“MONSIEUR!”
Even before Jacques Lavoie offered me a hand, I sat up like a shot. Kebab skewers rained down from my shoulders and peppered the floor.
“What in the world are you doing here?”
He made that very Gallic gesture of his. The one where he shrugs and turns over his hands. It said, Why shouldn’t I be here, it is my shop, yes? even before he said, “Why shouldn’t I be here, chérie? It is my shop, yes?”
“Of course… it’s your… shop.” I was so surprised, so relieved, and so completely bowled over, I could barely put together a coherent sentence. Maybe that’s why I stayed put right where I was, right there on the floor amid a slew of kitchen gadgets and soup mixes. “But where have you been? Why didn’t you come forward to tell the cops what happened to Greg? What on earth is going on?”
There was that gesture again. This time, it conveyed a message that was all about how it would take a while to explain. Before he could even begin, though, Monsieur looked toward the front door.
“I have been a little nervous,” he explained, watching me watch him. “You understand this, yes? After everything that has happened… If we could turn out the lights, perhaps?”
“Of course.” Before he could make a move toward the switch, I got to my feet and flicked off the lights, checking the sidewalk out in front of the store as I did. It was empty. Except for my car and that dark sedan still where I’d last seen it, so was the street. Even so, Monsieur’s gaze darted to the front windows again and again, and I couldn’t stand to see him look so uneasy. I took his arm. “We’ll talk in the office.”
“Oh, no, chérie. I have an idea even better than that.” He bent to retrieve two packages of potato-soup mix. “The water is already boiling and the wine, it is open. If you hadn’t interrupted me while I was searching for the soup mix, I would have put everything back where it belongs and be eating my dinner right now. You’ll join me, yes? We’ll go upstairs. To the cooking school.”
I had already started down the aisle toward the back of the store, but when I heard this, I put on the brakes and fought to catch my breath. “That’s where you’ve been all this time? Upstairs?” I was torn between giving Monsieur a hug and punching him in the nose, and he wasn’t the only one I was mad at. After all, I was supposed to be the detective, and I hadn’t even known the person I’d been looking for was living right over my head.
Good thing the lights were off. Monsieur didn’t see when my cheeks flamed.
Or maybe he did. “I am sorry to cause so much trouble,” he said. “C’est vrai! It is only just that…” Again, he glanced at the windows and, even in the dark, I could see that his eyes were round and his forehead was creased with worry. He ran his tongue over his lips.
And I decided right then and there that whatever he had to tell me, it could wait until we were upstairs and had the door closed and locked behind us.
We went to the back of the store and he punched in the security code to open the door at the bottom of the steps that led up to the cooking school. Even once we were upstairs, though, he didn’t turn on any of the lights, and I knew why. The school has a gigantic window that looks over the street. It lets in an incredible amount of light. The design is pure genius. The natural light adds to the elegant ambience established by the stainless-steel appliances and the individual work stations with their sleek granite countertops.
But a window that lets in light lets it out, too.
I didn’t need Monsieur to say a word. In complete darkness, I followed him to the back room where there was storage space, sinks for cleaning up-and no windows. Once we had the door to that room closed, he dared to turn on a light.
I saw that he had a nearby table set with a linen cloth, china, and a set of sterling flatware. There was a loaf of bread on the table, too, and an open bottle of wine. He got another glass, poured, and handed it to me.
“That is better, yes?”
“Yes. But…” I sucked in a long breath and forced myself to let it out slowly. “I’m confused. What have you been doing up here?”
Monsieur didn’t look any happier saying it than I was hearing it. “Panicking mostly,” he admitted.
“Then why not talk to the cops!” It seemed the simplest solution to me, and I cupped my wineglass in both hands and paced back and forth, waiting for some sort of explanation that would put the last week into perspective.
It was a long time coming. Monsieur drank some wine, poured the soup mix into the water he had boiling on the stove, got a bottle of sherry from a cupboard. He waved toward the table and I took a seat. He set a place for me, cut into the loaf of bread, and handed me a piece.
“It is difficult to explain,” he said.
“As difficult as it’s been for your friends to wonder if you’re dead or alive?”
I hadn’t meant to sound so furious. Or maybe I had. Now that my shock had settled into mere surprise, I felt bitter frustration nip at the edges of my composure. Like anyone could blame me? I scraped unsalted butter over my bread and chomped, chewing it over along with the thought that relief and anger can apparently go hand in hand.
