Chicken Soup & Homicide (9 page)

Pitts raised a bushy eyebrow and tapped his forehead with his index finger. "Let's see? How about to make yourself appear to be traumatized from finding the body…to call attention away from the fact that you caused his death?"

Sophie swallowed so hard Amy heard the gulp. "That's ridiculous. And you know it." Amy swished her hand at him. "Why don't you go do your job and find the real murderer instead of trying to terrorize innocent women? You should be ashamed of yourself."

He stared at her for a few seconds. Was he still trying to be intimidating, or was he stunned that she'd stood up to him? He spun on his heels and stomped away, shoving empty chairs out of his path to the door.

When he disappeared on the sidewalk outside, Amy turned back to Sophie. She was dabbing at fresh tears with the black-stained tissue. Amy leaned toward her and quietly said, "He's gone. I think most of his detective skills are just playing bad cop and hoping the ridiculous routine works on the real criminals to scare them into confessing. It's easier to accuse everybody than actually investigating."

"You may be right, but it certainly doesn't feel good to be one of his targets."

"It sure doesn't." Amy picked up the basket she had brought with her. "I have supplies to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we were discussing last week. Maybe working on those will make us feel better."

"Anything has to be better than sitting here worrying." Sophie stood up and peeked into the basket. "Looks like you've been busy. Why don't we make up a few sandwiches and set them out as samples? I'll hang around the counter and ask people what they think."

"Sounds like a great idea. The more you can figure out what people like before the café opens, the less you'll need to worry about tweaking the menu."

"But first," Sophie said, pointing at the nearby restroom door, "I need to wash my face. I probably look like a ghoul from the mascara streaks."

Once Sophie had emerged from the bathroom, she followed Amy into the shop's kitchen. Then they passed through a newly constructed entrance into the former gift shop next door. Sawhorses, boxes of ceramic floor tiles, and power tools littered the floor while a couple construction workers studied a brick wall. Sophie greeted the men as she opened another new door leading into the kitchen of the former Maxson's Bakery. She stopped and pointed toward the front windows. "They're getting ready to open up the walls in the dining areas between all three storefronts. Then they'll put in a partition so the back of the old gift shop space will be a storage area between the two kitchens. I am so excited about the expansion, but the murder feels like a storm rolling in to ruin everything."

Amy nodded in agreement. Sophie was right about the ominous situation. Pitts dressed in all black clothing. All the time. He was the human equivalent, in appearance and personality, of a hail storm. His accusations inflicted damage wherever he went.

"We can work on that prep table." Sophie's voice echoed a bit as she pointed to one of several stainless steel-topped tables in the cavernous kitchen space. "I'll round up some tools for us."

Other than adding the access door, nothing really needed to be done to the former bakery's kitchen. Elliot Maxson had been a super neat control freak, so all of the appliances and work areas were spotless and in working order when he sold the bakery before retiring. The giant industrial ovens made the original coffee shop's single convection oven seem like an Easy Bake Oven. Amy began arranging the loaves of bread, jars of nut butters, and pints of jams on the table while Sophie laid out cutting boards, bread knives, and spreaders.

"We should be able to get quite a few sandwiches out of each loaf if I cut the slices thin enough." Amy plucked at the end of the plastic wrap on the coconut bread. The sweet scent was a little bit of tropical heaven in the middle of the cold Michigan winter. "I'm going to use cashew butter and pineapple jam with this, sort of like a piña colada."

"That sounds wonderful," Sophie said as she examined the labels on the jars. "You've done great coming up with all of these. I can't wait to see what they taste like. I think I'll go for sunflower seed butter with tomato jam on the rosemary bread."

"Yum. I was hoping you would like my idea of savory PB and J." Amy had bought jars of every kind of nut butter she could find at Columbo's Market, from the standard peanut to soy bean. Then she scoured her cookbooks for unique jams and preserves, coming up with everything from a dried-apricot spread to whiskey-onion marmalade. The hardest part had been narrowing down all of the choices into half a dozen of each sandwich item. There were only so many samples they could eat at one time. It would take at least three test sessions to get through all of the culinary ideas she had unearthed in her cookbook-reading binge.

