Sylvie Cachay (Steven Hirsch)
It was a romantic table for two — but only Nicholas Brooks showed up.
In chilling testimony yesterday in the sensational Soho House tub-strangle trial, a hotel manager described how “Room 20” had ordered ahead two big entrees, and yet Brooks dined alone at a cozy table in the sixth floor restaurant.
That’s because the then-24-year-old’s swimsuit designer girlfriend, Sylvie Cachay, 33, was already strangled dead in a bathtub one floor down, prosecutors seem poised to argue.
“How many people showed up?” prosecutor Joel Seidemann asked, as the second week of testimony wrapped with an incriminating image of a now-accused murderer sitting across from an empty place setting.
“Just one,” answered Bryant Toth, food and beverage manager at the exclusive, members-only hotel.
“How many were you expecting?” the prosecutor asked. “Two,” the manager answered.
“Room 20” had originally called room service that night — Dec. 9, 2010 — asking that an entree-sized Cobb salad and a second entree, a hangar steak with salad and fries, be brought up to the room. But someone then changed the order, asking that it be served instead in the restaurant, Toth told jurors.
Brooks — the unemployed, pot-smoking son of Oscar-winning composer Joseph Brooks — sat down at the table and ordered a Maker’s Mark bourbon in one glass and a diet Coke in another,
He then proceeded to pick at his double-helping of food, the manager said.
“He looked a bit angry — [like] he had had a bad day,” he told jurors.
Brooks would soon leave the apartment and embark on an hour of drinking and cocaine use, prosecutors have said. Even as he was leaving the hotel, bathwater was already cascading down from Room 20’s overflowing bathtub, inside which staffers would find Cachay’s half dressed corpse.
“I did the mouth to mouth,” another staffer, Brian Alvarez, told jurors earlier today, of desperately trying to revive the waterlogged body. “And I noticed her mouth bubbled,” he said. “It gargled inside.”
Defense lawyer Jeffrey Hoffman is trying to convince jurors that Cachay died in the tub accidentally — and that the fingertip-sized bruises on her neck came from “aggressive” resuscitation attempts after staffers pulled her half-dressed body from the tub.
“You put your fingers on the side of her neck, right?” Hoffman asked Toth of searching unsuccessfully for Cachay’s pulse.
“I imagine so,” Toth answered.
“Well, you were there,” the lawyer pressed.
“Yes,” Toth answered.
In pretrial hearings, prosecutors have scoffed at defense attempts to blame the neck bruises — and the telltale burst blood vessel’s in Cachay’s eyes — on anything but strangulation.
Testimony continues Monday, with the trial expected to extend through the July 4 weekend.