Basil Instinct (6 page)

I could most definitely play with their heads.

So, when class ended, I kept Georgia Payne and Corabeth Potts around. Corabeth let me know she was anxious about missing the bus back to CRIBS. I thought this concern showed some good stuff in the big girl. She was actually sweating a little. Narrowing my eyes, I had a moment wondering whether she was either high or snowing me, but thought not. Narrowing my eyes again—this time, trying to picture her dressed in the Miracolo look—I thought I could work with this girl.

So, I brought on the temporary help.

I hired Georgia—who mentioned she was hoping to get back into kitchen work after being away for a while— to be a second sous chef for the next few days. She seemed pleased, ready to show up at Miracolo the next day, and reasonably well dressed, without any part of her backside telling whole chapters of, say, the Tolkien trilogy. Corabeth I would turf to Paulette and Vera for a nuclear makeover that would find her waiting on customers before she could say Callowhill Residential Institute for Behavioral Success. I’d call the stalwart folks at CRIBS and square it with them. Georgia even offered to pick her up on the way to Miracolo later that afternoon.

On a mission, I swung by Target and shopped
for the Corabeth makeover. A size-16 pair of black pants with elasticized waistband. A white Oxford button-down shirt in XXL. And a box of Nice ’n Easy hair color in black, but then I thought the effect would be a little too Lily Munster, so I exchanged it for ash blonde. If Corabeth kicked up rough at the changes, Paulette would have to make it clear these were, well, conditions of employment. She needed to conform to the Miracolo “look.” Which I secretly believed was tiresome, but while Maria Pia Angelotta was in charge, what are you going to do? Black pants, white shirt.

In just forty-eight hours, the Miracolo “look” would also include murder, but for now, as I slung the Target bag into my car, we were keeping it down to nothing more than pants and shirts. When life was still simple.

Halfway back to my place, my phone sang out some Scott Joplin ragtime at me, and I picked up. “Hey, Eve,” said the caller. “It’s Joe Beck.” He always tells me his whole name, like I’m not going to recognize his voice, or he’s distinguishing the Joe he is from all the other Joes I must know, or he’s not quite comfortable being on just a first-name basis with me.

“Hi, Joe Beck. I’ve got a problem.”

“You mentioned.”

He didn’t sound nasty about it, so I forged ahead. “It’s my nonna.”

“I figured.”

In an acquaintance of just one month, already he got the picture of life in the Angelotta brood. Life happens to Maria Pia, and all the rest of us scramble around trying to push it back or just jump out of its way. In a sense, I suppose, life was not unlike lighted matches being flicked at you. “It’s a long story,” I told him, which is when I discovered that I thought it was.

“Highlights?”

“Oh, possible homicide, reckless endangerment, abuse of a recipe . . .” Was there no end to the stuff I was inventing that day?

Silence. “Just tell me now,” he said finally. “Any withholding of evidence?” Ah, Joe Beck. He of the long memory when it comes to my more problematic moves. But then, it had been only three weeks since the infamous bracelet incident during my last murder investigation.

“Not as of this time,” I hedged, reserving the right to withhold. Evidence, information, taxes, affection.

“Any breaking and entering?”

“Hey, bucko, you were with me!”

“To keep you from committing a felony.”

“Do we really want to split these particular hairs?” I said patiently.

Then: “Free for lunch?”

“Are you asking, or just telling me you have no social life?”

“Asking.”

“Because I’m sure Kayla’s available.” Low, Eve, low. He had shown remorse. Or, at least, a degree of embarrassment.

With a sigh, he explained, “This is a business lunch.”

“Oh.” More lighted matches. “I knew that.”

“My place in twenty?”

And then I got prissy. “I thought you said it’s a business lunch.” Was this the same woman who had plunged a Wüsthof knife into a butcher block not all that long ago? Maybe I should ask Renay where she got her python tattoo . . .

“It is. I mean my office.”

“Of course.”

Then his voice spiraled up in confusion. “I mean, I assume you want my legal help, right? I mean, this isn’t just a social call, right?”

“I believe I paid you a retainer.” Which was somehow beside the point, but I was fast losing a grip on the point . . .

“One dollar.”

I sounded haughty. “Will you be needing more?”

He laughed. “Than a buck? Depends on what I have to do for you, Angelotta.”

