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

The next day the three men were back with a search warrant, and again I witnessed everything. The two dull men in baggy suits confiscated Jake’s apron, which he surrendered with offended dignity. Then they demanded that he turn over all his cleavers and carving knives. “What am I supposed to carve with?” Jake asked, holding out his hands in bewilderment.

“Use a fork,” the tall cop said, holding the crumpled apron up close to his eyes to examine the stains. “The lab,” he said, handing the apron back to one of the flunkies. He looked up again at Jake. “Would you mind opening the doors on that oven?”

“It lets the heat out,” Jake said sullenly.

“I don’t doubt it,” the tall man said, returning Jake’s hostile stare with one of his own.

Jake changed his strategy slightly. “Opening the doors lets in air. Make the fire bum hot.”

“Well, that’s fine,” the tall cop said. “One offsets the other.” He nodded to one of the flunkies. “Open it.”

The little man unlatched one of the big iron doors and swung it open with his fingertips, his tongue poking out between his teeth. His partner put his head in at an angle, trying to look up the chimney, and yanked it back out immediately with a cry. “Hell, it’s hot in there!”

The tall cop’s face was as rigid as before. “Where’s the fire?”

Jake pointed at the smaller iron doors at the side walls of the oven. “Underneath.”

“What are you burning?”

Jake stiffened. “Hickory,” he said firmly.

The cop nodded and sucked in his cheeks. “Put it out,” he ordered.

Jake’s jaw dropped. “You must be kidding.”

The tall cop flourished the search warrant with a bored gesture. “Put it out,” he repeated. He settled wearily on a bench and leaned back with his elbows on a table. “And while we’re waiting, I’ll have a short end of ribs, hold the pickles, and coffee.”

The two flunkies hustled out with the confiscated evidence, and I watched in awe as a troubled Jake poured cold water over his precious hickory logs. For the first time in years, the sacred fire was quenched. In my eyes the tall cop, nibbling unconsciously at his ribs, was no better than a religious vandal or a grave robber. Jake sat silently on a chair near the front window, staring at his knees. He looked strange without his apron.

I wasn’t there that night when the police searched the oven, but the next morning Jake told me that they nearly took the place apart. One lab specialist crawled all over the floor looking for bloodstains. Another rummaged through the trash barrel in which Jake disposed of the long ends of ribs, asking again and again in amazement, “You mean you throw this stuff away?” The tall cop had hired a midget named Maurice to scale the inside of the cold chimney with a flashlight. His muffled voice kept coming down from above, “It sure is dirty in here,” or, “You know, I wouldn’t mind moving into a place like this.”

The total result of the search: zero. “I told them over and over again,” Jake said laughingly, “I don’t know where Madeline went. She just went up in smoke.” He shook his head. “The big guy wasn’t too happy. He never paid for his ribs.”

That morning, Jake cleaned the oven and started a fresh fire, piling in the hickory logs with a delicacy that was touching. “The next time this fire goes out,” he said heartily, “it’s over my dead body. You can bet on that, friend.”

A few days later, without comment, the police returned his knives, cleavers, and apron. “They could have at least cleaned the apron,” Jake said.

The police didn’t come around after that. Missing Persons never found Jake’s wife either. After a few weeks the subject of her disappearance pretty much faded from everyone’s thoughts. Ellen filled her place with cheerful efficiency, business picked up at the Cathedral Barbecue, and Jake’s smile and sandwiches both seemed to get bigger as the memory of Madeline receded into the hazy past. Sometimes he would get philosophical, proclaiming his independence of women. “Maybe it’s true that Eve was made from Adam’s rib,” he said one afternoon, soberly inspecting a fat-laden long end. “But if so, it was a bad slab.”

I would never have learned the whole story were it not for the Internal Revenue Service. Like most people, I can’t face my taxes till the last moment, and this year I went right down to the April 15 deadline with tax tables and schedules and unfathomable forms spread all over my office so deep that the mice were taking the long way around. I toiled wearily till way after dark, my joy at discovering that Gibbon Catwalk Rentals was a tax shelter offset by the corresponding discovery that I was broke.