Murder With Fried Chicken and Waffles

by A. L. Herbert

  I pick up the shirt and pair of slacks from the dresser and toss them into the washer on my way to the bathroom, where I step into the shower to wash off as much of last night as possible. As the water cascades across my body, I have to keep reminding myself that last night was not a dream. Did I really find Marcus dead . . . murdered in the kitchen of my restaurant? Did Wavonne and I really drag his stiff corpse down the back alley? Did we really tamper with a murder scene? Was it really Wavonne, and not me, being the voice of reason and telling me to call the police? I know the answer to all my questions is a solid yes, and as I rinse the soap off my body, I still think I made the right decision. If we had called the police, who knows what would have happened. They might have shut me down for days. And when word got out about a murder at Sweet Tea, who knows how many customers I’d lose. I don’t care how good my greens and macaroni and cheese are—people don’t want to eat at a murder scene. I just need to play it cool . . . keep a low profile and not mention a word about anything to anyone.

  If the police start asking questions, Wavonne and I will just say everything appeared fine when we left the restaurant. From there we went by the grocery store and then straight home. I put the fear of God in Wavonne before I let her go to bed last night and made her promise me that she wouldn’t breathe a word of this mess to anyone. Wavonne is no fool. She might not have a lot of education or much of a work ethic, but she knows we’d both be in big trouble if anyone found out we moved a dead body from a crime scene. Hopefully, that will be enough to motivate her to keep it zipped.

  After I get dressed, I head toward the kitchen and am surprised for the second time by the smell hitting my nose. I wonder why the kitchen smells of roasting meat so early. Then I remember that Wavonne and I picked up pork chops for Momma last night. She’s already been up and has them smothered and simmering in a pan on the stove. I’d normally sneak a quick taste of the sauce, but I have no appetite this morning, and after last night, the last thing I want to look at is a frying pan.

  I consider getting the cereal out of the cabinet and pouring myself a bowl with some milk, but I’m too much of a basket case to down any food. Instead I decide to just go into the restaurant early, start for the front door, and walk out to my van. I’m about to get inside my vehicle when I stop myself. I don’t want to do anything out of the ordinary today. The last thing I need is someone telling the cops that “Halia usually doesn’t come in until nine, but the day a dead body was found in the alley she came in early for some reason,” so rather than leaving, I pick up the Sunday Washington Post from the doorstep and sit down at the kitchen table.

  I’m about to start reading the paper to take my mind off things when Momma emerges from her bedroom. She doesn’t work on Sundays. She doubles up on her baking on Saturday mornings to cover the Sunday crowd. Sundays are all about church for Momma, so there is no time for baking at Sweet Tea.

  “You’re up early for a Sunday. What time did you and Wavonne get in last night?”

  “It was almost . . .” I’m about to say “it was almost two a.m.,” but I stop myself and reset. “I guess it was about one. You didn’t hear us come in?”

  “You know I’m out cold by ten o’clock. You work me to the bone at that restaurant. It makes an old lady tired. I don’t think an earthquake would wake me up.”

  I’m glad she went to bed early and didn’t hear us coming in so late. Now, if the need arises, she won’t have to lie if the police ask her what time Wavonne and I came home last night.

  “I was beat last night, as well . . . went straight to bed.”

  “Did Marcus and his guests enjoy my banana pudding?”

  “They did. They enjoyed all your desserts. We served them some pineapple upside-down cake and red velvet cake, as well. Raves all around.”

  “Any single men in the bunch?”

  I sigh. “I didn’t ask, Momma.”

  “Have you noticed the new UPS man who comes to the restaurant almost every day?”

  “Stan?” I ask, recalling the portly white guy who delivers our packages.

  “Yes. I didn’t see a wedding band on his finger.”

  “Really? Then I guess you can ask him out on a date.”

  “Now, be serious, Halia. What’s wrong with him? He’s seems very nice . . . has a steady job. Of course, it would be better if he was black, but beggars can’t be choosers, you know. And besides, Georgia Wallings, my friend who volunteers with me over at the hospital gift shop, has a daughter who married a white fellow, and let me tell you, Georgia now has the most beautiful grandchildren—not too light, not too dark.”

