Simmer Down Read online

  “I cannot believe Oliver is dead,” Hannah continued as though she were talking to herself. “This completely fouls up all my work for the Full Moon Group.” I expected her to stomp her feet and march off like a seven-year-old. Unfortunately, she remained where she was.

  “I’m sure. It’s so irritating when your boss dies and interferes with your marketing campaign, huh?” What a bitch this girl was! I was considering smashing her head in with a Robocoupe when Sean showed up.

  “Hey, weird night, huh?” At least we now had a topic of conversation other than my dumping him and breaking his heart.

  “Sure is. Sean, this is Hannah,” I said dismissively. “Oliver was her boss.” Would she just leave already?

  “Nice to meet you.” Sean held out his hand to monster girl and looked appalled at my insensitivity. “I’m sorry for your loss. What a dreadful night you’ve had. Are you all right? Would you like a glass of water or anything?” As usual, Sean was the epitome of caring and gentleness.

  Hannah, suddenly demure, thought perhaps she should sit down for a moment. I rolled my eyes as Sean dashed off to find a chair for the damsel in distress.

  Josh had finished with Detective Hurley and joined Hannah and me.

  “They’re taking my Robocoupe and everything from my table, can you believe that? The Robocoupe I can understand. I don’t even want that thing back after what happened. But the platters? My butane burner? What a pain in the neck.”

  “Chloe! They’ve confiscated our flyers!” Naomi had appeared, enraged that the police were collecting all of the Organization’s materials from the evening. I silently thanked the Boston Police Department for saving me from having to sort, file, lug around, and otherwise deal with the countless posters and papers from our table.

  Eliot appeared, looking totally bedraggled and defeated by the night’s events. I couldn’t imagine how upset he must feel that his gallery had become a crime scene. Would the murder really hurt his business? Maybe it would attract ghouls and drive off the kinds of people who bought gigantic granite eggs and oil paintings of operations.

  “Folks,” he said, putting one hand on Naomi’s back and one on Josh’s, “this is obviously a terrible way to end the evening. I know we all had high hopes for publicity and fund-raising tonight, but that all takes a backseat to Oliver Kipper’s murder.” Eliot’s protruding eyes produced a few tears, and he shook his head a few times as if to gather himself together. “I need to stick around, but I’m sure you can all go home.”

  “Not all of you.” Detective Hurley interrupted. He peered down at his notebook. “Hannah Hicks? You’ll need to stay.”

  SIX

  THE next morning, I woke up to Josh’s cell phone shrilly echoing throughout my apartment. Ugh. I was on school vacation and was not to be disturbed while catching up on post-crummy-evening sleep. By the time Josh and I had managed to slip past my parents and our exes without formal, awkward good-byes, it had been pretty late. Our drive home had been full of sighing and headshaking and the unspoken agreement that there was no need to pick things apart: not the reemergence of both Hannah and Sean on the same night and not the grotesque murder that had been committed with one of Josh’s kitchen appliances. I think both of us felt embarrassed by our disappointment that the evening had obviously been less about Josh’s food than one would have hoped, so we had kept repeating things like, “How awful!” and “Poor man!”

  Josh had left early to go in to Simmer and had obviously forgotten his cell phone, a lapse that showed how tired he must’ve been when he’d left. But with only two days until New Year’s Eve and the opening, he had a mountain of work to tackle. His phone had been ringing constantly over the past few weeks as he set up purveyors to handle the restaurant’s food supply and searched for kitchen staff. I’d better pick up the phone and give whoever was calling Simmer’s number.

  “Josh’s phone,” I murmured, still half asleep.

  “What? Who is this? I need Josh!” a woman shrieked insanely.

  I completely hate it when someone calls me and then demands to know who picked up the phone. “Who is this?” I asked calmly.

  “Who is this?” she repeated even more hysterically. “Give Josh the phone now!”

  “This is Chloe. Josh can’t come to the phone. Can I take a message?”

  “What? No, you can’t take a message. This is Hannah, and I’ve been at the police station all night, where I’ve been terrorized by a bunch of idiots who want to know everything about the Full Moon Group and what happened last night, where I was and what I saw! What is wrong with this city? Josh needs to come get me. Please!”

