“Old soul.”
“Exactly.” She sighed. “I gave somebody at the
Courier Times
a photo of Arlen and me at the Philadelphia Food and Wine Festival. He was wearing a red ascot”—she bit her lip—“and looked very handsome. I hope I get the photo back.”
This from a woman who doesn’t own a single photo album.
I asked, “Did you see anyone hanging around?” Say, an entire wait staff practicing the tarantella?
She cocked her head. “Where?”
“At Miracolo, the morning you dropped Arlen off.” I gazed at her over my demitasse.
“There were plenty of people around, Eve.” She was fixedly sketching circles in the sunlight on the granite countertop. “But no one in particular.”
I dropped my spoon noisily into my saucer. “I know about the tarantella, Nonna,” I said in a tone that sounded like I was accusing her of cheating on me.
“Oh, you, you, you, you know so much.” With her chin high, she blurted, “He said he’d leave the place exactly the way he found it.”
“Oops.”
“Sometimes you are really too sarcastic,” she told me. “Have a biscotto.” Like it was an antidote. One manicured hand pushed the plate of her special pistachio biscotti toward me. Even when she was in a culinary dry spell, my nonna could crank out the pistachio biscotti.
I chose one and took my time studying it. “Why did he take down the shadow box with the Caruso seventy-eight?”
“Did he? Maybe he forgot his glasses.” She gave me a typical dramatic shrug, but my Crap Detector started dinging when she didn’t look me in the eye. “And I’m pretty sure I told him he could take things out of those silly little show boxes—”
“Shadow boxes, Nonna.”
“—to see things up close, as long as he put them back.”
My head felt like slow-drying cement. I tried to picture the scene around the corpse, but couldn’t. Except for the Caruso 78 and the busted shadow box kicked into the corner. What else had I missed?
We stared each other down so hard, you’d think we were playing Texas Hold ’Em.
I held out my hand.
She looked at me blankly.
“The key, Nonna. Please.”
She slammed her hands down on the table. “Whose restaurant is it?”
“Which is why you can appreciate the need for better security,” I retorted. “I’ll let you in any time you have a good reason.”
She glared at me. “You act like you own the place.”
“
One
of us should.”
“Honestly, Eve, one little mistake—”
“Nonna, please. You know I love you.”
“What if you’re lying passed out on the floor? Who’s going to let in the
paramedici
?”
Oh, for God’s sake. “I’ll take my chances.”
Her eyes narrowed and her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “What if it’s Landon lying passed out on the floor?”
Low. Really low. I actually gasped and she pressed her advantage, painting the scene. “And Choo Choo is home shaving his head nice and close”—in Maria Pia’s view, her grandson’s choice to go hairless was akin to my wearing pants—“and you’re home wondering what you can wear to ruin your chances.”
“Well, if nobody’s there,” I said, leaning toward her, “who would know if Landon passed out, hey?”
She slammed a hand on her chest and said imperiously, “I am his nonna. I will know.”
“All right, Nonna,” I said finally. I would find out why she really let Arlen Mather in to Miracolo. I would find out why he pulled down my Caruso 78. I would find out whether she was indeed on her way to pick up her dress for Festa della Repubblica—or with him, instead. But for now, “Keep the key,” I told her, sounding casual. If she thought I’d backed off the key business, she might get reckless.
I asked her, “Was Arlen retired?”
She gave me an innocent look over the rim of her cup. “Semi,” she said.
“What did he do?”
“This and that,” she offered. And, to clarify: “Here and there.”
“You’ll have to do better than that with the cops, Nonna.”
“Ours,” she said grandly, “was a love relationship.”
Well, I couldn’t go anywhere with that. “Did he leave any stuff here?” Toothbrush? Boxers? Viagra?
She sprang up, raised a finger at me, and flowed out of the kitchen at a pretty good clip. I heard her clip-clop down the hall and up the stairs. Finally she returned with a blue summer-weight blazer over her arm and a Polo Ralph Lauren dopp kit. Luckily, at that moment her landline rang out in the living room and she darted off to answer it. While she was gone I fished around in Mather’s blazer, pulling out a movie stub, a nearly empty packet of Tic Tacs, and—from the breast pocket—a worn blue business card.