Was the man actually flirting with me? Or had it
really been that long since my one-off and misguided back-office romp with the FedEx guy that anything sounded sexy? “Well—” Why was my brain drifting to the leather couch in the Miracolo office? Was I truly no better than my flaky farming cousin?

“See,” he went on, “you could have said it’s a social call, and then wormed the legal advice out of me anyway.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Huh?”

“You should be so lucky,” I said with some spirit that really pretty much put me on a level with L’Shondra and Renay. “If it’s ever a social call, Joe Beck, you can be sure I’m not there—” I searched for the stuffiest words I could find—“under false pretenses.”

“Good!” said Joe Beck. Then, with a smile in his maddening voice, he added, “I’ll look forward to it. Now, what say you swing by Sprouts and pick us both up something for lunch. And, if you’re worried about our lawyer-client relationship staying pure, I won’t even offer to pay you back.”

“I should hope not.” What just happened here?

“I’m at 1220 Franklin Crescent. See you in twenty.” With that, he hung up.

*   *   *

After multiple calls to Choo Choo, to begin the extravagant reaming I had in mind, went unan
swered, I decided it was probably better done in person. Although it may involve a bit of a footrace. Note to self: Bring tennis shoes and a cheese grater. I swung by Sprouts—a trendy veggie restaurant, all of whose sandwiches are named after food warriors—just up the street from Miracolo. For Joe Beck I ended up with a Michael Pollan gluten-free wrap with locally grown, seasonal, and not too many vegetables, and for me I got an Alice Waters bagel with goat cheese schmear topped with sprouts grown by schoolkids. Then I swung by Starbucks and got two Ventis of the real thing, bold and black.

Two miles south on East Market Street, I turned west onto Franklin Boulevard and hit construction, where I waited out the lethargic (not to mention cryptic) hand signals of a hard-hatted gal planted on the blacktop in the bright June sunshine, and turned at last onto Franklin Crescent. The Crescent was a new three-story “colonial” office complex, where the developers were hoping you’d overlook the exterior glass elevators and underground parking warren in their attempt to make you think you were back in William Penn’s day. It turned out Carson and Beck, Attorneys at Law, were on the first floor of the second building, which I could get to through a beautiful brick archway and then a courtyard with a fountain I was pleased to see did not depend on cherubs peeing.

At that moment—in that place—I felt very far
away from Miracolo and the Quaker Hills Career Center. There’s something about the smell and sound of a fountain that makes me feel like I’ve landed on my time-traveling feet in a piazza somewhere on the Mediterranean. The sun, overhead, was glancing off the arc of the spray. It’s irresistible. I dug into my hemp bag and came up with my change purse, which actually held more than three coins, but that’s all my fingers pulled out.

A dime and two pennies.

Going for the cut-rate dreams, I pitched my puny twelve cents into the fountain, vowing never to tell Nonna. I don’t like to encourage her. Mind you, I really wanted to wish for nothing bad to happen to her at the hands of the Psycho-Chefs Club—really I did. But then I thought about wishing for the doomed Choo Choo Bacigalupo to trip on some little irregularity in the sidewalk as he beat it on down the street just ahead of me in my tennis shoes while I hurled my cheese grater at his bald head. In the end, though, as crazy as it sounds, I just wished for a nice lunch with Joe Beck—nice and not too business-y. Some laughs and longing looks from him that might have nothing to do with wishing for more mustard to mysteriously show up on his Michael Pollan wrap would also be welcome.

Inside the offices of Carson and Beck, I was pleased to see a male receptionist. Strictly from a
feminist angle, of course. The kid had the basics of grooming down, in that his pants covered his flesh, and whatever body art he may have had was staying coyly out of sight. I also appreciated his not sending anything flaming in my direction. In short, Milo Corwin (according to the nameplate on the kidney-shaped desk) looked like he most definitely did not fall out of CRIBS.

I set the cardboard multicup coffee holder and recyclable Sprouts bag on Milo’s desk. Then, just as I was giving the lad my name, with my hands stuffed in my pockets, which for some reason was reminding me of some movie with Charlize Theron, Joe Beck emerged from the office of the same name. He’s a compact kind of guy—about five foot nine inches’ worth of trim and lean—with dark blond hair cut short but not so short every single hair didn’t add to the total, beautifully shorn and golden effect.

