Never Say Pie (A Pie Shop Mystery) (4 page)

At first there was chaos in my little pie shop. Everyone talking at once. Everyone blowing off steam. Kate had helped me set up enough chairs and tables, then she stayed around to help serve pie, what else? And coffee.

Then I called the meeting to order. I’ve never been much of a joiner, never wanted to belong to any clubs or organizations with long, boring meetings, but this was different. With an adversary like Heath who had a mouthpiece like the local paper, we needed each other if we wanted to fight back.

“We’re here to do just a few things,” I said when everyone had been served a piece of seasonal three-berry pie and coffee. “First vent frustration here where we all understand each other’s angst. Second, exchange ideas; and finally, plot strategy.”

The first part was easy. After a few minutes of angry epithets and name calling, like “know nothing” and “big phony” and “Pathetic excuse for a food critic” the crowd settled down. But moving on to the second and third items was tricky. Some like Tammy wanted to do nothing for fear of alienating our food critic more.

“Nothing? After what he did to us?” said Lurline who was wear
ing matching hot pink shorts and a hoodie. “I say we boycott the newspaper.”

I had to refrain from objecting to any boycott of the newspaper if they were going to promote my pie contest, so I kept my mouth shut.

“That’ll show ’em,” the long tall sausage brother agreed. “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll give the guy a tour of our facilities. That goes for everyone in the room by the way. Please come on out to the farm for a tour. We’ve got nothing to hide. We’re proud of our pork products. It’s not just sausage. We’ve got a whole line of meat.”

But his brother shook his head. “The guy will never come. He’s made up his mind.”

“Who is this Barr anyway?” said Jacques. “Where does he get off bad-mouthing the cheese I sell? I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. He’s a fraud. I say let’s expose him.”

I smothered a smile. Of all people to call someone a fraud, it had to be Jacques. Away from his cheese booth he sounded completely American. But put him in a sales booth with a decent Camembert in front of him and suddenly he sounded positively Parisian. He even looked the part tonight with his spiky haircut and his slim-cut linen jacket. All he needed was a beret.

“I haven’t seen him,” I said, “but some of you did. I only talked to him on the phone. I asked him to give me another chance and he said he’d come by the shop. That was Monday and I still haven’t seen him. But then he said he’d be in disguise like a real food critic so I couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes,” I said. “So if he was wearing a mailman uniform or dressed like my dairy supplier maybe I missed him.” I didn’t mention the pie contest. I hated to give Heath credit for the idea, especially if it worked.

“I don’t think so,” said Martha, the chicken seller wearing stretch
pants and a sweater. It gets cool at night even in the middle of summer along the coast, fog or no fog. We don’t have balmy summer evenings like other parts of the country so everyone was dressed warmly. “I think he’s a chicken. Which is an insult to my birds. What I mean is that he’s afraid of us. He hides behind his byline but he’s scared to meet us face to face since he’s dumped on us in his article. Otherwise why isn’t he here? I challenged him to meet with us tonight, and I invited him to visit my ranch. You all are invited too,” she said. “You’ll never buy a chicken from anyone else once you see how ours are raised. But where is our critic? Why won’t he stand by his words?”

“Right on,” Lindsey said. “I told him about this meeting too.” She turned to me. “Hope you don’t mind, Hanna. I thought it was only fair. So if he had any guts he’d be here.”

There was a moment of silence while everyone turned and looked at the door. Nothing. No one. A second later there was a loud knock.

I swallowed over a hard lump in my throat. There was a communal gasp. Had Heath Barr answered the summons? We were all pretty brave without him around, but if he actually walked in now would we really tell him what we thought? That he was all talk, he had no taste, he didn’t deserve to be a food critic and so forth and so on. Or would we politely ask him for his credentials, if he didn’t mind, and tell him we hoped he’d come back Saturday and give us another chance? Or …

The knocking was louder and more insistent. I went to the door. Technically I closed at six, so it couldn’t be a customer at this hour. I yanked the door open. Sam was standing there looking grim. As I said, he’s not ever Mr. Smiley, but he looked especially stern tonight.

