by Cleo Coyle
“You have to let me handle this, okay?”
I frowned, my jaw clenching. This wasn’t easy. “So…you’ll talk to him?”
“Yes. I will. I promise.”
“Okay, then. Guess I’m demoted back to ‘butt out’ mode.” I forced a smile.
My daughter smiled, too, and we returned to the kitchen.
Joy grabbed a fresh white jacket from a cabinet and buttoned it on as she escorted me past the walk-in fridge, the prep tables, and the cook stations. When we got to the double doors that led to the dining room, I turned to her. “I can wait around, you know. Madame and I would be happy to escort you home. I’m sure it’s lonely with your roommate in Paris for the next six months.”
Before Joy could reply, the doors pushed inward, bumping my behind. I leapt aside as Chef Tommy Keitel himself swept in.
“Chef,” Joy said, nodding. “You remember—”
“Clare Cosi!” Tommy exclaimed. “The coffee lady. Hey, good to see you again!”
He extended his hand, but the doors opened once more, and a member of the waitstaff entered, a tray of dishes on his shoulder. After an awkward moment, Keitel’s large, strong hand clasped mine.
“I’ve got to clean up my station,” Joy said, quietly excusing herself.
Keitel looked exactly as I remembered him. He was a tall, fit man in his fifties with arresting blue eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, a slightly crooked nose, and what looked to me like a perpetual smirk of confidence.
He released my hand then slipped off his coat and hung it on a peg. He wore a black silk shirt underneath, opened enough at the collar to show off his curling gray chest hairs, wiry muscles, and a silver chain. He grinned at me as he rolled up his sleeves, revealing the heavily developed forearms of a man who’d probably mixed and whisked and turned dough for thousands of hours in his lifetime.
“So, Clare, how do you like my kitchen?” Tommy asked with undisguised pride.
“Interesting,” I said, tightly folding my arms.
Tommy nodded, then cocked his head, shouting at a waiter who’d just pushed through the double doors. “Hey, René! Where the hell is Nappy?”
The Haitian man who’d waited on my table stopped and blinked, as if he was uncertain how to reply. “I, uh, just saw him, Chef,” he finally said. “I’m sure he’s around…”
I cleared my throat. “The last time I saw your maître d’, he was chasing your executive sous-chef into your back alley.”
Tommy winced. “Again?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “And I really think you should speak with—”
“René!” he barked again. “Did Dornier take any calls for me?”
“Your wife,” the waiter called as he moved toward the back staircase. “She rang three times during service, looking for you.”
Tommy scowled at that.
“And Mr. Wright stopped by. He needed to speak with you about something. Since you weren’t here, he spoke with Brigitte.”
Tommy’s scowl deepened.
“Chef Keitel,” I tried again. “Speaking of Brigitte, I witnessed quite a scene with her here earlier—”
“Tommy?” a new voice called from behind me. The voice was deep and male, almost guttural.
Tommy’s face instantly brightened as the stranger stepped into the kitchen through the dining room doors. “Hey, there he is!” Tommy cried. “Have any problem parking the SUV?”
The newcomer silently shook his head. He was clad in black from his pointy boots and chinos to his shiny black leather blazer. His sunglasses were black, too—so dark I thought for a second that he might be blind.
“Clare Cosi, this is Nick, a buddy of mine from Brighton Beach.”
I extended my hand. “Nice to meet you, Nick.”
The man drew his narrow hand out of his pocket and shook mine. His flesh was ice-cold, but then he’d just come in from outside, and it was November. Under his dark glasses, the man’s complexion was so pale, it looked almost pink. His hair was light brown, and it hung in long, thin strands from an elongated head. His chin had a deep cleft, and his lips were thin and expressionless—literally. He remained silent.
“Well, it was great to see you, Clare!” Tommy said with a dismissive wave. “Nick and I have some work to do.”
“But I wanted to tell you—”
“Good night now!” Grabbing Nick’s arm, he turned his back to me and swiftly led the man toward the walk-in refrigerator.
