by Cleo Coyle
“Coffee?” I asked. “You’re up so early you probably need it.”
I headed for the kitchen and my drip coffee maker, Matt on my heels.
“Someone had to get up early,” he said. “In case you didn’t make it home. Someone would have to open the coffeehouse.”
“Please,” I said with a wave. “In all the time I managed this place for your mother—during our marriage and since I’ve returned—I’ve never once missed the opening. You, on the other hand—”
Matt put up his hand to stop me.
“Let’s not go there. It’s the here and now we’re talking about.”
Matteo sat down at the table while I scooped beans into the grinder.
“Anyway,” he said, “I wonder how much longer you’ll be able to keep that sterling employment record going? Especially with millionaire Bruce Bowman—a.k.a. Mr. Right—in hot pursuit. Or is the pursuit technically over now?” Matteo glanced at his watch and raised an eyebrow. “Gauging the hour—and your choice of attire—I’d say Bruce got pretty much what he was after. How about you, Clare? Happy?”
Matteo had learned the many ways to bait me early in our marriage. For the first few years, I refused to sink to his level, but soon we were fighting fairly regularly. It was possible my hostility gave him some kind of sick justification to seek comfort elsewhere—not that he’d ever really needed an excuse.
In the years since the divorce had become final, however, I’d had little to no patience with Matteo’s games.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am happy,” I tossed over my shoulder. “Bruce made me very happy. And correct me if I’m wrong, wasn’t it you who always said I was too uptight and should lighten up? You’re just mad because I didn’t lighten up while I was married to you.”
“That’s a load of—”
I pushed the button on the electric grinder, drowning out his reply. Grinding beans too long would create a bitter brew, but frankly I preferred having the bitterness on my tongue than in my ear.
When the beans were pulverized I turned off the grinder and dumped them into the drip machine’s cone filter to the sound of silence. I got the whole thing brewing, then grabbed two large mugs and set one in front of Matteo.
The nutty smell of freshly brewed Breakfast Blend gradually filled the kitchen. I yawned, leaned against the granite sink, and let the earthy aroma revive me.
It slowly dawned on me that through some bizarre circumstance of karmic justice, Matteo and I were both reliving an all too common scene from our past—only in reverse.
Back when we were married, Matt had been the one who invariably partied the night away, usually with some vivacious little bubblehead, as a result of a networking party, while I played the part of the responsible, long-suffering, faithful, injured spouse. I didn’t like my role, but what Matt saw as my “uptight” morals allowed for no other choice of lifestyles. Just because Matteo strayed at the drop of a thong, didn’t mean I would.
If I remembered correctly, it was Matteo who usually made coffee on those bleak mornings, still dressed in the clothes he went out wearing the night before—pumped full of adrenaline, or testosterone, or cocaine, or all three. He’d make coffee while I sat at the table or gazed out the window, sulking, and contemplating the end.
Now if I were a cruel person, I would take pleasure in this remarkable turning of the tide—and maybe I was a cruel person because a part of me knew Matt wanted me back, and I was honestly enjoying this moment. On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t cruel. Maybe I was just human.
When the pot gurgled its last, I carried the hot carafe to the table.
Matt spoke again. “Your friend Detective Quinn stopped by last night, around closing time.”
I froze in mid-pour, dribbling three dark drops. Matteo swept his hand across the table, wiping them away.
“Quinn put a tail on Bruce,” he continued. “From the report he received late last night, it appeared a woman with a bright yellow parka entered Bowman’s house. He thought it was Joy who had gone in. He came here, alarmed, looking for you. He found me instead, and I explained you’d borrowed Joy’s yellow parka. What his plain clothes officer saw was you going in. That’s when Quinn told me—”
I finished pouring and sat down at the table across from the father of my child. “I know what he told you. He told you Bruce Bowman is a suspect in a murder.”
“The suspect, in three murders.”
“Quinn exaggerates,” I said evenly. I tasted my coffee and found it bitter. I added an extra dash of cream—and, uncharacteristically, a heaping teaspoon of sugar.
