Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery (14 page)

Renie debated decking the most recent breakfast thief. The punchout with Daphne Huggins might have sapped Mavis’s strength, but she was four inches taller and ten pounds heavier than Renie. And Renie was debilitated by hunger.

With a sigh of resignation, she stood on her tiptoes and reached for the Shredded Wheat.

“Well, Dash,” said Mavis, “police spokespersons tell me you knew the dead woman. Intimately.”

“That’s the best way to know most women,” Dash replied with a sly grin.

“Skunk!” Mavis flared, caught Ellie’s wide gray gaze, and clenched her teeth.

Ellie stopped nibbling on her toast. “What are you talking about?”

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“What do you care?” snapped Mavis. “What I’d like to know is what name Dash—or Rico here—used when he married Wanda.”

“That’s an easy one,” Dash responded, setting his empty plate aside. “Artie Allegro. Nickname Ankles, for obvious reasons.” He pushed back his chair, placed one sockless leg over his other knee, and wiggled his foot. “Get it?”

“Keep it.” Mavis curled her lip over her coffee cup. “You took that one after doing five-to-ten in Soledad, right?”

The chilling look Dash gave Mavis was so fleeting that Judith almost thought she’d imagined it. “Two and a half. I got out early for good behavior. And I was framed,” he added with dignity. “Guilt by association. It can happen,” he observed with a glance at Ellie.

“It happened twice.” Joe Flynn was in the kitchen, holding the swinging door behind him. “Conspiracy, racketeering, bribery, fraud, everything but forgetting the words to the

‘Star Spangled Banner.’ After Soledad, three years in San Quentin. A parole violation for an unscheduled trip to Europe. Who was your travel agent? The Mafia? I’ll bet they booked you into Sicily.”

Judith had to admit that Dash’s self-control was exemplary.

He regarded Joe much like one fraternity brother ragging another. “Northern Italy only. Milan, Florence, Lake Como.

Some shrines, of course. You ever been, Flynn? The Irish are hot for shrines. When they sober up, they get all weepy.”

“Shrines!” blurted Judith, oblivious to Joe’s rising ire. “The last time Joe was in church, he got sick and threw up in the collection basket!”

Joe glared at Judith. “I had the twelve-hour flu. And how the hell do you know the last time I went to church?”

“Prison!” exclaimed Ellie, already having dropped her toast in her coffee. “Oh, Dash, were you really framed?”

“Like a Rembrandt, and just as deserving,” Mavis put in viciously. “I’m surprised he’s not still there.”

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“Don’t tell me Herself got all three of her other marriages annulled!” railed Judith, facing Joe with hands on hips. “What did she do, take the Pope out for drinks?”

Joe was livid, his eyebrows bristling, the gold flecks striking dangerous sparks in the green eyes. “Put a cork in the personal crap! This is a murder investigation, Mrs. McMonigle!”

He stopped, aware that the others had interrupted their wrangling to listen. Except, it seemed, for Renie, who was stuffing her face with Shredded Wheat and making chewing noises that sounded like an army marching on gravel. Joe gripped Judith’s arm. “I’m the one getting the annulment,”

he said in a voice both low and fierce. “Herself can get stuffed.”

TEN

JUDITH’S DARK EYES had grown very wide. Under the red sweater, her heart gave a lurch. She had a terrible desire to laugh out loud, but just stood there in the middle of the kitchen and wondered why she felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

Then, as reality set in, she recognized that whether Joe and his wife were separated, divorced, annulled, or in quar-antine had nothing to do with her. The only thing that really mattered when it came to Joe Flynn was that he should wrap up his murder investigation and blow away the clouds of doom that hung over Hillside Manor. And, if he couldn’t manage to do that quickly enough to save Judith’s reputata-tion, then she intended to do it for herself. With a lift of her chin, Judith took a step backward. Joe dropped his hand.

“Good luck,” she said lightly. “The archdiocese has tightened some of the loopholes in canon law.” She had no idea what she was talking about, but it sounded good.

“I’ve got some loopholes of my own to close up,” said Joe, his color back to normal as he moved briskly 103

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to the phone on the wall. “I’m going to jack up that M.E.

He’s taking too long.”

Everything was taking too long for Judith. Hurriedly, she wiped her hands off on a dish towel and excused herself to her guests. To her relief, the living room was empty, Lance apparently having limped upstairs with Harvey’s help. Judith sunk down on the window seat next to the bookcase and pulled out an almanac. She had just flipped to the index when Renie appeared, dollops of milk on her sweatshirt and an anxious expression on her face.

