by Клео Коул
“No! Please!”
“Where is the evidence?”
I thought fast. If I could lure him toward the stairs…and employ some sort of distraction…
“It’s in a locked container,” I lied at last. “In the enclosed alley. Right out back.”
“Let’s go get it. Together.”
He waved the gun, indicating that I should lead, walking in front of him. I felt my mouth go dry, my legs go weak. Adrenaline flowed through me like a hundred cups of coffee.
“Don’t you have any conscience?” I asked, trying to mentally push him off balance. “Even if you don’t care about Anabelle. How could you kill your own grandchild?”
“Child. Not grandchild.”
“What?!”
“I have no remorse, Ms. Cosi, because Anabelle Hart had it coming. She brought it on herself.”
“What!”
“You can’t sell yourself as one thing and then turn around and expect to be bought as another.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She was a nude dancer when I first saw her. Sure, I flattered her with some jewelry and some nights at the Plaza, but that didn’t mean I bought her as anything more than a little tramp, even after she quit the nude dancing. She thought she’d found her sugar daddy to fund her little artistic delusion. Getting pregnant was a stupid calculation on her part. I don’t dance to the tunes of tramps, they dance to mine.”
“But your son? She was seeing you son. I don’t understand—”
“When I told her to get lost, she went after my son to spite me. She suckered him into a relationship to get me to pay up. But her only leverage was that pregnancy—so I got rid of it.”
“And her. She died of her injuries!”
“That’s too bad, but like I said, she had it coming. She brought it on herself.”
My head was reeling, my mind racing. I suddenly remembered two things that Esther Best had said—that Anabelle had been arguing with her stepmother about money for a few months now…and that she’d talked to “Richard” before going to work the night she was assaulted.
All along, I had thought Richard was Richard, Junior. But it was the father. It was Richard, Senior, whom Anabelle was trying to blackmail—clearly with the help of her stepmother, who had bookmarked all those Engstum System Web sites on her laptop.
“How much did she ask for?”
“One million.”
“Oh, god…”
Engstrum was worth well over fifty times that. Suddenly, Arthur Jay Eddleman popped into my mind.
“Why didn’t you just give her some money and tell her to go away?” I said. “She was pregnant with your child after all—”
“First rule of business, Ms. Cosi, never pay more for a service than it’s worth. I had no intention of ever parting with one red cent. Now let’s get that evidence. Do not move unless I tell you. Otherwise I will shoot you.”
“Okay, okay, please don’t shoot.”
We’d come to the back door. It was chained and bolted.
“Unchain the door,” he said. “Slowly.”
I did.
“Now unbolt it.”
I did.
“Now slowly open the door.”
I was about to pull open the door when, at last, I got the distraction I was waiting for—
Mrrrrroooooooooowwww!
Java’s jaguar-like “I’m hungry!” screeched into the tense silence of the stairwell. As Engstrum turned his head toward the noise, I spun, hurling my fist full of grounds. They hit his face, further startling him.
Remembering Dr. Foo’s chats about Wing Chung Gung Fu—and how small stature could be used to advantage—I immediately ducked low under Engstrum’s arms and kicked out, striking hard at his knee.
“Aaaah! Fucking bitch!” he cried. The gun went off but missed.
The back door was on the landing just above the narrow staircase to the basement and the strike sent him off balance. I struck at his knee again and down he went, tumbling head over heels all the way to the cold basement floor.
I didn’t know if or how badly the man was hurt so I raced for the front entrance, knowing I’d find help faster on Hudson than through the back alley. I was digging in my pocket for the key when I saw two familiar faces at the door.
Langley and Demetrios!!
They waved. Later, I would learn they’d been sent back over by Quinn to take me to the precinct for my statement. But that moment I didn’t care why they were there, I was just overjoyed to see their smiling faces, which dropped to grim alarm when I unlocked the door, tore it open, and screamed bloody murder.
