

  “Damnit.”

  “Hold on. We can also learn a lot by just how much damage we find. Too much damage to that little garage, and we start asking new questions.”

  “Like what?” I asked, intrigued.

  “One way to assure that as little as possible of the victim remains after a fire would be to use an accelerant such as gasoline, rocket fuel, almost any highly flammable substance. That means the fire is deliberate, and whether the fire causes the death or is only meant to be a cover-up, you’ve got a crime.”

  “Did the fire investigators find traces of an accelerant at Stock’s fire?”

  “Gasoline,” Honnett answered.

  “Really? So that proves it was arson.”

  “Yep. Whoever set it, guess he figured like you did that everything burns up. But that’s not exactly true. Even if the body was completely consumed by the fire and no clothing or tissue was left, the teeth and bones are almost always found in the debris. As it happens, bones were recovered that gave us general height information, and teeth were found in good enough condition to make a match.”

  “And you tried matching them to Tim’s dental records? And they didn’t match?”

  “Whoa. Slow down. It’s only been about sixteen hours, okay? Nobody works that fast except maybe Superman.”

  “But I thought you were Superman,” I said into the phone, “last night.”

  “Now, don’t get me started, Maddie.”

  I liked to yank his chain, but I turned my mind back to considering Honnett’s news. “So what you are saying in your infinitely slow way is that the body could still turn out to be somebody other than Tim Stock.”

  “More than that. I think it’s likely that our victim is not Stock, yes,” Honnett said.

  “You do?” I was stunned. “Because of my theories?”

  “Well, don’t take this wrong, Madeline, but no. It’s not your theories. It seems that the man who got torched there was mid-thirties or a little older, like Stock. But our victim’s teeth couldn’t have been Stock’s. Our victim had been wearing braces. The metal and plastic were melted, but they were still there.

  Braces.

  “The thing is, we can try to match these teeth we found with the dental records of Tim Stock, but if they come up negative, like we think they will, we are kind of stumped. We’ll check missing persons reports and other databases to see if anyone missing might fit the general size and sex of the corpse. Then we’ve got to check the teeth we recovered against any dental records available for the missing persons. Of course, if the victim has no dental records, or hasn’t been reported missing, this will obviously be a fruitless search.”

  “I see,” I said. “You know, I have an idea.”

  “Shoot,” Honnett said.

  “There’s a guy who worked here. Quentin Shore.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He didn’t show up at work today.”

  “Well, I’m sure we could find a thousand guys in L.A. who didn’t show up at work, Maddie.”

  “Yeah. That’s true,” I said. “But Quentin Shore was a thirty-eight-year-old guy. And I’m pretty sure he wore braces.”

  “That so?”

  “I think.”

  “Well, I’ll check on it. We’ll go out and see if we can find him. If not, we’ll look for his dental charts. It takes time, but I’ll get on it.”

  “Good. Have you had to give up on your drugworld contract-killings theory yet?”

  “Naw. Just a new wrinkle, that’s all. A matter of sifting out the deaths that belong in the pattern and those that don’t. Even if we do make a positive ID with Quentin Shore, we still have a lot of questions to answer.”

  “I see.”

  “But as long as we’re talking, you wouldn’t have any idea why Shore might have got himself killed over in Tim Stock’s garage, now would you?”

  “Not yet.” My speculation meant nothing to Honnett, obviously. He’d said as much. Without the sort of hard evidence he dealt with on a regular basis, like identifying traces of accelerants and matching teeth to dental records, my notions were of no use at all. The ponderings of the lion down the alley would probably hold more credibility.

  I saw no point in sharing my concern that Tim might have tried the ultimate way to keep pursuers at bay, by playing dead. And if it turned out to be Quentin who had died in the garage, did that make Tim the killer? Was Susan’s buddy and Artie’s head writer and Dawn’s former date the kind of guy who would kill a coworker just to cover his own tracks?

  “So, now, what are you going to do?” Honnett asked.

  “Me? I’m working. I’m slaving away in the game-show salt mines,” I said. “I’m writing questions for our next show.”

  “Try some out on me,” Honnett said, making small talk.

  “I would. But if I told you any of my new questions before they air, I’m afraid I’d have to kill you.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Not perhaps the most prudent joke to make to a homicide detective.

  “I won’t take that as a threat,” he answered calmly.

  Lucky for me, cops have a pretty dark sense of humor, too. And as he hung up, I thought back to the last time I’d seen Quentin Shore, the previous morning out at Chef Howie’s trailer. At the time, of course, the man had had little reason to smile. I recalled using a few strong words. But still, I was almost positive he was wearing braces.

  Chapter 22

  Susan Anderson popped her head into my office. “Hi, Madeline. Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure. Come on in.”

  “Sorry to disturb you. Here’s some copy. It’s a recipe for one of the bumpers,” she said, and then kindly explained, “A bumper is the part of the show—”

  “I do know what a bumper is, Susan,” I said, with a hint of dignity in my voice.

  “Oh, of course. Good.” She handed me a few sheets of paper. “You’ll need to rewrite that a bit. We need about forty seconds for this one.”

  “So, I write something, and then read it out loud, and time myself?”

  “I think so. I always heard Quentin talking to himself, so I guess that’s
what he was up to. I think Tim used to give some recipe ideas to Quentin, and then Quentin wrote the bumpers and I put them in the scripts. But now, without either of them here or…Well, whatever you come up with will be fine.”

  I glanced at the pages. It was a simple enough recipe for guacamole. Susan turned to leave.

  “Susan?” I called after her. “You know he isn’t dead, don’t you?”

  Susan turned back around with an almost guilty expression on her sweet face.

  I looked her over. “You knew it all along, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not good at keeping secrets.” A resigned look crept into Susan’s eyes. “Even when I was a kid, I would warn everybody in my neighborhood not to tell me anything.”

  “That sounds promising,” I said, smiling at her. “Have a seat.”

  Susan, in her Chuck Woollery T-shirt, stared at the large rose-colored sofa in disbelief. “Where did that come from? Where’s Tim’s old sofa?”

  “I hope they took it out and chopped it up for toothpicks,” I said. “It was pretty gross.”

  “Oh, damn,” Susan said. She looked like she might start to cry.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “I had given Tim a gift. It’s a long, long story. As sort of a joke, Tim kept it under one of the sofa cushions. Anyway, it cost over fifteen hundred dollars and I bet it was still there.” She sighed a big sigh. “Never mind.”