by Cleo Coyle
“Creepy how?”
“His demeanor, I guess. I mean, I’ve seen all types in the Village, believe me, but this guy was hard-core intense. His skin was extremely pale, and his brown hair was longish, but not in a trendy way. It just hung there, you know? And he was dressed all in black—which, again, isn’t exactly atypical for New York. But these clothes weren’t in the least fashionable. He didn’t utter a word to me, even after we were introduced, and he wore these pointy boots and a black leather blazer, the kind the outer-boroughs guys wear.”
I suddenly thought of Esther’s boyfriend. BB Gun had been wearing a black leather blazer that was a lot like Nick’s.
“Anything else you remember?” Mike asked.
“Yeah. When Tommy introduced me to Nick, he said the man was from Brighton Beach.”
“Brighton Beach, huh? That area of Brooklyn is full of Russians.”
“So?”
“So it’s a long way from Manhattan. Why’s Keitel hanging with a guy like that?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Yes, you can, Clare. The black leather blazer’s a popular rag with the wiseguys. Do you know if Keitel owns his restaurant?”
“He doesn’t.” I related what I’d overheard during Brigitte’s meltdown. “One of the men on the staff loudly reminded Brigitte that she was under contract just like Tommy Keitel.”
“So.” Mike paused, put down his cup. “Tommy doesn’t own the restaurant. Which means he answers to an owner—or owners. And restaurants like Solange aren’t cheap. Starting a place like that must cost a cool million—”
“Six.”
“No.”
“Yeah. David Mintzer told me it costs around six million to get a-two-hundred seat restaurant off the ground in midtown Manhattan. And to maintain it, the cost is something like five to eight hundred dollars per square foot per month, just for rent.”
Mike whistled. “I guess that’s why a martini in those joints costs eighteen bucks.”
“And a lamb chop is forty-four. Yeah, that’s why.”
“Well, there you go,” Mike said. “The picture seems clear enough to me.”
“What picture?”
“Put the pieces together, Clare. Somebody with big money is backing Tommy’s restaurant. Tommy goes missing from dinner service. Nobody knows why or where he’s gone. Then he shows up late with some creepy guy in wiseguy rags from Brighton Beach—”
“You’re saying Nick’s attached to the Russian mob? That Tommy got his financing by way of some corrupt gangsters from the eastern bloc?”
Mike leaned back, folded his arms. “You know and I know the Italian mob has a long history of funding food-related businesses in New York. They practically owned the Fulton Fish Market before Giuliani cleaned it up. And where the Italians have lost ground, the Russians have been moving in to take it up.”
“I don’t know…” I shook my head. “Mob or no mob, the problem from my point of view isn’t Tommy and his backers. I mean, factoring out the man’s recent neglect of his responsibilities, the real danger to my daughter is Brigitte Rouille, and that’s all I care about…”
I stood up and began to pace the small kitchen. “If I could just find some way into that restaurant, I could keep an eye on things, make sure Brigitte doesn’t freak on my daughter again…Maybe I could even help the woman…get her to admit she has a drug problem…”
Mike cleared his throat. “Uh, Clare…” He lifted his coffee cup and pointed to it.
“What?” I stopped pacing. “You want a refill?”
“No.” He laughed. “I mean…yes, I’d love more. But that wasn’t my meaning.”
“Excuse me?”
“Didn’t you tell me Solange’s coffee was abysmal? You said it tasted like…What was it?”
“Mississippi swamp mud. Although I’ve never actually tasted mud from the mighty Mississippi, so it’s technically an unfair comparison.”
“And didn’t you help out David Mintzer this past summer? Setting up the coffee service at his new Hamptons restaurant?”
“Yeah, sure.” I shrugged. “I roasted blends especially for his place, created a coffee and dessert pairings menu, and—Oh, yes! I see where you’re going! I can do the same thing for Solange!” I started pacing again. “Tomorrow, I can go back. I can make a sales pitch to Keitel and Dornier!”
“Dornier? Who’s Dornier?”
