by Cleo Coyle
I turned the knob and realized the door wasn’t locked.
“David, I’m coming in!”
I slowly cracked the door, giving him time to protest. Peeking inside, I saw the pool of red on the ivory marble. Then I swung the door wide—and screamed.
TWO
MOM! Was that you screaming? Are you okay?”
Joy was the first one down the hallway, Madame right behind her, a little slower than her granddaughter, but hustling nonetheless.
“Clare, what’s wrong?!”
“It’s David...” I whispered, feeling numb.
His face was turned away from the bathroom doorway, but I could see he’d been shot in the head. His body was still as a stone, the skin of his arms a waxy blue-gray, his fingernails colorless.
“Joy, what’s going on?” Graydon Faas came down the hall next, his lanky form striding with urgency. Two more members of the wait staff followed—Suzi Tuttle, a Long Island native, and Colleen O’Brien a young Irish immigrant.
The entire group formed a huddle around me. I pointed, and they turned to see David Mintzer lying face down on his imported Italian marble floor, a pool of red staining the ivory stone.
“My god,” Madame murmured.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Colleen whispered.
“No,” Graydon rasped. “It can’t be.”
As we all stared in shocked silence, a male voice spoke up from behind us—“Was I dreaming? Or did I just hear Clare scream?”
We turned. David Mintzer was standing right behind us.
Then we all screamed.
David had just stepped out of his pitch dark bedroom, bleary eyed and squinting. He was only a few inches taller than my five-two, and I spontaneously threw my arms around his neck.
“Ohmygawd, David,” I cried. “You’re alive!”
“Clare?” David’s bulbous brown eyes blinked at me in puzzlement. “What in the world is—”
He stopped talking, having finally noticed the wide open door and the tragic, bloody mess in his custom-designed bathroom. “Oh my lord…who is that?”
Everyone was still staring in shock through the doorway. I gently pushed past them. Careful to avoid the blood, I walked into the bathroom and crouched down next to the body, felt the waxy blue-gray skin. I gently turned the head so that we could all see the corpse’s face.
Joy gasped, Graydon cried out, and Colleen screamed.
By this time, I’d already guessed who it was by a process of elimination. When I saw the features of the young man, my fears were confirmed. The corpse on the floor was Treat Mazzelli.
By now, I also knew why I had made the mistake of misidentifying the body. Both David and Treat had short, black hair, stood under five seven, and were wearing short-sleeved shirts. Sure, David’s Ralph Lauren linen number was 300 dollars more than the “Cuppa J” Polo that Treat was wearing, but the pinkish/salmon colors were nearly identical and so were their khaki slacks. Because the shirts were worn loose and untucked, it wasn’t immediately apparent that Treat’s form was that of a muscle-bound weightlifter in his twenties and David’s that of a middle-aged foodie. From a distance, both men appeared to have the same hairy arms and stocky builds.
As the crowd at the door reacted with distressed exclamations, my mind began to race. Awhile back, I’d solved the murder of a Blend employee—a case on which a certain tall, attractively rumpled NYPD detective had been assigned. After that, Mike Quinn had become a regular Blend customer. As I routinely foamed up his grande lattes, he’d share details about his homicide cases (not to mention his rocky marriage, which was still bordering on divorce).
I was far from a pro at detective work, and I’d made plenty of mistakes in my subsequent attempts. But there were a few things I’d learned from listening to Michael Ryan Francis Quinn. In fact, I could almost hear his advice now—
Think objectively, Clare, not emotionally. Start by simply looking around. What do you see?
I glanced around the bathroom floor, near Treat’s blue-gray hands and saw no gun. Then I took a closer look at his skull. There were no sooty smudges or burns around the wound. No gunpowder particles were visible. That meant Treat hadn’t been shot at close range. And, of course, he hadn’t shot himself.
I turned and scanned the large bathroom window.
“There it is,” I whispered.
