Chopping Spree Page 26

  Ah, men!

  Ah, food!

  After supper and two pieces of Tom’s melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cake, Arch announced that he had to write up the field trip.

  Chopping Spree Salad

  1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts

  ¼ cup fresh lime juice

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  1 large head romaine lettuce, outer leaves removed

  4 canned hearts of palm, well rinsed

  Nonstick cooking spray

  ¼ cup pine nuts or blanched, slivered almonds

  ½ cup diced fresh jicama

  1 cup seeded diced tomato (about 2 medium tomatoes)

  ½ cup trimmed, thinly sliced scallions (about 2 scallions)

  Tangy Lime Dressing (recipe follows)

  Place the chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap and pound them with a mallet to a ⅓-inch thickness. Slice each breast in half lengthwise.

  In a 9 × 13-inch glass pan, mix the juice with the oil and place the chicken into this marinade while you prepare the rest of the ingredients and dressing, about 15 to 20 minutes.

  Wash the head of romaine very well, then cut an inch off the top to make an even edge. Carefully slice the rest of the head into ½-inch slices. You should have about 8 cups of romaine pieces. Rinse these well, spin them to remove any moisture, and wrap them in paper towels. Chill until you are ready to assemble the salad.

  Place the rinsed hearts of palm into a bowl of cold water and allow them to soak for 5 minutes to remove the brine.

  While the hearts of palm are soaking, lightly spray a small sauté pan with nonstick spray (or use a nonstick pan) and toast the pine nuts over medium-low to medium heat. Stir frequently to prevent burning. When the pine nuts are just beginning to turn golden brown (3 to 4 minutes), remove them from the heat, place on a plate to cool, and set aside until you are ready to assemble the salad.

  Remove the hearts of palm from the water, pat them dry with paper towels, and cut them into ¼-inch discs. Wrap the pieces in a paper towel and chill until you are ready to assemble the salad.

  Dice the jicama and tomatoes, slice the scallions, and set aside. Spray the grill with nonstick spray and preheat the grill while you prepare the Tangy Lime Dressing.

  Grill the chicken over medium-high to high heat for about 4 minutes per side, or until it is cooked through but not dry. Remove the chicken to a cutting board, cool slightly, and cut into bite-sized pieces.

  Place the lettuce, hearts of palm, jicama, tomatoes, scallions, and chicken in a large, attractive salad bowl. Toss with half of the dressing, then add the dressing by tablespoons until the salad is lightly dressed, not overdressed. (You may have a bit of dressing left over.) Sprinkle the toasted pine nuts on top and serve immediately.

  Makes 4 large servings

  Tangy Lime Dressing:

  ½ garlic clove, minced

  ¼ teaspoon dried fines herbes (available in the spice section of the grocery store)

  1 teaspoon minced fresh parsley

  1½ teaspoons minced fresh cilantro

  ⅓ cup buttermilk

  1½ tablespoons fresh lime juice

  ⅓ cup best-quality mayonnaise

  3 tablespoons (or more) heavy cream

  1 tablespoon finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

  Place the garlic, fines herbes, parsley, and cilantro into a miniature food processor and blend until pulverized, less than a minute. In a medium-size bowl, whisk together the buttermilk with the lime juice and mayonnaise until well combined and smooth. Whisk in the garlic-spice mixture, the cream, and the cheese, blending until smooth. Taste very carefully and add more cream if the dressing seems too tangy. Add salt judiciously, as the mayonnaise and cheese are already salty. Grind in some pepper and taste again. Use immediately.

  “Did anyone come in before you left?” I couldn’t help asking. “To… claim the body?”

  He blinked. “Yeah, Mom. Some woman crashed through the door, grabbed the cadaver, and screamed, ‘Dad! Where have you been?’”

  I shook my head while Arch and Tom exchanged grins. “Someone from the coroner’s office, Arch.”

  “Oh!” Arch shook his head. “No.” He dumped a third piece of cake onto his dish and disappeared upstairs.

