Fry Me a Liver (10 page)

My host did, as promised, make a mean smoothie, which he brought to the living room. We sat to watch a big dumb movie with Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell. After a few minutes, Kane slipped an arm along the back of the sofa and around my shoulder. It was an old move, a trusted move, and in this case a welcome and effective move. I had never had a muscular, beefy arm on me. In New York, you mostly found those in gay bars. I snuggled closer and he looked at me.

“You have such a lot of love to give,” he said.

I didn't answer. I didn't agree. I always felt I had angst to give and issues to resolve. Maybe he saw something I didn't. That would be new and nice.

“You're being very quiet, mysterious,” he went on.

“Just enjoying the moment,” I assured him. I was.

“Well, from where I sit, you must be very, very special,” he said with a nervous, pubescent-boy catch in that otherwise confident voice.

“Oh?”

“I'm looking at you and not one of my favorite movies,” he said.

That, I assumed, was a very high compliment from this guy. He didn't, thank God, break the mood by asking me what my favorite movies were. I'm not sure he would even have heard of
Wuthering Heights
, which would have required more mood-killing explanation.

I smelled banana smoothie on his breath, which went just fine with my peach. And that wasn't just the restaurateur talking. We brought the two flavors closer and that was the last I saw of the movie. His kiss slid from lips to cheek to neck. Fortunately, the product in his hair was subdued by the scalpy sweat generated by the hot costume he had been wearing; there was more man than salon in my nose. We ended up on the floor where I discovered that the rest of Captain Health was as fit as that sturdy Herculean arm had been. It occurred to me, at some point between hitting the carpet and heading to the bedroom—in his arms, I'll have you know—that this was the first time in my life I had been with someone younger than me. That took some mental adjusting; that plus the fact that it would probably be more like that than the other way as time went on. Happily, I was able to shut Analytical Gwen down as we disappeared into the darkness.

My newfound friend was not the big-time lover Phil or even Grant had been, but the night was everything I needed it to be. Cozy, warm, caring, and restful. I woke with the sun blazing through one of the skylights I hadn't even noticed the night before and, dressing quickly, I made my quick good-byes while he was still drowsy. I jotted down my cell number on a pad in the kitchen. I'm not sure if I really wanted him to call, but what the heck, I was in that kind of mood so it didn't matter right then.

I felt pleased and I felt good and most of all I felt attractive as I took the drive of shame. It was a fresh, sunny morning inside and out. I went home, fed two ticked-off cats—who were overfed as a rule and had nothing to kvetch about, though being Jewish cats, that didn't stop them—made a phone call, and then got in the shower. That felt really good too. There were layers of “yesterday” all over me, and I wanted to face today as fresh as possible. I scrubbed as near as I could get to the pre-explosion Gwen, dressed in jeans and a button-down white blouse as if I were going to work.

I wasn't. I was going to have organic pancakes.

I had called Benjamin Weszt's number when I got home to last-minute accept his invitation to breakfast. He seemed surprised and delighted to hear from me. I was glad. That might soften things a little when I told him what Candy said about not having seen him around. Because if he wasn't around, how did he end up in the basement? There was no way in other than the trapdoor staircase in the kitchen.

Now that my phone was recharged, I could check my messages. I did that before I left the house. There was a message from A.J. Two that her mother was basically the same as she had been the previous night: moments of dim alertness but mostly sleep. The doctors were pleased, she said, that her mother had not gotten worse.

Well . . . of course. I would have been more pleased to hear that she had gotten better.

There was nothing from the staff about Thomasina, nothing from my insurance guy, nothing from Detective Bean, and nothing from Kane—which did not surprise me since that was my track record with men. I refused to let myself get paranoid, like I was being shunned for legal reasons. I just wasn't used to being so cut off. For all I knew, the staff was feeling the same thing, that I wasn't looking after them. Or maybe they were just giving me time and space to deal with the disaster. Who knew?

The bed and breakfast was a big antebellum house with a colorful garden on three sides and a lovely patio with vintage swinging chairs all the way around. It was, as advertised, “A Little Bit of Gentility.”

Parking was in a long, curved driveway on the side. I pulled in and wobbled a little on knees that not only were still raw but got a little bit abraded the night before . . . from when I dropped off the sofa onto the carpet.

Breakfast was a buffet set on a long period sideboard in the den. Guests filled their trays and sat in the vintage armchairs that were arrayed throughout the large, sunny room. Benjamin and Grace were just coming down the staircase, looking at their cell phones. We were the only ones in the room. Benjamin definitely looked cleaner than he had when I met him, a pocket handkerchief short of dapper, wearing a starched white shirt and tailored plum-colored sports jacket and black trousers; Grace looked pretty in a pale yellow sundress. There was still something familiar about her that gnawed at me.

