Dark Tort

“We’ll wait for you outside,” Julian announced as he held the door open for Marla and Tom.

“Sally,” I repeated, my voice hopeless, “I just feel so awful—”

Sally kept rubbing her forehead, her face down. “How did my baby look?” she whispered. “Did she look as if she suffered?”

I thought of Dusty’s bloodied forehead, of her darkened cheek, of the broken glass of the picture frames. Her neck had been very red, too red, when I was doing CPR. Had she been strangled? I remembered from Med Wives 101 that it took four minutes for the brain to be deprived of enough oxygen to die. Four minutes of having someone’s hands grasping your throat so tightly that you can’t breathe. Four minutes of struggling with a choker’s deadly grip. Four minutes of being swung around an office, getting your face smashed into glass and your legs and torso whacked mercilessly into desks and furniture. Four minutes.

“No,” Sally interjected. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear about it. I want to imagine her the way she was. Trying to grow up. Trying to get ahead in the world.” Sally’s bloated eyes sought mine. “But you know what? The world didn’t want her. When she was down, that’s what she’d say. ‘The world’s against me, Mom,’ she’d say. And then she’d start over on some new project. Some new job. Some new boyfriend.” Sally exhaled again in disgust. “And for what? For nothing.”

“Oh, Sally.”

Sally put her hand on her hip. “I don’t need meals, Goldy. What I need is for you to find out what happened to my baby.”

“What?”

“I read the paper. I know you help Tom sometimes.”

“Well, I…the police are—”

“You really think they’re going to help the welfare people? The way Bishop Sutherland did, for example? Please. That law firm was a nest of vermin. Vermin, all of them. Dusty knew it. Something was going on, I’m sure of it. I know my…I knew my daughter. The past month, she’d been acting really secretive. Something was going on, and that’s what got her killed.”

“Did you tell the detectives this?”

Sally’s laugh was shrill. “No, Goldy, I didn’t tell the detectives this, because then the next thing you know, they’ll start spreading rumors about Dusty, and who she was going out with, and what she was up to, and then oops! All of a sudden some dark facts will come out. They tried to say my son Edgar was a violent drunk. Goldy”—her eyes implored me—“he was a kid. And I don’t want to be hearing that my daughter did this or that, she was involved with so-and-so. And by the way, wasn’t she expelled from Elk Park Prep, and oh yeah, didn’t she use her wiles to try to break up the marriage of one of her teachers? And on and on, until in the minds of the public, she deserved to die.”

I sighed, unable to think of anything to say. She was right. I’d seen it again and again. A low-income person without power is blamed for a crime and goes to jail on scanty evidence. A wealthy person who’s guilty as hell impugns the job the police are doing, impugns the victim, impugns whoever’s around, and gets away with rape…or murder.

“You want to help us?” Sally asked, her voice both defiant and pleading. “Then help. I’m not saying you’re a bad cook. We think you’re a great cook. But if you really want to help me? Find out what was—what is going on in that scumbag law firm. Then you’ll be able to tell us who killed my baby girl.”

I looked her in the eye and licked my lips.

“Please,” she begged me. “Please find out what happened to my baby.”

I nodded. I thought, What the hell am I doing? But I said, “Okay, Sally.”

As I walked carefully back across the street, I again saw Dusty’s lifeless body. I remembered her eager expression as she learned to cook. I recalled how disappointed she’d been when one of her own cakes had fallen. I remembered how her face had lit up when I found her the vintage Calvin Klein suit.

I thought of the birthday cake I’d made her.

And then I remembered a joke Marla had told me when I’d started working at Hanrahan & Jule.

Q: Who’s the only kind, courteous person at a law-association breakfast?A: The caterer.

Well, I thought as I entered our house. Not anymore.

CHAPTER 6

Our kitchen clock said it was just eleven, aka back-to-reality time. Or at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself. I stared at the phone. What did I need to do? Oh yes, call Nora Ellis to see if she still wanted to throw a birthday party for hubbie Donald the next day.

She wasn’t there, so I left a message. Even if the sky falls in, never assume a client will cancel a party, Andre, my mentor had told me. Feeling numb, I moved mechanically over to my computer to check the prep schedule for my three upcoming events: the party, the christening, and the ribbon cutting for the new Mountain Pastoral Center. That last was supposedly going to be held at my catering and conference center, the Roundhouse. The plumbers had assured me they would be done by then. I had too much on my mind to call them for the fifteenth time and bug them.

In the hallway, Tom, Julian, and Marla were talking in low tones about Dusty’s friends, who should be called, who else in the church could bring in meals and run errands for the Routts. I should have been helping them. But somehow talking about the Routts, after all I’d been through during the last eighteen hours, was more than I could handle at the moment. I walked into the kitchen.

Nora had handed me the recipe for the birthday cake she wanted for her husband. It was from one of Charlie Baker’s last paintings, she said, The Cake Series II. She’d bought the painting for Donald and was giving it to him for his present. Charlie’s recipe, Nora claimed, was an historically accurate version of Journey Cake, a confection the pioneers had baked on a board and eaten as they journeyed across America in their covered wagons. Actually, what Nora had given me was just a list of ingredients, which was all that my good old pal Charlie Baker, for whom I’d catered and with whom I’d cooked for the St. Luke’s bazaar, had ever put at the bottom of his paintings. I made myself a latte and remembered Nora’s happy expression when I said I was an old hand at Journey Cake, also known as Johnny Cake.

I pulled out flour and spices and thought about tall, cheerful Nora Ellis, whose straight blond hair fell in a perfect curtain around her head. When we first met, she told me she’d had good and bad luck with caterers. She’d already been burned, figuratively speaking, by both a Denver and a Boulder caterer. Worrying about these mishaps must have been why she was so stressed out when she was running the charity event Julian had catered, I reasoned now. Anyway, my talks with her had always been very amicable. To avoid a repeat of her two unfortunate events, she wanted tastes of the dishes I proposed to serve. I’d acquiesced. In point of fact, most party givers wanted a taste test these days. Problem was, you couldn’t measure efficiency of service, politeness of wait staff, heat of the food, and myriad factors that were just as important as how things tasted. Nora had told me she’d heard that unscrupulous caterers often made blatantly dishonest substitutions. At the Boulder party, her guests were supposed to be served poached salmon. Instead, they’d gotten choulibiac, an infinitely cheaper dish made from leftover bits of salmon. The Denver caterer had unabashedly offered up pork loin instead of the promised roast suckling pig.

“Oops,” I said.

“Yeah, oops,” Nora replied, her pretty face alight with an equal mixture of anger and humor. “Oops, guess what caterers got reported to their respective Better Business Bureaus?”

In the end, Nora had decided on stuffed Portobello mushrooms and empanadas with guacamole for appetizers. For the main course, she’d opted for beef tenderloin, that long, luscious piece of meat from which filets mignons were sliced. Hot beef in the middle of a cold October day was appropriately festive, I assured her. Served with feathery mashed potato puffs, a light salad, and steamed vegetables, the lunch would not be too heavy. And, I added with a smile, beef tenderloin was something a caterer simply could not fake.

As Nora and I had drunk cup after cup of spiced apple cider in her mammoth kitchen, I’d assured her that