The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier (24 page)

Shaking uncontrollably, I turned back to see Scruggs walking calmly towards me, gun in hand. There was nothing I could do. Even if there had been, I was too scared to do it. He stood over me like a black Goliath. He opened his jacket and returned the gun to a shoulder holster. Then he reached into his coat’s inner pocket and pulled out a leather folder. He extended it down with his long arm and flipped it open to reveal an impressive shield.

“Charles Webbe,” he said, “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

56

I held my glass up to the light. “Nopalitos,” I said

“What about them?” asked Susannah.

“I just realized it. Margaritas are the same shade of green as nopalitos.”

She lofted her glass. “You’re right.”

Angie materialized next to us. “You two wanting a refill?”

“Just admiring the color,” I said.

“But since you’re here,” said Susannah, and Angie smiled and left to get refills.

“So what was the big break-through you were about to explain?” Susannah asked.

“I was sitting in court while a senile-looking judge, Layton, and a woman named Rincon from the D.A.’s office discussed my future. The longer they talked, the more nervous I became. I felt so... helpless. It was my future, but I had no say in it. I was a piece of driftwood on the river, a cog in a wheel. I was being ground by the wheels of justice, I—”

“Cut the metaphors, Hubie, and get to the point.”

“Right. I was in a mill. ‘Mill’ – that was the key word. I thought of the Moulin Rouge because moulin means mill in French. Then I realized it’s a cognate with the Spanish word for mill, molina.” I looked at her. “That’s not as common as you might suspect. French and Spanish are both romance languages, but they don’t share—”

“Hubert, I’ve got class tonight. Can you get to the point? I won’t be able to concentrate if you leave me hanging about this mystery.”

“Sorry. So molina took me to molinero, the Spanish word for the person who operates a mill.”

“A miller.”

“Right. And then I remembered Rafael listing all the people he remembered from Café Alsace.” I did a little drum roll on the table. “One of them was Jim Miller, and he was the manager.”

She stared at me.

“Jim, get it? Short for James. Which in Spanish is Santiago.”

She stared some more. Then she said, “So Jim Miller and Santiago Molinero had the same name in two different languages? That’s the big breakthrough clue?”

“No, they shared more than just a name. They are – were – the same person.”

“There must be lots of people named Santiago Molinero and even more named James Miller. That doesn’t make them all the same person.”

“Of course not. But these two were.” I hesitated. “Or this one was? I don’t know how to talk about two people being one. Anyway, there were other clues pointing in that direction, but I didn’t see them until I thought about the two of them being one.”

“Such as?”

“In the order in which I saw them—”

“Or the order in which you missed them,” she said. We both laughed just as Angie showed up with our refills.

“I guess you’re glad to see me,” she said.

After Angie left, I continued my explanation. “It might be a coincidence that there was a James Miller at Alsace and a Santiago Molinero at Schnitzel, but for them both to be the manager is a double coincidence. That was enough to start me wondering.”

She perked up. “You were right to start wondering. The hardest part about an alias is remembering it. You decide to call your self Frank Smith and then the next day, you introduce yourself to someone as Fred Smith or Frank Jones and blow your cover.”

“Really?”

“Sure. It happens all the time.”

“How many people have you ever known who adopted an alias?”

“Dozens. In murder mysteries, Hubie.”

Here we go again, I thought.

“So,” she elaborated, “what they do is choose something based on their real name. Like Richard Franklin might become Frank Richards.”

“And James Jesse might become Jesse James,” I added.

She cocked her head to the side. “I didn’t know he used an alias.”

Neither did I.

“So what was the next step?” she asked.

“His skin was a weird color. At first, I just thought it was odd. But when I started speculating that Molinero might be Miller, I figured it must have been that rub-on instant tanning lotion. Turns out I was right, and guess what?”

“What?”

“Jalapeño juice is a solvent for that stuff. The parts of his face I splashed the jalapeño juice on turned back to his normal skin color. It was weird looking at his face there on the floor—”

“I don’t need to know what he looked like dead. Maybe he just wanted that outdoorsy look a tan gives you.”

