I gave him a playful little kick in the shin. Just a love tap.
I’d rather have the 78 than the gloves, but Caruso memorabilia doesn’t come on the market very often. Caruso collectors are an elusive bunch, worse even than a secret society, since they guard their identities even from each other.
Mark checked his gold watch—he must be good at day trading, whatever that is. “I’d like to see you work sometime, Eve,” he said softly, green eyes back to full twinkle mode. In my head, I substituted
work
with
naked
.
“Sure thing, Mark, anytime.” Nail him down. “A week from tonight?” Would the crime scene tape be gone by then?
He leaned in closer. “Nothing sooner?”
“Friday?” I blurted. Never stand in the way of a good-looking man whose only fault is that he wants to see you sooner.
“You’re on.” He grinned and gave me a peck on the cheek before I knew it was coming and could intercept it with my lips. The man was fast—and elusive. Catching my breath, I got tangled in a swirl of his cologne, something by Serge Lutens that I recognized because I’d snagged a sample card at Saks.
My eyes followed him as he strode up the street. At this rate, the snow would be falling before he and I experienced anything half as cheap and pointless as my onetime adventure with the FedEx man.
*
My contribution to the Happy Food Potluck at Landon’s was a salmon ball.
“Anything, but
anything,
with horseradish is not happy food, Eve,” Landon lectured me. “Don’t you have sinuses?” I followed him into his granite and Italian tile kitchen, where everything seemed suspended from the high ceiling: a Casablanca fan, a wineglass rack, hooks for his gleaming copper Calphalon cookware.
Landon is a trust fund baby whose six-room condo is in the upscale Innerlight Estates complex overlooking Pensey Park on the south side of town. Maria Pia’s younger son, Dom Angelotta, made a fortune in plumbing supplies, which pretty much offset her pique when he announced he was not going to work in the family business. Landon is his only child.
And Landon is the greatest art hag I have ever met. If there’s a gallery opening anywhere in the borough of Manhattan, Landon is there with a bottle of Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino for the owner. He also likes small dance companies and dignified poetry readings.
Four of Miracolo’s “human resources” were collected on the leather sofas in the living room, eating happy appetizers, which turned out to be edamame dumplings and caramelized onion Brie
en croute
. Apparently the dumplings and Brie didn’t cut it with Landon’s handsome tabby cat, Vaughn, who was stretched out on his back pretending to be asleep.
Gathered were Choo Choo, Paulette, Jonathan, and the treacherous Dana, all stakeholders. Paulette Coniglio was one of my father’s former lady friends, who had waitressed all her life and still needed a paycheck. I liked her. Jonathan Bolger was still in a closet that appeared to be painted shut, but he was an excellent sommelier, and Landon had hopes.
“Vera will get here when she can,” Choo Choo explained, balancing a strangely empty plate on his lap. “She’s taking her brother to an AA meeting.” We all knew she had finally talked him into going. Redheaded Vera Tyndall was a little younger than my thirty-two, putting herself through Temple University part-time, taking care of her brother, and an all-around good egg. The kind of person you can totally trust with your goldfish and house plants. And she actually liked Maria Pia, who was as difficult as she could be charming.
Landon brought me a plate and a big glass of red wine, probably not from a bottle of the Giacomo Conterno. “And poor, dear Alma will be late, too. She’s got her grief support group until eight.” Alma Toscano was a hard-luck friend of my grandmother’s. When her husband killed himself two years ago, Alma underwent what Maria Pia called a “circumstance revision”—read: she fell on hard times and came to work at Miracolo. She kept going to the support group because they had all bonded, so now it was something social, only without having to learn Mah Jongg.
Working at Miracolo was an answer to grief, tuition, habit, empty nests, man trouble, underemployment, and performance dreams, since both the food and the company were wonderful.
I was chewing an edamame dumpling, waiting for the bliss to happen, when Dana spread a wide smile all around, then folded her hands and turned to me. “So,” she said conspiratorially, “tell us what we can do to help.”
“Well, Dana,” I said, touching a gold cocktail napkin to the lips I was saving for Mark Metcalf, “first, you can tell me why you talked Reginald Jolly out of my spare key.”
