A Brisket, a Casket

by Delia Rosen

  She looked at me. “What is it?”

  I hesitated. “Thom, tell me…did Murray ever have trouble getting food deliveries?”

  She huffed out a laugh. “Lawsy, lawsy no.”

  Lawsy, lawsy? I desperately needed a Southern slang dictionary. Although it seemed to me a good, long smoke would be a great alternative. “Then you don’t remember a situation like we had last night?”

  “With that hog Luke picked up at the airport?”

  “Right.”

  Thom shook her head. “I guarantee you,” she said, “if we’d of got a pig instead of a pastrami, Murray would’ve slaughtered it a second time before lettin’ its baked butt into his kitchen.”

  “And how about the pickle shortage?”

  “It’d be like a church hall bingo game without lonely hearts widows.”

  “What?”

  “There’d be no chance.”

  “So these kinds of things never happened before,” I said. “To the best of your knowledge.”

  “Mine or anyone else’s.”

  “How about with our restaurant services? Were kitchen or dining room supplies ever late to arrive?”

  “No.”

  “Linens?”

  “Always came back from the cleaners on time,” she said. And looked right into my eyes. “Okay, Princess, my turn. You prepping me for a quiz or is there some other cause for this drill?”

  I realized I was on the brink of a sharing moment. Or is “moment of sharing” the phrase? The point being that I hadn’t counted on having one with Thom any more than I’d contemplated jumping in front of a speeding locomotive. But I could suddenly see its headlights bearing down on me…and they looked conspicuously like her unwavering blue eyes.

  “I’m only trying to confirm something to myself,” I said. “When Murray was trying to make it as country musician in New York, his mother—my grandmother—constantly discouraged him from sticking with it. He was almost thirty-five years old and music was all he cared about besides cooking, which he considered his hobby. He’d dropped out of college when he was eighteen, worked a zillion odd jobs so he could buy his instruments and set up his own studio. But she never let up on telling him he should’ve been a dentist. That he could’ve been driving around in a Jaguar instead of some old Ford Fairmont.”

  “Bet he’d get plenty upset.”

  I nodded. “They’d have the worst blowouts. And I’m talking at family occasions. He’d tell her he was proud of what he did for a living even if he had to struggle to make ends meet. It was, like, ‘You pick at people’s rotten teeth with your fingers! I’ll use mine to pick at my guitar strings!’”

  Thomasina’s features appeared to soften. It might’ve been my imagination, but I doubted it. “How ’bout the rest of the family?” she said. “You mean to say none of ’em believed in him?”

  “They basically feared the wrath of Mom. Or that’s how it seemed to me, though I admit I was pretty young back then. But I remember everyone running for cover when she roared.”

  “Includin’ your dad?”

  “I have to admit he was the favorite son. Went to school, got a business degree, the whole deal.” I shook my head. “I guess I’m rambling, Thom. But I always felt Murray was special. That he had these gifts. He used to tell me he’d have been lost if he couldn’t play his music and then relax by putting together a meal….”

  “And he was sharp as a tack when it came to such things,” Thomasina said. “Murray could leave his bedroom in the morning wearin’ his shirt inside out and his underpants on backwards…well, that is…”

  She stopped talking, cleared her throat as if something were caught in it.

  “You okay?” I asked

  “Fine.” She coughed into her hand. “I just didn’t want to give you the notion I ever saw his bedroom.”

  “Wouldn’t have occurred to me, Thom,” I lied.

  “Or, you know, his drawers.”

  “Of course not.”

  “My comment about them bein’, you know…”

  “A figure of speech.”

  “Right, there you have it.” Thom coughed again. “What I was gettin’ at is that Murray did seem scrambled sometimes. Catch him before he had his fourth cup a morning coffee, you’d have thought he was a sleepwalker. But I know he was on top a everything that went on hereabouts.”

