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

The Cathedral Oven by Floyd Warneke

I’ve been eating at Jake Elkhorn’s Cathedral Barbecue ever since the day four years ago when I caught that first glorious whiff of smoldering hickory wafting across the swan pond. Jake’s hole in the wall was three blocks from the park, between a radio supply house and a discount carpet racket, but I could have found it at night, blindfolded in a blizzard, just by following my nose. Any true barbecue disciple could have done the same. Long slow smoking over a hickory fire is the hallmark of genuine barbecue. Some joints pile a few logs in the foyer, just for show, and think they can get away with smearing some doctored tomato juice on boiled beef bones, but the smell is the giveaway. If you live in New York or California, you don’t know what I’m talking about. You think you’re barbecuing ribs when you warm them over a shallow pile of charcoal briquettes in your back yard. That’s not barbecue. That’s sterilization.

I could have cried with joy when I walked into the Cathedral Barbecue for the first time. There was Jake behind the counter, a glowing fat man in a white apron and a squashed chef’s hat, surrounded by piles of black fragrant chicken splits, briskets of beef, and slabs of ribs piled literally shoulder high, still gleaming from the oven. And the oven! A brick shrine worthy of the generic description cathedral, with two big iron doors, one of which was open to reveal, through the smoke, slabs of ribs on racks and on hooks, briskets, even a huge turkey.

“What’ll it be, mon compadre?” Jake asked cheerily. He was wielding a cleaver nonchalantly, hacking the inferior long ends off the ribs and flinging them into a trash barrel behind him. I was overwhelmed. At most restaurants, Jake’s throwaways would go for five bucks, a la carte.

“A beef sandwich,” I said, barely able to contain my emotion.

“On the plate or by itself?”

“By itself.”

Jake whisked a sheet of waxed paper from a dispenser, conjured up a bun from out of nowhere, and plunged elbow-deep into a huge mound of freshly sliced brisket, transferring a large heap of the thick slices onto the bun, hot beef spilling over in a trail across the counter that would have been enough for five sandwiches downtown at Leonard’s Wood Pit Barbecue. Before I could blink, Jake had slapped on the sauce with a fat brush (spraying the counter and his apron), pushing the top of the bun on the dripping meat, and served up the sandwich under my nose. It couldn’t have taken more than five seconds. “That’s a buck twenty,” he said. I would have paid twice that and counted it a bargain. I was hooked.

I began to lunch at the Cathedral Barbecue almost every day. My catwalk rental company is a one-man operation, so when I’m tired of hanging around the office waiting for the dust to settle on the file cabinets, I just tape a hand-lettered envelope on the door: “Out to Lunch.” I usually drop in at Jake’s mid-afternoons, after the heavy lunch traffic has cleared out. It’s a dark, restful sort of place when it’s empty — just a few redwood benches and picnic tables and a broken jukebox. I like to linger over a beer, staring at the beautiful waterfall in the Hamm’s chandelier which revolves slowly overhead.

Sometimes Jake will join me, leaning against the wall in his brown-stained apron, the sweat rolling down his round face and neck. We talk about sports or student radicals or grocery prices, but mostly about meat. Jake appreciates the time, effort, and artistry involved in smoking meats, the long night hours tending the oven, the sleepy mornings nursing the meat to perfection. “You take a turkey,” he says. “That’s a good fourteen hours of smoking. People don’t understand what you mean by smoking. They’re used to cooking over a flame. Even a cathedral needs watching. You got to keep the heat down. You go into the Wood Pit and order ribs. What do you get? They come out pink. They’re raw. They need another hour at least.” He waves a hand in disgust. “What do people know?” He talks like that, in short disconnected sentences. He isn’t a good listener, but he’s good company. He’s big and sweaty and happy and his hands are always shiny from handling fat.

For the first three years I patronized the Cathedral Barbecue, there was a cloud over the place, and I don’t mean hickory smoke. The bleak aspect was provided by Jake’s wife, Madeline, a menopausal shrew who seemed to delight in public spats. Madeline helped Jake with the lunch crowds, taking orders and handling the cash register while Jake made sandwiches and wrapped takeout orders of chicken and ribs. She was Jake’s opposite — tall, thin, withered, dark, with nasty almond eyes and a heavily lipsticked leering mouth.

Madeline was always needling Jake. Sometimes she would linger on in the afternoons to nag him about his drinking. It was true that Jake would nip at the bottle from time to time during the day, but to hear Madeline tell it he was a rip-roaring drunk. “I’ve had it!” she would scream, pacing about the room to the embarrassment of the few midafternoon customers. “Why should I knock myself out for a lush? I’m humiliated to be seen on the streets. People point me out and say, ‘There goes the wife of Jake the lush.’ ”

Madeline’s outbursts made Jake livid with rage. “Will you shut up!” he would hiss through clenched teeth. “Shut up!” But Madeline was relentless in her efforts to humiliate him. It was ironic, really, because it was Madeline who would have been taken for the drunk, bumping against tables and barking at Jake in a voice that could be heard outside on the sidewalk. Even when he was under the weather, Jake could total up a bill and make change as fast as he could build a sandwich. The supposedly sober Madeline had to struggle with paper and pencil and still couldn’t get it to come out right.