Like pale, timid monks, the line cooks watched their larger-than-life boss and his strange friend wend their way to the back of the kitchen. Joy glanced in my direction and flashed a tiny wave.
“Don’t worry,” she mouthed to me. “I’ll speak to him.”
I waved back, realizing there was nothing more to do but trust my daughter. I wasn’t through butting in. I promised myself that. For now, however, Joy said she could handle explaining things to Tommy, and I had to trust that she would.
With clenched fists, I forced myself to walk away. Though I was sad to say good night to my daughter, I was far from broken up about leaving Tommy Keitel’s restaurant. More than anything, I wanted to get back downtown to my Village Blend, where at least I could get a decent cup of coffee.
THREE
THE Village Blend occupied a four-story Federal-style town house in New York’s historic West Village. To my customers, however, the Blend was more than just a java joint. It was a dependable oasis of calm in a crowded, expensive, stress-inducing city that routinely stripped its occupants of their dignity.
The place was my oasis, too. Behind my espresso bar, I felt capable and in control. After that knife-wielding episode in Solange’s cutthroat kitchen, I was relieved to get back to some comfortable, familiar, sane surroundings, if only to lock up for the night and head upstairs for a fresh pot of joe and a warm vanilla bath.
As I stepped off the chilly Hudson Street sidewalk and pushed through the beveled glass door, however, I wondered whose coffeehouse I’d just entered.
Oh, it looked the same. Twenty coral-colored café tables sat on a restored wood-plank floor. There was a working fireplace, a colorful collection of antique grinding mills and tin coffee signs, a wrought-iron spiral staircase leading to a second-floor lounge, a line of French doors (which we threw open in warmer weather for sidewalk seating), and a blueberry marble counter fronting a pastry case and state-of-the-art espresso bar. What threw me, however, was the discordant noise reverberating off the exposed brick walls.
The pounding instruments mixed with the barking chant of an angry male voice had all the musicality of construction equipment. And then there were the enchanting lyrics:
The game’s all the same, homey
Uptown and down
Cell phones and names, baby
Bitches, hoes, and goin’ down
Bang, bang, for money, sonny
That’s what she want
So you bang, bang that booty, sonny!
Take it from her c—
Ack! I thought with a shudder. What barista of mine is running rap through the Village Blend sound system?!
It couldn’t have been my assistant manager. When he wasn’t scribbling one acts or landing small parts in locally filmed TV dramas, Tucker Burton was pulling shots for me to upbeat pop and retro eighties.
There was no way Gardner Evans would be playing rap, either. Gardner was a serious jazz musician who regularly decried “gangstas” making millions on selling “crack music to little crackers whose idea of slumming was going to the fringes of their suburbs for a 7-Eleven Slurpee” (his words, not mine).
The rap fan couldn’t have been fine arts painter Dante Silva. His preferences ran to Moby, Philip Glass, New Age, ambient, and space music. And if Joy’s father had been pulling shots of espresso tonight (which he did on occasion, when he wasn’t traveling the globe brokering deals for the planet’s finest micro-lots), opera or classical would have been playing right now. Unless Matt was feeling manic, in which case he’d be blasting the sort of s
ynthpop electronica he routinely partied to in European and Brazillian dance clubs.
Unfortunately, what greeted me as I entered the Blend was none of the above.
Rich man’s got his dope, homey
Yo, he need that hit!
All his bitches get a taste
’Cause he think he the shi—
“Okay,” I murmured. “This ends now.”
I crossed the floor to the espresso bar, which appeared to be abandoned of all human oversight. “Hello!? Hello?!” I slapped my hand on the marble counter. “Is anyone here!”
“Don’t start buggin’, lady! I’m coming!”
Esther, another of my part-time baristas, emerged from the back pantry area loaded down with paper cups, sip lids, heat sleeves, and coffee stirrers. “Oh, it’s just you, boss,” she said upon seeing me. Then she dumped the stock on the counter and began to sort it out.
