A Brisket, a Casket Read online

  I hadn’t yet made my choice, but the unlit cigarette was still in my mouth. The Non-Smokers Protection Act banned smoking in Nashville’s workplaces, so I couldn’t light up till I left the premises. Although this was my private office, and I was the only person who actually worked in it, I’d been told that wasn’t a satisfactory loophole. No sense getting shut down on a legal trifle. If Murray’s was going to close, it would be in grand fashion.

  The result, say, of a storm of bad publicity due to a local bigshot dying from our food. Hypothetically, of course.

  I stared at the snapshot above the untouchable guitar case and reminisced, my door locked so nobody could walk in and catch me sautéing in melancholy. My dad had taken the picture at Murray’s suburban home in Hicksville, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan on the Long Island Expressway. I think it was one of our family’s annual Passover get-togethers. I’d been nine or ten years old, which would’ve put Murray in his early forties.

  That was around twenty-five years ago. A long time. Still, Uncle Murray had left us too young. They say a modern person at sixty-something is equivalent healthwise to the previous generation’s fifty-somethings.

  Or something.

  I guess Murray’s leaky aortic valve hadn’t gotten word of current life-expectancy trends.

  In the photo, we were posing by his enormous kitchen range. Murray had pulled over a chair and lifted me onto it, and I’d knelt so I could reach the pots and pans on his stovetop as I helped him cook. Smiling as we clinked spatulas for the camera, we wore aprons he’d bought us with the slogan “Schmutz Happens” in front.

  Cute.

  I leaned back in my chair, and it squealed like a strangled monkey before clunking against a wobbly stack of cartons behind me. The boxes were heavy and full, and I hadn’t yet peeled back their flaps to pore through their contents. I mentioned that the office was a wreck, right? The USS Murray. Although I’d cleared a lot of junk off the desktop, a memo spindle in one corner stood crammed with telephone messages in Thomasina’s handwriting. Most were from Artemis Duff, my uncle’s friend, longtime drummer—and accountant.

  One of Murray’s original band members, Artie was one of those rare musicians who’d been grounded enough as a young man to get a college degree and a day job. He’d been dashing in and out of the restaurant for weeks, blizzards of loose paper spilling from the overstuffed ledgers he took from the office. Since we were overdue for a conversation about the tangled state of my uncle’s finances, I figured I’d wait before tossing the memos, just in case the two men hadn’t been caught up—a distinct possibility given Murray’s chronic disorderliness. There were record books, overstuffed manila folders, and loose mounds of paperwork just about everywhere around me. A little digging had revealed some metal file cabinets, a credenza, and a couple of extra chairs beneath the jumbled mess, and I had a hunch that running a giant vacuum cleaner over the room might bare a few more pieces of furniture. Hopefully, there’d be nothing too gross decomposing among them.

  Aside to public health inspectors: I jest.

  The clutter wasn’t my doing. It had been part and parcel of my inheritance, coming along with the restaurant downstairs. In all truth, I’d probably had enough time to straighten up the office. It had been over three months since my move to Nashville. But a whole list of to-dos took precedence…or was it a list of excuses?

  Whatever term fit, I knew I’d get around to the unenviable task before long. I’m very structured when it comes to work, having spent almost a decade sorting out corporate books at a boutique forensic accounting firm on Wall Street. My career at Thacker Consulting was basically about clearing trails through tangled arithmetical woods, and I’d become very systematic in my professional habits. Out of necessity rather than disposition, I concede.

  Housekeeping was another story, though I try to avoid slobbette status. Losing one of my cats under a pile of dirty wash would be tragic and inhumane.

  A slow, thoughtful breath slipped out over the unlit cigarette in my lips. Then I tilted forward to study another picture of Murray, one I’d brought from New York and stood on the opposite end of the desk from the memo spindle. This time my chair’s rickety springs made just the ittsiest bittsiest of squeaks, that’s how careful I was not to further destabilize the Leaning Tower of Cartons.

