The Grilling Season (31 page)

“Wait!” I yelled. Duke scowled, opened his eyes wide, and tugged off the metal ear muffs.

“I gotta go, lady. I’m going out to lunch in a few minutes and I need to finish this load. You want a landscaper, ask the people at the nursery to give you a referral someplace else. I don’t want to work for nobody who liked that woman. Got it? See ya later, okay?”

“Well, hold on,” I said, desperate now. “Just
talk to me. I don’t really want landscaping. I catered for Suz Craig and I’m having some problems—”

Duke smirked knowingly. “Ah, she stiffed you, too, huh?”

“What?” Then I understood. Suz Craig had refused to pay him for his work. I assumed a sad expression. “We had terrible problems,” I confided.

Duke looked at the sky and shook his blond head. “Honestly, people like that—”

“You heard she was killed.”

“Yah. No wonder.”

“So you thought she was hard to deal with, too. I’m just wondering if your story is similar to mine.”

“I’ll tell ya, I’d have to be half plastered to tell my story about that woman. But then you wouldn’t be able to shut me up.”

Inspiration struck. I asked, “How quickly can you finish your load?” He grunted something unintelligible. Undaunted, I went on. “How does tequila and chili sound? My treat.”

Duke grunted again, something that I decided to take as a yes.

I said, “Let’s do lunch.”

I
nside Aspen Meadow Barbecue, there was only one free table. I quickly nabbed it for Duke and me while scoping out the restaurant’s interior. All I needed now was someone I knew informing my new drinking buddy, Duke, that my husband was a cop. That could put a chilling effect on our lunchtime chat. But of the two dozen men ranging from scruffy to burly at the bar and tables, no one looked familiar.

Once Duke had seated himself and called greetings to a few of his pals, I slipped over to the bartender. “Two tequila doubles for my friend, but just give me water, because I’m driving us home. When I signal, bring us the bottles. Put water in mine. I can’t drink, but I don’t want him to feel as if he’s drinking alone.”

The bartender, who sported a stiff handlebar mustache, squinted at me appraisingly. “You trying to keep him away from the wheel, or you trying to get him into bed?”

I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket. “Just please do what I ask.”

He palmed the bill in a way that suggested
he’d been bribed before. “I’ll give you something besides water, to look more realistic. Tell you the truth, I’m glad somebody’s driving Duke home. Every Wednesday I gotta call somebody from the nursery to take him.”

Soon Duke and I were crying “Skol” and clinking our first glasses. I took a tentative sip of what turned out to be flat Mountain Dew.

“Whatcha drinking?” Duke wanted to know, his tone already mellowing from defensive to chummy.

“Different kind of tequila. Lime-flavored.” We chugged our second shots companionably and I sneaked a peek at my watch. Just past noon. I needed to be home to put together the doll club’s dinner no later than three. Subtracting time to get Duke back to his place, that gave us about two hours. I signaled to the bartender to bring us the bottles. The man was so inventive, I had no doubt he could provide a suitable container for my Mountain Dew.

Duke smacked his lips. “Ah. Well. So. What happened to you with that woman? You trying to get money out of the will? That’s what I’m doing. Lawyer says it’ll take at least a year ‘cuz a the criminal investigation. My plants’ll croak by then.” He shook his head unhappily.

“No! Actually, see, I have a different kind of problem. My ex-husband’s the one who’s been accused of killing her—”

Duke grinned broadly. “Oh, boy. Mind if I smoke? It’s not tobacco, it’s a clove cigarette. Heard of ‘em?”

“No, but go ahead.” In a minute the spicy
smoke rose in a cloud. I gagged but plunged onward. “I catered for Suz Craig, even though she was my ex-husband’s young, blond girlfriend. No grudges, you understand. But now her death has made a real mess for my family. You know, everybody blaming everybody. So my problem is that I keep looking back at what happened and thinking, How could I have prevented this?”

The bartender arrived and winked at me. He set a tequila bottle in front of Duke and a black ceramic decanter in the shape of an Aztec goddess in front of me. Cute. Then the waitress arrived and Duke informed her that we wanted two bowls of their hottest chili. I thought longingly of a crisp, cold arugula salad and how well it would go with iced coffee.

“What could you have done to
prevent
it?” Duke now repeated incredulously, shaking his big head. “Nothing. Not a damn thing. Some people are just that way. Bossy, impossible to please. Nothing you do is right for them. I always want to ask new clients, Are you an asshole? ‘Cuz if you are, I’d like to know up front. Save us both a lot of time. But, a’course, the nursery owner won’t let me.” He shook his head again.

