“We’re canvassing the neighborhood now. The shooter may have dropped something . . .”
Just then I noticed a white panel van with a satellite antenna double-parking across the street. Emblazoned on the van’s side were three words that sent a chill though my blood: New York 1.
“Oh, God . . .” I muttered. Hazel Boggs’s murder was about to make the local news. As a technician jumped out and began unpacking camera equipment, I hurried back to Matt. He looked positively stricken.
“Clare,” he whispered, “I have to get out of here.”
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm before he could bolt. “These cops will detain you if you try to run. It could get loud. You’ll just end up calling attention to yourself.”
“But if Breanne sees me on the news—”
“Just give me a second.”
I rushed up to Lori Soles, who’d always been the softer touch. “Detective Soles, I’m happy to stick around, but my business partner really needs to get back to our shop. Can you talk to him another time?”
Lori frowned. “Now would be better—”
“Oh, let the guy go,” Sue Ellen broke in, surprising the heck out of me with an accommodating hand wave. “Spinelli got a statement from him already. And we can track Mr. Tight End down tomorrow. On one condition . . .” She shot Matt an openly flirtatious smile. “He has to give me his digits.”
With New York 1’s cable news camera approaching, Matt wasn’t about to argue. He quickly reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, extracted a business card, and slapped it into Sue Ellen’s outstretched hand.
“My cell number’s on there,” he said before taking off. “Catch you later.”
The detective smiled as she pocketed my ex’s card. “Not if I catch you first . . .” she promised, her eyes following Matt’s posterior all the way back to our coffeehouse.
FIVE
FIFTEEN minutes later, I was back inside the Blend.
“Where’s Matt?” I asked, approaching the espresso bar.
Gardner Evans glanced up, jerked his thumb toward the ceiling, and went back to crowning a hazelnut-toffee latte with spoonfuls of frothy foam.
I looked around the Blend’s first floor and realized I was witnessing an unheard-of customer pattern for a Monday at midnight. The place was packed, and I didn’t need a beverage-service management spreadsheet to analyze why.
Sitting around our marble-topped café tables was a base of neighborhood regulars, a handful of NYU undergrads, and a sprinkling of FDNY and police personnel. All of them had come here as a result of the bad business a block away. Murder and coffee, it appeared, were a profitable mix.
“You okay here?” I asked Gardner, scanning the work area. I was unhappy to see him alone. “Where’s Dante?”
“Downstairs, getting stuff from the big fridge.” Gardner drizzled the finished latte with toffee syrup, dusted it with a fine hazelnut powder, and placed the tall glass mug on the counter for the waiting customer. Three more were still in line.
“Things were dead in here an hour ago,” he told me, “and we were going to start restocking and cleaning when we got this rush—”
“Hey, boss!” Dante walked out from the back, each tattooed arm lugging a gallon of milk product. He stashed the jugs in our espresso bar fridge and moved up to the counter. “What the heck’s going on outside?”
“Yeah, we heard the sirens,” Gardner said. “A couple of customers said someone got whacked?”
“A young woman.” I rubbed my eyes. On a good day, they were emerald green, but between the beers and the tears, I figured they were massively shot with red. “Listen, I have to go upstairs and talk to Matt right now, but I’ll be back down shortly to help.”
“Do you want to open the second floor for this mob?” Gardner asked.
The Blend’s upstairs lounge often caught the spillover on busy weekends. But my guys were already into overtime. “Morning comes too soon around here,” I told Gardner. “Let’s keep the customers on the first floor. No more dining room service, either. Give everything wings—and you can start with two doppio macchiatos for Matt and me.”
“No problem, Clare . . .”
Gardner pulled a pair of double espressos into paper cups then spotted each of the dark pools with a dollop of foamed milk. (That’s what macchiato basically translates to, by the way: to mark with a spot or stain. Some coffeehouses reverse this recipe, marking a cup of steamed or foamed milk with a bit of espresso instead. At the Blend, however, tradition still ruled.)