Chapter One The big guy lumbered toward me, waving the cleaver. Weeping like a baby. "Take it easy, buddy," I said. "No harm done." "I d-d-didn't mean to do it. I swear to God I didn't." "I hope not," I said, looking at the mangled, bloody mess he'd caused. "Why don't you give me that cleaver before you make this any worse?" "I'm a screwup," the big guy said. He was close enough for me to read the little name tag on his white coat. Eldon Something with Too Many Consonants. "We all have bad days, Eldon," I told him. "Just hand me the cleaver." He hesitated, then handed over the knife. He made a loud sniff to clear his sinuses, then used the sleeve of his white jacket to wipe the moisture from his eyes and the sweat from the rest of his face. I was sweating, too. It could have been the heat from the television lights. Or the steamers. Or Eldon's incompetence with the cleaver. Probably all three. "I'm sorry, chief," Eldon mumbled. "Chef," I corrected him. "Oh, right. Chef." Actually, it's Chef Billy Blessing. If you recognize the name, and I sincerely hope you do, you'll understand that I don't engage in a whole lot of on-the-job chef-ing these days, though I do run a popular restaurant on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Blessing's Bistro. (A New York magazine pick. Tops in food and service per Zagat, thank you very much.) I have a line of savory prepared meals (which you can find in the frozen-food sections of the better supermarkets). And there's a series of cookbooks (the latest of which, Blessing's Best: Brunches, just went into a second printing, a New York Times Bestseller). But people usually know me because I'm on TV. My own show, Blessing's in the Kitchen, appears on the Wine & Dine Cable Network, Thursdays at four p.m. EST, and, for reasons I've never understood, repeated at two a.m. on Saturdays. I guess if you come home drunk, the first thing you want to do is turn on the forty-two-inch LCD and watch me cook. And, crucial to the whole Blessing mini-empire, I'm a regular on Wake Up, America!, the morning news show airing weekdays on the Worldwide Broadcasting Company. I'm the guy with the food features, interviews, and the joke of the day. Viewers tell me I remind them of a stocky Eddie Murphy, minus the mustache, the honking laugh, and the leather pants. I prefer to think of myself as a more accessible, less intense version of Denzel Washington. They also assume, because our producer, Arnie Epps, has instructed me to keep a smile on my face whenever I'm on camera, that I'm always cheery. I'm not. At the particular moment I am describing, in the midst of a disastrous trial run for a new Wine & Dine series, I was one hundred and eighty degrees from cheery. I turned to survey the other nine inhabitants of the soundstage kitchen. They, like Eldon, were dressed in chef coats, with most of their hair tucked under white caps. Also like Eldon, they were all very young, the exception being a beady-eyed fortysomething gent who had the appearance and the odor of a greasy-spoon fry cook. They'd separated themselves by gender. A male with acne was staring at me with the goofy adoration of a dependent dog. Another was nervously rubbing a mustache that looked like anchovies attacking his upper lip. I spied a brown Mohawk partially tucked under Excerpted from The Morning Show Murders by Al Roker, Dick Lochte All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
