Red, Green, or Murder

Chapter Eleven

When Estelle and I pushed our way through the swinging door to the kitchen of the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant, the chef was standing with his arms folded across his chest, leaning a hip against one of the butcher block prep tables. Fernando Aragon looked every one of his sixty-five years. He appeared to be contemplating the floor tiles. His fleshy nose was bright red and dark circles made his dark eyes appear both huge and deep.

On a cutting board on the table, a modest-sized pork roast awaited processing. I knew where the thin-sliced meat was headed, and the thought made my stomach growl in anticipation. Fernando’s daughter Aileen stood at one of the large stainless steel prep sinks, washing and sorting a mound of vegetables. She saw us first, and raised her head in greeting. “Dad,” she called, and Fernando eased out of his fog, turned, and saw us.

“Look at this!” he exclaimed, and drew out the word this as if it had about five i’s and at least that many s’s. His speech had the music of Chihuahua, the state of his birth-a nice, rich accent that the years hadn’t diluted a bit. He wiped his hands on his apron and then locked mine in a double-handed grip. “Bill, mija said you were here earlier. I’m sorry I missed you. I don’t know where my mind is today. I’m thinking a lot about George, I guess. You know how that goes.”

“’Fraid so,” I said.

“It was his heart?”

“Most likely.”

He frowned and looked askance at me, then at Estelle. His gaze dropped to the manila envelope that she was carrying, and he waited for us to drop whatever bombshell we’d brought into his kitchen.

“We have a question or two, Fernando,” I said.

His eyebrows arched in surprise. “About the food, you mean? Was something wrong…”

I held up a hand. “Everything is preliminary…just a goddamn mess, is what it is. Look, we’re starting to think that George had an allergic reaction to something.”

“An allergic reaction? How…”

“It looks as if he passed away just after he sat down at the kitchen table to eat his lunch. A couple of bites, and something came apart.” I rested a hand on my own chest at that thought. “So it’s natural that we would have some questions.” I glanced at Estelle, wondering if she’d noticed how effortlessly I managed to slip back into the we business. But as usual, her lovely face gave no hints about what might be going on in that inscrutable mind.

“An allergic reaction?” Fernando repeated. The notion obviously didn’t compute. “Tell me what that means, Bill.”

I knew that he understood the word just fine-it was the context that puzzled. “Just that,” I said. “You know how some folks are super-allergic to something that doesn’t bother another person one bit, like a bee sting. Or pollen. Or juniper. It gets one person, and not another.”

“So George…”

“There’s some reason to believe that he reacted strongly to something, Fernando. To something. We don’t know what. I don’t know if a wasp flew in the kitchen and stung him, or what. It may turn out to be as simple as that.”

“A bee sting?” he said in disbelief, and he looked to Estelle for corroboration. “¿Y usted, señora?” he asked. Estelle had remained watchful but silent, simply a presence that I knew could make a person nervous.

“What I’d like to find out from you, Fernando,” she said, “is a list of ingredients. George had a take-out…”

“The burrito grande,” Fernando finished for her. “Almost every week, that’s what he has.” He laid a hand on his own chest. “By arreglo especial.” He grinned and pointed a stubby index finger at me. “And sometime he shares the festivities with a special friend, am I right?”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “Today was one of those days. Didn’t work out.”

Estelle rested a small note pad on the stainless table, pen poised. “Let’s start with that,” she said. “Just the ingredients.”

“You want…” Fernando began, then shook his head, his patience under the test. “You know, such a dish is a combination of so many things. And George, he’s been eating with us for years, agente. Why should something suddenly,” and he waved a hand in the air helplessly. “All of a sudden, as you say?”

“I’m looking for changes,” Estelle said. “So it will be helpful to know the ingredients. Especially if you have made a change recently.”

“There has been no change,” Fernando said vehemently. “That is part of the secret. But,” and he took a deep breath of resignation. “If you want a list, you want a list, ¿verdad?”

“Cada uno y todo,” Estelle said.

“Híjole, where do I begin with a thing like this,” he muttered, and he glanced over at the large wall clock by the door. “Mija, can you?” and he gestured at the waiting roast.

