Cappuccinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse (A Cape Bay Cafe Mystery Book 1) (3 page)

“
M
atty
!” I shouted, stepping toward him.

He didn’t even hesitate, just kept running toward where we were standing at the back of the house.

Mike, in full cop mode, walked forward to intercept him. “Matt!” He caught Matty as he tried to run by and held him in place.

“What’s going on? Where’s my dad? Let me go! Tell me what’s going on!” Matty fought against Mike’s grip, but Mike held on.

“Matt, Matt, you gotta calm down, man,” Mike said as he struggled to keep Matty from running past him.

Matty made a few more attempts to escape before he gave up. “Okay, okay.” He raised his hands in surrender, and Mike let him go slowly. Matty ran a hand through his hair. “What’s going on? Where’s my dad?”

I didn’t know whether to reach out and comfort Matty from the pain I knew was coming or keep my distance. I ended up stepping closer so that I was barely an arm’s length away, close enough to reach out and touch him but far enough away that I wasn’t crowding them. It had been less than a month since I’d gotten the news about my mother that Matty was about to get about his dad, and I knew how much it hurt.

Mike took a deep breath. “Matt, I’m really sorry to have to tell you this—”

Matty stepped back, shaking his head rapidly. “No, no, no, no.”

Mike stepped toward him and rested a hand on Matty’s shoulder. “Matt, your dad passed away.”

“But—he can’t—” Matty glanced at me.

My eyes filled with tears I struggled to keep from pouring down my face.

“No, no, no,” he repeated and ran around Mike.

Mike caught him as Matty got around the corner of the house to where he could see his dad slumped in his chair on the patio.

“Dad,” Matty cried out as he collapsed to his knees.

Mike grasped Matty’s shoulder. “You can’t go over there, Matt. We have to process the scene.”

“‘Process the scene’?” Matty exclaimed. “What do you mean, ‘process the scene’? Did someone kill my dad?” He looked frantically toward his dad’s body as if he were searching for blood or bullet holes or some other sign of foul play.

“We don’t know,” Mike said. “In cases of unexpected deaths, we need to make sure we document everything just in case.”

Matty sat back on his heels. Mike looked at me and nodded toward Matty. I knelt beside Matty and took his hand.

“They’re just covering their bases, Matty,” I said quietly.

Matty looked at me as if he were just noticing that I was there. “Franny,” he said quietly.

I smiled at him sadly. I hadn’t heard anybody call me “Franny” in years. We heard motion behind us and turned to see the paramedics we’d forgotten about wheeling a stretcher across the lawn.

“Uh, Francesca, how about you take Matt inside?” Mike suggested.

I looked at Matty, and he nodded. We both stood, our knees wet from the damp grass. Still holding hands, united in our orphan sorrow, we started toward the front of the house.

“Try not to touch anything!” Mike called after us.

I glanced back and nodded as Matty’s hand tightened on mine. The added reminder that someone may have killed his dad pained him.

Mike said to the paramedics as we passed them, “Let me get my camera out of my car, then you can take him.”

Matty and I walked to the front door. I reached for the knob, but Matty shook his head.

“He always keeps it locked,” he said, reaching in his pocket for his keys.

But my hand was already turning the knob. I looked at Matty and saw him crumple.

“I’ll make sure to tell Mike,” I said. I knew we both hoped that his dad had just forgotten to lock it this once. As painful as my mother’s death was for me, I couldn’t imagine how much worse it would be if someone had taken her from me deliberately.

I glanced around as we stepped inside the house. Nothing looked disturbed or out of place. Everything was as quiet and in its place as if Mr. Cardosi had just stepped out to run to the store. Matty and I sat on the sofa in the front room, where we’d sat many times to watch TV in the afternoons. His house was a mirror image of my own, with the master bedroom on the right of the entrance instead of the left. Unless they’d been remodeled, Capes were all pretty much the same.

