by Harper Lin
“Of course I’m sure,” I said. “He and Sandra are scheduled for a couples massage tomorrow, and she thinks the murder is a bad sign, so he wants it to get wrapped up as quickly as possible.”
Matt still looked skeptical.
“He said I’m good at it.”
“Okay, now I know you’re making things up.”
“No, I’m not.” I stood up from where I leaned against the chair and wrapped my arms around him. “He’s seen my good work. And it’s not his case this time, so he doesn’t care that I’m in the way.”
Matt brushed a kiss across my lips. “See, even you admit that you get in the way.”
I grinned. “Never said I didn’t.”
He kissed me again, so soft and slow that I considered forgetting about investigating for the night and just heading upstairs. But duty won out.
“Let’s go down to the lounge and get a couple after-dinner drinks. What do you say?”
Matt chuckled softly. “You just want to get to work on this.”
“Maybe.” I intertwined my fingers with his and started pulling him back toward the lobby. “But a nightcap would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
He shook his head slowly, the smile still curling the corners of his lips up. “You’re too much. You know that?”
“Yes.” I smiled. “But you love me anyway.”
“Yes, I do.” He kissed the top of my head and let me lead him toward the lobby.
Chapter Nine
The lobby lounge was alive with activity when we got there. A jazz quartet played in the corner by the piano, and several couples danced on the parquet floor as the band played what sounded distinctly like a cover of a popular pop song from a few years ago. I tried not to giggle as the singer scatted the rap portion of the song.
Matt shook his head as the singer shooby-doo’d a line I remembered being edited out of the radio version of the song and headed for the bar.
“Look!” I pointed excitedly at the coffee bar. “The barista’s actually there!”
“Seems like an odd time to show up to work.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”
“You’re never going to sleep tonight.”
I shrugged and made a beeline for the coffee bar. “It’ll be fine.”
Matt went to the bar to order something that, admittedly, was probably a more appropriate drink for the time of the night. But still, there was coffee, and I wanted some. Tommy had been a good sport about fumbling through making a macchiato by following my directions, but I was excited to see what the real barista could do.
“Hi!” I said cheerfully as I walked up to the counter.
The barista sauntered over to me and leaned against the counter, his hands spread wide. “What can I get for you?” The way he said it was more like a come-on than a request to take my order.
“What’s your favorite?” I, of course, knew what I wanted—another macchiato with those Ecuadorian beans—but I always liked to ask that question when I went to a new coffee shop or had someone new helping me. I felt like it gave me a good idea of who they were as a barista and what I could expect from whatever kind of drink I did end up getting. And sometimes their favorite sounded really good, and I actually did get it.
He gave me a look that was more a leer than a normal smile. “A green eye. You know what that is?”
I nodded.
“It’s a black coffee with three shots of espresso.”
“I know that.”
He actually winked at me. “Of course you do.”
“I’ll have a macchiato. With the Ecuadorian beans if you have any more ready,” I said dryly. I didn’t want to encourage him.
He raised his eyebrow and smirked at me. “The Ecuadorian beans, huh? They’re a little strong. Pretty pricey too. We charge extra for them. Are you sure you don’t just want the kind you’re used to?” He gestured at a grocery store blend behind him.
I swallowed down my instant irritation at his assumption that I couldn’t handle a strong cup of coffee and wouldn’t appreciate the high-end blend. I smiled politely however. “Yes, I’m sure.”
He shrugged. “If you say so. But if you don’t like it when you get it, I’ll make you a new one with the regular stuff. On the house.” He winked at me, and I felt my stomach churn at his attitude. He grabbed a cup. “Right, a latte macchiato.” He reached for the milk to steam. “You know why it’s called a macchiato? It’s Italian.”
“An espresso macchiato,” I corrected.
“Yeah, there’s espresso in it.”
