Latte Trouble (14 page)

“The cop’s not staying?” Matt said a little too loudly. “Didn’t Rosario’s deliver any donuts this morning?”

“Give it a rest, Matt,” I said and slipped out of his grasp.

T
HE
rest of the work day was long and busy. The younger customers never stopped coming. Even the usual lulls between rush hours were nonexistent. I’d told Esther Matt’s theory about the appeal of our so-called poisoned coffee and she began calling our patrons “Fugu thrill-seekers.”

At four o’clock Esther headed for home, and Moira agreed to stay on. She’d worked until nine the evening before, and agreed to work the extra hours again tonight. I told her how much I appreciated her help. “Don’t mention it,” she replied. “I want to help Tucker any way I can.”

When Gardner Evans arrived with some new jazz CDs from his collection, Moira finally departed. Not until ten did Detective Quinn return. He strode through the front door and approached me at the coffee bar.

“Have a seat,” I told him as I foamed up a couple of lattes (his favorite). Quinn took a quiet corner table by a window and I joined him there. He sipped the drink, his blue gaze steady over the rim of the glass mug, never straying from my face.

“I meant what I said this morning, Clare,” Quinn began. “It is good to see you again.”

Oh god
. A caffeinelike jolt that had nothing to do with the shot of espresso in my latte was rocking my metabolism. I counseled myself to keep my mind off Quinn’s incredible blue eyes and on the business at hand.

“What happened to Rena Garcia?” I asked.

Quinn sighed and finally broke his stare, looking down into the frothy cloud in his tall glass mug. “That’s a police matter—” he tried to tell me, but I was ready for him.

“Don’t you clam up on me now, Mike Quinn.”

My tone wasn’t teasing and it wasn’t warm. I’d waited for hours for him to get around to talking to me again, and I swore to myself that he wasn’t leaving this coffeehouse until I knew as much as he did.

Mike, who could obviously see I meant business, rubbed his stubbled chin, then took another sip of his latte, a long one. Foam clung to his top lip and he wiped it away with the easy brush of two fingers. He leaned close, lowered his already low voice.

“This morning the supervisor in Ms. Garcia’s apartment building received some complaints about loud music coming from the apartment. He knocked, and when he didn’t get a reply he used his pass key to enter the premises. That’s when he found the victim. The Medical Examiner estimates she’d been dead for ten to twelve hours.”

“You said she was poisoned.”

Quinn nodded. “Cyanide was used. Forensics examined the dregs of a coffee Ms. Garcia consumed, found traces of poison…” The detective paused, locked eyes with me. “It was a Village Blend take-out cup, Clare. That’s why I asked you about the poisoning that took place here the other night.”

I told Mike about that night. About Detectives Starkey and Hutawa, and Tucker’s arrest. He listened quietly to my theory that Lottie had been the original target, and I told him what Tad had admitted to me earlier today—about Fen and the blackmail threat.

“Benedict never mentioned blackmail to me,” said Quinn, clearly annoyed.

“He’s trying to protect himself,” I concluded. “One way or the other.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the truth gets out about his involvement with something as shady as Rena’s theft of Fen’s designs and Fen’s subsequent blackmail, it could ruin Tad’s investment business. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t tell you about the blackmail because he killed Rena himself—”

“No,” said Quinn quickly. “Benedict’s not a suspect. He has a rock-solid alibi from seven o’clock last evening until almost four this morning.”

“What?”

“First he and his staff were conducting some kind of investment seminar on a boat called the…” Quinn pulled a worn leather-bound rectangular notebook from the breast pocket of his trenchcoat. “
Fortune
.”

I nodded, recalling Tad’s seminars had been scheduled for both Wednesday and Thursday nights.

“After that,” Quinn continued, glancing at his notes, “he and his staff traveled together to their investment firm’s office and spent most of the night working with Tokyo counterparts on Nikkei stock sales.”

“So when did Rena drink the poison?”

“Between nine and eleven o’clock in the evening. And the body wasn’t moved. She drank that poison in her apartment.”

I thought that over. Could Tad have handed Rena a poisoned cup of coffee before he’d boarded the
Fortune
? It made no sense on the face of it. Who would carry around a cup of coffee for hours without drinking it?

I tried to make the pieces fit another way. “Could Tad have
hired
someone to poison her?” I pondered out loud.

