Death is Semisweet (16 page)

“Why Café Heaven?” Stephanie asked.

“Would you rather come down to police headquarters? Or have all of us come to Heaven’s place of business?” Bonnie asked.

“Café Heaven sounds good,” Stephanie said.

Heaven was thrilled, of course. But she knew Bonnie would give her a lecture of some kind. She was right.

“Café Heaven is convenient for this meeting because it will not be open at ten in the morning and the chef/owner will be busy in the kitchen and not sticking her nose in my business. Got it?” Bonnie barked, looking hard at Heaven. “Thanks for a lovely evening,” she said as she walked out.

W
hen you got them all together there were lots of Fosters. Uncle David. Stephanie and her mom and dad. Cousin Janie and her mom and dad, the Andersons. Junior and his wife, though none of their daughters were in attendance because they weren’t coming home for the holidays this year. Claude was by himself. His wife hadn’t been out of bed since he was arrested, having always been prone to sick headaches. No one mentioned Claude’s son but Heaven remembered hearing that he didn’t live in Kansas City. Stephanie’s grandmother was there, looking worried but also obviously happy to see her children together again.

Heaven was peeking out at this gathering in the dining room from the kitchen side of the pass-through window. She’d set out two carafes of coffee, one with caffeine, one without. She’d also gone to Lamar’s doughnuts
on her way in to work and picked up several dozen of the local favorite, left a dozen glazed in the kitchen for the crew, and put the rest out for the family.

“Things will go so much better if everyone gets revved up on coffee and sugar,” Bonnie said when she saw the spread. Bonnie had arrived early and reminded Heaven that she didn’t want to see her snooping around.

“I know you’ll be using your waitress ears to try to hear, but I don’t want to see even the top of your red head, do you understand?” Bonnie said sternly.

Heaven didn’t really know what Bonnie was thinking would happen at this family reunion. “I’ll stay out of the way, but I don’t get it. What do you hope to gain by this?”

“I’m losing control. I never had control but every day some new piece of crap happens and it all revolves around this family, a family that doesn’t even speak to each other and hasn’t for years. I wanted to see if they would meet together and then I want them to understand that even though I arrested Claude for the murder of Oliver Bodden, and I think he’s the perp, there is still something dangerous going on. Now leave me alone,” Bonnie’d ordered and she’d paced around the dining room until the Fosters straggled in. By ten everyone was present and accounted for, punctuality being a desirable Kansas City trait.

“Don’t think this is going to be like one of those meetings at the end of
Murder She Wrote
, where Jessica has it all figured out,” Bonnie said to the group. “This is more of a warning than anything.”

“Warning of what?” Claude said suspiciously.

“I want you all to be on the alert. I think someone is seriously trying to destroy your family,” she said with as
much gravity as she could muster. “And I can’t seem to protect you.”

Claude stood up, his thin body quivering with rage. “Protect us? You’ve accused and arrested me for murder. You’re the one who’s ruining our family business. You’re destroying us.”

Brother David snorted. “She can’t ruin my family business because I don’t have a family business. My brothers stole my share of it away from me a long time ago.”

With that, the grandmother started to cry, Stephanie’s mom went down to the end of the table to comfort her and everyone started to yell at everyone else. Bonnie let it go for a couple of minutes, then she whistled her ballpark whistle and yelled, “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs. “This is a real problem, folks. I want you all to be aware of what’s happened here. First, someone who knew their way around a rifle shot down the Foster’s anniversary blimp and killed the pilot.”

As some of the crowd started to speak, Bonnie whistled again. “I said shut up. Now what I’ve found out about the pilot leads me to believe he was collateral damage, that his death wasn’t the primary goal of that attack, that if his death was planned, it was planned in relation to him being the pilot of the airship you, the part of the Foster family that owns the chocolate company,” she said, staring hard at Uncle David as if daring him to pipe up again, then turning back toward Junior, “hired to celebrate your company’s anniversary. From what I’ve learned about your family rift, there are probably people in this very room who would have been happy to chip in on some kind of unhappy accident for that airship, if not for the death of an innocent man. If any of you have anything to tell me in that regard, know that I understand how these things turn bad. On paper,
maybe someone in this room thought no one could get hurt, that all it would do was cause trouble for the brothers who I’m sure some of you think deserve trouble. Then something went wrong and the pilot was killed. If this is the case, please call me and I’ll go with you to the prosecutor’s office, explain some of the back history. I will help you if you come to me.”

Heaven peeked out and saw Stephanie’s mother return to her seat, lean over to her husband and pat his hand. Stephanie had kept her eyes lowered through most of Bonnie’s speech. Now she was looking down the table at her grandmother. Heaven could see tears in both of their eyes.

Heaven wondered about that hand pat. Surely Stephanie’s father hadn’t gone berserk and shot down that airship. No, it couldn’t be him, the kindly general practitioner. Stephanie said her mother didn’t even allow guns in the house. Heaven went over and checked some squash she was baking in the oven. But maybe he had a gun at the office. Maybe he had been harboring resentment all these years. Heaven rolled her neck around, trying to rid her head of paranoid thinking. No way. It was just a hand pat. She went back over to the window.

The whole group looked so unhappy and here they were together for the first time in years. What a waste. Business and families could be such a terrible combination.

