You Cannoli Die Once (9 page)

“What!”

“He went in, but so did she.” She kept wiping her hands, but all I could hear were the sounds of the pouring rain and the chatter of the customers. “Eve, face it, kid, your grandmother followed him inside.”

*

Eloise sent me out into the rain with a complimentary cherry crêpe. My brain felt like a snow globe, all water and fake, excitable white stuff. As I automatically headed in the direction of Market Square, I downed Eloise’s freebie. Glop never tasted so good. Suddenly I felt strangely attached to Full of Crêpe—it was a warm and good place full of attempts at Frenchness and health code violations that really weren’t very important, a place where, yes, the floor might be dirty, but people don’t end up dead on it. An altogether fine establishment.

I let myself into the Volvo and ratcheted the seat back. A quick call to Directory Assistance gave me the number to Saks. When I got a silky woman’s voice, who murmured, “Personal Shopping,” I told her who I was, and that I wanted to check on whether my grandmother had picked up her altered dress, so I didn’t have to run down there myself.

I waited with my eyes closed while she checked. And it was no real surprise to me when the murmuring Saks lady got back on the line, and told me she was sorry she couldn’t save me a trip. Because Maria Pia Angelotta’s dress was still there.

*

It wouldn’t be cool to call Landon while he was with Nonna at the Quaker Hills Police Department. Sooner or later Ted and Sally would get around to Eloise Timmler, so all I wanted to do was investigate like I was doing one of the time challenges on Top Chef until that moment came. That was all I knew.

Maria Pia had never appeared as mysterious to me as she did at that moment in my Volvo sanctuary, waiting out the rain. My mind was skittering all over the place. That silly, useless catchphrase,
there has to be a reasonable explanation
, kept colliding with some cannier, less evolved place in my brain that kept repeating just one primal suggestion:
damage control, damage control, damage control.

Whenever the sensible Eve piped up with good questions about why Maria Pia was lying her ass off, the rest of me just wanted another of Eloise’s orgasmic cherry crêpes. Finally, I stared long enough through the rain cascading down the windshield that an important piece of information registered: the black-and-yellow Police Line Do Not Cross tape was … gone. Gone!

Grabbing my stuff, I flung myself out of the Volvo and darted to the front door. Inside the restaurant, I sank teary-eyed against the closed door.

No traces of anything out of the ordinary. Of cops or killers or Arlen Mather’s final steps.

Taking a deep breath, I looked around the dining room. The tables, the piano, the shadow boxes that hadn’t come down from the wall, all looked inexpressibly dear to me. I loved the rough brick walls, the black glossy trim on the windows, the sheer curtains as light as a dragonfly’s wings.

I needed one simple task. That’s all I wanted.

Pay the rent.
There you go.

I walked through the kitchen, not looking at the place where Arlen had hit the floor. In the office, where Joe Beck had begun his day feeling up my leather couch and avoiding the CSI team, I sat at the desk, pulled out the checkbook, and made out the June rent check to Mar-Jo Properties. I might not have any answers for my nonna’s behavior, but this much I knew: tomorrow, Miracolo reopens.

Before I tackled all the calls I needed to make to get us up and running again, I realized it was now respectable business hours out on the West Coast, so I called Calladine’s Classics in Vancouver. It went right to voice mail. “Calladine,” came a voice that sounded like a reference librarian you’ve just roused from poring over a bibliography on medieval undergarments. “Leave a message.”

Frustrated, I gave him my name, number, and something about an estate collection. I purposely didn’t mention Arlen’s name since I didn’t know where that relationship stood. First, get him on the phone, then feel him out about the murder victim.

I slipped the rent check in my pocket, where I felt something else, and pulled out Weird Edgar’s Gross-B-Gone business card. Add him to the call list. I might even have to have him come a couple of times before I’d believe our kitchen floor has no trace of Arlen. Then I ducked out the back door and headed up Market Square to the Ashbridge Building on the east end, where the Mar-Jo offices were located. The rain was letting up, and shoppers were stepping back out into the square.