He had blue eyes that really looked at you even when you wished they didn’t. He had the shoulders of a Marine and the hips of a work by Michelangelo. He had a smile that made you think all was peachy in the world even though snow leopards were endangered. And let’s not even address that dimple in the right cheek that rivaled all other facial sinkholes in all other humans. Just three weeks ago I had to stop my cousin, the kale-
loving Kayla, when she wanted to share the details of her three-night fling with this man. Because if there’s one thing I hate more than pepperoni pizza (a failure of imagination), it’s experiencing glorious things only secondhand.

Today he was wearing a crisp white shirt and summer-weight gray pants. In the awkward silence when we stood there looking at each other with our hands in our respective (instead of each other’s) pockets, Joe Beck said, “Angelotta,” with a smile that was just a little bit wary. The dimple was only semideployed.

“Beck,” I countered, thrusting the lunch at him.

“Hold my calls,” he said to Milo, which felt thrilling to me in a Hollywood kind of way. Then he opened an arm toward his inner sanctum—Milo actually gave me a look that told me it was all right, not that I asked, thank you very much—and I swept in front of Beck Boy into the heart of his lawyer lair.

I took a seat in an armless black leather chair and set the coffee on a glass and teak desk that I judged to be the size of Delaware. My esteemed counsel set down the Sprouts bag and took a seat in the Aeron chair the commercials have been calling “true black” for the last two years, easy. In silence he dug out the sandwiches so slowly you’d think they were evidence in a homicide. “It’s not
evidence in a homicide,” I said with a little eye roll as punctuation.

“It will be if you keep it up,” he rejoined (I think that’s the proper word).

For a moment I felt like the very annoying Brigid O’Shaughnessy from
The Maltese Falcon
. I uncrossed my legs. “Mine is the bagel.”

He grunted and we ate for a while in silence, our eyes on fascinating spots on his glass desk, on which sat an iPad and iPhone and (unbelievably) an old-fashioned desk calendar. All I could read upside down was something as fascinating as “pick up dry cleaning” on June 27th. What a life. I dabbed a Starbucks unchlorinated paper napkin at my lips, after which I wondered if I still had some lipstick going on.

“The problem?” he prompted, halfway through his Michael Pollan. No longing looks were coming my way that had anything to do with either mustard or sex. So be it.

I wound up: “Maria Pia got an invitation from Belfiere.” There. Enough said. Let him do what lawyers do: get restraining orders, file motions, put up billboards.

He waved his sandwich around in a dim but encouraging way. “Who is—?” said Joe Beck slowly.

“Belfiere,” I repeated, licking at the goat cheese schmear. “To quote my nonna,” I said, trying to be impartial, “the oldest all-female totally secret culi
nary society in the world.”

Joe Beck in the crisp white whatever and summer-weight ya-ha picked up his bold and black Venti. So did I. Together—if that’s what you can call it—we blew across the hot coffee and locked eyes. Was it a promise of things to come? Had I gotten all this on a mere twelve cents?

“And the problem is—?”

“Short story?” I said, trying to keep my mind on the problem.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Joe Beck, ditto.

“Landon and I—”

“Landon?” He looked like this was a first.

“My cousin.”

“Right, right, right.” And then he added, in case I was in any doubt: “Landon!”

“I’m glad this is a business lunch.”

“Totally.”

“We make a good team.”

He studied my lips. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Landon.” I blurted, setting aside the rest of my Alice Waters bagel.

“All right, all right. Landon.”

Be professional. This man doesn’t like you, I reminded myself. Have some pride. Use some common sense. For the love of God, you’ve invested a buck. “Landon and I”—I launched into the facts,
just for a change of pace—“did some research and discovered a post on a blog for the victims of cults by someone named Anna T. She had been a member of Belfiere.”

“Go on.” Joe Beck steepled his fingers. How could such short hair look so, well, disheveled?

I wiped my lips and fingers on a paper napkin and found myself wondering just how much weight a glass-top desk could withstand. “Anna T. described a poison-guessing ‘game’ they played that led to the collapse and death of one of the members.”

Joe Beck Lawyer kicked in. “Well, the police will have a record—”

I shook my head, smiling what I hoped was a knowing and superior smile. “Ah, no,” I countered. I actually raised my index finger. “The police,” I said, raising my eyebrows at him, “were never called.” I paused for dramatic effect. “Anna T. says nothing about the death ever appeared in the local newspapers.”