A Taste of the Nightlife (17 page)

“We can’t use the dining room,” Marie reminded me. That was still cop territory. O’Grady had been very clear on that.

“But we can use the kitchen and the back door. Grab a bin and let’s go.” I hefted a tub of not-so-new-anymore potatoes and started up the stairs.

“Yes, Chef,” said Jorgé.

“Yes, Chef!” said Marie.

“Yes, Chef!” said Suchai.

After that, it got kind of amazing. First it was just the four of us, sorting, chopping, getting the burners fired and filling that cold kitchen with the sounds and smells that meant life. Then Mohammed, another of our line cooks, came in, towing Marie’s apprentice, Paolo, behind him. They said nothing, just washed up, found knives and started taking apart crates of tomatoes. Somebody had gotten busy on the phone, and I hadn’t even seen who it was. By the time we got around to turning the toasted bread into crumbs and croutons for the
pomodoro
, the whole line—including all the baby Bobby Flays—was in. Half the front-of-the-house crew took up stations beside them to pack boxes with sandwiches and highly improvised bar cookies, courtesy of Marie and Paolo. The other half had appropriated folding tables from somewhere and set them up out back because the food pantry workers had wanted to know how soon they could start funneling people toward us, and now we had a line.

I did not cry. Seeing my people—who I was sure were getting ready to bail on me—working full tilt to feed their fellow New Yorkers could not possibly make me cry. That would be bad for my authority.

I was backing out the door carrying a stockpot full of pasta carbonara and blood sausage when a woman in a black pantsuit shouldered her way through the line of the homeless, the hungry and the idly curious.

“Oh my ghad! Omighad! It’s perfect! Perfect! Charlotte, if I wasn’t going to kill you, I’d kiss you.”

Elaine West, Nightlife’s PR agent, was professionally thin and tastefully blond. She carried a designer bag big enough to conceal a full-grown watermelon and when she didn’t have her BlackBerry in her hands, her thumbs twitched.

“Why are you going to kill me?” I passed the pasta off to Katy, who worked the dinner shift the three days a week she wasn’t at film school.

“Because you didn’t tell me!” Elaine was already thumbing her phone. “Dave? Elaine West. We need a camera down at Nightlife. Now. I don’t care where from, just get it here.” She hung up.

“I wasn’t doing this for the PR,” I muttered.

“Well, you are now, sweetie.” She linked her arm in mine and smiled. “So let’s go over how this extremely generous impulse came to you, so you can get your life back and have a total smash of a reopening.”

When she put it that way, I was not only more than ready to be coached, I was doing the face-palm. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I guess that’s why we were paying her the big bucks, or would be as soon as we had them.

By the time the first camera got there, I was in a fresh-pressed chef’s coat explaining how important it was for the city’s food professionals to give back to the community and praising my people, who were all donating their time. I meant it, of course, but according to Elaine it also made me look magnanimous and feminine. Well, there’s a first time for everything.

We drew an audience as soon as the cameras started clustering around. Suchai put out one of the stockpots with a sign asking for donations to the food bank, and the dollars started fluttering down. More cameras converged and I had to go through my Elaine-prepped spiel four more times, but I did so with a song in my heart. Some days you know that, just this once, you did good.

Sundown found us all collapsed in the kitchen, drinking beers, scarfing down leftover pasta, sandwiches and cookies. We all had our smartphones, BlackBerries and PDAs out so we could take turns reading from the blogs and news Web sites. Every good mention earned a new round of high fives. It wasn’t a 100 percent turnaround by any means, but the conversation about us had switched away from murder and vampires, and that felt like a victory.

Every time I glanced at the door to the dining room, though, I knew nothing had really changed. The limits of my ability to play make-believe had been reached. Until we knew for sure why Dylan Maddox had died, and more important, until Little Linus and the rest of New York’s finest knew, everything could come crashing down on us again.

So while the crew huddled together, texting their comments to the holdout blogs that still didn’t think we were all that plus or minus a bag of chips, I took a fresh beer to Suchai where he was hunkered down on an overturned five-gallon bucket. We raised our bottles to each other.

“Thanks for being here, Suchai.”