Absently fingering the two earrings in my right earlobe, I climbed the stairs to the second floor, ducking into the sprawling office space of Cahill Enterprises. Patrick was just coming through his glass-enclosed executive office, sleek leather briefcase in hand. “Eve!” He seemed so genuinely happy to see me, I found myself wishing I could offer him a couple of my secret-recipe cannoli.

White shirt, khaki pants, blue-and-gold-striped tie. Very Patrick.

He gave me a quick kiss on only one cheek, apparently unaffected by Dana’s return to Frenchness.

I gestured at his shoes: cordovan-colored tassel loafers.

He laughed, then pointed, with a shudder, to my double-pierced ear.

“Lucky thing,” I said, crossing my arms.

“You’re telling me,” he said with a smile.

“If you wore Timberlines and I wore pearls … ” I shook my head.

Patrick nodded in agreement. “There’s no telling how much trouble we would have gotten into.”

“You never would have met Dana,” I pointed out to him.

“And you never would have met … well—” He seemed stumped.

“—any number of forgettable men,” I finished. Did that sound too pathetic? Too much like a flash mob?

Patrick leaned against an empty desk. He was a Type A personality who was either unusually low-key—in order to hear him, you had to lean in pretty close—or headed for a breakdown. I was undecided which. So, because he and I were friends, I checked in with him every so often just to gauge how life was going.

“Aside from the murder, Eve, how are things down the street?”

“The crime scene techs just left,” I told him, “so tomorrow we’ll open for dinner.”

He nodded. “Dana was worried that if the restaurant stayed closed for a long time, she wouldn’t be in good voice.”

“Oh, no worries there, Patrick,” I said ambiguously. Which led very suavely to my next question. “Besides, she’s always got Cahill Enterprises. She worked yesterday morning, right?”

“That she did,” he confirmed softly. “She rolled in around eleven thirty.”

11:30?

Hardly morning.

He went on, “She said she had some things to take care of before showing up here.”

Some things to take care of?

I faked my way through the conversation with Patrick while trying to remember exactly what Dana had told me.
I was working at the office that morning
. She deliberately made it sound like she was there from 9 a.m. until noon. Only she wasn’t. There were more than two hours unaccounted for. Which meant Dana had deceived me about the morning of Arlen Mather’s murder.

7

It’s truly tough when you realize you’re the sort of person your friends and family lie to and sneak around. I mean, not everybody I know is Italian, so why were they all behaving that way? What explained Dana? And not, for once, in a big existential way? While I watched Jimi Baker in his black muscle shirt and Eagles cap replace the lock on Miracolo’s front door, I pondered the problem.

From the kitchen came the sloshing sounds of Weird Edgar, who had happily given up his lunch hour to provide Gross-B-Gone services. I was a little taken aback when he told me I qualified for his “buy one, get one half price” promotion, “because you never know what unwanted bodily fluids life’s gonna deposit on you.” Even as he pressed the coupon into my hand, I wondered just how much human effluence he thought I was good for. By the time he got around to buffing the floor, I was chained to the office desk phoning our suppliers, trying to hear them over the sounds of Weird Edgar, who you’d swear was busting broncos.

Landon called to report that our nonna had held up very well with the cops. She shoveled them the line about how she had dropped off Arlen at Miracolo to look at the opera memorabilia, and they hadn’t asked her much else. Now Landon was taking her to lunch, where they’d happily gab about who was hotter, Al Pacino or Andy Garcia.

Choo Choo called to say he had a little something to show me. I found myself wondering whether he could use the coupon from Weird Edgar.

When I called Kayla to tell her to deliver the usual order tomorrow, she said, “Goody gum-drops.” Now, some people might think that was sarcasm. I, on the other hand, knew it was.

Alma checked in. She had gotten a free sample at Starbucks, entered a sweepstakes at the Prudential Real Estate office, and talked the shoe repair guy into putting a pair of Toscano’s Tootsies in his window. When I pressed her about her mission, she said nobody had seen a thing outside the restaurant yesterday morning. She still had plenty of shopkeepers to question, but she didn’t want to miss
Judge Judy
and had to get back to her apartment.

It’s so hard to get good free help these days.

