Diane Davidson - Prime Cut

His bills had been uncomplicated: figuring ten to twenty people per day, service, tax, and gratuity included: ten dollars a pop for the coffee break, eighteen for the lunch. He’d averaged a daily gross of about seven hundred dollars. On Friday afternoon, he had written down the check number of the payment Leah had made to him for the first week’s work. I did not know whether he had ever deposited the check. I sighed and closed the notebook. Downstairs, the loud pow of Tom’s nail gun split the air.

I would be seeing Pru Hibbard the following afternoon, at the memorial service. It would not be tactful to pose any questions about Andre’s week with the fashion folks. The last thing a bereaved widow needed was to imagine there was anything unusual about her husband’s death. Which, of course, there was.

Slowly, I read back over the menus. I visualized André working on Sunday, peeling peaches for the compote he would serve on Monday morning for Ian’s Images. First, he would have placed the thickly sliced peaches in a baking dish, then reamed out a lemon for its juice, mixed the juice with some red wine, sugar, a cinnamon stick, and some cloves and a bit of salt. This he would have heated and poured over the glistening peaches before placing them in the oven. Then, for the other dish … Wait a minute.

I closed my eyes and remembered André bustling about to prepare crème brûlée . He’d insisted on teaching me his old-fashioned way, although I’d ended up developing my own method. André would stir and heat eggs with cream to a rich custard, then chill the dish overnight, which is why he would have started it on Saturday. Then on Sunday he would have covered it with a thin layer of light brown sugar, and … Hold on.

To caramelize the sugar, he did not use a hand-held propane torch, as I did. No: André used his own salamander, an old-fashioned iron tool heated over a fire and then run over the top of the crème , to make it brûlée . Like his butter-baller, his balloon whisks, and battered wooden spoons, André’s salamander came from the time before modern kitchen equipment was common. It was a curved, fancy implement that I’d seen many times in his red metal toolbox.

In my mind’s eye I saw André’s dead body, his burned hands. Crème brûlée crusted by the heat of a salamander. Strangely shaped burns carved into the skin followed by death … or something like that. In any event, because of the shape of the burns, I knew the salamander must have caused the scars. How had it happened? When could the burning have happened? Not Sunday when he’d originally made the custards, or he would have put salve on them, wouldn’t he? Or bandages? He’d told the cabdriver he’d finished making the food … but he had to be at the cabin early for prep. Why? Could there have been some reason why he’d felt he had to make more custards Monday morning? What would that reason be? Could someone have him While he was cooking, as Rustine had startled me today, so that he burned himself, had chest pains, and took an overdose of nitroglycerin? If someone had surprised him, why wouldn’t that person have called for help when André collapsed, as Boyd had called for help today?

It still didn’t make sense. But at least I knew one thing. André had been burned by his own salamander.

I checked my watch: just before five. I put in a quick call to the morgue, and was astonished to be put straight through to Sheila O’Connor.

“Sheila, it’s Goldy … look, I just didn’t know who else to call—”

“No problem.”

“Remember those marks on André’s hands?” When she mm-hmmed , I took a deep breath. “I know what caused them.” I told her about the menus, the crème brûlée , and the salamander.

“So, what are you telling me?” she asked patiently. “That he was burned he was cooking? I never thought anything else.”

What was I telling her, exactly? “Of course he was burned While he was cooking, but it just doesn’t add up. Why would he tell the cabdriver he was all done, and then proceed to make more food? If one of the photo people came to the cabin and told André extra people were showing up, and then André burned himself and collapsed, why didn’t the photo person call for help?”

Sheila took a deep breath. “Goldy, you loved your teacher. I know you did. I know you hate to think of him as old and vulnerable. But he was . Our guys found his empty bottle of nitroglycerin, by the way. His doctor says the bottle should have been full.”

“He took a whole bottle? When he was sensitive to it? Why would he do that? How much was in his system?”

“About two hundred milligrams. It’s a lethal dose. Goldy—”

“Did he have any … internal bruising that would have shown someone forcing pills down his throat?”

“You’re always telling me about Med Wives one-oh-one, Goldy. Remember? Nitroglycerin dissolves in the mouth.”

“Do you have any evidence that might indicate this wasn’t an accidental overdose? Please, Sheila, he was my teacher.”

“Have Tom call me tomorrow.” Then she clicked off.

Sometimes problems, like a well-simmered stock, must be put on the back burner. I couldn’t obsess about Andre’s death any more that day. Nor could I contemplate how long it would be until my kitchen was back in service. Nor did I even want to think about being replaced as the caterer for Weezie Harrington’s birthday party, or of my replacement, Craig Litchfield, wowing the country club divorcée set.

Instead, I forced myself to shove all that aside, and relaxed into our lovely dinner on the deck. If the pizza was a bit cool, the calzones a tad mushy, no one mentioned it. Arch raptly contemplated the sun slipping behind burnished copper clouds. The only thing he told us about his day was that he and Julian had been invited to Rustine and Lettie’s house the next afternoon for lunch. Tom, exhausted from his carpentry labors, fell asleep on a deck chair before Julian could proffer take-out tiramisù. I gently woke him and tugged him up to bed. Julian, bless his heart, offered to clean up. He said he was actually starting to like washing dishes in the tub.

The next morning, Tom was once again up early and hammering away as I pulled myself out of bed and stretched through my yoga. Julian and Arch were sleeping in. We had no catering jobs, although Julian had vowed to experiment with something to take to Rustine’s.

Maybe he didn’t dislike her quite as much as he pretended.

When I came into the kitchen, Tom appeared to be about a third of the way through nailing in the lower cabinets. Unfortunately, huge piles of boxes obscured my ability to admire all of his work.

“What do you think?” he asked happily. He wore a sweatshirt and jeans, a carpenter’s apron, and two days’ worth of beard.

I smiled. “I love it.” No matter what I thought, I had learned over the last few days to say his work was fantastic .

“You’ll have to get your coffee in town, I’m afraid,” he told me. “I had to shut off the water, just for the morning. And Marla called. She’s almost done with the IRS and wants to meet you at St. Stephen’s at three-thirty, before the service.”

Relief swept over me. My friend was finally going to be released from audit agony! “That’s super.” I located the phone and called Lutheran Hospital. Leah Smythe, I was finally told by a nurse I knew, had two broken ribs and lacerations on her face, arms, and legs. The doctor was in seeing her, but the nurse would relay the message that I’d called. And could she find out about Barbara Burr, I asked. I was put on hold, then told sadly that Barbara’s condition hadn’t changed. Next I called Pru Hibbard; the line was busy. I put nightmares of bottom-feeding Realtors out of my head, and hoped the engaged line meant other people were making sympathy calls to Andre’s widow.