Latte Trouble

Four

A dozen voices spoke at once, mine and Matteo’s among them.

“Quiet!” the woman barked. “One at a time.”

Matteo stepped up to her, taking on the police woman directly. I was suddenly afraid my ex-husband’s inbred antagonism toward authority figures in general and members of the law enforcement community in particular was about to assert itself. I was right.

“Look, lady, I don’t know what you think happened here, but nobody was poisoned.”

This isn’t the right approach, Matt, I silently wailed. Then I stepped between them—while attempting to push Matteo backward with my elbow. Given that he was over six feet and all muscle, and I was under five-five with zero weight training, the effect was nil.

“Hello,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is Clare Cosi. I’m the manager of the Village Blend.”

“Detective Rachel Starkey,” she replied, ignoring my proffered palm. Then she eyed Matteo behind me. “And who’s the big bohunk behind you?”

Bohunk? Who talks like that?

“He’s Matteo Allegro, my—”

“Business partner,” Matteo finished for me with a glance at Breanne Summour.

“Okay, Mr. Allegro. My partner here will get your statement, while I speak with your partner here, and the rest of her staff.”

I realized as I was listening to Detective Starkey that she had the very slight but telling signs of a Queens accent—a drawling of vowels and dropping of Rs. The Blend’s private carting company was based in Queens, and I heard that accent at least twice a week because I always invited the sanitation crew in for a coffee break when they stopped by to empty our dumpster.

Like me, it appeared Detective Starkey had cleaned up well, virtually masking her working-class accent and dressing for a slick presentation of authority.

Starkey faced the rest of the room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said loud enough to be heard over the dance music, “the uniformed officers will take statements from everyone else.”

“Excuse me, Detective,” declared the Truman Capote wannabe. “But I should think you’d want to talk with me. I saw the whole thing. That poor man was poisoned. His friend said so before he collapsed, too.”

A middle-aged woman in a silk pantsuit and tinted glasses placed a hand on her hip. “Well, I saw it, too.”

I couldn’t believe this crowd was so catty they were jockeying for prime positions at a crime scene.

Detective Starkey seemed unfazed. “Detective Hutawa will take both of your statements,” she said.

The heavyset detective’s frown deepened as he pulled out a notebook and pen and motioned the short man in the white fedora to follow him to the coffee bar.

Detective Starkey took my arm. “Get your staff together, Ms. Cosi, and let’s talk behind the counter.”

I turned, waved for Tucker to come forward. Esther and Moira McNeely were already behind the coffee bar, waiting. We gathered next to the espresso machine, and Starkey pulled us all into a tight circle as she fixed her Ice Station Zebra blue eyes on mine. “What happened here, Ms. Cosi? In your own words.”

“Well…one minute Mr. Flatt was enjoying himself—”

“You call him Mr. Flatt?” the detective cut in. “Does that mean you know the victim?”

“No,” I replied and chose my next words carefully. “His name was…on the guest list.”

“I see,” Starkey said, eyes unblinking. “Go on.”

“So,” I continued, “Mr. Flatt seemed fine. Then he just collapsed. A minute later, his friend collapsed, too.”

“Were they eating? Drinking?”

Tucker spoke up. “They shared a latte.”

Her piercing stare shifted from me to Tucker. “A latte? What kind?”

“Caramel-chocolate,” Tucker replied. “That’s mostly what we’re serving at this party.”

“What’s in this latte?”

Tucker shrugged. “Espresso. Steamed milk. Caramel-chocolate syrup. Whipped cream. And a chocolate-covered coffee bean on top.”

Detective Starkey paused rather meaningfully. “How about Amaretto?”

“Amaretto?” replied Tucker. “In a caramel-chocolate latte? No, Detective, no Amaretto.”

“And you’re sure about that, Mr…?”

“Burton. Tucker Burton. And, of course I’m sure. I made that latte myself.”

A shout interrupted us. “The medical examiner’s here, Detective.” It was Officer Langley calling over from his post at the door. Two more uniformed officers had arrived as well.

“I’m busy here, Officer. The M.E. knows his job. Tell him to do it,” Starkey replied without shifting her gaze from Tucker. Then she reached out and put her hand on Tuck’s shoulder. “And do you know who brought Mr. Flatt his beverage, Tucker Burton?”

