An Appetite for Murder (17 page)

“You can let it go in the privacy of your office, you can weep in the walk-­in, but at the bench, you must pick up your knife and finish boning out those chickens.”

—­ Gabrielle Hamilton

I rushed back into the kitchen. “My laptop’s gone!”

Connie came back down the spiral stairs and reported nothing missing from her room.

The police took down the information I gave them about my missing computer. “You need to get that lock fixed,” said Torrence again, pointing at the front door. “And get some locks on the windows too. You can’t be too careful. Call us if you have any other problems. We’ll be in touch if the computer shows up. It’s possible that it will be pawned.” The way he said it, he didn’t hold out much hope that I’d see it again.

“What the heck?” said Connie, once they’d tromped down the dock.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll help you clean everything up.”

We spent the next two hours straightening up the boat. The worst of the destruction was confined to the downstairs. Connie’s room had definitely been searched, but mine was trashed.

Every fifteen minutes, I took a break and walked from one end of the dock to the other, calling for Evinrude. I even took a few trips out through the parking lot to Palm Avenue, looking for flattened masses on the pavement. He could never make it across this busy street alive. Not that he’d want to run away, but in his fear, he might blindly bolt. Searching for me. And home, of course. And lately, home was hard to find. A flicker of despair iced my heart.

“No luck?” Connie asked when I returned.

I sighed and sank into the wicker loveseat beside her. “No,” I said, tapping my fist on the seat’s arm. “I’m going to try checking on Miss Gloria again.”

I dialed the number for information at the hospital and asked to be transferred to her room. On one of my trips searching for the cat, I’d stopped at the dockmaster’s office and located Miss Gloria’s last name on the list of mailboxes. Peterson. A name that common would make it hard to search for her relatives, if she had any. I had no idea how long she’d even lived in Key West or where she’d come from before settling on the island.

“We have no information on a Gloria Peterson,” the clerk replied.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “I know the EMTs
were bringing her to your hospital. I saw them load her into the ambulance myself.”

“She may still be in the emergency room,” said the clerk. “Processing patients takes time. Or if it was a very serious injury, they might have airlifted her to the Miami trauma hospital.”

I reported that news to Connie. “I wonder if we should check on Sparky?” Miss Gloria’s sleek black cat.

“Would she want us breaking in?” Connie asked.

“We won’t—­we’ll go in if her door’s open. She’d definitely want someone to take care of him. Who else would think of it—­Mr. Renhart?” I smiled, trying to picture him worrying about a neighbor’s pet. Although he’d come through stronger than I might have expected in the case of Miss Gloria.

Connie rustled through the junk in one of the kitchen drawers until she came up with a flashlight. “Did the cops look at her boat? I wonder if it was tossed too? Should we take a weapon?”

“They said they were going to check it out,” I said, then added: “You have a weapon?”

Connie laughed. “I have steak knives and my father’s antique putter.”

“Stand back or we’ll sink the putt!” I said.

We left our boat and started down the dock. A heavy cover of clouds had rolled in, obscuring the moon. And a chilly breeze had picked up, whistling from the west. The water of the Bight slapped against our row of houseboats. At home in New Jersey, I would have predicted snow.

“It’s spooky out here,” I whispered, and then pointed. “This is where I found her.”

“A little old lady is attacked in broad daylight. Why?” Connie asked. “You think the guys who trashed our boat also clocked Miss Gloria?”

“The timing works, but again, why?” I asked as I hopped onto the bow of Miss Gloria’s boat. “What were they looking for? Did she see something happening?”

I tried the door: unlocked. Inside, a squeaky mewing greeted us. Sparky materialized out of the dark and began to wind himself around my legs. I bent down to scratch behind his ears and stroked his spine to the base of his tail. “Poor kitty, I bet you’re hungry.” I flicked on the galley light, found his food in a plastic container in the cabinet under the sink, and filled his bowl. But he stayed close to me, mewing piteously and ignoring his dinner.

“He’s lonely, isn’t he?” Connie asked. “He knows something’s wrong. Let’s bring him home until we figure out what’s going on with Miss Gloria.”

