Irish Stewed (14 page)

“The story of the Lance of Justice’s murder has local Emmy written all over it,” she crooned. “You know I can’t give away the details. They’re just too delicious.”

I wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad. That would explain why my heart started up a funny, stuttering rhythm inside my chest. “Then, you do know something?”

She gobbled down the last bite of chocolate pie and her timing was perfect; Denice came over to collect the dishes just as Kim said, “Not only do I know something, but I have a line on who killed the Lance of Justice, and why.”

I caught my breath, almost afraid to ask, “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

Kim sat back so Denice could reach across the table and grab Dustin’s plate. “Not yet,” she purred. “I’m not quite ready yet to reveal all. I will tell you . . .” She looked left and right and, sure that none of the other reporters were anywhere near, she leaned closer and lowered her voice. “I will tell you something curious and maybe you can explain it to me.”

I swallowed hard and prayed that Sophie’s name wasn’t about to come up. “I’ll try.”

“I went through Jack’s files. You know, as part of digging into his life and his final days. He had receipts from here at the Terminal. He was here just about every day.”

This wasn’t news and I told her so.

“But here’s the thing I think is weird.” She scooted her
chair closer to mine and it scraped across the weathered floor like fingernails on a blackboard. “This is the most people I’ve ever seen in this place. I’m right, right?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I mean, no offense, but every time I looked in the windows before today, this place was like a morgue. No customers. So, I’m thinking in the last few weeks when Jack was here, there weren’t all that many customers, either. I’m guessing . . .” She looked around and then, because she was afraid she’d look too obvious and some of the other reporters at nearby tables might catch on, she sat back and stared down at the table in front of her. “He could have sat anywhere, right? I mean, if there were no customers, he would have just waltzed in and sat anywhere he wanted to.”

“That’s not exactly the way it works in restaurants,” I told her. “When there are fewer customers . . .” Notice I did not use the words
no customers
. “We generally close off a section or two. Let’s say it was a typical afternoon. We might have seated Jack over by the windows because people like to watch the trains go by and so that’s the first section we fill. We’d leave the tables by the kitchen empty and the ones over there.” I waved in the general area of the tables along the front of the restaurant where I’d found Jack’s body. “There’s no use having our waitresses running all over the place. If we keep our customers contained in one area, our waitstaff has less ground to cover.”

“Well, that explains it, then.” Kim nodded like she’d already thought of this theory on her own and just needed confirmation. “See, every receipt I have of his says Jack was seated at table number sixteen. Every time he came here. So I guess table number sixteen”—she gave the restaurant a sharp-eyed once-over—“that must be right over by the windows somewhere.”

I managed a smile and, three cheers for me, I kept it in place, too. Right before I pointed toward the windows along the back of the Terminal and to a table that was definitely not table number sixteen.

“Right over there,” I told Kim.

A lie?

Theoretically, I guess it was. But see, I had my reasons and they bounced around inside my head along with the question that burned through my brain.

Jack Lancer kept his receipts from the Terminal?

Before I got carried away, I reminded myself that there were any number of possible reasons.

He might have kept the receipts because he was simply careless and didn’t clean out his files often enough.

Or it could have been because he was dishonest and had plans to scam the system.

But those receipts might mean something else, too. And my money was on that something else.

See, if Jack kept his Terminal receipts in with his business files, that told me he thought of the money he spent here at the restaurant as legitimate business expenses.

And that meant he was hanging around the Terminal because he was working on a story.

Ice formed in my stomach, but I kept my voice even when I managed to say, “Maybe Jack liked to watch the trains.”

“Maybe.” Kim gathered her purse and her receipt and went up front to the register with Dustin trailing behind, and because I knew Inez and Denice were both busy, I cashed them out. I counted to ten once Kim and Dustin were out the front door, and when I was done, I counted to ten again and I refused to budge. Just in case Kim happened to look back, I didn’t want to look too eager.

With that in mind, I took my time when I strolled back into the restaurant to do a little verification of my own.

Table sixteen.

I skirted the jut-out that was the back wall of the waiting area and headed over to the tables at the front of the restaurant, where I’d found Jack’s body.

That table, just for the record, was number fourteen.

And table number sixteen?

I got to that table—the one right next to the one at which Jack had spent his last moments on earth—and sat down where Jack must have sat all those days when he’d been here on business, all those days when he must have been working on a lead.

