One Foot In The Gravy Read online

  “Uh-huh. And so what?”

  “I just wouldn’t have expected Lola to invite him,” I said, lowering my voice to a hush. “I’m not saying she’s a snob. But most of her other guests are kind of upper-crusty.”

  “And what makes you think he ain’t?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it, at a loss for words. Hoppy was a well-known penny squeezer. He would give away chocolates if it helped him socially, but that was it. He wouldn’t part with an extra shopping bag if a customer begged and pleaded for one, it didn’t matter that you were walking around his store with chocolates spilling from your arms and containers of dipped strawberries balanced on your head. I shouldn’t have needed a reminder that the world was full of rich, cheap jerks. As a former forensic accountant on Wall Street, I’d specialized in following the money trail of financial hotshots who were cooking their books on the way to their second or third or fourth billion.

  I looked at Thom. “Okay,” I said. “What’s Hoppy’s story?”

  “Hapford’s, you mean. His full name’s Hapford Hopewell Jr. The inventor of Hopewell’s chocolate patties.”

  The ice cream treat that looked like frozen cow patties. They were a local sensation, especially among teens . . . or anybody with a juvenile sense of humor. “Wow, no sh—”

  “Mind your cussin’ tongue.” Thom speared me with a reproachful glance, forget that I’d been speaking in a whisper.

  “Sugar,” I said. “Wow, no sugar!”

  Thom went on. “Downtown rents and overheads bein’ what they are, ain’t no way Hoppy could make ends meet without sellin’ a lot of them.”

  “I thought there was a family fortune—”

  “I heard that too.” Thom nodded, squaring her jaw. “That would explain how come he thinks he can treat customers the way he does. It’s the same to him if he gets one or a hundred walking through the door every day.”

  “Sounds like you’ve had some run-ins?”

  “I take my nieces in there for chocolate lollies, only place you can get ’em. He looks at us like we only carried Canadian money. He’s an a-hole, to put it bluntly.”

  I have no patience for someone who’s entitled and arrogant, but I let it stand. Who knows what goes on inside anyone’s skull, even your own? Meanwhile, I wasn’t too sure that I could go on standing much longer. My toes had cramped up like I’d just run the River Kwai Half-Marathon.

  Thom noticed me shifting uncomfortably. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You got quiet all of a sudden.”

  “So?”

  “So quiet ain’t your regular M.O.”

  I shrugged. Couldn’t argue. “It’s my feet. They’re killing me.”

  She stared down at them. “Wah-wah. I could’ve told you wearin’ stripper shoes was a bad idea.”

  “Strip—Thom, these are dress pumps, not . . .”

  She chopped her hand through the air to cut me off again, wiggling her foot to showcase her square-toed orthopedic flats. “Stop with the whiny excuses. Whatever happened to people takin’ responsibility for themselves?”

  I raised my eyes from the black bricks she was passing off as shoes and looked her in the eye. “Same thing that happened to taking pride in their appearance.”

  “Oooh, snap. I should’ve expected that’d be your attitude,” she snorted. “Well, I worked hard my entire life. After thirty years in the restaurant business, I know what to put on my hush puppies. I’d rather be professional than just look the part.”

  I kept looking at her, caught by surprise. She seemed really aggravated and upset, as opposed to being just her usual intentional pain in the neck. “Thom, what’s wrong?”

  “Forget it,” she said. “I just don’t appreciate people gettin’ all judgmental about my choices or my footwear.”

  “Hang on . . . that’s unfair,” I said. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  “You want to stick a label on me so you can feel superior, go right ahead and knock yourself out.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  Since there probably isn’t much chance our squabble would have devolved into an out-and-out catfight, I won’t exaggerate and claim we were saved by the bell. But we were interrupted by a glassy little tinkle from the parlor.

  I turned toward the sound and saw Lolo Baker holding a glass dinner bell on the other side of the entryway. A slender, silver-haired woman in charcoal trousers and a paler-than-pale pink silk blouse, the mystery bash’s hostess sported a pearl necklace with an appropriately Sherlock Holmesish magnifying glass pendant, and stood ringing the bell amid a lively crowd of guests.