If we figure it out, I thought but didn’t say, as I scooped up the cat and tucked him under my sweater. We retraced our steps up the finger, now slick with rain. Once back in our boat, I retreated to my room, settled the purring black animal onto the bed, and used Connie’s computer to check my e-­mail. First in the queue was a note of congratulations from Wally Beile at
Key Zest
, addressed to me and a woman named Sally.

Dear Hayley and Sally,

Congratulations! You’ve made it through our final cut for the food critic position at the magazine.
The competition has been amazing. To that end, we invite you two to write and submit one final review. The file will be due in my in-­box by five p.m. tomorrow. It goes without saying that this should be your finest work!

After an initial burst of euphoria, a slow knot of terror began gathering in my midsection. How could I possibly manage this with everything else in my life falling apart?

A second e-­mail was from Eric, asking how the conversation had gone with Deena. I texted him back:
NEIGHBOR ASSAULTED, HOUSEBOAT TRASHED, EVINRUDE MISSING.

He phoned me immediately. “I’m coming over.”

I didn’t argue—­I wanted him there.

“Eric’s coming over,” I called out to Connie in the living room once I’d hung up.

“Ray is too. And he’s bringing a pizza.” She came to my bedroom door and grinned. “Can we whip something up for dessert?”

“Of course.” I closed up her laptop and crossed the living room to the galley. Molasses cookies. I could bake them in my sleep. I turned the oven on to 350 degrees. Then, grabbing a stick and a half of butter from the freezer, I nuked it until soft and began to beat it with sugar, molasses, and an egg.

“Ray thinks our break-­in could be related to Kristen’s murder,” Connie said, as she collapsed in the goose-­necked rocker by the window. “Because what’s the common denominator?”

“Unfortunately, it’s me, right?” I added the dry
ingredients to the wet, dropped spoonfuls of the batter onto a cookie sheet, and slid the pan into the oven. “I bet you’re sorry you ever invited me to live here.”

“It’s not your fault, Hayley,” she said, not sounding entirely convinced.

By the time the cookies were out of the oven, both Ray and Eric had arrived.

“It’s raining like hell,” Ray said, shaking himself off like a wet dog. “Supposed to be a lousy day tomorrow too.”

I could only think of Evinrude, huddled out in the cold and wet under someone’s car or on their boat deck or . . . ​Feeling myself growing panicky, I forced my mind back to my friends.

“Did the police say anything about Kristen’s murder while they were here?” Ray asked after devouring his third slice of pizza.

“Nothing was said, but I know the guy I’ve seen twice this week recognized me,” I said. “I heard him mutter to his partner that I was a person of interest in the Faulkner case. Other than that, they didn’t discuss it—­certainly not with me.”

“But if you’re a real suspect,” Eric said, dunking a molasses cookie into a glass of milk, “they aren’t going to tell you anything. Did you figure out what’s missing here?”

“As far as we can tell,” Connie said, “even though they left a big mess, only Hayley’s computer was taken.”

“And that was no prize,” I added. “A five-­year old Mac that was on its last legs.”

“So maybe they were looking for content rather than hardware,” Ray said. “What were you working on?”

I finished chewing and swallowing the cookie I was eating, because it would have been rude to spit it out. But it went down like a mouthful of sawdust. “A list of everything I know about Kristen and the murder. Just like you and I talked about doing.” I stared at Eric. “But how would someone know I was making the list? And why would they care?”

“They would care if they were on it—­or if you were getting too close,” Eric said. “And if they figured you would turn your notes over to the police.” He reached across the table to squeeze my hand. “We’ll figure this thing out.”

Connie fetched a legal pad and a pen with the Paradise Cleaning logo on it and we re-­created the list of notes that I’d been drafting earlier in the day. They included: Henri Stentzel, Chad’s relationships before me, the proposed restaurant on Easter Island, the key lime pie itself, and possible alibis for me the day of the murder. Including Miss Gloria.

“Obviously, Miss Gloria can’t help because she’s unconscious in the hospital,” I said. “Some hospital, somewhere.”

“Which is probably not coincidental,” Connie added, and scribbled two stars next to our neighbor’s name.