“Just take one part at a time,” Estelle said. “Begin with this, perhaps?” She pointed at the pork.

“That’s good,” Fernando agreed. “I oven-roast the pork, you know. The old fashioned way. Let me show you.” He strode to the large walk-in freezer and reappeared in a moment with another three or four pound package bundled in white butcher’s paper. “Little ones like this,” he said. “You know, most people don’t know what’s involved.”

“Me, for one,” I said. “You never know how many customers you’re going to have, do you? Or what they’re going to order.”

“That’s exactly right,” Fernando said. “One can never know.” He held up his left index finger. “There is an idea, but it cannot be exact. With small roasts, there is not so much waste. And the quality is better. That is always, what do I want to say, at the heart of what we do. Each ingredient must be quality, or the final result is not. Simple, ¿no?”

“May I have the label?” Estelle asked.

“Of course.” He peeled off the sticker and handed it to her. “This is not the same roast, you know.”

She stuck it neatly on the page of her notebook. “From the same vendor?”

“Yes, of course. But if you ask me what the pigs eat, I can’t tell you,” Fernando said. He crossed quickly to the stove, opened the oven, and removed a flat pan covered with aluminum foil cover, revealing a small quantity of sliced pork. “This is the remains from the roast used for George,” he said. “You want a sample?”

Estelle nodded and extended a small plastic bag to him, and he selected a forkful or two. An evidence bag wasn’t what the chef had in mind when he offered the sample, but he didn’t question her. “Is this enough?” She nodded again. “This comes from Aguirre’s Meats, of course,” he added. “In Deming. They are the best. They can tell you just what the pigs ate, if you are curious.” He pushed the pan back in the oven. “There’s no telling what is in meats these days. I won’t pay for the organic label-I don’t trust them, either.” His eyes twinkled. “What’s an organic pig, can you tell me that?” He put the frozen package back in the freezer. “I roast the meat, keeping it just a touch raro, ¿verdad? It’s going to be cooked again, you know.”

Aileen had left the sink, and was engaged with the finished roast, a large catch pan positioned at the outfeed side of a spotless stainless steel slicer. The gadget’s motor was an innocent, soft buzz, but that spinning blade captured my respect. I had visions of thin slices of fingers spraying out the back.

“We slice very thin, Bill.” Fernando stood at Aileen’s elbow and watched the preparations. “Very, very thin,” he said again as Aileen fed the first pass. “That’s one of the secrets. Like paper, eh?” He jerked his chin at me. “You know, don’t you. It’s best that way.” He held out his hand and caught a slice. As he folded it, he inspected it judiciously, then tore it in half, handing half to me and popping the rest into his mouth. How could I refuse?

“Seasoning on the meat?” Estelle prompted.

Fernando ticked them off on his fingers as his daughter continued to work. “Salt, pepper, maybe a touch of garlic. A little bit of sage. A tiny trace of chipotle, for the smoky quality. With good meat, you know, not so much is necessary.” He made a volcanic gesture with his fingers. “You want the pork to come through,” he said, and his hands settled. “You need some of each?”

“Probably not,” I said, and realized I might be stepping on my own tongue. I didn’t know what Estelle wanted. I did know that it hadn’t been long since I’d finished eating my afternoon snack, but already my stomach rumbled in anticipation of further samples.

Fernando was patient and pre-dinner traffic slow, and Aileen adept at covering the orders that trickled in. He took us through the construction of a Burrito Grande step by step.

“And you know,” he said at one point in the tour, “some people think that the chile is the heart of Mexican cooking, but it is not. It is not. You cannot save bad food with good chile. That’s what most people forget. Use chile that is hot enough, and you might conceal some mistakes. But that’s all.” He held up an admonishing finger again. “The roast, whether it is pork, or chicken, or beef, must be the best. Some will prepare the dish with these enormous chunks of meat, you know, full of gristle and fat,” and he grimaced. “Like something dipped out of an old stew. And to make matters worse, they soak everything in some kind of soup until the meat is unrecognizable.” He shivered in mock horror. “That is not the way. The meat must be the best. Even if it’s but lowly ground beef, it should be the best.”

