Beat Until Stiff Page 5

  He turned on his bedside lamp. He was fully clothed, even to the point of having his jacket on. The hot white light from the lamp bleached out his freckles and gave him a sickroom pallor.

  “Does it matter, Mary? When aren’t you working an extra shift or overtime?” He sounded as tired as I felt.

  “It’s what I do, Jim,” I protested. “Just like you’re a cop.”

  “No, it’s more than that for you. I’m not the most important thing in your life. I’m not even a close second. First your job, then your mother and sister, and I come in third.”

  “That’s not true,” I cried.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s true. I think it’s true,” he said, pointing a finger at his chest.

  “It’s the baby thing, isn’t it?” I accused.

  Jim and I had been to a parade of fertility specialists in the last two years, but with no success.

  In slow motion, he eased himself off of the bed and walked across the room to the doorway. I twisted around, my body groaning with the effort, my heart breaking with the certainty that he was walking out that door.

  “No, Mary, I wish it were that simple. I’m leaving now. You probably don’t believe me, but I do still love you in a way. And I know you love me.” He paused. “But not enough.”

  My arms out-stretched in supplication, I begged, “Don’t leave, Jim. I’ll quit, do something else. I’ll…”

  “No,” he interrupted in a voice so quiet I barely heard him. “You love what you do. How happy do you think we’ll be if you quit? It won’t work. I’ve got to go.”

  My arms fell limp at my sides, my throat dry with fear. What in the hell was happening?

  “Where are you going?”

  He straightened up, as if bracing himself for a blow. Of course, it should have been me bucking up for the hit.

  “Tina Regan’s.”

  As if struck by lightning, every hair on my body stood on end. If I had thought about it, I guess I would’ve assumed he was going to one of his brothers’ houses.

  “Tina Regan, Tina Regan,” I repeated. “Isn’t she the woman whose husband, the motorcycle cop, was killed last year by some motorist hyped on meth?”

  He nodded.

  “You mean the widow with four children?” I was incredulous. “It’s her kids, isn’t it?”

  It had never occurred to me he might leave me for another woman, the ultimate punch in the gut. Literally. The more he talked, the more my stomach twisted itself in a pretzel.

  “It’s not her kids. She’s a nice, soft sort of woman.”

  “That’s what you say about quilted toilet paper, not people.”

  “I can always count on you to have a smart, bitchy remark handy.” He closed his eyes. His eyelids fluttered slightly, like he was trying to control himself.

  “No insults, okay? I don’t want to remember you like this. I want the nice memories.” His hand moved toward me as if to touch my cheek and then stopped. “You’re beautiful, smart, funny, sexy, but you know.” He inhaled like it was the last breath of air in the room and then let it all out. “You’re not easy. At this point in my life I want easy. And I won’t play third fiddle anymore. I’m sorry.”

  He lingered in the doorway. I took a mental snapshot for posterity; his eyes the color of forget-me-nots, the deeply etched laugh lines around his mouth and eyes, and the curve of his long, shapely fingers gripping the door jamb. Then he was gone.

  I grabbed a lapel of my chef’s jacket and ripped—hard. The buttons popped off and scattered, click, click, click on the hardwood floor. Hail began pelting the windows and roof; its clatter drowned out my high-pitched weeping and the thud of the front door slamming.

  I knew I’d go crazy if I didn’t stop replaying that scene in my head. I paced around the house like a tiger looking for fresh kill, searching for anything to distract me until I was ready for bed. I picked up books only to throw them down after reading a few paragraphs, did some laundry, tried to watch television but switched it off in disgust as every show seemed to be geared to twenty-two-year-olds. Finally around midnight I thought I might be tired enough for bed. I slept on the living room couch so I couldn’t hear the click of the answering machine in case he called back. I tossed and turned for several hours until eventually I fell asleep around four in the morning. Despite my exhaustion, severe hunger pangs woke me up at seven. Not surprising. Since I lost my breakfast on the floor of the laundry closet, yesterday’s food intake consisted of half an omelet and eight ounces of brandy. And lots of coffee.

