“You must’ve called while he was at the snowball stand.”
“Jesus.” Lenny rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Just take the phone and use it.”
“I’m not gonna use it in restaurants. People who do that are the world’s biggest assholes.”
“I agree.”
“And I’m not gonna use it while I’m driving. I got enough distractions without a phone stuck in my ear.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to endanger yourself. Or anyone else, for that matter. Look, open the cover here—see this little LCD display? When you turn the phone off, the carrier takes messages for you, and the screen shows how many you have.”
“If I gotta have one, G should get one too.”
“What for? You two are always together.”
“Not right now we’re not,” Rickey pointed out. “I’m here, and he’s at the test kitchen training Terrance. What if I needed to get in touch with him?”
“OK, OK, I’ll have Flanagan pick up a phone for him tomorrow. Christ, it’s like having a couple of kids—one of you gets something, the other one has to have it too.”
“Thanks for the phone, Dad.”
“Sure. Thanks for reminding me why I never got married.” Beneath the casino, Terrance was trimming the fat off a small ribeye steak. “You said save this fat?” he asked. “Don’t throw it away?”
“Right,” said G-man. “You’re gonna use it to add flavor to the meat.”
“It looks disgusting.”
“Terrance, I’ve watched you eat four plates of fettucine Alfredo. You think a little steak fat is disgusting?”
“I don’t like the way it quivers.”
“You know, this could be a problem for a grill guy.”
“I’ll get over it. I don’t love scraping plates, either, but I been washing dishes at Escargot’s for four years.”
“I guess you got a point. OK, now you want to lay out your cubed fat on the grill, cover it with a layer of peeled garlic cloves from your mise, and put your filet on top. You know, Rickey has some idea that we’re gonna do this with Wagyu beef, but I don’t see how. People in New Orleans aren’t gonna pay fifty bucks for a steak.”
“Fifty bucks!”
“Yeah, he says Lenny can get it wholesale for twenty a pound. Then we gotta mark it up. I don’t think it’ll fly.”
“Well, that’s why Rickey needs you. He lets his imagination get the best of him sometimes.”
“Tell me about it. Now, take one of these metal hats and put it over your steak. The fat’s gonna start melting and the garlic’s gonna perfume the meat. Right now you can stand here and count off two minutes, but during service you’ll be doing a lot of other stuff, so make sure you know how long two minutes is.”
“I know how long two minutes is. I watch a lot of hoops.”
“Yeah, you cook it for two basketball minutes, it’s gonna turn into shoe leather. Two minutes by the clock, OK? Then you lift the hat and give it the cognac.” From Terrance’s mise-en-place, G-man grabbed a bottle of cognac fitted with a bar-style pour top and upended it over the ribeye. A blue flame danced across the grill.
“Damn!” said Terrance.
“It’s cool. Now put the hat back on and let it go for two to six more minutes, depending on how the customer ordered it.”
“Ain’t that kinda short for well-done?”
“That’d be eight minutes altogether, which is way too long. But anybody who pays for a nice steak and then orders it well-done isn’t gonna know the difference.”
“Hey now, I like my steak well-done.”
“You ever ordered one in a restaurant?”
“No, I seen the shit they do to ’em. Throw ’em over their shoulders, throw ’em in the deep fryer, throw ’em on the damn floor.” Terrance wrinkled his nose. “I hope you don’t expect me to do nothing like that.”
“I promise we’ll never require you to throw anybody’s steak on the floor.”
They grilled a second ribeye and sat in the semicircular booth to eat. Watching Terrance saw at his meat, G-man wondered how anyone could prefer a well-done steak, but he knew he would sound like a food snob if he pressed the matter further. Instead he said, “You put in your notice at Escargot’s?”
“No, and I ain’t looking forward to it. Mike’s gonna make my life miserable for the whole two weeks, just like he did to Rickey.”
“So don’t give notice.”
“You mean just don’t show up one day? Nah, I don’t work like that.”
