Beverly Bird - I'll Be Seeing You

“I wasn’t—”

“Just answer my questions!” He lowered his voice. “Like you would if you were in one of those books you said you liked. You know, the ones where they lawyer up.”

“Then you might try questioning me like they would in those books. What do you think I was catering? It was food. You ate some of it.”

More tiny fists, Raphael thought. Boom-boom-boom at his temples. With a careful, precise motion, he turned the recorder on again. “There was no party in that house tonight. What did McGaffney need a caterer for?”

“Allegra, I would imagine. I didn’t ask. It’s none of my business, except in the respect that it affects what I serve and how I serve it.”

Raphael pressed his thumbs against the little men inside his head. “Ms. Mulhern. I’ll ask again. What were you catering?”

Kate flopped against the sofa cushions, looking at him disbelievingly. “Filets with orange béarnaise sauce for the entree. The appetizer was oysters Rockefeller, followed by a hearts-of-palm salad. Well, you saw what he did to that.” Raphael reached for the tape again, and she hurried on. “We never got to dessert, but I had pears in a caramelized brandy sauce for that course. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“All this for two people?” Raphael clarified. Something in his jaw ticked again.

“That’s what I do.”

“You cater for two people.”

“That’s my niche. Otherwise, I’d be just like every other caterer in Philadelphia. I needed to do something different if I was going to stand out, make my mark.” She shrugged. “I’ve gone for as many as dinner for six, but then it starts negating my purpose.”

Raphael began to understand. “So you do take-out dinners.”

Kate stiffened. “Of course not. Restaurants do takeout. But what do you get? Food in little cartons that someone has to reheat—”

“And then it’s stale.”

She nodded urgently as she would at a clever child. “That’s it exactly. And someone has to be in the kitchen to do all that, to spoon it all out and put it on the table. But I cater.”

“You bring it over and spoon it out and put in on the table.”

He might have just suggested that she shot McGaffney herself. She pulled her spine straight again. Somewhere Raphael thought he heard fingernails scraping down a blackboard.

“I prepare on the premises,” she said stiffly.

“You took all this food over there and cooked it for McGaffney, and served it.”

“Yes. I do all the elegance and service and variety of eating out, but in the privacy and comfort of one’s own home.”

“So how much did this cost him?”

“Two hundred and eighty seven dollars. Plus tax.”

Raphael felt his brows climb his forehead. “McGaffney paid three hundred dollars to have dinner at home with Allegra Denise?”

“He did unless his check bounces. What’s wrong?” She didn’t like his expression.

“Why?” he said, almost to himself. “Why would he do that? Did he call you himself to set this up?”

“I don’t remember. But I can tell you in a minute.”

She got up and disappeared down a short hallway. Raphael waited, wondering. Why hadn’t McGaffney just taken Allegra out, especially for that kind of money? Obviously, he had wanted to be alone with her. But why?

Sex came readily to mind. But knowing Allegra, McGaffney would have gotten that regardless. So he must have had something important to discuss with her. Inside word on the Eagan clan?

Kate came back with a notebook. “He called me himself,” she said, waving it at him.

Raphael nodded. “When?”

“Two days ago. On Wednesday at three forty-seven p.m.”

“You wrote down the time?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

Why not? There was no specific reason for it, but it didn’t hurt to do, and who knew when she might need the information, like now? She stared at him without answering.

Raphael looked at her a moment too long. She made a good witness, but her ingrained sense of perfection was irritating the hell out of him. “Did he say why he wanted to engage your services?”

She seemed to think about it fiercely. “No.”

“Nothing,” Raphael clarified.

“He just said he was having a lady over.”

“Did he say where he had gotten word of your business?”

“No, but I had a great review in the newspaper in June. Ever since then, I’ve been doing four or five dinners a week. I’ve even had to cut back on my hours at the diner.”

“You cook at a diner, too?”

She nodded.

“Why? If you’re doing five of these dinners a week, you’re knocking back maybe fifteen hundred dollars, right?”

“Wrong. That’s before costs. And paying the help. And taxes.”

“Who helped you tonight?”

“No one.”

“Then what does your help do?”

Kate sat back and rubbed her forehead. “Four out of five clients call already knowing what they want. You know, they’ll request lobster or…or just something specific. They call with these silly, preconceived notions of what a gourmet meal should be. If I have to cook to their prerequisites, I can’t always orchestrate it so that I can do the whole thing myself. I can’t be serving if I need to be in the kitchen doing something to whatever’s simmering there. On those occasions, I pay a second pair of hands to serve.”

“How many employees do you have?”

“Two now. They’re on call. If one can’t do it, the other one generally can. Actually, I just hired Beth four days ago.”

Raphael’s antennae twitched. That was convenient. It would bear some looking into. “Beth who?”

“Beth Olivetti.”

“Who’s your other employee?”

“Janaya Thomas. She’s been with me for about two months now.”

“But no one was with you tonight?”

“No. I just told you that. McGaffney gave me carte blanche to prepare whatever I wanted so I could streamline the meal.”

“Okay. Let’s move on to that. To what you did tonight.”

Kate nodded, sitting forward again. She didn’t entirely understand all his questions, but she was beginning to enjoy this—in a matter of speaking. It was intriguing, she admitted, watching him work through what had happened. “I didn’t hear anything.”

His eyes narrowed. “Let me ask the questions, okay?”

“But that was what you were going to ask next, right?”

It had been, but he’d be damned if he’d say so.

“Anyway, I didn’t. I just took the steaks to the dining room and there he was. Splat in the salad.”

“No gunshot.”

“No.”

The killer had used a silencer then, Raphael thought. But she’d been right there in the kitchen, through a solitary door. “What about a…like, pffting sound?”

She thought about it. “I didn’t hear anything like that. But then, there was the matter of the dog.” As soon as the words left her, Kate felt her face go scarlet.

Raphael sat forward, his eyes narrowing sharply. “What dog?”

Kate got to her feet unsteadily. She looked warily at the door, where the little beast had once slept religiously whenever Shawna had gone out. Love, murder and mayhem. Belle had trailed those things behind her like a banner. And she had also saved Shawna’s life.

As she had saved Kate’s tonight.

It had been Belle, Kate realized. Because if she had taken those steaks to the dining room—the first steaks, twelve and a half minutes earlier—she could very well have walked in on the killer. McGaffney’s skin had still been warm when she’d felt for his pulse. He hadn’t been dead long.

Her heart caught, and Kate hit her chest with her fist to start it again. “Uh, I had just finished the steaks,” she explained. “The first steaks, that is. There was a crash. She…this dog…came in through the back door I’d left open. She got up on the center island somehow and stole a steak and knocked one of my plates over. I had to cook two new ones.”