Coffeehouse 09 - Roast Mortem

by Cleo Coyle

  After we sat, I began to explain the situation.

  “Just show him,” Matt said, cutting me off.

  I chafed at my ex’s tone, but I didn’t say a word. Matt distrusted cops (and all authority figures)—partly because of his run-ins with the NYPD and partly because of his bad experiences with corrupt officials in banana republics. I knew how difficult it was for my ex-husband to come here with me. The last thing I wanted to do was get into an argument.

  I set the backpack on the table, pulled out the package.

  Quinn almost never showed emotion on the job. But as he studied the box of matches, the single charred stick, and the arsonist’s note to me, his features twisted openly with fury, worry, and frustration. When he finally spoke, it was a single, quiet curse.

  “That son of a bitch . . .”

  Matt folded his arms. “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  “No . . . I’m going to get this to our people in the Crime Scene Unit, but . . .” Quinn exhaled.

  “I know,” I said, reading him. “It’s been handled to death.”

  “Who opened it?” Quinn asked.

  I turned to Matt. “You explain . . .”

  “One of our customers, Barry, first noticed the backpack—”

  “Barry?” I interrupted. “Tucker said it was a group of NYU students.”

  Matt shrugged. “Barry found it first. He went to the students next, asked if it was one of theirs. They all passed it around.”

  I still didn’t like the sound of that. “What was Barry doing in the Blend so late?” For months now, the man had been coming in mornings or early afternoons, never in the evenings.

  “Tucker said something about his having a fight with this new boyfriend. The guy’s on some anticaffeine or anticoffee kick. I don’t know. One of those political food movements. He wanted Barry to give up coffee. Barry said no. They had a fight, and Barry came to the Blend to spite him . . .”

  “Excuse me,” Quinn said. “But how many people handled this thing? An estimate?”

  “Ten, maybe twelve,” Matt said.

  Quinn went silent. The cop curtain finally came down on his emotional show.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I know that makes it impossible for your people to find forensic evidence.”

  “Not impossible. Just harder . . . We’ll have detectives from this precinct assigned to your case. After we’re done in here, you tell them everything, okay? They can work with the fire marshals investigating the Caffè Lucia fire. You’ll also have to get me the names and addresses of everyone who touched this thing. Any fibers, fingerprints, or other DNA evidence we find, we’ll have to match against your customers and baristas, and eliminate them one by one.”

  Matt folded his arms. “How long with that take?”

  “A while. It’s not attached to a homicide—”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But Enzo is in a coma. He’s not expected to live. And if he doesn’t, the person or persons who set that fire are going to be—”

  “Murderers.” Quinn said. “I know.”

  “What happens in the meantime?” Matt snapped. “While we’re waiting for some technician to lift a fiber from the asshole who threatened Clare. We go up in flames?”

  Quinn focused on me. “When we’re through here, I’ll speak to my captain. We’ll get you protection.”

  “It’s not me who needs it,” I said, meeting his eyes. “I have you, don’t I?”

  Quinn gave me the sweetest look. I returned it.

  “Excuse me!” Matt cried. “What about the Blend?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Quinn said, still holding my gaze.

  “Good,” Matt grunted.

  Quinn reached out then, opening his hand as he moved it across the table. He waited, keeping it there until I put mine in his. Then he gently but firmly closed his fingers.

  Matt blew out air. “Are we done now?”

  “I need to talk to Mike about something else,” I said softly. “Privately, if you don’t mine.”

  “Fine. I’ll wait for you downstairs.” Matt rose, left the room, and shut the door—more of a slam really.

  “You okay?” Quinn asked.

  I nodded, swallowed the sand in my throat. I wanted to tell him everything then, what I’d learned at the firehouse and not just about possible suspects in the Caffè Lucia fire. I wanted to speak to him about the disturbing story that Captain Michael had told me. But this arid, airless room was so awful—and it was Quinn’s turf. If I were going to question the man about his past again, I wanted it to be on mine.

  “I need to see you tonight, Mike. My place, okay?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “You want me to wake you up at four in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  The corners of his lips lifted. “Okay then. I will.”

  I rose. “I’m sorry it isn’t easier.”

  He stood, too, picking up the contaminated evidence. “I’ll take this to my captain, explain what you’ve been up to. We’ll get sector cars doing routine checks of the Blend all night, and when you open tomorrow, you’ll have at least one plainclothes officer undercover inside throughout the day.”

  “Thank you, Mike.” It was far from the first time I’d said it, but I meant it as much as ever.

  “One more thing, Clare.”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you please send Allegro back in here? I’d like a private word with him.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “DON’T move . . .”

  The male voice at my ear was no more than a whisper. I’d been sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, so soundly, so sweetly under a heap of bedcovers. Then came the voice, dragging me back to the land of the conscious, the anxious, the miserably alert.

  “Mike?”

  “You heard me. Don’t move . . .”

  I was lying on my side, still groggy and disoriented, when I felt the mattress sinking behind me. Under the blankets, large hands caressed my curves.

  “What time is it?”

  “All the clocks have stopped, sweetheart. There is no time. Right now there’s nothing but you and me . . .”