Drawing their guns, they were at the back landing in seconds.
But there was no need to fire. Or even to pull out cuffs.
Richard Engstum, Senior, was sprawled at the bottom of the Blend staircase, unconscious. A wad of wet coffee grounds and a couple of well-placed kicks had reduced the fortified captain of e-business investments to a ragdoll of flesh and bone.
Now he was broken, bruised, and battered…
Just like Anabelle.
Thirty
“Don’t you know that old saying, Clare?” “What?” I asked Madame.
“You know you’re ready to die when you can no longer make a fist.”
Madame presented her open hand to me. Slowly but surely, she clenched each finger until she’d made a rocksolid ball.
“There, you see, dear. Nothing to worry yourself about. I’m feeling just fine.”
It was one week later. The police and media had come and gone, and things were slowly getting back to normal at the Blend. Madame stopped by for a visit—no longer in mourning black, thank goodness, but in a cherry red pantsuit.
With all the publicity, Matt and I finally told her all about what had transpired. She didn’t understand why we’d kept it from her. That was when Matt and I agreed to come clean with what we knew about her condition.
With a French-pressed pot of Kona, Matt and I took her up to the second floor to finally discuss it.
Madame refused to admit a thing to us about her cancer, and I was growing alarmed. She seemed to be in outright denial.
“Madame, Matt and I love you,” I said. “Don’t you want us to know?”
“Know. Know what?”
“There’s no use pretending,” I told her at last. “I saw you at St. Vincent’s with Dr. McTavish.”
Madame’s face actually paled.
“There, you see? We know,” said Matt. “So there’s no need for your pretense any longer.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said. “But I didn’t know where it was going. Now I do.”
“And?” I asked, afraid to hear the worst.
“And…We’re dating. I admit it,” said Madame.
“You’re dating your oncologist?” I said.
“My oncologist? Well, I suppose he’s mine. That’s the way we put it on Valentine’s Day, don’t we? Although that’s quite a few months away yet.”
“Wait a second,” said Matt. “Mother, do you have cancer or not?”
“Cancer? No, for heaven’s sake, I just had a spectacular physical. My doctor tells me I’ll live another twenty years. Maybe more. Why ever would you think I had cancer?”
“Because you were seeing an oncologist!” I cried.
“My dear, I was—and am—seeing a man with as much sex appeal as Sean Connery. The fact that he’s an oncologist is beside the point—”
“B-but you were sitting in a wheelchair,” I said. “Last week. On the cancer treatment floor—”
“Oh, my goodness! You must have seen me the day I’d finished passing out silent auction booklets at the hospital. I was wearing new shoes that day, and my feet hurt, so as a joke, Gary wheeled me around to deliver the last few booklets.”
“Ohmygod, and all this time we thought—”
“What? That I was dying of cancer?”
“Yes!” Matt and I said together.
Madame laughed. “That’s so
ludicrous.”
“I don’t know,” I said, becoming slowly irritated. “Why else would you have gotten each of us to sign those contracts—without once mentioning the fact that you were making us de facto partners.”
“Why else indeed?” said Madame.
“This opens another whole line of discussion,” I said. “And since you’re not, in fact, dying of cancer, I’d like to point out that—”
Madame looked at her watch.
“—Matt and I cannot share the duplex apartment,” I continued. “It’s crazy.”
“You know, I just remembered something!” Madame announced, rising. “I’m running late! Gary is picking me up for an early dinner then we’re going to the new Albee play. We’ll have to discuss this another time!”
And with that pronouncement, Madame swept out of the Blend, leaving me and Matt to, as she put it, “work it out” between us.
Of course. As usual.
We’re still working it out, that’s all I’ll say for now. As for Flaste and Crewcut (who turned out to be a delinquent with an outstanding warrant named Billy Schiffer), here’s the scoop—
Flaste admitted Eduardo Lebreux had hired him to ruin the Blend. But when the plan failed, that was the end of Lebreux’s involvement. As we suspected, Flaste hatched the little burglary plan all by himself, hoping to make a tidy profit selling the secret Allegro book of recipes to Lebreux.
