Decaffeinated Corpse

by Cleo Coyle

  For a split second, I glanced up, toward the end of the alley. That’s when I saw it—a dim outline slumped against our building’s brick wall.

  My god . . .

  I stood and gawked for a stunned five seconds. Then I let go of the Dumpster’s lid, barely registering the earsplitting clang of the heavy metal.

  There’s a body, I realized. There’s a body in my alley.

  THREE

  LONG after the fact, what I did next would seem less than brilliant. Okay, yes, in retrospect, I probably should have run back inside and yelled for help. I should have been too upset to be intrigued, but I wasn’t.

  Why exactly I felt no fear, I couldn’t swear to. Maybe what I witnessed on 9/11 makes all other potential threats seem trivial. Maybe now that my daughter has left home, I’m done with being circumspect 24/7. Maybe it was simply a residual by-product of excessive caffeine consumption, but I’d reached a point in my life when potential threats no longer cowed me. Something spurred me forward . . . in this case, through the shadows behind the Blend.

  For a moment, I couldn’t make out much more than a silhouette at the end of the alley. The misty darkness was too thick, the streetlight’s illumination stopping at the sidewalk. I considered this might be a homeless person, even though the homeless were much more prevalent in the funkier East Village than the more affluent West, and when they took to sleeping (or passing out) on the New York pavement, authorities picked them up and delivered them to city shelters.

  Shelters weren’t a picnic. The homeless avoided them for many reasons, including fear of theft—of what little property they had—and violence, or unwillingness to comply with the shelter’s rules. But the imperfect system was better than some of the bleaker alternatives.

  When I’d first managed the Blend, in my twenties, I’d come across a homeless man during a morning walk. I’d dropped Joy off at kindergarten and was in no hurry to return to our little apartment. Matt had stumbled in during the wee hours, zonked after an endless flight from somewhere—Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica . . . take your pick. Silly me wanted to surprise him by doing his unpacking, but I was the one who’d gotten the surprise. I’d found it buried at the bottom of his Pullman: a box of condoms.

  For a few pathetic seconds, I’d tried to tell myself that my young husband had bought the box upon touchdown at JFK, anticipating his return to our bed. But it was far too easy to examine the box and see that there were not in fact twenty-four foiled packets inside, as the black box with the purple lettering proclaimed. There were fourteen.

  During his three weeks away from me, Matt had used ten condoms—and I doubted very much he’d used them during the ninety-minute taxi ride from Queens to Manhattan.

  It wasn’t the last time Matt would stray. For years he would deny it. The condom box, he would later explain, was something he’d had on hand for weeks before the trip and packed in case I decided to fly out and join him for a weekend. I’d accepted such a lame excuse for the same reason all wives of cheating husbands do: I didn’t want my marriage to end.

  On that particular morning, the morning I found the condoms, I was still too much in love with Matt. I also loved managing his mother’s coffeehouse, baking for the customers, having little Joy play in the Blend after school, usually with my mother-in-law stopping in for a visit. Every busy morning and sunny afternoon felt achingly familiar, like the days of my childhood in Pennsylvania, when I practically lived with my grandmother in her Italian grocery.

  That box of condoms was a live grenade thrown into the middle of my sweet, cozy life. I was shocked, hurt, furious. Matt was still snoring away in bed, and I wanted to throttle him in his sleep, throw the box at him, demand an explanation. But I didn’t—

  Little Joy was calling me. It was time to take her to school. So I took her. Then I took myself on a long walk along the river to think. The February morning was frigid, but I didn’t care. I chose a path that would insure me some privacy to consider Matt, my marriage, and what I’d discovered. And then I discovered something else—a body.

  I still remember how the corpse had been dressed, with so many layers of sweatshirts he couldn’t close the buttons on his long, soiled overcoat. The coat was a finely tailored garment, the kind a CEO’s new wife might have given away during the city’s annual winter coat drive, gleefully making room in her husband’s closets for more fashionable frocks.

