French Pressed

by Cleo Coyle

  I was out on the landing now, just outside the apartment’s front door. The detective stepped in front of the young officer and took a hard look at me. I looked at him right back, squarely in the eyes—easily done because he wasn’t much taller than I, though he was as wide as a fireplug, with beefy hands and an olive complexion.

  “How did you get up here?” he asked. “This is a crime scene.”

  “I just want to talk to my daughter.”

  “Let my mom come in!” Joy cried from inside. “I want to talk to her!”

  The detective turned his head. “Stay put in that kitchen, Ms. Allegro! And stay quiet!”

  He turned back to me. “How did you know to come here?”

  “My daughter called me on her cell phone before she called you.” I frowned and put my hands on my hips. “Look, she’s the one who found her friend and notified you. Why are you treating her like a criminal?”

  The man folded his arms and scowled. “Fifty percent of the time, the person who ‘finds’ the body is the person who killed the body.”

  “Then I was wrong.” My eyes narrowed. “I thought we could trust the police, and that’s what I told my daughter. But I guess I should have told Joy to leave here immediately and forget what she saw.”

  The man’s hard expression changed after that. He didn’t exactly turn apologetic, but the scowl had lessened considerably. He exhaled, glanced at Joy a moment, and then turned back to me. “I will let you speak with your daughter, but I’d like to talk to you first, Mrs.—”

  “Ms.,” I said. “Cosi. Clare Cosi.”

  “And Joy Allegro here is your daughter?”

  “I’ve gone back to my maiden name—if that’s all right with you.” I put my hands on my hips. “If not, my ex-husband’s downstairs. You could consult him.”

  The man didn’t blink. He yanked a big radio off his belt. “Murph? It’s Ray,” the detective said into the device. “You got a guy down there says he’s the girl’s father?”

  I could hardly hear the reply. “No, don’t arrest him. Just keep him there. Lock him up in the car if you have to. Just make sure he doesn’t come up here.” The detective shot me a dark look. “Like his old lady.”

  I folded my arms. “That’s ex–old lady.”

  “I’ll get back to you, Murphy,” the detective said, and returned the radio to his belt.

  “All right, Detective,” I said. “You know my name. Would you please tell me yours?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Salinas,” the man replied. His NYPD badge appeared and disappeared in a quick sleight of hand. “And I’m in charge of this homicide investigation.”

  I tensed at the word homicide.

  SEVEN

  LIEUTENANT Salinas cleared his throat. “Did you know the deceased, Ms. Cosi?”

  “If it really is Vincent Buccelli, then the answer is yes. I met him a few times.”

  “You know his family?”

  I shook my head. “He moved here from Ohio a few years ago to attend culinary school. As far as I know, any family he has is back in Toledo.”

  “So you know him because of your daughter?”

  “Yes, Vinny and my daughter were friends—”

  “Close friends? Boyfriend and girlfriend friends?” Salinas asked.

  “Just friends from school and work. Platonic friends. I’m sure Joy has told you all of this.”

  “She has,” he said, “but I’d like to hear it from another source. How well did you know this Buccelli kid, Ms. Cosi?”

  “I met him a month ago at a business event. He and Joy came into my coffeehouse several times after that—”

  “Coffeehouse?”

  “I manage the Village Blend on Hudson Street.”

  The man paused as if considering his options. He pulled at his loud tie, further loosening the already loose knot. “Maybe you can help us,” Lieutenant Salinas said at last.

  “I’ll try.”

  “First of all, would you be willing to provide a positive identification? Your daughter refused to look into the corpse’s face. Understandable, if they were friends. So would you help us out? Make the ID?”

  I frowned. “Right now? This minute?”

  “Yeah,” he replied with a slightly irked look that said, When else?

  I took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Taking my arm, he steered me off the landing and into the one-bedroom apartment. The place was spacious, and the living room looked neat and comfortable with plants and a fish tank. There was a pale green sofa and chair set, a glass coffee table, a small television, and a standing bookshelf filled with cookbooks. All of the framed posters on the walls had something to do with food: an artful photo of fruit, a sidewalk scene at a French café, a colorful day at a farmers’ market.