“We’ve been worried sick,” I said without apology. After all, I wasn’t the one who needed to apologize. “And all this time-”
“I have been right here. Yes.” At least he had the decency to hang his head. When the timer rang, Monsieur filled two soup bowls, added sherry to each, and served. While I waited for my soup to cool, I stared across the table at him.
“It is hard for you to understand, I know,” he said. “Things are… how do you say this? These thing are confusing.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” Now that I’d had a few minutes to think, my brain had finally started to work and my thoughts were lining up. Systematically, I went over everything I’d learned and seen since the day Monsieur went missing, including those driver’s licenses.
My hands trembling with the effort to control my temper, I reached for another slice of bread and buttered it. “So tell me, what’s really going on? And who are you, Monsieur? Who are you, really?”
He had been in the middle of ladling a spoonful of soup to his mouth and he stopped, the spoon raised and the soup on it sending a small cloud of steam in front of his face. It struck me as appropriate, seeing as how Jacques Lavoie’s life was all about smoke and mirrors.
He put his spoon back into his soup bowl. “I am not surprised that you have discovered this about me,” he said. “You are a very smart woman. This, I have always known.”
“Not so smart that I can’t be fooled.”
“Oh, no. No, chérie!” Monsieur’s laugh was deep and throaty. It always reminded me of Pepé Le Pew. “You are very bright. You have found out-”
“That there is not now and never has been a family named Lavoie in Sceau-Saint-Angel, France. That you own a truckload of false IDs. That you are not and never have been Bill Boxley, and that when you stole his wallet, you took his driver’s license but not his credit cards.” I took a deep breath before I added, “Oh, and I also know that Fred Gardner must have been one hell of a good teacher because folks in Allentown still remember him fondly even though he’s been dead for twenty years.”
As I spoke, Monsieur’s face grew paler and paler. By the time I punctuated my last words by slapping my hand against the table, he was the color of the white apron he wore over a blue oxford shirt that looked as if it had been slept in.
“See?” He blinked rapidly and tried for a smile that never quite peaked. “It is just like I said. As a detective, you are brilliant. You must be, chérie, to know all this. You are as smart as you are beautiful. It is no wonder that my dear friend Jim thinks so highly of you. You are-”
In any other circumstances, I might have been all for basking in his praise. Right then and there, I was so not in the mood. I leaned over the table and cut him off with a look. “You can cut the crap and the phony accent-Norman.”
If ever I hoped to find proof, there it was. Monsieur’s mouth fell open and he collapsed back into his chair.
In spite of the fact that I was fighting mad, I was not heartless. Rather than continuing my attack, I backed away and gave him a moment to collect himself. He did, and right before my eyes, I saw a transformation. The swagger went out of his shoulders. The cocky Gallic smile fled his face. When he finally spoke, I wasn’t the least bit surprised that there wasn’t a trace of an accent anywhere in his voice. It was flat and nasal and East Coast sounding. Norman may have grown up in Allentown, and maybe he did come to a bad end in Las Vegas, but if I was a betting person (and it goes without saying that I’m not), I would have bet he’d spent time in New Jersey, too.
“It’s a scam. All of it’s a scam. Like all the other scams. You understand, don’t you, kid?”
I wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. I kept my eyes on him. “You mean like Vavoom!?”
With his spoon, he made figure eights in his soup. “Kind of.” He shrugged. “I mean, the whole thing about being French… you can see how it helps with the business, right? Who’s going to take cooking lessons from a guy named Norman from Allentown? Who’s going to buy expensive cookware from him? Norman Applebaum…” He sighed. “Doesn’t exactly have the ambience I was looking for when I bought this place.”
“And Bill Boxley?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Boxley was the guy from Fredericksburg, right? That’s where I was running a sweet little scam with this cleaning fluid.” His shoulders shot back, his eyes lit, and I didn’t have any trouble at all picturing him as Bill Boxley, hawking his product in front of an enthralled crowd. “Cleans. Shines. Polishes. Just a little dab on a rag takes care of all your cleaning needs. Tarnished silver? Just wipe it away! Dirty floors? Add a quarter cup to a bucket of warm water and they’re hospital clean! Greasy dishes?”
