Shot in the Dark Page 15

  That comment brought to mind Esther’s earlier crack to Sydney about doing “much more” on Saturday night.

  “So what’s your narrative?” I asked. “What are you planning to spring on the prepaid Cinder crowd?”

  “Planning?”

  “I mothered a teenage daughter, Esther. Don’t waste your clueless puppy-dog eyes on me. I know you’re preparing some stunt for tomorrow.”

  “Stunt?”

  Folding my arms, I gave her my super-serious boss stare.

  “Okay, okay.” Esther put up her hands. “Don’t Deadeye Dick me . . .”

  And with that obscure literary reference, my resident slam poetess explained her own action plan—the Esther Best Op—and her reason for staging it.

  I was fine with it. More than fine. I thought her plan was brilliant.

  “You have my blessing,” I told her. “And you’re right. Sydney may be ‘taking control of the story.’ But this is still our coffeehouse.”

  “Oh, thank you, boss! I just know it won’t suck!”

  Rising from my chair, I almost laughed. Almost. But the memory of Carol Lynn Kendall’s arrest, Haley’s cold corpse, and Tucker’s resignation kept my chuckles at bay.

  Esther gestured to the clutter before us. “I’ll bus your sticky-bun-bribery table. You should head downstairs, because we might get a new customer, and Dante is otherwise engaged.”

  “AJ is still here?”

  “She and Dante obviously made a love connection. And they didn’t even swipe to meet. Imagine that!”

  As I headed for the stairs, I was imagining a few other things, too, mainly questions about Haley’s work for Cinder. There were still plenty of missing pieces in this fishy puzzle. Maybe AJ could float a few into place.

  Forty

  WHEN I reached the shop’s main floor, I found the Village Blend was still a customer-free zone. Dante, God love him, had moved behind our counter, just in case one happened to show up.

  AJ was now perched on a barstool across from him. Her pleated skirt fell to the side to reveal long legs, tightly crossed, the one on top bobbing up and down like the handle of an excited water pump.

  Their private smiles and flirtatious glances quickly disappeared as I approached.

  “Hey, boss, are you finished upstairs?” Dante asked, suddenly all business.

  “Done,” I told him. Then I faced AJ. “Did Dante help you pack your equipment?”

  “He’s been a perfect ten—” she said. “I mean gentleman!” Her cheeks blushed rosy. “I mean . . . he’s keeping me company while I wait for my Uber car.”

  “So, AJ,” I began, hoping I sounded casual. “I understand you worked under Haley Hartford. She was your supervisor?”

  AJ frowned. “For a while.”

  “What did you and Sydney mean about not holding grudges? Did Haley leave under some kind of cloud?”

  AJ shifted uncomfortably. “I really can’t talk about that.”

  “Can you share anything about Haley’s new job?”

  “She was developing an app for a start-up fitness company.”

  I nodded. “The detectives mentioned her new boss was a Mr. Ferrell. But there’s something I don’t understand . . .” I made a show of scratching my head, doing my best to look innocently perplexed. “Why would Haley quit a full-time position at a successful company like Cinder for an untried business that might fail?”

  “Money, that’s why!” AJ blurted, her leg pumping faster. “Three weeks ago, Tristan Ferrell instantly doubled Haley’s salary and gave her a ten-thousand-dollar signing bonus—in cash.”

  “Cash? Why?”

  “Off the books. No taxes. Haley was helping her little sister through medical school. She was always looking for a way to earn.”

  “Tristan Ferrell?” Dante murmured. “Hey, I know that name! Tristan Ferrell is Nancy’s other boss.”

  “Nancy Kelly? Our Nancy?”

  “That’s how she keeps her membership at the Equator fitness club. She couldn’t afford it otherwise.”

  “I thought that foreign exchange student from Dubai bought her a membership.”

  “A one-month pass,” Dante said. “He’s already moved on to a new conquest, but Nancy found another way to extend her gift, and make a little cash on the side.”

