Mozzarella Most Murderous (20 page)

“Oh my goodness! That’s unconscionable! Sick people were dying because they didn’t get the drugs they thought they were paying for? Druggists have done that in our country. You wonder how such people—”

“And there’s the possibility that they were planning to ship illegal narcotics disguised as items on their regular product list.”

Of course I immediately thought of Sibyl and Hank and their new containers. If the toxic waste fumes couldn’t get out, then drug enforcement dogs probably couldn’t sniff the narcotics inside one of those containers. I’d have to warn Hank not to do business with Ruggiero. “Do you have any identification to prove that you are an Italian spy of some sort?” I asked. After all, he could have made all this up.

There was a knock on the door, and the short, mustachioed man entered. “The lady is Signora Carolyn Blue, General,” he said. “One of the cards is her room card, unless she stole it and the credit card. The other is a card the maids use to get into the rooms for cleaning purposes. That was undoubtedly stolen unless the maid was an accomplice.”

He spoke English! And he’d been pretending not to while he was twisting my arm and pushing me around! What a sneak! And now that he wanted to threaten me with the information he’d gathered, he spoke English. “Nunzia had nothing to do with it,” I said angrily. “I took the card from her cart because I expected to find Paolina’s red leather notebook in your room, General.”

“Explain that, please,” said the general.

“She carried it with her all the time and wrote poetry in it. You did know that she was a poet?” I studied his face, looking for signs that he, like all the other men in her life, had had no idea of Paolina’s depths and talents. “And I would like to see ID, please.”

“Loppi, Marsocca, show her some ID,” said the general.

“What about you?” I asked. The general opened his wallet and took out a photograph from a pocket that was hard to get into. It was of Paolina and said, “
A Papa
,” and was signed, “Lucia.”

“Her name was Lucia, Lucia Bianconi. I am Luca Bianconi, her father, and I did know that my daughter wrote poetry. I had a book of her poetry published for her twenty-fifth birthday.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling more tears about to embarrass me. “But why would you let her do something so dangerous? Perhaps that’s why she’s dead—because of her job.” Then I had a thought. “But maybe it wasn’t murder. Oh, dear, maybe it’s my fault!” All three men stared at me, gimlet-eyed. “I mean, I didn’t kill her, but I did tell her how Edna St. Vincent Millay died. Of a fall down stairs after the death of her husband. And Paolina, I mean Lucia, had had a disappointment. A—a male friend stood her up. You don’t think she threw herself down the waterfall, thinking her favorite poetess had committed suicide over love, so—”

“It was murder,” said the general sharply. “Lucia was not the type to commit suicide, certainly not over a man. You ask why I let her join my organization. She was a wild girl, promiscuous, in fact.”

“She was a free spirit,” I corrected him indignantly.

“That’s a kind way to put it, Signora. You evidently didn’t know her as well as you thought you did. However, I had hoped to satisfy her need for excitement and intrigue by giving her the job until such time as she matured enough to marry and give me grandchildren.” He sighed. “It was a mistake. And now, just to clear this matter up, Signora, where were you when my daughter was murdered?”

“Asleep, I imagine,” I replied. “As I said, we went sightseeing in Sorrento, had dinner together, hugged one another when I got off the elevator on the eighth floor, and then I went to bed. I didn’t see her again until I went out to the pool for coffee and spotted her body lying under the water. I dragged her out and tried to revive her, but I think—” I sniffed back tears. “I think she’d been dead for quite a while.”

He studied my face, nodded, and said, “Thank you for your friendship to my daughter on her last day. You may go now.”

“
Go?
Really, General, if you didn’t kill Paolina—Lucia, I should say—I have several other ideas. I have been investigating this, you know.”

 

I would have
been hesitant to tell her father my theories about Paolina’s death since each involved her having slept with a different man, but since he already knew—that thought disappeared from my head when a shocking idea occurred to me. Had he told his daughter to sleep with Ruggiero Ricci? He must have known that she was using her charms, as it were, to get information from the president of the company. Which seemed a little tacky and melodramatic.

