Stick a Fork In It

by Robin Allen

  “If you read my website,” Jamie said with a certain amount of testiness, “you would know that I haven’t reviewed it and have no intention of doing so.”

  Jamie Sherwood is a former newspaper journalist and current freelance food writer. His website, Amooze-Boosh—the Texas spelling of the French amuse-bouche, which translates to “mouth amuser”—gets thousands of hits each day from people all over the world hungry for his opinionated take on the Austin food scene: grand openings and undignified closings, chefs who call all the shots or who had to call a bail bondsman, behind-the-kitchen-door reports, food trends, manager movements, scandals, and plain old restaurant reviews.

  “That’s on your website?” I asked.

  “My opinion about raw food is on there. But since your house burned and you’re living with your neighbors, I’ll tell you what I think. It’s absurd.”

  “You sound a bit constipated, Jamie. Some fiber might do you good.”

  “Vegan is bad enough, but raw vegan? How is that even food? Why would anyone do that?”

  “Isn’t your website’s tagline ‘everything food, amusing or not’? Aren’t food writers supposed to have an open mind?”

  “I do about real food. Raw food isn’t real food.”

  I knew where this was going. Jamie likes to engage me in verbal swordplay as a way to sharpen his thinking for his reviews and articles, which I normally enjoy. But he was making his thrusts and parries while sitting in an air-conditioned office, and I was making mine in a doorless Jeep in south Texas in the late spring.

  “How about Mother’s Café?” I suggested.

  Thirty minutes later, I had delicious artichoke enchiladas on a plate in front of me and a very handsome man on the other side of the booth.

  “Did you dress up just for our lunch date?” Jamie asked.

  I still wore my personal inspection uniform of black jeans and black T-shirt. “Olive sent me over to that new place on Slaughter for a food permit inspection.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I never kid about permits,” I said.

  “No, about the new place. What is it? I’ve been trying for weeks to find out about it. No one’s talking.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Hmm. I don’t see any cats running around with your tongue, so do you have amnesia?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Funny,” he said. “Gimme.”

  “They made me sign a confidentiality agreement.”

  Jamie sat back in the booth and let out a soft whistle. That was ripe information in and of itself. He could spend two or three articles speculating about what it meant. Blast! I needed to be more careful.

  He looked out the window and watched four soldiers wearing fatigues from nearby Camp Mabry approaching the front door, but that was just a cover for what he was really doing. He uses silence as an interview tactic for reticent interviewees. They don’t know he’s waiting for them to fill the uncomfortable silence, but I did. Still, I said, “I’m no stool pigeon, Jamie. You’ll have to find another informant.”

  “There isn’t another. I’ve run through my contacts twice and can’t find one person who works there or even knows someone who works there.” He looked down at his plate and said casually, “It’s like they’re going to hire the entire staff on opening night.”

  He raised his eyes to see if my reaction told him whether he had guessed correctly. A couple of years ago, a restaurant had perpetrated that disaster. “Close, but no,” I said.

  “Just tell me what their menu is like so I can prepare my palate.”

  I couldn’t tell him anything about Capital Punishment, but I needed him in a receptive mood because I wanted to talk about our relationship. I told him what Todd had told me before I signed the agreement. “They’re serving comfort food.”

  “Like pork chops and fried apple pies?”

  “Is that how your mom comforted you?”

  “Every time Fluffy ran away,” he said. “Mashed potatoes and chicken noodle soup?”

  “If it were a hospital, which it’s not.”

  “It looks like one from the outside. What about the inside?”

  Yes, there were gurneys and syringes inside, but they weren’t there to save people. I didn’t want to lie, so I said, “Yes, there’s an inside.”

  “Just give me a hint,” he said.

  “Sorry, but I have to obey the gag order.”

  He lifted a bite of food on his fork. “This spinach lasagna is comforting. Love the pecans.”

  “Good enough to be your last meal?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “That would have to be a filet mignon, sautéed spinach, and sour cream cheesecake. Rare on the filet.”

  “No cherry-stuffed duck breast or fried eel fritters?”

  “Simple is better,” he said, taking another bite. “I’m going to double their business with my review.”

  “What review?” the waitress asked as she refilled our tea glasses. She’d had the same dreamy smile on her face since Jamie sat down at her table.

  Jamie looked at me with uh-oh in his eyes.

  “He didn’t say review,” I said. “He said he got a gnu.”

  Our waitress frowned. “A new what?”

  “Could I please get a cup of potato soup?” I asked.

  “Beckham would envy your footwork,” Jamie said when she walked off. “Sometimes I forget we’re not hanging out at your kitchen table.”

  He was letting me think I had gotten him off the topic of the new restaurant, but I knew he would eventually come at it from another angle. Jamie never gives up. And he knew I knew, so he would have to be extra crafty. We sipped our iced teas and smiled at each other.

  I had second thoughts about initiating a conversation about our relationship unprovoked. Nothing had been said, and there were no awkward silences to spur such a discussion. In fact, things had become quite comfortable between us, which is what worried me.

