“Dead bodies freak me out.”
Graydon Faas’s hands shook as he lifted his mug of coffee.
“It’s all right,” said David, patting the young man on the shoulder. “They aren’t a barrel of laughs for me either.”
I had brewed a twelve-cup drip carafe of our medium roast Breakfast Blend and was just finishing gradually and evenly filling seven mugs. (I never pour one cup at a time out of a pot. I always pour a little into each cup until they’re all filled. That way, if there are any inconsistencies in the suspension—too strong at the bottom of the pot, for instance, and too weak at the top—no one cup will suffer from the extreme.)
As David splashed cream into his coffee, I gulped mine black, barely tasting the nutty warmth. Adrenaline wasn’t a problem at the moment, but I feared my energy levels would spike and then fall, which was why I’d chosen the Breakfast Blend. I had many other more complex and robust-tasting blends on hand, but the medium roast had more caffeine than the darker Italian or French roasts, and I wanted to be alert for the next few hours.
Everyone was drinking their coffee now, except Colleen, who was still sobbing into a series of Kleenexes. The girl’s loose auburn curls had begun slipping from their ponytail, and her usually ruddy skin looked pale as a shroud, making her dusting of freckles appear as if someone had roughly grated a cinnamon stick across her barely-there nose. An Irish immigrant here in New York on an education visa, Colleen had just turned twenty. From the age of eight, she’d worked in her family’s Dublin pub/restaurant and her experience as a waitress showed in her efficient, earnest, unflappable service.
I sat down at David’s seven-foot-long kitchen table directly across from Colleen and Joy. Madame sat next to me. Around the rest of the table sat David, Graydon, and Suzi. For a minute, we all listened to Colleen’s sobs in the huge gourmet kitchen—that and the dishwasher’s rhythmic swishing next to the Sub-Zero fridge.
Joy reached over, stirred cream, then sugar into Colleen’s warm mug and gently pushed it into the girl’s shaking hands. Colleen swallowed with difficulty, then began to take small sips.
We all silently watched.
Obviously, Colleen had something very personal going on, but no one said a word. Normally, I would have given the young woman her privacy, but if she knew something that would help the police, I wanted to know it too.
“Colleen,” I carefully began, “we’re all upset about Treat, of course, but you seem really undone. Is there anything you want to share with us?”
“Ohhhhhh!” she wailed, then began bawling again.
Damn. Now everyone was staring at me as if I’d just kicked the poor girl. Everyone except Suzi Tuttle.
“Oh, for god’s sake, Colleen,” she snapped. “He’s not worth it.”
Suzi, the Long Island native, was twenty-five, but she’d been bartending and waitressing since high school. She had triple-pierced ears and (apparently) more piercings elsewhere on her body, or so she liked to brag. The hard-partying image was deliberately played up with short-cropped hair dyed white blond and black eyeliner as thick as Cleopatra’s.
Suzi’s tough attitude actually worked well in David’s East Hampton restaurant. Cuppa J’s customers weren’t exactly known for being passive and polite. They were wealthy, elite, famous people who were used to having their whims and demands satisfied with a finger snap. One thing you could not have in that environment was a thin skin.
Still, Suzi’s hardness at this moment seemed out of place—until Colleen blew her small, pug nose and, in a mild Irish brogue, announced with great profundity: “You all might as well know. Treat and I, we were…we were close.”
“He was banging you,” Suzi said flatly.
Colleen’s eyes narrowed. “We were lovers.”
Suzi waved her hand. “Treat didn’t love anyone but himself.”
“You raccoon-eyed witch! How can you say that? With him lying upstairs like that and all…” Colleen’s sobs began again.
“I can say it because I know exactly how he operated,” Suzi calmly replied. “He told you to keep your relationship quiet, right? So there wouldn’t be any ‘funny vibes’ at the restaurant.”
Colleen stopped crying. Her jaw dropped. “How did you know? Did he tell you about us?”
“Girlfriend, get a clue. Treat told me the same thing when he was sleeping with me. And I found out why. Before me, he was hooking up with Prin!”
Madame put down her coffee cup, leaned toward me and whispered, “Sounds like the boy was sampling David’s restaurant staff like a box of chocolates.”
Prin Lopez was a model-gorgeous Hispanic girl with sleek, dark brown hair down to her hips and long-lashed copper eyes. She’d grown up in a rough part of the Bronx, the poorest borough in New York City, but had worked her way into waitressing at a popular Upper West Side bistro, where David and Jacques Papas (Cuppa J’s manager) had met her. Both had been impressed with her service as well as her ability to speak fluent Spanish—always handy in an industry that consistently employs kitchen workers from Mexico and Latin America.
