Decaffeinated Corpse cm-5

by Клео Коул

  “But what?”

  “But what if Hernandez didn’t kill Ellie?”

  “Come on, Clare. It’s the only scenario that makes sense.”

  “Not so fast,” I said—an admittedly useless thing to say to someone as wired as Matt. “Isn’t the whole point of a civil lawsuit to be awarded monetary damages? Why would Hernandez want to mess up the progress of getting the hybrid to market? Wouldn’t it make more sense to let the decaffeinated plant be a success, then sue for a share of it? And if Hernandez killed Ellie, then who killed Hernandez?”

  The questions hung there for a moment. When I decided I’d given Matt enough time to come to the same conclusion I had, I answered my own question.

  “Could Ric have done it? Did he somehow find out about Ellie’s murder, and then take revenge on the man who killed her?”

  Matt shook his head. “Ric’s a lover, not a fighter. In all the years I’ve known him, I never saw him raise a hand to anyone. Not even guys who tried to provoke him. He always used his wits and charm to get out of a bad situation.”

  My memories of Ric validated Matt’s claim. After all, the man hadn’t exactly held his own against the mugger who’d attacked him a few nights ago, though by his own account Ric was taken by surprise and from behind.

  “Look,” Matt said. “Hernandez had a lot of enemies. I know about this guy, and he’s a real piece of work. Brawling at New York nightclubs. Hanging out with known drug dealers. Gambling debts. Running out on restaurant and nightclub bills. A guy like that can make a lot of enemies.”

  “Then why did he come to the Beekman alone?” I said. “Why wouldn’t a man like that have a bodyguard with him?”

  “I don’t know, Clare, but if you ask me, Hernandez had it coming.”

  “Don’t talk like that! You’ll get arrested for suspicion again.”

  “Even if I had wanted to kill Hernandez, I would have had to get in line—a long one.”

  “I suppose it’s possible somebody with a grudge finished Hernandez off,” I said. “But I’d like to know the connection...”

  Matt had no reply. He was staring at a graph on his laptop screen. “I made a few connections of my own.”

  “Good news or bad?”

  Matt’s grim expression said it all. “Ric’s buying beans. Colombian beans. A good quality Bogotá. Only I know this little fact, but Ric was going for the taste and complexity of Bogotá beans when he developed his hybrid.”

  He paused. “It gets worse. Ric contracted a Mexican firm to decaffeinate the beans he bought. I just talked to a fellow in Chicago who confirmed that a Royal Select Company processing facility in Mexico will take a delivery of Ric’s Bogotá in a couple of days.”

  “The cutting!” I realized. “Now it makes sense!”

  “What?”

  “Remember the little hybrid cutting you helped Ric smuggle into the country?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Ric lied to me. He said he borrowed it from you to show to Ellie. But Ellie assured me that she never saw it. Ric must have borrowed that cutting to show to Monika Van Doorn and her people at Dutch International. I’m sure everyone was impressed, and Dutch International signed the contract. Now Ric is going to deliver beans. Only they’re not going to be from his hybrid decaf plants—”

  “They’re going to be Mexican water-processed decaffeinated Bogotá packed in Gostwick Estate Reserve Decaf bags,” Matt said, finishing my thought.

  I nodded. “It’s the Kona scandal all over again. Only this time you and I are right in the middle of it.”

  “But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Matt assured me. “It’s all my fault. I helped Ric smuggle the cutting, and I’m an accessory to fraud. Not you.”

  “I’m in this with you, Matt. Both of our reputations are on the line, not to mention the reputation of this coffeehouse. It’s ugly what Ric is doing, but we have to face it. The Village Blend is about to become a party to fraud.”

  Matt stood. “It isn’t fraud if it’s exposed. I’m going to pay a visit to Monika Van Doorn. I’m going to tell her what I know, and what I suspect. After that, it’s between her and Ric.”

  “But you don’t even know where the woman is staying.”

  “Yes I do. Mother’s invited to the Dutch International Halloween party tonight. The RSVP contact is a number at the Waldorf=Astoria. So I called the hotel and checked with the desk clerk. The Van Doorns have been staying in a suite for over a month.”

  I rose to join my ex-husband. “Let’s go.”

