Beware False Profits Part 6

"You're sure? You're not addicted to detective work?"

I glanced at Ed, who seemed to be hanging on my answer. And what could I say? I had just trooped all over Manhattan trying to find out what happened to Joe Wagner. Only that time Ed was one of the gang.

"You just keep the murder rate in check, and I'll be fine," I said. "Helping with homework and gutting houses keeps me plenty busy."

"I'd hate to get too close to you if you had a crowbar in your hands." He sent me half a grin, then turned to talk to a couple of men who had just wandered up. I recognized one of them as our chief of police, and another as a member of the city council, who was often the only voice of reason.

Chad came out of the warehouse and everybody turned expectantly. He began with his most fetching grin and a few jokes. Then he launched into an apology for Joe. He delivered it with such charm and good humor that by the time he finished, I don't think anybody really cared whether Joe Wagner was in New Jersey or Hong Kong.

"Maybe Maura was right," I told Ed as we all marched into the warehouse. "Chad's something of a smooth operator, isn't he? Could be he wants Joe's job."

"Every second in command wants to be first. Chalk one up to Maura for noticing."

With both of us cheering her on from the sidelines, Maura would be so self-actualized by the end of the week she could run for president.

I tried to concentrate as Chad showed us how and where food was stored. He gave statistics about where the food came from, how much from local farmers, how much from community food drives, how much from grocers and wholesalers worried about expiration dates or outdated packaging. We saw the kitchen where volunteers prepared meals for the elderly and homeless and a small cla.s.sroom where schoolchildren came to learn about world hunger and the way food is grown and distributed. We saw the office in the back, where all supplies were carefully accounted for and donations were logged and acknowledged for the IRS. We saw the garage where two trucks used in the transfer of food were housed, and the tool room where the community garden supplies wintered over.

I was impressed by how clean and orderly everything seemed, and I had to give Chad his due.

He kept moving, and we visited the administration building to see the store. He showed us the new and brighter paint, and the way shelves had been rearranged to better show off the merchandise. I recognized several baby quilts that Junie and our church needleworkers had made and donated. Some lucky families would be able to wrap their new babies in handcrafted warmth.

The administration offices and conference room were excluded from the tour. I imagined that Chad had little to say about what happened there. But by the time he walked us over to the VIP tent, I thought everyone was impressed by the food bank and by Chad himself. I was even more worried about Joe.

"Please enjoy our hospitality," Chad said as he ushered everybody into the tent, which had been set up beside the warehouse, out of Mayday! traffic.

Clearly the food bank valued their VIPs. I had hoped for a plate of brownies, but there were tea sandwiches and delicate pastries, platters of fruit and cheese, and best of all a chocolate fountain with cubes of pound cake, fresh strawberries, and other a.s.sorted goodies.

"I like this VIP stuff," I told Ed. "If I'd known there was a chocolate fountain in my future, I wouldn't have squawked so loudly when I discovered what you planned to do with your life."

That was meant to be a joke, but Ed wasn't paying attention. I followed his gaze to the table. My first glance had stopped at the fountain. Now it stopped at the punch bowl, where his was riveted.

"That looks like the Women's Society punch bowl." He glanced at me. "Why would our church punch bowl be at Mayday!?"

I understood why Ed was looking at me for the answer. The punch bowl and I have a history. Not exactly this punch bowl, since its two predecessors more or less collapsed into a million pieces. But since the last time, I've sworn off relationships with cut gla.s.s. I stay ten yards away. I have nightmares about Waterford crystal.

I held up my hands. "If it's ours, I had nothing to do with it. Nothing."

"If you want punch, let me get it, okay?"

"I would die of thirst rather than get too close."

"Don't look now, but the chocolate fountain is right next to it."

"Then I'll stand on the opposite side. I promise."

I looked over and realized that Sally Berrigan, a member of our church and Women's Society, was standing to one side of the table with a small group of volunteers, looking proudly at their handiwork. Sally is involved in almost every social justice organization in town, and they're all lucky to have her. She always gets things done, and obviously had been instrumental in creating the spread before us.

I walked over to her as everybody descended on the food and gave her a hug. "This looks yummy."

Sally beamed. She's an attractive older woman in a no-nonsense, Ivory soap sort of way. You only have to look at Sally to know you're in the most capable of hands.