  “Good for Georgia,” I say. “Shouldn’t you be checking on your pork chops?”

  While Momma turns from me toward the stove, I grab the paper and make a run for the living room before she has a chance to start in on me again. I sit down on the sofa, and as I look at the front page, I can’t help but think that tomorrow there will be a headline reading “Local Entrepreneur Found Dead behind King Town Center.” Then I remember that the murder happened in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In a county that has, at times, averaged one murder a day, I guess it’s not incredibly likely that Marcus’s death will make the front page. It may end up buried somewhere in the Metro section.

  How is that possible? A man is murdered, and it’s not even news. If it happened in one of the white upper northwest sections of D.C., it would be news. If it happened in neighboring Montgomery County or over the bridge in Alexandria, Virginia, it would be news. But in Prince George’s County? Not so much.

  Things didn’t used to be like that here. When I was a kid, growing up in the seventies, we lived in Clinton, only a few miles outside the Beltway and maybe ten miles or so outside D.C. Back then, Prince George’s County wasn’t much different from any of the other D.C. suburbs. It was a county of mostly middle-class white families, with good schools, nice shopping, and well-maintained homes. In fact, Momma, Daddy, and I were the first African American family on our block back in 1976, and while we were never called the n-word or had our house vandalized or anything extreme like that, there was definitely an unwelcome feeling from many of the neighbors. We weren’t invited to many of the parties or barbecues, some parents scooted their kids past our house on Halloween, and whenever I’d start playing with this one little white girl across the street, her mother would see us through the window and always suddenly need her daughter in the house for something. But slowly things began to change—more and more black folks were making their way out of the city, and Prince George’s County became the suburb of choice for African American families in the D.C. metro area. One year after we moved in, another black family bought a house a few doors down, and, a few months later, another black family moved in farther up the street. By the late eighties, there were more black families on my street than white families, and Prince George’s County remained a great place to live with good schools, nice shopping, and well-maintained homes . . . only by this time it was a mix of white and black families. It wasn’t until later that things really started to take a turn toward decline. I hate to say it, but I think white people were plain uncomfortable sharing their neighborhoods . . . their schools, their stores, their shopping centers, with so many black people, and as white people moved out, more black people moved in. By 1990 it was uncommon for white people to move to Prince George’s County. If you were white and living in Prince George’s County, you had most likely purchased your house a long time ago and hadn’t yet partaken in the white flight to neighboring Montgomery or Charles County or across the Potomac River to some Virginia suburb.

  It’s sad to say, but somewhere along the way, people decided that houses in majority black neighborhoods were worth less than houses in white areas, and, as real estate prices fell, lower-class people moved in, which made prices drop further, which led to even lower-class people moving in, and things went from bad to worse. Crime was on the rise. Everything from shoplifting to robbery to carjacking was happening more often in Princ
e George’s County (which, by this time, was often referred to as PG County in what felt like a derogatory manner) than any other suburban county in the D.C. area. And, from 1985 to 2006, my home county accounted for 20 percent of all murders in the state of Maryland.

  The high crime levels, and, if we’re being honest, blatant racism led to a decline in the retail services offered here. In the seventies, Prince George’s County was home to Landover Mall, a true regional shopping destination with a Woodward & Lothrop and a Garfinckel’s, two now defunct high-end department stores. I was so sad when I heard that the entire mall (except for the Sears . . . something about Sears owning the land underneath its store) was being bulldozed a few years ago. Iverson Mall in Hillcrest Heights, the first enclosed climate-controlled mall in the D.C. area, is still hanging in there, but the Woodward & Lothrop and a Montgomery Ward that used to anchor the mall are long gone. The Ethan Allen furniture store on Branch Avenue closed years ago. One of the main shopping centers that used to house a Zayre and a Chesapeake Bay Seafood House in Camp Springs is now a self-storage facility. Hell, even the Chi-Chi’s by the bowling alley closed. A real sore point with us Prince George’s County residents is that Whole Foods, that overpriced, hoity-toity organic market, has a warehouse in Prince George’s County, but no stores.

