NORMAN… ER, JACQUES… DID SAY CLAUDE BROOKING was a friend, so I assumed they might have some things in common.
Like charming little gourmet shops.
Or cute French accents (even if they weren’t real).
What Eve and I discovered-after we wasted precious minutes searching for Claude in the maze of booths selling everything from cookware to cookie mixes to knife sharpeners-was a mishmash of tables piled with every cheap kitchen gadget imaginable. (Yes, I know, this makes me sound like a cooking snob, and honestly, it’s not like me, but a couple weeks at Très Bonne Cuisine is bound to do that to a person).
Claude’s merchandise was displayed around a huge RV that had been pulled right onto the site. Just in case that wasn’t conspicuous enough, the RV had a yellow banner draped across the side of it that proclaimed Brooking Cooking in huge red letters.
And Claude Brooking?
I didn’t even have to ask. Claude Brooking had to be the guy in the blue, yellow, and orange Hawaiian shirt who was doing his best to schmooze a couple of ladies into buying colorful little plastic cups that clipped over the side of a pot.
“You’ve never seen anything like these,” he said, and forget the French accent. Claude and Norman must have known each other back in New Jersey. “Look at this, sweetie. You put your egg in here, see. Then you hang this contraption onto your pot and boil your egg. Then…” He slipped the plastic holder off the pot with a motion that said voilà, even if Claude didn’t. “You can serve the egg right from this thing. Is that wonderful, or what? And the price? For anybody else, these are four for twenty dollars. But today only as a show special…” Claude gave the women a wink. “Today only and only for you two, you get all four of them and a set of matching measuring spoons for a mere twenty dollars. It’s once in a lifetime. I’m a crazy man even to offer you this kind of deal. What do you say, ladies? Can I wrap up a set for each of you?”
They were all too eager, and I checked my watch-again-and waited as patiently as I could while Claude rang up the sale.
When he was done, I stepped forward.
“For you, little lady…” Claude wiggled his eyebrows at me, then slid his gaze to Eve, who was standing at my side. “Today only and only for you two, I’m willing to deal. What will it be?” He gestured toward the hodgepodge that was his on-the-road showroom. “Anything at all. Including me, if you’ll take me home.”
I would have laughed, just to be polite. If I had time. “Jacques Lavoie,” I said instead. “He’s a friend of yours, right? He’s doing a cooking demonstration and-”
“He’s back?” Claude’s hair was way too dark for a man of his middle years. So were his eyebrows. They shot up his forehead. “I called him a couple times and left messages. He never called back.”
“He’s been busy. So are we.” I scanned the tables, searching for a mandoline. When I didn’t see one, I had no choice but to throw myself on Claude’s mercy. “His demonstration is about to start and-”
“Really? That’s so cool!” Claude reached under the table, produced a sign that said Out to Lunch, Be Right Back, and balanced it on a pile of tea infusers. “You going back to the amphitheater?” he asked. “I’ll walk with you.”
“That’s fine. Really.” The only way to stop him was to put a hand on his arm. “But Jacques needs a mandoline.”
“Going to play music, is he?” A few weeks before, I might have laughed at the joke. Now I knew how lame it was and Eve didn’t get it at all, seeing as how she didn’t know about the musical instrument or the kitchen gadget. Claude was the only one who chuckled before he asked, “Jacques, he needs it now?”
I checked my watch again and gauged the time remaining against how far we had to walk back to the amphitheater. “He needs it right now.”
Claude nodded his understanding and started looking. He looked on the table where the tea infusers were stacked, and on another table dotted with precarious piles of strawberry hullers, cherry pitters, and cheese graters. Failing there, he moved on to a third table, this one filled with staggering heaps of folding chopsticks (I know, I’d never heard of them, either), can openers, and oven mitts that could supposedly withstand temperatures of up to five hundred degrees.
“I know I’ve got a mandoline here somewhere,” Claude said along with something else, but by this time he was down on his hands and knees, searching through the boxes stowed under the tables and it was hard to hear him. “If you can just be patient…”
“I’m trying,” I said from between my gritted teeth, and because she understood, Eve gave me a pat on the back.
When Claude popped back up from the nether reaches of his stock supply, I breathed a sigh of relief-until I noticed he was empty-handed.
“Might be in the RV,” he said, poking a thumb over his shoulder. “Give me a minute, will you? I’ll just go inside for a quick look-see.”
He did, and when he did, I dropped my head into my hands.
“I wanted everything to go smoothly,” I grumbled. “You know, just to make this easier for Norman.”