  “Well, I hope Tristan Ferrell doesn’t steal Nancy from us the way he stole Haley from Cinder.” I turned back to AJ. “I wonder . . . was Haley doing that other job on the side before she took it full-time? Was that the source of the tension? Is that why she left?”

  The leg was pumping so fast now that I feared AJ was going to lurch off her stool. “There were . . . other issues,” she confessed.

  Unfortunately, that’s all she confessed. An alert on her smartphone ended our conversation.

  “Oh! Sorry, gotta go. My car is coming.”

  As I waited for Dante to help the less-than-talkative Tinkerbell load her equipment into the hired car, I couldn’t help wondering about the “other issues,” and I made a mental note to find out. Tomorrow night Team Tinkerbell was coming back to the Village Blend. With a little luck, one of them might enjoy gossiping about office politics—or at least have looser lips than AJ.

  By the time Dante returned, Esther had joined me behind the counter.

  “What?” Dante said, seeing our hopeful stares follow his every step across the shop. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “We have an action plan,” Esther announced.

  “And this involves me?”

  I nodded. “You’re the best artist on staff.”

  A grin of pride split his face.

  “Don’t get all peacocky, Baldini, you’re no Leonardo.”

  “I wouldn’t be, would I? Da Vinci is not among my influences.”

  “Let’s hope the ‘Code’ part is,” I said. “Because we need you to decipher your memory of a face, and reconstruct it as a sketch. Esther and I will help . . .”

  After I explained our Barista APB idea, Dante said he understood what we wanted, but we would have to decide “which version” of Richard Crest he should draw.

  Esther blinked. “What do you mean, which version?”

  “There’s the one we saw the night Gun Girl confronted him, when he was trying to hide his face. And there’s the one I saw last night.”

  “Last night!” Esther and I cried together.

  “At that new gastropub on Bleecker. I saw him swiping through women on his phone. Fifteen minutes later, he was drinking with a giggling NYU undergrad. She was practically in his lap . . .”

  I exchanged glances with Esther. She was right. Crest was still swiping. I turned back to Dante.

  “You said he looked different?”

  “Changed his hair. It was much darker. The top wasn’t slicked back anymore. It was shaggy and kind of tousled. The skinny suit was gone, too. He wore jeans and a hoodie. And he had lots of jaw shadow, you know, celebrity stubble.”

  “Draw both versions of him. Right now.”

  While Dante went to work in our upstairs lounge (sketching Village Blend wanted posters), Esther took over the empty counter, and I went to the basement to roast coffee.

  In the heat of our vintage Probat, I stewed.

  My staff would soon be ready to ID Richard Crest. And Soles and Bass assured me they’d pick him up when he walked in.

  But what if Crest never walked in?

  What I needed was something to entice the man back into my coffeehouse. Unfortunately, my expertise was culinary, and this guy wasn’t the sort who’d be seduced by sticky buns—not the kind we sold, anyway.

  So what would tempt him?

  As the light dawned, I pulled out my smartphone. To reel in this catfish, I would need the proper bait. And no one knew more about alluring lures than my ex-husband.

  Time to cons
ult the king of hooks—and (pickup) lines.

  “Hello, Matt? Can I come over?”

  “To my place? Hey, anytime . . .”

  Forty-one

  “I want you to help me set up a Cinder account. I want you to do it as soon as possible. And I want my profile to attract as many men as possible.”

  For a frozen moment, my ex-husband stared at me, slack-jawed. Then he howled with laughter. “At last, you’ve come to your senses! You finally dumped the flatfoot!”

  It was nine o’clock in the evening. I was sitting on a couch in the newly built man cave of Matteo Allegro’s Brooklyn warehouse, and I wasn’t wearing my own clothes.

  To cover my top, Matt had lent me an old flannel shirt (with buttons missing in all the wrong places). As for my bottom, it was (barely) covered by a pair of his skimpiest nylon gym shorts.

