Smart vs. Pretty (10 page)

The blood on Patsie’s head wound had already begun to congeal. He struggled to his (incredibly tiny) feet. “I’ve got other deliveries to make. I’m okay; don’t worry. I won’t sue.” Patsie climbed the hatch steps, opened the door, and left. Matt and Amanda followed him out. They watched as his van pulled up the street, stopping in front of the Heights Cafe.

Amanda said, “I have some special powers, Matt. I don’t know if you’re aware of them. And I’m getting a clear message that you’re holding something back.” Amanda had felt a tweak in the force, but besides that, she noticed several huge footprints in the dirt on the floor: oversize shoes that weren’t Matt’s boots, Patsie’s tiny slippers, Frank’s narrow loafers, or Clarissa’s spiked heels. “You’ve harbored someone down here, haven’t you?” she asked. “Who was it? A friend? Another homeless person?”

Matt’s brow knit like a sweater. “I was planning on telling you. I just hadn’t compiled my notes.”

Amanda was suddenly uncomfortable, as though all her clothes had shrunk a size. “Who was it, Matt?”

He lowered his eyes. “It was Chick. Peterson. The dead guy.”

F
rank’s eyelids snapped open—a grueling way to start the day. “What time is it?” she asked the blurry blob hovering above her head.

“It’s about five,” said the voice she knew to be her sister’s. “Sorry to wake you.”

“Yeah, you sound real sorry,” Frank said. She blinked a few times and her eyes focused. Even predawn, Amanda looked like Miss America. If she weren’t her sister, Frank would swear she was Stepford.

Frank groaned and sat up in her maple sleigh bed. “What? Had a bad dream?” She noticed her sister’s outfit. “Dressed already? Am I missing something?”

“We need to talk. Matt’s waiting in the living room,” said Amanda.

“Matt who?” asked Frank.

“You know. Matt Schemerhorn. Our new hire. He’s been sleeping in our basement.”

Frank rubbed her forehead. “You woke me up for this?”

“There’s more,” said Amanda. “Chick Peterson was sleeping down there, too.”

“Maybe we should be charging rent—that’d be one way to make some money.” Frank kicked off her covers. She grabbed her baggy pants off the bedroom floor and put them on. “Okay, okay. I’m up.”

Amanda said, “You should buy jeans that fit, Frank.”

“I need a French roast,” said the older sister.

“I could eat,” said Amanda.

“Diner?”

“Let’s go.”

Matt, Frank, and Amanda left soon after, walking the six blocks to the diner in silence, respecting the quiet of the early hour. The bustle of the city picked up as they got closer to the restaurant. It was located across the street from Cadman Plaza, a little patch of green off the exit ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge that the city had classified as a “park.”

The Park Plaza Diner had been a supermarket before it became a restaurant. The produce shelves were still used to stock supplies in the kitchen. The walls were covered with beveled mirrors, the carpet (not common to diners this far from Long Island), was maroon with an orange swoosh pattern. The tables were so thickly coated in lacquer that you could scratch the surface with your fork for hours without hitting real wood. The red vinyl on the chair seats was secured with tacks. And the booths: red vinyl with lacquered tabletops again, and each one had a minijukebox nailed into the wall. You got two songs for a dollar. The selections ranged from early Whitney Houston to the late Doobie Brothers. The volume knobs didn’t work. If someone across the football field–length restaurant had a hankering to hear “The Greatest Love of All,” every other patron would share the pleasure in decibels that would rival an airplane hangar. Despite the wealth of restaurants in the neighborhood, Amanda and Frank ate at the Park Plaza at least once or twice a week. Eating together was their time of truce, the diner their neutral ground.

The owner’s son, Harry, wasn’t in yet. A man they’d never seen before ushered them to a booth facing Court Street. Even at that hour on a Sunday, the traffic toward the bridge was heavy. The twenty-four-hour diner was a quarter full with maybe thirty early risers. Frank couldn’t believe so many people were functional at that hour. Their regular waitress wasn’t in yet either. A tired-looking woman with a puff of dyed black hair handed out menus.

Amanda said, “It’s such a different world at five-thirty. Kind of makes you wonder what you’ve been missing.”

Frank said, “Maybe it makes
you
wonder what you’ve been missing.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You said, ‘It makes you wonder,’ presumably speaking about me. If you were speaking for yourself, you would have said, ‘It makes
me
wonder.’”

“I was speaking for the collective ‘you.’”

“Count me out of the collective.” Frank grunted.

“With pleasure,” said Amanda. “You’re an incredible bitch before you’ve had coffee.”

Matt said, “Man, is this what sisters do? You say the most bile-filled, mean things with no holding back, and still expect the other to love unconditionally?”