He chanced a glance my way. When he saw I wasn’t buying (his cleaning product or his attempt at winning me over), he went back to being regular ol’ Norman. His shoulders slumped. His cheery, confident personality disappeared, and he made a face. “I made a bundle. Until folks found out my magic cleaning fluid wasn’t so magical.”
I’m not usually cynical. Which is why he was surprised when I sneered, “What, it ate through cloth?”
“It was fine on cloth. It was fine on everything. It should have been, it was dishwashing detergent.”
“Which you repackaged and sold as something wonderful. Like the seasoned salt you sell as Vavoom!”
“And you put it on sale!” He tried to look outraged by the audacity of my management decision, but actually, Norman looked a little impressed. “You got guts, kid,” he said. “You’re good at setting things right.”
If it was true, why didn’t I feel better? I spooned up a mouthful of soup. “I’m getting nowhere on Greg’s murder,” I said. “But that’s because I haven’t been able to get all my questions answered. Because the person who has the answers…” I paused here so my words had a chance to sink in. “The person who has the answers was nowhere to be found.” A thought struck and I set down my spoon and looked across the table at Norman.
“You said Monsieur was a scam. Like all the other scams. That’s what you said. Do you think it’s possible that any of those other scams has anything to do with Greg’s death?”
He scratched a hand through his hair. “I don’t see how.”
“But you knew the killer was looking for you, and not Greg.” I didn’t say this like it was a question, but I was hoping for confirmation nonetheless.
Norman gave it to me with a brief nod. “That’s why I’ve been hiding out,” he said. “He wanted to talk to me. And I saw what happened to Greg. I’m not a brave person, Annie. If that guy gets ahold of me… well, I can’t even think about it without having a panic attack. That’s why I ran out of here the night Greg was killed. I was so upset, I didn’t know what to do. By the time I calmed down and decided to go home, there were cops at my place. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t know if they thought I shot Greg. I was so scared, I couldn’t think straight. I spent that night just driving around and the next day after the cops were gone, that’s when I came back here. I figured it was the last place anybody would look for me, the cops or”-he gulped-“the guy who killed Greg.” Embarrassed, he looked away. “I thought I’d get up the nerve to go to the cops, but I haven’t. I don’t know if I ever will. I thought-”
“What? That you could hide up here forever?”
He answered with a shrug.
“Like it or not, you’re going to have to talk to the police eventually. They’ll protect you. You’re a witness.” When Norman didn’t reply, I looked at him closely. “You are a witness, aren’t you?”
He gave me another shrug.
“This is getting us nowhere!” Frustrated, I pushed back from the table and looked around the room. There was a stack of paper on a nearby countertop and I went over and grabbed it along with a pen. I plunked both pen and paper on the table next to Norman.
“We need to work our way through this thing, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one place to start. Let’s go out on a limb here and say I’m right. That guy was after you, Norman, and I’m thinking that if we try hard enough, we just might be able to figure out why. Go ahead.” When he didn’t make a move to pick up the pen, I handed it to him. “Write down the ones you can think of.”
“The scams?” It was hard to look at the man seated in front of me and not think of him as the jolly Frenchman who had influenced so many people-including Jim-with his flair for food. When he looked up at me, he no longer looked larger than life. He was an ordinary guy. An ordinary guy named Norman. A little befuddled, he asked, “All of them?”
There was more frustration than resignation in my sigh. “We’re not going to figure out what’s going on otherwise.”
Norman agreed, and while he worked on the list, I sat back down to finish my soup and another piece of bread.
Just for the record, he might really be Norman from Allentown, but the owner of Très Bonne Cuisine knew a thing or two about food, all right. Sherry in potato soup is a very good thing.
I FINISHED THAT BOWL OF SOUP AND A SECOND ONE.
Norman had rummaged through the supplies upstairs and come up with what he needed to make chocolate mousse for dessert. Let’s face it, nothing is going to keep me away from chocolate. Not even my shock, my surprise, and the fact that I was just plain annoyed at Norman and all he’d put us through. I dished up the mousse and, in a rare moment of culinary inspiration, added a few raspberries. Apparently, Norman had been sneaking out to the open-all-night grocery store. The fridge in the cooking school cleanup room was far better stocked than mine at home.
Good thing my mood was mellowed by the endorphins the chocolate had triggered in my brain. Otherwise I would have lost it as I read through the list of Norman ’s scams.
