Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (24 page)

“Hi, I’m Steve,” said the guy with a Texas accent. “This is Gail, my baby. We just got married three weeks ago.”

Handsome and drunk in a suit with an undone tie, Steve looked like a Wall Street guy after a long day. Tall, brunette Gail baby was also good-looking and very drunk. She hummed to herself loudly as she took out her phone and started texting. Real charming couple.

“It’s my first time. Is it like they say?” Steve said to me. “Does it really taste like chicken?”

“I have no idea,” I said truthfully. “It’s my first time, too.”

“I call the penis,” Gail said with a giggle, without looking up.

“Oh my God! Do you think they’ll actually serve that?” Steve said in horror. Then he took out his own phone and started typing. Googling about it, perhaps.

I looked at the idiotic young couple in awe. I’d been doing OK up to that point, but as I stood there, I really started to become angry. This couple was actually going to eat another person. Why? So they could write about it on their Facebook wall? For nothing, I realized. For kicks.

How had they and Lucy and Barbara and the rest of the folks here become such amoral, mixed-up, disgusting, animalistic excuses for human beings? I wondered. I mean, Stone Age savages ate people because they were Stone Age savages. Or in the case of the Donner Party, it was in order to survive. That a modern person, or in this case a busload of modern people, would actually pay two grand to experience what eating another person was like was starting to piss me off like you would not believe.

There was prearranged seating, and Brooklyn and I took our places at a table with half a dozen polite middle-aged Asian cannibals as the boat pulled out. We headed south for the harbor. I could see the Statue of Liberty lit up outside the window off to my right.

It was about five minutes later when the lights dimmed and then a spotlight hit a black curtain beside the jazz quartet. I remembered what the witness to the murder in Harlem had said about a woman being bound like a leg of lamb. If that actually happened, if they actually brought someone out like that, I was going to take out my undercover Glock and start either arresting or shooting people.

Because I was sick of these freaks, just sick to my stomach.

But instead of a bound woman, a line of waiters suddenly appeared from between the parted curtain, bearing covered silver platters. As one of the platters was set down in front of me, I wondered if I was about to see a head under the silver dome like John the Baptist’s.

My head swam as I started sweating.
There better not be
, I thought. Or someone was seriously getting hurt.

There was a drumroll, and then all at once, the waiters pulled up the domes. Underneath on a white plate was a nouvelle-cuisine-looking dish with raspberry-colored sauce over what looked like pork.

As I stared at it, suddenly all of it, the whole night, the old woman, the sway of the boat, and especially the sight of the mystery meat on my plate, hit me like a sledgehammer.

I screeched my chair back just in time to puke my three light beers between my shoes.

CHAPTER
80

THE ASIAN CULINARY ADVENTURERS
at my table started complaining loudly in a language that wasn’t English as I sat there bent over, dry heaving.

“Are you OK, Mike?” Brooklyn said at my back.

“Not even a little,” I said as I stood, wiping my mouth.

When I turned around, Frosty was at the front of the room holding a microphone.

“The wine for our first course—” he began as I grabbed the tablecloth in front of me and pulled like a magician. But I guess I was no David Blaine, because instead of just pulling out the tablecloth, I sent everybody’s dinner sailing. There was an enormous clatter as plates and silver went into laps and across the dance floor.

The jazz quartet honked to a dead-silent stop as everybody stared at me. I took out my gun and my shield as I stepped forward.

“NYPD! Nobody move!” I said.

“Hands on tables now!” Brooklyn cried as she followed me.

“What in the hell are you doing?” the evil Frosty wanted to know.

I shoved him down into his seat.

“You’re under arrest, scumbag,” I informed him.

“I know my rights! This is not illegal!” he shrieked, red-faced. “Cannibalism is not illegal!”

What he said was shockingly true. Noah had told me that though there were laws against the desecration of bodies, as of yet cannibalism wasn’t technically illegal. Though after tonight, I was definitely going to write my congressman.

“Are you listening to me?” brayed the pudgy sap. “No crime is being committed here. What’s the charge?”

