On What Grounds (Coffeehouse Mysteries, No. 1) (A Coffeehouse Mystery) (3 page)

“
I
’
VE
done away with Flaste,” Madame had announced that morning without preamble. “He’s an utter moron.”

Flaste? Flaste?
I tried to recall with a yawn. Who was
Flaste again? And how would Madame have “done away” with him?

The picture of a rotund, effeminate man finally came to mind. A surreal montage ensued: I saw Madame’s wrinkled hands pushing the fat man off the Village Blend’s four-story roof; her bejeweled fingers stirring arsenic into his morning latte; her determined knuckle clenching a revolver’s cold, metal trigger.

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I rolled over. The phone’s death-black cord coiled across my starched white pillow. Blood-red digits glowed next to the bed. I made out a five, a zero, and a two.

5:02
A.M.

Good lord.

Half-opened miniblinds revealed the striated sky—a dark cobalt dome lightening to streaks of pale blue. Silver stars flickered a losing battle, their waning light a pallid display in the face of the brilliant noise just below the horizon.

I knew how those poor, pathetic stars felt. At thirty-nine and counting, I was forty years younger than Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois, yet I always felt comparatively little and weak in the presence of her burning energy.

Madame’s dawn phone call may have seemed odd, but ever since her husband had passed away six months before, her vigilance with the Blend had grown keener, almost obsessive. She’d begun ringing me about everything that had gone wrong or been mishandled—in the greatest of detail, and at the oddest hours.

“Do you know what that conniving boob did?” Madame asked. “
Do
you?”

At last, a moment where I was expected to respond. “Uh. No,” I said.

“He had the gall to actually
sell
the plaque—the Village Blend plaque!—to a roving antiques agent!”

I grimaced. A part of me felt sorry for the poor bastard who’d become the latest in a long string of hired—and fired—Blend managers. Lord, if Flaste had sold that plaque, he
was
an utter moron.

From the day it opened in 1895, the Village Blend’s only signage has been that brass plaque, engraved with simple black lettering:
FRESH ROASTED COFFEE SERVED DAILY
. “And that is the way it
should
be,” Madame had always insisted. No lights, no awning, no vulgar oversized neon sign. Just the old plaque. Subtle. Gracious. Like a gentlewoman. Elegant, sophisticated, never calling attention to herself, simply drawing people closer with her regal air and fetching bouquet.

Situated on a quiet corner of Hudson Street, in the first two floors of a four-story red brick townhouse, the Blend had been sending her rich, earthy aroma of freshly brewed coffee into the winding lanes of Greenwich Village for over one hundred years. The historic streets surrounding the place had once felt the footsteps of Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, e.e. cummings, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Albee, Jackson Pollack, and countless musicians, poets, painters, and politicians who’d influenced American and world culture.

Within a few blocks sat the Commerce Street home where Washington Irving wrote
Sleepy Hollow
; the historic church of St. Luke in the Field, whose founding vestryman, Clement Moore, composed
’Twas the Night Before Christmas
; and the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theater, which was started in the 1920s by a group that included poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and decades later employed a young usher by the name of Barbra Streisand.

In more recent years, film, theater, and television stars had patronized the Blend, along with novelists, reporters, musicians, and fashion designers. Fortune holders as well as fortune hunters and most every famous resident of the Village had at one time or another stopped by for a famous Blend cup.

The coffeehouse had been a part of the area’s history—through good times and bad. And the sign wasn’t just a sign. It was practically a holy relic. Every manager of the Blend soon understood that
correctly
displaying the thing was less a matter of nostalgia than job security.

“I not only fired him, I made certain he was visited at one
A.M
. by two of New York’s Finest.”

Madame never did suffer fools gladly.

If anyone knew this fact, I did. For almost ten years, between the ages of twenty and thirty, I’d worked as the manager of Madame’s beloved Blend. (She maintains I was the “absolute best.”) Consequently, I got to know my former employer as well as my own mother (that is,
if
I had known my mother—she had left me and my father before my seventh birthday, but that’s another story). Anyway, even after I’d quit the Blend, we’d remained close.

