Diane Mott Davidson - Goldy 6 - The Main Corpse
Prospect Financial Partners
Luxury Beer and Hors D'Oeuvre Party
EURYDlCE GOLD MINE
IDAHO SPRINGS, COLORADO
SATURDAY, JUNE 5
Chinese Shrimp Dumplings
Tomato-Brie Pie
Crab Quesadillas
Giant Mushrooms Stuffed with Chicken Sausage
Bacon-Wrapped Artichokes with Dijon Cream
Assorted Beers, Ales, Wheats, and Stouts
White Chocolate Truffles, Gold Foil- Wrapped Fudge Bars
French Roast Coffee
1
Sometimes you'd kill for a booking. I was ready - I'd had a rotten spring. The lack of business meant I spent afternoons frantically scrolling through my client files. Wasn't the Hardcastles' daughter supposed to get married? Didn't they want me to do the reception? And what about the Garden Club brunch, Newcomers' picnic, and Kiwanians' First-of-Summer barbecue? In terms of scheduled events, these last two months were the worst in the five years since I'd become a professional caterer. It wasn't just a rotten spring: It was disastrous.
The problem, everyone said, was the weather. From the middle of March until now, the beginning of June, maddening, endless rain and snow had assaulted the Colorado high country. The Audubon Society announced that birds migrating north had overflown the state completely. Drownings were up, landslides were up, catered events were way, way down. The clubs had all canceled their outdoor events, and the Hardcastles' daughter was on Prozac.
I set aside the dumpling dough I was kneading and looked out my kitchen window. Morning fog shrouded the mountains of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. In a recent empty moment - I was having lots of those lately - I'd read an article in which a psychiatrist claimed people actually eat more during long bouts of depressing weather. But if folks dig into whole grilled swordfish and soup bowls of chocolate mousse during gray-day melancholy, then caterers should hit the jackpot when it pours, right? Reading the article, I'd known in my heart the shrink's argument was wrong. Now, I finally had the bank statement to prove it. I rolled the dough to razor-thinness. It wasn't the lack of income that bothered me so much. After all, I'd been married to a man with a regular paycheck for just over a year. But second-time-around connubial bliss was one thing. Financial independence was another. Since I'd had five years of being on my own, to have my business fail would be mortifying. I whacked the next batch of dough with my rolling pin. To lose Goldilocks' Catering would be unthinkable.
Thank goodness my best friend had come to the rescue - bless her large, recovering-from-cardiac-arrest heart. In her midforties and ultrawealthy, Marla Korman was the other ex-wife of my ex-husband-known to both of us as the Jerk. When my business began to falter, Marla wanted to extend me a business loan. Very firmly, I'd said thank you, but no. Next she offered to have a venture capital firm - Prospect Financial Partners, in which she had more than a passing interest - analyze Goldilocks' Catering as an investment prospect. To this I'd also given a polite no thanks. If too many cooks spoiled the broth, there was no telling what a venture capital firm could do to a catering business. But then Marla had the devious but brilliant idea of booking me to do a celebratory event for Prospect Financial Partners. How could I say no? So this afternoon, I was catering a heartwarmingiy profitable luxury beer-and-hors d'oeuvre affair for the venture capitalists- - t an extremely unusual site.
I eased up on the rolling pin and pictured the venue for the party: the portal opening to the Eurydice Gold Mine. Of course, the party wasn't being held in the old mine, but under a tent erected at its entrance. And I was grateful for the last-minute booking, even if the firm had called on me in a state of panic. No question about it, Prospect Financial Partners needed a social bash. In the worst way.