“I’ll think of something,” I said as I lifted him up, no mean feat, and hauled him out the dining room door to the outside deck. The cool, fresh air off the water was wonderful after the humid cafeteria stench of the dining room. I immediately felt a thousand times better.

“You have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?” Frosty screamed in a high voice. “Ever hear of PRG Trucking? Maybe not. My family’s firm is not
the
biggest trucking company in the country, it’s just the third biggest! When my army of lawyers is done suing you and your department, you’re going to wish you’d never been born!”

“I already wish it after tonight’s festivities, you roly-poly sack of puke. Now, who killed her? Was it you?”

I shoved him against the side of the boat.

“You feel like going for a swim?”

Frosty fell to his knees and started blubbering.

“No, no, no. You’re wrong. It’s a mistake. The meat we have is from a cadaver, someone who donated their body to science. We bought it off a lab rat at a car company. They use bodies for crash dummies. We’re epicurean cannibals, not sexual sadists or serial killers. This is just the final frontier of culinary experimentation. We didn’t kill anybody. I swear to you!”

I let out a breath as I watched him blubber. I knew he was telling the truth. Noah had told me all about the different types of cannibalism from his research: sexual cannibalism, aggression cannibalism, spiritual and ritual cannibalism, epicurean cannibalism. It was obvious now that the group here tonight wasn’t a pack of budding Jeffrey Dahmers. Sick, amoral assholes who needed a beating and some lessons on how to be human, maybe, but not actual killers.

It looked like we had come upon cannibals in the city, only they were the
wrong
type of cannibals. Super.

I went in and spoke to some of the waiters. When I stepped back out onto the deck, they were behind me, pushing rolling carts with all the “food” on them. One by one, I started Frisbeeing the plates into the harbor. Brooklyn came out and started enthusiastically helping me.

“What are you doing?” Frosty the Jackass wanted to know.

“It’s called a burial at sea. This is the remains of a human being. That means something to me because, see, I’m a human being, too. It’s called human fellowship. You and the people in that dining room there might want to look into it.”

“But you can’t do this,” he said.

“No?” I said, flinging another plate into the drink. “Now go get the captain to turn this boat around for shore, would you? I’m sorry, but tonight’s culinary adventure has come to a close.”

CHAPTER
81

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT
when I got home. I was tapped out, all right, officially out of patience and in absolutely no mood for any more nonsense from anyone after the night’s fiasco.

The night wasn’t a complete waste, thanks to Brooklyn. Though I continued to fume as the boat made its way back to the dock, my partner wisely managed to keep her head. Ingratiating herself with a few of the diners, she managed to get more insight into the cannibal subculture and, better yet, score a few names of some even sketchier culinary adventurers that we might want to look into.

Though we were still in the dark on Naomi’s murder, I was quite proud of Brooklyn and the rest of the gang. If nothing else, at least my Harlem crew was really coming along as investigators and as a team.

A funny thing happened as I walked through my front door. I heard singing coming from the kitchen. Though the rest of the apartment was dark, in the lit kitchen doorway I could see Seamus at the sink, singing to himself as he washed dishes.

It was the old Irish tune “The Fields of Athenry,” about a poor Irishman who gets sent to a penal colony for stealing food for his family. Seamus had a good singing voice, and it was nice to stand there in the darkened hallway for a few peaceful moments and listen to him sing the sad and yet somehow hopeful old ballad.

I waited until he was finished before I walked in. He gave me a pat on the back and a gentle smile as I grabbed a towel and started drying beside him.

How he could grin or sing after picking up the slack of babysitting and dinner and homework without Mary Catherine was beyond me. Seamus was certainly a wise guy and a prankster, but he was also one of the most selfless and truly faithful people I’d ever known. Plus he loved my kids as much as I did, if that was possible.

In his calming presence, I felt embarrassed by my night’s out-of-control emotional outbursts, especially my rough treatment of the heart-attack-candidate suspect, Dale Roanoke. Wrath was a sin I’d been really wrestling with since coming home from California.

