by Клео Коул
Matt lightly bumped my arm. “Are you going to explain all this to me?”
“All what?”
Matt exhaled. “All this crap about directing initial queries to the professional on the scene. The last time I checked, Clare, the Specialty Coffee Association of America wasn’t on the NYPD payroll for third-party consulting.”
“Dial it down,” I whispered. “I helped the detectives with a case a few months ago, and the way the chips fell, they ended up assuming I was a professional private investigator. It’s no big deal. Now please be quiet. I’m trying to hear what they’re talking about.”
It was difficult to pick up the lowered voices, so I moved away from Matt and stepped closer to the powwow around Hazel Boggs’s corpse.
“. . . a single gunshot wound to the back of the head,” the Asian man in the nylon jacket was saying. “Entry wound is evident but no exit wound.”
“The witness assures us that she only heard one shot fired,” Lori Soles told the group.
“Then your only bullet is lodged right here,” the Asian man replied, “inside the victim’s skull.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t get pancaked against a bone,” Sue Ellen said.
“If there’s no exit wound—” Lori glanced down the block, “then the bullet lost velocity.”
“That’s correct.” The Asian man nodded. “The weapon couldn’t have been fired from a very close range.”
Sue Ellen pointed to the upper floors of buildings in the vicinity. “Could the gun have been fired from a window or balcony?”
“Not possible.” The man shook his head. “Look at the angle of entry on the wound. The victim was shot at street level from somewhere directly behind. We’ll know more after we get inside the skull.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Lori Soles turned to the older plainclothes officer. “I guess the guys can stop looking for bullets. There was only one, and it’s in there.” She pointed to the dead girl’s cranium.
“We’re canvassing the neighborhood now. The shooter may have dropped something...”
Just then I noticed a white panel van with a satellite antenna double-parking across the street. Emblazoned on the van’s side were three words that sent a chill though my blood: New York 1.
“Oh, God...” I muttered. Hazel Boggs’s murder was about to make the local news. As a technician jumped out and began unpacking camera equipment, I hurried back to Matt. He looked positively stricken.
“Clare,” he whispered, “I have to get out of here.”
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm before he could bolt. “These cops will detain you if you try to run. It could get loud. You’ll just end up calling attention to yourself.”
“But if Breanne sees me on the news—”
“Just give me a second.”
I rushed up to Lori Soles, who’d always been the softer touch. “Detective Soles, I’m happy to stick around, but my business partner really needs to get back to our shop. Can you talk to him another time?”
Lori frowned. “Now would be better—”
“Oh, let the guy go,” Sue Ellen broke in, surprising the heck out of me with an accommodating hand wave. “Spinelli got a statement from him already. And we can track Mr. Tight End down tomorrow. On one condition...” She shot Matt an openly flirtatious smile. “He has to give me his digits.”
With New York 1’s cable news camera approaching, Matt wasn’t about to argue. He quickly reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, extracted a business card, and slapped it into Sue Ellen’s outstretched hand.
“My cell number’s on there,” he said before taking off. “Catch you later.”
The detective smiled as she pocketed my ex’s card. “Not if I catch you first...” she promised, her eyes following Matt’s posterior all the way back to our coffeehouse.
Five
Fifteen minutes later, I was back inside the Blend.
“Where’s Matt?” I asked, approaching the espresso bar.
Gardner Evans glanced up, jerked his thumb toward the ceiling, and went back to crowning a hazelnut-toffee latte with spoonfuls of frothy foam.
I looked around the Blend’s first floor and realized I was witnessing an unheard-of customer pattern for a Monday at midnight. The place was packed, and I didn’t need a beverage-service management spreadsheet to analyze why.
Sitting around our marble-topped café tables was a base of neighborhood regulars, a handful of NYU undergrads, and a sprinkling of FDNY and police personnel. All of them had come here as a result of the bad business a block away. Murder and coffee, it appeared, were a profitable mix.
