Butcher's Knife ~ a Hewitt Fairfax Mystery_a brief retirement Read online

  "No," said Fairfax. "Do you?"

  "I got some ideas," he said, slamming one fist into the other palm.

  "Well, I hope you're talking to the cops," said Fairfax.

  "They don't give a shit," he said.

  "Well, that's not true. I talked to them this morning, and as far as I could tell, they're pretty interested in..."

  "They were just here talking about drugs. Julio didn't do any drugs! He had no interest."

  "I know that," said Fairfax.

  "So why don't they know that?"

  "I'm not a cop anymore, so..."

  "It's 'cause he's Mexican."

  Silence followed. Fairfax thought there might be some truth in that, but he didn't blame the cops. Like everyone else, they were just doing their jobs.

  Chapter Three

  After sitting with Julio's family for a while, talking about funeral arrangements and trying to figure out what he could do to help, Fairfax was wrung out. Earlier that morning he'd stuck a sign on the restaurant's front door and a sign on the back, saying Hewitt's would be closed that evening. He'd called the hostess, Roxane, and one of the waitresses, Chantal, and asked that they come to the pre-shift meeting, even if there wasn't going to be any shift. He also asked that they call the rest of the staff and tell them to come too. Roxane had everyone's number. Of course, so did Fairfax, but he was tired of talking.

  He left Julio's family and headed over to the restaurant, parking in the far corner of the parking lot. He went through the back door, got some ground coffee and half-and-half from the walk-in, and proceeded to make himself a pot of the darkest possible French Roast. Certain cop habits proved hard to shake, and drinking endless amounts of coffee was one of them. Eating at least one meal a day in the car was another.

  Smelling the coffee as it brewed and hearing it begin to plop into the carafe was soothing, and Fairfax felt himself begin to calm down a little bit while he shuffled through the papers on his desk. A delivery from one of his produce suppliers was due that afternoon, and he had a few invoices to deal with. He was deeply absorbed in calculating how many pounds of romaine he would need next week when a knock on his office door caused him to slosh his coffee onto his shirt.

  "Yoo-hoo!" said a bright and slightly abrasive voice.

  "Ah. Roxane," said Fairfax.

  "Here's a paper towel," said Roxane, handing him one.

  He daubed at his shirt. "You're early."

  "Well, I couldn't stay away," she said. "I'm broken up."

  She didn't seem all that broken up. She was in her late fifties, with heavy, careful makeup and hair in a stiff pageboy. Roxane wasn't his favorite employee, but she was good enough at her job. She had worked for almost twenty years at the restaurant that was in the building before Hewitt's, an English-themed place called The Fox and Hare (which Fairfax always thought could double, with a small spelling change, as the name of a beauty salon). It was a hard adjustment for her. Every little thing Fairfax did, Roxane would comment, "Well, at The Fox we always..." Eventually Fairfax had to say, "Well, The Fox went out of business, didn't it?" That mostly shut her up.

  Because she was bossy and a know-it-all, the rest of the staff didn't like her much. She did nice things for people, though, like bringing supermarket cupcakes on birthdays, and Fairfax knew she had a mother in the special Alzheimer's facility, Silver Ranch, up on the hill, and no other family. Fairfax couldn't fire her.

  "There's not much here for you to do, Roxane. Would you like some coffee?"

  "Oh, I can't have caffeine after lunch! I'll never sleep at all."

  "It's only 12:07."

  "I just wanted to catch you before the meeting. I overheard something the other day and I thought you should know about it."

  He got up, shut his office door behind Roxane and took some file folders off the other chair. It was cramped quarters; he was pretty sure it had been a mop closet in the time of The Fox and Hare.

  "What's up?" he asked.

  "Well," said Roxane, sitting carefully on the edge of the chair, hands folded in her lap, "you know how I hate to gossip."

  "Uh-huh," said Fairfax.

  "But I heard Chantal talking the other day about Julio."

  "Oh? Who was she talking to?"

  "To Katy," said Roxane, referring to the other waitress. "You know how they're always gabbing. They leave me out of it. Guess I'm too old, or something."