“Are you okay?”

Judith started to shrug off her cousin’s concern, then took a deep breath. “Yeah, I think I am. I just had to escape for a couple of minutes. I keep feeling as if I’m riding a carousel that’s out of control.” She cradled the almanac against her bosom. “It’s not just Joe…It’s this whole mess. Every time somebody says or does something, instead of answering questions, new ones are posed. I need time to think, to sift everything through my mind.” She paused, pressing her lips together and glancing out the window at the rose garden.

The fog had finally cleared off, with patches of blue sky breaking through the glowering gray clouds. “It’s quiet right now. Let’s go upstairs and brainstorm.”

Unimpeded for once by their guests, the cousins reached the sanctuary of Judith’s bedroom under the eaves. Kicking off her shoes, Judith flopped down on the bed and was sorely tempted to stretch out for a nap. She had been up now for over twenty-seven hours. It occurred to her that along about five a.m. she had gone beyond the point of giving in to fa-tigue and had advanced to the stage where sheer nerve takes over.

Renie was sprawled in the chair where Ellie had perched a few hours earlier. “Well? What does the almanac reveal?

I hope it’s more specific than Madame Gushenka.”

“Football,” muttered Judith, flipping to the latter part of the thick volume. “Rose Bowl games…Here it is,
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1966, UCLA 14, Michigan State 12.” She looked up from the fine print. “You remember that game?”

“I sure do,” said Renie with unexpected gusto. “Don’t you?

Cousin Sue and Ken had just bought their house on the other side of the lake and she won five hundred dollars in a football pool. She bought that god-awful cut-velvet settee and those lamps with the safari shades.”

Judith grinned. “Really hideous. And the house turned out to be an ex-brothel that smelled so bad they had to move out three months later.”

Renie nodded in amused reminiscence. “That was after they tried to fumigate the place and the neighbors’ goat wandered in and died of cyanide poisoning because he got into the—Oh, good grief!” Renie’s brown eyes locked with Judith’s black gaze. “The fumigating material had cyanide in it! Do you suppose that somebody got hold of the stuff they’re using at the Brodies and popped it into the coffee cup?”

Judith thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask an expert. Like Dooley.” She put the almanac aside and straightened up the rumpled comforter. “What about the UCLA connection? So far, Ellie, Lance, Mavis, Dash, and Harvey have all gone to school there. We know Ellie and Dash were from the L.A. area. Maybe Mavis is, too.”

“She’s very L.A.,” said Renie, with the typical disparage-ment of a native Pacific Northwesterner. “Aggressive. Ambi-tious. Hard-working. Not to mention being in what some would call a glamour job.”

“Right. Easy to check out. But how did Lance and Harvey get there?”

“I know that,” said Renie brightly. “Harvey did his undergraduate work at the university here, then went on to med school at UCLA. And Lance won a football scholarship. He majored in art because it was the only subject he could spell.”

“What about P.E.?” Judith didn’t wait for an answer to her own facetious question. “How did you find all that out?”

“Actually,” replied Renie, tucking her feet under her, “I sort of pieced it together from remarks made while
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Harvey was hauling Lance out from under the dinette table.

Somehow, the subject came up, so I asked Ellie about it just now.”

“All of a sudden this place looks like a Bruin reunion,”

mused Judith. “Who do we know who went to UCLA?”

“Cousin Marty did, for a while,” replied Renie.

Judith looked askance. “Marty went everywhere, including Alfred U.”

“He made that up,” insisted Renie.

“No, he didn’t. It’s in New York. Anyway, he’d be too young for this crew.”

“We could call Westwood,” Renie suggested.

“And ask what? If the dean of students at UCLA remembered how Dash and Harvey and Mavis and Ellie got along on campus?” Judith gave her cousin a withering look.

“Besides, it’s Saturday. Nobody would be around.” She stopped, some shard of memory pricking at her brain. “There was something—somebody—else…Dr. Edelstein, that’s who.

His obituary said he’d gone to UCLA.”

“Gosh,” pouted Renie, “I’m feeling left out. I knew I should have gone away to school.”