Amanda and Frank looked at each other. The younger sister said, “Pretty much.”

“Cool,” he observed.

“So you’ve been camping out,” said Frank to Matt. “I hate not knowing what’s going on in my store. Say you got hurt down there, Matt. We don’t have insurance for squatters. You could sue us and we’d lose everything. Not that we have much left to lose.”

“This might be a good time to tell you about Patsie Strombo,” said Amanda. “The baker kind of got hit on the head down there this morning.” Amanda filled in the details.

The nub of tension throbbed under Frank’s left eyebrow. “Great. Now we
will
be sued. Just when things seem to be getting better, something happens. Have I said that ten times in the last few days? I feel like Sisyphus with this café.”

“Who?” asked Amanda.

“The guy with the rock, right?” asked Matt.

Frank turned from Mutt to Jeff. “Did Patsie say he was going to sue?” she asked. “He very pointedly said he wasn’t.” That was Amanda.

Frank nodded. “Matt, you’ve got to get out of the basement. I’m sorry, but you have to find another place to stay. You can”—Frank paused, not sure why she was being so generous—“you can stay on our couch if you’re desperate.”

“You’re not firing me?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Frank said.

The waitress returned and they all ordered the $2.50 Breakfast Special #1: two eggs any style, home fries, toast, juice, coffee.

“Why would Chick be hiding out in the basement when he had his own apartment?” asked Frank.

Amanda pressed her butter knife into the napkin, making little hash marks. “I don’t think Chick really had an apartment,” she said. “I think he was staying with Benji Morton.”

“Benji?” asked Frank.

Amanda said, “I saw Benji coming out of Chick’s building last night. Chick’s alleged building.”

Matt said, “You’re an observant person, Amanda. Maybe we should hang out sometime. You know, away from work. Not a date. Dating is just another of society’s enforced rituals by which people judge each other on superficial terms of questionable value, such as the media-imposed definition of physical attractiveness and the ability to communicate using easy-to-digest platitudes that have nothing to do with what a person is really thinking and feeling.”

Frank said, “Am I crazy, or is he starting to make sense?” Of course, any chain of events led directly to a date for Amanda. Visions of Walter flashed before Frank’s eyes.

Matt said, “A lot of people are surprised by it, but the truth does make sense. More often than not, the truth also hurts.”

“Oh, God.” Frank groaned.

“Groan all you want. But you know exactly what I mean. It’s hard to trust anything these days. You can barely trust what you see right in front of your eyes. I suspect everything and everyone. Because we’re all guilty of something.”

“Everyone is guilty?” Frank asked. If Clarissa thought Frank was paranoid, she should get a load of Matt.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’m guilty of helping myself to your hospitality. And I’m prepared to face the consequences. But there don’t seem to be any.”

“Not yet,” Frank repeated.

“What am I guilty of?” asked Amanda.

Matt smiled. “Not a thing. You, Amanda, are pure.”

Frank said, “You, Matt, are pure. Pure bullshit.” She could think of a million things Amanda was guilty of: impulsiveness, selfishness, vanity, grabbiness, to mention a few.

“What are you guilty of, Frank?” asked Matt. “I have an idea.”

“What?”

“Backing down from your own judgment to let Clarissa walk all over you just so she’ll be your friend. Self-annihilation.”

Frank gasped. Was that how it looked? “Clarissa wants to be
my
friend. And I’m not backing down. I’m deferring to her professional opinion.” How humiliating that anyone would view her as rolling over for Clarissa. It was outrageous. She refused to accept Matt’s interpretation. Frank examined the scruffy barista. She didn’t feel self-conscious at all around Matt. Strange; he was a man. A young man, though.

“I can see you have a lot of faith in Clarissa,” said Matt. “But until you have faith in yourself, you’ll never get what you really want. You’ll never even know what you really want.”

Make that a very young man, thought Frank.

Amanda continued playing with her utensils. “I’d like to hear about Chick. You spent more time with him than anyone else, Matt. What was he like?”

“He was a nomad,” Matt said. “No roots. No ties. He told me he had no close family or friends. I think he grew up in California.”

“Did he talk about me at all?” asked Amanda.

“Oh, yeah. He said how beautiful you are.”

It always had to come back to how beautiful Amanda was. Frank watched her sister glow with the compliment. How many times could she hear the same thing?

Frank said, “Yes, so Chick responded predictably, anthropologically, to Amanda’s symmetrical features and her appetizing waist-to-hip ratio. Did he say anything about why he might have gotten himself killed?”

The food came. The trio ate and reflected. Amanda asked, “How many nights was Chick in the basement?”

“Just Thursday, the night before the contest,” said Matt.