I groaned. I had imagined that my friend had been attacked because she tried to stop someone from boarding our boat—­which was bad enough. I hadn’t pictured her being put out of commission because of what she might know about Kristen’s murder.

Connie typed “Easter Island restaurant proposal” into her computer’s search bar and scrolled through the list—­two blog posts weighing in against the proposal, an article in the
Citizen
about the history of Easter Island, several fixed-­price menus for Easter dinner.

Connie clicked several links and finally reached the second page. “Here’s a YouTube video taken at the hearing about rezoning Easter Island for commercial purposes,” she said, and placed the computer on the coffee table so we all could watch it.

The video, which appeared to have been captured on the phone of someone in the audience, jumped into action just as the man at the podium called for comments from the public. We could see the heads of the people sitting in front of the photographer and a grainy podium in the distance.

Eric squinted at the screen. “I think that’s the chairman of the city council running the meeting.”

A small man with a neat mustache shot up out of his seat, obscuring the screen for a moment. “Let’s face it—­the rich people in this town have us by the short hairs. And our city council is more concerned with increasing revenues than any shoddy pretense of maintaining a decent quality of life on this island. The proposed development will cost the citizens of Key West for services such as electricity, water, and fire and police departments. And what will we get in exchange? A restaurant where most of us can’t afford to eat.”

He looked like he wasn’t planning to cede the floor anytime soon, but the city council chair broke in from the podium to ask for other comments. He pointed to a
man on the other side of the room, and the video swooped left.

“We voted not to change the zoning on this piece of property five years ago,” said the second man. “Why is this issue back on the docket? What is the point of rehashing something that’s already been decided?”

“Money!” a woman hollered in a muffled voice. The video swung around to the back of the room to focus on her. “The Faulkners have enough to buy the whole town off. Or at least our so-­called public servants on the city commission.”

“Order,” yelled the chair, barely audible above the comments now being shouted from the audience. He banged the podium with a gavel. The video ended abruptly and we played it through a second time.

“That looks an awful lot like Wally Beile,” I said, leaning closer to the screen and pointing to the back of the head of the man who had asked why the vote was being revisited. “Kristen’s co-­owner at
Key Zest
.”

“So Wally was against Kristen’s restaurant?” Eric asked.

I held my hands out. “No idea. Though they sure didn’t agree on everything else. She purged me from the list of food critic applicants and he stuck me right back on it. In fact, I nearly forgot—­I made the cut! I’m one of the top two candidates. He wants us to submit a final review tomorrow.”

“Hayley, that’s wonderful,” said Connie. The guys chimed in with their congratulations.

“What restaurant are you going to write about?” Ray asked.

“I have no idea. The idea of choosing turns me to jelly. What if I pick Louie’s Backyard and he’s looking for something really casual like B.O.’s Fish Wagon?”

“Don’t overthink it,” said Eric. “Just make a decision and go with it. They obviously like what you’re doing, or you wouldn’t have made it this far.”

Miss Gloria’s black cat pranced into the room and rubbed on Eric’s ankle. “Who’s this?” he asked, reaching down to stroke her.

“Miss Gloria’s Sparky,” said Connie.

“Any news about Evinrude?”

I choked out a no and went outside to call for him yet one more time. The sympathy on their faces would only make me start crying.

When I returned, Connie was explaining how we’d found the cat on Miss Gloria’s houseboat and taken him in until our neighbor came home. “Back to the list that was on your computer,” she said. “Anything else we should add?” She tapped the legal pad with her pen.

“Related to the Easter Island restaurant,” I said, “is the business about the chef Kristen lured away and whether his leaving caused Henri’s place to fail. If it did, she must have been really pissed at Kristen. But other than interrogating Henri, I don’t see much that can be done there.”

Eric got up to leave, kneading my shoulders while I packed a small plastic bag of cookies for him to share with Bill.

“Why don’t you run home with me?” he asked. “Then you can borrow my car to get around town tomorrow.
It’s supposed to be horrible weather and I’m not going out. You know how to drive a stick, right?”

He overrode my weak objections and we dashed out into the rain. On the way across town, I filled him in on what Deena had told me about Chad’s love life. Which I’d been too embarrassed to mention in front of Connie and Ray.