Fry Me a Liver Page 9

  “Don’t ask,” I warned.

  “Not an interview—just help me out.”

  “How? And also—why?”

  “Woman to—”

  “No, Candy, that’s not going to do it,” I said, hard and with an exclamation point. I was way past the age and era when sisters banded together for mutual protection. My former husband had a girlfriend during our marriage. She didn’t look out for me. My father’s ladies didn’t give a damn about my mother. I didn’t think my staff would sue or not sue me based on gender. I turned back to the door.

  “What about this?” she said. “I need this story.”

  “You have it. You got the video Benjamin shot, the on-scene report. What more could you possibly want?”

  “Actually, Gwen, the stuff you just mentioned makes the whole thing worse.”

  “How is that possible? You scooped everyone!”

  “It raised the bar for the next report. It’s like . . . like a director who wins an Oscar, then has a flop. It would have been better not to win in the first place.”

  “Oh, please. Stories like this are forgotten in two or three days.”

  “Not this,” she said. “There are a lot . . . well, a lot of angles.”

  “Uh-huh. Who live and dies. What happens to the deli. Who sues me.”

  “Never mind the details, Gwen, it’s news.”

  “It’s also my life and I don’t want to help exploit it.”

  “That depends on how the story is told,” she said. “How it’s spun.”

  If I hadn’t just come from the insurance agent, that comment might not have gotten any traction in my brain. But it occurred to me, as much as I hated the thought, that having an ally in the press might not be a bad idea. That is, if I could trust Candy to stay on and remain a friend. I didn’t feel sorry for her plight; I felt sorry for mine.

  And then—I felt it rush in, like a cold winter wind. The rationalizations. Even if I didn’t like the kind of stories Candy told, as a rule, journalists and the Fourth Estate were a good thing. If they didn’t push for the truth, who would?

  But Candy is different, I reminded myself. She zooms in on tragedy and suffering and stays zoomed in.

  Yet people watched it, I reminded myself. That didn’t make it news, that didn’t mean I had to participate in the process, but as much as I hated the thought of it, I might need that platform one day soon.

  “What do you want?” I asked, mentally kicking myself as the words came out. I figured I could at least go that next step.

  “Thank you, Gwen!” she gushed.

  “Hold on—it was just a question.”

  “Right. Right. I want to get back down there,” she said.

  “I don’t have any say in that.”

  “You have more than I do,” she said.

  “And even if I did, why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m begging you.”

  “Again, why? It can’t be for just another day on top of the news cycle.”

  “It isn’t,” she said. “Just hear me out. Remember a few years ago when one of the tabloids was all over the John Edwards love baby story?”

  “Kinda.”

  “The tabs broke it, they had access, they were all over it. They tied it all up and got it into a courtroom. The paper was almost nominated for a Pulitzer for that. Quite an achievement for a supermarket rag.”

  “Almost and nominated,” I said. “That’s a lot of qualifiers.”

  “But they were in the arena, fighting,” Candy said.

  “For what? A fool’s errand. Where is the tabloid today? Where’s the credibility?”

  “They didn’t capitalize on it, agreed,” Candy said. “The thing is, how long do you think I’ll be able to do what I’m doing? I’m already Botoxing. I don’t want to be like Olive Boyle, lifting my face till my socks are earmuffs.”

  That got to me. For the first time since I’d met her, I felt that Candy was being sincere. More than that, she sounded scared. I’d been there too.

  “What exactly do you need?” I asked—warily, tentatively, not at all ready and willing to commit.

  “Video, that’s all,” she said. “You can take it, that doesn’t matter. I need pictures from inside, downstairs—something to show that I’m really plugged in. Something to get the attention of the national media.”

  “I don’t know if I can get into the basement.”

  “Okay, fine, then whatever you can get me,” she said. “I can do the setup out front then and cut to whatever you shoot with a voice-over. I’d owe you big-time, Gwen.”

