by Ali Brandon
Jake snorted as she unfolded her six-foot frame from the bistro chair. “Kid, you’d have better luck rousting Hamlet at that hour. How about I stroll down the block sometime around nine and admire your handiwork, instead?”
With those words, Jake waved in Robert’s direction and headed down the stairs to the bookstore’s main floor. Darla, meanwhile, resettled herself at the table with her clipboard. Neatly stowed inside were the sheaf of handwritten notes, paid invoices, and paper napkin diagrams that she’d collected over the past few weeks. Clipped atop it was a bulleted list that detailed two dozen action items that had come of the committee’s original planning meetings. As chair, Darla was in charge of delegating and follow-through.
Reluctantly, she erased the check next to the line that read Arrange for a band. Despite this setback, however, a satisfying number of check marks remained. In fact, the only other tasks still open were assigning the decorating team—to be resolved at the upcoming meeting—and collecting the participation fee from one final business owner. Although that last one might prove more difficult than Darla had originally anticipated. The holdout was George King, the decidedly un-perky owner of Perky’s Coffee Shop.
“Hey, Ms. P., you want a latte?”
The question came from Robert, who had finished serving two giggling teenage girls, one a tall, light-skinned African American with a lion’s mane of golden brown curls, the other a short, pale brunette whose hair had been cropped into a spiky pixie. Both wore yoga pants and long T-shirts and were drinking tall glasses of flavored iced coffee with a veritable mountain of whipped cream and shaved chocolate floating on top.
Slinging a white towel over the shoulder of his black Pettistone’s polo shirt, Robert eased his way from around the counter and headed to her table. Picking up Jake’s empty cup and giving the spot a swipe with his towel, he went on, “We got in that new Peruvian coffee blend if you want to try some.”
Darla suppressed a smile as she caught the two girls giving Robert the once-over while his back was turned. Robert had been a tall, scrawny kid living on the streets when she’d first hired him, but he’d begun to fill out as the result of regular meals. His three-times-a-week lessons at TAMA had further refined his physique, so that he was turning into quite the handsome young man, Darla thought with a bit of surrogate maternal pride.
“Sounds good, but I think I’d better lay off the strong stuff for a while. How about a nice decaf with cream and sugar?”
“Coming right up.”
Darla had noticed how adding Robert to her staff had slowly but markedly begun to change the customer demographic of Pettistone’s Fine Books, as well. When she’d first assumed the reins following her great-aunt’s death, the majority of the bookstore’s customers were at least retirement age. Doubtless that had been reflective of the fact that Great-Aunt Dee had been in her eighties when she’d died, and her store manager, James—himself a retired university professor—was old enough to collect social security. Darla had felt like quite the spring chick in comparison at the ripe young age of thirty-five.
Bringing on board a teenager, however, had added a whole new vibe to the quaint if somewhat staid shop.
Hiring Robert had not been part of the five-year plan that Darla had written up within her first few weeks of taking over the business. When she’d first encountered Robert the previous autumn, he’d been homeless and antagonistic, recently kicked out of his indifferent father’s house for the unforgivable crime of turning eighteen. It hadn’t helped his cause that Robert embraced the goth look, with dyed black hair, black vintage clothing, facial piercings, and makeup that included black kohl eyeliner and black nail polish.
But then a few weeks after that incident, Robert—his “children of the night” appearance toned down to a slightly more business-acceptable version—had showed up at her store looking to fill a salesclerk job. To Darla’s surprise, Hamlet had given Robert a literal paws-up as a candidate. The admiration apparently had been mutual, with Robert dubbing the cat his “little goth bro” because of Hamlet’s inky fur. Since the finicky feline had previously chased away several other candidates whom Darla had deemed more suitable, she’d agreed to hire the youth on a trial basis.