And a story.

And an investigation.

And I looked where he’d been looking all that time. And watched what he must have been watching.

My heart skipped a beat, then another one just for good measure.

Table number sixteen.

Table number sixteen gave Jack Lancer a bird’s-eye view of the Irish store.

“W
hat, no line out the door yet?”

We’d been blessedly busy on Friday evening, that was for sure, but we were far from slammed, so I should have known Declan wasn’t serious. That didn’t keep me from stepping back, my weight against one foot, and giving him a long, hard look when he breezed into the Terminal bright and early on Saturday morning.

That is, right before I looked over his shoulder, out the window, and at the Irish store.

Curious?

Oh, I wasn’t just curious about what the Lance of Justice had been up to every day with his butt in a chair and his eyes on Declan’s business, I was downright dying to figure out what was going on.

And if it had anything to do with Sophie.

And Jack Lancer’s death.

Hoping to make it look like I wasn’t nearly as interested
as I really was, I kept my voice cool and level when I asked, “Don’t you have a first communion party to go to?”

“You remembered.” Declan was carrying a box, one of those white cardboard archive boxes with a lid, and he set it down on the rolltop desk. “You sure you don’t want to come?”

“To your family party?” Because I couldn’t explain how the very thought of being with that much family was not only unfamiliar, but terrifying, I didn’t elaborate and I didn’t answer. “What are you doing here at this time of the morning?” I asked him instead.

“The party doesn’t start until this afternoon.” As if he had every right, he moved toward the kitchen. “That means I have time for a cup of coffee. Have I told you that you make a really good cup of coffee?”

Flattery would get him nowhere, and he should have realized that by now. But I hadn’t had my first cup of coffee yet, either, and I did want to dig a little deeper. Into Declan’s business. Into Declan’s motives. I pushed through the swinging kitchen door and behind me, he stopped, his fists on his hips, and breathed in deep.

“Mom’s Irish stew! I’d know the smell that lingers in the air for days anywhere. So, what I heard yesterday isn’t just a neighborhood rumor.”

“Before you get the wrong idea—”

“Would I?” When he stepped nearer and looked down at me, his eyes gleamed. “Get the wrong idea, I mean. What about?”

“It is your mother’s recipe.” Since that index card from Ellen was out on the counter, there was no use denying it. “But I made some modifications.”

As if he’d never seen the recipe before—and really, I didn’t believe this; I think he’d seen it so many times, he
knew it by heart—he picked up the card and read over the ingredients.

“I changed up the red wine for Bloody Mary mix to give it a little kick,” I told him, pointing to the entry in his mother’s neat handwriting. “I added a little bit of brown sugar and a dash of Irish whiskey, too.”

“You didn’t mess with the Guinness, did you?”

“Never!” I handed Declan a cup of coffee and poured one for myself.

“There’s a tradition in my family,” he told me. “About how stew is always better the day after it’s prepared. Especially if you allow it to simmer on the stove nice and slow for a couple of hours before you serve it. But that doesn’t mean a bowl of it couldn’t be heated up in the microwave. I mean, if there was an emergency.”

He was teasing.

And I was thinking it was the perfect opening I needed. To get him to hang around. To get him to talk.

With a smile I hoped didn’t look too self-satisfied, I took a bowl to the cooler, loaded it with some of yesterday’s stew, and stuck it in the microwave.

“Are you going to report back to your mother?” I asked him while it heated.

“No doubt she already knows what you’re up to. Kitty and Pat would have made sure of that.”

Kitty and Pat. I thought back to what I’d heard from Carrie at the art gallery the day she dished about the neighborhood and its denizens and threw caution to the wind. Hey, this was a murder investigation. And I needed answers.

“It is true?” I asked Declan, stopping the microwave and checking the temperature on the stew. It was just right, but when I took the bowl out, I held on to it for a while. The
aroma that drifted off it was both tempting and tantalizing. Maybe that would work to my benefit.

“I heard your uncle is the head of the local Irish mob.”

Declan’s granite gaze snapped from the bowl in my hands to me. “Who says?”

“I heard it around.”