  I needed food.

  I took a hot shower to melt away the couch-induced kinks in my neck, threw on some clothes, and was heading out the door to the local diner for breakfast when Amos appeared at my front steps with a dozen donuts in hand.

  “Hey, girlfriend. Need some processed sugar in your life?”

  Amos Savage is my best friend and second-in-command at the restaurant. When Jim left, he moved in with me for three months to make sure I bathed and ate.

  “You’re a life saver.” I gave him a hug.

  I love low-down junk food. Not fast food, but hot dogs from Casper’s, hot out of the deep-fat fryer doughnuts, anything bound to up your cholesterol level over three hundred. Those burgers smothered in mayo and grease from the old Clown Alley on Columbus. Thank God it closed down some years ago—a few hundred more of those and I’d be staring a major heart attack in the face by the age of thirty-five.

  Once in the kitchen I did my thing with the espresso machine and Amos set the table, his long elegant fingers rummaging around in my dining room for linen napkins and silver napkin rings. We’d known each other for over five years, and his overwhelming physical grace still stops me in my tracks every now and then. He’d been a dancer with Alvin Ailey before a knee injury sidelined him forever, but he still moved as if he were on stage. Watching him arrange a dessert plate was like being at a performance of Swan Lake, every movement perfect and sure. I’m in awe of people with that sort of grace. My clumsiness as a child and teenager is a family legend. All the ease I’ve developed in the kitchen is because of hard work and training.

  “I called you five times this morning. I even tried the cell phone. What gives?”

  I snapped my fingers.

  “Thanks for reminding me. I’d better turn on my cell phone in case my mother needs to get a hold of me. Jim and I had a fight last night and he kept calling back. I turned everything off and slept in the living room.”

  “The newspaper ain’t saying nothin’. I got ten calls from people asking me where in the hell you were. Everybody and their mother is trying to reach you to get the skinny.”

  I bet. Every chef I knew was probably gagging with curiosity. And it’s not people being ghoulish.

  Even in a big town like San Francisco, the hard-core cooking community is relatively small. People move around a lot to learn from other chefs, so you get to know people in the field. Because our hours are so strange, the demands relentless, and the stress unforgiving, we share a strange world that glues us together in a type of camaraderie that’s probably only shared by theater folk. Food’s a lot like theater. We have to dance on cue. Otherwise your food’s cold, or the wine doesn’t taste good with your food, or you’re missing your fork, or the piecrust on your dessert has the consistency of a floury hockey puck.

  We raised our voices over the hissing of the espresso machine.

  “If I may say so, you look like shit, honey. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

  “Got to go downtown to make a statement.” I handed him a latte and we sat down.

  The doughnuts were arranged on an antique china platter in a neat little pyramid, topped with a donut hole. It was worthy of a photo in Gourmet.

  “I bet—” I took a big bite of a chocolate old-fashioned. “It was—” another bite—“Thom.”

  Amos stopped mid-chew; the powdered sugar on his jelly doughnut mustached his upper lip like a dusting
of snow on a coal heap.

  “Yeah, like he and Carlos were bosom buddies. Went bar hopping together, picked up chicks,” he snorted. “The only ‘chicks’ Thom picks up are the chickens on Polk Street. Would you stop with this Thom-bashing? It’s getting old.”

  I sulked for a few moments.

  “You know what a pain in the ass he is. The way he sucks up to those rich socialites. It’s disgusting.”

  He’d finished his jelly doughnut and was about to chomp into a maple bar.

  “Get out of your ivory tower, girl. He forces you to create and stretch, otherwise you’d be pushing apple pie on everyone. And no rich-bitch socialite is going to pay ten dollars per person for apple pie.”

  “It’s his fault that I discovered Carlos’ body.”

  Amos looked at me with the scorn I deserved. I couldn’t help it; there was something about the controller that rubbed me the wrong way.

  Amos’s watch went off. He got up, got a glass of water, and returned to the table to take his second round of pills for the day.

  “How’s the T-cell count these days?” I asked.