Wait a minute, I thought. What’s happening here? Starkey’s intense gaze was holding Tucker like a hunter drawing a bead on an unsuspecting deer. “Tucker, don’t answer that!” I blurted out. But it had already overlapped with his—

“I did. I brought it.”

“Ms. Cosi, I’m not speaking with you at the moment.”

The detective’s words were a little too sharp, a little too loud. I didn’t care. Tucker was family, and I wasn’t going to watch him railroaded. I stepped up to the woman. “Tucker isn’t obligated to answer anything.”

At nearly six feet, the chic Detective Starkey towered over me like an imposing stiletto, but I didn’t care. My façade and vocabulary, not to mention my current address, may have improved as much as hers since my own working-class childhood, but the old ways died hard—and I’d bet a thousand goomba dollars my old neighborhood was ten times tougher than hers.

“He’s my employee,” I knocked the woman’s hand from Tucker’s body. “And I’m the one responsible for the drinks served here.”

Detective Starkey reacted but not in the way I’d expected. One blond eyebrow arched and she studied me with the detached interest of Mr. Spock examining a strange new life form.

“Clare, it’s okay,” said Tucker. “I’ll answer your questions, Detective. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Did Mr. Flatt say anything to you when you served him the latte?” asked Starkey, dispassionately resuming the interrogation as if I’d never existed. “Did he complain about the taste, perhaps?”

I crossed my arms and made unhappy groaning noises. Tucker ignored me. “No, detective, Ricky didn’t complain about the latte. And I didn’t serve the latte to him, Ricky took it off my tray.”

Starkey’s blond eyebrow arched again. “Ricky? That’s the victim’s first name? So you knew Mr. Flatt?”

Tucker sighed. His narrow shoulders seemed to sag inward. “I…I knew Ricky.”

“Under what circumstance did—”

“Rachel!” Detective Hutawa keened from across the room. “The doc wants to speak with us, pronto.”

Detective Starkey flinched. What she probably wanted to do was curse a blue streak. Instead, she held up an index finger to Tucker. “I’ll be right back,” she promised. “And, Ms. Cosi? Do me a favor.”

My arms were still tightly crossed. “What?”

“Kill that damn music.”

I watched the woman saunter across the room, then go into a huddle with her partner and another man in khaki pants and a blue blazer. Beyond them I spied Matteo, with Breanne Summour stuck to his side like an expensively dressed carbuncle. I stepped to the end of the counter and slammed the speaker system’s off switch. Everyone looked up as the pulsing electronica pounded its last beat and a funereal silence fell over the coffeehouse. I returned to find my staff in a tight circle. Wagon trains, I thought. Tucker was biting his thumbnail in a sudden moment of regret. “Oh, god, Clare. Did I tell that detective too much?”

“That would be a yes,” said Esther.

Moira’s eyes, already dewy, went wide. “That’s not funny, Esther. The police are going to arrest Tucker.”

Tucker went pale. “My god, I can’t go to jail. I just can’t…”

“Nobody’s going to jail,” I said.

“I didn’t poison anyone,” insisted Tuck. “And I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Ricky. I mean, after what he did to me, I wanted to kill him, sure. But I didn’t want to kill him, kill him. That latte wasn’t even meant for him. I was supposed to give it to Lottie Harmon.”

Moira put her arms around Tucker and hugged him. He buried his face in her shoulder and shook his head in despair.

I knew that latte was meant for Lottie. And other people did, too. Surely the detectives will pick up on that, I thought, after they interview the key witnesses and gather all the facts. I noticed that another plain-clothes policeman had entered the Blend, or perhaps he was some official from the Medical Examiner’s office. Since it was obvious more law enforcement people were still arriving, I scanned the room, hoping against hope that a certain tall, attractively rumpled police detective might show up in the nick of time and put everything right again. But there was no sign of Mike Quinn anywhere.

Then my gaze caught young Officer Demetrios. He was leafing through a worn notebook filled with his bold block letters. I stepped out from behind the counter to confront him. “What’s going to happen?”

He looked nervously beyond me, toward the huddle near the corpse. “I…I couldn’t say, Ms. Cosi.”

He tried to push by me, but I refused to be shaken loose so easily. “Why isn’t Mike Quinn here?”

“I heard Detective Quinn’s on leave.”