  "Yeah? And?"

  "Chantal and Julio were dating. And she was upset because he dumped her."

  "Huh," said Fairfax.

  "I know how you look down on your employees getting involved with each other–"

  Fairfax held up his hands. "That must have been your old boss. I don't care what people do in their spare time."

  "It causes nothing but problems. I for one avoid it."

  "Is there anything else?"

  No," said Roxane. "Not really. She and Katy were whispering all evening about it. This was last week. I'll admit it annoyed me. But I just thought you should know that things are a lot more complicated than they look on the surface."

  "I guess that's to be expected," said Fairfax.

  Still, it did surprise him. He sometimes thought of the restaurant as a little world he created. It was easy to forget that his employees had separate lives, where they could go home, eat meals, have sex, get murdered, all without his knowledge or permission.

  He was surprised again when he did a head count at the pre-shift meeting and saw that his entire staff was there. Everyone, of course, but Julio.

  Outside, it had begun to snow, one of those dreary March snows with huge flakes and gray slush building up in the street. Fairfax watched it drift down through the big front window of the restaurant. March was the cruelest month, really, not April. Leaves started coming out in April, but in March leafy trees still felt like a figment of the imagination.

  Fairfax sat in front of everyone at one of the larger tables, a six-top, but his staff was scattered among the smaller two- and four-tops. Unsurprisingly, the front of house people sat on one side of the dining room and the back of house on the other. The busboy, a teenager named Cam Rizzo, sat square in the middle.

  "Shouldn't you be at school?" he asked the kid.

  "They closed early," he said. "It's supposed to snow a lot more."

  "Really?" said Fairfax. He had a suddenly longing to go sit by his wood stove and have himself an actual snow day. "Well, I won't keep you all for long."

  He updated everyone on what had happened to Julio and told them when the service would probably be–Saturday–though when he'd left Guadalupe that morning they hadn't nailed it down. He said he'd like the restaurant to pay for the funeral and told his staff that if they wanted to contribute to the fund they could leave an envelope on his desk, but no one should feel obliged.

  The restaurant would be closed today and Friday, but would open again after the funeral for Saturday dinner.

  "So we ain't gonna get paid?" said Eugene, the alcoholic prep and line cook.

  "Well," said Fairfax, "I'll see what I can do. But if the money's not coming in, there's none to go out."

  There was a little bit of grumbling. Honestly, Fairfax had expected there to be more crying over their dead co-worker. Maybe they were all still stunned. Fairfax was.

  "Also, I wanted to say that you should all be expecting the police to contact you sooner or later. Julio was last seen here, so it's possible that you witnessed something worth mentioning. I hope you talk to them. It doesn't mean anyone's a suspect or anything."

  There was a little snicker from the back-of-house side of the room. Pete Kroll, the other prep-line cook, said, "I heard a rumor it was your knife."

  "What? Who did you hear that from?"

  Pete was a thirtyish guy who had probably been a jock in high school—athletic, but not college scholarship athletic. He was a good cook, and had some good ideas, and Fairfax figured he was a restaurant lifer. He probably resented the fact that Fairfax had promoted Julio to so
us chef—actually he definitely resented it, because he said so, and had threatened to quit. Instead Fairfax gave him a raise, which seemed to make him happy for the time being.

  Fairfax had the uncomfortable realization that Pete was going to be getting his promotion, now that Julio was out of the picture.

  "Where did I hear about the knife? Nowhere special," said Pete, with an unfriendly smile.

  "Is that true?" asked Chantal, her eyes wide. Chantal was a pretty young woman not long out of high school. She was a bit too scatterbrained to be an excellent server, but being pretty and flirtatious helped. There were certain regular customers who were disappointed if it was her night off.

  "I can't really talk about—"

  "It must totally be true," said Katy White, the other waitress, with a hoarse laugh. Katy was a woman in her thirties who had a child who was about four. The child's name was Sage; Katy had the name tattooed on her arm. Fairfax could never remember if Sage was a boy or a girl and meeting the kid didn't help matters. Katy was an incredibly hard worker, almost desperately hard. She never missed a shift.

