by Клео Коул
“I’ll need a statement from everyone,” Melchior said.
“And I shall also provide you with a guest list from yesterday’s event.”
“Good,” O’Rourke said. “That would be helpful.”
“I only ask that you not bother my party guests unless you absolutely feel it is necessary to approach them. That said, I want you to do all you can to apprehend the person or persons responsible for this terrible crime.”
“I understand, Mr. Mintzer.” O’Rourke nodded. I promise you we’ll proceed with great discretion.”
“Thank you,” said David. “Now let me take you upstairs and give you my version of what happened last evening.”
As they spoke, David steered O’Rourke and Melchior out of the kitchen and presumably toward the bathroom where Treat had been shot. I peered out the tall kitchen windows at the uniformed officers still pacing the dunes. When I turned around again, Madame was in front of me.
“David was certainly adamant in his denial,” she remarked quietly.
“He protested too much,” I replied, rubbing my forehead.
“You still think he was the assassin’s target?”
“Now more than ever.”
David appeared thirty minutes later. I braced myself, ready for him to unleash another wave of righteous outrage. Instead, he took my arm and steered me back toward the kitchen table.
“Listen, Clare. I’m sorry about doing that to you in front of the authorities, but you have to understand my position.”
I might have been humiliated but I wasn’t stupid. “You’re more concerned with bad publicity than the fact that someone may be trying to murder you, is that it?”
David sighed. “Please, Clare. No one is trying to murder me. But even if someone wanted me dead, I could never admit it publicly. I have multiple businesses. Partnerships all over the world. I frankly loathe the comparison, but, like Ms. Stewart, I am my companies. They do not function without me. I can’t afford for anyone—not my associates, not my partners, investors, customers, or clients—to entertain the notion that I’m involved in something shady enough to invite a murder attempt. Millions of dollars and thousands of employees livelihoods are at stake. I have responsibilities.”
I wanted to speak, but bit my lip and nodded instead. “I understand.”
David slumped down in a seat in front of the table. “In any case, there are obviously gaps in my home security system—”
“Didn’t I tell you that the first day I came?”
“Indeed you did. That you were right about, Clare.”
“It’s time you got a serious alarm system,” I told him, “installed outdoor lighting—”
“I shall make the call just as soon as the police leave my house.”
“Not just alarms and motion detectors, okay?” I said. “Real security guards, around the clock. You don’t have to hire Spielberg’s ex-Masaad agents, but for god’s sake get some Pinkertons, at least until Treat’s murder is solved and the murderer caught.”
David smiled. “Very well, but on one condition.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to drop the notion that I’m the real target for murder—pronto.”
After a beat I nodded. “Okay. Agreed.”
“Good.” David rose. “Now I’ll rejoin those detectives, before there’s any more damage done to my imported Italian marble bathroom.”
Six
Cuppa J was a short ride from David Mintzer’s beach house, but, typical of a sunny summer day in the Hamptons, traffic was horrendous.
Democratic, too.
Late model BMWs, Ferraris, Mercedes, and Jaguars inched along with the same egalitarian sluggishness as my lowly Honda. A ten-minute drive became forty minutes of start-and-stop frustration.
When I finally left “Leisure with Dignity” around eleven-fifteen, the Suffolk County police were still going over details of the shot in the dark. I could tell David was losing patience in discussing details of the party, what he knew of Treat’s background, how it might be related to his fellow employees or David’s guest list. Through it all, David’s facade probably appeared as charming as ever. But I had gotten to know him pretty well by now, and I recognized the cracks forming at his edges.
I’d promised him that I’d stay out of it…but how could I keep my promise? While I tried to tell myself that the police were on the case and that was enough, in my gut I knew they were on the wrong case. And what good would that do David?
In the bumper-to-bumper traffic, I contemplated what O’Rourke and Melchior would do next. They’d probably want to know the results of the autopsy and whether the bullet in Treat’s skull actually matched up with the shells I’d found. I’d bet a forty-pound bag of Jamaica Blue Mountain that they would.