An NYU comparative literature major, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather) had untamed dark hair, currently stuffed into a backward Yankee cap; a pleasantly plump figure, now swathed in our blue Village Blend apron; and large brown eyes that were constantly on the lookout for anything that might require her critical observation.
“I’m glad to see you restocking.” I folded my arms. “But why are you playing rap on our sound system? You know the rules.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Esther pushed up her black rectangular glasses, rolled her dark eyes, and in an oh-so-droll tone began to recite my playlist playbook. “No rap, hip-hop, heavy metal, or arena rock.” She took a theatrical breath. “No polkas, bagpipes, Broadway show tunes, military marches, or anything recorded by Ethel Merman. Oh, and…wasn’t there one more verboten type of music on your list?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Anything by Wagner. But that’s not my rule. It’s Madame’s.”
I personally enjoyed Wagner’s epic compositions. But if approaching Nazi tanks had forced me and my family to flee our beloved Parisian home with little more than the clothes on our backs, I probably would’ve banned Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer from being played in my coffeehouse, too.
“Look,” said Esther in the sort of can’t-you-be-reasonable tone I’d heard a thousand times from my daughter, “the CD’s only been playing about fifteen minutes. Nobody’s complained. There’s only one more song. Can’t we let it finish?”
I glanced around the room. It was almost midnight, and there were only three customers left in the place. An Asian man and East Indian woman were nursing lattes with heads bent together in a first-date-passionate conversation. They didn’t appear to be bothered by the music. Neither did the young white guy in a black leather blazer, lounging near the crackling fireplace, bopping his blond, spiky head to the beat of the rapper’s profane chant.
“Fine, Esther,” I said. “I’ll let it go this one time…but what the heck possessed you to put it on in the first place?” Like all of my baristas, Esther had a preferred playlist—one that seemed much more aligned with her feminist sensibilities. “What happened to your Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Siouxsie and the Banshees mix?”
Esther shrugged.
“What does that mean?” I pressed. “You like rap now?”
“My boyfriend’s into it. He brought the CD over special and everything, you know? The least I could do was play it for him.”
Hold the phone. “Boyfriend?” Ever since I’d known Esther, she’d dated here and there. But never before had she used that “antiquated, Leave It to Beaver term”—as she’d once deemed it.
“He’s right over there.”
Esther pointed across the room toward that wiry young blond man; he was still bobbing his head to the rap. Just then, he looked over at us. He stared for a moment, then winked at Esther and gave her a little wave.
Esther sweetly waved back. “Isn’t he cool?” she murmured out of the corner of her mouth. “He’s waiting for me to get off.”
I raised an eyebrow, more than a little curious about the young man who’d finally cracked Snark Girl’s hard-as-a-hazelnut shell.
“Where did you meet him?” I asked. Something about the combination of his angular face, stiff posture, and outer-boroughs clothes told me this little guy was way too street hardened to be an NYU student. And I’d bet the contents of tonight’s register drawer that underneath the dude’s black leather blazer was a mass of tattoos.
“I met him a few weeks ago,” Esther said, “at a Park Slope poetry slam. He read, too. He was awesome.”
“What’s his name?”
“Actually…he hasn’t told me yet.”
“What?”
Esther shrugged. “He wants me to call him by his handle.”
“Which is?”
“BB Gun.”
Good Lord. I stepped around the counter and pulled Esther aside. “How much do you know about this guy?”
Esther shrugged. “Enough.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Oh, boss, you’re way too suspicious of people. I appreciate your concern, but you don’t have to worry. He still lives with his mother.”
“Esther, that’s no recommendation! Serial killers live with their mothers!”
What is it with these girls? The more mysterious the “dude,” the more irresistible they find him! Joy was no different. And, although it pained me to admit it, neither was I—at their age, anyway. When I was nineteen, I’d known next to nothing about my ex-husband, yet I’d let myself fall completely in love with him.
