French Pressed (8 page)

L
IEUTENANT
Salinas cleared his throat. “Did you know the deceased, Ms. Cosi?”

“If it really is Vincent Buccelli, then the answer is yes. I met him a few times.”

“You know his family?”

I shook my head. “He moved here from Ohio a few years ago to attend culinary school. As far as I know, any family he has is back in Toledo.”

“So you know him because of your daughter?”

“Yes, Vinny and my daughter were friends—”

“Close friends? Boyfriend and girlfriend friends?” Salinas asked.

“Just friends from school and work. Platonic friends. I’m sure Joy has told you all of this.”

“She has,” he said, “but I’d like to hear it from another source. How well did you know this Buccelli kid, Ms. Cosi?”

“I met him a month ago at a business event. He and Joy came into my coffeehouse several times after that—”

“Coffeehouse?”

“I manage the Village Blend on Hudson Street.”

The man paused as if considering his options. He pulled at his loud tie, further loosening the already loose knot. “Maybe you can help us,” Lieutenant Salinas said at last.

“I’ll try.”

“First of all, would you be willing to provide a positive identification? Your daughter refused to look into the corpse’s face. Understandable, if they were friends. So would you help us out? Make the ID?”

I frowned. “Right now? This minute?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a slightly irked look that said,
When else?

I took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Taking my arm, he steered me off the landing and into the one-bedroom apartment. The place was spacious, and the living room looked neat and comfortable with plants and a fish tank. There was a pale green sofa and chair set, a glass coffee table, a small television, and a standing bookshelf filled with cookbooks. All of the framed posters on the walls had something to do with food: an artful photo of fruit, a sidewalk scene at a French café, a colorful day at a farmers’ market.

The only sign of violence was a small end table that had been knocked down. Some mail was scattered about, and the phone lay on the floor, its receiver off the hook. I saw a dusting of white powder on the black plastic and realized the police had tested the phone for fingerprints.

An attractive middle-aged woman wearing a dark nylon jacket stood up and approached Lieutenant Salinas. She was petite, with high, prominent cheekbones and dark hair bunched up under a hairnet. She pulled a pair of latex gloves off, exposing long-fingered, mocha-hued hands and fingernails painted a scarlet so deep it was almost black. Behind the woman, the man wearing an identical jacket continued to snap pictures.

“What do we have here, Dr. Neeravi?” Salinas asked.

“This is most definitely a homicide,” the woman replied in an East Indian accent. “The victim died from a single blow with a knife to the root of the neck—”

She paused to touch an area of flesh between her neck and shoulder. “The knife was directed downward, coming in at the base of the neck, missing the collarbone, and doing major damage to the great vessels arising from the heart. In short, the victim bled to death.”

“You have a time of death?” Salinas asked.

Dr. Neeravi made a face. “That’s going to be a problem.”

“Come on, Doc,” Salinas pleaded. “Give me a ballpark.”

“Let me explain. Someone—perhaps the perpetrator—opened all of these windows. Now, perhaps it was done to dissipate any smell from the body, preventing a neighbor from alerting the authorities right away. Or perhaps the perpetrator knew it would help mask the time of the murder. Whatever the reason, the draft streaming through those windows is under thirty degrees Fahrenheit, which means the body’s change in temperature is not something I can use to pinpoint an exact time of death.”

The doctor tore the hairnet off her head and shook her shoulder-length hair loose. “If pressed, I’d say he was killed one to four hours ago. I’ll know more after the autopsy.”

“Was the assailant strong?”

I winced, because I knew what Salinas was
really
asking.
Could the killer be a woman?

“The victim was not overpowered, and there are no defensive wounds because the dead man was struck from behind. Strength wouldn’t count as much as skill here, in my opinion. If the blade had struck the victim’s collarbone, he probably would have survived.”

“
Skill
, eh?” Salinas nodded. “Okay. The assailant may have had knife skills. That’s interesting. And there’s no sign of forced entry, which means the victim probably knew the person who murdered him.”

Dr. Neeravi nodded. “At least casually.”

Salinas snorted. “Casually enough to turn his back on his own killer—unless the murderer had a gun or waved the knife as a threat to force the victim to turn.”

“Lieutenant,” the uniformed officer called. “Look what I found.”

Holding it by the edges so as not to smudge any fingerprints, the policeman displayed a copy of a men’s magazine—and I wasn’t talking
Playboy
or
Maxim
. This was a magazine featuring young, fit men in intimate poses. It was clearly a magazine meant for gay men.