“Makes sense,” I said, marveling at how wonderfully detached and disciplined Estelle Reyes-Guzman could remain through this gustatory seminar right at dinner time, jotting her clinical notes without drooling.

“Now, the tortillas need to be as only my wonderful wife can make them-not like some of those things that stick to the roof of your mouth, they are so thick and gummy.”

He walked over to another cooler and opened the door to reveal shelves full of small, neatly wrapped packages. He slipped one out and opened it for inspection. The flour tortillas were generous in size, remarkably uniform in thickness and texture. Again he ticked off the ingredients for Estelle. He shrugged expressively. “Nothing has changed in the recipe for two hundred years.”

He watched Estelle jot notes and then slid the package back in the cooler, selecting a smaller one in its place. “If you use cheap, bulk cheese,” he said, “that’s what your dish tastes like.” He peeled off a label, handing it to Estelle. “This is made by the Costillo dairy in Mesilla. It is a sharp cheddar that has some life. I have been buying my cheese from them for twenty years. Never a change. Never.”

He tossed the block of cheese into the cooler, then maneuvering around Aileen, advanced on the sink where she had been working. “If you use tired, frost-burned lettuce, or tomatoes that are hard and tasteless, then, well, you know…then the chile can’t save them. But,” and he shrugged, holding his shoulders up for a long moment. “If everything is good, and the chile is fresh and the best…then you have something worth eating, ¿verdad?”

“Verdad,” I said, risking just about the full extent of my knowledge of Spanish.

Estelle rested against the sink, eyebrows locked together, examining her notes. “When you prepped either yesterday or this morning, did you do anything differently, Fernando?”

“No, nothing. Maybe this morning a little more care than usual in the presentation for him. I know…we know…that George is, how do you say it, delicado?”

“Frail,” Estelle added.

“That’s it. He has not been so good, you know. That’s why the meal comes to him, not him to the meal.”

“Was there any ingredient that came from a fresh batch of something?” I asked. “Something that was just delivered, maybe?”

“It is always fresh,” Fernando said, trying not to sound hurt.

“But you know what I mean,” I said. “In the ebb and flow of all this, there must sometimes be a little glitch, or a new batch of something that is maybe just a little different. Not of lesser quality, but just different in some way.”

Fernando’s face scrunched up in thought. “I can not imagine what that would be,” he said. “You know, there are some…places,” and he said it as if he were deliberately sidestepping naming names, “who accept what vendors try to deliver.” He held up a hand that halted the process. “They just take what the truck delivers, without question. I will not do that. I accept what I want to accept, and the vendors all know that.”

“What about the chile itself?” Estelle asked.

Fernando frowned and returned to one of the coolers. He selected a plastic bag, perhaps two or three pounds, of green chile. I could see the pods were nicely cleaned, split in half or thirds lengthwise, with very few seeds. “This is today,” he said. “And yesterday, it was another small bag, but from the same batch.”

I leaned against the table, regarding the bag of chile. “How do you prep this?”

Now totally resigned to our probing, Fernando sighed with good-humored patience. “Now you are asking for secrets,” he chuckled. He selected a long knife from the block, wiped the blade on a clean towel, and nudged a couple of chile pods out of the bag. “It must be this way.” With amazingly rapid, expert chatterings of the knife, he reduced the chile into elegant little strips, like miniature French cut string beans. I looked at Estelle thoughtfully as she held a plastic bag to accept a sample.

“Do some folks like it cubed?” she asked. “Or maybe diced is the word?”

“The way Victor fixes it,” I added, and Fernando grunted something I didn’t catch. He didn’t bother feigning politeness by asking, ‘Victor who?’

“’Fixes it’ directly from a can,” he said. No love lost there, but then again, Victor Sanchez brought it on himself with his continual imitation of an annoyed rattlesnake. “That is not the way I will do it.”

“You’ve never run out of chile and had to resort to the can?” I knew I was on thin ice with that one. He didn’t grab a cleaver, though.

“You only run out if you don’t plan ahead,” Fernando said flatly.

I nodded at the shelves clearly visible in the roomy pantry beyond the coolers. The fat #10 cans marched in rows on the upper shelves, and the distinctive labels of the canned chile were easy to spot.