  I busied myself wrapping up the unchopped vegetables. Tom started on the dishes. After I’d stored the leftovers in the walk-in, he asked me to sit down so we could talk. My mind reeled off an “Uh-oh,” and I uneasily took a seat.

  “You showed me those pages you got from Dean’s doctor’s office,” he began. He was drying the bowl I’d used for the salad. “But the guys working the case didn’t find the prescription the doc made that Dean had just filled. A bottle of Vicodin Extra Strength.”

  I swallowed. “From what you’ve told me, they couldn’t find a lot of things.”

  “The prescription was only for twenty pills,” Tom went on. “If you assume Julian is innocent, then somebody followed Dean to that shoe department to kill him. Our perp saw an opportunity—customers have left, clerks gone for a moment, big cabinet to hide behind—and took it. Then when the killer was slipping out, maybe he or she saw the clerks coming back to clean up. Or maybe the killer saw you coming in with the guitar. Barry Dean was barely alive, so our perp shoved him into the cabinet. Still, Barry might tell you who stabbed him. So the perp panics. Whacks you with the guitar and calls nine-one-one. Julian shows up, tries to pull the knife out of Barry, and gets arrested. Hitting you and incriminating Julian were unplanned.”

  “So you think Barry’s murder was premeditated. How does the sheriff’s department see it? The same as you?”

  “That depends,” Tom mused. “At this point, they’re just trying to gather enough evidence to turn this thing over to the district court.” He gave me the full benefit of his ocean-green eyes. “The only thing that’s going to help Julian is if our guys find out who killed Barry Dean. I don’t know if they’re telling me everything about the case. But I have to warn you that the trail is getting cold. It’s been over forty-eight hours since you discovered the body.” I tsked while Tom continued: “Our guys turned Dean’s house inside out, went through his two cars and his boat. When they pulled their detail off his place, they still hadn’t found much. Julian’s Rover, his apartment? Nothing there, either.”

  I groaned. “I can just imagine the mess the cops must have made at Julian’s place.”

  “You know how I got that chocolate icing shiny tonight?”

  “How?”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out Barry Dean’s Vicodin prescription, and placed it on the table. “I used an ingredient I hardly ever use. Your clarified butter. The kind you keep in the freezer.”

  “Tom, I was going to tell you…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They… the pills, they slipped into my apron pocket somehow when I was on the shoes, you know, beside Barry…. The bottle must have fallen out of his pocket. That’s how I got Barry’s doctor’s name.”

  “Goldy, you should have handed these over. With both of us handling them, there’s not a hope of prints now.”

  “I was just trying to help Julian. How can I trust the sheriff’s department, when all they’re trying to do is find evidence to convict Julian? But I’ll turn them in tomorrow, if you want.”

  Tom arched an eyebrow. “I’ll do it,” he told me gently. “Remember, I already told our guys about the shoving incident… that was in the doctor’s report. They went out to the site—logical place to look for a ditch, since Barry worked at the mall. Sure enough, we found two witnesses who claim it was a woman who did the pushing. We’re figuring it was one of Dean’s two girlfriends. Ellie McNeely or that lady who works in lingerie.”

  “You’re kidding!” I was incredulous. “That’s it? No description?”

  “That’s it,” he said, as he pocketed the pills and gave me a skeptical look.

  “Tom, I rea
lly meant what I said about being sorry. About hiding the pills.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Miss G. Sorry until the next time.”

  “No more evidence from crime scenes. I swear it.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  He couldn’t have been too angry. Or maybe I convinced him my contrition was sincere. I say this because a couple of hours later, once snow was again falling quietly and the house was hushed, Tom pulled me up the stairs and we made love. Afterward, wrapped in his warm arms, I drifted off, thinking that it sure would be nice if we could both take a vacation. Then, at least for a couple of weeks, we could make love all the time.

  Thursday morning, I awoke feeling groggy. To my astonishment, a new five-inch blanket of snow had muted not only the traffic noise coming up from Main Street, but Arch’s and Tom’s getting-ready-to-go shuffling about. My body had apparently demanded, and received, its long overdue dose of sleep. I went through a slow yoga routine, showered, and dressed. This was the day of the shopaholics meeting at the mall, which I fully intended to attend. Today I also would try to talk to Pam and/or Victor, if they’d see me. Ah, but for the meeting, I needed something else….