  The only sign of violence was a small end table that had been knocked down. Some mail was scattered about, and the phone lay on the floor, its receiver off the hook. I saw a dusting of white powder on the black plastic and realized the police had tested the phone for fingerprints.

  An attractive middle-aged woman wearing a dark nylon jacket stood up and approached Lieutenant Salinas. She was petite, with high, prominent cheekbones and dark hair bunched up under a hairnet. She pulled a pair of latex gloves off, exposing long-fingered, mocha-hued hands and fingernails painted a scarlet so deep it was almost black. Behind the woman, the man wearing an identical jacket continued to snap pictures.

  “What do we have here, Dr. Neeravi?” Salinas asked.

  “This is most definitely a homicide,” the woman replied in an East Indian accent. “The victim died from a single blow with a knife to the root of the neck—”

  She paused to touch an area of flesh between her neck and shoulder. “The knife was directed downward, coming in at the base of the neck, missing the collarbone, and doing major damage to the great vessels arising from the heart. In short, the victim bled to death.”

  “You have a time of death?” Salinas asked.

  Dr. Neeravi made a face. “That’s going to be a problem.”

  “Come on, Doc,” Salinas pleaded. “Give me a ballpark.”

  “Let me explain. Someone—perhaps the perpetrator—opened all of these windows. Now, perhaps it was done to dissipate any smell from the body, preventing a neighbor from alerting the authorities right away. Or perhaps the perpetrator knew it would help mask the time of the murder. Whatever the reason, the draft streaming through those windows is under thirty degrees Fahrenheit, which means the body’s change in temperature is not something I can use to pinpoint an exact time of death.”

  The doctor tore the hairnet off her head and shook her shoulder-length hair loose. “If pressed, I’d say he was killed one to four hours ago. I’ll know more after the autopsy.”

  “Was the assailant strong?”

  I winced, because I knew what Salinas was really asking. Could the killer be a woman?

  “The victim was not overpowered, and there are no defensive wounds because the dead man was struck from behind. Strength wouldn’t count as much as skill here, in my opinion. If the blade had struck the victim’s collarbone, he probably would have survived.”

  “Skill, eh?” Salinas nodded. “Okay. The assailant may have had knife skills. That’s interesting. And there’s no sign of forced entry, which means the victim probably knew the person who murdered him.”

  Dr. Neeravi nodded. “At least casually.”

  Salinas snorted. “Casually enough to turn his back on his own killer—unless the murderer had a gun or waved the knife as a threat to force the victim to turn.”

  “Lieutenant,” the uniformed officer called. “Look what I found.”

  Holding it by the edges so as not to smudge any fingerprints, the policeman displayed a copy of a men’s magazine—and I wasn’t talking Playboy or Maxim. This was a magazine featuring young, fit men in intimate poses. It was clearly a magazine meant for gay men.

  “There’s a whole pile of glossy mags just like this one over here, hid
den inside this hollow ottoman,” the officer added.

  “Bag them up,” Salinas commanded. “We’ll check for prints later. With glossy paper, we might get lucky.” He faced me. “You didn’t tell me the victim was homosexual, Ms. Cosi.” The lieutenant said this in an accusatory tone, as if I’d been holding it back.

  “I didn’t know. Joy knew Vinny better than I did. Didn’t she mention it?”

  Salinas frowned. Said nothing.

  “Do you still want my help?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Salinas turned to Dr. Neeravi. “Can I try for a positive ID?”

  The woman nodded. “Sure. The area around the body has been swept and dusted. The ambulance can take the victim to the morgue when you’re finished. Just be careful not to step in the blood. It’s pretty messy.”

  Oh, God…

  Lieutenant Salinas steered me around the couch, and that’s when I saw the corpse. Dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, Vincent Buccelli lay on his stomach on the polished hardwood floor, sprawled across a brownish-red throw rug. I took a step closer and realized there was no rug, only a drying pool of the dead boy’s blood.

