Topped Chef: A Key West Food Critic Mystery Read online

  Him: I made a reservation at Michaels.

  Me: Been dying to try Michaels. Sounds great.

  Him: Steak from Chicago and Hayley from New Jersey, a perfect menu.

  He’d even added a little smiley face, which seemed utterly, nerve-wrackingly out of character. Once I was ready—too early—I paced in tiny circles around the living area, yelling out answers to Jeopardy! before the contestants could get to them.

  “You’re making me woozy,” said Miss Gloria from her seat in the galley. “Come sit with me and try a bite of dinner. I used to fix this when the boys were little but I couldn’t remember all the ingredients. I’d love a professional opinion.” She patted the chair beside her, her smile a little quivery.

  So I grabbed a fork and a small saucer from the dish drainer, plopped down in the seat at the kitchen table not occupied by sweet old ladies and pushy cats, and nibbled at her tuna casserole.

  “What do you think?” she asked, grinning hopefully. Either Miss Gloria was terribly out of practice or had never really enjoyed cooking. I was betting on both, but especially the latter. Mayonnaise, pasta, and dark tuna in oil, all mixed together and heated through—something you might find on a college student’s hot plate. Both cats were standing sentinel on the couch, drawn, I was sure, by the fishy odor.

  “Delicious,” I said, shuttering my eyes closed for dramatic effect. “It reminds me a bit of one of the chefs’ dishes we chose this morning. Let’s see…cheddar cheese, a hint of pickle relish, overtones of mayonnaise, a dash of dehydrated onion flakes?”

  She giggled and ladled another spoonful onto my dish. “You forgot the Worcestershire sauce. That’s my secret ingredient.” She rested her elbow on the table and put her chin in her palm. Her eyes twinkled, set off by the rhinestones on her pink sweatshirt. “Do you think Nathan Bransford is the one?”

  I shivered and let my fork clatter to the table, then crossed my arms in a big X to ward off that thought. “I have no idea—I’m really bad at this. I thought Chad Lutz was my destiny and you know how that worked out.”

  Chad and I had lasted five short weeks after I moved to Key West to live with him last fall. But to be painfully frank, I barely knew the guy when I followed him the length of the eastern seaboard—as my mother and my closest friends were fond of pointing out. In the end, I came out way on top, landing in the paradise of Key West, which might never have occurred to me otherwise. I thanked Miss Gloria again for the bite of casserole, excused myself, and went to brush my teeth for the third time this evening and grab my purse.

  When we scheduled this dinner date, the detective—Nate, I had to remember to call him—had insisted on picking me up. He was old-fashioned that way, he’d said. Which made me a little more nervous because I like to be able to bolt if necessary. Plus, the idea of arriving at a restaurant in a police car made my stomach turn—and I’d never seen him drive anything else. At ten minutes to seven my phone buzzed with a call from Nate. My mind, programmed to expect disaster lately, assumed he was canceling.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I need to spin by the harbor and check something out. Do you mind meeting me at the restaurant? I may be a couple minutes late.”

  “No problem,” I assured him, my blood pressure dropping a few points from the sheer relief of taking my own ride—and a little giddiness at knowing we were still on. I grabbed my coat, kissed Miss Gloria on the cheek, and kissed the gray M marked on Evinrude’s forehead, and started down the dock toward my scooter.

  Minutes later, I stood alone at the host’s podium outside Michaels on Margaret Street, nervous as a polydactyl cat in a stampede of tipsy tourists. I would not have guessed that this unobtrusive gateway on a quiet residential street opened up into the charming courtyard of one of the best restaurants in town.

  “Reservation for two, Bransford,” I said smiling weakly at the host. “The other half of the party is running a little late.”

  “May I seat you outside?” asked the host, smoothing his tie down the length of his crisp, white shirt.

  “Perfect,” I said, although wondering whether Nate might rather be indoors. January was “winter” in Key West, like everywhere else in the northern hemisphere, and the locals took the season seriously. But the overhead heaters would warm the nip in the night air, and the splashing of the big fountain at the back of the courtyard might take a tiny edge off my nerves. I could see myself hyperventilating if we ended up trapped at a table in the back of the small indoor space.

