IT WAS ALMOST 1:30 P.M. BY THE TIME MIKE RETURNED TO Shelton. He pulled into a parking space near traffic light seven and made notes on a legal pad about his conversation with Sam Miller. The information in Sam’s notebook was too speculative to serve as a cogent defense in the case. Mike’s stomach growled. He’d missed lunch, and the sweet tea provided by Muriel Miller wasn’t a substitute for a meal. Mike called the church. Delores answered.
“Any problems?” he asked.
“No, it’s been real quiet. I’ve been reading one of my magazines.”
Delores loved gossip magazines and kept close tabs on the real and imagined scandals of movie and soap opera stars.
“Anything I need to know that’s going on in Hollywood?”
“Not really, but if I see a good sermon illustration, I’ll mark it.”
A CONCRETE-BLOCK BUILDING ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWN WAS home to the world’s greatest hamburger. Owned by identical twin brothers, the Brooks Brothers Sandwich House had been serving up hamburgers topped with homemade chili and sweet onions since Mike attended high school. He pulled into the gravel parking lot.
Next to a pale yellow building was a long wooden table under a tin roof that provided open-air eating. The building itself was too small for a dining room, so all the brothers’ business was either take-out or eaten by customers alfresco style at the communal table. Between noon and one o’clock, the line of construction workers and businesspeople stretched out the door.
The kitchen was open to public view, and one of the brothers was busy flattening round balls of fresh meat on a grill top. In a pan on a single-coil electric unit rested a smoking pot of chili. Orders were written on the white bags used to hold each order. The Brooks brother at the grill looked up when Mike entered the restaurant.
“Hey, Mike! How you doing?”
“Pretty good.”
Mike had known the Brooks brothers for more than twenty years. He’d watched their hair turn gray and their waistlines grow, but he’d never been able to tell them apart. In middle age, they remained carbon copies of each other. While one brother cooked, the other filled Styrofoam cups with tea and lined up orders of thick-cut french fries.
A rough-looking man named Dusty with the sleeves cut out of a biker T-shirt took the orders. Scowling, and with a pen in his hand, he stood behind the counter and waited for Mike.
“I recommend the fried liver mush,” Dusty said. “It’s fresh and crisp.”
Mike would occasionally eat the square patties of liver, but if Peg found out, she made him brush his teeth twice and gargle with mouthwash before getting close to him.
“No, my wife has been extra nice to me the past few days, and I don’t want to ruin it. I’ll have two cheeseburgers all the way.”
He moved down the counter toward the cash register. Hamburgers sizzled on the black grill. Above the cash register hung a small bell that Dusty rang every time a first-time customer came into the shop.
“Been on any cruises lately?” Mike asked Dusty.
The counterman saved his money so he could book a cheap three- or four-day cruise every year.
“It’s coming up in a month.”
“Where are you going?”
“Aruba, Grand Cayman, and St. Thomas.”
The brother pouring tea laughed. “Don’t believe him, Mike. It’s the same thing he always does. They fly him to Miami, drop him in a dingy, and tow him to the Bahamas where he drinks beer for forty-eight hours before coming home.”
Dusty patted his belly with a grin. “I know what they mean by all-inclusive— it’s all the boiled shrimp and beer I can put down from the time the boat leaves Miami until it gets back to the dock.”
The door opened and Braxton Hodges, a reporter with the Shelton paper, entered. Braxton, a balding man with glasses and rumpled white shirt, reported on everything from livestock winners at the county fair to the annual black-tie fund-raiser for the local hospital.
“Heard you were in court this morning,” the reporter said to Mike after he ordered.
“That’s not news.”
“It is in Shelton. Getting bored with the pulpit?”
“No, just trying to help someone out of a jam.”
Dusty handed Mike his sack of food. “The liver mush makes a tasty dessert.”
“Talk Braxton into it,” Mike said. “He can write an article about what it does to his digestive tract.”
Mike went outside with his food. He bowed his head for a silent blessing, then pulled out a burger and took a bite. Like the Brooks brothers’ physical appearances, the hamburgers were always the same and uniformly excellent. Braxton Hodges joined him.
“Admit it,” Hodges said. “You wanted a thick slab of liver mush between two pieces of white bread.”