Holiday Buzz

by Cleo Coyle

  Bree didn’t share my “provincial” view that marriage vows were sacred. She fully accepted Matt’s hound dog nature, allowing him “off leash” for limited periods. She was also gorgeous enough to keep him happy at heel, and she footed the bills for their high living, which made my ex-husband amenable to wearing a diamond-studded collar while on her turf—at least in small doses. When the collar got too tight, he’d be gone again, heeding the call of the wild.

  And speaking of wild . . .

  As Matt unwrapped a ginormous patty melt, I got the distinct impression I was about to watch a gleeful hunter consume his hard-won prey.

  “That looks like an awful lot of beef,” I said.

  “Angus. Ten ounces.”

  “I don’t understand. You were escorting Breanne to a night of holiday parties that didn’t serve food?”

  “They served things that passed for food.”

  “Come on, how bad could it be? They were catered parties, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, but the first shindig was thrown by Lite Bite Cuisine, one of Breanne’s advertisers. Their corporate chef microwaved up an entire line of frozen diet dishes. Ever tasted a ‘Skinny Mung Bean Alfredo’?”

  “Not lately.”

  “How about a ‘Lactose-Free Parfait with Flaxseed Granola’?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then we were off to the Get Fit get-together at Cooper Union. Do you know what a braised leek-wrapped water chestnut tastes like? Nothing. That’s what it tastes like.”

  Matt picked up half his patty melt and offered it to me. At the Bryant Park party, I’d scarfed a baker’s dozen of Christmas cookies—sugar, buttercream, chocolate, and caramel—which (come to think of it) didn’t add up to “real” food, either. When the aroma of freshly cooked beef hit my nose, my protein-adoring saliva glands kicked in.

  Once again, I ignored them.

  “I plan on eating with Mike,” I stated firmly. “When he gets in . . .”

  “Suit yourself,” Matt said, and then he shrugged, as if aloof, but his expression was more telling. Like the alkie who abhors indulging alone, he was obviously miffed by my sniffing rejection.

  With off-putting gusto, he tore a big, sloppy bite from his beef-a-palooza snack, which proceeded to ooze juice onto his whiter-than-white dress shirt.

  I pointed. “Your wife won’t be happy if you show up like that.”

  “I have another shirt in the SUV.”

  He began reaching for a fry, but stopped. Well aware of my hungry stare, the man dumped the entire cone of shoestrings onto the patty melt’s wrapping paper, sending a fresh wave of caramelized potato air my way.

  Next he opened a small plastic container. Like a sadistic foodie Picasso, he drizzled ruby red ketchup over the golden brown canvas, while shooting me a taunting smile.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some?”

  My mouth was really watering now. Swallowing hard, I started to shake my head—but the fries were too much! Breaking down, I snatched three and shamefully shoved them into my mouth. As they hit my buds, I closed my eyes.

  Oh God . . . The ketchup is homemade; the chef even smoked the tomatoes!

  Matt saw the look on my face and didn’t ask again. He simply slid the untouched half of his sandwich my way. The artisan bread oozed with a thick layer of melted white cheddar. Oh man . . .

  With a sigh, I succumbed.

  “Just one word of caution, Clare,” Matt smugly warned as I took my first juicy, meaty, cheesy bite. “You heard of the Five-Napkin Burger? Well this is an Eight-Napkin Patty Melt.”

  “Eight?” I mumbled, mouth embarrassingly stuffed.

  Matt smirked at the dribbles now running down my front and pointed to the pile of paper napkins. “Since you’re eating half, you’re only entitled to four.”

  “Oh?”

  He blinked. “I’m joking.”

  I stared and he frowned, pausing to study me.

  “Clare? What’s wrong?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something must be wrong. I could always make you laugh.”

  “No you couldn’t,” I said, waving his comment aside.

  “Sure I could. I even made you laugh the day we signed our divorce papers.”

  “I was giddy.”

  “You were crying.”

  He was right. I was crying, all those years ago. And given this evening’s sad discoveries, I was close to crying now, but what good would it do anyone?