  Outside the weather was blustery; the storm from the night before hadn’t completely dissipated. Periods of menacing clouds were followed by flashes of blue skies. After I instructed Tucker to call in barista help, Matt and I flagged a cab on Hudson and rode uptown.

  The old, original Waldorf=Astoria was located where the Empire State Building now stands. The current structure is a forty-seven story art deco landmark on Park Avenue. The grand hotel has been a temporary home for kings, princes, and the über-wealthy. I was reminded of that fact when we exited the cab on Forty-ninth Street and saw the commemorative plaque affixed to the wall. (Former President Herbert Hoover and retired U.S. General Douglas MacArthur had both lived in Waldorf suites.)

  Matt paid the fare while I stepped into the crowd. I glanced up at the MetLife Building looming in the background. Then I glanced at the hotel’s majestic entrance and stopped short.

  Matt joined me on the sidewalk. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” I cried, dragging him off to the side.

  Matt resisted, so I pulled harder. “Clare, what’s the matter with you?”

  “That man, coming out of the hotel,” I whispered, trying not to point. “That’s Neils Van Doorn, Monika’s husband.”

  He followed my gaze. “No way, honey. Look at the way he’s dressed. Van Doorn always looks as if he just posed for a “Fashions of the Times” layout. That guy’s either a recent immigrant or a style-challenged tourist.”

  Matt was certainly right about the clothes. Neils wore a lime green polyester track suit and matching jacket over an orange sweatshirt. The shiny material was decorated with shoelace trim in chocolate brown. Not even the discount chains would be caught dead selling clothes that tasteless. Neils Van Doorn was wearing the kind of cheap stuff hanging on racks outside outlet stores on Fourteenth Street, right down to the no-name twenty-dollar sneakers on his size twelve feet.

  “That’s him!” I insisted, seizing Matt’s hand and tugging him back to the middle of the sidewalk again. “He’s waiting at the light. Look at his face when he turns... There.”

  Matt nodded. “You’re right. I don’t get the clothes, though. Maybe that’s his Halloween costume. Superior Dutchman dresses as typical American hip-hop mook.”

  “Too subtle for an elitist’s Halloween costume,” I replied, still dragging Matt by the hand. “Men like Van Doorn dress up as Julius Caesar or Napoléon Bonaparte. I think he’s wearing a disguise.”

  Matt touched his forehead. “So now we’re going to follow him, right?”

  “From a distance. We don’t want to spook him.”

  “Don’t you need a license to do detective work in this state?” Matt shot back. “I have an idea. Why don’t you follow him, and I’ll go talk to his wife.”

  “No!” I cried, dragging my ex-husband across the street. “There’s plenty of time to corner Monika later. Anyway, I’m too nervous to follow Van Doorn alone. In that disguise, who knows what kind of dive or dump he’s heading for.”

  Matt rolled his eyes. “Clare. This is gentrified Manhattan in the twenty-first century. There are very few dives or dumps left.”

  Twenty-Four

  “There’s no way I’m going in there.” Matt folded his arms over his chest and stood his ground.

  “I don’t want you to go in now,” I said. “Wait until after Van Doorn leaves. Otherwise he’ll see you.”

  But Matt shook his head. “Not now. Not ever,” he replied.

  Here we go a
gain.

  My ex would—and did—travel through the most primitive underbelly of the Third World in search of specialty coffee beans. But a few years back, during another crisis, he’d refused to enter the men’s room in a gay bar that we had staked out. Now he refused to enter an admittedly seedy pawnshop on Manhattan’s West Side.

  We’d followed Neils Van Doorn on a long trek to this disreputable looking shop on the ground floor of a decrepit warehouse, a half block away from the Hudson River.

  “What do you think he’s doing in there?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you go in and find out,” Matt replied. “Van Doorn doesn’t even know who you are. You might pull it off.”

  “Maybe I will,” I declared.

  From the recessed service door we’d ducked into, Matt watched with disbelief as I approached the pawnshop’s front window. I paused, perusing the array of stuff on the other side of the grimy glass.

