Mumbo Gumbo

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  I was just about to disconnect, but on the office monitor, the first segment of the show was concluding. A beautiful shot of Chef Howie preparing guacamole appeared on the screen. Randy East’s voice could be heard over the shot as he read the bumper copy that led into the first commercial break:

  “‘Want to take a smooth trip south of the border? Say olé! with a zesty guacamole dip. The ingredients are simple, and so are the steps.

  “ ‘Start with:

  3 ripe avocados

  1 diced vine-ripe tomato

  4 small onions, minced

  2 tablespoons of chopped fresh cilantro

  “‘Mash and stir it all together…’”

  The recipe I had fixed at the very last minute had been un-fixed. As Randy East read off the ingredients, I spoke quickly into the phone. “Wait a second, Chuck. Someone has to get over to 3142 San Gabriel. I’m not sure what part of the city that is, but that’s the code address in tonight’s recipe. They should get there fast. Someone in that house is not safe.”

  I pressed the End button on my cell phone and turned to Holly. “We’re sticking together. Honnett’s orders.”

  “Did he say we have to stay right here?”

  “No. Let’s go to the soundstage. This is my big break in show business, damnit, and if the cops are coming to shut this place down, I better make the most of being a glamorous TV writer while I still have the chance.”

  “Wow,” Holly said, following me out of Greta’s office. “When they say ‘fifteen minutes of fame,’ they aren’t just joking around, are they?”

  We walked across the lot together, Holly in her high-heeled sandals and long black dress, and me. I had changed earlier into my best new clothes, a lowslung olive-colored skirt and a short gauzy white top that left a tiny gap of skin exposed at the waistline when I raised my arms. Holly looked at me once again as we walked up to the Food Freak soundstage. “You have become bold, Maddie,” she said approvingly. “It’s the new Mad Bean.”

  “Stop it,” I said, shushing her. The red light outside the heavy door of the soundstage began to pulsate, on and off. It warned that the show inside was taping and all needed to be extra quiet.

  “Mad Goes Hollywood,” she whispered in my ear, to annoy me. It worked.

  We walked behind the set as quietly as possible, careful to step over cables on the floor, until we came to the back of the audience risers. Onstage, the Baker sisters were just answering their final question.

  Chef Howie was standing next to the trio, reading expertly from his cue card, “Okay, we’re playing ‘Bad Recipes’! For the final point, and the round, remember you must replace the incorrect words in the following culinary statement. Just correct this silly recipe: ‘Bullwinkle J. mousse is made with eggs, butter, sugar, and cocoa.’” As Chef Howie read the words, they appeared in graphics on the lower portion of the screen on a large monitor that faced the audience.

  Marley Baker looked at Sydney. Sydney said, “Chocolate?”

  “Yes!” Chef Howie said, beaming. “Chocolate mousse is made with eggs, butter, sugar, and cocoa! You did it! You won the round!”

  Holly and I stood to the side of the audience risers and noticed the “Applause” sign flash on. We saw Randy East, his full face smiling at the audience, cheering at us all, getting the audience to give it some more oomph! Without thinking, Holly and I began to applaud. Over the noise, I spoke into Holly’s ear. “I wrote that question,” I said.

  “Awesome,” she replied.

  Chef Howie waited for the cheers to die down and turned to the contestants on the set. “Who are the hottest chefs competing here tonight? We’ll find out in just a moment, when the Baker sisters take on Bruce and Belinda Holtz in the showdown of the year…Don’t you dare leave your seats, friends!”

  The show took a two-minute break for commercials, and the stagehands and gaffers began to attack the set. The contestants were moved into the Kitchen Arena section where they would do their thing, back to back.

  “So can you tell me what you think?” Holly whispered.

  “I’m not sure. Someone has deliberately planted those bumper recipes in the scripts to communicate a code over the air. That code has been addresses, Hol. I’m worried. Those addresses may connect to a series of homicides.”

  “Who would do something like that?”

  I shook my head. “Only a few people had the influence with this show to get those recipes on the air.”

  “Like the head writer, Tim Stock?” she asked.