“You can show up. Around lunchtime, when he’s too busy to think much about it, tell Mike it’s your last day. By the time it really gets through his skull, your shift’ll be over.”
Terrance sighed. “That just ain’t the way I operate. I’ll give him notice, let him fuck me around for two weeks, and leave knowing I’ll never have to see him again.”
“What’s up with Mike these days, anyway? He ever say anything about Rickey?”
“Not that I’ve heard, but he don’t talk to me too much. Why?”
“I don’t know,” said G-man, deciding not to mention the phone call Lenny had received. “Mike seemed kinda obsessed with him for a while there. I guess it worried me a little.”
“I wouldn’t worry on account of Mike,” said Terrance. “He hates Rickey, but he’s a coward. He ain’t gonna do nothing about it.”
“Somebody complained about what?” said Rickey. He and Lenny were in Oscar De La Cerda’s office, having received a call from the lawyer as the last of the kitchen equipment was coming in.
“The sign in the window,” said De La Cerda. “The one you have to post for fifteen days, remember? The one that says you plan to serve alcoholic beverages? You post it so people in the neighborhood can complain about it if they want to. Well, somebody complained. Called up Sam Marx at the Finance Department and said they didn’t want a restaurant moving in.”
“Can they do that?”
“Sure they can do it,” said Lenny. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Or it might mean we don’t get our liquor license!”
Lenny and the lawyer glanced at each other. “Well, that’s the worst-case scenario,” said Lenny.
“Who made the complaint? Was it Mike Mouton?”
De La Cerda consulted a note on his desk blotter. “No, I don’t think your crackhead pal lives in the district. The complaint was made by one Rondo Johnson of 1311 Lafitte Avenue.”
“Mike’s got something to do with this. I know it.”
“Calm down,” said Lenny. “Don’t get paranoid. It can’t be Mike’s fault every time.”
“It is this time, though. You posted those signs in your windows, right? When you opened your restaurants?”
“Sure. Had to.”
“Did anybody complain?”
“Well, no. We had a few people call up and ask questions, but nobody ever lodged a complaint.”
“See? I bet it hardly ever happens … What time is it?”
“2:30,” said De La Cerda, bewildered by the apparent change of subject. “Why?”
“Lunch shift is over. And check it out—Lenny gave me this cute little phone. You got a Yellow Pages?”
De La Cerda pushed the phone book across the desk, shooting a quizzical glance at Lenny, who shrugged. Rickey looked up a number and dialed.
“Yeah, let me talk to Cole … Hey, this’s John Rickey … Fine, great. Listen, you know that sign you had to put in the window before you opened? The one saying you were gonna serve liquor and all? … Well, did anybody ever actually call to complain? … Uh huh. OK, thanks, I’ll let you get back to it … Sure. OK. Bye.”
He hung up and turned back to the others. “That was Cole Parker at Poivre. He says nobody complained about his sign. Now I’m gonna call Devlin over at the Lemon Tree.”
“Don’t bother,” said Lenny. “It doesn’t prove anything. Even if this is the first time anybody ever made a complaint, that doesn’t mean Mike is behind it.”
“I don??
?t see that it matters much,” said De La Cerda. “We’re not automatically fucked because one person complains. It just means the Finance Department will take his complaint under advisement when considering your application. The area’s commercially zoned, so I don’t think you have a lot to worry about. Of course, it would be best if we could get Mr. Johnson to withdraw his complaint.”
“How do we do that?”
“You go talk to him.”
“Just me?”
“I think it’s best if you go on your own,” said Lenny. “If you take G-man along, it could look like you’re trying to intimidate the guy with numbers.”
“What if he has numbers?”
“Do you want to do it or not? You could just wait and see what happens. But who knows? Maybe you can charm the guy.”
“If Mike got to him, he must be an asshole. I’m not gonna be able to charm him.”
“It’s not essential that you talk to him,” said De La Cerda. “Like I said, I don’t think you have much to worry about unless he starts stirring up the neighborhood association or something.”