Bonnie continued. “I wish I thought the whole airship mess was just a vindictive prank gone wrong. And we won’t talk about the death of Oliver Bodden because it is an active investigation involving one of you. With the things that happened yesterday, I’m afraid we have a nut on our hands who is angry at the whole Foster family, and that worries me. If we eliminate the death of Oliver
Bodden from the equation, we still have quite enough coincidences to make me nervous.”

“What happened yesterday?” Stephanie’s grandmother asked.

Bonnie held up her hand like a sidewalk crossing guard to indicate she was going to answer and everyone else should be quiet. “Chocolate was sabotaged at both the Chocolate Queen and the Foster’s factory. Now that Stephanie’s business has also had a problem, I have strong gut feelings that there is a person out there who is very angry at the Foster family, or one of you who is very angry at the rest of you.”

A clamor of noise broke loose again. Stephanie stood up. “But what about the information that came out last night? What if all of this has something to do with child slave labor at the cacao plantations in Africa? What if it doesn’t have anything to do with the Fosters, except as we are chocolate candymakers?”

You could tell by the looks on their faces that the child slavery issue wasn’t something Junior and Claude were up on. They looked horrified, as if they needed another negative thing concerning their business right now. Heaven, peeking out the pass-through window, couldn’t imagine what it would be like to find out that a product that your whole business was based on used slave labor.

She had been thinking about it from her restaurant’s perspective overnight. If chocolate wasn’t such a popular product, she might eliminate it from her menus. But as it was, even she, a liberal by anyone’s definition of the term, couldn’t imagine doing that. Stephanie, and certainly the brothers, didn’t have a choice. It was their entire business.

Bonnie was trying to quiet everyone down again.

“Hold on, hold on. I would imagine that if a group were going to protest your businesses because of child labor practices in the chocolate industry, they would protest publicly and let people know why they were upset, especially because this isn’t something that’s widely talked about in the United States. It wouldn’t bring any awareness of the problems in Africa if they nailed an airship in Kansas City and didn’t come out and say why they did it, or if they killed Oliver Bodden, for that matter. I think this is someone who is watching silently right here in Kansas City and is enjoying every problem he or she has created for all of you. That’s why I want to put you all on notice. You must be careful. You must be aware of what’s going on around you. If even the slightest thing seems out of place, I want you to call me right away. I’m passing out my card with my cell phone and my home phone on it as well as my office. Now why don’t you all just sit here together for a while and I’ll get us some more coffee,” Bonnie said, not asking but telling. She headed for the kitchen doors.

Heaven didn’t even attempt to act like she hadn’t been listening. She nodded at Bonnie as she came through the doors. “Good job.”

“Then why don’t I feel better?” Bonnie asked, holding up the coffee pot expectantly.

Heaven pointed back in the dining room. “It’s over in the back corner. I made you another pot.”

As Bonnie turned to go, Heaven thought of something. She put her hand on the detective’s arm to get her attention. “Ask them to think back. If there was anyone they’ve recently fired or who had quit under negative circumstances, maybe they could put together a list of names. It could be a disgruntled employee.”

Bonnie grinned. “Yes sir, Miss Heaven. I be askin’
them,” she said as she pushed open the dining room door.

M
arie Whitmer, secretary to Claude and Harold Foster, was nervous. She’d heard from Junior and he hadn’t been very forthcoming, just said they had a meeting at ten and they would be in after that.

She speculated the meeting had been with Claude’s lawyers. Everyone in the company was upset. They all came to her for information or for reassurance that everything would be straightened out and no one would lose their jobs. She, normally so on top of things, was at a loss as to what to tell them. And it was Christmas, a time when everyone wanted to spend money, enjoy their families. Instead, they were all scared to death they’d be out on the street, her included.

The phone rang and she grabbed it quickly, hoping it was the brothers. “Executive offices,” she said by way of hello.

It wasn’t the brothers. In fact, it wasn’t anyone she wanted to talk to. “Oh, it’s you. I told you not to call for a few days, that I’d call you,” she said tersely.

The expression on her face was fearful. She always carried a cloth hankie and now she twisted it around her hand.

I
t was weird. Heaven had felt happy all day, not the usual little fleeting jolts of happiness that only last a few minutes.

Since it was Christmas Eve and also Sunday, the restaurant was closed and wouldn’t open again until Tuesday evening. She and Iris had cooked and carried on together at home, getting ready for an onslaught of people for their annual Christmas Eve party.

Stuart had departed on Saturday evening for the West Coast. Hank had negotiated to have Sunday evening off and in return he would go in to work tomorrow afternoon for another doctor who had a family. Both of these things, Stuart gone and Hank home, were part of the reason that Heaven was so upbeat. Hank had acted as the fix-it man around the house, changing lightbulbs and organizing the bar. He let Heaven and Iris have their space but he always seemed to know when they needed his help, to reach a baking pan on the top shelf or to taste test the guacamole.

People had started arriving about an hour ago, at seven, and the room was getting full.

Almost every employee of Café Heaven was here, except for a few who had gone out of town.

There were lots of Hank’s colleagues from the hospital, and some of his Vietnamese friends from the neighborhood.

Earlier in the day, Iris had called some of her high-school friends who still lived in Kansas City and several had shown up.

Bonnie and her whole family had just arrived. Stephanie had shown up early, right after her shop closed at five, saying if she went home first and came at the appropriate time she’d fall asleep and sleep through Christmas. She’d brought leftovers from the shop with her and put out a huge tray of various chocolate items. Stephanie had asked earlier in the day if her uncle David could come to the party and he and Dale Traver were talking in a corner. Heaven was glad to be able to keep an eye on David.