  “Yes. But if Tim was behind the address code, why did he order that expensive looping session? I’m afraid, Holly, that by correcting that one recipe, some innocent woman in Burbank died.”

  “That’s horrible.” Holly looked ill.

  “I know. And something else is bothering me. The very next week after Tim made the change in the recipe, he went into hiding. It seems like whoever is behind these deaths must have discovered what Tim had done.”

  “You think they threatened him and he ran?”

  “Maybe Tim discovered what those recipes really meant. He could have noticed the Burbank woman’s address in the newspaper, and started to figure it out. This code is not that sophisticated. Anyone who can cook would recognize that the quantities of those ingredients don’t make sense. The fact that no one on the show stopped them from getting aired is the key here. I bet Tim freaked when he finally figured out the truth. Those recipes meant death. Maybe the people behind these killings decided Tim knew too much and had to be eliminated.”

  “So they put out a contract for Tim,” Holly said, worried, “by putting Tim’s own address in the show.”

  I kept thinking it over. Who could be behind such a string of killings, anyway? Honnett had told me the deaths looked like professional hits, but they didn’t share the same methods, which made it much harder to prove they were linked. What the deaths had in common was the night of the week they occurred, the night Food Freak aired, and the suggestion that most of the victims had disputes with a certain drug gang. Perhaps the address going out on network television each week was like some macabre job posting. Any hitman out there could make a kill and pick up some money.

  “It can’t be true. We gotta be missing something,” Holly said, worried. “Why would anyone on this show want to be involved with this? These people are game-show people.”

  I remembered that Susan had said much the same thing. Game-show people might be guilty of the sort of infractions that could get them pulled over to the side of the road by the culture police, but they were hardly organized criminals.

  In front of us, the large letters spelling “Applause” lit up. The audience sitting on risers next to us began to yell and clap. The televised competition was about to resume.

  Chef Howie told the contestants that the recipe they would have to prepare for the evening was a spicy and rich “Mumbo Gumbo.”

  Holly turned to me and grinned. “That’s yours, isn’t it? That recipe? Oh, Mad, you are famous now.”

  So this was fame.

  Chapter 28

  A frenzy of slicing, dicing action was about to get under way in Food Freak’s Kitchen Arena and I wished I could just focus. The audience all around us was screaming for their favorite players. The band had begun to play “Let’s Get This Party Started.” It was my recipe for gumbo, after all, that these über-contestant chefs were about to modify for the final food fight, and I wanted to pay attention to the cooking mania ahead. But then, I was so close to understanding this recipe-address puzzle and it wouldn’t leave me alone. The answer seemed right there, just beyond my reach. If I could figure out who had written those mangled recipes and gotten them in the script, I’d know it all.

  Quentin Shore could have done it. He had access to the show material. He had been the primary writer responsible for the bumpers. But now Quentin was dead, and still the address code had made it into the current script. Quentin might have played a part in writing up the bumper copy, but he wasn’t the only one
involved.

  Greta. I had to consider Greta. She was Tim’s boss and as such she reviewed all the scripts. But that didn’t work, either. Greta wasn’t here this week and somebody here was involved. Somebody had changed the bumper copy back to its original numbers just a few minutes ago, after I’d tried to fix the guacamole recipe on Randy’s script card one last time.

  A shot rang out.

  I looked up, startled, nervous. It was just the starting gun on the final Food Freak gonzo cook-off. The contestants, wearing their neon-colored aprons, rushing about in the Kitchen Arena, had begun cooking their gumbo. The show’s band, The Freaks, moved on to another hard-rocking number and it was off-the-charts loud. Holly couldn’t stop herself from bopping along with the beat. Neither, I noticed, could most of the audience members. This show was now in over-drive. The divorced couple, Bruce and Belinda, started fighting immediately over how much cayenne, if any, they were going to use. Chef Howie dashed over to their side of the kitchen set to interview the ex-wife, who was almost in tears. Her new boyfriend was sitting in the audience section a few feet away from where Holly and I stood. He was yelling at Bruce to lay off and let Belinda spice it up, goddamnit!