“I’m sure he will if that’s what it takes,” said Rickey. “He’ll do whatever Mike makes him do. But what the hell. I’ll go talk to him.”
“No way are you going over there alone,” said G-man when Rickey told him about the conversation. “What the fuck is Lenny thinking, anyway? I got a few things to say to him about this.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Are you kidding? Are you so caught up in the restaurant that you can’t see anything else? You got no idea what you could be walking into, Rickey. You said yourself Mike probably set it up.”
“Lenny doesn’t think so.”
“Fuck Lenny. He doesn’t have to go knocking on some perfect stranger’s door.”
“I guess you got a point there.”
“I don’t think we should go at all,” said G-man. “If De La Cerda doesn’t think we have a problem, I say we just wait and see what happens.”
“I can’t just wait.”
“Yeah, I figured you’d say that. In that case, I’m going with you.”
“Whatever,” said Rickey. In his heart, though, he was pleased. He had a bad feeling about this thing, and he hadn’t looked forward to visiting Rondo Johnson on his own.
At eleven o’clock the next morning, they parked in front of 1311 Lafitte Avenue. Like all the houses in the neighborhood, it was a narrow shotgun built right up against the sidewalk. Once it had been painted pink. Now the spots where the paint had not peeled away altogether were the color of dirty flesh. Three concrete steps led up to a glass storm door decorated with aluminum birds. A BEWARE OF THE DOG sign was wired crookedly to the storm door, but no dog barked as they climbed the steps.
“What are we supposed to say to this guy?” asked G-man.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll do the talking.”
“What are you gonna say?”
“I don’t know yet,” Rickey admitted. He’d thought about it most of the night, but hadn’t come up with anything that gave him confidence.
Before they could ring the doorbell, the storm door swung open. “Help you?” said a rusty nail of a voice that did not sound as if it wanted to be helpful in the least.
“Mr. Johnson?”
“I don’t wanna buy nothing, I don’t wanna hear about Jesus, I just wanna know what the hell you’re doing on my stoop.”
Rondo Johnson was an old white man, maybe eighty-five, maybe just weighed down by a lifetime of bad habits. He was not fat by New Orleans standards, but the excess flesh that hung from his arms and his neck had a doughy, unhealthy look. The smell of dead cigarettes wafted from him, and Rickey could see yellow nicotine stains on the first two fingers of his right hand.
“Well, uh, Mr. Johnson, my name is John Rickey and this is Gary Stubbs. We’re—”
“Unicef?”
“What?”
“You from Unicef? They already come by here at Halloween. I told ’em to go to hell—what I’m gonna feed African babies for? So they can come to America and ruin my neighborhood? We got enough—”
G-man interrupted the old man. “Actually, sir, we’re the owners of the restaurant opening over on Broad Street.” He managed the sir without a trace of sarcasm; Rickey couldn’t have done it.
“You from the restaurant?”
“That’s right,” said Rickey. “You made a complaint about our liquor license.”
“You’re damn right I made a complaint. I done lived in this house forty years. I remember when that other place was in there. The Eye-talian place. It brought a bad element to the neighborhood. Just look what happened to that man.”
“The other restaurant—uh, could we come in and talk to you for a minute?”
“No, you can’t come in. How the hell I know you’re who you say you are? You don’t look like restaurant owners. You look like a couple bums. I already been robbed twice and I got a heart condition. I ain’t letting you in my house.”
“Where’s your dog?” asked G-man.
“He got some kinda cancer. Lady next door said he oughta see a vet’narian, but I figure you gotta be crazy to spend that kinda money on a animal. I took him to the pound.”
Rickey and G-man glanced at each other. This wasn’t going well. “I’m sorry about your dog,” said Rickey. “Anyway, uh, the other restaurant—there was a Mob connection, and the guy who got killed was stealing money from them. Nothing like that will be going on in our place.”
“Don’t guess you’d tell me if it was, would you?”
“Well—”
“Listen, boy. Nobody wants another restaurant to move in that building. We don’t want the traffic and we don’t want a buncha drunks coming in. We like things the way they are.”
