Shot in the Dark Page 18

  As Esther rolled her eyes and cracked wise about “Baldini’s Rogues’ Gallery,” I considered giving Dante another assignment—drawing that man with the red beard who nearly ran me over. But I quickly talked myself out of it.

  What if Red Beard actually turned out to be a PI, sent to catch Matt in flagrante with a married woman? The public revelation would be beyond embarrassing. No, my plate was full enough, and Matt said he would handle it.

  “So what’s our next step?” Esther asked.

  “I start the manhunt by swiping right on the most likely suspects. I plan to invite them to ‘ask for Kara’ at our shop tomorrow night—”

  “Tomorrow? But that’s our big event night.”

  “Exactly. With a large crowd here, Crest will feel comfortable, believing he can blend in. He won’t know our entire staff will be on the lookout for him.”

  “Smart,” Esther said with tiny applause. “This is going to be fun. Can I help you swipe through suspects?”

  “I was counting on it.”

  “Stimulation first!” she declared. “An espresso?”

  “For plowing through peacocks? I’m going to need something much stronger. Make it a Shot in the Dark.”

  While Esther got busy dropping a shot of espresso into a black pool of high-octane brew, my finger got busy swiping on one of Marilyn’s recommended apps.

  Eesh. Talk about a rogues’ gallery!

  I paged through the profiles with hope, but out of the whole muscle-flexing, backpacking, dog-smooching, naked saxophone-playing bunch, not one had Crest’s MO.

  Suddenly, in the midst of my swiping, a sound distracted me, the full-bodied alto of a mature woman’s laughter.

  Madame?

  Turning in my seat, I took a longer look at that older couple facing the fireplace. When I’d hurried in, I barely noticed the violet beret and matching jacket of the female in the pair. Now I realized the hat was sitting at a jaunty angle on a familiar silver pageboy.

  But if the woman was Matt’s mother, who the heck was the lanky, mocha-skinned gentleman giving her the giggles?

  Must be another “Silver Fox” date, I assumed, admiring the man’s jet-black hair and distinguished gray temples. But I was wrong. In mild shock, I suddenly recognized Madame’s sixty-something companion—

  “Sergeant Jones?!”

  At my cry of surprise, the older couple turned in their chairs. It was Madame, all right, getting cozy with Leonidas Jabari Jones of the NYPD Harbor Patrol.

  “Clare!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t notice you arrive. My goodness, dear, whatever are you wearing?”

  Forty-eight

  GATHERING my barely clothed dignity, I tightened the belt on Matt’s oversize London Fog and made my way over to the couple’s table. The sergeant gallantly rose.

  “Good evening, Ms. Cosi.”

  Though he was out of uniform, the man’s spine was still flagpole straight, his legs braced as if our floor’s wood planks were a boat deck. His shoulders were squared under his tweed jacket, and the black eye patch was still in place. But the hard-nosed cop face was gone, replaced by an easy grin.

  “As I was telling your charming employer—after I stopped by the other day to try your delicious coffee, I realized I’d been here before. Many years ago—”

  “Lee and I are practically old friends,” Madame said, her violet gaze glistening in the firelight.

  As I sat down with the pair, Esther brought my Shot in the Dark, and Madame asked her to brew something exceptional for “Lee and our special reunion.” Esther quickly returned with her order—a French press primed with our most sought-after (and insanely expensive) coffee, one we kept in rare reserve.

  While the coarsely ground Billionaire blend beans were steeping in filtered hot water, Madame urged Sergeant Jones to tell me and Esther the story of how they first met.

  “I’m sure these young ladies don’t want to hear me reminisce—”

  “Don’t be silly!” Madame jabbed him playfully with her elbow. “It’s historic. They’ll love it.”

  “If you say so, darlin’,” Jones said with a wink of his good eye. “It was decades ago, a lifetime, really. I was no more than a punk-ass kid running wild in the Village with my friends. Suddenly, I see my idol, Jimi Hendrix, entering this very coffeehouse. I burst through the door, ready to charge right up to him.”

