On What Grounds (Coffeehouse Mysteries, No. 1) (A Coffeehouse Mystery) (9 page)

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“For one thing, I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

“And how is that?”

“Like he’s interested.”

“Really?…He does?”

Matt stared at me. “My God, Clare, you’re interested, too.”

“Of course not!” I said, “Don’t be stupid. He’s married.”

“So?”

“What do you mean
so
! Do you honestly think I’d get involved with someone who’s married? Well, I’m not you, Matt. Get
that
straight. And you know what? My interest in any man is not your business. Not anymore. You think you can just waltz in here and—and—”

I ran out of gas. It had been a long morning. I turned away, walked to the window, and crossed my arms. The rain that had been threatening all morning had finally begun to fall.

Matt didn’t move for a few moments, then he finally let out a disgusted grunt and headed for the stairs. “Guess it’s time for me to finish getting dressed, before I get any
more
of a chill.”

Five seconds later I heard a sharp thump, and I knew on the way up the steps, he’d sent his fist into a wall.

I
N
1849, four Sisters of Charity founded St. Vincent’s as a thirty-bed hospital for the poor in a small brick house on Thirteenth Street.

Today St. Vincent’s has 758 beds, and the only trauma center below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. It’s also a teaching hospital—something I have firsthand experience with because its medical residents are outstanding customers.

I figured at least one of the red-eyed young residents who regularly stumbled into the Blend for double-tall lattes, triple espressos, and grande Italian roasts during their periodic thirty-hour on-call shifts would be able to tell me about Anabelle’s condition. So, as soon as the Crime Scene Unit left the shop and Tucker arrived to help Matteo open the coffee bar again, I grabbed an umbrella and trudged up Seventh Avenue South, through the pouring rain.

When I neared the hospital’s entrance, I paused at one of the building’s walls. Cold rain streaked the dark gray stone, trickling like tears down its smooth blank face. Just a few years ago, this gray wall wasn’t so blank.

I could still see the hundreds of photos—the faces, the names, the desperate messages scrawled beneath: “Have you seen…?” “Please, please call…” “Looking for my…wife, husband, son, daughter, brother, sister, lover, friend…”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had been in New Jersey, watching the breaking news on television like most of the country, but I still remember how hard it was to contemplate the details: the cut throats of stewardesses, the terror of passengers as commercial jets were turned into guided missiles, the horrible deaths of the Trade Center workers—people from all nations, all beliefs, all income levels, people who’d simply arrived early to get the job done—office workers, restaurant staffs, banking executives, security guards, and maintenance men.

Many of those killed had lived in this Village neighborhood. They had woken that morning unsuspecting, unaware it would be the last morning of their lives, the last opportunity to feel a new day’s sunshine, smell and sip a cup of freshly brewed coffee.

People forget as years go by, but this city will never forget. The terror, the tragedy, or the courage…

The firemen running up as others ran out. The businessman who wouldn’t leave his friend stranded alone in a wheelchair. Two figures in a window, high above the street, a man and a woman with locked hands, jumping together, like so many others before and after them who decided a falling fate was better than burning up alive amid the toxic cloud of melting office furniture and hundreds of gallons of jet fuel.

When the reality hit that morning and most of the city felt paralyzed, Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois descended from her Fifth Avenue penthouse, just a few blocks from this spot, and marched straight to the Blend, instructing the staff to brew coffee nonstop around the clock—and deliver a fresh thermos every two hours to every nurses’ station at St. Vincent’s. The Village hospital had treated over 1,400 patients, including some of the most severe trauma cases.

“At such times, you do what you
can
do,” Madame had said to me. “And we can do coffee, so that’s what we
will
do.”

And we did. Joy and I dropped everything to help. In the weeks that followed, we even helped Madame transport urns down the West Side Highway, to Ground Zero, the smoldering site of the collapsed World Trade Center, where firemen, iron workers, and hundreds of volunteers toiled tirelessly for months to recover remains and clear away the tons of smoking, twisted wreckage near the tip of Manhattan island.

Nothing would end the heartbreak of that fall and winter, certainly nothing as trivial as a cup of coffee. Yet every time Joy, or Madame, or I placed a hot paper cup into the hands of an exhausted volunteer, I understood why Madame wanted to take urn after urn down there.