We were quiet, neither of us feeling the need to put our pain into words. That was all I had wanted in my first days back in town—to sit quietly and think about my mother. I stole a few glances at Matty. I’d only seen him briefly on the day I got back then again at my mother’s funeral. I wasn’t in much of a state of mind to pay attention to how he looked either time. I could see that, despite the tension and anguish in his face, he had been aging well. He had grown his thick, dark hair longer than he wore it in high school, but it was still a preppy, business-like length. He still had the same warm brown eyes. Back in school, those eyes could make me melt. We’d never dated, but that hadn’t stopped us from flirting, and he’d been an expert at using those big brown eyes for that.

I didn’t know how long we sat there. After my mother died, I’d felt as though I’d barely sat down on the train in New York when we arrived in Boston, so we could have been on that couch for five minutes or two hours. Time passed differently when your life was falling apart. There was a quiet knock on the door before it opened. I popped up off the couch, ready to fend off any prying neighbors, but it was just Mike. I sat back down next to Matty, who was staring off into space.

“Just going to take a few pictures,” Mike said, nodding at us.

I nodded back as Matty continued staring.

Mike stepped into the master bedroom, and I saw the flash from his camera as he moved around the room, taking pictures. He went up the stairs next, and I heard his heavy shoes moving around the floor above us. Matty glanced at the ceiling then looked back at the spot on the carpet he seemed focused on. I leaned back on the couch and crossed then uncrossed my legs.

Mike came down the stairs a few minutes later and nodded at us as he passed through the living room to the back rooms of the house. I heard the click of the camera and saw the flash as he took more pictures. He seemed to be spending more time in the kitchen than he had in the other rooms. Finally, he came back into the living room and took a couple of pictures before sitting on a chair across from us. Matty didn’t look at him until Mike cleared his throat.

“Did you find anything?” Matty asked, his voice hoarse.

“There were no visible marks on the body,” Mike said professionally.

I cringed at his reference to “the body.” That body had been Matty’s dad just hours earlier. At least I hoped it had only been hours.

“They’ll want to do an autopsy. Standard procedure to determine cause of death.”

Matty nodded.

“Nothing appears disturbed in the house,” Mike said.

“Can you tell me if your dad drank coffee throughout the day or just in the morning?”

“He makes a pot in the morning,” Matty said, forgetting to use the past tense. “He drinks most of it before he goes into the shop then takes a travel cup with the last of it.” Matty wrinkled his forehead, looking more alert. “Did Dad make it into the shop this morning?”

Mike shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ll check on it. Would you normally hear if he didn’t go in?”

Matty sank back on the couch, shrugging. “Who knows? Dad would get in a mood sometimes and just decide he wasn’t opening the shop that day. I’d drive by and see it closed and freak out, but when I’d call to check on him, he’d say he just didn’t feel like cutting hair that day.” He shrugged again. “Who knows? You know how Dad could be.”

Mike nodded as he scribbled in his notebook. I wasn’t sure what recent events Matty was referring to, but I remembered that Mr. Cardosi could fly off the handle at perceived slights. I remembered one time when the paper boy had delivered the Boston paper but not the local one and Mr. Cardosi went on a tirade. He had been certain the paper boy had done it deliberately, that the editor of the local paper had told him not to deliver it, and that there must be something negative about Mr. Cardosi in that day’s paper. My grandfather had taken him our copy of the paper to show him that there was nothing about Mr. Cardosi in it at all, but Mr. Cardosi just accused him of being a part of the plot against him. He’d looked suspiciously at my grandfather and the paper boy for months after that.

“Do you know if there was anyone who had a grudge against your dad? Who might want to hurt him?” Mike asked.

Matty scoffed. “My dad’s enemies are more in his imagination than in real life.”

“Any close friends? Girlfriends? Anyone your dad might have been close to? We probably won’t need to talk to them, but it’s good to go ahead and get it in the notes.”

Matty shook his head. “No, I mean, there’re the guys at the barbershop—the employees and the regulars—but I don’t think he really socialized with anyone outside of work.”

Mike nodded and scribbled. “When was the last time you talked to your dad?” He was starting in with the same questions he’d asked me.

Matty visibly crumpled. “A couple of days ago. I’ve been so busy. God, I wish I’d called him. I just—I just had no idea it was the last time I’d talk to him.”

“Did you see him that day or just talk on the phone?”

“The phone. I haven’t seen him since last weekend.” Matty bent forward and put his head in his hands. “If only I’d known it was the last time. I would have hugged him, told him I loved him.”