  Soft tugs coaxed off my nightshirt. The touch of slightly calloused fingers were cool at first, but quickly warmed on my naked skin. Tender kisses came next, to the back of my shoulder, along my neck, around my jawline . . .

  I smiled in the dark.

  A few minutes later, Quinn’s long, heavy body was covering mine, and I found my way back to sweet oblivion.

  AN hour later, we were lying together, still under the covers, my head on his shoulder, his durable arm around me.

  “Mike . . . ?”

  My voice sounded shamefully hesitant in the shadowy chill of the pre-dawn room. “There’s something I didn’t tell you earlier . . .”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. But you go first.”

  “No,” I said, far from eager to spill. “You.”

  “All right, well . . . Remember that private word I had with your ex-husband?”

  “Yeah, what was that about? Matt wouldn’t tell me . . .”

  “I asked him to stay here with you.”

  “You’re kidding . . .”

  Not so long ago, Mike nearly broke up with me because Matt was still making use of this duplex. “I can’t believe it,” I said. “You asked Matt to stay here with me?”

  “I didn’t want you to be in the building alone. That’s all. Matt agreed with me.”

  “Oh, no, he didn’t. I was up here all night alone—until you came.”

  “You were alone in the duplex, Clare, but not in the building. Allegro spent the night downstairs in the Blend, doing business with Europe and Japan on his PDA. I spoke to him before I came upstairs to you, told him to get home, try to get some rest . . .”

  Once again, I was surprised, but only a little. Matteo Allegro’s long list of petty vices continued to be trumped by one major virtue: the man had a ferocious protective
streak. Whether it was his daughter, his mother, his new wife, or old, my ex-husband refused to accept someone he loved being in harm’s way.

  “Okay, sweetheart, your turn,” Mike said, his voice almost teasing. I felt a soft kiss on my hair. “What didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “I went to your cousin’s firehouse last night.”

  Mike’s big, warm body froze against mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Your cousin swore to me on the phone that he wouldn’t be there—”

  “But he was anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked you to stay away from him, Clare.”

  “I thought I was staying away from him. I swear. He lied to me—”

  “You promised me.”

  “You’re not listening, Mike. Try to understand . . .”

  I did my best to explain my side of it. “I needed to do it. I needed to find answers. The problem is . . . I found more questions . . .”

  Mike let my final statement hang for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “You want to explain what that’s supposed to mean?”

  “It means your cousin told me about the history between you and his younger brother, Kevin . . .”

  Mike exhaled, loud and long. “Let’s get this out of the way, all right? I want to know every single thing that son-of-a-bitch cousin of mine told you.”

  “Fine.” I threw off the covers and got up.

  “Clare! Where are you going?!”

  “I’m not going to discuss your cousin in this bed,” I said, grabbing my robe, wrapping it tight. “Are you hungry? I need to cook.”

  “Oh?” Mike blinked, his tone suddenly more pliable. “What did you have in mind?”

  CRAB cakes. That’s what I had in mind. Mike loved them, and I’d already picked up two pounds of fresh lump crabmeat from the Lobster Place on Bleecker. (Blue, of course. For Maryland-style cakes, the crabs really should be blue.)

  So, okay, seafood wasn’t your typical breakfast fare. But Mike had been up all night and this was going to be dinner for him.

  Now, as the coral glow of dawn lightened the darkness beyond my window, I made a pot of coffee and poured two mugs. Quinn sat at my kitchen table in sweat pants and a faded Rangers T-shirt, his feet bare, his dark blond hair mussed. The man had a strong presence, even when he didn’t say a word. With his twilight blue eyes watching my every move over the rim of his coffee mug, I found it difficult to focus on the cooking, but I did my level best.

  Back around midnight, I’d already mixed the crabmeat with binders and herbs and formed the small patties. Now I pulled the wax paper covered plates from the fridge, brushed them lightly with an egg wash, and carefully rolled each in a crisp breading of Japanese panko.

  The clammy texture of the chilly patties against my fingers and palms reminded me of another dish—my nonna’s spinach and ricotta malfatti, just one of the daily take-out specialties we made for her grocery.

  Malfatti, which translates to “badly formed,” were essentially dumplings of ravioli filling (hold the pasta). But the idea I found useful at this very moment was bigger than that. Italian culinary philosophy dictated that you never apologized for your mistake. You just made up a little name for it and moved along.

  My malfatti look lumpy? Hey, don’t blame me! They’re called badly formed, aren’t they? Those little meringue-hazelnut cookies of mine resemble toadstool tops? So what! They’re called brutti ma buoni, right? Ugly but good!

  It was exactly the tack I took with Mike, explaining (but never apologizing) for my encounter with his cousin the previous evening.

  Laughable, wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t my fault your cousin was there. Don’t blame me!

  (Of course, I was careful to leave out the part about his flame-haired twin inviting me to play Texas Hold ’Em in Atlantic City.) But then I got to the story of how Mike had put his career ahead of his younger cousin Kevin . . .

  When I finished, Mike appeared to come down with a prolonged case of lockjaw. Finally, he let out a harsh laugh.

