Finger Lickin' Fifteen Read online

  “Not yet,” Lula said. “But I know I could be real good at it. Look at me. Don’t I look like a woman who could cook the shit out of chicken? I’m like a combination of Paula Deen and Mario Whatshisname. I’m just around the corner from bein’ the Mrs. Butterworth of barbecue sauce.”

  “The cook-off is in a week,” Connie said. “Is there still time for you to enter? Do you have to qualify or something?”

  “I don’t have to do nothin’ but sign up,” Lula said. “I already looked into it, and the idiot who’s runnin’ the cook-off used to be a customer of mine back when I was a ’ho. He was what you call a drive-by. He’d pick me up on my corner, and two blocks later, we’d concluded our business.”

  “That’s more information than I need,” Connie said.

  “Well, I’m just sayin’ so you get the picture.”

  “I have to run,” I told them. “I’m late for work.”

  “After we win the contest and capture the killer, none of us is gonna have to work,” Lula said. “We’re all gonna be ladies of leisure.”

  IT WAS NOON, and Ranger’s men were moving around, breaking for lunch, so I left my cubicle and went to the kitchen area to mingle. Ella kept the large glass-fronted refrigerator filled with sandwiches, fruit, raw veggies, yogurt, low-fat milk, snack-size cheeses, a variety of fruit juices, plus individual cups of chicken salad and vegetable soup. Early in the morning, Ella supplemented this with a caldron of oatmeal and a chafing dish of scrambled eggs. The dinner offering was always some sort of Crock-Pot stew, plus a breadbasket.

  Ranger almost always ate breakfast and dinner in his apartment. And lunch was usually a sandwich and piece of fruit from the common kitchen, taken back to his office. There were three small round tables set to one side of the kitchen. Each table held four chairs. Two men I didn’t know were eating at one of the tables. Hal and Ramon were at another. The third table was empty. I selected a sandwich and joined Hal and Ramon. I’ve known Hal for a while now. Hal isn’t the sharpest tack on the corkboard, but he tries hard. His nickname is Halosaurus, because there’s a stegosaurus resemblance.

  “You’re my new favorite person,” Ramon said. “You got me out of that cubicle. I was dying in that cubicle.”

  “It’s not my favorite job, either,” I said, “but I needed the money.”

  I unwrapped my sandwich and examined it. Multigrain bread, pretty ruffled green lettuce, thin-sliced chicken, a slice of tomato, slices of hard-cooked egg, and salad dressing that was for sure low fat. It looked good, but it would look even better with bacon.

  “No bacon,” I said, more to myself than to Hal and Ramon.

  Hal grinned. “Ranger thinks bacon is the work of the devil.”

  “Sometimes I walk past Ella’s apartment, and I smell bacon frying,” Ramon said. “I think she makes it for Louis.” He looked over at me. “Have you ever seen Ranger eat bacon?”

  “No,” I said. “Not that I can remember.”

  “I think sometimes he cheats and goes to eat with Louis,” Ramon said.

  “No way,” Hal said. “Ranger’s pure.”

  Both men looked at me.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not commenting on that one.”

  Hal flushed red, and Ramon gave a bark of laughter.

  I finished my sandwich and pushed back from the table. “I’m going for a walk around the building. Is there anyplace off-limits for us worker people?”

  “Only the seventh floor. No one would mind if you went into the men’s locker room, but there could be a lot of wood if you stayed too long. And then Ranger would probably fire us all,” Ramon said.

  “I don’t want to get anyone fired.”

  “That’s good,” Hal said, “because everyone here wants to keep their job.”

  “Not everyone,” Ramon said.

  I cut my eyes to him.

  “You were on the job last night,” he said to me. “I’m sure you know the problem. Everyone in the building knows the problem.”

  “Then why isn’t the problem solved?” I asked him.

  Ramon did palms-up. “Good question. If I knew, I would tell immediately. And so would Hal. And before this happened, I would say every man in the building would tell and would lay down their life for Ranger.”

  “Maybe it’s not in the building,” I said to Ramon.