Frank couldn’t believe it’d taken this long to find him out. Anyone could have gotten down there at any time and hidden for days, robbed them, hurt them. “Why didn’t you ask us first?” she said to Matt.

“You might have said yes. There’s no thrill in having permission.”

“I think I may fire you now.”

Amanda asked, “Had Chick stayed with Benji at all?”

Matt nodded. “Morton was the reason Chick came to Brooklyn from Vietnam in the first place. That’s what he told me, anyway.”

“Vietnam?” asked Amanda. “He was in Jamaica.”

“No, definitely Vietnam. That’s where he met Benji Morton’s former college friend. That guy set up Chick with Morton.”

“Chick told me he didn’t have any local friends,” Amanda said.

“Morton wasn’t his friend,” Matt explained. “They had a
mutual
friend. A guy like Chick would never consider a guy like Morton a friend.”

Frank said, “Okay, then who’s the mutual friend?”

Matt flipped through his steno book. “Fortunately for you, I’ve taken copious notes. And I’ll assume that I won’t be fired?” He waited for Frank to nod. “Good. This mutual friend was an American in Vietnam.” Matt paged back a few sheets and read, “‘Bert Tierney.’ He’s an entrepreneur, trying to set up a vacation resort on a South Vietnamese beach.”

Frank noticed that Amanda had barely touched her breakfast. It’d been two solid days of stress. Was her sister falling apart? wondered Frank. “Are you okay?” she asked Amanda.

“Just thinking about Chick,” she responded. “How little we knew of him. You should be with people who know you and love you in the days before death, don’t you think? Doesn’t it seem wrong that he was surrounded by virtual strangers?”

“So now we’re going in search of Chick?” asked Frank. “I thought we were hot on the trail of a livelihood.”

“That’s not very generous of you,” said Amanda.

Matt said, “I can tell you one thing: Chick was a coffee man.”

Frank turned to Matt. “You say that as if you’re a coffee man.”

Shaking his head, Matt said, “I have no sense of smell, so I’ll never come close to you. But coffee has texture, a weight on my tongue. I don’t have too many complex beverage experiences.”

“What makes you think that of Chick?” asked Amanda.

“Chick had a bagfull of coffee beans. He constantly popped them into his mouth raw,” Matt said.

Beans as food? thought Frank. In Yemen and Ethiopia, the only countries on Earth where coffee trees were indigenous, the natives had long eaten the cherries and leaves as a narcotic. In some parts of Turkey, coffee beans were used in soups.

“The beans were green?” Frank asked.

“Blue. Dark blue. Almost purple.”

Amanda said, “Purple beans?” She looked at Frank. “Kona?”

The older sister and true connoisseur shook her head. Hawaii’s volcanic soil produced a blue bean, but she’d never seen a purple Kona bean. “Maybe,” said Frank.

Matt read from his notepad. “Chick originally came into Romancing the Bean because he saw Amanda. He asked me what I knew about you. I didn’t know anything. And that was pretty much it for conversation.” He went back to his home fries.

Frank asked, “How’d you sneak into the basement? You hid in the bathroom? You’d wait for us to leave….”

“Better that than picking the hatch door lock, like Chick,” he said. “The night Morton threw him out. That’s how he got in.”

Amanda said, “I need to lie down.” She did. Right there in the booth. Typical histrionics, thought Frank. She moved across to Matt’s side of the booth to give Amanda more room.

Frank said, “Amanda, if you and Chick were meant to be together, he wouldn’t be dead. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.” Thank God Chick hadn’t died in their basement. “I would have loved to see one of those beans,” Frank said to herself out loud.

“You paying for breakfast?” asked Matt.

“Sure,” she said.

“For your kindness,” he said. Matt reached inside his jeans pocket and pulled out a paper napkin. He carefully unfolded the napkin, revealing seven dark blue, almost periwinkle, peaberry coffee beans. Peaberries are small round beans. They occur (rarely) in nature when a cherry contains only one seed, as opposed to the usual two flat-sided seeds. For some reason, the Tanzanian crop of robusta trees grown at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro yields a lot of peaberries, but those raw seeds are green. The aroma in these blue beans was nearly gone, which meant that the flavor was, too. She’d never seen anything like them before.

“Amanda, have you ever heard of Vietnamese coffee?” asked Frank.

Amanda’s voice rose weakly from under the table. “No.”

Frank hadn’t either. She tried to picture the topography of Vietnam. She knew the country had jungles and beaches, but she wasn’t sure it had mountains high enough to grow arabica trees. The only Pacific coffee regions Frank was familiar with were China, Indonesia, and Hawaii. “Chick gave these to you?” she asked Matt.