Authors: Cleo Coyle

Tags: #Fiction, #Detective, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction - Mystery, #Coffeehouses, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Cosi; Clare (Fictitious character), #Mystery fiction

Holiday Grind (11 page)

BOOK: Holiday Grind

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After that, he settled in near the fireplace with his double espresso, his cell phone, some industry trades, and his PDA. Every once in a while, he’d look up at me and wink. But that was Matt, ever constant in his inconstancy.

AS the day wore on, business picked up, and I was glad to see Dante arriving on time. Tying on his apron, he joined me behind the counter to deal with the crescendo of the after-work crowd. By six thirty—far too early for my bottom line—the rush began to slow again. That’s when Dante spotted my relief coming through the front door.

“Gardner’s here!” he called at the register. “And look who else decided to show on her night off . . .”

I glanced up from my espresso machine to see who was walking in behind Gardner’s easygoing strides.
Esther Best
. And she wasn’t alone. Sweeping in after her on a blast of frigid air was the last person I expected to see tonight—Vicki Glockner, the daughter of my murdered Santa Claus.

EIGHT

“VICKI, I’m so sorry about your father.” I came around the counter to embrace my former barista.

She nodded her head, setting off the tiny jingle bell earrings. “Thanks, Ms. Cosi. That means a lot.”

Her pretty face was florid; her eyes, which were the same bright hazel green as her father’s, were now puffy from crying and shadowed from lack of sleep. Under her fuzzy yellow beret, her mass of salon-streaked, caramel-colored curls, usually silky and soft, were frizzy and windblown. She tossed back a handful and sniffled.

I pointed out an empty table. “Have a seat, girls; I’ll get us some drinks.” A few minutes later, I brought three mo chaccinos over on a tray.

Vicki sniffled again as Esther and I helped her off with her long, belted beige coat. She pulled off her yellow hat and matching scarf, then wiped her eyes with a tissue. Esther and I took seats flanking her.

As we drank in silence, I couldn’t help recalling some of the last words I’d said to Vicki almost eight months earlier . . .

“No opening shifts. No closing shifts. I’m sorry, Vicki, but I can no longer trust you with the keys to this coffeehouse.”

Within two weeks of hearing those words, Vicki had quit—via a cell message. She’d wanted more hours to earn more cash, and I wasn’t willing to accommodate her.

Vicki’s skills weren’t the problem. She’d come to me from a recently closed restaurant on Staten Island, already trained on a professional espresso machine. She started out loving the coffeehouse experience—experimenting with the bar syrups, learning how to prep our menu of coffee drinks. She was great with the customers, too, (crucial for a true Italian barista), but food and beverage service wasn’t only about skill and affability.

Vicki had started coming later and later for her shifts, forcing her coworkers to cover for her, and her behavior at work was becoming far from reliable. One evening, I found Gardner alone, dealing with a growing crowd. Vicki had gone downstairs to fetch supplies, and she hadn’t come up for thirty minutes.

I found her down there, all right, making out behind the roasting machine with a cute customer. She didn’t know the guy. He’d simply been flirting with her and she’d invited him down there for a necking session—and I’m being polite. When I’d interrupted them, their hot-and-heavy focus was moving a lot lower than the neck.

I liked Vicki; it was hard not to. A full-figured girl with an equally full personality (just like her late dad), she had a mile-wide smile with adorable dimples. She laughed easily and at only twenty-one years old joked around with the customers with a level of ease I typically saw in someone much older.

Because Esther and Vicki had gotten to be good friends during the time Vicki worked for me, I’d actually asked Esther to help straighten her out. She’d told me Vicki’s parents had separated recently, and I assumed the girl’s erratic behavior was akin to Joy’s “acting out” after her father and I had split. The backlash was understandable. Alf and I even discussed it one afternoon over lattes . . .

“Vicki was always a good kid,”
he told me.
“I know she made some bad choices when she was working for you. But I don’t blame her. Childhood’s an insecure enough ordeal without having your parents screw up your universe, you know?”

I didn’t disagree with Alf. Even though “childhood” was a debatable term for a twenty-one-year-old, I knew how much psychological stock young adults put in having their childhood world still available to them, whether they went back to it or not.

My heart went out to Vicki because I assumed she felt some of the same fears I’d felt around her age—which, frankly, was what tipped the scales for me toward marrying Matt. At nineteen, my fine arts studies were going well, but my grandmother had recently died and my father had just sold off our family grocery. Yes, Matt had gotten me pregnant and I wanted to legitimize Joy’s birth, but a big part of me felt adrift at that time. My past was gone, my future uncertain. I’d wanted ties again, stability, someone to love and lean on, a family to belong to.

Unfortunately, my sympathies for Vicki did little to change her. Not even Esther could straighten her out.

“That girl,”
Esther told me,
“has a mind of her own.”

Vicki was always sincerely apologetic after she was caught messing up. Her behavior would improve for a week or so, but she’d always backslide again. Then she started picking up guys from dance clubs, bars, God knew where. One day there’d be a preppy white student from the Upper East Side waiting for her shift to end, the next a black kid from Greenpoint in basketball sweats, a week later an Italian street tough from Ozone Park.

Finally, one night, she’d been responsible for closing and “forgotten” to set the security alarm and bolt the back door. A lot of managers would have fired her for that alone, but I still didn’t have the heart. I read her the riot act instead, limited her hours, and kept her off key shifts. She pulled the plug herself, leaving the Blend for a waitressing job at a bistro on the Upper West Side.

