Oath of Office

CHAPTER 53

Millie Neuland unlocked the front door of her restaurant and motioned for Lou to come inside. She had on what he had come to believe was her standard uniform-a light blue gingham dress and frilly half apron. Her broad smile upon seeing him rivaled the brightness of the midmorning sun.

“Dr. Lou!” she said, wrapping him in her arms. “What a pleasant surprise. I’m so glad to see you. Are you all right? Your face looks a little bruised.”

“I’m fine, Millie. Fine.”

“Wonderful.”

Behind Millie, across the vast restaurant, Lou could see half a dozen cooks and an equal number of waitstaff, all getting ready for what was sure to be another busy day.

Everybody eats at Millie’s, he was thinking.

“Business as usual,” he said.

“Business as usual,” Millie echoed. “Come in, come in.”

Millie seized Lou tightly by the arm and guided him into the expansive foyer.

“So, what brings you out here so early?” she said. “You know you don’t have to beat the crowd to get served first.”

Lou grinned. “If the truth be known,” he said, “I came here to talk to you. Is there a private place we can sit down?”

“Why, of course, dear. My office is on the second floor.” She gestured to a staircase off the right side of the foyer and undid a velvet rope so they could ascend.

Shuttered office doors lined one side of a long carpeted corridor that was interspersed with foldout tables, on which there were several fax machines, a printer, and reams of copy paper. There was also a water bubbler and mailbox cubby system, in addition to numerous employee notices on bulletin boards-OSHA-type stuff. Taped to the wall was a poster announcing an upcoming softball game against a rival restaurant.

“Lots of excitement in the news today,” Lou said as Millie unlocked a door at the end of the hall.

“I should say. Soldiers dropping out of the sky in the middle of nowhere to subdue a drug king-that certainly is exciting. Can I get you some tea? Coffee? Eggs? We’re going to begin our breakfast experiment in another month.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Lou said.

Millie’s office, a modest, windowless space with a ceiling that was peaked like the roof above it, was surprisingly uninviting. There were no framed pictures about. No motivational posters adorning the walls. Not a single cookbook, either. There was just a simple desk, two chairs, several filing cabinets, and a lot of papers.

All business.

Lou closed the door behind him as he entered.

“This used to be a supply closet,” Millie said, gesturing him to the classic hard-backed maple kitchen chair on the guest side of her desk and taking what looked like a high-end orthopedic desk chair on the other.

“So why’d you make it your office?” he asked.

“Oh, I didn’t want to be tempted to spend too much time in here. You can’t understand your customer if you’re not with your customer. Know what I mean?”

“I don’t think there’s a restaurateur who knows their customers like you do,” Lou said.

“Everybody eats at Millie’s,” she replied cheerfully, picking up a menu off her fairly cluttered desk to show Lou the saying printed below her rainbow.

“That commando raid in West Virginia,” Lou said. “Actually that’s what I came out here to talk with you about.”

“Now, what a strange thing for you to do,” she said, her blue eyes narrowing slightly and surrendering some of their sparkle.

“Not so strange,” he said. “I’m not sure what your news source was, but the raid had nothing to do with drugs.”

“Now, how would you know that?”

“Because I was there,” Lou said.

Millie tried for a quizzical look, but her eyes had grown hard. “And if the raid had nothing to do with drugs,” she asked, “exactly what did it have to do with?”

“Corn. It had to do with corn.”

“Oh?” Millie crinkled her nose and smiled at him benignly. “I’m afraid I’m not following.”

“Renee,” Lou said.

“Who?”

“My ex-wife, Renee. She’s the one who really figured it out for me.”

“Figured what out, dear? You’re not really making any sense.”

“You see, once I realized that William Chester’s corn was the cause of all these people periodically losing their judgment and doing crazy, sometimes dangerous things, I was looking for a common thread-something that would tie John and Carolyn Meacham, Roberta Jennings, Joey Alderson, and the staff at DeLand Hospital together. I kept thinking it had to be airborne, or how else could those people have become affected as they did.”

Millie Neufeld was granite now. “I’m afraid I still don’t get you, Doctor. Perhaps you’d better come back another time.”

“But then it hit me. On the helicopter ride back from West Virginia, we actually flew somewhere near your place. By then I already knew. Just as you said, everybody eats at Millie’s.”

Millie, her smallish hands gripping the edge of her desk, glared across at him. “Why don’t you stand up, Lou?”

He did as she asked.

“Will you take your shirt off, dear?”

“Wire?”

“I just want to make sure our conversation stays private, if you know what I mean.”

Lou took off his shirt, and Millie gasped at the extent of his cuts and scrapes. He pulled up his pant legs, too, then put his shirt back on.

“I don’t have a wire,” he said.