They’d also be conducting interviews with people who knew Treat, trying to dig up some significant vendetta or grudge. But it was the people around David who needed to be interviewed as far as I could see.
Well, I thought, at least they’re going to talk to Marjorie Bright.
Certainly, she was at the top of my suspect list. But as I inched along in traffic, I rethought the theory I’d hastily blurted out to the Suffolk County detectives. Cringing, I realized there were holes in my hypothesis through which I could probably drive a Hummer (much like the bright yellow one hogging part of the shoulder in front of me).
For one thing, why would Ms. Bright have fouled up her alibi by hanging around the crime scene? Unless she fell into that category Mike Quinn had once mentioned—pathologically wanting to see the results of her bought and-paid-for crime—which I myself didn’t wholly buy.
And for another, if a paid assassin had been involved in the crime, then why did I find bullet casings? A true professional would not have left shells behind. It smacked of amateurish carelessness…so…did that mean the shooter was actually an amateur?
“Clare! Hey, there, Clare!”
I peered out my open window to find Edna Miller waving at me from her roadside farm stand. Around her, wicker baskets displayed the colors of summer—red tomatoes, green-husked corn, plump white cauliflower, purple eggplant, and quarts and quarts of those lush, Long Island strawberries.
“Hi, Edna!” I called back.
My first week in the South Fork, I had befriended Edna and her husband, Bob, with a two-pound bag of Kona, that sweet, smooth coffee with buttery characteristics and hints of cinnamon and cloves, grown in the volcanic soil of Hawaii. (Many coffee roasters offer Kona blends, but for my money the single-origin experience is the way to go.)
The Millers had been running this farm stand of impossibly fresh vegetables and fruits every summer for the last twenty odd years—and before that, Bob’s father had run it. They were “Bonackers,” part of the local families that had been living out here for generations.
(At one time, “Bonacker” had been a pejorative term like hick or bumpkin. Its etymology was Native American, from the word “Accobonac,” which roughly means “place where groundnuts are gathered.” Such was the naming of nearby Accobonac Harbor and, consequently, the people who lived around it. These days people wore the name with pride. The East Hampton High School sport teams had even adopted it as their nickname.)
The Miller’s land was located on the unfashionable side of the highway—the side away from the ocean—yet they’d been able to sell off just a portion of it for a small fortune. They’d kept the rest in the family and continued to farm it, just as they had for hundreds of years.
“You want anything today?” Edna called, striding quickly out to the road. She was in her usual worn jeans and large tee-shirt, a half-apron wrapped around her waist.
“No, I’m heading over to work at the moment,” I replied, as the car inched along. “Did you have a nice Fourth?”
“Yes, but what’s this I hear about yours?” Edna was pacing the Honda now, slowly moving along the shoulder of the road as I rolled along.
“My Fourth?”
No way, I thought. The
re’s no way she could possibly be referring to the shooting. All of the guests left before I discovered the body. So who could have told her?
“My daughter-in-law’s sister is married to Park Bennett,” she explained. “And he lives next door to John King. And his son’s on the local police force. He said his boy was at that mansion you’re staying at…David Mintzer’s place. And he said a young man was killed—”
“Yes, yes, I know all about it. But we don’t know very much at this point. David’s a little touchy so maybe you could, you know, keep it quiet.” Right. That’ll happen.
“Oh, surely, surely!” said Edna. “Of course!”
Behind me, the platinum blond on her cell phone laid on the horn of her Mercedes convertible so loud and so long that I thought I’d lose the ability to hear higher decibels. When I looked ahead, I saw the yellow Hummer in front of me had pulled away about a grand total of four car lengths.
“Whoa,” I said. “I guess I better speed up a little, sorry, Edna!”
“No problem, Clare. People are really touchy this weekend. You should have been here an hour ago. Two corporate attorneys got into a punch-out over the last honeydew melon!”
