Клео Коул - Murder Most Frothy

“Okay…all right…sure…” Everyone mumbled and began to wander back down the hall and toward the stairs.

“Wait for me,” David said as I swiftly walked away. “I’m certainly not staying up here alone!”

“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.