by Al Roker
The cat was grinning. I was not.
I was, in fact, teetering on the edge of panic.
Unless someone was playing a very gruesome, cruel prank, Felix, a busy assassin, who slit throats and burned down buildings, had taken the time to drop by my office and leave a warning. Or even worse, a promise.
I took a few more deep breaths and began to wonder if the drawing might have been a diversion. That thought sent me hastily around the office, checking behind and under the couch, behind the books on the shelves, in the various drawers, in the closet that doubled as a walk-in supply cabinet.
There were no incendiary devices. No cats in either human or feline form.
I made the office tour again, slower this time, looking for something out of place. Nothing seemed to have been touched. Nothing seemed to be missing. Except … no, I remembered I’d put Rudy’s black book in my pocket. I removed it and placed it back in a desk drawer, next to his DVDs. My growing collection of Rudy Gallagher memorabilia.
As long as I had that drawer open, I used my shaking hands to remove and pop the cap on the little bottle of single malt.
Then I called for Cassandra.
Since Felix had presumably dispatched numerous victims without a single witness to any of the crimes, I doubted that he would have been spotted sneaking into my office to leave his love note. After checking with the servers, Cassandra informed me that this was the case.
“I hope you’re going to show that napkin to the police,” she said.
“Solomon would just say I drew it myself.”
“Well, this is not good.” She frowned. “This cat killer could come back. We don’t know what he looks like. The odds of him bumping into anyone in the hall below are negligible.”
To prove the point, we both descended the stairs and headed toward the front of the house without seeing a soul. But as we passed Private Room 1, the door opened and Trina Lomax stepped into the hall. She saw us, smiled nervously, and asked, “The ladies’ loo?”
“Right past the stairwell,” Cassandra said.
We watched her progress until she’d entered the ladies’ room.
“If she’d been your Felix,” Cassandra said, “all she would have had to do was to run upstairs, draw her picture, and run back down.”
I wondered if, while I was on my power walk back to the Bistro, Minnie the Mouse might have done just that.
Chapter
TWENTY-NINE
With Wake Up! and the back-to-back taping of two Blessing’s in the Kitchen cable shows, my Thursday schedule was nonstop. And I was glad. Anything to keep the stick-figure cat and its deadly pistol out of my head.
Arriving at the Glass Tower, I discovered that per Trina Lomax’s request, my increased on-camera presence on the morning show had been put into effect, much to Kiki’s dismay. My assistant dutifully prepped me for a down-and-dirty three-minute survey of food-influenced bestsellers, from the latest by the Sweet Potato Queens to Robert B. Parker’s new Spenser caper, Sweet and Sour. This was followed by a brief, almost improvisational, chat with Lance Tuttle about the current economy’s effect on publishing, which lent credence to the rumor that he’d been trying to float an autobiography.
Next, Kiki physically removed a muffin from my fingers and, using language a bit profane for so early in the morning, explained that I no longer had ten minutes for breakfast. She then dragged me by the arm across the studio and out the door to meet the crowd waiting patiently on the sidewalk.
Nineteen minutes later, Kiki made sure I was on time to share the news desk with Gin and Lance for a discussion of “the president’s plans for bailing out the recording industry,” about which I knew nothing and cared less. As I stumbled glassy-eyed from that experience, my assistant declared that I was on my own while she prepared tomorrow’s schedule.
“Hold on,” I said, following her into office/dressing room. “While we have a second, maybe you’d better explain the attitude. I assume it’s because I’m working more.”
“We are working more,” she said, tossing her clipboard onto the desk atop a pile of comic books.
“Looks like you’ve got time to read,” I said.
“Those are research for the segment tomorrow at the Manhattan Museum of Culture and Art,” she said. “The superheroes exhibit.”
“Right. The dead superheroes.”
“Arnie just threw them on the desk when I got in this morning. Then he handed me today’s new schedule, leaving me less than half an hour to shift everything around. You might have said something about the museum assignment yesterday. Not to mention the increased workload. Or that you wanted me to set up a meeting tomorrow with Mr. Turducken in New Jersey.”
“You’re right about the museum thing. I should have given you a heads-up. But the new schedule was one of those ‘suggestions’ Trina floats. I had no idea it was going into effect so quickly. I thought we’d have time to talk about it today.”
“Oh.” She seemed only slightly mollified.
“About the Jersey thing,” I said. “I may just pass on that.”
“You will not,” she said. “Arnie said it was a must, and I already set it up at ten a.m. Don’t cause me any more grief, please.”
“This isn’t about my trip to Jersey,” I said. “What’s going on, Kiki?”
She took her chair and faced the computer monitor. “Nothing I want to talk about.”
It was one of those statements that invariably means just the opposite.
I pressed my butt against the edge of the desk and looked down at her. “What’s the problem, Kiki?” I asked. But from the tears filling her eyes, I already knew.
“Tuck left,” she said.
Tucker Eldridge had been the third or fourth insignificant other in her life since I’d known her. I’ve never quite understood how a woman as smart, self-sufficient, and attractive as Kiki could wind up wasting her emotions on a gallery of such smooth-talking, self-centered jerks, but, as the waitress Bridget Innes had put it so insipidly, “The heart knows what the heart needs.” Ignoring the advice of the brain, evidently.