  I wasn’t usually quite this nervous about dinner with a new man but Nate and I had suffered a series of ruinous interactions over the past few months, none of which could be properly called a first date. The evening on which my mother had tagged along might have been the worst outing in all of romantic history. Hard not to keep running over the script like a tongue on a rotten tooth. So I much preferred to back up and start fresh. On the other hand, that put all the first date pressure squarely on this evening.

  The host seated me and assured me the waiter would be around shortly to take my order. I pulled out my phone. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t consider this dinner as review material for my food-critic job—it would be too easy to overlook important social cues if I was busy whittling clever sentences in my head about the food. On the other hand, eating out was a busman’s holiday. How could I ignore it?

  I snapped pictures of the fountain and the bar, which was buzzing with customers eating small plates of food and dipping vegetables and bread cubes into vats of fondue, and then jotted some notes on the décor. The rustic wooden floors, the living bamboo wall separating the restaurant from the property next door, the white wooden ceilings with fans, the strings of tiny lights following the line of the eaves, the clusters of tropical greenery with uplighting, all made it feel cozy and romantic. My phone buzzed with an incoming text message from Nate’s phone number.

  Fifteen minutes. Sorry. Order drink and appetizer. Be there asap.

  Oh geez. Now I had the pressure of ordering for him piled on to the pressure of waiting for the date to begin. When the waiter stopped by, I selected “our salad” thick with shrimp, eggs, provolone, pepperoncinis, and salami for Nate because it sounded manly and substantial, and grilled asparagus with ham, roasted peppers, and Boursin cheese for me. And finally, I added a Bloody Mary for my jangling nerves.

  I’d finished the asparagus (just a hair too much ham for my taste) and the drink, including licking the circle of celery salt off the rim, and begun nibbling on his salad—delicious, when he texted me again.

  Twenty minutes. Order me a steak, medium-rare, and baked potato?

  Which seemed odd. How long would it take to cook a steak? Why didn’t he order when he got here? Maybe he was having regrets about the entire evening. I clicked back over to the messages I’d been studying all day. He hadn’t sounded regretful—more like he was really looking forward to the date. Maybe he imagined we’d gobble the dinner and then go back to my place and…forget it. With no privacy to mention, there would be no romance on Miss Gloria’s houseboat. Besides, I was nowhere near ready to take that step. I waved the waiter over, explained that my date was running even later than predicted, and ordered the strip steak for Nate, and the snapper meunière for me.

  “We have a very popular chocolate lava cake for dessert,” the waiter said. “It comes with vanilla ice cream. We like to warn folks ahead because we prepare them individually and they take about twenty minutes to bake. Shall I add that to your order?”

  “Definitely,” I said, mouth watering at the prospect. Pointing my internal compass toward that dense, warm chocolate would make me feel better, no matter what else happened—or didn’t happen—tonight. “And could you bring along a glass of the house red wine and one of the white?” Nate hadn’t said anything about alcohol and maybe he couldn’t drink while on the job, but the longer I waited, the more nervous I felt. And I hated to drink alone.

  After the waiter had cleared my appetizer plate and delivered the wine, I tapped the
web address of the Key West Citizen into my phone to see if there might be breaking news in the crime report—something that would require the services of the top detective on the KW police force. But the latest entry—several hours earlier—was a story about a homeless man who’d been evicted from an Old Town bar for falling asleep and refusing to leave. I hoped it wasn’t Turtle. In any case, that was a bread-and-butter no-brainer for Key West cops: Nate would never have been siphoned away from dinner to handle that.

  Twenty minutes came and went and so did the waiter with our main courses. “Shall I keep the gentleman’s dinner in the kitchen so it doesn’t get cold?”

  I glanced around to see if the other diners were watching, probably speculating that I’d been dumped. Not only dumped, but left with a big fat check. “He said he’d be here any minute,” I told the waiter, who nodded with raised eyebrows, but then backed away.

