Roast Mortem (15 page)

Rossi said nothing.

“Anyway,” I added. “I think she may have used this fireman and his knowledge to help set off a firebomb and burn down the caffè.”

“And you don't have any other information on this man's identity?”

“The only thing I can tell you concerns the firefighters who responded—”

“You're talking about Ladder 189 and Engine 335?”

“If that's who responded.”

“It is.”

“Well, Enzo confessed to me that his daughter liked to play with men. And the captain of the firehouse that responded told me that a lot of his guys liked to frequent Enzo's caffè, so . . .”

“So you think a member of the FDNY from Ladder 189 or Engine 335 helped Lucia Testa set the fire?”

“It's one theory, but yes, I do . . .”

After another moment of silence, Rossi asked, “Are you sure you can't
get
me a name, Ms. Cosi?”

The question confused me. It took me a moment to process it. “Marshal Rossi, are you saying that you'd like me to investigate further?”

“No comment.”

I took a breath. “You can't officially ask me to investigate, can you?”

Rossi didn't answer directly. What he said was: “Like I told you before, Ms. Cosi, if you have
any new information
for me, just give me a call.” He lowered his voice. “Call me anytime, okay?”

“I'll see what I can do . . .”

I hung up and stood staring for a moment.

Given Mike's talk with me last night, I shouldn't have been so astonished by Rossi's reaction. The man was a detective, after all, and I was an informant bringing him leads. It was no different from a street cop using snitches. Sure Rossi might have gotten the same leads once he started questioning Enzo, but I'd given him a head start and he knew it.

Obviously, the fire company was another matter. Those guys were tighter than family. James Noonan and Bigsby Brewer even referred to each other as brothers. The second an investigator like Rossi started asking questions, they'd stonewall him, especially if it meant protecting a man in their own firehouse.

I dug into the pocket of my robe for an elastic band, scraped my sleep-mussed hair into a taut, work-ready ponytail, and considered my options.

Enzo had been reluctant to give me the name of Lucia's secret fireman lover. Would he give it to Madame? I wasn't so sure.

The strongest connection I had to Ladder 189 and Engine 335 was Captain Michael Quinn. I could talk to him. But Mike specifically asked me to stay away from his cousin.

Just wait, Clare
.
Calm down and wait . . .

Madame would get a name. That was the easiest solution. And if that failed, there was always next week's Five-Borough Bake Sale to benefit the NYC Fallen Firefighters Fund. I'd have a chance to question some of the guys there, though I had to admit the idea of pressing those men to betray one of their own made me a little queasy.

Feeling the acute need for some reassuring warmth, I went to the stove, poured filtered water into the lower half of my three-cup Moka Express. I ground the beans fine, piled them into the little filter basket, screwed the two pieces together, and placed them over medium heat.

The shimmering blue flame of the gas burner reminded me of Mike's eyes in the firelight. I chewed my lower lip, still a little swollen from his kisses, and in the quiet of the kitchen, I felt the faintest echoes of his lovemaking still singing through my body—so sweet and slow at first then breathtaking in its intensity. I ached for him now, sorry he'd had to leave so early.

As the express water came to a boil, however, my thoughts began to turn . . .

“Captain Michael,” I whispered to the empty air. He truly was my best bet for a source inside that firehouse, which made me reconsider Mike's request to stay away from the man.

Given Mike's fire-academy story, I didn't doubt that things had gone down badly between the two cousins.
But didn't all of that stuff happen more than twenty years ago?

Last night's Quinn vs. Quinn standoff came to mind—Captain Michael smirking at his cousin in the hospital drive; Mike doing a reach around for his handcuffs.

There must be more to the story.
I moved to sit down at the kitchen table and that's when I realized . . .

A powerful, roasted scent suddenly suffused the air. My espresso was done. I moved to the stove, sloshed the steaming liquor into a demitasse, and sipped it so quickly it burned my tongue. I didn't care.

Quinn was one of the best interrogator's in the NYPD. He could effortlessly manipulate any information exchange. I thought I was hot stuff, getting him to spill, but the reverse was true: Mike Quinn had manipulated me
.

My fist hit the kitchen table so hard it sent the cats scurrying into the next room.

When I'd asked Mike what had started the beef between him and his cousin, he'd treated the phrasing literally: “What started it,” he'd said, emphasizing the
started
. “I guess you could say it started a long time ago . . .”

After downing the hot coffee, I banged open my cupboards and made a hasty breakfast—a giant popover pancake (aka Dutch Baby, Bismarck, poor girl's soufflé): flour, eggs, milk, salt, all whisked up with more fury than Dorothy's tornado.

I poured the batter into a preheated pan and flung it into a blistering oven where it quickly inflated like the puffy exterior of a Navajo bread; but instead of honey, I finished the whole thing in the bracing-sweet style of an espresso Romano, with a quick, tart squeeze from a lemon wedge and a generous dusting of powdered sugar.

My breakfast eaten, I went back to my cupboards and pulled out more ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt . . . I began throwing things together: brown sugar, cocoa powder, leftover espresso . . .

A few minutes later I had a batter for my Magnificent Melt-in-Your-Mouth Mocha Brownies. The manic activity made me feel less like an ineffectual sap, but only a little, so I poured the dark elixir into a square pan, set it aside, and went to the fridge once more . . .

Milk, eggs, butter, and a treasure from the spice rack. Nutmeg? Piquant yet soothing; exotic yet wistfully familiar. The Elizabethans believed it could ward off the plague; Charlie Parker and Malcolm X used it to get high . . .
Good enough for me!

I took out my electric hand mixer and assaulted the butter and sugar with glee.

I added the eggs, one at a time, ferociously beating between each addition.