“How was Suz Craig bossy to you? She seemed to like the landscape work you were doing when she showed it to me.”

Duke raised his bushy blond eyebrows, then tilted the tequila bottle toward his glass. “Oh, sure, she lied. You think everything’s fine, when all the time she’s getting ready to axe ya. But plain and simple? The woman was a bitch. Too damn smart. Never had to learn how to deal with regular people.
Tolerance, you know? She didn’t have none. Patience neither.” He quaffed another double shot. “For example. She trips on her in-grade steps made outa four-by-fours, the ones she ordered, and all of a sudden she wants new steps. Only she wants flagstone this time.”

“Flagstone,” I repeated. “Like the patios?”

“Yah. So we order more flagstones and put ‘em in the garage with the stuff we’ve hidden from the vandals. We build the steps. She doesn’t like the way they look. Fifteen thousand dollars and two weeks’ work time from my crew, and she says, Take out the flagstone, I want granite. Where’m I supposed to get granite steps? I say, Ya want an escalator? I know a guy.”

“Someone did fall down the steps and sprain his ankle,” I pointed out.

The tequila bottle was rapidly emptying. “Oh, I know, believe me. Big fat guy, shoulda watched where he was going. But it isn’t just them steps. She wants white tea roses alternating with pink musk mallow. This is a harsh, dry climate, I keep telling her. Ya want tea roses, ya need Florida. Even if ya put in rugosas, ya need irrigation. Fine, she says, just do it. So we put in a water tank and a drip system. But then she doesn’t want to
see
the water tank, right? So we have to wait to put in the rugosas and mallow until a picket fence goes up. And then she says, Ooh, ooh, I need stepping-stones around the picket fence. I say, How ‘bout marble? And she gets all huffy.”

Our chili arrived. One bite of the fiery concoction almost sent me running for the creek with my flame-spewing mouth wide open. Instead, I drank
deeply of the Mountain Dew, right out of the Aztec goddess decanter.

“Damn,” said Duke admiringly.

I ripped into several packages of saltines, dumped them over the chili, and ate cracker crumbs as I unabashedly wiped tears from my eyes. When I could finally clear my throat, I asked, “So what finally happened?”

He stopped shoveling chili into his mouth, chewed, and considered. “After all her complainin’ and moanin’ and us tryin’ to accommodate her? One day we show up as usual, though I’m thinkin’ I’m going to have to give my crew a year’s worth of free beer to keep ‘em on this job, and she comes out and says we’re fired. The fat guy’s fallen down the steps and she doesn’t want to get sued. I say, Fine, lady, we just need our tools, and she says. Make it snappy.”

He ate more chili. I filled his two double-shot glasses. He drank, then sighed. If the chili was scorching his throat, he gave no sign of it.

“Down by the picket fence there are the rugosas and musk mallow that we just planted. But doggone if she hasn’t put in a friggin’ half-dozen
marble
stepping-stones, next to the plants, around the fence. Did she do it herself or hire somebody else? I say, Hey lady, who did this? I was only kidding about the marble, I say, and she says for us to get out pronto and send her a bill.” His face turned morose. “So the nursery, you know, it takes them about a month to itemize the bill. She hasn’t even gotten our bill and she’s dead.” He ate more chili without a wince, then slugged down another double shot.

“What a mess,” I said comfortingly.

Duke shrugged. His eyes had taken on a wet, bleary look. “I asked the cops … I said, Could we at least have our plants back? Because I figure we earned them.” He drained another shot glass. “They said … You know what they said to me?”

“Probate.”

“Yah, they said I’d have to wait until probate was over. Until the investigation was done. I said the plants would be dead by then. We never put a pump in the irrigation system.” He scraped the last spoonful of chili from the bowl, poured another double shot of tequila, and downed it. How many had he had? I’d lost count at ten. “Some night when I’m trashed? I’m going to go back over there. Dig up those plants we put in. Nobody’ll miss them. Pee on her patios, too, while I’m at it. Matter of fact, I should go right now.” He regarded me sadly. “Wanna come?”

I said no thanks and paid the bill. By the time I’d deposited Duke at his apartment—he lived in the same complex as Frances—I’d come up with some more questions. But Duke was no help. He stumbled to his door and declared he was ready to dive into bed. At least he didn’t ask if I wanted to join him for that, too.

