Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Rickey’s off, but I gotta work at the Apostle.”

  “How long are you two planning to stay there?”

  “Until we can make a living somewhere else, I guess.”

  “Well, listen, what if I put you on the Duvet Corporation payroll? Say I’ve decided to hire you and Rickey as consultants? That way you could devote all your time to Liquor. It wouldn’t stand up to an audit”—Lenny lowered his voice—”but it might satisfy Rickey, since I know he won’t let me just give you money.”

  “Lenny, he’s gonna know you’re just giving us money. He’s not really gonna think we’re consultants.”

  “I know that. But the consultant thing might let him take the money without getting his panties in a wad. You know how he’d react if I just said, ‘Hey, I want to support you for the next few months.’”

  “Yeah, that might not go over too well. But why didn’t you just offer us the jobs? How come you’re telling me all this?”

  “Because I’ve never seen you get your panties in a wad about anything,” said Lenny. “I wanted to see what you thought of the idea first.”

  “It might work. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Ask me what?” said Rickey, coming in from the kitchen. “Oh, hey, Lenny.”

  “Hi, Rickey. Listen, we need to get moving with the renovation. You should be testing recipes and thinking about who you want to hire. How about you guys quit the Apostle Bar and I put you on my payroll as consultants?”

  “OK.”

  “OK?”

  “Sure. I figured you were gonna offer us something like that pretty soon. I accept if G does.”

  “It’s fine with me,” said G-man.

  “Then I guess it’s settled,” said Rickey. “Hey, Lenny, I meant to ask you—I read about this walnut eau de vie from Hungary and thought it might be good in a salad dressing. You think we could find some?”

  “I’ll have De La Cerda check it out. He’s arranged to import stuff for me before. He got me a crazy cheap deal on a bunch of black truffles from Toscano awhile back, and they were good, too.”

  “You didn’t happen to sell any of those truffles to Anthony B, did you?” said Rickey.

  “I didn’t sell him any. I gave him a couple, three.”

  Rickey and G-man started laughing.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Rickey. “Find out what De La Cerda says.”

  “Will do. And I’ll have Flanagan hook you up to the consultant thing. Say two thousand a month? Apiece, naturally. I know it’s not much, but do you think you could get by on that until we open?”

  “Yeah,” they said, more or less in unison. Neither of them had ever made more than $1300 a month before, and usually well under that.

  “OK, then, I better get going. Glad this worked out. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look stunned before,” said Rickey when Lenny had gone.

  “I know exactly how he feels.”

  “What? You thought I wasn’t gonna accept his offer?”

  “Well, I sure thought you were gonna bitch about it first.”

  “Why bother? We’re already table-dancing for Lenny. I’m supposed to complain if he wants to slip a little extra cash in our garter?”

  “That’s more disgusting than the kidneys.”

  “Well, it’s true, and I don’t even care any more. We’re gonna fix that place up just like we want it, and hire a bunch of great cooks, and open a killer restaurant, and someday we’re gonna buy out Lenny’s 25 percent.”

  “You know, Rickey, you never stop surprising me.”

  “You thought the same thing as Lenny, didn’t you? You thought I was gonna pitch a fit, but maybe the consulting thing would keep me from crying about it. You people think you know me so well, but I still got my little mysteries.”

  “You do,” said G-man. “You certainly do.”

  “Hey, you know the first thing we should do with our four thousand dollars a month?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Eat somewhere real nice without Lenny.”

  “You got a date.”

  chapter 15

  Mike Mouton was happy. He had a brand-new bag. He locked his office door, poured some of the cocaine onto a pocket mirror, and chopped it up with a razor blade. It was clean white stuff, not yellowish and smelling of gasoline like some of the shit NuShawn had had lately. Just as Mike was about to hoover up the two fat lines he’d laid out, the phone rang.

  “You seen the paper today?” his father asked, bypassing niceties like “hello” and “how are you.”

  “No.”