  Minutes passed, three then four. I hated to let my fish congeal in its rich artichoke sauce. So even though I felt awkward and foolish about eating solo in the flickering candlelight, only the untouched steak sitting at the place across from me, I dug in. The fish was buttery and delicious. And the wine slid down my throat like a sudden rain through a dry riverbed, dampening my embarrassment at dining alone at a table clearly set for two.

  Finally, my phone rang. Private caller. “Hello?”

  “It’s Detective Bransford. Nathan. Nate. I’m not going to make it,” he said brusquely. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Rats! I’m sorry, too.” The combination of feeling slightly tipsy and quite relieved made me babble. “The food has been wonderful so far. Can I wrap your steak and bring it to you?”

  “Not necessary,” he said. “I won’t have time to eat it. I’ll call the front desk and give them my credit card number.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What’s wrong?” I couldn’t help adding, my curiosity kicking up a notch. In the distance, outside the restaurant, I could hear the shriek of sirens heading down Southard Street. Toward him?

  “Looks like a silly prank gone bad,” he growled. “Or if we’re really unlucky, a suicide.”

  He never would have told me this much if he hadn’t just stood me up at one of the nicest restaurants in town. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At the old harbor,” he said. “Hang on another minute.”

  Then I heard another man’s voice rumbling a question and Bransford’s tense bark in return. “Find the owner of the boat. Now! And for god’s sake, take a few pictures and then get the damn body down before the damn press gets here.”

  And then he came back on the line to me: “Sorry. I don’t know when we’ll get things wrapped up. Probably late. We’ve got a lousy situation. Why don’t you finish eating and go ahead home and I’ll phone you later if it’s not too late.”

  “Fine,” I said, at the same time I was signaling to the waiter for the check.

  If there was a strange body on a vessel down at the harbor and Nate was in charge of the investigation, I wanted to find out what happened. Call me curious or just plain nosy, but I wasn’t going to sit here alone and continue forking down the calories—though leaving the chocolate lava cake broke my heart. I hung up, and asked the waiter: “Could you box up the steak and the dessert and bring the bill? I’m kind of in a hurry.”

  * * *

  I bungeed the aromatic package to the back of my bike and headed the few blocks over to the harbor. A quartet of blue lights flashed against the starlit sky, and beams of light probed the rigging of the moored boats. The water carried garbled gruff voices to the street corner where I’d stopped. The cops had gathered on one of the docks midharbor, and appeared to be peering through the forest of rigging to the darkness at the far end, where the mast of one of the smaller sailboats listed to the right. Squinting in the dim light, I was able to make out a bulky weight three-quarters of the way up the mast, which looked unlike any of the other boats’ equipment.

  Swallowing hard, not wanting to think too much about that lump, I parked my bike and circled around to the finger that led to the sailboat’s dock, stopping at the chain with its rusty KEEP OUT sign hanging from the links. I peered at the weight again. Could it be a radar machine? An extra sail? A puff of wind gusted and the boat listed to a forty-five-degree angle, the dark lump swinging out toward the water, the mast groaning under the load.

  I stepped over the chain and moved closer. To my absolute horror, the heavy weight took the definite shape of a human figure. Dangling from the mast. White sneakered feet were illuminated by the beam of a flashlight. The wind picked up, pushing the person back and forth on the groaning rope like an oversized metronome. Two officers struggled to lower the figure to land.

  I started up the dock, edging a few steps nearer.

  “Go easy,” said one voice to the other. “He hits the deck and we destroy evidence and our necks are on the block.”

  As the figure lurched and bounced down the mast toward the deck, a bright searchlight was switched on, lighting up the bizarre details: first the curly platinum-blond hair that had to be a wig and the red lipstick. Then the discolored features, the protruding tongue, the bulging eyes. And finally, a black cloak. The body landed on the deck with a resounding thud.

  “Turtle?” The word came out before I could stop it and echoed over the water. I clapped my hand to my mouth.

  “What are you doing here?” Bransford’s voice boomed behind me, causing my pulse to gallop and my guilt-o-meter to surge.