“No, I want an espresso macchiato, not a latte macchiato.” Actually, a latte macchiato would have been a good choice for that time of night since it was more milk than coffee, but I resented his assumption. I could see in his eyes that he assumed that since I was a girl, I couldn’t possibly want the stronger drink.
He raised his eyebrows with an amused smirk and went ahead and said it. “You know that’s pretty strong, right? It’s mostly espresso—”
“It’s espresso marked with milk. I know. That’s why it’s called a macchiato. Macchiato means ‘marked’ in Italian.”
He looked at me with something between annoyance and disgust. “Well, aren’t you a smart cookie.”
I gritted my teeth at his impressing level of condescension. “I have some experience.”
“Go to a lot of coffee shops, huh?”
I took a slow, deep breath to keep myself from saying anything I’d regret. Even after I did, I still wanted to say something to put him in his place. He could only be a little bit more than ten years younger than me—in his early twenties, I guessed—but I still wanted to snap at him to have a little respect for his elders.
Fortunately, Tommy saved us both from making a scene.
“Hey, Carrick, this is the lady I was telling you about,” he said, walking over to the edge of the bar and nodding in my direction.
Carrick looked from Tommy to me. “Oh, the one who runs the little coffee shop?”
“I own it,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s been in my family for over fifty years.”
“Oh, well, that explains it.” He chuckled and went back to making my drink—steaming the milk for way too long, I might add. “You learned about coffee from Daddy.”
I was ready to climb across the counter. For one thing, I didn’t think my father had ever set foot inside Antonia’s—he’d taken off too fast. But for another, what did it matter if I learned about coffee from my mother and grandparents? I knew my stuff no matter where or how I’d learned it.
“Stop being a jerk, Carrick.” Tommy looked annoyed. At least I wasn’t the only one. He looked at me. “Tell him off if you need to, Fran. No one will blame you. In fact, everyone appreciates when someone puts him in his place.”
Carrick glared at Tommy and sullenly went about pulling the espresso for my drink. He’d now spent more time mouthing off to me than it would have taken to just make the drink.
Tommy ignored Carrick and looked me in the eye. “I’m serious. And if he doesn’t lay off, you come tell me, okay?”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I would ever either tell off Carrick or tattle on him to Tommy, but at least I knew I wasn’t the only one he treated like dirt.
Matt walked over, carrying a highball glass filled with a brown liquid—whiskey, I guessed—over ice. He slipped his arm around my waist and brushed a kiss across my temple. “Everything going okay over here?”
Carrick looked at us out of the corner of his eye. I wondered if he was more afraid of Matt than he was of me.
I looked dead at him. “Mm-hmm. The barista here was just making my espresso macchiato.”
Carrick’s nostrils flared. “I’m a baristo, not a barista.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Baristo” was not a word.
“Yeah, it’s like how a male ballet dancer is called a ballerino, not a ballerina. In Spanish, when a person is a male, you change the A at the end of a word to an O.”
That was true, but neither of those words were Spanish.
“It’s a really common mistake. A lot of people make it. You shouldn’t feel bad that you didn’t know that.”
Matt’s arm tightened around my waist. I glanced over at Tommy, who I could tell was half listening. With my teeth clenched tight, I said, “I didn’t know it because it’s not true.”
Carrick laughed as he somehow still worked on making my drink. It should not have taken that long. “I understand why you’d think that, but it really is baristo—”
“No. It’s. Not.”
“Yeah, actually, it is.”
“No, it’s not, Carrick.” Tommy whipped a towel over his shoulder and came over to stand near me at the coffee bar. “Don’t be a moron. You know that baristo’s not a word, and it’s not going to become one just because you keep saying it is.”
Carrick pouted and finally poured the milk into my espresso that had to already be a little cooler than it should be.
“And of all people,” Tommy continued, “why would you try to tell her that when you know she owns a coffee shop?”