Quinn shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“First, my gut. I’ve seen enough trumped-up versions of shock and grief to judge when it’s genuine, and Benedict’s reaction to his fiancee’s death was as real as I’ve seen. Second, my background work today showed that Tad Benedict put down substantial nonrefundable deposits on a Hawaiian wedding and honeymoon package, and a realtor was handling the sale of his one bedroom and the purchase of a two bedroom in the same building. The realtor said Benedict was getting married next month and wanted more space.”

“And you don’t think he could have set all that up to make himself look innocent?” I pressed.

Quinn shook his head. “If Tad Benedict had wanted to kill Rena Garcia for financial gain, he would have married her first before killing her. Then he would have inherited her shares of Lottie Harmon after her death.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then what if he was simply trying to dump Rena because Fen was blackmailing her? What if he wanted to be free of the entanglement?”

“Why not just cut and run? Why not just break off the engagement, go to Lottie and tell her everything, and let Rena take the fall? No…there’s no logical motive for Benedict killing his fiancee. With Rena dead, life gets very complicated. As it happens, Rena has no will. Her shares will be going to her closest living relative, not Tad and not Lottie.”

I sighed, agreeing—for the moment—that Tad didn’t look very good as a suspect in Rena’s murder.

“But it’s good you told me about the blackmail, Clare. This gives me an in.”

“An in? With whom?”

“Starkey and Hut aren’t exactly forthcoming, and I don’t want to horn in on their investigation of the Blend poisoning. But this Rena Garcia murder, it’s a separate case that may be connected so they can’t complain.”

“Demetrios called them bad cop, worse cop,” I said. “Are Starkey and Hut really that terrible?”

“They’re not bad cops. They just have bad attitudes.”

“Well, I think you should go after the designer Fen. Have a talk with him.”

Quinn’s lips twitched and one eyebrow arched. “Thanks for the advice, Detective Cosi. He’s the first on my list.”

I shrugged. “Just making sure you’re dotting your
I
s and crossing your
T
s, Detective.”

We sipped in silence for a moment, then I carefully broached another subject. “I tried to reach you a few days ago…Demetrios told me you were out on leave.”

Quinn frowned. “Personal matter…”

I was going to let it drop, but Quinn obviously felt he had to explain. “My wife took the kids on a little vacation—without telling me. Wait, that’s not entirely accurate. She left a note.”

“Jesus, Mike, what happened?”

“We had a fight one night. Next thing I know, I come home from a double-shift and she’s gone—took the kids and hopped a plane to Orlando for a week. I come home to a note, you know? Needless to say, I panicked. One of her old boyfriends works at the Disney World resort, and I thought she’d decided to snatch the kids and leave me.”

For many months now, Mike had been confiding in me about his bad marriage. He’d gone back and forth many times on the issue of divorce. Finally, for the sake of his young kids, he’d decided to try marriage counseling.

“I thought you said the counseling was helping?”

“I thought it was. But she was obviously acting out….” He sighed in disgust. “When I got down there, it was passive aggressive central. She acted like it was some carefree family vacation that we’d planned for months. For the sake of the kids, I went along.” He shook his head. “She pulled the kids out of school, terrorized me, ran up our credit cards on first-class tickets…I left cases hanging, victims’ families…I could have strangled her.”

“I’m sorry, Mike.”

“I’ve consulted two lawyers. The estimates for a contested divorce and custody battle…” He shook his head. “You can’t imagine.”

“Believe me, I can,” I assured him. “Although I was lucky. Matt never contested my getting Joy.”

“That wouldn’t happen with me.”

“The rewards of full-time parenting outweigh the expenses.”

“Maybe so. But those attorneys still need to put their fat fees on a low-carb diet.”

“Well, look on the bright side. Lots of lawyers patronize this place. Ultimately, you’d be helping my bottom line.”

I smiled. Quinn’s grim demeanor cracked, and he laughed out loud. I laughed too, and squeezed his hand. I was about to pull it back, but he held on, caressed my fingers gently with the rough pad of his thumb. I met his eyes. What I saw there made my limbs weak.

Across the room, a throat loudly cleared. I looked up. Matteo was standing there, glaring at us. Quinn noticed. He released my hand, finished his coffee, and rose.

“I’ve got to go,” he told me. “But I’ll check back with you after I talk with this Fen character.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I whispered.

Then Quinn touched my arm. “Don’t worry, Clare. With a second murder using the same modus operandi, I predict Tucker will be out of jail in no time….”

I closed my eyes, praying he was right. “Thanks, Mike.”

Quinn gave me one last small smile. Then he was gone.

As I bussed the table, Matt approached. “What did the flatfoot want? Did he tell you he threw Tad in jail?”

