Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [42]
“Tell that to the chef. No, really, tell him. Preferably tomorrow morning at nine A.M., so I have time to sleep in while you get your balls handed to you on a chopping block.”
“Listen, none of that’s important. It’s all small stuff.” Rob waved his hand. “But I heard you were writing a book. Is that true?”
She stared. “Did I miss the water cooler on the tour? Because I could really stand to know where you all get your information so damn fast.”
“There’s no such thing as a secret in the kitchen,” Rob told her. “Which is kinda what I wanted to talk to you about. So is it true?”
“Yes, I have a book deal.” The thrill she got from saying it was probably illegal in twenty states.
Rob stepped closer and a stray passing headlight caught his eyes in a weird way, making them seem sharp and fragmented.
“Then I’m your guy,” he said, his voice tight and high.
“What are you talking about?” Miranda asked, genuinely mystified and really wishing he’d finish creeping her out so she could go home already.
“You want to know all the gossip? The shady backgrounds, the bad pasts, the rap sheets? Who in the kitchen does the dirt, how and when, and with who else? I know all of it. And I’m willing to spill. With one condition.”
Miranda’s heart started pounding again, this time from excitement.
“What condition?”
He smiled, a thin, unpleasant expression that made him look more like a ferret than ever.
“Keep my name out of it. If you out me as your source, after what I’m going to tell you, I’ll never work in a restaurant again.”
It was hours before she made it to bed that night, but they were productive hours. Rob spilled, as promised, loads of dirt. It turned out that he felt he’d been passed over by Adam and Frankie in favor of cooks with less formal training, and it rankled.
Not that Rob put it so succinctly, but Miranda pieced it together. The many and varied comments on the various line cooks’ immigrant backgrounds and lack of familiarity with classical French terminology were a big clue.
She couldn’t wait to transpose her notes from their conversation and order them into something resembling a narrative. There was a lot to work with here: criminal priors, Mafia connections, insanely dangerous pranks played on other kitchens and bragged about . . . none of it attributed directly to Adam Temple, but that sous-chef, Frankie, was on the hook for enough illicit nookie in and around the restaurant premises to keep the Department of Health and Sanitation hopping for a year. Which only made her retroactively even more anxious about the fact that Jess had been talking to the guy last night. She needed to nip that friendship in the bud.
Once she finally hit her bed, she slept so hard she actually missed her alarm going off and had to scramble to get showered and dressed. She put on one of her office outfits, hoping the conservative dark gray wrap dress would boost her confidence with its associations of delivering the verbal smackdown to bad restaurants across the city.
Jess still wasn’t up when she left. He’d been in his room with the door shut when she got home, but his light had still been on. She worried he wasn’t getting enough sleep, and thought about trying to enforce a curfew or a lights-out policy while she did her makeup.
Luck was on her side, and she caught a cab right away. The cabbie seemed to know the best way to go, and to not be intent on taking her from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side by way of Rockefeller Center, so Miranda crossed her fingers and hoped her luck continued to hold.
The cab pulled up at the corner of Seventy-eighth and Columbus Avenue, where Miranda paid up and got out. She was going to have to figure out a bus schedule; all this cab fare was killing her.
Market on a Saturday morning was very different from Market on a Friday night. It already felt more welcoming than it had when she’d been there before during off-hours, and Miranda wondered at that. It wasn’t like she’d spent any time at all, really, in the front rooms. Still, the morning sunlight filtered in the dark gold–tinted