  “I don’t ask, they don’t tell. I feel pretty good though. Thank the Lord,” he intoned in his best Baptist bass. Amos comes from a small town in Alabama. His father is a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher who’s convinced his son is possessed by the Devil. Amos told me there’s only one thing worse than being black in a town like that and it’s being gay. Well, if you’re black and gay, you catch the first bus out of town.

  “You look great and nothing’s wrong with your appetite.” His six-foot-four frame had filled out in the last year, erasing that gaunt, I’m-dying-from-AIDS look. The disease has taken its toll though. He’s only thirty-three years old and his hair’s as white as meringue. Partly because San Francisco is a gay mecca like New York, and partly because gays are attracted to the food scene, both men and women, the number of deaths from AIDS has been staggering. I’ve lost count of the number of men I’ve worked with who have died.

  “I’m back at the gym five days a week. Ran into Thom there yesterday. Don’t know why that guy’s so fat. He works out more than I do.”

  “I know why,” I grumbled. “He eats like a pig. He’s always begging desserts off me.”

  “Well, Brent must be paying him a mighty fine salary. He was driving a brand-new red BMW. And not a puny little boxy number, no ma’am, but one of those sleek roadsters.”

  I stopped eating and looked at him in amazement. “Those cars cost at minimum thirty grand. How could he possibly afford a car like that?”

  “Maybe he’s got a rich sugar daddy somewheres.”

  Memo to self: ask Brent for a raise.

  He reached for the second to the last doughnut. I slapped his hand.

  “Stop, I want to take those on the road with me. I might get hungry later on.”

  “Okay, you need it more than I do. You’re too skinny. Your tits and ass done packed their bags and left town.” I resisted the impulse look down and check my ever-shrinking cleavage. “I got to go to a meetin’ anyway. Missed the last couple of days.”

  The food business is rife with drug and alcohol abuse. You never hear about this in the Wednesday food section of the San Francisco Chronicle. The general public thinks that a chef’s life is glamorous, creating wonderful little meals for celebrities. Well, in addition to cooking scrumptious tidbits for the beautiful people, we also produce two hundred dinners a night for the rest of humanity. This entails a lot of hard work and overtime. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to generate the energy you need to start your shift, and after your shift, when you want to wind down, you’re too wound up to even sit still. This is where the drugs and alcohol come in; you take something to get up and take something to get down, it’s a vicious cycle. Many people are in recovery for both alcohol and drug abuse.

  Being married to Jim probably saved me from chronic alcoholism. While alcohol is no stranger to any Irish household, Jim was so pathetically square that I had a safe respite from the crazy, adrenaline-junkie world of cooking whenever I walked in my front door. I have that edgy sort of personality that all too easily sees booze as a convenient and welcome form of self-medication. The tendency to bitchiness disappears when I’ve had a few. I become wonderfully indulgent, even, God forbid, happy-go-lucky. The transition from Cruella de Ville to Snow White in just two shakes of a cocktail shaker frightens me. I wonder who is the real Mary Ryan? I made an ironclad rule when Jim left that I would not, under any circumstances, drink alone.

  I shooed Amos on his way, promising I’d fill him in on the gory details once I got the okay from O’Connor.

  I was inserting the key in the ignition when my cell phone rang.

  “Hope you’re dressed, Ryan. By my calculations you should be on the bridge by now.”

  O’Connor.

  “If I didn’t have to talk to obnoxious cops all the time I’d be on the bridge by now.”

  “There are no obnoxious cops, just obnoxious witnesses. I called to tell you I’m not going to be at the station. Sergeant Lee will take your statement.”

  Asshole. Yesterday, he reads me this riot act and now he doesn’t have the courtesy to make an appearance.

  “Did you get any sleep? You looked pretty whacked out yesterday.”

  “No. Jim and I got into an ugly fight and…Wait a minute… Are you checking up on me? I can take care of myself.” I jabbed the end button and hurled the cell phone over my shoulder into the back seat.

  All the well-being built up by some espresso and excellent doughnuts dissipated. Self-destructive I know, but I replayed the telephone call with Jim the entire length of the bridge. Suddenly, I found myself parked at the Church Street station lot with no recollection of the entire trip.

