You Cannoli Die Once (13 page)

I looked at Joe, standing in the doorway to the courtyard, backlit by the tiki lights and the moon. And I smiled at him, the good-looking guy who made tea for destabilized neighbors, the guy who could now garnish plates with the best of them.

“Anytime at all. Just watch out for the compost, Beck,” I teased. We exchanged smiles that seemed to say we were already better friends than I knew, and something flashed between us that felt very nice indeed.

Raising the bottle in a salute, he was off.

Landon closed up the front and when the dining room went dark, Paulette and I waited for him by the back door. When he came into view in the semidarkness, we all smiled wanly and went out into the night. With as much satisfaction as I could muster at 12:47 a.m., I locked our brandnew Schlage and followed them down the brick walk to the street.

On Market Square, the streetlights showed a deserted street. Though Jolly’s Pub was still open, no one was spilling out the front door, either on their own or assisted by the frightening Adrian. Paulette called a final “good night!” and set off toward the parking garage two blocks away. I could feel Landon relax when we were finally alone, and we set off arm in arm toward our cars.

As we neared mine, I saw a towering figure lounging against the hood. Choo Choo.

We ran the rest of the way, flinging ourselves at Chooch, who wrapped his arms around both of us at once. Nobody cried; we were too tired.

“How’s Nonna?” breathed Landon. His voice dropped. “Is she on … suicide watch?”

Choo Choo smoothed a beefy hand over his skull. “Nonna?” he asked, incredulous.

I knew what he meant: she puts
other
people on suicide watch.

“Is it awful?” I breathed. Knowing Maria Pia, instead of sweetening the jailer with smokes or chocolates, she’d antagonize him with hurled, untranslatable words and a hand gesture that pretty much tells him his ass looks like a turkey’s tail feathers.

He shook his head. “When I left she was just sitting there on her bunk.”

Landon looked earnest. “Upper or lower?” Somehow the answer mattered.

“Lower. No roommate. Yet.”

This was a lot of information, so the three of us went silent for a minute.

Then Landon tried to sound chipper. “Sounds okay—I mean, doesn’t it,
bella
?” He turned to face me. He looked more than usually anxious, and I couldn’t say why.

Choo Choo just looked at me. “Nonna wants to see you tomorrow sometime, Eve.”

“I was planning on it.”

“She says be sure not to forget, because … ”

As it registered that he was biting his lip, I took a step back. “Tell me, Choo Choo.”

He slammed his hand on the hood of my car. Then he looked at us with a ragged, haunted expression. “She had motive, means, and opportunity, Eve. And she said she has something to confess.”

Friday

I lay in the dark in my loft, faceup and uncovered, until the clock said almost 3:30 a.m. Who was Arlen Mather? And why was he playing at being someone named Maximiliano Scotti? Had he just put it on for the opera fund-raiser? What had he been up to? And what did it have to do with opera memorabilia? I just couldn’t get a fix on our murder victim.

Still, there was one new clue.

On a whim I dug around for my phone and hit a number on speed dial that I hadn’t called in quite some time. I knew he’d still be up, that insomniac, splendiferous dancer pal of mine. He answered, wide awake. “Angelotta?” came his happy bellow.

“Tone!” I was absurdly happy to hear the voice of Tony Treadwell. We talked for half an hour, Tony filling me in on some recent auditions, good, bad, and most definitely ugly. We laughed a lot. Things were good with Lila, his live-in girlfriend, and they had bought a dachshund and named him Nijinsky. I filled him in on the murder and my jailed nonna, and how there wasn’t anything much happening in my love life. (Tony always gets the truth.)

Then Tony asked about my leg and when I was coming back.

What a funny notion. “To the City?”

“To dance, you goof!”

I felt so touched. There was still someone who viewed my defection three years ago as mere recuperation. I sniffed a little and told him I had no plans beyond tomorrow’s menu.

“Listen, Tone, I need some info. Do you still see Veronica Gale?”

Veronica was the over-the-top set designer for an Off-Broadway musical about the lost city of Atlantis that Tony had played the second lead in. I’d remembered that she had the same creds as Arlen Mather: ASID I had googled it earlier, and discovered it stood for the American Society of Interior Designers. Veronica Gale might be able to take me a step further.

