French Pressed

Twenty-Five

The sound of ringing woke me. For a moment, I thought it was an alarm clock, and then I realized it was the bedside phone. There was movement next to me on the mattress, and that’s when I remembered—

Mike.

I opened my eyes. He was there, beside me. His spartan bedroom was bathed in morning light, the sun rays pouring in through the half-closed miniblinds.

“Hello?” his deep voice murmured.

I was about to answer when I realized Mike was talking into the phone receiver. His long arm had allowed him to grab it off the nightstand without even sitting up.

“No. It’s okay. I asked you to…” he said to the unknown caller. “What did you get?”

I started to sit up off the pillows; Mike instantly pulled me back down. His free arm wrapped around me, urged me close against his long, strong form.

“Uh-huh…and?”

I tucked my head into the crook of his shoulder, rested my hand on his bare chest. Mike’s body was solid, the muscles well-defined. There were scars here, and I lightly outlined an angry-looking slash—a knife wound was my guess. Then I touched some healed incisions from surgeries, which looked like entry points from multiple gunshot wounds.

Mike’s free hand stopped stroking my hair. His fingers moved lower, to the nape of my neck. His massaging was sweet and leisurely, his finger pads slightly calloused, a texture that made me purr.

Mike shifted slightly, cleared his throat. “Go on. I’m listening…”

I pressed my lips where my hands had just been. Mike took in sharp breaths of air, feeling my mouth on his skin. Then his free hand moved down my body on a mission to mess with my focus, too.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll be in later.”

He punched the Off button and tossed the phone away. The call may have ended, but Mike’s touching was just beginning.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Who cares,” he growled.

I was wide awake now, but getting up wasn’t an option. It would be well over an hour before the man would let me out of his bed.

“So…” Mike said as I poured him a cup of coffee, “do you remember that phone call I got?”

“Phone call? What phone call? That was over an hour ago. So much has happened since.”

Mike laughed. He was sitting at the cheap card table in his kitchen; four creaky folding chairs completed the less-than-elegant set. The kitchen itself was new and clean with faux marble counters, a full-sized fridge, and a good gas range. As I expected, the larder was spare, but he did have a coffeemaker, a small grinder, and some of my Village Blend beans. It was gratifying to see I’d had some influence on the man, after all.

In the fridge were bottles of a good Mexican beer, a few limes, a carton of half-and-half, Chinese mustard, and one egg.

While Mike showered, I’d thrown on one of his T-shirts, made us the coffee, and rifled a cardboard box I’d found sitting on the counter. Someone had written Mike in big letters with a Magic Marker along with the address of this place. I got the impression from its contents—a collection of pans, dishes, cups, a small spice rack, and some unopened grocery items—that this was a box from his old Brooklyn brownstone, the one he’d owned jointly with his wife.

Mrs. Quinn was now living on an estate on Long Island with the Wall Street whiz whom she intended to marry. I figured she had no use for these things from her old kitchen, and the movers delivered them here with Mike’s clothes and the few other items in the place—obviously very few.

I dug out a cardboard container of cornmeal, a small sack of flour, some baking powder, and sugar, stirred them together with the egg, the half-and-half, and a bit of oil. I poured the batter in a square pan and baked it at 400. The timer was set for twenty, but Mike was out of the shower in twelve.

Now he was sitting across from me at the table in gray sweats and a faded blue T-shirt, his feet were bare, and his dark blond hair looked even darker now that it was wet and slicked back against his squareish head.

I wanted to kiss him again.

It took a few gulps of hot coffee to focus and remind myself that Mike’s mouth occasionally did something other than that.

“…and I need to talk to you about it,” he was saying.

“Huh?”

“The phone call, sweetheart.”

“The call. Right. Was it serious?”

“It was a colleague calling with some news.” He leaned forward in his folding chair. “Billy Benedetto’s your prime suspect in Keitel’s murder, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, this man named ‘Simon,’ who hit on you in Flux and then really hit on you in the street, was a perp with a lot of aliases. After a long, hard night of questioning, the little jerk spilled his guts to the interrogating detectives. He gave up Benedetto.”

“Wait. You’re telling me that Benedetto was running the May-September gang?”

“Yeah. He helped set up dozens of robberies. He was the beverage manager for three different nightclubs. He used security cameras at each club to select whales for his crew of young robbers to harpoon.”

“Where’s Benedetto now?! Don’t you have enough on that creep to arrest him?”

“Of course. My guys are looking for him as we speak.”

“Why didn’t you tell me an hour ago?”

Mike shrugged, sipped his coffee. “I didn’t want to break the mood.”

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Mike sat up, looking around as if an emergency alert had just gone off. “What the hell was that?”

“It’s your oven timer.”

“My what?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t bake much, do you?”

There were no oven mitts in the cardboard box, so I used a dish towel to pull the pan out. My knife got busy, and I set the warm, fresh squares of corn bread on a plate between us.

Mike stared at me as if I’d just dug a five-carat diamond out of his sink.

“Where did you get that?”

“What? The corn bread?”

“Yeah.”

“You had the ingredients. I whipped it together.”

He stared at me, still a little dumbfounded. “I had the ingredients? In this apartment?”

