Читать книгу Why Is Murder On The Menu, Anyway? - Stevi Mittman - Страница 9

Design Tip of the Day

“When we think of fooling the eye we tend to think only of trompe l’oeil, but there are many more ways of tricking the viewer than simply painting scenes on walls. There are faux finishes. There are fiber-board tables hidden under the fanciest of cloths. And of course, there are metallic paints and gold leaf, reminding us that ‘all that glitters is not gold.’”

—TipsFromTeddi.com

Until now the best thing about going out with Howard has been the food. I mean, only the finest restaurants, and all at Newsday’s expense, as long as I let him order for me and sample what’s on my plate. I mean, how great is that? I thought it couldn’t get any better.

Only it has. Now the best thing about going out with Howard is that I get to tell Drew Scoones, when he calls this afternoon, that I am busy dressing for dinner at Madison on Park and can’t really talk.

And no, I can’t possibly see him.

Perhaps he’d like a raincheck? I say cooly.

He says it’s not raining. “Gonna see old Nine Fingers? She gonna be there?”

I tell him that I don’t know, that again I’m sorry, but like I said, I’m busy.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” he says. “I’m sure I can find something to do. It’s not like I’ll be sitting in my apartment pining, sweetheart. I can always go hang out in a pool hall, drop in at Hooters, find somebody to keep the old bed warm.”

I tell him I’m sure he can, while I hold earrings up to my ears and pick a pair of long, dangly chandeliers that Bobbie would tell me are so “last year.”

I don’t know why he feels he’s got to be mean to me.

“Won’t be quite the same, though,” he says, like he doesn’t know why, either.

And I say, “I wish we were still friends,” then gasp when I realized I’ve said it aloud.

“I’m still your friend,” Drew says and his voice is so low and soft that it does that thing to me I don’t want done, deep in the pit of my stomach. So I tell him that I’ve really got to go, but just before I hang up the phone he says that maybe he’ll just spend the night working on my murder investigation with old Hal instead of me. And he adds that he’s surprised I’m not more interested.

And, of course, I don’t hang up. “It’s not my murder investigation,” I say in my own defense. “I didn’t even know the man. And I want to just put it behind me. I don’t like feeling like a murder magnet.”

Drew is pretty silent, no doubt giving me time to play the whole scene out again in my head, to smell that sharp bitterness that filled the men’s room at The Steak-Out, to see the look of surprise on the dead man’s face. And, in some small, petty recess of my mind, to remember that the dead man is the reason Dana’s bat mitzvah may wind up being held in some Korean restaurant where kimchee accompanies every dish.

“Well,” Drew says, “you might ask your friend tonight if he isn’t interested. I’m pretty certain he knew him.”

Howard is stunning in his navy sports jacket and his khaki shirt, which he wears open at the collar so that he is not overly formal, but still well-dressed. The man truly knows how to put himself together. He looks out of place in the parking lot that serves both the strip of stores and restaurants on Park Avenue in Rockville Centre and the local Long Island Railroad station. Spring is in the air, and there is just the slightest warm breeze, promising the summer to come. My skirt with the sequins scattered over the flowers catches the breeze and propels me toward Madison on Park, where Howard says that Madison wants to talk to me.

The restaurant is dim—usually a sign that they are hiding worn carpeting, frayed linens and a chipping paint job, but, maybe because of the soft music playing in the background, the place still manages to pull off a romantic air.

It’s warm, in that homey sort of way where you get the sense that people come here fairly often, but only as the default choice. Despite its reputation, it doesn’t look to me like the kind of place you’d celebrate a new job (unless you’re me and the job is redecorating the place), or that you’d take your boss if you wanted to impress him. It’s upscale, but just barely hanging on by a thread. It’s comfortable, sort of.

In fact, that’s what’s wrong with it. It’s not anything enough.

It’s one of those places you agree on when he doesn’t feel like Chinese and you don’t feel like Italian, and Thai sounds too exotic and a hamburger too ordinary. Judging from the diners, it’s nobody’s first choice, but everyone can agree on it.

Madison, her right index finger heavily bandaged, greets us at the door as though we are long-lost relatives from the old country. She is what my mother would call “on.” I think it has to do with being in her element.

