Murder Most Frothy

number.”

Joy nodded excitedly. “He did. Look.”

From the pocket of her khaki skirt, my daughter pulled out a cocktail napkin.

“Let me see that,” I said.

She handed it over, sliding it across the kitchen table as she explained, “He gave it to me after I brought him your café pousson.”

I examined the napkin. On it, the slick, forty-year-old Hollywood actor had scrawled his name. Below it was a cell phone number. I stood up, tore the napkin in two, pushed the autograph back toward my twenty-one-year-old daughter and shoved the piece with the man’s phone number down the garbage disposal.

“Mom!” she cried. “What are you doing?!”

With the determination of a mother on a mission, I flipped on the disposal. “Sorry, honey.”

Joy leaped to her feet and banged the table with her fist. “I can’t believe you did that!”

“Believe it.”

“You had no right!”

I could see she was just getting started.

It wasn’t the first time she and I had faced off. The entire reason Joy was out here was because of my playing protective mom.

Less than a year before, I’d caught her doing cocaine with her friends in the bathroom stall of an infamous nightclub. (I know, I know—what was I, myself, doing in an infamous nightclub, right? Trust me, there was a good reason, and when I stumbled upon Joy, she had insisted what she was doing was none of my business. But I begged to differ.) I asked her father to have a long talk with her. God knows I’d had enough of them with her when she was in high school, but now she was a young woman, living with a roommate her age. I knew she needed to hear some straight talk from the horse’s mouth (so to speak—and I’m being kind). Matteo Allegro had become an addict during our marriage and it was one of the reasons our wedded bliss ended long before our ten-year union did. (It was also the reason I used to refer to Matt as a “horse’s other end”).

Matt well knew what could happen to a person who thought he or she could handle casual drug use: impaired judgment, pouring money into the habit, becoming unreliable, lying to and hurting loved ones. In Matt’s case, this included the habit of cheating on me, which, as far as I was concerned, was as much an addiction as his chemical dependency and sprang from the same “self-medicating” issues.

In any event, Matt’s “horse’s mouth” talk seemed to work, and Joy had buckled down with her culinary school studies for the rest of the year. Then, one day near the start of spring, she came running into the Village Blend waving a local magazine.

At the time, David Mintzer had been sitting at my espresso bar, reading the Wall Street Journal and sipping a doppio espresso. He had already asked me to work for him. And I had already declined. “I work for Madame,” I’d told him with a shrug. “Managing the Blend is a job I love, and I’ll be taking over as co-owner in the future. I’m not looking for a change.”

But when Joy burst into the coffeehouse with her “big plans for the summer,” which included an illegal Hamptons share, my outlook changed. Joy had circled five possible share houses listed in the local magazine. She just needed a “teensy-weensy loan” from me to get into one of them.

Now I knew perfectly well that Hamptons’ officials had set up codes limiting the number of occupants in rental houses. I also knew that hundreds of entrepreneurs routinely violated those laws by running illegal shares all season long, cramming up to thirty or forty people into one house. This was the way twenty-and thirtysomethings without Hilton sisters-level loot could afford to “summer” in these exclusive seaside towns.

A decade ago, this share thing seemed like a good idea. I’d been around thirty at that time, Joy around eleven. When she’d gone away for two weeks of Girl Scout camp, I gave in to a girlfriend who’d insisted that a “wild” week of meeting men, dancing, drinking, and sunbathing was exactly what I needed after my divorce from Matt.

I decided to give it a try, shelling out 1,500 dollars for one week of a South Fork summer by the sea. Typically this was how it worked: a three-or-four-million-dollar house would rent out for 100,000 dollars or so for the season. In order to cover that cost, the people running the share would cram each bedroom with multiple mattresses. For your share price, you got the mattress, toilet paper, paper cups, and the use of the house’s kitchen, pool, hot tub, and bathrooms.

On the face of it, the idea seemed good. It was the “democratization of luxury,” I’d told myself. But the reality wasn’t so good. Frankly, I’d hated it. The house was a 24/7 party. Jello shots, cocaine lines, naked orgies in the hot tub.

Hey, I like a good time as much as the next person. But I’d never been a hard partying girl. My ex-husband would have loved it. Not me. I did my best to get into the spirit of the house. Then, near the end of the week, one of the men I’d gotten to know pretty well began kissing me in a hot tub of a dozen people and, before I could stop him, removed the top of my two-piece swimsuit. When a second guy I’d never even seen before that night tried to join in the “fun,” I suggested to the first, as I frantically tied my top back on, that if he wanted to go further we should find some privacy.

He took me to the only private place in the huge house—a mattress placed in a walk-in closet. He said this was the spot for anyone who needed to “spend time alone.” I looked at that bare mattress on the floor of that closet, a naked light bulb above it, and spontaneously threw up. Suffice it to say, the “ambiance” of the place didn’t do it for me, and the next morning, I packed up and left a day early.

I didn’t want Joy to go through that—or worse. And I certainly didn’t want her to be exposed to drug use again or excessive drinking and partying in a wannabe Animal House.

Joy was livid. She did not share my attitude toward illegal share houses and found my point of view hopelessly clueless and unhip. We faced off.

Wanting to make her happy (without making me crazy worried), I came up with a compromise. I proposed a deal to David. I’d work for him part-time over the summer in his East Hampton restaurant, set up all his coffee selections and a dessert pairings menu, and train his staff in barista skills, as long as he’d agree to employ Joy and allow her to stay with me in his mansion, and allow me to continue overseeing the running of the Village Blend.

David happily agreed to my terms and everything had worked out superbly…until tonight, of course.

Joy was once again furious with me for being clueless, unhip, and interfering in her private life. Treat’s body was temporarily forgotten in the heat of the moment—or maybe it was the stress of that discovery that made our stand-off all the more emotional.

“That phone number was mine,” she shouted. “You had no right to destroy it!”

The people around the table had gone dead silent watching us, but I wasn’t backing down.

“Joy, don’t you understand? You’re my daughter. If I see you throwing yourself in front of a truck, I’m going to do everything in my power to push you out of the way—even if it means I get run over in the process.”

Joy frowned and folded her arms, glaring in silence. I glared back. Surprisingly enough, it was Graydon Faas who broke the tension.

“You know, Joy,” he said after clearing his throat, “I think your mom’s sort of right about that actor dude.”

Joy shifted her gaze to Graydon. He shrugged. “Keith Judd, like, gave his number to every cute girl at the party.” Graydon scratched his head. “You’ve got a lot going for you, you know? A guy like that…he wouldn’t appreciate you.”

“Oh,” Joy said in a small voice. Clearly dying of embarrassment, she sank back down in her chair, refusing to look at me.

I sat back in my own chair, too. Nothing like having co-workers witness an intimate family squabble. I sighed, hearing a distant rumbling rolling in off the ocean. The coming storm. As if there wasn’t already a tempest in here.

The police had yet to show. I checked my watch. It had been almost twenty minutes since I’d called 911, and I was used to New York City’s lightning-fast response times—usually somewhere between three and eight minutes.

I began to worry. Surely there would be evidence outside, but if the rain came before the police showed, would some of that evidence be washed away?