  Which summed up many of the thoughts that had been circling through my head since Artie’s visit. Sure, my uncle had enjoyed the high life. Yeah, he’d had his vices. And maybe he did occasionally leave the house with his drawers in a twist, though I suspected Thom might have done some of the twisting herself, a mental image I preferred not to contemplate. But it seemed wrong to peg him as wasteful or oblivious to money matters just because he hadn’t been good at keeping conventional records.

  People had underestimated Murray pretty much his entire life. I knew he was a perfectionist about his music, and had sensed he was the same with the deli. It didn’t seem likely he could’ve been too lax when it came to running it—not when it was obvious there was no problem paying his employees, filling his orders, and so on. In his own right-brained way, he’d seemed to have a system, or, more like it, multiple systems, of organizing his personal and professional affairs. The tricky part was that he didn’t often bother sharing them with anyone.

  I frowned contemplatively. It had occurred to me that if there was one thing that might have thrown those systems out of whack, it was my uncle’s unlimited generosity.

  “What about the cash entertainer types borrowed from Murray?” I said. “You think all those outstanding loans could’ve tapped him out?”

  Thom screwed up an eye as if looking at me through a rifle scope. “How’d you know about them loans?”

  “From Artie Duff,” I said. “When he was up in my office before lunch.”

  “He mention the shoebox under the register?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “According to him, it was bottomless for musicians trying to make it in the industry.”

  She shook her head. “Well, he can say whatever he wants, that ain’t quite the way it was.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “I just said so, didn’t I?”

  I waited for her to explain, and instead got about ten seconds of dead silence. “Look,” I said. “Could you please help me feel less like I’m pulling teeth? For a single conversation?”

  Thom gave a huge shrug while letting out an equally massive breath. “You’d have to know Murray like I knew him to understand,” she said at last. “Just ’cause he was a kind, bighearted soul don’t mean he was anybody’s fool.”

  “So he did reach into the shoebox often enough.”

  “And knew darned well who’d pay him back and who wouldn’t,” Thom said. “Maybe he got in over his head with that computer caterin’ business. But he knew people. If he didn’t think someone was good for the money, he’d give what he could freely spare without figuring he’d ever see it again. For him it was the same as a charitable donation.”

  “What if he thought a person would repay him?”

  “He’d dig deeper,” Thom said, still beading in on me. “But he hardly ever made the wrong calls. Of all the men and women Murray helped over the years, I can’t remember more’n a couple he expected to settle up that turned out to be deadbeats.” She frowned. “Now it’s somethin’ else entirely whether he got the thanks he deserved from people…and by the bye, he didn’t only give a leg up to musicians.”

  “Right,” I said. “Artie mentioned something about artists. Athletes too, I guess—”

  She chopped a hand through the air between us. “Let’s not go there.”

  “Huh? I—”

  “I don’t want to talk about no lousy ingrate ballplayer,” she snarled. And I do mean snarled.

  My first thought after she cut me off again was that I’d hit a raw nerve. My second was the realization that I had a good to excellent idea what—or who—was at its root. My third was that if I was right,
it would answer quite a few questions that had been puzzling me, and open the floodgates to a tidal rush of entirely new ones.

  “Okay,” I said. “It seems to me we’re both overdue for a break. I want to go out and clear my head before diving back into these boxes.”

  “You mean go suck on a cigarette?”

  “That might be an integral part of the head-clearing process, yes,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  Thomasina shrugged a bit less mightily than before. “You want to keep puffin’ away, it’s your affair. But I’d rather you ease up on the smokes and stay healthy. With Royce Ramsey and his double-dealin’ sidekick Liarson circlin’ for the kill, all of us here need to stick around to fight them off.”

  I looked at her. Was that concern I’d detected in her voice? If so, I was sure it was only because my sticking around, as she put it, was—for the present—tied to the deli’s survival. Still, you had to start somewhere. Who knows? Should the day ever arrive when Thom could stomach me more than a platter of spoiled herring, it was possible I’d reflect on that moment with intense fondness.

  Before I got too weepy at the notion, however, I asked her to bring me the evening’s dinner totals. “Let’s keep up our pre- and post-Buster tragedy business comparisons,” I said. “I want to see how we do tonight without the Silver Foxes. But we’ll need a week or two’s worth of register receipts to know how we’re trending.”