  “Excuse me, friends!” She beamed a smile. When she didn’t immediately get everyone’s attention, the eyes narrowed thin as threats and the smile became a shrill piccolo trumpet. “Your attention please!” That did it. “Dinner will be served in ten minutes . . . and then our criminal mischief begins!”

  Delighted murmurs swarmed around Lolo as Thom returned her attention to the goulash. She gave it a stir with her spoon, closed the lid, checked the burning Sterno underneath it, then sidled over to the tray of mushroom-and-carrot-stuffed flank steak.

  A moment later, she cocked her head at an angle, scrunched up her face like a puzzled bulldog, and began looking around the buffet table for something.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “The gravy terrine,” she said. “I don’t see it anyplace.”

  I didn’t either. But I did remember Luke carrying the gravy from our borrowed CreepLeeches van in its insulated container and promising he’d fill the terrine with it. “Hang on, I’ll be back in a jiff,” I said, and turned toward a hall off the dining room.

  “Where you going?”

  “The kitchen.” We’d pulled our vehicles up around one side of the house to its entrance and lugged everything inside. “Bet you the gravy’s still there.”

  “All ri-i-ighteeo!” The faintly familiar, drawling male voice, as well as the lip-smacking that went along with it, had come from right behind me. “I do so love to have nice, thick, piping-hot gravy with my steak.”

  Hoppy, I thought, facing him unhappily. It hadn’t been more than ninety seconds since Lolo’s tenminute dinner alert. But there he was with his strong, craggy face, eager eyes, thick lips, and the word “Hoppy” embroidered on the handkerchief tucked in his blazer. At least it wasn’t accompanied by a rabbit or a picture of a cowboy.

  “We’re just finishing our preparations,” I said, and struck my best professional pose. “Give us a few minutes and we’ll have everything ready for you . . . and the rest of the guests.”

  I’d hoped Hoppy might take those last words as an unsubtle hint to scram. Instead, he leaned forward to study the flank steak, then straightened with a cringe-worthy wink. “No tastes? For a good neighbor in the downtown business community?”

  I stared at him. Putting aside that he’d never offered me a professional discount at his shop, it was the first time Hoppy had let on that he knew me from a hole in the wall. “How about I give you the same kind you give me?” I said.

  Hoppy’s mouth twisted in thought. “Well, now, I can’t quite recall—”

  “Exactly,” I said, swinging into the hallway.

  The gourmet kitchen was at the end of the hall past a door to a storage or linen closet. I heard guitar-playing from inside as I rushed closer, and then saw Luke, dressed in a black Western shirt and matching skintight slacks, strumming away on his Gibson acoustic beyond the entrance.

  “You mind if I ask what you’re doing?” I said, stepping through.

  He looked at me from where he stood beside a countertop. “I’m workin’ out tonight’s theme song, Nash.”

  “Theme song?” I hesitated. “News flash! This is a catered party. It is not one of your nightclub gigs.”

  I wasn’t nearly old enough to be Luke’s mom. But his baby-blue eyes always brought out my maternal instincts. He smiled, all innocence. “I just figured that if we’re gonna do these parties as a regular thing
from now on, I could provide some special musical touches. Here, let me show you.”

  “Wait a sec, Luke. I need to find the—”

  Too late. He was already plucking out a chord. And singing along to it. “It’s a deadly deli mystery, killer could be you, victim could be me. Time will tell, we’ll have to see, what happens when the clock strikes three . . .”

  I held up a hand like a traffic cop. “Luke, please. Do me a favor and hit the pause button a sec.”

  He blinked a little woundedly and aborted the tune. “Sorry. I figured you’d love it.”

  “That day may come,” I said. “I mean, I think it’s really good.” Talk about feeling guilt-tripped. “But it’s way past three o’clock . . .”

  “Right. That’s how come I was smoothin’ the kinks in here. I need a different word to rhyme with ‘see.’”