“Napoleon Dornier is Solange’s maître d’ and wine steward.” I folded my arms and tapped my chin, thinking aloud. “Since he’s responsible for the front of the house, he’s got as much say in the beverage service as Keitel, so if I can’t persuade Tommy, I’ll work on Nappy. He struck me as a prideful man. I can’t imagine he thinks it’s a good idea to poison a customer’s palate at the end of a meal with crap coffee.”
Mike nodded. “So there it is. You’ve got an in.”
“I’ll give it my best shot anyway. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for the suggestion.”
He smiled. “So how about seconds?”
“Sure. I think you’ve earned it.”
I grabbed the French press pot off the counter, but before I could refill his mug, Mike’s strong arm circled my waist. He tugged me onto his lap.
“I meant seconds of something else,” he murmured in my ear.
A shiver tore through me as Mike’s lips moved down my neck. Oh, yes… I was exactly where I wanted to be, and if I were a cat, I’d most definitely be purring. There was only one problem—
“Mike…I thought you only had thirty.”
“We’ve got at least five left.” He tipped his head at the kitchen clock. “Let’s make it count.” Then his mouth was on mine, and for the next few minutes the only thing I drank in was Michael Ryan Francis Quinn.
FIVE
“I wish you didn’t have to go…”
Mike and I were standing by the apartment’s front door. He was holding me close, stroking my hair, which was now free of its pins and down around my shoulders.
“Three more hours tops, Clare. Then I’ll be back.”
I nodded, hardly able to believe it. “Wait,” I said as he turned to go, “let me get you a key. Then you can just let yourself in and come upstairs, okay?”
“Okay.”
Mike smiled as he held out his hand, ready to take that little piece of magic metal—the key to a lot more than my front door. But before it left my fingers, a loud, sharp bang sounded somewhere below us. We froze, realizing a door in the stairwell had opened and closed.
Mike met my eyes. “Are you expecting anyone?”
I shook my head, listened to the footsteps on the staircase. “Could be Joy,” I whispered. “She’d be off work by now. Her roommate’s in Paris for the next six months. Maybe after what happened tonight, she doesn’t want to be alone…”
But as the shoes clomped closer, I realized the tread was far too heavy to be my daughter’s. Mike and I waited, staring at the apartment’s front door as a key scratched into the lock, then came the click-clock of the dead bolt, and the door opened.
“Hey, Clare!”
Oh, no.
Short, black hair on a square-jawed face, Roman nose, cleft chin, and a hard body courtesy of his favorite extreme sports: rock climbing, cliff diving, mountain biking, and meaningless sex (not necessarily in that order). My ex-husband beamed at me through the wedge of swinging wood. He pushed the fissure wider, and his cheesy grin fell.
“Quinn?”
Mike blew out air. “Allegro.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing away the ruination of my evening. But it didn’t work. When I opened my eyes again, Matteo Allegro was still standing in the doorway, his right arm in a white plaster cast, his left shouldering an overstuffed athletic bag. He’d come back to stay.
My ex-husband glanced at me, then glared at Mike Quinn. “What’s he doing here?”
“Clare and I have been seeing each other for a month now,” Mike levelly replied. “And you knew that already, Allegro, so don’t be a horse’s a
ss.”
Matt flipped his key ring. “Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Detective. Because I thought you might be staking out the place to arrest me again.”
Quinn shook his head, looked down at me. The warmth had drained from his blue eyes. The chilly cop curtain was back. “I’ve got to go.”
As he began to turn away, I touched the sleeve of his overcoat. “The key,” I whispered, holding it out again.
“Can’t.” He jerked his head toward my ex. “Not if he’s here.”
I wanted to scream, but it wouldn’t have helped. I stood dumbfounded and horrified, watching Quinn’s sturdy form stride out while my ex-husband sauntered in. As they passed each other through the doorway, Matt purposely bumped the detective with his bulging canvas bag.
“Grow up, Allegro, will you?” Quinn bit out before continuing downstairs.
Matt moved into the duplex’s antique-filled living room and dropped his bag onto the Persian rug. “What’s his problem?”
