French Pressed (16 page)

“She was an intern here for the last three months.” I kept my answer short and only slightly evasive. “Her culinary school can confirm that.”

Then I switched the subject pronto and began telling Detective Lippert about Brigitte Rouille and her violent outburst. I also mentioned that Tommy Keitel was feuding with the restaurant’s owner, Anton Wright, about something. I brought up that shady character named Nick and told Lippert about Keitel getting some kind of mysterious missive in a glossy black envelope.

“It sounded like Chef Keitel received more than one of these envelopes,” I said. “And whatever was inside angered him tremendously. It could have been a threat, even blackmail of some kind.”

“Blackmail? Hmmmm. And why do you think that, Ms. Cosi? Because the letter came in a black envelope?”

I stared at Lippert. “I think it’s something you should look into.”

“I see…”

Detective Lippert continued to listen to me talk, he even took some notes, but then he went right back to Joy. He asked what “stuff” my daughter had come for so late, and I told him about the things in her locker and her expensive knife set.

“You’re talking about the knife kit spread out on the counter beside the deceased?” Lippert asked.

“Yes.” I nodded. “It’s Joy’s.”

The luggage tag attached to the set had my daughter’s name and address right on it. Unless they were idiots, the detectives had to know it was Joy’s already.

“Maybe Chef Keitel was packing up Joy’s knives when the killer arrived,” I theorized.

“And the killer used your daughter’s knife to kill him?”

“I guess it was the closest blade in sight—”

Lippert’s expression turned thoughtful then mildly puzzled. “In a kitchen full of knives? There are blades and meat hammers and skewers hanging all over the place in there. Why would some stranger just happen to grab your daughter’s knife?”

Clearly, Detective Lippert was playing with the idea of Joy as the killer. I wasn’t surprised he wanted to explore this angle, but I was sure I could talk some sense into him.

“Listen,” I said quickly. “It’s important that you find Brigitte Rouille as soon as possible. I’ll bet she still has bloodstains on her. I wasn’t sure before, but now it makes perfect sense. She’s on drugs. Her life’s been spinning out of control for weeks now. Brigitte tried to stab Joy yesterday, in the restaurant. I witnessed that myself. I think she has a grudge against my daughter…and if you scratch the surface, I’ll bet she had a past with Tommy Keitel. I remember someone saying that they’d known each other a long time. And Tommy
is
a womanizer. Brigitte could have been jealous of Joy, addled by the drugs…Lots of people saw the woman threaten my daughter. Ask them. I’ll bet that’s even why she used my daughter’s knife to kill Tommy. She wanted to make it look like Joy committed the crime…”

I closed my eyes, realizing for the first time that Vinny Buccelli might have been killed for the very same reason: to frame Joy.

My God,
I realized,
I’ll bet Brigitte even knew about Tommy and Joy using Vinny’s apartment for sex!

“But why would this Brigitte person kill her boss?” Lippert asked.

“Because Tommy wasn’t her boss anymore. Chef Keitel fired Brigitte this morning, banned her from his kitchen. At this stage of her career, it could ruin her. Any future work would have relied on a good recommendation, and it sounded like Solange was the last chance she had. Isn’t that a strong enough motive for her to kill Keitel?”

Lippert shrugged. “Sure it is, Ms. Cosi, but your daughter was the one who was here. She had the opportunity.”

“But Joy’s got no blood on her—”

“Soap and water will clean blood. And since Keitel was killed in a kitchen, the killer would have had easy access to a sink to clean up. As for bloodied clothes, those are easy enough to change out of, aren’t they?”

We went around like that for a few minutes when Detective Tatum rose from the table where he’d been sitting with Joy. He walked to the center of the dining room, caught Lippert’s eye, and waved him over.

I saw Joy wiping her eyes at the table across the room. But she didn’t look overly distressed anymore. In fact, her expression was a little calmer, as if she’d just unloaded her burden on a really sympathetic friend.