  “I would like to believe that.”

  I glanced at Hal. “What do you think?”

  Hal shook his head. “I don’t know what to think. It used to be we were a team here, and now we’re all pulled up inside ourselves. It’s creepy working with people who are looking at you funny.”

  I stood and gathered my trash off the table. “I’m sure Ranger has it under control. He doesn’t seem overly worried.”

  “I saw Ranger jump off a bridge into the Delaware River in January once. He was going after a skip, and he didn’t seem overly worried,” Ramon said. “He handed me his gun, and he did about a sixty-foot free fall into black water.”

  “Did he get the skip?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. He dragged the guy out and cuffed him.”

  “So he was right not to be worried.”

  “Anyone else would have fuckin’ died. Excuse the language.”

  I wandered out of the kitchen, walked past my cubicle and down the hall to Ranger’s office.

  “Knock, knock,” I said at his open door.

  He looked up from his computer. “Babe.”

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “I’ve got as much time as you need.”

  I knew he wasn’t just talking about conversation, and there was a quality to his voice that gave me a rush. And then, for some inexplicable reason, I thought about Morelli. Morelli didn’t flirt like Ranger. Morelli would say sure and then he’d look down my shirt to try to see some boob. It was actually very playful, and it felt affectionate when Morelli did it.

  Ranger relaxed back in his chair. “I’m pretty sure I lost you for a couple beats.”

  “My mind wandered.”

  “As long as it always comes back.”

  I repeated my conversation with Hal and Ramon.

  “This business runs on trust,” Ranger said. “Ninety-five percent of the time, the work is mundane. When it rolls over into the other five percent, you need total confidence that the man watching your back is on the job. Knowing there’s an unidentified weak link in the organization puts stress on everyone.”

  I left Ranger and walked through the building. I couldn’t listen at doors or rifle through files, because I was always on camera. I peeked into the conference rooms and strolled halls. I stuck my head into the gym but stayed away from the locker room. The garage, the practice range, some high-security holding rooms were below ground, and I didn’t go there. The men I encountered gave me a courteous nod and returned to work. No invitations to stay and chat.

  I returned to Ranger. “You have a well-oiled machine,” I told him. “Everything looks neat and clean and secure.”

  He almost raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?”

  “Yep.”

  “How much am I paying you?”

  “Not enough.”

  “If you want more money, you’re going to have to perform more services,” he said.

  “Are you flirting with me again?”

  “No. I’m trying to bribe you.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Would you like to think about it over dinner?”

  “No can do,” I said. “I promised Lula I’d test-drive some barbecue sauce with her.”

  FIVE

  I DROPPED INTO the office a little after five. Connie was shuffling papers around and Lula was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Lula? I thought we were supposed to eat barbecue tonight?”

  “Turns out, Lula only has a hot plate in her apartment, and she couldn’t get the ribs to fit on it, so she had to find someplace else to cook.”

  “She could have used my kitchen.”

  “Yea
h, she considered that, but we didn’t have a key. And we thought you might not have a lot of equipment.”

  “I have a pot and a fry pan. Is she at your house?”

  “Are you insane? No way would I let her into my kitchen. I won’t even let her work the office coffeemaker.”

  “So where is she?”

  “She’s at your parents’ house. She’s been there all afternoon, cooking with your grandmother.”

  Oh boy. My father is Italian descent and my mother is Hungarian. From the day I was born to this moment, I can’t remember ever seeing anything remotely resembling barbecue sauce in my parents’ house. My parents don’t even have a grill. My mom fries hot dogs and what would pass for a hamburger.

  “I guess I’ll head over there and see how it’s going,” I said to Connie. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Not even a little.”

  MY PARENTS AND my Grandma Mazur live in a narrow two-story house that shares a common wall with another narrow two-story house. The three-hundred-year-old woman living in the attached house painted her half lime green because the paint was on sale. My parents’ half is painted mustard yellow and brown. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Neither house is going to make Architectural Digest, but they feel right for the neighborhood and they look like home.

