On What Grounds

by Cleo Coyle

  I asked how he’d met Joy. Apparently, he’d been friends with the guest saucier instructor who’d balled Joy out for ruining her hollandaise sauce. Mario had been observing the class in support of his friend, and after the class, he’d approached Joy.

  “My heart went out to this pretty little girl. She looked as though she was going to cry—and I remembered how stupido I felt when I had made a mistake at my first job in a four-star restaurant. I was hired the day I applied because the chef was on the spot. He handed me the house recipe for cream of mushroom soup and told me to prepare it for Sunday brunch. I went to work, and when it was done, the chef tried some.”

  “He didn’t like it?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Mario replied. “The soup was superb, and for a very good reason. Along with the cultivated mushrooms, I had diced a thousand dollars’ worth of truffles. I felt so like an ass because I had made the most expensive pot of soup in history! I explained to the head chef that I had never taken classes, that I always learned on the job. But the little restaurants I had worked in…Well, they didn’t serve truffles. I got fired anyway. Of course, that was a long time ago.”

  “Oh, so you don’t make mistakes anymore?” Matt said.

  Mario’s eyes met Matt’s. “No.”

  Joy hung on Mario’s every word. The boy’s arrogance would be interpreted by her as confidence. I knew this because I had been young and in love with a guy like this, too.

  In Mario’s defense, however, he was otherwise polite, lively, intelligent, and when it came to Joy, clearly considerate. Of course Matteo hated him already, even after Mario diplomatically asked for seconds on the carbonara (that was a nice surprise) and repeatedly complimented the Venetian champagne.

  By the time dessert rolled around, things were far more congenial than they had been when the long evening began, though Matt still eyed Mario warily and answered most of the questions asked of him with a monosyllabic grunt.

  Along with the chilled cheesecake, I served a hearty espresso made with a dark-roasted Antigua bean. Its smooth nutty flavor perfectly complemented the walnut crust of the cappuccino cheesecake.

  To my delight, Mario went on and on about the quality of the espresso. (Okay, I admit it. The kid managed to work his way onto my good side.)

  By eleven o’clock, Joy said it was time to go, claiming she had an early class tomorrow. With a final hug, she and her new boyfriend were gone.

  “She sure can pick them,” Matteo said miserably.

  “She’s a chip off the old block,” I replied.

  Matteo looked at me, puzzled for a moment.

  “Our daughter managed to find a guy who is self-assured to the point of arrogance, something of a know-it-all, but smooth and charming as they come. Sound familiar?”

  “No,” Matteo said.

  “No? You idiot! He’s just like you!”

  “What? You’re crazy! He’s nothing like me!” Matteo threw up his hands. “I’m going to clean out the second bedroom so I don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

  “Fine,” I replied. “I’ll clean up here, then go down to the Blend to close up with Tucker.”

  I hadn’t forgotten the sad events of this day. And I remembered that I still had to prepare a list of employees and their addresses and phone numbers for Detective Quinn—which I didn’t want to mention to Matt, considering his opinion of our local gumshoe. I also had to juggle everyone’s work schedule to cover Anabelle’s absence.

  When the kitchen was clean, the dishes done (except for a single espresso cup that seemed to be strangely missing), I bagged up the garbage to carry it downstairs. On the landing just outside the front door I found a second plastic bag full of stuff—boyhood items Matteo was tossing to make room for the foldaway bed. I peered into the bag.

  There were a few dog-eared magazines, mostly, dating back to the 1970s, including vintage issues of Playboy. There was an old board game, Risk, which I thought quite appropriate, and a battered copy of Ernest Hemingway’s paean to the bohemian life in Paris, A Moveable Feast—undoubtedly a seminal influence on Matteo’s young mind.

  Amazing what someone’s garbage will tell you.

  Then it hit me. Garbage—specifically the garbage in the can in front of the Blend’s basement steps this morning, the garbage that Anabelle supposedly slipped on before she was sent down the stairs and into a coma.