At about the height of Treat’s head in a standing position was a single bullet hole in the glass. I knew next to nothing about ballistics, but it seemed obvious the glass would have slowed the velocity of the bullet. I looked for an exit wound in his skull, but saw none, and I knew the medical examiner would have to retrieve the bullet from inside his brain during the autopsy.
I gently lifted one of Treat’s arms. It wasn’t stiff, but I wasn’t surprised. I had seen Treat alive less than two hours before and it took longer for rigor mortis to set in. The skin still felt warm. The parts closest to the floor appeared purplish, but when I touched the purple areas, they blanched.
“Clare, what are you doing?” asked David. He was about to step inside.
“No, don’t!” I warned. “Don’t come in. This is a crime scene.”
I rose and carefully left the bathroom, closing the door behind me.
Treat had been a considerate young man, personable, with a buoyant sense of humor. He’d been a good worker, always on time, amazingly even tempered, even in the hot house of Cuppa J’s East Hampton kitchen. In fact, he was one of the few people who could make Victor Vogel, the relentlessly intense chef, laugh. For that we were all grateful.
So who the hell would want to shoot a good-natured young man like Treat in the head? I asked myself.
Nobody, I silently answered.
The shooter must have made the same error I had, mistaking Treat for David.
Standing around me now in the hallway were the members of Cuppa J’s wait staff. They had been working closely with Treat for more than six weeks, and I noticed their reactions.
Colleen O’Brien was sobbing uncontrollably.
Joy, teary-eyed, was trying to comfort her.
Graydon Faas looked totally stricken as he stared at the corpse, slack-jawed and dumbfounded.
Only Suzi Tuttle looked unaffected. She simply stood there with arms folded, a look of ennui on her attractive features.
I made a note of Suzi’s reaction (or lack thereof ) before I pushed through the group and walked into David’s bedroom. The large space was pitch dark, but there was enough light from the hallway for me to make my way around his divan and over to his king-size bed.
“Clare, where are you going?” asked David. He followed me into his bedroom while the others waited in the hall.
“I’m going to call 911.”
As I removed the wireless receiver from its base on the carved mahogany end table and dialed the emergency number, David clicked on a few of his Tiffany lamps. When the operator picked up, I explained the situation, gave my name, and David’s address and phone number.
“Did you hear anything while you were in here, David?” I asked after hanging up. “Anything at all?”
“Nothing.”
“How long were you up here?”
He checked his wristwatch. “About two hours I guess. I came up to lie down just before the fireworks. I must have fallen asleep. My god…I still can’t believe this…what do you think happened to Treat? An accident?”
An accident? Yeah, right. One of your guests just happened to be cleaning a gun on your back grounds, and it just happened to go off and accidentally pop through your private bathroom window at exactly the right time to take down a man close to your height and dressed just like you.
I said none of this, of course. With the exception of Ted Ammon’s tragic fate, homicide was unheard of in this burgh. (Ammon had been an upstanding financier until he was brutally bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton mansion by his estranged wife’s electrician, who also happened to be the woman’s lover.)
Okay, so the locals re
ferred to Ammon’s old Middle Lane address as “Murder Lane,” but until that specific crime, there hadn’t been a homicide out here in years. The last thing an East Hampton resident expected was a real murderer to squeeze through their impenetrable privets—and I could see it was going to take a little time for David to accept that a homicide had just taken place in his own house.
“I’m not sure what happened,” I told him carefully, “but, David, back up a minute. Tell me exactly why you left the party.”
He shrugged. “I felt a migraine coming on. They’re allergy induced and I know exactly how to treat them—a cold, dark room and my prescription medication. I popped two pills and came straight to the bedroom. Didn’t bother turning on any lights, just turned up the air-conditioning and lay down. I heard the fireworks going off, but I couldn’t even bear to watch them. I dozed off and the next thing I remember is hearing you scream.”
“Clare, what’s going on?” called Madame from the doorway. “Did you call the police?”
“Yes,” I replied.
I could hear Colleen’s sobs hadn’t subsided and the others were still huddled around the bathroom doorway like witnesses of a traffic accident who weren’t sure whether they should leave the scene.
