“Meat woulda been better?”

“Protein?” said Kleffer. “What do you think? The more up in front you are, the more you get to transform protein. I got sweetbreads, Mr. L., he knew what I could do with them. I made sausages with a chestnut sauce, judges came in their pants.”

Milo said, “Meanwhile, J.J.’s chopping lettuce.”

“Kale. Swiss chard. Carrots.” Kleffer laughed raggedly. “Got so pissed he cut himself, bled all over the mise en place, everything ruined, he got kicked off the show in the middle. Like a fucking exile! He was just a prep slut, anyway. Meanwhile, I’m doing my sweetbread with the chestnut sauce, must have drove him nuts, he hated me.”

“Because of the sweetbreads.”

“More than the sweetbreads,” said Kleffer. “My team won. And he was a fucking loser.”

Milo had him email the video to the desktop at his office and to his cell phone.

“Anything else, Darius?”

“I know he hurt Kathy, you just told me on the phone.”

Milo said, “Not exactly—”

“You hand him to me, I give him mega-pain slice-dice.”

“Let’s take it slow, Darius.”

Kleffer smoked, kicked the ground, slapped a wall.

“Darius?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m mellow.”

“You think Williams would’ve killed Kathy to get back at you because he was upset over a cooking competition?”

“When he fucked himself up by bleeding on the mise, everyone was talking about it, Billy Slade fired his ass from Inca Grill. Last I heard he was making burgers in a dive-bar on Delancey Street.”

Kleffer laughed again, tilted his hand back and forth. “Sear, flip, sear, flip. That’ll melt your brain. Asshole deserved it, he was a shithead from day one, even unloading on the Guatemalans.”

“The Guatemalans?”

“The prep guys, they’re like the backbone of the kitchen, you don’t piss them off. Asshole actually hit one in the face, claiming the guy was messing him up on purpose. Which is stupid, the Guatemalans are professionals. You can get away with a lot of shit in a kitchen but you don’t mess with the Guatemalans, they know more than you. That was his problem, thinking he was smarter than everyone, going to Harvard.”

“We’ve been told Yale.”

“Same difference,” said Kleffer. “So what if you took Persian fucking philosophy? Can you conceive a badass sauce? Can you marry flavors? The kitchen is the ultimate test, Asshole couldn’t stand up to it. He never liked me because whenever we ended up in the same place, I was higher up. That’s why he stole Kathy from me. I know it was him.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. “I leave New York and come here. So guess who shows up? It’s like, you’ve got to be kidding.”

“J.J. showed up at Beppo—”