“SMUGGLING.”
“Art forgery.”
“Fake antiques.”
“That’s almost just like art forgery. That doesn’t count.”
Eve rolled her eyes. At least she remembered to keep her voice down. We were in class (Fabulous Fruits and Vivacious Vegetables), and as we had all the way from Georgetown to Arlington, we were trying to figure out what sort of shady dealings Drago could have been involved with that would have resulted in his office being trashed-and in Drago being killed.
Eve whispered to me while she opened her can of chestnuts. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the gallery.”
“Except that Drago said the gallery was important,” I reminded her. “That’s why we’ve got to concentrate on crimes that involve art. Unless Drago wasn’t involved in anything illegal at all.” Don’t ask me why, but that was a new thought. I had been running on the assumption that Drago was a bad guy.
“Maybe he was an innocent bystander,” I suggested. “Or a government witness. You know, like on all those TV shows.”
“Of course he wasn’t!” Eve practically sneered. In a beauty queen sort of way, of course. “You saw him that evening when he was coming out of here. And you saw him when he and Beyla were arguing. He was one nasty dude. Bad as bad can get.”
“I hope that’s not the Brussels sprouts you’re talking about.”
We’d been so deep in our speculations, I had no idea Jim was standing right behind us until his comment interrupted our discussion. I jumped, and the chestnuts I was just pouring out of the can landed half in the sink and half on the floor.
“Sorry.” Jim sprang into action. He stooped to retrieve the chestnuts on the floor. I suppose in the great scheme of things, I should have been grateful for his gallantry.
Except that I bent to get them at the same time.
We clunked heads, and both of us came up rubbing our foreheads.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. I was all set to bend down again when I saw that Jim was going to, too.
“Sorry.” It was his turn.
We exchanged uncertain smiles, and though it was unspoken, we made the executive decision to let the chestnuts stay put for a while.
“So…” He concentrated on the ones that had landed in the sink. When he leaned over to scoop them out, his arm brushed mine.
I suppose I was still jittery from the whole snoop-around-the-gallery adventure, not to mention the way we made our excuses to Yuri and hurried out of there after I found Drago’s office looking like a tornado had gone through it. I sucked in a breath as my arm involuntarily jumped.
“I hope I’m not that scary.”
The smile Jim turned on me was as hot as his accent. And believe me, that accent was plenty hot.
I reminded myself that he was just being nice, like any cooking teacher would naturally be to any cooking student, and did my best to corral the suddenly out-of-control fantasies that threatened to leave me grinning back at him like some brainless bimbo. Or worse, like a woman whose head was too easily turned by something as simple as a man being nice to her.
Even when the man in question was the yummiest thing she’d seen since the last pint of Funky Monkey she’d gone through.
He turned off the hot-as-hell smile just as quickly as he had flashed it and backed away enough to take in both Eve and me in one quick glance.
“So, you were saying? About the Brussels sprouts?”
I was still too electrified by the brush of Jim’s skin against mine to cobble together any sort of reasonable response. It occurred to me that I knew I was in trouble when I left the logical replies to Eve.
“Not Brussels sprouts,” Eve said. So far, so good. That seemed sensible enough. She leaned in closer and lowered her voice even more. “We were talking about Drago.”
Thatwas not sensible!
I jumped again, this time back into the conversation before the spark of interest that lit in Jim’s hazel eyes kindled into anything else. Like curiosity. Or more questions.
“Oh, Eve, you are such a kidder!” I gave her arm a playful whack and turned to Jim, my discombobulation forgotten in the face of my need to steer us clear of a subject we had no right to be discussing. Not with Beyla and John only a few feet away. “Of course she’s not talking about that poor dead guy. We didn’t know the dead guy. We don’t know anything about the dead guy. We were just talking about the Brussels sprouts.”
I flashed what I hoped was an extremely carefree smile and returned my attention to my chesnuts. Jim stood in silence for a moment, regarding us with a glimmer in his eye. Then he turned and walked away.