“Were you and your dad close?”

“As close as he was to anyone. He’s not a real sociable guy.
Wasn’t
.” Matty caught himself referring to his dad as if he were still alive. “He
wasn’t
a real sociable guy.” As if using the past tense hurt him all over again, Matty made a choking sound and covered his face with his hands.

I rubbed Matty’s shoulder. I suddenly realized how lucky I was that I’d spent the hours after I found out my mother was dead on a train instead of being questioned by the police.

“I’m sorry, Matt.” Mike looked over the notes he’d been scribbling as he talked to Matty. “Just a couple more questions. Did your dad have a will?”

“Yeah, I think so. It’d be in the safe in his closet.”

Mike looked up with his eyebrows raised. “There’s a safe in the closet?”

“Yeah,” Matty said. “You didn’t see it?”

“I just took pictures of what was visible. I didn’t open the closet.” Matty started to stand, but Mike raised his hand for him to stop. “Whatever’s there or not there isn’t going to change while we’re sitting here. Let's wrap this up, and then we’ll go look.”

Matty sank back onto the couch.

“What about life insurance?” Mike asked.

“Yes,” Matty said. “He got it after my mom died, so I’d have something if anything happened to him. The paperwork should be in the safe too.”

“You’re the sole beneficiary of both of those?”

“Yeah.” Silence fell for a few seconds, then Matty snapped his head up to look at Mike. “Wait, you don’t think—”

Mike held up his hand again. “No! No, no, no! Just making sure I have all the information. Like I said, we probably won’t need to use any of this, but it’s better to go ahead and get it all now.”

Matty nodded.

Mike looked between his notebook and us several times then made a face and took a breath. “So you, uh, you showed up here at the same time as the ambulance, Matt.”

I looked at Mike sharply. Despite his denial seconds before, the way he was talking to Matty made me suspicious.

Matty either didn’t notice or ignored it, nodding in response. “Yeah, I did.”

“Were you just driving by?”

“No, Mrs. Howard across the street called me. She saw Franny hanging around, and I guess she called here and no one answered, so she called me. She saw you pull up while we were on the phone and told me to hurry.”

“And where were you when you got the call?”

“I was in the car, on my way home from work.”

“So you just drove over here instead,” Mike said.

“Yeah.”

Mike nodded and scribbled some more in his notebook. “I think that about wraps it up for me. What’s the best number to reach you?”

Matty gave him his cell phone number.

Mike jotted it down then looked at us. “Okay, want to show me the safe?”

Matty nodded and pulled himself up off the couch. Mike followed him across the room, and I brought up the rear. I lingered in the doorway as Matty walked to his dad’s closet and opened it. From where I stood, I could see that the safe was still closed. Mike pulled his camera back out and took a couple of pictures.

“Can you open it up for me?” Mike asked.

Matty knelt in front of the safe. He spun the dial a few times then popped it open. Mike leaned in to take a few more pictures, then he nodded at Matty. Matty reached in and pulled out a stack of papers.

“Everything there that you expect?” Mike asked.

Matty sat on the foot of the bed and flipped through the papers. “Yeah, I think so. I don’t really know everything he kept in here, but here’s the will—” He pulled out a stapled bundle of papers and set it next to him on the bed. “And here’s the life insurance paperwork.” He laid the single sheet of paper on top of the will. “Do you need to look through these?” He held the other papers out to Mike.

“No, just wanted to make sure nothing was missing.” Mike glanced around the room. “Speaking of missing, do you see anything that’s not where it’s supposed to be?”

Matty looked around. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay, well, if you notice anything, just give me a call, okay?” Mike reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a business card that he handed to Matty. “One for you, too.” Mike passed another one to me.

I looked it over then put it in my pocket with my phone. I saw Matty put his on top of his dad’s will and life insurance policy.

“Unless there’s anything either of you want to ask me…” Mike looked between the two of us.

I shook my head.

“Matt?” Mike asked.

Matty looked up as though he’d gotten lost in thought. “What? No.”

“All right then, I’ll be on my way. If either of you think of anything else—” Mike was interrupted by a loud rap on the front door before it swung open.