Steamed (32 page)
Authors: Jessica Conant-Park,Susan Conant
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Mystery Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Boston (Mass.), #Cooks, #Women Graduate Students
Wait a minute. That didn’t make any sense. Although I
was
a little delirious from dehydration, I was able to understand that food poisoning was an unreliable murder method. Of course, I’d been sick for only a few hours. Maybe the illness would progress until I died right here on my ugly tile floor. While Josh slept peacefully in the other room. Or maybe the food poisoning was a warning? No! The health code violations: the mussels had made me sick because they’d been stored at too warm a temperature. And Josh had served them as a special that night at the restaurant!
was
a little delirious from dehydration, I was able to understand that food poisoning was an unreliable murder method. Of course, I’d been sick for only a few hours. Maybe the illness would progress until I died right here on my ugly tile floor. While Josh slept peacefully in the other room. Or maybe the food poisoning was a warning? No! The health code violations: the mussels had made me sick because they’d been stored at too warm a temperature. And Josh had served them as a special that night at the restaurant!
I limped to the couch and pulled a blanket over my shivering body. At least Josh hadn’t awakened to find me slumped over the toilet. Maybe I should have listened to Heather and to Detective Hurley. It was true that I hardly knew Josh. I hadn’t known anything about his outbursts at his previous jobs; the angry side of Josh was one I’d never seen. Realistically, I had no idea who he was.
I heard the clock radio alarm go off in the bedroom at seven forty-five. Prince was hollering that he wanted to be someone’s lover. I was still half asleep when Josh walked in and found me in the living room. I tumbled off the couch in dehydrated shambles.
“Hey, what’re you doing out here? Oh God, was I snoring or something?”
“I’m sick. I was up all night throwing up,” I barked before going to the kitchen for water.
“Oh, honey. Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.
“No. I’m not okay. All I could taste was mussels. Which I will never eat again.”
“Oh my God. You must have a stomach bug or something,” he called back sympathetically.
I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, angrily clutching my glass of water. “That or the risotto made me sick.” I glared at him.
“Wait, you think I gave you bad seafood?” He went to the bedroom and pulled on a shirt.
“All I know is that you gave me dinner, and I puked it up for three hours,” I shot back.
“Are you kidding me? You think I’d make you sick on purpose? There was nothing wrong with the food. I just got those mussels in yesterday. They couldn’t have been fresher!”
“Fine, then I’m just sick, okay? And, by the way, why didn’t you tell me you’d been fired, twice, for throwing raging fits?” I knew I was being unreasonable, but I couldn’t stop myself from yelling at him.
Josh was angry now, too. “Who the hell told you that?” he demanded.
“It doesn’t matter. I just know, okay?” I was starting to cry. There was barely enough fluid left in my body to produce tears.
“Oh, okay. I get it. So now you think I killed Eric, too, huh? You think I poisoned you because you’ve been trying to figure out who the murderer is? I’m outta here.” Josh threw on his shoes. “Call me when you catch the real murderer, Chloe,” Josh snapped as he walked out my back door.
I didn’t stop him from leaving.
NINETEEN
“HEATHER, this is not a spa,” I informed my sister. I peeked out of my mummylike wrappings and glared at my monster of a sibling. “We belong in one of the Egyptian rooms at the Museum of Fine Arts.”
“Chloe, this is very trendy right now. Try to embrace this experience, and you might actually benefit from it.”
Heather had lied to me.
Spa
meant pedicures, facials, relaxing massages. This place, called Wrap It Out, was some bullshit fake of a spa where clients paid
actual money
to be entirely wrapped up in stretchy bandage material, doused with smelly liquid—embalming fluid?—and have supposed toxins extracted from their bodies. I was lying on a padded table, totally immobilized, and stuck there until the spa warden returned to unwrap me.
Spa
meant pedicures, facials, relaxing massages. This place, called Wrap It Out, was some bullshit fake of a spa where clients paid
actual money
to be entirely wrapped up in stretchy bandage material, doused with smelly liquid—embalming fluid?—and have supposed toxins extracted from their bodies. I was lying on a padded table, totally immobilized, and stuck there until the spa warden returned to unwrap me.
