Why Is Murder On The Menu, Anyway?

“What are you? Eleven years old?” I ask. Okay, that might be a little harsh, but she is really bugging me. “I just saw another dead body. I really thought that the first one would hold me for this lifetime. So yes, Drew Scoones was there. So yes, he’s still good-looking.”

This last bit is the understatement of the year. And, so yes, my stomach did do flip-flops at the sight of him, but I’ll never admit it, because it was clear his didn’t do flip-flops at the sight of me. Maybe I should have sprung for the highlights after all.

“For all I know, he’s married by now.”

“He’s not.” Bobbie says this like she absolutely knows. When I give her the how-can-you-possibly-know-that? look, she smiles and says, “Diane.”

I imagine Drew Scoones thinking that I am keeping tabs on him and want to crawl into a hole and die.

“Mom!” Jesse yells out the front door to me, opening it enough to let loose Maggie May, the bichon frise I “inherited” from Elise Meyers, the woman I found murdered last year. (Okay, fine. So I stole the dog. She was dead and her husband, who was trying to kill her before someone else beat him to it, wasn’t going to take care of her dog, now was he?) Jesse gestures with his hand that there is someone on the phone.

“It’s probably Howard,” I tell Bobbie. “He’s taking me out to some Iron Chef cook-off thing tonight. Maybe I can beg off.”

Bobbie gives me the look. The one that says I’m breaking yet another Long Island rule—canceling an engagement the same day. It seems like, much to Bobbie and my mother’s dismay, I will never learn how to get ahead on Long Island. At nearly forty, it’s probably too late.

Then she concedes that maybe, under the circumstances, it could be all right.

“Maybe,” she says, grabbing Maggie May’s collar and dragging her into the house. “Like if you make up some wild story about seeing some murdered guy on the john….”

“It’s Drew,” Jesse says breathlessly, and his face is lit up like it’s Superman calling. “You should invite him to dinner, Mom,” he says, then scrunches up his nose at the thought of my cooking. “Or something, anyway,” he adds.

I pretend to be offended by my eleven-year-old’s suggestion as I ruffle his hair on my way to the kitchen, where I pick up the portable from the counter and say, “Hello.”

“You’re gonna love this one,” he says, like there hasn’t been a three-month lull in our conversations, like I haven’t jumped every time the phone rang since the last time he called me, eighty-six days ago. “Your dead guy? He’s the one who shut down Sheldon’s of Great Neck. Isn’t that where you were planning to have Dana’s bat mitzvah?”

He knows exactly where her bat mitzvah was supposed to be. He even went with me to look Sheldon’s over, to make plans, to pick which room to have the meal in, which one to serve the hors d’oeuvres.

And then he just stopped calling. “What do you mean, ‘he was the one who shut it down’?” I ask.

“He’s…that is, he was, with the Board of Health. He was the food inspector who claimed Sheldon’s didn’t meet the County’s standards. Looks like you are S.O.L. As usual.”

“As long as it doesn’t make me a suspect,” I say. I mean, been there, done that, and “shit outta luck” beats having to prove I’m innocent—or that my best friend is—again.

Drew just laughs.

“Well, I do have a motive,” I concede. “Though you know that I didn’t know who he was until this moment. And okay, I had opportunity. I admit I was there in the restaurant when he was killed. But means?”

I think for just a nanosecond and I can’t believe what crosses my mind.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve found the gun and it’s registered to Rio.”

Drew laughs again at the mention of my thank-God-he’s-behind-me ex-husband, a man who believed in the principle of survival of the slickest. “I forgot how funny you are,” he says.

There’s a silence while he waits for me to ask whose fault that is.

I don’t.

“So anyway,” he says, “I just thought you’d want to know the guy who screwed you is dead.”

Ha. The guy who screwed me is on the other end of the phone telling me the guy who screwed me is dead.

“So whatcha been up to?” he asks, just baiting me into asking him why he vanished off the face of my earth.

“Business,” I say. “I told you today, I’m doing a lot of commercial properties, restaurants, things like that.”

He doesn’t say anything, waiting, I suppose, for me to ask him what he’s been doing. Bobbie will give up buying shoes before I ask that.

