by Cleo Coyle
I tried to walk slowly, but she jammed the gun into my ribs and pushed. We climbed past the second floor and third, past my duplex door and all the way up to the highest landing of the service staircase. Before us stood the door to the roof.
On the way up I’d been careful to push each door all the way open. I had told Bruce I’d be upstairs, so if these stair doors were left open and my duplex door was locked, I prayed he’d follow the obvious lead and come up to the roof, which was clearly where we were headed.
“Unbolt the door.”
I turned the heavy lock at the center of the roof door, retracting the thick bolts backward from the wall.
“Let’s go,” she barked, and we were out on the snowy roof, the door standing wide open behind us.
The wind was whipping off the river and it lashed my body with icy blasts. I shivered in the dark, stepped forward, and slipped, going down to my hands and knees. It wasn’t an accident. I wanted to be down here. My hands closed on the layer of snow still there from the night before.
“You’re going over, Clare. Let’s go.” She grabbed me by my hair and tugged.
“No!”
She pulled harder, forcing me toward the edge.
“You have two choices. Jump, and you might survive the four-story fall. Or I will shoot you dead and make it look like a smash-and-grab robbery. These idiot police won’t do a thing. Believe me, there are no geniuses in law enforcement these days.”
“Don’t be too sure, Maxine,” I said, shivering with pain and fear and cold and still trying to stall. “Detective Quinn already knows about the intern in Westchester.”
Once again, Maxine’s beautiful, confident face fell. “What? What does he think he knows? What? Tell me?”
“He knows you pushed that girl to her death. That it wasn’t a suicide. He knows you pushed Valerie Lathem, too, at the Union Square subway. He knows you lured Inga Berg to the roof and somehow made her jump or pushed her off. He knows about Sahara McNeil. He knows about Joy, too, and for that I hope they light you up like a fireworks display—”
That’s when I let her have it. I sent the icy snowball right into her face and stumbled to my feet. The snowball landed hard, smack on the plastic surgery perfect nose, between the high cheekbones, above the collagen lips.
“You bitch!” she screamed, but I was already lunging away from her and the edge of the roof.
She dove for my legs and I went down. Now we were both in the snow and struggling near the roof’s edge. I felt her get on top of me, straddle me. I was kicking and screaming, then somewhere in the struggle I heard Bruce’s cry—
“My God! No!”
He ran toward us, and then I felt the gun at the back of my head.
“I’ll kill her,” rasped Maxine, her voice high-pitched and crazed. “I’ll shoot her, Bruce. I will. Then your little precious Clare’s brains will be all over the nice white snow.”
“No! Don’t hurt her, Maxi. Don’t. It’s me you want to hurt. You know that. Come on, Maxine. Hurt me.”
The gun moved away from my head for a moment. My god, I thought, what was she doing? Was she going to shoot Bruce?
“No!” I cried.
And then the gun was back, the cold barrel pressing against the base of my skull, and I knew I was dead.
A second later, I heard the explosion. The gun going off was like a cannon at my ear, but I wasn’t shot. My ears were ringing painfully now, but the bullet had missed, and I could no longer feel Maxine’s body straddling mine.
I was alone on the roof, and I realized Bruce had thrown his body at Maxi, knocking her off. The body slam had knocked the gun away from my head, but the momentum had carried them both a few feet beyond the edge of the roof.
I was very close to the edge myself. I looked down, into the alley behind the Blend, then closed my eyes. The image was one I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.
Bruce and Maxi were laying four stories down on the concrete, their still bodies in a terrible, twisted embrace.
TWENTY-FIVE
MAXINE died almost instantly, her neck broken.
Bruce had survived with injuries to his spine and internal bleeding. He was rushed to St. Vincent’s and, I was told, regained consciousness.
My friend, Dr. John Foo, a resident and a regular at the Blend, had been on duty in the emergency room when they’d rushed Bruce in. I remained in the waiting room, pacing. Matteo was there with me, sitting nearby. He stood up the moment Dr. Foo came out of the OR.
“How is he?” I asked.
Dr. Foo hesitated. “When Mr. Bowman regained consciousness, he asked the attending if you were okay. We told him you were fine and a short time after that we lost him…I’m sorry, Clare. We did what we could, but he let go. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”
It’s a terrible feeling to lose someone. Losing someone you had just fallen in love with—there aren’t any words for that. None. I just felt myself falling—a hole, black and empty, was swallowing me up.
And then I was caught.
I don’t remember much after that, just feeling Matt’s arms around me, and hearing his voice saying over and over—
“I’ve got you, Clare. I’ve got you.”
THE next day, I swore out my statement for the police. Quinn was very patient and more than kind. Within a week, he came by the Blend to spend some time with me, talking over the case at length.
Tucker brought a ten-cup thermos of Mocha Java to my office, then closed the door as he left and Quinn and I sat down.
He began by telling me that their search of Maxine’s apartment revealed some expensive surveillance equipment, high-powered binoculars, and the same printer and personal stationery used to write the note to Inga. Her laptop revealed evidence that she’d hacked into Bruce’s e-mail account. The police also found a folder on her laptop containing an extensive personal journal.
