Клео Коул - Decaffeinated Corpse

Beads of sweat dewed Matt’s upper lip. The shock was wearing off, and the pain setting in. “What about Ellie?” he asked.

“I’ll bet it was Neils again, looking for Ric’s cutting. Neils was already pawning his expensive things, so Monika must have cut him off financially. He was probably desperate to make his own fortune. Stealing and selling that cutting to Carlos Hernandez or someone like him would have gotten it for him. But when Neils broke into Ric’s hotel room, looking for the cutting, Ellie was there. You yourself told me that Ellie and Ric had made love that afternoon—”

“I see where you’re going,” Matt said. “When Neils kept failing at getting his hands on the cutting, he resorted to securing a fortune the old fashioned way—by murdering his rich, cheating wife and inheriting everything before she could dump him.”

“Exactly.”

Mike Quinn appeared a moment later. “You were right, Clare,” he told me.

I met his blue eyes. “I thought you said you didn’t have the resources to follow Neils Van Doorn?”

“We don’t. But I decided to follow Van Doorn during my off-duty hours. See what the guy was up to. I figured you had something on him, so...”

I blinked, genuinely flattered. I was about to tell him so, too, but he was glancing in another direction, toward the staircase. “I only regret I couldn’t prevent the murder of Mrs. Van Doorn,” he said. “Her doorman wouldn’t let me into her party. I had no costume or invitation. The sidewalk outside was the best I could do.”

While we spoke, more uniformed police officers arrived. I saw two of them escorting a stumbling Zorro out of the men’s room.

“Hey, Mike! Look what we found. Another Zorro!”

“That’s Ric Gostwick,” I told Mike. “But before you cut him loose I think you’d better listen to this...” I pulled out the robot voice toy and handed it over.

“You’re not kidding?” Mike asked, looking at the cheap plastic recorder.

“I wish I were...” I glanced at Ric. On many levels, my heart went out to him. “But in this country, we don’t exact justice at the top of twenty-sixth floor balconies. And as trying as Matt can be, I’d really like his name off that Midtown detective’s ‘persons of interest’ list.”

Mike nodded. “I think you missed your calling, Cosi.”

“Is that right?”

“With your nerve, you should have been a cop, a thief, or a demolitions expert.”

“Well, I’m too moral to become a thief, I’m too old to get into the police academy, and I’ve got more interest in working with flavor profiles than plastique. Guess it’ll have to stay a hobby.”

“Case by case, then?”

With everything that had happened, it felt wrong to smile, but a part of me was glad I’d finally done something right.

“Yeah, Mike,” I said. “Like I tell my Blend trainees. ‘One customer at a time.’ ”

“What’s that?” I asked Mike Quinn a week later.

It was early evening, a slow night, and Mike walked into my coffeehouse, ordering up his regular, as usual. When I put the double-tall latte on the counter, however, he pulled out an unusual looking piece of paper and dangled it right in front of my nose.

“This is a BOLO, Cosi. And it’s got your name on it, and your license plate number.”

“ What is it?”

“A ‘be on the lookout’—for your red Honda.”

“It’s not a traffic summons?”

“Someone driving your car went through a dead stop red light in Brooklyn last week, sped recklessly down Court Street, refused to pull over, and evaded a police chase. So, please tell me that your car was stolen.”

“It wasn’t.”

“You’re guilty of all this?”

“I can explain.”

Mike reached behind him, pulled out his handcuffs, and slapped them down on the coffee bar. “These would be going around your wrists if I hadn’t seen this issued last week and claimed it for follow up.”

“You’re burying the violation?”

“You’re lucky you live in my precinct. I’ll talk to the Brooklyn officer who’s charging you, get him to reduce it to a traffic ticket. But I’m warning you right now, you’re going to owe me.”

“Well, I could give you free lattes for a month, but I don’t know, Mike...” I picked up the handcuffs. “It seems to me I could do a whole lot worse than having you use these on me.”

Mike smiled—a rare occurrence. “I told you, Cosi. You owe me. But the cuffs are Stage Five.”

“And where are we?”

He plucked the cuffs from my hands and put them back on his belt. “Stage One.”

“Which is?”

“Dinner and a movie.”

My eyes widened. It was the first real date he’d ever proposed. “When?”

“How about every Saturday night for the foreseeable future?”

I laughed. “What if there are no good movies playing?” The detective took a long, satisfying sip of his latte. “I think we’ll come up with something else to occupy our time. Don’t you?”

“Oh, sure, let’s see...” I scratched my head. “There’s Yahtzee, Scrabble, Crazy 8s...”

Mike glanced around the coffee bar. “So where’s Zorro?”

“Uptown. His girlfriend’s taken him in. Since his arm’s in a cast, she’s having a high time playing nursemaid. Believe me, he’s living like a prince. I actually think they’re getting serious... and speaking of serious. Any word yet from the district attorney’s office?”

Mike nodded. “No plea deal. Van Doorn’s lawyered up pretty well, and he doesn’t want to admit his guilt, so he’s going all the way to trial. But old Neils is going to have a rough time of it. We’ve got DNA evidence nailing him to Ellie’s murder, a security camera showing him leaving the V Hotel near the time of death, not to mention all those witnesses to the Halloween shooting of his wife. There’s more than enough for a conviction on something... Gostwick, as you know, was another story.”

“I know...”

In the end, Ric wasn’t a stone-cold sociopath. He may have been a serial cheater, but he didn’t really want to see his oldest friend sent up for a murder he didn’t commit. When the police played him my recording, Ric officially confessed. The DA worked out a manslaughter charge of eight years, and he would likely get out in four or less for good behavior.

As for his magic beans, they were contractually in the possession of the Village Blend. If I let Matt’s kiosks have them all, which I intended to, the Gostwick Estate Reserve Decaf would easily last the year. We’d have a good chance of turning those floundering kiosks around... and, in the meantime, Matt already found a horticultural consultant for Ric’s family, to help them keep the hybrid crops producing—Norbert Usher.

Ellie’s young assistant at the Botanic Garden was quite eager and knowledgeable, as it turned out, and he’d learned plenty from working with Ellie and Ric over the last eight months. The Gostwick family was only too happy to have him come down to Brazil and work in their nursery and on their farm.

The Dutch International contract for those fake Gostwick Estate decaffeinated beans was voided, and Matt was going to see what he could do to help Ric’s family expand legitimately, albeit slowly.

Ric admitted that his fraud scheme with the late Monika Van Doorn’s company was a way for him to purchase more land and quickly expand his crops. He’d been a little too eager to restore his family’s fortune to what it once had been... but all of that was behind us now.

As for my baristas, things were working out well for them, too, although not for me. Gardner had gotten so many solo piano gigs from his single appearance at the Beekman that I was now super short-staffed, and working 24/7 while still looking for good trainee baristas.