  “But I stopped him,” Madame said. “Jimi dropped in every so often, and sometimes even played upstairs. Onstage he was riveting, a genius musician, but offstage he was fragile and shy. Encounters with his fans often ended badly, so I tried to be protective of his privacy.”

  Madame patted Lee’s arm. “But I couldn’t bear to disappoint this handsome young man. So when I served Jimi’s coffee and pastry, I quietly introduced him to one of his youngest fans.”

  “That is historic!” Esther cried as she pressed and served the Billionaire blend. “What did the greatest rock guitarist in history say?”

  “You mean after I greeted him with something incredibly stupid?” Jones replied.

  “It couldn’t have been that bad,” I said.

  “I told Jimi that I wanted to play guitar just like him. Oh, man. He set me straight. ‘Kid,’ he told me. ‘I’ve been imitated so many times I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.’ Then Jimi told me I should live my own damn life and make my own damn mistakes. That’s the only way I would find my own song. I didn’t understand what he meant. I was too young to know how valuable those words would be.”

  Jones paused. “Not long after that, Jimi died of an overdose. Jump ahead in time, and I’ve got no job, no future, taking every drug I can lay my hands on. One day I overdose. While I’m recovering in the hospital, I hear “All Along the Watchtower” on the radio. That’s when I understood what Jimi was trying to tell me, and I knew if I didn’t change my life, I’d end up imitating the worst mistake of his . . .”

  The sergeant went on to tell us about his favorite uncle, an ex-navy man, who visited him during recovery and encouraged him to join the service.

  “He warned me to get away from the music scene and all the drugs or I’d start using again. And if I died, he’d never forgive me, because it would kill my mother—his only sister. I knew my uncle was right. I was broke and broken. So I held my breath and jumped into a new world.”

  “That’s a big change,” I said. “Didn’t you have trouble adapting?”

  “Plenty, at first, but . . . I liked the camaraderie of the navy, the traveling, the ocean at night. I liked the structure of knowing what I had to do each day and what was expected of me. I kept playing music, too, formed a little band on the ship. I’ll tell you, no one was more surprised than I was, but I stayed clean on the water.”

  “Only you’re not in the navy now,” Esther pointed out.

  He laughed. “Blame it on Fleet Week. I fell for a wonderful woman here in New York, and we started a family. That’s when I left the service, to be closer to them. It was my late wife’s father who helped me get into the NYPD and then the Harbor Unit, and there you go—that’s my song. So far, anyway. I’ll be forced to retire soon, and I’m sad to say that part of my life will be over . . .”

  While Lee Jones turned his attention back to Madame and sampling our Billionaire blend, I exchanged glances with Esther. I could tell she was still bubbling with excitement about the Hendrix connection to our coffeehouse.

  Though I was never a big fan of his music, I knew Hendrix had a passionate following, which gave me an idea. I’d have to research it upstairs in the attic, where we kept the old photos and memorabilia that Madame had amassed over the decades. But if it worked out, the Village Blend might benefit.

  There was another part of the sergeant’s story that impressed me even more than the Hendrix meeting. And that was the grit he showed in overcoming his addiction.

  Now, as Sergeant Jones rave
d to us about our “Billionaire” beverage, I couldn’t help considering the coffee hunter who’d made the cup possible. Like Jones, my ex-husband had kicked his drug habit. Unlike the sergeant, however, he hadn’t changed much else in his life.

  Matt was still hooked on the partying that led to his downfall in the first place. Despite all his assurances, I’d never stop worrying that in a weak moment, with the wrong crowd—or the wrong woman—my daughter’s father might end up making the worst mistake of his life, too.

  My grim meditation was interrupted by a tiny royal fanfare, the signature alert for female users of the Cinder app, telling me that a pack of potential princes had been pumped into my Pumpkin Pot.