  I turned, met his angry eyes, and shrugged. “I was on my way back to houseboat row. I wanted to help. I brought your dinner over. I know I can’t work worth a darn on an empty stomach, so I thought maybe you—”

  “Go home,” he said, and pushed past me toward the knot of cops and the body.

  5

  I would think a chef would look at me and kind of go, “Pfft, move on with your little fried self,” he said.

  —Katy Vine

  When I arrived at our houseboat, Miss Gloria was watching a rerun of a cooking show on the Food Network while talking on the phone with my mother. They’d become fast friends after my mom stayed with us for a few days earlier this month. On the TV screen across the room, Emeril was hacking a chicken to pieces and then dredging the pieces in egg and flour.

  “You’re home early,” said Miss Gloria, her face lighting up with a huge smile. Then the smile faded away. “Maybe home early from a big date isn’t good news, though, is it?”

  Mom’s voice floated through the receiver. “How was her dinner with Nate?”

  “I’ll put you on speakerphone, so you can hear it firsthand,” said Miss Gloria, even as I tried to wave her off.

  I dropped the sack of leftovers on the coffee table and flopped onto the couch. Evinrude and Sparky hopped up to investigate the scent of grilled meat. After shooing the cats away, I gave my mother and Miss Gloria the short version of how I’d ended up eating alone, then a whitewashed version of seeing the hanged man down by the harbor.

  “I’m scared to death it was Turtle, the homeless guy I bought coffee for this morning.”

  “Why would you think that?” Mom asked.

  I explained about his cloak and Turtle’s cape, but then had to agree with Miss Gloria’s assessment—a hundred folks on this island might own a garment like that. Our island is rife with costume parties and pirate events and just plain kooky people. Besides, why in the world would a homeless man be wearing a wig and lipstick? Not that that helped me feel better in the grand scheme of things—a man was still horribly dead.

  “So you never even saw Nate?” asked Mom.

  “I ran into him at the dock,” I said, and then admitted that he and I seemed to fit together like nails on a chalkboard.

  “Even considering that he was called in to deal with an awful crime,” I said, “he was pretty harsh when I tried to drop off the food.”

  “What were you wearing?” she asked.

  “Mom! What does that have to do with anything?”
r />   “I’m sorry, darling,” said my mother. “You’re completely right. Your Nate has such a stressful job. He probably doesn’t always handle it as well as he might.” She cleared her throat. “I liked him quite a bit when I met him. But maybe he really isn’t ready to date again.”

  “Was it Maya Angelou who said ‘when people show you who they are, believe them’?” asked Miss Gloria. Which seemed like deep wisdom from a tiny old lady in a sparkly pastel sweatsuit.

  “On another subject,” said my mother, “how are the plans for Connie’s wedding coming?” Connie was my college roommate. She’d grown close to my mother after hers died of cancer during our freshman year.

  “She’s so busy,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything except they want it to be on the beach.”

  “But it’s only two months away,” said Mom. “What’s she going to wear? Are there any attendants other than you? What are you going to wear? And what about the reception? What will they serve?”

  I felt a rising surge of panic. If Connie was too overwhelmed to plan the occasion, the maid of honor should step up. Me. “I’ll get on it,” I said. “And keep you posted.”

  * * *

  I had to drag myself out of bed the next morning. The caffeine in the chocolate lava cake that Miss Gloria and I had bolted down after hanging up with my mother, along with my alternating feelings of disappointment and humiliation over the interaction with Nate had kept me awake for hours. And worst of all, the sound of that body hitting the deck with a sickening thunk. Had it been Turtle?

  One quick look in the mirror confirmed the crepey bags under my eyes: I had no business being on television. Besides that, I was wicked nervous about appearing on camera again. It would have been kinder for the show’s theoretical audience—and me—if I went back to bed. Instead I showered, troweled on some miracle concealer that my mom had left behind on her recent visit, and spent a little extra time blow-drying my curls into submission. Then I donned the yellow Key Zest shirt again, layering it over a pair of snug black jeans. Finally, I swallowed a cup of coffee, laced up my favorite black sequined sneakers and headed downtown to the Studios of Key West.