“And you’re wondering if Uncle Pat’s . . . affiliation . . .” He pronounced the word exactly as I would expect an attorney to. Carefully. As if to say I could draw my own conclusions, but he sure as heck wasn’t going to say anything specific. Or damning. “You think what Uncle Pat may or may not have been up to has something to do with Jack Lancer’s murder?”

“I think Jack Lancer wasn’t just hanging around here every day because he liked the pie, though I do have to say, we have really good pie.”

“And really good Irish stew. So I’ve heard.”

What is it they call it in lawyerspeak? Quid pro quo?

Clearly, if he was going to tell me anything, it would cost me a bowl of Irish stew.

Since it was warm, I set the bowl down on the counter rather than hand it to him, and I got him a spoon.

“Bon appétit,” I told him.

“
Sláinte
,” he said, and he pronounced the word
slantay
. That is, right before he bowed his head over the bowl of stew.

“For food in a world where many walk in hunger,” Declan said softly. “For faith in a world where many walk in fear. For friends . . .” He glanced my way before he lowered his eyes again. “For friends in a world where many walk alone. We give you thanks, Lord.”

He grabbed the spoon and dug in. He blew on the spoonful of beef, potatoes, and carrots, then popped it in
his mouth and held it there before he chewed and swallowed. “Hmmmm.”

“Hmmmm? Is that hmmmm good, or hmmmm bad?”

“Hmmmm.”

He was teasing. Again. Rather than look too eager, I went to the cooler and got out the ingredients that George would need to start the day’s batch of stew. Carrots, potatoes, parsnips, leeks.

It didn’t hurt to look busy, and not too interested in what he might—or might not—be willing to share about his uncle Pat.

Unless Uncle Pat wasn’t the one Jack Lancer was interested in.

It wasn’t the first time I’d run the theory through my brain, because the night before when I tried to make friends with Muffin and got slashed knuckles again for my effort, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Jack Lancer was watching the Irish store.

And in addition to taking care of all his family’s business, Declan ran the Irish store.

“So, what kinds of work do you do for your family?” I asked him.

He swallowed a mouthful of stew and don’t think I didn’t notice that the question didn’t surprise him. “Like I told you before, I help them out. With legal questions and all.”

“Was there any reason that might have interested Jack Lancer?”

He’d been blowing off a particularly hot chunk of parsnip and he paused, his lips pursed, and looked over at me. “You think he was here at the Terminal because of me?”

“I think he had a line on an idea for an investigation. And I wonder if that investigation had something to do with you.”

“It didn’t.”

“You seem pretty sure.”

His smile was nothing if not angelic. “My soul is as pure as the driven snow and my reputation is just as sparkly clean. In case you’re wondering, so is Uncle Pat’s.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“About me? Or about Uncle Pat?”

I threw my hands in the air. “Don’t you want to get to the bottom of this?”

“This bowl of stew?” He scraped his spoon through the last of the thick gravy and finished it off. “Absolutely. And I’ll be back later for more. But you know, if you’re going to feature Irish food, you’ll need to add another dish or two. I’m thinking colcannon would be perfect.”

I hadn’t asked for the recipe. How could I when I was so busy choking on the aggravation that stemmed from that oh-so-easy smile and the maddening way he had of blowing off every important question I asked him? Declan, though, had other ideas. He pulled a printed recipe out of his pocket and handed it to me.

“Mashed potatoes with plenty of butter,” he said while I looked over the ingredients. “Steamed shredded cabbage and my own secret ingredient, a bit of steamed kale. You won’t see that in most recipes, but it adds a nice dash of color. So do the chopped scallions you sprinkle on top before you serve it. Panache—it’s what you California girls are all about, right?”

Right about then, I was all about feeling as if I wanted to wring his neck. I might have, too, if George hadn’t tromped into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” Declan called to him.

George grunted.

Frustrated and annoyed, I went out into the restaurant. I wasn’t surprised when Declan followed.

“It’s better than hers, you know,” he said, stopping me in my tracks.

I turned to face him. “I assume we’re talking about the stew because apparently, stew is all we can talk about, even when there’s been a murder here and the murderer is still on the loose.”

“Stew is what we’re talking about. And yours is better than my mother’s. I will say that to you here and now, but don’t ever expect me to say it in front of her. Ellen Katherine Kane Fury has a reputation in these parts, and she takes it seriously. It would break her heart to know some fancy-schmancy chef could actually improve the old family recipe.”

