Coffeehouse 09 - Roast Mortem

by Cleo Coyle

  “Sounds like your famous Buffalo wings.”

  “Except I don’t deep-fry those, just crisp them up in a cast-iron skillet. A tempura batter might be interesting to try . . .” I couldn’t help channeling one of my old In the Kitchen with Clare columns. “Home cooks tend to use all-purpose flour because it’s always in the pantry, but cake flour is the best way to go for frying batters, even for beer-battered onion rings, because it’s lower in gluten.”

  “Well, sweetheart, the day you want to experiment, give me a call. I’ll be happy to help with the taste testing.”

  “I’ve noticed you’re always available for that.”

  “I’m always available for a lot of things.” He threw me his best leering wink. I laughed and leaned back on the sofa, grateful my bike pants had an expanding waistband. “Man, I really needed that . . .”

  Mike reached out with a paper napkin, gently wiped at a ruby smear along my cheek. “I’m guessing you liked it . . .”

  I did the same for him, rubbing at a smudge on his chin. “I’d say your man Sully’s a good guy to trust.”

  “So am I,” Mike said. Then he leaned in and moved his mouth over mine.

  That tasted even better.

  Mike’s mouth was sweet and slightly sticky from the chicken glaze, and (frankly) I would have been happy to gorge myself on nothing but him for the rest of the night. But, after a few blissful minutes, I was the one who broke contact.

  “I’m sorry, Mike . . .” I softly pushed on his hard chest. “I’d like to talk a little more . . .”

  TWELVE

  AS we broke contact, I saw the disappointment in Mike’s eyes. I didn’t blame him. I needed to talk, and that’s not what he needed.

  “Everything you did tonight was wonderful,” I quickly reassured him, “coming to the hospital, helping with Mrs. Quadrelli, driving us home, arranging the food . . .”

  But I wanted one more thing from Mike Quinn: answers about his cousin. And if the lip-lock went on any longer, I wouldn’t care about getting them—or anything else apart from the two of us upstairs on my mahogany four-poster.

  Mike studied my face. “It’s okay,” he finally said. “I’m always glad to help . . .”

  He leaned back on the sofa, stretched an arm across the back, gestured for me to move closer. I did, leaning into him.

  “I have to admit,” he said, gazing at the crackling hearth, “it was nice seeing you with a satisfied expression again. The way you were choking down that vending machine coffee back at the hospital . . .” He shook his head. “I had to bite my tongue to keep from cracking up.”

  “You had to bite your tongue? I thought I was going to lose it when Mrs. Quadrelli went on about Gustave Flaubert styling her hair.”

  “Yeah, old Gustave’s probably some poor kid from Brooklyn named Gus Flabberson.”

  “Par for the course on the hustle-a-buck schemes that go on in this town.”

  “I thought I’d heard every alias in the book,” Mike said. “Jacking the name of Madame Bovary’s author is more creative than some.”

  “I’m betting Gustave’s boss has an entire list of famous French author names ready to go.”

  “So you think he’s got Stendhal doing the shampooing and Balzac on the register?”

  “No,” I said. “If the man knows his French writers, Dumas is on the register and Stendhal’s in charge of color. Balzac belongs with the stylists.”

  Mike laughed. “I actually do follow you, you know?”

  “Oh? You mean not all cops are jarheads?”

  “Naw. We only look like a paramilitary organization.”

  I smiled. “Well, I’m not in a position to throw stones. I used a false identity to get in to see Enzo.”

  “And you got some good information, too.”

  “You think so?”

  “Like I told you earlier,” he said, “call that fire marshal first thing in the morning. Tell him everything . . .”

  The list of suspects wasn’t small, but I’d gathered good leads. Only one thing still troubled me: “I can’t stop wondering who that fireman is, the mysterious one who’s secretly seeing Lucia.”

  “Me, too,” Mike said. “If that woman was looking for expertise in torching her dad’s caffè, she couldn’t do any better than a fireman.”

