Double Decker Dead

by E M Kaplan

  Double-Decker Dead

  A Josie Tucker Mini Mystery

  EM Kaplan

  Copyright © 2018 EM Kaplan

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by the author

  For

  The people who are annoyed by how many months pass between Josie stories

  Special thanks for advice to:

  The King of Shorts

  Hang on a second. Let me explain something…

  Cranky food critic and amateur detective Josie Tucker has three best friends. One of them is Susan, who first appears in The Bride Wore Dead and again in Dim Sum, Dead Some. What you’re about to read is an amuse-bouche of a story (a “mouth amuser” or an appetizer while you’re waiting for the main course) that gives you another peek into Susan’s world. On the Josie Tucker timeline, this story falls right before Full Slab Dead, but you don’t need to have read that first.

  Enjoy!

  Emily

  #

  “Does a Double Decker have a slice of bread on the inside like a club sandwich, or is it just meat and cheese, meat and cheese, meat and cheese?” Susan asked, scrutinizing the menu from Dante’s. Rain had been beating down on the streets of Boston all day, and Josie didn’t feel like venturing out for lunch beyond the deli below Susan’s second-floor apartment, so they were sticking with sandwiches today.

  “The magic of a Dante’s Double Decker Deluxe lies in its layers. Bread, no bread in the middle—it doesn’t matter. You start with a full pound of meat. Then you add whatever floats your boat—onions, liverwurst, anchovies, head cheese, smashed bananas, pimentos, kale, capers—as long as it ends up with multiple stories.” Josie made horizontal slashing motions with her hand to mimic the multi-layered pièce de résistance of Dante’s sandwich repertoire. “That’s what makes it the Daily News Reader’s Choice ‘Champion of Sandwiches.’”

  The reader’s choice contest had been Josie’s latest campaign at work and had earned her a high-five from her boss. A raise or health insurance benefits would have been more welcome, but Josie had to take her small victories when they came.

  “Seriously? Why do you do that? That’s disgusting. You always get so gory about food. Ugh. You could have just stopped at ‘layers,’ but no, you had to bring up things like…organ meats.” Susan shivered. “I’m getting my usual turkey and Swiss. What do you want?” The top of her golden head glistened at that moment thanks to sunlight bursting through the kitchen window making her look like a sandwich angel, and Josie felt remorseful about her snarkiness. For a second. Then the uncomfortable and foreign sensation went away.

  Why am I like this?

  Because it’s funny. At least, to me.

  Usually Josie ordered when they ate together. As a food blogger with a big ol’ picture of her face on a popular local website, she didn’t mind when people recognized her if it meant a free bag of kettle chips, a bonus cookie, or even a bottle of wine. However, Dante and his volatile brother, Sal, were big fans of Susan’s, as were most parking meter cops, grocery clerks, waiters, cab drivers…well, basically, everyone. If they wanted their deli order fast and padded with top-shelf pancetta, Susan was their go-to gal in this case.

  “The building seems quiet today. I take it Dante and Sal are behaving?” Maybe the downpour was keeping tempers muted. The whole city seemed gray.

  “Not this morning,” Susan said. “It was a Battle Royale with shouting and broken dishes—the works. The only thing I know is if it’s quiet downstairs, it means only one brother is here.”

  “I don’t know how you can stand living over it,” Josie said.

  Susan shrugged. “It smells good. Also, it makes me feel like I don’t live alone. Do you know how close I am to becoming a crazy cat lady?”

  Josie looked around the tiny one-bedroom apartment that had seen better years. The worn wood floors could have been a century old. The plastered walls probably had interesting brick behind them if only someone cared enough to expose them. “You don’t have a cat.”

  “But I could get one. Someday.”

  Josie rolled her eyes. “Turkey for me, too. Hold the Swiss,” she added, for once in her life putting her testy stomach ahead of her taste buds.

  Susan’s delicate eyebrows shot up. “Are you feeling all right? Should I take your temperature? Did you set up an end-of-life directive? A living will?”

