Latte Trouble - By Cleo Coyle Page 0,1

York Full Frontal Fashion television network. Lottie wore her auburn hair long and dyed a bold scarlet. She’d been thin to begin with, but tonight she appeared to have dropped even more weight. She’d also shed the simple flowered skirts she’d favored since Madame (the eighty-year-old owner of this landmark coffeehouse) had introduced me to her over eighteen months ago, when Lottie had first moved back to Greenwich Village from her former residence in London. Now, clad in a chocolate Fen suit accented with striking pieces from her line—a caramel latte swirl brooch and sheer espresso scarf sprinkled with “coffee-bean” beads—she appeared at least ten years younger than her fifty-something years.

Luminaries of the fashion world surrounded her—designers, critics, models, magazine editors, along with a sprinkling of pop singers, HBO stars, and supporting actor film types. Her two young business partners were here as well. Tad Benedict and Rena Garcia had risked everything, along with Lottie, to see this spring collection succeed. Her fall line (launched last February) was already selling out in Saks and Herrods, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorfs, and Fen’s international boutiques. Now it was imperative that Lottie prove herself with her spring line to be more than a one-season wonder, a fashion fluke.

So, of course, the last thing I needed right now was for Tucker to lose it in the middle of this production. For the past two hours, I myself had been the one making the coffee drinks, but I needed a break and had assumed Tucker could handle it for at least the next thirty minutes. If he couldn’t, I’d have to get back in the saddle—pronto.

I moved behind the counter to speak with him, but Moira was already hovering protectively and blocking my path. “Is he all right?” I asked.

Moira frowned, brushed aside a lock of auburn hair with the back of her long, narrow hand. “I don’t know, Clare. I’ll take care of him and find out what’s wrong.”

I waited for Moira to step aside, but the girl gestured toward the crowd. “Seems like Esther needs help at the door.”

She wasn’t kidding. The Village Blend’s front entrance looked like the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel on a Jets game day, so I hurried over. On my way, I tried not to worry about Tucker’s uncharacteristic freak out and prayed it was not some kind of omen for the deterioration of what had been, up to this point, a fairly smooth running affair.

Shoot me, but I believe in omens. My Italian grandmother who primarily raised me while my father ran a bookie operation in the back of her Pennsylvania grocery had given me the “411”—as my twenty-year-old daughter Joy would put it—on the malocchio, the evil eye, the curse. And although I liked to think I’d shoved this vaguely primitive philosophy behind me, I still could not dislodge an increasingly uneasy feeling that something bitter was brewing.

I arrived at the door to find the line of new arrivals fronted by a young man with short, blond-streaked brown hair. He wore a charcoal gray suit over an electric blue Egyptian cotton shirt with a lime green handkerchief blooming out of the suit’s breast pocket. On his arm were two women.

The first was a typical, barely twenty-year-old model with streaked blond hair uptwisted and a tangerine leather outfit. The other, however, was memorably striking, even in this air-brushed crowd. She was well over six feet in her spike-heeled boots, had beautiful Asian features—straight black hair, worn all the way down to her hips, and almond-shaped eyes of an unusual deep blue-violet, which she’d emphasized with violet eye shadow and a matching violet minidress that glittered with metallic threads.

The trio was obviously impatient to make their entrance, but they had been stopped for a guest list check by the Blend’s resident iconoclast, New York University comparative literature student Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), who chose to make a consciously unfashionable statement with faded khakis, an oversized green sweatshirt, her long dark hair done up in four tight anti-fashion braids, and “so five minutes ago” glasses with thick black frames.

I understood where Esther was coming from. Trendy, flamboyant dressing wasn’t my style, either—mainly because I could never pull it off. On the other hand, at forty, I thought protesting “the frivolous pointlessness of high fashion” (as Esther put it) by deliberately dressing down was pretty much a pointless gesture in itself. So, I’d at least attempted to dress appropriately for the evening in the boring, prototypical New