  Sergeant Jones overheard it and laughed. “Is Queen Elizabeth on deck?”

  I pulled the smartphone out of my pocket and did my best to explain why a grown woman, engaged to a loving man, had four dating apps on her mobile screen.

  Forty-nine

  THE sergeant listened with amazed interest as I told him about my “fishing expedition” for a man I believed was connected to the murder of Haley Hartford—the young woman his crew had pulled out of the Hudson.

  “You wouldn’t have any new insights, would you?” I asked.

  “I’m flattered you’d like my input,” he said. “But until you told me, I didn’t even know that girl’s name.”

  I was surprised. “Soles and Bass never spoke to you?”

  Jones shook his head. “The Harbor Unit pulls people out of the water all the time—the living and the dead. We’re almost never involved with the investigation into how they got there. We fill out reports and let detectives take it from there.”

  “But you know the Hudson River, right?”

  “Better than I know myself. I’ve worked on that stretch of water for going on thirty years.”

  “The detectives said there’s no camera footage they can use. But now I wonder—what about outside New York’s jurisdiction? Could there be cameras on the New Jersey side that captured Haley’s murder?”

  “The Hudson is over a mile wide. Standard security cameras shoot five hundred feet, at best. Even if you found a camera aimed at the right area of the riverbank with no river traffic in between, best you would get is a blur.”

  My hopes sank.

  “But,” he added, “since the Tappan Zee Bridge accident several years ago, insurers have been pressing for crash cameras on all commercial vessels. I know for a fact that a lot of the barges on the river that night were equipped with cameras.”

  “Really?” I leaned forward. “Could you request access to the footage?”

  “Warrants would be involved, because the cameras are on private vessels. And there’s going to be a lot of footage, too. But I can make a few informal queries; contact some of the captains who were on the river that night. When they hear the circumstances, they might want to volunteer their help. I’ll see what I can come up with . . .”

  “That’s very good of you, although it sounds like it may take a while.”

  “A week, at least, maybe longer.”

  “Then we better not cancel the Barista APB,” Esther advised.

  “The barista what?” Madame asked.

  “It’s part of the fishing expedition . . .” Esther pointed to the pantry, inviting her to check out Dante’s sketches.

  Madame’s eyes widened. “I see the game is afoot. Count me in, too!”

  With the moral support of everyone around me, I finally opened my Cinder Pumpkin Pot—and gasped. The little digital count told me no less than 380 men in the tristate area had swiped Kara into their own Pots as a desirable match.

  “Good grief, Matt was right about that bikini photo!”

  “Target the newbies first,” Esther suggested. “Filter for guys who are new on the app. Unless our shark had more than one identity, he probably started using his new profile in the past week.”

  I applied the filter, and the profiles narrowed down to around sixty. Finally, I started swiping, looking for photos with telltale signs of a fake identity.

  Sergeant Jones helped plenty on that score.

  “That’s a doctored photo.” He pointed at the screen. “A boat that size would capsize if it had that many girls on it.”

  “Great!” Obvious duplicity. I immediately sent that Fella a message.

  “Look at this one.” Jones laughed. “He claims he’s the #VegasKing. But those trees behind him aren’t desert palms, they’re Florida palms.”

  “I’ll bet that’s a spring break photo . . .” I sent him a message, too. Within ten minutes I’d sent out a dozen Glass Slippers, reaching out to every questionable or dishonest profile we could find.

  Despite the lateness of the hour—or more likely because of it—responses dropped into my box immediately. Given the dubious nature of the men I’d contacted, these replies tended to be “adult” in nature (not to be confused with mature).

  “Goodness,” Madame cried when I displayed the first message. “That invitation doesn’t sound very comfortable—”

  “Or anatomically possible,” Jones added.

  I hit the next message. “This man wants to show me a picture of his bedroom.” I displayed the image.

  “Looks more like a hardware store,” Esther said with a snort. “I get the dangling chains, but what’s with the John Deere riding mower?”