“Especially,” she continued, “after your food poisoning experience. This is the perfect way to completely remove foreign substances from your skin. You won’t believe how refreshed you feel after. It’s wonderful,” she proclaimed, sighing with content.
I rolled my head to the left and stuck my tongue out at her. I turned to the right and looked at Adrianna. Heather had surprised me by inviting Ade along for the torture.
“Could we talk about something else, please? Anything to make time go faster?” Ade pleaded from her cocoon.
“Fine,” Heather said. “Chloe, keep telling us about Josh and how he tried to murder you last night.”
“He did not try to murder me. At least, well, he just couldn’t have.”
“The point is, you just told us that Josh has a history of unstable behavior and is a definite suspect. I told you you were rushing it,” Heather said.
“No, that is not the point at all,” I shot back. “Josh is totally pissed off at me because I accused him of assaulting me with bad risotto.”
“Look,” Adrianna began, spitting a loose bandage off her mouth, “nobody’s perfect, but that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Eric’s murder or your food poisoning. So what if Josh has been fired? Life is not neat and orderly with everyone behaving in exemplary fashion at all times. Christ, Owen has been fired from zillions of jobs. Before he got the blimp job, he was the personal assistant to a comedian, then he cleaned the shark tank at the Aquarium, and then he was the golf ball marshal at that country club.”
“A golf ball marshal?” Heather shrieked. “What kind of job is that?”
“He was very important. Who do you think picks up all the stray golf balls off the course? But the manager found him swimming in the lily pond and asked him not to come back. See? So, Owen got fired from all those jobs, and he’s perfectly normal.” Ade paused. “Okay, he may be a little
unusual
, but it’s just taken him a while to settle in to something. Same thing for Josh. He had to work out some issues at those other restaurants, but he’s doing great at Magellan, right? And who cares if he freaks out once in a while? He’s
passionate
about his work, which is probably one of the reasons the restaurant is doing so well.”
unusual
, but it’s just taken him a while to settle in to something. Same thing for Josh. He had to work out some issues at those other restaurants, but he’s doing great at Magellan, right? And who cares if he freaks out once in a while? He’s
passionate
about his work, which is probably one of the reasons the restaurant is doing so well.”
“I guess,” I said.
“He sounds dangerous,” Heather warned.
“Heather, Josh is no more dangerous than you or I,” Adrianna said. “Seriously, do you think I’d let Chloe go out with someone I thought had even the slightest chance of being a killer? Really. I met him, and he’s totally into your sister and totally harmless. I know she rushes into every relationship, but that’s because she’s passionate, just like Josh. Which is why they’re such a good match.”
“And I think passionate is great. I do. But she also needs to display some sense of caution, guarded optimism, self-control, or whatever you want to call it,” Heather elaborated.
“Hi. I’m still here. I’d wave, but I can’t move. I know you can’t see me behind the wraps, but I can hear you.” I felt as if I were in my Group Therapy class again. How had I become everyone’s favorite subject of analysis? “Josh did not set out to poison me, okay? And now he’s never going to talk to me again.”
“Okay, well, if Josh didn’t kill Eric Rafferty, who did?” asked Heather.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
When we’d finally been released from our “spa” treatments, I had to admit I did feel pretty good. I said good-bye to Heather and Adrianna and headed to Home Depot. Instead of taking responsibility for my own behavior in the manner advocated at social work school, I’d begun to suspect that it was the unfinished and crooked stripe of paint in my bedroom that was the reason Josh and I hadn’t slept together and were now fighting. Who wanted to have sex in that horrid environment? Just to prove how dedicated I was to reforming my unlucky bedroom, I was going to pay
full price
for Ralph Lauren paint. Choosing a color would be easy; my friend Ralph, as I thought of him, limited himself to attractive hues.
full price
for Ralph Lauren paint. Choosing a color would be easy; my friend Ralph, as I thought of him, limited himself to attractive hues.
I kept the car windows down as I drove; the putrid liquid the evil spa-keepers had poured on my wrappings to detoxify my body was making me queasy. Also, my stomach was empty. I was sorry I’d eaten all of the cookies I’d taken with me last night.
The cookie batter! Made from scratch: with flour, butter, sugar, chocolate chips . . . and fresh eggs. Fresh
raw
eggs.
raw
eggs.