And Robert had proved to be a model employee. Not only had he bonded with Hamlet, but he’d become protégé to the acerbic James, their relationship resembling that of grandfather and grandson. James didn’t even seem to mind the youth’s subtle manner of poking fun at him, like adopting a version of the store manager’s ever-present sweater vest as part of his own personal uniform.
Moreover, it had been Robert who’d encouraged Darla to add an ever-growing section of graphic novels and comics that had helped draw in the younger crowd. And now as barista, he’d brought in a broad circle of friends.
All in all, Darla thought in satisfaction, hiring Robert had been a smart choice.
A short time later, Robert brought her a fresh cup of decaf. The two teenage girls were still dawdling over their own coffees, and Darla overheard one girl address her friend: “Too bad you can’t get the Kona Blue Party blend here like you can at Perky’s. Then this would be, you know, the most perfect place ever.”
The other girl nodded. “Yeah, that stuff is the best. I get it at least once a week. But Robert is, like, way cuter than that guy at Perky’s. And nicer, too.”
Darla particularly agreed with that last sentiment, since the rival coffee shop owner had a notoriously foul temper . . . one reason she had yet to collect his portion of the block party funds. She’d already promised herself she’d remedy that situation today.
Right after the meeting, she decided. With that task weighing a bit on her mind, she went back to her clipboard and the papers gathered upon it. She needed to do just a bit more figurative housekeeping before the committee arrived.
She was reviewing the decorating teams list when she heard her name being called from the vicinity of the stairs. Darla looked up from her chart to see her store manager, Professor James T. James, gesturing in her direction.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he went on in his usual precise, sonorous tones, “but Detective Reese is downstairs. He says he needs to talk to you for a few minutes. And he claims that the matter is important.”
Important?
Darla frowned. Knowing Jake’s pal, NYPD detective Fiorello Reese, as she did, “important” could mean anything from something as innocuous as his wanting to tell her that their favorite deli had added a new variation of meatball sub to its menu, to asking whether she’d been witness to a crime somewhere in the neighborhood.
Not that anything like that ever happens around here.
As if hearing Darla’s sarcastic thought, Hamlet slit open one emerald green eye and stared in her direction.
Just kidding, Hammy, she silently reassured him.
Or perhaps she was the one who needed the reassurance, given that Hamlet possessed an apparent talent for pointing the paw at bad guys. Fortunately, it had been some time since she and Hamlet had unwittingly stumbled across any sort of criminal activity. She had even reached the point of telling herself that she’d only imagined that Hamlet was a veritable Sherlock Cat when it came to figuring out whodunit.
Mentally crossing fingers that the detective’s news was more of the meatball sub variety than otherwise, Darla called back to her manager, “Tell Reese to give me a second to pack up all my paperwork and then I’ll be right down.”
Hamlet, meanwhile, having overheard that his nemesis was in the store, opened the other eye and gave himself a long stretch that almost sent him tumbling off the bistro table. Then, with a quick paw lick that Darla translated to mean, I actually did that on purpose, he got to his feet and leaped to the ground.
“You behave now, you hear?” Darla called after him as, tail waving like battle flag, he purposefully marched toward the stairway as she stowed the paperwork that she’d spread across the s
mall table back into her clipboard.
Unlike his immediate kinship with Robert, Hamlet had taken a dislike to Reese from the start. The feeling had been mutual, no doubt because they both considered themselves alpha males who liked things done their way. It hadn’t helped that the pair’s first meeting had occurred in Darla’s darkened apartment when Hamlet attacked Reese in a case of mistaken identity. Fortunately, the detective had been wearing a leather jacket, which had protected him from four fuzzy feet worth of unsheathed claws.
The jacket had been less lucky.
Man and cat had managed a truce afterward, but it was an uneasy one. Darla typically found herself playing reluctant referee anytime the two crossed paths.
Now, as the cat paused and turned to give her a guileless blink of green eyes, she added with a mock-stern look, “Spare me the innocent act. I know you and Reese don’t get along, but remember that you’re on the clock. Save the cat-itude for after hours.”