According to Jacques, Prin had left the South Fork abruptly for a family emergency and wouldn’t be around to help with the July Fourth weekend crowd, which was a shame, because this weekend was bound to be the busiest of the season.
As I made a mental note to ask Prin about her relationship with Treat when she returned to work, I noticed Joy, across the table, squirming uncomfortably and gnawing her lower lip. I wasn’t going to press her now, but I was praying that Treat Mazzelli hadn’t also started sleeping with my daughter. From the way the guy had been flirting with Joy earlier this evening, it seemed apparent he was already making plans to dump Colleen.
It also seemed apparent that Treat had been racking up conquests. But not just any conquests. The Hamptons were always packed with single, available women. If Treat had wanted to bed a string of willing young females, he could have driven just a few miles over to Sagaponack. “Sagg Main” was the most active singles beach scene in the Hamptons, full of gym-toned bodies looking for true love—or a weekend simulation of same.
Obviously Treat had preferred to seduce a succession of young women in close proximity to one another, bedding each one while pretending he could keep them all from finding out. It was the sort of pattern set by a guy who obviously got off on high-risk living, maybe even thrived on a situation that could, at any time, blow up in his face.
If that were the case, I wondered: were there other parts of his life that were just as high-risk? So high-risk that someone would want him dead? Had the shooter hit the right target after all?
Graydon interrupted my thoughts with a sudden sigh of agitation. Running a strong hand through his blond streaked buzz cut, he self-consciously announced, “You guys, I barely knew Treat. I mean, I’m sorry for what happened to the dude, but I don’t know anything that can help and I really…I’m really wrecked. I’d like to go home and hit the sack. Is that okay?”
Suzi again waved a dismissive hand. “You just want to catch your waves at the crack of yawn.”
“So?” Graydon folded his arms. “I said I was sorry about the dude, but do you really think he’s in a position to care one way or the other?”
Suzi looked away.
Colleen began to cry again.
“There, there,” said Madame, reaching across the table to pat Colleen’s hand. “You know Ms. Tuttle may not have said it in the kindest way, but I do believe you’ve shed enough tears for the boy upstairs. Take it from a woman who’s been around the block a few times, my dear, men are like buses—one may throw you off unexpectedly, but there’ll always be a new one coming right behind you, inviting you to climb aboard.”
For a second there, we all stared at Madame, a little shocked at her suggestive phrasing. She simply blinked at us, either completely oblivious to the unintentional double entendre or appalled at our provincial reaction to it.
“What?” she finally snapped. “What did I say?”
Joy put an arm around Colleen. “My grandmother’s right. In fact, how’s this for something to cheer up about. I’ve got Keith Judd’s phone number, and I’ll bet we could both party with him—”
“What?” I interrupted with alarm. “Joy, you’re kidding, right? That actor didn’t actually give you his phone number.”
Joy nodded excitedly. “He did. Look.”
From the pocket of her khaki skirt, my daughter pulled out a cocktail napkin.
“Let me see that,” I said.
She handed it over, sliding it across the kitchen table as she explained, “He gave it to me after I brought him your café pousson.”
I examined the napkin. On it, the slick, forty-year-old Hollywood actor had scrawled his name. Below it was a cell phone number. I stood up, tore the napkin in two, pushed the autograph back toward my twenty-one-year-old daughter and shoved the piece with the man’s phone number down the garbage disposal.
“Mom!” she cried. “What are you doing?!”
With the determination of a mother on a mission, I flipped on the disposal. “Sorry, honey.”
Joy leaped to her feet and banged the table with her fist. “I can’t believe you did that!”
“Believe it.”
“You had no right!”
I could see she was just getting started.
It wasn’t the first time she and I had faced off. The entire reason Joy was out here was because of my playing protective mom.
Less than a year before, I’d caught her doing cocaine with her friends in the bathroom stall of an infamous nightclub. (I know, I know—what was I, myself, doing in an infamous nightclub, right? Trust me, there was a good reason, and when I stumbled upon Joy, she had insisted what she was doing was none of my business. But I begged to differ.) I asked her father to have a long talk with her. God knows I’d had enough of them with her when she was in high school, but now she was a young woman, living with a roommate her age. I knew she needed to hear some straight talk from the horse’s mouth (so to speak—and I’m being kind). Matteo Allegro had become an addict during our marriage and it was one of the reasons our wedded bliss ended long before our ten-year union did. (It was also the reason I used to refer to Matt as a “horse’s other end”).
Matt well knew what could happen to a person who thought he or she could handle casual drug use: impaired judgment, pouring money into the habit, becoming unreliable, lying to and hurting loved ones. In Matt’s case, this included the habit of cheating on me, which, as far as I was concerned, was as much an addiction as his chemical dependency and sprang from the same “self-medicating” issues.