I was a complete idiot. Josh hadn’t poisoned me; I had poisoned myself. Frantic, I yanked my cell phone out of my purse. Josh didn’t pick up his cell, and I couldn’t blame him. Like an obsessed stalker, I tried back six times in a row but didn’t leave any messages. I didn’t know what to say or how to apologize for being such a jerk; I just hoped I could make it up to him.
I took a break from my desperate calling to run into Home Depot. It was crowded, as it always was on Sundays, and to get to the paint aisle, I had to fight my way past a crowd inspecting leaf blowers. I’d almost made it to Ralph’s paint chip display when the Oops paint cart loomed before me, and I succumbed to my usual sympathetic sense of obligation. I was putting a gallon of what I hoped was a sexy blue with aphrodisiac powers into my cart when someone started loading even more cans of rejected paint onto the shelf. I looked up to see Brian standing before me. He was now clad in an orange store apron instead of the white coat he wore at Magellan.
“Hey, Brian. I didn’t know you worked here,” I said, completely caught off guard. It was like seeing your math teacher at the mall: teachers existed only on school grounds and had no business materializing in places where they had no reality. Similarly, Josh’s sous chef had corporeal form only at Magellan and could have appeared at Home Depot only because of some sort of cosmic accident.
“Chloe,” Brian said with surprise. “Hey, what’re you doing here?”
“I come here all the time. I have so many cans of Oops paint at home you wouldn’t believe it.” I paused. It felt uncanny to talk to Brian outside Magellan. “I can’t believe you have the time to work here, too.”
“Well, I just work a couple days a week to make a little extra money. This is my section, the paint department. Being a sous chef pays the bills and not much else, so . . .” As his voice trailed off, he shifted from side to side, clearly uncomfortable talking to his chef ’s girlfriend except at the restaurant. He looked down at my can of paint. “So, um, I gotta go. I have a couple more hours here, and then I might go in to the restaurant to help Josh. I’ll see you later, Chloe.”
I watched him walk away, staring dumbly at Josh’s protégé as he made his way awkwardly to the back of the store. I flinched with embarrassment for him as he tripped over his own feet and bumped into a woman pulling rollers off a shelf.
I pushed my cart with its gallon of paint to the front of the store. Skipping the self-checkout, I went to a human cashier to pay. I was disconcerted and confused and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something off about Brian. He certainly was clumsy; no wonder he’d had so many accidents in the kitchen. I handed over a five-dollar bill, took my receipt, and picked up the can—the can with the neon orange splotch of paint on its lid.
The can marked with the same color as the traces of paint found on Eric’s body.
In all that Josh had said about Brian, he’d never mentioned a second job. I wondered whether the police knew about it. And Josh. Did Josh know? Clutching the gallon of paint, I ran to my car, got in, and tried Josh’s cell phone, which he still refused to answer. Damn! Smelly or not, I had to see Josh.
Next I dialed Detective Hurley’s number. As I listened to the ring, something else hit me. Last night at Magellan, after Brian had told me about Josh’s fits of temper and the jobs he’d lost, Brian had been sharpening the kitchen knives. I now realized that Brian’s technique had been the reverse of Josh’s. When Josh sharpened a knife, he held it with the blade facing away from him. Brian had done the opposite: instead of safely drawing the sharp blade away from his body, he’d drawn it toward himself. For any chef, even a young sous chef like Brian, it was second nature to sharpen knives all the time. When Josh had made that wonderful dinner for me at my house, he’d brought his own sharp knives, but before using them, what had he done? He’d sharpened them. The practice was ingrained in any chef. If Brian had used Josh’s cimiter, there was good chance that he’d sharpened it, not in the men’s room at Essence, of course, but at Magellan, when he’d first picked it up. The police had the cimiter, which had undoubtedly undergone close forensic examination. A forensics expert would certainly be able to determine whether the blade had been honed by someone who pulled it toward him along a sharpening steel, as Brian did, or by someone who moved the blade away from his body, as Josh did. But had the experts looked
for
that difference? What did forensics experts and police detectives know about
chefs
? And about chefs’ all-but-instinctive habit of putting razor edges on the blades of all the knives they touched?
for
that difference? What did forensics experts and police detectives know about
chefs
? And about chefs’ all-but-instinctive habit of putting razor edges on the blades of all the knives they touched?
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