Balling the Jack

“Not quite. Try Garrett, Winston. CEO of Pyramid Publishing. On the board at the Met. Net worth of about twenty million.”

“Wow. Who’s he suing?”

“He’s not suing anybody. His wife is.”

“His wife, sir?”

“Regina Garrett. Big socialite. Always popping up in the paper. A month ago she threw a cocktail party to honor some French designer. Small party, but top-shelf. Real A-list crowd. Had the thing catered by Prego’s, a little Italian outfit. They do appetizers, cheese and crackers, that kind of thing. Well, an hour into the party, six people come down with food poisoning. Not serious, no one kicked the bucket, but apparently a real mess. People losing it out both ends, some not making it to the bathroom. You get the picture.”

“Yes, sir. What caused the poisoning?”

“They traced it to the bean dip. It seems the caterer mixed together two seasonings, cilantro and pegrini. They’re okay by themselves, but combine ’em and the effect on the human digestive system is explosive. Vomiting, diarrhea, the works. Now you and me, maybe we get steamed, demand our money back, that’s the end of it. But to these society types, this kind of thing is the Hindenburg. Their good name, social standing, all that on the line. And I take it this Regina Garrett is no lamb to start with. She wants a hundred thousand dollars to cover her anguish and the damage to her reputation, and a letter of apology sent to each of the guests. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, sir. It sounds a little lightweight to me.”

“That’s because, Reasons, you don’t see the larger picture. This isn’t just about some bad bean dip. Mr. Garrett’s company, Pyramid, is the third-largest publishing house in the city. They probably do five million dollars in legal fees a year. We shine on this one, he’s indicated he’ll steer some of that our way. Now what do you think?”

I think it’s crossed over from lightweight to bullshit.

“I think it sounds like a winner, sir.”

“Good. We depose Prego in half an hour. Mrs. Garrett we do at noon. I want you to sit in on both of them.”

“Yes, sir.”

GIUSEPPE PREGO WALKS into the conference room looking like a man with two weeks to live. The moment I see him I know we’re working the wrong side of this case. He keeps turning his hat in his hands, patting his head with a kerchief. He looks at both lawyers with worry but with deep trust, his whole manner suggesting that some huge mistake has occurred, but he, Giuseppe Prego, is now here to talk to the good people involved and set the matter straight. I like him off the bat. In a deep accent he tells his side of the story.

His American dream started when he opened a twenty-four-hour deli in Gramercy Park in 1970. He and his wife worked round the clock, every day but Christmas. In the eighties they began catering small parties for friends and built a solid reputation for gourmet appetizers. They impressed a few upscale clients with their distinctive hors d’oeuvres and found a profitable niche working just the kind of intimate affair thrown by Regina Garrett. The way Prego tells it he made the bean dip for the party, all right, but not with pegrini.

“You must understand. I work with food twenty-five years. Anybody who work with food know you can’t mix cilantro and pegrini. Never.

“That night, I deliver the hors d’oeuvres myself. I show them all to Mrs. Garrett in the kitchen. She say fine, fine, except the bean dip. She say it not look ‘friendly’ enough. I want to say, ‘Friendly’? What is ‘friendly’? This is cilantro bean dip. People will not talk to it, they will eat it. I want to say this but I don’t, of course. I say, ‘Mrs. Garrett, you want it to look friendly, you put some parsley on top, just a little, the green on the black look nice—you know, friendly.’ I ask her you want me to do it but she say no, she will do it. So I leave, go back to my store. Then later she call up yelling about people sick and about pegrini. I say, ‘Pegrini, what pegrini?’ She hang up and then two days later a lawyer come into my store with papers. Twenty-five years in the same store and I never get papers from a lawyer.”

He says his niece Rosa will back him up. She stayed to work the party and saw Mrs. Garrett dumping a green seasoning into the bean dip before sending her out with the tray.

When he finishes, Prego stands and shakes the hand of everyone in the room. His lawyer, the stenographer, even me and Carter. He looks hugely relieved, dabbing at his face again as he leaves. I’d bet two weeks’ salary the man hasn’t told a lie in his life.

REGINA GARRETT STROLLS in at twelve-fifteen for her noon deposition. One look at her and it’s clear why her hubby kicked all that ass in the business world. If she waited at home for me, I’d stay in the office too. For old Winston’s sake I hope he has something going on the side.

She shows up for the session in a fur, perches her ninety-five pounds on a chair and looks all of us up and down. If her features were a little softer she’d look just like the Grinch. The tanning rooms have left her a light orange and her last lift pulled the skin over her cheeks and eyes tighter than a drum. She smokes one filtered cigarette after another. I keep waiting for a poodle to jump in her lap.