  Thom grunted. “Princess, we get through supper without any more customers dropping dead, it’ll be a real positive trend in my book,” she said, turning toward the door.

  That was Thomasina Jackson for you, a full-size portion of joy and moral support.

  I listened to her clomp downstairs, waiting till I was fairly sure she’d left the kitchen so I wouldn’t run into her on my way out. Then I grabbed my cigarettes off the desk, followed her to the bottom landing, and dashed into the alley to light up, my accumulated stress dissipating in a cloud of tobacco smoke. Well, almost dissipating, temporarily, I should qualify.

  Not that anyone was taking notes.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday’s dinner numbers were crappy. I know, I know, there isn’t much Southern decorum in that assessment. But it’s what my literature professor in college called le mot juste—the absolute, perfect word. And considering our take, it was actually a mild way of putting things.

  The receipts for the night came to eighteen hundred dollars. That corresponded to sixty diners, plus or minus a few, since some customers will split a single a la carte meal between them. According to Thom, an average Saturday night’s total was four thousand dollars from roughly a hundred fifty people.

  I didn’t need a Cray computer to see that business had declined by more than half on what’s normally the busiest dining-out evening of the week. Add to it that this was June, and Main Street was hopping with summer nightlife, and the shortfall became discouraging and crappy.

  No shocker, then, that by closing time, my wait staff was as down as the contents of my cash drawer. Servers rely on tips to boost their income, and Saturday night is their big piñata. When they clear about a hundred dollars each in gratuities, they leave with smiles all around. The fifty dollars each of the servers took in made them look sad.

  I guess if I’d had to pick a low point, it would have been watching A.J. slouch out the door after telling me she was—shudder—heading straight home to bed. It wasn’t just that she’d canceled a date with her loverboy cop, though that did have something to do with it. But when you put Saturday night, A.J., and a mattress together, and the upshot was sleep rather than scandal, you knew the universe was showing serious cracks.

  Our kitchen closed at eleven o’clock, and the last of the dining parties left at midnight. By twelve-thirty, my entire staff had called it quits—and that included Thom, who always stayed longer than everyone else to tidy up. With plenty of anxiety to work off, I decided to stick around my office and take care of some odds and ends.

  It was about an hour before fatigue caught up with me. I’d looked over the full day’s receipts, laid out their totals on a computer spreadsheet for future reference, then spent a little while un-boxing and sorting out more of Murray’s files. Having made some progress on that front, and with my cluster yawns increasing in frequency, I finally packed it in around two o’clock, slinging my purse over my shoulder and heading downstairs to the kitchen.

  My Kizashi was out back in the deli’s parking lot, and the alley running between the deli and the C&W hootenanny joint next door led straight into it. But while I’d meant to turn out the entrance to the immediate right of the stairs, I found myself pausing there at their foot a minute. I’d managed to skip eating anything besides chocolate amid the day’s nonstop activity and commotion, and was a little hungry…okay, got me, make that starved enough to almost consider nibbling Crispy the Hog’s ears to their nubs. That is, if the police hadn’t carried them off along with Crispy.

  The problem—besides my fridge being bare at home—was that the soonest I’d get back to Antioch would be about two-thirty, a quarter to three in the morning, and snacking on anything too heavy before I hit the sheets would invite vagrant pounds to call my thighs their own. That left out chocolate in any form, since I was genetically incapable of eating it in moderation. On the flip side, Newt had baked his Johnny Cashew pie as our house special dessert. Was a slice…no, a sliver…of pie and a cold glass of milk before bedtime such a degenerate sin? I needed a smile. I was in fact suffering from a smile deficit. If I wanted, I could make up for the invasion of fat cals with frowning abstinence from goodies on Sunday.

  I turned away from the door into the kitchen. The ceiling fluorescents were off, but Newt had left a small light on over the range knowing I’d planned to stick around my office after everyone else cleared out. Though that light didn’t do much to relieve the dimness, it only took seconds for my vision to adjust as I went toward the walk-in refrigerator.

