Espresso Shot (2 page)

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Authors: Cleo Coyle

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Detective, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction - Mystery, #Coffeehouses, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Cosi; Clare (Fictitious character), #Mystery fiction, #Divorced people, #Brides, #Weddings, #New York (N.Y.), #Brides - Crimes against, #Cookery (Coffee), #Attempted murder

BOOK: Espresso Shot
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The stalker’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. Several times, this course had been run. An ideal stretch was coming up, where signs warned of active driveways. No cars were parked there. No curbs were blocked—nothing to come between the bride-to-be and certain death.
Everything was perfect. Now it was going to happen. Now—
The stalker cut the wheel. Tires bounced over the concrete curb. The engine roared, and the vehicle shot forward. Breanne half turned, blond hair flying, finally aware of the threat. But it was too late. In another second, Beauty would be broken beyond repair—
DIE! DIE!
But she didn’t.
Before three tons of metal could smash her slender form, Breanne’s body was struck by another; a lunging, muscular man slammed her off the sidewalk and into a recessed doorway.
The SUV hurtled past the pair, crushing the woman’s dropped cell phone, mangling her designer handbag. The stalker cut the wheel again, banged off the curb, clipped a parked car.
There was screaming, shouting, commotion. The stalker checked the rearview. A man in workout sweats helped Breanne to her feet; a flash of profile told the stalker who he was.
With a raging string of curses, the stalker continued driving the route that had been planned. Breanne and her muscular savior would call 911, report the incident. In ten minutes, maybe less, the police would start looking. By then the vehicle would be off Manhattan’s streets.
The SUV made the corner on First Avenue; turned again to the
side street that led to the bridge ramp, headed for the Queens side of the East River. There was a place near the warehouses, deserted and dingy. The stalker would ditch the vehicle there. Then a short hike to the subway and back to Manhattan.
It would take a few days to create a new plan, but one would be made, and then it would be done. When the handsome groom saw his bride at the altar, her white gown would be replaced with a burial shroud. Yes, one way or another, Breanne Summour was going to die before her wedding day.
ONE
THE way I see it, a wedding is a new beginning, full of hope and possibility. Death is an ending—black, dark, final. Flowers are involved with both, and tasteful music selections, but for the most part, brides and corpses have nothing in common, unless you’re talking about the bride of Frankenstein, in which case the bride
is
a corpse.
This particular wedding story involved a bride and several corpses. I was not one of the corpses. I wasn’t the bride, either. The one and only time I’d been a bride took place at Manhattan’s City Hall, where I waited with my groom in a long line of couples to obtain the proper paperwork, after which my future husband and I were ushered into a room with all the charm of a DMV office. A fleshy-faced justice of the peace in a snug-fitting suit then auto-stamped our marriage license in the midst of declaring us wed, which sounded something like—
“I now pronounce you” . . .
ker-chunk
. . . “man and wife.”
I was nineteen at the time.
In calendar years, my bridegroom was barely three years older than I. Sexually speaking, however, Matteo Allegro had traveled light-years beyond. Case in point: our first date.
The life-altering event began with my giving him a chaste tour of the Vatican Museums. It ended in a Roman
pensione
with me giggling naked and blindfolded on a narrow bed, my future husband hand-feeding me bites of gorgonzola-stuffed figs. Eve had the apple. For me it was a Mediterranean fruit drenched in honey and balsamic vinegar.
Dozens more times, I’d succumbed to Matt’s perilous charms (not to mention those figs), and by summer’s end my fate was sealed. I’d gone to Italy a virgin art student, determined to expose myself to Renaissance genius. I’d returned pregnant with a daughter named Joy.
Matt had been the one to name our daughter, a child he loved dearly (too often from afar), but ultimately Joy’s name had not been a good predictor of the years ahead, and after ten difficult laps with my groom around the sun, I forced myself to admit that the magnetic young man to whom I’d passionately pledged my undying fidelity viewed our vows not as a sacred covenant but as a loose collection of suggested guidelines. (His addiction to cocaine hadn’t helped, either.)
After our divorce, I’d made a new life for myself and our daughter. We moved to a suburb in New Jersey, where I put together an odd collection of part-time jobs: assisting a busy caterer, writing freelance for coffee industry trades, and baking snacks for a nearby day care center (caffeine free, I assure you).
Unfortunately, my new address across the Hudson and a ream of fully signed legal papers did little to stop my infrequent reunions with my ex-husband. Given his perpetual itches and my own pathetic weakness, the man’s magic hands, hard body, and low intentions occasionally found their way back into my lonely, single-mom bed.
Now, with our daughter grown and working abroad, I was back to living and working in Greenwich Village. My marital partnership with Matt remained dissolved, yet our alliance continued in other ways: like the parenting of Joy, for one (the fact that she’d reached legal adulthood was beside the point), and the running of the Village Blend coffee business, for another.
According to Matt’s elderly mother, who was bequeathing the Blend’s future to both of us, I was the best manager she’d ever employed and the best barista she’d ever met. For his part, Matt was more than simply the owner’s offspring; he was an extremely savvy coffee buyer and broker without whom the legendary Blend would be just another java joint.
On good days, my ex and I actually acknowledged what we meant to each other. Even on bad ones, we managed to remain begrudging friends. So, when he asked me, I agreed to help out with aspects of his second wedding, a union with the annoyingly swanlike Breanne Summour, disdainer-in-chief of
Trend
magazine.
