Why Is Murder On The Menu, Anyway?

I imagine Drew Scoones thinking that I am keeping tabs on him and want to crawl into a hole and die.

“Mom!” Jesse yells out the front door to me, opening it enough to let loose Maggie May, the bichon frise I “inherited” from Elise Meyers, the woman I found murdered last year. (Okay, fine. So I stole the dog. She was dead and her husband, who was trying to kill her before someone else beat him to it, wasn’t going to take care of her dog, now was he?) Jesse gestures with his hand that there is someone on the phone.

“It’s probably Howard,” I tell Bobbie. “He’s taking me out to some Iron Chef cook-off thing tonight. Maybe I can beg off.”

Bobbie gives me the look. The one that says I’m breaking yet another Long Island rule—canceling an engagement the same day. It seems like, much to Bobbie and my mother’s dismay, I will never learn how to get ahead on Long Island. At nearly forty, it’s probably too late.

Then she concedes that maybe, under the circumstances, it could be all right.

“Maybe,” she says, grabbing Maggie May’s collar and dragging her into the house. “Like if you make up some wild story about seeing some murdered guy on the john….”

“It’s Drew,” Jesse says breathlessly, and his face is lit up like it’s Superman calling. “You should invite him to dinner, Mom,” he says, then scrunches up his nose at the thought of my cooking. “Or something, anyway,” he adds.

I pretend to be offended by my eleven-year-old’s suggestion as I ruffle his hair on my way to the kitchen, where I pick up the portable from the counter and say, “Hello.”

“You’re gonna love this one,” he says, like there hasn’t been a three-month lull in our conversations, like I haven’t jumped every time the phone rang since the last time he called me, eighty-six days ago. “Your dead guy? He’s the one who shut down Sheldon’s of Great Neck. Isn’t that where you were planning to have Dana’s bat mitzvah?”

He knows exactly where her bat mitzvah was supposed to be. He even went with me to look Sheldon’s over, to make plans, to pick which room to have the meal in, which one to serve the hors d’oeuvres.

And then he just stopped calling. “What do you mean, ‘he was the one who shut it down’?” I ask.

“He’s…that is, he was, with the Board of Health. He was the food inspector who claimed Sheldon’s didn’t meet the County’s standards. Looks like you are S.O.L. As usual.”

“As long as it doesn’t make me a suspect,” I say. I mean, been there, done that, and “shit outta luck” beats having to prove I’m innocent—or that my best friend is—again.

Drew just laughs.

“Well, I do have a motive,” I concede. “Though you know that I didn’t know who he was until this moment. And okay, I had opportunity. I admit I was there in the restaurant when he was killed. But means?”

I think for just a nanosecond and I can’t believe what crosses my mind.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve found the gun and it’s registered to Rio.”

Drew laughs again at the mention of my thank-God-he’s-behind-me ex-husband, a man who believed in the principle of survival of the slickest. “I forgot how funny you are,” he says.

There’s a silence while he waits for me to ask whose fault that is.

I don’t.

“So anyway,” he says, “I just thought you’d want to know the guy who screwed you is dead.”

Ha. The guy who screwed me is on the other end of the phone telling me the guy who screwed me is dead.

“So whatcha been up to?” he asks, just baiting me into asking him why he vanished off the face of my earth.

“Business,” I say. “I told you today, I’m doing a lot of commercial properties, restaurants, things like that.”

He doesn’t say anything, waiting, I suppose, for me to ask him what he’s been doing. Bobbie will give up buying shoes before I ask that.

“Is there anything else?” I ask, as in: is there a reason I’m sitting here holding on to the phone, unable to breathe, wishing that we were still friends? Still more than friends?

“You doing anything tonight?” he asks. I tell him I’ve got a date, but the cocky bastard sounds like he doesn’t believe me.

“Howard is taking me to some charity cook-off,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “Howard. That doesn’t exactly count as a date.”

“He’s picking me up, paying for my dinner, taking me to a show, and bringing me home. What part of that isn’t a date?” I ask. Bobbie, putting her little crocheted shrug over my shoulders in an attempt to influence what I’m going to wear tonight, gives me a thumbs-up. She seems to think that the right sweater will always win the day.

He tells me, “the part that comes next.”

“What comes next is none of your business,” I tell him and hang up. I give Bobbie a look that says it’s none of hers, either, and head upstairs to get dressed without my fairy godmother to give me her glass slippers, though I think I still have the Manolos she loaned me a few weeks ago.

Howard is simply glowing this evening. It’s like he’s been lit from within, and he is devastatingly handsome in a beige linen jacket over a chocolate-brown T-shirt that hugs his torso like…Well, I’m not going there, so suffice it to say that Howard is over six feet tall, filled out without any fat, and he has the fastest smile I’ve ever seen. Nothing lights a face like a smile.