Often their arguments came to the brink of violence, and I was amazed at Madeline’s audacity in enraging a man so gifted with carving knife and cleaver. Always, however, just at the point when blows seemed inevitable, Madeline would take the car keys and storm out the front door. “Get out of here!” Jake would scream. “Don’t come back! I don’t need you!”

Witnesses to Jake’s marital battles were not often repeat customers. Even I, a confirmed disciple, sat embarrassed during these clashes, my head lowered, pretending not to hear. Afterward I could not meet Jake’s eyes until a respectable period had passed. Jake may or may not have been an alcoholic, but one thing was for certain: his wife was a psycho. She was bad for business and bad for Jake.

I could readily sympathize with Jake because I had fared poorly in marriage myself. My first wife was a gourmet cook who divorced me because of “irreconcilable differences” — that is to say, she rebelled at my restricted diet of barbecued meats, steaks, prime rib, and steamed shrimp. We parted amicably and she later married the headwaiter on the Super Chief between Los Angeles and Chicago.

My second ex was a waitress at the Beef and Bubbly. She shared my enthusiasm for barbecue and we enjoyed many happy years together, but she turned out to have an unfortunate metabolism. By the time she reached three hundred twenty pounds the spark was gone out of our marriage. She remarried also — choosing a young mystic in Los Angeles who had a radio program. In short, I learned that selecting a wife is more difficult than selecting a good cut of meat.

Jake could have taken the divorce route too, but his was not a legalistic temperament. His horizons were very limited — to his restaurant, to the great hickory forest around his country cabin, to the fragrant clouds that swept up the chimney of his cathedral oven. However much Madeline may have enraged him with her public displays, she was a fleeting nuisance, like a mosquito in your bedroom at night. Madeline was simply not that important to Jake. After a couple of quick ones behind the counter, he would get mellow and sentimental. No, if anyone was going to call it quits, it figured to be Madeline.

That’s what I thought had happened when she suddenly stopped showing up. For two days Jake had to handle the lunch crowd by himself, a long line twisting down the middle of the restaurant and out into the street — but nobody complained. Madeline was unpopular with the regulars because of her sharpness and because sometimes she would open up Jake’s sandwiches and take off a slice or two of beef right under your nose. “What are you running?” she would shout over her shoulder. “A charity?” No, Madeline was not missed.

After those two freelance days, Jake hired a young girl with long blonde hair who wore a sweatshirt bearing the seal of Texas Western College at El Paso. Ellen was instantly popular. She was cheerful, she could add without resorting to her fingers and toes, and she left the sandwiches alone. What’s more, she spoke with a sweet Southern accent — the word “hickory” came off her tongue in a way that made you homesick for places you’d never been before, like Chattanooga and Possum Trot.

After a couple of days, Jake broke his silence on Madeline’s absence. “She’s gone,” he told anyone who asked. “Went up in smoke.” To his more intimate friends he confided that he had filed a report with Missing Persons. “They’ll be out looking for her,” he told me languidly, slicing brisket with a long narrow carving knife. “If anybody can find her, they can. If they bother to look. I told them, ‘I’m reporting her gone, that’s all. I ain’t asking you to bring her back to me.’ She wasn’t no prize.”

Of course, Madeline’s disappearance wouldn’t go down that easy. There was a lot of open speculation in the neighborhood, not all of it generous, connecting Jake’s marital difficulties and his deftness with a meat cleaver. One afternoon my office neighbor, Barney Meyerhoff, blew the dust off my scale model catwalk and squinted across the desk at me. “I ain’t saying he actually done her in,” he said. “But I don’t bite into one of his sandwiches these days without lifting the bun first and taking a peek.”

Jake’s differences with his wife must have gotten around to Missing Persons. Before the week was out, three investigators had dropped in to ask Jake a few questions about the disappearance. I was nursing a beer and experimenting with a barbecued mutton sandwich (too greasy for my taste), so I was close enough to hear everything. There was one very tall aggressive questioner wearing a checked sport coat and a regimental tie, and two dull older men in baggy suits who ordered sandwiches and spent the whole time at the counter passing barbecue sauce and napkins back and forth.

Jake stuck to his version of Madeline’s disappearance, which was that he was totally ignorant of the circumstances. “I don’t know where she went.” He shrugged. “She just went up in smoke.” Involuntarily we all glanced toward the big iron doors of the cathedral oven, but Jake just folded his arms across his ample stomach and smiled. The tall cop stared at Jake’s stained apron with a thoughtful expression.

The next day the three men were back with a search warrant, and again I witnessed everything. The two dull men in baggy suits confiscated Jake’s apron, which he surrendered with offended dignity. Then they demanded that he turn over all his cleavers and carving knives. “What am I supposed to carve with?” Jake asked, holding out his hands in bewilderment.

