Double Shot

looked ruefully at the bullet hole in my new kitchen floor. Add on to that the price of oak-floor repair.

I took what they call in yoga a cleansing breath. If you’re smelling something putrid, does the breath still cleanse? I didn’t think so. Focus, I told myself. Marla, whom I always depended on to be brave and helpful, was blubbering on the deck.

First I had to find the spoiled food. I began to check the trash containers. Every one of them was empty.

“Why didn’t you shoot them?” Marla wailed. “You had the gun, for God’s sake, why didn’t you keep firing? Oh my God, mice! Maybe they were rats,” and so on.

I stared at the two commercial refrigerators I’d installed in the kitchen. They were walk-ins I’d bought at a restaurant auction. The previous evening, I’d placed eleven hundred dollars’ worth of grilled and chilled herb-crusted salmon, potatoes Anna, radiatore pasta salad, and spinach souffle mixture into them. The food cart had contained the now-wrecked desserts. When Julian Teller, my longtime assistant, drove over from Boulder, he was bringing a vat of his luscious cream of asparagus soup. Liz Fury, a forty-two-year-old single mom who was my other helper, was visiting an early-bird farmers’ market to pick up fresh arugula and watercress for the salad. These she would toss with delicately marinated hearts of palm and her own champagne vinaigrette.

Slowly, I opened first one, then the other refrigerator door.

I lurched away from the blast of hot, putrid air. A second later I was taking shallow breaths through my mouth and peering inside.

The refrigerator interiors were warm and dark. They stank of rotten food. I knew the math of spoilage; every caterer did. For every hour foods with mayonnaise and other perishable substances are at a temperature above sixty-five degrees, the toxins multiply exponentially. My attacker couldn’t just have shown up this morning and wrecked this food. So what was going on?

I moved outside as quickly as my battered body would allow. Marla was still sniveling on the deck. I checked the compressors. Someone had thrown the safety switches on both of them. I howled and pushed them into place, then hobbled back inside.

The refrigerators had hummed to life. I pulled open the doors, then stared inside. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.

The bowls, vats, and trays of salmon, potatoes, pasta, and spinach reeked of putrescence. So the guy, or whoever it was, had thrown the compressors last night, to guarantee that the food would be wrecked? And then he’d broken in this morning to plant some mice? Had he done anything else?

I saw the answer in a line of small, dead trout strung across the shelves of one refrigerator. On the base of the other walk-in, another paper bag seemed to be wriggling…oh God.

About six mice—fewer than in the other bag, anyway—scampered out. I jumped from one foot to the other, which made my body scream with pain.

“More mice coming!” I hollered at Marla.

“Will you shoot that damn gun?” she shrieked from the far side of the deck.

“Not again,” I called back. I limped back to my van and stowed the thirty-eight in my glove compartment.

This was not, as it turned out, one of my better ideas.

Within ten minutes, I’d rustled up both Liz and Julian on their cells. I said I needed a ton of d-Con, at least a dozen mousetraps, and a carload of air fresheners.

“Okay, boss,” Julian agreed. The kid was calmer than any twenty-one-year-old I’d ever known. “But what’re you going to do for food?”

“Assiettes de charcuterie,” I said decisively. “Plates of chilled imported salami, Westphalian ham, and Port Salut cheese. And some lovely fresh rolls. Can you find an open delicatessen in Boulder? And a bakery?”

“No prob.”

“Plus, I’ll need a load of unsalted butter and…jars of gherkins, if you can manage it. With your soup, Liz’s salad, and the garden-club cakes, we ought to be in good shape.”

“The garden-club cakes?”

“Flourless chocolate. Marla ordered them to sell for her splinter group’s bake sale. But they’re not going to get them.”

“Goldy, what’re you going to do if Roger Mannis shows up?”

“Oh, God help us.”

Roger Mannis was the new district health inspector, assigned to make life difficult for yours truly and other caterers in our part of the county. The guy was a nightmare, Uriah Heep meets Jack the Ripper, with a Ph.D. in biology, to boot. He’d shown up—unannounced, as was his prerogative—at our very first event in the Roundhouse. I’d been serving tea, sandwiches, petits fours, and sliced fruit out on the deck. Unfortunately, the garden-club ladies had been acting anything but ladylike in their fight over a town tree-planting campaign. Roger Mannis—thirtyish, tall, and dark-haired, with deep-set eyes and a chin that could have sliced a pork loin—had started writing up every infraction he could find. He shook his head at the landscaping over my new plumbing lines. He stuck his little thermometer into the fruit salad and found it insufficiently chilled. He claimed to have detected insect remains on the floor of the deck. Julian and I knew to beg pardon and act obsequious, especially since we needed to calm the enemy armies of the garden club, who’d been on the verge of a fruit fight.

My dear Liz Fury, however, had been a bit more flippant. Tossing her silver-white hair and thrusting a long finger in Roger Mannis’s face, she’d told him that the staff of Goldilocks’ Catering abided by all hygiene rules. She announced, moreover, that Roger was being an ass. Distracted, the garden-club ladies had begun to titter. Liz hollered that Roger could get that ass, his ass, away from the Roundhouse immediately. Otherwise, she’d call his supervisor, her uncle Ozzie, who also happened to be the Furman County Health Inspector, and have him canned. “So to speak!” cried one of the women, and the entire garden club had snickered.

Roger Mannis had responded by narrowing his pupils, bottomless dark caverns that made most caterers’ innards quake. His sharp chin had quivered as he’d stepped toward me and hovered ominously, clutching his clipboard. He’d been so close I could smell his aftershave. I’d actually cowered. Then Roger Mannis had turned on his heel and left.

Unfortunately, someone had been sitting right next to where I was standing during the whole interchange with Mannis. The wrong someone, as it turned out: Cecelia Brisbane, that most ruthless of gossip columnists, had been peering through her thick, cloudy glasses as she tried to cover the garden-club meeting. I heard later that she’d been hoping for hot items on the tree-planting conflict. Instead, Cecelia had mercilessly skewered me, the event, and the district health inspector. During what recent get-together was a county official with a chainsaw chin, muskrat eyes, and clothes resembling a nuclear-bomb inspector told off by our town’s caterer?

There was no point calling the Mountain Journal office and complaining. I’d tried that once and it hadn’t worked. I just didn’t want to think about it.

So…now, in answer to Julian’s question: What was I going to do if Roger Mannis made an unexpected visit to this catered event…and saw all this spoiled food? I didn’t want to contemplate that, either.

“Goldy, are you all right?” Julian asked, startling me.

“Sure. Thanks for reminding me about the dear inspector,” I replied into the phone. “Let me see if Marla can waylay him.”

While Marla and I dumped the vats of slimy pasta, stinking salmon, and putrid spinach into plastic bags, I tried to think of a way to bring up the Mannis predicament. The apparent disappearance of the mice had soothed Marla’s nerves somewhat. Plus, she’d been eager to speculate about who could have done all this damage— although her considerable moneybags were still placed on the Jerk.

“He threatened you from prison,” she asserted as she lugged a trash bag to the Dumpster. “To your face and behind your back. To Arch, to his lawyer, to anyone who would listen. He read the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News every day, and when some guy got off for beating or killing his wife, he mailed the article to you, Goldy. For God’s sake!” She paused at the far end of the parking lot. “I suppose he’s making an appearance at the lunch?”