  “Now here’s a man who’s rather handsome, despite his obvious toupee,” Madame said of the next suspect.

  “Hmm . . . he wants to ‘reveal his true self,’” I said, reading his text. “And in the interest of openness, he wants me to look at the picture he sent.”

  I tapped the screen and blanched.

  “Oh, my,” Madame said. “Is the poor man completely bald?”

  “He sent you a shot of his junk!” Esther cried. “What is it with these dirtbags? If I wanted to look at sausage, I’d go to a German restaurant!”

  Madame wasn’t laughing anymore. She was fuming. “Why are young men so crude these days?”

  “Not so young.” I pointed to his profile age. “Mr. Toupee-Wearing Reveal His True Self is pushing forty.”

  “He must think it’s something women want to look at,” Madame reasoned.

  “Let’s take an informal poll,” Esther announced. “Out of the three women present, how many of us want to look at that? Show of hands. Okay, none!”

  “Then who can explain it?” Madame asked in all seriousness.

  The women at the table automatically stared at the only chair occupied by the opposite sex.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Sergeant Jones waved his hands. “I’m a widower with two grown, single daughters, who constantly worries that my beautiful babies are being subjected to this kind of disrespect.”

  “You know what,” I said. “I honestly don’t know if it is disrespect.”

  “What else would it be?” Madame asked.

  “Complete cluelessness,” I reasoned. “Lack of experience on what appeals to women.”

  “Sorry, boss,” Esther said, “you forgot to insert the word real before women.”

  “What’s the alternative?” I asked. “Plastic women?”

  “In a few years, when sex dolls become affordable? Yes. Until then, from a behavioral science perspective, the issue is pixilated women.”

  “Video games?”

  “Internet porn. Their brains have been pickled by it. And, no doubt, plenty of them have absolutely no clue what to do with an actual, real woman.”

  “Oh, this is depressing,” Madame said, sitting back.

  “Don’t be depressed,” Esther cajoled. “We’re talking about an odd subset of a rarified culture. Believe me, my Boris knows what do with a real woman!”

  “Dante knows what to do with them, too,” I said, then choked on how that sounded. “What I mean is: he’s a charming young
man who respects women and has a clue what to do with them—you know, romantically.” In the awkward silence that followed, I glanced at Esther. “Don’t tell him I said that!”

  Esther cackled.

  “We all know what you meant, dear,” Madame said, patting my shoulder.

  “You know what?” I said, clapping my hands and rising. “I think it’s time I called it a night.”

  Fifty

  “ARE you in bed?”

  It was Mike Quinn’s warm voice in my ear, calling around midnight.

  By now I’d fed, petted, and brushed my Java and Frothy into purring paradise, done a few chores around the apartment, dealt with another crop of Cinder Fellas (even more unsettling than the previous), and left another voice mail message for Tucker.

  I was tempted to call Joy, too, but didn’t want to rush her.

  Our DC coffeehouse, which featured live jazz on its second floor, was crazy-busy on Friday nights. Joy usually closed the kitchen around eleven and was free by midnight.

  “I’m waiting up for Joy’s call,” I told Mike. “She wants to talk.”

  “Okay to talk with me in the meantime?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Are you in bed?” he asked again, but this time his voice had gone all low and throaty, and I sensed a mischievous tone in it.

  “I’m in the bedroom,” I told him, “changing into a nightshirt.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “That depends,” I said. “Where are you exactly?”

  “In a conference room at One Police Plaza.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Not if you count the dozen other senior officers from the Joint Operations Anti-Narcotics task force. But they’re very distracted, and I’m in a corner by a window.”

  “Mike, I am not engaging in phone sex with you while you’re on the job!”

  “Really? That’s a new rule.”

  “Consider it an addendum: only when you’re totally alone. Like that stakeout you were on forever and were bored because there was absolutely no action and your fellow officers left for a meal break. But that’s it!”