Swap Out!

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

Jeff “the Chef” Davis watched Julio’s show that he’d taped last night. His new flat-screen television looked huge and out of place in his apartment, but the picture was worth it. Made it feel as if he was really there.

He half watched as his friend did his Spanish paella, a second place winner at three different contests back before he was a television star. A good dish, Jeff knew it well. Jeff “the Chef” had placed first all three times: a Prime Rib marinated in pineapple barbeque sauce, breast of turkey à la Davis, and Mahi-mahi roasted with red peppers and caramelized with Jamaican rum.

Jeff switched the Chagall reprint of I and the Village beside the screen with the smaller, framed menu of his prize-winning seven-course meal at a Craig Claiborne contest. The large screen stood out less. Well, a little less.

Julio was selling his finished paella to the audience. Then he called a girl up from the audience, at least a decade younger than he was, more like two. Jeff knew he’d picked his next target. Julio had always been a fan of the long and leggy blondes. His wife, his mistress, and bee-you-tee-ful Jennifer from Ohio were practically interchangeable. He’d known Julio for years and the man never ceased to amaze him. Jeff had trouble speaking with a pretty woman outside his professional, on-screen persona. Julio swept them up like a Central Park street cleaner.

The menu was really too small for the space it was supposed to fill. Somewhere he had a photo of Craig shaking his hand. An old Craig and a younger Jeff, much younger. Which was why he’d taken it down in the first place. But he was over that now and it would look nice beside the menu.

On screen, the feeding each other thing made a cute touch. Julio and the leggy blonde looked good together on camera, you could even hear the audience sighing at the romance of the moment. He certainly knew how to play the crowd.

Jeff should call him and see if he’d persuaded the blonde into his bed. Or even the blonde and her friend. It was hard to put anything past Julio, he was a blonde-glutton. Maybe he wouldn’t call, they might still be abed. It was only mid-afternoon.

It wasn’t until the floor director rushed on screen that Jeff realized something was wrong. He grabbed the remote and turned the sound off. After some fumbling he turned it up to a room-filling roar. He more fell than sat back on his couch.

Chaos exploded on his television screen. Julio and the girl collapsed. Audience members screamed. Someone actually trampled Julio as they sprinted across the set. Jeff jerked to his feet and then dropped back onto his couch as his knees let go. He looked around for some explanation. But he was alone in his upper West Side apartment. All the plush trappings of the nation’s number one television cooking show host paled before the tragedy unfolding on the screen.

No one thought to stop the camera feed and the camera guys were doing their job well. Too well. They captured it all for posterity. The stampede as half the audience surged forward to gawk. The other half a stampede as they bolted for the door in terror of their own lives.

Julio’s gaping mouth and confused, dying eyes were abruptly replaced with black. After a few seconds a Tide commercial filled the screen. The sound of the screams and confusion continued over the wholesome housewife and her son’s grass-stained soccer uniform.

Jeff hit the mute button. The abrupt silence lasted a long moment before he heard a siren sound far below. It was wrong, they’d be too late already. And the time was wrong. He’d taped Julio last night.

Julio couldn’t be dead, not last night and not now.

He’d had dinner with the man two or three nights ago. Three. They’d been friendly rivals for a decade, once they’d found they were both from the same neighborhood in a back corner of Bronx.

Julio had shrugged off the loss of both Becky and Bobbi Jean, his wife and mistress, lightly.

“We learned growing up that it was dangerous to get too attached to anything, especially a relationship. You remember, mi amigo.”

Jeff had grown up two blocks away and his parents had moved to the country before Jeff was ten or Julio was born, which Julio blithely brushed aside as if they’d been bosom buddies. But he remembered the Bronx and that letting anyone close was dangerous. Was that why he was fifty-six and alone? No, that wasn’t it. Jeff picked up the remote and set it back down.

“I’d be some kinda peesed,” Julio’s television accent slipped out on occasion in his real life as well, “if they weren’t just women.”

Jeff had almost spit his Katz’s corn beef sandwich on Julio.

“See,” Julio had taken a bite of his pastrami on rye and spoken around it. “My male ego is intact. Women are everywhere. They are all beee-you-tiful,” he kissed his fingertips and tossed the kiss toward the ceiling, “and thankfully many of them are willing to tickle the fancy of big TV stars like us.”

And last night, in the midst of a detergent commercial, Julio had died on a studio floor in midtown. Dead because of his promiscuity? Perhaps killed by his mistress or wife?

He had to call Julio. It had all been some sick joke. They’d have a good laugh over it next week while Jeff cooked Beef with Oyster Sauce and Mr. Chu’s Pork Egg Fu Yung as promised.

Jeff managed to find the stop on the remote, before reaching for the telephone. On screen was Maggie Hadderly doing her “Health and Happiness with Hadderly” routine. She was an up and comer, have to keep an eye on her. A comfortable enough thing to do for its own sake, cute kid. He’d even bought her cookbook, retail. It was good enough for a first one. The potential was there.

The closed captioning caught up with the show, it came up whenever he had the sound muted.

Yesterday Maggie Hadderly was cooking for a studio audience of sixty five . . .

Good crowd for a weekday, pre-recorded show. She was doing better than he thought.

. . . when she went to her oven. Experts are saying this required no exceptional mechanical skills to achieve.

Maggie sashayed to her oven. She really was fun to watch, the woman definitely knew how to sell it. She pulled open the oven door and a tongue of flame twenty feet long shot out of the oven and enveloped her in fire.

Jeff sprang back to his feet and dropped the remote. It bounced off the coffee table and the mute switched off.

Screams filled his apartment. Maggie’s screams. Her audience’s screams.

He almost screamed in response.

People rushed in from off camera with fire extinguishers. They shot them off—and the entire studio kitchen was enveloped in flame.

“In addition to the napalm in the oven, three fire extinguishers had been refilled with gasoline,” the voiceover resumed, some pert woman was reporting in exactly the same tone she’d probably used last week to report the results of the Westminster Dog Show.

Jeff recovered the remote and turned the volume down as he watched. Maggie was roasted alive.

God, napalm. Who had she “peesed off?” Some jilted lover? She was nearly as infamous for the length of her list of conquests as she was famous for her cooking. Had she and Julio both been murdered by someone they’d slept with?

He buried his head in his hands. The phone in one hand and the remote in the other clunked against his forehead. He hung up the phone and muted the television.

The news was now busy reporting a stray kitten who’d scampered across the runway at a Bryant Park fashion show. Leggy models in tight skirts and stilettos were sprawled like spilled rice along the runway. The captioning appeared . . .

Fortunately the models in the shorter [cough] attire were wearing thongs.

A close up made sure that America had a clear view of how little use a thong really was in hiding anything.

He pressed the play button. Detergent had to be better than this.

Show day tomorrow.

For the first time he didn’t want to go and wasn’t sure if he dared. Not that there’d been any ex-lovers lately to hunt him down. But still, maybe the winning entry was to not enter at all. Huddling beneath the bedcovers in his high-security, high-rise apartment sounded very appealing.

A sharp knock on the apartment door jerked him back to his feet. The television remote flew from his hands once more and landed on the carpet in front of the set.

Some stupid corner of his brain suggested getting a new career selling yo-yos for the number of times he’d leapt to his feet in the last two minutes.

The knock expanded. Bidda, bidda, bum, bum, bum.

No! This couldn’t be happening. b****y hell!

Twenty-seven years since he’d heard the “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” drum solo pounded out on his door. Plus four months and six days, the same useless part of his brain informed him. He resisted looking at the clock so that it could fill in the hours. The morning of his last day with EMS. His last day working to change the world for—

Oh hell and damnation!