  “That’s not why I’d do it, if I did it.”

  “I know. But I don’t have anything I can offer except an IOU.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t want her to owe me anything—except maybe courtesy and respect. But if I expected that from her, I was likely to be disappointed, despite her sincerity now. So I didn’t say anything. I just left and told her to get me a fully charged cell phone and then to meet me at the deli in an hour. She pulled one from a jack in the console of the van and handed it to me. I hoped it just happened to be there and that she wasn’t figuring on playing me successfully.

  I would tell the police I needed to get stuff from the office . . . which I did. I would shoot Candy’s video from there, get some shots of the kitchen and the hole in the floor and the work going on there. It would probably be a useful record for me to have as well, for the insurance company.

  But there was also something I wanted to check. The way the events played out, Benjamin should have been the last person to use the restroom. The classic toilet seat up-or-down test might not be conclusive, but something else might.

  Chapter 8

  If I didn’t remember the drive to my insurance agent, the drive back to the deli was just the opposite. It had a hyper-real quality to it. Zebeck and Candy had gotten my mind focused and it stayed that way.

  It was toward the end of golden time in the late afternoon when I reached the deli. The orange light and long shadows created a warm, homey tableau that I did not feel. That hurt because for as long as I’d been down here, whatever the season, whatever my mood, whatever the stresses or challenges of the moment, that light was like an old comfortable blanket over me and my adopted city. Today it felt foreign, like I was just a visitor here. My anchor was barricaded by several layers of police tape.

  I walked up to the officer standing out front. He was a rookie, a sweet kid, but he knew me and I knew him. He always ordered oatmeal with sliced banana. I showed him the two letters from my insurance agent and he got a quick okay from a sergeant to let me in. I was grateful that Harkins wasn’t around to get in the way.

  I went right to my office following a dust-free path worn by the comings and goings of workers. There was a fine coat of grayish powder over everything else. It was like a science fiction movie where someone emerged from a fallout shelter and found everything eerily frozen in time and dusty. My cell phone was on the desk. I blew off the dust, which billowed and fell like a firework. The phone still had some juice. I used a marker to black out the cell phone light. I put the charger in my bag, which was plopped on the floor, then accessed the video camera function on the phone. I held it in my palm, face out. Candy had said she wanted the images to be moving and bobbing, not static. A cinema vérité look would make the viewer feel they were there, getting a true insider’s look at my poor, ruined deli.

  They would be inside, all right—inside the deli but not inside my head. To me, the deli where I had basically lived for more than a year and a half was as foreign as the street. All the electricity was off, save for work lights that were powered by a pair of generators near the Dumpster and strung around the blotch-shaped crater in the kitchen. A hazy cone of ivory light was coming from down there as well. But Murray’s Deli itself was a dead husk, unwelcoming and unfamiliar. There was no warmth in the trappings, no trace of me or my uncle Murray or the staff in the dining area, just a muddy orange-gray where the
light came through the front window and fell on the dust.

  I lingered outside my office to give Candy her money shot of the pit. There was a thin cloud of dust and the workers all wore masks. It was miserably depressing and I turned away. I got some personal items from the office—photos, documents, my laptop—and the cash from the register and went to the bathroom. I checked the towel in the dispenser. It had not been used. I looked in the trash can. There was no toilet paper; it was as clean as when Luke had emptied it. Unless Benjamin had flushed the paper or wiped his hands on his pants—and men did do that, I knew—he hadn’t washed his hands.

  Or he wasn’t in here and had lied about it. Why?

  I thanked the police for letting me in. The kid at the door was very sympathetic and said he hoped that things worked out for me somehow. It sounded like he had heard more than I had but I didn’t ask. He had a natural empathy. I didn’t want to turn that into suspicion and regret by grilling him.