“Sure. All the time.”

I explained what I needed him to find out from Veronica, and I had to get him to promise to wait until morning. Laughing, he agreed, and then he said he’d send me audition information for the upcoming revival of
The Boys from Syracuse.
I actually agreed to meet for lunch at the Broadway Deli sometime in the next two weeks.

When we hung up, I felt deeply happy. No, it wasn’t happiness exactly. It was a quiet certainty that I had reconnected with an important part of my life. Tony stood for dance, for my life before my days and nights consisted of cooking northern Italian dishes. Lying there beneath the cool ceiling fan, I saw dance in the fan, I felt dance in my pulse, I heard dance in the rasp of the peepers in the woods.

But fans slow to a stop, pulses settle down, and peepers go away.

My Broadway dance career was over.

Now my life was all about Quaker Hills, Miracolo, and most important, my family.

My mind kept stealing back to Choo Choo’s words:
She has something to confess.

The words fell in rhythm with the fan as it spun in its slow, dependable circles.

Something to confess. Something to confess. Something to confess.

What could Nonna possibly have to confess? I would never believe that she would commit murder, so what could it be? I decided it had to have something to do with cooking. Something about a recipe. Something shocking. And then I talked myself into believing the absolute worst: that it was she, not that
strega
Belladonna Russo, who used the Stella D’oro ladyfingers in the recipe for her contest tiramisu.

And with that, I finally fell asleep.

*

In the warm morning light, over a couple of espresso shots in my butterfly chair while the sun burned off the dew, I wish I could tell you things looked better.

They did not.

Sometimes we really do expect too much from coffee.

The neighbor’s poodle wandered over for his usual stroking and patting; then he gave me a reproachful look that seemed to say
Get over yourself,
and trotted off, his tags jingling. The birds, singing on branches backlit by the sun, didn’t get it, either.

Nonna was in jail. Dana was sneaking around topless. Landon hadn’t been this anxious since Kurt had come out to his dad on
Glee.
And Kayla was Kayla.

Which, for me, was a source of bafflement greater than why the cops thought my nonna had beaned her boyfriend. So she hadn’t picked up the alterations from Saks. So she was seen entering Miracolo at the key time. You call that suspicious?

Because I certainly do.

This was a job for shopping therapy.

So I checked in with my key people. Choo Choo agreed to make the trip to the Philly fish market for the
fritto misto di pesce
special for that evening, and Paulette would drive out to our supplier to pick up our order of microgreens for garnish. We tossed out ideas for the dessert special, but nothing seemed right. My call to Landon went straight to voice mail. All the more reason for some serious trying on of overpriced clothes at Airplane Hangers.

I told them I’d pack Nonna a little overnight bag. By 10 a.m., I had watered my geraniums and stocked the glove compartment in the Volvo with a couple of bags of my favorite pico de gallo chips—the gustatory equivalent of Zoloft—and driven over to Nonna’s. The house seemed depressed without her. As I stowed the latest issue of
Gourmet
and Nonna’s favorite Chanel Precision Sublimage Essential Regenerating Crème into a green leather bag the size of Delaware, my hand paused.

And I had the feeling the French peasants must have experienced the moment it occurred to them they could storm the Bastille.

That evening’s dessert special was suddenly crystal clear.

With Nonna away, the cannoli would play.

*

At Airplane Hangers, I bought a low-cut, light jersey sleeveless dress in the shade of red that makes my chestnut hair look inspired. I also bought it in black, which makes the rest of me look inspired. On my way back to the car, I spotted Dana on the south side of Market Square. Although everyone in Miracolo had keys to the restaurant and could have followed Arlen Mather inside, Dana was the only one actually acting like she was up to no good.

Something made me keep my trap shut and hang back, because I swear she was acting furtive. And not flamboyantly furtive, which is how she acts when she wants to be caught at something. No, she honestly looked like she didn’t want to run into anybody she knew. Which went a long way toward explaining the nondescript jacket and what could only be described as a fishing hat with a striped band, with the brim turned down.