  The county had been in decline for a long time, but over the past few years, a revival of sorts has been taking place. Crime rates have been going down, and retailers seem to have finally realized that while we may be black, and our county may have a higher crime rate than other areas, we are mostly a county of hardworking people who make good livings. In fact, we are the wealthiest and most highly educated majority African American jurisdiction in the country and would be happy to spend our money close to home if only there were somewhere to spend it.

  New town centers in Largo and Bowie opened a few years ago; FedExField, home of the Washington Redskins, was built near the old Landover mall site; trendy shops and restaurants have opened in Arts District Hyattsville; and Wegmans, a specialty high-end grocery store chain, opened in Lanham. But the crown jewel in Prince George’s County’s rebirth was the opening of National Harbor on the Potomac River in Oxon Hill. It was a project that was in development for years, and I, like so many jaded residents, never thought it would actually happen. But in 2008, the three-hundred-acre positively elegant waterfront development opened. It’s now home to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center and several other hotels, waterfront condos, offices, retail stores, restaurants, and a marina. And thanks to a successful gambling ballot measure (that I have mixed feelings about) a full Las Vegas–style resort and casino is in the works. It’s the biggest thing to hit Prince George’s County in decades.

  Well, no one can accuse me of being a “Moesha Come Lately.” I opened my restaurant long before Wegmans came to town, or National Harbor opened for business. I helped ease the shortage of high-end restaurants that had existed in the county for years. In many parts, if you wanted something more than a burger or some fried chicken from Popeye’s, you had to drive for miles.

  I got the idea to open my own restaurant years ago when I worked nights as line cook at a nice all-American restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. My day job was at the Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland. Four days a week I’d make the hike from Suitland to Arlington, which usually took more than an hour in heavy traffic. The part-time line cook job did bring in a little extra money, but I mostly did it because I loved to cook, and I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of a busy kitchen. And to be honest, my day job at the Census Bureau didn’t exactly leave me exhausted. Often I could get most of my duties for the entire week done in a day or two, so being a little fatigued from a late night broiling crab cakes and sautéing pecan-crusted trout didn’t really get in the way of my day job.

  My official title was line cook, but I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades at the restaurant. If they were short on servers, I’d step in. I functioned as the hostess here and there, and sometimes I even ended up supervising the kitchen. But mostly I cooked. I sautéed shrimp, and grilled steaks, and fried fish, and roasted chicken. I had a knack for it, and it was me who developed a shrimp scampi recipe on the fly when we ran out of grit cakes for the shrimp and grits entrée on the menu one busy Saturday night. That recipe became a regular menu item and is still served there today. I may not have gotten straight As in school, and I may not be the most beautiful or thinnest girl on the block, but the thing about Mahalia Watkins—girl can throw down in the kitchen.

  I grew up cooking with my grandmother. Truth be known, and for better or for worse, my adventure into the culinary arts began as a way for me to get out of going to church. Every Sunday, Grandmommy would host a big family get-together after service. Anywhere from fifteen to thirty people would show up on Grandmommy’s doorstep after services, and there was no way Grandmommy could go to church and prepare a meal for that kind of crowd unless people wanted to eat at midnight. Grandmommy always said feeding the churchgoers was her way of worshiping God. It wasn’t long before I realized that, if I stayed back and helped her, it could be my way of worshiping God, too, which was a hell of a lot better than trying to sit still for three hours while some old windbag preached, and a bunch of fools got to hootin’ and hollerin’ in the aisles as if they were overcome by the Holy Spirit . . . when the only thing those damn drama queens were overcome with was the desire to be the center of attention.

  Grandmommy and I would start cooking at nine in the morning. The menu varied from week to week, but one thing that was always a staple was fried chicken and waffles. Often it was my job to batter the chicken, which Grandmommy always marinated in seasonings the night before. Sometimes I’d mix up the waffles using the whipped egg whites we always added to make them extra fluffy. Other days I was busy rinsing greens or mashing sweet potatoes. I don’t remember if pre-shredded cheese was as available in the seventies as it is now, but regardless, I often spent a good deal of the morning grating cheese by hand for the macaroni.