“I’m curious,” I said after an enormous yawn. “What did Flaste get for the sign?”

“You know, that’s rather interesting. He sold it for nine hundred and seventy dollars, which was lucky for him, according to the officers who arrested him.”

“Doesn’t
sound
lucky.”

“It was thirty dollars under a thousand, you see.”

“Not yet.”

“Well, my dear, theft of one thousand dollars is a Class E felony. So the officers were forced to book him only on a petit larceny charge, a mere misdemeanor. Consequently, Moffat ‘walked’—as the policemen put it—after an appearance in night court.”

“Not exactly a case for an Alan Derschowitz defense,” I said.

“Nevertheless, I made my point.”

“Your point?”

“I may be old, but I’m not stupid.”

I laughed. “What about the plaque?”

“Oh, those polite boys from the Sixth Precinct who explained the charges, they retrieved it for me. I was so happy to have it back where it belonged that I told them to come by anytime for a free cup of Kona. The
real
thing, Clare.
You
know what I mean.”

Indeed, I did.

Coffee and crime may not
seem
the likeliest of pairs, but you’d be surprised how often they went together. Take the great Kona scandal of 1996. A cabal of coffee producers, one of whom Madame had known rather well, had been caught rebagging cheaper Central American blends and transshipping them through Hawaii marked as that exceptional bean, Kona—ironically mellow for something grown in volcanic lava. As far as anyone knows, at least at this writing, Madame’s friend is still in federal prison.

“Now, the reason I called,” continued Madame. “You must come to see me, Clare.
This morning
.”

A long silence followed in which I heard opera music on the other end of the line. The mellifluous tenor was singing an exceptionally gorgeous piece from Puccini’s
Turnadot
. “
Nessun dorma
!” Translation from the Italian: “Nobody shall sleep!”

Appropriate,
I thought, because Madame wasn’t just playing opera. She was trying to make a point. Besides being one of my favorite pieces—full of all the tragic yearning and beautiful heartbreak that exemplified Italian opera—it was orchestrating what Madame had promised would one day come: my
wake-up
call.

No, I can’t come,
the coward in me wanted to say.
I have a deadline
. Which was, in fact, true. For the past twenty days I’d been writing a two-part article for
Wholesale Beverage
magazine on the quality of Latin American coffee harvests. The piece was due next week.

But I had to admit, if only to myself, that I was grateful for the call and the invitation to get out of the house—because I was ready to tear my hair out. The subject of the article wasn’t the problem, the
isolation
was.

Working at home had been fine while I was raising Joy. But since my lively daughter had moved out the month before, I found the small house in the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey to be less than stimulating. Lately I’d begun staring at the lengthening grass in the front yard and thinking about Madame’s furious words the day I had quit my job managing the Blend.

“I
do
understand why you feel the need to leave,” Madame had said after much wailing and breast beating. “But the suburbs! I swear, Clare, one day you will wake up to find the suburbs have far too much in common with the cemetery.”

“The cemetery!” (I had been outraged, hurt, and angry at Madame for her lack of support, given my personal circumstances at the time.)

“Yes,” Madame had countered. “Both have well-tended lawns, far too much silence, and far too little traffic in the full range of the human condition.”

“It’s safe! And restful!”

“Safety and rest
I’ll
enjoy when I’m dead. I’m warning you, Clare, you’re making a mistake, and one day you will admit it.”

I had ignored Madame, of course, and moved ninety minutes west of the city, determined to prove the woman wrong. And for the most part, Madame
had
been wrong—

Raising Joy had been a joy, and the income I’d made from a combination of jobs (providing paid help at a day-care center, baking part-time for a local caterer, and writing the “In the Kitchen With Clare” column for a small local paper) had helped make the difference between the monthly bills and my ex-husband’s inconsistent child support payments.

Then just last year, after a rather soul-searching thirty-ninth birthday, I had actually pushed myself to pitch articles to food-and-beverage trade magazines like
Wholesale Beverage, Cupping,
and
In Stock,
and miracle of miracles, they’d actually bought a few.