Viceroy Vinyl
Your Source for Vintage Opera Recordings
Buy
•
Sell
•
Appraise
Abel LeMeur
212-765-8302
www.viceroyvinyl.com
With a thrill of discovery, I slipped the business card into my pocket, and then dug around in the kit. Brushes for teeth, nails, and hair. Clippers for nails and nose hair. Mint floss. Three different prescription meds. The only one I recognized was an anticholesterol drug. As I heard Nonna head back toward the kitchen, I hurriedly tapped the names of the other two meds into my phone, then zipped up the kit and set it back on top of the blazer, where she had left it. There’s something infinitely sad about going through the personal—very personal—possessions of the newly dead. The dead who got up one morning perfectly healthy and had no idea that Fate was patiently hanging around outside.
When my nonna reappeared, she brushed back some hair with infinite weariness. “It was Choo Choo.”
“Nonna,” I said, gesturing to Arlen Mather’s things, “you’ll need to turn these over to the cops.”
She staggered back a step. “It feels like poor Arlen is getting lost in all this—this—murder business, do you know what I mean?” She stared for a moment at the pathetic little pile of his things, and then her face fell apart and she started to cry. “He would simply hate all this.”
Being the victim and all. I squeezed her shoulder, wishing I were Dana, who could do it better.
She pressed a tissue against her waterproof mascara. “You’re thinking I should go to the—the—police place and get it over with.”
Maria Pia was just going to have to suck it up and go see Ted and Sally. It would look a whole lot worse if she didn’t. “That’s a yes, Nonna.”
Of course, she shot me a look like I was exiling her in a dugout canoe somewhere deep in the Amazon. “Thank goodness he wasn’t shot. They’d want to know if I own a gun.”
For the first time in the last twenty hours, I laughed. “Well, if that happened, you’d really have nothing to worry about.” If my granny really had a hate on, the worst she’d do is serve somebody butter that she’d left out for a week.
“Well, I don’t know why you say that.” She seemed offended.
“Oh, that’s right,” I joked, “I forgot about your nine millimeter Browning handgun.”
“Of course I don’t own a Browning, Eve.” She laughed at the very thought. “You know my gun is a Glock.”
*
I lost no time calling Landon. “Did you know Nonna packs heat?” I slammed myself into my ten-year-old blue Volvo sedan and jammed the key into the ignition.
He was silent for a moment. “Well, does she actually
carry
the, uh, heater?”
I backed out of Nonna’s driveway. “Landon, listen to you. ‘Heater.’ You should try this sexy talk on Jonathan.”
“No,” he said shortly. “Too much too soon.”
I could see his point. “I think Nonna keeps the gun in the drawer with the custard cups. She kept eyeing it while she was telling me that she would never tell me where she keeps it.”
“The question, of course,” said Landon slowly, “is the ammo. I vote for removing it.”
“Unanimous.”
Landon slipped into his communing-with-the-spirit-world voice. “Check the drawer with the ramekins. Right below the custard cups. That’s my guess.”
Landon often had flashes of insight into our grandmother’s labyrinthine brain. I’d definitely check the ramekin drawer next time. “Is this something we have to worry about at the restaurant?” I had visions of Maria Pia taking out some disgruntled patron who dissed the gnocchi.
As I hit Friends Way, the prettiest boulevard in Quaker Hills, we chewed over whether Maria Pia had a permit for the “heater.” We decided she probably didn’t. The Glock was likely one of her impulse buys, like the time she bought scuba equipment.
In the short run: snag the ammo. In the long run, we would research plastic Glock look-alikes online and order a replacement for whatever was stashed in the custard cup drawer. She’d probably never miss it.
Then Landon had to go. His assignment for Operation Free Maria Pia consisted of quizzing shopkeepers on the north side of Market Square for info about suspicious activity in the commercial district the morning of Arlen Mather’s murder.
“Be sly,
caro,
” I urged him, kind of breathlessly. “Sly.”
He tutted at me. “Girlfriend.”
“Remember, you’re not getting just information. You’re getting alibis.” Landon was a good choice for that stretch of the district: he was in a bocce league with the owner of Sprouts (Landon designed the team uniform), he hit garage sales with the owner of Pleasure Chest Antiques, and was still on good terms with his former boyfriend Jimi Baker, the locksmith at Baker and Locks.
