Murder Most Frothy cm-4

by Клео Коул

  So who the hell would want to shoot a good-natured young man like Treat in the head? I asked myself.

  Nobody, I silently answered.

  The shooter must have made the same error I had, mistaking Treat for David.

  Standing around me now in the hallway were the members of Cuppa J’s wait staff. They had been working closely with Treat for more than six weeks, and I noticed their reactions.

  Colleen O’Brien was sobbing uncontrollably.

  Joy, teary-eyed, was trying to comfort her.

  Graydon Faas looked totally stricken as he stared at the corpse, slack-jawed and dumbfounded.

  Only Suzi Tuttle looked unaffected. She simply stood there with arms folded, a look of ennui on her attractive features.

  I made a note of Suzi’s reaction (or lack thereof ) before I pushed through the group and walked into David’s bedroom. The large space was pitch dark, but there was enough light from the hallway for me to make my way around his divan and over to his king-size bed.

  “Clare, where are you going?” asked David. He followed me into his bedroom while the others waited in the hall.

  “I’m going to call 911.”

  As I removed the wireless receiver from its base on the carved mahogany end table and dialed the emergency number, David clicked on a few of his Tiffany lamps. When the operator picked up, I explained the situation, gave my name, and David’s address and phone number.

  “Did you hear anything while you were in here, David?” I asked after hanging up. “Anything at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How long were you up here?”

  He checked his wristwatch. “About two hours I guess. I came up to lie down just before the fireworks. I must have fallen asleep. My god…I still can’t believe this…what do you think happened to Treat? An accident?”

  An accident? Yeah, right. One of your guests just happened to be cleaning a gun on your back grounds, and it just happened to go off and accidentally pop through your private bathroom window at exactly the right time to take down a man close to your height and dressed just like you.

  I said none of this, of course. With the exception of Ted Ammon’s tragic fate, homicide was unheard of in this burgh. (Ammon had been an upstanding financier until he was brutally bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton mansion by his estranged wife’s electrician, who also happened to be the woman’s lover.)

  Okay, so the locals referred to Ammon’s old Middle Lane address as “Murder Lane,” but until that specific crime, there hadn’t been a homicide out here in years. The last thing an East Hampton resident expected was a real murderer to squeeze through their impenetrable privets—and I could see it was going to take a little time for David to accept that a homicide had just taken place in his own house.

  “I’m not sure what happened,” I told him carefully, “but, David, back up a minute. Tell me exactly why you left the party.”

  He shrugged. “I felt a migraine coming on. They’re allergy induced and I know exactly how to treat them—a cold, dark room and my prescription medication. I popped two pills and came straight to the bedroom. Didn’t bother turning on any lights, just turned up the air-conditioning and lay down. I heard the fireworks going off, but I couldn’t even bear to watch them. I dozed off and the next thing I remember is hearing you scream.”

  “Clare, what’s going on?” called Madame from the doorway. “Did you call the police?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  I could hear Colleen’s sobs hadn’t subsided and the others were still huddled around the bathroom doorway like witnesses of a traffic accident who weren’t sure whether they should leave the scene.

  I glanced at David. This was still his house and I didn’t want to sound obnoxiously bossy, so I tried to pose my directive as a question. “Maybe we should all go downstairs? To the kitchen? I’ll make us some coffee and we can wait for the police together?”

  “Okay…all right…sure…” Everyone mumbled and began to wander back down the hall and toward the stairs.

  “Wait for me,” David said as I swiftly walked away. “I’m certainly not staying up here alone!”

  Three

  “Dead bodies freak me out.”

  Graydon Faas’s hands shook as he lifted his mug of coffee.

  “It’s all right,” said David, patting the young man on the shoulder. “They aren’t a barrel of laughs for me either.”

  I had brewed a twelve-cup drip carafe of our medium roast Breakfast Blend and was just finishing gradually and evenly filling seven mugs. (I never pour one cup at a time out of a pot. I always pour a little into each cup until they’re all filled. That way, if there are any inconsistencies in the suspension—too strong at the bottom of the pot, for instance, and too weak at the top—no one cup will suffer from the extreme.)