  Oh, God. Even I felt sorry for her. Since she’d spent the entire night at the police station, it was no wonder she was coming unglued. But didn’t she have anybody else in Boston to call besides her ex-boyfriend? Still, there was a limit to how nice I was going to be to Hannah, who’d just threatened to steal Josh back. Not that he’d want her. Even so.

  “Are you still at the police station?” I asked.

  She whimpered. “Yes, and I don’t have a car and I don’t even know how to get home.”

  “All right, give me the address. And then go wait outside.”

  I vaguely recognized the address she gave me, but never having been held for questioning, I had no picture in my mind of exactly where the police station was. Josh knew nearly every single street in this city and would’ve known exactly how to get there. As he explained it, he’d been lost in every possible location while driving around looking for undiscovered markets where he could buy unusual ingredients and ethnic specialties. But there was no way I was going to call him and send him Hannah’s way. I just hoped I knew where I was going.

  Josh had told me last night that Hannah was a tough, independent woman who usually got weepy and needy only when her tears and pleas served a purpose. He had said that even he had thought she’d looked pretty shaken up after finding Oliver’s body. At a guess, Hannah had sensed his sympathy, and this morning phone call of hers was an effort to play on it.

  Although I was willing to drive into Boston to get Hannah, I was hardly going to roll out of bed in my pajamas and race downtown without making an effort to look at least semidecent. Even after a night of what I hoped had been relentless interrogation under bright lights, Hannah probably retained her neat-as-a-pin look, and I was not about to be shown up by Josh’s ex. Besides, rescuing Hannah, I told myself, was a test of social work professionalism; I was off to meet with a traumatized client and had an obligation to look professional. As it turned out, my professionalism translated into a tight shirt over a heavily padded bra, skintight pants, and tall black boots, not to mention the twenty minutes with a flatiron needed to calm down the effects of last night’s humidity on my hair. It had cooled off today, but it was still abnormally warm for December in Boston.

  I then spent six minutes staring at Ken the hermit crab in an effort to determine whether he was alive or not. There did appear to be some crab tracks in the sand, so I hoped he’d been taking midnight strolls across his cage. I changed his water dish, scooped up something gross that must be crab poop, and sprayed the tank with a water bottle. Heather had told me that misting the hermit crabs was supposed to increase their activity level, but Ken seemed as outraged by humidity as I was and stayed hidden in his shell.

  Since I couldn’t pick Hannah up in the pigsty I called a car, I spent ten minutes tossing embarrassing CDs into the glove compartment—six volumes of Now That’s What I Call Music, two American Idol compilations, and a few other horrors—and throwing out Dunkin’ Donuts cups and half-eaten candy canes. I displayed Josh’s CDs on the passenger seat to give the impression that I frequently drove around listening to System of a Down, Mudvayne, Drowning Pool, and Papa Roach and was quite possibly the coolest girlfriend in the entire world.

  I found Hannah outside the police station and turned up “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor,” as though it were quite possibly my most favorite song ever. I pulled up in front o
f Josh’s ex and cooly waved to her. She must have been looking around for Josh’s bright yellow Xterra and took no notice of me. I kept waving, and Hannah kept ignoring me. I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from her, double-parked in front of a pissed-off driver in a monstrous Durango, but Hannah stood oblivious to my increasingly wild gestures. I rolled down the window.

  “Hannah!” I yelled above the music.

  Turkey Burger Girl finally walked to my car, bent down, and peered through the window as though I were some tourist asking for directions. “Oh. Chloe, it’s you. Is Josh coming?”

  Yeah, Josh was coming, and we’d taken separate cars to pick up this fool.

  “No, he’s at work. Do you want a ride or not?”

  Hannah looked around, as if to make sure nobody saw her getting into a car with me, and reluctantly opened the door. I slowly and dramatically gathered Josh’s CDs off the seat saying, “Here, let me get these out of your way.” She showed no sign of recognizing me as the coolest girlfriend in the entire world, sat down, and promptly turned off the music. “Do you have any coffee?” she demanded.