Of the remaining operatives, Jonathan—who hadn’t lived in Quaker Hills for the last ten thousand years and didn’t know every citizen’s choice in toilet paper—was put on research detail, along with Vera Tyndall. Choo Choo took the shops on the south side of Market Square (he and Reginald’s bouncer, Adrian, belonged to the same gym, but Adrian actually went). The charmingly abrasive Paulette got the east side because the group felt those shopkeepers would cave quickly under an Italian steamroller; and I got the leftovers: the Becks, Eloise Timmler from the crêperie around the corner, and Maria Pia herself.
Alma Toscano was assigned to pound the beat on the west side of the square. Landon believed Alma was hoping to entice Sasha Breen, the sleek-like-a-blond-whippet rich-girl owner of Airplane Hangers, into selling her line of hand-decorated shoes, Toscano’s Tootsies—“Art for Your Feet!” (or, as the discerning Landon mutters, “Crap for Your Corns!”)—at the shop. The hard-luck Alma had apparently cornered the market on felt, feathers, buttons, beads, fabric paint, and glue guns.
I parked the Volvo down the street from Miracolo. Then, pulling out the business card from Arlen’s jacket, I put a call in to Abel LeMeur of Viceroy Vinyls. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but some insight into Arlen would be a start. How much of a collector of vintage opera recordings was he? And would any possible murder suspects step out of those particular shadows?
The voice that rumbled “Hello” sounded browned by years of cigarettes.
As a cover story, I had decided to shoot for vague with a possibility of money. So I introduced myself and told Abel LeMeur that I was calling about the estate of Arlen Mather. I had discovered a Viceroy Vinyls business card among Mr. Mather’s possessions and thought I’d inquire about his appraisal services.
“Mather, you say?” LeMeur sounded a little more alert.
“Right. Arlen Mather.”
He told me it must have been a couple of years since Mather came to his shop in Greenwich Village. Bought a rare 1928 recording of Rosa Ponselle singing “Pace, pace mio Dio,” and that was it. Only time he ever saw him. Then LeMeur explained his appraisal fees and asked how big Mr. Mather’s collection was. This question I sidestepped, shoveling something about how the man had just died and we hadn’t gone into many details yet, at which the record seller offered condolences.
“I got the feeling from some things Mather said that he did most of his business with Calladine,” said LeMeur.
“Calladine?”
“Geoffrey Calladine in Vancouver. Big, big seller. Calladine’s Classics, that’s him. Guy’s so big he doesn’t even have to advertise.”
My eyes strayed to the two vehicles that I assumed were unmarked police cars, out in front of Miracolo, but my ears belonged to LeMeur. “Have you got a number for him?” When the guy on the other end sounded cagey, I reassured him that Viceroy Vinyls would handle all our appraisal needs. Mollified, he set down the phone and looked for Calladine’s contact info. When he came back on, he rattled off a number with a Vancouver area code. I thanked him and let him go.
Since there was a three-hour time difference, I knew my call to Calladine’s Classics would have to wait, so I locked up the Volvo and headed for the restaurant. Crime scene tape still festooned the front door, so I flipped the latch to the stockade fence that rimmed the property and strolled along the flagstone walk that led to the courtyard and outdoor dining area. I picked up an empty sandwich wrapper that had blown over from Sprouts. The last few days had been dry, so any chance at footprints, or whatever else I thought I might find at the scene that the trained professionals had missed, was nil.
I pinched a couple of withered white honeysuckle blooms hanging from the trellis along the long brick wall, then peeked through one of the windows. A couple of CSI guys in paper booties were doing a sweep of the dining room, and a third was dusting for prints on the double doors to the kitchen. I tried to think it through. Was Arlen Mather’s killer already inside Miracolo, that morning, waiting for him? Or did he follow him in?
Or—and here, I have to admit, my chest felt rickety—did his killer let him in with her very own key? What could the well-groomed, well-dressed Arlen Mather possibly have said (“You call
this
opera memorabilia?”) or done to my pistol-packing nonna to have made her snap? It’s not as if he stole her carefully guarded recipe for osso buco (braised veal shanks). It’s not as if he’s Belladonna Russo, Nonna’s culinary archrival, who should stay east of the Delaware River.
As I rounded the building I glanced in the small window to the office, then quickly flattened myself against the wall, hidden by the tumble of honeysuckle spilling over the window frame. Inside the office, standing stock-still between the bookshelves and the closed door leading into the kitchen, was Joe Beck. Clearly hiding.