Roux the Day by Peter King Page B

admitted.
    “It’s a popular Gulf fish and you’ll see it cooked lots of New Orleans ways. We cook it Italian style—dipped in seasoned flour, then egg and then seasoned breadcrumbs. The big difference is that the standard Italian breadcrumbs are too fine and you can’t get the fillets crispy. You have to use the very coarse grade.”
    Trout Florentine was another dish popular in Italy but given a New Orleans twist here at the Villa Romana. Artichoke with garlic mayonnaise was yet another, and the plentiful supply of oysters had initiated a number of cross-cultural dishes—veal rolls stuffed with oysters and sausage was a good example.
    My appetite was getting the better of me by now. “I think I’d better order,” I told Della, and settled on the oysters she had described and then the seafood Terrabona.
    “We have an excellent Gavi di Gavi if you like Italian wines.”
    “I wouldn’t have any other kind,” I told her.

CHAPTER NINE
    “J UST A SMALL PORTION ,” I said firmly when Della pressed me to have one of their house specialties as a dessert. It came in a small cup and I slowly cut the spoon through the crunchy, crusty top and withdrew a spoonful. It was delicious—a slightly different version of the French crème brûlée, which also has a crusty top, or the Italian panna cotta, which does not. The texture was like silk on the tongue and the vanilla flavor was assertive, not the neutral taste we get used to in many ice creams.
    “Is this a good time for you to make your report?” she asked, smiling.
    “I talked to Larry Mortensen, Richie’s brother,” I told her. “He gave me a hard time at first, accused me of killing his brother.”
    “Goodness!” Her eyes rounded.
    “He accused Elsa Goddard, too.”
    “He must have lost that argument.”
    “Ah, you know her well, I can see. Yes, I think Elsa and I both convinced him of our innocence. He seems still bent on the vengeance trail, though.”
    “What about the Belvedere book?”
    “We didn’t get very far with that. We talked about the possibility of some family secret recipe. What do you think of that, from a professional point of view?”
    Her features were not suitable for an expression of deep thought but she gave it a good shot. “It’s possible, I suppose,” she said at length. “But I’m not sure. If there were something else, it would be more likely.”
    “I agree. Trouble is … what?”
    We batted that around without any conclusion and she said, “Well thanks for the report. I’ll pass it along.”
    “Thank you for the meal. It was great. You deserve to be successful.” The first and second courses had, in fact, been very good and I told Della she was achieving the blend of New Orleans cooking and Italian cooking with remarkable results.
    “You’ll have to come again and have our gumbo Milanese,” she said. The twinkle in her eye led me to believe that she was kidding but she insisted she was serious. I had to suppose that the possibility of liaisons with the two cuisines was unlimited.
    A thought was nagging at me as I was leaving. Had the farm-boy exile driving the cab been right, and we had been followed by another cab on the ride to the TV studio? In the first scary moments of being chased by a dead man with a gun, I had assumed that the pursuit had been a continuation of the cab incident. But that didn’t make sense—Larry Mortensen could not have been following me because he had been scheduled to be in the studio for Elsa’s show. Either the boy was wrong or someone else had been in that other cab.
    The implications were not pleasant, and, anyway, another query was arising. If there was something in the Belvedere chef’s book that made it vital to get a hold of, why hadn’t someone already seen that entry? I thought back to the lawyer, Van Linn. Whose lawyer was he? Did he know more than he was telling me?
    I phoned him. I expected a polite brush-off—nothing total, but at least stressing how busy he was, et