by Delia Rosen
“If I drop dead on the street from eating my free potato knish, make sure to send two of ’em home to my wife next week!” he said, stepping out onto Broadway.
I stood beside Thom as she locked the door behind him. “If he’s really got a wife, how come she’s never with him?” I said.
“You got to ask after hearin’ a line that dumb come out of his mouth?”
I supposed she had a point. “Okay, I’m going up to the office. Is there a new key to the side door?”
She looked at me. “You don’t plan on stayin’ late again, do you?”
“I have more of Murray’s boxes to dig through,” I said. “I’d like to end the weekend feeling I’ve made some decent progress.”
We stood there at the door. Behind the register, A.J. tried to act like she wasn’t eavesdropping as she cashed out. It would have helped her performance if she wasn’t gawking at us.
“Princess, I realize bein’ a New Yorker goes along with thinkin’ you’re invincible,” Thom said. “But how can you want to stick around this place alone after last night?”
“I can’t be afraid of running my own restaurant,” I said with a small shrug. “Besides, it was two in the morning when everything happened. I’ll be out of here by nine o’clock tonight.”
She looked uncertain. “You give any thought to figurin’ out who tried to leave you packed away in the cold meats section?”
“Nice way of putting it,” I said.
Thom waited, stone-faced.
I sighed. “Sure I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
“I don’t have any answers.”
“How about McClintock? He share any bright ideas with you?”
“I don’t think he’s reached the idea stage,” I said, wanting to tell her as little as I could about my visit to his office. “Thom, why are you asking me this right now?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I ain’t as smart as some hotshot detective who’s gettin’ paid to investigate such things. But it seems to me the person that locked you in the fridge got in and out of the restaurant on his own. And could find his way around okay.”
“We don’t know that it wasn’t a diner who stuck around after closing,” I said. “He could’ve hidden out and waited for me.”
“Hidden where?” Thomasina said. “Ain’t as if people can just squat under tables without someone noticin’ it when we sweep up.”
“I haven’t heard that mentioned as a possibility, Thom. Although there’s a chance he could’ve moved around between the stairwell, restrooms…any number of places.” I sighed. “Look, I can see why you might think it’s someone with access to the deli. But even if you’re right, that still leaves us with a lot of people. We’ve given cellar keys to our suppliers so they can make early deliveries. And don’t tell me we ought to suspect A.J. or Luke!”
A.J. blinked offendedly behind the register. I acted oblivious.
“Those two young fools couldn’t’ve harmed you if they tried,” Thom said, prompting another round of eye-fluttering from our snoopy cashier. “But I don’t see what’s wrong with me stickin’ around to keep you company. Just this once.”
I smiled and squeezed her shoulder. She didn’t punch me, growl like a rabid coyote, nor make any other move or sound that caused me to flinch in mortal terror. If that didn’t prove o ur relationship had soared to a new plateau, I didn’t know what would.
“Thanks, Thom,” I said. “I’m okay, though. Really.”
She let out a grunt of reluctant acceptance. “All right, have it your way,” she said. And then eyed me a moment. “By the bye, since you brought up McClintock, what took you so long to get back from his office today?”
I shrugged. I could have sworn she’d mentioned his name first. Not that it mattered. Although McClintock hadn’t asked that I keep our talk about Murray confidential, I had a sneaking suspicion he wouldn’t appreciate having Thom find out about that conversation. “I don’t know,” I said. “Guess he wanted to be sure we’d covered all the bases.”
“Bases, huh? Like in baseball?”
I cleared my throat. Her prying tone immediately made me regret using that particular figure of speech. “I suppose. Don’t other sports have bases?”
“None I ever heard of.”
“Goes to show you can always learn something new,” I said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start on my work….”
“You go on ahead,” she said. “But as a word to the wise, I’d suggest you don’t get too personal with the detective.”
“Thom, we’ve had an eventful weekend around here. And he’s in charge of investigating the, uh, eventfulness.” There, I thought. Now I was flexing my verbal muscles. “What’s the problem?”
“I didn’t say there was one.” She scrutinized me a little more. “I just think it’s just best to keep your guard up around him.”
“Right, well, I’ll remember that if his name and photo pop up during my next eHarmony search…if I ever join eHarmony,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m scramming upstai—”
“Hang on,” she said. “I need to show you something before I forget.”
I watched as she went around the front counter, reached underneath it, and brought out Liarson’s portfolio.
“What’s that doing here?” I said.
“Old Vern found it in the booth where we had our sitdown this morning,” she said. “That buzzard lawyer forgot to clean up his droppings. He called while you were gone to tell me he’d return for it, but ain’t showed up yet.”
“You think he’ll be back tonight?”
“I wouldn’t be too surprised.” Thom looked at me. “The sneaky little runt can’t be trusted. He rings the bell, I’d advise you throw the briefcase out the door at him and slam it before he oozes in.”