“He’s nervous, but he shouldn’t be.” At my side, Eve didn’t look nearly as edgy as I felt. “ Tyler ’s got everything under control,” she said. “There are cops stationed at all the doors. There are cops backstage and in the sound booth of the amphitheater, and even in the audience. Nobody is going to get close enough to Norman to kidnap him. Nothing’s going to happen to him.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to his cooking, either, not if we don’t get that mandoline so he can slice the onions for the French onion soup.” I glanced over my shoulder toward the RV. There was no sign of Claude. “You don’t suppose the inside of that place looks anything like the outside here, do you?” The very thought was enough to offend my sense of order, and I shivered. “How’s he ever going to find that mandoline in time?” I scanned the booths nearest to us. If one of them had a mandoline, believe me, I would have bought it with my own hard-earned money and headed straight for the amphitheater with it. The way it was, there was a super-duper cleanup mop being sold at the booth to our right, and all-organic potato chips on our left. There wasn’t a mandoline in sight.
There was no sign of Claude, either, and because the precious minutes were ticking away, I stepped around the tables that bordered his space and headed up the stairs and into the RV, with Eve right behind me.
My intuition was right on: The inside of Claude’s RV looked a whole lot like the outside space where he did business. There were boxes piled on the floor and on the table behind the driver’s seat and the built-in bench behind it. There were boxes stacked three high to our left, all along the hallwaylike space that led to a room where I could see a couple of built-in bunk beds that were stacked with boxes. I could see open packages of gadgets scattered about, and charge receipts (both new and used). I could see plastic carry bags that said Brooking Cooking on the side, and ripped-open cartons that had at one time contained everything from measuring cups to salt shakers.
I could see everything and anything-but Claude.
“Claude?” Over my shoulder, I gave Eve an “I don’t know what’s going on” sort of look and, leading the way, I sidled toward the bedroom, my back pressed to the wall of boxes. “Claude, are you all right? Did you find the mandoline? We don’t have a lot of time and-” My gasp drowned out the rest of my words.
That’s because I found Claude lying facedown on the bedroom floor. There was a quickly growing pool of blood around the gash at the back of his head.
“Oh, my gosh!” Behind me, I felt, rather than saw, Eve pull back. She never did do well with blood and gore.
I can’t say I did, either, but I knew an emergency when I saw one. I dropped down on the floor beside Claude and felt for a pulse and when I didn’t find one, I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket. I guess I was so busy pressing the buttons on it and hoping for a cell signal that never materialized, I didn’t hear the door of the RV slam shut.
I didn’t realize Eve was gasping to find words to warn me, either. Not until I finally looked up, frustrated by my phone, and found her with one arm yanked behind her back and a knife to her throat.
I was on my feet in a flash, but I knew better than to make another move. Not when that blade was right up against Eve’s windpipe.
“Who… what?” I looked past Eve to the man who stood behind her. He was a little older than middle-aged, and bald. He looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t sort through my panic and fear to figure out why. I didn’t have to ask, either, but I was so taken aback and so terrified, I couldn’t keep my words to myself. “What on earth are you doing? What do you want?”
The man laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.
“I want what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “I want what’s mine. I thought I had to go to Norman to get it, but you ladies, you’re the answer to my prayers.”
“We don’t know anything.” That was Eve talking, and I had to give her credit, what with her being able to do that while there was a gleaming knife blade pressing into the delicate flesh of her throat. “We don’t know anything about Norman, or the money, or the bank robbery or-”
My grimace came too late for her to take back her words.
“Look…” I tried to sound calm. Big points for me since by this time, I was so afraid of what might happen to Eve, so worried about Claude, and so claustrophobic, I would have leaped out the window near the bunk beds-if there weren’t boxes piled high in front of it. “Look…” I tried again. “I think you’ve got us mixed up with someone else. Eve’s right. We really don’t know anything.”
“I don’t care if you do.” The man had a handkerchief in his pocket and when he pulled it out, a strong chemical odor filled the room. He pressed the cloth to Eve’s nose and mouth, and a second later her eyes closed and she sank to the floor. “Your turn.” He stepped over her and toward me, and because of the clutter, I had nowhere to go. Because of the knife, I couldn’t fight back.
He yanked the cell phone out of my hand and tossed it over his shoulder. I saw it land in an open packing box. Then I saw the handkerchief heading for my face.
“Finally, I’ve got what I need,” I heard the man say just as the handkerchief smothered my face. My head buzzed. My vision blurred. His voice came from a million miles away. “ Norman will listen now. He has to. You’re his friends. And now, you’re my hostages.”