Since Lebreux’s involvement was underhanded but not illegal, we couldn’t do much more to him than chew him out verbally—which Matteo did admirably—ruin his reputation in the business, and shun him socially, which Madame is seeing to with her characteristic marble-fisted determination.
As for Flaste and Schiffer, they’re drinking jailhouse coffee now, which is probably punishment enough, even without their sentences.
And what ever happened to the Village Blend plaque?
Well, my old friend the butcher, Ron Gersun, walked in with it the day after the burglary.
“Ron!” I cried, seeing the plaque tucked under his beefy arm. “Where did you find it?”
“It was there…you know…. in Oscar’s Wiles.”
“Where? Matt said he looked all over that bar.”
Ron’s expression turned sheepish. “It was in the men’s room.”
I pictured my ex-husband in his search high and low, but then coming up against the men’s room door and stopping short. Matteo Allegro would fearlessly trek anywhere in the world—Central America, Africa, Asia. Anywhere but a Christopher Street men’s room. What a chicken.
“I guess Schiffer must have stashed it in there when I was around the corner stuffing my hair into a baseball cap,” I told Ron.
“You know, you looked kind of cute,” he said. Then he scratched the back of his head. “I mean as a guy.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said. “I think.”
I wanted to tell him that he looked pretty good, too, in his leather vest with his tangled chest hair and anchor tattoo, but I thought it best to derail that train of thought fast. My god, this was one weird world we lived in. Maybe Eduardo Lebreux was right after all—sometimes it all came down to the packaging.
“Well, see ya around, there, Coffee Lady.”
“Have a cup?” I offered. “On the house?”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
“Latte?”
“Hell no! Lattes are for girly men. Make mine a doppio espresso!”
“One double espresso coming up!” I said, praying all the while that Ron Gersun never ever discussed his coffee bar preferences with Detective Quinn.
Quinn himself is a regular now. Double tall lattes are still his favorite.
I keep pressing the detective to let me help him solve another crime, but after I almost got myself shot, he warned me to stick with coffee from now on and leave murder to the professionals.
Which brings me to the case at hand—
Unlike Anabelle Hart, Richard Engstrum, Senior, survived his fall down the Blend steps. He was hospitalized for a few weeks, but that didn’t deter the District Attorney’s Office from charging him with murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, and a host of lesser charges including unlawful entry. (It turned out Engstrum had taken the front door key right off Anabelle’s ballet-charm key ring the night he assaulted her. When Quinn and I found the key ring in her purse the next day, it appeared untouched, so we never checked each and every Blend key to see if one was missing.)
“The Manhattan DA is piling it on Engstrum,” was how Quinn characterized the many charges.
Engstrum’s lawyers took one look at the photograph of the victim—pretty, young, talented, pregnant, and dead Anabelle Hart—and their client—a businessman with a bubble-like IPO that made him rich while taking his investors on a one-way ride to Suckersville—and urged Richard Engstrum to accept a plea bargain.
Given the fact that my testimony combined with the DNA testing on Anabelle’s fetus would have sunk him in front of a jury, he did the wise thing and agreed. Though his sentence is still pending, Quinn tells me he will probably get twelve years of hard time for assault and criminally negligent homicide, and attempted murder. But that’s not all he was in for…
Mrs. Darla Branch Hart got what she wanted, too, even if Mrs. Engstrum did not. You see, Anabelle’s stepmother filed a ten-million-dollar wrongful death suit against Richard Engstrum, Senior. This news even made the pages of The New York Times.
It was one of the few times a New Yorker with the Engstrums’ Upper East Side address didn’t want the Times’ attention—I tell ya, publicity’s a real bitch when it’s the wrong kind.
The Village Blend was mentioned in the papers, too. The New York Post headline said our coffee was “to die for.”