Carrick pushed the drink over to me sullenly and without saying a word. I could tell at a glance that he’d gone too heavy on the milk. It was more mixed than marked with milk. Normally, I wouldn’t say anything, especially when it was a high-quality blend like this that I hated to see go to waste, but…
“This has too much milk.” I pushed it back across the counter.
“How do you know? You haven’t even tried it.” Carrick slid it toward me again.
“How do you know if you put the right amount in without trying it?”
Matt and Tommy burst out laughing as Carrick’s face twitched. He snatched the cup back and poured it out, then brought it back over to the espresso machine.
“A clean cup, please.” I smiled sweetly.
Matt leaned on the counter to support himself as he cracked up. Tommy turned away, presumably to keep his coworker from seeing exactly how hard he was laughing at his expense. If Carrick was looking though, Tommy’s shaking shoulders would have given him away.
Carrick put my cup in the dirty dish bin and got out a new one. This time, I watched as he made my fresh drink at a normal pace. He passed it across the counter when it was finished, and I looked down into the cup.
“Color looks good.” I sniffed it, putting on a little bit of a show to demonstrate that I wasn’t going to be a pushover, and nodded that the smell met my approval. I was tempted to swish my first sip around my mouth and then spit it out like I was at a wine tasting, but I resisted the urge and swallowed it down—although I did swish it around a little, but that was because I wanted to savor the rich flavor.
Matt and Tommy watched me a little too intently. I would have liked to think that they were just concerned about whether I would like it, but I was pretty sure they were both hoping it would be terrible and I would completely lose my cool on Carrick. While Matt had only just met him, I got the feeling that Tommy had been waiting a long time to see Carrick get his comeuppance.
As much as I would have liked to provide their entertainment for the evening, I wasn’t going to lie. I smiled as I put the cup down. “Very good.”
Matt and Tommy’s disappointment was visible. They reacted like their team had missed a score or a point or whatever in a sports game. Well, they didn’t yell or anything, but they definitely would have liked to see my reaction if the macchiato hadn’t been good. Unfortunately for them, it was perfection.
Carrick, for his part, smiled smugly, like he knew it would be all along. It was kind of an odd reaction for someone who had literally just screwed up the exact same drink, but based on what little I already knew about him, it wasn’t surprising.
I stuck my hand out across the counter. “Truce?” I didn’t want to declare one, but I remembered that I was supposed to be investigating the murder for Mike. As much as I hated to admit it, Carrick could have some information about it that could prove useful.
He looked at me suspiciously but finally reached out and took my hand. “Truce.” The smug smile back on his face, it was obvious he thought he was doing me a favor by agreeing even though I had clearly been the one to come out on top since I’d gotten him to remake my coffee the right way.
Seeing that the action was over for the time being, Tommy went back to the bar to take care of his customers. Matt pulled up a barstool next to me and sat down.
As I sipped my drink, I watched Carrick move around the coffee bar, fiddling with things. I had to figure out how to get him talking. For lack of a better idea and because he didn’t seem like the type who cared much for social niceties, I decided to just go for it.
“So I guess you knew Gina?” I was glad I’d overheard her name. I would have felt much more awkward asking if he knew “that girl who got killed.”
A strange look passed over his face like a shadow. “Yeah, I knew her.”
“It must be hard for you to keep working when your friend just died.”
He shrugged. “We weren’t really friends.” But he looked uncomfortable.
Matt looked at me with an expression that said he wasn’t sure what I was doing. Neither was I, but I knew I had to get some useful information. Mike was depending on me.
“Oh really? Was she not the friendly type?”
“She was fine.”
This wasn’t going well. I decided to take a different approach. “We were actually down in the spa when they found her. Everyone down there seemed pretty upset.”
He tried to hide it, but I could see that this got Carrick’s attention. He wiped the already-clean counter with a rag. “Oh yeah? Who all was down there?”
“I only caught a couple of names,” I said as casually as I could. “Noelle was one. And Amber. She’s the one who found her.”
Carrick nodded thoughtfully, which raised my curiosity about why he wanted to know who was down there.