  “Stop it. I’m fine,” Josie said. “I need to act like an adult, even if my stomach is holding me hostage. As my best friend, you should support me in this slipshod, half-hearted endeavor.”

  “All right, but keep your phone nearby until I get back,” Susan said, heading for the door. “Dial 911 and hover your finger over the Send button.”

  “Go. Shoo.”

  “I’ll leave this open in case you shout for help,” Susan said as she ducked down the stairs with her wallet in hand. Her voice wafted up the stairwell. “Can you still hear me? Stomp once for yes, two for no.”

  “Very funny.” Josie stood by the door, listening to Susan’s footsteps descend. Since her latest messy breakup, her friend tended to escalate her teasing to the edge of bitterness before she backed off, a pattern that never failed to amuse Josie, especially since she knew it was only temporary.

  Instead, Susan’s shriek ripped up the stairwell.

  #

  The beefy body of the deceased man sprawled facedown at the foot of the steps. He lay just inside the restaurant’s service entry, which also led up to Susan’s apartment. His signature black t-shirt with the neon green Dante’s logo on back topped blue jeans with squeaky-clean athletic shoes below them. The only obvious sign of injury was a smear of red that marred the back of his dark, curly hair. After glimpsing red, Josie avoided looking at him again. She wasn’t good with blood, and the growing puddle forced her to take deep breaths to stop the stairwell from spinning.

  Within thirty minutes of Susan’s discovery of the body, police had arrived and swarmed the place. A red-headed cop in plain clothes corralled the few rainy day, late-lunch patrons, who had come into the stairwell to gawk, back into the restaurant. Josie and Susan remained on the steps, horrified and whispering to each other.

  “Is it Dante?” Josie asked Susan, who looked like she could use a shot of something strong like whiskey.

  Her friend’s gaze tracked to the figure on the floor but returned to Josie’s face in a hurry. “No, I think it’s Sal. See he’s wearing a wedding ring? Dante’s not married.”

  Josie glanced again, averting her eyes as much as she could from the man’s battered noggin. His left hand lay next to his face, and he was indeed wearing a thick gold band on his third finger.

  Their whispering attracted the attention of the red-headed male detective. “You’re the one who found him?” he asked Susan, skirting the body as a short, Linda Hunt-looking woman in a Medical Examiner windbreaker took photos. “I need you to step over here. Could you answer a few questions for me?”

  Susan hissed at Josie, “I blame you for this. People don’t die around me. You’re the one who collects dead bodies.”

  “Would you keep your voice down?” Josie said, cringing. First of all, it wasn’t true. Not exactly. Well, a little true, but whatever. Second of all, getting embroiled in another mystery was the last thing her anxious stomach needed, but man, why would anyone want to off poor Sal? She was dying to find out. Well, not literally dying. She blanched at her inner choice of words. “Go with the nice detective. I think he likes you.” Susan rolled her eyes but le
t herself be led to the opposite side of the entryway.

  The small woman with the camera straightened from where she’d been crouching by the body and muttered to herself, “Looks like the vic was either coming in or out when he got attacked. Maybe receiving a delivery. Based on the position of the body, probably not a fall down the stairs. If I had to take a guess, I’d say blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Probably never even saw it coming.”

  “You can tell he hadn’t been outdoors,” Josie said. Although she’d butted into the woman’s thoughts, she still kept her distance—not only to keep from contaminating the scene but because, hello, dead guy right there. “His shoes are too clean. It’s been raining nonstop and there’s a massive, disgusting puddle right outside the door.”

  A broken drain pipe had created a mini-swamp outside. One of Josie’s shoes was still squishy from accidentally stepping in it when she’d arrived just an hour ago.

  The petite medical examiner squinted at her. “And you are…?”

  This part of a conversation always made Josie cringe. She carried a P.I. license in her wallet, but she hadn’t done anything to earn it. Her boss had procured it for her through shady means.