“So maybe Bruce only killed one woman instead of two or more,” said Matt. “Yeah, I could see how Detective Quinn was exaggerating just a tad. Nothing to worry about.”
I shook my head, disturbed. “Matt, listen to me. Bruce is not a murderer. Quinn’s wrong. Misguided, over-wrought, and…wrong. And if he’s telling you about it, then he’s obviously trying to convince you to persuade me to stop seeing Bruce. But I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to do something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like prove Quinn wrong.”
“Whoa, Clare—”
“Don’t ‘whoa Clare’ me,” I said a little too loudly. “You want to know what I think? I think both you and Quinn are jealous. You with your public parade of serial flirtations, and Quinn with his messed-up marriage and all the baggage that comes with it. Frankly I’m sick of the both of you.”
“Aren’t we being a little harsh?”
I gritted my teeth and glared at Matt. “I meet a man. A nice man. More than a nice man. A remarkable, talented, tender, and hard-working one. Someone sane, reasonable, adult, self-aware, and brutally honest about the mistakes of his past, and you and Quinn conspire together to ruin things for me.”
“Clare, you’re starting to sound paranoid. I can’t speak for Quinn, but I’m not out to frame your boyfriend, or hurt you, believe me.”
“Not out to hurt me? That’s rich. Just what did you think you were doing all those times you had a fling with some barmaid, stewardess, or mutual friend’s wife?”
For a long minute, he had no reply.
“I didn’t do it to hurt you, Clare,” he finally said softly. “You know that.”
Sadly, I did. It had taken me years to come to terms with the idea that Matteo and I had very different attitudes toward sex. For him, physical love was just another exhilarating activity—like mountain climbing, surfing, getting falling-down drunk, or bungee jumping. Sex was no big anxiety-producing ordeal—and there certainly didn’t have to be any complicated meaning behind it. What meaning was there in a drunken binge or a bungee jump?
But for me there had to be more than the excitement of the chase, or the thrill of the seduction. Much more. I had to respect the man, and like him a lot, if not love him completely. Sex meant relationship. Sex for me could never be a one-night stand.
I know now that Matt never really understood what his little infidelities were doing to me back then. It was like he was missing some gene, or had an amazing psychological blind spot where the result of his own behavior on others was concerned. The cocaine didn’t help either, frankly. But my cognitive comprehension of my ex-husband’s shortcomings didn’t go very far to ease the pain in my heart. Or stop the anger I still felt toward him at times.
Like right now.
I picked my coffee mug up. We drank in silence.
“I’m not out to hurt you and I never was, Clare,” Matteo said after a long pause. “I just didn’t get it, you know? I do now.” He met my eyes. “I do…right now.”
I was a little taken aback. Just when I was angry with him, he said something like that—which was about as close to an apology for his past indescretions as I would ever get.
“Maybe you can help me, then. Help me find out the truth about Bruce,” I said slowly, hopefully. “These murders, if that’s what they are, and Quinn’s suspicions about Bruce…I can’t sort it all out myself…Matt, they
’re like dark clouds hanging over what could be…well, what I think could be something very important for me.”
Matteo shifted impatiently, then gulped his coffee. “I’m not a cop. You’d do better getting your buddy Quinn to help.”
“You and I did pretty good the last time…with Anabelle Hart. We solved a real crime, didn’t we? We put a real killer in jail. That was something.”
Matt shook his head. “We got lucky, Clare. We could just as easily have ended up in jail for breaking and entering, or for impersonating federal officers—and need I remind you that you almost got yourself killed?”
I sat back in my chair and ran my finger along the edge of the warm coffee cup.
“You need Quinn,” said Matteo.
“I can’t go to Quinn. I can’t trust him with this.”
I paused, then decided it was time to come completely clean.
“His marriage isn’t going well, Matt…and he was telling me about it one night, and I think he might have been interested in seeing me…or at least I think he was thinking about it…before I got involved with Bruce.”