“He doesn’t have the problem! I do!”
I chased after Mike, following him down to the shop to let him out and lock up again. I tried once more to offer the key, but he absolutely refused to come back with Matt in the apartment. How could I blame him? If the tables were turned, and Mike’s estranged wife had appeared with a legal right to use his living space, I would have felt the same way.
“I could come to your place,” I offered.
“No.” He gently touched my cheek. “It’ll be a while before I’m off. You get some rest. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”
AFTER trudging back up to the duplex, I found Matt in the kitchen, fixing himself a fresh pot of coffee—or at least trying to. With his right arm in that cast, he was making a royal mess of it.
“Clare, this Brita pitcher needs refilling. And the filter needs to be changed.” He shook his head at the spilled water on the counter. “How could you not notice?”
“I’ll give you something not to notice!” I took off my shoe and hurled it at him.
“Hey!” Matt lifted his cast to fend off my flying pump. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Matt, why are you here? Four weeks ago, you moved in with Breanne!”
Breanne Summour to be exact, editor-in-chief of Trend magazine, aka Snarks ’r’ Us, as the blogging chef of one snidely reviewed restaurant famously tagged it.
Breanne and Matt had been dating for about a year now. Given my ex’s desire for publicity and Breanne’s need for a hunky escort to fashionable events, they were a match made in Manhattan, or at the very least the New York tabloids. Every so often, I’d notice their picture in the Post’s Page Six or one of the tony glossies at my hair salon: “Trend’s top editor is looking especially perky tonight on the arm of international coffee broker Matteo Allegro.”
Matt continually claimed his “friendship” with Breanne was just “casual,” which in Matt-speak naturally included casual sex. But then Matt broke his arm, and Breanne turned into Florence Nightingale. This was perfectly fine with me, since the trashionista’s new desire to nest with my ex got him the heck out of my hair for almost a month. So why was he back now?
“You can’t tell me you got tired of five-hundred-dollar Egyptian cotton sheets and a penthouse view!”
Matt shrugged. “Breanne flew to Milan a few days ago for a trade show. I got lonely.”
“You did not. I know when you’re lying, Matt. Your eyes go wide, like a begging puppy dog, and you forget how to blink.”
“Okay, okay…” Matt held up the hand of his good arm. “The truth is…ever since Breanne left for Europe, her housekeeper has been hitting on me.”
“What?!”
“It was subtle at first, but tonight it got weird. And the housekeeper’s a live-in, so there’s no escaping it.”
“Since when can’t you handle a woman making a pass at you?”
“The housekeeper’s not a woman, Clare. His name’s Maurice.”
“Of course!” I threw up my hands. “If it was a woman, it wouldn’t have been a problem. You simply would have slept with her until Breanne came back. Problem solved.”
Matt’s face fell into an “I’m wounded” pout. “That’s just not true, Clare. And it’s not fair.”
“The person it wouldn’t have been fair to is Breanne!”
“Let’s drop it, okay?” he said and pointed to the half-spilled pitcher we used to filter our coffee-making water. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”
“Not!”
I wheeled and limped angrily out of the kitchen, one foot now shoeless, the other clomping loudly along, since I was unwilling to give up a second possible projectile.
Matt followed, his tone more contrite. “I didn’t mean to butt in on you, but a decent hotel room in this town is four hundred a night. Breanne’s not coming back for a few more days, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been footing the tuition bills for Joy’s culinary school. I don’t have much extra cash to throw around. Do you?”
“What are you implying? That I should pay for your hotel room because you can’t tell Maurice the housekeeper to keep his hands to himself?”
“There’s no lock on Breanne’s bedroom door. It was creeping me out. You have to believe me.”
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation!” I checked my watch. “And at nearly one in the morning!”
Matt rubbed the back of his neck. “You mind giving me a massage? My muscles are really stiff.”
“You really want the other shoe, don’t you?”
“What did I do now?”
“God, Matt, you haven’t acted like this much of a jerk since we were married. What’s happened to you anyway? Did a month of having your every whim fulfilled regress you back to a spoiled childhood?”