In any event, Matt’s “horse’s mouth” talk seemed to work, and Joy had buckled down with her culinary school studies for the rest of the year. Then, one day near the start of spring, she came running into the Village Blend waving a local magazine.
At the time, David Mintzer had been sitting at my espresso bar, reading the Wall Street Journal and sipping a doppio espresso. He had already asked me to work for him. And I had already declined. “I work for Madame,” I’d told him with a shrug. “Managing the Blend is a job I love, and I’ll be taking over as co-owner in the future. I’m not looking for a change.”
But when Joy burst into the coffeehouse with her “big plans for the summer,” which included an illegal Hamptons share, my outlook changed. Joy had circled five possible share houses listed in the local magazine. She just needed a “teensy-weensy loan” from me to get into one of them.
Now I knew perfectly well that Hamptons’ officials had set up codes limiting the number of occupants in rental houses. I also knew that hundreds of entrepreneurs routinely violated those laws by running illegal shares all season long, cramming up to thirty or forty people into one house. This was the way twenty-and thirtysomethings without Hilton sisters-level loot could afford to “summer” in these exclusive seaside towns.
A decade ago, this share thing seemed like a good idea. I’d been around thirty at that time, Joy around eleven. When she’d gone away for two weeks of Girl Scout camp, I gave in to a girlfriend who’d insisted that a “wild” week of meeting men, dancing, drinking, and sunbathing was exactly what I needed after my divorce from Matt.
I decided to give it a try, shelling out 1,500 dollars for one week of a South Fork summer by the sea. Typically this was how it worked: a three-or-four-million-dollar house would rent out for 100,000 dollars or so for the season. In order to cover that cost, the people running the share would cram each bedroom with multiple mattresses. For your share price, you got the mattress, toilet paper, paper cups, and the use of the house’s kitchen, pool, hot tub, and bathrooms.
On the face of it, the idea seemed good. It was the “democratization of luxury,” I’d told myself. But the reality wasn’t so good. Frankly, I’d hated it. The house was a 24/7 party. Jello shots, cocaine lines, naked orgies in the hot tub.
Hey, I like a good time as much as the next person. But I’d never been a hard partying girl. My ex-husband would have loved it. Not me. I did my best to get into the spirit of the house. Then, near the end of the week, one of the men I’d gotten to know pretty well began kissing me in a hot tub of a dozen people and, before I could stop him, removed the top of my two-piece swimsuit. When a second guy I’d never even seen before that night tried to join in the “fun,” I suggested to the first, as I frantically tied my top back on, that if he wanted to go further we should find some privacy.
He took me to the only private place in the huge house—a mattress placed in a walk-in closet. He said this was the spot for anyone who needed to “spend time alone.” I looked at that bare mattress on the floor of that closet, a naked light bulb above it, and spontaneously threw up. Suffice it to say, the “ambiance” of the place didn’t do it for me, and the next morning, I packed up and left a day early.
I didn’t want Joy to go through that—or worse. And I certainly didn’t want her to be exposed to drug use again or excessive drinking and partying in a wannabe Animal House.
Joy was livid. She did not share my attitude toward illegal share houses and found my point of view hopelessly clueless and unhip. We faced off.
Wanting to make her happy (without making me crazy worried), I came up with a compromise. I proposed a deal to David. I’d work for him part-time over the summer in his East Hampton restaurant, set up all his coffee selections and a dessert pairings menu, and train his staff in barista skills, as long as he’d agree to employ Joy and allow her to stay with me in his mansion, and allow me to continue overseeing the running of the Village Blend.
David happily agreed to my terms and everything had worked out superbly…until tonight, of course.
Joy was once again furious with me for being clueless, unhip, and interfering in her private life. Treat’s body was temporarily forgotten in the heat of the moment—or maybe it was the stress of that discovery that made our stand-off all the more emotional.
“That phone number was mine,” she shouted. “You had no right to destroy it!”
The people around the table had gone dead silent watching us, but I wasn’t backing down.
“Joy, don’t you understand? You’re my daughter. If I see you throwing yourself in front of a truck, I’m going to do everything in my power to push you out of the way—even if it means I get run over in the process.”
Joy frowned and folded her arms, glaring in silence. I glared back. Surprisingly enough, it was Graydon Faas who broke the tension.
“You know, Joy,” he said after clearing his throat, “I think your mom’s sort of right about that actor dude.”
Joy shifted her gaze to Graydon. He shrugged. “Keith Judd, like, gave his number to every cute girl at the party.” Graydon scratched his head. “You’ve got a lot going for you, you know? A guy like that…he wouldn’t appreciate you.”