Matteo snorted. “I told you the man wanted you.”
“Christ, I didn’t say that!”
“You said he seemed interested. What about you? Were you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Honestly.”
“Okay, I like Quinn. He laughs at my jokes, and I usually enjoy his morose sense of humor and I find him a little bit sexy—in a rumpled, hard-boiled, film noir sort of way. And, okay, we’ve been flirting pretty heavily with each other since we first met. And it’s probably Quinn, now that I think about it, who helped me start to believe that I should give the opposite sex a chance again—”
“Clare.”
“What?”
“This is way more information than I need to hear.”
I threw up my hands. “Quinn has too much baggage. His marriage is falling apart, he loves his children and is clearly ripped up about his unresolved feelings for his wife. Anyway, I’d never get involved in a tangled mess like that and he knows it. But I also think he wasn’t thrilled to hear I was dating anybody again, let alone Bruce, and I really think Quinn’s grasping at straws where Bruce is concerned.”
“I see,” said Matt.
“I’d rather trust you with this…investigation…or whatever you want to call it. Helping Bruce is what I want to call it.”
Matteo smiled. “I’m flattered.”
“Why?”
“Because you feel you can trust me. That makes me want to help you, but the truth is you still need Quinn. He’s been investigating these crimes for weeks, he’s talked to people we don’t even know about, and he has all the facts at his disposal.”
I sat straighter and leaned across the table.
“Quinn doesn’t know everything,” I whispered. “I did a little investigating on my own. Last night, while Bruce was asleep, I logged onto his computer and read his e-mails.”
“You logged onto the man’s computer and read his e-mails? Without his knowing, I take it?”
“Of course.”
“Jesus Christ, Clare, you’ve got nerve…no wonder you found out about Daphne and me. And I thought I was so careful.”
“You were flaunting her, Matt. Even Madame knew…”
“Mother knew?”
“Yes, but she forgave you. I doubt she ever forgave Daphne, though.”
It was sad, really. Madame and Daphne had been friends for years before Daphne made a play for her best friend’s son.
The direction of the conversation was obviously making Matt uncomfortable, so he changed it.
“Clare, if you logged onto his computer, that means you had some suspicions of your own.”
“No,” I lied. (Okay so I’d had a moment of doubt after I saw the model number on his HP DeskJet, but the truth was I wanted to look for anything that might contradict the picture Quinn was trying to paint of Bruce, and I had.)
“So what did you find out from all of your investigating?”
“I think the key to this whole thing is Sahara McNeil. She was someone Bruce hadn’t seen in years, not since he was first married. He didn’t even know she was in New York until Cappuccino Connection night—”
“And then he found out Sahara was living in the city and he killed her,” concluded Matt.
“That’s not where I was going.”
“That’s where Quinn would go. And what about the subway victim? And Inga Berg? Wasn’t Bruce connected to both of those women, too?”
I sat back and took a sip of my coffee.
“He was involved with both of those women, true,” I said. “But for a short time, and I think that’s just coincidence. New York is a big city, but the circles in some of these dating services are really quite small. Bruce admitted to me that he’d dated a lot of women since his divorce, including the dead women, but I’ll bet a lot of other men dated them, too. Inga, certainly. Ask Tucker. She used to yammer on about her dates every weekend. And Bruce told me Valerie liked the happy hour scene—and she was the one who told him about SinglesNYC.com, the on-line service where he met Inga.”
Matt folded his arms. He didn’t seem convinced yet, but at least he was still listening.
“So why do you think this Sahara person is the key?”
“Sahara McNeil sent Bruce an e-mail link to a web page. It was a promotional site for the art gallery where she worked. It’s in SoHo, a place called Death Row. Ever heard of it?”
Matt shook his head. “Never.”
“They don’t exactly specialize in our kind of thing,” I told him. “The tagline on the site said something about dealing in ‘violent art’ and ‘art inspired by lust, morbidity, and obsession.’”