  A two-wheeled handcart stood beside the frozen man, overflowing with three bulging green garbage bags, presumably his only possessions. Newspapers covered his torso and legs, a collection of dailies others had read and tossed. One stiff hand gripped an empty bottle of vodka, the drunk’s method for keeping warm, which killed you all the faster when you were out in the cold.

  This was every struggling, transplanted New Yorker’s nightmare: to end up alone, destitute, living on the street. . . . I called 911 and waited for the ambulance to come, watched the paramedics zip him into a body bag and wheel him away on a stretcher.

  There was no ID on the dead man, and I wondered who he’d been in life, how he’d fallen so far, whether anyone would cry over his death. Then I realized I was crying, since I’d been too late to care.

  I wandered home, feeling weak and mortal, my anger chilled by dread. My grandmother had passed away by then, my father was serving time in a penitentiary for running an illegal sports book, and my mother had been gone from my life since I was seven.

  If I left Matt, Joy would come with me. But would I be able to properly provide for her, give her what she might want or need? In the dead of winter, in my early twenties, I didn’t think I could. And Matt was far from a harsh or aloof partner, quite the opposite. When he was actually around, he’d been an understanding companion, an adoring lover, and a doting dad. Like it or not, I was still very passionately in love with my husband.

  Thus began my master’s program in ignoring and pretending, tolerating and rationalizing: Matt’s not cheating. I buy his explanations . . . okay, Matt is cheating, but he says the sex means nothing, a physical experience with no more meaning than his mountain biking or rock climbing . . . Matt’s drug use is no big deal. He has the cocaine under control . . .

  It would take me a decade to douse my burning infatuation for my larger-than-life husband, corral my runaway fears. At twenty-nine, I would finally build up the courage to quit the job I’d loved, managing the Blend for Madame, and move to New Jersey with Joy. A shaky collection of part-time employment followed, which led to a viable career as a freelance writer—first with a regular culinary column in a local paper, then trade magazine pieces, and even one article in the New York Times.

  It would take me another ten years to forgive my child’s father, decide and admit what I really wanted (this partnership in the Blend), and stop making my life about hiding and withdrawing, worrying and retreating, even when things looked dubious or dangerous . . . like now.

  AS I continued to move through the shadows of my alley, I became more and more concerned about the slumped-over man. Was he just passed out? Knocked out? Or worse?

  Within a few feet of him, I finally saw that he was too well dressed to be homeless. His gorgeous tan jacket was butter-soft suede; his fine brown slacks, the caramelized color of espresso crema. Neither appeared worn or ripped. He was propped in a sitting position against our back wall, his arms and legs limp.

  I remembered Madame’s stories—the poets and painters of ye olde hipster Village. But things had changed too much since the days of the beat generation. Today’s West Villagers didn’t get falling down drunk on a nightly basis. The residents of this era were all about civilized, progressive attitudes and sophisticated tastes. And it just wasn’t sophisticated to get so blotto you peed in St. Luke’s churchyard and vomited on your obscenely expensive Bruno Magli shoes.

  The unconscious man appeared to be attractive, too, not just well dressed. His sturdy, clean-shaven chin rested on a solid chest. The stranger’s head was bowed, his black hair cut just like Matt’s, in a ne
at, masculine Caesar. In fact, if I hadn’t seen Matt inside the Blend, I might have mistaken this man for my ex.

  “Hello?” I called softly. “Are you all right?”

  Brilliant, Clare, of course he’s not all right.

  Was he even breathing? I bent over the body, peered into his face and gasped. The man on the ground wasn’t a stranger. It took me a few seconds, but the memory came back to me . . . the man in my alley was Federico Gostwick.

  Matt was right, I realized. Ric looked as if he’d hardly aged one year, let alone ten. I could see he was breathing; and, thank goodness, he wasn’t dead, but he obviously needed help.

  My hand slipped under my apron. I felt around for the small, hard rectangle in my jeans pocket, but it wasn’t there. My cell phone was missing. I couldn’t call 911 because I’d left it behind the counter!