  The photo was professionally taken—I always thought of it as his “guitar headshot.” Murray gripping the neck of a Les Paul with both hands, his shirt black with white piping and pearl snaps. Broad-nosed, full-lipped and dark complected, his male-pattern baldness hidden by a flashy white felt cowboy hat with a silver buckle and whiskey-colored edging around the brim, he could have been described as a Semitic Garth Brooks. But though he’d gone for the macho-introspective look for the shoot, there was a wicked humor in his eyes that I’d never seen from Garth.

  At the bottom, in bold metallic Sharpie ink, he’d written:

  Keep Ridin’ Gwennie!

  My Heart To Yours

  Uncle M

  My eyes lingered on the inscription. After a while, they started to sting.

  “Keep ridin’,” I read aloud, plucking the cigarette out of my mouth to hold it between my fingers.

  I was trying. I really was. My ex-husband had scammed his investors out of their life savings even while cheating on me with a flock of silicone-accessorized pole dancers. When he got caught redhanded at both, we’d all wound up sharing the losses.

  I’d been left heartbroken as well as broke. Or nearly broke. Incapable of stooping too low, Phil had secretly blown most of my personal assets along with his clients’, and I’d sunk nearly every cent I had left into the condo and reopening the deli.

  “I have to keep riding, Uncle Murray,” I said quietly. “You know I hate feeling sorry for myself. You know. But maybe I do a little right now. Because another fall like the last one and not all the deli’s horses or—”

  I snipped off the end of the sentence, unwilling to finish it. Everyone in my family had called Murray a hopeless dreamer, but I’d always seen him as a bright, free spirit without a grain of pessimism in his bones. Someone not all the world’s weight could crush.

  It might have disappointed him to hear me say that any fall would stop me from pulling my broken pieces together and climbing back up on my horse. No matter how badly I was hurting.

  I exhaled again and checked my wristwatch. Half past midnight already. The kitties would be starved for their eight-hundred-thirty-ninth absolute last meal of the day. My, how time flew when somebody croaked in your restaurant and you had trouble choosing your comfort candy.

  Setting down my cigarette, I dragged a palm across my eyes and appraised the Goo Goo and Nestlé bars. Then I reached for the latter, and made a crinkly racket tearing open its wrapper. I owed Cazzie an objective review, and thought it would’ve been unfair to form an opinion of something new and untried in my current frame of mind.

  Not that I was too, too upset or anything.

  But the wetness on my hand from wiping my eyes gave the chocolate a weirdly salty taste as I scoffed it down.

  Chapter Three

  The morning after the karaoke calamity, I was having my regular Saturday breakfast with Cazzie Watts in the abundant sunshine bathing her kitchen table. The window was wide open, its yellow lace curtains parted to admit the scent of garden lilies.

  “Caz, I’m a gefilte fish out of water,” I said.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Cazzie said. “But you know what’s worse?”

  “What?”

  “Being a gefilte fish in water,” Cazzie said. “Well, if by water you mean a lake or the ocean.”

  I looked across the table at her. For the uninitiated, gefilte fish is a type of food, not a fish per se, though the recipe does contain fish as its main ingredient. You mix ground whitefish, matzo meal, eggs, carrots, and onions together in balls or patties and poach them in seasoned broth.

  Soooo…gefilte fish can’t swim in water. Or even float. Since they’re c
ooked patties, get it?

  Caz’s little witticism wasn’t bad. Never mind that the qualifying clause had cost her some pithiness points, it ordinarily might have gotten a half smile out of me. I couldn’t manage one, however, having started the day feeling pretty cooked myself. I’d applied super-concealer to the dark, puffy bags under my eyes, and lifter cream to their droopy lids, but had no illusions about the combo making me look half as fresh as the breeze riffling the curtains. In fact, my cosmetic objective was very modest…say, to avoid being mistaken for a female Morlock.

  “I mean it,” I said after a moment. “It’s like I’m totally out of my element.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time you had a bad night.”

  “But this time’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “When things go wrong for me, I always bounce back fast. A pre-bedtime chocolate binge followed by a few hours of optional sleep, and I’m good as new.”

  “And today?”