That explained why I hadn’t seen him lately. Some time ago, I’d weaned the man off the stale, bitter swill they called coffee in the average New York City bodega, so I’d been wondering where he was getting his caffeine fix.

“Is there something wrong with Detective Quinn? An emergency? Is he sick or something?” I asked.

Officer Demetrios shrugged. “He’s taking lost time, that’s all I know. Something personal, I guess.”

Most likely marital woes, I decided. Off and on over the past year, we’d spoken of his troubles, of his cheating wife, of his indecision over seeking a divorce, and of all the custody issues that would subsequently involve his two children—

But I put thoughts of Detective Quinn aside. He wasn’t here and he wasn’t going to be, so it was up to me to focus on the problem at hand. “What do you know about those two?” I asked, gesturing to slick Detective Starkey and her hapless partner Hutawa.

Demetrios’s eyes were guarded as he whispered his reply. “You heard of that good cop, bad cop thing—the one they use on television shows?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“With these two, it’s more like bad cop, worse cop. Starkey and Hut don’t cut anybody any slack.”

“Starkey and Hut? You’re joking.”

“For chrissake, not so loud, Ms. Cosi. And you didn’t hear those names from me,” he rasped, then hurried away as if I had the plague and was on fire.

I noticed the huddle by the corpse had finally broken up. Detective Starkey was heading back toward the coffee bar, her face impassive. My staff and I formed our own huddle as we watched the woman approach.

“The Medical Examiner’s early conclusions match my own. Richard Flatt was the victim of foul play,” Detective Starkey informed us. Her eyes drifted to Tucker. “And since Mr. Burton here denies your latte recipe uses Amaretto—”

“Amaretto?!” Tucker and I cried together, perplexed.

“Ms. Cosi, the M.E. and I both smelled the scent of bitter almond. The victim’s skin has a distinctive pink hue, so if it isn’t Amaretto in the latte your barista here has been serving up, then it’s prussic acid—that’s cyanide.”

Moira and Esther paled. I felt sick. Tucker stumbled and nearly fainted. Detective Starkey clutched his arm to steady him. When she spoke, her tone was calm but firm. “Mr. Burton, I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me back to the station—”

“No…I won’t go,” Tucker cried, his eyes like a wounded animal’s. Two uniformed officers I didn’t know, a young one and an older one, stepped up to Tucker’s side, took hold of his wrists. “Don’t resist, son,” warned the older one.

“But I didn’t do anything,” Tucker protested, struggling. “Please, let me go….”

“Look at me, Mr. Burton,” Detective Hutawa demanded, stepping right in front of him. Tucker stopped squirming to stare at the stout detective.

“Can you hear me?”

Tucker nodded.

“I asked if you can hear me, Mr. Burton?”

“Yes, yes, I can hear you.”

Hutawa’s face was grim as he began to intone, “You have the right to remain silent…”

“Oh, god, no.” Tucker closed his eyes.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

“No. Please,” Tucker begged.

“This is wrong!” I insisted.

“You can’t do this,” Moira sobbed. She pushed forward, trying to get to Tucker. Esther Best restrained her.

Detective Hutawa’s gravelly voice rumbled on. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one…”

“Clare! Do something,” Esther Best cried as she held Moira.

I searched the crowded room for Matteo. He stood rigidly watching the arrest, frowning in fury, and it seemed to me he was about to barrel across the floor to raise living hell—but the light grip of Breanne Summour was apparently enough to hold him. Her French manicured fingers looked bone white against the fine black material of his Armani-clad arm, restraining him with bloodless insistence. Her glossy lips vigorously formed words, gripping his ear in a rapid whisper.

I turned my gaze from my ex and squared my shoulders. “Tuck,” I said in a voice I hoped was calm and reassuring. “I’ll bail you out. I’ll find you a lawyer. Don’t worry, I promise I’ll do everything I can.”

Which was, at that moment, not a thing. For now, I was forced to stand by and watch as the detectives placed handcuffs on Tucker’s wrists and led him through the doors to a parked squad car.

As the police vehicle drove away, two detectives commanded me and my staff to step away from the counter. Then I helplessly watched as they wrapped my espresso machine, sink, and pastry case with fat rolls of police tape—the bright yellow color providing an incongruously sunny backdrop to the death black words that gave my coffee bar its new name: CRIME SCENE.