Soon all of the loaves of bread were sliced and small offset spatulas were stuck into every jar. Sophie had a notebook to jot down all of the combinations along with their tasting notes. Just setting up the ingredients seemed to have put Sophie in a better mood.

"Let's make some incredible sandwiches." Amy fist bumped Sophie. Maybe the gesture was a bit over the top for the circumstances, but it made her friend smile. "Lunchbox gourmet. Here we come."

"You know, I kind of like that term. Would you mind if I poached if from you? Maybe I could make that a category on the café menus."

"Go right ahead." Amy swiped bacon jam on a slice of banana bread. Peanut butter was already spread on the other half of the sandwich. It would be her homage to Elvis Presley. "I think that's what consultants are supposed to do anyway—give clients ideas."

She would've happily helped with the new menu for free, as a friend, but Sophie had insisted on putting her on the payroll as a recipe consultant. The new title was snazzy, but it also came complete with a giant helping of apprehension that settled in her stomach like greasy mac and cheese. People with no formal chef training didn't deserve to be consultants, did they? It was the equivalent of an unemployed geek who spent twenty hours a day playing first-person shooter video games in his parents' basement being hired as a security specialist.

Sophie licked a smear of orange marmalade off the back of her hand. "I'm glad I hired you."

"You didn't, and still don't, have to pay me. You're my friend. I can come up with sandwich ideas and menu categories for free."

"Nonsense. Your input is valuable, so you deserve to be paid for it."

As Amy cut her rock 'n' roll royalty-inspired sandwich into cubes, she thought about Carla, who also needed her ideas and input to get Pitts off her back. Hopefully, the awesome sandwiches would soften the blow of bringing back the subject of Chet's death, like sticky, calorie-filled pillows. "I don't want to upset you, but I was wondering if we could talk about what happened at the expo again. The Detective of Doom is targeting the wrong people. So maybe we can steer him toward the real killer if we figure out who it is. Did you notice anything or anyone that looked odd or seemed out of place on Saturday night?"

Sophie carefully spread pomegranate jelly on a slice of rosemary and cheddar bread. Her cheerful expression slipped back to strained. "I've been thinking about that a lot. It's not like Chet was a lovable teddy bear, so he could've pissed off a lot of people who I don't know. However, there was one person backstage that I absolutely know didn't like him. I'm not sure what happened, but there was some serious bad blood between Chet and Preston Neale."

Preston, the belligerent drunk who had staked out a lounging spot in her path to the freezer. She had thought he was just being obnoxious, but what if he'd been trying to keep her away from the freezer? "Holly's son didn't get along with Chet? Do you have any idea what happened?"

"All I know is that Preston used to be on the fast track toward superstar chef status courtesy of a stint at Cornerstone. Now, according to Holly, he isn't even working at all, let alone in a restaurant. Chet pounced on any opportunity he could find to knock others down so he would look better. I'd say there's a pretty good chance Chet derailed Preston's career in some way."

* * *

Amy wedged the last mixing bowl into the dishwasher. Cleaning up the kitchen was an obsessive nightly routine as automatic as brushing her teeth before going to bed. She glanced at the window as she used her hip to close the appliance's door. Snowflakes were materializing in the darkness and slamming into the glass. It sounded like a thousand mice toenails scratching, trying to get in. The swish and rattle of the dishwasher would be playing the role of a white-noise machine to drown out the nightmarish sound. Maybe then she wouldn't think about Alex driving through the storm to go back to work.

He had eaten dinner with her. Gulping down spicy chili and cramming cornmeal muffins into his mouth in silence. Typical behavior for a competitive eater training for a spicy-foods eating contest. Not so typical for her husband. They had been married for almost seven years. Until recently he had always maintained a comfortable balance between his life with her and his work as the owner of a media company. He assured her that he was in the process of hiring more people, but until they were trained, he was working triple time to get everything done. It was wonderful that his business was thriving, but lonely for her. There were only so many recipes she could develop to occupy herself. Pogo could only converse with barks and tail wags. And a little spousal sympathy for being wrongly accused of murder sure would be nice too.