  As David splashed cream into his coffee, I gulped mine black, barely tasting the nutty warmth. Adrenaline wasn’t a problem at the moment, but I feared my energy levels would spike and then fall, which was why I’d chosen the Breakfast Blend. I had many other more complex and robust-tasting blends on hand, but the medium roast had more caffeine than the darker Italian or French roasts, and I wanted to be alert for the next few hours.

  Everyone was drinking their coffee now, except Colleen, who was still sobbing into a series of Kleenexes. The girl’s loose auburn curls had begun slipping from their ponytail, and her usually ruddy skin looked pale as a shroud, making her dusting of freckles appear as if someone had roughly grated a cinnamon stick across her barely-there nose. An Irish immigrant here in New York on an education visa, Colleen had just turned twenty. From the age of eight, she’d worked in her family’s Dublin pub/restaurant and her experience as a waitress showed in her efficient, earnest, unflappable service.

  I sat down at David’s seven-foot-long kitchen table directly across from Colleen and Joy. Madame sat next to me. Around the rest of the table sat David, Graydon, and Suzi. For a minute, we all listened to Colleen’s sobs in the huge gourmet kitchen—that and the dishwasher’s rhythmic swishing next to the Sub-Zero fridge.

  Joy reached over, stirred cream, then sugar into Colleen’s warm mug and gently pushed it into the girl’s shaking hands. Colleen swallowed with difficulty, then began to take small sips.

  We all silently watched.

  Obviously, Colleen had something very personal going on, but no one said a word. Normally, I would have given the young woman her privacy, but if she knew something that would help the police, I wanted to know it too.

  “Colleen,” I carefully began, “we’re all upset about Treat, of course, but you seem really undone. Is there anything you want to share with us?”

  “Ohhhhhh!” she wailed, then began bawling again.

  Damn. Now everyone was staring at me as if I’d just kicked the poor girl. Everyone except Suzi Tuttle.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Colleen,” she snapped. “He’s not worth it.”

  Suzi, the Long Island native, was twenty-five, but she’d been bartending and waitressing since high school. She had triple-pierced ears and (apparently) more piercings elsewhere on her body, or so she liked to brag. The hard-partying image was deliberately played up with short-cropped hair dyed white blond and black eyeliner as thick as Cleopatra’s.

  Suzi’s tough attitude actually worked well in David’s East Hampton restaurant. Cuppa J’s customers weren’t exactly known for being passive and polite. They were wealthy, elite, famous people who were used to having their whims and demands satisfied with a finger snap. One thing you could not have in that environment was a thin skin.

  Still, Suzi’s hardness at this moment seemed out of place—until Colleen blew her small, pug nose and, in a mild Irish brogue, announced with great profundity: “You all might as well know. Treat and I, we were…we were close.”

  “He was banging you,” Suzi said flatly.

  Colleen’s eyes narrowed. “We were lovers.”

  Suzi waved her hand. “Treat didn’t love anyone but hi
mself.”

  “You raccoon-eyed witch! How can you say that? With him lying upstairs like that and all…” Colleen’s sobs began again.

  “I can say it because I know exactly how he operated,” Suzi calmly replied. “He told you to keep your relationship quiet, right? So there wouldn’t be any ‘funny vibes’ at the restaurant.”

  Colleen stopped crying. Her jaw dropped. “How did you know? Did he tell you about us?”

  “Girlfriend, get a clue. Treat told me the same thing when he was sleeping with me. And I found out why. Before me, he was hooking up with Prin!”

  Madame put down her coffee cup, leaned toward me and whispered, “Sounds like the boy was sampling David’s restaurant staff like a box of chocolates.”

  Prin Lopez was a model-gorgeous Hispanic girl with sleek, dark brown hair down to her hips and long-lashed copper eyes. She’d grown up in a rough part of the Bronx, the poorest borough in New York City, but had worked her way into waitressing at a popular Upper West Side bistro, where David and Jacques Papas (Cuppa J’s manager) had met her. Both had been impressed with her service as well as her ability to speak fluent Spanish—always handy in an industry that consistently employs kitchen workers from Mexico and Latin America.

