Taco Noir (7 page)

              It was outrageous, and once again it would have made me the big blind, but seeing how we were out of sandwiches and beer, I decided that glory never went to the faint of heart.

              “Fine,” I told Jesse. “Let’s play some poker.”

              The dealer threw two cards each at us and I saw that I had a pair of jacks. Or, as I call them, a sucker’s hand. Not good enough to win most of the time, but good enough to make you believe that you had something. Across the table, Jesse dabbed his forehead and peeked at his hand.

              “I’ll see and raise three grand,” he said nonchalantly, tossing in most of his chips. I watched his mug, figuring that he must have had better than my jacks. He sat motionless as the sweat ran down his chins, and his water glass remained untouched.

              “I’ll call,” I sighed, hoping for another jack on the flop. What greeted me was not very welcome to either of us. A deuce, five, ten.  Whatever we had in our hands was what we were playing.

              I bet a grand, which in these circumstances is almost as bad as checking. Jesse pushed in a grand as well, and we both waited to see what bad news came up.

            The dealer threw a jack onto the table, leaving me with trips, which would beat anything Sweet Jesse was holding. Suspecting he might hold queens or better, I threw in another grand, leaving us still evenly matched with five grand. He threw in another grand to call, and I noticed that the water still lay untouched.

            The river card came and with it brought potential disaster. The dealer turned up an ace. If I was right about Sweet Jesse’s pocket aces, I was dead. If he only had a pair of kings as hole cards, however, I would clean him out. I looked down at my anemic stack of chips and checked, broadcasting weakness. Jesse peeked under his hole cards, as if they had somehow changed in the minutes since he last looked. He then turned his gaze up to stare at me, and sat like a fat, sweaty statue.

            “I say we call an end to this evening,” he said after a moment, pushing the remainder of his chips into the pile. “All in.”

            I did my best not to blink, grit my jaw, or even breathe as Sweet Jesse wiped his forehead and waited for me to make my play.

            Like me, Jesse knew the score. He also knew that I figured if he was holding the pocket aces, he would win. And whether he was or not, only he knew.

            There was a hot, sweaty eternity between us as I stalled, counting chips, looking at my hole cards, and dividing three-hundred and nine by seventeen in my head I was hoping for any sign that Sweet Jesse was ready to crack.

Finally he did.

I called as Sweet Jesse took the most refreshing drink of ice water I had ever seen in my life.

SWEET JESSE’S MONTE CRISTO SANDWICH

4 large eggs

1/4
^th
cup of whole milk

2 teaspoons sugar

2 tablespoons hot sauce

½ teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

12 slices thick, heavy sandwich bread

6 slices Swiss cheese

12 or so slices of thin deli ham

12 slices of thin turkey

3 tablespoons oil for pan

6 tablespoons strawberry preserve, served on the side of each sandwich

• In a shallow bowl, mix the eggs, milk, sugar, hot sauce, and cinnamon. On your workspace, build a pile of sandwiches out of your Dijon mustard, bread, cheese, ham, and turkey. Try not to be bashful with the cold cuts.
  

• Heat oil over medium heat, and dredge your sandwiches through the egg mixture, coating both sides of the sandwich. Fry on each side until both are a light brown.
  

• Serve them up with the strawberry preserves on the side, and make sure that you make enough for you, your guests, and any flatfoot that might happen to raid your game.
  

THE CASE OF VINTAGE LARCENY

Thefts occur, losses are suffered, and meats are tendered.

It was a hot, sticky, miserable day when Marcel Robest drifted into my office, making a bad day worse. I knew of Robest from what I gleaned from the society pages before I wrapped my garbage in them. Men such as Robest were referred to as “men of leisure” in polite society, or what my Ma would have referred to as lazy good-for-nothings. They were the guys with so much loot that they didn’t even have to pretend to work. Their species wasn’t usually spotted before four in the afternoon, and they tended to stalk their prey until the wee hours of the morning. Still, he stunk with wealth, so I sat up and willed my suit to look as if I hadn’t taken it off the hanger three days before.

