Latte Trouble (16 page)

A
S
Mr. Raj drove us back to the West Side of Manhattan, I told Madame what I’d discovered—which wasn’t much, in my estimation.

Bryan Goldin knew Lebreaux and he’d modeled for Fen. But all that got me was a legitimate reason for his being on the
Fortune
and at Lottie’s party. I also brought Madame up to date with Rena Garcia’s murder. “Eduardo Lebreaux might have had a motive for instigating the poisoning at the Blend. But he has no motive I can see for poisoning Rena Garcia, which pretty much rules out Matteo’s theory that Lebreaux is behind all this.”

“Eduardo is a cad and a criminal,” said Madame, “and he may even be capable of murder. But only if it’s in his interest, and I must agree with you, Clare, that I don’t see the motive for murdering Rena Garcia, that poor girl. If Eduardo were truly behind it, wouldn’t he have waited for a more public affair to poison someone with a Village Blend drink?”

“Like tomorrow’s runway show,” I automatically replied, and then cringed at the thought that the murderer might indeed be striking again at that very event, which meant I had less than twenty-four hours. I massaged my temples, feeling a headache coming on. “I have to solve this, Madame.”

“Yes, my dear, but how?”

I leaned back in the car seat and gazed at the passing shops and restaurants, the crowded sidewalks. I tried to remember some of the cases Quinn had discussed with me while he was drinking latte after latte at my coffee bar over the last few months.

Okay, Mike, how would you think through all this?

Think out loud, Clare
, I could almost hear him advise me.
Take it step by step. First, tell me what you know….

“The murderer’s first target wasn’t random, and it wasn’t Ricky or Jeff. It was Lottie. I’m sure of it. And since we know Rena was the second target, what does that tell us? Who would want Lottie and Rena dead?”

“Tad Benedict?” offered Madame.

“Detective Quinn ruled him out and for now I have to agree. But, according to Tad, Fen was blackmailing Rena for control of the label.”

Madame’s eyes widened. “So
Fen
is the guilty party!” she cried. Then her face fell and she shook her head, looking down at her lovely pecan-colored, fur-trimmed Fen coat. “Oh, what a shame. Such a talented designer.”

“Yet…it still doesn’t quite fit,” I said, tapping my chin. “I mean, Fen killing Rena makes sense. He tried to blackmail her. Maybe he found out about her and Tad’s plans to cut and run by selling their shares to other investors. He might have become angry and killed her—or had her killed. But why would Fen have tried to kill Lottie herself? She’s the sole creative talent behind her label, so killing her means killing the label too.”

“It sounds to me like Fen wants to control Lottie Harmon, not kill her,” noted Madame. “And there may be more than one motive for that.”

“What do you mean, more than one motive?”

Madame smiled enigmatically. “Fen and Lottie were an item years ago.”

“An item?”

“Lovers.”

“Lovers?” I echoed. “But I’ve known Lottie for over a year, and I’ve never even seen her in the company of Fen. There’s nothing about them in the gossip columns or paparazzi photos that I can recall either.”

“These days, Lottie is only interested in Fen in terms of the business. Nothing else. I was curious about it, of course, and I asked her about him a few times, but she said she has absolutely no interest in her old flame as anything but a business associate and that’s the way she wants it.”

Sounds like Matteo and me
, I thought.
Or at least it did until I screwed up and slept with him
. But I didn’t share that particular thought with Madame. Instead, I said, “So you think there might be a sexual dimension to all this? That Fen is trying to possess more than Lottie’s label?”

Madame’s eyebrow rose. “It certainly explains his going to such extreme lengths to obtain the stock. When passion is the motivation, better judgement tends to go out the window.”

“Didn’t you say something else about Lottie earlier today? You thought the years had changed her?”

“Yes, that’s right. Less comfortable in her own skin. You know, more than once, I asked her why she quit the business, asked her to fill in the blanks about her years living abroad, but she always glossed over the answers, turned the subject to another topic—and always with that strained, high-pitched laugh.”

“She did that to me, too. She’s very guarded about her past.”