“And you don’t have any proof, either, my friend. Merely allegations.”

“The FBI could seize your invoices. I bet they’ll find you have a very limited number of food suppliers. I bet they’ll also find that each of your suppliers can be traced to a food processing plant owned by Chester Enterprises and its subsidiaries. Like I said, it’s all about corn-specifically, Chester corn.”

“Interesting concept. The trouble is, I wouldn’t be so foolish as to keep any invoices around.”

“What percentage of the food you serve is processed from that stuff?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Yes, you could. How about Millie’s Cola? Who makes that?”

“You mean the fructose in it? I think you already know the answer to that question.”

“And your beef?”

“All of it corn fed,” Millie said.

“Chicken the same?”

“Chicken. Turkey. Taco shells. Cola. All my pasta. Customers almost never complain, either. My cereal. My frying oil. My biscuits and grits. Cookies. Chocolate. Potato chips. Yogurt. Mayonnaise. Margarine. Ketchup. Salad dressings. Syrup. Even our wheat bread has some corn baked in it. Forget amazing grace, we’re talking amazing grain! You asked what percentage? The answer is almost everything on my menu.”

“Millie, why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Feed your customers Chester’s corn.”

A wistful look overcame her. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to survive in the restaurant business these days?” she asked. “The economy was tanking and it was taking my customers down with it. Food prices were going up high and fast, but the bigger chains could keep their prices low because of volume. I didn’t have that luxury. The only way I could have stayed profitable was to raise my prices and lose my customers. Then Mr. Chester came along.”

“Mr. Chester is the one those commandos were after. He’s dead.”

Millie stiffened momentarily, then quickly regained her composure. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“What kind of deal did he offer you?”

“He needed a place to test his products for allergenicity and other health effects, and he needed it fast. All I had to do was buy my food from his processors. I tasted everything first, of course. It was good, high-quality stuff. No problem there. Plus, he funded my retirement by just a little bit.”

“What’s a little, Millie? What was selling out like this worth to you?”

“Enough to let an old lady leave it all someday.”

“And Stone?”

“He was paid to keep an eye on things. He did whatever William asked him to. If there was trouble with any of the deliverers, he would take care of that. Little things that I guess added up to a lot. You sure William’s dead?”

“Sure as sugar,” Lou said. He shook his head in dismay. “Did you know what Chester was doing? Why he needed to get that corn of his into the marketplace so rapidly?”

“A retirement fund buys a lot of silence. I didn’t really ask.”

“So you had no way of knowing that his experimental corn could dangerously diminish the decision-making capacity of your consumers?”

Millie shrugged. “I just knew that they were loyal and regular customers. But Chief Stone did ask me to keep a close lookout for anything unusual in any of them-allergic reactions, skin problems, and such. And as I said, there were none.”

“What you were looking for was only the tip of the iceberg-the things you can see.”

“If you say so. Why hasn’t everyone who ate here over the last eighteen months suffered these lapses?”

“Maybe they have, to a greater or lesser degree. We may never know if the problems were related to how much people ate here or just an allergic, idiosyncratic reaction, but I am positive that your food is the cause. And regardless, Millie, what you did was illegal, wrong. You knowingly fed your customers food products that were not FDA approved or even tested.”

“You have no proof of that. I’m just a businesswoman running a business. I bought my food from the supplier that gave me the best deal. Proof, Doctor. You have no proof that I did anything wrong.”

Lou sighed aloud. “Why don’t you come with me, Millie.”

She followed Lou out into the corridor.

“Do any of these offices have windows overlooking the loading zone out back by the kitchen?”

Millie nodded. “All of them, except of course for mine.”

Lou opened the door to the next office he came to, letting Millie enter first. He watched her walk over to the large picture window, then saw her shoulders sag when she looked outside. Lou came over to stand beside her. The loading zone was a beehive of activity. Outside were police cars and several official vehicles from the FDA, DEA, and EPA. They were taking food out of the kitchen and loading it into FBI vans.

“The agents closed this place until they can get statements from your employees. They’re downstairs doing that now. They have a court order, but I told them they could wait to give it to you.”

“Why, aren’t you the foxy little fellow, Lou Welcome. Too bad I’m not a big fan of chicanery.”

“The FBI doesn’t need invoices when your food can be tested for the DNA of mutated termites.”

“Is that what Chester used to make his food? Bugs?”

Millie’s insouciance made Lou boil. “There’s a lot at stake here, Millie. Lives have been lost and destroyed because you closed your eyes to what was going on. You’re going to be found guilty-either by the law or the IRS.”

“Well, you should know something yourself, Doctor.”

“What’s that?”

“I may not be getting everything William was going to pay me, but there are plenty of top-of-the-line defense attorneys who love to eat at Millie’s.”