“But he also had a beard.”

“Lots of people have beards. And lots of people with Hispanic last names have light skin, so he didn’t need to color his skin to appear Hispanic.”

“But he wasn’t trying just to look Hispanic. He was also trying to look different. He needed not to resemble his former self because he knew some people who applied for jobs at Schnitzel might be from Café Alsace or one of the other places he’s started.”

“There were others?”

“Schnitzel was his sixth restaurant, all colossal failures.”

She shook her head in amazement. “I don’t get it. Why would someone who failed so often keep… Oh my God! He wanted to fail. It’s like that movie, The Producers, where the accountant teams up with a Broadway producer to deliberately produce a flop. They raise more money than they spend, so when the play closes, they pocket the surplus. The investors figure everything is gone and don’t even pursue it.”

“Exactly. And remember the name of the musical they produced?”

“Who could forget it? Springtime for Hitler. But audiences decided it was a spoof, and the play became a hit.”

“So no failure and no unspent money to pocket. See a parallel here?”

She slapped the table and laughed. “Schnitzel was the restaurant equivalent of Springtime for Hitler, a restaurant doomed to failure.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And it became Chile Schnitzel and began to succeed like Springtime for Hitler. So he had to undermine the restaurant.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “He’s the one who called the police about the poison being your glazing chemical.”

“Right.”

“And he somehow got Voile to take the wait staff out on strike.”

“Right.”

“And then he sicced the D.A. on you for larceny.”

“He must have, although he didn’t admit that one because I didn’t ask him about it before the shooting started.”

She brightened. “And I’ll bet he told Voile to flirt with Rafael so he wouldn’t be thinking about Molinero and possibly recognize him.”

“I hadn’t thought of that one.”

“That’s because you date two women at once.”

“I don’t date…” I saw she was laughing and cut short my reply.

“Anything else that made you suspicious of Molinero?”

“Yeah, when I took him the glazed sample and the drawing of the edelweiss overlay, he approved them with barely a glance.”

She was seeing it all now. “He had insisted that you had to do the work in the restaurant. You thought it was because he wanted oversight and control.”

“Right.”

“But what he really wanted was for the glazing chemicals to be there in case he needed to poison someone.”

“He said it’s important to have rodent control in a restaurant.”

She shuddered. “Any other clues that Miller and Molinero were the same guy?”

“No, but there was one that should have made me realize he probably wasn’t Hispanic. Remember me telling you that during the meeting about restarting the restaurant, Molinero stopped opposing the idea and ask for a show of hands of those in support of the fusion idea?”

“Yeah, but why did he do that? He must have known the vote would be in favor.”

“Of course. But he thought Chile Schnitzel would be an even bigger failure than Schnitzel. He thought we were unwittingly advancing his scheme. So he allowed the vote and appeared very magnanimous in doing so. But when he called the vote, Juan asked him to repeat it in Spanish for the benefit of the staff who didn’t speak English. So Molinero said, ‘Si les gusta este nuevo plan, levanten los manos’.”

“So?”

“He said it incorrectly. It should be las manos, not los manos.”

“I thought Spanish words ending in ‘o’ were always masculine.”

“Almost always. But mano is one of the few exceptions.” I raised my eyebrows in anticipation.

She eyed me warily. “O.K., I’ll bite. Why is mano an exception?”

“Because mano is derived from the Latin manus which was a fourth declension feminine noun.”

She rolled her eyes. “Four years of Latin and all you got from it is a chance to show off once in a while.”

“Not true. Father Groas and I occasionally exchange Roman greetings.”

57

Charles Webbe showed up at Spirits in Clay promptly at ten as we had agreed. He wore a dark blue suit, a starched white shirt and a regimental tie. His black shoes were polished to a gloss.

So was his head. He had sheared the dreadlocks and shaved what remained, including the beard.

I led him to my kitchen where he accepted my offer of fresh coffee. I had put away my usual cheap brand in favor of New Mexico Piñon Coffee.

“How do you take it?” I asked him.

“Black,” he said. “Like your girlfriend.”