The green eyes squinted a little at her admonition. However, rather than flopping on the floor and flinging a leg over his shoulder to lick the base of his tail—Hamlet’s patented “kiss off” gesture—he merely resumed marching in the direction of the stairs.
TWO
“Cats,” Darla muttered in amused exasperation as the oversized feline slid like a silken shadow down the steps. Transferring her clipboard and coffee to the longer rectangular table designed for groups, she followed after Hamlet to make sure the ornery beast stayed in line.
Reese was standing near the cash register, leafing through one of the free newspapers piled there on the counter. He was dressed in his personal summer uniform of dark dress slacks and beige sport coat, the desecrated leather jacket (which Darla much preferred on him) back in his closet until cold weather hit again. As usual, his tie—a college-style striped one in blue and pale yellow—was hanging loose, though Darla forgave him that sartorial slip. With a bodybuilder’s physique, doubtless it was uncomfortable having a heavy strip of silk knotted tightly around one’s muscular neck.
He glanced up as Darla approached, and she realized that her heart, if not skipping the usual clichéd beat, was still pumping a bit faster than normal in his presence.
Don’t be silly, she silently admonished herself. They were, after all, just friends. They’d tried the dating thing a couple of times in the past, but the relationship had never moved beyond the awkward stage, so they’d mutually agreed to keep things platonic.
Even so, she occasionally found herself wondering if she’d made the wrong choice in that decision.
“Hi, Reese. James said you needed to tell me something important,” she greeted him, not bothering with the usual pleasantries as she searched his expression for some clue as to what it was that rated the designation “important.” But, just as with Jake, she rarely could read him when he was in cop mode.
“How’s it going, Red?” he asked as she joined him, his tone friendly if a bit subdued.
The greeting, while reassuring her that this was not an official police call, still made her wince slightly. The only other person who’d ever called her by that particular nickname had been her slimeball ex-husband, the memory of whom was better shoved into a very tiny recess somewhere at the back of her brain. Over the months, she’d finally given up protesting the appellation, grateful that at least the detective hadn’t tagged her with the equally unoriginal moniker of “Rusty.”
“Busy, busy, what with the block party. How about you?” she replied, virtuously not whipping out her own secret name weapon. She’d once heard another cop jokingly call him “Little Flower,” the literal translation of his Italian first name. As Reese had once explained to her, he took after his father in appearance—“Midwestern corn-fed,” as Darla always termed his blond-haired, blue-eyed good looks—but his Sicilian mother had won the naming rights.
“Same old, same old,” he replied with a shrug that strained the sport coat’s already-taut shoulders. “You know how it is in the summer. The heat, it makes people crazy . . . and then you got the people with no AC, and they go even crazier. So we get some weird calls. Speaking of which—”
He paused and eyed Hamlet, who had leaped up onto the countertop and was eyeing him back . . . though, following Darla’s earlier admonition to mind his manners, the feline had settled a good six feet away from him.
Darla arched a brow in fair imitation of Jake and gave him a mock-outraged look. “Are you calling my cat weird?”
“Hey, you’re the one who says he’s super-intuitive or something. All I’m doing is making sure I’m out of claw range.”
Apparently satisfied he was beyond the Hamlet danger zone, Reese returned his attention to her. “So, uh, Red, you got a minute?”
“Sure, but really only a minute. The block party committee will be here anytime now. You want me to send up for a cup of coffee for you while we talk?”
She indicated the tiny bistro table against the far wall where a sliding door midway up the paneling hid an old-fashioned dumbwaiter. The sign taped to it read, “Place your to-go coffee orders here.” A second sign propped on the table beside an order pad gave instructions on how to send up one’s coffee request, which then would be sent down the same way.
Previously, Darla and her staff had used the ancient contraption as a mini elevator to transport boxes to the second floor stock area. It had been James’s idea to use the dumbwaiter for its literal, original purpose. And given the number of elderly customers they had who might not be able to negotiate the stairs, Darla had agreed it was a brilliant notion.