I ignored the jibe, carried the cups to the coffee bar. Matt followed me behind the bar and pinned me to the counter. He tried to hug me, kiss me. But his gestures weren’t simple affection as much as raw possessiveness. Once again, I regretted the other night.

“Want to have dinner after we close up?” Matt asked. “There’s a new late-night Thai place on East Seventh.”

“Matt, I…” My voice trailed off when I noticed a scarlet smudge on my ex-husband’s collar. Lipstick, in a garish hue I would never wear.

Matt followed my eyes, found the smudge.

“Jesus, Matt,” I snapped, “we just slept together two nights ago—”

“Take it easy, Clare, this lipstick is Joy’s—”

“Joy was never here.”

“No, I ran into her on the street, an hour or so ago.”

I crossed my arms. “And I suppose you had that little talk? About Joy’s questionable friends and their drug use?”

Matteo looked away. “I didn’t have time. She said she was running late…”. He could see the doubt in my eyes. “Clare, honestly, I can explain—”

“Forget it.”

“Come on, it’s almost closing time. Give me a break.”

“I was stupid to have ever thought you’d change,” I shot back. But I didn’t really think myself stupid. I’d been smart—smart enough to have protected my heart from Matt. Smart enough to have already guessed this would happen.

“Clare!” he called as I strode away. But I just kept walking.

T
HE
next day was Saturday. I opened the shop, greeting the baker’s Yankee-jacketed delivery boy and my first customers of the morning in a near-robotic state. I couldn’t stop thinking of Tucker. I had run out of leads. Even worse, my own decidedly less than brilliant theory about Tad and the late Rena Garcia being the guilty parties now lay on the ash heap of history. I could not have been more wrong about the ill-fated couple, who were not suspects, but victims.

The morning rush came and went, the mail arrived, and I pulled espressos, mixed lattes and cappuccinos by rote. By eleven, Detective Quinn was too busy to return my calls—presumably because he was diligently tracking down the elusive fashion designer Fen. Matteo was off and running on his coffee kiosk planning. And Rena’s killer was still on the loose. Then, as I was preparing for the early lunch rush, a bicycle messenger arrived with a hand-delivered package.

“Are you Clare Cosi?”

I nodded and he offered me a clipboard. “Sign here…and print your full name here.”

I scribbled my name, then wrote it out in block letters. The man handed me a manila envelope; the return address read “Tanner and Associates, Attorneys-at-law.” The address was on Madison Avenue. Noting the delivery, Esther Best appeared at my shoulder.

“What is it? Good news I hope.”

“Something from Tucker’s lawyer, I think.”

I ripped into the envelope and found a letter and another envelope inside—this one from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, the New York City Department of Corrections.

“Be advised that this authorized pass allows Ms. Clare Cosi and Mrs. Blanche Dreyfus Allegro Dubois to visit prisoner #3244798909, Mr. Tucker Burton of—”

I ceased reading because Esther Best was whooping and
woofing
(a hip-hop generation thing) and drawing the attention of several patrons. “When are you going?” she cried.

“As soon as I can,” I said, closing my eyes in grateful relief.

I quickly climbed the back steps and entered my small, second floor office to call Madame. I had been trying without success to arrange a visit with Tucker since his arrest, never imagining how difficult it could be to visit someone once he was incarcerated in what amounted to America’s only penal
colony
. Unless you’re a relative, it’s nearly impossible to visit a prisoner on Rikers Island, and even then you can only see the inmate if they’ve put your name on an official list kept at the prison. For everyone else, save legal council or members of law enforcement, a request for a visit must be sent to the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, who receives between 1,500 and 2,000 such requests every month. Typically it takes weeks to receive a reply, usually in the negative.

I’d mentioned the problem to Matteo, who passed the information on to Breanne. Somehow Ms. Summour’s lawyer had managed to cut through the mountain of bureaucratic red tape and the authorization magically had appeared. Though I was no fan of Breanne Summour, at the moment, I was truly grateful for the pass, and I knew Madame would feel the same.

I dialed her number and Madame answered on the second ring. “It’s the maid’s day off, my dear,” she explained. I told her the wonderful news and Madame was as ecstatic as I was.

“I’ll be over in an hour,” I told her.

Fifty-two minutes later, I flagged a cab on Hudson, climbed in, and told the driver my destinations. “First I need to pick up someone on Fifth near Washington Square Park. Then we’ll be going on to Rikers.”