He has told me three times how his friend Nick, the chef at Madison on Park, has been practicing for this evening, how he has made all kinds of entrées and desserts and how Howard has had to try them all. He throws around words like Provençale and forestiere like I’m supposed to know what he means. He says Nick did a dish with roasted Maine lobster and kabocha squash gnocchi with sautéed black trumpets in sage oil. When I look stricken he assures me that the trumpets are mushrooms and not swans, and shakes his head at me.

“You’ve no appreciation for good food,” he complains as if I’m just being stubborn. He glances at our tickets and gestures with his chin to keep progressing down the aisle of the cavernous high school auditorium where they have set up several kitchens on the stage and placed big TV screens around the room so they can zoom in on the stovetops and prep areas.

What he means is that the other night when he took me out to review a new Italian restaurant for Newsday, the Dentice Mare Monte was absolutely wasted on me. As is anything with olives or artichokes or a host of other foods he thinks God invented just to pleasure man.

We get to our row and he grimaces because we are obviously farther back than row B ought to be. He hurries up ahead, sees that there are rows AA to FF before the single alphabet begins, and, with obvious disappointment, waves me into our row in front of him. Excusing ourselves, we clamber over people who refuse to stand up to let us get to our seats—and who then have the nerve to glare at us when we stumble over their purses and toes. I remind Howard as we navigate the various obstacles that the gâteau au chocolat wasn’t wasted on me.

He pulls a laugh from his inexhaustible supply as we take our seats, and he wonders aloud how it is that I can remember the French names only for desserts or things that involve chocolate.

“Chocolat,” I correct, saying it with what I hope is a convincing French accent.

He waves away my attempt at being seductive and tells me that I should have been there for the practice run. “Cockle Bruschetta,” he says, like cockles were likely to be the surprise ingredient they’d have the chefs use tonight. “Then a choucroute Royale Alsacienne, done not with sauerkraut but with a pickled mushroom…” He closes his eyes like he’s having sex and it is too perfect to describe.

At least, I think he’d close his eyes during sex. It’s not something I know firsthand.

“And just this morning I had to go on a scavenger hunt for tamarind paste,” he tells me as I settle into my seat and take in our surroundings. “Took me until nearly noon to find it in this little Indian spice place on Broadway down on the South Shore.”

“The Taj? The one next to The Steak-Out?” I ask. I remind him that was where I was at lunchtime, and it was where I discovered the murdered man I’ve already told him about.

He stops helping me off with Bobbie’s shrug and asks me if I’m sure. I tell him it’s not the sort of thing that one forgets. And then I could swear he shudders.

“You all right?” I ask and he gets all defensive, like I’ve impugned his manhood or something.

“I suppose you talked to the police,” he says. I tell him that yes, they interviewed my mother and me. But, because the chip on his shoulder is the size of Shea Stadium when it comes to Drew Scoones, I don’t mention just who “they” were.

“Well, luckily you didn’t see anything,” he says, slipping out of his jacket and carefully folding it behind him on the chair.

“Just a dead man,” I say a bit sarcastically, since he seems to think that watching someone cook a fancy French meal trumps discovering a dead body.

I could see his argument if we were at least going to taste the results. And if they were chocolate.

He suggests that we leave our stuff on our seats and go backstage to see his friend Nick. We exit our row in the opposite direction and, after convincing the powers that be that we are vital to the survival of Earth, we are permitted to go behind the scenes to look for Nick and Madison Watts, owners of Madison on Park. Howard has described Nick in detail, but has never even mentioned Madison before tonight, so I am taken aback when he allows himself to be greeted with kisses on both cheeks by an elegant thirtysomething-just-younger-than-me woman who seems as surprised to see me as I am to see her kissing the man I’ve come in with.

She’s dressed all in black, like, well, like a black swan. Or like Mrs. Danvers, from Rebecca with Joan Fontaine. And let me tell you, if I were crumbs, I’d know better than to stick to her outfit. You know how interviewers always ask stupid questions like, “If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?” Well, Madison Watts would be a rare orchid that you know would cost thousands of dollars and would die if you looked at it wrong. And it would be your fault, not the flower’s.

Or maybe a Venus flytrap.

Something intimidating.

Yes, if I had to find one word to describe Madison Watts, it would be intimidating.

“Madison,” Howard says, and my ordinarily warm, garrulous date has suddenly gone cold and distant. “I’d like you to meet Teddi Bayer.”

“Your…?” Madison says, as if daring him to introduce me as his girlfriend. She waits, not giving him an out.