I DREAMED I WAS WORKING AT TRÈS BONNE CUISINE, helping a man in a black and white golf shirt who was walking down the aisles, browsing. We stopped near the soup mixes and he adjusted his thick glasses on the bridge of his nose and smiled when he found what he was looking for on a nearby shelf.
“Finally,” he said, “I’ve got what I need,” and he handed me a bottle of chloroform.
Like an icy wave, the memory washed over me and I jerked awake and gasped for breath. My eyes flew open and in that one moment, I realized why the man who’d kidnapped us looked so familiar: He was a Très Bonne Cuisine customer I’d waited on just after Greg’s murder.
Which meant all those days ago, he was hot on Norman ’s trail. He’d been following me all along-and I’d led him straight to Norman in Atlantic City and, from there, straight here to the food show.
The enormity of the realization flashed through my bloodstream and for I don’t know how long, I lay on the built-in bench in what passed for the dining area of the RV, trying to make sense of it all. It might have been easier if my mouth wasn’t fuzzy and my head didn’t pound. It might have been a whole lot more comfortable if my wrists and my ankles weren’t duct-taped.
Carefully, I shifted my weight. Since my hands were behind my back, I wobbled a bit, but I managed to sit up so I could see to my right, into the driver’s area of the RV (it was empty) and to my left and back to the bedroom (from this angle, all I could see were boxes in the hallway and what looked to be the entire contents of the display we’d seen outside the RV; there were kitchen gadgets everywhere, as if our abductor had simply opened the door and shoveled them in). Eve was similarly bound and slumped on the bench across from me. I didn’t like the pallor of her skin.
“Eve!” I realized the moment I called out to her that I was alerting our kidnapper to the fact that I was awake and that it might have been smarter not to, but I was beyond caring. How could I when Eve looked so fragile and pale? “Eve, wake up. Answer me. Are you all right?”
When she shifted and groaned, her head rolled forward. I let go a sigh of relief.
“You’re OK?”
Her eyes fluttered open. “Annie? What… what happened?”
I didn’t bother to tell her that at this point, that wasn’t the question. The only question that mattered was, what were we going to do now?
From where I was sitting, I could see the big-as-a-picture-window windshield at the front of the RV. Beyond it, there were few lights left on in the exposition center and, as far as I could see, no people around, either.
“It must be late,” I said and by this time I’d pulled myself together enough to keep my voice down. “The show must be over. There’s nobody out in the hall.”
Eve had to look over her shoulder to see what I could see. When she did, tears filled her eyes. “What’s going to happen?” she asked. “What does he want? Is he going to hurt us?”
I thought about Claude and wondered if his body was still back in the bedroom where we’d last seen it. “If he wanted to hurt us, he would have done it by now,” I told her. She looked relieved to hear it so I guess in the great scheme of things, I could justify the little white lie. “I think he wants to use us to get at Norman, to get his money back.”
A single tear slipped down Eve’s cheek. Only she could make crying look attractive. If I let myself go (and believe me, I was close enough to panic that it just might happen), my nose would get red, my eyes would puff, and my skin would get blotchy. Eve cried like the heroine in a romantic blockbuster. She sniffed decorously, too. “What are we going to do, Annie?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t have a clue.
Maybe it was just as well. Before I could open my mouth, we heard the sounds of a key turning in the door. The next thing we knew, the man who must have been Matt O’Hara hoisted himself up into the RV.
“Well, lookee who’s awake.” He beamed a smile at us. It made my blood run cold. “Just in time, too. I was just about to make a call to your friend Norman.”
“We can’t help you.” My words scraped out of my parched mouth. “We don’t know where Norman is.”
He barely gave me a look. “Shut up. And don’t lie to me. It won’t do you any good. I know he was here doing a cooking demonstration today. I sat right there in the auditorium and watched it. Sorry you had to miss it, ladies. You would have loved the drama. Especially when a little kid in the audience popped a paper bag. I swear, Norman just about fainted, right there onstage. That’s how much of a scared little girl he is.”
I took offense at him making fun of Norman. I took more offense at him assuming that little girls are always scared. He might have noticed my scowl if he’d bothered to look.
Instead, O’Hara shifted his gaze to Eve, who wilted beneath it. “You said you knew about the bank robbery. What else do you two know?”
There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to fake our way through this so I simply told the truth. “We know that you and Howard Fish robbed a bank back in Nevada. He was holding the money for you, right? What, were you set to meet somewhere so you could split it? Is that when the cops caught up to you?”
“The cops caught up to that idiot, Howard.” O’Hara spat the words. “The rat bastard squealed on me, so eventually, yeah, they caught up to me, too.”
“But Howard was convicted, and you were cut loose. After that, he wouldn’t tell you where he stashed the money, would he?”