  I dropped my own sack of kitchen garbage on the landing and hurried down the steps. I wanted to grab the bag in question before Tucker carried it outside to be collected. The crime scene unit had already examined the bag and dismissed it as evidence, but they didn’t know this place as well as I did.

  Within that Blend garbage, there might be something that they’d overlooked, some clue that would help me prove what I knew in my gut: That Anabelle’s “accident” was no accident at all. It was a slim hope, perhaps, but given the news of our insurance fiasco, I was close to desperate.

  As I entered the Blend from the back staircase, Tucker was just locking the coffeehouse’s front door. “Garbage!” I cried out like a madwoman. “Where is this morning’s garbage?”

  “Lined up in the basement with the rest,” Tucker replied. “I was about to put it outside.”

  I took the basement stairs two at a time, and scanned the line of dark green plastic bags lined up against the stone wall. After singling out the one with lingering flakes of fine grayish white powder still clinging to its waterproof surface—the one the crime scene unit had dusted for prints—I dragged it directly underneath the fluorescent lights.

  I was surprised they hadn’t impounded the whole mess, but I guess they didn’t need foul old garbage stinking up their evidence room. And anyway, Detective Quinn had made it clear that everything about the scene and Anabelle’s body made the incident appear to be an accident, not a crime.

  I gingerly unwrapped the wire tie on the top of the bag and opened the mouth. Inside was a second bag sealed with a wire tie as well. This was standard for the Blend. Coffee and espresso grounds, as well as tea leaves, are moist, so we use two bags behind the counter—one inside the other—as double protection against breakage or spillage.

  After opening both bags, I peered inside, not quite sure for what I was searching. At first glance, the contents seemed typical enough. The bag was filled with off-white paper filters stained with coffee grounds, loose grounds, and caked grounds dumped from espresso baskets—some still retaining their packed circular shape hours after being discarded. Most of the paper filters were encrusted with dark black grounds that shined like oil under the harsh light. These were the remains of our famous French Roast—the Blend’s Brew of the Day on that unfortunate evening.

  Pie-pan-sized paper filters from another urn were lined with a lighter, brown mass that resembled mud—which told me a Colombian bean had been brewed at one point (and that the beans had been ground too fine, which probably resulted in a bitter cup. I made a mental note to lecture the staff yet again on the proper grinding techniques).

  Soiled napkins, disposable plates, and half-eaten pastry sat amid crushed cardboard cups, stirring sticks, paper towels, and other refuse, but none of it could be considered unusual—let alone incriminating.

  I sighed.

  So much for intuition.

  And yet…I couldn’t dismiss my feeling that there was something here in this garbage bag that could shed some light on what had really happened a little over twenty-four hours ago.

  I stared down at the contents of the plastic sack and realized that this foul garbage was possibly the last thing Anabelle saw before her tumble down the stairs. The morbid thought sent a slight shudder right through me, which is the reason I screamed like a banshee when I felt strong fingers grip my shoulder.

  After the bloodcurdling noise echoed off the thick stone walls, a voice spoke—

  “Good god, relax. It’s me.”

  “Matt!”

  “Didn’t you hear me coming down the steps?”

  “I was lost in thou
ght,” I said, my voice still shaking a bit from the scare. “What the hell are you doing down here anyway?”

  “I found this bag of kitchen garbage leaking on the landing,” Matteo said, tossing the sack onto the pile. “I brought it down before it ruined the parquet.”

  “I guess I dropped it when I came down here.”

  “You dropped the garbage on the way downstairs to put the garbage out? Clare, are you feeling all right?”

  “Forget it,” I said, facing him. It was then that I noticed the tiny espresso cup Matteo gripped in one hand.

  His eyes followed mine. “I found it on the end table in the hallway,” Matteo explained. “Mario must have left it there after dinner. Joy was showing him the apartment, I guess.”

  “So put it in the dishwasher,” I replied. “Unless you think it’s so polluted by that boy’s touch that you’re planning on throwing it away.”