Oh, no.

I could feel the dread creeping up my spine. Two uniformed officers were still standing over her. They seemed too close. I made a move to go to her, but a policeman hovering near me put his heavy hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t noticed him back there.

“Please stay in your seat, ma’am,” he said. “Detective Lippert will be back in a moment.”

I watched the detectives confer. They spoke quietly, not glancing at me or my daughter. They talked for at least ten solid minutes, glancing at their notebooks to compare facts. Finally the two men nodded.

Frowning, Detective Lippert returned to my table.

“What were you talking about?” I demanded. “What’s going on?”

Lippert sat down across from me again.

“Calm down,” he said tersely.

“What do you mean, calm down?” I said loudly. “What do you intend to do?”

“With you? Nothing,” Lippert replied. “You’re being released, Ms. Cosi. We’re not charging you for illegal entry or trespassing, though we can. Nor are we charging you as an accessory to murder.”

“But what about my daughter?”

Joy’s shrill cry interrupted us. “
No!
Are you people crazy? Don’t—”

Two uniformed officers gripped Joy by the arm. Then Detective Tatum began handcuffing my daughter’s hands behind her back.

“No, please,” Joy’s voice was desperate, terrified. “Listen to me. Why won’t you listen? I didn’t do anything. Please! You’ve got it all wrong!”

I moved to go to her. The uniformed officer standing behind me grabbed my arm. “Let me go,” I warned him. “Let me go to my daughter.” But the policeman held on. With a curse, I elbowed the officer, right in the gut. I heard him grunt, felt his grip relax. I broke free, ran across the dining room.

“Joy!” I was less than two feet from my daughter when a new pair of officers grabbed me, restrained me. “Let my girl go. Please! She didn’t do anything!”

But Detective Tatum wasn’t listening. With a neutral face, he loudly intoned the words that froze my blood:

“Ms. Joy Allegro, you are under arrest for the murder of Tommy Keitel.”

“No!” Joy cried. “I didn’t do it!”

As the uniformed officers began dragging her to the police car outside, she turned her head, and her eyes met mine. “Dad’s right, Mom,” she said. “We can’t trust the police!”

I struggled against the officers holding me, but they were stronger and slightly crueler in their determination to keep me restrained, having seen what I’d just done to their buddy in blue.

Detective Lippert stepped in front of me, blocking my view of Joy. His warm, friendly demeanor had gone dead cold. He glanced at the two uniformed men restraining me then met my eyes.

“If you assault another officer, we’ll arrest you, too.”

“Why are you doing this?!” I demanded, wincing at the forceful grip the men were applying.

Lippert pointed to the pages of his notebook. “Ms. Allegro herself supplied all the evidence we needed to make the arrest. She gave Sergeant Tatum one of the strongest motives I’ve ever heard. Tommy Keitel was her lover. The man jilted her today and also fired her, humiliating her in the process. Ms. Allegro confirmed that the murder weapon belonged to her, which you did, as well, Ms. Cosi. And you also confirmed that when you arrived, your daughter was already here and the victim already stabbed, which meant Ms. Allegro had the time and opportunity to commit this act.”

Detective Lippert closed his notebook. “I don’t think I have to look any further for a prime suspect. Do you, Ms. Cosi?”

I
returned to my closed, dark coffeehouse and dragged myself up the back stairs to the duplex. My body was exhausted and bruised from the manhandling by Detective Lippert’s men. The door to the master bedroom was wide open, the room empty. It was after three in the morning. Matteo was still out clubbing with the Waipunas.

I tried Matt’s cell and was sent immediately to voice mail. That’s when I remembered how he’d warned me to stop calling earlier because his cell battery was about to die.

So what else is new?
I thought. For far too many years, Matt was unavailable to me when I’d wanted him.
Why should tonight be any different?