As I watched him go, I found myself wondering just how much he knew.
“He’s cute.” Eve’s words cut into my thoughts.
“Not what I was thinking,” I told her.
“Yeah. Right.” She smiled broadly.
“I mean it. He’s cute, all right. But that’s not what I was thinking.”
Her gaze followed Jim as he made his way to the front of the room. His back was to us. He was wearing tight jeans that stretched nicely over his butt.
Need I say more?
“Oh honey, if you weren’t thinking about that…” Eve grinned, then eyed me, curious. “Whatwere you thinking?”
“That we shouldn’t say too much in front of strangers. That we don’t know who to trust. That we haven’t sorted things out yet and that means we don’t know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”
Eve’s expression wilted. “You don’t think-”
“I don’t know what to think,” I told her, and it was true. Deep down, I didn’t believe that there was anything shady about Jim.
But if that was true, why was I more nervous than ever just thinking about him?
BY THE TIME I WAS BACK IN CLASS THE NEXT evening, I was still mulling over the questions that filled my head, as crowded and as noisy as the summer tourists out on the Clarendon streets-the ones I had to fight my way through to get to the shop.
There was the good guy/bad guy question: which people associated with Très Bonne Cuisine could we trust?
There was the Jim question, but I won’t get into that. Every time I thought about Jim, my mind ping-ponged like a… well, like a Ping-Pong ball. Part of me was concerned with what he’d overheard the night before, what he thought of it, and the whole trust issue. But the other part of me…
OK, I had to admit it: I had a thing for Jim. Lately, every one of my fantasies featured him in a major way. It was playing hell with my head, not to mention my body.
Better not to go there. At least not there in class when he was standing ten feet away. I wasn’t crazy: I knew he couldn’t read my mind, but I couldn’t risk him reading my body language, either. If he guessed at half the thoughts that flitted through my head and raised my temperature as I watched him prepare for tonight’s pasta class, I’d die from embarrassment.
I decided it was a lot less dangerous to think about what Eve optimistically called “our case.”
There was the Monsieur Lavoie question, and what he knew about Drago, and why they’d been arguing the night Drago was killed. I hadn’t had a chance to address that one, because every evening when I arrived at the shop, the little Frenchman either wasn’t around or was busy with customers.
There was the John question, too. I’d paid little attention to it so far because I figured it was just an aberration and it would go away. But it hadn’t. And I wasn’t imagining it, I swear.
Every time I glanced his way, John the accountant was looking back at me.
And there were more questions. Like who had trashed Drago’s office? And why had his partner, Yuri, seemed unconcerned enough about it that he could chat with us out in the gallery instead of being in the office trying to get things back in order?
But then, that might have been the neatnik in me talking.
As if all that wasn’t enough, as of that afternoon, I had something new to consider.
I might have felt better about the whole thing if I’d had a chance to tell Eve and get her take on things. Trouble was, I’d discovered this piece of the puzzle on my lunch hour, and by then, she was already at work behind the cosmetic counter at Hecht’s. Because of her work schedule, we’d decided it was easier (logistically speaking) to meet at Très Bonne Cuisine tonight rather than drive together. And now I couldn’t wait to talk to her.
I unpacked my groceries and waited semipatiently. Didn’t it figure that tonight Eve was late?
I watched the minutes tick away on the clock that hung above the classroom door. If Eve didn’t show up soon, Jim would start class, and we wouldn’t have a chance to talk until break. Call me crazy, but if I had to hold onto this new information that long, I thought I might burst.
Lucky for me, Eve made it just under the wire. Unlike most people who at least would have made the effort to look frazzled to be arriving at the last second, she strolled into the classroom without a care in the world, every hair in place and her makeup perfect.
I waited until she was standing next to me before I turned my back to Beyla and John’s cooking station and made apsst sound.
Eve played along.