O’Hara slammed a fist against the nearest cardboard box. “Said he was doing the time, so he should take all the profits. I never could get him to tell me. Then Howard died, and I couldn’t find out anything about anything. Until a friend on the inside told me about some dope named Norman Applebaum. Said he’d been Howard’s cellmate for a while, that he’d been Howard’s friend.”
“And you put two and two together.” This made sense and I know it sounds crazy, but at a time like that, logic was exactly what I needed. My emotions were too brittle. They couldn’t be trusted. Logic was the only thing that was going to save us. “Why did it take you so long to find Norman?”
“Why do you care?” O’Hara reached into his pocket, and for a second I was afraid he’d pull out the chloroform-soaked hankie again. Lucky for us, he was looking for a piece of paper. He unfolded it, and, peering through the gathering gloom, I recognized the phone number of Très Bonne Cuisine.
“Been in prison,” he said. I guess that was the answer to my question. “Took me a while to find your friend Norman. He likes to change his name. But now that I have found him…” O’Hara waved the piece of paper in front of my eyes. “As soon as we get out of here and I can get a cell signal, you’re going to make a phone call for me.”
“You won’t get that far.”
I signaled Eve to keep quiet, but it was too late. She was upset and when Eve is upset…
There was nothing I could do but sit back and pray that she’d come to her senses.
“There are cops all over this place,” Eve said. “They’ll stop us before you can drive this thing out of here. They’ll find us.”
“They must be looking.” I said this to myself more than to anyone else. Again, I was sticking with rational thought, and this was as rational as thoughts came. Jim and Norman knew I’d been on my way to find Eve and go to Claude Brooking’s booth for a mandoline. When we didn’t return in time for the cooking demonstration, they must have been worried. They must have come looking for us.
“Of course they did.” O’Hara saw the wheels were turning inside my head. “Why do you think I had to make sure you two wouldn’t make a sound? They came looking, all right. But that Scottish guy, and that other one, the guy in the suit-he must be a cop, I can tell them a mile away-neither one of them knew that Brooking guy. I told them I was him and they bought right into it. Didn’t recognize me from any of my mug shots. Good thing I shaved my head since my last prison picture was taken, lost some weight, too. That cop, he never suspected a thing. I told them I sent you away with whatever it was you’d come for. And they headed off again, looking for you.” He glanced at his watch. “That was hours ago. Think they’re nice and worried by now?”
I pictured Jim and Tyler searching the building. I imagined how frantic Jim would be when he couldn’t find me.
I told myself not to go there or my panic would swallow me whole.
“So what’s your plan?”
I don’t think O’Hara expected me to be so objective about the whole thing. Which didn’t oblige him to answer. He kicked his way through the gadgets that littered the floor, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition.
“We’re going to head outside,” he said, carefully pulling the RV toward the garage-sized doors I saw across the now-empty exhibition floor. “And when we stop to check out, if one of you makes even so much as one little bit of a noise…” He took his knife out of his pocket and left it on the front seat next to him. “One of you makes a noise and I cut the other one. That’s a promise.”
We were quiet when he pulled out of the hall, and we were quiet while he drove along the D.C. streets looking for a place to pull over and make his phone call. He finally found it across Woodrow Wilson Plaza in the Federal Triangle Metro parking lot.
O’Hara turned off the RV, punched the numbers on his cell phone, and held it up to my ear. I wasn’t surprised when Jim answered the Très Bonne Cuisine phone.
“Jim?” My voice was tinged with tears and I knew that would get me nowhere. And it would worry Jim. I swallowed my emotions. “Jim, it’s Annie.”
“Annie, darlin’. Are you-”
“I’m fine, Jim. Eve is fine. We’re with Matt O’Hara.”
I heard Jim repeat this news to whoever was in the room with him, and I wasn’t surprised to hear Tyler asking for details.
I didn’t have a chance to provide any before O’Hara took the phone away.
“Now you see I’m not playing games,” he said, and I don’t know if Jim was on the phone, or if he was talking to Tyler. “You tell your friend Norman I want my money, and I want it now.”
Whoever he was talking to repeated the message, and replied, and O’Hara scowled. “Tomorrow morning’s too late.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s not easy to get your hands on that much cash. OK. Tomorrow. Six a.m. and not a moment later. Put the money in a brown paper sack and put the sack in the trash can nearest to the entrance of the Washington Monument. Oh, and if you’re not there…” I didn’t like the smile that pulled at the corners of O’Hara’s mouth. “If the money’s not there and if the cops are, your two lady friends here are going to be dead.”