She inhaled the glorious scent of vanilla and rum that was beginning to waft from the oven. Her recipe for Midnight Fudge Bundt Cake had been tweaked to perfection, but the cupcakes for the parade had needed a few minor changes to make them irresistible. As she was mixing the batter, she realized the cupcakes could also be her ticket to getting Holly to talk about her son by asking the master cupcake baker for a critique. So she divided the batter and added dried cherries to half.

Alex was going to be at a trade show all weekend. After convincing Trisha that anything she made would do fine at the Parade of Desserts, she decided to invite her and Sophie over so they could prepare their desserts and themselves for the event together. They were going to meet at Amy's house on Saturday afternoon. She had a craft room full of pastry boxes and ribbons to dress up the dessert packaging, an overflowing jewelry chest to accessorize everybody's outfits, and a stash of makeup and hair products that rivaled the inventory of a salon. Some girly camaraderie would do them all good after a stressful week.

As the dishwasher swished to life, Amy settled at the small desk in the corner of the kitchen. She typed Chet Britton's name into the search box on her laptop screen. She scrolled through the links to newspaper articles about his death, all repeating the same information. Then an online article from a local entertainment magazine appeared on the list. It was an interview with Kellerton's most famous chef that she hadn't read before. Amy clicked through to the website. Britton's background in the restaurant world was impressive and so was his level of highbrow obnoxiousness. He slammed Jake Sawyer's new affordable gourmet restaurant, Nibbles & Noshes. Since Jake was Britton's former sous chef, most likely their business parting wasn't amicable, because instead of wishing the fledgling business good luck, Britton panned the food as being barely edible because of its low price, nowhere near the same caliber as his expensive gourmet offerings. The remarks were an obvious attempt to hurt the other restaurant.

Amy checked the date when the interview was posted. A week after the Chicken Soup Showdown teams had been formed. That made the acidic criticism a double-edged sword. A two-for-one deal. Rattle the captain of one of the other showdown teams and ruin his business along the way. No wonder Chef Jake had been so keen on winning. Showing up a critic was sweeter than chugging corn syrup straight from the bottle.

So did Holly Neale, Chef Jake's showdown partner, have a beef against Britton too? A few more minutes of web surfing produced several newspaper articles about a lawsuit filed by Preston Neale against Cornerstone Property Management for breach of contract. Chef Britton's company had hired Preston to be the head chef of a new restaurant, but the venture failed before it even opened. Preston lost the suit.

The oven timer beeped. A warning to check on the cupcakes before they burned and be wary of the other people who were in the showdown before they burned her or her friends. The suspect stew was getting thick with people who had big problems with Chef Britton. Or at least, her suspect list was getting longer. Pitts was probably still doing his Accuse-A-Palooza act, randomly targeting the wrong people.

"Wonderful. I'll see you in about an hour," Amy said before hanging up the phone. The plan wasn't quite going the way she had expected, but she could improvise. Some of her best recipes were conceived when she needed to substitute an ingredient. Like using chunks of mango, when she couldn't find any decent fresh peaches, in a quick bread. That recipe ended up being printed in a magazine after it won a sweet bread contest. Going to Holly Neale's house, instead of her cupcakery, could yield some interesting results. It didn't sound like her son liked to help around the bakery, but there was a good chance he'd be at home.

She probably could've come up with a more creative excuse to talk to Holly than faking needing help with a cupcake recipe, but it got her an invitation to stop by. Anything was better than the truth.
I was wondering if we could chat so I can decide if you or your son is capable of murder.
Pitts had it easy. He didn't have to come up with excuses to question people. Didn't need to bake cupcakes to help pry out answers either.

In order for the ruse to work, she had to make the buttercream for the cupcakes she had baked the previous night. The problem was, she needed to turn on a mixer to whip the butter into fluff. Alex hadn't made it home until 3:00 a.m., and he was still sleeping. Even if she used a small hand mixer instead of her lemon-yellow Kitchen Aid stand mixer, the powerful engine still sounded like a tiny jet revving up for takeoff. The master bedroom was upstairs, and she had shut the door when she came downstairs, but the noise was still at a frequency that would burrow into a dream and give a person nightmares about going to the dentist.