Flamenco, Flan, and Fatalities

Book 2: Happy Hoofers Mystery

by Mary McHugh

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Murder is nothing to tap at. . . The high-kicking Happy Hoofers--Tina, Janice, Pat, Mary Louise, and Gini--have been booked to flaunt their fabulous flamenco footwork on a luxury train ride through northern Spain. But when a blowhard talk show host is found deader than four-day-old flan--with Gini as suspect numero uno--the feisty friends waste no time stepping into their sleuthing shoes to protect one of their own. The dynamite dancers will have to step up their game before a clever killer brings the curtain down on one of them . . . for good! Includes Photo Tips And Tasty Recipes

Release date: March 1, 2015

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 318

Sample

I must say the five of us were a good-looking group in our silky summer dresses and strappy high heels, earrings swinging, as we strolled toward the coach that would take us to the restaurant for the first dinner on our tour of northern Spain. We climbed aboard and said hello to the other passengers from our luxury train. We couldn’t wait to see everything, do everything, experience everything in this amazing country. We took seats in two available rows and craned our necks, looking out the windows at the bustling street in front of the station.

Just as the door closed and the driver gunned the engine into life, there was a loud commotion. We heard a familiar voice demanding that the bus wait for him. I looked out and saw a large, sweaty man waving his arms and shouting.

“Where is Eduardo?” he yelled. “He was supposed to make all the arrangements for me on the train. Where is he?”

I’d heard this voice before somewhere. A strong wave of dislike grabbed me. Who was this person? Why didn’t I like him?

“Nobody knows how to do anything in this country,” he said.

Eduardo, the host of our trip, got off the bus and held out his hand to the noisy man.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Shambless. I’m Eduardo. We waited for you and your party as long as we could. We have reservations for dinner and we need to leave on time.” Our host was slender and dapper in dark slacks and a starched white shirt. The shouter, by contrast, looked like an unmade bed.

“I’m filming this whole trip on your crowded little train for my TV show. I’d have thought you’d have the decency to wait for me and my crew before you ran off to the restaurant. They’ll wait for us. They can’t buy publicity like my show will give them. And neither can you.” He waved a pudgy finger in Eduardo’s face as if he were not the center of attention already.

“We are indeed grateful that you chose our trip, Mr. Shambless,” Eduardo said. I cringed watching this nice man having to apologize to this creep. “I regret any confusion I may have caused. Please join us on the bus and tell me what I can do to help you.”

“Just stay out of my way unless I need you,” Shambless said, motioning to his cameraman and a pretty young woman with long, straight blond hair and a V-necked blouse that showed off her incredible breasts every time she bent over, which was often.

I remembered why I disliked this man. Dick Shambless was a television talk show host who enthralled whole sections of the country every day with his anti-gay, anti-government, anti-everything rantings. Why did he have to come on this trip?

One of the women sitting near us stood up and pulled the man sitting next to her to a seat in the back of the coach. I heard her say, “I don’t want to talk to him,” as she moved to the last row.

“Just ignore him, Sylvia,” the man said, following her down the aisle with a camera bag over his shoulder. “You don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”

I nudged my friend Mary Louise, who was leafing through a brochure about local attractions.

“Did you see the look on that woman’s face when she heard Shambless’s voice?” I whispered to her.

She looked up, concern in her lovely blue eyes. “She seemed—, I don’t know,—angry? Scared? What was it?”

“Well, she certainly wasn’t happy to see him.”

The talk show host lurched onto the bus, heaving his vast weight into the front seat, without a “hello” or “how are you” to anybody around him. The cameraman stood in the front of the bus and filmed Shambless, and then swung the camera around to include the rest of us.

Eduardo leaned over closer to Shambless, and said, “You might want to include our beautiful dancers who are going to entertain us on this trip. Our Happy Hoofers.”

“Happy Hookers?” Shambless said. “Why would I want to include a bunch of hookers?”

“No, no,” Eduardo said, embarrassed, looking at us apologetically. “They’re dancers and we are really lucky to have them.”

“Tell them to stand up,” Shambless said. “Let me get a look at these babes.”

Eduardo asked each of us to stand. We reluctantly got to our feet as he introduced us individually. I was ready to slug Shambless, but I felt sorry for Eduardo, so I smiled into the camera when he said, “This is Gini Miller, award-winning filmmaker and dancer extraordinaire.”

Eduardo asked Tina to stand next. “And this is Tina Powell, magazine editor and leader of the dancers.”

Shambless snorted when Eduardo motioned to Janice to stand. “Janice Rogers, actress and director,” Eduardo said.

“You sure that’s hoofers with an f?” Shambless said.

I was about to punch his lights out when the man with Sylvia called out, “Janice! Janice Rogers. I didn’t know you were on this trip.”