“Use a fork,” the tall cop said, holding the crumpled apron up close to his eyes to examine the stains. “The lab,” he said, handing the apron back to one of the flunkies. He looked up again at Jake. “Would you mind opening the doors on that oven?”

“It lets the heat out,” Jake said sullenly.

“I don’t doubt it,” the tall man said, returning Jake’s hostile stare with one of his own.

Jake changed his strategy slightly. “Opening the doors lets in air. Make the fire bum hot.”

“Well, that’s fine,” the tall cop said. “One offsets the other.” He nodded to one of the flunkies. “Open it.”

The little man unlatched one of the big iron doors and swung it open with his fingertips, his tongue poking out between his teeth. His partner put his head in at an angle, trying to look up the chimney, and yanked it back out immediately with a cry. “Hell, it’s hot in there!”

The tall cop’s face was as rigid as before. “Where’s the fire?”

Jake pointed at the smaller iron doors at the side walls of the oven. “Underneath.”

“What are you burning?”

Jake stiffened. “Hickory,” he said firmly.

The cop nodded and sucked in his cheeks. “Put it out,” he ordered.

Jake’s jaw dropped. “You must be kidding.”

The tall cop flourished the search warrant with a bored gesture. “Put it out,” he repeated. He settled wearily on a bench and leaned back with his elbows on a table. “And while we’re waiting, I’ll have a short end of ribs, hold the pickles, and coffee.”

The two flunkies hustled out with the confiscated evidence, and I watched in awe as a troubled Jake poured cold water over his precious hickory logs. For the first time in years, the sacred fire was quenched. In my eyes the tall cop, nibbling unconsciously at his ribs, was no better than a religious vandal or a grave robber. Jake sat silently on a chair near the front window, staring at his knees. He looked strange without his apron.

I wasn’t there that night when the police searched the oven, but the next morning Jake told me that they nearly took the place apart. One lab specialist crawled all over the floor looking for bloodstains. Another rummaged through the trash barrel in which Jake disposed of the long ends of ribs, asking again and again in amazement, “You mean you throw this stuff away?” The tall cop had hired a midget named Maurice to scale the inside of the cold chimney with a flashlight. His muffled voice kept coming down from above, “It sure is dirty in here,” or, “You know, I wouldn’t mind moving into a place like this.”

The total result of the search: zero. “I told them over and over again,” Jake said laughingly, “I don’t know where Madeline went. She just went up in smoke.” He shook his head. “The big guy wasn’t too happy. He never paid for his ribs.”

That morning, Jake cleaned the oven and started a fresh fire, piling in the hickory logs with a delicacy that was touching. “The next time this fire goes out,” he said heartily, “it’s over my dead body. You can bet on that, friend.”

A few days later, without comment, the police returned his knives, cleavers, and apron. “They could have at least cleaned the apron,” Jake said.

The police didn’t come around after that. Missing Persons never found Jake’s wife either. After a few weeks the subject of her disappearance pretty much faded from everyone’s thoughts. Ellen filled her place with cheerful efficiency, business picked up at the Cathedral Barbecue, and Jake’s smile and sandwiches both seemed to get bigger as the memory of Madeline receded into the hazy past. Sometimes he would get philosophical, proclaiming his independence of women. “Maybe it’s true that Eve was made from Adam’s rib,” he said one afternoon, soberly inspecting a fat-laden long end. “But if so, it was a bad slab.”

I would never have learned the whole story were it not for the Internal Revenue Service. Like most people, I can’t face my taxes till the last moment, and this year I went right down to the April 15 deadline with tax tables and schedules and unfathomable forms spread all over my office so deep that the mice were taking the long way around. I toiled wearily till way after dark, my joy at discovering that Gibbon Catwalk Rentals was a tax shelter offset by the corresponding discovery that I was broke.

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.”

I shook my head to indicate that I did not understand.

“Don’t you see?” Jake made a falling gesture with one of his arms. “She landed face first in the bowl of liquid smoke.” He prompted me with his other hand, the one holding the glass.

A light began to dawn in my head. “She went—” I mimicked Jake’s falling gesture with my hand, “—down in smoke?”

He began to laugh uncontrollably. “Yes, yes,” he sputtered. “Down in smoke.” He laughed on for a few seconds and then added, in a more controlled voice, “Of course, I had to hold her head down in the bowl until I was certain...” His voice trailed off and he turned morose again. “It was a great tragedy, of course. A terrible tragedy.” He poured himself another drink and stared at the glass in silence.

After a while I broke the silence with another question. “What about the body, Jake?”

His features went soft. “Aw — I buried her in a beautiful spot. It’s up on a hill above the river. A beautiful stand of hickory.” He stood up shakily and opened one of the fire doors. Again, the flames made magical shadows dance around us. He turned to me, the poker dangling from his hand. “You don’t use liquid smoke, do you?”

“Who, me?” I was offended. “Of course not.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “You know better. It’s not—” he looked at me, and in an instant of understanding we spoke in unison, “—the real thing.” He sat down again and poured me another drink. “Barbecue is my life,” he said.

We did not speak again that night. It was like a religious experience — just me and Jake and the cathedral oven.