“My childhood was anything but spoiled, Clare, and why are you so bent out of shape? Because I walked in on your big good-bye scene with the flatfoot? Well, big deal! So what? He was leaving anyway!”
“He was supposed to come back. Now he’s not.”
“You’re better off. You can’t trust cops. Especially that one.”
“Oh, is that right? And who am I supposed to trust? You?”
“I’m not your problem. He is.”
“The problem is you, Matt. He won’t come back with you here.”
“Then he’s gay.”
“Mike Quinn is not gay.”
“Oh, yeah? Then why didn’t he just take you with him back to his place?”
“Because he’s not going back to his place. He’s going back on duty!” I threw up my hands. “I can’t expect you to understand. And I shouldn’t have to explain myself, either. We’re divorced, Matt. We share a daughter and a business; and because of Madame’s bizarre sense of humor—not to mention her delusion that one day we’re going to reconcile—we both have a legal right to use this apartment. But we’re never again sharing the matrimonial bed, and I’d like to find someone who will.”
“Oh? So now the flatfoot is more than a passing law enforcement fetish? He’s potential husband material? And this happened after a month of his not sleeping with you?”
I threw the second shoe.
“Hey!” Matt lifted his cast again, and it bounced off. Then he actually had the nerve to grin at me. “Looks like you’re out of ammo!”
“Arrrrrggggh!”
“Come on, Clare. Truce? How about we for call for pizza? Sal’s delivers all night.”
“I’d rather reload with a closet full of shoes!”
I wheeled and stormed out of the living room. My adrenaline had been pumping, and I had no interest in going to bed, but I had to get away from Matt. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the hint. Matt’s footsteps followed mine right up the duplex’s short staircase and into the master bedroom.
Madame had decorated this duplex years ago, when she’d lived here with Matt’s father. Not only had she filled the place with amazing antiques, she’d lined the walls—bedroom and marble bath included—with lovingly framed sketch
es, doodles, watercolors, and oils that had been created over the decades by artists who’d frequented the Village Blend, from Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollack to Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The four-poster bed of carved mahogany was one of my favorite pieces in the master bedroom, and it didn’t even completely dominate the space. Commanding just as much attention on the opposite wall was a carved hearth of ivory-colored marble. A century-old, gilt-edged French mirror hung above the fireplace, and a chandelier of pale rose Venetian glass hung from a fleur-de-lis medallion in the center of the ceiling.
The walls had been painted the same pale rose as the imported chandelier, while the door and window frames echoed the same shade of ivory as the marble fireplace and silk sheers covering the floor-to-ceiling casement windows.
It was a stunning room in a spectacular apartment, which was unbelievably convenient for me, since the Blend was just two flights down. And, until this evening, I hadn’t seriously considered giving up the use of it. Affordable apartments were scarce in Manhattan and rent-free, fully furnished duplexes in the West Village weren’t just unheard of, they were a fairy tale come true.
Unfortunately for me, this fairy tale came with a troll—one who seemed to take delight in popping up at the worst possible times. Matt’s constant world traveling usually kept him out of the picture. A few days a month, tops, he’d need to crash in the second bedroom. But since he’d broken his arm, Matt had grounded himself. That hadn’t been my problem until this minute.
“Come on, Clare,” Madame’s son cooed to me, “let’s not fight…There’s another reason I’m here, you know, not just Breanne’s horny housekeeper—”
“Get out of this bedroom!”
“Not until you hear me out.”
Matt took a step closer. I folded my arms and frowned, trying not to notice how well the troll happened to be put together tonight, with black wool slacks that were perfectly creased and pleated, a pale yellow cashmere sweater that was probably softer than kitten fur, and an Italian-made bronze jacket cut from a leather so supple it looked good enough to eat.
Matt wore clothes well. No doubt about it. But for years, as the Blend’s coffee buyer, he rarely wore anything fancier than sturdy hiking boots, well-worn jeans, and fraying rock band T-shirts.