  The wardrobe change hadn’t been part of my plan when I’d called the man, hours ago, to arrange this meeting. After leaving Esther on duty at the Village Blend, and receiving no answer from Tucker after five voice mail messages, I climbed into my hired car and rode to Red Hook. The next thing I knew, I was having a near-death experience . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  IT was seven o’clock and the sky was already murky-dark when my Uber car pulled up to Matt’s coffee storage facility. Surrounded by eight-foot-high chain-link fencing, the blocky structure sat on the edge of New York Bay.

  Fog was rolling in off the water. Its cold dampness seeped through my light jacket, and I shivered under the only visible streetlight. As my low boots clicked along the cracked sidewalk, the lonesome call of a ship’s foghorn made the deserted area seem even more desolate.

  Next to Matt’s warehouse, a burned-out auto garage, which had once been a mafioso chop shop, was now leveled and would soon be the site of the Village Blend’s brand-new roasting facility.

  The Uber driver had taken off before I had time to punch in the keypad code that would unlock the warehouse’s gate. As I began to enter the string of numbers, a flash of light drew my eyes to the street.

  Typical of urban residences in residustrial neighborhoods, the old row houses around Matt’s warehouse appeared abandoned. Doors were blocked by iron gates, windows by jailhouse bars.

  There was only one vehicle on the block—a wine red SUV parked beside the roastery construction site.

  I knew Matt employed a two-man day crew at the warehouse. They helped with things like transporting coffee and supplies, and odds and ends jobs like our shop’s laundry. But I didn’t recognize the vehicle as one of theirs. I also knew Matt liked to meet with his architect every Friday, and wondered if this was his SUV.

  Maybe Matt and the architect are at the site now.

  I walked toward the high plywood fence. This blighted area, where Matt had set up shop, was notorious for poor drainage. On the way, a broken sidewalk and massive mud puddle forced me into the street.

  That’s when I heard it—the SUV’s engine turned over, its loud roar shattering the stillness. Then powerful headlights snapped on, blinding me.

  Before I could take a step, the SUV lurched forward, fishtailed on the damp pavement, and headed right for me!

  I tried to get out of its path, but slipped in the mud instead and, with an ugly splash, landed on my padded posterior. The SUV surged through the puddle’s edge, sending a cascade of freezing, filthy water over my head as its wheels missed me by inches!

  I cried out, but the SUV kept moving down the block. Then it skidded around the corner and disappeared.

  Five minutes later, I was stumbling through Matt’s warehouse door.

  “Clare, are you okay?!”

  My ex-husband’s expression went from surprise to concern to barely suppressed laughter, the latter after I reassured him that my muddy, dripping self was perfectly fine—and hopping mad.

  “What happened?”

  “Ask your architect!”

  “What are you talking about? He left hours ago.”

  “Well, someone nearly ran me over, and then just drove off, leaving me like this on the ground!”

  Matt took a step backward. “I can see that—phew—and smell it.”

  Between the delayed shock, and the fact that Matt liked to keep his storage facility temperature on the cool side, I began to shiver. My ex quickly wrapped me in his jacket, and guided me up the wooden stairs to his newly built living space.

  “Let’s get you out of those wet clothes and into a hot shower. I guarantee my new spa heads will sooth your troubles away.”

  “What about the jerk who nearly killed me?! If he wasn’t your architect, what the heck was he doing, lurking there in the dark?”

  “Are you sure it was a guy? There’s a nice view of the bay between the buildings—the lights are really pretty at night. Sometimes couples park around here to make out. You might have spooked them in the act.”

  “You really have a one-track mind, don’t you? There are no ‘pretty lights’ out there tonight. The bay is covered in fog! Why don’t you make sure that wasn’t some burglar, casing your warehouse to rob you? Maybe he thinks there’s a safe in here!”

  “Take it easy. Geez, Clare, talk about a one-track mind. That flatfoot of yours has you thinking every gomer on the street is a major crimes suspect.”