He shrugged and swigged. This was one of the few times I’d ever seen him in T-shirt and jeans instead of his immaculate white captain’s coat. He looked relaxed and easy, except for the dark circles under his eyes that came with being a new parent. “My wife would kill me if I didn’t. She thinks you are the next great chef in Manhattan.”

“I always did like Surio.” I grinned, and changed the subject as abruptly as any blog. “You remember that fang tease from Saturday, the one who helped start this mess? What table was she at?”

“Two up front. She had the pumpkin soup.” Suchai grimaced.

“That much I remember. Thanks.” He wanted to ask me what was going on, but being Suchai, he just nodded and took another swallow of beer.

“Did you see them come in?”

Suchai shook his head slowly. “I was making sure everyone knew we had Anatole Sevarin in the house, and then I had to help Terry with the service on fifteen. You should ask Robert.”

“It’s on the list.” I looked down the neck of my beer bottle.

Suchai nodded again. “Listen, Chef, I hate to have to ask this—”

“I know. I know.” I waved his words away. “You need to know when we’re reopening. I’ve got no answer. If you’ve gotten a job offer, I won’t blame you for taking it.”

He looked down the neck of his beer bottle too. I’m not sure what either one of us thought was in there. “We’re all right for a while, but I’ve got the kids now . . . you know how it is.”

“Believe me, Suchai, I’m trying to get answers as fast as I can.”

“Sure. And if there’s anything I can do, you let me know.”

“I will.” There was a pause I did not want to spend any longer than necessary in, so I reverted to giving orders. This was my kitchen, after all. “You take off, and say hi to Surio and the pups for me.”

“You got it, Chef.” Suchai got to his feet and joined the others heading for the lockers. I put my beer bottle on the counter and walked over to the desk in the corner that served as my office.

My computer is old, and cranky, but it is also has a (painfully slow) WiFi connection to the other computer out front, where Robert enters the reservations. I sat down and tapped at the keys, calling up the date, time and table. Of course, Detective O’Grady had already dug out this information, but he wasn’t the one I wanted it for.

The problem was, the system showed no reservation for table two at eight p.m. on Saturday. We enter the table number after the reservation is seated. It’s a bookkeeping measure, and one way we track how busy we’ve been. Besides, you get the occasional customer who wants their “regular table,” and it’s good to have a record of what that table is. But table two at eight p.m. last Saturday had no reservation, not for Pam Maddox or anybody else. I swore and scrolled down, then up again. Maybe Pam and her nebbish-date had just walked in off the street. But no, that couldn’t be. We’d been booked solid on Saturday. I remembered because it had been our first time as an absolutely full house, and we’d been elated, even before we knew about Anatole Sevarin.

All the other reservations were there—at least, it looked like they were—but as far as the reservations list was concerned, table two had been free.

My first thought was that someone on the Paranormal Squad had deleted the reservation. But that made no sense. They’d need it for evidence, wouldn’t they? My next thought was that Chet had deleted it. I waited for guilt to show up, but it didn’t. What came instead was a fifty-pound sack of further disappointment.

My crew were coming out of the changing area with their jackets on and waving at me as they filed toward the back door. I waved back and told myself there was more than just me and Chet to worry about. People counted on me. This had to go away. All of it. Whatever it was.

Suchai paused and looked back at me. “You coming, Chef?”

“You go on.” I hit a couple keys and blanked the screen. “I can lock up.”

“You sure?” Marie leaned out from behind him.

“I’m sure. I’ll call tomorrow as soon as there’s news.”

We said our good-nights and I listened to their footsteps, and how the back door opened and closed again. But instead of silence, I heard another pair of hard-soled shoes crossing the tiles, and getting closer. I automatically sat up and shoved my hand into my pocket for my cell phone.

“Ah, Chef Caine. I’m glad I caught you.”

Robert Kemp rounded the corner and I let out a long, slow sigh of relief.

Running a successful restaurant is all about the little things. Decor, table arrangement, and lighting all matter as much as the menu. Every detail affects the guests’ response to the space, starting with the person who greets them at the door. The maître d’ is the famous first impion, and despite all his troubles, Robert Kemp was one of the best in the business.