To me she seems exactly the kind of woman who would destroy anyone before she’d slip one rung on the social ladder. As she speaks, her eyes slide around the room.

Mrs. Garrett says she served everything as she received it. Prego delivered the hors d’oeuvres about 5 P.M. and stayed to put the final touches on the bean dip. He sprinkled a seasoning over the top of it and she asked what it was. He said it was pegrini.

“The name jogged something in my memory, some cautionary note about its safety, the way it reacted with other spices, something. I raised the question with Mr. Prego but he waved it off. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You can never have enough pegrini. It goes with everything.’ Well, not being a chef myself, of course, I took his word for it. He came well recommended, after all. I felt a little uneasy, but I put the dip on Rose’s tray and sent it out into the crowd. And then … oh, it hurts even to think of it, but you know the rest. As soon as people were taken ill I knew my suspicions were right. I called Mr. Prego immediately and confronted him and he—why, the man denied everything. Denied he had added any pegrini at all. And the names he called me! My word. I know I’m under oath, but I’d just as soon not repeat them. Anyway, that’s just how it happened.”

And I’m a Choctaw Indian.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_5772aa69-d9c7-5a1e-af59-1325801acaad)

THE FIRST DRINK of the day is the best. Cools the head and marks the formal start of the evening. I could use one. I just came from the pad, where I walked in on this exchange:

“Come now, Mike, remember what we talked about. You don’t want to say the Mets got killed. How about they were defeated? Or better yet, outscored?”

Mike gets a puppy-dog smile on his face and says, “Right. They were outscored.”

I left without a word. What is there to say?

“Hi, Mason. Draw me the coldest one you got.”

“Coming up.”

Mason bartends here at Adam’s Curse on dart night. He’s the only real person I know who rolls up his T-shirts and keeps a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve. He slides me a pint, pops a toothpick in his mouth, and leans forward on his hands on the long wooden bar.

“I’ll say it once. Ready?”

I nod.

“But in the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat, psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.”

“Pink Floyd. The Wall. ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part I.’”

He shrugs. “That was a gimme. I know you got a big match tonight. Next time you’ll earn your suds.”

I don’t doubt it. Every week Mason gives me one line of rock ’n’ roll. If I name the band, song and album, our team gets a round on the house. Tonight he went easy on me. When he wants to be a ballbuster he’ll drop something from Hüsker Dü, or PiL. I’ll run it by the whole team and still strike out.

The match he mentioned is the reason I’m here. Tonight our team, the Drinkers, takes on the Hellions for the Manhattan Tuesday Night Darts Championship. The Hellions beat us out for the league title and this is our chance to even the score.

It won’t be easy. They don’t make dart teams any tougher than this crew. They play out of County Hell Pub, a blue-collar Irish joint in Hell’s Kitchen. One of Papa O’Shea’s bars, and if you’ve seen it you know why they got into darts. If I drank in that neighborhood I’d carry a weapon too.

The Hellions have walked off with the last three titles, and their captain, Joe Duggan, is a piece of work. As mean a mick as ever washed onto our shores. I get spooked just looking at him. Thin and strong and pale, with yellow eyes and a bad complexion. More on him in a minute.

First, a little background on darts. To me, it’s the best bar game there is. Full of skill and strategy, and best of all, you get better the more you drink. Up to a point, anyway. I learned to play from Dad, who grew up throwing for drinks in neighborhood bars in south Jersey. In college I kept a board on the back of my door and played for shots with the fellas.

One night after graduation, Dave and I challenged a couple drunks to a game in a West Side dive. Loser buys. We beat ’em four straight with their darts. After the last game they showed us empty wallets and the bigger one steadied himself with a hand on my shoulder.

“So you see, gents, we kenna pay. But a debt is a debt, so I give you this.”

He handed me a business card with “Adam’s Curse” printed on it.

“Go there and see Stella. Tell her Jerry sent you. She’ll put you on a team and you can stop beating up on the likes of us.” They rolled out the door.

The next day we looked up Adam’s Curse and met Stella, the seventy-fìve-year old matron of the place. “So you beat Jerry, did you?” she asked.

“Four straight, ma’am.”

“Don’t let it go to your head. Every time he sends me a new team I let him drink on the house for half an hour. I run eight squads out of here on two nights and Jerry sent half of them to me. Now—you’ll need six players to field a team. Can you do that?”