“There’s a whole pile of glossy mags just like this one over here, hidden inside this hollow ottoman,” the officer added.

“Bag them up,” Salinas commanded. “We’ll check for prints later. With glossy paper, we might get lucky.” He faced me. “You didn’t tell me the victim was homosexual, Ms. Cosi.” The lieutenant said this in an accusatory tone, as if I’d been holding it back.

“I didn’t know. Joy knew Vinny better than I did. Didn’t she mention it?”

Salinas frowned. Said nothing.

“Do you still want my help?” I asked.

“Yes.” Salinas turned to Dr. Neeravi. “Can I try for a positive ID?”

The woman nodded. “Sure. The area around the body has been swept and dusted. The ambulance can take the victim to the morgue when you’re finished. Just be careful not to step in the blood. It’s pretty messy.”

Oh, God…

Lieutenant Salinas steered me around the couch, and that’s when I saw the corpse. Dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, Vincent Buccelli lay on his stomach on the polished hardwood floor, sprawled across a brownish-red throw rug. I took a step closer and realized there was no rug, only a drying pool of the dead boy’s blood.

“It’s him. That’s Vinny,” I said, pushing my hair back. “I mean…That’s Vincent Buccelli, Lieutenant.” I swallowed hard, steeling my reaction to how violently he’d died.

“You okay, Ms. Cosi?”

I nodded, trying to commit to memory every grisly detail of the crime scene. Vinny’s arms were flung wide, though smears of blood on the floor told me he’d flailed around for several minutes.

I looked hard at the knife. Its handle was silver. About an inch of the blade stuck out of Vinny’s left shoulder, right at the base of the neck. The rest of the blade had been forced down vertically, deep into his chest. His head was turned, his eyes open but unfocused. The flesh of his face appeared waxy, almost a translucent blue gray; his lips were pale, nearly white; his mouth was gaping and flecked with crusted blood.

I followed the boy’s gaze and deduced that Vinny had died staring at the handle of the knife that had killed him—probably in shocked disbelief, if his frozen-in-death expression meant anything.

I closed my eyes, forced back tears.

“The butcher knife went in pretty deep,” Salinas observed.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding and opening my eyes again. “About nine inches—”

“Huh?”

“That’s a ten-inch blade, Lieutenant. And it’s not a butcher knife,” I corrected. “That looks like a chef’s knife…more accurately, a
French
knife. It’s one of the most commonly used tools in food preparation.”

Salinas raised a bushy eyebrow. “And you know this because you’re a cook, like your daughter?”

“I know my way around a professional kitchen,” I replied, “but I’m not a formally trained chef. I know a lot about knives simply because last Christmas I wanted to buy my daughter a very special chef’s knife as a present. And I wanted to find her a really good one.”

Salinas opened his mouth.

“And before you ask, this is
not
my daughter’s knife sticking out of the dead man.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m not an idiot, Lieutenant. It’s obvious my daughter’s your prime suspect.”

“The victim was a cook, right—”

“An aspiring chef,” I corrected.

“Yeah, well, he’s an
expiring
chef now,” Salinas cracked.

The uniformed officer and the photographer both laughed. Even Dr. Neeravi smiled.
Gallows humor,
I thought. Mike Quinn told me it was common at crime scenes—helped relieve the tension. It failed to relieve mine.

“This might be Vinny’s knife,” I suggested. “You could look around, find his kit, check to see if the chef’s knife’s missing.”

“Thanks for the suggestion,” Salinas replied. “But you’re a little late.”

“I don’t understand,” I replied.

“We’re not idiots, either. We found the dead man’s chef kit on the table. All the knives are there.”

“So you’re telling me that the killer brought the knife?” I asked.

“That’s our theory,” Salinas answered. “At ten inches, that’s not an easy knife to hide. But it’s November. People are wearing long sleeves, big coats—” He gestured to my parka.

“I didn’t kill him, either.”

The lieutenant rolled his eyes, faced the doctor. “What about blood? Would the killer get hit with spray?”

Dr. Neeravi nodded. “Blood would most definitely strike the killer. It’s like slicing a tomato—some juice is bound to squirt at you.”

Another pleasant image…
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “But unless I’m completely wrong here, there’s no blood on Joy’s clothing.” I pointed to my daughter peeking out from the kitchen doorway. She’d remained silent and still through everything, sobbing silently and wiping her eyes. “She’s wearing a white turtleneck,” I pointed out. “Don’t you think splattered blood would have been a
tad
obvious?”

“Take it easy,” Salinas told me. “There are indications the killer cleaned up after the deed. Towels in the sink, stuff like that. And she could have had a smock or coat, extra clothes and shoes, that she discarded before calling you and us.”