  “Somebody’s opening a restaurant in the old Giambucca’s place. Where your Uncle George was killed.”

  “That dump? Nothing’s been in there for years.”

  “Says in the paper these two characters are fixing it up.” Wilford Mouton, known to one and all as Pinky, had the gravelly baritone of a lifelong chainsmoker. Even over the phone, Mike could almost smell his cigar breath. “They been cooking in some bar, now they gonna open a real restaurant.”

  Suspicion touched Mike like a cold finger. “Does it give their names?”

  He heard newspaper rattling at his father’s end of the line. “Yeah. John Rickey and Gary Stubbs.”

  “They can’t!” Mike slapped the desk, almost tipping the mirror with the cocaine on it. “That’s impossible. They don’t have the money to renovate that place.”

  “Must be somebody’s helping them out, then.”

  Mike remembered his not-so-clandestine foray to the Apostle Bar, the disbelief and deep sense of injustice he’d felt when he saw who was coming in with Rickey. “Lenny Duveteaux,” he said. “They’ve been palling around together.”

  “Hell, if Lenny’s helping them, I guess they got enough money to open two restaurants if they want to. Say, Michael, you told me you were friends with Lenny. Why you didn’t get him to help you open some nice little place?”

  “I don’t want to open a restaurant.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You keep saying you’re happy in that dead-end job I got you. You wanna work for somebody else your whole life, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. Hell, at least these kids got some initiative.”

  “They don’t!” Mike shouted into the phone. “They don’t have anything but dumb luck!” But Pinky had already hung up.

  Uncle George, thought Mike. Uncle George tortured and shot like a dog in the cooler of a Wop shithole on Broad Street, and now goddamn Rickey opening a restaurant there. Mike Mouton’s childhood had been a lonely time. His mother—who’d died when Mike was seventeen—was always more interested in Mike’s two sisters. His father treated him like a project he’d started and then lost interest in, some needlepoint pillow or model ship whose continued presence was an embarrassing nuisance. Mike had never been the kind of kid who made a lot of friends; something about him put people off. It was as if they could smell something bad on him even though his house was clean and his mother made him shower every day. Pinky’s sour cigar smoke, maybe. His Uncle George was the one person who seemed to like him all right.

  Unfortunately, the Moutons didn’t like Uncle George. “He might be my brother,” Mike’s father often said, “but he’s no kin of mine.” Though he was supposed to be managing Giambucca’s, George Mouton didn’t care about the restaurant business, or about money at all except as something that could be bet on horses. He talked about hitting the big one someday, but he seemed to feel that the win would be an end in itself rather than a means to fortune and leisure. When he took Mike to the Fair Grounds with him (Mike soon learned to tell his mother he was going to the library; she believed he was very well read), it was easy to see that the place just made George happy. He loved the smell and the sheen of horseflesh, the bustle of the grandstand, the bugle playing “Call to Post,” the characters who populated the track. Mike liked all these things too, but what he liked most was the company of his uncle, the one per
son who seemed to enjoy being with him. Looking back, he sometimes wondered if George had been friendless too, if he’d simply felt less like a loser in someone else’s company, even that of his teenage nephew. But that was unprofitable thinking.

  Even more unprofitable was Mike’s suspicion, faint but persistent, that his father had tipped off George’s bosses to his theft. The owners of Giambucca’s had hardly been meticulous with their receipts; that was why George had been able to skim so much. He’d started with small sums, but it seemed so easy that he soon graduated to large ones. At least, that was what Mike had been able to piece together. He knew his father had been tight with the owners. George was an embarrassment, and Pinky Mouton hated to be embarrassed. Pinky was a businessman—CEO of a restaurant supply chain for twenty years, he’d been appointed to the board of the Downtown Development District in retirement—and George was bad business.

  However, Pinky had probably figured they’d just quietly knock George over the head and throw him in the Mississippi. The splashiness of the murder had shocked the whole city. It made the front page of the Times-Picayune for three days straight, and the follow-up stories lasted for months. Pinky was furious. Mike, then twenty years old, found a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that George had managed to embarrass his brother one last time.