  As the music pounded and the cooks raced around the Kitchen Arena, I kept wondering who else on the staff might have had control over the script. If I could eliminate all the people who couldn’t have done it, I’d have an idea who did.

  I considered the Food Freak people, one by one. Chef Howie Finkelberg and his wife, Fate, had relatively little access to the scripts. It was possible they might have proposed some recipes, but neither could make sure such mixed-up numbers as were actually aired made it to the final script. Too many others reviewed the content of the show for errors and would have fixed any mistakes that were found. I had to rule them out.

  In the same way, the contestant coordinators, Nell and Stell, were out of the loop. They had no contact with the script material at all.

  The announcer could have changed the recipes, I supposed, by reading it out his own way, but in the normal course of shooting this series, the shows were pretaped. He would have been stopped by the director and asked to redo it if he didn’t follow the script. I could rule out Randy East. Our problem was with the script itself.

  Jennifer Klein had more involvement with the scripts as they were being developed. As a staff writer, she had some input on changes. But Jennifer hadn’t worked on the bumpers. And that left her out.

  I considered the show’s PAs. Kenny and Jackson were just too low on the totem pole to have any say. Too many people above them had the authority to change their work. But that didn’t apply to their supervisor, Susan Anderson. Susan controlled production of the scripts. She typed them and made any updates and it was conceivable she could even alter their contents slightly, if no one else noticed. I thought that over and then had another uneasy thought. Susan had a lot of influence over the show’s head writer. She could have fed Tim those bumper recipes, I supposed, and persuaded him to hand them off to Quentin to submit. It was true. Susan’s position in Tim’s life and her job supervising the scripts gave her just enough opportunity to get those recipes through. And then I had one more horrible thought. Susan had a lot of reasons to hate Artie Herman.

  But Susan Anderson? The sheep lady? The girl who named one of her lambs Mutton Jeff and dyes her wool with Kool-Aid? No matter how much opportunity to tamper with the scripts she might have had, Susan could not possibly be involved in a scheme that dispatched killers. It’s true, Susan might have hated Artie enough, with some hidden revenge in mind, to want to destroy his hit show. But aside from the complete improbability of Susan getting involved with a drug cartel, Susan was in love with Tim. Susan couldn’t have knowingly typed a bumper recipe and placed it in the show’s script that would have sent a killer straight to Tim’s house.

  The whole idea of Susan as the guilty party was completely impossible. Susan Anderson? I had gotten to know Susan. She was not even capable of talking back to her demented boss, much less of masterminding some gangland-style killings. I thought it over again. Could she really have added those recipes to the script? I changed my mind. Not really. Surely others would have noticed if the script was being typed “incorrectly” too often. Artie would have noticed.

  And that’s when I knew for sure. I remembered Jennifer telling me that any changes to the final script cards had to be shown to Artie for his approval. Artie had final say over the script. Artie was the last word. And Artie had been standing by the announcer’s podium right after I’d tried to correct the bumper recipe. He’d had the chance to override that correction one last time.

  But was Artie—that sweet little nebbish of an old man—capable of this sort of monstrous enterprise? Of sending killers out into the streets? I thought about it. I was inclined to believe Susan’s version of what had happened in Mexico, the version where Artie came unglued and went ballistic, and then later repented and paid off Susan to forgive him. So, okay, yes, I could believe Artie had a terrible temper. Look at the way he got rid of Greta—Greta, who had worked for him for years. I believed Artie could blow. But why would he get mixed up with killers? He was an old ad man, a corny guy who made corny jokes. He was a guy who loved alliteration, for Pete’s sake. And now, capping years of success in television, Artie Herman had the biggest hit series of all. Food Freak was number one. Would such a man at such a time in his life go into business with gangbangers and drug lords? Was he the kind of man who could order the deaths of so many people? It made absolutely no sense.