She put her purse away and set down her grocery bag. “What?” she spoke the word out of the side of her mouth. “What’s up?”
“I went to the library,” I whispered back. “Today at lunch. Look what I found.”
I had my purse ready on the counter. As surreptitiously as I could, I slid a single sheet of paper out of it and toward Eve. It was a copy of what I’d found on microfiche. She took one look at it and her mouth fell open.
“It’s Beyla!”
So much for surreptitious. Eve’s surprise was complete, and her voice was loud enough to attract attention.
All the wrong attention.
Just as I suspected, when I chanced a glance in their direction, both John and Beyla were looking our way.
I swallowed down my mortification and turned my back on them. “Keep your voice down,” I hissed. Trying to be as casual as I could, I took a box of spaghetti out of my grocery bag and used it to point to the photo. It showed Drago in the foreground, a champagne flute in one hand. “It’s a picture from theWashington Post a couple years ago. The opening of Arta.”
Eve bent for a closer look. “And Beyla was there.” She stood and looked me dead in the eyes. “This proves she lied. To us and to Tyler. She knew Drago. She had to know Drago-she was at the opening of the gallery!”
“Exactly. What we need to decide is what to do with the information. Do we talk to Tyler? Or do we-”
As always, Eve didn’t seem to register the worddecide. Not as much asinstinct, anyway. Oraction. Just as I reached to put the photo away, she slid it out from under my hand and started across the room with it. “We’ll ask her to explain herself,” Eve said. “Right now.”
Was it a good idea?
We never had a chance to find out.
Thankfully, before Eve took two steps, Jim called our attention to the front of the room and started to talk about pasta.
Reluctantly, Eve stopped and turned back to our workstation.
At least for now, our questions about Beyla would have to remain unanswered.
JIM TOOK ONE TASTE OF EVE’S PASTA SAUCE, SMILED, and gave her the thumbs-up. “Excellent!” he purred.
Call me small-minded, but I wondered how much the comment had to do with Eve’s cooking skills and how much it had to do with the peek of cleavage showing at the top of her snug white tank.
Like I said, small-minded. Not to mention flat-out, green-eyed jealous.
I hastily brought myself back to reality. What guy wouldn’t appreciate Eve’s good looks and her model-perfect body? And while I was at it, why would I kid myself thinking that Jim would be any different from any of the other guys Eve and I met when we were together?
You’d think by now, I’d be used to it.
Except this time, for reasons I couldn’t explain, it stung a little more than usual.
Of course, there were advantages to being the wing-woman. If I were smart, I’d put any delusional thoughts of Jim as a romantic interest out of my mind once and for all, and concentrate on Jim as critic of my pasta sauce.
Somehow, that only made me more nervous.
When I spooned up a taste of my sauce for Jim, my hands shook. When I passed him the spoon, I lost control. He ended up with a splotch of tomato sauce across the front of his white cook’s apron.
“Sorry!” I grabbed a towel and started dabbing at the sauce, only managing to smear it across the apron and onto his white shirt. I felt my face turn the color of a tomato. “Really sorry.”
“It’s OK. Honest.” Jim took the towel out of my hand and did some triage on his own. “I can wash it.”
“It’ll stain. If we had some club soda.” I made a move to go I don’t know where in search of the magic liquid.
Jim stopped me with a hand on my arm. “I said it’s OK, and I mean it. It’s an old shirt anyway, and I’m not nearly as concerned about it as I am about you.”
“Concerned? About me?” I looked down to where his hand still rested. The point of contact felt like it was going to combust. “Are you?”
For a nanosecond, I thought he was actually going to say something personal, but the second passed, and he smiled politely instead. “About your cooking, of course.”
Deflated, I reached for another spoon. This time, Jim wasn’t taking any chances. He slipped it out of my hand, dipped it into my sauce, and took a taste.
“It’s…” He coughed and, bless him, tried not to make a face. “I think maybe you’ve added a wee bit too much sugar.”