What cheered and warmed these weary people for a few minutes wasn’t the liquid extraction of a handful of beans, but the idea that someone had made it for them. Someone had cared. Someone had loved—an essential reminder for anyone who must daily face the gray, twisted evidence of someone else’s hate.

“The coffee almanac said it best,” Madame liked to remind us at the end of those long days. And then she’d quote words written at the beginning of the last century:

“Coffee makes a sad man cheerful, a languorous man active, a cold man warm, a warm man glowing. It awakens mental powers thought to be dead, and when left in a sick room, it fills the room with a fragrance…. The very smell of coffee terrorizes death.”

To Madame, a cup of morning coffee was more than a pick-me-up, it was fortification against whatever the world was about to throw at you, be it the best or the worst.

Which brings me back to my fears for Anabelle. After my silent moment at St. Vincent’s rain-streaked wall, I entered the hospital and found its elevator bank.

The ascent took the usual four months with orderlies, nurses, and visitors entering and exiting on their appointed floors. During one of these brief stops, the elevator doors opened and I caught a glimpse of a familiar face down one of the hospital corridors—

Madame was sitting in a wheelchair and chatting with a gray-templed white-coated doctor. Before I could step out, the doors closed again.

“Excuse me, what floor was that?” I asked the tall Filipino orderly, who was standing beside me with an empty wheelchair.

“Cancer treatment,” he said.

My stomach dropped.

Cancer treatment. My god.

Madame had indeed seemed more tired lately. And the contracts she’d tricked me and Matt into signing.
My god,
I thought again, it all made sense now: She was ill. That’s why she wanted the legacy of the Blend in our hands. That’s why she’d had the nerve to give us both permission to live in the duplex—she wanted to see us get back together before she…before she…

My god.

My mind was still processing this awful revelation when the elevator door opened on the floor for the intensive care unit. While I was still reeling from this news about Madame, I knew Anabelle was in even more serious trouble, so, like a triage nurse, I did my best to put my worries about Madame on hold and refocus my attention on Anabelle.

Venturing into the ICU waiting area, I noticed a young woman with a mass of frizzy dark hair and baggy clothes standing at a large observation window, staring at a ward full of beds. It was Anabelle’s roommate, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather, she’d told me when we first met).

Anabelle’s bed wasn’t far from the observation window. She appeared to still be unconscious, plugged into an array of daunting-looking medical machines. A nurse sat near the foot of the bed, watching the monitors. Next to the bed, a slender blond woman stood, her back to us.

Through her trendy black-rimmed rectangular glasses, Esther glanced over at me. Like the mother I was, I found myself thinking how lovely the girl’s features were, how beautiful her skin, and yet they were hidden by that too-long mass of frizzy, unconditioned hair and those clunky black glasses.

The truth was, I actually had a soft spot for Esther Best because I’d been just like her in my teen years (albeit a might less hostile). Eventually I grew out of it. I lost weight, made an effort with my appearance, dealt with my anger, and accepted the things I could not change, as the saying goes.

The biggest issue for Esther, as it had been with me, was her attitude. The giant chip on her shoulder usually fell on anyone within earshot, especially members of the opposite sex, whom she puzzled about on a fairly regular basis. From what I overheard in her conversations with poor Tucker, she was “totally perplexed” as to why the few boys who asked her out were so “hostile” after only an hour or two with her.

I greeted Esther. She nodded, and then she glanced back to the window, offering one of her characteristic observations—

“I thought she was supposed to be graceful.”

Gee, how charitable,
I thought with a sigh. “Anabelle
is
graceful, Esther. She’s a dancer.”

“I know she’s a dancer. Everyone does. My god, it’s the first thing that comes out of her mouth in case you haven’t noticed—especially with men—‘I’m a dancer!’ But geez, Clare, I don’t call slipping down a flight of stairs and ending up here graceful. I’d call it stupendously klutzy.”

You know that old saying,
If you’ve got nothing nice to say—then slide over here and sit next to me.
Well, Esther was definitely comfortable on
both
sides of that couch.

“Who’s to say she slipped?” I asked Esther.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, she may have been pushed,” I said, watching Esther closely for a reaction. “I think somebody pushed her.”

Esther’s eyes narrowed. “Like who?”

Okay, so the truth is the New York Police Department’s Crime Scene Unit hadn’t uncovered a darned thing to support my “pushing” theory. The only “physical evidence” they found was that JFK luggage tag from the back alley, which to my chagrin, Quinn handed over for the Crime Scene folks to file (even after Matteo identified it as coming from his luggage) along with Anabelle’s jacket and purse.