I met Madame’s eyes and we both nodded, obviously thinking the same thing. Lottie’s past was sure to hold some valuable answers. Just then, Mr. Raj pulled up to the coffeehouse. I kissed Madame good-bye and thanked her for her help.

“Do let me know what you discover, my dear,” said Madame, her eyes once again bright with obvious curiosity.

“Of course.”

As I stepped out of the car, I could see that the “Fugu thrill-seekers” were still out in full force. The East Village crowd—with tattoos and multiple body piercings—loitered on the sidewalk around the Blend’s old wrought iron front bench. No doubt they were waiting for one of their numbers to drop dead from a poisoned take-out. As I passed through an odd-smelling cloud, I sensed not everyone was smoking tobacco.

Entering, I saw Esther servicing a line of customers at the counter, Moira and Matt were busily mixing coffee drinks behind the bar. Either things got crazy and my ex had volunteered to pitch in, or Matt was deliberately exercising his barista skills in anticipation of demonstrations for investors in his kiosk scheme.

Esther spied me as I rushed by and was about to call out. I shushed her with my hand, then flashed her ten fingers. “Back in ten minutes” I mouthed to her. Then I raced up the spiral staircase in the dining room.

Inside my small, second-floor office I tossed my purse on the desk, peeled off my coat, and fired up the computer. Since I knew next to nothing about the history of Lottie’s label, I decided to use the Internet to see what I could turn up. I began by Googling the name “Lottie Harmon.” The search yielded 9,003 entries. I narrowed the search by entering “history of Lottie Harmon label.” That brought me a workable 1,456 entries—workable because hundreds of links were essentially the same story, a reprint of a long and uninformative (for my purposes anyway) press release issued by Rena Garcia when the label was resurrected last year. I eliminated all of those entries and narrowed the search to the early 1980s—the first blush of the Lottie Harmon line. I came up with a tidy 717 entries and began calling them up.

After eliminating the useless links, the most common of which was a widely reprinted Associated Press Hollywood glitz and glamour story featuring the passage “…Morgan Fairchild and
Lottie Harmon
accessories…” I ended up with only 295 entries. Realizing this might take longer than I thought, I began to look through them. I struck gold on the fifth entry, when I followed a link to a 1980s nostalgia Web site.

The homepage for EightiesNeverDied.com featured a montage of pop culture icons posed along the lines of the old album cover for the Beatles’
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. There were television stars like Larry Hagman as
Dallas
heel J.R. Ewing; Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown; Don Johnson looking suave as Sonny Crockett on
Miami Vice
; Johnny Depp, Richard Grieco, and the rest of the cast from
21 Jump Street
; Michael J. Fox; and Al Bundy.

Music was represented by Devo sporting their signature red plastic domes, Madonna looking anything but virginal, Billy Idol’s sneer, Boy George, Duran Duran, George Michael, and Michael Jackson. Featured movie stars came from the signature films of the era—Jennifer Beals in her oversized sweatshirt from
Flashdance
; Tom Cruise in his skivvies from
Risky Business
; Harrison Ford’s
Indiana Jones
; Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing pecs as
Conan the Barbarian
; Michael Douglas, hair slicked back as Gordon Gecko from
Wall Street
; and a knife-wielding Glenn Close in
Fatal Attraction.

In the background, presiding over all, the twinkling eyes of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, The Gipper. Down either side of the page were plenty of links to various aspects of life in the 1980s, all with catchy titles like “Decade of Greed” for the business section (though it seemed to me there’d been as much or more greed and ruthless dishonesty during the dot bomb bubble of the 1990s), “We Are the Music,” “The Vices of Television,” “Cold War,” “Idol Worship,” “Go Goth,” and more of the same.

I followed the link dubbed “Shoulder-pads and Legwarmers” and found an eighties fashion page with a list of articles. Most of the features, I learned, had been culled from the fashion magazines of the day, the pages dutifully scanned and posted on the site by its webmaster—probably in violation of numerous copyright laws. There were articles about Michael Jackson’s lone glove, the fashion sense in
Dallas
and
Miami Vice
, male makeup. Finally I spied a link called “Spangles” and recalled that Lottie Harmon had invented the famous glittering tie-bar. I hit the link and it took me to a
Trend
magazine article from 1980 titled “Designing Women.”