But maybe she had fallen in love with Ruggiero, a handsome older man who perhaps reminded her of a father who had always been too busy waging war and running spy organizations to pay any attention to her. After all, he’d left her in a convent school. What a terrible dilemma for her—to be in love with the very man she was betraying to her father.

It sounded like an opera plot. One of the beautiful, new sopranos could sing Paolina; a tenor for Valentino, singing of unrequited love, maybe one of the new tenors from Mexico or South America; a baritone for Ruggiero, the lover-villain; and a bass for the general.

“You were going to make some suggestions, Signora,” prompted the general. He wasn’t singing.

What would a female sleuth in an opera be? I wondered. A mezzo? Jason had bought a CD by a fabulous new mezzo, very nice looking. She could play me.

“Signora?”

“Oh, yes. Well, I don’t want to embarrass you, General, but Paolina was Ruggiero Ricci’s mistress. Maybe he discovered that she was a spy. Or, and again I mention this with hesitation, but his office manager says she slept with someone else the night before she came to Sorrento, someone who visited Ricci in his office and stopped to talk to Paolina on the way out.”

“And did the office manager say who this visitor was?” asked the general.

Now this was touchy. “Well, she said it was a foreigner who spoke Italian and was perhaps an American, perhaps a participant in the conference, but that can’t be, because the only Americans are my husband, who doesn’t speak Italian, except for a few phrases from Italian opera, of which we’re very fond, especially Verdi, although Puccini—”

“Yes, yes,” said the general impatiently. “Everyone loves Italian opera.”

“Not so many Americans, actually, although I think opera is becoming more popular in our country. A number of the smaller cities have companies that do a few performances a year. El Paso, for instance. That’s where Jason and I live.”

“
Signora.
”

“Yes. Well, back to Jason; he was in Paris until the evening of the next day, as was Sibyl Evers, another American, a professor from Rutgers and, of course, being female and not even knowing Paolina, she wouldn’t have killed her. Sibyl’s husband Hank Girol is the third American, but he drove in from Rome the morning I found Paolina’s body, so I don’t think Gracia could have been right about the person being an American.”

“I see. Well, thank you, Signora Blue.”

“I’m not through,” I protested. “I haven’t even gotten to the better suspects, the more likely ones. If Ruggiero knew that Paolina took a new lover, he might have killed her out of jealousy, even if he didn’t know that she was a spy. He says he was in Catania that night, but who knows? I didn’t see him until late in the afternoon after she died, but he could have been here, and since he admits his wife was out of town, she can’t vouch for him, nor he for her.”

“You asked Signor Ricci these things?” asked Signor Loppi, who probably had some rank, but we hadn’t really been introduced, so I didn’t know.

“Well, tactfully,” I replied. “So as not to alert him that I suspected him. I also asked his wife, but she never answered me.” I felt a bit conflicted about implicating Constanza, who could be quite nice and obviously loved her children to distraction. “As I indicated, Signora Ricci-Tassone doesn’t have an alibi since she was not in Catania and didn’t appear publicly here until late afternoon, but she could have been in Sorrento. Her husband was not a faithful man, as I understand it, so she might have gotten fed up and killed his latest mistress, Paolina.

“And then there was the lover who was supposed to meet Paolina here in Sorrento and called to cancel. I believe I mentioned that. Perhaps he came after all and killed her for whatever reason. He could be anyone.” Oh, dear, that wasn’t very tactful. “And there’s Valentino Santoro, the toxicology expert at the Ricci company. He was madly, evidently hopelessly, in love with Paolina. Maybe knowing about her various lovers just—just pushed him over the edge. Which reminds me, Constanza Ricci-Tassone had hoped that Dr. Santoro would marry their daughter, Elizabetta. Maybe the mother killed Paolina so that Santoro would turn to the daughter for—ah—comfort.”

“Are you getting all this down, Marsocca?” the general asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Marsocca was very tall and looked quite amusing sitting in a spindly chair, his legs poked up, trying to make notes in a notebook balanced on one pointy knee.

