No matter. Business booms at the Coffee Cup.
Every morning and noon black and white professionals, government workers, blue-collar laborers, lawyers, judges, bankers, and realtors are packed shoulder to elbow. It ain’t the ambience. It’s the cookin’—down-home food that will warm, then eventually stop your heart.
The Coffee Cup has been owned by a loosely affiliated group of black cooks for decades. Breakfast never changes: eggs, grits, fatback, deep-fried salmon patties, liver mush, and the usual bacon, ham, hot-cakes, and biscuits. At lunch the cooks are a bit more flexible. The day’s menu is posted on two or three blackboards: stew meat, pig’s feet, country steak, ribs, chicken that’s fried, baked, or served with dumplings. Vegetables include collard greens, pinto beans, cabbage, broccoli casserole, squash and onions, creamed potatoes, and black-eyed peas. At lunch there’s corn bread in addition to biscuits.
You’d never catch Jenny Craig or Fergie dining at the Cup.
I arrived at seven-fifty. The lot was overflowing, so I parked on the street.
Worming through those patrons waiting inside the door, I noticed that every table was full. I scanned the counter. Seven men. One woman. Tiny. Short brown hair. Heavy bangs. Fortyish.
I walked over and introduced myself. When Woolsey looked up, two turquoise and silver earrings swayed with the movement.
As we exchanged introductions, a place opened up two stools down. The intervening men shifted over. Patches over their pockets identified them as Gary and Calvin.
Thanking Gary and Calvin, I sat. A black woman moved toward me, pencil poised over pad. Screw the diet. I ordered fried eggs, biscuits, and a salmon patty.
Woolsey’s plate was empty save for a mound of grits topped by a lake of butter the size of Erie.
“Not fond of grits?” I asked.
“I keep trying,” she said.
The waitress returned, poured coffee into a thick white mug, and placed it in front of me. Then she held the pot over Woolsey’s cup, put a hand on one hip, and raised her brows. Woolsey nodded. The coffee flowed.
While I ate, Woolsey provided what background she deemed appropriate. She’d been a detective in Lancaster for seven years, before that, a uniform with the Pensacola, Florida, PD. Moved north for personal reasons. The personal reasons married someone else.
When I’d finished breakfast, we took coffee refills.
“Tell me the whole story,” Woolsey said, without preamble.
Sensing this was a woman who did not fancy equivocation, I did. Woodstove. Bears. Cessna. Privy. Cocaine. Macaw. Missing fish and wildlife service agents. Headless skeleton. Cagle report.
Woolsey alternated between sipping and stirring her coffee. She didn’t speak until I’d finished.
“So you think the skull and hands you found in the Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, privy go with the bones we found at the state park in Lancaster County, South Carolina.”
“Yes. But the Lancaster County remains were destroyed, and I haven’t been able to read the anthropology report or view the photos.”
“But if you’re right, the John Doe is
“Brian Aiker. Yes. His dentals exclude the skull.”
“But if the skull and hands are
“Yes.”
“In which case you guys would still have an unknown.”
“Yes.”
“Who could possibly turn out to be the mother of the dead baby or her boyfriend.”
“Tamela Banks or Darryl Tyree. Very unlikely, but yes.”
“Who might have been involved in trafficking drugs, bear galls, and endangered bird species.”
“Yes.”
“Out of this abandoned farm where the bears and the skull turned up.”
“Yes.”
“And these dealers might have been business associates of two guys who crashed a Cessna while dumping coke.”
“Harvey Pearce and Jason Jack Wyatt.”
“Who might have been working for some cracker who owns strip joints and wilderness camps.”
“Ricky Don Dorton.”
“Who turned up dead in a Charlotte flophouse.”
“Yes. Look, I’m just trying to put the pieces together.”
“Don’t get defensive. Tell me about Cagle.”
I did.