Mozzarella Most Murderous (10 page)

Oh God
, I thought.
I’m going to have a white face with round red circles on my cheeks. And how will I remove the dried paste?

“Of course, other Italians, such a noisy people, made a fuss as well. Please stop wiggling, Madame Blue.”

“I wasn’t wiggling. I was about to say something.”

“Oh, very well. What is it?”

“I didn’t realize that large dogs were allowed in the cabin of a plane. Is that customary in Europe?”

“Where else would he sit? We paid for his seat, of course. Now, do not talk. I must apply lipstick.” And she did. “And now the eyes.” She stared into mine, as impersonal as if I were a canvas upon which she planned to paint an eye.

“Actually, I’d rather not—”

“I insist,” said Albertine Guillot sternly. “My dog is responsible for your injury to the detriment of your appearance, so I am, as the owner of the dog, responsible for what repairs can be made.” And she selected an eyebrow pencil from the array of cosmetics she had laid out, clamped a finger to my temple, suggested that my eyebrows could use a professional plucking, and drew lines. “You may talk while I work on your eyes, as long as you do not become so expressive as to move your head, brows, or eyelids.”

Well, that was very thoughtful. Now I could talk. As if I wanted to talk to Albertine Guillot. “Your English is very good,” I said grudgingly.

“But of course. I studied it from childhood. I cannot imagine why you Americans allow your children to grow up with only one language.” She had outlined my eyes with another pencil.

“Are you well acquainted with the Riccis?” I asked, thinking that I might obtain some information for my investigation into Paolina’s death.

“My husband has known Ruggiero for some years,” she replied. “Signor Ricci is, as you might imagine, a man given to many indiscreet liaisons with young women. The death of his secretary, however it happened, will no doubt prove to be embarrassing to him and to Constanza for a time.”

She was now applying eye shadow. I hadn’t noticed the color and hoped that it wasn’t red, which does not look good on me, or anyone else, in my opinion.

“And have you met Mrs. Ricci before?” I asked.

“Several times. Her taste in designers is excellent, although her Italian ancestry skews her color selections.”

I remembered a trip to Paris and the realization that all the women were wearing black. No doubt Albertine Guillot felt that any choice other than black was in poor taste. “I understood that Signora Ricci was of Norman ancestry.”

“Quite true,” my snobbish, multilingual cosmetician agreed as she brushed mascara onto my eyelashes. “And she is most fortunate that her Norman-French blood guides her to some extent in her wardrobe selection. There.” She put away the mascara brush and box, gathered up the cosmetics she hadn’t used on me, and informed me that she would leave the others so that I could take care of my appearance myself in the days to follow.

Then she left! She didn’t even hand me a mirror and ask what I thought of the remodeling job. She had closed the door before I climbed off the stool and went over to a mirror. And I must admit that one would never know her dreadful dog had attacked me. In fact, I looked quite dramatic, although I doubted that I’d ever be able to reproduce the effect.

So Ruggiero Ricci was given to many indiscreet liaisons, was he? Did that mean that Paolina had been the first woman to cheat on him, and that he had been so indignant that he killed her? Or did it mean that his wife finally got fed up with his infidelity and killed Paolina to give him a scare?

 

I blamed Lorenzo
for stirring the children into such wild moods, for he wrestled with them in bed and made jokes about the food at breakfast until they were overcome with giggles. What a wonderful father he is to my darlings! And then, once he had gone off to more serious pursuits, there was his mother, who welcomed them to her room, although they were bouncing off the walls, and suggested all sorts of delights to fill their day—a boat ride, for instance. Of course, they wanted to know why Mama wasn’t going along, but Violetta told them that I was too fat, that I’d sink the boat, which, of course, caused more laughter, although it was all too true. I hadn’t seen my feet in several months, and Lorenzo had to help me on with my shoes because I could no longer do it myself.

