On What Grounds Read online

  Finally, they fastened a brace around her head and neck, moved her to a flat board, and strapped her down. Anabelle seemed more like a corpse than a person now. Her limbs were limp, her face ashen.

  I hated not being able to help, hated being forced to watch impotently as strangers took her away.

  Tears blurred my vision, made my nose run. This can’t be happening echoed through my mind so many times I was no longer sure whether I was thinking it, saying it, or screaming it.

  At the top of the stairs, the paramedics placed the board on a folding stretcher, then pushed the thing swiftly across the main room.

  About then, Esther Best burst into the Blend’s entrance. She stopped dead at the pallid, rag-doll body of her roommate.

  “Ohmygod, what happened!” she cried with uncharacteristic emotion. Even Esther’s brown eyes, which were usually narrowed in some sort of jaded, hypercritical observation behind her black-framed glasses, now stared in wide-open shock.

  In front of me, the two paramedics were pushing tables out of the way. I followed closely behind, so focused on the stretcher, its wheels thundering across the wood-plank floor, that I didn’t even hear the male voice calling until I tried following Anabelle out the shop’s front door—

  Like a steel curtain, an impenetrable blue wall slid closed before me. Navy shirts, gun belts, nickel-silver badges. I collided right into it.

  The officers stood shoulder to shoulder. Both looked to be in their mid-twenties. One tall and lean, the other shorter and broader through the chest and shoulders. The tall one with the light hair and gray eyes whose name tag read LANGLEY spoke first. He was holding a notebook.

  “Woah, there, ma’am! Sorry, but we need to ask you some questions.”

  “Where are they taking her?” I asked, bouncing backward. Instantly, I tried to move around them, but they bobbed and weaved right along with me: Left, right, left, right, left—

  The whole thing looked like a pathetic one-on-two basketball game. And with my small stature, there were definitely no NBA offers in my future.

  “Calm down, ma’am. They’re taking her to St. Vincent’s,” said the other cop. He was the shorter one. Dark eyes and hair. His name tag read DEMETRIOS.

  I strained once more to look around the uniformed young men. On the street, a large crowd of onlookers had gathered—students with backpacks and older residents, many of them Blend regulars. Esther was speaking with one of the paramedics. All eyes watched as the other paramedic shut the two back doors simultaneously. The single loud thud struck me with a terrible premonition of finality.

  “Yeah,” said Langley. “They’ll do what they can for her. And her roommate says she’ll go to the hospital. We got some basic information about the victim from the roommate, but right now we need to hear what happened from you.”

  After the ambulance drove away—much too slowly, as far as I was concerned—Letitia Vale, one of the Blend’s regulars, poked her head of wrapped gray braids inside the front door.

  “Clare? Are you all right? What happened?”

  Letitia was the third-chair viola player with the Metropolitan Symphony. A tea drinker. (Tea was not the Blend’s specialty, but we did have a standard selection. Earl Grey, jasmine, camomile—the teas one would expect.) Letitia said what she mostly enjoyed about the Blend was its atmosphere and its anisette biscotti.

  When I had first managed the Blend almost ten years ago, Letitia had been a loyal customer. She’d even pulled together a little chamber ensemble to play at the Blend’s annual holiday parties.

  “Oh, Letitia, Anabelle had an accident…” My voice choked to a stop.

  “Heaven and earth! Is there anything I can do?” asked Letitia.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the cop named Demetrios told Letitia as he moved his body to block hers in yet another bob-and-weave game, “but we need to close the store now.”

  “Oh! Oh, of course. Clare, I’ll come back later.” She waved reassuringly.

  I nodded, no longer trusting my voice.

  “Okay, ma’am,” said Langley, opening his notebook. “It’s Clare, right? Why don’t we start with your full name and address.”

  I stared at him. Suddenly I had trouble focusing.

  “Ma’am?” Langley prompted.

  “What?” I asked.

  He gazed into my face for a long moment.

  “Okay, ma’am, I need you to take it easy, okay? I need you to take some deep breaths and sit down.” He motioned to the empty chair at one of the store’s twenty Italian marble-topped tables. “Can you tell us how you found the body—”

  “Body?” My stomach turned, saliva filled my mouth. “I’m not…feeling so well.”

  Demetrios shot Langley a look.

  “Uh, sorry, ma’am,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean the body. I meant, uh, the girl.”

  “Sit down, okay?” advised Demetrios. “You don’t look so good.”

  I tried, but couldn’t. It only made me feel worse. All I could think of was what Grandma Cosi used to say to women who’d just suffered a loss or shocking news and came to her kitchen for a reading of coffee grounds. Do something familiar so you don’t faint. I looked up. Saw Demetrios’s name tag.

  “That’s a Greek name, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me make you some coffee.”

  “What? No, ma’am, that’s not necessary—”

  But I was already moving behind the counter, grabbing the tall, long-handled brass ibrik, measuring the water, and placing it on an electric burner.

  The cops, mumbling between themselves, seemed unhappy with my activity, but it was helping me feel less numb and more normal. I’d prepared Greek-style coffee (aka Turkish coffee) many times. I’d learned how from my world-traveling ex-husband, who’d enjoyed the strong taste—even more powerful than espresso.

  As I made the coffee, the cops stood at the counter and watched. After a minute or so, they began to ask me some questions.

  (What time had I arrived this morning? Was the shop open or locked? How long had the girl worked for the store?)

  As long as I kept busy making the coffee, I found I could answer pretty well.

  (Close to nine. Locked. Six months, but I had known her only one.)

  I’d explained how I’d just moved in above the store. How I’d managed the place ten years ago but had left to live and work in New Jersey.

  They wanted to know why I’d decided to come back after so long.

  “A lot of reasons,” I told them absently.

  And over the next few minutes, as I continued to prepare the Greek coffee, I silently reminded myself of a few of them—starting with that early-morning phone call four weeks ago from Madame…

  THREE

  “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.

  M
adame’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 gi
rlfriends. 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.