“You okay here?” I asked Gardner, scanning the work area. I was unhappy to see him alone. “Where’s Dante?”
“Downstairs, getting stuff from the big fridge.” Gardner drizzled the finished latte with toffee syrup, dusted it with a fine hazelnut powder, and placed the tall glass mug on the counter for the waiting customer. Three more were still in line.
“Things were dead in here an hour ago,” he told me, “and we were going to start restocking and cleaning when we got this rush—”
“Hey, boss!” Dante walked out from the back, each tattooed arm lugging a gallon of milk product. He stashed the jugs in our espresso bar fridge and moved up to the counter. “What the heck’s going on outside?”
“Yeah, we heard the sirens,” Gardner said. “A couple of customers said someone got whacked?”
“A young woman.” I rubbed my eyes. On a good day, they were emerald green, but between the beers and the tears, I figured they were massively shot with red. “Listen, I have to go upstairs and talk to Matt right now, but I’ll be back down shortly to help.”
“Do you want to open the second floor for this mob?” Gardner asked.
The Blend’s upstairs lounge often caught the spillover on busy weekends. But my guys were already into overtime. “Morning comes too soon around here,” I told Gardner. “Let’s keep the customers on the first floor. No more dining room service, either. Give everything wings—and you can start with two doppio macchiatos for Matt and me.”
“No problem, Clare...”
Gardner pulled a pair of double espressos into paper cups then spotted each of the dark pools with a dollop of foamed milk. (That’s what macchiato basically translates to, by the way: to mark with a spot or stain. Some coffeehouses reverse this recipe, marking a cup of steamed or foamed milk with a bit of espresso instead. At the Blend, however, tradition still ruled.)
I picked up my two steaming paper cups, snapped on flat lids, and pointed to the door. “Anyone who comes in here from the police or fire departments gets free drinks tonight. And start brewing up a thermal urn of the Breakfast Blend. When I come down, I’ll bring the coffee out to them.”
“Okay, Clare.”
“Sure, boss.”
“Thanks, guys.” I left the espresso bar and began to cut a serpentine path through the crowded café tables. I’d been in a pretty big hurry to get to Matt—until I realized the conversations taking place around me were about tonight’s shooting. My pace instantly slowed.
At a table to my right, a group of NYU guys in ripped jeans, T-shirts, and day-old chin scruff were all agreeing that they hadn’t seen or heard a thing and they didn’t know the woman.
Right. I moved on.
At the next table, a twenty-something girl in vintage seventies fringe leather was speaking excitedly about seeing the New York 1 news van. Her redheaded girlfriend in a neon pink cashmere sweater confessed to a crush on Pat Kiernan, the station’s morning anchor.
O-kay. I kept walking.
Three more tables turned out to be a bust: conversations about rent hikes, a lousy love life, and an HBO miniseries. But at the very next table, a couple of guys were talking about the shooting. It sounded to me like they were comparing notes on their separate questioning by canvassing cops.
I slowed to a complete stop.
“Did you hear anything? ’Cause I sure didn’t,” the first man said.
He appeared to be in his early thirties, had a fresh-faced, midwestern look about him with thick blond hair and a J. Crew outfit of pressed khakis, a pale-yellow button-down, and a matching sweater draped over his shoulders.
“You didn’t hear anything because your apartment window doesn’t face Hudson,” the second man replied. “Mine does.”
I recognized the second man as a regular Blend customer named Barry. He was a very nice, soft-spoken but brilliant Web designer in his early forties. His brown hair was thinning, and his once-trim figure was spreading a bit, but he had a warm, genuine smile and always took the trouble to compliment our coffee. Like many of my regular Village customers, Barry also happened to be gay, and the man he was sitting with looked about ten years younger and a whole lot cuter than Barry’s current boyfriend.
“I actually heard the shot,” Barry announced.
“Really?” the other man replied. “You heard it? What about Martin?”