“Nick around?” he asks instead.

Madison eyes me critically while I try not to stare at her perfect complexion and huge gray eyes. I struggle to remember if I put on lipstick before Howard picked me up and figure it’s probably gone by now, anyway. I am wearing one of Bobbie’s crocheted tops with the matching shrug from last year and a pair of Ann Taylor pants which, I admit, are a good five years old. I feel mismatched, underdressed, out of style and fat. Where are this woman’s Hadassah arms? If Nick is such a great cook, why doesn’t her figure show that she ever, ever eats?

I’d credit Madison with an uncanny ability to reduce me to shame and self-loathing, but heck, nearly anyone can do it. It’s not like I don’t try. I’m sure I look good when I look in the mirror at home, or at the very least, good enough. And then I get where I’m going, see someone wearing the right thing, someone whose hair looks like she just stepped out of the salon, someone whose makeup isn’t smudged under her eyes, whose shoes apparently don’t cripple her feet, and all I want to do is crawl back into bed.

With the slightest hint of an accent, Madison, who looks like she’s primped all afternoon when I know she had to be preparing for the show, asks, “I know you, don’t I?” Those exquisite gray eyes of hers narrow slightly, as if she’s seeing through my disguise as a socially-acceptable, upwardly-mobile person who could pay for her own ticket and dinner if she had to. Which, luckily, I don’t.

I tell her that I don’t think we’ve ever met at the same time that Howard tells her that I am a decorator. “She’s doing a lot of commercial work,” he says. “Redecorating restaurants…” He pauses like he’s suddenly put two and two together and gotten Reese’s peanut butter cups. “You two should talk.”

My heart thumps wildly in my chest. Doing Madison on Park would be quite the notch in my glue gun. I can almost see the wheels turning in Madison’s head, too, and I smile at her like it’s an open invitation for her to watch the same process in mine—as long as we come to the same conclusion.

“You look so familiar to me,” she says, taking a step or two back and eyeing me from head to toe. “Have you been to the restaurant?”

I tell her I’ve been dying to come, but I’ve been so very busy. And poor, I think, but I don’t tell her as much.

“She’s doing The Steak-Out,” Howard tells her and we all exchange one of those oh, right, looks.

“You weren’t there today? When it happened, were you?” Madison asks, putting her hand on my arm as if ready to console me if I was.

And I admit that, unfortunately, I was.

“So sad about Joe,” she says as someone official-looking approaches her and she has to excuse herself to see to something about the show. “We’ll talk later,” she says to me, and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I get the sense she is going to let me do the restaurant.

“‘So sad about Joe,’” Howard mimics as he looks around, I suppose for Nick. “She hated him just as much as the rest of us.”

I’m about to ask him how he came to know someone from the Health Department when he brightens and points toward the back of the stage. “Look! There’s Nick!”

Nick, who even with a chef’s hat on his head only comes up to Howard’s chin, pumps my hand until my arm goes numb. He is a cherub of a man, a little too chubby, a little too short, a little too bald to be considered good-looking, or even cute. But his eyes sparkle when he sees us and his pudgy hands clasp mine in a warm welcome.

“You’re here! I’m so glad! Now go away!” he says cheerily. “I must set up le mise en place.” I have no idea what that is, but I don’t dare ask Howard because he’s probably already told me three times and because if he tells me again I still won’t care. “They’re going to tell them the ingredients fifteen minutes before they’re supposed to start cooking,” Howard tells me.

“Yeah,” I say. I am getting testy because all we’ve talked about is food, on every monitor is food, and I’m getting hungrier by the minute. I still can’t believe we get to watch and not sample. “Like cockles.”

Howard, not offended that I clearly think cockles—which I have only heard of in the nursery rhyme—haven’t a chocolate bar’s chance in a gynecologist’s office of being the “designated food,” tells me, “It could be anything, and he has to be prepared. I mean, he’s got to have a million recipes in his head that need only the ingredients that are supplied, along with the spices and stuff he’s allowed to bring with him.”

I wonder for a moment about whether Howard would be more interested in me if I were a great cook, and whether Howard’s interest would make Drew jealous. And then my reality check kicks in. Drew doesn’t get jealous because Drew doesn’t really care. Remember this, I tell myself.

I watch the TV screens as the chefs lay out their wares, line up their knives, peelers, microplanes.

“What’s that?” I ask Howard, pointing at a stainless-steel gadget on one of the TV screens. He pulls his eyes away from Nick’s setup for a second. “A culinary torch,” he says dismissively before pointing out that Nick’s is newer and bigger and that he usually uses a salamander for caramelizing sugar.

I know better than to ask what a salamander is.