I glanced at David. This was still his house and I didn’t want to sound obnoxiously bossy, so I tried to pose my directive as a question. “Maybe we should all go downstairs? To the kitchen? I’ll make us some coffee and we can wait for the police together?”
“Okay…all right…sure…” Everyone mumbled and began to wander back down the hall and toward the stairs.
“Wait for me,” David said as I swiftly walked away. “I’m certainly not staying up here alone!”
THREE
DEAD bodies freak me out.”
Graydon Faas’s hands shook as he lifted his mug of coffee.
“It’s all right,” said David, patting the young man on the shoulder. “They aren’t a barrel of laughs for me either.”
I had brewed a twelve-cup drip carafe of our medium roast Breakfast Blend and was just finishing gradually and evenly filling seven mugs. (I never pour one cup at a time out of a pot. I always pour a little into each cup until they’re all filled. That way, if there are any inconsistencies in the suspension—too strong at the bottom of the pot, for instance, and too weak at the top—no one cup will suffer from the extreme.)
As David splashed cream into his coffee, I gulped mine black, barely tasting the nutty warmth. Adrenaline wasn’t a problem at the moment, but I feared my energy levels would spike and then fall, which was why I’d chosen the Breakfast Blend. I had many other more complex and robust-tasting blends on hand, but the medium roast had more caffeine than the darker Italian or French roasts, and I wanted to be alert for the next few hours.
Everyone was drinking their coffee now, except Colleen, who was still sobbing into a series of Kleenexes. The girl’s loose auburn curls had begun slipping from their ponytail, and her usually ruddy skin looked pale as a shroud, making her dusting of freckles appear as if someone had roughly grated a cinnamon stick across her barely-there nose. An Irish immigrant here in New York on an education visa, Colleen had just turned twenty. From the age of eight, she’d worked in her family’s Dublin pub/restaurant and her experience as a waitress showed in her efficient, earnest, unflappable service.
I sat down at David’s seven-foot-long kitchen table directly across from Colleen and Joy. Madame sat next to me. Around the rest of the table sat David, Graydon, and Suzi. For a minute, we all listened to Colleen’s sobs in the huge gourmet kitchen—that and the dishwasher’s rhythmic swishing next to the Sub-Zero fridge.
Joy reached over, stirred cream, then sugar into Colleen’s warm mug and gently pushed it into the girl’s shaking hands. Colleen swallowed with difficulty, then began to take small sips.
We all silently watched.
Obviously, Colleen had something very personal going on, but no one said a word. Normally, I would have given the young woman her privacy, but if she knew something that would help the police, I wanted to know it too.
“Colleen,” I carefully began, “we’re all upset about Treat, of course, but you seem really undone. Is there anything you want to share with us?”
“Ohhhhhh!” she wailed, then began bawling again.
Damn. Now everyone was staring at me as if I’d just kicked the poor girl. Everyone except Suzi Tuttle.
“Oh, for god’s sake, Colleen,” she snapped. “He’s not worth it.”
Suzi, the Long Island native, was twenty-five, but she’d been bartending and waitressing since high school. She had triple-pierced ears and (apparently) more piercings elsewhere on her body, or so she liked to brag. The hard-partying image was deliberately played up with short-cropped hair dyed white blond and black eyeliner as thick as Cleopatra’s.
Suzi’s tough attitude actually worked well in David’s East Hampton restaurant. Cuppa J’s customers weren’t exactly known for being passive and polite. They were wealthy, elite, famous people who were used to having their whims and demands satisfied with a finger snap. One thing you could not have in that environment was a thin skin.
Still, Suzi’s hardness at this moment seemed out of place—until Colleen blew her small, pug nose and, in a mild Irish brogue, announced with great profundity: “You all might as well know. Treat and I, we were…we were close.”
“He was banging you,” Suzi said flatly.
Colleen’s eyes narrowed. “We were lovers.”
Suzi waved her hand. “Treat didn’t love anyone but himself.”