"I wanted the VIPs to feel good about their trip to Mayday! Of course if Brownie Kefauver bites his tongue instead of my cuc.u.mber sandwiches, I won't be sorry."

I knew the context. Sally ran for mayor in the last election and was soundly defeated. Her platform was thoughtful and well considered, which apparently was the problem.

I looked over my shoulder and saw that indeed, the Kefauver family had arrived. They hadn't been on the tour since Hazel knew everything she needed to about the way the food bank worked-and planned to throw her axe into those gears anyway.

"That woman," Sally said softly. "You have no idea how much trouble she caused with this reception. We had everything planned, then she came in and slashed the budget."

I tried to soothe. "Well, it looks like you did a wonderful job." I hesitated. "You even thought to borrow the church punch bowl."

"Not because I wanted to. We had everything set to rent from Quite the Party, and Hazel cancelled our order. She said we would have to borrow whatever we needed. So we did, with a lot of effort. And the chocolate fountain? We had one on order that came with an attendant. They aren't as easy to operate as you might think. But Hazel decided we could learn."

"It looks great. You learn fast."

"Yes, and as long as the bees don't find it, we don't have strong winds, we got all the lumps out of the chocolate, n.o.body trips over the cord, and the fountain is perfectly level, it should work just fine."

"Wow."

"Oh, and the final blow? Hazel refused to let us purchase the chocolate that's made especially for it. We had donated chocolate available, so she insisted we find a recipe ourselves and use it."

The chocolate fountain was beginning to look a shade less yummy.

Sally must have read my expression, because she put her hand on my shoulder. "It tastes perfectly fabulous. You just add vegetable oil based on the pounds of chocolate you need, but you have to melt the chocolate first and do some adjusting to get it flowing. Then you turn it off and on again every twenty or thirty minutes to reprime the pump. I won't go on..."

"I'm wondering why you didn't get Hazel to do this herself, since it was her idea to change the order."

"Hazel and chocolate? Not a chance. Her views on what foods are acceptable for human beings are way out there. Only food in its purest form. She claims she eats nothing but nuts, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Of course..."

Sally's eyes were sparkling. I knew that look. Sally was listening to her better side, trying to stem the flow of gossip. But I wasn't above pulling a brick or two out of that dam.

"You don't think she really follows the diet?"

"You're a vegetarian, aren't you?"

"I don't expect other people to follow the lettuce-lined path."

"Well, the rumor is Hazel doesn't practice what she preaches. She's a junk food junkie. I'm told she's a hopeless chocoholic, and get this...she smokes!"

I envisioned Hazel, the food n.a.z.i, rolling a tobacco leaf and smoking it "in its purest form."

"People have seen her smoking?" I asked.

"People have smelled it. I'm one of them. She tries to cover it up, but she's not successful. I get the feeling maybe she smokes half a pack at a time whenever she can get away with it. I think she more or less stores it up until she can go off on a binge by herself again."

This was a character flaw that improved Hazel's resume. She almost sounded human. Imperfections have their place.

"But of course she would never admit it," Sally continued. "So she rails against the evils of chocolate and lets the rest of us do all the work. She forgets the rest of us have busy lives, too. In fact, the minute I'm done here, I'm heading out of town."

"Somewhere fun?"

She looked at me as if I needed my consciousness raised. "A conference on urban renewal for small cities."

In her own way, Sally is as single-minded as Hazel.

I told her again how lovely everything looked, then I wandered over to sample the wares.

Chad Sutterfield was standing by himself at the end of the table, so I went to chat with him after I filled my plate. I planned to save the chocolate fountain for dessert. I wanted to look forward to it.

"You did a great job on the tour." I offered him one of the tiny spinach quiches that had just been put out, but I guess it's true what they say about real men. He shook his head.

"You'll have to tell me how those are. We have thirty boxes in the warehouse freezer."

"What will you do with them? They don't seem like the kind of thing families are looking for when they come to get groceries. 'I'd like dried milk, canned tomatoes, a pound of cheese, and a box of fancy appetizers?'"

"One day next week we'll probably include them in our meals for the elderly." He watched me take a bite and smiled when I nodded my approval.

"You get all sorts of odd things like this?"

"We're always surprised what people think we might use. Once we got a hundred pounds of ground ostrich meat."

"What did you do?"

"They say it's really healthy, so we couldn't see disposing of it. Our volunteers made spaghetti. I won't tell you where we served it. Maybe you ate some."

