Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Witnesses to Jake’s marital battles were not often repeat customers. Even I, a confirmed disciple, sat embarrassed during these clashes, my head lowered, pretending not to hear. Afterward I could not meet Jake’s eyes until a respectable period had passed. Jake may or may not have been an alcoholic, but one thing was for certain: his wife was a psycho. She was bad for business and bad for Jake.

I could readily sympathize with Jake because I had fared poorly in marriage myself. My first wife was a gourmet cook who divorced me because of “irreconcilable differences” — that is to say, she rebelled at my restricted diet of barbecued meats, steaks, prime rib, and steamed shrimp. We parted amicably and she later married the headwaiter on the Super Chief between Los Angeles and Chicago.

My second ex was a waitress at the Beef and Bubbly. She shared my enthusiasm for barbecue and we enjoyed many happy years together, but she turned out to have an unfortunate metabolism. By the time she reached three hundred twenty pounds the spark was gone out of our marriage. She remarried also — choosing a young mystic in Los Angeles who had a radio program. In short, I learned that selecting a wife is more difficult than selecting a good cut of meat.

Jake could have taken the divorce route too, but his was not a legalistic temperament. His horizons were very limited — to his restaurant, to the great hickory forest around his country cabin, to the fragrant clouds that swept up the chimney of his cathedral oven. However much Madeline may have enraged him with her public displays, she was a fleeting nuisance, like a mosquito in your bedroom at night. Madeline was simply not that important to Jake. After a couple of quick ones behind the counter, he would get mellow and sentimental. No, if anyone was going to call it quits, it figured to be Madeline.

That’s what I thought had happened when she suddenly stopped showing up. For two days Jake had to handle the lunch crowd by himself, a long line twisting down the middle of the restaurant and out into the street — but nobody complained. Madeline was unpopular with the regulars because of her sharpness and because sometimes she would open up Jake’s sandwiches and take off a slice or two of beef right under your nose. “What are you running?” she would shout over her shoulder. “A charity?” No, Madeline was not missed.

After those two freelance days, Jake hired a young girl with long blonde hair who wore a sweatshirt bearing the seal of Texas Western College at El Paso. Ellen was instantly popular. She was cheerful, she could add without resorting to her fingers and toes, and she left the sandwiches alone. What’s more, she spoke with a sweet Southern accent — the word “hickory” came off her tongue in a way that made you homesick for places you’d never been before, like Chattanooga and Possum Trot.

After a couple of days, Jake broke his silence on Madeline’s absence. “She’s gone,” he told anyone who asked. “Went up in smoke.” To his more intimate friends he confided that he had filed a report with Missing Persons. “They’ll be out looking for her,” he told me languidly, slicing brisket with a long narrow carving knife. “If anybody can find her, they can. If they bother to look. I told them, ‘I’m reporting her gone, that’s all. I ain’t asking you to bring her back to me.’ She wasn’t no prize.”

Of course, Madeline’s disappearance wouldn’t go down that easy. There was a lot of open speculation in the neighborhood, not all of it generous, connecting Jake’s marital difficulties and his deftness with a meat cleaver. One afternoon my office neighbor, Barney Meyerhoff, blew the dust off my scale model catwalk and squinted across the desk at me. “I ain’t saying he actually done her in,” he said. “But I don’t bite into one of his sandwiches these days without lifting the bun first and taking a peek.”

Jake’s differences with his wife must have gotten around to Missing Persons. Before the week was out, three investigators had dropped in to ask Jake a few questions about the disappearance. I was nursing a beer and experimenting with a barbecued mutton sandwich (too greasy for my taste), so I was close enough to hear everything. There was one very tall aggressive questioner wearing a checked sport coat and a regimental tie, and two dull older men in baggy suits who ordered sandwiches and spent the whole time at the counter passing barbecue sauce and napkins back and forth.

Jake stuck to his version of Madeline’s disappearance, which was that he was totally ignorant of the circumstances. “I don’t know where she went.” He shrugged. “She just went up in smoke.” Involuntarily we all glanced toward the big iron doors of the cathedral oven, but Jake just folded his arms across his ample stomach and smiled. The tall cop stared at Jake’s stained apron with a thoughtful expression.