  I returned to the parking garage and my car. I turned off the camera and sat for a while . . . and then I just started crying. Actually, it wasn’t “just.” It had been building ever since we fell down that rabbit hole and the few tears I’d spilled hadn’t released most of the pressure and sadness. I was just becoming aware of additional bruises on my thighs, on my palms, everywhere that had taken part of the impact. Muscles were sore in my neck. And my hysterics didn’t start out as crying, it started out as a sick, sick laugh; I actually wondered if I should consider suing the Murray’s Deli Corporation. If that wasn’t a comment on a farblunget system, I don’t know what was.

  The sixty-two-year-old manager, Randy, must have seen me on the closed circuit camera. A thin man with a thick gray moustache and goatee and an incongruous white suit—he was a livestock auctioneer until his skills were no longer required—Randy came down on his little electric golf cart, which puttered softly in the concrete cavern. He was a relic of the vanished South in other ways too. His Colonel Sanders look and scrupulous good manners instantly evoked a bygone age.

  The man pulled up to the driver’s side, got out, and rapped on the window. I rolled it down.

  “Hey, Randy,” I sniffled.

  “Hello, Ms. Gwen. Forgive the intrusion, but you want to come to the office for a shot or two or three?”

  I smiled at him. He was earnest, his bushy eyebrows so steeply arched they were almost vertical.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have to drive.”

  “Going once. I’ll have Phil give you a lift.”

  Phil was the valet for nonregulars and people too lazy to walk down and get their own vehicles.

  “I think I just needed a complete collapse,” I said.

  “Going twice. A drink can help. I know. I’ve done it.”

  “I think I did okay on my own,” I grinned.

  “You still having it? You want privacy?”

  “I think it’s over.” I waited a moment, looked around as if I were waiting for a sneeze. “Yeah . . . I’m done.”

  He grinned crookedly. “Sold to Gwen Katz. You northern folks are strange.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “See, I can’t turn things on and off like you just did,” he said. “Couple weeks back, I saw a cat get run over here—squashed flat and I still can’t get it out of my head.”

  “That’s not something I’d forget, either.”

  “No? What about the kid who bullied me back at the school privy in Kingston?” he said. “I watch his Facebook page, know where he is at all times. I promise you, Miss Gwen, one day I’ll get him.”

  “What are you going to do, put his head in a toilet?”

  Randy’s smile broadened. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. You got some rebel in you. One day that is exactly and precisely what I intend to do.”

  I hadn’t been entirely serious, but Randy was. It was refreshing; you knew where you stood with the guy. Not like Harkins or lawyers or even me and my staff. What was really upsetting, I suddenly realized, was that because I was anticipating lawsuits, I was reluctant to go to the hospital. Nothing had happened, but I was already circling the wagons and I didn’t want to look at Luke or the others, especially my two injured employees, and have that front and center in my head. I was going to have to go there, I wanted to go there—but it was awful to feel this way about it.

  After making sure I was really okay—he ducked to window level and examined my eyes like I were a pig on the block, and I mean that in a good way—Randy scooted away and I sat a moment longer. There was a call on the cell phone. I smudged off the black marker with my thumb as I checked the number. It was Candy. I answered, told her I got her footage but that the battery was probably too low to send. I said I would bring the phone back to the station. She said she would prefer to meet me at the deli since she had to do the live broadcast from outside before cutting away to it.

  “It has to look like I’m really in there,” she said.

  “I’m in the parking garage, level two,” I said. “Meet me there.”

  “Why there?”

  I looked around. “Because I feel safe here.”

  “In a bunker?”

  I looked around. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  She said she was on the way. She also thanked me. That was like lemonade in the desert. Just goes to show you never know where a much-needed lifeline is going to come from.

  I sat and waited until she arrived, my thoughts all over the charts. Nothing new; just fears sharpened by the passing minutes. When Candy arrived—with a new camera operator driving the van—she spotted me and literally bounded out. I gave her the phone through the still-open window, and as she looked at the video on the phone, her smile blossomed like a sunrise.