“Is there anything else?” I ask, as in: is there a reason I’m sitting here holding on to the phone, unable to breathe, wishing that we were still friends? Still more than friends?

“You doing anything tonight?” he asks. I tell him I’ve got a date, but the cocky bastard sounds like he doesn’t believe me.

“Howard is taking me to some charity cook-off,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “Howard. That doesn’t exactly count as a date.”

“He’s picking me up, paying for my dinner, taking me to a show, and bringing me home. What part of that isn’t a date?” I ask. Bobbie, putting her little crocheted shrug over my shoulders in an attempt to influence what I’m going to wear tonight, gives me a thumbs-up. She seems to think that the right sweater will always win the day.

He tells me, “the part that comes next.”

“What comes next is none of your business,” I tell him and hang up. I give Bobbie a look that says it’s none of hers, either, and head upstairs to get dressed without my fairy godmother to give me her glass slippers, though I think I still have the Manolos she loaned me a few weeks ago.

Howard is simply glowing this evening. It’s like he’s been lit from within, and he is devastatingly handsome in a beige linen jacket over a chocolate-brown T-shirt that hugs his torso like…Well, I’m not going there, so suffice it to say that Howard is over six feet tall, filled out without any fat, and he has the fastest smile I’ve ever seen. Nothing lights a face like a smile.

He has told me three times how his friend Nick, the chef at Madison on Park, has been practicing for this evening, how he has made all kinds of entrées and desserts and how Howard has had to try them all. He throws around words like Provençale and forestiere like I’m supposed to know what he means. He says Nick did a dish with roasted Maine lobster and kabocha squash gnocchi with sautéed black trumpets in sage oil. When I look stricken he assures me that the trumpets are mushrooms and not swans, and shakes his head at me.

“You’ve no appreciation for good food,” he complains as if I’m just being stubborn. He glances at our tickets and gestures with his chin to keep progressing down the aisle of the cavernous high school auditorium where they have set up several kitchens on the stage and placed big TV screens around the room so they can zoom in on the stovetops and prep areas.

What he means is that the other night when he took me out to review a new Italian restaurant for Newsday, the Dentice Mare Monte was absolutely wasted on me. As is anything with olives or artichokes or a host of other foods he thinks God invented just to pleasure man.

We get to our row and he grimaces because we are obviously farther back than row B ought to be. He hurries up ahead, sees that there are rows AA to FF before the single alphabet begins, and, with obvious disappointment, waves me into our row in front of him. Excusing ourselves, we clamber over people who refuse to stand up to let us get to our seats—and who then have the nerve to glare at us when we stumble over their purses and toes. I remind Howard as we navigate the various obstacles that the gâteau au chocolat wasn’t wasted on me.

He pulls a laugh from his inexhaustible supply as we take our seats, and he wonders aloud how it is that I can remember the French names only for desserts or things that involve chocolate.

“Chocolat,” I correct, saying it with what I hope is a convincing French accent.

He waves away my attempt at being seductive and tells me that I should have been there for the practice run. “Cockle Bruschetta,” he says, like cockles were likely to be the surprise ingredient they’d have the chefs use tonight. “Then a choucroute Royale Alsacienne, done not with sauerkraut but with a pickled mushroom…” He closes his eyes like he’s having sex and it is too perfect to describe.

At least, I think he’d close his eyes during sex. It’s not something I know firsthand.

“And just this morning I had to go on a scavenger hunt for tamarind paste,” he tells me as I settle into my seat and take in our surroundings. “Took me until nearly noon to find it in this little Indian spice place on Broadway down on the South Shore.”

“The Taj? The one next to The Steak-Out?” I ask. I remind him that was where I was at lunchtime, and it was where I discovered the murdered man I’ve already told him about.

He stops helping me off with Bobbie’s shrug and asks me if I’m sure. I tell him it’s not the sort of thing that one forgets. And then I could swear he shudders.

“You all right?” I ask and he gets all defensive, like I’ve impugned his manhood or something.

“I suppose you talked to the police,” he says. I tell him that yes, they interviewed my mother and me. But, because the chip on his shoulder is the size of Shea Stadium when it comes to Drew Scoones, I don’t mention just who “they” were.