“You’re kidding me, right?” I asked him, glancing up as I finished page three and flipped to page four. “You sold fake doctor’s excuses to people so they could get out of work? A fake doctor selling fake excuses? People really fell for that? There’s no way.”
He slipped into the Jacques Lavoie personality and accent effortlessly and tossed out the Gallic hand gesture with a casual, “I am a genius, yes?”
I slapped the pages on the table. “You’re a crook.”
“Come on, Annie.” Norman tasted his mousse and nodded, satisfied. “I didn’t really hurt anybody with any of my scams. Yeah, I sold people a bill of goods. But hey, I didn’t cheat anybody who didn’t want to be cheated. Would you believe there’s a magic cleaning fluid that can change your life?”
“Of course not, but-”
“Would you pay somebody to write you a doctor’s excuse, just so you could get out of work?”
“Never, but-”
“Would you buy a college paper? I mean, if you were a student, would you pay money for a paper and turn it in as your own work? In any class? Would you pay somebody to write your paper on eighteenth-century English poetry? Or geology? Or-”
“You know enough about eighteenth-century English poetry to write papers about it?”
Norman grinned. “That’s paper, singular. I only ever wrote one and I’ll bet it’s been turned in at least once on every college campus in America. The Internet is a wonderful thing. And college students are young and stupid and more concerned with partying than studying.”
“And they have their parents’ money to spend.”
He winked. “You bet!”
I tapped the papers into a neat pile and set it down on the table. “Well, I don’t think Greg was killed because of some eighteenth-century English poet, do you? It doesn’t make any sense.” My mellow chocolate mood was fading and I was getting crabby fast. Then again, by that time it was three o’clock in the morning, and I am not a night person. “There’s got to be something you can think of, something that would explain-”
“Shh!” Norman put a finger to his lips and, just like he did, I bent my head and listened.
I heard exactly what he heard-the sounds of someone moving around downstairs in the shop.
For the second time that night, my breath caught and my pulse pounded triple time in my ears. In spite of the fact that I told myself there was nothing to worry about-that there was no way anyone knew we were up there and that even if they did, there was no way they could get to us-I thought of the nervous way Norman had looked at the front window while we talked downstairs. And the sight of Greg’s body lying in a pool of blood.
“There’s someone downstairs.” Norman mouthed the words and pointed. “Don’t move. We can’t let them know we’re up here.”
It was the perfect plan and it actually might have made me feel secure if the next sound we heard wasn’t the door at the bottom of the cooking-school steps creaking open.
“We’ve got to hide.” That was me, mouthing the words and gesturing wildly, like we were playing some kind of weird version of charades. I looked around the cleanup room, but except for a big walk-in cooler that took up most of one wall, there really was no other place to hide.
And there was no way on earth I was going to hide in a walk-in cooler.
With no other options, I did the only thing I could think to do. I motioned Norman to one side of the door that led into the room and I took up position on the other side-but not before I armed myself with the copper pot Norman had used for the soup.
When the door snapped open, I was ready.
I raised my arm, swung, and-
“Annie!”
“Don’t do that to me!” Since Jim was the one who’d nearly gotten beaned by the soup pot, I probably wasn’t completely justified screaming at him. I clutched my chest to keep my heart from beating its way through my ribs and fell back against the wall. “What on earth are you doing here? Why didn’t you let me know it was you? Why didn’t you call?”
“I did call. A dozen times at least,” he said. It was the first time I remembered my purse-and the phone in it-was still down on the front counter of Très Bonne Cuisine. “I thought something was wrong. I thought something had happened, and I looked all around the shop. And then I found your purse, but not you. Annie, you gave me quite a fright.”
There was no easy way to tell him the surprises weren’t over.
Rather than try, I turned Jim around. For the first time since he’d walked in the room, he saw Norman.
Jim’s mouth opened and closed. He smiled. He looked to me for confirmation that he wasn’t seeing things, and when I nodded, he raced forward and pulled his old friend into an enormous bear hug.
“It’s you. It really is. You’re not dead. You’re alive. You’re well. Annie found you.”
“Not exactly.” I didn’t like to take credit where none was due. I stepped into the touching reunion scene. “This is Norman Applebaum,” I told Jim, and it was a good thing he was in on my yearbook thievery; at least I didn’t have to explain this part of the story. “ Norman ’s been hiding out up here in the cooking school since soon after Greg’s murder.”