“He stole fifty dollars from my purse and my iPod,” Kiki added, bursting into tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said, yanking a tissue from the box and handing it to her. “Good thing he was into music. He could have taken that flat-screen I gave you for Christmas.”
“Damn you, Billy,” she said, crying and laughing at the same time, and stopping both to blow her nose. “I just always seem to—”
She went from sorrow to panic mode, grabbing the clipboard and staring at it. “You’ve got less than a minute to get to Set Three.”
I made it with twenty seconds to spare. This time I was serving as a human prop for Gin’s interview with Mr. Z (not his real name), a former convict who was performing a public service by spilling the secrets of the pickpocket trade.
That completed, having checked my wallet to make sure it was intact, I moved on to the show’s kitchen set, where Hollywood tough guy Stewart Gentry, in town to promote his new movie, demonstrated his skill at creating a baked Alaska. It turned out to be closer to half-baked. But it was one of those dancing-dog moments. The point wasn’t how well the dog danced.
Gentry, who’d graduated from the soaps in the seventies to become a big-screen idol for the last three decades, proved to be a surprisingly good interview. In the course of prepping his dessert he briefly mentioned his current film, a comedy-thriller in which he played a middle-aged private eye helping a precocious teenage girl find her stolen dog. Then he delighted me and the audience with several candid, witty tales of the rich and infamous. As hilariously outspoken as he was about his fellow thespians, his best stories were self-deprecating vignettes that mercilessly undercut his gruff, macho film image. All of this was good news, because he, and yet another of his baked Alaskas, had also been booked on one of my cable shows that afternoon.
When Wake Up!’s closing credits began their roll, I found him in the green room, filling Kiki’s
pretty ear with more tales of the tinseled west. “… so this twenty-five-year-old jackass who was only producing the picture—which means he should probably have been on the phone somewhere and not bothering working people—says, ‘Have I made myself clear? Grab-ass costs us money. There will be no more grab-ass on this set.’
“He storms off, and I turn to this grip standing next to me and ask, ‘Who the hell was the little geek complaining about anyway?’ And the grip busts out laughing and says, ‘Hell, Stew, he was talking about you!’”
My assistant’s tinkling laughter complemented the stars in her eyes. So much for the now hopefully unlamented Tuck.
I asked if she’d arranged for transport to the Wine & Dine building.
“Done,” she told me. “Joe’s waiting on B level.”
“Can I bum a ride?” Stew Gentry asked.
“Sure, but don’t you have a limo?”
“I suggested Ms. Kiki use it,” he said. “She tells me you’ve loaded her up on work, and I want to make sure she can get around town fast enough to be ready for our dinner tonight.”
I looked at my assistant, who grinned and shrugged. One door closes and another opens.
Stew was set for the second of the two shows we were taping. Lily Conover, by far the most amenable producer I’ve ever worked with, found the actor a couch to snooze on while we filmed show number one, then got an assistant to prep him for his appearance. Prepping Stew included picking up a new set of clothes from his hotel, waking him, and arranging for him to shower and shave in one of the executive bathrooms.
I met with him ten minutes before we were to appear on camera. He was sitting alone in the cable net’s version of a green room, not much bigger than a closet but with comfortable chairs and a couch, an HD monitor, and a cooler for wine, water, or soda. I caught him in the middle of chasing down a pill with a Pepsi.
He seemed a little embarrassed. Not about the Pepsi. “It’s something my doctor prescribed,” he said, tossing me the little plastic bottle as if to prove the point. On it was the name Alprazolam, along with a warning strip not to take the drug with alcohol, since it could intensify the effect of the booze.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Hate to admit it, Billy, but unlike you TV guys, I get a little uptight going live before the public. One of those pills helps to loosen me up.”
I was about to ask him more about the drug but was interrupted by the arrival of Liz Youmans, who handled publicity for the show, and a young woman carrying a camera. Stew looked a bit stricken but relaxed when I casually slid the pill bottle into my pants pocket.
Liz introduced herself and the camerawoman to Stew and asked if he’d mind if they took “a few shots to submit to the media.”
I reminded Liz that we had less than ten minutes before showtime. She got what she needed in eight.
And the show began.
I don’t know how much the Alprazolam had to do with it, but Stew was charming, funny, and entertaining. He even managed to get through several bites of my considerably less-than-best beef Wellington and spoonfuls of his not-even-half-baked Alaska.
After the taping I walked him to his limo, which was parked in front of the building with a very glamorous-looking Kiki on the backseat.
Stew and I shook hands and vowed to get together on his next visit east.
“Don’t worry about Kiki,” he told me. “We’re just gonna have dinner and a few laughs.”
“Keep it at just a couple of chuckles, then. She has to be at work at five-thirty,” I said.
He grinned. “Hell, doesn’t everybody? I’ll be yawning over at CBS around that time.”
His limo had melded into the nighttime traffic when I remembered I still had his pill bottle in my pocket.