There were cheek-to-cheek kisses, after which we went to the sideboard, Benjamin insisting I go first.

“Did you manage to sleep?” he asked as he followed Grace along the sideboard.

“As it happens, I did. You?”

“Yes. It was an exhausting day,” he said.

“How's the room?”

“Very, very comfortable and quiet,” he said.

“These old homes are just so exciting,” Grace enthused. “We don't have anything like them in Southern California.”

“But we don't have a Grand Canyon,” I pointed out.

They laughed. We sat in a pinwheel array of armchairs, the sturdy wicker trays in our laps.

“I confess I was surprised to hear from you,” Benjamin said. “But pleased. We really wanted to know how you were doing, how your staff is.”

“I saw them last night and there's no change as far as I know,” I said. “I'll go back to the hospital later this morning to see for myself. I also had to go see my insurance agent and I had to get things from my office. Oh, and I saw Candy Sommerton. The reporter you were kind enough to help.”

“You didn't seem to get along with her,” Benjamin said.

“I don't, really, but there was something she wanted to talk to me about.”

“Anything interesting?”

I had some pancakes before continuing. “She said that neither she nor her camera operator saw you in the diner, in the bathroom, or anywhere else until we all met in the basement. And yet,” I went on quickly, looking at Grace, “I could swear I saw you somewhere before yesterday. I just can't place where.”

There's “awkward” and then there's
shpilkes
, a level of discomfort expressed by the amount of disgust one puts in the word. Judging from the way the couple stopped eating at once and sat frozen for several seconds, this was heavy
shpilkes
.

“How odd,” Benjamin said when he found his voice.

“Which part?” I asked.

“That they didn't see me,” he said. “I was there.”

“Yes—you remember, I had the gefilte fish. We talked about it.”

The woman was right, even if she did say the word as though it ended with a “t” and not an “uh.”

My eyes became searching little slits. They shifted from Grace to Benjamin. “How did you know their names?”

“Whose?”

“Newt and Raylene?”

“I heard them later,” he said.

“You weren't near them. I was looking in that direction. You two came from the other side.”

“That's because we were taken to an ambulance there,” Benjamin said. “Really, Gwen—what is this?”

“I don't know,” I admitted.

“She's searching for answers,” Grace said charitably, looking at Benjamin, setting down her tea cup and laying a hand on his. “It's totally understandable.”

He nodded. I looked back at her. I caught her in profile as she turned back to me.

“You did have the gefilte fish,” I said.

Her eyebrows dipped and her look said, “What?”

“I saw you,” I told her, flipping through images in my brain. “But not yesterday. Two or three days ago.”

“No,” she smiled, then hid behind her tea cup.

“We weren't here,” Benjamin finished her statement.

The mood in the den had changed. Moments before we had all been warm and cozy among the big nineteenth-century furniture with its mist-green dandelion patterns, plates filled with hot, traditional food. Now they'd been busted, I could see it in their expressions, and things had frosted a bit. I had seen Grace in the deli, not looking quite like this, but she was there. I used a pair of mental spurs to urge my brain to greater action.

“Dark hair,” I said to the woman. “You had black hair.”

“Don't be—”

“Silly? Thom was on a break and I was on the register when you left. Let me see your sunglasses.”

“I don't have any, Gwen.”

“Coming from sunny California, Bubeleh, that story is stuffed derma.”

Benjamin had deflated visibly when Grace said that. She was not quite the lying improviser he was.

I set my tray on an end table to my right. If they tried to get away, I wanted to be free to tackle them. I picked up a slice of toast with preserves and bit off the end.

Just then Elsie Smith wandered in. The fiftysomething owner, wearing a frilly apron and a benign smile, looked us over.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. Then she saw me. “Oh, hello, Gwen. How are you, dear?”

“Peachy,” I told her, holding up the toast.

“That's apricot,” she replied, trying to be helpful. “I made the spread myself. It's the same recipe as my great-great-grandmother used.”

“It's delicious,” I told her.

“I want to say, Gwen, I feel awful about what happened. You'll let me know if there's anything I can do?”

“I will,” I assured her.

I wanted to say,
Use your body to block the stairs so these turkeys don't bolt
, but I smiled—with both eyes still on my breakfast companions, who were eating mechanically and showed no sign of imminent departure—and told her we were all good. She dipped her head solicitously, like a great lady of the South might have done, and gave us the privacy she must have noticed I wanted. Or maybe she wanted it; tough to say.

Benjamin broke the fast-forming ice.

“Is there a Mr. Smith?” he asked.