I bristled at the
fancy-schmancy
, but there was no use mentioning it. He wouldn’t listen, anyway. “Your secret is safe with me.”

“But still, you don’t trust me.”

“How can I?” I spun away from him and went to the waiting area. “I never get a straight answer out of you.”

I knew he’d followed me, but I didn’t realize just how closely. When I got to the rolltop desk and whirled around, my nose was practically pressed to the dark green T-shirt he wore with an unbuttoned green and white plaid shirt.

He crooked a finger under my chin and this time when he looked into my eyes, there was no sparkle of amusement in his. He was as serious as a heart attack. “I’m being as honest with you as I can be,” he said.

Since my mouth was suddenly dry and my voice was breathy, it wasn’t easy, but I managed to say, “Spoken like an attorney.”

“Hey!” His mouth inched into a smile and he stroked his finger from beneath my chin to just under my bottom lip. “Now you’re getting personal.”

“I could say the same about you.”

“Not as personal as I’d like to get.”

“Really?” I batted his hand away and backed up as much as I was able. No easy task considering the corner of the rolltop desk poked me in the small of the back. “You think I can be so easily distracted?”

His pout wasn’t all that convincing. “I’ve been told I’m pretty good at being distracting.”

“Well, it’s not going to work. Not with me. So, here’s an idea: you can take your oversized ego and your lame pickup lines and your—”

“But I brought presents.” Declan whisked the archive box off the desk and popped off the top. “The least you can do is not kick me out until I can give them to you.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t want your presents.”

“You don’t know what they are.” He reached into the box, brought out a dozen small orange, white, and green Irish flags on sticks and wiggled his eyebrows. “See? What do you say? Would these make great decorations, or what? If you’re going to feature Irish food, you should have Irish flags, too. Everybody knows that.”

“Everybody doesn’t know anything.”

“And a large Irish flag.” He pulled that out of the box, too. “You can hang it . . .” He looked around the waiting area and his eyes lit up and he pointed to the front door. “I’ve got one of those flagpoles back at the shop. You know, the kind you can mount to a wall. I’ll have it up outside your front door in a jiffy. What better way to advertise the fact that you’re featuring the greatest cuisine in the world!”

“We don’t need hokey gimmicks,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, like adding Irish food to the menu to entice customers isn’t a hokey gimmick?”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer before he pulled a stuffed leprechaun out of the box.

“Paddy!” I remembered the leprechaun in his green suit from the visit I’d made to the Irish store. “You said he was your shop mascot.”

“Well, he’s good luck, and it’s only fair to spread a little of that around the neighborhood.” Declan plopped Paddy down on top of the cash register. “I’ve got other things in here, too,” he said, tipping the box so I could see inside. “Green streamers, sparkling rainbows, a wreath made of wooden shamrocks. And check these out!” He took them out of the box so I could see them better. “Little pots of gold on sticks so you can put them in drinks or in pieces of cake.”

I can’t say if I was horrified by the over-the-top tackiness of it all or just speechless at the fact that Declan had decided—without even consulting me—that a change in decor was needed along with a change in the menu.

Before I had a chance to think it through, Inez came in. She took one look at the box of goodies in Declan’s hands and a broad smile lit her face. “What a terrific idea!” Before I could tell her it wasn’t, she grabbed the streamers and the rainbows and the wreath and skipped into the restaurant with them. “I know just where to put it all,” she called back to me. “This is going to be terrific.”

“See, terrific.” Declan poked me in the ribs with one elbow. “Get with the program. Have a little fun.”

“Fine. Good.” I knew a losing cause when I saw one. “If it will help fill the tables . . .”

“Oh, the Irish food will do that.” He gave me a wink before he went to the door. “You’ll see. Paddy . . .” With one finger, he pointed at the grinning leprechaun perched on the cash register. “Paddy will take care of the rest.”

With that, he walked outside whistling “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and before I even had a chance to catch my breath, George shuffled into the waiting area. “I’ve got it ready,” he said. “You know, for tomorrow.”

I shook my head to clear it. For reasons I didn’t exactly understand and didn’t want to think about, whenever Declan was around, it felt as if the earth had tipped a bit on its axis. In an effort to get my bearings I braced a hand against the desk, squared my shoulders, and faced George.