But now that Joy had packed up and moved to Manhattan to attend culinary school…well, things were different. Unlike many teenagers, my daughter had centered her social life around the house and a close group of girlfriends. Half a dozen teenagers hanging around wasn’t unusual. And I often joined their Video-Movie-Rental parties and “Martha Stewart Survivor nights,” in which the group of girls would cut out cooking projects from Martha Stewart’s
Living
magazine, then randomly pick them out of a brown paper bag and have to complete the dish in ninety minutes—even if it meant racing to the store for missing ingredients.

(With a game like that, it was no surprise to me when Joy and all four of her friends ended up enrolled in culinary schools or restaurant management programs after their high school graduation.)

These days, however, my evenings had been spent eating Snackwell cookies (what’s the point of baking for one?), watching Lifetime movies, and blowing catnip-laced soap bubbles for Java (whose fur happened to match the color of a medium-roast Arabica bean).

The truth was a bitter residue building up at the bottom of my underused life: fulfillment (except when it came to my daughter) remained elusive. Madame’s call was a welcome excuse for me to take the express bus to the Port Authority terminal on Forty-second Street. And, after my morning espresso and a bracing shower, that’s precisely what I did.

M
ADAME
lived near Washington Square in an expansive suite of rooms capping one of those old buildings on Fifth Avenue that had a concrete moat and a doorman who dressed like a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Pierre Dubois, her late second husband, insisted she move in with him there in the early 1980s. He’d said he vastly preferred it to Madame’s more modest West Village duplex above the Blend, which was the site of their original steamy encounters.

Much like Madame herself, the venerable Fifth Avenue address bridged two worlds. Nearby was New School University. A mecca for writers, artists, and philosophers, it had once served as a “University in Exile” for intelligentsia fleeing Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Also nearby was the
Forbes
Magazine Building, which housed a lavish collection once owned by millionaire Malcolm Forbes—everything from ship models to Fabergé eggs made for Russian czars. It served as another sort of mecca: a capitalist’s.

Pierre had definitely leaned toward the Forbes end of that particular spectrum. His vast Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment firmly reflected this—as well as his affinity for all things “Old World.”
Really
old—like eighteenth century.

Brocade drapes, heavy gilt-edged furniture, and overwrought statuary made me feel as though I’d entered a Gallic museum. Then again, Madame’s late spouse always had harbored a love for Napoleon, whom the short-statured Pierre had even slightly resembled.

My trips here always had me contemplating Madame’s contradictions. While I understood she had fallen in love with an Old World man, I also knew that the New World was still a very important part of her. Why else would there be such a note of tremendous pride in her voice when she told her tales of sobering up Jackson Pollack, William de Kooning, and other abstract expressionists at the Blend with more than one pot of hot black French roast? Or allowing the occasional struggling poet (such as the young Jean-Louis—“Jack”—Kerouac) or evicted playwright to sleep on one of the second-floor couches?

Upon my arrival, Madame emerged from her bedroom suite still wearing mourning black, yet elegant and regal as ever. The unadorned dress was impeccably tailored. Her only jewelry was Pierre’s diamond and platinum wedding band. Her hair, once a rich dark brown, had long ago turned gray and was now rinsed a beautiful silver and blunt-cut above her shoulders. Today she wore it in a French twist, a sleek and simple black pearl comb holding it in place.

This elegant façade had deceived many over the years into assuming Madame was nothing more than an elite socialite.

But I knew the truth.

There was unbreakable marble in that woman’s satin glove, and I’d seen it unveiled on every sort of person in this city: from corrupt health inspectors, shady garbage collectors, and chauvinist vendors to bratty debutantes, self-important executives, and narcissistic ex-hippies.

The key to Madame’s contradictions was quite simple, really. Although her family had been very wealthy back in prewar Paris, they’d lost everything to the Nazi invasion and were forced to flee to struggling relatives in America with nothing but the clothes on their backs.