Клео Коул - Through The Grinder

I sat straighter and leaned across the table.

“Quinn doesn’t know everything,” I whispered. “I did a little investigating on my own. Last night, while Bruce was asleep, I logged onto his computer and read his e-mails.”

“You logged onto the man’s computer and read his e-mails? Without his knowing, I take it?”

“Of course.”

“Jesus Christ, Clare, you’ve got nerve…no wonder you found out about Daphne and me. And I thought I was so careful.”

“You were flaunting her, Matt. Even Madame knew…”

“Mother knew?”

“Yes, but she forgave you. I doubt she ever forgave Daphne, though.”

It was sad, really. Madame and Daphne had been friends for years before Daphne made a play for her best friend’s son.

The direction of the conversation was obviously making Matt uncomfortable, so he changed it.

“Clare, if you logged onto his computer, that means you had some suspicions of your own.”

“No,” I lied. (Okay so I’d had a moment of doubt after I saw the model number on his HP DeskJet, but the truth was I wanted to look for anything that might contradict the picture Quinn was trying to paint of Bruce, and I had.)

“So what did you find out from all of your investigating?”

“I think the key to this whole thing is Sahara McNeil. She was someone Bruce hadn’t seen in years, not since he was first married. He didn’t even know she was in New York until Cappuccino Connection night — ”

“And then he found out Sahara was living in the city and he killed her,” concluded Matt.

“That’s not where I was going.”

“That’s where Quinn would go. And what about the subway victim? And Inga Berg? Wasn’t Bruce connected to both of those women, too?”

I sat back and took a sip of my coffee.

“He was involved with both of those women, true,” I said. “But for a short time, and I think that’s just coincidence. New York is a big city, but the circles in some of these dating services are really quite small. Bruce admitted to me that he’d dated a lot of women since his divorce, including the dead women, but I’ll bet a lot of other men dated them, too. Inga, certainly. Ask Tucker. She used to yammer on about her dates every weekend. And Bruce told me Valerie liked the happy hour scene — and she was the one who told him about SinglesNYC.com, the on-line service where he met Inga.”

Matt folded his arms. He didn’t seem convinced yet, but at least he was still listening.

“So why do you think this Sahara person is the key?”

“Sahara McNeil sent Bruce an e-mail link to a web page. It was a promotional site for the art gallery where she worked. It’s in SoHo, a place called Death Row. Ever heard of it?”

Matt shook his head. “Never.”

“They don’t exactly specialize in our kind of thing,” I told him. “The tagline on the site said something about dealing in ‘violent art’ and ‘art inspired by lust, morbidity, and obsession.’”

Matt scratched his unshaven chin. “That’s creepy, but I still don’t exactly see where you’re going.”

“It seems possible to me that Sahara could have been done in by one of the artists her gallery represented. In fact — wait just a second, I’ll be right back.”

I rose and went to my bedroom, then returned with the Hello Kitty notepad I’d filled out on Cappuccino Connection night. I quickly leafed through the pink pages.

“One of the men I was screening for Joy called himself Mars. He had that intense kind of stalker look and said he was a painter. But the strangest thing was that he spent most of his time ogling Sahara McNeil. He kept repeating that he’d already made his ‘connection’ for the night, and Joy said he’d told her that, too, which was truly odd since she was only the second person he’d sat with. The first one was Sahara.”

“So you think that this Mars may have killed Sahara? And since he’s a painter he may have known her through this Death Row gallery thing?”

“It’s a place to start,” I replied, trying not to sound totally desperate.

Matt sat gazing in silence at the steam rising from his coffee cup.

“Look at the facts,” I said after a pause. “Valerie Lathem hasn’t been ruled a homicide. Inga Berg’s killer could have been any number of men, and Sahara McNeil…I think she’s the real key. If I can find other suspects, I’ll bring them to Quinn’s attention. I just need some ammunition to prove Bruce is being framed.”

Matt nodded.

“Okay,” he said, slapping his palms on the table. “What do you want me to do?”

Just then the downstairs door buzzer went off, a faraway sound from up here in the duplex.

“First, I want you to let the pastry man in while I change clothes,” I said. “And then I want you to clear the sidewalk.” I glanced at his tanned skin, the familiar bronzed coloring of the perpetual equatorial summer. “You remember how to shovel snow, don’t you?”

Matt raised his dark eyebrow and gave me a look that seemed to say I’d been the one doing the shoveling for the last few minutes. Lucky for him, I had a coffeehouse to open.

Until the 1840s, SoHo — the truncated term for the neighborhood in lower Manhattan south of Houston Street — was a sleepy residential section of Manhattan. Then the building boom of the 1850s transformed it into an area of expensive retail stores and lofts built to house light manufacturing.

During this commercial building spree, the use of then-inexpensive cast-iron materials instead of carved stone became the vogue, making opulent, Italianate architecture like the 1857 Haughwout Building on Broadway near Broome Street the norm. Iron columns, pedestals, pediments, brackets, and entranceways were mass-produced for so many SoHo buildings that the area became known as the Cast Iron District.

By the 1960s, however, the facades of these structures were looking pretty worn from a century or more of neglect, and the once pricey lofts had begun to house cheap sweatshops. At that time, an entire floor of an industrial building could be rented for next to nothing, and impoverished artists did exactly that. Within a decade SoHo became the East Coast mecca for art, and by the 1970s hundreds of art galleries, large and small, mingled with antique dealers along West Broadway, Broome, Greene, and Barrow.

Transformed into a bohemian colony, the exhilarating mix of art, design, and architecture attracted the uptown crowd to the area, and by the late 1970s a new brand of tenant was buying up lofts. It was the era of the art patron rather than the starving artist, the latter forced to search the west side’s warehouse districts and the outer boroughs to find inexpensive industrial space. By 1980, the newly renovated lofts of SoHo were more likely to be written about in Architectural Digest than in Andy Warhol’s Interview .

Fortunately, the “artsy” character of the neighborhood never truly faded, and within the irregular borders of SoHo — and in some areas around it, too — the largest concentration of galleries and museums in North America could still be found.

A promising artist or designer could work anywhere he or she liked, but a showcase in a SoHo gallery was the essential element in a truly successful artist’s or designer’s portfolio, which was why the ambitious still poured into New York City year after year upon art school graduation.

On this bright, blustery, and cold Saturday afternoon, the narrow streets of SoHo were crowded. Last night’s snow appeared fluffy and white on rooftops and car hoods, but on the streets and sidewalks, foot and car traffic had turned the early snowfall into slushy black puddles.