“See you soon!” I called, my car speeding up.
“See you, Clare!”
Edna waved and turned back to the farm stand. I considered what she’d just said—not the story about the honeydew punch-out. That was actually on par for how bad things could get during the crowded summer season. Wealthy Manhattan people came out here to relax, but far too many of them packed their sense of entitlement and city impatience along with their toothbrushes.
“The people out here are competitive and ambitious,” David had warned me when I first came. “They’re killers on the job. That’s how they got out here in the first place. And people who spend Monday through Friday screwing over people aren’t going to stop acting that way on Saturday and Sunday.”
The local paper was full of incidents like shoving matches over parking spaces and restaurant tables. Just last week there was an assault charge filed after a few haymakers were thrown in a health food store. (One can only presume it took place in the stress reduction supplements aisle.)
Anyway, I began to consider how Edna had heard about Treat’s death. Obviously news traveled fast in this small enclave. And I doubted a murder in East Hampton would be treated like one in the city, precisely because murder was so rare.
This small village fussed over the color of the awnings on Main Street for god’s sake. They cited you for tacking up a yard sale sign. The last thing they would tolerate was an unsolved murder in their midst. The guilty party would have to be found and successfully convicted or the competency of the authorities would be loudly and continually questioned by the powerful, opinionated people who summered here.
In a place like this, the only sure way for the murderer to escape detection would be to pin the crime on someone else…that’s why the bullet casings could have been left. Sure, it could have been a careless amateur, or it could have been a cunning assassin setting up a frame job. To do that, the shooter would have to plant the weapon somewhere the police could find it…say, on the premises of someone who might have had a motive. Then the cops would have their conviction, and the shooter would get away with murder.
The permutations of this theory were still bouncing around in my head when I turned into the shaded driveway of Cuppa J.
Seven
My grandmother grew up in a world of straightforward sensibilities, when things were labeled simply and clearly. You said what you meant, and you meant what you said. But that was a long time ago, before SNL, MTV, metafiction, The Daily Show, and the saturation of practically every aspect of contemporary culture with irony.
Sure, “Cuppa J” sounded like a casual, unassuming joint, but those were hardly the adjectives for David’s tony East Hampton cafe. Of course, he wasn’t the first to apply paradox to a restaurant name, not by a long shot. Chef Thomas Keller’s lowly sounding “French Laundry” was the most acclaimed gourmet restaurant in Napa Valley, if not the most highly regarded eatery in the country. And the Brooklyn Diner, just a few blocks away from Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, was actually a four-star restaurant with linen tablecloths and a stellar wine list.
Cuppa J offered eclectic, upscale bistro fare, with the flavor of coffee infused into many of the main dishes (coffee can be used to great effect in meat dishes as a subtle flavoring agent, tenderizer, or marinade). The restaurant served wine and cocktails, but the star of the culinary show was the array of expensive after-dinner coffees and dessert pairings. Consequently, this season we’d become the place to book an after-dinner, pre-clubbing table. While most restaurants wound down by ten in the evening, our place was still hopping with many tables booked right up until midnight.
The two-story restaurant, with its red brick exterior, had been a Chinese restaurant before falling into foreclosure a year ago. This past spring David redid the surrounding grounds with topiaries, flowerbeds, and shade trees. He’d cleaned the brick, repainted the peeling white trim, and replaced the first floor windows with white french doors.
I drove through the customer parking area, framed with ivy-colored trellises, and around to the back of the restaurant where the employees parked. It was just past noon when I walked through the kitchen door. The waitstaff would be arriving in a few hours to prepare for dinner service from four until midnight—and I expected finally to see Joy, who I hadn’t heard from the entire day. Clearly, she was ignoring the five messages I’d already left on her cell phone’s voicemail.
