Clare. People are really touchy this weekend. You should have been here an hour ago. Two corporate attorneys got into a punch-out over the last honeydew melon!”
“See you soon!” I called, my car speeding up.
“See you, Clare!”
Edna waved and turned back to the farm stand. I considered what she’d just said—not the story about the honeydew punch-out. That was actually on par for how bad things could get during the crowded summer season. Wealthy Manhattan people came out here to relax, but far too many of them packed their sense of entitlement and city impatience along with their toothbrushes.
“The people out here are competitive and ambitious,” David had warned me when I first came. “They’re killers on the job. That’s how they got out here in the first place. And people who spend Monday through Friday screwing over people aren’t going to stop acting that way on Saturday and Sunday.”
The local paper was full of incidents like shoving matches over parking spaces and restaurant tables. Just last week there was an assault charge filed after a few haymakers were thrown in a health food store. (One can only presume it took place in the stress reduction supplements aisle.)
Anyway, I began to consider how Edna had heard about Treat’s death. Obviously news traveled fast in this small enclave. And I doubted a murder in East Hampton would be treated like one in the city, precisely because murder was so rare.
This small village fussed over the color of the awnings on Main Street for god’s sake. They cited you for tacking up a yard sale sign. The last thing they would tolerate was an unsolved murder in their midst. The guilty party would have to be found and successfully convicted or the competency of the authorities would be loudly and continually questioned by the powerful, opinionated people who summered here.
In a place like this, the only sure way for the murderer to escape detection would be to pin the crime on someone else…that’s why the bullet casings could have been left. Sure, it could have been a careless amateur, or it could have been a cunning assassin setting up a frame job. To do that, the shooter would have to plant the weapon somewhere the police could find it…say, on the premises of someone who might have had a motive. Then the cops would have their conviction, and the shooter would get away with murder.
The permutations of this theory were still bouncing around in my head when I turned into the shaded driveway of Cuppa J.
SEVEN
MY grandmother grew up in a world of straightforward sensibilities, when things were labeled simply and clearly. You said what you meant, and you meant what you said. But that was a long time ago, before SNL, MTV, metafiction, The Daily Show, and the saturation of practically every aspect of contemporary culture with irony.
Sure, “Cuppa J” sounded like a casual, unassuming joint, but those were hardly the adjectives for David’s tony East Hampton cafe. Of course, he wasn’t the first to apply paradox to a restaurant name, not by a long shot. Chef Thomas Keller’s lowly sounding “French Laundry” was the most acclaimed gourmet restaurant in Napa Valley, if not the most highly regarded eatery in the country. And the Brooklyn Diner, just a few blocks away from Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, was actually a four-star restaurant with linen tablecloths and a stellar wine list.
Cuppa J offered eclectic, upscale bistro fare, with the flavor of coffee infused into many of the main dishes (coffee can be used to great effect in meat dishes as a subtle flavoring agent, tenderizer, or marinade). The restaurant served wine and cocktails, but the star of the culinary show was the array of expensive after-dinner coffees and dessert pairings. Consequently, this season we’d become the place to book an after-dinner, pre-clubbing table. While most restaurants wound down by ten in the evening, our place was still hopping with many tables booked right up until midnight.
The two-story restaurant, with its red brick exterior, had been a Chinese restaurant before falling into foreclosure a year ago. This past spring David redid the surrounding grounds with topiaries, flowerbeds, and shade trees. He’d cleaned the brick, repainted the peeling white trim, and replaced the first floor windows with white french doors.
I drove through the customer parking area, framed with ivy-colored trellises, and around to the back of the restaurant where the employees parked. It was just past noon when I walked through the kitchen door. The waitstaff