I took the case from her hands, duly warned about detectives and runts. “Might as well bring this upstairs with me,” I said.
“Suit yourself.” Thom shrugged. “One last item…you can use your old key in the side door. It was the jamb that had got splintered and had to be fixed, not the lock.”
I nodded, flipped A.J. a little wave so she’d know she could stick her nose back into her own business, and pushed through the kitchen doors toward the stairs.
An hour later, I was sitting at my desk surrounded by lots of open cartons and feeling thwarted. I tried to convince myself that I hadn’t been searching for anything in particular, and supposed to some extent it was true. But I’d really been looking for answers as I straightened up the place. Not only that night, but the night before. Somehow or other, I’d hoped to find out what had gotten the restaurant into grave financial trouble.
There had been nothing in the boxes that brought me closer to my goal. I’d found an address book filled with names of wholesalers, which would be handy if I actually stayed in business long enough to order from them. I found loose sheets of paper and Post-its on which Murray had scribbled semi-legible phone numbers, his handwritten supply orders and personal laundry tags, and long to-do lists with all kinds of items that I suspected had never gotten done. I found takeout menus with his partial song lyrics written on their backs, recipes he’d been working on, birthday and holiday cards he’d forgotten to mail, unopened sample bottles from wine, beer, and liquor salesmen….
The discoveries went on and on, but ultimately led to a dead end. By a quarter to nine, I was worn out and vaguely down in the dumps. My bum wrist was sore from shuffling cartons around and my eyes felt grainy with fatigue. I figured it was time to raid the chocolate bowl for some candy and call it quits.
I swiveled around in my chair, looked at the old Gibson guitar case leaning against the wall, and thought about the photo I’d moved downstairs. Murray, me, our victoriously upraised spatulas, my Schmutz Happens T-shirt…and Murray’s thoughtful, loving inscription across the bottom.
Keep ridin’ Gwennie. My heart to yours.
I swallowed hard over a lump in my throat, my eyes no longer just stingi
ng but moist. I’d been a loser at marriage, and now I was a loser at my new career. My uncle had entrusted me with keeping his dream alive and I’d failed miserably. Feeling guilty about it wouldn’t solve anything. Not any more than it would help if I started to cry. It wouldn’t help.
I sniffled, pulled a tissue from the box on my desk, and sat there feeling guilty and crying anyway.
“I’m sorry, Murray,” I said, staring at the photo through my tears. “Maybe I stink at this deli business. But I’ve really tried my best to make it work. Tried for you, for me, for both of us.”
My teary eyes had remained on the guitar case. Murray had handled it so often, brought it along on so many different gigs, it had always seemed like it was part of him. The red sunburst Gibson he’d kept inside that case was his favorite acoustic, and I could have closed my eyes and seen him strumming one of his original songs on it as if he were right there in front of me, the guitar on his lap, a pick in his left hand.
Moving forward to the edge of my chair, I reached a hand out to touch the case. I couldn’t have explained the impulse if someone had asked. Well, okay, that’s an outright lie. I could have explained very easily. But it would have made me even more blubbery than I was, and I hated smudging my makeup beyond repair. Fortuitously, however, there was nobody to see me smudge. No one to see my defenses crumble. No one to tell how badly I wanted, needed, to feel close to my uncle at that moment.
I was startled when the case tipped over sideways and fell to the floor. The guitar inside was pretty heavy, not to mention the hardshell case itself, so it should have stood weighted in place. It had been propped there in its spot against the wall since before Murray died….
I didn’t understand why it had fallen. But fallen it had. Slid down the wall, hit the floor, bang. Chalk another one up to my klutziness.
Although—
I frowned. It had struck me at once that the bang was all I’d heard. Where were the boingy, spoingy notes of protest the guitar should have made on landing?
I bent over to grab the case’s handle and stand it upright…and realized I hadn’t been imagining things. There was no guitar inside. Just a loose, lightweight object I took to be a book of sheet music.
I don’t know why this surprised me. In fact, the surprising thing should have been that I hadn’t noticed the case was empty sooner. My uncle could have gotten a new case for his guitar. It might have been in his home studio when he died. I hadn’t seen it there, but he’d willed most of his instruments to a group of local musicians and it could have been among them. I could ask Artie about it, since he’d been executor of his estate.
Even so, I wondered, why keep an empty guitar case here in the office? And not only that…
Murray had been totally self-taught and unable to read a note of written music. I supposed he might have used chord charts when he was young—but that had been long decades ago. He was well, well beyond that as a musician, and could figure out how to play most songs in a blink just by listening to them.
“What on earth would you be doing with sheet music?” I said to the silent room.
Since the room didn’t cough up an answer, I decided to try finding one on my own. So, instead of putting the case back where it had leaned against the wall, I carefully set it flat on my desk, unlatched it, raised the lid, and looked inside.