“Well, I know my daughter, and I know she could never, not in a million years, do something as brutal as this. I think you know that, too. So I’d like to take her home now—”

“Not yet,” the detective shot back.

I stepped close. “Not even if I give you the name of a real suspect?” I whispered. “Someone who worked in close proximity with the victim and had a grudge against him?” I met Lieutenant Salinas’s gaze. “Not even if I give you someone who’s also been known to attack her fellow workers with a chef’s knife, and did exactly that earlier this evening? Because I witnessed it.”

The room went completely silent. Salinas and the uniformed cop exchanged glances. Then the detective-lieutenant’s bushy eyebrows rose.

“Damn, Ms. Cosi. I’m all ears.”

D
ESPITE
my extremely helpful cooperation with the authorities, Lieutenant Salinas refused to release Joy from informal custody until almost three thirty in the morning. He grilled her, took fingerprints, and had a policewoman search Joy’s person and clothing for any clues he could find.

After that, I put my foot down and demanded Salinas release Joy, which he did. To the detective’s credit, Salinas realized how hard it would be for Matt, Joy, and me to hail a taxi in this part of Queens in the middle of the night, so he had one of his squad cars give us a lift back to Manhattan.

The driver was Officer Brian Murphy, the big cop Matt had confronted on the street. The policeman didn’t say a word on the trip across the Queensboro Bridge and down to the Village. But when he dropped us off on Hudson Street, Officer Murphy did suggest that my ex-husband come back to a certain Woodside pub and look him up “after the doc cuts that cast off your arm.”

Somehow, I doubted the man wanted to buy Matteo a beer.

Joy was too distraught to go back to her empty apartment alone, and I firmly suggested she come back with us to the duplex above the Blend. Matt readily agreed.

By the time we got there, it was four in the morning, and we were exhausted. With Matt’s broken arm, I insisted he take the big mahogany four-poster, while Joy took Matt’s smaller bed in the guest room. That put me on the downstairs couch.

Matt pulled me aside after Joy went to bed and suggested I join him in the master bedroom. “We can share the bed, Clare. I promise I won’t touch you.”

His eyes were wide as a puppy dog. He failed to blink even once.

I thanked him very much and headed straight for the living room couch. Now, swathed in flannel pajamas and tube socks, I punched the feather pillow I’d snatched from the closet, pulled a knitted throw over me, and tried to get some sleep.

But sleep wouldn’t come. My mind was too agitated. I couldn’t let the question go:
Who would want to kill Vinny? Brigitte Rouille might have done it…
The woman was obviously unstable, and according to Joy, she’d been picking on poor Vinny so badly that he’d called in sick. But I knew there was a huge gap between picking on a subordinate at work and actually killing him. On the other hand, Brigitte almost slashed my daughter, an event I saw with my own eyes.

As crazy as she’d behaved with Joy, however, I frankly couldn’t see Brigitte Rouille bolting out of Solange and hopping a train to Queens to take out her frustrations on Vincent Buccelli in a homicidal bender. That assumption made me feel a little guilty about giving Salinas her name—but only a little.

If Brigitte wasn’t guilty of murdering Vinny, then she had little to fear from some police questioning. In fact, maybe a visit from the authorities would inspire the troubled woman to seek some professional help before she did hurt someone.

So who else could have done it?
I’d been asking myself this for hours, of course, and after Salinas released my daughter, I’d specifically asked Joy about Vinny’s friends or a possible boyfriend. She said he was a loner, and it was totally news to her that he was gay. On the other hand, she confirmed that he’d never talked about having a girlfriend or liking any girl, and he’d certainly never made a pass at her.

If Vinny Buccelli was in the closet, could he have been carrying on some kind of secret gay affair that went badly?

By the end of the evening, Lieutenant Salinas had started asking questions around that exact theory. Vinny could have been the victim of a crime of passion, a gay lover or encounter that had turned deadly. If so, the young man’s secret affair could have been with another student at the culinary school or a fellow cook at Solange. Who else would carry a ten-inch French knife around with them?

As I lay there in the living room, watching the slowly breaking dawn lighten the world beyond my French doors, I considered calling Mike Quinn.

I’d thought about Mike earlier, too, while I was waiting for Joy to be released in Queens. But I’d decided not to bother him. He’d been leading his own important task force into the wee hours, and there was little he could have done to influence a man like Salinas anyway. I figured it would be better to let things play out, let Salinas see for himself that there was no reason to suspect Joy of murder.

