Rubbed Out (A Memphis BBQ Mystery) (2 page)

“What a mess,” said Lulu, shaking her head. “But I’m surprised to hear that you’re letting him get to you. You’re a fine cook and I’m sure the booth is as cute as it can be. Can you try to ignore him?”

“No. ’Cause he won’t leave us alone,” said Cherry grouchily. “If he’d just stay in his booth and stop popping over to ours, then we’d be fine and dandy. Every time he comes in our tent, he’s criticizing something about the way we set up the grill or our decorations or whatever.”

Lulu said, “Isn’t that what they call trash-talking? I bet he’s trying to get a rise out of you to keep you from focusing. He probably thinks that gives him an edge.”

“I absolutely do not know. He’s baiting me all the time, Lulu.”

“Maybe he has a crush on you,” said Lulu, hiding a smile.

Cherry rolled her eyes in a way that would have been the envy of any teen girl. “I doubt it. But whatever it is, it’s driving me nuts. That’s why I ran over here—I needed to escape before I did something I might’ve regretted.”

Cherry attacked her onion rings with enthusiasm. “I
need some grease,” she said, dipping a ring into the large puddle of ketchup on her plate. “Not that your onion rings are too greasy, Lulu. Actually, they’re perfect. But you know what I mean. Grease is my coping mechanism when I get stressed out.”

Lulu laughed. “Not that you ever get really stressed out. But I’m like you—food helps me deal with stress.” Lulu looked ruefully down at her plump figure.

Although Lulu could tell that Cherry was stressed today, you couldn’t really tell from her appearance. As usual, she wore cheerful neon-colored clothes that clashed with her henna-colored hair and large, jangling bracelets, and had her Elvis motorcycle helmet close beside her. Cherry claimed that life was too dangerous to face without a helmet.

Lulu, with her white hair demurely tucked into a bun and customary floral print dress, felt positively faded next to her.

“I do too get stressed out. At least once a week I endure stress during my docent gig at Graceland.”

“Is it because of that little woman who keeps coming on the tours and messing with you?” asked Lulu.

Cherry gulped down a large forkful of onion rings and chased it down with some ice-cold sweet tea. “That’s the one. I swear I don’t know what that old lady’s problem is. If she thinks I don’t know anything about Elvis, then why does she purposefully get in my group for Graceland tours?”

“And why,” wondered Lulu, “does she go to Graceland every single day?”

Cherry blinked at Lulu. “That’s not the surprising part, Lulu. She’s paying homage to the King, that’s all.”

Naturally, Cherry wouldn’t find anything odd about a daily trip to Elvis’s home.

“I only wish that she’d stop interrupting me every single time I open my mouth. And I wish she’d stop chucking out obscure factoids about Elvis’s life. Everybody in my tour group starts listening to her instead of me. It burns me up.”

It sounded like the little woman was angling for a spot as a Graceland docent. Wasn’t that almost exactly how Cherry ended up with her volunteer role there? And the rest of Cherry’s Elvis-obsessed friends, known as the Graces?

“This morning, though, it was totally Rock and Ribs stress. At first I signed up for the barbeque competition because I thought it would be a lot of fun. I dragged Flo and Evelyn into it and we’ve been planning the booth for months. But now with this Reuben making catty comments about our team, he’s making me feel all serious and competitive—which wasn’t why I signed up.” Cherry’s face was almost comically dejected.

“Evelyn? Evelyn’s not cooking, is she?” Lulu couldn’t keep the concern from her voice. Flo and Evelyn were two of the other Graces. The Graces were her very best friends and regulars at Lulu’s restaurant. They were the
King’s biggest fans and Graceland’s very first docents—which had earned them their nickname.

“Hush your mouth!” said Cherry, with a panicked expression. “Absolutely not, no ma’am, she certainly isn’t. She’s our sponsor, since she’s Miss Moneybags, you know. She insisted on putting up almost all of the money for the decorations, entry fee, tee shirts, food, everything. But Evelyn wouldn’t want to cook and we wouldn’t let her, either. She’s enjoying herself by hanging out at the booth, drinking, and being decorative. I’m the one who’ll mostly be cooking, but Flo will help me out, too. And I thought you could help me, Lulu, which is why I’m here.”

“But folks who are affiliated with restaurants can’t participate,” said Lulu.

“I don’t need you to cook. I need you to show off,” said Cherry. “Tonight is Friends and Family Night at the festival. Since this Reuben is so high and mighty, I thought I’d introduce him to my best friend, Lulu Taylor—proprietress of the legendary Aunt Pat’s Barbeque restaurant. That ought to take him down a peg or two.” Cherry gave a malevolent grin at the thought.

