Authors: Isis Crawford

A Catered Wedding (16 page)

BOOK: A Catered Wedding

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“That must make your work very difficult,” Bernie said.

“I'll say.” Esmeralda took another sip of her side car and put the glass down. “I try and keep everything running as smoothly as possible for Jura, but sometimes it's so problematic.

“Jura's brothers don't understand what an enormous amount of pressure he's under. Naturally he's going to be a little sharp sometimes. Even Leeza never understoodâthough she should have.” Esmeralda scowled for a moment.

“So why is Jura under so much pressure?” Bernie asked.

“Because,” Esmeralda said, “Jura is the one that determines whether the product he's buying is good or not. The business stands or falls on his palate. It's a terrible responsibility. His brothers just don't have the same ability to taste that Jura does. He really is amazing in that regard.”

“Well,” Bernie said slowly, “like I just said, family owned businesses can be problematic in the best of times.”

Esmeralda looked at her.

“People argue. I know my sister and I do. I've heard instances where brothers and sisters even steal from each other.”

“No one would ever do something like that at Raid Enterprises,” Esmeralda protested.

Somehow Esmeralda didn't look convinced, Bernie thought as she went on with her lunch.

Chapter 16

S
ean shifted the phone from one hand to another as he watched Libby walking around his room and tidying things up. She was like her mother that way he thought. Everything had to be in place, whereas his younger daughter could walk over a pile of laundry that was sitting in the middle of the floor and just keep going.

“That was Bernie,” Sean said after he'd hung up.

“So I gathered.” Libby removed an empty glass off his nightstand and put it on her tray. “What does she have to say about Esmeralda?”

Sean took a bite of one of the ginger bars that Libby had just brought up for him to try.

“Even more interesting than that,” Sean said after he'd swallowed, “is what she has to say about two stores that she visited. Evidently both of them are thinking of discontinuing carrying Raid products because recently the quality has been inconsistent.”

Libby set the tray down.

“Stores? What stores?” she asked.

Well that was a mistake
, Sean told himself as he watched the edges of his daughter's mouth turn down.

“I thought she was just going to talk to Esmeralda.”

Sean began backtracking as Libby put her hands on her hips and began tapping her foot on the floor. This he knew was not a good sign.

“She was. I think this was a spur of the moment idea.”

“Well she better catch the 4:15 out of Grand Central,” Libby huffed. “That's all I can say. Amber has to leave by five o'clock tops. Which means I'm going to have to be out front selling instead of in back cooking.”

“I'm sure she'll be back in time,” Sean reassured her although he thought the odds were that she wouldn't be.

Sometimes, he reflected, talking with his two daughters was like walking through the proverbial minefield. Actually, he'd rather walk through a minefield. At least there, if you paid attention, you could see what to avoid. With Bernie and especially with Libby, who could tell? All this emotion.

When the girls were younger he'd tried to run the family like his unit. So many warnings for talking back or fighting or crying. After five warnings he'd told the girls he'd put them on report. Hey, it worked with his men.

But before he could even explain what being placed on report entailed Bernie had rolled her eyes, Libby had burst into tears, and Rose had just shaken her head and walked back into the kitchen.

Maybe if he changed the subject?

“These bars are excellent.”

“I'm using candied ginger from Jamaica. Bree Nottingham said they were too spicy.”

“Not for me,” Sean remarked.

“You like to eat habaÃ±ero peppers whole,” Libby reminded him.

“That disqualifies my opinion?”

“I didn't say that.”

But Sean could see the frown on Libby's face melting. He watched as she went over and began to even up the stack of magazines on his dresser. Then she turned on the window fan. The sound of whirring filled the room. Finally, she came over and plunked herself down on the edge of his bed.

“Bernie could have told me,” Libby said.

Sean sighed, started to reach out to his daughter, realized that his hand was shaking, put it back on his lap, and ignored it. Give this friggin' thing he had an inchâhe refused to even mention its name. Name something and you called it into existenceâand it would take over his whole life. As it was, he realized he'd been paying far too much attention to it over the last three years.

“She doesn't mean to be inconsiderate,” Sean explained to Libby for what he was sure was the two hundred thousandth time. “She just gets an idea and goes ahead and does it. She's been like that since she was two.”

“I know what's she like,” Libby said as she pushed the tray with the glasses away from the edge of the table with the tip of her finger.

Sean watched for his daughter for a moment. She looked halfway between sad and thoughtful.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Come on,” Sean urged.

Libby sighed. “It's just that . . .”

“Just that what?”

Libby shrugged. “Nothing important. It's just that sometimes I wish I could be like Bernie. You know. Not think things through. I don't know why, I just can't do it.”

“And I wish I was a tom cat so I could pee on the police chief's front door. Every day.”

Libby laughed. For a few moments Sean and his daughter sat listening to the fan.

Finally Libby spoke. “You know what Bernie said about the stores canceling their orders?”

“Possibly canceling their orders,” Sean corrected.

“Okay, possibly canceling their orders. It made me think about what happened in the kitchen when Jura tasted the caviar.”

“He stalked off and started yelling at his brothers, correct?”

“Right,” Libby replied. “The caviar was pretty bad. Even Bernie said so and she knows better than I do.”

“I'd forgotten about that incident,” Sean confessed. “I don't know how I could have done that.”

He ate another piece of one of Libby's ginger bars. He knew he shouldn't, but they were so good they were impossible to resist.

“This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities,” Sean mused as Libby tucked a lock of her hair back behind her ear.

