Fry Me a Liver Read online

“Forgive me, Gwen, but the worst thing you can do right now is withdraw,” Benjamin told me.

  “I appreciate the concern and it isn’t that,” I said. “I’m just not sure what I’ll be doing a minute from now, let alone tomorrow.”

  He smiled sweetly and slipped me a card. “Understood. Please call if you feel up to it, or if you need anything.”

  I didn’t look at the card. People were always handing me business cards in the diner, mostly exterminators and food service providers. I just tucked it where I tucked everything, in my tuchas pocket.

  The young couple departed; the police didn’t need anything more from them, as far as I could tell. They were odd ducks but I didn’t give them any more thought. I went back to where my staff was texting, probably letting family and friends know they were okay. A.J.’s ambulance was gone, Thomasina had been taken away, so it was just us, we few, we who should be happy to be alive.

  I was grateful, though as the terrible reality of what had happened settled in, I found myself doing what I usually did in stressful situations. I was getting riled up and eager to do something.

  And, as always, I didn’t have to do much. Something new soon tapped me on the shoulder.

  Chapter 6

  My staff went to the Baptist Hospital where both A.J. and Thomasina were taken. I did not go; they needed time alone. And, frankly, so did I.

  I’m not sure my manager’s prayers had anything to do with the selection of that hospital, or the fact that Thomasina was a passionate Baptist. But it was a fitting destination that, I was later informed, received a “Hallelujah, Lord!” when she arrived. I envied Thom the faith which events like these could not dislodge. I didn’t understand it; I was, as I’d just demonstrated, more comfortable thinking things through and waiting for help than praying to God to free me. Though I have to admit, I wondered about the value of doing both. Because there went Thom, to the hospital of her choice, while I stood outside my dusty diner unable to serve customers, with nothing to do and with two employees injured, one of them seriously.

  Who is the shmuck? I asked myself.

  And who, I also asked myself, was the masochist. I watched from just within the police tape. Sometimes I looked inside—more was visible in the kitchen area as the sun passed overhead and came through the back door—and sometimes I looked over at Detective Bean. She talked to Sandy briefly. She spoke with people who had been in the dining area. I wondered if they would ever return. Sandy’s father, Alex the butcher, arrived shortly after the ambulances left. He was in a van that was the twin of the one destroyed in whatever it was that had happened. Even before he stepped out, I heard Detective Bean ask if he wouldn’t mind staying since she wanted to talk to him. He nodded.

  Alex was right out of Sholem Aleichem, a.k.a. Solomon Rabinovich, a.k.a. the author of the Tevye the Milkman stories, which became Fiddler on the Roof, among other tales of Jewish life in the shtetls—the poor villages of eighteenth century eastern Europe. He was stocky, about five-nine, with monster arms, an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, big, wild eyes, and a full white apron he hadn’t bothered to remove. There were smears of blood on it. In any other circumstance, a police detective would have taken him into custody for something.

  Alex Storm wasn’t even Jewish. He was from New Orleans. But my uncle had called him an honorary Jew since Alex had shared his family recipe for chopped liver—though he called it Creole p’lâté . . . the l standing for liver. Alex did that with all the viscera pastes he made. That included p’tâté for tongue, p’bâté for brain. I liked it. Quirky charm always got to me.

  As soon as Bean finished, the butcher jumped out, embraced his daughter, then looked around to find me. He hurried over, big arms in ungainly motion like a charging orangutan on the Discovery Channel. That, too, was seriously endearing.

  I ducked back under the tape to greet him, my arms stiff at my sides to protect me from his big bear hug. Standing several steps back, Sandy winked at me. She knew exactly what I was doing.

  “Dear Lawd, how are you, hunny bunny?” he asked with more than a hint of the Deep South in his voice.

  “Relatively undamaged,” I told him. His endearments were always beautifully sincere.

  “Thank God, thank God. Sandy all right, you all right—I feel blessed. I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner.” He broke the hug. “Forgive me?”

  “Of course! Is everything all right?”

  “Oh sure, sure. I was in the meat locker, ignoring the vegan activist group, and didn’t hear my phone,” he said. He hugged me again. This time I wasn’t prepared. “I’m so glad you’re all right!”

  “I was.”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re breaking some ribs,” I said.

  He laughed self-consciously and released me. “You’re sweating,” I said, looking him over.

  He waved dismissively. “The protestors already had me agitated and I drove like a muleteer to get here.”

  “Run any of them down?”

  “Huh? No. I just put a curse on them using feathers, candle wax, and spit.” He looked back at Sandy who was texting someone. “I swear, Gwen, I was never so worried in my life. I couldn’t reach Sandy till I was in the neighborhood. We didn’t have hills in Louisiana. Sandy cleared it with the law to let me in.”

  “I think that’s because the law wants to talk to you,” I said.

  “Yes, so the law informed me,” he said.

  I was looking past him at Detective Bean. She and her iPad were approaching from the alley beside the deli. Her expression was grim.

  “She doesn’t look happy,” I said. “That’s not a good sign.”

  “Why?” Sandy asked, coming closer.

  “Because she likes me a lot.”