  I reached for a brown ski hat that I’d crocheted in a burst of domestic-goddess energy, back during one of Goldilocks’ Catering’s slow periods. In the end, the knobbles and swirls I’d crafted into the cap had made it too big and cumbersome for skiing. Now the thing looked like a twenties-era flapper’s cap. Or maybe a chocolate-colored wig. But it was perfect to disguise myself for my foray to Shopaholics Anonymous.

  Tom had left me a note on the kitchen counter.

  Miss G.: The corpse was Lucas Holden. Found in a motel near Durango, dead of a heart attack, no sign of struggle or forced entry. Coroner’s office is looking into the situation, but it’s going to take a while. Sorry to say, our guys didn’t find anything up at that portable toilet. Too much new snow. I’ll pick up Arch today. He says they’re doing lacrosse drills in the gym. See you at six. T.

  Remembering my promise to bring cookies to Victor Wilson, the excavator-cum-construction-manager, I removed a batch of homemade currant-cookie dough from the freezer and preheated the oven. Then I pulled a double espresso, reread Tom’s note, and sipped the coffee. Even after the pop of caffeine, a weight seemed to be pressing on my chest and dragging my spirits netherward. I just could not believe that Lucas Holden would have quit his job at the mall in an angry huff, then conveniently died only days later in a motel in southwestern Colorado. Maybe Lucas was the “friend” who’d pushed Barry Dean down. Then again, he hadn’t looked even remotely womanly.

  I sliced the log of rich, currant-specked dough into thin disks and popped them into the oven. I set the timer and wondered about these witnesses who’d said a woman had pushed Barry down so that he fell into a ditch. If this included the guy who’d supposedly seen Julian driving the dump truck, then the first thing everybody at the construction site needed—after they had some cookies—was a trip to the ophthalmologist.

  OK, say Lucas saw the person who’d pushed Barry into that ditch. And then someone had, someone had, someone had… what? My mind circled back to the idea of Lucas Holden being followed and injected with something lethal. With no autopsy done on an unsuspicious death that resulted in a donated cadaver, there wouldn’t have been a drug or any other kind of screen.

  The fragrant smell of baking cookies infused the kitchen. When the tantalizing treats were done, I carefully placed them on racks, and pulled another espresso. I munched thoughtfully on a buttery, crunchy cookie, whose texture was perfectly balanced with the sweet chewiness of the currants. I washed the cookies down with the espresso, and peered out the kitchen window at the new-fallen snow. My face in the glass reflected doubt about all the speculative roads my mind seemed bent on exploring. Then I thought of Julian waking up in jail for the third morning, and phoned Helen Keith, assistant coroner for Furman County.

  Helen Keith was a fiftyish, unmarried, longtime colleague of Tom’s. They were also longtime friends. He admired her professionalism; she appreciated his work ethic. Maybe she’d extend that appreciation to my attempts at amateur sleuthing. Then again, maybe not.

  Helen answered on the first ring, and I genially reminded her who I was, that we’d visited at sheriff’s department barbecues two summers in a row, and wasn’t it great we could touch base? Not fooled, Helen politely said she was waiting for an important call. I took a deep breath and asked if we could have a quick chat. She assented.

  I gave her an abbreviated version of recognizing Lucas Holden’s missing-toe cadaver. In an Oh-by-the-way fashion, I asked if her office could do a standard drug screen on Holden’s body.

  “Goldy, I know that you have a friend in jail. But the tests aren’t going to be easy, and the results certainly won’t be quick,” she replied, her voice matter-of-fact. “But since this corpse was connected to a crime, we’d be doing a drug screen anyway.”

  “Ah, well. Thanks. Any chance I could find out if he had any drugs in him?”

  Helen Keith laughed. “Good-bye, Goldy.”

  I guessed that was a no.