  “Bounceless,” I said. “Truthfully, Caz, I’ve started to doubt I can fit in.”

  “At the deli? Or are you talking about Nashville in general?”

  I shrugged, spreading my hands. Technically Cazzie Watts and her family were my neighbors outside Nashville, our adjoining villa-style condos being located in Antioch, a small suburban town about a dozen miles southwest of the city off Highway 41.

  “It’s the whole deal, Caz,” I said. “I’m not sure I can cut living here. Or if I’ve got what it takes to run Murray’s. It’s awful.”

  She just stared at me and shook her head.

  “It isn’t awful?” I said.

  “I think it’s very normal considering what happened yesterday,” she said.

  I looked at her. Cazzie was an African American woman of about thirty-five with a nutmeg complexion, dark brown eyes, and fine, high-cheekboned features accented by a lush wedge of soft medium-length black curls. She was wearing a raspberry halter-neck blouse and faded skinny jeans of an enviously small size…one that would have led to a full, numbing loss of circulation in my legs had I dared try them on.

  “Do you want to discuss it?” Cazzie said into the extended silence.

  “Nothing to discuss,” I said with the shrug that had become my all-purpose gesture of the morning.

  She continued to peer across the table. Too tired for a staring contest, I lowered my eyes to the cereal boxes between us. One was Lucky Charms, her seven-year-old Cole’s fave. The other was Cocoa Puffs, which his brother Jimmy, who was a wizened eight, deemed a superior product.

  I had cast my lot with Jimmy. Probably the reason was my chocolate fetish. Also, I identified with the cuckoo bird mascot, since its crest kind of resembled mine before I dragged a brush through the frizz every morning.

  As I turned the boxes sideways and diligently studied their nutritional ingredients, Cazzie reached over to her countertop for the newspaper and made a brief show-and-tell of its front page. The Nashville Times tabloid writers had been more pedestrian about slapping on their headline than I’d foreseen:

  BUSTER SERGEANT DIES AT 56

  Deli Dinner Becomes

  Auto Legend’s Last Supper

  “I thought maybe this was the cause of your funk,” Cazzie said, holding up the paper.

  I poo-poohed her suggestion with a flick of my hand. “Why’d anybody let that stupid rag of a paper bother them?”

  Cazzie made a face. “Gwen…do you or don’t you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  I breathed in the naturally perfumed air from outside, exhaled. “What’s wrong is that I felt irrelevant last night,” I said at last. “I’m the restaurant’s owner, but I might as well have been a spectator. It was like I’d stepped into a situation I didn’t understand…and that hardly needed my involvement.”

  “Dealing with the police, you mean.”

  “No,” I said. “Well, yeah. Except it all started before they came. With the hog that was supposed to be pastrami.”

  “So a roast hog made you feel irrelevant?”

  “Not the hog per se. But the screwup drove home how much I don’t know about running a delicatessen. It should have been a pastrami. It really should have.”

  “Right, I think you’ve established that—”

  “My uncle did the deli’s ordering himself, Caz,” I interrupted. “He wrote all his suppliers’ names in notebooks, but now they’re scattered everywhere…and even Thomasina’s clueless about where he bought half his stuff.” A sigh escaped me. “Bottom line, I called a meat wholesaler in Joelton for a pastrami and instead got Porky the Pig after a serious forest fire. I’m not prepared to fill Murray’s shoes—or cowboy boots as the case may be.”

  Cazzie looked thoughtful. “You handled the situation, didn’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “All I did was spend a fortune on crisis management. And look how things turned out.”

  “Gwen, give yourself credit. You’re drawing a connection between two things that couldn’t be more separate. What happened to Buster had nothing to do with that pig.”

  I shook my head. “I’m telling you, the pig was a honey-glazed bad omen. And I’ve got a hunch more trouble’s on the way.”

  “Like what?”

  “I wish I could put a finger on it,” I said with a shrug. “When the police detective arrived and took charge of the scene, I sensed some kind of tension between him and Thom. He seemed pleasant enough at first, but his attitude got downright nasty after they exchanged words.”