  There was a pause as I waited for Matt to say something.

  “I think they were kissing,” he said.

  I blinked. “That’s what two people who like each other tend to do,” I said evenly. “Usually they do it every chance they get.”

  “So, you really think she likes him?” Matteo asked.

  There was a touch of anguish in Matt’s voice that, to be honest, I couldn’t share. I had lived through too many of Joy’s grade school crushes, her junior high school dates, a summer fling, and even a serious high school romance to fret over yet another romantic interest in my daughter’s life. Of course, Matt was there for none of it, so this was all new to him. Poor man.

  “Don’t you know how to read coffee grounds?” Matt asked.

  Now that was a silly question, and certainly a leading one. My ex-husband knew perfectly well that I read coffee grounds the way some read tarot cards. I learned it from my grandmother, who learned it from hers.

  I know, I know! It sounds ridiculously medieval. Yet it is an ancient art, and coffee ground and tea leaf divination—collectively known as tasseography—is a little like interpreting a work of art.

  Coffee residue or tea leaves dry at the bottom of a cup to form a “picture.” Interpreting that picture is similar to gazing at clouds and trying to see the shapes of bunnies, locomotives, sheep, what have you. And as with cloud gazing, two people may see the same cloud and interpret it entirely differently.

  One might see a mushroom, for instance, and another a mushroom cloud—which makes tasseography a kind of Rorschach test, too, since the person seeing the mushroom and the one seeing the nuclear detonation might just have slightly different worldviews.

  In any event, to “divine” tea or coffee, you study the “picture” created by drying tea leaves or coffee residue on the bottom of a cup. You then let your subconscious loose to freely associate ideas.

  When I was young, I thought it was a good party trick, and I often used it as a way to meet people, including boys. As the years passed, however, I learned that my divination skills with coffee grounds could be uncannily accurate. A few things happened that scared me. And I now did it only rarely.

  “What do you see?” Matt said, waving Mario’s used espresso cup under my nose.

  I wanted to turn away, but despite my better judgment I gazed into the depths of that cup. The remains of the coffee grounds had dried to form the distinctive shape of a hammer in the center of the cup. Around that hammer was a halo of stains shaped like licks of fire.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, pushing the cup away. “You know it’s just a parlor trick. And I haven’t done it in years. I can’t tell you anything more about that boy than you already know.”

  “I know I don’t like him.”

  “Fancy that.”

  Abandoning my quest, I tied the garbage bag again. Out of habit, I tied the inner bag first. But as I was about to close the outer bag, I noticed a bulge on one side of the sack. A wad of garbage had ended up wedged between the two layers of plastic. From working behind the counter myself, I knew that happened sometimes, usually when some last-minute trash turned up after the inner bag, filled to the brim, had already been sealed.

  I opened the outer bag wide and reached down between the plastic layers.

  “What are you doing now?” Matt said, clearly repulsed.

  “Reading garbage,” I replied. “A whole other brand of divination.”

  “Not if you count the supermarket tabloids. Didn’t they go through the late JFK Junior’s garbage on a fairly regular basis?”

  “I guess that’s why they call it muckraking,” I said, poking around until my fingers closed on what felt like a mushy mass of cold, wet spinach. Steeling myself, I drew out the sloppy blob.

  Matt watched over my shoulder as I opened my hand. A hand that was stained with a wad of used tea leaves. Green tea leaves, just about enough for a grande cup’s worth.

  Anabelle herself was not a tea drinker, so she must have brewed it for someone else. No doubt, the tea leaves were wedged between the two bags because she’d already tied the first bag for the night when she’d tossed the leaves away. So brewing that tea must have been one of the last things she’d done that evening.

  If I was correct, and someone had entered the store and assaulted Anabelle that night, then said person was a tea drinker.