  The answer I gave my father earlier about being on a slow mend with Jamie was the truth, but it didn’t tell the whole truth. When you mend something, you must first decide if it’s worth keeping, then you decide whether it can be fixed. If you want to do a good job, you look for other breaches so you can fix everything at the same time. You figure out the best way to put it back together, which sometimes isn’t its original form. You decide whether you can fix it yourself, then gather the best tools for the job. And then you take your time mending it because if it breaks again, you might have to throw it out and get a new one.

  Jamie and I had spent a couple of years together. I knew that our relationship was worth keeping, and I knew it could be fixed, but I needed time to look for other breaches. What had unraveled in Jamie that allowed him to make such a disastrous decision one night? What was fractured in me that wouldn’t let me forgive him after all these months?

  Jamie dipped his spoon into the soup our waitress had brought. “How many hamsters you got turning wheels in there, Poppycakes?”

  He knows me too well for me to even attempt to slide around that. “We need to talk about our relationship,” I said.

  He swallowed. “Do you mean the relationship we’re in right now where you don’t trust me because I was unfaithful to you, and you’re still deciding if you ever will, so we need to take things slow, and you’ll come back when you’re good and ready?”

  “That about sums ’er up.”

  “Just saving us some time,” he said. “I know where we stand.”

  “When are you going to get a haircut?” I asked. “You’re looking a little Ted Kaczynski these days.”

  “You don’t like my Unabomber look?”

  “Is he on death row?”

  “Doing life. Why?”

  “Just curious.”
>
  x x x

  It was 2:15 pm when I pulled up to Capital Punishment, and the first thing I noticed was how dead it looked—like it had been abandoned. Did Troy tick off everyone and they walked out? Or did Miles lose the rest of his guys to rumors of la migra? Surely the protesters hadn’t succeeded in shutting them down. Maybe everyone decided to take the holiday off after all.

  The only sign of life was a red convertible BMW with the vanity plate GSHARP. Ginger.

  The sound of metal clanking brought my attention to the front gate, which had been left unlocked. Anyone could just walk through, and I was anyone, so that’s what I did. I tried the sliding metal entrance door. Locked. Same thing at the gift chamber, so I hoofed it around the building to the kitchen door, which had been propped open with a cinder block.

  “Ginger?” I called as I crossed the threshold. “I’m here to finish the inspection.” The door must have been open for a while because the kitchen felt like a hug from a sweaty aunt. “Hello?”

  The room was darker than a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night, but no lights came on when I flipped the switches. By the time I reached the cooking line, I ran out of daylight from the open door.

  If you’re not the curious sort of person—the sort of person who must know how things end, who finds it difficult to sleep at night if everything isn’t sorted according to size and color and placed in its proper compartment—then you would have gone home and come back another time. But if you’re the sort of person who has to know why a restaurant that needed to complete thirty days’ worth of work in eleven days had been deep-sixed in the middle of a workday, you would have pulled a flashlight out of your inspector’s backpack and gone Indiana Jones in search of an answer.

  I decided to come at it like I would a surprise health inspection, if the surprise were on me and I had to start doing them in the dark. I painted broad sweeps of light around the kitchen, taking in the big picture, then I spotlighted countertops. Except for four empty beer bottles sitting together in a puddle of their own sweat, they were bare. I made a quick check of the sinks. A new one had not been installed, so they wouldn’t be passing their food permit inspection. But with no electricity or construction workers, that would not be their worst news of the day.

  I pointed my flashlight at the floor and saw that I had a straight shot across the kitchen. “Food police! Freeze!” I said as I burst through the kitchen door. No one but me laughed at my silliness. I swept the light over the dark space and saw that the crates that contained Ol’ Sparky had been moved to the center of the room.

  I lifted the flashlight and ran the beam along the catwalk. It looked much as it had earlier, except now there was a body hanging by the neck from a rope.

  eight

  “Girl on the premises,” I called out of habit as I let myself into the Johns’s kitchen.

  My voice sounded like what you would expect it to after spending the past couple of hours answering official questions. I had already been through a police interrogation when Évariste Bontecou was killed at Markham’s, so I tried to be helpful by offering more details from the start so they didn’t have to ask for them. That worked against me, however, because they became suspicious of my precise memory and asked even more questions to trip me up. It also didn’t look good that they found two people on the property when they arrived and I was the one still earthbound and breathing. After giving them my father and Jamie as alibis, they let me go.

  The clock on the stove showed 5:17 pm. The Johns had decided to keep Four Corners open until 8:00 pm for the holiday, so they would be gone for a few more hours. Goody goody gumdrops. I needed a long soak in some warm water, and I didn’t want my peace or my thoughts disturbed.

  I went to the bathroom and started filling the tub, then sprinkled in some expensive-smelling bath crystals that, to my delight, turned into bubbles. As I waited for my bubble bath to mature, I browsed the titles of books resting on the back of the toilet: The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Anna Karenina. That last one was probably put there by John Without just for show. There were also a couple of Western novels, a book on dog obedience, and one that made me smile: A Confederacy of Dunces. It so perfectly described Troy, Todd, Danny, and Miles.