The firm had been in an uproar the last few weeks over the unexpected death of their chief investment officer. In what I viewed as peculiar hard-heartedness, clients had flooded the firm with unsympathetic calls to find out how Victoria Lear's dying would affect their portfolios. In particular, the clients demanded, would the fact that CIO Lear was gone to that great securities exchange in the sky postpone the scheduled reopening of the Eurydice? The partners had assured their nervous investors that plans to capitalize the re-opening of the gold mine were absolutely on track, despite the unscheduled demise of Victoria Lear. But chaos and uncertainty are not easily quelled, especially when money is involved. Prospect's clients were close to rebellion, otherwise known as pulling out.
Finally, Marla had convinced the Prospect partners that it would be marvelous fun - not to mention a break from the crisis atmosphere at the firm - to do a catered affair next to the Eurydice portal. Wine and dine 'em, she'd said, and they'll forget their uneasiness about Victoria's death. And she, Marla, had the perfect caterer for the occasion.... With the temperature hovering in the low fifties and rain and hail threatening, it wasn't a place I would have chosen for a party. But I assured the Prospect firm of my ability to adapt. When the rain arrived, I told them we could make like rich Arabs and huddle under our tent.
Marla had a large portfolio with Prospect. More significantly, she was in the fifteenth month of a rocky romantic involvement with Prospect's financial whiz, Tony Royce, one of the two partner-owners of the venture capital firm. Clever, intense, and perpetually well-dressed, Tony had been with Marla constantly through the darkest days of her illness almost a year ago. But rumors abounded of how handsome, dark- haired Tony had dated other women before and after Marla's hospitalization. The gossip mill even worked overtime spreading a kinky tale concerning Tony's relationship with a certain Vegas stripper. A couple of months ago, Marla had heard of Tony's wanderings. She'd told him she'd remain a Prospect client, but her heart couldn't take him seeing other women. She'd ended their relationship. Secretly, I was glad. I didn't want my best friend with another jerk.
In May, however, Tony had repented. He swore a very public, ceaseless devotion to Marla. Even I was impressed. I'd desperately hoped they'd celebrate their new togetherness with lovely, intimate dinners catered by yours truly. But no.
Ever one to combine business with pleasure, this last month Tony had taken Marla to every restaurant where the Prospect Partners were thinking of putting their money. Marla regaled me with stories about this panorama of eatery outings, where she would muse over the food - delicious, unusual, or just plain weird. Tony assessed each restaurant's ability to attract diners. After the mine venture, Tony told her, Prospect was going to diversify by putting capital into a restaurant with regional expansion plans. But when Marla's cardiologist had heard she was taste-testing hollandaise sauce and deep-dish pizza all over the state, he'd put an immediate stop to this particular type of financial analysis.
"Tony and I are in love," Marla had confided to me when she made the booking. "It's the real thing, Goldy."
"Is he going to find someone else to do his taste-testing?"
"He says so," she'd dreamily replied. "But he needs me now more than ever. For moral support. He's so distraught over the firm's loss of Victoria."
I said nothing. I didn't want to be reminded. I couldn't think of Victoria Lear's death without shuddering.
An avid off-roader, Chief Investment Officer Lear had lost control of her car while negotiating narrow, precarious Orpheus Canyon Road. Orpheus Canyon, two miles east of the Eurydice Mine, snaked through the mountains between Idaho Springs and Central City, another old mining town that now featured legalized gambling. The dirt road's precipitous drop-offs frequently claimed drivers who made the smallest miscalculation of the road's lethal curves. No one had seen Victoria Lear's Toyota Land Cruiser dive off the mud- slick road. It had been a week before her body had been discovered within the gnarled wreckage. There had been little forensic evidence to recover. The constant rain on the dirt road had obliterated the Toyota's tracks. Three days ago, the Clear Creek County coroner had ruled her death accidental.
"Prospect Financial needs to make everything appear normal," Marla claimed over the phone. "That's why they loved my idea of having the party up at the mine. To show the investors they're in control."