For months now, Breanne had been planning the nuptials and reception. Photographers were hired (still and video), flower and cake designs selected (elaborate and expensive), dress fitted (a House of Fen original), and venue reserved (New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art). In sum, the event was shaping up to be a tad more lavish than the unceremonious City Hall
ker-chunking
of the man’s first marriage to me.
This was the week that brought us down to the wire. Breanne was moving into panic mode, and her groom-to-be had just moved back into the apartment above our coffeehouse.
“So you’re all settled in upstairs?” I asked Matt as he took a load off at my espresso bar.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “In my old guest room.”
“I can’t believe Breanne is happy with your moving back into the duplex. I mean, she does know I still live here, right?”
“It’s not for long. Just five days. Frankly, she’s happy I’m out of her hair.”
I studied my ex-husband’s wide, unblinking brown eyes. “She doesn’t know you’re staying with me, does she?”
“No.”
Matt, Matt, Matt . . .
“You can stay with your mother, you know. She’d be thrilled to have you.”
He glanced away. “I told you already. Joy’s coming in this week. I haven’t seen her in months, and I’d really like to stay under the same roof as my daughter.”
“One last week of us as a big, happy family, right?”
“Right.”
“And what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”
Matt shrugged.
I went back to finishing a double-tall mochaccino order: two steaming shots of espresso stirred into a base of my homemade chocolate syrup, a pour of steamed milk, plenty of frothy foam, and a whipped cream cloud as high as Denali. I dusted the ski slope with bittersweet shavings, set the drink on the counter, smiled at the young woman waiting, and turned back to my ex.
“You wouldn’t be avoiding your mother because she’s been chewing your ear off to cancel the wedding, would you?”
Matt massaged his eyes. “Let’s not go there.”
“Well, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s been chewing my ear off about it, too. For months.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay . . .”
I moved back to the espresso machine, unlocked the portafilter handle, dumped the packed cake of grounds into the under-counter garbage, then moved to rinse the filter in the small sink. The mochaccino order appeared to be my last of the evening. Gardner Evans was due to relieve me any minute, and most of the twenty marble-topped café tables were empty, which was typical for a Monday evening in April. The tourists wouldn’t start flowing back into the historic district for at least another month.
“Anyway,” I told Matt, “all of us have enough to do this week to keep us out of trouble. You’ve got your pals flying here from every country of the coffee belt, don’t you?”
“Practically. They’ll be arriving all week, but I’ll see most of them as a group on Thursday.”
“At your mother’s luncheon?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to have a bachelor party with them, too, right?”
“A bachelor party?” Matt snorted. “She would murder me if I had a bachelor party! Didn’t I mention that?”
“
She
who? Your mother?”
“My bride-to-be.”
“Breanne would
murder
you? Just for having a bachelor party?”
Matt slipped off his exquisite Armani blazer and laid it carefully on the high bar chair next to him. As he rolled up his sleeves, my gaze drifted up his tanned, sculpted forearms to the open neck of his fashionably tie-free dress shirt.
For as long as I’d known him, Matteo Allegro had been his own man, a hiking-booted, extreme sports-loving explorer. Ever since his involvement with Breanne, however, I swear my ex had been fitted with an invisible collar and leash (compliments of some name designer, of course).
“You want a double, right?” I said, moving back to the espresso machine.
“Single.”
“But you usually have a
doppio
espresso at this hour.”
“Single. That’s what I want.”
“O-kay,” I said.
I ran the burr grinder, which I’d set up earlier with some very special beans, and wondered if a drink order could be Freudian. “Set me straight here. If ‘what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her’ when it comes to your bedding down upstairs, then why don’t you feel the same way about a bachelor party with your buddies?”
“Because what Breanne doesn’t know will
become
known if paparazzi take embarrassing photos of the thing and post them on the Net. Or worse, sell them to ‘Gotham Gossip.’ ”
“Oh, I see. So it’s more like what Randall Knox doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”
“Right again.”
Knox was the
New York Journal
’s new “Gotham Gossip” column editor. I’d never met the man, but Tucker Burton, my actor/playwright assistant manager with an unhealthy appetite for celebrity prattle, had warned me already about the guy’s rep:
“Knox is wired into this town, Clare. They say he has tentacles running around every New York inside track. And when those slithery limbs retract, look out!”
“Look out?” I said. “For what?”
“Bombshells, sweetie. Usually scandalous, always readable!”
“Damn the man,” Matt muttered. “Did you know Breanne has some sort of history with him?”
“History?” I said. “What do you mean, history? Were they lovers?”
“No. Bree says their relationship was professional. That’s all I know. That’s all she’ll
tell
me. Either way, the prick’s only too happy to publish dirt on her—”
“Or you,” I noted.
Matt shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it . . .”
“What do you mean? Are you talking about that snarky item Knox published on Joy?”
Our daughter had been arrested for a terrible crime a few months back. When the news broke, there was enough dirt to fill ten pages, let alone a single gossip feature. Strangely, however, Randall Knox spent some of those precious column inches pretzeling his report so he could embarrass Breanne, and even Matt, whom he described not as an international coffee broker but as “Breanne Summour’s flavor of the month.”
“It has nothing to do with that item on Joy,” Matt assured me. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his short, dark Caesar. “I don’t want to alarm you or anything—”
Few things alarmed me more than my ex saying, “I don’t want to alarm you.”
“—but Knox has got some photographer trailing me around the city, waiting for me to do something embarrassing. Breanne saw the man stalking me one night. She knows he works for Knox.”
“What?!”
Matt lowered his voice. “It’s one of the reasons I’m bunking with you, if you want to know the truth. This is my place of business, so my being here is nothing unusual. All I have to do at the end of the night is take the back stairs up to the apartment, and I’ll have my privacy.”

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