Basil Instinct (16 page)

It worked. “That’s true,” she admitted.

I pressed my point. “Isn’t the first door really more the ‘front’ door than the front door?’ ” I rolled my eyes at Paulette, who was giving me a look that involved lifting half her face in unadulterated scorn.

On the other side of the door, Maria Pia struggled only a few seconds with the dominant gene of Camarata pride that pretty reliably trumped every other human emotion. Then: “Very well.” Off she went, moving out of the light that played feebly over the corpse of our late, lamented sous chef.

Choo Choo oozed out of the foyer, followed by Paulette, and with that I knew the jig was most definitely up. “Eve?” Joe Beck was standing in the dining room, rubbing back his short golden hair with his forearm. I looked up at two strangers, a man and a woman in blue T-shirts and pants, carrying equipment. In the dim light I could hardly make out their faces. All I felt was gratitude that it wasn’t Nonna’s body I was crouching next to in the sweet old foyer of Miracolo. “Honey,” said Joe Beck, taking a step toward me, “come on out of there.”

The side of my face tingled. I stood up, feeling like I was abandoning Georgia to an unknown fate—although, truth be told, she would probably have fewer postdeath adventures now—and my
arms hung at my sides. All of them waited while I stood there uncertainly. Joe added softly: “Just let them do their job.”

With a huge huff, I did the thing I discovered as a kid would sometimes keep me from bursting into tears: I walked straight into Joe Beck’s arms, my own arms pinned tightly against my chest. There I sobbed, and sobbed even louder when Maria Pia burst onto the scene, invoking half the saints and the spirits of her father, the poet Dante, and Frank Sinatra.

Someone handed me a tissue—I’m assuming Paulette, who among women is the “always prepared” Boy Scout, unless anyone she deems able-bodied asks for a hand across the street. Someone else patted my back. I twisted my face into some semblance of Eve Angelotta’s public face.

Twisting my neck just enough to see what was coming down, I saw Maria Pia actually push the medics aside. Getting what she thought was the full picture of what we had in the foyer, she propped her hands on her midnight-blue satin Belfiere costume and started nodding some big nods. I could almost guess what was coming but didn’t have the strength to step out of Joe’s arms. “So, Georgette, you’re—what?” she addressed the body, jerking her proud chin at her. “Ten hours late for work and this is the best you can do?”

*   *   *

All told, once it sank in, Maria Pia took the news of Georgia Payne’s death well. New employee, bad heart, whaddya gonna do? Then, a little embarrassed at her mistake, she got all airy and philosophical, delivering the opinion that it’s not easy to tell the difference between life and death in some people. Especially (here I cringed) if they’re not Italian. At that, the medics—whose names, as luck would have it, were Kaplowitz and Mahoney—turned slowly to look at her. Paulette jumped in, offering to help the Philosopher of Quaker Hills out of her Belfiere gown, which offered maybe two minutes of distraction as Nonna relived the success of the evening.

The mood changed, though, as soon as I raised the bar on the truth.

Choo Choo, who from the look on my face could tell what I was about to do, headed straight for the kitchen for the bag of Cheetos he keeps stashed on a shelf behind the coffee grinder.

Paulette held the cast-off costume in a stony reverie.

Joe Beck smiled at me and opened his hands wide.
Your story, your show.

You know the expression
All hell broke loose
. This sentence always conjures up the kind of chaos only
a great artist or a terrible ruler can create. But the kind of hell that can break loose has a real measure of subtlety. The crack in the ice, the one drink too many, the casual fib. Hell starts small. The rest of us just can’t keep it small. The news of the death of the person whom Nonna waffled between calling Georgina and Georgette was manageable. Hovering near the medics, Nonna said surprisingly few words, mostly about how she supported the referendum to build a new fire station in Quaker Hills.

But then all hell broke loose.

It started at 10:37 p.m. on Friday, June 20. And it may have had something to do with my stepping up and announcing, in the kind of clear and concerned voice you hear in commercials about erectile dysfunction, “I found Georgia Payne in that position, and in that spot, at 12:03 this afternoon.”

Maria Pia looked like she had swallowed a cannoli, whole. She was unable to speak, which is not in itself a bad thing.

Paulette’s stony reverie cracked a little, but she withstood it.