  The detective motioned with her head. Alex pointed to himself with a questioning look and she used her index fingers to jab toward all of us. We met her at the front of a police car. The sun was warm and bounced sharply from the trunk. Alex squinted in the glare and perspired even more.

  “Anything wrong?” Bean asked him.

  “My friend’s restaurant blew up!” he said.

  “Is that why you’re perspiring?”

  “What? Oh, no—I’m just hot,” he replied.

  That must have passed muster, because Bean didn’t take an iPad photo. Though she also seemed to have something else on her mind.

  “The bomb squad just informed me that the explosion was not an accident,” the detective said. “Preliminary analysis suggests that a sizeable improvised explosive device went off inside a white container that, as best as we can ascertain from a badly charred section, was labeled ‘plate.’”

  I felt a chill. “That’s p’lâté,” I informed her.

  “Spell it,” she said, and raised her iPad.

  I did, adding, “It’s chopped liver, one of our biggest sellers. We had removed two out of three tubs from the truck.”

  “And placed them where?”

  “There was one on the table to fill orders and one was in the walk-in cooler.”

  “Where was the third?” Bean asked.

  “The third was still in the van,” Sandy said. “It was a different blend, with curry, headed for one of our other clients.”

  “It was so labeled?”

  “Curry, yes, but not with the address. I knew where to take it.”

  “Do you have any idea which one exploded?” I asked.

  “The one in the refrigerator,” she said. “The van is intact, so that rules out the curry. And you’re not dead, which eliminates the other.”

  Duh. Bean gave me a crooked smile that let me know it was okay; it had been a rough morning. The detective took me by the arm and ushered me aside, motioning for Alex to give us privacy.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t want the rest of this information being tossed around, even by well-meaning folks,” she said. “I only got to see the cooler from the doorway, but it is a pretty sturdy-looking unit. Do you happen to kn
ow the specs?”

  “It’s all stainless steel—I don’t know what gauge or anything like that. But it was, I don’t know, about two, three inches thick? And the floor has an added covering of a nonslip rubber compound. The thing is, it may have been open.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose—”

  “During the meal rushes, we’re always going in and out so we don’t always close the door tight. It may have been open a crack.”

  “I see,” Bean said. “That actually makes sense, because it looks like the unit was turned slightly by the blast so that the right front edge was thrust downward like a wedge, cracking the floor by the back door, causing that side of the kitchen to slope inward, and that’s what made the van roll up against the back door. The van picked up just enough momentum to go through the rift created by the walk-in. Most of the damage was caused by the weight of the van, not the explosion.”

  “So whoever did this may not have expected this level of destruction,” I said.

  “Perhaps, or they know how you work and had a good idea exactly what would happen,” Bean replied.

  “You really think they could have anticipated the van?”

  “Anticipated? No. But perhaps someone was watching with a detonator and seized the moment.”

  Great. Then there was a possibility we were being targeted. All those feelings of being an outsider, the ones I’d tamped down, came whirling back.

  “What about access, Gwen?” Bean asked.

  “To what? The kitchen?”

  She nodded.

  “Someone’s in the kitchen at all times, more or less. Bathroom break is the only exception.”

  “Anybody outside that you noticed?”

  “There was a homeless man picking up one of the containers of food I leave out there,” I told her. Before she could ask, I said, “I didn’t see his face. I don’t know his name. He was wearing an old red blazer, blue jeans, and he had long gray hair worn loose under a black baseball cap.”

  “Had you seen him before?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. These folks change clothes when they find something new, less torn.”

  “Do you ever talk to them?”

  “If they talk to me first.”

  “Ever exchange harsh words with any of them?”

  “There’s no reason,” I said. “They only come to me for food. I’ve probably spoken kinder to them than I do to most of the men I know.”

  She studied me for a moment. “You seem to pay pretty close attention to the people around your place.”

  “Closer than to the men I date,” I said.

  “This’ll go faster without the levity,” Bean pointed out.

  I nodded. Mentioning Grant brought out the worst in me. “I’m a New Yorker,” I said. “We have personal proximity alerts that work better than a fighter jet.”

  Bean laughed at that. I didn’t even realize I was being amusing. My head was still trying to figure out exactly what was happening.

  The detective asked for a list of everyone else I could remember seeing there that morning: full names, staff included. I provided them all. This wasn’t the House Un-American Activities Committee. I did not mind naming names since I believed that everyone I knew was innocent.

  And if they aren’t, they deserve to be in prison.

  I thought back through the morning from the moment I unlocked the door. I saw the faces in my head. I also saw my beloved little deli, intact and whole. You’d think I would be used to us being knocked on our collective tuchases by now—dead diners, dead catering customers, dead street musicians, dead deliverymen. I wasn’t. It’s like New York City. Big as it is, old as it is, that doesn’t stop it from flinching. Every trauma, whether it’s an attack on the city or a person, a storm, a financial collapse, each one hits a new nerve, leaves a new wound that takes time to heal. As much as traumas seem the same, they are not. The people around us are not. The dynamics are different every time.

