but just barely hanging on by a thread. It’s comfortable, sort of.
In fact, that’s what’s wrong with it. It’s not anything enough.
It’s one of those places you agree on when he doesn’t feel like Chinese and you don’t feel like Italian, and Thai sounds too exotic and a hamburger too ordinary. Judging from the diners, it’s nobody’s first choice, but everyone can agree on it.
Madison, her right index finger heavily bandaged, greets us at the door as though we are long-lost relatives from the old country. She is what my mother would call “on.” I think it has to do with being in her element.
“What a fiasco,” she says and laughs a tinny laugh. “Well, at least the publicity hasn’t hurt us any.” She shepherds us through the half-empty restaurant to a spot against the back wall. It’s apparent to me that Madison on Park can’t live on its six-year-old Zagat rating much longer.
A waiter appears and pulls the table out for me. I slide into the banquette while Howard takes the seat facing me and asks Madison how Nick is taking last night’s disappointment.
She says they’ll surely never forget it and looks down at her bandages. She leans into the table and says quietly, “If it didn’t hurt so damn much, I’d cut off another one just to keep the sympathy diners coming in.”
Howard looks just as appalled as I feel, and Madison seems to sense her mistake. She once again laughs her tinny laugh to signal she was only joking and then disappears toward the kitchen.
I pick up my menu, open it and am surprised by the offerings. The choices are exotic. The prices are through the roof. I’m thrilled because I now have a bead on what the restaurant needs. Forget homey. Forget comfortable. You don’t pay these kinds of prices just for the food, you pay them for atmosphere.
And if there’s one thing I know how to create, it’s ambience.
I close my eyes, imagining this place with chandeliers rather than high hats, fabric walls rather than paneling, a fabulous window treatment. When I open them, I catch the faintest glimpse of someone through the window, just now walking out of view. Though I didn’t see his face, I’d know that leather jacket anywhere. So when Howard asks me if there is anything I see that I want, I nearly choke on my water. When I can catch my breath I tell him, as I always do, to order for both of us.
Howard orders the inzimino, which he tells me is calamari, spinach, chickpeas and nero d’avola served on a crouton. I don’t have a clue what nero d’avola is, but I say, “and for me?” which tells him I’d only eat his choice at gunpoint, and even then I might not. He suggests the foie gras and braised duck terrine, and I give him my please take pity on me look. He orders me a tricolor salad and then goes on to order three different entrées of which he requests petit portions for us to share and taste. Like I would really touch a braised pork shank with pepperoncini and wild mushrooms over a ragout of root vegetables.
While he orders, I watch Drew Scoones pantomiming outside the window. The best I can tell, he’s asking me to go ahead and ask Howard something. I shake my head. Howard catches me, shifts around in his seat so that he can see out the window, and asks what I’m looking at since Drew is no longer in view.
I tell him the window treatment is dreadful. He turns back to me. Drew comes back into view. Howard turns for another look. Drew manages to disappear again.
If Drew wants to know what Howard knows, he can ask him himself. What does he think? That Howard is a murderer? As far as I know, Howard’s never done an illegal thing in his life—if you don’t count the turn he made against the light the night that Drew followed us and pulled him over to give him a ticket.
And that was entrapment.
And Howard is not duplicitous—except maybe the whole trolling thing on JDate when we were first going out. But I don’t count that since he thought he was flirting with me and not with my mother, who’d registered me without my knowledge or participation.
So what if he knew the Health Department Inspector? He’s a food critic. Shouldn’t he know the man who makes sure he isn’t going to get food poisoning doing his job?
“So, Teddi, about The Steak-Out…” he starts. “I wanted to ask you—” But Nick comes over, his chef’s hat askew, and interrupts him.
“Howard’s girl,” he says, nodding at me and grabbing up my hand to shake it. “Good to meet you again. Madison see you yet?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead he asks Howard if he can talk to him alone for a minute, apologizing to me as he asks.
Howard, looking horrified, says, “No,” really weirdly. Like just “no,” without any “sorry,” or “something wrong?” or anything. I remind myself that another of my New Year’s resolutions was to stop seeing perfectly ordinary things as suspicious. Just because Drew Scoones put a bug in my ear (or wherever he put it) is no reason to let my imagination run away with me.
“I have to powder my nose, anyway,” I say, putting my napkin beside my plate and coming to a stand.
Nick apologizes again and says he only needs a minute while Howard reaches out his hand to stop me from leaving the table. Drew is still watching, now from across the street, and I can just see relating this to him and listening to him guess that Howard’s credit card was refused.
I pat Howard’s hand and get up from the table. The layouts of most restaurants fall into two categories. Cheaper, funkier ones often have their restroom toward the side or front of the place. The ones that want to appear classier, more exclusive, have them in the back, near the kitchen, because they aren’t afraid of what a patron might see. The layout of Madison on Park and The Steak-Out are nearly identical—loos near the kitchen, only the placement of the Male/Female rooms are reversed.
Which explains why I am frozen in my tracks in front of the restroom doors, feeling slightly nauseated and just a trifle dizzy.
“Are you all right?” I hear someone say, and turn to find Madison standing beside me. “You look kind of green, dear.”
I assure her I’m fine, but my hand just won’t reach out and grasp the doorknob. I feel sweat break out on my upper lip.
“Shall I get Howard?” she asks, seemingly caught between leaving me to possibly fall down in a dead faint and wanting someone else to deal with it.
I explain about The Steak-Out and being the one to open the men’s room door and find the body.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she coos over me solicitously. Or, should I say, salaciously. She, like everyone else, no doubt wants the gory details. “So sad about Joe. Who would do a thing like that? In a men’s room, no less. Leave it to a man, right? I swear, it’s the sort of thing you see on television. A regular mob hit, or made to look like one, I’d say. So sad.”
“So you knew him?” I ask, wishing I could pull my antennae in. None of my business. None of my business.
Still…
“Don’t tell Nick,” she says, lowering her voice dramatically. “Especially now. But this was before I even knew Nick, anyway. Joe and I…we were kind of an item for a while. Not that anyone knew. We kept it hush-hush. I mean, a restaurateur and the health inspector. It could be misinterpreted.”
“You owned this restaurant before you knew Nick?” I ask.