  I settled into my bath and reflected on the day’s unsettling episode. The detectives hadn’t told me they thought it was a suicide, but I heard the word. And that’s what it looked like—Troy Sharpe hanged himself in an empty restaurant. They didn’t have to tap into a keg of brain power to come up with that.

  But it takes time for cops to investigate a person’s life, and they can know only what they’re told by friends, family, and official files. They would find out that Troy had been a star high school quarterback fawned over by everyone from the lunch ladies to the school nurse, the prom king who married his queen, a US Marine—reasons to live. If they sifted through another layer of sediment, they would uncover a drinking problem, a discharge from military service, an unhappy marriage—enough tarnish on his shiny life to make their suicide theory not unlikely.

  The thing about a theory, though, is that it mixes facts and speculation to come up with the most likely possible outcome. You might say that the more facts you embrace, the better the theory. And you would be wrong. A liberal dose of guesswork can be just as effective because it, too, requires facts. Facts mixed with intuition.

  I had not spent much time with Troy, but it was enough to know that he was a hero. Not like Boo Radley, who came out of the shadows to save the day and then quietly returned to them. Troy had heard crowds chanting his name every Friday night. He drove a flashy German coupe with the vanity plate 8SHARP. He liked practical jokes, which require victims and witnesses for maximum impact. He was opening a death-themed restaurant on the anniversary of a notorious mass murder’s execution.

  No, Troy was more like Holden Caulfield, who is the hero of his own life, and that type of hero always needs an audience. It was possible that the rotten stuff in his life had putrefied enough to prompt a suicide, but there was no way Troy the Train would have taken his own life all alone in an empty restaurant. That was my theory, anyway.

  Before I could entertain alternate theories about how Troy got dead, the bathroom door swished open and there stood John Without, looking like an Oscar in shiny gold bike shorts and matching shirt, a folded newspaper in his hand.

  I threw my arms across my chest. John Without screamed and brought his free hand to his mouth.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” I demanded.

  “I’m setting stuff up for tomorrow night before I go to the gym. Why aren’t you at work?”

  I had parked at my house under the carport, so he probably hadn’t seen my Jeep. “Didn’t you hear about the accident?” I asked.

  “Oh, please,” he said. “When are you going to stop using that hurt hand excuse for everything?”

  “When are you going to stop dressing like Barbie’s hairdresser?” He could find out about Troy on his own.

  Cool air had worked its way over to the tub and settled onto my skin, giving me goose bumps. It made me aware of the absurdity of having this conversation with my neighborhood archenemy while under a thinning blanket of bubbles. John deserved what I did next.

  I sunk lower in the water, then put my hands on the sides of the tub and made to push myself up. “Can I get dressed, please?”

  A crimson flush vaulted up his neck, past the sparse ring of drab brown hair and over his fallow scalp. He extended the palm of his free hand in front of him, then slapped the newspaper over his eyes. Sports section. “Stay!”

  I ignored him bossing me like a dog. “Sorry, John, but I can’t stay in the bath and put clothes on.”

  John turned his back to me. “I’m leaving.”

  “Don’t bust a bicep,” I said as he slammed the bathroom door. Then he slammed the front door.


  I had just finished drying and dressing myself when Jamie called. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “So far.” I knew he wanted to ask me a bunch of questions about Troy’s death, and I wanted to bounce my theory around with him, so I asked if he would bring a movie over to the Johns’s house. “Something dark and moody,” I requested.

  x x x

  “You went to the same high school as Troy, right?” Jamie asked.

  “He was two years older,” I said. “I didn’t really know him, though.”

  We sat facing each other on either side of the center cushion of the Johns’s green microsuede couch, drinking fresh orange juice that Jamie had brought for me. I never get tired of seeing him in faded jeans and a black T-shirt.

  He had already done some inquiring and knew a lot about what had happened. His police scanner had alerted him to the death, then his sources at the Austin Scuttlebutt Factory embellished the story. He seemed disappointed that I couldn’t confirm the rumor of a pentagram on the floor under the corpse. “But it was dark, and I didn’t get that close,” I said.

  “What happened to the electricity?” he asked.

  I sipped my juice. “It worked earlier. I can’t imagine what happened to it in the three hours I was gone.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t know why I was putting up a brave front. I didn’t need to be rawhide around Jamie. But I did need to be cautious. This was one of those occasions that could easily rush the mending of a broken relationship. A vulnerable sniffle from me, a consoling hug from him, and then the Johns would be walking in on hanky-panky. “It just sucks to see a dead body again.”

  “Police are saying it looks like a suicide.”

  “Looks like. It could also have been an accident.” I told him about Troy’s floor show but not the gurney race because the fake hanging would be hard enough to explain without breaking confidentiality if Jamie decided to probe. “The rope had been tied to a pole on the catwalk.”