Stress always did this to me. I had to bake. At times, nostalgia was the reason. Baking brought me back to those early hours with Nonna in her grocery store's kitchen: hot ovens warming the chilly air; sticky white dough coming together beneath flour-dusted hands; battered sheet pans emerging from their transmuting fire baths heavy with the gold of fresh Italian loaves and crunchy, sweet biscotti.

On a morning like this one, however, other things drove me to the beating of the batter: a sense of reassurance for one, a reclaiming of the feeling I had control over
something
.

Measuring the flour calmed me somewhat (a different part of the brain apparently calculated ounces and grams, sifted out lumps). Then I married the wet and dry ingredients.

“I now pronounce you Doughnut Muffin batter . . .”

In flavor and texture, the resulting muffin would indeed taste like an “old-fashioned” doughnut. It wasn't magic, just a culinary trick. (Most quick-bread batters called for a simple stirring of ingredients, but the dump-and-stir muffin failed to yield an optimal product. Creaming sugar into butter whipped air into the batter's foundation, substantially improving its texture. In this batter, the technique would evoke the same airy tenderness as a classic cake doughnut.)

I filled the paper lined cups, opened the heavy oven door, then slid my pans home with the satisfied sigh of a weary body slipping into a warm bath.

I guess what I most appreciated about baking was its transformative qualities, and not simply because the end product was more than the sum of its parts. The entire process served as a much needed reminder of a simple but profound truth: the fundamentals of cooking never changed.

In a world where firebombs went off in your face and your lover held back on you, just knowing that stirring sugar into liquefied shortening would always give a different result than creaming it into softened butter was an honest-to-God comfort.

I still didn't know how I was going to get the whole truth out of Mike, but I would find a way. In my view, family feuds were ticking time bombs
.
I'd already had one incendiary device go off in my face. I wasn't about to let it happen again.

 

 

WHEN
I finally headed upstairs, I felt much calmer—less like a rube of an interrogator than a capable woman back in control. Entering the bedroom, however, my momentary illusion of calm was blown away by a brand-new storm.

The steady sound of beeping may have been weak, but its familiar meaning shot adrenaline through my body as effectively as a blaring ambulance siren.

I rushed to the dresser and saw the blinking light. Someone had left me an urgent message.

I played back the recording, and the frantic voice of my ex-husband assaulted my ear.

“Clare! Where the hell are you?”

I checked the time stamp on the message. Matt had phoned me during my lengthy talk with Rossi.

“I get off my plane at JFK, pass a newsstand, and what do I see? My mother on the front page of two tabloids! Why is she on a stretcher for God's sake? And surrounded by firemen? What the hell happened? I can see
you
standing in the background! Why didn't you call me, Clare? Now I can't reach her! Or you! And my battery is dying. Will you please call me back when—”

A robotic voice followed. “End of messages.”

THIRTY
minutes later, my hair still damp from a quick shower, I descended the back staircase to my coffeehouse. Grabbing a Village Blend apron off a pegboard in the pantry, I peered through the open archway into the main shop.

“Good morning,” I called to the lanky back of my assistant manager.

Tucker Burton turned around, tossed his floppy brown mop, and flashed a footlights-worthy grin. “Well, hello, sleepy head! How are you?”

I avoided a direct answer, which might have resulted in a primal scream. Instead I firmly tied my apron strings and pointed to our machine.

“How's she running today?”

“Not bad.”

I didn't reply. I didn't have to. Tucker already knew what to do next. He turned back to pull me a test shot, so I could judge how bad “not bad” really was.

The machine itself was a beauty, reliably stable when it came to maintaining temperature and pressure. The espresso was what worried me. Like a gifted but temperamental child, my favorite elixir had easy days and difficult days; days of generous glory with lush, oozing
crema,
and days of stingy infamy with thin, diluted sourness.

The process of coaxing every bit of sweetly caramelized flavor from Matt's superlatively sourced beans was truly a kind of java alchemy. Three solid months of flight time had to be logged by my trainee baristas before they could attempt even one perfect shot for a customer.

What my newbie baristas had to fully understand was the array of variables that could devolve the process; how their perfectly dosed and tamped pulls of sultry-sweet nectar, executed in the exact same manner, with the same equipment and coffee beans, could suddenly turn into acidy slipstreams of espresso hell. Only when the untried learned to get comfortable with confusion, friendly with frustration, would the one-true-God shot be within reach . . .

As Tucker worked on pulling my taste test, I peered over the blueberry marble counter. Our tables were half empty, a normal pattern for a late weekday morning. The occupied seats were recognizable regulars—NYU students with open text books, neighborhood freelancers with open laptops, and a few hospital workers on open cell phones.

Tucker's morning backup, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), appeared to be chatting with a small group of fans. (Yes, I said
fans
. Esther may have been one of my strongest latte artists, but her true renown as a local slam poetess had spread through at least two of the five boroughs. New customers, mostly aspiring “urban poets” and rappers, were showing up every day just to talk to her. Lucky for our bottom line they ordered coffee drinks from her, too.)

I finished scanning the room.

No sign of Matt yet.

After hearing his frantic message, I'd speed-dialed the man. All I got was voicemail (no surprise). So after my shower, I pulled on jeans and a Henley the color of toasted coconut and descended the stairs. I wasn't scheduled for another hour, but Matt would be bursting in here any minute, and I theorized he'd be more likely to stay calm in a public place.

As the high morning sun broke through the low clouds, it made
me
feel calmer. The dazzling rays gleamed in the sparkling glass of our shop's French doors. The restored wood-plank floor was all waxed and shiny; the twenty marble-topped tables stood reliably in place.