Diane Davidson - Killer Pancake

I switched on the coffee urn and tried to ignore him as I reached for the cookie tin. I didn’t want to get upset on a festive occasion, especially a festive, lucrative occasion. Let the mood fit the food , we always say in the food business. But when Reggie marched up in his gaudy print shirt and edged between me and the dessert-plate platter, my mood turned decidedly dark.

“Would you please go back out to the dining room?” I said in a pained, sweet voice. I reached for the container of fudge cookies and arranged them decoratively on a separate piece of stoneware.

When I looked up, the brown hair around Reggie Hotchkiss’s bald spot was trembling. His thin, good-looking face was filled with rage. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what you and your fascist-pig husband are doing investigating my place of business without a search warrant.”

I leaned back, startled. A temptation arose to use language that certainly would never get Goldilocks’ Catering invited back to the Braithwaites anytime soon. To keep my temper in check, I reached out for a fudge cookie, brought it to my mouth, and took a huge bite. The dark, velvety moistness melted over my tongue. I closed my eyes and chewed. It was better than a shot of tequila.

“Are you going to answer me,” Reggie yelled, “or are you going to stuff your face? What kind of damn caterer are you anyway?”

This eruption brought a furious, flushed Julian catapulting into the room. He slammed an uneven stack of plates down on the counter and hollered, “What in the fucking hell is going on out here?”

So much for future catering at the Braithwaites. I calmly swallowed the fudge cookie, squeezed past Reggie, and hoisted the platter of cookies. This I offered to Julian.

“Would you please,” I asked with as much charm as possible, “take these goodies out to the guests? Mr. Hotchkiss wants to have a chat with me, and we’re going to have to go outside, I’m afraid.”

But Julian didn’t take the tray. Instead, he addressed Reggie Hotchkiss: “You touch her, and I will beat your bald head to a pulp. Understand?” His sneakers squeaked on the tile floor as he grabbed the platter from me. “I’m going to be out on that deck in five minutes. Five minutes. Got it?”

Reggie Hotchkiss stared at the ceiling. He said, “Ah, but I do feel such a bond with the younger members of the working class.”

Julian glared at him in disbelief, then pushed through the door to the dining room.

“Come on, Reg, you want to talk, let’s make it snappy,” I said as I led the way to the side deck.

The sun had set, and the sky, now violet, promised a perfect backdrop for fireworks. I sighed and wished fervently that Reggie were not there. Unfortunately, he placed his imposing self with its red, white, and blue shirt once again in front of my face.

“First,” he said suddenly, holding up one index finger, “you call my place of business. You say”—and here he raised his voice to a falsetto that resembled nothing that had ever come out of my mouth—“‘oh, my, but I want to buy all kinds of stuff from your fall catalogue!’ Then next”—voice back down, a second finger up—“you make an appointment under false pretenses—”

I’d suddenly had enough. “Don’t you dare bully me,” I said evenly. “I made an appointment. I kept it. I even paid for a job that didn’t get finished. What’s your complaint, anyway? I’ve got work to do and you’re interrupting it.”

“Oh, I’m interrupting your work, oh, excuse me.” Reggie flailed his arms. “And what about all our new products that you wanted to order?”

“You mean all those products you stole from the fall line of Mignon Cosmetics? Those?”

His face colored in great red and white splotches that dashed with the loud shirt. “What?” he bellowed. “What?”

“Excuse me, Reg,” I said, furious myself now, “I think you know quite well what I’m talking about. I catered that banquet for Mignon. You were there too, spying in your cute blond wig. You got your list of what you figured would be money-making Mignon products and you just copied them into your fall catalogue. Anybody with half a brain could see the plagiarism.”

His face contorted with rage. Maybe I’d gone too far, maybe it took a full brain to figure the theft he’d committed. But he’d made me so angry with his accusations, I couldn’t help it. And besides, I hadn’t told him the cute blond wig had fallen on my head when I was escaping Lane, the needle-wielding facialist.

“You are in some kind of trouble,” Reggie warned in an ominous voice. This time the index finger trembled when he pointed. “You have just dug yourself into a hole so deep, you’ll never get out, lady. You—”

“Hey, you stupid fuck!” yelled Julian from the deck door. He strode angrily out onto the deck and squared off against Reggie’s patriotically clad paunch. “What’d I tell you about not threatening her?”

“I know who you are too,” Reggie raged at Julian, still wagging his finger. “You’re the low-class creep that Claire Satterfield had finally decided was her one and only. Lucky you, boy. She went from robbing the grave to robbing the cradle!” The colors in his face were decidedly unhealthy.

“You better watch what you say,” growled Julian, suddenly aware, as was I, that the rest of the guests had appeared on the other deck, their faces filled with curiosity about the disappearance of their fellow guest, their servers, and the resulting commotion.

Reggie held up his hands. “No competition from me, guy. I didn’t want to sleep with her, I just wanted to hire her. That woman could sell cosmetics just by standing still. How was she in bed?”

That did it. Julian lunged forward. Reggie began to whack indiscriminately. I tried to step between them and caught the brunt of Julian’s forceful, angry body on one side and Reggie’s chest on the other.

From the middle of the male sandwich, I choked out, “Go inside, Julian! Please!”

He obeyed by whirling around and striding angrily back into the kitchen. Reggie Hotchkiss fell against the deck rail. Absent male support, I tottered on the deck planks. I caught my balance just a moment before my trajectory would have landed me on the grill. The pain from Julian’s body crashing into mine was concentrated in my head. I rubbed my temples and tried to clear my brain.

When I looked up at Reggie Hotchkiss, he had recovered. Standing stock-still, he hissed, “I have been mistreated and misjudged, and I am not going to forget it.”

“Fine.”

He brushed imaginary dust off the American-flag shirt and made his final pronouncement in my direction. “In the classless society,” he said as he headed for the deck stairs, “there will be no need for servants. You will be obsolete. ” He trod heavily down the wooden steps and headed for his Bentley, presumably not the same one he had driven up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Everyone was staring. I asked lightly, “In the classless society, who does the cooking?”

Sensing that the excitement was over, the guests on the deck turned their attention back to Babs. Her perfectly made-up face was trembling with anger, but she managed to announce breathlessly that, goodness, time was marching on! Each guest was to carry a sparkler and a glass of sparkling wine down to the lower garden. Lawn chairs were set up there, she trilled on. Even as she spoke, the maid was moving across the yard lighting upright torches. The dark-haired woman Reggie Hotchkiss had come with volunteered to light the sparklers and pour the wine. Her high, laughing voice seemed to indicate that she minded not in the least that Reggie had deserted her.