Miranda Bliss - Dying for Dinner

“You’re going to take the case, right?” Eve didn’t wait for me to answer. She’d left her purse in my office that morning and she got it out of the bottom drawer of my desk, dug inside, and pulled out a tube of lipstick. “I mean, you pretty much have to, don’t you? What with Monsieur being our friend and all.”

“I dunno.” I rolled my chair back. “It’s not that I wouldn’t like to know more-”

“Of course you would.” Eve uncapped the lipstick, applied it, and smacked her lips together. “You’re a smart woman with an inquisitive mind.”

“But we don’t have much to go on.”

“You mean the cops don’t.” Eve pulled a mirror from her purse. She pouted into it, checking her lipstick. “You’re oodles smarter than they are, Annie. You’ve proved that more than once.”

“I have, but-”

“And you know you could do it again.”

“I might be able to, but-”

“And you want to, don’t you?” She looked directly at me when she said this and, face-to-face with the sheen of excitement in Eve’s blue eyes, I found it impossible to speak anything but the whole truth and nothing but.

“It is interesting to investigate,” I said, my words tentative. “I’ll admit that. I like solving the puzzle of a case. I like knowing that a victim has found justice and the person responsible will be punished. But-”

“But? But what?” She shoved both lipstick and mirror back in her purse, tucked the purse in the bottom desk drawer, and sat up straight. “You are not telling me that you’re going to give up on Monsieur Lavoie, are you, Annie? Because I just know that can’t be true. He’s our friend. And you’re the best detective this side of the-”

“Oh, no. Don’t try to pull that on me!” I was up and on my feet even before I realized it. “Being curious about what happened to Monsieur is one thing. Being thought of as some kind of Sherlock Holmes is-”

“The absolute truth. And you know it. You’ve got a gift.”

“Maybe. Possibly. OK…” I indulged in a little vanity, not a weakness that usually plagued me. “OK, you’re right. I’m pretty good at this detective thing. That doesn’t mean-”

“Of course it does. You don’t think the police are anywhere near as concerned about Monsieur as we are, do you? I mean, truly, they might want to be, but they’re just as busy as can be. And they don’t know Monsieur like we do. They don’t like him as much as we do. I mean, how can they, when they don’t know him. Unless some of them do. I mean, if they’re cooks. And they shop at his store. But I don’t think they all could. I mean, every single cop on the Arlington force? That seems a bit unlikely. And it would mean Monsieur would be busy. All of the time.” She must have seen my eyes go glassy. Eve twitched away the rest of her convoluted theory.

“Why, if we don’t take charge and take on this investigation,” Eve said, her voice as rock steady as her shoulders, “the mystery of what happened to Monsieur might never be solved.”

I hadn’t failed to notice how the you had somehow morphed into we . It didn’t matter and, besides, like I’ve said before, there’s no one I’d rather have with me on an investigation than Eve.

“We could go back to the places Jim and I stopped last night,” I told her. “Those couple little bars in Clarendon, and that coffee place that Monsieur likes so much. Maybe there will be someone there today who wasn’t there last night.” It was an idea, sure, and it was better than sitting around doing nothing, but honestly, it felt useless. I twitched my shoulders, but that did nothing to get rid of the uneasiness that sat on them like a weight. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like enough.”

“It’s a start, and it’s better than doing nothing. The whole thing is just so odd, isn’t it? I mean, Monsieur, he’s anything but a shrinking violet. You’d think he’d want to come forward and tell the world what happened at the shop last night. He’d get interviewed on the news if he did. And there’s nothing he likes better than publicity.”

Leave it to Eve. The PR angle was one I hadn’t thought of, but I knew she was absolutely right.

“He loves his friends, too,” I said. “He must know we’re worried about him. If nothing else, you’d think he’d give Jim a call just to let him know that everything’s OK.” My shoulders drooped. “Unless everything’s not OK.”

“Which we have no way at all of knowing until we get to the bottom of this crazy thing.” Eve stood. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen her earlier in the day, but I guess I’d been preoccupied and hadn’t noticed that she was dressed in a creamy skirt and pink blouse that made her look as fresh and bright as the flowers that grew in the boxes outside Bellywasher’s front door. Eve always dresses to impress, but that Tuesday, she looked even more spectacular than usual.

It didn’t take a detective to figure out what was going on.

“So…” In an attempt to look as casual as possible, I shuffled and reshuffled the papers on my desk. “When I walked out of Très Bonne Cuisine last night… when Tyler walked me out and walked me to the car… did he say anything to you? Anything about maybe stopping here today to talk to us all again?”

“Goodness no!” Eve’s petulance was a little too… er… well, petulant to fool me. She folded her arms over her chest in a classic defensive posture if I ever saw one. “You were right there, Annie. You know what happened. Tyler said hello. Then he gave me that little arctic smile of his. But he never said… I mean, even if he had, you don’t think I’d actually care, do you? He wasn’t any happier to see me last night than I was to see him.”

“Eve?” It was Heidi again. This time when she opened my office door, she left it open. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Really?” As Eve had proven over the years, she could be cool and calm up in front of dozens of beauty pageant judges, but even so, she wasn’t much of an actress. Her faked surprise at hearing she had a visitor didn’t fool me. When she threw back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and walked out into the restaurant, I didn’t even need to confirm my suspicions. I did, anyway. I wasn’t surprised to see a single customer sitting at the small table near the front window. He looked an awful lot like Tyler Cooper.

Maybe it was a good thing the lunch hour rush was in full swing. From the looks of the crowd waiting near the front door, I could tell Eve wouldn’t have much time to chat with Tyler.

While I thought about all this and what it might mean, I tried Monsieur’s phone again.

I didn’t get any better results.

With no other options and no hope of making any sense of those invoices stacked on my desk, I sat back down and took out a legal pad.

What could have happened to Monsieur? I wrote at the top of the page.

Under that, I made a list of the spots Jim and I had stopped the night before and next to that, the names of the people we’d talked to at each one. A couple minutes’ time on the computer and I had phone numbers for each of those places, too. I promised myself I’d call them to see if anyone was there I could talk to who hadn’t been there the night before-after I finished half the invoices.

With that bit of incentive, I might actually have gotten back to the work that was from that day forward supposed to be my full-time job if Jim hadn’t popped into my office again.

“Did they like their birthday cake?” I asked, and I swear, he was so distracted, he had to think about it for a couple seconds before he knew what I was talking about.

His quick smile told me the celebration had gone well. “I’ve been on the phone,” he said without preamble. He sat in the chair Eve had so recently vacated. “Arranging for a cleaning crew to get over to Très Bonne Cuisine once the police are done with the place.”