  “The coffee machine in the car is out of order today,” I said dryly.

  “Do you at least have a tissue?” Without waiting for a response, she opened the glove compartment and unleashed a flood of my hidden CDs. I hurriedly grabbed them off her lap and cast them into the backseat. Goddamn Heather and her stupid birthday gifts. Who wanted a remix of Jennifer Lopez’s greatest hits? The sound of that woman’s voice made my ears bleed, and now Hannah Banana thought I spent my time singing along to musical catastrophes.

  “No,” I said trying to control my blushing, “I don’t have any tissues.” Not that Hannah seemed to need one. She was pretty composed, especially by comparison with the way she’d sounded on the phone.

  “What took you so long? I need to go to the Whole Foods near my apartment, okay?”

  Clearly an order, not a question. She was testing my professionalism, I decided. I’d need to watch myself, especially if I wanted to hear the details of her night at the station. I was itching to learn what Detective Hurley knew about her that I didn’t.

  “Which store do you want to go to? I don’t know where your apartment is.” I was driving aimlessly around and now almost turned the wrong way onto a one-way street.

  “I go to the Whole Foods on Westland. Right by Symphony Hall. Turn here.” Hannah gestured left, visibly smug that she got to tell a Boston resident where to go. “Oliver and Barry put me up in a condo off Boylston Street.” More smugness oozed from her pores; condos around Boylston Street didn’t run cheap. Gone was the hysterical Hannah of the phone call, and back was the Hannah I’d met last night, bossy and superior.

  “So, what did the police ask you about?” I was hoping, of course, that she’d say something terribly incriminating. “Are you officially a suspect?” She was at the gallery last night and did work for Oliver, after all. Besides, she was a horrible person. And my competition. With any luck, she’d soon be arrested, convicted, and locked up for the rest of her life!

  “They wanted to know all about the Full Moon Group, how long I’ve been working for them, what kind of employers they are, stuff like that. I said I didn’t really care what kind of people they are. They pay me well, and that’s what I’m interested in. Barry and Oliver didn’t always get along, but I stayed out of their problems. I was there to do a job. Oliver runs…well, ran,” she corrected herself, “a tight, moneymaking business. He was practical, knew what made money, and he wanted to keep on doing what brought it in. That’s where I came in. I was keeping them on track and pushing ahead with what had been working for them. You should go into one of their clubs and see how packed they are.”

  Careful to voice no opinion, I said, “I have.”

  “Barry, on the other hand, is so full of himself and his grandiose ideas about fancy food and art and culture. He’s always going on about wanting them to open a fine-dining, ritzy restaurant. I mean, come on! That’s not what the Full Moon Group does. They’ve got highly successful clubs, and they make a killing. Why would they mess with that? And, actually, I don’t think Barry does want to mess with it, considering how much money he and Sarka spend.”

  “Do you know anything about Oliver’s wife? Dora?” I asked, figuring now that I had Hannah talking, I should get what I could out of her.

  “Oh, that stupid woman. Like I told the detective, Oliver and Dora fought all the time. She is a self-entitled bitch, and I don’t blame Oliver for being fed up with her. Basically, her role in life is to be a pain in the ass and spend lots of money.”

  “So why was Hurley so interested in you?”

  Hannah practically harrumphed at me. “Because I work for them, Chloe. I have insight into who might have wanted Oliver dead. And his business partners, obviously.”

  “So was Barry being questioned last night, too?” I wondered aloud. I didn’t get an answer. By waiting for one, I almost missed the turn into Whole Foods.

  “Here! On your right!” ordered Hannah, irritated that I was not performing my chauffeur duties adequately.

  I parked in the lot and trailed into the store behind Hannah. She grabbed a shopping cart and headed into the produce section. I caught up with her as she pulled a folded piece of paper from her purse. She whipped her perfect hair around to look at me. “Josh is cooking for me this week, just so you know. He wrote me out a list of what to buy. He’s not sure what night yet because he’s so busy with the new restaurant, but he’s got it all planned out.”