Reese, meanwhile, was shaking his head, his expression now reflecting something that Darla could best peg as discomfiture. “Nah, I’m good. I just came by to give you a little update before you heard it from someone else. You see, I—”
“Star-spangled, my Brooklyn butt,” a woman’s voice from near the front door declared in strident tones, which—along with the jangle of the front door bells—cut short Reese’s reply.
Darla smiled, not needing to glance over to recognize the speaker as Penelope Winston. At five-foot-nothing and perhaps one hundred pounds, with her salt-and-pepper hair cut short in a spiky do, the woman still resembled the New York City Ballet star she’d been thirty years earlier. These days, however, it was her brusque manner and smoker’s rasp that often first garnered attention when she walked into a room.
Still, Darla had developed an affection for the woman over the weeks they’d been on the committee together. While Darla routinely overlooked her potty mouth, Penelope also had made a conscious effort to clean up her language in front of the group; hence the use of “butt” rather than a coarser body part term.
“No way am I going to let my girls dress up like Yankee-Doodle majorettes,” Penelope went on, waving the bright red e-cigarette—or, more properly, as Darla had learned, pen vaporizer—that accompanied her everywhere. Addressing the three men who were crowded around her like her posse, she finished, “When they take off their hoodies and sweatpants, they’ll be in red and white striped leotards and little blue shorts. Believe me, everyone will get the idea.”
“Hey, leotards and little shorts work for me.”
This grinning observation came from Doug Bates, owner of Doug’s DOUGhnuts and another of Darla’s committee members. Nearing fifty, and packing almost that many extra pounds, Doug favored the multiple gold chains and a tan that would put a Hollywood star to shame look. His genial, blond good looks always brought to Darla’s mind an image of how Reese might look in another decade or so, if he gave up the gym for nights out in the local bar . . . or days spent sampling doughnuts. As usual on a working day, the man was wearing his baker’s white drawstring pants and black-and-white checked newsboy hat, though he’d swapped the double-breasted chef’s jacket for a black T-shirt with his shop’s logo.
Catching sight of Darla, Doug waved and called, “The gang’s all here. You want us upstairs
?”
“Sure,” Darla called back, acknowledging him with a return wave that also included Penelope and the other two men on the committee—Steve Mookjai and Hank Tomlinson. “I’ll be up in just a minute.”
She watched them start up the stairs, Steve and Hank at the head of the line, Penelope following, and Doug bringing up the rear. Darla turned her attention from her committee back to Reese, but not before she saw something out of the corner of her eye that made her do a momentary double take.
Had she imagined it, or had Doug just given the dance instructor a flirty swat on her “Brooklyn butt” as she climbed the stairs ahead of him?
Certain she must have been mistaken—as far as she knew, Doug and Penelope were nothing but casual friends—Darla turned back to Reese and said, “I can put them off for another couple of minutes. What did you want to talk about?”
The cop shrugged. “It’ll keep. I know you’re busy with this whole Fourth of July thing. I’ll catch you later.”
“Okay, if you’re sure.”
Darla frowned a little as she watched him leave, the string of bells on the front door jangling after him. She’d rarely seen the blunt-speaking cop at a loss for words, let alone looking so uncomfortable at not blurting out exactly what was on his mind.
“It was probably the meatball sub thing,” she told Hamlet. The cat raised one side of his fuzzy mouth in what she could only interpret as a sneer before he plopped onto the counter, kicking a couple of free papers onto the floor in the process.
Great.
Darla shot the feline a dismayed look as she scooped up his handiwork. Obviously, he didn’t share her assessment of the situation. And now that Hamlet had weighed in on the subject, it was going to nag at her until she finally found out why Reese had come by, though with Reese’s schedule, that might not be until the block party. At least she’d made him promise to attend.