We both laughed. I offered him a cuerno de azucar. He managed to eat it without a single grain of sugar flecking his clothes.

I looked him in the eye, something that was harder to do than it should have been.

“You saved my life.”

He shrugged. “It’s what we do. The Director gets out of sorts when we lose a civilian.”

“I owe you an apology. I thought you were going to shoot me.”

“No need to apologize. I generally have the same feeling when someone is running at me with a gun.”

“But I thought you were Molinero’s accomplice.”

“Because you saw me in his office.”

I was flabbergasted. “How did you know I saw you?”

“I also saw you,” he said as if it were obvious.

“But the place was dark, and you never looked at me.”

He smiled. “I’m a trained observer. I don’t need to look at you to see you.”

I felt silly and embarrassed about hiding behind my work table now that I knew he knew I was there all along.

“I saw someone else in the restaurant late one night.” I hated to rat on Arliss, but I figured Webbe needed to know.

“Arliss Mansfield,” he said.

Sees all, knows all, I thought. “What was he doing there?”

He told me. I felt gloomy.

“How did you get in Molinero’s office, anyway?” I asked him.

He gave me a cold stare. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Then he laughed. He had an easy laugh.

“Why didn’t you say something when you saw me?”

“I didn’t want to blow my cover. Anyway, I figured you’d think I was trying to steal something, and that was fine. Just as long as you didn’t know I was looking for evidence.”

I nodded.

He smiled broadly. “You probably felt bad about labeling a black man a thief.”

“I did.”

“Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. If I see someone in an office in a closed and dark building, I assume he’s a burglar. The color of his skin doesn’t matter.”

I refilled his cup and he accepted another cuerno de azucar.

“So Arliss wasn’t the accomplice and neither were you. Can you tell me who it was?”

“Bonnie Miller, but you know her as Wallace Voile.”

“So Wallace was an alias. And… Wait, Miller? As in James Miller? Macklin Masoot told me she was Molinero’s paramour, but I didn’t believe him.”

“You were right not to believe him.”

“She wasn’t his paramour?”

He shook his head. “Jim Miller wasn’t her lover. He was her father.”

I drank some coffee while that sunk in. I had disliked her from the moment we met, but now I saw her not as the icy beauty but as the girl whose father had been killed.

“Why did you pose as a dishwasher?”

“I couldn’t pose as a chef. I can’t cook. And a black man applying for a dishwashing job doesn’t raise anyone’s suspicion.”

“That’s a sad commentary.”

“Won’t always be that way,” he said. His tone reflected both realism and confidence. Maybe those are the ingredients of wisdom, I thought. 

“How’d you come up with the name M’Lanta?”

He laughed. “You like it?”

“Not really. But I guess it worked.”

“I was trying to find a name when I saw a bottle of the stuff, and I liked the absurdity of it so much, I couldn’t resist.”

“When I told a friend of mine your name was M’Lanta, she said, ‘No wonder he’s a potscrubber’. I told her some people might consider that a racist remark.”

“Some might. Not me. It’s a classist remark. A black man named R’nandle is at a disadvantage in life. But so is a white man named Jethro. It’s harder for the black man because he already has a steeper hill to climb, but names do make a difference.”

“R’nandle?”

“Just made it up. Maybe I should have used that rather than M’Lanta.”

“Charles Webbe has a nice ring to it,” I said.

“It was the name of the best man I ever knew,” he said, “my father.”

And the name of the man who saved my life, I thought to myself.

58

Susannah said, “I can’t believe you tried to crack the safe.”

I shook my head at my own folly. “If I’d had the sense not to try, I would’ve been out of there before Molinero showed up. I wouldn’t have been shot at and almost killed.”

“What I don’t understand is why you went there to begin with. Why not just tell the police your suspicion about Molinero and let them handle it?”

“I thought about doing that. I wanted to do that. Skulking around empty buildings goes against my nature. But I kept thinking about that saying that the wheels of justice grind slowly.”

“Everyone knows that, Hubie. As sayings go, it’s just run of the mill.”

“Hey, I’m the one who makes puns,” I complained after I laughed.