The piece featured a captioned photo taken at New York, New York, one of the trendier Manhattan discotheques of that long-gone era. The scene was a crowded dance floor with three women in the foreground. The central figure appeared to be the scarlet-haired Lottie of over twenty years ago—in her early thirties. Below the photo the caption read “The rewards of working for Lottie…sushi, and an evening at a hot new club.” I looked at the two other women in the frame. Both appeared to be younger than Lottie. One was a very pretty brunette, the other had a plainer face, blond hair, and was very heavyset.

A second photo showed another scene in the same nightclub, apparently the same night because Lottie and the pretty brunette were wearing the same clothes. Between the two women was a good-looking man in a suit who was about Lottie’s age—no identification in the caption.

Lottie stood at the man’s right, her armed linked through his. At the man’s left was the pretty brunette. She stood gazing at him, her hand on one of his broad shoulders. There was something about the brunette’s look that told me she felt more than mere friendship for the handsome man, and I wondered who she was.

I began to read the old article, and in the first few paragraphs was startled to learn that “Lottie Harmon” wasn’t a single person. Three people originally had formed the Lottie Harmon label—Lottie Toratelli, Harriet Tasky, and Lottie’s younger sister Mona Lisa Toratelli. However, it was Lottie who became the public face of the company. I checked the photos out again, wondering if the pretty brunette at the handsome man’s side was Mona Lisa Toratelli or Harriet Tasky.

The article brought up more questions than answers. The biggest? If Lottie Toratelli had returned to New York to resurrect the Lottie Harmon label, then what had happened to Harriet Tasky and Lottie’s sister, Mona Lisa? What had happened to the three women’s original partnership?

I saved my search results, printed the
Trend
article and the two photographs from the EightiesNeverDied.com Web site, then returned to Google.

This time I typed in “Lottie Toratelli.” I received one hit. That same
Trend
article I’d just read. I couldn’t believe it. “Just like that, Lottie Toratelli is no more,” I murmured.

Clearly, Lottie had taken pains to make sure she was only identified as Lottie Harmon in any future articles or photo captions. I didn’t have time to search all the Lottie Harmon references, so I quickly attempted to find out what had happened to her old partners.

First I typed in “Mona Lisa Toratelli.” I received seven results. Six didn’t tell me anything remarkable, but the seventh held something shocking—Mona Lisa Toratelli’s obituary filed by the Reuters news service.

Apparently the young woman had perished in 1988 in a tragic accident. Mona Lisa was described only as a “designer” for Lottie Harmon who had been on a gem-buying expedition in Bangkok, Thailand, when tragedy befell her. Details about her death were sketchy. It seemed Mona Lisa fell from a hotel balcony, but it was easy to read between the lines and see that authorities thought she might have jumped. The obituary also mentioned she was survived by a six-year-old daughter, but there was no reference to the father’s name or his whereabouts.

Harriet Tasky was somewhat easier to trace. A Google search led me to a Web site for a vintage clothing business in London called “Tasky’s Closet” which was owned and operated by Ms. Tasky. There was no home address or phone number for Harriet Tasky anywhere on the site, however, and the “Contact us” button was addressed to “The Webmaster.”

So, I thought, Mona Lisa is dead and Harriet Tasky is living across the Atlantic on a business venture of her own. I wondered if the original Lottie Harmon partnership had been dissolved as a result of Mona Lisa’s death. I also wondered if Lottie and Harriet had parted as friends, or if there had been any acrimony.

Lottie had been living in London, too. If Harriet had some sort of vendetta against her former partner, it seemed to me she would have attempted something before now…unless she was jealous of Lottie’s resurrecting the label.

I considered e-mailing “The Webmaster” a set of questions for Ms. Tasky, pretending to be a journalist looking for answers. It was pretty much a long shot, but it was worth a try—unfortunately, it would have to wait until later. At the moment, I had to check in on my own business. I glanced at my watch and winced, realizing my “ten minutes” of research had ended up taking over forty-five.