“What a fiasco,” she says and laughs a tinny laugh. “Well, at least the publicity hasn’t hurt us any.” She shepherds us through the half-empty restaurant to a spot against the back wall. It’s apparent to me that Madison on Park can’t live on its six-year-old Zagat rating much longer.

A waiter appears and pulls the table out for me. I slide into the banquette while Howard takes the seat facing me and asks Madison how Nick is taking last night’s disappointment.

She says they’ll surely never forget it and looks down at her bandages. She leans into the table and says quietly, “If it didn’t hurt so damn much, I’d cut off another one just to keep the sympathy diners coming in.”

Howard looks just as appalled as I feel, and Madison seems to sense her mistake. She once again laughs her tinny laugh to signal she was only joking and then disappears toward the kitchen.

I pick up my menu, open it and am surprised by the offerings. The choices are exotic. The prices are through the roof. I’m thrilled because I now have a bead on what the restaurant needs. Forget homey. Forget comfortable. You don’t pay these kinds of prices just for the food, you pay them for atmosphere.

And if there’s one thing I know how to create, it’s ambience.

I close my eyes, imagining this place with chandeliers rather than high hats, fabric walls rather than paneling, a fabulous window treatment. When I open them, I catch the faintest glimpse of someone through the window, just now walking out of view. Though I didn’t see his face, I’d know that leather jacket anywhere. So when Howard asks me if there is anything I see that I want, I nearly choke on my water. When I can catch my breath I tell him, as I always do, to order for both of us.

Howard orders the inzimino, which he tells me is calamari, spinach, chickpeas and nero d’avola served on a crouton. I don’t have a clue what nero d’avola is, but I say, “and for me?” which tells him I’d only eat his choice at gunpoint, and even then I might not. He suggests the foie gras and braised duck terrine, and I give him my please take pity on me look. He orders me a tricolor salad and then goes on to order three different entrées of which he requests petit portions for us to share and taste. Like I would really touch a braised pork shank with pepperoncini and wild mushrooms over a ragout of root vegetables.

While he orders, I watch Drew Scoones pantomiming outside the window. The best I can tell, he’s asking me to go ahead and ask Howard something. I shake my head. Howard catches me, shifts around in his seat so that he can see out the window, and asks what I’m looking at since Drew is no longer in view.

I tell him the window treatment is dreadful. He turns back to me. Drew comes back into view. Howard turns for another look. Drew manages to disappear again.

If Drew wants to know what Howard knows, he can ask him himself. What does he think? That Howard is a murderer? As far as I know, Howard’s never done an illegal thing in his life—if you don’t count the turn he made against the light the night that Drew followed us and pulled him over to give him a ticket.

And that was entrapment.

And Howard is not duplicitous—except maybe the whole trolling thing on JDate when we were first going out. But I don’t count that since he thought he was flirting with me and not with my mother, who’d registered me without my knowledge or participation.

So what if he knew the Health Department Inspector? He’s a food critic. Shouldn’t he know the man who makes sure he isn’t going to get food poisoning doing his job?

“So, Teddi, about The Steak-Out…” he starts. “I wanted to ask you—” But Nick comes over, his chef’s hat askew, and interrupts him.

“Howard’s girl,” he says, nodding at me and grabbing up my hand to shake it. “Good to meet you again. Madison see you yet?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead he asks Howard if he can talk to him alone for a minute, apologizing to me as he asks.

Howard, looking horrified, says, “No,” really weirdly. Like just “no,” without any “sorry,” or “something wrong?” or anything. I remind myself that another of my New Year’s resolutions was to stop seeing perfectly ordinary things as suspicious. Just because Drew Scoones put a bug in my ear (or wherever he put it) is no reason to let my imagination run away with me.

“I have to powder my nose, anyway,” I say, putting my napkin beside my plate and coming to a stand.

Nick apologizes again and says he only needs a minute while Howard reaches out his hand to stop me from leaving the table. Drew is still watching, now from across the street, and I can just see relating this to him and listening to him guess that Howard’s credit card was refused.