Chapter
THIRTY
I arrived at the Bistro in the middle of the second seating. There were empty tables, but business was brisk enough for Cassandra to be in what, for her, passed as a good mood. “Two of the waitresses called in sick” were her first words to me. “I hope this isn’t the start of some virus thing. We’re almost completely booked for tomorrow night.”
“You and I can always bus the tables,” I said.
“To someone who once did that, it’s not funny, Billy,” she said, and left me to my meet-and-greet. Probably shouldn’t have mentioned that I wasn’t joking.
I worked the room and was just heading up to my office, hoping there would not be another cat drawing waiting for me there, when one of those odd feelings—in this case a tension in the room—caused me to turn.
A party of five—three young men and two young women—had just entered the restaurant. One of the men was standing a foot away from Cassandra, weaving a little, probably drunk.
She was in a combative stance, scowling at him. In that moment I realized who he was and headed their way as quickly as I could without disturbing the diners.
“Mr. Rodell,” I said, and our illustrious district attorney turned from Cassandra with reflexes that resembled spasms.
He stared at me with eyes that were barely focusing.
“Blessing, huh?” he said, smirking. “I was jus’ telling your girl, it looks like business isn’t quite as good as the last time I dropped by.”
“Billy, I—” Cassandra began, but I cut her off.
“We’re doing fine,” I said, talking to both of them.
“Thanks to me,” Rodell said. “I could have kept the padlock on this place forever.”
I smiled at him, placid as a pond. “What can I do for you and your party, Mr. Rodell? Dinner?”
“Jus’ drinks,” he said. “In the bar, where it’s nice and dark.” He smiled at the woman nearest him, adding, “And intimate.”
The others in his group didn’t look quite as drunk as he. They also seemed a little sheepish, like maybe they’d rather be a dozen other places than out drinking with an obnoxious asshole, which probably made them assistant DAs who were favoring job security over integrity.
“I’m heading home, Phil,” the young woman who’d been the object of his “intimate” comment said. “It’s been a long day.”
“It’s just starting. This is your night, Bess.” He turned to me. “This beautiful young woman won her first case today.”
“Congratulations,” I said to her.
“So our drinks are on the house, right, Blessing? Unless you want the house locked up tight again.” He grinned.
I sensed that Cassandra was about to deck the guy. And his loud talk was starting to annoy the diners. “Of course the drinks are on the house,” I said, leading Rodell and his reluctant party into the lounge area, which was empty except for a couple sitting at the bar.
“Take any table you’d like,” I told Rodell.
“We’ll belly up to the bar, like real drinkers, if we can get those yuppies to move their big asses over one.”
There were four empty bar stools to the left of the couple, two empty to their right. The man turned, frowned at Rodell.
“Nobody has to move,” I said, grabbing one of the two unused bar stools and adding it to the unoccupied quartet. The man whom Rodell had insulted shrugged and returned his attention to his female companion.
“Sit,” Rodell ordered the members of his party. He looked at Juan and said, “Barkeep, grog for my compat’rits.”
Juan moved toward them. “Yes, sir,” he said. “What can I get you?”
“Apple martoonies, all around,” Rodell said.
“Yes, sir. Sweet or sour?”
Rodell blinked and turned to the young celebrant, Bess, patting her thigh. “What’d’ya think, honey? You feeling sour or sweet?”
“Whatever you want, Phil. I’m finished drinking.”
“Finished? No way.” He turned to Juan. “You’re the bartender. Just make the goddamn drinks.”
Juan looked at me, his face totally without expression. “Yes, sir,” he said, a little white around the lips.
“Hold up,” I told him. “Mr.
Rodell and his friends are honored guests. I’ll fix their drinks.”
I lifted the gate and joined Juan behind the bar. He gave me a confused look.
“Could you put some ice into a shaker?” I asked.
“Sure.”
While he did that, I robbed the glass shelf of bottles of Stoli, apple schnapps, and Midori liqueur, and deposited them in front of Rodell, then grabbed a lime and a crisp green apple from the small fridge beneath the bar.
“What you are about to see,” I announced, falling back on a line of patter from the days when I’d used words as tools of distraction, “is the creation of the finest apple-tinis available in the Big Apple. And perhaps the free world.”
I took the shaker from Juan and picked up the bottle of Stoli. “First we use the very finest, one-hundred-proof, go-to-the-moon vodka, guaranteed to make the cocktail seem as smooth as a magic carpet ride.” To add a little excitement, I flipped the open vodka bottle end over end in the air and caught it by the neck, spilling not a drop, a trick I’d picked up working in a tourist restaurant-bar in the Bahamas.
Rodell and his minions, Juan, and the other two customers were all watching me with curiosity.
“Then we add the very heart of the drink, the apple schnapps. Not too tart, not too sweet. Now, while I use just a splash of Midori, watch carefully, Mr. DA. …”
“I am watching carefully,” he said. “Lot of poisoning going on these days.”
It had been a long time since I’d dealt with anyone as obnoxious as Rodell. When I didn’t toss the liqueur into his face, I figured I’d passed another of life’s little tests. Only slightly derailed, I continued my spiel. “Then just one squeeze of lime juice, one little kiss of citrus, and we … shake, shake, shake your booty.”