  My mind raced. Tea drinkers were not common at the Blend. But just today I’d spoken to four—Letitia Vale, who had no motive; Anabelle’s stepmother, Darla Branch Hart, who either had a motive or was simply an opportunist in the face of her stepdaughter’s tragedy; and the two Russian dancers, Vita and Petra, who certainly did have a motive.

  “What’s up?” Matt asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “That maybe I should have learned to read tea leaves instead of coffee grounds.”

  SEVENTEEN

  T HE next morning, I opened the Blend on time. At ten minutes after six, Dr. John Foo was through the door like clockwork.

  “Good morning, Clare,” he said.

  “The usual, Dr. Foo?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  As I pulled the two espresso shots for the double tall latte, I made the usual small talk with the handsome young Chinese-American medical resident. After his morning workouts at the dojo down the street, he was usually in a chatty mood. For the past four weeks, since I began managing the Blend again, I listened and learned.

  The first time we met, he’d told me one of the forms he studied was Wing Chun Gung Fu. “It was actually invented by a Buddhist nun named Ng Mui,” he’d said.

  I knew nothing about martial arts, or Buddhism. But any form of self-defense invented by a nun was definitely worth learning more about in my book, so I’d been chatting about it with him ever since. Dr. Foo had even showed me a few simple moves, encouraging me to take it up at his dojo—but finding free time had been a challenge over the last four weeks. The struggle to get the Blend back on its feet had been all-consuming.

  “So how are things at the hospital?” I finally got around to asking as I gave him his latte.

  “They’re going well,” he said. “I’m learning a lot on this rotation in the intensive care unit.”

  He took his first sip, closed his eyes and smiled. “Great cup, Clare. As usual. Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  As he picked up the protective cardboard sleeve and slipped it onto the very hot cup, I asked, “Have you learned anything more about Anabelle Hart?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I got the information you wanted. But this has to stay confidential, agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  What Dr. Foo said about Anabelle’s condition shocked me, but it didn’t change my plans. So, a few hours later, at just after 10 A.M., Matt took over managing the Blend and I ventured out.

  The Dance 10 Studio was located in a refurbished office furniture warehouse on Seventh Avenue South

  , a bustling thoroughfare that cut through the heart of Greenwich Village’s historic district.

  Lined with bars, restaurants, off-Broadwa
y theaters, and cabarets, the wide, high-traffic avenue attracted high-spirited crowds nightly. On some Friday and Saturday evenings, it reminded me of Mardis Gras in the French Quarter. Anything went.

  On a Friday morning, however, the wide avenue was quiet. The windows of the bars, restaurants, and cabarets were dark, and the vehicular traffic relatively light as I crossed the street.

  I actually wanted to approach Dance 10 from the opposite side of the avenue from where it stood. According to Tucker, there was a little bar located there, and randy college boys, cheap beers in hand, were said to use the vantage to drool up at the dance studio’s wall of windows, where honed female forms floated across the wood floor during the last rehearsals of the night.

  “The straight little boys start their pub crawls there,” Tucker explained to me, “because if they don’t manage to get lucky during the course of the night, then at least they’ve got a female form or two to fantasize about in the wee hours.”

  I decided to see for myself if there was any truth to that particular rumor—and, unfortunately, there was.

  Directly across the avenue from Dance 10 were the tall front windows of Mañana, a little dive of a bar with a fake south-of-the-border motif—the prerequisite sombreros, horse blankets, and piñatas dangled from hooks on its walls and over its stained wooden bar.

  Mañana survived for four reasons, according to Tucker:

  It caught the overflow from the much bigger Caliente Cab Co., a huge bar/restaurant with its most memorable characteristic being a giant-size margarita glass hoisted over its doorway.

  It served the cheapest beers in the area. (The stuff tasted like “piss,” so said Tucker, but it got you drunk for far less money.)

  The name Mañana meant “tomorrow” and was sometimes used among college freshmen who enjoyed showing off their knowledge of high school Spanish. Consequently, “See you Mañana” would confuse their half-drunk friends who hadn’t studied the language and they’d end up stumbling into this eponymous dive. And last but not least—