“You raccoon-eyed witch! How can you say that? With him lying upstairs like that and all…” Colleen’s sobs began again.
“I can say it because I know exactly how he operated,” Suzi calmly replied. “He told you to keep your relationship quiet, right? So there wouldn’t be any ‘funny vibes’ at the restaurant.”
Colleen stopped crying. Her jaw dropped. “How did you know? Did he tell you about us?”
“Girlfriend, get a clue. Treat told me the same thing when he was sleeping with me. And I found out why. Before me, he was hooking up with Prin!”
Madame put down her coffee cup, leaned toward me and whispered, “Sounds like the boy was sampling David’s restaurant staff like a box of chocolates.”
Prin Lopez was a model-gorgeous Hispanic girl with sleek, dark brown hair down to her hips and long-lashed copper eyes. She’d grown up in a rough part of the Bronx, the poorest borough in New York City, but had worked her way into waitressing at a popular Upper West Side bistro, where David and Jacques Papas (Cuppa J’s manager) had met her. Both had been impressed with her service as well as her ability to speak fluent Spanish—always handy in an industry that consistently employs kitchen workers from Mexico and Latin America.
According to Jacques, Prin had left the South Fork abruptly for a family emergency and wouldn’t be around to help with the July Fourth weekend crowd, which was a shame, because this weekend was bound to be the busiest of the season.
As I made a mental note to ask Prin about her relationship with Treat when she returned to work, I noticed Joy, across the table, squirming uncomfortably and gnawing her lower lip. I wasn’t going to press her now, but I was praying that Treat Mazzelli hadn’t also started sleeping with my daughter. From the way the guy had been flirting with Joy earlier this evening, it seemed apparent he was already making plans to dump Colleen.
It also seemed apparent that Treat had been racking up conquests. But not just any conquests. The Hamptons were always packed with single, available women. If Treat had wanted to bed a string of willing young females, he could have driven just a few miles over to Sagaponack. “Sagg Main” was the most active singles beach scene in the Hamptons, full of gym-toned bodies looking for true love—or a weekend simulation of same.
Obviously Treat had preferred to seduce a succession of young women in close proximity to one another, bedding each one while pretending he could keep them all from finding ou
t. It was the sort of pattern set by a guy who obviously got off on high-risk living, maybe even thrived on a situation that could, at any time, blow up in his face.
If that were the case, I wondered: were there other parts of his life that were just as high-risk? So high-risk that someone would want him dead? Had the shooter hit the right target after all?
Graydon interrupted my thoughts with a sudden sigh of agitation. Running a strong hand through his blond streaked buzz cut, he self-consciously announced, “You guys, I barely knew Treat. I mean, I’m sorry for what happened to the dude, but I don’t know anything that can help and I really…I’m really wrecked. I’d like to go home and hit the sack. Is that okay?”
Suzi again waved a dismissive hand. “You just want to catch your waves at the crack of yawn.”
“So?” Graydon folded his arms. “I said I was sorry about the dude, but do you really think he’s in a position to care one way or the other?”
Suzi looked away.
Colleen began to cry again.
“There, there,” said Madame, reaching across the table to pat Colleen’s hand. “You know Ms. Tuttle may not have said it in the kindest way, but I do believe you’ve shed enough tears for the boy upstairs. Take it from a woman who’s been around the block a few times, my dear, men are like buses—one may throw you off unexpectedly, but there’ll always be a new one coming right behind you, inviting you to climb aboard.”
For a second there, we all stared at Madame, a little shocked at her suggestive phrasing. She simply blinked at us, either completely oblivious to the unintentional double entendre or appalled at our provincial reaction to it.
“What?” she finally snapped. “What did I say?”
Joy put an arm around Colleen. “My grandmother’s right. In fact, how’s this for something to cheer up about. I’ve got Keith Judd’s phone number, and I’ll bet we could both party with him—”
“What?” I interrupted with alarm. “Joy, you’re kidding, right? That actor didn’t actually give you his phone number.”