              “What can I do for you?” I asked the pudgy, middle-aged swell with the dapper salt-and-pepper hair. He sat down in the chair I reserve for the paying guests and raised his nose disapprovingly, his refined olfactory senses used to better than the five-and-dime’s best cologne. I shifted forward in my seat and paid close attention to what the man with the fat wallet had to say.

              “I want you to find a bottle of wine for me,” he said curtly, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket and waving it beneath his nose.

              “I think you made a wrong turn at Fifth and Elm. This isn’t Joe’s Bar and Grill.”

              “The wine I seek,” said Robest, ignoring my attempt at wit, “is a single bottle of Henri O’liveri Madeira. It is of a 1791 vintage and was bottled in 1841.” His eyes took on a look of someone who had loved and lost, but in his case, the loss might have held some recycle value.

              “And why exactly do you want this bottle?” I asked, suspecting that the answer might be a bit unseemly.             

              “It is MY bottle!” said the fat man, slamming a dainty fist onto my desk in way of punctuation. “It was stolen from my personal cellar and I want it returned to me!” He slipped his hand off of my desk and held it away from my sight. I paid him the courtesy of pretending not to notice him rubbing a bruised hand.

              “I see,” I said, opening up a notebook and pulling an attentive expression from my repertoire. “I take it your bottle of booze is pretty rare?”

              “The grapes of this particular wine were harvested during the lifetime of Marie Antoinette,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “A case was given to Queen Victoria as a birthday present, and this particular bottle of ‘booze,’ as you call it, was given to Sir Winston as a thank you for services rendered to the crown.” His eyes shone with the zeal of my least favorite uncle, a mug that spends every holiday trying to introduce me to religion. “To lose such a prize is an abomination.”

              “I follow you,” I said. “And how did you manage to get your hooks on such a prize?”

              “How I came to own it is of no matter,” he said, snapping out of it. “What is important is that the bottle come back to me.”

              “So that you can drink an old bottle of wine?” I asked, imagining a very expensive salad dressing in a dusty glass coffin.

              “So that I can possess an ancient treasure!” he hissed, his eyes narrowing. It didn’t take much to picture Robest slithering into the garden selling apples. “That bottle of wine, it isn’t to drink. It is to own.”

              I told the fleshy little glutton that he had himself an agent, and named the highest price I could think of. He agreed without a second thought, and it made me regret that I couldn’t come up with a bigger number. Robest might have been off his hotdog, but his money was green.

              I spent the day interviewing the help. It came to no one’s surprise that most of his employees couldn’t stand the smug bastard, and if I were Robest I would have thought twice before I chowed down on tonight’s seafood bisque. Despite their apparent hatred of the man, they all seemed crystal clear on who paid the bills. The picture they painted of Robest was of a secretive, greedy man who wasn’t in the habit of sharing anything with anyone. No one in his employ was familiar with any of the contents of his wine cellar, let alone the priceless bottle that lay inside. I had grilled them like halibuts, and came away with the feeling that each of them had as much a chance to find the bottle of Madeira as they would of better employment. But what they lacked in enological knowledge, they made up for in spades in the gossip department.

              The evening the bottle went missing from Robest’s cellar, he had hosted a small dinner party for an intimate group of sycophants, catered by a young, up-and-coming chef in the city. The dinner was designed to showcase Robest’s wine cellar and pair some of his treasures with culinary creations created to rub his fortune in the faces of those who attended. From all accounts, he did just that, and the foie gras had left an ashen taste in the attendee’s mouths.

              Robest’s valet gave me the name of the half-dozen or so envious souls in attendance that evening, as well as letting loose a lot of venom he kept in reserve from his boss. Apparently there was nothing that Robest did that didn’t offend his staff. If I was the fat man, I might inspect my toothbrush before next using it.