I expected to hear Dana’s sudden intake of breath.
I didn’t expect Choo Choo’s, Paulette’s, Jonathan’s, and Landon’s, as well.
Something was afoot.
Something not even Brie
en croute
could make okay.
“Well?” I demanded.
Dana clicked her tongue. “Oh, that faithless man!”
The rest of them looked like fourteen-year-olds called out for missing curfew.
“Staff?” I said with cool menace in my voice.
Landon started wringing his hands. “It was a surprise for you, that’s all.”
So they were all in on it. I actually said, “
Et tu,
Landon?”
“Hear us out,” put in Choo Choo. “Next week is June second, and you know what that means: Festa della Repubblica.”
“When Italians voted to end the monarchy,” piped up Paulette.
“At the end of World War Two—”
“Which made Italy a republic.”
“We’ve been meeting in the mornings,” Jonathan explained, “so we could go through the routine.”
Landon looked at him with adoration.
“What routine?” I didn’t like the sound of this.
Paulette, who had to be close to sixty, actually said, “We didn’t want to get out there and suck.”
This was getting worse and worse. “At what?” I barked.
They all started talking at once. “The tarantella!” They all looked at me earnestly, their voices tumbling together. What I could make out was anxiety about time running out, reputations to uphold, harder than they thought, spectators, bunions, local TV, and pride. The phrase
dance from hell
was muttered a few times.
When the last one wound down, saying something softly about how they thought I’d be proud, I closed my eyes for a minute, letting them stew, and finally said, “Tell me you’re not taking it to the streets.”
Choo Choo held up a hand. “Strictly inside. One performance.” For a maximal kind of guy, Choo Choo could make the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sound like little kids in pony carts.
“But at the height of the dinner rush!” Landon exulted.
Choo Choo shot him a look.
“Okay, okay,” I relented. “But I never want you to pull a stunt like this again.”
If I could have grounded them, I would have.
Still, they looked contrite.
I sighed. “At least it was just the one key.”
I saw a quick, calculating look cross Jonathan’s face. He and Dana studied their plates, while Paulette trailed her fingers along the black and brown spots on the cat’s belly. Choo Choo tugged at his lower lip and Landon sprang up, brightly announcing that dinner was served.
My head started to throb. “Tell me it’s just the one key.”
Then Dana had to admit they couldn’t all practice on the same mornings, so she had—here she coughed into her hand—copies made.
Once we sorted out who had made copies from their copies, it turned out that all seven tarantella dancers had keys to the Miracolo Italian Restaurant and before-hours rehearsal space. All five of them experienced a temporary lull in appetite when I mentioned, in a wickedly casual way, that now I’d have to report to detectives Ted and Sally that any one of the wait staff could have been inside the restaurant with the dear departed Arlen Mather.
Although I was hoping for more mileage out of this scare, they were a resilient group who suddenly remembered the purpose of the potluck and worked out a game plan they named Operation Free Maria Pia.
When I pointed out she wasn’t in jail, Choo Choo snorted, and Dana drawled, “Well, not yet, darling.” Three of them put themselves on neighborhood crawl duty—questioning the shopkeepers on Market Square to see if they had seen or heard anything of interest—and the other two went on background check duty, which meant digging up whatever they could about Mather.
It sounded like a good plan. One they wouldn’t have to scheme or trespass anywhere to do.
I looked at them through my raised wineglass. They were my world at Miracolo. My surprise Festa della Repubblica tarantella dancers. I must confess, I got misty.
5
Wednesday
Maria Pia Angelotta, retired chef, owner of Miracolo, potential murder suspect, and Genovese dragon, stood motionless in the center of her high-end, All-Clad-studded kitchen. She seemed lost in a troubling daydream, holding an espresso maker in one hand. Her front door is never locked—a matter of some alarm for Choo Choo, Landon, and me—so she didn’t hear me when I greeted her from the arched kitchen doorway.
“Hi, Nonna.”
She turned a look of mild interest toward me, taking in my Ann Taylor black twill capris. “Perhaps your legs are not your best feature,” she mused.
Not my best feature, indeed! “I’m a dancer.”
“Dancers dance.”
“Unless they have to work in the family salt mine,” I threw out.