I pat Howard’s hand and get up from the table. The layouts of most restaurants fall into two categories. Cheaper, funkier ones often have their restroom toward the side or front of the place. The ones that want to appear classier, more exclusive, have them in the back, near the kitchen, because they aren’t afraid of what a patron might see. The layout of Madison on Park and The Steak-Out are nearly identical—loos near the kitchen, only the placement of the Male/Female rooms are reversed.

Which explains why I am frozen in my tracks in front of the restroom doors, feeling slightly nauseated and just a trifle dizzy.

“Are you all right?” I hear someone say, and turn to find Madison standing beside me. “You look kind of green, dear.”

I assure her I’m fine, but my hand just won’t reach out and grasp the doorknob. I feel sweat break out on my upper lip.

“Shall I get Howard?” she asks, seemingly caught between leaving me to possibly fall down in a dead faint and wanting someone else to deal with it.

I explain about The Steak-Out and being the one to open the men’s room door and find the body.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she coos over me solicitously. Or, should I say, salaciously. She, like everyone else, no doubt wants the gory details. “So sad about Joe. Who would do a thing like that? In a men’s room, no less. Leave it to a man, right? I swear, it’s the sort of thing you see on television. A regular mob hit, or made to look like one, I’d say. So sad.”

“So you knew him?” I ask, wishing I could pull my antennae in. None of my business. None of my business.

Still…

“Don’t tell Nick,” she says, lowering her voice dramatically. “Especially now. But this was before I even knew Nick, anyway. Joe and I…we were kind of an item for a while. Not that anyone knew. We kept it hush-hush. I mean, a restaurateur and the health inspector. It could be misinterpreted.”

“You owned this restaurant before you knew Nick?” I ask.

“Not this one,” she says. “Another restaurant. In Boston, in fact. Nothing like this one. And I was just a chef, anyway. I’m embarrassed to even tell you the name.”

She can tell me who she slept with, but not where she used to cook. Howard always tells me that chefs take their knives to bed. Now I believe him.

My cell phone rings. It’s the theme from Home Alone, which means one of my kids is calling from home. I apologize to Madison, who didn’t even appear to notice, and I take the call. It’s Jesse, who tells me that his father wants to borrow my car. Only he doesn’t call him “my father.” He calls him “your ex-husband.”

Rio gets on the phone. Before he gets past “How ya doing?” I tell him he cannot borrow my car.

“You really get a kick out of busting my balls, don’t you? In front of our kids, too. You don’t even wanna know what I need it for?” he says like it’s an accusation.

I tell him I don’t. “Unless one of my children is bleeding on the floor and you need to take him or her to the hospital, you can’t borrow the car.”

“It’s something like that,” he says. “And I only need it for a couple of days.”

I ask him what he means by it’s something like that.

He says one of his kids needs to go the hospital.

“I’ll be right there,” I tell him, signaling to Madison that I’m sorry, waving to Howard that we’ve got to leave. He’s deep in conversation with Nick and I decide I can get home faster with Drew and his siren. I should never have left the kids alone. I am a terrible mother. I should be arrested for child abuse.

Only, then who’d raise my kids?

I dash out of the restaurant like a maniac, searching for Drew, while I try to get a straight answer out of Rio.

I should know better.

“Who is hurt?” I demand. Drew appears from nowhere.

“What’s happening?” he demands.

The kids, I mouth. “Rio, I swear to God I will kill you if you don’t tell me, this instant, who is hurt and how they are hurt.”

Drew hustles me toward his car.

“Nobody’s hurt,” Rio says. “I didn’t say anyone was hurt. Did I say anyone was hurt?”

I put up my hand to stop Drew, who looks pretty pale for a man who sees dead people on a daily basis. “If no one is hurt, why are you taking my kids to the hospital?”

“I didn’t say your kids,” Rio says. His voice changes like he’s cupping the phone. “I said mine.”

“What? My kids aren’t your kids?” I ask before I realize what he’s saying.

“I’m gonna be a father again,” he says. I lean against Drew’s car. My legs have turned to gummi worms. Relief? Jealousy? Drew leans into me the better to hear Rio’s news. “The kids are gonna have a new little sister, sometime in the next couple a days.”