Then it occurred to me that I really didn’t
want
Matt at all. I wanted to inform him what had happened to our daughter, sure. Given Breanne’s connections, he would know what high-powered lawyer to call, so I’d leave that to him.

The man I actually wanted and needed was Mike Quinn. A little desperate to hear his voice, even if it was only on a digital recording, I picked up the phone and dialed his apartment’s number.

I knew he was still on duty, so I wasn’t surprised when I got his answering machine. I left a long, rambling, semicoherent message with every detail I could think of about Joy’s arrest, ending with “Please, please, Mike, call me back.”

Then I stretched out on the narrow couch. I tried to sleep, but visions of what my daughter was probably experiencing played through my imagination like a waking nightmare. I recalled my grim trip to Riker’s Island when Tucker had been falsely charged of a crime and arrested. I wondered if they’d put Joy on a bus to that terrible place, shackled beside some crack dealer or small-time felon.

The phone rang beside my ear, and I bolted upright. Daylight streamed through the living room’s French doors, and I realized I’d nodded off. I glanced at my watch:
8:15.

The phone rang again. I snatched the receiver off the hook.

“Yes?”

“Clare? It’s Mike.”

“Thank you. Thank you for calling. I’m sorry I phoned you so late, but I didn’t know who else to turn to—”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay. You did the right thing.” His voice was tender and reassuring, a splash of light in my darkest hour.

“So you got my message?”

“As soon as I heard it, I started making phone calls. All I got were voice mails, so I caught a few hours’ sleep. Ray Tatum at the Nineteenth just returned my call.”

“Yes, I remember Detective Tatum,” I said. “He’s the one I wanted to throttle when he handcuffed my daughter. What did he say?”

There was a long pause. “It’s not good, Clare, but it’s not the end of the world, either.”

I took a breath. “Tell me.”

“The medical examiner on the scene estimated that Tommy Keitel was murdered within an hour of the time his body was discovered. No one really knows when Joy arrived, because the burglar alarm hadn’t been set, and the door wasn’t locked.”

“Is that good or bad?”

Mike sighed. “It’s not great. If the alarm had been set, the time of entry and exit could’ve been determined by checking in with the security monitoring company. As it is, we only have Joy’s word to go on, and frankly, Tatum and Lippert don’t believe her.”

“Lippert,” I bit out unhappily. “I tried to tell that man what I’d discovered. I outlined the other leads they could have investigated for Keitel’s killer, but Lippert was obviously humoring me, buying time so I wouldn’t disturb Tatum’s interrogation of Joy.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Clare. You’ve got a natural talent for investigative work, but you’re not a trained interrogator. I know Ray Tatum well, and I know he’s one of the best in the department. I don’t doubt he sweet-talked Joy into crying on his shoulder, telling him everything.”

“Incriminating herself, you mean?”

Heavy silence followed. Even across the phone line I could sense something bad was coming.

I cleared my throat. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “There’s more, Clare.”

His voice was quiet and steady, as if he was about to tell me that someone had just died. “The handle of the murder weapon was wiped, but there were two fingerprints lifted off the base of the blade itself. They were Joy’s thumbprints. The match is perfect.”

“Mike,
listen
to me. My daughter did
not
kill Tommy Keitel.”

“Clare…” There was an exhale and I could just picture the man running his hand through his sandy hair. “She had a motive. She had an opportunity. It could have been a crime of passion—”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this! You’ve met Joy. Does she look capable of stabbing a person to death? I know my daughter, Mike. I saw her right there in the kitchen moments after she discovered the body. She didn’t do it!”

“Okay, Clare. Take it easy. I do believe you. I had to ask.”

I calmed, realizing Mike’s years as a detective weren’t going to vanish just because of a personal relationship. The possibility of Joy’s being guilty was there, so he had to consider it. The man’s pragmatism probably reached the molecular level.

“So now we move on,” Mike said.

“Move on?” I whispered. “What do you mean, move on?” Was he giving up on Joy? On me?