Matt scratched his unshaven chin. “That’s creepy, but I still don’t exactly see where you’re going.”
“It seems possible to me that Sahara could have been done in by one of the artists her gallery represented. In fact—wait just a second, I’ll be right back.”
I rose and went to my bedroom, then returned with the Hello Kitty notepad I’d filled out on Cappuccino Connection night. I quickly leafed through the pink pages.
“One of the men I was screening for Joy called himself Mars. He had that intense kind of stalker look and said he was a painter. But the strangest thing was that he spent most of his time ogling Sahara McNeil. He kept repeating that he’d already made his ‘connection’ for the night, and Joy said he’d told her that, too, which was truly odd since she was only the second person he’d sat with. The first one was Sahara.”
“So you think that this Mars may have killed Sahara? And since he’s a painter he may have known her through this Death Row gallery thing?”
“It’s a place to start,” I replied, trying not to sound totally desperate.
Matt sat gazing in silence at the steam rising from his coffee cup.
“Look at the facts,” I said after a pause. “Valerie Lathem hasn’t been ruled a homicide. Inga Berg’s killer could have been any number of men, and Sahara McNeil…I think she’s the real key. If I can find other suspects, I’ll bring them to Quinn’s attention. I just need some ammunition to prove Bruce is being framed.”
Matt nodded.
“Okay,” he said, slapping his palms on the table. “What do you want me to do?”
Just then the downstairs door buzzer went off, a faraway sound from up here in the duplex.
“First, I want you to let the pastry man in while I change clothes,” I said. “And then I want you to clear the sidewalk.” I glanced at his tanned skin, the familiar bronzed coloring of the perpetual equatorial summer. “You remember how to shovel snow, don’t you?”
Matt raised his dark eyebrow and gave me a look that seemed to say I’d been the one doing the shoveling for the last few minutes. Lucky for him, I had a coffeehouse to open.
EIGHTEEN
UNTIL the 1840s, SoHo—the truncated term for the neighborhood in lower Manhattan south of Housto
n Street—was a sleepy residential section of Manhattan. Then the building boom of the 1850s transformed it into an area of expensive retail stores and lofts built to house light manufacturing.
During this commercial building spree, the use of then-inexpensive cast-iron materials instead of carved stone became the vogue, making opulent, Italianate architecture like the 1857 Haughwout Building on Broadway near Broome Street the norm. Iron columns, pedestals, pediments, brackets, and entranceways were mass-produced for so many SoHo buildings that the area became known as the Cast Iron District.
By the 1960s, however, the facades of these structures were looking pretty worn from a century or more of neglect, and the once pricey lofts had begun to house cheap sweatshops. At that time, an entire floor of an industrial building could be rented for next to nothing, and impoverished artists did exactly that. Within a decade SoHo became the East Coast mecca for art, and by the 1970s hundreds of art galleries, large and small, mingled with antique dealers along West Broadway, Broome, Greene, and Barrow.
Transformed into a bohemian colony, the exhilarating mix of art, design, and architecture attracted the uptown crowd to the area, and by the late 1970s a new brand of tenant was buying up lofts. It was the era of the art patron rather than the starving artist, the latter forced to search the west side’s warehouse districts and the outer boroughs to find inexpensive industrial space. By 1980, the newly renovated lofts of SoHo were more likely to be written about in Architectural Digest than in Andy Warhol’s Interview.
Fortunately, the “artsy” character of the neighborhood never truly faded, and within the irregular borders of SoHo—and in some areas around it, too—the largest concentration of galleries and museums in North America could still be found.
A promising artist or designer could work anywhere he or she liked, but a showcase in a SoHo gallery was the essential element in a truly successful artist’s or designer’s portfolio, which was why the ambitious still poured into New York City year after year upon art school graduation.
On this bright, blustery, and cold Saturday afternoon, the narrow streets of SoHo were crowded. Last night’s snow appeared fluffy and white on rooftops and car hoods, but on the streets and sidewalks, foot and car traffic had turned the early snowfall into slushy black puddles.