  “Honey, I owe you,” she enthused. “I know you don’t approve of what I do or how I do it, but woman to woman, person to person—I appreciate this.”

  I shrugged. “Y’know, there are vegans who think I’m a criminal.”

  She looked with open surprise. She didn’t realize that I had found a way to thank her for what she’d done for me without actually thanking her. She took my power cord, plugged it into an outlet in the van, and uploaded the video to her computer. She returned the phone with a smile and a hand that squeezed mine. Again, that was something I needed.

  When she left, I put myself in motion. Not to the hospital; not yet. I drove home, fed my two cats, and got in the shower. I stood there, just letting the spray pour over my head, and was amazed at how much gunk collected on the floor of the stall. I grabbed the shampoo and washed my hair not once, not twice, but three times. The rest of me was pretty clean by the time I got to scrubbing it, which was a good thing; it would have hurt rubbing all the bruises and cuts. I pulled off the water-soaked bandages and applied new ones with first aid ointment. I had put my dirty clothes on the hook behind the door, but now I gathered them in tight-fingered fists and jammed them in the wastebasket. I wished I could burn them and all the thoughts the shower couldn’t wash away. I felt better physically and, from experience, I knew my psyche would probably follow slowly, kicking and screaming to a better place.

  Dressing in a monogrammed white blouse and black slacks, I knew what I had to do next: give my psyche a push.

  Baptist Hospital is a massive complex covering nearly forty acres. The centerpiece is a massive stone building, ten stories of clean lines and a lot of glass. Visiting hours were nearly over but the gal at the reception desk was a regular at the deli. She knew me, knew what had happened, and she let me up to see my people. I crossed the lobby and ran into Luke and Dani as they were leaving the elevator. Seeing them was discomforting and strange. The fight-or-flight feeling that had been burning in my gut, the lawsuit crap, got pushed aside. The two looked alarmingly tired and pale—paler than usual, anyway.

  “How are you?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

  I was trying to sound warm and comforting but I did not get a good vibe back. Both seemed surprised to see me.

  “It
’s all broken,” Dani said.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said. “A.J. is, like, in this coma and Thom is crying even though it hurts to do that.”

  “Is A.J. really in a coma or is she medicated?” I asked, looking to Luke for an answer.

  “She’s got things in her arm—,” Dani said.

  “Dani, which is it?” I said a little impatiently.

  She started a little at my tone.

  Luke stepped forward protectively. “It’s not a coma,” he said. “She’s sleeping. They took tests, I think an MRI, and now A.J.’s resting in bed. We waited for information but visiting hours are over unless you’re family. A.J. Two is still up there.”

  “A.J. Two is messed up,” Dani said. “It all is.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” I assured her. “We’ll get through this.”

  “Not me,” Dani said. “I’m done.”

  “Girl-pie, hush,” Luke said.

  Luke glanced from his girlfriend to me to the front door and hugged her tighter. I had been watching him during our brief chat, even when I was looking at Dani; that was the only time he had looked at me. Either he was numb or suffering post-traumatic stress from being blown down to the basement or he simply did not want to engage.

  “Excuse us,” Luke said as he moved around me, his arm still around Dani.

  I got in the elevator, sick to my kishkes over his coldness. Reflexively, I held the door for a tall, muscular figure in a white bodysuit, a blue mask, blue trunks, and a blue cape that reached to just below the padded knees. They were a little worn and I tried not to imagine why he had those on. He didn’t so much enter the elevator as flounce in, like the improbable offspring of a bull and a gazelle.

  “Captain Health thanks you!” he announced in a stentorian baritone that seemed to come from down around his knees and gained volume as it traveled upward.

  “You’re welcome,” I said softly.

  He rotated his finger around like it was stuck in a vortex before mashing the button for his floor. “Where are you going?”

  I told him. He did another flourish and pushed the button as the door whooshed shut. He regarded me. “Is there someone in your circle in need of my services?”