“Hi, Carlos.” I waved at the restaurant’s reliable sous chef, Carlos Comacho. He was busy, cutting up onions and carrots, preparing for Executive Chef Victor Vogel’s arrival. He gave a quick smile and went back to his work.
The next person I encountered was Jacques Papas, who stuck his head out of his office at the sound of my voice. Papas acted as the restaurant’s manager, maitre d’, and sommelier. Half-French and half-Greek, Papas was in his early forties, swarthy, with dark eyes and ink-black hair (which I assumed he had dyed, because the only thing that occurred in nature that dark was a celestial black hole). We stood nearly eye to eye, but what the man lacked in size he made up for in belligerent energy. I had yet to see him smile. His usual demeanor was one of mild disdain mingled with boredom—either that or a sneer.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
The manager offered me a sour look, then crisply turned and disappeared back into his office.
Living in Manhattan, I was no stranger to divas of all stripes in the upscale restaurant game. But Papas had attitude beyond reason. At least he was consistent, I thought, shrugging off Papas’s chilly snub. He treated employees and guests with equal contempt.
After walking through the spotless, stainless steel kitchen, I strolled by the staff ’s break room and pushed through the burgundy leather double-doors, which took me into the two-story dining room.
While the exterior of Cuppa J was as unassuming as its name, the interior was another matter. David had taken great pains to model the decor after a pair of famous Paris coffeehouses—the traditional Café Marly, designed in the 1990s by Oliver Gagnére and Yves Taralon, and the more modern Le Café Costes designed in 1985 by Philippe Starck.
The Marly’s influence was evident as soon as you stepped into the breathtaking room. Dark burgundy-hued walls were gilded with art deco flourishes and lined with cherrywood wainscoting that perfectly matched the sixty-two cafe tables. Forest green velvet couches and low-backed ivory armchairs were interspersed with freestanding antique torchiers (a practical replacement for the Marly’s iron incense burners). A staircase of emerald marble framed by twin cenotaphs was situated on the south side of the dining room. And the brass-railed stairs led to an upper mezzanine fronted by more brass rails.
At the top of the staircase a massive clock was set into the wall. This mosaic timepiece, fashioned from sheets of translucent quartz and colored stones, was a homage t
o the central motif of the now defunct La Café Costes, right down to the movement of the clock’s arms, which spun around twenty-four times every hour.
David assumed this bizarre Alice in Wonderland feature was a nod to the surrealists. To me it seemed a fairly obvious statement about the nature of caffeine.
The narrow mezzanine circled the entire restaurant. Along with additional seating, the upstairs featured a cherrywood bar, a spectacular view of the main dining room below, and an eye-level view of the huge brass-and-glass chandelier that dangled from the high ceiling.
Crossing the dining room, I walked over to the first floor’s open coffee bar.
Over the years, the crimes I’d seen upscale restaurants commit against the bean truly made me shudder. Leaving pots to simmer on burners until the liquid had the consistency of muddy tar. Serving customers espressos in cold cups. Frothing cappuccinos with steam wands that hadn’t been properly cleaned. Filling stacks of paper filters with pre-ground coffee and allowing it to sit around aerating for hours before brewing. (The moment you grind your beans, they begin to lose their freshness.)
As Cuppa J’s barista manager/drill sergeant, I’d pretty much browbeaten every waiter and waitress into following the holy rituals of high-quality coffee service.
With my clipboard in hand, I was very pleased to note that the area had been left shipshape by the previous evening’s closers. The espresso machine had been properly cleaned, demitasses neatly stacked on top; the coffee canisters were left tightly sealed; and the French presses were lined up in formation on the cherrywood shelves like good little soldiers of sparkling glass.
I checked the contents of the coffee canisters. There were twenty in all, each holding a different blend or single-origin coffee featured on our menu. Back in the city, we did micro-roasting daily in the shop. In my weekly trips back to the city, I’d create the roasts needed at Cuppa J, then transport the whole beans back here in vacuum-sealed bags.