  Josie started to say, “I’m nobody,” but another windbreaker—a guy this time—came into the hallway and saved her from having to answer.

  He said, “Hey, I know you.”

  “Oh… Nah, probably not,” Josie said, shifting her feet and ducking her head. She edged toward the stairs. This wasn’t going to end well.

  He snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Yeah, yeah. You were part of that university thing that happened. The dead guy on the campus. I saw you at the press conference. Badass.” He said to his partner, “She’s a P.I.”

  The woman looked skeptical but shrugged. Whether she believed Josie or not seemed immaterial. She looked like a woman who had seen things, but she was just here to do her job and she wasn’t going to let some faker like Josie get her panties in a wad. Josie immediately liked her. “I heard your BFF lives here. What do you know about the dead man?”

  “Not much,” Josie said. “He’s the brother of the guy who owns the deli.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder at the restaurant. “The whole building belongs to Dante. He’s my friend’s landlord.”

  The woman sized up Susan, who was answering the red-headed detective’s questions. A rosy blush had spread across his face as he fell under her spell. His fair-skin DNA wasn’t doing him any favors in the playin’ it cool department. “Any chance of a love triangle gone wrong?”

  “Only between me, my empty stomach, and the lunch I’m not getting,” Josie said. Instant remorse pinged through her gut for the inappropriate gallows humor, but matching smirks spread across the investigators’ faces and she felt her street cred go up a notch. “My friend doesn’t get out much. She’s romantically involved with a take-out menu.”

  “Did you hear anything earlier today?”

  Josie assumed she meant the sounds of a struggle, shouting, or a meaty thud. She shivered again and shook her head. “I’ve only been inside the building an hour, but there wasn’t a body lying here when I came up the stairs. Only muddy footprints.” The entryway looked as if a horde of filthy kindergarteners had just come in from recess.

  “So the time of death might be within the last hour.” The woman frowned as her windbreaker-wearing partner squatted beside the dead man. “Body temperature might help confirm that.” She glanced behind her at the stairwell exit’s grimy door. “Looks like a million people have gone in and out that thing. Disgusting. Doesn’t anyone clean anymore? There’s forty-seven years’ worth of prints and flu virus on that. It locks automatically, right?”

  “Yeah,” Josie said. “You have to be let in unless you piggyback your way in when someone’s already going in or out.” She’d been buzzed in by Susan earlier because the place had been deserted. She hadn’t seen another living soul. Or a dead one, either.

  “Anyone locate the brother or the wife?” The woman investigator asked around. A few faces looked up, but no one answered to the affirmative.

  “The busboy called it in,” her partner said.

  “Oh yeah? What’s he like?” The woman’s eyes flashed with interest.

  “Sweet kid named Jack. Has Down’s Syndrome. Seems responsible. Said he would stay here until the brother could be found.”

  “Any other employees here today?”

  “There’s a dishwasher named Keri. She’s back in the kitchen taking deep breaths. Super freaked out.” He consulted his notebook. “Goes to Berklee College of Music and busks at a T station on the weekends when she’s not working here.”

  “What’s she look like?” the woman detective wanted to know.

  “Millennial. Arms full of tattoos. Piercings in her eyebrows. Ear gauges. About five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet—which she is, that’s not just a figure of speech. She’s drenched. She let go of the dish sprayer and got herself right in the chest while I was standing there. It was epic.”

  Everyone jumped as the steel door banged open and bashed into the wall. Rain splattered across the floor, messing up any potential footprints even more. The woman detective groaned and gritted her teeth. A man who looked almost identical to the body stood in the doorway. Behind him, a woman in leather pants with bulky muscles and long hair dyed jet black pushed her way inside. The couple’s wet feet tracked more prints across the floor as they spilled into the already-crowded space.

  The black-haired woman’s husky voice cracked as she shouted, “Oh my God! What happened to Dante?”

  #

  “Hang on, I thought you were Dante,” the red-headed detective said to the man standing in the doorway as the metal door banged shut behind him.