“Put Jesse on the phone,” I tell Mr. High Sperm Count while Drew laughs at me and Howard comes charging toward us.

“Mom?” Jesse says, and my heart goes out to this middle child of mine who is always caught in the middle.

“Listen to me, Jesse,” I say as evenly as I can. “Go into my office. In my desk, in that little drawer behind the door that opens for the printer, is some money. Give your father fifty dollars and tell him to use it for a cab to take Marion to the hospital when the time comes. Do not, I repeat, do not, give him the keys to my car.”

Jesse asks if I’m sure he should give him the money and I tell him softly that we do not take out our anger at his dad on a pregnant lady and her new baby. Hell, how else is he going to learn to be a good man? A mensch? Surely not from his father.

When I hang up, the men at my side seem to have nothing to say.

“My ex is going to be a father again,” I say, trying to sound breezy about the whole thing. “What does that make me?”

“Mad?” Howard asks.

“Even crazier than usual?” Drew suggests.

“I mean, Marion is my kids’ stepmother, or will be if Rio ever bothers to marry her. But we’re already divorced, so what would his baby be to me?”

“A thorn in your side?” Howard says.

“A pain in the ass?” Drew suggests.

“I’m glad you two are so thoroughly enjoying yourselves. Too bad it’s at my expense.”

Both men stand around with their hands in their pockets as if they don’t want to touch this situation literally or figuratively.

Finally, Howard asks Drew what he’s doing here. Drew claims that he was hungry, saying that even cops eat, and somehow the three of us wind up back in Madison on Park like we’re the best of friends.

Nick comes by to tell us to order freely. Everything is on the house. He brings a bottle of wine, which Howard tries to decline as too generous, but Nick insists.

Drew, making some Everyman statement, orders a beer.

With some difficulty, Madison pulls up a chair and all of us reach to help her a moment too late. She waves away our belated attempts as if to say “It’s nothing,” and declines the offer to join us in any wine, our gazes connecting as she does. Then, as if brushing the moment aside, she asks me what I think of the decor.

I try to find something nice to say and mention the romantic air. Drew looks amused.

“You can be honest,” she says. “God knows, they’re always saying honesty is the best policy.”

“So, what kind of name is Madison, anyway?” Drew asks. I don’t know if he is somehow implying that the woman hasn’t come by the name honestly, or just making conversation. I never can tell exactly what Drew is up to, which is how I wound up in his bed in the first place.

Anyway, she explains that she was born on Madison Avenue to Yugoslavian immigrants. I want to say, “So there.”

I tell her the restaurant has good bones, but the colors are off, and so much more could be done for the place with very little expense. And then I tell her that I would be happy to do the work at cost since the restaurant would be a great showcase for my talents. I tell her that Bobbie and I are still establishing our credentials and that it would be worth it to us to give her a great deal.

“A win-win situation,” Howard calls it while Drew indicates that his phone is vibrating and that he has to go.

“Ask them about Joe Greco,” he whispers in my ear as he gets up to leave. I glare at him while he shakes hands with Howard and takes Madison’s uninjured left hand. “You take care now,” he tells her as she rises along with him and sees him out, greeting new diners at the door.

“So what did Nick want to talk to you about, anyway?” I ask Howard while he waxes on about braised remembrance farm greens, whatever they are.

“Wanted to tell me about the health inspector being murdered,” Howard says. “I told him I already knew from you.”

“Why did he want to tell you about Joe Greco?” I ask. Howard doesn’t ask me if that was the man’s name.

He just says that Nick always treats him like he’s “in the business,” what with him being a food critic and all and that I shouldn’t go reading anything into it, the way I always do. “It’s not like he had anything to do with it,” he adds.

“Fine,” I say, dropping it in favor of talking about decorating Madison on Park.

“Can you really keep the cost down?” he asks me. This from a man who is having caviar-encrusted salmon on the house.

“It doesn’t look like they’re hurting,” I tell him, imagining Scalamandré silks on the window with layer upon layer of passementerie.

Howard looks around the room. “Appearances,” he says, “can be deceiving.”