I hadn’t meant to. It kind of fell in as I was measuring.
“You’ll do better next time,” Jim assured me. He didn’t wait to hear my excuses but moved onto to Jared and Ben’s station, leaving me wishing there was a remedial cooking class I could transfer to.
Of course, that was better than thinking about how the simple wordwee snaked its way through me, leaving a thread of warmth.
“Break time,” Eve said, and her voice snapped me back to reality. “I’ve got to duck out and call Tony.”
When I gave her a blank look, she sighed.
“The librarian. Remember? We had lunch together before work today and we’re meeting for a drink tonight.” She glanced across the room, and her eyes narrowed. “I’ll make it fast,” she promised. “Then we can pin Beyla down about that picture of the gallery opening.”
I nodded. As reluctant as I was to confront anybody, I suppose talking to Beyla made sense in terms of our so-called investigation.
Beyla said she didn’t know Drago, but we had proof she did. It would be interesting to see how she’d handle our questions, and if she’d lie again.
But not until Eve returned.
Suddenly, I realized the subject of my musings-Beyla-was headed my way. She had one hand cradled under a spoon of pasta sauce and a little smile on her lips that made me think of the old saying about the cat that ate the canary.
She dispensed with the niceties altogether, poking the spoon in my direction. “Here,” she said. “You try.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Something about a woman we had implicated in a murder suddenly offering me food made me a little uneasy. I automatically backed away. “Jim always says we shouldn’t compare ourselves to the other students in the class. Everyone has their own cooking style.”
“But yours… it is… How do you say this? I am thinking that yours, it is not so good.”
I couldn’t keep from staring at the pool of sauce on Beyla’s spoon. “I’m sure my cooking isn’t as good as yours,” I blurted out. “At least from what you’ve said about how your family admires yours. And the compliments you’ve been getting here, and…”
I couldn’t keep from wondering what was in Beyla’s sauce, and why she was suddenly generous enough to want to share it with me.
“It’s very kind of you really. But…”
I didn’t think Beyla’s sauce was poisoned, did I?
“You do not think the sauce, it is poisoned, do you?”
Beyla’s question so closely reflected my thoughts that I had no choice but to protest.
“Poison! Why on earth would you want to poison me? Don’t be silly.” I tried for a smile that instantly wilted around the edges. “Of course I’d love to try your sauce. I’m sure it’s delicious.”
She held the spoon to my mouth. “Yes. It is very delicious. There is a… how do you say this? A secret ingredient. You will enjoy it.”
I gulped, but I didn’t dare open my mouth.
She moved closer. “You will enjoy it so much. If you taste this little-”
Just as Beyla was going to press the spoon to my lips, it flew out of her hands. Spoon and sauce landed in a puddle on the floor. The next thing I knew, Eve stumbled between the two of us.
“I am so sorry!” Eve offered her apologies to Beyla and a wink to me. “I must have tripped. I didn’t mean to-”
“Of course you did not.” Beyla’s expression was icy. Without another word, she turned and walked away.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and Eve grinned. “Thought you weren’t suspicious of her?”
I shrugged my answer. “I don’t know what to think anymore. It’s crazy to think she would try to poison me in front of the whole class. But-”
“But…” Eve watched Beyla get settled back at her own station.
“But maybe now that you’ve made another mess…”
Jim had a funny way of sneaking up on me. He was back from break, too, and I turned to find him surveying the flecks of tomato sauce that dotted the floor. He didn’t look angry or even exasperated. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, turning his gaze from Eve to me. “To both of you. I’d really like to do it tonight, but I’ve got a committment. Tomorrow night? After class?”
Before either of us could answer, he returned to the front of the classroom. Eve and I exchanged looks, but we didn’t say a thing.
We didn’t have to-I could tell we were thinking the same thing.
We didn’t know if we should be excited about the prospect of getting together with Jim.
Or really worried.