“We move on to other suspects, Clare. Tatum isn’t looking. He and Lippert firmly believe they’ve found their killer. So if you want this crime solved, we’re going to have to solve it ourselves.”

“You’re in this with me?” I said, close to tears.

“Of course.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“Good, because we can use his help. We can also use a theory, if you’ve got one.”

“Brigitte Rouille,” I said without hesitation. “She’s my prime suspect.”

“Okay, Clare. I’m listening.”

“Well, Brigitte was Tommy’s second-in-command. The woman had excellent knife skills, she was very strong physically, and she had a history with Tommy. He went out on a limb to give Brigitte a job when nobody else would. Two and two is four. With Tommy’s womanizing ways, I’m sure he and Brigitte were lovers at one time.”

“You think Brigitte is capable of murder?”

“Yes. Her behavior toward my daughter was off-the-charts hostile. She called her a brat and a whore and threatened Joy with a knife. There were plenty of witnesses to that, me included.”

“Good.”

“I believe Brigitte killed Tommy in a fit of anger. The man had just fired her for using drugs. She could have returned to the restaurant to have it out with him—or maybe even throw herself at him, for that matter. Knowing Tommy’s ego, he could have said any number of things to send her into a violent rage.”

“Why use Joy’s knife to kill him?”

“That was the sweetest revenge of all for Brigitte. It allowed her to frame her romantic rival for the man’s murder while getting herself off the hook. And as for the fingerprints on the knife—well, it was
Joy’s
property, so her fingerprints on the blade shouldn’t be a revelation, should they? Brigitte could have wiped her own prints off or worn a glove.”

Mike paused for a moment. “It’s not a bad theory. Drugs can drive people to commit crimes they might not have considered sober.”

“That’s not all.”

“Okay. I’m still listening.”

“I think Vincent Buccelli’s death points to Brigitte, too.”

“How?”

“Tommy and Joy were using the boy’s apartment for sexual encounters.”

“Christ, Clare. What was your daughter thinking?”

“Don’t even go there.”

“Well, clearly
Keitel
went there. To Vinny’s apartment, I mean. And if the head chef was disappearing with the pretty intern often enough, then people probably figured out what was happening, right?”

“Yes, Mike, exactly! If Brigitte still had feelings for Tommy—maybe even hoped to become his mistress again—how would she have felt seeing him carry on an affair right under her nose with an intern half her age? It probably drove her crazy to see the two of them disappearing in the afternoons for sex. I’ll bet Tommy was even insensitive enough to tell Brigitte where she could reach him while he was gone! And…come to think of it, more than one person at the restaurant mentioned that Brigitte had it in for Vinny. She probably started picking on him when she realized he was allowing Tommy and Joy to use his apartment for their trysts!”

“Makes sense so far.”

“Well, here’s the kicker. On the night Brigitte threatened my daughter with a knife, she accused Joy of ‘undermining’ her rep with Tommy. That was the
very same
night that Vinny was murdered. I’m betting Brigitte cracked that night. She went out to Queens and killed Vinny, using a knife from Solange. I think she did it with the intention of framing Joy, who had a key to Vinny’s place. Or even Tommy, since she knew he went there to sleep with Joy.”

“I follow. An investigation would have eventually turned up their names. Both had access to Vinny’s apartment, and both worked at Solange, so they had access to the murder weapon.”

“I’m not saying it makes complete sense. But the woman wasn’t making a lot of sense the night I saw her ranting. If we can find her, we might get her to confess to at least one of the murders.”

“And Joy’s a suspect in Vincent Buccelli’s murder, too. Is that right?”

“She was interrogated but never charged.”

“Who’s the detective on that case?”

“Lieutenant Salinas.”

“Hold on…” I heard some shuffling of paper. “Salinas is in Queens, right? Do you remember the precinct number?”

I told him.