  While pretending to examine the old microwave ovens, cheap stereo systems, and kitsch jewelry from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, I watched Neil Van Doorn inside the shop. He spoke with a three-hundred-pound bald man sitting on a tall stool behind steel bars. Neils slipped the watch off his left wrist, handed it up to the fat man, who examined it closely. I moved to the next window, still pretending to shop. I found myself gazing at old military gear—web belts, rusty helmets, bayonets, a compass, and an old, olive green box with U.S. ARMY stenciled on its side in bold white letters.

  It started to drizzle and I pulled my collar up. Meanwhile Neils and the fat man haggled. Finally the man behind the bars opened the cash register and counted out money, slipped the bills through a hole in the bars. I hurried back to Matt.

  “I think he’s pawning his watch,” I said incredulously.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Matt replied. “The Van Doorns are rich. He’s been living at the Waldorf=Astoria for over a month. Do you realize what that costs?”

  “I know what I saw. Anyway, his wife has all the money. Maybe she has him on a tight leash—wait, he’s coming out.”

  I ducked into the doorway with Matt, but we were on the same side of the street. If Neils walked in our direction, there was no way he would miss seeing us. Fortunately, he paused under the shelter of the doorway.

  He reached into his jacket, pulled a New York Yankee cap out of his pocket, and slipped it over his head to protect himself from the rain. Then he stepped onto the sidewalk and moved toward us.

  Remembering the cap I saw on the night Ric was mugged, I was about to say something, when Matt’s hands closed around my waist. He turned me completely around and pushed my spine against the door. Then he pressed his heavy form against me, bent low and covered my mouth with his before I could say a word.

  With Matt’s back turned to Van Doorn, and our faces pressed together, there was no way the man would recognize either of us. Through eyelashes dampened by the light rain, I watched Neils Van Doorn pass us by without a second glance.

  I gently pushed Matt’s chest. He kept kissing me. “Matt,” I murmured against his gently moving lips—and pushed harder.

  “Sorry,” Matt mumbled sheepishly as he finally broke off. “I saw it in a Hitchcock movie once, thought it was a nice ploy.”

  “Well, the last time I checked, I wasn’t Ingrid Bergman, not even close. And you aren’t Cary Grant, either.”

  “It was a nice kiss, though.” His eyebrow arched. “Don’t you think?”

  I had no time to be annoyed. I’d recognized that Yankee cap, and I told Matt about the night Ric was mugged. The attacker had knocked me down, too, and dropped the headgear. I told Matt about catching a glimpse of it.

  “Come on, Clare. There are a lot of Yankee caps in New York City. Probably a million.” But even as he said it, I could tell Matt was wavering.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence,” I insisted.

  He gazed up the block, in the direction Neils had disappeared. “Maybe.”

  “What should we do now?” I asked.

  Matt frowned, glanced over his shoulder. “I guess I’m going inside that damn pawnshop.”

  As I followed Matt through the door, a buzzer went off beside my ear. Loud and piercing, the sound startled me. I heard the fat man behind the caged counter chuckle at my reaction.

  Inside the pawnshop, the air was warm and close. A radiator hissed somewhere nearby, and the place smelled of mildew and old paper. With each step we took, the warped hardwood floor bumped hollowly.

  The shop itself had a strange layout. There was merchandise in the window, but nothing at all in the front of the store, not even shelves. Instead, all the items were piled onto aluminum racks on the other side of the cage. The items were identified by cardboard tickets attached with strings. Prices were scrawled with black magic marker on the tags. The prices seemed absurdly low, but how did one gauge the value of a used and dented microwave oven, anyway?

  The wall on the right of the room was the building’s original exposed brick—highly desirable in a SoHo or NoHo loft. Oddly, the wall on the opposite side of the room was covered floor-to-ceiling by sheets of plywood painted a faded and dirty white.

  There was a large square hole cut into the wood close to the ornamental tin ceiling. I would have thought it was some kind of ductwork for the heating system, but Matt warned me before we came in here to be careful—there could be a man with a loaded gun watching us through that hole right now.

  “Need any help?” asked the fat man behind the cage.

  He was either smiling or sneering, I couldn’t tell which. But as Matt approached the steel bars, I could see the man sizing up my ex. From Matt’s wardrobe (he still wore the formalwear from the Beekman party) the clerk could guess Matt wasn’t from the neighborhood.