“The entries were rambling and full of wild rants. It was clear she’d been enraged by Bowman’s decision to divorce her. She believed he’d been nothing before her and now that she’d ‘molded’ him into a man worth having around, some other woman was going to benefit and she couldn’t let that happen. The first murder, the intern at Bowman’s Westchester offices, had apparently been an escalation of a confrontation. When the push led to the woman’s death, and the police ruled it a suicide, Maxine began the pattern, thinking herself a genius who was smarter than the ‘idiot’ police. You get the picture.”
“I don’t think I do, Mike…It’s so hard to equate that attractive, together woman with someone so out of control.”
Quinn took a long sip of coffee. “The Right Man.”
A shiver went through me, remembering what I’d labeled Bruce when I’d first met him. Was Quinn reverting to gallows humor? If he was, I wasn’t laughing.
“Excuse me?” I said stiffly. “Do you mean ‘Mr. Right’?”
“No, Clare. The Right Man is the term for a syndrome. It’s a way of explaining, for example, what happens in domestic violence cases. A man sees himself as always right. He can seem completely charming to the world, and be totally in control in most every aspect of his life, but he’ll choose to be out of control in one aspect—toward a wife, for example, beating her severely if he perceives she’s made a fool of him in some way or disobeyed him or cheated, any one of which could be a fantasy perception on his part.”
“You’re saying Maxine had this syndrome?”
“I’d say it looks that way from everything we’ve learned. She was the Right Woman—a goddess of her world, dominant in the marriage, likely spoiled as a child, always right, used to having her way, yet, ironically, at the heart of it she harbored deep insecurities. That was clear from the writings in her laptop’s journal, as well.”
“Where did Bruce fit in then?”
“From what you’ve told us, Bruce looked up to her for years. And Right Men and Right Women often look for mates who are submissive and admiring because it fills them with a sense of self-worth. Deep
down, Maxine thought she was a failure. There were ramblings about her father and hurtful things he’d said to her and about the people at the law firms who fired her. But Right Men and Women don’t necessarily have to be failures. They can be worldly successes, too. What’s critical is whether or not they’re harboring a deep-seated sense of inferiority. And, it’s fairly clear that Maxine did.”
“Insecurity is one thing…but all those murders?”
“Yeah…I know…but you have to understand that remaining in control to the rest of the world is a hallmark of this syndrome. To function in the world, everyone learns self-control. The Right Man or Right Woman does, too, and he or she will maintain this self-control with every other person in his or her life, but one. Around this one person, the Right Man or Woman will decide that self-control is not necessary—be it a lover, wife, child, or parent. For Maxine Bowman, it was her husband, Bruce. With him, she made the decision to be out of control, to explode at will, venting rage, even violence, if she wished. It’s a decision, Clare, a conscious decision to be out of control.”
“So you’re telling me when Bruce left, Maxine’s escape valve left, too?”
“Yes. No more man around to look up to her no matter how she treated him. No more reassurance that her father was wrong…that she wasn’t an aging princess who’d failed to make anything of herself. No more special place to release her inner demons, to be out of control. Worse than that, in her mind, the guy was now betraying her with other women and these women were going to benefit from what she perceived as her property—a piece of real estate she felt was hers by virtue of the effort she put in to making it valuable.”
“Sweat equity,” I murmured, remembering the way Bruce had talked about his own efforts in turning the Westchester house he and Maxine had shared into a property worth twice its purchase price. “It must have been a shock to Maxine to find Bruce stubbornly fighting back in the divorce for his fair share of everything.”
“Yet another tangible example that she’d lost control of him, that he had finally become his own man, a man who was now tossing her away. And when he began to see other women—”
“She killed them.”
“Yes. She obviously didn’t want to destroy what she’d put so much effort into building, so instead she killed any woman who dared to attempt ownership of it.”
“But what was her end game? What did she think she’d gain from it? Did she really think Bruce would go back to her once all these women were dead?”
Quinn shook his head. “Crimes of passion are a base transfer of rage. There’s no logic to it, Clare. Only violence and pain…”
“And tears.”
Quinn was frowning. I was crying.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly, wiping away the wet.
“I went to see Valerie Lathem’s mother and grandmother,” he said softly.
I closed my eyes, shuddering with the memory of those front page photos, thanking god I hadn’t seen Joy’s name in the headlines.
“They’re a religious family…so knowing that Valerie didn’t take her own life…it meant something to them.”
I nodded.
“Listen, I’m worried about you. Are you going to be okay?”
“Yes…” I swallowed, sniffled, and nodded again. With a deep breath, I looked up, into my friend’s wind-burned face, so full of concern, his blue eyes intense, waiting. For his benefit, I managed a small smile. “Thanks, Mike.”
He let out a fairly substantial exhale. “Kid, I’m just glad you’re still here.”
So was Joy. So was Matt.
“So am I.”
FOR a long time, I avoided routes through St. Luke’s Place and its curving extension just beyond the historic district’s boundary. I tried my best to forget the snowy night I’d gone to that house on Leroy, the night I’d crossed the line. One chilly spring day, however, I wasn’t paying attention to the direction of a stroll, and Joy led me back to that site.