Barry frowned and shook his head. “Martin left.”
“Oh, really?”
The cute guy leaned forward slightly. I smiled, seeing the obvious. Barry, however, remained glum.
“He packed up three days ago,” Barry said with a sigh. “So I was alone tonight. This is actually the first time I’ve come out since he dumped me. Anyway, I didn’t know what I heard was a gunshot. Not at the time. I thought it was something harmless, you know? Then I hear sirens and forty minutes later, the cops are pounding on my door—”
“Excuse me,” I said.
Both men looked up. Barry smiled. “Oh, hi, Clare. What do you need?”
“Did you just say that you heard the gunshot in the street?”
Barry nodded. “Sure did. It was right under my window, too.”
“And where do you live exactly?”
“Two and a half blocks away, on the same side of the street as the Blend.” Barry gestured in that direction. “I’m in a second-floor apartment.”
“You heard the shot right below you?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“And what did you see?”
“Not a thing. That’s what I told the police. I went to my window and looked down—I thought it might have been a kid with fireworks or a car tire popping, something like that—but there was nothing. Not a soul.”
Barry’s story fit with what I’d experienced, too. By the time I’d turned around to look for the shooter, the person was out of view.
“Did you tell the police anything else?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, I mean... You didn’t see anything, but did you hear anything after the shot? Say, like, footsteps running, something like that?”
“Well, actually, now that you mention it...” Barry scratched his chin. “I did hear some footsteps really close, but they weren’t running. They were walking.”
“What?” I’m pretty sure my bloodshot eyes bugged at that.
“I heard some footsteps, like you said. But I didn’t see anyone there, so I didn’t mention it to the cops, you know? I mean, why would that matter?”
“Well, if you heard footsteps walking, yet you couldn’t see who was walking, don’t you think this person could have been the shooter, maybe moving out of sight, say around the side of your building?”
Barry stared at me for a few dumbfounded seconds. “Oh my God, Clare. I didn’t think of that. The footsteps must have been the shooter ducking into my alley. Oh my God, I should have told the police—”
“It’s okay. Listen... Why don’t you write down this number?” I put down my cups and reached for Lori Soles’s business card in the back pocket of my jeans. “This is one of the detectives investigating the shooting. Just call her cell and tell her what you just told me. All right?”
“Okay, Clare. Oh my God...” He wrote the number on his Village Blend napkin.
“Don’t worry, Barry. You didn’t do anything wrong. Enjoy your coffee.”
Juggling the two lidded paper cups, I moved to the base of the spiral stairs in the center of the dining room, unhooked the thin velvet rope with the dangling Second Floor Closed sign, and rehooked it behind me. As I clanged up the wrought iron steps, the crowd’s raucous chattering slowly dissipated, and my mind started working.
Something isn’t adding up...
By the time I reached the quiet of the upstairs lounge, I was fairly certain of one thing where the shooter was concerned. I looked around for Matt to see what he thought, but it wasn’t easy to locate the man. Most of the room was shrouded in darkness.
Six
The second floor’s sofas looked like hulking silhouettes, the colorful throw rugs like gray storm puddles. There were eight antique floor lamps in this large space, an eclectic collection scattered about to give the feeling of a funky, comfortable bohemian apartment, but there was nothing cozy about the room tonight. None of the lamps were turned on. The strongest light came from the hearth at the far end of the room.
Tucked into the exposed brick wall, the split logs were crackling, their high flames flashing like tangerine lightning in the antique coffeepots above the mantel. Fog-gray shadows moved across the old tin signs on the exposed brick walls. The effect was creepy, as if the ghosts of dead customers had come back for some kind of grim midnight party.
Since Matt had taken the trouble to set the fire, I expected to see him in front of it, his muscled frame sunk into an overstuffed couch, his shoes off, his feet up. Instead, I found him standing next to the tall front windows, his body angled tensely for a better view of the activity around the emergency vehicles a block away.
