Shadow Of Misgivings (Margot Harris 5)
Page 9
“A couple of days.”
“What did he eat? I’m guessing UberEATS doesn’t get out this far.”
“We have a full kitchen behind the bar area. Freezers full of steaks. If he’d wanted to, he could have eaten like a king.”
“You let him eat your steaks?”
“He was my guest. I’m an O.G. around here, so he had the run of the place.”
“Did you check the kitchen and see if he’d been eating?”
“I assumed he was eating.”
“If he was here, he would be.”
“Somebody slept in his bed.”
“Yeah, but for how many nights? One or three?”
“You think he could have gone before the meeting?”
“It’s possible. Nothing here says he wasn’t.”
“You know, he never was much for putting away his dishes when he was a kid.”
“That didn’t change.”
They made their way back to the kitchen. There was one plate sitting on the counter. It looked like someone had eaten off of it recently, but it could have been an hour ago or it could have been a couple of days.
“I only see the one plate,” Marv said as he looked around the kitchen.
“Mal would only use one plate,” Margot told him. “He’d wash it off after he ate and then use the same one.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Mal. That doesn’t help us much then.”
“How tight do you keep the inventory?”
“Not tight, We ain’t a restaurant. When we start to run out, we go get more.”
“Yeah? It’s not like there’s a store around the corner.”
“If we’re having an event, we make sure we have plenty of everything, but otherwise we play it by ear.”
“You said it was fully stocked when Mal came three days ago?”
“Yeah.”
Margot went to the freezer. She wasn’t sure if she could tell the difference between Mal eating here one day or three, but it was worth a look. She opened it up and let out a short sharp scream as she jumped back, reaching instinctively for the gun in her purse.
She moved her hand away as she realized the blue eyes of the man in the freezer matched the color of his skin. Stuffed in amongst the rib eyes and the T-bones was a dead man.
Her first thought was it was Mal, but even in his frozen state, it was clear the body was someone else. He was too short and his hair too long. Plus Mal never wore a Devil’s Racers motorcycle jacket.
Marv saw her initial reaction and asked, “What’s up? You got a fear of red meat or something?”
“Did you have a dead body on ice before you put up Mal?”
Margot stepped aside as Marv went to look.