“Oh,” Joy said in a small voice. Clearly dying of embarrassment, she sank back down in her chair, refusing to look at me.
I sat back in my own chair, too. Nothing like having co-workers witness an intimate family squabble. I sighed, hearing a distant rumbling rolling in off the ocean. The coming storm. As if there wasn’t already a tempest in here.
The police had yet to show. I checked my watch. It had been almost twenty minutes since I’d called 911, and I was used to New York City’s lightning-fast response times—usually somewhere between three and eight minutes.
I began to worry. Surely there would be evidence outside, but if the rain came before the police showed, would some of that evidence be washed away?
“I wonder where the police are?” I fretted aloud.
David shook his head. “July Fourth in the Hamptons is the craziest time of year and the village police force isn’t very big.”
Suzi agreed. “There are probably major problems all over town tonight.”
“Traffic will be horrendous,” David added. “There’ll be accidents, DUIs, and drunk and disorderlies on top of what will surely be a few requests for ambulances.”
“I guess we were triaged,” I speculated aloud. “I mean, they did ask what Treat’s condition was, and I did tell them that he was…you know, already gone.”
Colleen began crying again.
I stood up. “Everyone stay here.”
“Where are you going?” David asked.
“I’m going to check on Alberta.”
This was the truth, just not the whole of it.
I moved through an archway and entered a long hallway. A large garage sat at the far end. In between were doors to the laundry room and the servants’ quarters.
I passed by the first door, which was the bedroom shared by the cook and butler. I knew it would be empty. Kenneth and Daphne Plummer had been married for twenty years. They’d worked for David more than six. Daphne was the cook, Kenneth the butler. For the long Fourth of July weekend, Daphne had traveled to Indiana for her niece’s wedding. And Kenneth was in the city, taking care of some utility issues at David’s Greenwich Village townhouse.
When I came to the second door, however, I lightly knocked.
“Alberta?” I called.
David’s fifty-seven-year-old housekeeper was the only staff member he’d asked to work over the weekend. She’d declined an invitation to the party, so David gave her the night off, knowing we, the restaurant staff and Madame, would handle any post-party cleanup duties.
I knocked again. This time I was sure I heard voices on the other side of the door. I just couldn’t tell if it was two people talking or Alberta’s television set. Then there was some scrambling movement and the door opened.
Alberta Gurt’s quarters consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, and private bath. David had mentioned this to me the day I’d first arrived in the mansion. Her front door wasn’t open very far at the moment, but I could see the bedroom door was closed and a single dim lamp was all that illuminated the sitting room. The TV set was off.
“Alberta,” I said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but something happened during the party tonight.”
“Oh?” she asked, blinking. “What’s that?”
Alberta had pale blue eyes and light brown hair sprinkled with gray, which she wore in a short, neat cut around an attractive face. She had the full shape of a woman in her middle years, not slender, but not heavy either, and at the moment she was wearing a deep violet nightgown with pink lip gloss and pearl earrings. It was strange seeing her like that. I was so used to her crisp housekeeper’s uniform of sky blue slacks and matching tunic. But it was her evening off, so more power to her.
“Did you happen to hear or see anything that may have seemed out of place?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you hear something that may have sounded like a gunshot?”
“What? Like the fireworks? I heard them, all right. How could you not?”
“But you didn’t come out to see them?”
“Oh, no. I was watching my favorite TV show, enjoying the night off. You’ve seen one fireworks display, you’ve seen them all,” she said with a wave of her hand. I noticed some pretty rings on her fingers.
There was a silent pause. It seemed odd to me that she didn’t ask why I was asking about a gunshot. “All right, Alberta. Thanks. Sorry I bothered you.”
“That’s all right, Clare.”
She seemed in a hurry to shut the door. Nevertheless, I quickly asked, “What is your favorite TV show, by the way?”
“Oh!…you know, that new reality show everyone’s watching, American Star.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Really?” Alberta wasn’t exactly in the demographic for a show like that, which took a pool of unknown young singers and had them perform every week until the audience voted them down to one winner, presumably America’s next pop diva.
“Oh, yes,” Alberta said quickly. “Talent scout shows aren’t new you know, I grew up on Ed Sullivan. Is there anything else, Clare?”
“No,” I said. “Good—”
I never got “night” out of my mouth. Alberta was already shutting the door with a hastily called “G’night!”
As the thunder rolled again, louder than before, I proceeded down the hallway until I reached the door at the very end. I turned the knob, entered the dark space, and flipped on the light.
There were a few flashlights on a shelf in David’s tencar garage. I grabbed one and resolutely headed out the side door. It was late, it was dark, and it was probably dangerous, but I intended to have a look around the grounds for myself.