He pushed his way up the aisle to hug her.

“Janice Rogers,” he said. “I don’t believe you’re here. It’s so good to see you again. How are you? Are you still acting?”

Janice pulled away to look at him.

“Tom Carson,” she said. “It must be ten years since we were in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? in New York. How are you? Are you still acting?”

“If you can call it that. I’m in a soap opera. I haven’t been in anything on the stage in years.”

“Listen, there’s nothing wrong with soaps. It’s still acting. Which one are you in?”

“Love in the Afternoon,” he said. “Have you ever seen it?”

“I have, actually,” she said. “In fact, it’s really good. I got hooked on it one year when I didn’t have an acting job and was just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”

“I can’t believe you ever sat around waiting for a part,” Tom said. “You’re a terrific actress.”

“Can we get on with this?” Shambless said impatiently. “You can sleep with her later.”

I would have killed him right then and there, but Tom said, “Let’s catch up at dinner, Jan.” Then he went back to his seat.

Eduardo introduced Pat as a family therapist and Mary Louise as “the mother of three,” and the cameraman finished filming us.

As the bus started, the nicely stacked blonde sat down next to Shambless and turned on a tape recorder. He started to talk into it when a petite woman behind him leaned over his seat, and said, “Oh, Mr. Shambless, I’m one of your biggest fans. I watch you every day and I thank God for all you do to protect our country. You’re a national treasure.”

He turned to her with a forced smile, and said, “God bless you. I’d be nothing without loyal fans like you.” He patted her hand.

I felt like I was going to be sick, but I swallowed my bile and muttered to Pat sitting in front of me, “What is he doing here? He’ll ruin the whole trip.”

Pat turned around to say to me in a low voice, “We don’t have to talk to him. In fact, please keep me from saying anything to him. He’s a Neanderthal. He hates everything—intelligent women, gays, the president, social welfare programs—everything. I can never understand why so many people listen to him.”

“I don’t get that either,” I said. “The few times I’ve heard him when I surf through the channels, I just wanted to strangle him.”

“You’d make a lot of people happy if you did. Anyway, try to relax. Just ignore him and enjoy the ride.”

“You’re right, Pat, but it won’t be easy.”

On the way to the restaurant, our guide, a young Spanish woman named Rafaela, stood up and picked up a microphone to give us a brief history of this part of Spain, or Green Spain, as the northern section is called.

“Our train follows the five-hundred-mile route that pilgrims take from San Sebastian in the east to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in the west where the bones of St. James are buried—only we’re going in the opposite direction. The legend is that St. James’s body was brought from Jerusalem to Santiago de Compostela and buried in a field. Then nine hundred years later, someone found the bones and the cathedral was built around them. Pilgrims make the long journey to see them and are given a free room and meals when they arrive. If they make the pilgrimage when St. James Day falls on a Sunday, it’s a holy year and all their sins are forgiven forever. They go directly to heaven.”

“What a load of baloney,” Shambless said. “You’d have to be a real idiot to believe that stuff. How far is this restaurant anyway? I’m starving.”

The whole coach fell into a silence so hostile you could touch it.

Rafaela looked at him, her dark eyes reflecting the anger most people in the bus were feeling. With admirable restraint, she said, “It’s only a short distance. In fact, you can see it up the road there on the right.”

I stood up to peer out the front window of the coach and saw a startlingly white stucco hacienda, surrounded by brilliant red oleander flowers, which were even more beautiful against the stark restaurant walls. The September sun glinted off the sparkling windows. I could see a sign that read, BIENVENIDOS EL GUSTO DEL MAR, which I think means “Welcome to the Taste of the Sea.” My Spanish isn’t all that great.

When the bus pulled up to the gleaming white restaurant, Eduardo got off to shake hands with the owner, who was waiting to greet us. He was tall and handsome in the way that only Spanish men are—with that look in their eyes that says, “You cannot resist me.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Eduardo said, “I am pleased to introduce you to Señor Delgardo, the owner of El Gusto del Mar, this excellent restaurant.”

Señor Delgardo smiled and held out his hand to Shambless, who was the first one to clamber out of the bus. The cameraman took pictures of the restaurant and the other buildings nearby. The blonde ignored the rest of us and put her arm through the talk show host’s arm.

“Bienvenido, señor,” Señor Delgardo said to him as he got off the bus. Shambless just grunted and pushed past him into the restaurant.

The rest of us tried to make up for his rudeness by shaking hands with the owner and telling him how much we were looking forward to dining in his restaurant. He worked at being gracious, but it was obvious that he felt insulted by Shambless’s boorishness. Somehow, we were all crass Americans because of the thoughtlessness of the talk show host.