  Matt studied me after that, shook his head, and set the rest of his sandwich aside. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”

  “I don’t think this is the time and place to—”

  “What’s wrong, Clare?” His tone was steely, but his brown eyes looked worried. “It’s not our daughter, is it?”

  “No, nothing like that. As far as I know, Joy is fine . . .”

  Lowering my voice, I finally spilled it—the grim news about poor Moirin Fagan, the manner of her death, my attempts to help the assigned detectives, even my guilt over assuming she was shirking work, instead of being beaten to death with a footpath stone by some crazy predator.

  “I should have done more than cover for her—”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Matt insisted. “Moirin was working at your friend Janelle’s display, not yours.”

  “You don’t understand: Moirin was working for both of us. Janelle and I had a special arrangement.”

  “What kind of arrangement?” His voice had gone from supportive to tense.

  “Janelle agreed to bill me a ‘service charge’ along with her weekly cookie dough invoice. That charge was based on the hours that M spent at the Blend, helping the baristas with cookie and pastry sales.”

  “So you took a shortcut; found a way to hire a seasonal worker without going through the hassles of officially adding a new person to our staff?”

  “I couldn’t afford to hire another worker, even a part-time one, to do the fresh-baked cookies for us; the whole thing was an experiment, anyway. I didn’t know if the revenue would offset the costs. The arrangement benefited Moirin, too. She was grateful for the chance to earn extra cash.” I frowned and rubbed my eyes. “I just wished she hadn’t been working tonight.”

  Matt touched my shoulder. “Clare, just because she worked part-time for you doesn’t make you responsible for what happened to her.”

  “When she went missing, I didn’t look for her, Matt. I didn’t even try.”

  A blast of pop music suddenly filled the coffeehouse, much louder than the mellifluous holiday jazz that had been barely audible over the noisy customers.

  “I’m gonna dance, dance, dance, and shake my boo-ty. / Oh, the boys, they say it’s my national du-ty . . .”

  The brash singer was popular on the downtown scene, and a few of our younger female customers squealed and sang along.

  “There’s a problem here, it’s very near, / and it can only be solved by shakin’ my rear . . .”

  Gardner thrust his head out from behind the steaming espresso machine. “No way, Vicki,” his deep voice boomed in that stern but controlled monotone. “You are not playing Piper Penny on my watch, especially that inane song.”

  “Fine! I’ll turn her off, after it’s over,” Vicki said, dancing in place.

  When the song played out, she switched back to Gardner’s playlist. A smooth jazz rendition of “Blue Christmas” began, but Piper’s voice continued to echo in my head, and I rationally considered the theory of the lead detective on Moirin’s case: did the popular club singer really beat M to death?

  My mind called up the memory of tangerine-haired Piper in her belly-baring metallic pantsuit, throwing that demitasse at Ross Puckett’s head. The outburst was incriminating, but I’d noticed the singer before that.

  The first time I saw Piper Penny was during her TV interview in the front of the Bryant Park Grill. It was also the last time I saw Moirin alive.

  I closed my eyes and tried to conjure the image of M coming toward me on the par
k’s path. For some reason, my mental painting refused to depict her alive. In my mind she was a ghost, ethereal, like the pearl gray plume that had spiraled up from her cigarette.

  “Oh my God,” I murmured.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I gripped Matt’s arm. “The cigarette! Before she was killed, Moirin came toward me lighting a cigarette!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A smoke signal!” I gathered up my parka and purse. “I just have to test my theory before I tell the police . . .”

  “Test what theory? Where are you going?”

  “To the convenience store. I need a cigarette and I need it now.”

  Ten

  “I still don’t understand,” Matt groused as we stepped onto our icy sidewalk. “Why are we out here?”

  The snow was coming down faster now. Nearly two inches had accumulated on the cleared walkway since I’d last seen it.

  “I’ll explain in a minute. Be right back!”

  “Now where are you going?!”

  My damp loafers were no match for this weather, so I ran up to my small office, switched to snow boots, and rushed to rejoin Matt, who was buttoning up his black cashmere topcoat.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Where, Clare?”