  According to Jacques, Prin had left the South Fork abruptly for a family emergency and wouldn’t be around to help with the July Fourth weekend crowd, which was a shame, because this weekend was bound to be the busiest of the season.

  As I made a mental note to ask Prin about her relationship with Treat when she returned to work, I noticed Joy, across the table, squirming uncomfortably and gnawing her lower lip. I wasn’t going to press her now, but I was praying that Treat Mazzelli hadn’t also started sleeping with my daughter. From the way the guy had been flirting with Joy earlier this evening, it seemed apparent he was already making plans to dump Colleen.

  It also seemed apparent that Treat had been racking up conquests. But not just any conquests. The Hamptons were always packed with single, available women. If Treat had wanted to bed a string of willing young females, he could have driven just a few miles over to Sagaponack. “Sagg Main” was the most active singles beach scene in the Hamptons, full of gym-toned bodies looking for true love—or a weekend simulation of same.

  Obviously Treat had preferred to seduce a succession of young women in close proximity to one another, bedding each one while pretending he could keep them all from finding out. It was the sort of pattern set by a guy who obviously got off on high-risk living, maybe even thrived on a situation that could, at any time, blow up in his face.

  If that were the case, I wondered: were there other parts of his life that were just as high-risk? So high-risk that someone would want him dead? Had the shooter hit the right target after all?

  Graydon interrupted my thoughts with a sudden sigh of agitation. Running a strong hand through his blond streaked buzz cut, he self-consciously announced, “You guys, I barely knew Treat. I mean, I’m sorry for what happened to the dude, but I don’t know anything that can help and I really…I’m really wrecked. I’d like to go home and hit the sack. Is that okay?”

  Suzi again waved a dismissive hand. “You just want to catch your waves at the crack of yawn.”

  “So?” Graydon folded his arms. “I said I was sorry about the dude, but do you really think he’s in a position to care one way or the other?”

  Suzi looked away.

  Colleen began to cry again.

  “There, there,” said Madame, reaching across the table to pat Colleen’s hand. “You know Ms. Tuttle may not have said it in the kindest way, but I do believe you’ve shed enough tears for the boy upstairs. Take it from a woman who’s been around the block a few times, my dear, men are like buses—one may throw you off unexpectedly, but there’ll always be a new one coming right behind you, inviting you to climb aboard.”

  For a second there, we all stared at Madame, a little shocked at her suggestive phrasing. She simply blinked at us, either completely oblivious to the unintentional double entendre or appalled at our provincial reaction to it.

  “What?” she finally snapped. “What did I say?”

  Joy put an arm around Colleen. “My grandmother’s right. In fact, how’s this for something to cheer up about. I’ve got Keith Judd’s phone number, and I’ll bet we could both party with him—”

  “What?” I interrupted with alarm. “Joy, you’re kidding, right? That actor didn’t actually give you his phone number.”

  Joy nodded excitedly. “He did. Look.”

  From the pocket of her khaki skirt, my daughter pulled out a cocktail napkin.

  “Let me see that,” I said.

  She handed it over, sliding it across the kitchen table as she explained, “He gave it to me after I brought him your café pousson.”

  I examined the napkin. On it, the slick, forty-year-old Hollywood actor had scrawled his name. Below it was a cell phone number. I stood up, tore the napkin in two, pushed the autograph back toward my twenty-one-year-old daughter and shoved the piece with the man’s phone number down the garbage disposal.

  “Mom!” she cried. “What are you doing?!”

  With the determination of a mother on a mission, I flipped on the disposal. “Sorry, honey.”

  Joy leaped to her feet and banged the table with her fist. “I can’t believe you did that!”

  “Believe it.”

  “You had no right!”

  I could see she was just getting started.

  It wasn’t the first time she and I had faced off. The entire reason Joy was out here was because of my playing protective mom.