  Halfway there, I sniffed some leftover cholent, then saw it simmering on a counter to my right. Newt used an enormous slow cooker with a clay inner pot for making it, my uncle having had the insert handcrafted so he could reproduce the ancient European method of preparation, which had used clay pottery that would be buried in cooking pits or placed in baking ovens overnight. Pausing again, this time at the counter by the slow cooker, I eyed the cholent a minute and realized I’d never gotten my chance to sample it that afternoon.

  This time, I had nothing to distract me. Actually, this time it was the distraction. I lifted the cooker’s lid, reached for a wooden tasting spoon, and tried a mouthful.

  “Mmm,” I said aloud. Uncle Murray’s secret recipe called for a squirt of natural honey and smidgens of dried chipotle and cumin, giving his stew the mildest peppery-sweet tang. I closed my eyes in delight, savoring its rich, mingled flavors as they overspread my tongue. “Mmm-mmm-mmmmm—”

  I was cooing away like that—like a contented pigeon over a pile of bread crumbs, in other words—when a crash from out in the restaurant gave me a sudden start. My hand jerking involuntarily, I hit my upper lip with the wooden spoon, splattering tiny droplets of cholent up into my nose.

  I spun my head toward the double doors, the chilies in the stew instantly tickling my sinuses to bring about a hard, uncontrollable sneeze. I blinked as another sneeze came on, reflexively pinching my irritated nostrils to stifle it even while trying to peer out the glass door panels into the dining room. But I went zero for two, as my night crawler of an ex used to say. That second sneeze exploded from me before I could stop it, squirting tears from my eyes and blurring my vision—not that I could have seen into the darkness on the other side of the panels anyway. Still, it didn’t help matters.

  Sniffling, my eyes watery, I hurried out to investigate the noise, pushing through the double doors into the restaurant, reaching over to flip the light switches on the wall next to the doors.

  As the overheads came on, and the dining room brightened, and another aggravating
sneeze almost bowled me over backward, I saw that the cause of my cholent-in-nose reaction was nothing more than a couple of chairs that had fallen from a tabletop. Every night before closing, we flipped them upside down onto the tables as we cleaned and swept the place, so I guessed one must have been a little unbalanced and tipped over the edge to the floor, knocking the one beside it down too.

  Done with my sneezing fit, I went over and picked up the chairs, setting them back onto the table. Then I gave the dining room a perfunctory look, shut the lights back off, and returned to the kitchen and my quest for some cashew pie.

  The walk-in cooler was a large eight-foot square with shiny stainless steel-plate door and walls. A dial thermometer in front—its casing was also steel—said it was thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit inside the unit, but I would have known it was plenty cold without so much as glancing at it. Pulling open the door, I was hit by a blast of refrigerated air that instantly made me shiver.

  I entered the lighted interior, scanned the tiers of recessed floor-to-ceiling shelves. The meat and poultry was on the right, the produce on the left, our homemade desserts and dairy goods in back facing the open door. There were cartons of soft drinks, milk crates, and other supplies along the sides of the unit, along with a hand truck for carting them around. Since the cops had dutifully carried off many of our perishables the night before, the cooler was relatively bare…aside from the shelves of dessert. As they did at the start of every weekend, Newt and his two-man kitchen crew had whipped up a storm of bakery items that morning, and just the pleasure of seeing them all there together might have been worth having my teeth chatter.

  I saw cheesecakes, pound cakes, apple cake, carrot cake, and, naturally, several varieties of chocolate cake, Mississippi Mud and Brooklyn Blackout being high on my list of heavenly faves. I saw custards, cobblers, strudels, parfaits, fresh-fruit Jell-O salads, cream tarts, and cookies. I saw pies galore—one does not run a restaurant in the South without featuring a large selection of pies. There was lemon meringue, key lime, apple, blueberry, strawberry, peach, sweet potato, pumpkin, pecan…and my non-chocolate dessert amour du jour, the Johnny Cashew.