  I was ready to dash back inside when I heard footsteps on the nearby sidewalk, crisp and quick, aggressive, purposeful. I turned my head toward the approaching passerby, and that’s when I felt the shove—hard and deliberate.

  I was half crouched over Ric, off balance already, and the violent push propelled me forward, into the old bricks. For a split second, I think I was out. I remember the slamming connection to the cold wall, then nothing for a moment. I blinked and realized I was down on the ground.

  My hands moved under me, wet pebbles scratching my palms. My apron felt heavy, restrictive. I struggled to rise, but the ground seemed to tilt dramatically, like those old Batman TV shows when the villain was cackling with evil glee. I fell back again. The icy drizzle stung my face and hands, the nearby Dumpster smelled rank. I heard the distant scream of a police siren, glimpsed a navy blue baseball hat, the trademark NY logo embroidered above the bill.

  For a split second the Yankee cap was there, resting near me on the concrete. Then it was gone, snatched away. I sat up quickly but saw no one close by—except Ric’s body, still slumped against the wall.

  The top of my forehead was throbbing as I scrambled to my feet. My breathing was fast and shallow. I was disturbed, angry, and yes, finally, I was scared. Still, I had to risk a look. Stepping carefully, I moved beyond the alley, hoping to catch the glimpse of a figure running away on the sidewalk or lurking in a nearby townhouse doorway.

  I peered east down the dark, quiet street; then west, toward brightly lit Hudson. I searched for any sign—male or female, short or fat, tall or thin. But there was not one human being on the block. Not that I could see. The night’s shadows had cloaked my attacker.

  He . . . or she . . . had vanished.

  FOUR

  “HAND me your cell phone,” I asked Matt five minutes later.

  “Why?”

  “Because I left mine behind the counter, and I’m calling 911!”

  We were back inside the Blend. I’d already sounded the alarm. Matt had followed me outside, Tucker on his heels, and I’d led them to the end of the alleyway.

  By then, Ric’s eyelids had fluttered open, and he was making groggy, incomprehensible noises. Matt and Tucker helped him inside and lowered him into an easy chair by the fireplace so we could take a look at his condition.

  Joy rushed across the wood plank floor when she saw us coming, bumping through our cafe tables, most of them still empty. Those few customers nursing cappuccinos and espressos lifted their heads from their laptops, newspapers, and trade paperbacks. But as we closed ranks around Ric and lowered our voices, they went back to minding their own business—a skill ninety-nine percent of New Yorkers have perfected.

  (I’d once seen a four-hundred-pound man in a purple flowered muumuu belt out the entire first act of Oklahoma between Canal and 116th streets on the Number One train, and every rider in the subway pretended absolutely nothing out of the ordinary was happening. It wasn’t that hard to believe. I’d been one of those riders pretending.)

  As I tore off my wet, dirty apron, I quickly explained to Matt, Tucker, and Joy what had happened in the alley: that Ric was not passed out drunk; he’d been attacked, most likely by the same person who’d shoved me into the Blend’s brick wall. That’s when I asked Matt for his cell phone to call the authorities.

  “Don’t do that,” Ric murmured to me.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t call 911.”

  I stared in confusion. Those three little numbers represented more than the date of an infamous terrorist attack. Once dialed, the common citizen could immediately summon his own little uniformed army, including a team of battle-hardened paramedics. It was a tax-funded service any medieval duke would have envied, and I was more than ready to take advantage of it. So why the heck wasn’t Ric?

  “Please,” he said, “no police.”

  “But you need to report what happened,” I said, “and get some medical attention—”

  “I’m fine. Really, it’s no big deal.”

  “Of course it’s a big deal!”

  Ric remained adamant, and I considered calling 911 anyway. After all I was assaulted, too, and right in my back alley. But then I stopped to consider . . . there might be reasons Ric was reluctant to deal with the NYPD.

  “Is it your paperwork?” I asked. “Is your visa expired?”

  Ric shook his head. “No. I’m legally here . . . I just don’t believe we need to make a large matter of this . . . May I have something to drink?”

  Everyone nodded, and Joy ran off to get Ric some water, but I refused to budge—physically or mentally.

