Shoe Done It

waiting for food.

“I’m not surprised at anything you do,” he said. “And I can’t promise to tell you anything you want to know.”

“But you don’t even know what I want to know,” I protested.

“I can guess,” he said with a sideways glance in my direction.

“How long is this shift?” I asked the nice man on the other side, who was much more outgoing and friendly both to me and to the eaters.

“Hour and a half,” he said. “First timer?”

I smiled and nodded. “But not the last. It’s a great place, and the food looks good.”

“It is. You see people coming back for seconds.”

“Is that allowed?” I asked.

“It is when I’m serving beef stroganoff,” he said with a smile. “Some of us are going out for burgers afterward. Care to join us?”

I glanced over at Jack, who frowned, and I told Tim I had other plans tonight. At least I hoped I did. If Jack bailed on me, I’d be seriously annoyed. Okay, he didn’t want to tell me anything, but he couldn’t just walk out of my fashion show with three customers and not tell me what happened.

After our shift ended at seven o’clock, my ankle hurt as well as both of my feet. I dropped my apron and hairnet in a bin in the dressing room and rushed out to catch Jack before he escaped without me. For a moment I thought he’d run off, but when I looked around, I saw him standing on the sidewalk checking his watch. I had no doubt he was giving me a certain allotted time to show up and then he was out of there. Maybe he had a date. How would I know? He wasn’t the type to talk about his social life, if he had one.

“Thanks for waiting,” I said breathlessly. “Aren’t you hungry after working so hard ? I’m starving. Can I buy you dinner? I owe you.” Taking cabs and buying dinner for a man. It was like I was rolling in money when my boss was worried about the financial state of her store. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to afford to pay me much longer. Maybe I should be worried too. I would worry later, I told myself, just like Scarlett O’Hara.

“You think you can bribe me?” he asked as we walked down the street, passing an occasional homeless person pushing a grocery cart loaded with his belongings.

“It’s worth a try,” I said. “All I want is a little information.” I remembered reading about a Vietnamese restaurant in the area that had gotten some rave reviews online.

“Do you like Vietnamese food?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had any.”

“If you like Angkor Wat, I think you’ll like Little Saigon too. It’s very good.”

So he remembered I’d ordered Cambodian. “I pretty much like all kinds of food. And serving food to others makes me hungry.”

“What doesn’t?” he asked.

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I had lunch with you two weeks ago, and I have to say it’s rare to find a woman with a healthy appetite. So many are on diets. You never know.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “You could have said ‘big appetite’ instead of healthy. Unless you think I should be on a diet. I know one thing, I’m glad I’m not a professional model who has to squeeze into size twos. I was raised in the Midwest. Where I come from, there are lots of steak houses and German restaurants. So when someone took me out for Cambodian food when I first got here, I was hooked. It was so different, so exotic, I was blown away.”

“Prepare to be blown away again tonight,” he said. “If you’re serious about Vietnamese food, tonight you’ll have to try the green papaya salad and the lettuce wraps. And of course the pho.”

I didn’t mention how I was looking forward to being blown away by whatever he agreed to tell me about the present case at hand. I was just grateful we’d gotten this far.

After we were seated in the restaurant with the purple walls covered with black and white photographs of Vietnam, I let Jack order since he’d been there before. Just like he’d done at lunch that day. He also ordered a large bottle of Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, which he said went well with the food. Even though this was my idea, he quickly took over. What else did I expect from a former dot-com millionaire turned city cop?

The lovely slender young waitress greeted Jack warmly and took our order.

“Do you come here often?” I asked.

“It’s a high-crime area,” he said. “So I’m around a lot. Eating here is one of the perks of my job.”

“Like wearing designer clothes is for me. Or shoes.”

He poured beer into my glass and set the bottle down. “Let’s get it out of the way. You want to know what happened to the silver shoes.”

“Of course. I not only want to talk about them, I want to see them. I think I have the right. Who else knows as much as I do about those shoes? I brought the shoes from Florida. It was me MarySue snatched them from. I’m the one she tried to kill. Oh, by the way, I found out it was MarySue who took me to the hospital that night.”

He looked surprised. “How do you know that?”

“I, uh, an inside source.” I didn’t want to get my doctor in trouble.

“I thought they weren’t allowed to divulge that information. You must have pulled strings.” I thought I detected a hint of respect in his voice, or maybe that was anger that someone at the hospital had broken the rules. If by chance it was respect, maybe I could capitalize on it to get him to share information with me.

“The Admissions people didn’t want to talk, believe me,” I said, not admitting that Dr. Jonathan had helped me.

“I believe you.”

“If I could see the shoes you confiscated, I might be able to tell if they were MarySue’s or the ones Harrington made for his sister,” I said.

“You think so?” he asked raising an eyebrow.

“I know something about footwear,” I said modestly. “I could try.”

When the waitress brought the imperial rolls stuffed with seafood, pork and vegetables, I watched Jack dip his in nuoc mam sauce and wrap it in a lettuce leaf with shredded carrot and noodles. Then I copied what he did and got a mouthful of crunchy rice paper wrapped around spicy ground pork, crab and vegetables.

“Delicious,” I said. “So do we have a deal? I help you ID the shoes and you forget my boss is a possible suspect.”

He shook his head, but he was smiling ruefully at my naivete. “I don’t make deals, Rita.”

“Oh, sure you do. I read the papers. I watch TV. I know what goes on in big-city crime scenes.”

“If your boss is innocent, she has nothing to worry about,” he said.

I hesitated only a second while I considered the possibility that she wasn’t innocent. “She isn’t worried, I am. Because I’m the one who’s responsible for the shoes.” Dolce was very worried, more about money than anything, but that was none of his business. I paused while the waitress brought steaming bowls of the beef noodle soup they called pho. I watched Jack add bean sprouts, mint leaves, fresh basil and a large dash of hoisin sauce. Then I did the same. “All I’m asking is, what happened after the fashion show?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Okay, I understand you have rules to follow, so I’ll tell you what I think happened.” I could only hope his reaction would reveal how close I came to guessing the actual scenario. He shrugged as if I could do whatever I wanted, he wouldn’t stop me, but he wasn’t going to help me either. I leaned forward across the table and looked him in the eye. “You mistook the silver shoes Marsha wore for the real thing. I’m guessing you made a mistake, which you found out when Harrington told you how he’d made the shoes, and I bet he could prove it by showing you, oh I don’t know, stitches or holes or marks on the shoes or maybe his initials carved on the soles. After all, he is an artiste. So you let the suspects go, and you kept the shoes as evidence or as a guide for when you find the real thing. So you don’t really need me to tell you those are copies. But where are the real shoes? That’s the question, isn’t it? Does the person who killed MarySue still have the shoes? Because why kill her if you can’t keep the shoes? That’s what I want to know. Isn’t that what you want to know too?”

He didn’t say anything. He asked for a pot of tea, and we drank it with small dishes of coconut ice cream