  Mike snorted his two lines and went to the hotel lobby for a newspaper. Back in his office, he pulled out the entertainment section and turned to the restaurant review. Seeing a single red bean at the top of the column, he hoped for one wild moment that it was a hatchet job on Rickey’s new place, but of course that wasn’t open yet. The review dissected an expensive place in the Quarter that could not decide whether it wanted to be French or Italian. According to Chase Haricot, rude waiters represented the former option and overcooked pasta the latter. The one bean was for the gorgeous river view. The information about Rickey appeared in a sidebar of restaurant news:

  New Orleans is losing its best late-night dining option, but not for long. Chefs John Rickey and Gary Stubbs, who revolutionized the kitchen at the Apostle Bar with their spirit-enhanced recipes, will open their own restaurant this summer. Rickey and Stubbs are currently overseeing renovations on the property at North Broad and Toulouse Streets, formerly Giambucca’s Home-Style Restaurant. No word on the new name or menu, but let’s hope they keep the prosciutto-wrapped figs in Calvados.

  Mike caught himself grinding his teeth. He wasn’t sure if it was a side effect of the coke or just an externalization of his dislike for Rickey. His face burned as he remembered how Rickey had kneed him in the crotch and pushed him up against the cooler. Probably Rickey had gotten some kind of illicit charge from that. The little faggot obviously had it in for him—first the assault; then taking up with Lenny Duveteaux and turning the powerful restaurateur against Mike; now this. Mike felt certain that Rickey knew George Mouton had been murdered on the property and had chosen to open his restaurant there for that reason. He was thumbing his nose at Mike on a grand scale—not just Mike, but Uncle George too.

  He heard his father’s voice again. At least these kids got some initiative. They had even turned his own father against him—not that that took much effort. One of these days, though, his chance was going to come. Pinky, Rickey and his fag partner, Lenny Duveteaux—they would see what Mike was really made of.

  He took his new bag from the desk drawer and began to lay out two more lines.

  “A murder?” said Rickey. “What? When?”

  He was standing by the pay phone at the Apostle Bar. The pay phone also served as the house line, and Anthony had just looked into the kitchen to tell him he had a call from somebody at the newspaper.

  “Nineteen-eighty,” said the writer. “People called it the Red Gravy Murder.”

  “What do you mean, murder?”

  He caught Anthony’s eye. Anthony glanced away, but not before Rickey had seen the guilty look on his face.

  “I mean, there was a murder in the restaurant,” said the writer patiently. “Gangland-style killing—man shot twice through the brain. In the cooler, I think. Nobody told you about it?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  The writer gave Rickey a basic rundown of the events. “I can’t remember the guy’s name,” he concluded. “I can probably look it up for you.”

  “What, so I can name a dish after him?”

  “Hey, that’s a pretty good idea.”

  “Look, mister—what’d you say your name was again? Who are you, anyway?”

  “Sid Schwanz. I write horse racing stories and a column in the Living section. I thought I might do a feature looking back on the murder—it was a pretty big story.”

  Rickey leaned against the wall next to the phone. His bandanna was slipping down over his eyes, and he pushed it back up. “Mr. Schwanz, this is the first I’ve heard of any murder. I could use some time to think about it first. What kinda hours you keep?”

  “The latest.”

  “Well, why don’t you come to the Apostle tonight around twelve? Let me buy you a drink and we’ll talk about it then.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “You won’t write anything before then?”

  “Not a word, Chief.”

  Rickey hung up. He hated people who called him chief instead of chef, thinking they were being witty.

  “What’s up?” said Anthony too casually.

  “What’s up is that somebody once got killed in my restaurant, and I think you knew it.”

  “Aw, Rickey, you guys had just signed the lease. You were so excited. I wasn’t gonna ruin it by telling you that garbage. Anyway, the buildings in New Orleans are so old, somebody’s probably died in most all of them.”