Then Paulette shrilled at me over the phone that she thought the blind bookstore owner was shifty, and the old lady owner of the card shop was holding out on her, never mind the wheelchair, but she was pretty sure she was close to breaking the Korean kid at the dry cleaner’s. Paulette’s pop, CoCo Coniglio, hadn’t been a New York city police detective for nothing, never mind the charges that ended his career. “The
bistecca
doesn’t fall far from the
vacca
, hey?” Leaving me to wonder whether she had actually said the steak doesn’t fall far from the cow, the redoubtable Paulette hung up. Off, I supposed, to finish breaking the dry-cleaner kid.

If the ship goes down, I want Paulette in my lifeboat. She’d scoop up fish with her bare hands, organize the rowing, and toss complainers overboard. Why she wasn’t enough to keep Jock—my disappearing father—in town was a mystery along the lines of how Belladonna Russo’s recipe for tiramisu kept winning year after year at the Bella Cucina Cooking Competition, when you can tell she uses prepackaged ladyfingers. Just don’t bring it up to Nonna, who plots how to catch her rival in the act of ripping open the Stella D’oro plastic package.
That cheat! That shortcut-taker! That
strega!

*

I was glad to see the last of Weird Edgar, who crammed my check into his pocket and had to make three trips to his truck to get all the equipment out of my kitchen. Which, I have to admit, looked very nice. Back to its pre-homicide spit and polish. Now I could happily sashay around the Miracolo kitchen, rearranging utensils, canisters, and hanging pans.

My most rebellious move consisted of dragging the prep table noisily over the exact spot where Arlen Mather had breathed his last. But then everything looked crooked. Nothing looked right. Would Landon and Li Wei the dishwasher and I just be bumping into each other now? Would my food—I could hardly say the word—suffer? Why couldn’t Arlen Mather have fallen parallel to the table, instead of perpendicular? Was I really this neurotic? No wonder my friends and family lied their patooties off to me.

At that moment my ragtime ringtone started warbling. “Hello?” I recognized the number.

“Geoffrey Calladine,” came a soft, precise voice that sounded like it had moved on to bibliographies on Renaissance chamber pots.

Expecting a gabfest on the opera-recording buying habits of Arlen Mather, I headed into the office. I trotted out my line about looking into collection appraisals, which was met with a tepid hum from Geoffrey Calladine.

When I mentioned Arlen Mather, Calladine said, “Who?”

“Arlen Mather,” I repeated slowly. “It’s his collection I’m calling about. I understand he’s done a fair amount of business with you?”

“You’ve been misinformed.”

Huh? The Greenwich Village seller, LeMeur, had no reason to string me along.

“This is the first I’ve heard his name, Ms. Angelotta,” said my man in Vancouver. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I didn’t know him.”

I had to figure what this guy was hiding, so I said a fast good-bye.
What was going on?
Was this Geoffrey Calladine running some kind of shady business, and had my nonna’s boyfriend been part of it somehow? I had called a Vancouver cell phone number, but that didn’t mean Calladine was actually in Vancouver. Could he be … here in Quaker Hills? I walked just a little weak-kneed back into my kitchen, pretty much on course for freaking myself out altogether.

Which was when I saw Dana.

Jimi Baker was also replacing the lock on the back door, and when he got a call he’d wandered off to the side of the restaurant, leaving the door wide open. I stepped outside to pick up a screwdriver he’d dropped, and as I straightened back up, I spotted Dana in a third-story window, two doors up from the restaurant. Right next door to us, on the other side of the Miracolo fence, was The Bead Hive, a bead shop in a freestanding, two-story building like ours. But next to The Bead Hive was the narrow, three-story Logan Building, with Sprouts at street level. But I’d never thought about what businesses rented the upstairs spaces.

As I watched Dana, still dressed in her stained-glass top, talking to someone out of sight, I dwelled on her lie about her whereabouts the morning of the murder. Suddenly she turned to look out the window, and I plastered myself against the counter, hopefully out of her line of vision.

It seemed out of character for her to have fishy two-hour gaps in her schedule. And now this. What was she doing upstairs in the murky precincts over Sprouts, especially when she hadn’t mentioned it to me? She mentions
everything
.

Just as she turned away from the open window and I took the opportunity to leap out of the restaurant and dash over to the honeysuckle bushes, something incredible happened. Dana started to pull her colorful top over her head.

*