I’ll be seeing Mike soon enough, anyway
, I told myself.
I’ll ask for his advice when he drops by the coffeehouse.

Finally, just before five, I dozed off.

Around nine I awoke to the sound of a coffee grinder. I moaned, rolled over on the couch cushions, and pulled the throw up to my neck. Technically, this was my morning to sleep in because Tucker was opening the Blend, but when I heard the sound of laughter a few minutes later, and smelled the aroma of my freshly brewing Morning Sunshine Blend, I sat up.

Voices and another laugh came from the kitchen. I got to my feet, wrapped myself in my baggy terrycloth robe, and approached the kitchen doorway.

“Okay, muffin,” Matt’s voice declared. “You made coffee for me, so I’ll cook breakfast for you.”

“With one arm?” Joy replied.

“I can cook an egg with one arm. Just watch me.”

I smiled, pausing just outside the room to eavesdrop a little more.

“Step aside, Dad, and I’ll cook you the
best
egg you’ve ever tasted!”

“Better than my famous peppers and eggs?”

“
Much
better,” Joy said.

“Then I defer to your expertise.”

I heard a chair move and then a clank as a pan hit the stove top. The refrigerator door opened next.

“That’s how I got my job at Solange, you know.” Joy said. “For my audition, Tommy told me to cook him an egg.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a test,” Matt said.

“You’re wrong, Dad. According to Tommy, it’s the simplest ingredients that truly test a chef’s skill and imagination—not to mention technique.”

I continued to listen, feeling only a little guilty for spying. It was a charming domestic scene that would have warmed my heart a decade ago, when it would have counted. Now it only made me sad and maybe a little resentful, too.

It was so easy for the two of them now. But then Matt always had been the yearned-for parent. Oh sure, he showed for the important moments: birthday parties, school plays, high school graduation. He’d arrive laden with presents and stories about exotic, faraway places. For Joy, those were the good times, with a doting, if temporary, father. And then Matt was gone, before the return of the disappointments, arguments, and frustrations of normal, messy, everyday living.

During Matt’s absences, I raised my daughter as well as I could, but I resented having to be the sole authority figure, the de facto disciplinarian, the spoilsport, the stickler. I was the miser who vetoed things that were too costly, the prude who said no to activities a teenager didn’t have the maturity to handle.

“You know, I can make a pretty good egg,” Matt said.

“Sure. Uh-huh,” Joy said skeptically.

“Don’t you remember those peppers and eggs I cooked for your eleventh birthday?”

“That was my
ninth
birthday, Dad. And the answer is yes, I remember—”

“Doesn’t seem that long ago.”

“That’s because you’re old now.”

“Excuse me, little girl, but those eggs must have been pretty good for you to remember them.”

“How could I forget such a disgusting, greasy mess?”

“You’ve got to be kidding! My peppers and eggs are world famous.”

“You should have drained the peppers before you added the eggs.”

“Drain the peppers? But that’s where the savory flavor is—”

“It’s
grease
, Dad. Artery-clogging, cottage-cheese-thigh-creating grease. All it does is make you fat.”

“Fat? Do I look fat to you? No, wait, don’t answer that. I’ve been living pretty easy with Breanne, and this arm has interfered with my workouts for the last few weeks.”

“Is that why you’re getting a paunch?”

I covered my mouth to stifle the snort.

“I do not have a paunch,” Matt replied, sounding appropriately irritated. “What are you, size four?

“Six.”

“In my opinion, you should eat more. You don’t want to end up like the skinny models in Breanne’s magazine. They wolf down the catered lunch, then throw it back up right before the shoot.”

“Gross,” Joy said. “I could never do the bulimia thing, which is too bad, because I love to eat. And my butt’s too big.”

“Your butt is
not
too big,” Matt rightly affirmed. “In fact, you look skinny to me, and nobody trusts a skinny chef. You should pack on a few pounds, just enough to show you like to eat. Look at your
mother
—”

“Ahem!” I exclaimed, deciding it was a good time to cut Matt off.

Walking into the kitchen, I found Joy standing by the stove in sweatpants and a T-shirt, and my ex-husband lounging at the table, his hand around a mug, a floor-length silk Japanese kimono swathing his muscular body (Breanne again. No doubt).

Matt brightened when he saw me. “Clare? How did you sleep?”

“Sleep?” I muttered. “What’s that?”

“Come here, Mom,” Joy said, looking serious.

“What?” I said. “What did I do now?”