“Oh, hi Sam,” I said. “I hope nothing’s wrong. Has one of my fellow food vendors violated an ordinance by parking on the wrong side of the street or did someone leave their parking lights on? If there’s been an infraction, hand me the ticket, I’ll take care of it. Sorry to bother you when you’re off duty. We’re just having a little business meeting.” I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, which caused me to run on that way. I hoped it wasn’t an official visit.

“Who’s we?” he asked.

“We’re all food vendors.”

He held up a folded newspaper. “Would they be the same vendors that Mr. Barr criticized in his column.”

“Some of them are. We’re just exercising our right to peacefully assemble under the first amendment. Nothing wrong with that.” My nerves were on edge and Sam’s long silence didn’t help to calm me down. What did he want and if he didn’t want anything special why didn’t he leave?

I smiled politely and put a hand on the door as if to close it, but he put his foot in the way. “This is serious, Hanna. You can assemble all you want, but I’d like to come in and ask some questions. Like where were you and your friends early this evening when Heath Barr was murdered.”

I stepped backward and almost lost my balance. “Murdered?” I felt my knees buckle. “Are you sure? How?”

“With a serrated knife.”

I stared at him. The whole room behind me waited in hushed silence. Had they overheard? “Then it was murder,” I muttered. No sense hoping he’d committed suicide. I tried to picture the scene, as awful as it was.

“Where?” I managed to say when I found my voice.

“Across the throat.”

I gulped. “I mean where did it happen?”

“In his office at the
Gazette
,” Sam said. “Before you ask when, why don’t I come inside?”

Knowing Sam, I had no choice, so I stepped aside and he walked in. As usual, he wasn’t wearing a uniform so I addressed the group. “Everyone,” I said loudly so they could hear me over their animated conversations, “this is our police chief, Sam Genovese, with a … a …” A question? An accusation? An inquiry? I looked at Sam. What was the word I was looking for? “An announcement. Mr. Barr, the local food critic was found dead in his office at the newspaper this evening.” I was proud of myself for keeping my voice steady. I purposely didn’t say murdered, but murder had to be on all our minds. “No doubt it was while we were all assembled here,” I said pointedly. Thus giving us all an alibi.

The room was eerily silent. I hoped Sam noticed that they all looked properly shocked and dismayed. He couldn’t possibly think that one of us … We were all right here at least for the past hour. And yet who else wanted the guy out of our hair more than we did? Why else would Sam be holding the Monday
Gazette
in his hand? From just a glance, he looked like he’d gone so far as to highlight our names.

As the chairman of this gathering, I thought it best to first introduce the group to Sam. As if we had nothing to conceal. As if we were all eager to help him solve the crime. After all, murder in Crystal Cove could hurt us all where it mattered, in the pocket book. Who wanted to come to a farmer’s market if you were afraid you’d be stabbed with a saw-toothed blade for sale in that very market? None of us wanted any damaging publicity concerning our fair. Surely Sam understood that.

I continued to function as best I could in hostess mode. Granny would have been proud of me.

“Officer Genovese, you already know Tammy and Lindsey.”

He nodded. We were all in high school together and Sam currently lived in a bungalow next door to Lindsey.

“Jacques is the French cheese vendor from the Artisan Cheese stand.” I wasn’t sure Jacques was French at all, but he definitely looked European except for his all American Hippie Birkenstocks. He reached out to shake Sam’s hand and said something like “
enchanté
.”

“You know Lurline, I believe,” I said.

She gave him her usual perky smile as if we were just here to have a party. Better than looking guilty, of course, which she probably wasn’t. I couldn’t picture her slitting the critic’s throat on her way to the meeting, but then who could I picture? I looked around the room. And came back to Lurline. Sam being one of the few eligible men in town, Lurline had zeroed in on him some months ago. I’d seen her flirting with him, but then she flirted with everyone, eligible or not.