Pondering all this, I sighed and cut the delicate dumpling dough into squares. I sauteed morsels of fresh shrimp with scallion, water chestnut, and soy sauce. In control of what, I had wanted to ask, but had not. The mouth-watering odors of Chinese food filled the kitchen. When the shrimp had cooked to a succulent pink, I turned the mixture out to cool and started slicing thick slabs of tomato for the tomato-Brie pie.
Really, I reminded myself, I had enough problems of my own without worrying about Marla's romantic and financial interests. With the Jerk leaving his medical practice to his colleagues so he could take a sabbatical - otherwise known as can't-stand-the-Colorado-weather-need-lengthy-vacation-in-Hawaii - Marla and I had lost the person we loved to complain about most. And then there was my dear husband Tom, who had a whole plateful of problems all to himself, in which the death of Victoria Lear played a significant part.
I cut wedges of creamy Brie and alternated them with the tomato slices. Tom called this particular dish heart-attack-on-a-plate, so I would never serve it to Marla. I grated pungent Fontinella to sprinkle over the Brie. I wouldn't give it to Tom either, as I was extremely worried that his current job situation might lead to heart-attack-at-the-office.
Tom had been an investigator at the Furman County Sheriff's Department for more than a decade. His problem was his new boss. Five years from retirement, Captain Augustus Shockley was so paranoid he stayed locked in his office most of the day. Tom had taken to slipping his notes and reports under Shockley's door. In his two months as chief honcho, the only thing Shockley had seemed able to do was to move totally incompetent people into positions where they swiftly managed to drive Tom insane. Shockley had also, as it turned out, placed his retirement savings with Prospect Financial Partners, and he'd become obsessed with Victoria Lear's car accident. Check it out, Schulz! Go investigate the site! Shockley's frantic memos to Tom had ignored the fact that the steep, rain-soaked crash site was virtually unreachable. The memos also ignored the fact that Idaho Springs was in Clear Creek County and outside of Furman County jurisdiction - thus, not Tom's problem. Nevertheless, Tom had been in contact with his counterpart, the Homicide Investigator at the Clear Creek Sheriff's Department. As a result, Tom had been one of the first people the coroner had called with his report. This isn't very helpful, Shockley had scrawled across Tom's summary of the fatal wreck. I often thought my handsome husband resembled a bear. Now, with Augustus Shockley to deal with, he was beginning to act like one.
But, I thought as I whisked eggs with whipping cream, I was looking forward to tonight, after the party. Tom and I would toast the financial turnaround Goldilocks' Catering was making with the Prospect event. The party by the mine was going to be marvelous, I told myself confidently. I'd worked hard on recipes; I'd gathered mountains of fresh ingredients. Since my former in-house assistant, Julian Teller, had moved to upstate New York to attend Cornell, I'd hired another helper. Macguire Perkins had been one of Julian's classmates at Elk Park Preparatory School. For the party at the gold mine, Macguire had ordered beers, ales, stouts, and wheats-brewed beverages for aficionados. And I'd begun to cook with gusto.
A rental company was setting up the tent early this morning. The electricity wired to the mine would provide power for a compact disc player and rented portable ovens, which the same workers would place behind a makeshift counter at the back tent flap, all ready to use when I arrived this afternoon. Getting up the narrow dirt road to the mine, which was situated five miles above Idaho Springs, wouldn't be quite as convenient. High Creek Avenue did not wind and dip as dangerously as Orpheus Canyon Road, but first-time visitors to the mine were bound to be spooked. The invitations warned the guests to come in four-wheel-drive vehicles and to maneuver their vehicles with care. I prayed that the rental company folks had made it. The specter of Victoria Lear's car catapulting off a cliff had propelled me to do a very slow dry-run trek in my van the previous day. Yesterday's run, of course, had been anything but dry. To get from my house in Aspen Meadow to the mine - fifteen miles away - took Marla and me nearly an hour. We bumped across wooden bridges spanning rain-swollen creeks and rocked through deep mud on mountain roads. If the catering didn't work out, I'd told Marla on our way back home, I could always become a Sherpa.