  “He’s such a piece of work . . .”

  “Kevin?”

  “Michael. He gave you selected highlights, Clare, a carefully redacted tale of Quinn ancient history . . .”

  “You’ll have to explain.”

  “Kevin Quinn was supposed to follow in his late father’s footsteps, just like his older brother. But Kevin’s partying got out of hand. Underage drinking became a major problem. And then he began to drive drunk.”

  “So it wasn’t just a one time thing?”

  “No. When Kevin was pulled over in Manhattan one night, he used my name to get the officers to give him another chance. The pair contacted me themselves—I was on duty so I showed up inside of ten minutes to take my idiot younger cousin off their hands. I drove Kevin straight home, warned the kid to sober the hell up and straighten out. But Kevin blew it.”

  “What do you mean? He drove drunk again?”

  “A few months later, just before he was supposed to start training at the fire academy, the kid was back behind the wheel, loaded up on boilermakers. This time it wasn’t just a pull over, it was a traffic accident. He went right through a red light, banged up another vehicle. No one was badly hurt, but a few seconds’ difference in that crash and Kevin could have injured or even killed two young women.”

  “Oh my God . . .”

  “The story’s not over: this time Michael came to me, hat in hand, asking me to help out his little brother, just like I’d done before. Make it go away. Those were his words. But things were different this time. Kevin was falling down drunk when the arresting officers took him in. By the time I heard about it, he was already in the system. I made sure the kid got a good lawyer. I stood up for him in court, vouched for his character. It was all I could do.”

  “It didn’t help?”

  “The judge didn’t care in the least that Kevin had a relative on the job. She believed he needed a hard lesson. I didn’t say so at the time, but so did I. Kevin pleaded guilty and went to jail for a brief time. It killed his chances of becoming a New York City firefighter, and Michael never forgave me for not doing more to help his brother. But, Clare, I swear I did all I could.”

  I turned back to the stove, considering Mike’s words as I slipped six panko-breaded crab cakes into the hot peanut oil. The patties sizzled, the fresh herbs inside giving a hint of floral fragrance to the kitchen, but the primary sensation in the air was heavy and cloying, the kind of feeling you get when you know something is being fried.

  “I don’t understand why you and your cousin have to be at war over this,” I said. “Your actions were obviously reasonable and Kevin was in the wrong. How could anyone trust a kid like that to be a responsible firefighter, for God’s sake?”

  “Most of the family is on my side, Clare. Kevin even forgave me for not doing more to get him off the hook. But Michael never did.”

  “Why not? If what you say is true—”

  “It is. But my cousin’s told his version of that story for so many years now he actually believes it. And that’s the tragedy.”

  I turned back to the burner. Mixing and forming crab cakes was simple enough, but cooking them was not. For one thing, there wasn’t much keeping the patties together (not if you wanted to taste crabmeat instead of bread crumbs and binders), so poking them was a bad idea. Flipping should be done only once. And turning them was tricky. Anything held together this precariously had to be handled with finesse.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Mike, tried to keep my voice light and casual. “How many years ago did all of that happen, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Twelve or so, I guess . . .”

  “Is Kevin okay now?”

  “Kevin’s doing just fine for himself, Clare. He’s an engineer, married with two kids, and makes a perfectly good living. Until last summer, he had a great job at a firm in the city.”

  “But he had to move to Boston, right?”

  “That’s right . . .”

&nb
sp; Mike’s voice trailed off, and I let it go, focusing on the completion of his meal. Using a spatula I slipped four of the hot crab cakes onto a large dinner plate, placed three colorful mounds of my homemade condiments around them: lemon-garlic mayo; dill-laced mustard sauce; and avocado, gherkin, and roasted pepper relish. Finally, I piled a generous side of my Thai-style coleslaw into a small salad bowl. (In my opinion, the sweet heat and bright astringency of my Thai slaw was the perfect accompaniment to the unctuous richness of the pan-fried seafood.)

  Mike picked up his fork and dug in. “Oh, man, this is good . . .”

  I made up my own plate and sat down.

  “So . . .” I carefully poked. “Boston?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, pausing to chew and swallow. “Kevin was downsized recently—just last year—and he had to relocate for a new job, but I hear he’s happy in Massachusetts. And the last time I checked, he no longer touches alcohol.”

  As Mike inhaled his dinner, I ate my two warm cakes in silence, trying my best to enjoy the freshly fried flavor of lightly breaded seafood, the complementary notes in the tricolored accompaniments. But I still wasn’t satisfied.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything else between you and your cousin? Just the incident with Kevin?”

  Mike looked down, suddenly focusing his attention on the last little bits on his plate. “The thing with Kevin, Clare . . . that’s what Michael won’t forgive.”

  “You know, it sounds to me like your choosing your words carefully again. There’s more to this story, isn’t there?”

  “That’s all I can tell you . . .”

  “You mean that’s all you want to tell me.”

  Mike looked up then, finally met my eyes. “Sweetheart, I’m going to ask you one more time to stay away from my cousin. Will you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise me, Clare.”