              I left Robest’s household feeling a little dirty but armed with a short list of people who could have made off with the               Madeira that evening. I considered stopping by my apartment to wash some of the disdain off me before I moved on, but I figured the quicker I solved this case, the quicker I could dab a little cash behind each ear.

              The thing I just love about society swells is that they all believe in their heart of hearts that they are better than you. Perhaps it’s money, perhaps it’s breeding, perhaps it’s the soft, doughy hands that have never even so much as touched an honest day’s work. Whatever the reason, they seem down-right shocked whenever you have occasion to lay your hands on them. I might be generalizing, but so far a well-placed slap or a bent finger has loosened the tongue of many of the city’s most upstanding citizens, and it was a belief which I hoped would continue to serve me.

              I made a quick list of suspects from Robest’s soirée, and had a quicker job of crossing each name off said list. To a person, each of the hoi-polloi had a witness who could vouch for them, could prove that they never made it into the cellar, or couldn’t tell Madeira from mud water. They were simply there to taste the food that Robest had set out for them and to be seen. At the end of a long, brutal day, I had nothing but an exhausted list and bruised knuckles to show for it. I rolled the dice and came up snake–eyes.

              I returned to the office to wrap up some loose ends and to call Robest and tell him that he could keep all his great-smelling cash, when suddenly I got a tip in the form of an empty, growling stomach.

              I had yet to speak to the celebrity chef.

              Chef Martin LaRue was known in the trades as “the Big Man.” While I was a little on the chunky side, LaRue was down-right solid, built like a line-backer, and ready to throw fear into the suspension of even the heartiest taxi. He ran a catering business out of a swank little café he owned on the West Side. Café LaRue was the current flavor of the month, and at nine o’clock the line was around the block with people who had hopes of getting a table so that they could tell all their friends that they had gotten a table. The guy who guarded the front door looked like the guy who might guard the front door of Fort Knox, so I decided to try a more direct approach.

              I made my way around the building and through the trash-strewn alleys behind the Café LaRue, looking for the service door. The door was unlocked, and someone who looked to be the sous chef was enjoying a cigarette. From behind him blared the maddening sounds of a busy kitchen, where every second word was a curse word and the ones in between were French. It would be easier to catch the chef here, in his own element.

              I just had to keep my eyes open for the butcher’s knife.

              I made my way inside, where the racket and the chaos were at its thickest. Chef LaRue was at the center of his kingdom, shaking pans and stirring pots on at the range, and barking orders over his shoulder. I put a hand on the big man, and as I did, every action in the break-neck kitchen ceased, and the kitchen fell silent.

              “Hello, my dear detective,” said Chef LaRue, as if we were old chaps from the culinary academy.  “How may I be of service to you?”

              “You could start by telling me how you knew I would be turning up here,” I asked.

              “Monsieur Robest has been running all about town, squealing like a stuck pig about how his precious Madeira had been stolen during dinner,” he said in the same tone he might take as if discussing the price of snails. “I thought it only be a matter of time before some cheap gumshoe might come knocking on my door.” He dropped the spoon into his sauce and turned to look at me.

              “No offense,” he offered. I looked down at my trench coat and well-worn shoes.

              “None taken,” I said. “Now if you would be so kind as to spill the Cassoulet regarding the expensive vino, we can wrap this up quickly.”

              “My dear detective,” said LaRue, feigning hurt feelings. “Surely you cannot suspect Chef LaRue of such chicanery?”

              “Cut the baloney, Big Man,” I said, grabbing him by the collar of his chef’s jacket and yanking him towards me. “I know that Robest invited you into his cellar and I know that you know your wines!”

              “Of course I know my wines,” smiled the chef. “I’m French!” He slapped me on the shoulder and his smile widened. “But please, if we are to continue this conversation, allow us to do so away from the kitchen.” He turned towards the assistants in the kitchen, and they all turned away from the Frenchman and flew into a flurry of activity, looking everywhere but into the eyes of the chef. He opened the door leading to the front of the house and bid me enter.  He led me to a quiet corner in the back of the dining area, and we sat.