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

The post office was open till midnight, so I mailed my return about two hours before the deadline and wandered aimlessly about the streets for a while to get the stale smell of bankruptcy out of my lungs. Then it occurred to me that Jake might be tending his ovens. So I cut through a couple of dark alleys to the Cathedral Barbecue and... ah, that glorious smell! Jake was there all right. The front of the restaurant was dark, but through the little window in the door I could see him moving about in the dim light behind the counter. I pounded on the door.

“Compadre!” he cried when he opened the door. “You’re eight hours late.”

“I’ve had a terrible day,” I said. “I need a sandwich.”

Jake locked the door behind us and led me back to the oven. It was stark and eerie, illuminated by one bare light bulb on the wall. The rest of the room was dark. “Pull up a stool, friend,” he said. “I’ll make you a sandwich that you’ll have to declare on your next return.”

Jake was as good as his word. The two of us sat on wooden stools in front of the oven, eating, talking and swapping an occasional snort from Jake’s bottle. I observed that Jake’s taste in liquor was not as rarefied as his taste in barbecue, but I was not ungrateful, and within an hour both of us were pleasantly sloshed. Jake would open the fire door every now and then to poke the logs with an iron bar. The flames would cast a pleasant flickering light on the floor and make weird shadows dance high on the walls. I was experiencing a bittersweet melancholy and Jake was feeling sentimental. He kept reminiscing about Harvey Washington, the old black restaurateur who had taught him all he knew about barbecue. “Poor Harvey,” he murmured. “Did you know—” his eyes grew watery “—did you know that Harvey Washington is buried in an unmarked grave?”

I could feel Jake’s distress. “No. Really?”

He nodded sadly. “Not even a little plastic sign with his name on it. Nothing.” He burped. “When I die,” Jake intoned, “they can use the recipe for his barbecue sauce as my epitaph and I’ll be proud!” He barked this last word and nearly fell off his stool.

The question came out of nowhere. “Jake,” I said, surprising even myself, “how did you do it? How did you really kill Madeline?”

At first he did not seem to comprehend. He stared at me with dull eyes. “Huh?”

I knocked down the rest of my drink and smacked my lips with satisfaction. “I say, how did you kill Madeline? Your wife. The woman who used to work here.” His round face seemed to light up. “Oh!” He leaned his head quizzically to one side. “Well, it weren’t anything malicious.” He reached for a fresh bottle and filled my glass for me. “To Madeline,” he proposed. We clinked glasses. “My wife,” he added before drinking.

“Yes,” I said. “But how did you do it? You always say she went up in smoke. You didn’t cut her up, did you? You didn’t put her in the oven like the police thought?”

Jake seemed genuinely shocked. “Put Madeline in the oven? Oh my, no. Oh, no, no, no. I’m not an animal. Put poor Madeline in the oven? Oh, my, no...” He shook his head with every vehement denial, and I was afraid he would go on forever if I didn’t interrupt him.

“But Jake,” I said, “you’re always saying that she went up in smoke. How can that be, Jake? How can that be?”

Jake stopped shaking his head and sat like a statue for a while, his face expressionless. I thought he might have drunk himself beyond speech. Finally he looked down guiltily at his hands. “I stretched the truth,” he said.

I took a deep breath and pressed on. “How did you stretch the truth, Jake?”

“She didn’t actually go up in smoke. She sort of went down in smoke.” I was about to ask for a clarification, but Jake seemed to have returned to a plateau of relative lucidity, and he went on under his own momentum. “She made me very angry. Very angry. Do you know what she did?” I shook my head. “It was out at the cabin. We was out there one Sunday and I came upon her in the kitchen—” Jake shuddered. “And she was... she was—”

“Yes, Jake,” I encouraged. “What was she doing?”

He answered in a rush. “She was dipping chicken parts in liquid smoke.”

My mind was somewhat fogged, so it took a moment or two for the words to sink in.

“Liquid smoke,” he continued urgently. “You know, it comes in a bottle...” He seemed to be appealing to me.

“Yes, yes,” I nodded. “Artificial hickory flavor.”

“It was like a slap in the face,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes again. “Madeline Elkhorn — the wife of me, Jake Elkhorn — cooking chicken with liquid smoke! I don’t what came over me. I lost control. I went into a rage.”

“Yes? And—”

“I hit her over the head with a hickory log.” He breathed a sigh of relief, as if he had just rid himself of a great burden.

“You killed Madeline with a hickory log?” The justice of it made me smile.

“Oh, no. That just stunned her. But you see...” Jake began to smile a little too, as his mood took another one of its unpredictable turns. “You see, she fell across the table.”