  I half expected to see Jim lurking around the hallways. Considering my state of mind, I might have committed murder myself if he’d tried to confront me. I gave my statement to a sergeant who had been at the scene and was out of there in little over an hour.

  I figured I’d better go to the restaurant and find out what the game plan was. Maybe Juan had tried to reach me. I had no idea when we were re-opening. Tuesday’s opera night, and the restaurant would have been booked for months. Brent was probably on the phone to the mayor right now, pulling every political and media string he possessed to make sure we opened on Tuesday. No doubt on Wednesday morning there would be beaucoup references to American Fare in the society section of the Chron. To ensure our preeminence as the dining room of S.F.’s rich and famous, Brent might even go so far as to have himself photographed in his chef’s whites, with the most august of S.F. society’s elite hanging off his arm. The society page would probably refer to Carlos’ death as an “incident,” if at all.

  Carlos’ death was more than just an incident with me. I’d talk to Brent about setting up some sort of fund for Carlos’ wife. It was the least we could do. Poor guy. What in the hell was he mixed up in?

  Chapter 6

  I arrived at the restaurant at noon. The crime-scene tape was gone and a delivery truck was parked in front filled with cases of wine. I maneuvered my wagon behind the truck and walked through the dining room.

  A dining room, no matter how extravagant the lighting or decor, always looks forlorn without customers. It’s like a theater waiting for its audience. The maître d’ is like the usher, bringing you to your table and handing you a program in the form of a menu. Think of tablecloths, silverware, and wineglasses as stage props. Act One is the unfurling of the napkin, the reading of the menu, the clink of wineglasses as you toast each other.

  Act Two is the meal itself. The lead actor, the chef, has perfected the part by creating a meal that should surprise and satiate you. Like an actor, a chef sets out to woo you so that you’ll come back again and again. Unlike the theater, where the audience is by and large passive, the diner plays a critical part. The meal should be composed not only of good food but also good conversation. A
meal is not complete without fine repartee, whether it be a heated discussion of that day’s headlines or saucy bantering back and forth between two people heady with wine and potential romance.

  Act Three is dessert, the denouement, where the last bite should sum up your meal, your conversation. It’s the amen. That’s why I’m a pastry chef. I get the last word.

  When I entered the kitchen, Juan, the maître d’, was leaning up against one of the long stainless steel tables, his body in that slack posture of lost thought. He and Brent met many years ago in Denver. Juan started as a dishwasher, graduated to pantry chef, then to the line. Although he was talented enough to be a chef somewhere in his own right, he veered off into wines. Through sheer determination and hard work he is now one of the best sommeliers in the city. He introduced Chilean and Australian wines into the restaurant scene and cultivated a number of South American wineries that bottle exclusively for us.

  Juan’s one of the few Hispanics in the restaurant biz who’s broken through the glass ceiling. Although we’ve never developed the bond Brent and I have, we respect each other and work well together. I rely on him heavily as my Spanish is limited to Hola and Como esta?

  I coughed a couple of times to let him know I was there. He jerked around, his face ashen. Relentlessly anal about his appearance, today he wore a white polo shirt stained with coffee, and his jet-black hair, normally slicked back close to his head like a seal, was rumpled.

  Juan walked up to me, his voice distracted. “Good morning, Mary. I see you did not get my message. Brent decided to close the restaurant over the weekend. We will open for dinner on Tuesday. I anticipate being very busy. People are curious, you know, like vultures feeding on carrion.”

  “Wow, I’m impressed,” I said. “Did you clean this up all by yourself? It was a disaster yesterday.”

  The kitchen was spotless once more. The stainless steel tables, shiny and smart, had been scrubbed clean of print powder and all the coffee cups had been collected and washed. All traces of S.F.P.D. were gone. The only hint that a murder had taken place was a strip of yellow crime-scene tape with big black letters that said “DO NOT CROSS S.F.PD.” that had been crisscrossed over the entrance to the corridor where the laundry room was.