“Ah,” Fernando said, and ducked his head just a touch, embarrassed at being caught out. “I use the canned chile when I make…what do you call it…the stock for the sauce.” He straightened his shoulders. “There are some who use soup, you know.”

“Awful,” I added.

“Yes. I pureé the canned chile as a stock, then add more of this,” and he touched the plastic bag of sliced pods. “Just this.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded first me and then Estelle, both hands resting flat on the butcher block, knife at the ready. “You’re not telling me everything,” he said. He jerked his chin at the envelope in Estelle’s hand. “What do you have there? You brought me something.”

For whatever reason, Estelle wasn’t yet ready to share the photos with Fernando, and I didn’t run interference for him. The diced chile so obvious in the photograph indicated Fernando leaned on the canned goods a little more than he cared to admit. We didn’t want him slamming up his defenses.

“Did you know that Mr. Payton usually drank a glass of red wine with his meal?” she side-stepped.

“Now there,” Fernando said, wagging a finger, “is something to investigate,” and he leaned on each of the four syllables for emphasis. “If George could find a bottle of wine for three dollars, why pay four? You see?” He frowned again. “There’s a word for that poison that he favors.”

“Rot gut?” I offered.

“Exactly. It makes my mouth hurt just to think about it. Maybe the problem lies there.”

“That’s a possibility,” Estelle said. “Tell me again what time you prepared his meal?”

Fernando crossed his arms across his apron. “Aileen, what time did George call yesterday?”

“Sometime after ten, maybe,” she said, not breaking rhythm with the meat slicer. The roast had been reduced to the size of a baseball.

“So…sometime between eleven-thirty and twelve? That’s when it was delivered?” Estelle asked.

He nodded. “You have picked up the food from time to time, have you not?” he said to me. “This time, he asked if we would deliver. Sometimes, his daughter does the honors, but she was busy this day.”

“Who drove the food over?”

Fernando turned to look at Aileen. “It was Ricardo, no?” Aileen nodded. “Ricardo Mondragon,” Fernando said, and waved a hand toward the swinging door to the dining room.

Ricardo was forty-five years old going on ten, but steady and dependable. He took great pride, it always seemed to me, in keeping the Don Juan polished and spiffy, despite a strip or two of duct tape on the booth cushions. The dishes in the waitress islands were always stacked just so. At the moment, I could see his stooped, pudgy figure out in the dining room, putting a final polish on table tops.

“We packed it most carefully,” Fernando said. He pointed overhead to a broad shelf above the sink. A row of cheap Styrofoam coolers rested there, the kind stout enough for a single picnic or fishing trip, the mates of the one that we’d seen resting on George Payton’s kitchen counter. Estelle nodded absently, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “First in the glass dish with the cover, then in a paper bag, then in the cooler. Do you need to talk with Ricardo?”

“We may need to, but not right now,” Estelle said. We took another five minutes, poking into this and that, but the undersheriff had closed her notebook. I knew that any moment, Fernando would offer us something to take the edge off, and sure enough, he slid a oval plate off the rack and held it toward me.

“Let me…” he started to say, but I held up a hand abruptly, an amazing show of self-restraint.

“Fernando, thanks, but we need to be on our way,” I said. “We’ve taken enough of your time.”

“You come back,” he said, and then extended his hand to Estelle. “I hope you find out,” he added. “You know I will help any way I can.”

On the way out through the dining room, I saw that JanaLynn was discussing something with Ricardo Mondragon, who nodded soberly. He reached out and straightened the stack of roll baskets. Estelle came up behind the older man and placed a light hand on his shoulder. He startled as if she’d used a cattle prod.

“Ricardo, may I talk with you for a few minutes?” the undersheriff asked. I think that JanaLynn could guess the subject matter, since the expression on her face was sympathetic. “Maybe we can go outside for a few minutes.”

Mondragon’s big, wide face turned toward the kitchen, as if he needed permission from Fernando for such a venture. JanaLynn came to the rescue. “I’ll take care of this,” she said, one hand on the counter. She didn’t explain what the ‘this’ was, but Ricardo appeared satisfied. He followed Estelle toward the door.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” I said. JanaLynn reached out and gave me a brief hug, one arm around my shoulders.