  “To buy cigarettes,” I reminded him. “And it has to be a Lucky Strike.”

  “Since when did you start smoking, anyway?”

  “Who said I was smoking?”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll just watch and learn?”

  “Good idea.”

  The frigid wind kicked up, pelting my cheeks with stinging kisses. Matt groaned, feeling it, too. He lifted his scarf to cover his face, and I flipped up the hood of my white parka.

  While Dante had dented the accumulation around the Blend, the adjacent shops weren’t open this late, and a good five inches had piled up on their stoops. The sparkling white layers were pockmarked with pedestrian shoe prints, but those indentations were filling up fast.

  Matt and I linked arms to keep from slipping in the drifts, which glowed softly under streetlamps, half muted by the swirling snowflakes.

  “I’m dying to find out what you’re up to, so I hope this place is open,” he said against another gust of winter.

  “Saheed’s Deli never closes,” I assured him. And I was right.

  The tiny convenience store announced itself amid the landmark town houses like a blasting glass jukebox in a quiet cathedral, its bright windows a beer-and-chips beacon in the storm—which was not an exaggeration. The shiny storefront had attracted a number of the storm’s stragglers, including a threesome of NYU students huddled under the awning and an elderly man cradling a Chihuahua too tiny to negotiate the deepening snow.

  Saheed wasn’t on duty, but one of his male relatives stood behind the counter.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Matt said, drawing his wallet as the man passed me the cigarette pack.

  “You better buy a lighter, too,” I said. “Unless you’re carrying one.”

  Matt grabbed one from the Bic display. “My Ronson is with my travel stuff.”

  Back outside, I tore the cellophane off the Lucky Strike package and shook one cigarette out.

  “I hope you’re telling the truth about not having a smoking habit,” Matt said, tucking his wallet in place. “At eleven bucks a pack, I can see why you’d have trouble meeting the payroll.”

  “It’s the sin tax, Matt, and sins are costly.” I arched an eyebrow. “You, of all people, should know that.” I displayed the cigarette. “Are you going to light this thing, or what?”

  Matt blinked. “Me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Global Trekker. You’ve sampled practically every drug known to man—”

  “And I enjoyed some of them, too. But I never liked tobacco.”

  “And yet you’ve smoked enough contraband Cubans.”

  “Fine,” Matt said, snatching the white cylinder out of my hand. “Do we have to do it outside in the cold?”

  “That’s how Moirin did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Smoked what I believe was her last cigarette. When I saw Moirin Fagan for the final time, she was leaving the Bryant Park Grill and walking in the direction of the carousel. That’s where I found her body.”

  Matt frowned, studying my face. “Okay,” he said and struggled to light the Bic in the stiff wind.

  “The police found orange hairs on the footpath stone the killer used as a murder weapon. Piper Penny had reason to be furious with Moirin tonight, and the singer has orange hair. But I think Piper has an alibi. We’ll know for sure after this experiment.”

  Matt cursed and stepped behind a snow-covered Dumpster to dodge the stubborn wind. “Go on,” he said, and I heard the Bic flick several times.

  “As Moirin passed me, she opened a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes. She was so busy lighting her cigarette that she didn’t notice me. And at the same time, I saw Piper—”

  “Following Moirin?”

  “No. She was in front of a New York One TV camera. Roger Clark was just starting his interview. I’m sure it went on for at least five minutes, maybe more. He seemed quite taken with her.”

  “She’s photogenic, then?” Matt said.

  “Oh yeah.”

  Matt cursed again and the Bic clicked.

  “The butt of Moirin’s Lucky Strike was found beside her body. So, right now, you and I are going to figure out whether Piper Penny had enough time to finish her interview, track Moirin down, and bash in her head before the poor dead girl finished that cigarette—”

  A choking cough interrupted me. Finally, Matt just waved the Lucky Strike to show me it was lit and I checked my watch.

  “You smoke, I’ll time. How often do you think a smoker hits a cigarette, anyway?”

