Free Topped Chef A Key West Food Critic Mystery by Lucy Burdette Page A

Sam Rizzoli, I’m sorry for him. It was an ugly way to go out—someone must have been really, really angry to leave him like that. Whoever it was,” I added lamely.
    Torrence turned his chin over his shoulder to the place where the rest of the cast and crew waited. “You’re certain you didn’t notice that one of the other folks here might have had a beef with Rizzoli?”
    I shook my head. “I’ll be glad to let you know if I remember anything different.”
    “We’ll be in touch,” he said, as he pointed across the room at Randy Thompson and gestured for him to approach.
    I got up, feeling relieved to be off the hot seat, but a little battered.
    “What was your relationship with the late Sam Rizzoli?” the second officer asked Randy as I walked away.
    “Not good,” I heard Randy say defiantly. “Lousy. But I didn’t kill him.”

7
If Mom and I had one thing in common, it was the urge to cook and eat during a crisis. Even the whiff of crisis brought a surge of recipes to our minds.
—Hayley Snow
    If Eric had been in town instead of vacationing in Miami, I would have called him and invited him for lunch and thereby scored an informal counseling session. He had a way of jollying me out of the worst sort of funk, and as a psychologist, he understood how to handle people better than most anyone else I knew. He would have known which parts of the last twenty-four hours I really needed to vent about and which might simply fade away with time. And he’d have tips about how to get the picture of the hanged man out of my head.
    My second best option was Lorenzo, the tarot card reader. I almost always felt calmer after talking to him, too, though the process was less easy to define. Raisin-sized raindrops began to splat onto my face as I reachedmy scooter. I pulled a crumpled blue windbreaker from my backpack and slipped it on. I doubted Lorenzo would be at his card table on Mallory Square if this weather kept up. But he’d given me his phone number back when I first moved to Key West so I dialed him up anyway.
    “Lorenzo, it’s Hayley Snow. What time will you be setting up shop?”
    “Probably not happening today. I’ve got a meeting of the Mallory Square board later this afternoon. And the forecast is awful. Maybe tomorrow?”
    My stomach rumbled, a familiar combination of hunger and disappointment. The idea of having him over for lunch popped into my mind and then out of my mouth before I could lose my nerve.
    “How about lunch?” I asked brightly.
    “Lunch?” He sounded surprised, yet pleased. “Why not?”
    Now that I had an important guest, next came the problem of what to make. I craved something simple and warm—comfort food—to offset the gloomy weather and the deflating morning. The dish I would have prepared if I had been competing in the contest sprang to mind. “Do you like fish chowder?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    “It’s a red sauce base, not the creamy white New England kind,” I added.
    “Better and better,” he said.
    I gave him directions to Miss Gloria’s houseboat, and then hung up and punched her number into my phone. “Hey, it’s Hayley. Okay with you if I asked my friend Lorenzo to pop over for lunch?”
    Gloria shrieked with excitement. “The tarot man? Oh what fun! What should I wear? What are you serving? Should I set the table inside or out?”
    “Better make it inside,” I said with a laugh. “It’s raining. Could you fish the tub of chunky tomato basil sauce out of the freezer and defrost it? I have it labeled.”
    I fired up my scooter and drove four blocks south down Southard Street and then hooked a right over to the Eaton Street Seafood Market. In the market, I chose a pound of grouper, then continued up Eaton to Cole’s Peace Bakery to buy a loaf of ciabatta bread to make croutons, along with a small assortment of cookies. I nibbled on a mango triangle on my way out the door. Flaky and not too sweet—pure heaven.
    By the time I reached Tarpon Pier, it was