The Proof is in the Pudding (9 page)

Turning away because I couldn’t stand to look at him, I glanced across the ballroom to where Eileen was standing with her mother.

She was staring at Keith Ingram with a degree of hatred that I wouldn’t have thought possible in this gentle girl who had lived with me for most of her life.

We were one hour into the ninety-minute cooking competition. Up to this point, according to the instructions we’d received in the hotel manager’s office, we three judges had been free to move about as we liked, watching the progress being made at the twenty separate stoves in whatever order we wished.

The ballroom had been divided into five sections, with the stoves placed in groupings of four per sector, with the sectors numbered one through five. Paths six feet wide, marked by velvet ropes attached to brass stands, outlined the walkways through which the judges and members of the audience could stroll. The sectors were numbered to make it easier for the people attending to find their favorite celebrities. A program sheet with the locations diagrammed had been handed to each patron who entered the ballroom.

During the last half hour before time would be called and the celebrities—finished or not—had to present their dishes, all three judges were supposed to move along the quadrants of stoves together, carefully examining the dishes that were being prepared.

Sector One was at the end of the ballroom closest to the shallow stage. Sectors Two and Three formed the row on the west side of the room, with Sectors Four and Five comprising the row on the east side. If I described the layout to Nicholas on the phone later, I’d tell him to picture a torso with a head and two outstretched arms. Sector One would be the torso’s head—just below the stage—with Two and Three being the extended right arm and Four and Five being the left extended arm. Those reaching arms pointed toward the wide, double-door entrance to the ballroom. A uniformed security guard—not one of the two who had come charging in to confront John—had been posted there to make sure that anyone who tried to enter the event had a ticket to it.

Ingram, Yvette, and I had worked our way through the crowd to stand beside Sector Four, on the left side of the ballroom, halfway between the stage at one end and Sector Five. Dozens of people swarmed about, which sometimes made it difficult for us judges to keep moving. I didn’t mind, because having a lot of people around made it easier for me to avoid looking at Keith Ingram.

Wolf Wheeler, a comic movie actor in Sector One, was attracting attention to his workstation by tossing several eggs higher and higher and catching them to keep the airborne rotation going. At first his antics irritated me because I was sure he was going to drop the eggs and I hate to see food wasted, but then I realized he was a really skilled juggler performing an amazing routine. I watched him for a minute, and wished it could have been longer, but I was supposed to be concentrating on what the stars in Sector Four were creating. I pulled my attention away from him and went back to acting like a judge.

The celebrities in this quartet of stoves were three actors and an author. Francine Ames, whose dark-haired beauty had been compared to young Elizabeth Taylor’s, had starred for nineteen years as an often-married vamp on TV’s longest running daytime soap opera.

Oona Rogers and Vernon “Coupe” Deville were married-to-each-other action movie stars. As sinewy as gymnasts, approximately the same height, and with matching face-hugging caps of sleek bronze hair, they looked more like brother and sister than like a non-biological couple. According to the entertainment press, they had met a few years ago when they were cast as costars in an espionage thriller. They fell in love among the car chases and explosions. That first picture was such a box office success it had been followed by a series with the same two leading characters.

The last member of this cooking quartet was British author Roland Gray, whose international espionage thrillers had earned him the distinction of having had the most novels to reach number one on the
New York Times
best seller list during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Gray, whose hair was more salt than pepper, wasn’t handsome by any conventional measurement, but with his easy smile and blue eyes that fastened like lasers onto the person to whom he was speaking, he was undeniably charismatic. I had started reading his novels during the months after Mack’s death, when I was trying to adjust to sleeping alone in our bed. Classic movies on television, mystery novels, and Gray’s breathtaking plots and his fascinating secret agent hero took my mind off my pain for hours at a time. I appreciated Gray having done that for me.

Ingram, Yvette, and I surveyed the cooking activities, assessing the individual dishes and checking the skill level of the various celebrity chefs.

Vernon “Coupe” Deville was sautéing onions for his Philly Cheese Steak. He had his burners on high, with the result that the combination of butter and olive oil he was using sent little dots of hot grease into the air.

Ingram addressed Yvette. “Step back. You don’t want to get splattered.” Since I hadn’t been included in his warning, I guessed that he didn’t care if grease hit me.

Oona Rogers, Deville’s wife, wasn’t endangering anyone. Her workspace was much neater than his, and she wasn’t splashing the marinara sauce as she stirred it into her Chicken Parmesan.

Moving on, we watched Francine Ames take a partially baked strawberry-rhubarb pie from her oven and start to remove the aluminum collar she’d fastened around it to prevent the edges of the crust from becoming too brown. When a big hunk of piecrust came off with the collar of foil, her pretty face screwed up into a grimace.

“The pie will taste just as good,” she told us as she put it back into the oven for its final fifteen minutes of baking.

At the last stove in Sector Four, author Roland Gray was stirring a pot on the stovetop. “I’m making Lemon Pudding Surprise, from an old recipe of my mother’s. The ‘surprise’ will be little bits of candied fruit at the bottom.” His cultured British accent conjured images in my head of Number 10 Downing Street and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the audacious secret agent who was my favorite of his literary creations.