As we got off the bus, I noticed that Sylvia put her hand on her companion’s arm to restrain him. I heard him say, “Don’t be silly, Sylvia. It was a long time ago. Come on. You don’t have to talk to him.”

She followed him reluctantly into the restaurant.

Rafaela ushered us into a gleaming dark wood bar with a magnificent view of the beach and the Cantabrian Sea through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The white damask-covered tables were set with gleaming silver, crystal wine glasses, red and pink roses, and white candles. Most of the tables were reserved for our group of fifty passengers.

Shambless, still loud and obnoxious, sat down at a table for four and waved away other people who tried to sit with him, except for the blonde and the cameraman. “This is my vacation. I talk to people all year long. I don’t want to bother with anybody while I’m eating,” he said to Señor Delgardo when he tried to seat some of the passengers at his table.

The blonde whispered something in his ear and he smiled into the camera.

“Edit that out,” he said to the camera operator. His voice changed into a mellow, pleasing baritone. “What a pleasure it is to be here in sunny Spain . . . what is it, Julie?”

She said something to him and he continued, even more mellifluously than before. “Or, I should say rainy Spain,” he said, a slight chuckle in his voice, “because it’s the rain here in northern Spain that makes this Green Spain, a lush and beautiful place to see. I want to take you with me on this trip through picturesque fishing villages, to ninth-century monuments, to the Guggenheim museum. We’ll climb mountains, watch the ocean splash on the shore, visit historic caves.” He paused and smiled into the camera. “I’m so glad you’re here with me on this fascinating journey.”

He motioned to the cameraman to stop. “That’s it for now, Steve,” he said in his regular, ordinary, bossy voice. “Get some shots of the restaurant and the town around here.”

He turned to Julie. “How was I, honey?”

She took his hand.

“Superb, as always.”

He pulled his hand away and tore off a piece of bread from the basket on the table.

Our group was at the table next to his. We did our best to ignore him.

He looked up as the woman who was trying to avoid him and Tom, her companion, passed his table.

“Well,” he said loudly. “It’s been a long time, Sylvia. How’s your life going? Still with that soap opera? Lust in the Afternoon, isn’t it?”

Sylvia stiffened, stopped and looked at him with such hatred we could feel its heat, and then walked past him to a table as far from his as she could find. Tom glared at the talk show host and followed her to the back of the room.

“I wonder what that’s all about?” Tina said.

Janice leaned forward, and in a low voice said, “Tom’s a great guy. We were in a play together in New York a few years ago.” She paused for a minute, a dreamy look on her face. “We had a little thing going for a while,” she said. “Anyway, I heard that he married the producer of Shambless’s talk show, a woman named Sylvia something or other. I don’t know what happened exactly, but she left or was fired. I heard rumors that Shambless had her fired because she wouldn’t sleep with him, and then kept her from being hired as a producer on other talk shows. That’s how she ended up producing a soap opera. She hired Tom and I guess that’s when they fell in love and got married. I had no idea he was on this trip.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Shambless makes friends wherever he goes.”

We laughed and looked at Rafaela, who was about to tell us our dinner choices.

“Since this part of Spain is famous for its incredibly fresh seafood,” she said, “the owner of this restaurant has selected the most delicate and delicious dishes.” She translated the menu for us.

“Everything is superb here,” she said. “You can have cigalas cocidas, which is boiled crayfish with lemon wedges. The crayfish is so fresh it almost sings in your mouth.”

“Oh, great,” Shambless growled. “That’s all I need—singing fish. I just want a steak, medium rare, with French fries. And a bottle of red wine, if they have any good wine in Spain. Think you can manage that?”

Señor Delgardo, who was standing nearby, looked at Rafaela. They didn’t say anything, but their feelings about this man were unmistakable.

Obviously exerting a great effort to keep his voice pleasant, the owner said, “Señor Shambless, we are noted for our seafood. Try our vieiras al horno, which is—”

“Some kind of horny fish,” Shambless said, snickering and looking at his fan at the next table, who giggled.

“As I said before,” he said. “All I want is a steak. It’s simple. A steak. Medium rare. With French fries. And ketchup.”

Steve, the guy with the camera, leaned over Shambless and whispered something in his ear.

“Oh . . . yeah . . . good point. Wait a sec, Delgardo. Bring me one of your fish dishes with all the trimmings so Steve can film it for the documentary. And then bring me the steak.”

Señor Delgardo turned abruptly and went into the kitchen.

Rafaela tried to pretend she hadn’t heard all this and continued talking to the rest of us.

“As Señor Delgardo was saying, vieiras al horno is baked scallops. Again, very simple. Scallops made with onions, garlic, paprika, sprinkled with bread cru. . .