  “You’re speaking from experience?”

  Mike didn’t answer directly. What he said was, “Firefighters are experts in the methods of starting blazes, not just stopping them. It’s part of their training . . .”

  And there’s my opening . . .

  “So tell me, Detective, why didn’t you ever go through the training? I mean, given your hero father and your younger brothers . . .” Not to mention your evil twin of a cousin. “Why aren’t you a fireman, too?”

  I’d kept the tone light, but my question failed to amuse. Mike’s body tensed beside mine; his prolonged silence felt heavy. So I took a guess—and not a very wild one: “Is that the reason why you and your cousin don’t get along? Because you didn’t follow family tradition and join the FDNY?”

  He exhaled. “That’s part of it.”

  I shifted on the sofa, getting some distance so I could see his eyes. This was a situation I’d faced before with this man—How do you interrogate a trained interrogator?

  Not with tricks. When I wanted answers from Mike, I asked him straight. “I’d like to know what started the beef between you two.”

  “What started it . . .” He let out another audible breath. “I guess you could say it started a long time ago . . . when we were in the academy together.”

  “Police academy?” I assumed.

  “Fire academy.”

  “Fire academy? You went to the fire academy with your cousin?”

  Mike nodded.

  “What about that story you told me? About always wanting to be a cop? That schoolyard epiphany thing . . .”

  Just like me, Mike had gone to Catholic school, where the priests and nuns were big on the idea of vocation. At some point in our lives, they told us, God was supposed to reveal our life’s calling.

  I’d gotten the cosmic message with the birth of my daughter. According to Mike, he’d picked up the Almighty’s voicemail at the age of thirteen during a vicious fight that had broken out between two boys in the school courtyard.

  Instead of standing on the sidelines with the others, Mike jumped in to stop it and got a beating for his trouble—from both boys. The Jesuit who finally broke it up told Mike that with his zealousness to leap into human matters and make things right, he was destined to become a priest or a cop.

  “I probably could have been a priest,” he’d told me when we first started seeing each other. “I just couldn’t hack the chastity.”

  “So how did you end up in the fire academy?”

  “My dad wanted it. I respected the man, so I gave it a shot . . .” He shrugged. “It just wasn’t for me. After a few weeks, I quit.”

  “And your cousin Michael couldn’t understand?”

  Again, Mike shrugged. “He thought we were in it together . . .”

  “So he turned on you?”

  “Like I said, that’s how it started. Trust me when I say that my cousin has no love for me, and I’d like you to stay away from him. Can you do that for me, Clare?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  As we sat gazing at the hearth, I felt Mike’s hand brush aside my hair, begin to caress my shoulder. His heavy body leaned into me, and I felt his lips at my nape, applying little kisses.

  I knew what the man wanted. (I wanted it, too.) But I couldn’t let go. An idea kept banging around my brain, a pithy piece of police wisdom Mike once shared: If a smart perp wants to dodge an interview, he doesn’t clam up or even argue. He keeps feeding the interviewer information—just not any key information . . .

  And that’s what Mike had done with me. I was sure of it. Considering the Quinn clan’s history with the FDNY, I figured there had to be more to
his story. Not that I was some expert on familial expectation.

  After my mother left us, my father expressed zero thoughts about my future apart from I just want you to be happy, cupcake . . . The equivalent of a “Good girl, Lassie” pat on the head. My old-world grandmother, who’d primarily raised me, never pushed me to be anything—beyond a well-behaved young lady.

  It wasn’t until college that I realized not everyone was like me. A number of my classmates were pressured children, saddled with the baggage of parental aspirations. When the stars aligned, they had few issues: I always wanted to study contract law . . . Electrical engineering works for me . . . Sure, I’m going for the PhD . . .

  But when one future had two different maps, kids got lost.

  The strong ones waged external rebellion, raising shields against arrows as they followed the sound of Henry David’s drummer. The pragmatic ones chose deafness—screw the different drummer, he’s suspect—and locked down their spirits to the road often taken.