  I parked at the curb, behind Lula’s Firebird, and I let myself into the house. Ordinarily, my grandmother or mother would be waiting for me at the door, driven there by some mystical maternal instinct that alerts them to my approach. Today they were occupied in the kitchen.

  My father was hunkered down in his favorite chair in front of the television. He’s retired from the post office and now drives a cab part-time. He picks up a few people early morning to take to the train station, but mostly the cab is parked in our driveway or at the lodge, where my father plays cards and shoots the baloney with other guys his age looking to get out of the house. I shouted hello, and he grunted a response.

  I shoved through the swinging door that separated kitchen from dining room and sucked in some air. There were racks of ribs laid out on baking sheets on the counter, pots and bowls of red stuff, brown stuff, maroon stuff on the small kitchen table, shakers of cayenne, chili pepper, black pepper, plus bottles of various kinds of hot sauce, and a couple cookbooks turned to the barbecue section, also on the table. The cookbooks, Lula, and Grandma were dotted with multicolored sauce. My mother stood glassy-eyed in a corner, staring out at the car crash in her kitchen.

  “Hey, girlfriend,” Lula said. “Hope you’re hungry, on account of we got whup-ass shit here.”

  Grandma and Lula looked like Jack Sprat and his wife. Lula was all swollen up and voluptuous, busting out of her clothes, and Grandma was more of a deflated balloon. Gravity hadn’t been kind to Grandma, but what Grandma lacked in collagen she made up for with attitude and bright pink lipstick. She’d come to live with my parents when my Grandfather Mazur went in search of life everlasting at the all-you-can-eat heavenly breakfast buffet.

  “This here’s a humdinger dinner we got planned,” Grandma said. “I never barbecued before, but I think we got the hang of it.”

  “Your granny’s gonna be my assistant at the cook-off,” Lula said to me. “And you could be my second assistant. Everybody’s got to have two assistants.”

  “We’re gonna get chef hats and coats so we look professional,” Grandma said. “We’re even gonna get our names stitched on. And I’m thinking of making this a new career. After I get the hat and the coat, I might go get a chef job in a restaurant.”

  “Not me,” Lula said. “I’m not working in no restaurant. After I win the contest, I’m gonna get a television show.”

  “Maybe I could help you with that on my day off,” Grandma said. “I always wanted to be on television.”

  I took a closer look at the ribs. “How did you cook these?”

  “We baked them,” Lula said. “We were supposed to grill them, but we haven’t got no grill, so we just baked the crap out of them in the oven. I don’t think it matters, anyways, after we get the sauce on them. That’s what we’re fixin’ to do now.”

  “We got a bunch of different sauces we’re trying out,” Grandma said. “We bought them in the store and then we doctored them up.”

  “I don’t think that’s allowed,” I said. “This is supposed to be your own sauce recipe.”

  Lula dumped some hot sauce and chili pepper into the bowl of red sauce. “Once it gets out of its bottle, it’s my sauce. And besides, I just added my secret ingredients.”

  “What if they want to see your recipe?”

  “Nuh-ah. No one gets to see Lula’s recipe,” Lula said, wagging her finger at me. “Everybody’ll be stealing it. I give out my recipe, and next thing it’s in the store with someone else’s name on it. No sir, I’m no dummy. I’m gonna take the winning recipe to my deathbed.”

  “Should I start putting the sauce on these suckers?” Grandma asked Lula.

  “Yeah. Make sure everybody gets all the different sauces. Since I’m the chef, I got the most refined taste buds, but we want to see what other people think, too.”

  Grandma slathered sauce on the ribs, and Lula eyeballed them.

  “I might want to add some finishing touches,” Lula said, pulling jars off my mother’s spice rack, shaking out pumpkin pie spices. “These here ribs are gonna be my holiday ribs.”

  “I would never have thought of that,” Grandma said.

  “That’s why I’m the chef and you’re the helper,” Lula said. “I got a creative flare.”

  “What are we eating besides ribs?” I asked.