But with the children taken care of, I had well over an hour before I was to meet the others in the lobby for our tour of the Amalfi Coast, one of our country’s most beautiful sights. As I was coming out of my room, I saw the French woman knocking at Carolyn’s door. Even if Carolyn proved to be the murderer of my countrywoman, I wouldn’t have wished a visit from Albertine Guillot on her so early in the morning. What could that be about? Was she going to scold Carolyn for getting knocked over by the Frenchies’ ill-mannered dog? And Madame Guillot had had the nerve to frown at me and my children while I was sitting on the floor in the hall! I ducked back into my room, peeked out to be sure she was gone, and then headed for the elevator. I’d see if I could find a maid to question on the ninth floor until the coast was clear on Eight. After all, Paolina’s room had been on Nine, even if her body was found in the pool below.

I was quite lucky, for there had been no housekeeping carts that I could see on Eight, whereas a cart sat outside nine-oh-four near an open door, which usually meant there was a maid to be found inside, in this case, a friendly woman named Nunzia, whose graying hair was tucked back in a bun and whose nose featured an unfortunate wart.

“Good morning,” I said gaily, and entered the room to introduce myself and mention my own room number, asking if she knew when the rooms on Eight would be made up. She replied that she covered both the eighth and ninth floors but could go downstairs if I needed to have my room done sooner. I assured her that whenever she got to it was convenient for me, that I just wanted to apologize for the state of the bedclothes, which were mostly on the floor when my husband and children got through with them.

Nunzia, happily, liked children, as most Italian women do, and asked about mine. We had quite a chat before I managed to work the conversation around to the young woman who had died in the pool. “Such a pity,” said Nunzia. “A very pretty girl. She must have gone swimming in the early morning, which is forbidden, of course, since the hotel is owned by the Swiss. They forbid everything, including maids under the age of forty. They don’t want the customers flirting with the staff, those Swiss.”

Of course I asked why Nunzia thought Paolina had died in the morning rather than at night, and Nunzia said because her bed had been slept in the night before she was found in the pool, a very quiet sleeper she was, only the dent in the pillow to show she had been there.

“What? So young and pretty and no lover?” I asked.

We both chuckled, and Nunzia assured me that Signorina Marchetti had spent both nights alone, although she had an American friend, a woman, who had returned to the hotel with her that afternoon talking of a Mafia wedding. “The Americans, they think all Italians are Mafia. So silly,” said Nunzia. “Here it is the Camorra.”

With some difficulty I managed to get across to the rather innocent Nunzia that I wondered just what sort of friendship the dead girl and the American had had. Poor Nunzia was shocked when she caught on and wondered if she shouldn’t have stayed on the farm with her parents, respectable folk who would be distressed to think their daughter worked in a place where unnatural sexual activities might be occurring. Then she recalled that Paolina and the American had hugged and agreed to meet for dinner when they parted at the elevator, and that the American’s bed had been mussed with both pillows slept on.

Ah ha
! I thought, very pleased with the information I was gathering. Perhaps Carolyn and Paolina had slept together in Carolyn’s bed, then quarreled by the pool, where Paolina had struck her head when pushed. After that she fell or was pushed into the pool, and Carolyn left her there, dead or drowning. It could have happened that way. Instead of Paolina being thrown or jumping from the ninth floor, as the police thought. After all, who would trust
them
to get it right? I considered it very unlikely that Carolyn would be strong enough to dump another woman over the railing.

“Yes,” Nunzia was saying, “it was a strange day, the day they found the girl in the pool. I discovered in my cart—” she gestured toward the wheeled cart in the hall—“a tray, two pretty plates, and two wine glasses. The cart was in the housekeeping room on the eighth floor, and the dishes, surely a gift from the Holy Virgin, were hardly chipped at all, and they weren’t the hotel’s! It is not allowed to bring such things into the hotel with food and drink. Very strange indeed.

“Since the police didn’t ask me about them, I took them home. I imagine they belonged to the American. Americans are so rich, you know. They probably carry around their own dishes and throw them away when they’re soiled. Or maybe she threw them away after her argument with the dead girl. Such sinful conduct, to seduce an Italian girl!”

“Yes,” I agreed. “In some places in America, women are allowed to marry women and men, men.”