“Bill and Dave run the Primo Pork and Sausage Stand,” I said.

They nodded as Sam checked off something on the paper he held in his hand.

“This is Martha who raises free-range chickens.” I gestured in her direction.

She straightened her shoulders, stood, tilted her chin and looked
Sam in the eye. “Any questions about Barr you can ask me. I sold that scumbag one of my chickens last Saturday, they’re farm raised you know, and he had the nerve to say they were overcooked and overpriced. Sure they’re expensive, but they’re cooked perfectly and worth every penny. Come out to the ranch and I’ll give you a tour. I have nothing to hide. I didn’t kill Barr, but after I read that review I wanted to.”

I nodded vigorously. “She’s right,” I said. “Her chickens are superb. I know because I ate half of mine for dinner that night. And I would have cheerfully stabbed him after reading what he said about my pies. But I didn’t,” I added quickly.

Sam wrote something on a pad of paper. I wanted badly to look over his shoulder. Was he making a list of suspects? Was I on it?

“You see, Sam, we’re all professionals in the food business,” I said. “And speaking as an unbiased judge of food I can say that everyone in this room has reason to be proud of his product. I’ve tasted them all. Mr. Barr was wrong. He obviously had an ax to grind.”

I stopped when I realized that he’d been killed with an ax-like serrated knife. “I mean, he had no business trashing our food at the fair. We didn’t deserve it. He was wrong, dead wrong.”

I bit my tongue. Dead wrong? What was wrong with me? Blurting the wrong words at the wrong time. Nerves, that’s what. I felt a bout of hysteria coming on. The harder I tried to control myself the more likely I’d have an attack of inappropriate laughter. I took a deep breath. I had a horrible irrational feeling that Sam’s presence here suggested he already suspected one of us in this room of killing the food critic. Even though I told him we’d been having a meeting and even if we were available, we were not homicidal. But deep down somewhere I too was thinking maybe someone in this room had killed him. I wanted to, they must have too. Sam never said what time he was killed. So could any of us have done it?

“Thanks, Hanna,” Sam said in what I thought was a deceptively off-hand way. The others didn’t really know his modus operandi, but I wondered if Sam was actually trying to put everyone in the room at ease and off guard and then pounce on them, demanding to know where they were at such and such an hour. Which made me wish he’d tell us what hour did this so-called murder occur and where was I at that time? That’s the problem with living and working alone, I might not have an alibi.

“I apologize for interrupting your meeting like this,” Sam said. “Sorry it has to be an unfortunate circumstance that brings me here tonight. But my job is to investigate crimes and misdemeanors. As it happens those are few and far between in our little town. Usually what I investigate is a fender bender, a missing pet, or a lost wallet. Yesterday it was a broken clothesline and someone driving on the golf course, which you’ll see if you read my weekly column ‘The Crime Beat’ in the
Gazett
e. But today, this time we have a murder on our hands.”

He looked around my small shop. Everyone appeared to be suitably horrified. Some were wide eyed with pale faces and nervous fingers tapping on small tables. The tension in the air was so thick you could cut it with one of those serrated knives someone used to slash Heath Barr’s neck.

“Are we under suspicion?” Dave, the thin sausage maker, said with a worried frown.

“At this point I plan to talk to everyone who had dealings with Mr. Barr. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.”

“We have nothing to hide,” Bill said emphatically. “Say what you want about making sausage, but we only use the best ingredients. Come out and see if you don’t believe me.” Obviously a super salesman as well as a dedicated artisan, Bill immediately reached into his pocket and handed out business cards to everyone in the room, including Sam.

I wondered if Sam had read that somewhere about nothing to hide and nothing to fear. Nothing to hide? Everyone had something to hide. Especially Sam. He’d spent years in the city before coming back as police chief and had never disclosed much of what happened to him before he became our police chief. Somehow he’d managed to have a career as a big city cop and he’d also made a fair amount of money while he was gone. However he did that, it wasn’t by working in law enforcement. That I was sure of.