It wasn’t too surprising, I thought as I turned the van in the direction of home, that Suz had been so demanding about the landscaping. In the case of the catered lunch I’d done for her, I realized in retrospect, she’d been eager to make nice and accommodate the ACHMO people from headquarters. She’d wanted to seem calm and flexible in front of her own department heads. But landscaping was something
you had to live with and look at every day, sort of like your bathroom or bedroom. Still, why fire the nursery just because Chris had fallen down? Had Suz found somebody else to do the work for her? Somebody she liked better?

I pulled over on Main Street. It was only one-fifteen; Duke had gotten drunk a lot more quickly than I’d hoped. Cooking could come later. At that moment Macguire was right: I couldn’t quite face going through our door knowing my son wasn’t there. I called Tom on the cellular phone, fully expecting to get his machine.

“Schulz,” he answered gruffly.

“Hi. Remember Suz Craig’s tiff with the landscape people? Did she hire somebody else after that?”

“Well, hey, Miss G., how’s it going? Did you hear we found C-Four in that grill? We put two uniforms on guard at ReeAnn Collins’s room.” I said I knew, but that my urgent question at the moment was about Suz’s landscaping. Tom repeated, “The landscape people. Aspen Meadow Nursery?”

“Somebody new.”

“Not that we know of. I mean, nobody’s come forward saying they need to be paid except for Aspen Meadow Nursery.”

“No bills at all? No mail from, say, a construction company, an independent builder? Somebody in the marble business?”

He laughed. “What in the world are you up to?”

“Nothing. Just trying to fill the time between catered events.”

After I hung up, I sat in my van and brooded. Suz Craig had squabbled endlessly and bitterly with
Duke and his crew. Then she’d fired them, but only after Chris Corey had fallen. Why? Why hadn’t she fired them when the first problems erupted? And then Suz had put in some marble stepping-stones that Duke had suggested in jest? Why?

Oh, Lord. Why, indeed.

Why would Ms. “I don’t do, I delegate” Craig fire her landscapers and put in some stones herself? Because she’d needed to. I made a careful U-turn on Main Street and headed back to Aspen Meadow Nursery.

When I got there, I knew exactly what I wanted. Did they have a cap, a workshirt, work gloves, and a gardening apron emblazoned with the words
ASPEN MEADOW NURSERY
and their plant logo? The cashier gave me another one of her quizzical looks but said the owner had always told her that if customers wanted something, even if it was the funny-looking rock bordering the parking lot, sell it to them.

“The shirt might not be clean,” she said apologetically.

“The dirtier the better. And I’d like a shovel and a spade, too.”

I put it all on my credit card and raced home. In the kitchen Macguire stood back triumphantly from the mountain range of neatly chopped tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and steamed asparagus. Platters were heaped with sliced Camembert and grated Parmesan. I thanked him. Again I was aware of how much better he looked: healthy skin color, shiny-clean red hair, straight posture, a frame that looked as if it had gained at least five pounds in the last two days, bright eyes, and, best of all, a huge, happy
smile. No question about it, I was an herb-treatment convert.

“Great job,” I told him.

“Need any more help?” he asked energetically.

I surveyed all the work he had done. “Absolutely not. Thank you many times over.”

“Two more things,” he said secretively, then opened the walk-in. He retrieved a pan of grilled chicken. “I followed your recipe for marinating and grilling this chicken. Just a few minutes in the oven and it’ll be ready. I already tasted it. Juicy, succulent, tangy sauce, all that great stuff you always say. I’m a success! I can cook!”

“Macguire, I don’t know what to say—”

“Hold on, look at this.” He pulled out an enormous Bundt cake pan and held it out carefully for my inspection. Suspended sections of grapefruit glistened inside clear gelatin. “It’s from the
Fanny Farmer Cookbook
,” he said proudly. “Grapefruit molded salad. No mix. I made it myself.”

“You’re wonderful. And you really
can
cook.”

“Oh, and Arch called just when the Druckmans were getting ready to go to the museum. He was, like, whispering into the phone that the food’s not so good over at the Druckmans’ place. They should be back by now, so I’m taking him some of the burgers you made for the barbecue-that-isn’t-happening tonight. Is that okay?” When I nodded, he added, “Maybe Arch’ll come home sooner than you think.”

“Maybe.”

Together, we packed the food for the doll people’s dinner into my van. When Macguire had left with the bag of burgers, I made sure the security system was armed. Then I hightailed it to Suz Craig’s house. I had half an hour before I needed to set up at the LakeCenter.