Chapter 3 - The Basement Office
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At 11:30 PM, the last theater customers paid their checks and hurried out under umbrellas into the wet Manhattan night.
Inside Bellini’s Chophouse, the heavy front doors were bolted from the inside, the neon sign in the window was switched off, and the teenage hostess and two busboys clocked out through the side alley—leaving only Clara wiping down the mahogany bar and Chef Mateo scrubbing the flat-top grill in the back before he left at midnight.
Clara had personally bussed booth six at ten-fifteen, scraping the remaining twenty ounces of tainted ribeye straight into the commercial sink disposal and running scalding bleach water down the drain so there wouldn't be a shred of evidence left if Richie checked the bins.
Tucked deep inside the front pocket of her jeans, beneath her black apron, sat the stranger’s three hundred-dollar bills—enough to pay the late fee on her sister Lily’s nursing school lab registration tomorrow morning—alongside that inexplicable, heavy black metal card with the silver phone number.
Julian.
Even two hours later, she couldn't shake the memory of those piercing, arctic-blue eyes looking up at her from beneath that scruffy beard, or the low, commanding rumble of his voice when he told her to call him if Richie said a word to her.
At 11:45 PM, Chef Mateo poked his head out of the kitchen doors with his coat on. "I'm heading for the subway, Clara. Richie’s still downstairs in the office—want me to wait by the alley door until you cash out?"
"No, go home to your wife, Mateo," Clara smiled warmly, stacking the last of the barstools. "I just have to drop my credit-card slips in the office chute and I’m right behind you."
The back alley door clicked shut behind the chef.
The old restaurant went dead silent, save for the hum of the wine coolers and the drum of rain against the front glass.
Clara printed her shift summary from the POS terminal, bundled her credit-card receipts with a rubber band, and walked toward the rear coat alcove to grab her umbrella—when the basement door swung open and Richie Grasso walked up the wooden steps.
He wasn't carrying his coat to go home.
In his left hand, he held his iPad displaying the high-definition playback from the newly installed overhead security camera he had secretly mounted above the bar mirror two days ago to watch the bartenders' pours!
And in his right hand, dangling between two greasy fingers, was a half-chewed piece of charred ribeye wrapped in a white paper bar napkin—which he had fished out of the front foyer umbrella-stand trash bin where Julian had smoothly dropped it on his way out the door!
Clara’s heart stopped dead in her chest.
"Thought you were real slick, didn't you, Clara?" Richie snarled, slamming the basement door shut behind him and stepping sideways to block the narrow hallway leading to both the kitchen alley exit and the front lobby. "When I went out front to lock the vestibule ten minutes ago, I saw a dirty bar napkin sitting right on top of the dry umbrella bin. So I pulled the bar camera feed from nine-fifteen."
He turned the iPad screen toward her.
In crisp 4K digital zoom, the camera above the bar mirror had captured Clara leaning over the service mat with a blue pen, writing across a linen cocktail napkin before carrying the steak plate straight to booth six!
"I zoomed in on the bar mat where the pen pressed through the cloth," Richie hissed, his small dark eyes gleaming with ugly, predatory malice as he stalked toward her down the narrow wood-paneled corridor. "You wrote him a note telling him the meat came from the trash—and then you let him walk out with my steak while pocketing a hundred-dollar cash tip he left under the saucer!"
"He paid two hundred dollars in cash for a meal you stole out of a garbage tub, Richie!" Clara backed up against the locked mahogany liquor cabinet at the end of the hall, her hand sliding inside her apron pocket. "If he had eaten that meat and gone to the hospital, the Health Department would have shut this restaurant down tomorrow!"
"Who cares about some street bum?!" Richie spat, slamming his thick palm against the wall beside her shoulder to trap her in the corner. "You defied me in my own house! And worse—because you’re such a self-righteous little bitch, now I know I can't trust you to keep your mouth shut when old man Bellini’s auditors come around next month!"
"Just let me leave, Richie. I won't come back tomorrow—you can keep my week’s pay—"
"Oh, you aren't leaving until we settle what you owe me for ruining my night," Richie leered, his pudgy left hand grabbing her wrist and pinning it against the liquor cabinet while his right hand reached for the front of her blouse. "Either we go downstairs to my office right now and you give me a real good reason not to call Sloan Kettering’s charity fraud line on Monday morning, or I call the precinct captain—who happens to eat here for free every Friday—and have you locked up in Rikers tonight for felony theft from my safe!"
Panic and revulsion surged through Clara’s veins. With her free left hand, she clawed at his face, raking her fingernails down his cheek while driving her knee upward into his thigh—only for Richie to curse and slam her back hard against the mahogany paneling, knocking the breath from her lungs!
Inside her jeans pocket, her trapped right fingers brushed the cold, sharp edge of the black metal card—and her own cell phone sitting beside it, where she had already typed the ten silver digits onto the dial screen twenty minutes ago just in case!
Without looking down, Clara mashed her thumb three times against the lower glass of her phone screen inside her pocket, hitting CALL, right before Richie ripped her apron pocket open and threw her phone clattering across the hardwood floor under a booth!
"Nobody’s answering your phone at midnight, sweetheart!" Richie snarled, grabbing both of her wrists in one thick hand and dragging her toward the basement stairs.
Twenty feet away on the hardwood floor beneath booth two, the cracked screen of Clara’s phone lit up in the dark:
May you like
CALL CONNECTED — 00:04.
And across the rain-slicked asphalt of Tenth Avenue, inside the parked black Escalade where Dante and his partner Marco were listening to the live open line patched directly to Julian Vane’s penthouse three blocks away, both men already had their doors open and a steel pry-bar in their hands.