“Anita’s not still here, is she, Seamus?” I said.

Anita was Anita Ciardi, the longtime live-in housekeeper at Holy Name’s rectory, where Seamus worked. The saintly seventy-year-old and seventy-pound little fireplug had insisted on coming over to help out once she’d heard that Mary Catherine had to go back to Ireland. The Bennetts had more than one guardian angel floating around, apparently.

“Just sent her home after she got the laundry done,” he said. “When I came into the kitchen, she was taking out the flour to bake the kids some of her famous Italian cookies, but I told her I’d excommunicate her on the spot if she didn’t leave. How about you, Detective? You’re looking pretty tired. Any collars tonight?”

“Not a one,” I said, thinking of my many still-open cases.

“Well, you made it home in one piece, right?” he said, staring at me with his serene blue eyes as he handed me the dripping spaghetti pot. “You can chalk that in the win column, at least.”

“Hey, how about you? You had the doctor today,” I said. “The real doctor, not that Dowdy character.”

“Passed all the tests with flying colors,” Seamus said. “Like I told that doctor, I’m fit and fine as Rory McIlroy. And to prove my point…”

Still wearing his rubber dish gloves, Seamus dropped down and did twenty push-ups, which nearly gave me a stroke of my own.

“See,” he said, standing. “My own da lived till he was ninety-five. Three heart attacks and cancer didn’t slow him down. Not a step. Well, until he took his last one, I suppose.”

“That’s enough, Father. Good night now,” I said. “It’s late, so call me when you get back to the rectory.”

“Call you?” Seamus said as he snapped off his gloves and went for the door. “How about I just text you instead, you dinosaur?”

When my comical priest grandfather had left, I grabbed a beer and took it into the bedroom. I kicked off my shoes and hopped up on the bed and checked my e-mail on my phone. There was a message from my lawyer, Gunny Chung.

Mike
,

Just a quick note. First, I just wanted you to know I have my best people working on this. We are scouring the records for Mr. Bieth, including a thorough background check and examination of all social media sites to get to the bottom of exactly who he is, where he came from, what he wants, and what his motivations are. With that said, I have some bad news. We have a court date with Mr. Bieth and a judge scheduled on the 14th that you and, unfortunately, Chrissy, must attend. I will e-mail you the particulars as we get closer to the date
.

All the best
,

Gunny

I looked out at the lights of Manhattan and thought of my dear departed wife, Maeve.

“I’m blowing it, right? You agree with me?” I asked her.

In my mind, I pictured her in a golden field somewhere, happy and waiting for me.
The fields of Athenry
, I thought.

I finally wiped my tired eyes and finished my beer and laid the bottle carefully on the night table.

Those Irish ballads
, I thought with a sigh in the dark as the heavy lids of my eyes finally and joyfully closed.

They’ll get you every time
.

CHAPTER
82

I WOKE INSPIRED AT
six-thirty the next morning, and by seven-thirty, the dining room table was set for ten and everything was lined up.

There was a platter of bacon and sausage, both Irish and American, no cultural bias here this fine morning. A steaming yellow hill of scrambled eggs. Next came a bowl of peppery golden home fries crisped to my exacting standards. Set beside it was a loaf of white bread, toasted and liberally buttered and fanned niftily around the rim of a plate like a deck of cards. The only thing not made from scratch was the towering stack of pancakes beside the syrup.

No one’s perfect.

Well, except for Mary Catherine, of course, but she wasn’t here.

“What the…?” said Ricky as he came in, followed by a groggy Eddie and Brian. Ricky looked at the food and then down at his plaid tie.

“Oh, no, is it Sunday?” he said.

“No, son. It’s still Tuesday. Thought I’d give you guys a surprise hearty breakfast to kick-start your brains into learning mode. Pull up a chair and a plate and have at it.”

I didn’t have to tell the boys twice. Or the girls. Pretty soon, ten backpacks were ready and waiting by the front door as my ten little Indians dug in around the table like lumberjacks.