  As my grandmother used to say, Ain sheitel holts macht nit varem dem oiven. A single log doesn’t warm the fireplace. And a single experience, no matter how brightly it burns for that moment, doesn’t provide lasting illumination.

  I was pretty thorough—all those years of remembering numbers had paid off. Bean used the car to radio my information or descriptions to whomever one radioed information and descriptions to. After dating a detective for twice as long as I should have, you’d think I would have learned something about police procedures. I hadn’t. Another indication that I was with the wrong guy: I hadn’t been listening.

  I wasn’t ready to go so I continued to hang around in the protective bosom of the police cordon after Alex and Sandy had left in his van. They had waved good-bye while I was talking to Bean. I watched the forensics team scour the diner. Not that there was much to watch; they were as still as archaeologists fussing over an ancient tomb. Bean was gone. I knew from past experience that we did not have very many security cameras on the street, but I was sure she had gone off to check whatever was there.

  The afternoon settled into late afternoon, with the changing sunlight, a little chill, and more and more traffic being allowed down the street. I went up to the deli window and looked inside. I also watched the reflection of pedestrians across the street and the single line of cars moving behind me. Now that I was alone, it was time and calm for me to wonder: who and why?

  I truly did not think—did not want to think—this was a war against me, so the logical conclusion was that someone was after Tootsie Pearl or was trying to give Tootsie some airtime. Would someone risk killing people to make their candidate mayor of Nashville? I did not know, but it was certainly possible. I couldn’t come up with a possibility B.

  That was a bust, I thought.

  I stood there because I wasn’t sure what to do next. I didn’t want to go home because I’d be doing the same thinking only with a real sense of being alone. And what would I do there, play with the cats and watch TV? Clean? This place was my life.

  “I have seen it before.”

  I turned to the bass cello voice on my left. Oh, joy. It was Big Jefferson D. Harkins, a college hoop sensation, a black kid who broke his wrist rollerblading and never got his foul shot back. The Memphis-born onetime rising star was now a field agent for the Department of Codes and Building Safety. I had met him months earlier, when a sniper took out my window. He wore a tailored black suit, sunglasses, and a loud tie with a picture of his namesake, Jefferson Davis. He carried a digital camera in one hand and a tablet in the other. I thought of all those crappy little offices in New York that made the parts for clipboards, the wooden backs, the metal clasps, the springs, and wondered what would become of them.

  “What have you seen?” I asked. I wasn’t really interested in the self-impressed shmendrick. But like the game he used to play, local government was all about areas of responsibility. He controlled his like a little czar and, unfortunately, I needed his okay to do anything with my business. So I made nice.

  He looked down at me from six-foot-seven and smiled. “Contrary to what the philosophers tell us, lightning does strike twice.”

  “I think it was old wives who said that, not philosophers and scientists. Because I can tell you from personal experience, the Empire State Building gets hit dozens of times a year, same spot.”

  “Well,”—he laughed one of those deep, condescending laughs—“a lot of you northern folk do things that are contrary to the laws of nature.”

  I didn’t want to get into this with him. Harkins went to Thom’s church. It might embarrass her if we had a row. At the very least, she’d be forced to defend me when she needed to concentrate on getting better. Yet, despite that, despite my better angels, I heard the tiny little demons in my mouth saying, “Such as?”

  “Hey, I’m not supposed to expand on personal views during working hours,” he said.

  “Were you just in a garden?” I asked.

  “On one of the greenway trails,” he said. “Honeys
uckle?”

  “Fertilizer,” I replied.

  “I was checking out a storage shed,” he admitted. “Anyway, there are more important things than how I smell, such as—how are you?”

  “Drying.”

  “Say again?”

  “I took a street shower with a bottle of water, courtesy of Metro PD,” I said. “Other than that, I got cut up a little down there, nothing serious.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. “I heard Thomasina was down there with you. I called the hospital, they told me she’s serious but stable.”

  “That was nice of you, to check.”

  “The church sends out e-mails so that we can pray for our fellow parishioners,” he said. “I wanted them to know her status. She’s good people.”

  “She’s very good people.”

  There was a short silence and then Harkins said, “I’ve just been inside the kitchen, Ms. Katz. I am very concerned about the structure.”

  That was spoken like a man who was accustomed to giving people two answers in the same neutral voice: “You’re good to go” and “I am very concerned about the structure.” That latter means you’re shtupped.

  “How concerned?” I asked.

  “The van appears to have compromised the floor supports.”

  “They’re iron.”

  “They’re bent iron,” he said. “They cannot be bent back without a loss of integrity. They will most likely have to be replaced. There are also significant cracks along the baseboard in the kitchen on the northern and eastern walls. That suggests the walls have also been dislocated, which would impact the ceiling as well.”

  That was the analysis of someone who probably took a two year course in structural engineering, possibly when he was in college but more likely on the dime of the DCBS after he went to work there. Not that his assessments weren’t valid. But I didn’t understand why the city didn’t just send out a qualified engineer to render a real decision instead of a middleman to give me an interim one.

  “The final decisions will be rendered by our engineers and of course your insurance carrier will endorse or rebut those findings, but I do not believe they will find it advisable to reconstruct the building.”