Lulu squinted doubtfully at her friend. “He’s more likely to take it that you’re cheating or something—that I’m helping you out with your recipe.”

“Who cares?” scoffed Cherry. “At this point, I want to show him somebody who really knows how to cook barbeque. Take some air out of his sails.”

“Of course I’ll be there for you, Cherry. Besides, I can’t wait to see your booth all decorated for the festival. Are y’all entered in the best booth contest?”

“We are. Of course, a lot of the booths are super elaborate. But I sort of like ours, just the same,” said Cherry. “Especially since it’s covered with Elvis stuff.”

“Covered with Elvis stuff? Wasn’t the theme this year Siberia or something? How could you get away with doing Elvis?”

“No, it wasn’t Siberia. It was…well, hold on, I forgot.” Cherry tilted her bright red head to the side as if the bit of information she was looking for in there might fall out the side. “Oh, I know! Slovakia. That’s it. So we’re supposed to celebrate Slovakia for the Rock and Ribs festival, but all that means is that we represent the honored country by decorating our booths with that theme.”

Considering the Graces’ love for all things Elvis, Lulu had to wonder how they’d managed to pull in the Slovakia theme at all.

Cherry quickly enlightened her. “So we put an Elvis dummy in an apron with the Slovak flag on it, put a map of Slovakia on the walls of the booth with the town names renamed stuff from Elvis songs…stuff like that. You’ll love it.”

“I knew the Graces would find a way to incorporate Elvis into their booth design,” said Lulu, beaming.

“We had to use Elvis. Otherwise, the Graces’ booth wouldn’t make sense. Our team is called Don’t Be Gruel.
We had a regular party last night while we set up. Evelyn brought some really expensive liquor, Flo brought beer, and we were laughing so hard we almost threw up. Think you can make it over tonight?”

“I’ll pop out of Aunt Pat’s by five. You know usually this is such a busy time for us—Rock and Ribs brings gobs of visitors to town. They’re enjoying spring—seeing all the flowering dogwoods and the azaleas blooming. And, of course, they all want to visit Beale Street,” said Lulu.

“And eat the best barbeque in Memphis!” said Cherry with an expansive gesture to the Aunt Pat’s dining room.

Lulu laughed. “I couldn’t ask for better PR. I should be paying you. Anyway, I never usually even make it over to Rock and Ribs because the restaurant always needs extra hands. But this time we were proactive and hired extra waitresses and busboys as temporary help to get us through.”

“Maybe we can really spend some time hanging out together at the festival, then,” said Cherry, sounding excited.

“Sure thing! Besides, Ella Beth and Coco are dying to go to the festival this year. Usually, they can’t really make it over, either, since all the adults are working. So I’ll take a break from the restaurant and support y’all’s booth and take my grands around and keep an eye on Derrick, since he’s wanting to go to the festival with his girlfriend this year,” said Lulu. Derrick Knight was the teenage nephew of her daughter-in-law, Sara. And Sara
and Ben had recently been appointed Derrick’s guardians. Cherry snapped her fingers. “Glad you mentioned Derrick. I need to ask him a question real quick. Is he home from the high school yet?”

“Should be here any minute. But you’ll have to catch him before he takes off again. I swear that boy is tough to grab ahold of these days—always running off to do something. You wait here on the porch and I’ll grab the cookies from the kitchen—they should be cooled off by now. You know I always have an after-school snack for the kids,” said Lulu. “And food should keep him around for a while.”

Cherry yawned. “That’s fine. You go find the cookies and I’ll close my eyes for a second and join the Labs for a nap.” The restaurant’s two Labradors, B. B. and Elvis, were sound asleep, curled up with each other on the floor. “I guess we must have partied a lot harder last night than I thought. Plus, the sound of the ceiling fans is enough to make me drowsy.” She was leaning back in one of the high-backed rocking chairs and shutting her eyes when Lulu left the porch for the restaurant’s dining room.

When Lulu bustled back with a plate full of still-warm cookies, Derrick was thumping up the steps onto the porch with his big school backpack. Amazingly, Cherry slept right through the ruckus. Derrick started tiptoeing, and he and Lulu were quietly moving off the porch to the restaurant’s dining room when Cherry’s phone rang.

That was apparently the one sound that was guaranteed to wake her up. She jerked in the rocking chair, arms and legs flailing as she tried to get oriented and scrambled for her pocketbook. All her commotion woke up the sleeping Labrador retrievers on the porch. “Where are y’all sneaking off to?” she asked them with a mock glare. “I wanted to talk to Derrick. Hold on, let me grab this call.”

