LITMIR.BIZ

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he said. “It’s why I’m here.”

      I stood feeling boneheaded. Sure, why else?

      “Beau, listen up,” Thom said. “How about you just tell your officers we can open the kitchen doors?”

      “Sorry, I can’t,” McClintock said. “A man’s died in the restaurant—”

      “Not officially,” one of the techs pushing the gurney shouted from behind McClintock. “Officially, he’s showing no vital signs.”

      “But you’ve stopped trying to resuscitate him.”

      “That’s right.”

      “And covered up his face.”

      “Right, right.”

      “Meaning I can assume Mr. Sergeant isn’t among the living.”

      “He’s a stone-cold goner, you want my unofficial judgment.” The tech and his partner were maneuvering the gurney past the front counter. “I’m just sayin’, we’re being technical, the coroner’s got to pronounce him DOA at the hospital—”

      “I hear you,” McClintock said. “Thanks.”

      “Don’t mention it,” the tech shouted over his shoulder.

      McClintock released a long breath, then watched as the gurney was wheeled out onto the street and loaded aboard the waiting emergency vehicle. Finally, he looked back at Thom.

      “Sorry for the eruption,” he said.

      “That’s twice you apologized since you walked in.”

      “I suppose.”

      “So when you gonna quit addin’ to your sorrys and do right by lettin’ us open the kitchen?”

      He looked straight at her again. “My men still have work to do. Bottom line, nothing changes until they’re finished.”

      Thomasina’s eyes blazed with anger. I imagined their heat rays searing the tips of McClintock’s ears so they crisped like those of the hog that had started off the night’s assorted problems. Problems that now included one of Nashville’s most prominent citizens dropping dead while performing extraordinary and beautiful karaoke at the restaurant.

      But McClintock’s ears didn’t crisp, curl, or even slightly singe. Nor did any other visible part of his body. He just faced her in unruffled silence.

      “What sort of work?” I broke in before Mount Thom could rumble again. “It isn’t as if a crime was committed—”

      “No one’s suggesting that,” McClintock interrupted.

      “But if Buster died of natural causes…”

      “No one’s saying that either.”

      “Then what are you saying?”

      He shot me a pointed look. “I’m not aware of any rule that says I have to explain my job to you.”

      “I didn’t mean to be difficult…”

      “Once again, Ms. Katz, I’m here on police work. It’s unfortunate if that puts you out. But a man has died. And there’s a chance we’ll need samples to determine why it happened.”

      “Samp—you mean food samples?”

      McClintock nodded so faintly it seemed an inconvenience. “It’s important that no cooked or uncooked food leave the kitchen. The same goes for leftovers. I don’t want your people disposing of anything from inside the restaurant…not a single table scrap.”

      I opened my mouth, closed it. And then just stared at him in baffled silence.

      “How about this pastrami? Since technically it ain’t from the restaurant? Being it wasn’t here when Sergeant kicked the bucket.”

      That was from Luke, who’d apparently been preparing to jump headlong into the breach.

      I looked at him. Thomasina and McClintock did too. He’d slouched forward a little from holding the heavy cooler over by the kitchen doors, where his cousin Red was still playing the role of human roadblock.

      “I’ll have one of my men take it to the lab for trace analysis,” McClintock said.

      Trace analysis? Luke’s face was shocked—and uncharacteristically timid. I didn’t blame him. He needed help explaining. The pastrami had set me back over fifteen hundred dollars.

      “You don’t understand,” I said. “What he means is that it came from—”

      McClintock snapped around to face me. “I got him the first time.”

      “Detective, listen, I’m not sure you did,” I persisted. “See, that pastrami was really, really expensive. I flew it in all the way from Hollywood on a private jet—”

      McClintock brought up his palm in a silencing gesture.

      “We’ll be sure to give it full red-carpet treatment,” he said, and walked off without another word.

      I watched him a moment, at a total loss. Then turned to Thomasina. “What the hell is his problem?”

      She frowned.

      “There goes that foul mouth again,” she said.

      I was in my tiny shipwreck of an office above the delicatessen looking at a framed 8x10 photo of Uncle Murray and me. Murray had hung it to the left of my desk back when it was his desk, right above a battered hardshell acoustic guitar case leaning upright against the wall. The case—a Gibson—had been there the day I arrived from New York and did nothing but take up space. But I hadn’t had the heart to move it elsewhere. It reminded me too much of my uncle…as did the cover of an old Loretta Lynn LP beside my photo, though in a different way.

      Titled “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath,” it showed Loretta wearing a teensy Indian mini-dress with beaded tassels hanging over her thighs. The personalized autograph written across those same shapely bare thighs read, “What you thinkin’ about, Murray? LL.”

      As if she’d needed to ask.

      It was now five minutes past midnight. At around eleven-thirty, the last of the police officers and evidence techs had left the restaurant below, parading off with Ziploc bags full of table scraps and armloads of perishables from our freezers and refrigerators. My customers and serving staff had been allowed to go home long before that, and although the kitchen was no longer under cordon, Newt and Jimmy had stuck around to help Thomasina put it—and the dining room—back together again.

      All the deli’s horses and all the deli’s men, I thought moodily.

      With the cops gone, I’d stepped out onto the street for a smoke. But before I could end my latest cigarette abstinence streak at four days and counting, I’d turned back inside without lighting it and pushed through the kitchen doors, thankful the office was finally accessible again. Then I’d walked upstairs, gotten a Goo Goo cluster and Nestlé bar out of my top drawer, and set them in front of me as I sat studying their wrappers and deciding which one to greedily ingest.

      I hadn’t yet made my choice, but the unlit cigarette was still in my mouth. The Non-Smokers Protection Act banned smoking in Nashville’s workplaces, so I couldn’t light up till I left the premises. Although this was my private office, and I was the only person who actually worked in it, I’d been told that wasn’t a satisfactory loophole. No sense getting shut down on a legal trifle. If Murray’s was going to close, it would be in grand fashion.

      The result, say, of a storm of bad publicity due to a local bigshot dying from our food. Hypothetically, of course.

      I stared at the snapshot above the untouchable guitar case and reminisced, my door locked so nobody could walk in and catch me sautéing in melancholy. My dad had taken the picture at Murray’s suburban home in Hicksville, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan on the Long Island

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