“Doesn't it though.” Libby wiped her hands on her jeans and began picking flour out from underneath her nails. “Maybe someone is switching product around. You know packaging one thing and selling it as something else. Osetra for beluga. Or paddlefish for sevruga.”

Last one, Sean vowed to himself as he took a last bite of his ginger bar. “The old bait and switch. It's heart warming to know the old scams never go out of style. The question as I see it is: Where did this happen? In Russia or here? Then the second question would be: How frequently is this occurring? And the third question would be: Who is responsible?”

“I was just thinking,” Libby slowly said. “That if this were happening with a certain frequency you could ruin the name of the company, and in this kind of business, your name is your guarantee. If you don't have that, you don't have anything. I mean look at what would happen if I started serving bad food.
A Taste of Heaven
would be out of business in a month. Of course we don't know that this is happening.”

“We don't,” Sean agreed. “You're right. But for the moment let's assume it is. Then we're back to our first question. Where is this happening? In Russia? Here? Is actual caviar being switched or are empty tins marked Beluga being filled with an inferior product. To do that you'd need to buy the tins.”

“Anyone could do that,” Libby observed.

“Yes, they could,” Sean agreed. “But it would be easier for someone in the company.” A picture flashed though his mind of his mother canning tomatoes. “Of course you'd have to have a machine that seals tins. Not that that would be too hard to get.”

“They sell them in most big home-store type places,” Libby pointed out.

Sean thought about the Raid Estate. The place was enormous. Someone could set up a canning operation there. Hell, someone could put a herd of llamas in the garage and no one would be the wiser.

“But what about the inventory?” Libby asked. “You can't just have extra cans showing up or going missing. They must have a computer program to keep track of that.”

“Good point. Which means,” Sean said after a moment's thought, “either whoever is doing this is reselling the original product to someone and then refilling the tins, thereby making even more money, or someone in the company is fiddling with the books.”

“If it's taking place at Raid Enterprises,” Libby said.

“Yes,” Sean said. “If it's taking place at Raid Enterprises. But something tells me it is. Something tells me this has to do with the Raid family.”

“Why do you say that?” Libby asked.

“Just an old cop's gut talking.”

Libby nodded remembering how her father had always known when she'd done something wrong when she was a kid. Then she thought about Jura's expression of surprise when he'd tasted the caviar.

“Well, if it is a family thing I don't think Jura is in on it.”

“Which leaves his two brothers.”

“Or it could be someone else in the company,” Libby pointed out.

“Also true,” Sean agreed. “But in the meantime we should go speak to Joe.” When he'd run cases he'd liked to start with the principals. For him reading their faces always proved more illuminating than reading a crime scene.

“And Ditas,” Libby added.

“Definitely Ditas,” Sean concurred. “Definitely Ditas. Almost sounds like the name of a song. I can see someone tap dancing to it.”

“Me, too.” Libby laughed. Then she broke off a piece of one of the ginger bars and ate it. These are very good, she decided. Using candied Jamaican ginger had kicked them up a notch. “So how does Leeza come into this?” she asked her dad. “After all that's what we're supposed to be investigating, isn't it?”

Sean stroked his chin.

“Maybe Leeza was involved in the caviar scam.”

“And he found out and killed her?”

“It's possible,” Sean replied. “Not that we have any proof. And she would need other people to pull this off.”

“Maybe she was teamed up with Jura's brother Ditas,” Libby pointed out. “He seems to have been the only one that cares that she's dead.”

“Maybe.” Sean wheeled his chair around so it faced the window “Or maybe Ditas was doing it and Leeza found out and was going to expose him to his older brother and he killed her to silence her.”

Sean stopped talking. He could see waves of heat rising from the street. Things were too diffuse. He couldn't get his hands around anything substantive, yet. But his gut told him that the more he and his daughters dug, the more likely that they'd find what they were looking for, even if they didn't know exactly what it was yet.

Over the years he'd found that's the way these things proceeded. You just went out and talked to people and got these random pieces of information and eventually they all came together and made sense. He always thought that it was like doing a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. First you made the frame and then started fitting the pieces until eventually you came to the center.

That's why he was going over to the West Vale Country Club this afternoon. To hopefully hear what some of the club members had to say about the Raid brothers. Maybe that would shed some light on the situation.

“What else did Bernie say?” Libby asked when her father didn't say anything else.

“That Esmeralda now has blond hair and implants. Big ones.”

“How big?” Libby asked.

Sean blinked. Bernie had said watermelon size but he wasn't going to repeat that to Libby. “Big enough.”

“She was all over him at the house,” Libby mused.

“So Bernie told me.”

“Maybe now that Jura's free she's decided to make a move . . .”

“And,” her father continued, “Esmeralda knows that Jura liked Leeza . . .”

“So why not try and copy some of the elements,” Libby finished. “After all, they worked before.”

“Exactly,” Sean said, beaming at his daughter. She was definitely coming along.

“I wonder if she helped Leeza out of the picture,” Libby said.

Sean summoned up a picture of Esmeralda in his mind. He'd caught a quick glimpse of her before Fisher had bundled him off. She hadn't struck him as someone who could engineer a booby trap, but that didn't mean anything. Over the years he'd ceased being surprised by the talents people managed to summon up when they needed them.

“She's not on the top of my list,” Sean said. “But she's definitely there.”

“I don't know,” Libby said. “As a motive I think love beats out money any day of the week.”

“It certainly equals it,” Sean allowed.

BOOK: A Catered Wedding

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