  On the way to the mall, I tried again to call Pam Disharoon. No luck. Ditto with Kim Fury. Liz Fury, however, answered her cell on the first ring—understandable for a mother who must be worried sick about her son. I told her this wasn’t about catering work. Then I asked about Teddy.

  “They haven’t found him yet.” Her concern crackled through the cell. “There was some activity on the credit cards, but it was all over Denver.”

  “All over Denver? Er, how’s he getting around?”

  Immediately her tone became suspicious. “Why?”

  “I just… look, somebody hinted that Teddy stole Ellie McNeely’s car one day at the mall,” I blurted out.

  “He did not take Ellie’s car. Teddy… isn’t a very good driver. He hates driving. He wouldn’t steal a car. He has friends who drive him, most of the time…. You’re breaking up, Goldy. I have to go.”

  She disconnected before I could ask her if Teddy might like driving big trucks more than he liked driving cars.

  At Westside Mall, the blanket of snow had not slowed construction. In fact, the building process seemed more frenzied than ever. I pulled the van up by a plastic fence that now prevented folks from parking in the hard-hat area and watched the flurry of activity in amazement. Workers using pickaxes broke through frozen slush—the former parking-lot drainage lake—to lay pipe. Beyond the newly smoothed sidewalk, two loaders belching black smoke chugged around the rim of a huge pit whose snow-filled bottom resembled a bowl of muddied meringue. Victor, wearing his usual day-glo orange hard hat, strode back and forth, pointing and barking orders. When he’d finished hollering at one group of workmen and yelling at a second, he hopped into a bright green golf cart and bumped over ruts to the next problem area.

  “Excuse me!” I hailed him, once I’d stuffed the bag of cookies into my purse, stepped awkwardly over the plastic fence, and skirted a Porsche with the license plate DIRT GUY. Victor was scowling at the clipboard in his hands. When he turned the stare and the scowl in my direction, however, he smiled.

  “The caterer!” He sounded plugged up, as if he had a bad cold. Laboring in the snow and cold wind probably didn’t help. “How’re you doing? Bringing us goodies?”

  “You bet! If I’d known your crew was working in this weather, I would have brought you cocoa, too. Do you have a minute to talk?”

  He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “Great idea. Let’s go into the trailer and have some coffee.”

  People were always very cordial in anticipation of food you’d brought, I reflected, as I followed Victor to the construction trailer. I leaped across an area where two workers were putting in pipe, then carefully ascended the wobbly, ice-slick wooden steps to the trailer. Once through the bent aluminum door, I looked around. The trailer resembled the inside of a much-battered can. Worse, it was poorly warmed by glowing space heaters. At the desk inside the door, a bulky
woman in her sixties silently thrust her formidable chin in my direction. Using a pencil, she scratched her scalp through her thinning black hair. She was watching my every move.

  “Victor,” she said in a low voice, “have you taken that sinus medication I gave you?”

  “Not yet, Rhonda. I just need to have a bit of a visit with—”

  Rhonda’s fleshy jowls jiggled as she addressed me. “No reporters yet, miss. We’ll have a big press party in six weeks, and then you can—”

  “I’m not a reporter—”

  “It’s OK,” Victor interrupted. “We’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “Mall management said no journalists, Mr. Wilson,” she scolded him loudly, the edginess provided for my benefit. “And I have six urgent messages here for you.” She waved a handful of pink slips and sent another glower in my direction. Rhonda’s look said Every one of these is more important than you, bitch.

  Victor ignored Rhonda’s protectiveness and handed me a foam cup of muddy coffee that he murmured might not be fresh, but was definitely hot. Huddled beside one of the space heaters, I thanked him gratefully. He gestured toward diet sweetener and nondairy creamer, non-food inventions that I wish could be relegated to kindergarten projects involving glue and construction paper. I declined and grinned in Rhonda’s direction, tempted to ask for real cream. Sensing a demand, she narrowed her eyes and jutted out that scary chin.

  “Let’s go in my office,” Victor mumbled. I followed him into a walled-off cubicle, where he shut the plywood door, removed his hard hat, and shrugged out of his filthy overcoat. Then he nodded to a metal chair on the near side of his paper-strewn desk.