The kitchen emitted a quavering groan. In between Cheetos.

The medics gave me a keen look like they had possibly never seen such a fine example of a duck-billed platypus. “Go on,” said one of them slowly.

I decided to keep the knowledge of Georgia’s
Belfiere
B
to myself, at least for a little while. Doing so might buy me some time to figure out where Georgia’s purse had gone, whether her death had anything to do with her history with Belfiere, and why the presently absent Landon Angelotta was looking very much like a man with secrets—not at all like my beloved pillow-talking cuz.

I lifted my chin. “And you might want to check out Georgia’s fingertips.”

Ice was cracking hard and swift, everywhere.

And any guard let down after that third tequila wasn’t about to see you home unbedded.

The female medic checked out Georgia’s fingertips, raised her arched eyebrows even higher, and showed her partner. When he frowned and let out an appreciative whistle, then held up his phone, muttering, “I’m calling it in,” Maria Pia suddenly found her voice and started clamoring in Italian. But I’m pretty sure not even invoking the spirit of Old Blue Eyes to deliver her from her enemies in Quaker Hills—which was the first I’d heard of them—was going to alter what was rapidly becoming clear to us all: that Georgia Payne had met a violent death.

*   *   *

It was Sally Belts and Boots, the fashionista half of Quaker Hills’ two police detectives, who showed
up. Right off she sat the four of us down at our finest table—Paulette got busy with the cappuccino machine—and told us some interesting things. When she happened to mention that her last name was Fanella, Nonna eyed me like we were as good as sprung already. Georgia’s death was going to be a case for the coroner, but until they hear otherwise, the cops were treating it like a homicide, and the CSI team would arrive shortly. Paulette wanted to know if they liked their cappuccino with or without foam. Sally Fanella chose foam.

We spent the next hour and a half stepping all over each other as we tried to piece together the events of the afternoon, which, of course, was the first Maria Pia had heard of Georgia’s postdeath travel plans, all in service of keeping the news from her and her, uh, mah-jongg club. At which Paulette winked at me and I smiled brightly at Detective Sally, who was definitely not sporting her signature double belts and knee-high boots. In fact, she was wearing yoga pants and what looked like a ratty camisole under a lightweight tan jacket.

Maria Pia, unbelievably, was practically swooning with pride at our devotion. She ordered extra foam with her cappuccino, which she savored with sounds really better off left to the bedroom. I could tell Detective Sally was thinking the same thing as she tried to take notes about the dead Georgia’s
itinerary. My job at nearly midnight on that day was to convince this gal in the yoga pants—aided by the best I could provide in terms of Italian hand gestures—that I thought poor Georgia had keeled over with a heart attack or a blood clot.

The parts that involved the back half of Landon’s BMW we handled gingerly, and I’m pretty sure the word
trunk
never found its way into the conversation.

By that time Sally was clicking her ballpoint pen kind of manically. Her lips were pressed tightly together, no doubt because she was calculating just how much evidence was lost in the fouling of the crime scene, what with the equivalent of two hundred feet trampling it, coupled with the kind of manhandling of the body you see pretty much only at strip joints.

When the Crime Scene crew showed up, carting their equipment and arguing over whether the Phillies could go all the way, Maria Pia lost some of her bounce, probably remembering just last month, when a murder shut down Miracolo—such a nuisance—and she was jailed. Now, at least, she had the sweet comfort of Belfiere. How could the mystifying electrocution of one of her employees dim that glorious success?

The question of Landon arose.

Joe Beck sounded lawyerly and reassuring. Back on the job.

Detective Sally Fanella asked us to tell him to pay her a visit down at the station—at his earliest convenience. In the hour and a half she’d spent with us trying to get the overview of what had happened in Miracolo that day, the woman looked like she’d aged ten years. Her soft, wavy blond hair seemed to have lost its luster. Her skin had sprouted fine lines. She looked like she suddenly needed a trip to the local drugstore for a pair of cheaters. Wearily, she finally mentioned that the restaurant was officially a crime scene and that it was closed until further notice.

Actually, none of us moaned, not even Maria Pia, who, this time, might have been contemplating her “time off” as an opportunity for another fling with a brawny miner. Apparently she had an alibi for the time of “Georgette’s” death—she and Choo Choo had stayed up late watching
Babette’s Feast
, whereupon they both feel asleep—and was feeling footloose and unlikely to be considered a suspect. Ditto Choo Choo, because the two of them had stayed up late watching the movie together.