  I reached out and snatched the paper from her hand. Shit, she wasn’t kidding. I saw Josh’s familiar writing on the back of a harassment flyer. Right there on the back of one of my flyers was a list of ingredients and directions in his chef slang:

  Chkn., bone in

  bunch leeks, rough chop

  mixed root veg. (pot., swt. pot., parsnip, etc.), lg. chop

  1 lg. onion, rough chop

  mixed frsh. herb, rough chop (oreg., thyme, etc.)

  Looking up from the list, I was at first ready to rough chop Hannah, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about good food. How could Josh be cooking for her? I refused to make a scene. The best thing to do when faced with bad behavior was to be a class act, right?

  “Wonderful!” I proclaimed, forcing a huge smile. “Let me help you gather all these items for your romantic dinner!” I reached next to me and started grabbing red bliss potatoes and hurling them into the cart without bothering to put them in a bag. I yanked the shopping cart from Hannah’s hands and pulled it ahead ten feet. “Look at these beautiful root vegetables! And butternut squash!” I tossed five in. “How about some rutabaga? Or parsnips?” I didn’t wait for an answer and added eight of each to the growing mountain of ingredients. At the rate I was going, there’d be enough to feed a battalion of old girlfriends. I added twelve gigantic onions to the mound and reached in to mix the whole mess up. “There. Are. Your. Mixed. Root. Vegetables!” I hollered, garnering stares from the shoppers around us. “Follow me! You’ll need fresh herbs! Lots of them!” I was just plain old shouting now.

  So much for my class act.

  Hannah at least had enough sense to keep her mouth shut during my tirade and said nothing when we got to the checkout, where she paid $86.29 for her supposed dinner for two. The four overpriced organic chickens I’d insisted on hadn’t helped with cost control.

  I leaned in to the checkout person and whispered conspiratorially, “She’s having a romantic dinner with an old boyfriend. Keep your fingers crossed!”

  Hannah watched me like I’d completely lost it. Granted, I had lost it, but for good reason, and once the crazies had kicked in, there was no stopping them. For the sake of my mental health, Detective Hurley should’ve placed Hannah in solitary confinement for the duration of her miserable life.

  As we walked silently back to the car, with Hannah carrying all the bags, I tried to regroup. I was acting as badly as Hannah. I racked my brain to come up with a smooth
social work way to handle this situation and heard snippets of class lectures whip through my mind. Victim of trauma…resulting defense mechanisms put in place to protect the fragile ego…compassion for troubled client… Hannah’s controlling and obnoxious behavior could be the result of finding herself in an out-of-control situation. I needed to cut her some slack.

  Oh, yes. While making her feel guilty and ashamed.

  I drove to her apartment complex and planned my words.

  “Right here.” Hannah pointed to a posh four-story building surrounded by a wrought-iron gate. I put the car in park.

  “Look, Hannah,” I started, finally calm, “I know you had a horrible night, and I apologize for the way I acted. But how would you feel if your boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend said the things that you’ve said to me? Probably not very good. I haven’t done anything to you that warrants this kind of treatment. It is unacceptable and needs to stop.” There. Simple and to the point. I had set my boundaries and made it clear that they were not to be crossed—just as Naomi had taught me to advise our sexual harassment hotline callers!

  Hannah stared at me, expressionless.

  “So,” I continued with a little less confidence, “I understand that there can be leftover emotions from past relationships, but, um…” Why was she staring at me like that? “You see…Josh…Josh has moved on from the past and is looking forward to the future, you know, with me, and…”

  “You have parsley in your hair,” announced Hannah, reaching out and plucking a green leaf off my head. “Tell Josh to call me.” She collected her bags and slammed the door before strutting up the walkway.

  I was beginning to doubt that running interference between Josh and his ex had been worth the embarrassment. But I had to keep trying: until Oliver’s murder was solved, Hannah would keep trying to persuade Josh to rescue her from supposed police persecution. The ideal solution to the murder would, of course, consist of absolute proof of Hannah’s guilt. But even if someone else turned out to be the murderer, the police would stop questioning Hannah, and she’d lose her excuse for playing on Josh’s sympathy.