“Aw shucks,” I told the reporter, “it’s all in the grounds.”
But even with my tasseography, I didn’t see this one coming. I mean, I remember Anabelle telling me she’d learned how to handle garbage. As a nude dancer, I have no doubt she thought she could. One kind of garbage. The obvious kind. Just not the other.
As I’ve said before, packaging can be deceiving. Anabelle’s mistake was not understanding that there was a kind of garbage that masks its odor with five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce toiletries. And the hard truth is, when you decide that you’re clever enough to play with garbage—bad smelling or sweet smelling—you’re fooling yourself if you think you can walk away without some of it rubbing its stink off on you.
I just wish Anabelle had stuck to the high road. She was a diligent worker. She had the seeds of good character. And she had come so close to achieving her dream. But sticking to the high road can be a difficult business, even for good people. The altitude alone can exhaust you.
Not long after these events, I opened the Blend one morning to find Dr. Foo waiting. We made our usual small talk, but he saw I was rather low. When he asked me why, I confided everything I’d learned about Anabelle. Not her death—he already knew about that—but her fall.
He said he was sorry, and he also said something about how he himself was still learning how to accept that sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we cannot help the people we care about. As a medical resident working in St. Vincent’s intensive care unit, he’d had many challenges along those lines.
“How do you cope?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I find a way to grieve then try to let it go. Like the Buddhist saying, ‘You must close the book.’”
“I guess there’s something to that,” I admitted. “I mean, life goes on, and the people who are still alive need you.”
“Just as the people in your life need you,” he said.
And so I grieved for Anabelle Hart, and I still remember her in my prayers, but I accept that it is now time to close her book.
To me, she will always be young and beautiful and graceful—and sadly—misguided and ruined and dead. I just hope she felt a measure of peace when the crime of her murder was solved, and that wherever she is now, she has perpet
ual music and an unending expanse of smooth and level floor.
Recipes from The Village Blend
The Village Blend’s Caffé Cannella
Place a very thin slice of orange at the bottom of a cup.Pour a steaming hot, dark-roasted coffee (Italian or French roast) onto the orange slice.Stir with a cinnamon stick, which remains in the cup to continue flavoring the beverage. Let steep for a minute.Add a dollop of sweetened whipped cream and sprinkle cinnamon to taste. (Additional sugar is optional.)
The Village Blend’s Raspberry-Mocha Bocci
1½ ounces raspberry syrup
1½ ounces raspberry syrup
2 ounces freshly made espresso
7 ounces steamed milk
Sweetened whipped cream
Sweetened ground cocoa
Shaved chocolate curls
Raspberries
Pour the syrups into the bottom of a 12-ounce cup.Add the espresso.Fill with steamed milk.Stir the liquid, lifting from the bottom to bring the syrups up.Top with sweetened whipped cream, sweetened ground cocoa, and curls of shaved chocolate. Serve on a saucer with raspberries.
Clare’s Cappuccino Walnut Cheesecake
(Or, what to do with your leftover espresso!)
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
1 cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons butter, melted
32 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4 eggs
¼ cup sour cream
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
½ cup strongly brewed espresso (bean optional)
1 teaspoon instant coffee
TOPPING FOR CHEESECAKE
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
? cup heavy cream
¼ cup espresso
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 tablespoon cinnamon
Sugar to taste
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.Combine walnuts, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and the butter in a bowl and mix well. Pour mixture into 9-inch springform pan and press onto bottom. Set aside.In a food processor combine cream cheese and the rest of the cup of sugar. Mix until light and fluffy and completely combined.Add flour and eggs, one at a time.Add sour cream and cinnamon.Dissolve the instant coffee into the espresso, then add to cream cheese mixture.Pour into the pan and bake for approximately 1 hour (some ovens may require ten to fifteen extra minutes). Shake gently to test. Cake will be firm when done. Top will be lightly browned. Cool completely.