The emcee is apparently someone from the Food Network. I have been able to cram raising kids, running a business, trying to date and coping with my parents into one life, but it’s meant there’s no time for the Food Network. Howard seems to find this impossible to believe.

“You’ve never heard of him?” he asks. “He’s on after Rachel Ray.” I look at him blankly. He asks if I am pulling his leg.

“I know Emeril,” I offer gamely. “‘Kick it up a notch,’ right?”

Howard pats my leg affectionately and looks at me with something akin to pity while Mr. Food Network calls everyone to order and announces the rules.

“And now,” he says—and Howard takes my hand and squeezes it like they’re announcing the nominees for Best Actor in a Documentary Starring Food—“the ingredients.”

Howard raises a fist and shouts, “Yes!” at the mention of duck. I smile at him as if I care, while I imagine how best to redecorate Madison on Park, and how to present my ideas in a way that will convince Nick and Madison to take me up on my offer. Like one of Rio’s NASCAR races, Mr. Food Network tells the chefs to start their ovens. All around me people sit forward in their seats.

Around me, but not me. I’m thinking about traditional colors that go with oak, and how forest green has been so overdone. I want Madison on Park to take people by surprise. Not dead-guy-in-the-bathroom surprise, but something that will distinguish it from every other nice restaurant they’ve ever been in. I try to picture deep red with the oak. I like it, but I feel it still needs something to make it pop, to give it pizzaz. Touches of a pale chartreuse? A bold lavender? A deep purple?

A sharp whack jerks me from my reverie, and Howard tells me that the chef at the second station couldn’t cut the rind off an orange, never mind the head off a duck. I watch Nick’s monitor and see Madison put her hands on her hips and stamp her foot like Nick is purposely not getting on with it. There’s something Lady Macbethian about her as she directs Nick’s cleaver to some exact spot on the poor duck’s neck.

Howard says something about a perfectly cooked foie gras with poached pear and a port wine reduction sauce, but I’m trying to imagine the chartreuse and finding it unappetizing.

Maybe because now I’m associating it with dead duck.

Meanwhile, no one seems the least bit concerned that knives are being tossed about the stage with dangerous abandon. No one except me and a fire marshal stationed just off to the right of the stage. Sure—he and I are well acquainted with disasters. I arrive in time to report them and he gets to clean up after them.

An oven door is slammed, followed by an outraged shout about a soufflé and another about a rising cake.

A time warning is issued and the chefs go into double time. The monitors look like someone’s hit the fast-forward button on TiVo.

And I decide to go with the deep purple. Maybe it’s all the surrounding drama.

At each station, one chef is tending the stove and the other is at the chopping block. Almost every monitor shows vegetables being julienned with knives the size of light sabers.

A sudden gasp. Mine. Blood seeps onto the cutting board on Monitor Number Three—Nick and Madison’s station. Howard rises from his seat as Nick rushes to Madison’s side, wrapping her hand in a dishcloth and raising it up.

Someone in the crowd announces that he is a doctor. A half dozen others jump to their feet and announce that they, too, are doctors, throwing specialities around the room like baseball statistics.

“I’m a plastic surgeon.”

“I’m a surgeon.”

“I’m a urologist.”

A urologist?

Two or three doctors head for the stage, one even leaping up without bothering to use the stairs. And then Madison starts to scream, like she’s just realized what happened, and someone, I’m not sure who, knocks over one of those crème brûlée scorcher things. And suddenly there are flames leaping from the stage and people in the audience are screaming and Howard’s looking at me like it’s all my fault and he shouldn’t have brought me.

People clamber over seats despite the fact that all the flames are confined to the stage and that the fire marshal is ordering everyone to stay calm. Someone keeps shouting about the nightclub in Rhode Island, and several lawyer-types are yelling something that sounds like, “Sue, sue!”

Twenty minutes later, after we have been drenched by the automatic sprinklers, a police car has taken Madison, her severed fingertip and Nick to a hospital, and I have managed to pick the little padlock on Nick’s travel case with a bobby pin, Howard and I are gathering up his knives and tools.

“Wish you hadn’t touched that,” a familiar voice drawls and there, in the flesh, twice in one day, is Drew Scoones.

I drop the knife. “My mother’s right,” I say. “You are a stalker.”

Drew tells me to feel free to put the knife away, now that my prints are all over it. I assure him that, despite the fact that I was here, there wasn’t any crime.

“The woman just cut herself,” I say. “Heat of the moment,” I add, pointing toward the ceiling from whence, hair plastered to my forehead, I have been reduced to looking like a drowned rat.

He looks at the debris-strewn floor and hands me what I think is a citrus reamer. “So what is it with you and disasters?” he asks.

CHAPTER 3

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.”