I hadn’t seen her since—until tonight.

“I really liked your dad, Vicki,” I assured her as she sipped her mochaccino. “If there’s anything I can do to help—”

“There is!”

I blinked, a little surprised by the speed and force of her reply. “Okay. Tell me.”

“It’s that thing you do,” she said.

“That thing I do?” I paused. “You want me to make espressos for the wake?”

“No, not that thing. The other thing.”

I glanced at Esther, who looked suddenly uncomfortable.

“Sorry?” I said.

Vicki leaned toward me and dropped her voice. “What you did for Joy. I need you to do that again.”

“I’m not sure I know what you—”

“I know everything, Ms. Cosi. The real reason your daughter went to work in Paris; Esther spilled the whole story. She said you were the one who got Joy cleared of
double
murder charges. She said the police stacked the evidence against your daughter, but you still found the real killer.”

As Vicki wiped her nose, I shifted uneasily. Although I was proud of bringing Tommy Keitel’s killer to justice, my daughter’s involvement in that sordid affair was something I didn’t like spread around. I shot Esther enough of a frown to get that across. She replied with a typical Esther shrug—part sheepish, part defensive. I could almost hear her arguing:
Okay, boss, I feel bad about gossiping, but what did you expect? It was in the papers!

“I know you liked my dad,” Vicki went on. “And he really liked you. He told me how much he looked forward to his latte breaks with you at the Blend. You want to see his killer brought to justice, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, but the police are working on it. I’ve spoken with them—”

“You mean that clown with the do-rag? Sergeant Franco?! He thinks Dad was shot by some anonymous street punk. I know better, but Franco and his partner don’t believe me.”

I frowned. “What don’t they believe, exactly?”

Vicki’s gaze locked with mine. “I know my father was
executed
.”

Once again, I glanced at Esther. This time she looked a little freaked and shook her head—
Don’t ask me!

I turned to Vicki. “Who would want your father executed? I mean—”

“Omar Linford is his name,” Vicki replied. The sniffles were all gone now, her jaw set, her hazel green eyes flashing. “The man lives right next door, too.”

“Next door where? To your dad uptown?”

Vicki shook her head. “No, back home on Staten Island. He lives next to the house where I grew up and my mom and I still live.”

“So Linford’s
your
next-door neighbor?”

“He used to be close friends with my dad, but they had a falling out. Linford’s a shady businessman, Ms. Cosi. He may not have pulled the trigger on my father, but I’m
sure
he’s involved. I want you to find the proof—”

“Slow down, Vicki. How is this man Linford shady exactly? What’s your evidence?”

“It’s, like, obvious. He calls himself an importer, but no one seems to know
what
he imports. And he’s got ‘business interests’ in the Cayman Islands.” Vicki made air quotes around the words
business interests
.

“That still doesn’t tell me why he’d want your father killed. What motive would he have?”

“Motive! My dad borrowed two hundred thousand dollars from Linford!” Vicki’s reply was so loud a few heads turned our way. She lowered her voice again. “But he lost the restaurant anyway.”

“Restaurant?” I said. “What restaurant?”

“Dad never told you?” Vicki studied my surprised face. “He owned a restaurant for years—a steakhouse with a wine cellar. It was in our Lighthouse Hill neighborhood, right near the Island’s La Tourette golf course. It was
way
pricey, but he did pretty well, laughed it up with the Wall Street guys, you know?” Vicki paused to sip her mochaccino. “That’s why it didn’t surprise me when he started doing the stand-up thing in New York.”

“I don’t understand.”

Vicki shrugged. “He was practically doing it every night in the restaurant. Telling jokes, making his customers laugh—he loved doing that. Then the economy tanked, and those financial district guys lost their jobs and half their life savings. In, like, six weeks, Dad’s base just dried up.”

“So he lost the restaurant?”

“Not right away, Ms. Cosi. He
loved
his business to death, like,
literally
. He refused to close, just kept borrowing money to keep it going, spent a ton on ads in the papers, discount coupons, online stuff, but it didn’t work. Then his drinking got really bad and my parents’ marriage went right down the tubes with his business. That’s when I came to work for you. I was supposed to take over the restaurant one day, run it as
my
place. That’s why I didn’t even bother with college. I figured my future was all worked out, you know?”

I blinked, still absorbing this revelation. “I remember when you first applied to work here, Vicki. You told me you had hostess and barista experience, but you never said your dad owned the place.”

She shrugged. “I thought it would look better if I didn’t mention that Daddy gave me a job seating guests and making espressos. I mean, it worked, didn’t it? You hired me.”

And very nearly fired you
, I thought but didn’t say.

That’s when I remembered checking Vicki’s references—an older woman at a Staten Island number had sung her praises over the phone. Had that been her mother? Well, it didn’t matter now. I remembered Alf telling me that he was a reformed alcoholic. He’d confessed he’d had to live in the New York shelter system for a few weeks earlier this year. But the only thing he’d told me about his old life was that his marriage failed after he lost his income and life savings.

“So you see now, Ms. Cosi? That’s why Omar Linford had my dad killed,” Vicki declared, staring at me as if I were supposed to follow her logic.

I shook my head.

“Dad
never
paid Linford back. Not one red cent.”

BOOK: Holiday Grind

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