  “Maybe so, but I bet most of them didn’t have a guy get his head blown off in the kitchen.”

  “Did that writer tell you it happened in the kitchen? I didn’t think it happened in the kitchen.”

  “It happened in the walk-in.”

  “Well, that ain’t exactly the kitchen.”

  Rickey turned his back on Anthony and fed some coins into the phone. He called home, but there was no answer; G-man had the car and must be out somewhere. He called Lenny, but Lenny’s cell phone wasn’t on, so he left a message.

  He went back in the kitchen, grated two pounds of Cheddar, and mixed up a cheese straw dough with Calvados. While the dough was chilling, he made caponata. It was a weird combination, but he’d tried it before and it worked. As he was rolling out the dough, G-man came in. Seeing that Rickey was making cheese straws, he said, “What’s wrong?”

  Rickey told him.

  “Damn,” said G-man. “You talked to Lenny yet?”

  “I couldn’t get hold of him.”

  “Dude, are you OK?”

  “No,” said Rickey. “I’m really not.” He sat down on a beer keg, put his apron over his face, and began to cry. He hadn’t known he was going to do it, but once he got started, it was hard to stop.

  G-man sat beside Rickey and put an arm around his shoulders. “Come on. It’s gonna be OK. We’ve been through worse things than this. Come on, now.”

  “I know,” said Rickey, sniffling. “It just seems like every time we move forward, something horrible happens. Maybe we’re not meant to have a restaurant.”

  “That’s silly. You think Lenny had it easy when he opened his first place? Remember how he told us he’d just signed the lease when his contractor found termites in the attic, and it turned out the owner of the building had paid off the inspector not to say anything about them? They had to tent the building for a week and it cost, like, five thousand dollars, but look at him now. This is just a little setback.”

  “You think?”

  “I know it.”

  Rickey let out a long, shaky sigh and buried his face in his hands. G-man sat quietly beside him massaging the back of his neck, the only thing that almost always calmed Rickey down. He noticed a pillow-snarl in Rickey’s hair and gently untangled it with his finger. Anthony’s head appea
red in the window, then disappeared just as quickly.

  “You want something, Anthony?” called G-man.

  “Nuh-uh,” said Anthony without looking in again. “Got an order, is all.”

  “Well, put it up.”

  Anthony’s hand came around the edge of the window and stuck a ticket in the rack. “You want me to come back there and make it?”

  “No,” said G-man. “I got it.” He gave Rickey a quick kiss and got up to make the order, a martini muffuletta and fried okra rellenos.

  Rickey went to the sink to wash his face. He felt embarrassed, not because he had cried in front of G-man—he’d done that plenty of times before—but because he’d let this murder thing get under his skin so badly. G-man was right; they’d been through worse. What was more, they probably had worse still ahead of them. He needed to toughen up. He decided that, one way or another, he was going to keep Sid Schwanz from writing that story.

  G-man had only stopped by the Apostle en route to the grocery store. After making sure Rickey really was all right and promising to return before midnight to meet with Schwanz, he decided to go on his way. As he was leaving, Anthony followed him outside and said, “I guess Rickey was pretty upset.”

  “Well, yeah, it kinda sucks to find out somebody got murdered in your kitchen. But he’ll be fine.”

  “I guess you were just—I mean—I didn’t mean to act, you know, like there was anything funny going on.”

  G-man took off his shades. It was a sunny day and the light hurt his eyes, but he wanted to get a good look at Anthony. “Funny?” he said.

  “When you had your, uh, your arm around him and all.”

  “Anthony—”

  “Now don’t get mad, I ain’t saying—”

  “Anthony.”

  “What?”

  “I had my arm around Rickey because that’s what you do when your friend is upset.”

  “Yeah! Yeah, sure, that’s all I—”

  “But listen close: we are a couple, Rickey and me. Have been for years.”

  “A couple of what?”

  G-man folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the car, waiting.