Unexpectedly, I found myself standing once more in front of that simple yet refined house of Bruce Bowman’s. The house that had never become a home.
“Mom? Is anything wrong?” Joy had asked.
“No, honey…just memories.”
In the end, I tried not to become bitter over the tragedy of what happened, the horrible waste of it. I wanted to find a better way of remembering Bruce…so I tried to remember the early snowfall in the Village that Friday evening. Beautiful but transitory, disappearing by Sunday’s sunrise.
Bruce was like that to me, I decided. My lovely afternoon, my gorgeous evening. Not lasting, but remembered, and with something more than fondness. If only Maxine could have learned how to let go, I often found myself thinking, she would still be alive herself…
Thomas Paine, that fiery soul who’d died two centuries ago in Greenwich Village, once said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Maybe some of us do. But some of us don’t.
For Bruce it was too late. For Maxine, too.
It wasn’t too late for me, though. I had started over more than once in my life and I would do it again. The pain, I knew, would eventually recede…melting in time as inevitably as an early snow.
RECIPES & TIPS FROM THE VILLAGE BLEND
The Village Blend’s Café Mocha
(A chocolate latte)
Pour a generous helping of chocolate syrup into the bottom of the cup. Add a shot of espresso. Add steamed milk. Stir the liquid, lifting from the bottom to bring up the syrup. Top with sweetened whipped cream and ground cocoa.
The Village Blend’s Café Nocciuola
(A hazelnut latte)
Cover the bottom of a cup with hazelnut syrup. Add a shot of espresso. Add steamed milk. Stir the liquid, lifting from the bottom to bring up the syrup. Top with foamed milk.
Clare’s Café Frangelico
(A hazelnut-liqueur latte)
Pour a shot of Frengelico (a hazelnut liqueur) into a cup, add a shot of espresso. Add steamed milk. Stir the liquid, lifting from the bottom to bring up the syrup. Top with foamed milk or whipped cream.
Matteo’s Coffee-Hazelnut Cocktail
(Hold the espresso!)
¾ ounce Kahlúa (a coffee-flavored liqueur)
2-½ teaspoons Frangelico (a hazelnut-flavored liqueur)
¾ ounce vodka
3 ounces crushed ice
Combine Kahlúa, Frangelico, and vodka. Stir well. Pour over ice and serve in old-fashioned glass.
Coffee Marinated Steak with Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Hearty Coffee Gravy
COFFEE MARINATED STEAK
Place two to four of your favorite steaks (T-bone, Rib Eye, Sirloin, etc.) in a large flat pan and add enough strongly brewed coffee to cover. (A slightly acidic bean is recommended, but any Latin American blend will do. It’s the acidity that does the tenderizing.)
Marinate at least 8 hours. Overnight is best. Cook in a cast-iron skillet, or under the broiler.
GARLIC MASHED POTATOES
Peel three to six large Russet or Yukon Gold potatoes. Cut up into same-size pieces. Peel one clove of garlic per potato (more or less to taste).
Add potatoes and garlic to three quarts of salted water. Bring to a rolling boil. Cook until potatoes are soft. Add two to three tablespoons of butter, and a fourth cup (12 ounces) milk or cream to hot potatoes. Mash, then whip. Serve hot.
HEARTY COFFEE GRAVY
5 tablespoons butter
¼ cup flour
1 cup (8 ounces) beef broth or stock
¼ cup (4 ounces) freshly brewed coffee
2 or 3 tablespoons pan drippings (optional)
Melt five tablespoons of butter in saucepan. When melted, whisk in one-fourth cup flour, eight ounces of broth, and two or three tablespoons of pan drippings (if available). Whisk together with one-fourth cup fresh brewed coffee. Heat slowly until it just boils. Serve hot.
The Village Blend’s Coffee Storage Tips
1) Do keep your beans away from excessive air, moisture,
heat, and light (and in that order) so you can preserve the fresh-roast flavor as long as possible.
2) Do not freeze or refrigerate your daily supply of coffee! Contact with moisture will destroy the flavor.
3) Do store your coffee in an air-tight container and keep it in a dark and cool location. Remember that a cabinet near the oven is often too warm, as is a shelf near the heat of a strong summer sun!
4) Do purchase coffee in amounts that make sense for how quickly you will use it. The fresh smell and taste of coffee begin to decline almost immediately after roasting, so DO buy freshly roasted coffee often, and buy only what you will use in the next week or two.
Don’t Miss the Next Coffeehouse Mystery
LATTE TROUBLE
Clare Cosi was never under the impression that one could wear a latte. Of course, her ex-husband once had—courtesy of Clare herself—on the morning after one of Matteo’s “extra-curricular” romps. But this was different. This was fashion. Lottie Harmon, longtime Village Blend customer and once-famous fashion designer, has created an exclusive line of pricey, coffee-inspired jewelry and accessories. Now the Village Blend becomes a fashionista showplace—a stage for Lottie’s debut, and for murder. Suddenly, Clare is caught up in another mystery, because when somebody poisons one of the Blend’s famous coffee drinks, death returns to the coffeehouse door, bringing with it a latte trouble!