  I cleared my throat. “Maybe we ought to discuss this later,” I said. “At the moment, I’m looking for the flank steak gravy. Have you seen it?”

  Luke nodded and swung the guitar strap from his shoulders. He stood the instrument up against the counter and went over to a large stainless-steel sauce pot on the range.

  “I was warming it while I composed,” he said. “Ought to be about ready.”

  Ready or not, it was going out to the dining room. I spotted our terrine on the central kitchen island, hurried over to get it, ladled it full, and carried it toward the entryway, declining Luke’s offer to take it himself. I was in too much of a hurry to fuss around.

  That was when my foot seriously cramped up again. It was like a sadistic gorilla had my toes in its fist.

  “Ouccchhhh!” I blurted out unbecomingly.

  “Nash, you all right . . . ?”

  “Yeah, don’t worry. Just put away your guitar and come help us in the dining room pronto.”

  I limped through the entry without waiting for his arm. At least six or seven minutes must’ve passed since Lolo had waved her dinner bell high in the air, leaving me with no time to waste.

  I’d barely gotten into the hallway when I heard a loud crash over my head. And I mean loud enough to halt me dead in my tracks.

  I looked up, the terrine in my hands. There was more crashing and pounding in what seemed to be the room directly above me. And whatever was causing it had made the ceiling visibly shake.

  “What’s that about?” Luke said. He’d raced to my side from the kitchen. “Sounds like some wild ol’ orangutan’s jumping around upstairs.”

  I glanced over at him. It was a banner day for primate similes, I guessed. I was tempted to ask if it might be the same one that had mashed my foot.

  I never got the chance to ask that or anything else. Before I could get out a word, or even react, we heard the loudest, most violent crash yet. And then the ceiling came down in front of us, breaking up into a dusty shower of plaster and lath and whatever else might’ve gone into two-hundred-year-old ceilings.

  “Sand?” he blurted out.

  Luke was right. That was the last thing pouring out. I later learned it was stuffed up there to put out fires, in case the flames burned through.

  I recoiled in shock and surprise, the terrine tumbling from my fingers, gravy spilling from it, splashing everywhere on the parquet floor.

  I suppose only an instant passed between the collapse event, as Deputy Chief Whitman would call it later on, and the grisly arrival of Hoppy Hopewell through the hole above us. At the time, I barely realized what was happening. I saw a big, wide, ridiculously limp body falling through the ragged hole, wondered in stunned confusion whether it actually might be an ape, and then recognized Hoppy as he reached the end of his downward plunge with a hard meaty thump, his arms and legs bent at impossible angles, a coating of white dust on his person, one foot in a spreading brown puddle of gravy.

  “Jeez,” Luke said in a horrified voice. “Who’s he?”

  I stood looking down at the dead, broken body, dimly aware that the hallway had suddenly gotten crammed with partygoers. Most of those who hadn’t fainted or withdrawn for fear of additional falling objects were screaming like—well, chimps.

  After a while, I managed to pry my attention from Hoppy and meet Luke’s horrified gaze with my own.

  “Guess it’s pretty safe to say he’s the victim,” I replied at last.

  Chapter 2

  According to the Constitution—and I haven’t read it since sixth-grade civics, so I may be off a word or two here—everyone’s supposed to get equal treatment under the law. But the truth is, rich people have good friends where it counts, so they get better treatment.

  No one left the party. I guess no one wanted to look guilty, or else they didn’t want to miss a second of whatever was going to happen. The police were called, a patrol car arrived in less than ten minutes, and Deputy Chief W. W. Whitman Jr. was there less than five minutes after that.

  But all that was still a few minutes away. From the moment “Hindenburg” Hoppy crashed to his demise—and one of the guests, Dr. Curt Festus, a podiatrist, did press two fingers to his neck to make sure he was deceased—everyone milled around like wind-up toys, moving in another direction with no purpose other than to avoid looking at the body. Most of them hovered near Lolo, who sat in a thick-cushioned antebellum side chair in the parlor.

  “I still think we should cover that boy up,” Thom said, wrinkling her nose.