  “You”—koff, hack—“tell me!”

  The phone in my bag beeped loudly. “Oh, thank God!” I cried, sure it was Quinn, calling at last. But it wasn’t.

  “Esther just texted me. She marked it urgent.”

  Matt puffed on the cigarette. “What”—koff, keck—“does it say?”

  “‘Worst News Ever. Must talk 1st thing in AM.’” I sighed. “She must have heard about Moirin’s murder. I still have to break the news to Dante, Gardner, and Vicki tonight—and I’ll have to call Tuck and Nancy so they don’t hear it on the Internet. And on top of this tragedy . . .” I took a breath, then finally said it out loud. “Quinn has gone missing on me.”

  “What do you mean missing? It’s the age of smartphones. Nobody goes missing unless they want to.” Matt caught my stricken look. “I’m not suggesting that the glorified flatfoot is dodging your calls. I know how he feels about you.”

  “He’s traveling,” I said.

  “In this weather?” Matt scowled. “I’m rethinking a ten-block drive to the Meatpacking District, and your thickheaded detective is trying to get to New York from DC?”

  “On an airplane.”

  Matt slapped his own forehead. “Bad idea, Clare. You don’t—”

  “Mess with the weather,” I finished with him. “I know. I learned that lesson well enough from you.”

  “Honduras?” he said, and I nodded.

  Back then, Matt had still been my husband and Joy a little girl. He’d thought he was “bigger than mother nature”—that’s how he put it to me after a hurricane nearly killed him.

  Eighteen inches of rain fell in the first twelve hours, followed by hazardous flooding, and finally a mudslide. Despite all the warnings, Matt had attempted to travel across the country and ended up stranded in some nameless village in the Copan district, just as the worst of the monster swept ashore.

  Trapped by sixteen feet of rushing water, on the second-floor balcony of the only brick building for miles, he’d spent the entire night helping a retired Honduran cop with a flashlight haul people out of the raging water.

  The next day, trees the size of boats washed down the mountain and slammed into the building, one a
fter the other. The structure held together, but not the town or its people . . .

  “We couldn’t save them all,” he’d told me in a hollow voice, after returning home. A week later, waking from a nightmare, he finally shared his guilt about the innocent victims he saw slip away—an old man, two women, and a small child.

  Matt fell silent at my mention of that memory. A minute later, he waved his cigarette. “This thing is about finished.”

  I checked my watch. “Eight minutes. You were sucking pretty hard there, so let’s add one more minute.” I brushed the snow off my eyelashes. “Even nine minutes isn’t long enough. There’s no way Piper Penny killed Moirin. She didn’t have the time.”

  Eleven

  “WAIT a second,” Matt said. “Aren’t you jumping to conclusions? Moirin could have been chain-smoking . . .” He paused to cough again. “God knows why.”

  “The Crime Scene Unit only found one butt at the scene.”

  “She could have tossed the first butt, or even a second, before she reached the carousel. Seems to me you have to know how many cigarettes were missing from the pack that they found on Moirin’s body.”

  “That’s exactly right.” I pulled out my cell phone.

  Matt displayed his own butt. “Are we keeping this as evidence or something?”

  “Of course not.”

  Matt tossed the smoldering cigarette into the snow-choked gutter, and I dialed the number of Detective Lori Soles. She picked up on the first ring.

  “You’re still at the scene?” I asked.

  “The precinct. Transcribing Endicott’s notes,” she replied flatly. “What’s up?”

  I told Lori about my timeline issues. “. . . so I’d like to know. Was there more than one cigarette missing from Moirin’s pack?”

  Lori hesitated, and I knew why. Sharing information like that with a witness wasn’t exactly kosher procedure.

  “Come on, Detective. I’m only trying to help. You know that.”

  For the next few seconds, all I heard was a city garbage truck rolling by on Hudson, plow scraping the pavement. Then Lori spoke again, her voice much quieter.

  “According to the CSU team’s preliminary notes, only one cigarette was gone from the Lucky Strike pack found on Moirin’s body.”