  “That’s not fair. This is New York City. Any man who drives away from the scene of an accident shouldn’t be taken lightly.”

  “Fine.” He pushed me into the bathroom. “Calm down, clean up, and I’ll check it out.”

  The bathroom was small and bare-bones basic, with one of those fiberglass floor-to-ceiling efficiency showers that you’d find in a bargain motel.

  I wasn’t surprised at the Spartan accommodations. Matt Allegro spent half his life in low-rent hotels, glorified shacks, or even tents—places where air-conditioning and hot running water were not part of the amenities. He learned to live with less and make do with what he had.

  That said, on his hunt for exotic coffees, Matt might go days or even weeks without a shower or shave; yet when he returned to New York, he insisted on comfort, even luxury. Take this bathroom. The design may have been utilitarian, but it had plenty of steaming hot water, and no less than three stacked showerheads with eight glorious spa settings—and, yes, I tried them all.

  Matt’s soaps, shampoos, and scents were top-of-the-line, too. I used a tiny cake shaped like a rose petal (made by Fragonard of Paris, no less) and left the steamy shower feeling clean, refreshed—and nicely perfumed.

  In the tiny bathroom, I slipped into the old flannel shirt Matt had hung on the towel rack. He’d done it ten minutes ago, when he’d interrupted my showerhead sampling with a suggestive offer to “wash my back.”

  I not-so-suggestively told him to “back off.”

  He did.

  He also failed to return with clothing to wear below the waist—an innocent oversight, I’m sure.

  Forty-two

  I crept into Matt’s bedroom to dig up something for coverage down under and found him sitting on his king-sized bed with his laptop open.

  The screen displayed grainy security footage of the vehicle that almost ran me down. Matt had frozen the image so I could see the driver, a youngish man with a beard, caught in the act of opening the SUV’s door.

  “So that’s the flash I saw? His car’s interior lights?”

  Matt looked up and I tightened my grip on the towel around my waist.

  He smiled—actually, he suppressed a laugh. “You want to borrow a pair of shorts?”

  “Please.”

  “Come here first. Take a look. The SUV that nearly ran you down was parked by my warehouse for almost an hour. The driver got out and disappeared behind his vehicle. My guess? Nature called. Then he saw you coming toward him and took off.”

  “Don’t you think that’s suspicious behavior
?”

  Matt shrugged. “The roastery construction site is locked tight, and this warehouse has obvious security cameras. I think the guy was just innocently looking around, curious about the area. Maybe he wants to build here . . .”

  As Matt went on, I stared hard at the screen and realized I recognized this man. The photo was grainy and black-and-white, so I couldn’t tell the color of his beard, but I was sure that facial fur would be dark red—just like the man’s SUV.

  “I’ve seen that bearded man in our coffeehouse!”

  Matt looked closer. “Yeah, he does look familiar. I think I’ve seen him in the Village, too.”

  “So what’s he doing parked for an hour in front of your Brooklyn warehouse?”

  “Could be a coincidence.”

  “I spooked the guy, Matt, so much so that he fishtailed to get out of here and nearly killed me—without slowing down to find out if he did. That doesn’t sound innocent.”

  “No, it doesn’t . . .” Matt moved through the footage again. “I can’t make out his vehicle’s license number. But I see the warehouse camera did get a nice shot of you landing on your beautiful round behind. Would you like to see?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Look, I’ll share the footage with the local precinct, but that’s about all I can do—other than confront the guy if I see him again.”

  I considered the possibilities. “Do you think he could be a private investigator?”

  “What would he be investigating?”

  “You.”

  “Me?!”

  “Yes. Using dating apps to cheat is not uncommon in the swipe-to-meet world—you agreed to that fact three days ago.”

  “I’m not married anymore!”

  “No, genius, but one of your conquests might be.”

  “I don’t sleep with married women, Clare. It’s asking for trouble. And before you say it—yes, I can spot when a woman is married and posing as single.”

  “Really? You have mind-reading vision, do you?”