  “Did you try asking Thomasina what it was about?”

  “No,” I said. “And I got the distinct impression she didn’t think it was any of my business.”

  Cazzie quietly reached for her coffee and sipped. I did the same, but only after eating a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs from my cereal bowl. I was thinking maybe I should’ve had the Lucky Charms instead. I needed a drastic reversal of fortune. A green shamrock marshmallow surely couldn’t have hurt my chances.

  “There’s something more to this,” Cazzie said. “Isn’t there?”

  I nodded slowly. “I don’t understand why the cops put us in lockdown last night,” I said. “McClintock—”

  “That’s the meanie detective?”

  “Right, sorry,” I said. “He not only orders his men to bag samples of our food, but has them seize our order pads and kitchen tickets.”

  Cazzie’s eyes had narrowed. She was a junior partner with a law office, and though her expertise lay in intellectual property and copyrights, it was clear the attorney in her was paying attention.

  “Did he tell you why they took all that stuff?”

  “And actually not keep me in the dark for a change?” I said, and expelled another sigh. “Caz, you couldn’t have pried an explanation out of him with a crowbar. I only got one because—”

  I was interrupted by the sound of clunky little feet thumping up behind me. Snapping my head toward the kitchen entry, I saw Cazzie’s youngest appear there in a T-shirt and over-the-knee cargo shorts. A toothbrush poked from one corner of his foam-slathered mouth.

  “Jimmy, what are you doing?” Cazzie asked.

  “Cl kpshgng thsnk!” Jimmy said.

  Cazzie shot him a disapproving look. “Care to repeat that so I can understand you?”

  He pulled the brush out of his mouth. “Cole won’t stop hogging the sink,” he said. “He—”

  “Not true! I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  In case you’re wondering, that adamant denial had come from none other than Cole himself, who was in the bathroom down the hall.

  “Did so!” Toothpaste bubbled from Jimmy’s lips. “He wouldn’t get off the stool or stop smiling at his ugly puss in the mirror!”

  “I wasn’t smiling,” Cole shouted. “I was checking for food crud—”

  “Then finish checking and let your brother rinse his mouth,” Cazzie said. She glanced up at her wall clock, a green apple design she’d made in her ceramics workshop, don’t ask where she finds the time. “Aunt
Grace said she’d be here in ten minutes, so you’d better have your beach bags ready.”

  Cole spun his head around toward the entry. “See, I told you to get away from—”

  “Go rinse!” Cazzie ordered. “This instant!”

  Jimmy frowned, turned on his sneaker bottoms, and dashed from the room.

  “Motherhood…such a pleasure,” Cazzie said with a small headshake. “Thank heavens for relatives that give me sanity breaks once in a while.”

  I smiled. Grace, her sister-in-law, had two kids of her own and was taking the gathered bunch on an overnight outing to Nashville Shores.

  “Chris is away on a long one, huh?”

  “He’s back on an international track…Memphis, Chicago, London,” Cazzie said. “It’s a week-long trip sequence. Eight days to be precise. They’ve got him doing two a month, plus a domestic run.” She paused. “How’d you know?”

  I shrugged. Her husband was a commercial airline pilot, and he’d been on a domestic routine when we first met. But the airline had done some reshuffling because of employee cutbacks.

  “I don’t need to be psychic,” I said. “The boys always act up when their dad’s gone for long stretches.”

  Cazzie raised her cup, took a sip of coffee. “His new schedule’s hard on them.”

  I nodded.

  “Hard on me too,” she said.

  I nodded again.

  Caz sighed. “Whiny, whiny,” she said. “I shouldn’t complain.”

  I noticed that she looked a bit awkward. Cazzie knew about my ex, Phil, and his personal strip club revue. But I wasn’t that sensitive. Being divorced was lonely. But no lonelier than living with a man whose extramarital affairs would have left Tiger Woods holding his putter in exhaustion.

  “You never finished telling me about last night,” she said, changing the subject.

  I tried to recall where I’d left off.

  “The food samples,” Caz prompted. “You mentioned that you eventually learned why the police took them.”