Her chin-length black hair was tucked uncharacteristically behind her ears. And she was wearing sensible shoes with laces. She was so determined not to draw attention to herself that she wasn’t even wearing sunglasses. Instead, she wore black-rimmed actual eyeglasses on her face, and I had never seen Dana in glasses.

Why the get-up?

With her hands stuffed into the pockets of a shapeless jacket the color of earthworms, she turned to look in a shop window when Akahana strolled by. The fact that it was the dry cleaner’s didn’t seem to matter. When Quaker Hills’s only bag lady was far enough up the street that she must have felt safe, Dana continued up the south side of Market Square. Past the antiques store, the home décor shop, and Tattie’s. I followed at a safe distance, puzzled by Dana, buoyed by the thought of the rebel cannoli, impoverished by the two new therapeutic dresses.

At Jolly’s Pub her hand reached for the door, but she drew it back when she caught sight of something through the window. Dana appeared to sag, stumped. Then she turned the far corner, running lightly in the sensible shoes she must have picked up at a thrift shop. At that, I ran, too, reached the corner, and peered around just in time to catch her slipping around the back of the building. My heart was pounding, less from the exercise than the sheer suspense. At the back, I listened for a second, heard a door opening, and peeked around the final corner. Dana was ducking into the back of Reginald Jolly’s pub.

I darted down the alley toward the closing door.

I’d like to say I Saw All, but I was All at Sea. Maybe Dana and Reginald were smuggling porn out of the country via Arlen Mather’s interior design business … somehow … and when Mather wanted a larger cut, they eliminated him. Or … Dana was having an affair with Reginald Jolly, of all people, and when Mather figured it out and tried a spot of blackmail (“Pay up or the Patrick Cahill gravy train stops here!”), Dana lured him to the restaurant and eliminated him.

But wait. Reginald didn’t seem to know who Dana, the one who tricked him out of the key I had given him, was. Ha! I thought in a very Mr. Moto moment; he was blowing smoke at me, making me think he didn’t know Dana.

I caught the closing door at the last moment, gripping it with my fingertips, holding it open a sliver. My ear strained to hear either smuggler talk or lover talk—poor Patrick, Knight of the Tassel Loafers—or, better yet, killer talk.

But … nothing.

Easing my fingertips off the door, I walked quickly around to the front of the building, edging toward the window to peer over the half-curtains. At 11:27 a.m., I was expecting to see Dana, but she was nowhere in sight. Neither was Reginald.

Then I squinted hard at the lone figure sitting at the bar, and my mouth fell open. “What?”

There, slumped over a martini, was Landon.

I furiously texted him, unsure whether I should ask him to explain himself or rescue him from that possible den of iniquity. I settled for
Meet me outside ASAP.
I watched him look at his phone, leave a bill on the bar, call out something to someone invisible, and head toward the door with his small Gucci backpack.

I startled him by grabbing his arm and walking us both across the street to Providence Park. Dodging moms and strollers on the paths to the center of the park, I ascertained that Landon had not seen Dana at the bar, and that Jonathan had not rebuffed his advances because he hadn’t in point of fact made any, since it was still too much too soon and the lad wasn’t ready for
l’amour
.

All satisfactory answers to truly important issues.

So, by process of shrewd elimination, that left Nonna. I told Landon that I’d packed her a bag that included things Choo Choo hadn’t been able to pick up at the neighborhood Rite Aid, and asked him whether he wanted to pay her a visit with me after lunch.

“Of course!” He turned a beaming face to me.

Then I sweetened the pot even more. “Guess the dessert special,” I said in my best temptress voice.

Now I had him. He tried to guess, hitting on delicious answers, things I hadn’t prepared in quite a while. Nope, nope, and nope. Finally he gave up, his hands on his black-clad hips. “Give,” he ordered.

I whispered the forbidden word. “Cannoli.”

Landon shrieked, leaped up on a park bench that held only Akahana, and tugged at his hair in full Landon mode, appreciating the brilliance of my move. Then came the inevitable second thoughts. “What if Nonna finds out?” he asked anxiously.

I stood my ground. “How will she find out?” I looked him straight in the eye.

He seemed to consider it; then he erupted gleefully again, fully on board. He’d shave the chocolate. He’d wrap the cannoli tubes. He’d eat the leftovers.