  Although I hadn’t seen Federico Gostwick in years, I remembered a few things about the man. His striking good looks for one. With a British dad and Caribbean mom, he’d inherited an amazing combination of features: the patrician profile and six feet of height from his father; the olive complexion and thick ebony hair from his mother. Add fluid mastery of Spanish and Portuguese, English spoken with a slight British accent, and a romantic nature, and he had a recipe for (quite literally) charming the pants off any woman he met.

  That gave me pause . . . had Ric known his attacker? Was it a jilted girlfriend perhaps or a jealous husband?

  I lowered my voice. “I won’t call the police,” I told him. “But I want you to tell me every detail of what happened out there.”

  “Sure, love, but there’s not much to tell . . .” He shrugged. “I was coming down the side street, on the way to your front door on Hudson, when someone approached me from behind. I remembered a sharp poke in my back, like the end of a gun shoving into my ribs. Then bam . . .”

  Ric fell silent and rubbed the back of his head. There had to be more to this story, but he’d stopped talking. I glanced at Matt.

  C’mon, help me out here.

  I waited for my usually glib ex to ask some questions of his own, argue with his friend about his reluctance to call the police. In the face of my pointed stare, Matt said not a word.

  With a frustrated exhale, I turned back to Ric. “What do you mean bam?” I pressed. “Didn’t your attacker speak? Ask for anything?”

  Ric shook his head. “There was only this mechanical-like voice—”

  “Mechanical?” Tucker repeated. He and I exchanged confused glances. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, uh”—Ric’s hand waved, some Spanish phrases followed, and then—“the kind you hear on answering machines?”

  “Answering machines? You mean . . . a computerized voice like this?” Tucker asked, giving an impression that landed somewhere between Stephen Hawking and the automated teller who answers my bank’s phone.

  Ric nodded. “That’s it, but it wasn’t coming from a person the way you just did it. This voice sounded tinny, like it was being played on a recorder.”

  Tucker’s nose wrinkled up on his angular face. He glanced at me. “That seems odd. A mugger with a prerecorded message?”

  “Yeah, that’s odd, all right,” I said. “So, what did this mechanical voice say?”

  Ric shrugged. “I have a gun in your back. Put your hands up.”

  “Did you?” I asked.
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  “Yes.”

  “Then what happened?” Joy asked. She’d returned by now and was handing Ric a cup of water.

  As Ric sipped, he regarded Joy for a moment. “You look familiar . . .” His dark eyebrows came together. “I don’t think we’ve met, have we?”

  “That’s our daughter,” Matt replied.

  “No! Not little Joy!”

  Joy rolled her eyes. “Not little anymore, Uncle Ric.”

  “Madre de dios! You’re a grown woman. It can’t be that long—”

  Matt folded his arms. “Over ten years, bucko.”

  “Look at her! She’s just like her mama . . . beautiful.”

  “Shut up!” Joy blushed, waved her hand.

  I couldn’t decide if Ric’s sweetness was genuine or a dodge. Joy was my daughter, so of course I thought she was beautiful . . . just not me.

  “Ric,” I loudly interrupted, “please finish telling us what happened back there. What did that prerecorded, mechanical voice tell you to do?”

  The shrug came again, like a child reluctant to talk. “The voice said to step into the alleyway, that’s all.”

  “And did you?”

  “No,” said Ric. “I stalled a second.”

  “Why?” Tucker asked. “Weren’t you afraid of getting shot?”

  “I thought perhaps I could sprint away, take my chances that there was either no gun or this person was a terrible shot. And that’s when I heard the police siren, right around the corner on Hudson.”

  A few beat cops were regular Blend customers. Officers Langley and Demetrious stopped in almost every day for lattes and doppio espressos respectively, and I wondered if it had been their car. I remembered hearing that siren. It had been startling—instantaneous and close, as if the cruiser had just gotten the call from dispatch and hit the switch in front of the Blend.

  “It must have spooked my mugger,” Ric continued, “because the next thing I remember I was being hit hard on the head—and with something decidedly harder than my head.”