  And yet, Artie was the one with the ultimate control over what script material stayed in or came out. Artie might have given the bumper recipe to Tim each week, telling Tim to make sure he didn’t alter one ingredient. Tim must have seen immediately that some of the proportions of ingredients didn’t make sense. Tim was stuck between doing what he was told by the man who owned the show, and his dignity as a game-show writer. I smiled. A month back, that would have been a concept I couldn’t even imagine. But now I had walked a mile in Tim Stock’s Gucci loafers.

  Tim would have been angry. He would have passed off the bad recipes to Quentin. Quentin, of course, was struggling anyway. He had been hired because of his connection to Chef Howie. Quentin would have been grateful to be given something to do, anything, that would make him feel secure on the show.

  I looked up, startled. The section of audience sitting near me had just gasped. A large group of adults gasping in suspense can take your mind off anything. Their attention was riveted on the stage. On the Kitchen Arena set, the two teams were chopping and filleting. The contestant chefs were working feverishly to get their pots of gumbo ready to cook. They were being judged on the grace they showed under pressure. On the side of the stage, a raised platform held the celebrity judges. Bowzer was hamming it up, his eyes circles, his mouth a gasping O. Belinda Holtz had drawn first blood. She had stabbed herself while trying to shell too many shrimp too quickly.

  In the audience section nearby, Belinda’s new boyfriend jumped up in agitation and shouted, “Get the medics!” All the other contestants went back to their intense work, but Chef Howie was there in an instant. He consulted with the team, checking Belinda’s finger as she rinsed it in cold water.

  Randy East’s concerned voice filled the room, booming out over the rock and roll crescendos of the band. “This could be a crushing blow for a team of plucky individuals who overcame their own personal differences to cook together here tonight. Did you know that since winning on Food Freak earlier this year, Bruce Holtz has opened his own handmade ice cream shop in Wilmette, Illinois? And his ex, Belinda, has taken her quarter million and traveled around the world, tasting the best cuisines at the very best restaurants. Let’s see what Chef Howie and the judges say.”

  Belinda’s ex-husband, also an ex-marine, did a battlefield dressing, wrapping Belinda’s finger tightly in a Band-Aid he had pulled out of his wallet. Then he kissed away her tears. The crowd screamed their approval. These two
gourmets had determination and grit. Belinda said she wanted to continue and Chef Howie gave her the go-ahead sign. The crowd around me cheered their heads off. And the “Applause” sign didn’t even have to remind them.

  So Quentin had most likely written up the mangled bumper recipes, just doing what he was told, happy to keep his job. And this setup could very well account for all the cash Tim had resisted placing in a bank. A payoff for letting the bad recipes go out over the air and keeping his mouth shut. But what had changed? What had gone wrong?

  I guessed that Tim was never let in on the truth. He didn’t understand the deeper evil lurking behind those recipes. Maybe he resented getting mail saying his show’s recipes weren’t reliable. So he rebelled one time. On his own, he ordered that show number 10021 be fixed before it was broadcast. He must have found out soon after what those recipes were really used for—they represented addresses. And the person who lived at that altered address was soon dead. Immediately after that, Tim Stock ran.

  Onstage, the clock was counting down the last few minutes of the cook-off as the rock band launched into their final song. Sydney Baker had begun to scoop out dollops of sour cream while her sister Marley was pulling fresh sourdough rolls out of the oven. Sour cream in gumbo? I was amazed. The Holtzes had recovered from Belinda’s injury and were adding some last-minute crab legs to the pot. Chef Howie was excited and urging the crowd to go nuts. The audience screamed.

  I turned to Holly as Randy’s voice called out over the cook’s melee onstage, “Don’t go away! We’ll be right back with the final revenge-filled minutes of ‘THE FINAL FOOD FIGHT’…”

  “Holly, come on.”

  “Where are we going?” she called out after me, and then caught up.

  “I’ve got to call Honnett. I’m not sure how well I can hear my phone in here.”

  When we came to the heavy stage door, I pushed it open and found that the sky had gone dark during the time we’d been inside. It was nearly seven P.M. and the night air was chilly. When we were alone outside, I pulled my cell phone out and hit the Redial button. Noiselessly, it connected me with Honnett’s cell phone in an instant. The marvels of modern technology. Honnett was just a button-push away.