An Ordinary Decent Criminal by Michael Van Rooy Page B

carefully putting the baby gate into place in Fred’s room and locking it despite his squalls of outrage. I had to raise my voice to be heard downstairs over the baby.
    “I’m showering!”
    Claire came up and idly dusted flour off the front of her sweatshirt.
    “You have no idea how glad I am. Dinner will be in ten minutes.”
    Upstairs the taps ran cold, then hot, then warm and finally they stuttered along at that temperature for just long enough. I changedinto a pair of black dress pants cut down to shorts and a sleeveless white dress shirt and then came down to find the dining room lit by candles, with Fred dozing in his high chair.
    “Monsieur.” Claire made a broad gesture with her arm and showed me to my seat at the rickety old card table we were using since the cops had taken away our dining room table. God knows why. Probably to test it for blood or other crucial evidence. This despite the fact they had at least two confessions, both of them mine, plus whatever other theories they might have come up with. From past experience I knew we might maybe get the damn table back in a year. That was a big maybe and odds were we’d never see it again unless we visited a cop’s house or went to a police auction.
    I sat down and Claire brought out a cracked and chipped blue china plate, holding it at the bottom with the towel. On it was a very large, very bloody piece of meat with numerous score marks across it and a great number of peppercorns floating in a blood sauce. Beside the meat was a single baked potato steaming in a jacket of aluminum foil, and beside that was a small cup full of spinach with vinegar already added.
    Claire gave a truly regal nod and wink and I burst out, “You are trying to kill me. Do you remember what the doctor said? ‘No meat, maybe just a little chicken.’ Help, help, my wife’s trying to kill me!”
    I picked up a mismatched steak knife and fork and prodded the meat, only to have Claire pull the plate away.
    “Well, if you don’t want it . . .”
    When I growled at her, she put the food down and went to get her own. By the time she came back, I was on the fourth bite.
    “Oh, God! This is better than sex.”
    She looked at me and arched an eyebrow so I covered. “Um, er, with anyone but the present company, of course.”
    She put real butter, chives, and sour cream on her potato, and then passed them.
    “Good. Nice recovery. I guess my mama was wrong. You can be taught.”
    I ate some more. “Not to look a gift cow in the mouth, my sweet, but this is hardly welfare dining.”
    She waved a small chunk of meat in the air and I saw Renfield follow it with his muzzle while a thin line of drool broke free from his lower lip and fell to the floor.
    “This, my virtuous little ex-con, is a reward. While you were out sweating and doing God knows what (although I do hope it was legal), I took a message. Apparently your charm has managed to convince one Steven Marquez to hire you to work in his convenience store. You start tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. sharp.”
    I went over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, which she accepted as her due. On my way back I stole a tiny bite of her steak and she waited until I was sitting before continuing. “As for the steak, it was cheap, cheap, cheap. No one knows how to cut meat any more and no one actually likes to eat it, either, and so this poor little well-marbled steak sat there naked and battered for three days past its due date until only I could see the essential goodness within.”
    She cut off a nice-sized bite and examined it. “So I got it, nicely rotted, for a song.”
    She ate and I felt my stomach churn. Claire’s father had been a butcher with his own shop in Banff and she had learned from him while growing up. If she said the meat was good, then it was good, so I took another bite and she went on. “Tell me about your day.”
    So I did and frankly it was kind of boring but she listened and she asked questions and we talked. After a while we