Miranda Bliss - Dying for Dinner

“It’s a scam!” I repeated Jim’s words. They didn’t provide all the answers, of course, but suddenly those IDs we’d found at Monsieur’s… suddenly, they made a lot more sense.

I QUIT MY JOB AT PIONEER SAVINGS AND LOAN BECAUSE running back and forth between the bank and Bellywasher’s was too much to handle.

Great plan, yes?

It had worked for exactly… er… let me do a little math here.

It looked like my plan had worked for less than twenty-four hours.

Now, nearly a week after I walked into Très Bonne Cuisine and saw Greg’s body lying on the floor, my life was more hectic than ever. The shop was open six days a week and yeah, once in a while Eve came in to help or Jim stopped by to lend a little moral support. But by and large-at least until that happy day when the help Jim hired actually started-I was pretty much a one-man… uh… one-woman show.

And there were still invoices to pay and file at Belly-washer’s.

And invoices to pay and file at Très Bonne Cuisine.

And shipments to check, and bank deposits to take care of, and tax papers to prepare, and cash registers to balance and stock with proper change.

At both places.

Not to mention the whole taking-care-of-the-customers part, which I didn’t have to deal with at Bellywasher’s, thank goodness, but did have to handle at the shop. The problem with customers, see, is that they ask questions. About cooking. And cookware. The problem with me is that I don’t know any of the answers.

To say that my stress levels were to the moon would be completely understating the problem.

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that as much as I was itching to look into Monsieur’s disappearance and that tantalizing stack of licenses and how they might (or might not) be related to his Vavoom! scam, I never had much of a chance until Sunday. That was the one day of the week that Très Bonne Cuisine was closed, and after the brunch crowd at Bellywasher’s had finally cleared out and before the dinner crowd could arrive, Eve and I took some time and convened in my apartment.

I was sitting at my computer. She was on a chair next to mine. I gave her a sidelong look and made sure not to sound too critical when I said, “You know, there are no dogs allowed in this apartment complex.”

“Doc isn’t a dog.” Eve had the critter in her lap, and she lifted him so they could rub noses. He looked an awful lot like a dog to me. Even if he was wearing a red cotton sweater that matched Eve’s tank top. “Doc is my itty-bitty friend. And besides…” She scrubbed a finger behind one of the dark, V-shaped ears of the tiny Japanese terrier. “It’s not like he lives here or anything. He’s just visiting. With me. Nobody could complain about that. Nobody would even know he was here. He’s so well behaved and so quiet. Like a little angel in a dog suit!”

“Uh-huh.” Pardon me for not sounding nearly as enthusiastic. I clearly remembered the night she snuck Doc into the back room of Bellywasher’s and he escaped, walked out into the restaurant, and barfed all over the place. “My neighbors will not be happy if he starts carrying on.”

“He’s not going to carry on. He’s too good to carry on.” Eve planted a kiss on top of the dog’s head before she lowered him into an oversized white leather tote bag studded with rhinestones that matched the ones on Doc’s collar. At least I hoped he was wearing his rhinestone collar. During one of our investigations, we’d discovered that the sparkly collar Doc was wearing when Eve got him (the one we’d always assumed was just a showy fake) was the real deal. The thought of that many genuine diamonds in my plain ol’ middle-class apartment was enough to make my blood pressure soar.

Ever practical, I decided it was best not to think about it.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I told Eve, partly because it took my mind off the diamonds, and mostly because time was a-wastin’. “We’re going to do a little research. About Monsieur. I figure if we find out all we can about him, then we’ll be able to figure out what he’s up to with the IDs. And where he might be.”

Eve had recently seen her aesthetician, so when she shook her head, her blonde hair gleamed in the glow of my desk lamp. “I don’t know. Think about it, Annie. We know all there is to know about Monsieur. He’s our friend.”

“Do our friends tell us everything?”

I paused here. A long time. Which gave Eve the perfect opening to bring up Tyler. She hadn’t said one word about him in days. Naturally that made me suspicious. I was dying to know what was up with him. And her. And them.

When she said not a thing, I waited even longer.

That didn’t work, either, so I puffed out a breath of exasperation and went right on. “I’ve asked Jim,” I told her. “We sat down together last night and talked for a long time. I told him to tell me everything he knew about Monsieur.” There was a yellow legal pad on my desk and I picked it up and handed it to Eve. “That’s all he knows.”

She read over my neatly written notes. “French. Owner of Très Bonne Cuisine. Lives in Cherrydale.” Eve wrinkled her nose. “See? I told you so. We know all that.”

“Except there’s more.” I pointed to the next lines.

“Loves to cook. Good businessman. Reasonable boss, though not especially generous when it comes to salary and raises. Cares about his customers. Except for the Vavoom! thing.”

Eve wasn’t around the night Jim found me filling the Vavoom! jars so I filled her in about that part of the story. “Jim was disappointed,” I said. “He didn’t think his friend could ever be that-”

“Dishonest?” Eve flipped the page on the legal pad, but since there was nothing written past the first page, she flipped it right back. “It doesn’t say here that he thinks Monsieur is dishonest.”

“No.” The thought sat uneasily with me, and I twitched my shoulders. “Jim didn’t want to come right out and say it, so I didn’t add it. But that’s not the point.” I reached for the pad and tapped a finger against the list. “The point is that it’s a pretty short list. And pretty basic, too. Even though Jim has known Monsieur for years, he really doesn’t know that much about him.”

“Monsieur is a private person.”

“But he’s not.” I thought about all those smiling faces on all those jars of Vavoom! “Monsieur is a showman. He loves publicity. He adores the spotlight. He’s got a following in the area and he loves that, too. You’ve seen the way he perks right up when somebody walks into the shop and says they saw his picture in the paper or in some culinary magazine or another. The same thing happens at Bellywasher’s when he’s there and someone walks in and recognizes him. He’s as happy as a kid on Christmas morning when that happens, and he’s not shy about talking to anybody or about posing for pictures. So why is it that a man who loves to be the center of attention-a man we think of as our friend-why is it that we really don’t know that much about him?”

Eve tipped her head. “I never really thought about it before,” she admitted.

“Why would you? Why would any of us? We all meet people and we take those people at face value. They tell us they’re cooks, and we believe them. Why shouldn’t we? They tell us they’re rocket scientists or horse trainers or that they work behind the counter at the local Starbuck’s, and there isn’t one reason in the world for us to stop and consider if they’re telling us the truth or not.”

Eve still wasn’t sure where I was headed. At the risk of ruining her perfectly put together look, she worked her lower lip with her teeth. “Are you saying that Monsieur might not be who he says he is?”