Tall and trim and hawk-nosed, he had waving white hair swept back from a clear forehead. Robert dressed in suits made-to-order from Savile Row when he could afford them and the closest Hong Kong copies when he couldn’t. His shirts were always crisp, and I’d never seen him without cuff links. Along with the cultivated accent, he had faultless manners, and by the time he handed guests off to their table captain, they felt as if he’d mistaken them for minor royalty.

“Thanks for coming in, Robert. Please.” I pushed a chair toward him. He thanked me and sat. I happened to know Robert was closing in on seventy, but his back was still straight as a poker.

“I’ve been talking to some acquaintances about Mr. Shelby,” he said.

“Anything interesting?”

“Some. He came to New York about fifteen years ago with a business degree from Ohio State and apparently a strong desire to make his mark as an impresario. He managed to get a job at the Clientele. . . .”

“I know that name.”

“It was on the A-list for a while, but it closed after five years when it was found that the owners had been laundering money for some Russian oligarchs.”

“Heavy.”

“Quite. Mr. Shelby was gone before the federal agents moved in. He already had a new job, in fact, managing Le Bon Nuit.”

Now that was definitely a name I knew. Le Bon Nuit pioneered the whole concept of haute noir cuisine. That I shamelessly imitated some of its concepts when drawing up the plans for Nightlife is not something we need to discuss. Not all its concepts, of course, because it turned out some of them were really bad ideas, like the casual attitude toward standard accounting practices. “Didn’t Nuit have some trouble with, like, not paying their taxes?”

Robert nodded. “But again Mr. Shelby was gone by the time the IRS decided to take an interest. A similar situation occurred with his next management position, at Turcell’s.”

“So, Shelby’s timing is either really bad, or really good.”

“It would seem that way, yes.”

“These are all seriously high-end places.” And some pretty high-priced white-collar crimes. I mean, nothing to impress Bernie Madoff, but still a long way up from, say, robbing the tip jar or, as much as I hated to admit it, stealing my menu wholesale. “If this is Shelby’s level of scam, what’s he doing running a bite-easy for the young and hopelessly gothic?”

“The general opinion is that Mr. Shelby was too close to too much bad luck and started having difficulties finding work at the best establishments.” Robert examined his fingernails, which looked like they’d been given one of Jess’s best treatments.

“Yeah, but if Shelby had been setting up the problems and skipping out before the roof came down, he’d either be rich enough to retire somewhere safely out of town, or he’d be . . . in really deep trouble.” Nobody likes the guy who gets out with clean hands, especially not the ones who have hired him to do the dirty work.

“It’s also strange that he’s the owner, is it not?” remarked Robert. “That’s never been the case before, not even on paper. Previously, he’s always just been a manager, and not the top manager either.”

“Huh. Yeah. That is strange.” Worry stirred inside. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe this was the best Shelby could do on the straight and narrow. And it wasn’t so bad either. Post Mortem had been around for, what? Three years now? Four? For a New York club that was reason to celebrate.

On the other hand, with a work history like this, Shelby surely had some . . . widely varied connections. Which Detective O’Grady would know all about, wouldn’t he?

This assumed, however, that Little Linus was even looking at Shelby and Post Mortem. After all, they weren’t the ones who had come up with a dead body in the foyer, and I hadn’t called yet to tell them about being attacked in PM’s alley. That was beginning to feel like a major mistake.

“Chef Caine?”

“Hmm?” I realized I was staring across the now empty kitchen. “Sorry, Robert. It’s been a long day.”

“I understand. But a word of advice?”

I waved my hand for him to go ahead.

“I’ve been around long enough to see several waves of immigration into this city.” His slightly protruding gray eyes were unfocused, looking inside to his deep memory. “Every wave brings new variants on old problems. There are always shifts in the money flow, whether it’s the clean money or the dirty money. This also brings shifts in power. The rise and fall of small-minded men like Shelby tends to be closely tied to those shifts.”

“You think Shelby’s in on the start of something?”

“It could be.” He looked straight at me. “I just hope whatever it is, it stays away from you and Mr. Caine.”

This was a hint that even I couldn’t miss. He was warning me to stop asking questions, because of those little shifts in the power structure he was talking about. That power was in the hands of people I didn’t want to know about, and shifts could be measured in lost lives.