“Which keeps them
all
in pants, you should only remember.”
Had I come to the end of the Angelotta illogic thread? The point in these exercises is simply to utter something, no matter how inane. Last man talking, and all that. Whenever I get into one of these conversations with Nonna, I have a full understanding of what happened to the Roman Empire: they finally heard themselves.
When she swung around to me and slumped, I realized how stiffly she’d been holding herself. My seventy-six-year-old nonna was still kind of a dish, what with her masses of springy salt-and-pepper hair, her fine, high cheekbones set in a broad face that could handle every one of those wrinkles, and a nose with the kind of nostrils even money can’t buy.
There wasn’t a hue on Landon’s color wheel that didn’t look all the better for simply being near Maria Pia’s face. This was a difficult truth when I hit puberty and all the boys I was interested in hung around hoping to get a glimpse of my grandmother in her short black-and-red kimono. It’s one thing to look like leftover polenta compared to a dance squad babe who’s your age; it’s another thing altogether to be outdone by your granny.
“Darling,” she cried, as if she had just seen me for the first time. Clamping her hands on my shoulders, Maria Pia steered me over to the wood-and-chrome stools that stood around the S-shaped island in the middle of her kitchen.
We sat.
Nonna was dressed in a pale pink satin robe and matching peep-toe slippers. Her toenails were polished gold. “Tell me,” she said, searching my face for some kind of breakdown she could use as a jumping-off point for her own. She’d been in a culinary dry spell for a while, which I contend explains the likes of Arlen Mather. Whenever she wasn’t cooking well, she was at risk of a romance with an unsuitable man.
“Didn’t the police give you the details?”
“Only that Arlen was … attacked.” Her lower lip actually quivered and she looked at me for confirmation.
“Well, bludgeoned.” Spare the image, spoil the grandmother, I always say.
Her eyes went wide. “A head wound?”
“Oh, yes.” With all the sag of my first panet-tone, the sweet holiday bread.
“ ‘Wound’ always sounds so … fixable, don’t you think?”
“Well, not when ‘fatal’ comes in front of it. Believe me, Arlen has eaten his last
risotto alla milanese
.”
I scanned my grandmother’s still-beautiful face, certain she was hungering for more, well, description. And when I realized she knew there was no way she could outright ask for it without appearing heartless or—better word—ghoulish, I felt strangely uplifted. “The question, of course, is who killed him.”
She looked at me, wide-eyed. “Obviously,
cara
.”
“And how he got inside the restaurant.”
“To breathe his last.” Shaking our heads, we looked away from each other, pondering for a lengthy nanosecond the cruelty of a world that contains such things as murder and meatballs.
Maria Pia’s hands slid through the voluptuous tangle of her hair and she nodded. “Yes, how he got inside Miracolo. I imagine that’s what the police want to know.” We sat there companionably while she poured me an espresso, slipping a crescent of lemon rind onto my saucer. “Which is why,” she said, sitting up straight, “I’ll have to tell them the truth.”
The hairs on my arms went on high alert. “The truth?”
She licked her lips, a stalling tactic I knew well. Then she finally lifted her hands in bewilderment. “I let Arlen into Miracolo that morning.”
Was the sudden, end-of-the-world clanging only in my head?
“Why?” I finally got out.
“He wanted a look at the opera—
come si dice?
—stuff.” Suddenly she grinned at me, like this was a winning piece of information. Something I had in common with the flattened boyfriend.
My mouth was hanging open. “You left him there?”
“You don’t have to call Children’s Services on me, Eve. He was a grown man.”
And nothing bad ever happens to grown men. “So you just dropped him off?”
“I was on my way … to the mall.” Why did I feel like she was making it up as she went along? “The dress I’m wearing for Festa della Repubblica? The alterations are done—”
“Saks?” Sound casual.
“Ma certo.”
An elegant shoulder lift.
Now I could check her alibi.
“So you just let him in to look over my stuff? Couldn’t he do that during normal business hours?” This was smelling like the shipment of sea bass we got last week.
“I didn’t think you’d mind. Besides, what harm would come of it?” She gave me a pained look. “Arlen was a perfectly lovely, respectable—”