  “It’s him. That’s Vinny,” I said, pushing my hair back. “I mean…That’s Vincent Buccelli, Lieutenant.” I swallowed hard, steeling my reaction to how violently he’d died.

  “You okay, Ms. Cosi?”

  I nodded, trying to commit to memory every grisly detail of the crime scene. Vinny’s arms were flung wide, though smears of blood on the floor told me he’d flailed around for several minutes.

  I looked hard at the knife. Its handle was silver. About an inch of the blade stuck out of Vinny’s left shoulder, right at the base of the neck. The rest of the blade had been forced down vertically, deep into his chest. His head was turned, his eyes open but unfocused. The flesh of his face appeared waxy, almost a translucent blue gray; his lips were pale, nearly white; his mouth was gaping and flecked with crusted blood.

  I followed the boy’s gaze and deduced that Vinny had died staring at the handle of the knife that had killed him—probably in shocked disbelief, if his frozen-in-death expression meant anything.

  I closed my eyes, forced back tears.

  “The butcher knife went in pretty deep,” Salinas observed.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding and opening my eyes again. “About nine inches—”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s a ten-inch blade, Lieutenant. And it’s not a butcher knife,” I corrected. “That looks like a chef’s knife…more accurately, a French knife. It’s one of the most commonly used tools in food preparation.”

  Salinas raised a bushy eyebrow. “And you know this because you’re a cook, like your daughter?”

  “I know my way around a professional kitchen,” I replied, “but I’m not a formally trained chef. I know a lot about knives simply because last Christmas I wanted to buy my daughter a very special chef’s knife as a present. And I wanted to find her a really good one.”

  Salinas opened his mouth.

  “And before you ask, this is not my daughter’s knife sticking out of the dead man.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not an idiot, Lieutenant. It’s obvious my daughter’s your prime suspect.”

  “The victim was a cook, right—”

  “An aspiring chef,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, well, he’s an expiring chef now,” Salinas cracked.

  The uniformed officer and the photographer both laughed. Even Dr. Neeravi smiled. Gallows humor, I thought. Mike Quinn told me it was common at crime scenes—helped relieve the tension. It failed to relieve mine.

  “This might be Vinny’s knife,” I suggested. “You could look around, find his kit, check to see if the chef’s knife’s missing.”

  “Thanks for the suggestion,” Salinas replied. “But you’re a little late.”

  “I don’t understand,” I replied.

  “We’re not idiots, either. We found the dead man’s chef kit on the table. All the knives are there.”

  “So you’re telling me that the killer brought the knife?” I asked.

  “That’s our theory,” Salinas answered. “At ten inches, that’s not an easy knife to hide. But it’s November. People are wearing long sleeves, big coats—” He gestured to my parka.

  “I didn’t kill him, either.”

  The lieutenant rolled his eyes, faced the doctor. “What about blood? Would the killer get hit with spray?”

  Dr. Neeravi nodded. “Blood would most definitely strike the killer. It’s like slicing a tomato—some juice is bound to squirt at you.”

  Another pleasant image… “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “But unless I’m completely wrong here, there’s no blood on Joy’s clothing.” I pointed to my daughter peeking out from the kitchen doorway. She’d remained silent and still through everything, sobbing silently and wiping her eyes. “She’s wearing a white turtleneck,” I pointed out. “Don’t you think splattered blood would have been a tad obvious?”

  “Take it easy,” Salinas told me. “There are indications the killer cleaned up after the deed. Towels in the sink, stuff like that. And she could have had a smock or coat, extra clothes and shoes, that she discarded before calling you and us.”

  “Well, I know my daughter, and I know she could never, not in a million years, do something as brutal as this. I think you know that, too. So I’d like to take her home now—”

  “Not yet,” the detective shot back.