“Do you know them?” It was a stupid question, but I wanted to keep him talking.
“Yeah, I pretty much know everyone around here. It’s not a big place.”
And you have such a winning personality. I had the self-restraint not to say it out loud. Barely.
I glanced around like I was making sure no one could overhear and leaned in. “So, do you have any idea who could have killed her? Did she have any enemies? Did anyone have it in for her?”
He raised an eyebrow and looked at me out of the corner of his eye, making me wonder if I’d gone too far. But apparently, he didn’t think so, or at least if he did, he wasn’t showing it. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Who would?”
He looked straight at me. “What, are you with the cops or something?”
Matt snorted into his whiskey. “No, she’s just nosy.”
“Shut up,” I said, swatting at him. I didn’t know if he’d said it with the intention of helping me out or not, but I could see it working. I tried to look casual and disinterested. “Just curious is all.”
Carrick smirked at me yet again. “You’re one of those types, huh? Morbid fascination with death? I bet you’re one of those looky-loos who holds up traffic because you’re trying to get a look at an accident.”
I was not, and I resented the suggestion, but if it got him talking, I was willing to let him think so. I shrugged and tried to look embarrassed. “You know, I’m just… curious.”
He shook his head and looked superior. “Well, I don’t judge.”
I doubted that.
“If you really want to know the dirt on Gina, you need to talk to her friends.” Carrick began pulling shots of espresso into a cup.
“So who were her friends?”
“The spa girls.”
“And where can I find them?”
He looked at Matt like he was trying to see if Matt was hearing my apparent stupidity too. “In the spa.”
I tried to squash down my impatience. I was pretty sure he was being deliberately difficult and that he was going to make me dr
ag every single solitary piece of information out of him one by one. “So I should just go down to the spa and start asking them about Gina?”
He laughed. “Well, no, they’re not going to talk to you while they’re at work.”
I stifled a sigh. “So where do they hang out when they’re not at work?” It was probably what I should have asked in the first place, but I didn’t think he’d take quite so much pleasure in talking down to me.
“Home.” He chuckled like it was funny.
“Anywhere else?”
“There’s a spot they hang out on their breaks out by the loading bay. Just follow the noise.”
“Of the trucks at the loading docks?”
“No, of their yammering. You can hear it a mile away.”
I rolled my eyes and picked up my coffee cup. “Thanks.” I tried to keep the snarkiness I felt out of my voice. “Come on, let’s go sit over by the band,” I said to Matt.
I smiled to myself as we crossed the lounge to where the jazz quartet had continued working their way through the pop hits of five years ago. Despite Carrick’s efforts to be difficult, I had a good idea of who I wanted to talk to next.
It was too late that night to go in search of “the spa girls,” as Carrick had called them, or at least that’s what Matt told me. I had to admit he was probably right. It had been several hours since the police closed down the spa, and even if they hadn’t, the spa’s regular hours were long since over. No one from the spa had any reason to still be hanging around. I couldn’t say I minded too much since there were macarons in the room. And Matt.
So we went back upstairs, where we found, to my amazement, that the hotel had provided turndown service. The blankets were pulled partway back on both sides of the bed, and there was a chocolate on each of our pillows. A notecard left on the bed said, “Turndown Service provided by Bertina.” The housekeeper’s name was written in what I could only assume was her own handwriting, which made me wonder if she carried the cards around already filled out or if she borrowed a pen in each room. Pre-filled out seemed more efficient.
I wondered how she’d known that we were out of the room or if it even mattered. Maybe Bertina would have come by even if we were sitting on the couch watching TV and just turned down the bed while we cuddled and watched a romantic comedy. Okay, Matt probably would have been watching the Celtics, and I would have been playing on my phone, but the principle was the same. Or maybe the housekeeping staff had checked our dinner reservation and knew when we’d be gone. I wasn’t sure which idea I liked better—or which creeped me out more.