Rickey looked around at the dingy houses, the cracked sidewalk, the treeless, trash-strewn street.
“Everybody around here agrees with me, but I’m the only one who’ll bother to speak his mind. I ain’t afraid of you rich bastards. I’m gonna bring it up at the next neighborhood meeting, and take a vote, and we gonna talk to our councilman. We don’t want no damn restaurant. Now get off my stoop.”
The storm door slammed. The BEWARE OF THE DOG sign rattled. The aluminum birds trembled. Rickey made as if to knock again, but G-man caught his arm. “I think we better just go.”
“Shit,” said Rickey.
chapter 23
He wouldn’t even let you in the house?” said Lenny. “He practically threw us off his stoop,” said Rickey. “Said we looked like bums. Oh, and he took his dog to the pound because it had cancer.”
“Lovely.”
“We couldn’t get anywhere with him. He said he’s gonna turn the neighborhood against us, talk to his councilman, all kinda shit. So what do we do now? What’s the next step?”
“Let me talk to Oscar and call you back.”
Lenny hung up, checked the recording light on his tape machine, and called the lawyer. “What district is the Liquor property in?”
“Uh-oh. They didn’t have any luck with Mr. Johnson?”
“No, and he sounds like a regular old bastard. I hate to send them back up against him.”
“They’re gonna have to lose their cherries sometime.”
“Sure, they’ll have to deal with all sorts of bullshit, but I don’t want to make them do it now. Things are going so well. You know what they made the other day? Grilled lobster with a Wild Turkey sauce. Like they were inventing the wheel. I didn’t even have the heart to tell them Jasper White did lobster with bourbon back in the eighties.”
“Lenny. Let’s get back to the old bastard. What do you want me to do about him?”
“Get me the name of the councilman first of all. I’ll talk to him, see if he’s heard from Johnson. Who knows? Maybe the old man’s just blowing smoke.”
“I thought Rickey and G-man didn’t want you to get involved.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s that or lose the restaurant, they’ll reco
ncile themselves to my getting involved.”
“OK, I got the list right here. The guy for that district is Lance Taliaferro.”
“I know Lance. I’ll give him a call.”
Still recording, Lenny dialed Lance Taliaferro’s office. The councilman took his call at once and knew precisely what he wanted. “Sure, I’ve spoken to Mr. Johnson. Wish I hadn’t—he’s not very pleasant. Loves to talk about how much things have deteriorated since the blacks moved in—only he doesn’t say blacks—but when it comes to this restaurant issue, he acts like the neighborhood’s so nice and the place is gonna ruin it. Then he starts in about his heart condition. Is this your restaurant, Lenny? I heard it was a couple of young guys opening the place.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, I mean real young guys, like in their twenties. Couple of whiz kids.”
“That’s true,” said Lenny, pleased that word was spreading. “These guys are friends of mine—I’m just trying to help them out. So how seriously should they take this complaint?”
“Well, if Johnson really wants to make trouble for them, he probably can. I don’t have any problem with the restaurant, but I can’t ignore complaints from my district. He’s called me three or four times already. I disregard that, he’ll put the word out for sure—could hurt my chances for reelection.”
“Hey, even if you didn’t get reelected, you’d have a great new restaurant in your district.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see it move in. But I don’t know how I can help you if this old character really wants to stir up the shit.”
“You think there’s any chance he’s working for somebody?”
“What do you mean?”
“The owners believe they have an enemy. Maybe Johnson could be getting paid to complain?”
“Hell if I know. Even if he is, that’s not illegal.”
“OK,” said Lenny. “Thanks, Lance. Come see me sometime.”
“Will do.”
He called Rickey back. Rickey answered the phone sounding stressed out. “Don’t worry about this,” said Lenny. “Calm down.”
“Seems like people are always telling me to calm down lately.”
“Maybe you ought to give it some thought, then. Seriously, don’t worry about Mr. Johnson. I’m taking care of him.”