  Less than a year before, I’d caught her doing cocaine with her friends in the bathroom stall of an infamous nightclub. (I know, I know—what was I, myself, doing in an infamous nightclub, right? Trust me, there was a good reason, and when I stumbled upon Joy, she had insisted what she was doing was none of my business. But I begged to differ.) I asked her father to have a long talk with her. God knows I’d had enough of them with her when she was in high school, but now she was a young woman, living with a roommate her age. I knew she needed to hear some straight talk from the horse’s mouth (so to speak—and I’m being kind). Matteo Allegro had become an addict during our marriage and it was one of the reasons our wedded bliss ended long before our ten-year union did. (It was also the reason I used to refer to Matt as a “horse’s other end”).

  Matt well knew what could happen to a person who thought he or she could handle casual drug use: impaired judgment, pouring money into the habit, becoming unreliable, lying to and hurting loved ones. In Matt’s case, this included the habit of cheating on me, which, as far as I was concerned, was as much an addiction as his chemical dependency and sprang from the same “self-medicating” issues.

  In any event, Matt’s “horse’s mouth” talk seemed to work, and Joy had buckled down with her culinary school studies for the rest of the year. Then, one day near the start of spring, she came running into the Village Blend waving a local magazine.

  At the time, David Mintzer had been sitting at my espresso bar, reading the Wall Street Journal and sipping a doppio espresso. He had already asked me to work for him. And I had already declined. “I work for Madame,” I’d told him with a shrug. “Managing the Blend is a job I love, and I’ll be taking over as co-owner in the future. I’m not looking for a change.”

  But when Joy burst into the coffeehouse with her “big plans for the summer,” which included an illegal Hamptons share, my outlook changed. Joy had circled five possible share houses listed in the local magazine. She just needed a “teensy-weensy loan” from me to get into one of them.

  Now I knew perfectly well that Hamptons’ officials had set up codes limiting the number of occupants in rental houses. I also knew that hundreds of entrepreneurs routinely violated those laws by running illegal shares all season long, cramming up to thirty or forty people into one house. This was the way twenty-and thirtysomethings without Hilton sisters-level loot could a
fford to “summer” in these exclusive seaside towns.

  A decade ago, this share thing seemed like a good idea. I’d been around thirty at that time, Joy around eleven. When she’d gone away for two weeks of Girl Scout camp, I gave in to a girlfriend who’d insisted that a “wild” week of meeting men, dancing, drinking, and sunbathing was exactly what I needed after my divorce from Matt.

  I decided to give it a try, shelling out 1,500 dollars for one week of a South Fork summer by the sea. Typically this was how it worked: a three-or-four-million-dollar house would rent out for 100,000 dollars or so for the season. In order to cover that cost, the people running the share would cram each bedroom with multiple mattresses. For your share price, you got the mattress, toilet paper, paper cups, and the use of the house’s kitchen, pool, hot tub, and bathrooms.

  On the face of it, the idea seemed good. It was the “democratization of luxury,” I’d told myself. But the reality wasn’t so good. Frankly, I’d hated it. The house was a 24/7 party. Jello shots, cocaine lines, naked orgies in the hot tub.

  Hey, I like a good time as much as the next person. But I’d never been a hard partying girl. My ex-husband would have loved it. Not me. I did my best to get into the spirit of the house. Then, near the end of the week, one of the men I’d gotten to know pretty well began kissing me in a hot tub of a dozen people and, before I could stop him, removed the top of my two-piece swimsuit. When a second guy I’d never even seen before that night tried to join in the “fun,” I suggested to the first, as I frantically tied my top back on, that if he wanted to go further we should find some privacy.

  He took me to the only private place in the huge house—a mattress placed in a walk-in closet. He said this was the spot for anyone who needed to “spend time alone.” I looked at that bare mattress on the floor of that closet, a naked light bulb above it, and spontaneously threw up. Suffice it to say, the “ambiance” of the place didn’t do it for me, and the next morning, I packed up and left a day early.