  “I’m Sal. That’s my brother Dante,” the newcomer said. His olive skin had turned pasty white as he stared at the figure on the floor. He groaned and clutched his dark, curly-haired head in his hands, murmuring a string of dramatic Oh my Gods.

  “Sorry for your loss. As far as I can tell, he uh…was struck only once in the back of the head, so I don’t think he felt much. Sorry again, but can I see some ID? There seems to be some confusion.”

  The woman ME dug her latex-covered hand into the back pocket of the dead man. “His wallet is still here. This one’s Dante all right.”

  The detective handed Sal back his ID and asked, “When was the last time you saw your brother?”

  “I talked with him this morning. We had a discussion about payroll and our new store location we’re opening next year.” He moaned and rubbed his face. “Oh my God, what are we going to do now? I can’t run the place without him. No, I’ll think about that later. I gotta tell Lisa. Oh my God, I gotta tell Mama.”

  Next to Josie, Susan said, “The volume of their discussion this morning was at level eleven.”

  The detective overheard her. “Is that so?” He turned back to Sal. “Would you characterize your relationship with your brother as volatile?”

  “Well, you know, I mean, we’re brothers. We fight, but we don’t mean it. I mean, we kind of mean it, but we always work it out. Know what I mean?” The poor guy wasn’t exactly coherent. His eyes were open so wide, Josie could see the whites all the way around. Definitely in shock. S looked around for a chair in case he needed to take a load off before he passed out onto the slick, muddy floor next to his dead brother.

  “Even this time?” the detective pressed, looking skeptical.

  “Well, I didn’t do this!” he protested, a sob cracking his voice.

  “Who’s Lisa?” Josie asked Susan. She’d meant to say it as an aside, but everyone paused talking at the same time and her question came out louder than she’d intended.

  “Lisa is my brother’s new wife,” Sal said. He asked Josie, “Who are you?”

  “She’s a food critic,” the woman detective said.

  “She’s my best friend,” Susan said.

  Sal accepted that explanation with a shrug. “I
hope this doesn’t make you move out, Susan. You’re our favorite tenant.”

  “I’m your only tenant.”

  “Why don’t you worry about that later,” the detective said. “For now, everyone head into the restaurant so we can let the medical examiners do their job.”

  “Yeah, get the herd of elephants out of here. They’re stomping on my crime scene,” the woman ME said. She added belatedly to Sal, “Sorry for your loss.”

  #

  “I didn’t realize Dante had gotten married,” Susan said to Josie as they shuffled out of the stairwell into the restaurant.

  The place had all the elements of a classic American deli starting with a refrigerated case stuffed with Italian meats, cheeses, and pasta salads. Over the counter, a cascade of glistening cured sausages, an array of animal shanks and links in encrusted casings dangled from steel hooks. Prosciutto, ham, salami, Soprassata. Josie could smell the spices and applewood smoke from the doorway. On the side wall, among photos of Italy, Tony Bennett, and a Dante’s Inferno movie poster, trophies—brass cups, bowls, and a silver platter with an engraved boar’s head—overloaded a display shelf. She’d had no idea the local deli circuit held so many competitions.

  The woman with the dyed black hair and the bulging biceps overheard Susan. From the scarred bistro table where she’d pulled up a chair, she said, “Dante married Lisa Genovese last month. She used to be a waitress here.” Her tone implied a major eye roll.

  “I guess that makes her part owner of this place now,” Susan said, speculating.

  “Over my dead body,” Sal said, and then put his head in his hands and moaned again at his choice of words.

  “Who is motorcycle gang Morticia?” Josie asked Susan, careful to keep her voice down this time. She didn’t want to get pummeled by a leather-wearing lady beefcake. For that matter, if Josie was going to be snarky, she certainly didn’t need to be overheard when she was trapped in a room full of murder suspects because of the storm outside. Thunder crashed, right on cue, and rain began pelting the front windows with renewed fervor.