  Fairfax sighed. "Look," he said. "The knife disappeared sometime after Tuesday's shift but before Wednesday's. Anyone could have come in and taken it." This wasn't entirely true, of course. The door was locked most of the time. "Julio could have taken it and brought it with him." Fairfax suspected that police believed this scenario, actually. One of the drug gangs from the city had a habit of killing people with their own weapon, and it made sense to imagine that Julio, on his way to make a drug deal of some kind, grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen to defend himself. He would have been able to slip it back into the kitchen if all had gone well.

  It made sense if you thought Julio was involved with drugs, that is.

  One person who hadn't said much up to this point was Leo Simons, the only dishwasher. It had been hard to keep anyone else in the job for long, so when Leo wasn't there, they either had a temp from the agency or else Fairfax ran the dish machine himself.

  He was an odd choice for the police to interview first, thought Fairfax. Leo sometimes bragged about his physics degree from MIT, but never explained what happened between that triumphant accomplishment and his current position as a bubble dancer, as dishwashers are sometimes known in restaurant parlance. Fairfax thought it was no doubt some combination of mental breakdown and addiction. He was often drunk at work. In fact, he looked pretty drunk right now: his small eyes, sunken deep into his weather-beaten face, were red and bleary. Why had the cops called Leo?

  At last Leo spoke up. "It seems to me," he drawled, in the Texas/hobo accent he sometimes affected, "that the person who done it was either the boss man or," and here he gestured with a shaky hand around the room, "one of us."

  Chapter Four

  Two things occurred to Fairfax as he drove home through the increasing whiteness. First, there was no way Julio brought that knife to his quarry-side meeting with the person who killed him. Julio had his own chef's knife, plus a Swiss Army knife he carried in his pocket. He was also ethical, sometimes irritatingly so. He'd no more "borrow" Fairfax's knife than he would highjack a plane.

  That meant the killer definitely brought it.

  Second, he owed MaryLee a phone call. He'd give her a ring as soon as he pulled in the driveway. He wanted to know how the soup delivery went down.

  He pulled alongside his mailbox and noticed that his plow guy hadn't come yet. As he drove down his snowy driveway, leaving two deep tracks behind him, he felt relieved to be home. It had been a long day. He parked the car by the woodshed and reached into his his pocket for his phone, thinking he'd chat with MaryLee while he brought a log or two inside.

  No phone.

  He felt his other pockets, went back to the car and looked under the seat. Nope.

  "Aaaagh!" he yelled out into the empty night.

  He knew where it was—right on his desk where he left it. He could picture it there perfectly, its shiny black face in amongst the receipts and coffee stains.

  He yelled again, clutching his head, and then, before he had time to regret his stupidity a moment longer, got back into the car and zoomed down the hill, right back into town.

  It was weird to see Hewitt's so dark. Usually there was someone around or a light on somewhere, but this evening it just looked cold and empty.

  Just like me, thought Fairfax, chuckling to himself.

  He took his keys out and fiddled with the annoying lock. Normally he'd have gone through the back door, but the parking lot hadn't been shoveled. He'd parked along the street, right in front, so he could make a quick getaway as soon as he got his goddamn phone.

  The lock finally turned and the door swung open. The dining room was in shadows, what little light there was coming from the streetlight outside. It smelled good: the garlicky kitchen aroma lingered long after the last meal had been eaten and the plates washed.

  Fairfax crossed the dining room, avoiding the chairs and tables partly by memory. As he went through the kitchen doors, he reached for the light switch: there were no windows in the kitchen and so it should be pitch dark. Before he switched on the lights, though, he noticed something odd. A narrow strip of white, fluorescent light was glowing from beneath his office door. The door was shut, and the light was on inside.

  He had just enough time to recall that he had most definitely turned the light off and most definitely left the door open, and then a sudden blow to the back of his head knocked him into an even deeper darkness.

