We turned. David Mintzer was standing right behind us.
Then we all screamed.
David had just stepped out of his pitch dark bedroom, bleary eyed and squinting. He was only a few inches taller than my five-two, and I spontaneously threw my arms around his neck.
“Ohmygawd, David,” I cried. “You’re alive!”
“Clare?” David’s bulbous brown eyes blinked at me in puzzlement. “What in the world is—”
He stopped talking, having finally noticed the wide open door and the tragic, bloody mess in his custom-designed bathroom. “Oh my lord…who is that?”
Everyone was still staring in shock through the doorway. I gently pushed past them. Careful to avoid the blood, I walked into the bathroom and crouched down next to the body, felt the waxy blue-gray skin. I gently turned the head so that we could all see the corpse’s face.
Joy gasped, Graydon cried out, and Colleen screamed.
By this time, I’d already guessed who it was by a process of elimination. When I saw the features of the young man, my fears were confirmed. The corpse on the floor was Treat Mazzelli.
By now, I also knew why I had made the mistake of misidentifying the body. Both David and Treat had short, black hair, stood under five seven, and were wearing short-sleeved shirts. Sure, David’s Ralph Lauren linen number was 300 dollars more than the “Cuppa J” Polo that Treat was wearing, but the pinkish/salmon colors were nearly identical and so were their khaki slacks. Because the shirts were worn loose and untucked, it wasn’t immediately apparent that Treat’s form was that of a muscle-bound weightlifter in his twenties and David’s that of a middle-aged foodie. From a distance, both men appeared to have the same hairy arms and stocky builds.
As the crowd at the door reacted with distressed exclamations, my mind began to race. Awhile back, I’d solved the murder of a Blend employee—a case on which a certain tall, attractively rumpled NYPD detective had been assigned. After that, Mike Quinn had become a regular Blend customer. As I routinely foamed up his grande lattes, he’d share details about his homicide cases (not to mention his rocky marriage, which was still bordering on divorce).
I was far from a pro at detective work, and I’d made plenty of mistakes in my subsequent attempts. But there were a few things I’d learned from listening to Michael Ryan Francis Quinn. In fact, I could almost hear his advice now—
Think objectively, Clare, not emotionally. Start by simply looking around. What do you see?
I glanced around the bathroom floor, near Treat’s blue-gray hands and saw no gun. Then I took a closer look at his skull. There were no sooty smudges or burns around the wound. No gunpowder particles were visible. That meant Treat hadn’t been shot at close range. And, of course, he hadn’t shot himself.
I turned and scanned the large bathroom window.
“There it is,” I whispered.
At about the height of Treat’s head in a standing position was a single bullet hole in the glass. I knew next to nothing about ballistics, but it seemed obvious the glass would have slowed the velocity of the bullet. I looked for an exit wound in his skull, but saw none, and I knew the medical examiner would have to retrieve the bullet from inside his brain during the autopsy.
I gently lifted one of Treat’s arms. It wasn’t stiff, but I wasn’t surprised. I had seen Treat alive less than two hours before and it took longer for rigor mortis to set in. The skin still felt warm. The parts closest to the floor appeared purplish, but when I touched the purple areas, they blanched.
“Clare, what are you doing?” asked David. He was about to step inside.
“No, don’t!” I warned. “Don’t come in. This is a crime scene.”
I rose and carefully left the bathroom, closing the door behind me.
Treat had been a considerate young man, personable, with a buoyant sense of humor. He’d been a good worker, always on time, amazingly even tempered, even in the hot house of Cuppa J’s East Hampton kitchen. In fact, he was one of the few people who could make Victor Vogel, the relentlessly intense chef, laugh. For that we were all grateful.
So who the hell would want to shoot a good-natured young man like Treat in the head? I asked myself.
Nobody, I silently answered.
The shooter must have made the same error I had, mistaking Treat for David.
Standing around me now in the hallway were the members of Cuppa J’s wait staff. They had been working closely with Treat for more than six weeks, and I noticed their reactions.
Colleen O’Brien was sobbing uncontrollably.
Joy, teary-eyed, was trying to comfort her.
Graydon Faas looked totally stricken as he stared at the corpse, slack-jawed and dumbfounded.
Only Suzi Tuttle looked unaffected. She simply stood there with arms folded, a look of ennui on her attractive features.
I made a note of Suzi’s reaction (or lack thereof ) before I pushed through the group and walked into David’s bedroom. The large space was pitch dark, but there was enough light from the hallway for me to make my way around his divan and over to his king-size bed.
“Clare, where are you going?” asked David. He followed me into his bedroom while the others waited in the hall.
“I’m going to call 911.”
As I removed the wireless receiver from its base on the carved mahogany end table and dialed the emergency number, David clicked on a few of his Tiffany lamps. When the operator picked up, I explained the situation, gave my name, and David’s address and phone number.
“Did you hear anything while you were in here, David?” I asked after hanging up. “Anything at all?”
“Nothing.”
“How long were you up here?”
He checked his wristwatch. “About two hours I guess. I came up to lie down just before the fireworks. I must have fallen asleep. My god…I still can’t believe this…what do you think happened to Treat? An accident?”
An accident? Yeah, right. One of your guests just happened to be cleaning a gun on your back grounds, and it just happened to go off and accidentally pop through your private bathroom window at exactly the right time to take down a man close to your height and dressed just like you.
I said none of this, of course. With the exception of Ted Ammon’s tragic fate, homicide was unheard of in this burgh. (Ammon had been an upstanding financier until he was brutally bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton mansion by his estranged wife’s electrician, who also happened to be the woman’s lover.)
Okay, so the locals referred to Ammon’s old Middle Lane address as “Murder Lane,” but until that specific crime, there hadn’t been a homicide out here in years. The last thing an East Hampton resident expected was a real murderer to squeeze through their impenetrable privets—and I could see it was going to take a little time for David to accept that a homicide had just taken place in his own house.
“I’m not sure what happened,” I told him carefully, “but, David, back up a minute. Tell me exactly why you left the party.”
He shrugged. “I felt a migraine coming on. They’re allergy induced and I know exactly how to treat them—a cold, dark room and my prescription medication. I popped two pills and came straight to the bedroom. Didn’t bother turning on any lights, just turned up the air-conditioning and lay down. I heard the fireworks going off, but I couldn’t even bear to watch them. I dozed off and the next thing I remember is hearing you scream.”
“Clare, what’s going on?” called Madame from the doorway. “Did you call the police?”
“Yes,” I replied.
I could hear Colleen’s sobs hadn’t subsided and the others were still huddled around the bathroom doorway like witnesses of a traffic accident who weren’t sure whether they should leave the scene.
I glanced at David. This was still his house and I didn’t want to sound obnoxiously bossy, so I tried to pose my directive as a question. “Maybe we should all go downstairs? To the kitchen? I’ll make us some coffee and we can wait for the police together?”