My eyes opened wide. So wide, in fact, that a big, fat, runaway teardrop escaped them and splatted wetly onto the paperwork inside.
My brow creased. The thing I’d heard clunking around inside wasn’t a book, but a plain brown 9x12 string-tie envelope. Its front rested flat against the blue felt liner in the wide part of the case, where the guitar’s hollow body belonged. There was nothing written on the back of the envelope.
I lifted it out, turned it over. The pair of brief lines in front had been written with a marker pen in Uncle Murray’s easily recognizable handwriting, their words all in capitals. The top lines said: CATERING ORDERS/BANK RECEIPTS. Right below it was a single word followed by a question mark: ARTIE?
I stared at the envelope for a long moment, a big, fat, runaway teardrop escaping my eyes to splat wetly onto its surface. Then I unwound its string, opened the flap, and pulled out its contents so I could examine them.
Uncle Murray had been uncharacteristically neat in organizing the paperwork. It appeared he’d taken a full year’s catering order forms and sorted them by month, then stapled each month’s batch to a bank account statement for that same month. There was nothing fancy or complicated about the forms themselves, which were hard copies of the same electronic ones customers used to book their events online. The first page had the client’s name, address, and payment information. The second page was our standard catering menu, basically a pared-down version of our regular restaurant menu. Every selection chosen for the event had a check mark beside it.
Frowning in concentration, I looked over the first bunch of forms. The topmost order had been filled out the previous October by a Ms. Paulina Hardee for a company called Two River Investments. She’d advance-booked a holiday office party for mid-December—forty place settings, a mid-sized bash—and checked off several options for the guests:
Starters and Side Orders:
Steak Fries
Knishes (round/square)
Potato
Kasha
Spinach
Mushroom
Veggie
Kishka
Gefilte Fish
Old-Fashioned Soups:
Matzo Ball
Mama’s Chicken
Chicken Ochre
Split Pea
Classic Hot Sandwiches:
Murray’s Corned Beef
Murray’s Pastrami
Murray’s Turkey
Reuben
Classic Cold Sandwiches:
Murray’s Aged In-house Salammi
Murray’s Bologna
Murray’s Tongue
Murray’s Roast Beef
Murray’s Egg Salad
Celebrity Entrees:
Garth Brooks Prime Cut Brisket
Merle Haggard Meat Loaf
Glen Campbell Crossover Chicken and Rib Steak
George Strait Potato Pancakes with Applesauce
Dolly Parton Extra-Loaded Stuffed Cabbage Rolls
Desserts:
Homemade Apple Strudel
Kugel with Hot Fruit Sauce
Fruit Jell-O
Seven Layer Cake
Rugelach
Johnny Cashew Pie
My brow furrowed with concentration. At the bottom of the menu, Murray had scratched out several hasty notes and calculations with a pen, and I found myself studying them for a long moment:
$2,800
Tot. (40x$70)
$1,400
% down. (no bank record online pmnt.)
$1,400
(See Attched. Bank Stmnt.)
“There’s no record of Ms. Hardee’s down payment being deposited into your bank account,” I whispered into the silent office. “Why? Where’d it go?”
I flipped the page to the attached monthly bank statement and saw that Murray had circled several deposits, one of which was for the sum of fourteen hundred dollars and dated December eighteenth—a day after the Two Rivers affair. Above it in tiny letters, he’d noted: Two Rvrs/Hardee. Bal rcvd.
“So you did deposit the balance due, Murray,” I mouthed. “Ms. Hardee must’ve given you a check or credit card payment at the party. But…”
But it still left half the money unaccounted for. My hands shaking, I flipped to the next catering order. And the next, and the next, looking for a pattern. It wasn’t long before I began to see one emerge—and then become unmistakably clear as the full realization of what I’d discovered overtook me like a tidal wave, a cold sweeping current so powerful, I could barely keep my head above water.
You know that old platitude about the truth setting you free? Well, I felt as if I was drowning in way, way too much of it.
�
��My God,” I said, and heard myself pull in a gasping snatch of breath. “My dear God.”
Uncle Murray’s papers trembling between my fingers, I continued to study them and learn.
Chapter Nineteen
At a quarter to nine, I was in my office eating a Three Musketeers bar and waiting. Everyone on the restaurant’s staff had left, and I knew I’d promised Thomasina I’d be gone by then too.
But I was expecting someone.
As I say, I was waiting.
I wasn’t worried about my safety. Maybe it was stupid and reckless of me. And maybe I would have been worried if I hadn’t been so consumed with what I’d found out from the papers in Murray’s guitar case. But I had all my rationalizations lined up in a row. It was barely dark outside. Broadway was full of pedestrians. And although I’d be at the restaurant longer than expected, I still didn’t intend to stick around too, too late. If the person I’d called didn’t show up soon, I would go home.