I’d been spending the summer in Italy with my father’s relatives, making a study of Renaissance art. Matt was a few years older. He’d been traveling through Europe, visiting friends along the way. When our paths crossed on an Italian beach, that’s all I’d known about Matteo Allegro. Still, I let him take me to bed, again and again—until I’d come home from my European vacation pregnant with Joy and agreeing to wed a young man who believed the “fidelity thing” was an optional rider to any marriage vows.
“Esther, are you hearing me? Am I getting through?”
“Boss, get a grip.”
I glanced at the young man again. “Don’t you think a nickname like BB Gun should send up a red flag?” I whispered. “Don’t you think that boy could be violent?”
Esther rolled her eyes. “It’s just a handle. On the Internet, I call myself Morbid Dream Girl, but I don’t go around dispensing nightmare-inducing hallucinogens.”
“True…but you do like being morbid.”
“Goth’s my human condition. I can’t help it. Anyway, BB thinks I’m deep.”
I frowned. Not sure what to say to that.
“Listen, boss…” Esther put a hand on my shoulder. “BB’s been crushin’ on me since he heard me recite at the slam. He’s been taking me to dinners and movies and paying for both of us—that’s a first. And tonight he brought me the CD. I appreciate your concern and everything, I really do, but would you butt out of my love life? It’s really not your business.”
I bristled for a second, ready to tell her smartly that her love life was absolutely my business when it involved playing profane lyrics over the Village Blend’s sound system, but I zipped my lip.
I was obviously still in mother hen mode after coming away from my daughter, and while it was true that Matt, Madame, and I all felt that our employees were part of the Village Blend “family,” Esther was right. She deserved her privacy, and, frankly, the last thing I wanted to do was drive away a well-trained employee. I was short-staffed as it was, and good technique didn’t emerge overnight in this business; it came with hours and hours of repetitive practice. (Top coffeehouses, ours included, required a barista to train at least three months before pulling even one espresso for a customer.)
Despite her occasional crankiness, Esther really had blossomed as a barista. Her espressos were top-notch, and her latte art skills were nearly at the competitive level. And while I didn’t like her new boyfriend’s taste in music, Esther did seem much less depressed than usual; her jaded eyes were u
nusually bright, and her pale-as-a-vampire skin was actually flushing with anticipation.
“Okay, you win. I’ll butt out,” I said, but couldn’t stop myself from adding, “Just…don’t get carried away too fast. Get to know him.”
“Duh. Why do you think he’s here?”
“Right,” I said. “Tell you what, since he’s waiting for you and everything, why don’t you just get going now?”
“Really?” Esther checked her watch and pointed to the inventory on the counter. “What about restocking?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll close.”
Amazingly, Esther, queen of the jaded, actually grinned. “Thanks, boss!” she said. Minutes later, my love-struck barista and her new boyfriend were off—and so was the rap music.
In blessed silence, I took off my pinstriped suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of my blouse, tied on my Village Blend apron, and began restocking. I cleaned the tables next, swept the floor, and emptied the garbage cans.
I’d just finished counting the register drawer when I heard the bell over our front door ring. I cursed myself for not locking up after those last two customers wandered out. Looking up, however, I saw it wasn’t a customer. The man walking in was my boyfriend.
FOUR
THE tall, broad-shouldered police detective entered my coffeehouse like he always did, with the commanding authority of a seasoned New York cop. In one sober sweep, he scanned the room to take note of his surroundings, then his arctic-blue gaze came to rest on me and, ever so slightly, his expression melted.
“Hi, Clare.”
“Hi, Mike.”
In a city that hardened everyone—from little old church ladies to pretty-in-pink sorority girls—cops were the hardest cases of all. Mike Quinn was no exception. A square-jawed New York native, he had a long, powerful physique, short, sandy-brown hair, a dry sense of humor, and a load of street smarts from his years working a uniformed beat.