  The ones I worried about lived in the gray purgatory of indecision, giving their families the appearance of going along while quietly burning for another life. These kids saw the lights of an inspiring new highway yet continued to plod along the deadening old one, nurturing quiet resentment with every step. (And I knew from my own lousy marriage that a pretense like that was about as healthy as feeding a piranha in your stomach. Inevitably the thing grew bigger and bigger, gnawing at your insides until it completely hollowed you out.)

  Given the Quinn legacy, Mike’s father must have been devastated when his eldest quit the fire academy. It couldn’t have been the casual decision Mike was now making it out to be.

  I cleared my throat: “I noticed you like sharing that story about the schoolyard fight, but there’s something more, isn’t there? Something you don’t want people to know about why you became a cop.”

  The kisses stopped. The magic fingers quit moving. Mike leaned back, taking his hand and lips with him.

  “Mike?”

  “It’s not a pretty story, Clare.”

  “I don’t care. I’d like to hear it . . .”

  For a full minute, he stayed silent, shifting a few times on the sofa. Then just when I thought he would clam up for good, he rubbed his jaw, took a breath, and said—

  “When I hit high school, I started dating a classmate. Leta was her name, Leta Diaz. Bright girl, beautiful smile. She was my lab partner in chemistry, a class we both enjoyed, so we hit it off . . .”

  He paused to glance over at me. I nodded. “Go on.”

  “Leta’s family came here from the Dominican Republic. They ran their own little convenience store just off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. One afternoon, Leta’s dad was robbed at the store. He resisted and was shot to death.”

  “Oh God, that’s awful. Your poor girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, she took it extremely hard. I tried to be there for her. But I wanted to do more than just hold her hand and watch her cry her heart out, you know? I wanted to do something. So I did.”

  “What do you mean? You were just a high school kid.”

  “I had a gut feeling. The week before, at one of the school’s basketball games, I noticed the father of a classmate talking to Leta’s father. There was something about the way he was chatting up the man—it seemed odd, like a hustle.”

  “So?”

  “So this robbery that happened—it was during a very narrow window of time when Leta’s father had a great deal of cash on hand at the store to pay their packaged-food distributor. Once a week they got that delivery, once a week on a certain day, between certain hours.”

  “And you thought this man, this father of your classmate at school, was the stick-up guy?”

  “I knew he’d already done time for mail fraud. My classmate—Pete Hogarth was his name—he’d been complaining that his old man couldn’t get any work, also hinted that he had a worsening cocaine habit. So I took matters into my own hands.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I buddied up to Pete, went back to his apartment to hang out. The place was small, no privacy, but when I heard his dad kept pigeons on the roof, I knew that’s where I’d find evidence—and I did. The gun and the cash were buried in one of the coops. I called the detectives assigned to the case. They arrested Pete’s father. The ballistics matched up. He was the shooter.”

  “Leta must have been grateful.”

  “Honestly, she was too numb to fully understand what I did. Less than a month later, her family was back living in the Dominican Republic.”

  “So much for young love.”

  “Don’t sweat it, Cosi. My heart survived.”

  “Those detectives handling the case must have been impressed.”

  “They were. They checked in on me after that, encouraged me to go to the police academy.”

  “But your father wanted you to join the FDNY?”

  “I was the oldest. Like I said, I respected my dad, wanted to make him proud. But . . .”

  “But . . . ?”

  Mike turned on the sofa to fully face me. “As it came down, two of the guys in my class at the fire academy—they were relatives of Pete Hogarth’s. These guys didn’t care that Pete’s father was a scumbag killer. They just figured me for a narc, a rat, a guy you could never trust, and they made it a point of spreading the story of what I’d done.”

  “Is that how your cousin felt about you?”