Nunzia gasped and crossed herself. “I wonder if the Holy Father knows of these things. It must be very hard to be a good Catholic in America. I’ve heard terrible things about the American priests.” She whispered the last. “I don’t know whether to believe such things or not.

“And then this morning when I was getting the cart to take upstairs, I thought I saw Saint Giuseppe Moscati. What a fright he gave me. Came right around the corner and bumped into my cart, looking very upset.”

Ah
, I thought.
Ruggiero Ricci. He does look like the Naples doctor who was sainted not so long ago, although Ricci’s no saint. A saint would never squeeze the knee of a pregnant woman and propose to meet her in Rome once she’s had her baby.

“It gave me a shock, but of course he wasn’t the saint. He sounded Sicilian to me, and Saint Moscati was from Napoli, bless his kindly soul. He ministered to the poor without charging a
lira
. My own grandfather, who was burned in a big eruption of Vesuvius, was healed by the saint’s very hands. But this one, I heard him shouting, ‘What did you do?’ and some foreigner—he spoke Italian, but he was a foreigner—he said, ‘I wasn’t here. Where were you?’ and the one who looked like the saint said, ‘In Catania, of course.’ Then the foreigner said, ‘Maybe it was your wife,’ and the one from Sicily, where Catania is, said, ‘Don’t be a fool,’ and he came storming around the corner right into my cart. What a day!”

“What did the foreigner look like?” I asked, knowing that when I told Carolyn this tale, she’d want to know, or at least pretend to be interested.

“I didn’t see him. He must have gone the other way,” said Nunzia. “Shall I bring some candy for the pillows of your children? A little surprise? I make it the way my mother did.”

“Why, Nunzia, they’d love it. You must stop by our room tomorrow morning and meet them.”

By then Nunzia, having finished making the bed and emptying the waste baskets, was about to do the bath, so we parted good friends, and I stopped by my room on Eight before going downstairs to meet the others. I’d had an excellent and rather amusing idea. I’d dial 112, the Carabinieri, and report the murder. Although they are our military police, their functions overlap those of the Polizia di Stato outside the big cities. Wouldn’t Lieutenant Buglione be surprised when they showed up? And maybe something would be done to solve the murder. If not, at least they could entertain us by arguing over jurisdiction.

 

I put away
the black jacket I had been considering before Albertine Guillot arrived to make me look normal again—better than normal, actually. I still had over an hour before I was to meet Hank in the lobby, more than enough time for breakfast. Of course, Jason had already been out for a run, eaten breakfast, and was now in a conference room talking about toxins. I’d have to eat by myself.

When I stopped by the desk in the lobby to ask for more hotel stationery so that I could write to the children when I got back from Amalfi, I promptly made a fool of myself by telling the clerk what excellent English she spoke. In reply to my compliment, she grinned and said that was probably because she was a native of Michigan, doing a hotel internship with the Swiss company that owned the Grand Palazzo Sorrento.

“Well, that explains the rules posted everywhere,” I remarked, not very tactfully, but she laughed and introduced herself, Jill McLain of Ann Arbor. We fell into conversation about how she liked living in Italy—a lot; how long she’d been here—almost a year; and last, but most important, what, if anything, she knew about Paolina Marchetti.

“Actually, she’s been here before,” said Jill, “several times. Because I was meeting American friends to celebrate that night, I particularly remember that she was a guest of the hotel on the Fourth of July.”

“Alone?” I asked, trying to seem casual about it.

“No, she met an older man, very distinguished looking.”

Ruggiero Ricci
, I thought.

“They registered under the same name but had separate rooms, and it doesn’t seem to me that the name was Marchetti. Odd, now that I think of it.” Jill tugged thoughtfully at the brown strands of hair that curved in toward her chin. “What was that name? I can’t remember.”

“Do you think they were lovers?” I asked.

“I suppose they could have been. They were certainly very affectionate, and she was so upset when he was called away on business. She cancelled her own reservation and left. Maybe it was one of those May-December romances, and they were trying to act like uncle and niece or something.” Jill laughed. “You’d be surprised at how many of those uncle-niece couples we get.”