I laughed. “Try some.”

I didn’t have to suggest it twice. Mike grabbed a square, inhaled the aroma of the warm, sweet bread, and shoveled it in. “Hungry…” he said, as if he’d just realized it. He ate the entire square in about three bites and reached for a second.

“The standard recipe calls for skim milk, but I prefer using half-and-half anyway. It gives a much richer mouthfeel to the product, don’t you think?”

“Yhemmmh Immm thimnk so…” he replied. He swallowed the second square and reached for a third.

Finally, I thought, a man who has no issues with palate fatigue!

“So this Benedetto May-September gang thing…That’s good news, isn’t it?” I pressed. “I mean, once you get the man into custody, you can go over his computer files and papers with a fine-tooth comb, look for clues that he killed Keitel or hired someone to do it.”

Mike chewed, swallowed, and winked. “Piece o’ cake.”

Just then the phone rang. Mike got up, went into the next room for a few minutes. When he came back, he looked strange. I couldn’t read him—and that was unusual.

“What’s up?”

“My guys couldn’t find Benedetto at his apartment, so they started checking the clubs where he worked. They finally found the man about thirty minutes ago—or his corpse, anyway.”

“What do you mean his corpse?”

“He’s dead, Clare.”

“Benedetto’s dead?” I rose from the table, paced the room, tried to process this. “Benedetto’s dead? Benedetto’s dead!” Finally, I stopped pacing and faced Mike. “Where was he killed? Which club?”

“Club Flux. They found him in his upstairs office.”

“And how was he killed, Mike?”

“That’s the bizarre part. Someone slipped the man a Mickey. They found a half-empty bottle of champagne with two glasses. There are traces of the drug in Benedetto’s glass. They’re dusting for prints now.”

“The drug killed him?”

Mike shook his head. “When Benedetto passed out, the killer slit his throat.”

“Another murder with a knife?”

“Listen, Clare, I want you to think about your meeting with this guy. Did you pick up anything from Benedetto, any lead on who might have wanted him dead?”

“Billy Benedetto said he was expecting a backer. This mysterious backer was going to put up money for Benedetto’s new restaurant. The reason, according to Billy, was that he had something on this guy—and it sounded to me like—”

“Blackmail?” Mike said.

“Anton Wright!”

“What?”

“The owner of Solange! That’s who I saw go up to see Benedetto after I left him, which means Benedetto had something incriminating on Anton Wright. ‘Something big. Something bad.’ Those were his very words.”

“What did he have, Clare? What’s your theory?”

“I believe Billy and Anton conspired to kill Tommy Keitel. Anton’s a polished entrepreneur now, but Keitel told me the man started out in life as the son of a butcher—so he must have had knife skills.”

“You think Anton was the one who stabbed Tommy Keitel to death. And he did this for or with Billy Benedetto—”

“Yes, Billy had a very strong motive to want Tommy dead. But then Billy must have turned on Anton and blackmailed him. Anton obviously decided to get rid of blackmailing Billy by drugging him and slashing his throat. I can’t prove it yet, but I’m sure I’m right.”

“Murder needs a motive, Clare. And while your scenario gives a motive to Anton Wright for killing Benedetto—if he was in fact blackmailing Anton for some reason—it doesn’t answer the motive in the murder of Tommy Keitel. It comes down to a simple question. Why would Anton Wright want to kill Tommy Keitel?”

“Motive, motive…” I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “Why would Anton kill Tommy?”

“He wouldn’t. Tommy was the jewel in the Solange crown. No sane man throws away a jewel, Clare. He goes to great lengths to hold on to it.”

Mike paused just then; his blue eyes met my green ones, held them for a long, sweet, unnervingly suggestive moment, and I got the distinct impression that he wanted us to remember the emeralds from last night, the one’s I’d worn naked while we—

I cleared my throat. Any thoughts in that direction weren’t going to solve Tommy’s murder and free my daughter.

“I’ve got no answer for Anton Wright’s motive, Mike. I’ll grant you that. But Anton and Tommy were feuding about something. So I’m not clearing him off my suspect list. Not yet.”

Mike nodded, sipped his coffee, and smiled inappropriately—probably at my use of the term suspect list.

“What’s with you, Lieutenant? Half the time when I talk to you about my theories, I catch this little smile on your face. Do I amuse you?”

Mike leaned back. “You really want me to answer that?”

“No.” I rolled my eyes, glanced at the clock. “Listen, I better get dressed and get out of here. I want to shower and change back at the Blend. Then I have to go up to Joy’s apartment, pick up some of her clothes and personal items. She should be out of jail today, and she’ll be coming back to the Blend to stay with Matt and me until her trial. Even if the judge doesn’t put her under house arrest, I’m guessing she’ll just want to crash with us for the moral support.”

“I’ll go with you,” Mike said, rising from the table. “You can use the help carrying her stuff, right?”

“I’d love you to help me. But don’t you have to go in to work?”

“I do. But there’s no hurry.” He shrugged. “The ME’s office won’t get back to us for a few more hours, and it’s not like I have to rush in to interrogate Benedetto. The only investigator getting info from that scumbag now is the doc who’s performing his autopsy.”