“Here? In the school?” I could tell exactly when Jim’s relief turned to anger, just as mine had done. That would have been right about when his accent got so thick I could barely understand him. “And ye’re tellin’ me that all this while, we were a-frettin’ and a-worryin’ and thinkin’ you’d been killed like poor Greg was, and Annie’s been chasin’ here and there and all this time…” His outrage choked him, and all Jim could do was stare at Norman in wonder.
“There’s a lot I need to explain,” Norman said. As understatements went, that one was a doozy.
BY THE TIME THE SUN PEEKED OVER THE HORIZON, I think we’d heard it all. Norman told us how, growing up, he’d always been antsy, eager to see the world. He explained that soon after he graduated from William Allen High, he went out to Vegas.
And did he come to a bad end out there?
When I asked, at least Norman had the decency to look embarrassed.
He told us that he worked in a tiny bar far from the neon lights of the Strip, and as a way to make a little extra cash on the side, he rigged a couple of the countertop slot machines.
MaryAnn the waitress was right. Norman ’s story did not have a happy ending. He was caught and did jail time for his crime, eighteen months to be exact.
When he got out…
Well, Norman didn’t make any apologies, and though I may have expected a few, I guess I could understand. It was hard for a guy with a record to find a decent job, so Norman did the only thing that was logical. At least in his mind.
He became Bill Boxley. And Fred Gardner. And all the other people I’d found IDs for. And he’d run a series of scams along the east coast and the west, until that fateful day when the cooking skill he’d learned at the Nevada State Prison led him to the opportunity to own his own gourmet shop.
“The rest…” Norman filled our wineglasses-again. “Like they say, the rest is history. I always liked cooking, and when the idea hit that I could own my own shop, well, I decided that would be like heaven on earth. I’ve established a great business, and I love doing what I’m doing. Très Bonne Cuisine is my life. This is where I belong. I’ve given up the scams… well, except for the Vavoom! I started an honest business and I want nothing more than to keep it going. I even thought about turning over a whole new leaf and letting the world know who I really am.” He shook his head, dismissing the thought just the way he must have when it first occurred to him. “How can I? Would you shop here if you knew I was a con? Would anybody pay the least attention to a guy who learned to cook in prison?”
We’d been seated around the table for hours, and Norman got up and stretched. “I’ve never been happier,” he said. “Until-”
“Until somebody walked in here and blew Greg away.” Even the taste of the expensive wine Norman poured couldn’t sweeten my words.
Norman shivered. “Just thinking about it makes me sick,” he said. “I swear, I don’t know what the guy wanted. He just walked in-”
“You saw him come into the shop?” Wine or no wine, late hour or not, I’d waited a long time to ask him these questions, and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass. “Did you recognize the man?”
“I never got a good look at his face.” The gesture Norman made reminded me of the old Monsieur Lavoie nonchalance. Except that now, Norman didn’t look nearly as debonair as he did confused. “Tall. Dark jacket. Jeans. That’s pretty much all I could see from the back office.” This time his shrug was all about despair. “I can’t really describe him. I wouldn’t recognize him again if he walked in here right now and asked to sit down.”
“Then how did you know he was looking for you?”
While I asked the questions, Jim pulled out the same notepad that had been in his pocket earlier that evening (I guess technically it was the evening before now that it was Friday morning). Norman talked, and Jim took notes.
“I was loading the car. You know, I was supposed to take stuff over to Bellywasher’s. The steel-clad roaster and the ice cream maker and…” As much as he loved food and the expensive cookware he sold to prepare it, Norman shrugged it all off as inconsequential in the face of what had happened. “I was going in and out and I heard Greg talking to someone, but hey, that’s not unusual, is it? The shop was open late that night and whatever the guy wanted, I knew Greg would take care of everything. He always did. He was-” Norman ’s voice got thick and he coughed away his emotion. “Greg was a nice guy. I hate that this happened to him. If I would have been braver. Or smarter. If I realized sooner that something was wrong-”
“When did you realize something was wrong?”
I could tell Norman had been avoiding thinking about the whole thing, that’s how pale and shaken he was. I couldn’t blame him. All the more reason we had to talk about it.
“What did he say?” I asked. “The guy Greg was waiting on, how did you know he was really looking for you?”
“I heard him…” Norman swallowed hard. “I heard the man raise his voice. He said, ‘It’s payback time, Norman.’ ”