  Lula looked over at me. “Say what?”

  “You can’t just serve ribs to my father. He’ll want vegetables and gravy and potatoes and dessert.”

  “Hunh,” Lula said. “This is a special tasting night and all he’s gettin’ is ribs.”

  My mother made the sign of the cross.

  “Gee,” I said. “Look at the time. I’m going to have to run. I have work to do. Rex is waiting for me. I think I’m getting a cold.”

  My mother reached out and grabbed me by my T-shirt. “I was in labor twenty-six hours with you,” she said. “You owe me. The least you could do is see this through to the end.”

  “Okay,” Lula said. “Now we put these ribs back into the oven until they look like they been charcoaled.”

  Twenty minutes later, my father took his seat at the head of the table and stared down at his plate of ribs. “What the Sam Hill is this?” he said.

  “Gourmet barbecue ribs,” Grandma told him. “We made them special. They’re gonna have us rolling in money.”

  “Why are they black? And where’s the rest of the food?”

  “They’re black because they’re supposed to look grilled. And this is all the food. This is a tasting menu.”

  My father mumbled something that sounded a lot like taste, my ass. He pushed his ribs around with his fork and squinted down at them. “I don’t see any meat. All I see is bone.”

  “The meat’s all in tasty morsels,” Lula said. “These are more pickin’-up ribs instead of knife-and-fork ribs. And they’re all different. We gotta figure out which we like best.”

  My mother nibbled on one of her ribs. “This tastes a little like Thanksgiving,” she said.

  My father had a rib in his hand. “I’ve got one of them, too,” he said. “It tastes like Thanksgiving after the oven caught on fire and burned up all the meat.”

  What I had on my plate was charred beyond recognition. I loved Grandma and Lula a lot, but not enough to eat the ribs. “You might have cooked these a smidgeon too long,” I said.

  “You could be right,” Lula said. “I expected them to be juicier. I think the problem is I bought grillin’ ribs, and we had to make them into oven ribs.” She turned to Grandma. “What’s your opinion of the ribs? Did you try them all? Is there some you like better than others?”

  “Hard to tell,” Grandma said, “being that
my tongue is on fire.”

  “Yeah,” Lula said. “I made one of them real spicy ’cause that’s the way I like my ribs and my men. Nice and hot.”

  My father was gnawing on a rib, trying to get something off it. He was making grinding, sucking sounds and really concentrating.

  “You keep sucking like that, and you’re gonna give yourself a hernia,” Grandma said.

  “It’d be less painful than eating these burned black, tastes like monkey shit, dry as an old maid’s fart bones.”

  “Excuse me,” Lula said. “Are you trash-talkin’ my ribs? ’Cause I’m not gonna put up with slander on my ribs.”

  My father had a grip on his knife, and I thought the only thing stopping him from plunging it into someone’s chest was he couldn’t decide between Grandma and Lula.

  “Are you really going to enter the competition?” I asked Lula.

  “I already did. I filled out my form and gave it over to the organizer. He wanted me to do a favor for him, and I said nuh-ah. I said I don’t do that no more. Not that I don’t still have my skills, but I moved on with my life, you see what I’m sayin’.”

  “Did he take your form anyway?”

  “Yeah. I got pictures of him from when he was a customer.”

  “You’d blackmail him?”

  “I like to think of it as reminders of happy times,” Lula said. “No need to negatize it. What happens is, he looks at the picture of himself and thinks bein’ with me was better than a fork in the eye. And then he thinks it’s special if that shit stay between him and me and for instance don’t be seen on YouTube. And then he takes my contest application and gives it the stamp of approval.”

  “You got a way with people,” Grandma said.

  “It’s a gift,” Lula said.

  “I’m making myself a peanut butter and olive sandwich,” I said. “Anyone else want one?”

  “I got to go to the lodge,” my father said, pushing away from the table.

  I figured he might get there eventually, but he’d stop at Cluck-in-a-Bucket on the way.

  “I don’t need a sandwich,” Lula said. “But I’ll help clean the kitchen.”