For a grand total of about thirty minutes, they’d inspected the overflowing garbage can above the staircase, as well as every other potentially clue-filled surface. They found the smudged fingerprints of over a dozen people. Clearly, there was no way to get any leads from prints—unless someone who worked at the Blend had figured their prints would prove nothing.

I cleared my throat and raised an eyebrow to Esther, trying to look shrewd. “I don’t know who pushed Anabelle. But I’m going to find out.”

Esther rolled her eyes.

“By the way,” I said, “where were
you
last night?”

“At the
Words on Eighth
poetry reading, why?”

“Then where to?”

“Sheridan Square Diner with some friends. Then back to the apartment. Alone.”

“And when was the last time you saw Anabelle?”

“What are you? Working for the NYPD now? Those cops already asked me that stuff.”

“Just answer me.”

“I last saw her before I left for the poetry reading. She said she was going to the Blend for an eight-to-midnight shift.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Anything else you can remember? Did she mention seeing anyone?”

“Like I told the cops. No,
nyet, nada
, zippo!”

I sighed, out of questions already, and made a mental note to speak to Lieutenant Quinn about interrogating suspects. Maybe he could give me some pointers.

I looked through the ICU observation window at Anabelle again. The blond woman moved around the bed to talk to the nurse, and I got the first good look at her face.

She was distraught, that was clear. And the lines, creases, and shadows confirmed she was a lot older than her youthfully slender body appeared, probably late forties. The hair that fell just past her shoulders was blond but the roots were dark, and she’d pulled it into a tasteful ponytail. The skin was too tan for a New York autumn and her clothes—tight black designer slacks and a white silk blouse—appeared tailored to fit her perfectly.

“Who’s that woman?” I asked.

“Anabelle’s stepmother.”

“Her stepmother? I didn’t know she was in the New York City area. Anabelle’s employment forms say her next of kin is in—”

“Florida, I know,” said Esther.

“So what’s with the stepmother?”

“She came by the apartment a few days ago. Anabelle didn’t look too happy to see her, I can tell you.”

“Do you know why?”

“
Money.
I don’t know the particulars, but I do know Anabelle borrowed five thousand dollars from her stepmother to get started here in New York last year. Mommy Dearest was passing through here on some sort of business. I think she wanted it paid back.”

“What happened between them?”

Esther shrugged. “They just kept arguing. Actually, they’ve been arguing back and forth about money for about two months now.”

“Was Anabelle arguing on the phone yesterday, before she left for the Blend?”

“Come to think of it, she was—I forgot about that. She got a cell phone call about an hour before I left. I forgot to tell the cops, but now I remember. She had a pretty big fight, too—”

“Why? What did her stepmother want?”

“It wasn’t her stepmother she was fighting with. It was The Dick—”

“The what?” I said.

Esther rolled her eyes. “Anabelle’s
boyfriend,
Richard.”

“What do you know about Richard, anyway?”

“Richard Gibson Engstrum, Junior. Total asshole. Dartmouth senior this year. But this past summer he was living at home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Upper East Side.”

“Where does he work in the summer?”

“He doesn’t. Ever hear of Engstrum Systems? Daddy made a fortune on the NASDAQ run-up. They cashed out before the dot-bomb. The Dick’s got his lifestyle covered.”

“And his parents let him laze around all summer?”

Esther shrugged. “All I know is what Anabelle told me. Since she met him in July, he hasn’t worked.”

“Do you know where they met?”

“He was slumming with some friends at an East Village dance club—Nightrunners or Rah, one of those Alphabet City places. He saw Anabelle moving on the dance floor, and that was that. In case you haven’t noticed, guys drool over the girl.”

“I noticed, Esther. And it’s pretty hard not to notice that you’re incredibly angry about it.”

“About what?”

“About Anabelle—and her ability to attract male attention.”

“Hey, listen, I’m not like one of those nicey-nice Barbies who hides what she
really
thinks while she proceeds to stab you in the back each and every chance she gets. That’s what Anabelle liked about me—or at least she said so. She liked that I told the truth—and the truth ain’t always pretty. And the truth about me and Anabelle is that I’ve never been angry at her, I’ve just been
jealous
of her. So at least get that straight.”