  I stepped close. “Not even if I give you the name of a real suspect?” I whispered. “Someone who worked in close proximity with the victim and had a grudge against him?” I met Lieutenant Salinas’s gaze. “Not even if I give you someone who’s also been known to attack her fellow workers with a chef’s knife, and did exactly that earlier this evening? Because I witnessed it.”

  The room went completely silent. Salinas and the uniformed cop exchanged glances. Then the detective-lieutenant’s bushy eyebrows rose.

  “Damn, Ms. Cosi. I’m all ears.”

  EIGHT

  DESPITE my extremely helpful cooperation with the authorities, Lieutenant Salinas refused to release Joy from informal custody until almost three thirty in the morning. He grilled her, took fingerprints, and had a policewoman search Joy’s person and clothing for any clues he could find.

  After that, I put my foot down and demanded Salinas release Joy, which he did. To the detective’s credit, Salinas realized how hard it would be for Matt, Joy, and me to hail a taxi in this part of Queens in the middle of the night, so he had one of his squad cars give us a lift back to Manhattan.

  The driver was Officer Brian Murphy, the big cop Matt had confronted on the street. The policeman didn’t say a word on the trip across the Queensboro Bridge and down to the Village. But when he dropped us off on Hudson Street, Officer Murphy did suggest that my ex-husband come back to a certain Woodside pub and look him up “after the doc cuts that cast off your arm.”

  Somehow, I doubted the man wanted to buy Matteo a beer.

  Joy was too distraught to go back to her empty apartment alone, and I firmly suggested she come back with us to the duplex above the Blend. Matt readily agreed.

  By the time we got there, it was four in the morning, and we were exhausted. With Matt’s broken arm, I insisted he take the big mahogany four-poster, while Joy took Matt’s smaller bed in the guest room. That put me on the downstairs couch.

  Matt pulled me aside after Joy went to bed and suggested I join him in the master bedroom. “We can share the bed, Clare. I promise I won’t touch you.”

  His eyes were wide as a puppy dog. He failed to blink even once.

  I thanked him very much and headed straight for the living room couch. Now, swathed in flannel pajamas and tube socks, I punched the feather pillow I’d snatched from the closet, pulled a knitted throw over me, and tried to get some sleep.

  But sleep wouldn’t come. My mind was too agitated. I couldn’t let the question go: Who would want to kill Vinny? Brigitte
Rouille might have done it… The woman was obviously unstable, and according to Joy, she’d been picking on poor Vinny so badly that he’d called in sick. But I knew there was a huge gap between picking on a subordinate at work and actually killing him. On the other hand, Brigitte almost slashed my daughter, an event I saw with my own eyes.

  As crazy as she’d behaved with Joy, however, I frankly couldn’t see Brigitte Rouille bolting out of Solange and hopping a train to Queens to take out her frustrations on Vincent Buccelli in a homicidal bender. That assumption made me feel a little guilty about giving Salinas her name—but only a little.

  If Brigitte wasn’t guilty of murdering Vinny, then she had little to fear from some police questioning. In fact, maybe a visit from the authorities would inspire the troubled woman to seek some professional help before she did hurt someone.

  So who else could have done it? I’d been asking myself this for hours, of course, and after Salinas released my daughter, I’d specifically asked Joy about Vinny’s friends or a possible boyfriend. She said he was a loner, and it was totally news to her that he was gay. On the other hand, she confirmed that he’d never talked about having a girlfriend or liking any girl, and he’d certainly never made a pass at her.

  If Vinny Buccelli was in the closet, could he have been carrying on some kind of secret gay affair that went badly?

  By the end of the evening, Lieutenant Salinas had started asking questions around that exact theory. Vinny could have been the victim of a crime of passion, a gay lover or encounter that had turned deadly. If so, the young man’s secret affair could have been with another student at the culinary school or a fellow cook at Solange. Who else would carry a ten-inch French knife around with them?

  As I lay there in the living room, watching the slowly breaking dawn lighten the world beyond my French doors, I considered calling Mike Quinn.