Chapter 10
“And I thought doing food styling was grueling,” Bernie said to herself as she arranged mini crab cakes on a bed of watercress. Here it was seven o’clock at night and she, Amber, and Libby were in Nigel’s kitchen getting ready to serve dinner when she should have been relaxing with a martini. In the TV studio, someone served her food, not the opposite way around.
“At least the kitchen is air-conditioned,” Bernie observed, trying to be positive.
Libby grunted and turned up the heat under the sauté pan.
“And we got our stuff back from the police.”
Libby nodded and kept her eyes fixed on the pieces of chicken she was sautéing.
Bernie studied her sister for a moment. Libby had been acting preoccupied ever since they’d gotten their stuff out of the cafeteria, but then, Bernie reflected, her sister always had been sensitive to pressure and today had been a bitch.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“I’ll be better after this meal is served,” Libby allowed. “It’s been a long day.”
“It certainly has,” Bernie agreed and changed the subject. “Everyone likes the crab cakes.”
“As well they should.” Libby slid another piece of chicken into the sauté pan on the stove. The store was known for her mother’s crab and sweet potato cakes.
Bernie looked around. “How much do you think Herron spent on this kitchen?”
“Fifty thousand. At least,” estimated Libby as she eyed the granite countertops, brushed steel appliances, tile floor, and oak cabinets. “Probably a drop in the bucket by L.A. standards.”
“It would be triple that amount out there,” Bernie said. “Although these days they’re doing fifties kitchens. Refrigerators with rounded corners in robin’s egg blue. High Tech is out.” She absentmindedly slid her onyx and silver ring up and down her finger. “I was thinking that we’ve come a long way from crouching over a fire roasting a hunk of meat.”
“It’s amazing isn’t it?” Libby replied. “And those people managed to do it without a three-thousand-dollar gas barbecue, a fifty-dollar sable-hair basting brush, and a three-hundred-dollar German slicing knife.”
“Feeling a little puritanical, are we?” Bernie asked.
“No.” Libby indicated the hundreds of dollars worth of pristine copper and steel-clad pans hanging on the rack above the eight-burner commercial stove. “I just think if you buy something, you should use it.”
Bernie tsked. “Libby, Libby. These pans aren’t supposed to be used, they’re totemic items, strictly for show, a testimony to Nigel’s wealth and taste, in the same way that women in the fifties used to carry white gloves as a sign of their good breeding or African women in certain tribes wear all their gold jewelry.”
“Silly me, how could I have missed that?” Libby said.
Bernie laughed. “What does this guy Nigel do anyway?”
“Investment banking. Why?”
“Just curious.” Bernie picked up the tray. “And Libby.”
Her sister turned.
“Now what?”
Bernie pointed to the white shirt she was wearing, her own T-shirt having acquired a grease stain she couldn’t get out earlier in the day.
“I just want you to know that come what may, no matter what emergencies occur tomorrow—even if the entire town is wiped out by the plague—I am planning on getting a pedicure and going shopping. This is the last day I’m wearing this.”
“What’s wrong with my shirt?” Libby demanded.
“Nothing. If you’re a size sixteen.”
“It’s not that loose.”
“It certainly is.” Bernie took a handful of material and pulled. “God gave you boobs. Why not show them?”
Libby gave the chicken a jab with her fork. “Because I’m more comfortable when my shirts don’t fit like a second skin. I take it you spoke to your friend in L.A.”
“She called while you were in the shower.”
“And?”
“Emily said Joe told her he gave all my stuff to the Salvation Army. The bastard. He knows there’s nothing I’m going to do about it from here. You should have seen my Jimmy Choo’s.” A wistful expression crept across Bernie’s face. “They had Marabou feathers and four inch heels that had this little curve inward. They were wonderful and damned if I didn’t look good in them. When I wore them I felt as if I owned the room. Have you ever felt that way?”
Libby pushed her hair off her face with her forearm.
“No,” she admitted as she took the chicken out of the pan, laid it on a brown paper bag to drain, and started sautéing another batch. “I can’t honestly say I have.”
“It’s fun.” And Bernie started for the living room.
Libby kept sautéing. Considering the little time they’d had, she was pleased at the way she, Bernie, Amber, and Googie had pulled everything together.