“Ah! I forgot another possibility. Gracia Sindacco, the office manager at the chemical company, told a friend of mine that she thought Signor Ricci’s father might have hired a hit man to kill Paolina to avenge the honor of his family when she took a lover other than his son. He was evidently a Mafia person in his younger days. Now I gather he’s in ill health and couldn’t have committed murder himself. At least, that’s what Gracia said, and I see no reason for her to lie. She definitely didn’t seem to like him. In fact, she called him an evil old man.”

“And to whom have you mentioned this information, Signora?” the general asked me.

“To you. Obviously. Bianca Massoni knows all about it; she’s been helping me with the investigation. To Lieutenant Buglione of the Polizia di Stato, although I can’t say that he seems inclined to act on anything I’ve told him. And I offered my insights to Captain Pagano and Lieutenant Vacci of the Carabinieri. They arrived the second day and said they’d interview me after breakfast, but they never did. They didn’t even come back to the hotel yesterday that I know of, and when they arrived this morning, they went off to breakfast again. That’s what Bianca said, anyway. I was in the gift shop and didn’t see them.”

“I see.” The general frowned. “Well, you have amassed an impressive number of suspects, Signora,” he said. “We shall certainly look into these people. Have you any last thoughts you’d care to pass on?”

Is he making fun of me?
I wondered.
Oh, of course not. Why would he?
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I replied.

Loppi rolled his eyes. I think he was trying not to smile. “I saw that, Signor Loppi,” I said sternly. “And I see no cause for amusement in the situation. In fact, I take it very seriously. I would not have been assembling information and possibly putting myself if harm’s way if I didn’t.”

“We appreciate your efforts, Signora,” said the general, “and your evident concern for my daughter.”

“I was not laughing, General,” protested Loppi, his olive skin flushing, and his rather large, out-flung ears turning bright red.

“Signora,” prompted the general, ignoring his subordinate.

“Well, General.” I leaned forward. “It’s my opinion that if you find Paolina’s red notebook, which has been missing since her death, you will find her murderer. I suppose you’ll need warrants to search the rooms of the suspects I mentioned—”

“Did you have a warrant to search my room?” he asked.

“No, of course I didn’t have a warrant. I’m not a police officer, but for Paolina’s sake, and considering my suspicions of you, I did feel that the search was
warranted.
” I was rather pleased with my pun and wondered if he’d caught it. Puns in a language not one’s own are probably difficult to appreciate. “Be that as it may, the room in which you find the red notebook will be the room of the murderer, unless, of course, he or she has planted it in some other room to throw suspicion on someone else. One can’t discount that possibility.”

“Are you, Signora, by any chance a reader of detective fiction?”

“Only occasionally,” I replied, then added modestly, “but I have had some experience in investigating murders.”

“Have you?” The general gave me a strange look.

Good heavens, surely he didn’t think I might be a suspect. But probably not, since he thanked me for my input and escorted me to the door himself. He hadn’t even risen to greet me when I arrived, or rather was shoved into his presence. Before opening the door for me, he warned that I should say nothing about the investigation of the Ricci company, and thanked me again.

 

As the general
and I stood in the doorway shaking hands, I noticed the Carabinieri striding across the lobby, looking well fed. Had they been at the breakfast buffet all this time? They arrived in front of us and saluted sharply. The general returned their salutes, but said nothing. Just stared at them thoughtfully. Captain Pagano introduced himself and his subordinate. The general introduced me. “But you have already met Signora Blue, haven’t you?” he asked in English. “Several days ago, I believe.”

Lieutenant Flavia Vacci smiled at me. The captain mumbled something that acknowledged my presence and then told the general how honored they were to have the chance of meeting a man who had done so much to investigate the Mafia in Sicily. “We have come to offer whatever humble assistance we can to you, General Bianconi,” said Pagano.

“You have interviewed people, gathered information, have you?” asked the general.

“We are at your command,” said Pagano, eyes shifting uneasily.