"Nope. I'm a vegetarian, brought on at least partly by too many meals of mystery meat in school lunchrooms."

"I could tell you some hair-raising stories about string beans."

"Leave me some illusions."

A couple more people wandered up to thank Chad for the tour, and I wandered off to find Ed. After his warning, I was going to make him serve me a gla.s.s of punch. I might drink half a dozen gla.s.ses just to make a point.

I got close to the table just in time for disaster to ensue. The tent flap blew open, in itself nothing to cause a problem. But the same strong gust of wind that had sent it flying swept across the chocolate fountain. I remembered what Sally had said and jumped backwards just in time. Unfortunately, others nearby weren't so lucky.

Brownie, who had been dipping a strawberry, was now as chocolate as his name. And Hazel had been sprayed with enough dark chocolate to indulge in clandestine licks for a month to come.

The Kefauvers jumped back, sputtering.

"Turn that thing off!" Hazel screeched. "Who's responsible? Who's the incompetent who's responsible!"

Brownie took her by the arm and pulled her away from the scene. She was too busy peeling chocolate off her chin to resist. But she continued to screech more abuse as she peeled.

If you've never seen a chocolate tornado, you've missed something special. Chocolate flew everywhere. Everything for several feet in diameter was thoroughly coated. Sandwiches, pastries, and the punch bowl. As if that wasn't enough of a problem, the chocolate that wasn't spraying the table was bubbling out of the fountain in bursts, as if it was taking shots at the people trying to move food out of harm's way.

"Unplug it," Sally commanded, and two men I'd never met dropped to their knees, crawled under the table, apparently b.u.mping heads judging from the profanity, and managed to make a simple job unbearably complicated. While they struggled with the cord, chocolate coated everything in sight.

Ed came over to watch from a safe distance. "Tell me you had nothing to do with this."

"Oh, ye of little faith."

"What happened?"

"Sally was just complaining about how hard the setup was. I guess they didn't get it right after all." I looked up at him. "I'd built up to the chocolate fountain, you know. I have an active fantasy life, and I was dragging it out. I was just about to indulge. Does this seem fair to you?"

"I'll buy you a funnel cake."

"Maybe I could get a little closer and open my mouth. I can always wash my hair."

"Hazel!"

I wondered what Hazel had done now. I hoped whatever it was, it didn't involve Sally Berrigan and hands around the throat. Hazel was probably stronger, but Sally had more friends.

I turned to see Hazel facedown on the ground to our left. Hazel is a difficult woman and hard to like, but I knew she wasn't the kind of person who would faint for attention.

"Ed..." I grabbed his arm. "Something's got to be wrong."

"She was furious." He started forward.

I wondered if in her rage, Hazel had gone after Sally or somebody else, and they had shoved her and she'd fallen.

But now Brownie was kneeling beside his wife, shaking her. "She was okay. She was okay a minute ago. Then she gasped and...then, then she fell."

Once the tour was over I hadn't noticed Roussos, but he must have been with a crowd of VIPs closer to the tent door. Now he pushed past us and joined Brownie on the ground.

"Help me turn her over," Roussos ordered.

"Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe she hurt her back or her neck or-"

"We're turning her over now."

Used to following orders, Brownie pushed as Roussos got on the other side and pulled. I put my hand to my mouth. Hazel looked awful. And the chocolate splattered all over her cheeks and neck didn't help.

Roussos put his fingers against the side of her throat. He kept moving his fingers, as if he was feeling for a pulse. I knew he hadn't found one when he tilted her head back so her jaw dropped open, and he felt inside her mouth. He was checking to be sure her airway wasn't blocked.

"Somebody get the medics," he shouted.

He turned back to Hazel, positioned himself to blow air into her lungs, and began.

I was at his side in a moment. "I can do the chest compressions."

"Stay there just in case." He breathed again.

I watched in horror. Hazel's chest rose with each puff, but she wasn't breathing on her own. Just as I was about to repeat my offer, there was a noise from the door, and one of the emergency medical technicians on Mayday! duty rushed in.

I stepped out of the way, and he said a few words to Roussos, did a quick a.s.sessment, then took over. Roussos stood above them watching. I don't think he realized he was shaking his head. Roussos never gives anything away, so I knew the news was as bad as it gets.

I don't know how much time pa.s.sed. The fountain was unplugged, people were asked to leave, and finally the ambulance that had been parked at the front of the grounds arrived.