The appetizers were simple but good. One, because Libby believed in taking the edge off hunger, not killing it, and two, because she didn’t like fiddly little things. They were serving cherry tomatoes stuffed with goat cheese, nicoise olives, tapanade and hummus with toasted pita wedges, crab and artichoke dip in endive leaves, and little crab cakes with remoulade sauce, all of which Bernie had artfully arranged in bowls and platters decorated with fresh flowers and herbs.
The first course was a salad of field greens with strawberries and glazed walnuts tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing, which tasted good and took two seconds to throw together, and while people were eating that, Libby could finish off the second course, Moroccan style chicken sauté with preserved lemons, and reheat the couscous and gingered carrots.
For dessert Libby had had Googie make four different kinds of cookies: shortbread, linzer tarts, chocolate snaps, and lemon crisps. She’d also pulled some double-coffee ice cream that she’d made two weeks ago out of the freezer and was serving it with a simple chocolate sauce flavored with rum, a combination that everyone always liked.
Libby was thinking that she’d have to make some ice cream tomorrow morning, when Nigel Herron came into the kitchen. Tall and gangly, with a tendency to wave his arms about, he always reminded Libby of his namesake, the Blue Heron.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Libby asked, still keeping one eye on the chicken so she didn’t burn it.
“Well, first of all I wanted to thank you for doing this in the light of what happened on Saturday.”
“No problem.”
“So distressing.”
“Homicide tends to be,” Libby observed.
Nigel smiled weakly at Libby’s remark and rubbed the side of his nose with his knuckle.
“I was thinking about canceling the party, but Susan’s worked so hard, I just didn’t have the heart. And I think Laird would have wanted us to go on, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“I had to force myself to go in to work today. Everything seems so unreal. I understand you were down at the police station for most of the afternoon. Do they have any leads yet?”
Libby moved the chicken pieces around in the pan.
“If they have them, they’re not telling me.”
“Ah . . . I thought they might. Your being . . .”
“The former police chief ’s daughter?”
“Exactly.”
“All the more reason not to.”
“Ah, yes. I forgot about that unfortunate political contretemps.” Nigel rubbed his hands together. “I also wanted to tell you that Lydia and Janet should be here any moment.” He sighed. “I should have told them to come a half an hour earlier. I swear the pair of them has never been on time for anything in their lives.” Nigel came closer. “That’s a lot of fat in there, isn’t it?”
“You need fat to brown the chicken,” Libby said firmly. She’d been through this before. She knew there was even a nice long Latin word for fear of fat and it wasn’t fatophobia. Bernie had told her what it was. She just couldn’t remember.
“Oh,” Nigel said, not sounding even remotely convinced.
“Olive oil is good for your heart.”
“Yes. Well.” Nigel smoothed down the lapel on his brown silk tweed jacket. “I suppose it doesn’t matter really, does it. I mean, look at poor Lionel. One moment on top of his game. At the height of his fame. A three-million-dollar book contract. And the next moment writhing on the ground.”
Bernie stopped behind Nigel, empty tray in hand.
“If you want to get technical, he really didn’t writhe,” she observed.
Nigel half turned.
“No, I suppose he didn’t,” Nigel reflected. “He toppled.”
“Good word choice,” Bernie said.
Nigel beamed. “At one time I fancied myself a writer. But you know how these things go. Life takes us in different directions.”
Bernie gestured around the kitchen.
“This isn’t what I’d call a bad direction.”
Nigel shrugged and rubbed his nose again.
“I suppose that depends on how you define things.”
“And how do you define this?”
“Well, I haven’t achieved my heart’s desire.”
“That’s a pretty tall order.”
“I suppose it is,” Nigel conceded as the doorbell rang. “That must be Lydia and Janet,” he said. “Finally. Sometimes Lydia is beyond irresponsible. She was supposed to be here this afternoon to help me pack up Laird’s room.”
“He was staying with you?” Libby asked.
Nigel regarded her with the tolerant attitude a parent gives to a slightly backward child.
“Well, of course. Where else would he be staying? In a manner of speaking, I’m his literary muse.”
“I wouldn’t brag about that if I were him,” Bernie commented after Nigel had gone to get the door. “Is he British?” she asked Libby.
“No. He spent a semester in Oxford and has never gotten over it.” Libby indicated the warming oven with her chin. “Why don’t you take out the rest of the crab cakes and pass them around. Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes.”