  The acrid smell of smoke woke him up. He was lying sprawled on his face on the floor of the kitchen, his face chilled by the cold tile, his head throbbing like no one's business.

  Smoke.

  The smell of burning can awaken something primal in us. Fairfax felt a surge of animal strength as he breathed in the smell of fire, of something on fire—what was it? Where? He leapt to his feet, his head zinging, and saw, through the now-open door of his office, wafting curls of smoke.

  That the person, or persons, who walloped him might still be hanging around did not occur to him. His focus on the matter at hand was all-encompassing.

  In his office Fairfax saw a very strange sight indeed: a small but intense fire confined entirely to the top of his desk. Bright yellow flames licked up toward the ceiling, and papers—receipts, invoices, notes—were curling up, turning black, and taking to the air. He found an old ledger book and attacked the fire with it, frantically slapping the flames back down. To his surprise this procedure actually worked, and after stomping a few smoldering remnants with his shoe, Fairfax judged the fire to be out. He sat heavily in his office chair and stared at the blackened, filthy mess that was his desk.

  His phone, its case looking slightly warped, sat right where he left it. He picked it up and gingerly poked at a melted spot. Then it occurred to him that he was sitting at a crime scene—that, hell, his restaurant was a crime scene at this point—and he used his phone to call 911.

  There were some crackling sounds, buzzing, clicking.

  "Please state your emergency," said the voice on the other end.

  He sighed. "Hello, Charlotte. It's Fairfax."

  "Well, Hewitt Fairfax! Long time no see. Or hear." Charlotte Jackson, who was Fairfax's wife's sister, sounded delighted. They hadn't seen much of each other since Angela died, although they had always gotten along. It was just painful to both of them.

  "It's nice to hear your voice again," he said, truthfully. He explained his emergency.

  "So, then, do you want the fire department, an ambulance, or the police?"

  "I guess it wasn't much of a fire. And I'm fine actually. Why don't you send a car?"

  When the car pulled up a few minutes later, Fairfax was examining an object he'd found in his wastebasket.

  The cop, who turned out to be Officer Thompson again, knocked on the front door of the restaurant. When no one opened the door for him, he came inside and called for Fairfax.

  "Back here," said Fairfax.

  T
he cop stepped into the small office. "Ugh. What a mess. It smells." He waved his hand in front of his face.

  "Someone did me the favor of burning up some overdue bills. Here, take a look at this." Fairfax held out the object.

  "What is it?"

  "Bottle of nail polish remover. Empty. It was in my trash."

  "Hm," said Thompson. "Was it yours?"

  "For God's sake, Thompson, I don't paint my nails. No, it's not mine."

  "That stuff is pretty flammable. Do you think it was used as the accelerant?"

  "That's what I'm thinking," said Fairfax.

  Thompson leaned over and sniffed the desktop. "Yep, I'd say so," he said. "But why would someone want to set your desk on fire?"

  "Question of the year," said Fairfax.

  Officer Thompson took a report and spent a few minutes poking around the restaurant. "Anything else out of order?"

  "I haven't noticed anything," said Fairfax. "I'll have to do an inventory of the coolers, but I don't think any food's missing. There was no money in the till, since I took it to the bank Wednesday morning. So, maybe a disappointed thief?"

  "Disappointed enough to set your desk on fire? Well, people express anger in different ways."

  They walked out of the restaurant together, Fairfax locking up behind them. He touched his pocket and was relieved to find his phone there.

  "You should probably get your head looked at," said Officer Thompson.

  "I've heard that before," said Fairfax.

  Officer Thompson said, "No, I mean you might have a concussion. You want me to give you a ride to the ER?"

  "Hell, no. And spend six hours in a room full of puking toddlers and bleeding homeless guys? I'd rather die in my bed."

  Thompson shrugged. Fairfax felt bad for him. He was a nice guy, but he had the sense of humor of a German Shepherd.

  The cop and the ex-cop said their goodbyes. Fairfax returned to his car and pulled out his phone. As he waited for MaryLee to pick up, he watched his breath puff out in white clouds. The temperature was really dropping. You could never count on spring around here.