  “No. Michael defended me. But it wasn’t enough, and after a few weeks, my reality check kicked in. I knew what I wanted to be doing for the next four decades of my life, and it wasn’t fighting fires. I wanted to be hunting down predators, Clare, getting them the hell off the street. Hogarth shot Leta’s father in cold blood, and I made sure he couldn’t kill again. I liked how it felt when I took him down.”

  My mind flashed on Enzo, pale as a cadaver in the ICU; Madame weak and teary on that stretcher; Dante unconscious on the glass-strewn concrete . . .

  I closed my eyes. “Does it always feel good to take them down?”

  “For me it does. But you don’t always get them, Clare.”

  I realized something then, something Mike had known all along . . .

  “That’s why you’ve never discouraged me, isn’t it?” I met his gaze. “You solved your first homicide as a kid, without a badge or a gun. You know what someone like me can do.”

  “Information and evidence, sweetheart. That’s what clears cases. I can flash my shield all day long, but without information and evidence, I can’t do my job. That’s why we work to develop informants on the street, interview witnesses, run background checks. If you can get those things for an investigator, then you can help him—or her.”

  I exhaled. Given the fire marshal’s brush off earlier in the evening, not to mention Captain Michael’s oh-so-subtle warning not to get involved, I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear some encouraging words. Well, I was happy to return the favor.

  “I can see why you don’t like retelling that story. But it’s really something what you did. It took guts . . .”

  “Thanks.” Mike smiled, but only a little, as if he were flattered by my words but embarrassed, too. Pointing to the take-out bag, he changed the subject. “You want more?”

  “Not of that.”

  “Something else, then?”

  I nodded. The flames in the fireplace were at their peak. I could feel their heat against my skin, hear their teasing pops and sparks. Leaning over, I pulled Mike’s mouth back onto mine.

  He was pleased I’d started the kiss. I could feel it in his tightening arms, his widening smile against my mouth. He tugged me closer, used his tongue to part my lips, deepen our connection. Then his hands slipped under my oversized tee, and his slightly calloused fingers generated something with a whole lot more intensity than what he’d started in my living room hearth.

  “C’mon,” he whispered, finally breaking away. “Let’s go upstairs . . .”

  I wasn’t about to argue.
/>   THIRTEEN

  I woke the next morning to a pair of cat paws kneading my shoulder. I instinctively reached out for Mike. With a stab of disappointment, I realized the pillow next to mine was empty. That’s when I remembered dozing off in his arms. He’d kissed my forehead and whispered something about an early meeting with prosecutors ahead of a grand jury appearance.

  Suddenly I felt another kind of stab, a prickly one to my right foot. Java and Frothy were circling me like a pair of miniature Jurassic Park raptors.

  “Okay, I’m up!”

  I threw off the covers. “Happy now?”

  Tails raised in feline triumph, the girls bounded off the bed and waited for me at the door. With another yawn, I tied on a robe, thrust my feet into slippers, and followed their proud little forms—one coffee-bean brown, the other latte-foam white—to the kitchen.

  Despite that long, steamy shower the night before, I still had a thickness in my throat, a funky odor in my sinuses, and notwithstanding the many splendored moments of Mike’s lovemaking, my subsequent dreams had been filled with images of billowing black smoke, flashing red lights, and glinting razors of splintered glass.

  Tucker, my assistant manager, was scheduled to open today, which meant I still had a little time to pull myself together. Thankfully, I felt more human after I fed my tiny, furry raptors a can of furry raptor food and mainlined a Moka-brewed doppio espresso.

  Next I phoned Dante at Elmhurst Hospital. He was in good spirits this AM, announcing he was “ready to roll!” His release paperwork was already being prepared, and two friends were waiting in his room to take him home—Kiki and Bahni, the two young women who also shared his apartment.

  One for each of his tattooed arms, I thought, relieved to hear some good news.

  Next I called Madame, surprised to find her already dressed and on her way out the door. A driver was waiting downstairs, she explained, ready to return her to Queens and the bedside of her old friend.