Simmer Down

the gun on Barry, who seemed to accept his defeat and was kneeling on the floor, the fight drained out of him.
    “See this creep?” Gavin hollered. “He thinks he’s some kind of godfather. Trying to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. When I told him no amount of money could get him my restaurant, he pulled this gun on me. As if I would ever let you get your hands on my place. You’re disgusting, Barry.”
    I heard sirens wailing outside, and I was hoping that those were for Simmer and not for some other New Year’s crisis. With all the traffic and people crowding the streets outside, I hoped the police could get here before Gavin hauled off and shot Barry.
    “Barry!” Dora said angrily. “You fool!”
    She and Sarka appeared now and stood next to me, Dora looking furious and Sarka looking near tears.
    “I knew you must have been the one who killed my husband. You and your idiotic ideas about opening an expensive restaurant. As if wasting all that money on grand tours of Europe wasn’t bad enough, then you wanted to sink all of Full Moon’s profits into some money-eating restaurant?” Gone was the meek, sorrowful Dora from this morning. This woman was on fire.
    “You ungrateful little shit!” she continued, shaking and pointing her finger at Barry. “After everything that Oliver did for you! You would have been nothing if Oliver hadn’t taken pity on you and let you become part of his company. He was the one with the brains and the business sawy, and you just kept trying to muck that all up. But he wouldn’t let you. Oliver blocked you at every step, at every stupid, costly step you tried to take.”
    Dora turned to me, tears streaming down her face. “Barry couldn’t take it anymore.” Then she paused and eyed me suspiciously. “Weren’t you at my house today?”
    I nodded.
    “Huh.” Even in her crazed state, she seemed confused that someone of my low status could be present during this high drama. She turned back to Barry. “So, the night you killed Oliver, you’d had it with him ridiculing you for your pompous, contrived love of art and fine food! And you thought killing him would give you what you wanted?”
    Dora lunged toward her husband’s killer, and Josh and Snacker grabbed her before she could get more than a few feet.
    The police entered the restaurant, pushed their way to Josh’s office, relieved Gavin of the gun, and took Barry into custody.
    Sarka whimpered next to me. “Oh, God, Barry. What have you done?”

EIGHTEEN

    NEW Year’s Eve was not what I expected.” I lay snugly in bed with Josh spooning me.
    “You’re not kidding.” He let out a roaring yawn. “Barry seemed completely harmless. I cannot believe he’s the one who killed Oliver.”
    In spite of what he’d just said, Josh seemed more insulted than surprised by the revelation that Barry was the murderer. It was, I thought, a deep and personal offense to Josh that a fellow food devotee, someone who shared Josh’s own passion for fine cuisine, had twisted and even perverted that zealous love as Barry had done. As I mulled over the murder, I could see that years of Oliver’s dismissive attitude toward Barry and toward his dreams had finally provoked Barry beyond endurance. Had Barry also been enraged by Oliver’s interest in Sarka? I didn’t know. But Barry’s principal motivation had certainly been his ardent desire to make his fantasy restaurant become a reality. He must have realized that with Oliver alive, the Full Moon Group would never take the financial risk of opening a fine-dining establishment but would continue to limit itself to glorified and lucrative bars. On the night of Food for Thought, Oliver had poked fun at what he’d viewed as Barry’s pretensions about art and food—or so it must have seemed to Oliver. Barry, however, must have felt that his most profound dreams and passions, together with his most cherished images of himself, were being ridiculed and dismissed. In my view, Oliver’s taunting had been only one trigger for the murder. What had inflamed Barry, I suspected, and what had incited him to kill Oliver at the earliest moment, had been hearing Oliver’s mockery at Simmer’s booth. At the booth, Barry had been confronted with the reality of a man, Gavin, who was realizing the dream stolen by Oliver. Furthermore, Barry had tasted and loved Josh’s delectable medallions of beef. I hoped that Josh would never realize that his culinary genius had helped to provoke a