“Oh my God,” I garbled as I masticated.
“Good?”
“Mm, mm... mmmmm...”
Mike joined me, opening another box, which was stuffed with fried drumsticks, glistening with a sweet-and-sour glaze. A third held containers of tangy cold slaw with a hint of Chinese mustard; cubes of cold, crunchy Korean radish; and sweet potato matchsticks.
“You know, I could duplicate this,” I managed to boast around a mouthful of soy-garlic wing.
“I don’t doubt it,” Mike said, who’d swooned over my cooking more times than I could count.
“They must fry their chicken twice to get it this crispy...” I munched some more, gathering flavor and textural clues, deducing the culinary technique. “Then after they fry it, they must roll it in the sticky glaze and dry it out in a warm oven...”
“Sounds like your famous Buffalo wings.”
“Except I don’t deep-fry those, just crisp them up in a cast-iron skillet. A tempura batter might be interesting to try...” I couldn’t help channeling one of my old In the Kitchen with Clare columns. “Home cooks tend to use all-purpose flour because it’s always in the pantry, but cake flour is the best way to go for frying batters, even for beer-battered onion rings, because it’s lower in gluten.”
“Well, sweetheart, the day you want to experiment, give me a call. I’ll be happy to help with the taste testing.”
“I’ve noticed you’re always available for that.”
“I’m always available for a lot of things.” He threw me his best leering wink. I laughed and leaned back on the sofa, grateful my bike pants had an expanding waistband. “Man, I really needed that...”
Mike reached out with a paper napkin, gently wiped at a ruby smear along my cheek. “I’m guessing you liked it...”
I did the same for him, rubbing at a smudge on his chin. “I’d say your man Sully’s a good guy to trust.”
“So am I,” Mike said. Then he leaned in and moved his mouth over mine.
That tasted even better.
Mike’s mouth was sweet and slightly sticky from the chicken glaze, and (frankly) I would have been happy to gorge myself on nothing but him for the rest of the night. But, after a few blissful minutes, I was the one who broke contact.
“I’m sorry, Mike...” I softly pushed on his hard chest. “I’d like to talk a little more...”
Twelve
As we broke contact, I saw the disappointment in Mike’s eyes. I didn’t blame him. I needed to talk, and that’s not what he needed.
“Everything you did tonight was wonderful,” I quickly reassured him, “coming to the hospital, helping with Mrs. Quadrelli, driving us home, arranging the food...”
But I wanted one more thing from Mike Quinn: answers about his cousin. And if the lip-lock went on any longer, I wouldn’t care about getting them — or anything else apart from the two of us upstairs on my mahogany four-poster.
Mike studied my face. “It’s okay,” he finally said. “I’m always glad to help...”
He leaned back on the sofa, stretched an arm across the back, gestured for me to move closer. I did, leaning into him.
“I have to admit,” he said, gazing at the crackling hearth, “it was nice seeing you with a satisfied expression again. The way you were choking down that vending machine coffee back at the hospital...” He shook his head. “I had to bite my tongue to keep from cracking up.”
“You had to bite your tongue? I thought I was going to lose it when Mrs. Quadrelli went on about Gustave Flaubert styling her hair.”
“Yeah, old Gustave’s probably some poor kid from Brooklyn named Gus Flabberson.”
“Par for the course on the hustle-a-buck schemes that go on in this town.”
“I thought I’d heard every alias in the book,” Mike said. “Jacking the name of Madame Bovary’s author is more creative than some.”
“I’m betting Gustave’s boss has an entire list of famous French author names ready to go.”
“So you think he’s got Stendhal doing the shampooing and Balzac on the register?”
“No,” I said. “If the man knows his French writers, Dumas is on the register and Stendhal’s in charge of color. Balzac belongs with the stylists.”
Mike laughed. “I actually do follow you, you know?”
“Oh? You mean not all cops are jarheads?”
“Naw. We only look like a paramilitary organization.”
I smiled. “Well, I’m not in a position to throw stones. I used a false identity to get in to see Enzo.”
“And you got some good information, too.”
“You think so?”
“Like I told you earlier,” he said, “call that fire marshal first thing in the morning. Tell him everything...”
The list of suspects wasn’t small, but I’d gathered good leads. Only one thing still troubled me: “I can’t stop wondering who that fireman is, the mysterious one who’s secretly seeing Lucia.”
“Me, too,” Mike said. “If that woman was looking for expertise in torching her dad’s caffè, she couldn’t do any better than a fireman.”
“You’re speaking from experience?”
Mike didn’t answer directly. What he said was, “Firefighters are experts in the methods of starting blazes, not just stopping them. It’s part of their training...”
And there’s my opening...
“So tell me, Detective, why didn’t you ever go through the training? I mean, given your hero father and your younger brothers...” Not to mention your evil twin of a cousin. “Why aren’t you a fireman, too?”
I’d kept the tone light, but my question failed to amuse. Mike’s body tensed beside mine; his prolonged silence felt heavy. So I took a guess — and not a very wild one: “Is that the reason why you and your cousin don’t get along? Because you didn’t follow family tradition and join the FDNY?”
He exhaled. “That’s part of it.”
I shifted on the sofa, getting some distance so I could see his eyes. This was a situation I’d faced before with this man — How do you interrogate a trained interrogator?
Not with tricks. When I wanted answers from Mike, I asked him straight. “I’d like to know what started the beef between you two.”
“What started it...” He let out another audible breath. “I guess you could say it started a long time ago... when we were in the academy together.”
“Police academy?” I assumed.
“Fire academy.”
“Fire academy? You went to the fire academy with your cousin?”
Mike nodded.
“What about that story you told me? About always wanting to be a cop? That schoolyard epiphany thing...”
Just like me, Mike had gone to Catholic school, where the priests and nuns were big on the idea of vocation. At some point in our lives, they told us, God was supposed to reveal our life’s calling.
I’d gotten the cosmic message with the birth of my daughter. According to Mike, he’d picked up the Almighty’s voicemail at the age of thirteen during a vicious fight that had broken out between two boys in the school courtyard.
Instead of standing on the sidelines with the others, Mike jumped in to stop it and got a beating for his trouble — from both boys. The Jesuit who finally broke it up told Mike that with his zealousness to leap into human matters and make things right, he was destined to become a priest or a cop.
“I probably could have been a priest,” he’d told me when we first started seeing each other. “I just couldn’t hack the chastity.”
“So how did you end up in the fire academy?”