  I learned so much on those Sunday mornings, and I loved that time with Grandmommy. I was one of thirteen grandchildren, so I considered myself lucky to get a whole morning of alone time with her once a week. I helped her almost every Sunday from the time I was twelve until after I was eighteen and left for college. It was after I’d gone away to school that she had a heart attack and just didn’t have the strength to host Sunday dinner anymore. But I never forgot her recipes, and after six years of apprenticeship, I could make a soul food meal that would knock your socks off. Before I opened the restaurant I would even have family over once every six weeks or so for Sunday supper. Of course, it didn’t have the same feel as when we all gathered at Grandmommy’s house, but the food was just as good, and it helped to keep the family connected.

  Sweet Tea has been such a great way to keep my grandmother’s memory alive, and despite the hours I have to put in there and the headaches it gives me every day, I love that restaurant, and I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to it. Maybe calling the police and letting them find Marcus’s dead body on the floor of my kitchen wouldn’t kill my business. I honestly don’t know how my customers would react to the news, but I just can’t take the chance. I have bills of my own to pay, and I’m mostly supporting Momma and Wavonne, as well. No, I just can’t take that chance. The police will be notified of his body soon enough, and they can investigate from there.

  I try to put the whole thing out of my mind, but the memory of Marcus’s stiff hand is hard to ignore. Marcus was smarmy and always up to no good, but one thing I will say about him: the world is now a much less interesting place without him in it.

  CHAPTER 12

  I pull into the King Town Center with the expectation that I might see a spectacle of red and blue flashing lights and yellow police tape. Surely someone has stepped into the alley behind the shopping center and seen Marcus’s body. But everything seems to be “business as usual” as I maneuver my van into a parking space and turn off the ignit
ion. And that’s when I see it: Marcus’s car, a sleek black BMW. I was so frazzled as we left Sweet Tea last night that I didn’t even notice it in the parking lot.

  When I step into the restaurant, it’s bustling like a busy beehive. My servers are straightening up the dining room and filling condiment containers. I hear Laura’s voice in the back supervising the kitchen, and Tacy is rolling silverware at one of the back tables. Everyone is scurrying around getting ready for the Sunday brunch crowd. Nothing seems out of the ordinary—nothing except for the huge knot in my stomach and the eggshells I’m walking on waiting for someone to rush in the restaurant screaming about a dead body.

  Clearly the body has not been found. Wavonne and I left it next to the Dumpster—not behind it or in it . . . just next to it. You’d think someone would have taken out the trash or made a delivery and seen the body by now. But it is a Sunday, which isn’t a big day for deliveries, and most of the businesses in the shopping center don’t open until ten. It’s only nine now.

  I say hi to my staff and make my way to kitchen. As usual, Laura has everything under control. I see eggs being prepped for omelets, fruit being sliced for garnish, potatoes being chopped for home fries, and Laura is in the far corner standing next to one of my industrial mixers, which is whipping up the batter for our salty/sweet cheese nips. Sunday brunch is the one and only seating at which we don’t serve my grandmother’s cornbread. Instead, we offer a complimentary basket of salty/sweet cheese nips, a concoction I developed on my own using Grandmommy’s drop biscuit recipe as a base. We mix up flour, shortening, and other dry ingredients with a healthy helping of Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese. Then we drop the slightly larger-than-bite-size biscuits by spoon onto a cookie sheet. After we bake them to a golden brown, we brush them with salted butter, let them cool a bit before sprinkling them with course sugar crystals, and get them to the tables while they’re still warm. They are a challenge to execute. If we put the sugar on too early, the crystals will melt, and, if we wait too long, the crystals won’t stick, and we end up serving cold biscuits to my patrons. But the customers rave about them and always ask for the recipe (which I’d give them over my dead body), so they are worth all the trouble.