“I was quite inspired by the show you did on comfort foods,” he said. “When I was growing up, this pudding was what my mother made to soften life’s little blows.”

“I look forward to tasting it,” I said.

Ingram scowled at me. “You’re not supposed to get chummy with the contestants. We can’t show favoritism.”

It took all of my self-control not to snap back at the odious creature, but there had been enough confrontations here tonight. I forced my thoughts away from how much I detested Keith Ingram. Instead, I surveyed the room full of enthusiastic amateur cooks.

The aromas that were coming at me from every corner of the Elysian Ballroom were making my mouth water. I was hungry. Knowing that I would have to taste twenty separate dishes this evening, I hadn’t eaten anything that day except one piece of seven-grain toast and a slice of cheese with my morning coffee.

I was finding it easy to concentrate on what the celebrity cooks were doing, because the mobile audience was behaving respectfully. Even though they were drinking as they wandered through the room, they were as polite as spectators at a golf match. Their whispered comments to each other made a soft background rustle, like the sound of a breeze ruffling leaves.

High-pitched laughter from across the rows of kitchens startled me. I looked up to see a woman emitting “Oh! Oh! Ohhhh!” noises of excitement as she and others stared in awe at new antics of Wolf Wheeler. Other voices called out, “Higher. Higher!” and “That’s impossible!” as Wheeler juggled wine glasses—tossing them high in the air, catching them in front of him and behind his back and then tossing them again.

All over the ballroom, people were turning to focus on Wolf Wheeler’s amazing juggling act. The clamor level rose with shouted comments of encouragement, interspersed with sharp intakes of breath.

I was watching, too, when a drop of something very hot struck the back of my hand. I yelped in pain, but before I could find out what it was, suddenly my side of the room was enveloped in thick, acrid smoke.

A man’s voice yelled, “Fire!” In that instant, the scene in the ballroom changed from convivial to chaos. People screamed and coughed, and shouted.

Someone’s elbow struck a sharp blow to my diaphragm. It sent me reeling backward and against a stove. Suddenly feeling heat, the self-preservation instinct kicked in. I wrenched myself away from a stovetop flame just in time to avoid being burned. Turned around, disoriented, I had no idea which way to go toward safety.

Ceiling smoke detectors began to shriek.

Blinded by the smoke, I collided with a man. He grunted, then grabbed my arm and pulled us both down to our knees. I was too surprised to struggle as he pushed me under a preparation counter.

With my face forced close to the floor, I could breathe a little better because the smoke began to rise. The shelter of the counter kept us from being hit or trampled by the terrified crowd.

Heavy footsteps pounded into the ballroom. I recognized shouted orders from firemen, and heard the sound of powerful blowers being activated.

It didn’t take more than two or three minutes for the smoke to dissipate. The smarting in my eyes eased. With a few blinks, my vision began to clear and I looked up. One mystery—how firemen had arrived on the scene so quickly—was solved when I saw that the men who’d come to our rescue weren’t regular city firemen. Yellow patches on their green jackets identified them as the hotel’s private fire safety officers.

I heard one of the officers swear. “Jesus H. P. Christ—it was just a smoke bomb!”

The man who had been sheltering me helped me to stand. It was Roland Gray.

“Thank you,” I said.

“As I rule, I don’t pounce on a woman until a month of dinners have been shared,” he said in his charming British accent. “Ah, well. Ms. Carmichael, when you’re calculating your decision about tonight’s prize, I do hope you will take into consideration the fact that I
thought
I was trying to save your life.”

Smiling, I indicated my clipboard. “Sorry, but saving my life isn’t one of the judging criteria.”

Suddenly, his nose wrinkled with distaste. “Oh, no!” He hurried toward his stove. I followed, and saw immediately what had happened. During the excitement the burner under his lemon pudding had been left on. The pudding had boiled over, sending a thick, yellow river erupting over the pot and flowing down the side of the stove.

Gray shook his head. “My delectable dessert is DOA.”

Behind us, a woman screamed.

I whirled to see Yvette Dupree, eyes bulging, her arms crossed against the clipboard she pressed tight against her chest.

She was staring at the crumpled body of Keith Ingram, who lay facedown in a widening circle of blood.

Roland Gray was first to recover from the shock that had momentarily frozen the rest of us. He bounded forward, grabbed Ingram’s shoulder to turn him over onto his back—and was hit in the chest by spurting blood.

The stench hit my nostrils and I nearly gagged. I hadn’t known that fresh blood had such a sickeningly sweet, metallic smell.

Then I realized that blood pumping meant a heart still beating. I grabbed a roll of paper towels from the counter beside Roland Gray’s stove and dropped to my knees, hoping to stem the bleeding, but rough hands wrenched me away. I dropped the roll as two of the safety officers took over, trying to save Ingram.

It was a hopeless task. I’d known it was, even as I’d tried to stop his bleeding. Keith Ingram had been stabbed in the throat, and the wound was a gaping well of flesh and muscle.

Ingram wasn’t going to be able to blackmail Eileen, but I couldn’t forget that the video he’d made was an unexploded bomb that would go off if the wrong person found it.