Enough light spilled in from the streetlamps for me to make out a closed laptop computer on the table closest to him, along with a cluster of small porcelain espresso cups, all of which were empty.
“How many have you had?” I asked, walking up to him.
“Four.”
“Then you aren’t going to want this double macchiato, right?”
Matt grabbed the paper cup out of my hand, flipped off the lid, and bolted it.
I blinked. “Guess I was wrong.”
“I’m trying to sober up. Not that tonight’s events weren’t sobering enough already.” He crushed the cup in his hand and tossed it onto the table.
I nodded, closed my eyes, and sipped my own macchiato, pulling the richly caramelized coffee through the little island of frothed milk. It was profound, in a way, how the tiniest kiss of something sweet and white could transform the heavy impact of something so much darker. The drink’s caffeine was energizing, too, and my weary body wanted the stimulation as badly as Matt had wanted his—only not as fast, which, when you got right down to it, pretty much defined our differences.
“Listen,” I said, after opening my eyes, “I’m not scheduled for any more hours today, but Dante and Gardner have been dealing with the mob down there alone, so I told them I’d come back on. Do you think you could pitch in, too?”
Matt nodded. “I’ll help.”
Two simple words, an oasis in the desert. “Great.”
The father of my child stared at me for a long moment after that, his jaw working silently; then he peered out the window again. Obviously, the man was agitated. But I got the distinct impression it had nothing to do with the amount of caffeine he’d just consumed.
“Is something wrong? I mean other than the obvious—” I gestured in the general direction of the crime scene, where emergency lights were still flashing red against the century-old town houses.
“Yes, Clare. I think something’s very wrong, but I don’t know how to go about...” As Matt’s voice trailed off, he shook his head. “Can I talk to you?”
“Of course.”
He walked back to the table, but he didn’t sit down. Instead, he began to pace to the window and back again. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got some ideas about tonight’s murder.”
“What do you mean ideas?”
“I mean...” Matt stopped pacing and faced me, his chiseled
features half in shadow. “I’m not so sure the killer was that motorcycle-jacketed asshole back at the White Horse Tavern.”
“I agree with you.”
“You do?”
I told Matt what I’d just learned from Barry downstairs.
“The man’s apartment faces Hudson,” I said, “and he swears he heard the shot from right below his window, which means the weapon was fired a block and a half away from the victim.”
“Yes, but...” Matt scratched his head. “I’m sorry, why is that important?”
“It’s important because the jerk you threatened at the tavern was drunk. The man was slurring his words and unsteady on his feet. How the heck could a guy like that bull’s-eye the target of a woman’s head from that far away? And in one shot?”
Matt stared at me for a good ten seconds. The half of his face I could see had gone completely pale.
“Matt? Are you okay? Maybe you better sit down...”
My ex-husband nodded and took a seat at the table. “You’re right, Clare... You’re absolutely right. And it backs up my own ideas.”
“What ideas? I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t think that bullet was meant for the stripper. I think that bullet was meant for Breanne.”
“Breanne?” Now I needed to sit down. “You want to explain your theory?”
As I sank, he rose and went right back to pacing.
“Think about it, Clare. My engagement to Breanne is public knowledge. She’s picked me up here in the evenings countless times. I started my evening here earlier, and when we came back from the White Horse, Breanne’s look-alike was on my arm. If someone had been waiting in the night, staking out the Blend to get to Breanne, they would have seen this girl. Do you follow?”
“Yes, but—”
“Hazel Boggs was a dead ringer for my fiancée. From a distance, she fooled both of us. I think she fooled the shooter, too. I think Breanne was the target, not this poor girl from West Virginia. In fact, I don’t think it. I know it!”
Matt’s face was flushed, his eyes bright. A vein throbbed visibly in his neck. Despite the guy’s physical-fitness level, I was starting to worry he might have a stroke.