Judith ignored her cousin’s lament and frowned. “I’m not sure the UCLA connection helps us much. Ellie met Dash there, I gather, and Harvey. Dash met Mavis and Lance. And Lance and Mavis met each other. But it appears Ellie didn’t know Dash knew Mavis—or Lance at the time. And Edelstein is way out in left field.” She straightened the stack of books on her nightstand and wondered if she’d ever again feel free to cozy up under the covers with a good page-turner. “How’d Lance fall down in the first place? That gimpy knee, I suppose.” She paused, looking back down at the almanac. “So Dash tries to bribe Lance to throw the Rose Bowl, or at least get a big point spread in Michigan State’s favor. Lance can’t—or won’t, and UCLA wins by two, which must have thrown the oddsmakers for a loop. Lots of people lose a bundle and maybe Dash has to knuckle under to the mob—or at least to his father, Dukes Frascatti. Make sense?”

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“As much as anything else about now,” said Renie, pulling her sweatshirt over her head and putting it back on the right way. “So what ‘family’ was Oriana talking about on the back stairs with Dash? A real one, or gangsters?”

Judith tried to remember exactly what Oriana had said.

“She mentioned blackmail, stabbed to the heart, and—what was it?—no sense of family. That sounds more like blood relatives than mobsters.”

“In this case, maybe both.” Renie ran a hand through her short brown hair. “I wonder what Oriana’s maiden name was.”

“Bustamanti,” said Judith. “At least that’s the name she sang under. What are you thinking of?”

“Well, they’re both of Italian descent,” Renie pointed out.

“They could be related.”

“They don’t look alike,” said Judith dubiously.

“Neither do we.”

“True. Cousins, maybe?”

Renie shrugged. “Dash was in Italy. Maybe Oriana was singing there. Do you still get
Opera News?
”

Judith shook her head. “I had to give it up years ago as a luxury I couldn’t afford, along with toothpaste and shoes.”

She gave her cousin a wry look. “Then, after I started the B&B, I couldn’t listen to the Saturday Met broadcasts because of the weekend guests. I’ve got all my old copies, though, down in the basement.”

“Let’s look through them,” suggested Renie. “It’s a long shot, but we might find out something about Oriana in the international reviews.”

Judith agreed, then suddenly bolted off the bed. “My God!

Where is Oriana now? She never came down for breakfast!”

At a gallop, Judith and Renie headed down to the second floor. A multitude of grisly scenarios swam before her mind’s eye: Oriana poisoned in her bed, Oriana strangled with the drapery cord, Oriana shot with a .357 magnum. The prospect of another murder, had been kept at bay. Yet any killer who had dared to strike once wouldn’t hesitate
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the second time around. Ellie had suggested as much. Judith’s heart was pounding as hard as her feet when they reached the hallway and heard the strains of the Habañera floating out from the near bathroom.

“Thank God!” breathed Judith, leaning against the door that led to Otto and Oriana’s room. “She’s never sounded so good!” As Judith let her shoulders slump in relief, the door creaked open, almost causing her to lose her balance. “Well!”

said Judith softly, eyeing her cousin with a conspiratorial look honed to perfection by almost a half century of practice.

“Well, well.”

Otto was obviously elsewhere, no policeman sat on duty in the wicker chair, and Oriana was still singing her head off. The cousins tiptoed into the bedroom. The Brodies had been given the largest of the guest rooms, with a king-sized bed in a reasonable facsimile of First Empire design and a chest of drawers and dressing table to match. Judith took the precaution of locking the bathroom door while Renie immediately began rummaging as quietly as possible through the Brodies’ luggage.

The pickings were scant, as might be expected for an overnight stay. Otto’s brown leather suitcase revealed only shaving gear, a change of underwear, socks, slippers, a silk bathrobe, and a pair of orange and green striped pajamas.

Oriana’s eelskin bag contained black lingerie, a tiger-print negligee, black satin mules, and the clothes she’d worn the previous night. Disappointed, Renie shook her head at Judith, who was plundering Oriana’s purse.

“Ah!” mouthed Judith, waving a medicine bottle and tapping at the label. Renie pointed to her eyes, indicating that she didn’t have her glasses. “Nembutal, Oriana’s prescrip-tion,” whispered Judith, unscrewing the lid. She showed the capsules to Renie. “Easy to use.”

Oriana launched into the Seguidilla. Judith extracted a small leather-bound appointment book and flipped through the pages. Sure enough, Otto was right—Oriana had a message or facial scheduled virtually twice a week. “Pam-JUST DESSERTS / 109