The driver did a double take, his dreadlocks flying as he turned his head. “Rikers? Mon, you mean the prison?” he said in a lilting Caribbean accent. He shook his head, his dreads taking flight again. “Lady, I don’t even know how to get there. It’s in Queens, no?”

“Yes, it’s on the north shore of Queens—in the middle of the East River.”

“Well, lady, this cab, she don’t float. So I’m gonna have to call my dispatcher.” While the driver headed over to Washington Square, I pulled out my cell and rang Madame.

“Apparently, cabbies don’t know how to get to Rikers Island,” I explained.

“Never mind, dear. I’ll call my own car service. I’m sure Mr. Raj can help us out.”

I informed the cab driver I’d be getting out at Washington Square, and to forget the trip to Rikers. He seemed relieved. On Fifth, I found Madame waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of her building. She was wrapped in an elegant belted, pecan brown coat with faux fur trim on the cuffs, lapels, and turned up collar.

“Mr. Raj insisted on driving us himself. He’s made the trip before.”

My eyebrows went up. “Did he tell you why?”

She waved her hand. “I did not ask and he did not offer.”

A few minutes later, a black late-model Lincoln town car with bright white Taxi and Limousine Commission plates pulled up to the sidewalk. A diminutive middle-aged man with cocoa-brown skin and a thick iron-gray moustache stepped out and opened the door for us.

“
Bonjour
, Mr. Raj,” said Madame sweetly.

“
Bonjour
, Madame,” he replied to my French-born ex-mother-in-law. Smiling behind his moustache, he wore a well-tailored suit and a deep blue turban.

The ride out of Manhattan was fairly uneventful. We headed uptown and through the Queens Midtown Tunnel, then onto the Grand Central Parkway. As we approached LaGuardia Airport, however, the driver swerved onto a rarely used ramp marked Nineteenth Avenue. The ramp led to a narrow two-lane bridge, the only route to Rikers Island without a boat.

The bridge, largely unknown to most New Yorkers, stretched more than a mile across the East River. As we drove across the fast-moving water, a deafening roar sounded around us and the silver wings and fuselage of a United Airlines plane appeared over our heads. It rapidly descended, flying so low its roaring engines rattled our car windows and I could almost make out passengers in their upright and locked positions. For a moment, my heart stopped—I was certain I was witnessing a passenger airplane crash. Then I noticed the pier on our right displaying a huge sign directing pilots to LaGuardia’s runway 13-31. Seconds later, the jet smoothly touched down.

I sighed and sat back. Outside the car’s tinted windows, the sunlight played on the rippling waters of the East River. The route over the bridge was a lonely one, patrolled by officers in cars and on foot. Along the way, posted signs warned passengers that firearms, cameras, and photographic devices, tape recorders, beepers and cell phones, and a host of other items were not permitted inside the prison and would be confiscated; that proper identification would be required; and that all visitors were subject to a physical search before entering the sprawling island compound.

During the drive from Manhattan to Queens, I read to Madame from some papers the lawyer had provided, learning the information myself as I read. Apparently the island was named after the Rikers family, who’d sold the giant piece of rock rising from the East River to New York City in the 1880s. The city initially used the land as a dump. Over the next forty-plus years, the size of the land mass quadrupled, a result of the thousands of tons of refuse deposited there. By 1935, the dump was closed and the garbage barges halted as the first jail opened. The Rikers Island Correctional Facility is now one of the largest prisons in the world, comprised of
ten
jails spread across an area half the size of Central Park. There are nine jails for men and one for women, and the entire place has a daytime population of close to twenty-thousand people including prisoners, employees, and visitors.

Two-thirds of the inmates were in the same boat as Tucker—detainees who were legally innocent and waiting for their cases to crawl through the criminal justice system, stuck there because they could not produce bail, or bail was denied them by a judge because of various circumstances. The other third of the inmates on Rikers had been convicted and sentenced already and were waiting for an empty bed in an upstate prison. A smattering—all with sentences under twelve months—actually served out their entire incarceration on the island.

With its own schools, clinics, chapels, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a bus depot, even a ball park and running track, Rikers essentially has become a small town.

After driving through the security gates, we were stopped by a pair of armed guards who recorded our names and asked us the nature of our business. I showed them the official letter from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, and we were directed to the Control Building. On the way, the town car nosed its way through a quiet and seemingly deserted two-lane street that was lined by ultra-modern modular buildings erected between aging jails of brick and mortar built half a century ago. Everywhere I looked, fences loomed, twelve-foot-high steel mesh walls tipped by razor-wire.