  Matt smiled through the bars at the fat man, who stared with close-set eyes over a pug nose.

  “I believe a man came in here a few minutes ago,” Matt began. “Blond guy. Track suit. Sneakers. Yankee cap...”

  The fat man nodded, bored.

  “So you know him?” Matt asked.

  “He’s been in and out for the past couple of days,” the fat man replied, regarding Matt with rising interest. “Why do you want to know? Are you a cop or something?”

  I sensed no hostility in the man’s response, only wariness.

  “Nothing like that,” Matt said quickly. “Van Doorn is a friend of mine, that’s all.”

  “That’s his name? Von Doom?”

  “Van Doorn,” Matt corrected. “Didn’t you know?”

  The clerk shook his bald head. “We don’t ask for names around here. Not his. Not yours. We respect our customer’s privacy.”

  “I see. Very commendable,” Matt said, humoring the man. “I appreciate your discretion in this matter, as well. You see, Van Doorn is a friend of mine. Lately I’ve become concerned. He seems to have fallen in with a bad crowd. He’s been gambling, and I’m rather afraid Mr. Van Doorn might have accrued some debt with a local gangster.”

  The fat man snorted. “Do tell.”

  “If you could answer a few questions, I would be very appreciative.” While Matt spoke, he laid a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. The fat man’s meaty hand slammed down on the bill like he was swatting a fly. When he lifted his hand again the money was gone.

  “What sort of business does my friend do here?”

  “Look around, pal,” the fat man replied. “This here is a pawnshop, and he ain’t been buying.”

  “So he’s pawning things? Valuable items?”

  The man behind the counter shrugged. “A cigarette case. A money clip. Cufflinks. A couple of rings. The other day he brought in an Omega watch. Today he brought in a Rolex. Took three hundred bucks for it.”

  Matt pursed his lips. “And you say Van Doorn’s been doing this for a week.”

  “Maybe longer,” the big man said, showing a bit of sympathy for the first time. “Folks get in trouble—”

  “I know. And they have to sell their lives away, piecemeal.” Mat
t cleared his throat. “Roughly how much money have you paid Mr. Van Doorn for these items?”

  The fat man scrunched up his face. “Hard to say, buddy. He didn’t always take money. Sometimes he traded his stuff for other merchandise.”

  I was surprised and baffled. In this sea of junk, I could find nothing Neils Van Doorn would need or want. But Matt didn’t miss a beat.

  “I see you have a collection of military items in the window,” he said. “Did my friend trade his jewelry for something like that? A knife, perhaps? Or something more lethal?”

  The question dangled in the close air. The fat man studied Matt for a moment. My ex-husband slipped his hand into his pocket and produced another fifty dollar bill. Slowly, he slid it across the counter. But this time, when the fat man’s hand came down on it, Matt didn’t let go.

  “What did Van Doorn buy from you?” he asked in a firm voice.

  The fat man leaned close, until he was eye to eye with Matt. When he spoke, it was in a whisper. “Listen, buddy, I don’t want no trouble and neither do you.” The fat man’s eyes drifted up to the hole in the wall. “Let’s just say your friend took something a little more dangerous than a bayonet and leave it at that.”

  “Are you saying he bought a firearm?”

  The fat man yanked the bill out of Matt’s hand, leaned back. “You said your friend was in trouble, right? That he got in deep with the wrong guys, right?”

  “That’s right,” Matt said with a nod.

  “Then take my advice. Instead of buying his stuff back, just give him the money you were going to spend. Tell Von Doom to pay off the guys carrying his marker, and throw that .38 he’s packing in the East River.”

  “Then you did sell him a gun,” Matt pressed.

  The fat man spread his arms wide and grinned. “Gun? Who said anything about a gun? You sure didn’t hear it from me.”

  The man sat back in his stool, peered down his nose at Matt.

  “Now beat it. You and that nervous-looking babe over there. I don’t want no trouble.”

  Matt grabbed my hand and practically dragged me out of the pawnshop. In the street, the wind was blowing off the Hudson River, but the misty drizzle had ceased. We walked almost two blocks before Matt spoke.