My daughter’s arms opened wide. “You only
totally
came to my rescue
twice
!” she exclaimed, and before I knew it, Joy was hugging me like she used to when she was a little girl. “Thank you, Mom,” she said, swaying back and forth with me in her arms. “You were so great, coming to Vinny’s last night and standing up to that detective! I don’t know what I’d do without you! I love you!”

My eyes met Matt’s. He was smiling so big I thought his face was about to split.

“Am I dreaming?” I whispered to him.

He shook his head. “Your daughter loves you. You don’t believe her?”

“Joy,” I said, “your dad helped last night, too. I never would have made it up to Vinny’s apartment without your father’s innate ability to act like a big, dumb jerk.”

Matt rolled his eyes.

Joy laughed. She released me and stepped back. “Daddy told me what he did. I thanked him already.”

“I see.”

“So, sit down!” Joy insisted. “I’m about to cook you both the best eggs you’ve ever tasted.”

I took a seat across the table from Matt. Joy poured me a fresh cup of Morning Sunshine. Then she returned to the stove, where she added a second frying pan and a tiny sauté pan to the clutter on top of the range.

“I was telling Dad about Tommy asking me to cook him an egg for my audition,” Joy explained. “Of course, I realized that a four-star chef would expect a four-star egg, so I prepared it in the style of Fernand Point—he’s the man who invented French nouvelle cuisine.”

I glanced at my ex. “Are you paying attention? This is what you paid for, you know.”

“Yeah.” Matt smiled, rubbed the dark stubble on his chin. “I think it was worth it.”

Joy took two small china dishes and immersed them in a hot water bath. Then she lit the gas under the pair of frying pans and dropped a pat of butter in each. “We start with butter in a gently warming pan—”

“Butter?” Matt said. “I thought nouvelle cuisine was supposed to be light, not full of butterfat.”

Joy shrugged. “Monsieur Point had a saying about butter.
‘Du beurre! Donnez-moi du beurre! Toujours de beurre!’
”

“Butter, give me butter, always butter?” Matt translated.

“Exactly,” Joy said. “A lot of fine cooking can be done without butter, but nothing from the great syllabus of French classics—and nouvelle cuisine is no different. Okay, Dad, let’s move on, shall we?”

Matt’s eyebrow rose at his daughter’s pedantic tone. I laughed into my coffee cup.

Joy checked both pans. “Now that the butter is just warm enough to spread, but not hot enough to foam, crackle, or spit, I take two eggs—” She displayed the tiny white orbs to us in a fair imitation of a magician presenting his beautiful, delicate doves. “I crack each one into its own saucer. Then I slide the egg carefully into its own buttery pan.”

I watched as she deftly slipped the eggs into the melting butter, first one, and then the other. She adjusted the flame until it was barely more than a blue glow under each pan.

“At this low temperature I slowly cook the egg until the white barely turns creamy, and the yolk heats up but doesn’t solidify.”

With a knife, Joy plopped another lump of butter into the sauté pan, turned on the gas. “In a separate pan I melt more butter.”

Matt glanced at me and whispered, “When will these eggs be done? Next Friday?”

“I heard that, Dad!” Joy snatched the china from the hot bath, dried each plate. Then she glanced into the pan. “Perfect,” she announced. “Now I slip the egg onto a slightly heated serving plate and pour the fresh, warm butter over it. Then a touch of ground sea salt and fresh cracked pepper.”

Joy turned to face us, a plate in each hand. “Voilà! The perfect egg.”

She set the plates down in front of us, handed me a fork. I touched the yolk with the utensil, and then tasted it. It was sweet, like butter, and silky, too. I’d never tasted an egg quite like it. I took a bit of the white. It was creamy and delicate.

“Wonderful,” I cooed.

“Absolutely amazing!” Matt declared. “Delicate and buttery and perfectly seasoned.”

“So I guess Chef Keitel must have been impressed,” I said.

“Well, I got the job,” she replied with a shrug.

“How about Vinny?” I asked. “Was he given the same challenge?”

Joy’s face fell. She nodded silently. “Vinny was so talented. Tommy told me his eggs were amazing, even better than mine.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Matt said, licking his fork.

“Vinny didn’t even let his egg get near a
pan
. He separated the white from the yolk, cooked them both in buttered saucers set over boiling water, then reunited them at the moment of cooked perfection. He used sea salt for seasoning—and
white
pepper so no dark spots would spoil the look of the finished dish.” Joy looked away. “Vinny was such a great cook…and he was a really good friend to me…I can’t believe how I found him last night, lying there that way…in all that blood…” She wiped at a tear with the neckline of her T-shirt. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”