At the Control Building we were compelled to pass through metal detectors, then I slid the official pass from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections under a thick, bulletproof Plexiglas window to a bored-looking desk sergeant. He checked our identification—my New York State driver’s license, Madame’s United States passport—and we were handed off to two female prison guards. They took us to another area, scanned us again, this time with metal-detecting rods and a relatively new machine called an Ionscan, which was capable, we were told, of detecting drug residue in much the same way an airport scanner can detect the residue of explosive materials. One of the chat-tier female guards told us the year before over three hundred
visitors
were arrested on Rikers for attempting to smuggle contraband in to prisoners—drugs, weapons, bullets, etc.

Finally, we were frisked. The women worked silently and efficiently without meeting our eyes. We were asked to empty our pockets and purses, and our cell phones were confiscated, to be returned at the end of our visit. A few minutes later, another armed guard presented us with plastic identification cards.

“Don’t lose these,” he warned. “You will be subject to arrest if you do not display these badges at all times.”

I didn’t doubt it.

Our pass from the Deputy Commissioner must have put us on some kind of VIP track, because we were immediately taken outside by a young Hispanic guard and escorted across the street and down the block to a modern modular building.

I expected the kind of thing you see in the movies—a long table with chairs, bulletproof glass separating you from the prisoner on the other side, a telephone on the table, through which you talk to your loved one. Instead we were placed inside a small windowless room—a cell, really—with a heavy steel door, fluorescent lights, and insulated brick walls thickly slathered with institutional green paint. Madame and I sat on green plastic chairs until the door opened a few minutes later.

We looked up as Tucker entered, a burly uniformed guard twice his size leading the lanky young playwright and actor by his thin arm. I rose to give my friend a hug, but the look of pain and embarrassment on Tucker’s face gave me pause.

“Lift up your arms,” rumbled the guard.

Only then did I notice Tuck’s hands were folded behind his back—and handcuffed. The guard drew a key from his belt, removed the cuffs. Then he acknowledged our presence for the first time.

“Thirty minutes,” he said. “If you need me sooner, bang on the door.”

The guard turned on his heels and left. The door slammed with a loud clang. Tucker, pale and thinner than I’d ever seen him, rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had chaffed them. His beautiful mop of floppy brown hair was gone—replaced by a crewcut. He looked like a shorn sheep, but despite his obvious torment, Tucker stared at us through grateful eyes.

“God…Clare, Madame…thank you…for…” His voice broke as he sat in the green plastic chair beside me, and I took him in my arms. He sobbed, his shoulders heaving.

“I’ll get you out of here, Tucker. I swear…”

Tucker wiped his cheeks with his hands, nodded, but his face was a mask of doubt and confusion. “How did this happen?” he moaned.

Madame leaned forward, “Are you getting good legal council?”

“The lawyer…Mr. Tanner…he’s doing his best. Says that since the second poisoning wasn’t fatal, he can probably get the charges reduced to reckless endangerment. Mr. Tanner interviewed Jeff Lugar—”

I sat up. “What?”

Jeff Lugar was the second victim—the tan, buffed boy-toy who’d been Ricky’s date and finished off the poisoned latte. I’d been desperate for news about his condition. But after the initial stories reporting the poisoning, the ongoing details of the case had disappeared from the news cycle. In a city as big and rich in crazy front page headlines as New York, even a fatal poisoning at a chic event could become old news in forty-eight hours. The last report on Lugar’s condition listed him as “critical” and I had assumed he was in a coma or otherwise unable to give a statement. Obviously, I was wrong.

“Tucker, are you saying your lawyer
talked
to him?” I asked.

“Yes…or someone from Mr. Tanner’s office did, anyway.”

“What did he say?”

Tucker shrugged. “Not much. All I know is that from Lugar’s version of the events, Mr. Tanner says he can prove Jeff was not the intended victim and that his poisoning was just an unfortunate consequence of the crime…”.

I sat in silence, mulling over the possibility of getting to Lugar myself.

“How are you otherwise?” Madame asked in the meantime, patting Tucker’s hand.

“I think they may move me soon,” he said with a barely suppressed shudder. “Mr. Tanner is trying to get a psychiatric evaluation for me, which means I would be moved to a medical facility like Bellevue, but the judge is resisting…”.

His voice trailed off and he stared at the wall. Of course I understood Tucker’s concern. Out of solitary confinement, or “suicide watch,” he would be placed with the general population, mixing with hardened criminals—some already convicted of heinous crimes. A sheep to snarling wolves.