“Okay, Clare. You’ve got solid theories—for both murders. I’m going to give Salinas a call…”

Mike hung up, and I rose from the couch. As I stretched my achy body, I felt painful needles shoot through my arms. That’s when I noticed the nasty purple bruises where Lippert’s men had restrained me.

On a furious exhale, I headed for the kitchen and slammed together a stove-top pot of espresso. I needed the dark kick—even though I was already disturbed enough to kick furniture.

I ground the Italian roast fine, dumped the black sand into the filter, filled the lower chamber with water, screwed together the two separate parts, and banged the Moka Pot onto the gas burner.

Within minutes, liquid began to boil inside the little silver pot. At just the right moment, the water shot from the lower chamber to the upper, forcing itself through the cake of packed grounds. That’s when the stove-top espresso was born, suffusing the room with the intense aromatics of the darkly caramelized coffee beans.

I closed my eyes, and in the briefest flash of sense memory, the rich, earthy smell returned me to my childhood. I was back in my grandmother’s grocery again, watching Nana stir her pots of minestrone, mix up her homemade pastas, bake her Italian breads and cookies.

A sturdy, practical immigrant, Nana had lived a hard life, losing sisters in the Great Depression, a husband and brothers in World War II. She had what they called “the insight” and was able to read coffee grounds for the women of the neighborhood, advise them, even perform the occasional ritual to banish those cursed with the
malocchio
—what the old Italians called the “evil eye.”

Because my own mother had abandoned me—and my father was too busy running numbers, not to mention running around with a succession of flashy women—my grandmother was the one who made sure I was raised right.

Nana was my mother, my friend, my teacher, my shoulder to cry on, my fearless defender. Until her death, just a few months before I’d met Matt, she was the one person whom I could count on to make a bad day good again.

And now it’s your turn, Clare.

Since Joy’s arrest, my emotions had been all over the map. But dread and helplessness were no good to me now. It was time to distill my fears down, concentrate them into the essence of something useful.

I poured myself an ink-black shot and bolted it back. I poured a second and drank it down, too. The phone rang before I could pour a third.

I snatched up the kitchen extension. “Hello!” I blurted, a little too loudly. (The caffeine was starting to hit.)

“I spoke with Lieutenant Salinas,” Mike began without preamble. “Got his home number from the desk sergeant, since he wasn’t on duty. Got him out of bed, actually. But he wouldn’t tell me much—”

“What do you mean, he wouldn’t tell you much?” I paced the small kitchen, all set to fight somebody, anybody. “He’s a cop. You’re a cop. You’re both cops, for heaven’s sake—”

“Sweetheart, calm down—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down! This is my daughter’s life we’re talking about—”

“Clare! Listen to me! Salinas is not Ray Tatum, whom I’ve known for years. Salinas is a cop in a different borough, and as soon as he realized I knew one of his prime suspects, he clammed up. He had a right to. But at least I got him to admit he sent a man to Brigitte Rouille’s apartment. Unlike Tatum and Lippert, Salinas followed your lead. His detective found out that Ms. Rouille skipped out on her rent several weeks ago with no forwarding address.”

“Then she’s still at large!”

“But the trail is cold. Salinas started the initial paperwork on finding her, requested a warrant for her banks records, her ATM and credit card charges. But we’re not officially on the case, so we’re going to do it another way.”

“Another way?”

“Yes, Clare. We’ll find her another way. I promise.”

“I’m sorry, Mike.” I massaged the bridge of my nose. “I didn’t mean to yell just now. I—”

He cut me off with a terse, “Forget it.”

After a long pause, I asked, “Where do we go from here?”

“We start wherever the trail ended. I have the last known address for Brigitte Rouille. It’s in Washington Heights.”

“Salinas is still suspicious of Brigitte, right?”

“Not anymore. She
was
a person of interest in the death of Vincent Buccelli, but last night he learned about Joy’s arrest and the details of Keitel’s murder. Salinas is now looking to charge your daughter with a second murder.”