  She had just returned to the kitchen where Luke and I had gone to—well, sit, since my feet were a flaming agony and Luke felt the need to cradle his guitar. My manager had continued serving, since dinner was obviously not going to be served, and came back with an empty tray. She checked the spinach puffs that were reheating in the oven.

  “You’re not s’posed to touch a crime scene,” Luke said.

  “Oh, and how do you know it’s a crime scene?” Thom asked. She didn’t bother with tongs, but pulled the little pastries out with her fingers. “Old house, fat guy—all kinds o’ possibilities there.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?” I asked.

  “No,” Thom said. “We can talk about how we’re not going to get paid for this.”

  “We got the deposit,” I reminded her. “That’ll cover most of our costs.”

  “‘Most,’” Thom huffed.

  “So stop serving stuff,” Luke said, playing split chords that made the night seem like this was a Greek tragedy.

  “Hey, I’m tryin’ to salvage some good will from all this,” Thom said. “Otherwise, we’re gonna be known as the providers who were providin’ when Hoppy Hopewell swan-dived through the roof. You want that juju?”

  “Were you talking to me?” I asked.

  It took a second for Thom to get it. She laughed and shook her head and disappeared with the full tray. Luke was still trying to figure out what was so funny when the squad car arrived, followed by Deputy Chief Whitman.

  Lolo lived in the upscale Belle Meade neighborhood, which had its own small police force. That was why Whitman was here. Personally, I was glad Detective Grant Daniels of the Nashville PD was not involved. This isn’t how I wanted my loverboy to see me, all aching feet and imploded catering dreams. I felt the disappointment was all over me like a big, popped Bazooka bubble.

  Whitman was a wee one, about five-six, bald with a brushy mustache and gray eyes. He was in his early forties, I guessed, and built like a little cannonball. He squatted carefully beside the body, looked this way and that, up and around, examined the edge of a fallen chunk of plaster, then got out of the way so the photographer could take his pictures.

  A cop came in and asked us to leave the kitchen. That was where the forensics team was going to spread out. I shut the oven as I left and told him to help himself to whatever hors d’oeuvres were left. At this point, good will was all the nosh was going to get me.

  Another cop helped us negotiate the “collapse event” and gravy. We were shown to the parlor where everyone was being gathered. Lolo was tucked in a corner, just to the side of a full-length portrait of he
r husband.

  “You were right there, weren’t you?” someone said beside me. I looked over. It was Mrs. Letty Kurtz, wife of Nashville parks commissioner Sperling Kurtz. The wispy, white-haired lady was a former member of the Cozy Foxes, Lolo’s luncheon group that gathered regularly at the deli to talk about the latest mysteries they’d read, watched, or listened to—as in old-time radio recordings. She lost interest in mysteries, she said, when they became too predictable.

  “One step slower and I would’ve been wearing him,” I said with inappropriate levity.

  Mrs. Kurtz didn’t seem to think so. “You might have been killed too,” she said with a true mystery lover’s awareness of the fun to be found in death. “Flattened flat.”

  I smiled and edged away politely. Pausing just long enough to take off my shoes, I weaved through the crowd to where Lolo was sitting. Her blue eyes were open and staring, her expression numb. The magnifying glass around her neck was catching the light of the small chandelier; if this were one of her beloved old mystery movies, I’d tap her on the shoulder and discover she’d hypnotized herself with it.

  It wasn’t and she hadn’t. People were standing a respectful distance from their hostess, and mine was the only hand near to her. She clutched it without breaking her stare.

  “Did you know him?” she asked.

  “Not well,” I told her. I could tell she was stressed. Lolo was originally from Georgia and whenever she was stressed or excited, her thick accent returned.

  “I noticed you talking to him as though you knew him,” she said.

  “I didn’t, no. Not really. He wanted to sample the steak.”

  Her eyes turned to me slowly, like little machines. “He did like to eat, but not chocolate—isn’t that just so strange?”

  “I’d say it was more ironic,” I replied, not sure it mattered what I said. Her eyes went back to staring. Lolo looked like she was in a daze.