At the first indication from Sally Fanella that we were free to go, but not too far, I slipped out, exhausted, while the rest of the staff divvied up tasks for the following day. None of which included opening at 5 p.m. for the dinner crowd. I drove exhausted all the way home in my Volvo, which
my poor foot didn’t have the strength to push to 35 mph. When I pulled into my little parking spot and walked under the starry night to my Tumbleweed Tiny House, where I’d left a battery-op candle lighted in the window, I walked on shaky legs up to my front door. Grateful for an end to the day. Grateful for solitude. I always say I like my privacy, but really, it’s my solitude. I stopped just to take in the sweet sounds of the night, and I was so happy happy happy I couldn’t tell whether what I was hearing out there in the woods was spring peepers or summer crickets.

All I knew for sure was, they had nothing to do with Georgia Payne’s death.

Could I say the same for the rest of us?

I left my teeth unbrushed.

That’s how dog tired I was.

I stripped at the bottom of the ladder up to my sleeping loft, and I left my clothes right where they fell. At the top I sank into my mattress, crawling over to the window to push it open, and flopped onto my back. The peepers or crickets—or maybe some third possibility I hadn’t yet thought of—were audible. So I listened and drifted.

Who had a reason to kill Georgia Payne?

I shivered at the fleeting thought that Nonna had just attached herself to a group that Georgia seemed to want all the way out of her life. But how
far did she go? Was removing the Belfiere tattoo just the first step? How far did Georgia have to go to . . . what? Feel safe? Was she hiding out? If so, what bad luck, what with the whole mah-jongg club coming to the very restaurant where she’d just gotten a job.

And then I remembered Georgia’s red purse that had disappeared. Did that have something to do with her murder? Who would steal a purse? It was like a different kind of crime. The sort of thing that middle-aged culinary cutthroats, no matter how out of control, would never think to do. Stealing a purse was more along the lines of . . .

CRIBS kids.

Corabeth?

Really?

As I started to doze off, I vowed I’d get on the case, not to nab Corabeth, but hopefully to clear her. All my arms and legs were arranged in just the right way as I slipped off to sleep. I’m pretty sure I had a smile on my face that no one could see because in those delicious final minutes I could hear very clearly those words spoken by Joe Beck when he wanted me to get out of Miracolo’s foyer and give the medics room next to Georgia’s body: “Honey, come on out of there.”

Honey.

*   *   *

Overnight a storm blew in and I woke up once just to pull the window shut. Lighting darted through my little house, and thunder boomed away, right overhead, it seemed. All I felt was that drowsy kind of happiness that only made me slink farther under my lightweight comforter as the downpour pounded my tin roof. How bad can anything be, really, if at its absolute worst it still sounds like music?

But by morning it was still raining, so I had my coffee in my window seat, one of my favorite places in my precious little space, leaning up against a raft of colorful throw pillows, courtesy of Pier One. You can tell by the spangles and embroidery. All I had was my phone for company, and between sips, every time I called Landon, it went straight to voice mail. I could fool myself into thinking he was still sawing wood in his bed the size of a football field over there south of town in his pricey condo. But Landon Angelotta was an early riser. At any rate, Vaughn Angelotta, his handsome tabby cat, was, and would knead and paw him into submission, when he’d get out of bed and come across with a can opener.

While I nibbled a two-day-old chocolate croissant (I think the chocolate keeps it from getting
stale), Maria Pia called—sounding totally on her best game—and told me she had called the entire staff of Miracolo and told them we were on hiatus and that they would, of course, assist the police in their efforts to solve the mystery of Georgina’s death. I waited for her to add what I knew she was thinking—namely, that the sooner any evildoers were put behind bars, the sooner we’d reopen—but she was admirably restrained. For Maria Pia.

When she mentioned that she was contemplating entering the Sisters of St. Margaret Retreat Center to, er, contemplate for a day, preparing for her induction into—here her voice dropped to a whisper like she was uttering a state secret—Belfiere, I told her she’d better let Detective Fanella know her whereabouts. She grunted at me and we hung up.