“Deceased. That's all I know. Don't try to charm me and don't change the subject.”

“Whatever you think, Gwen, it's not what you're thinking.”

“What am I thinking, Benjamin?”

“That this is related to what happened. To the explosion. It's not.”

“What is it related to, then? How long were you in my basement?”

He hesitated. Grace seemed uncomfortable. Her tray moved like it were a raft on rough seas.

After what seemed like an hour, with segments of time marked by my crisply crunching bites of toast, Benjamin said, “Ask your employees about this.”

I stopped chewing. “My employees?” I said. “What do they have to do with this, whatever ‘this' is?”

Benjamin was silent. He sucked down some scrambled egg from which steam had stopped flowing. He chewed soundlessly. If I didn't get some answers soon, steam would begin flowing from my ears.

“So you did know one or more of them before yesterday,” I said, trying another tack.

Once again, neither of my hosts uttered a word.

I pulled my cell phone from my bag. “I'll just start calling them and asking.”

“Don't,” Benjamin said.

“Why?”

“Because that wouldn't be kosher.”

“Hey, don't throw my words at me in a bid for mercy.”

“I wasn't being patronizing,” he said. “I was—well, it's like a reporter who swore to protect his source.”

I was getting angry, not just at him but at my staff. And I wasn't even sure anyone who worked for me had done anything wrong—though now that I thought about it, Newt and Luke did seem to be uncommonly surprised when I came in early that day. Then again, for all I knew, this guy could just be
hockin me a chinick
—in other words, just bothering me to keep me off topic.

“So what am I supposed to do, just pretend you both didn't lie to me and that an employee didn't help in some way?”

“Why not?” Grace asked. “We didn't have anything to do with the explosion.”

“So you say.”

“I do say! Why would I lie about something like that? Why would we want to
cause
something like that? That is so very hostile!”

It would be too much to believe Grace was that stupid, even though she was young and blond with one of those nasal high-pitched girl voices that every young woman on earth seems to have embraced. Still, there was a chance the question might be sincere.

Regardless, I'd had enough game playing.

“Okay, I'm going to up the ante,” I said. “I won't call my people but I will call Detective Bean and ask her to find out why you were—what, casing my restaurant?”

“You mean, like criminals?” Grace asked indignantly.

“Just like criminals,” I said. “You may not have caused the big bang, but you were up to something no good. So which is it, Grace? Do you talk to me or do you talk to the police?”

“You can't threaten us like that,” she sputtered. “You won't be able to prove any darn thing!”

“
Au contraire
. Unless you slept in your car, and didn't charge a meal—which I think you did, because I remember you signing left-handed, now that I think of it—I can show you were in Nashville. Hell, I can go ask Elsie when you checked in—”

“All right!” Benjamin snapped. He forked a section of sausage into his mouth and set his tray aside. “All right. We'll talk.”

“Honey,” Grace said, “let me. Gwen, we read about the deli online and were thinking of buying the place. That is why we were ‘casing' it, as you put it. And . . . we were going to promote one of your employees if we did.”

“Promote them to what?” I asked impulsively.

“Manager,” she replied.

That left out Thom, since she was already manager. And she never would have hurt me, no how, anyway. I looked at Benjamin. “So you were checking out the
basement
of the deli. For what?”

“Space,” Grace said. “And vermin. It was due diligence so we would know how much to offer you.”

“What made you think the deli would be for sale?” I asked.

“Isn't everything, for the right price?” Grace asked. “I mean, you were in finance. You know money. Isn't that true?”

She was perilously close to stereotyping me but I let it pass. There was a lot more about her story that ticked me off.

“So you took it upon yourselves to bribe an employee to get a look at the place?” I said, not quite believing it.

Grace nodded. I tore a slice of toast in half and started chewing as I glared at her.

“The basement,” I said again.

“That's right.”

“Tell me. Do I own that building? Surely you checked before looking into this.”

They were both silent. Then Grace said, “We did not check that. It did not matter. We were interested in the business, in the goodwill you have built up over time, not in the structure itself.”

“Why the
farkakt
wig?” I asked.

“Because you are
very
sociable,” Grace said solicitously. “You talk to repeat customers.”

“We've been to other restaurants around the country and proprietors don't have your people skills,” Benjamin said. “We're going to scope out a few more here: Suit and Thai, The Curried Lamb—I'll bet we don't find anyone as interesting as you.”

“Uh-huh. And you won't find anyone who asks probing questions like these.”

Grace nodded. “That's a boon and a speed bump.”

“Great name for your memoir, which you can write in prison.”

Benjamin's mouth twisted. “You'd ruin one of your worker's lives over a little harmless snooping?”