Cherry hit a button on her phone. “Yep. What’s that? I’m on it. No worries. Bye.”

Somehow Lulu’s phone conversations never seemed to be that short.

Cherry threw her phone back into her small straw purse and clapped her hands. “Okay! That was team member Evelyn making sure I had the team tee shirts under control. And of course I lied and said yes.” She gave a hoarse laugh and looked intently at Derrick. “Derrick, I need your help.”

Derrick dropped his backpack against the wall of the porch and sat down in one of the rockers with a handful of cookies. “Sure thing. I have a little while before I’ve got to go meet up with some people. What’s up?”

“Tee shirts! I need you to design the tee shirts for our team. Those get judged, too, you know, so I’ll make you an honorary member of the Graces. But I need you to somehow weave in Elvis and Serbia. Oh, and barbeque. The team name, Don’t Be Gruel, should be on it, and the team names—with mine as pit master, of course. And I
need the design in”—Cherry glanced at her rhinestone-encrusted watch—“an hour.”

“Whaa?” Derrick had the startled expression of someone who’d had ice water thrown at him. Despite his tattoo-covered, pierced, tough exterior, he had a completely vulnerable and insecure interior.

“You can do it, can’t you, Derrick?” Cherry pleaded. “I’ll be in so much trouble if you can’t. I told Flo and Evelyn that I’d take care of the tee shirts and then I totally forgot. I thought we’d decided on just wearing our Elvis and Priscilla costumes, but the girls want tee shirts, too. If you can sketch something out this hour, then I can run over to the graphic print shop and get them to make tees out of it before they close for the day.”

Derrick blinked and a red flush crept up his neck, coloring in the tattoos that were climbing there. “Cherry, it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s more like I don’t know if I can. I’m not used to making logo-type stuff or big sketches. I don’t even know anything about Serbia. Plus, there’s somewhere I’ve got to be soon.” He looked as if he didn’t want to talk much about where that
somewhere
was. Teenagers could be real vague about where they went and who they saw there.

“Derrick, I promise this won’t take too long. If it does, you can stop and I’ll try to finish up your sketch.”

Lulu said, “I thought you’d said it was Slovakia, Cherry.”

“Shoot! You’re right, Slovakia. Not Serbia,” corrected Cherry.

“I bet Cherry has learned a whole bunch about Slovakia lately,” said Lulu, giving Derrick a comforting pat. “Why don’t y’all go back into the Aunt Pat’s office and brainstorm? I’ll bring more goodies and milk for fuel. A project like this requires more than cookies—I’ll serve up pasta salad and corn muffins.”

Derrick reluctantly followed Cherry into the restaurant, casting worried eyes at Lulu. His self-confidence had gradually started increasing since he’d moved in with Lulu’s son and daughter-in-law, but it was taking time. He’d been failing in school and getting into scrapes with the law before moving to Memphis but had rapidly made a turnaround…in everything but self-esteem. Maybe having a series of little victories like having everyone excited over his art would help.

Lulu patted the Labs, who were falling back asleep, then walked through the restaurant to the Aunt Pat’s kitchen. Her son, Ben, was cooking up a storm at the stove, and brown sugar, bacon, and onion were sending out a heavenly aroma. “Were we getting low on sides?” she asked, spotting baked beans, corn on the cob, and corn muffins all being concocted at once.

“Lots of side orders to go,” said Ben, really hustling, but turning for a second to give his mother a grin. “Looks like it’s going to be another big month of Rock and Ribs sales for us.”

Lulu found the pasta salad in the fridge and put a generous amount in a serving bowl. “This festival puts everyone in the mood for eating barbeque.”

“Which makes it the best festival in the world, naturally,” said Ben. “It’s the perfect setup for us. Thousands of visitors can’t eat at the festival since the barbeque is there to be judged and the health codes prevent it from being sold. So they end up with a huge hankering for barbeque that’s not exactly satisfied by the fried foods and sweets that the vendors sell.”

“And we’re the ones to make sure they get some barbeque,” said Lulu with satisfaction as she poured a couple of glasses of milk. “Did you know that the Graces have their own booth this year?”

Ben was focused on mixing more corn muffin batter and grunted in response. But his wife, Sara, who helped wait tables, walked in and overheard Lulu. “I hope they take pictures because I have a feeling I’m going to be up to my eyeballs in customers at Aunt Pat’s and won’t be able to get over there. You’re going to take Ella Beth and Coco this year, won’t you, Lulu? They’re about to bug me to death to go and hear the bands and eat a bunch of fair food.”