Pie A La Murder (2 page)

“Della, I’ve got something to tell you. . . .”

“You know I was married before, a long time ago.”

“Yes. Why are you bringing it up now?”

“What you don’t know is that I have a daughter. . . . She’s eighteen.”

“What!” I stared at Nicholas D’Martino, the man in my life. He’d never even hinted that he was a father, and certainly not one who had a teenage daughter. His striking Sicilian face with eyes the color of black coffee, high cheekbones, and a nose broken during his years as a college boxer was topped with a full head of dark hair that never quite managed to look combed. A thick lock of it curled down onto his forehead like a question mark, emphasizing his uncomfortable expression. He was looking at me as though he didn’t know how I would take this news. I wasn’t sure myself.

“You’re a journalist,” I said. “Isn’t telling me this after more than a year of our being together called ‘burying the lead’?” I was surprised at how calm I sounded.

His wry smile acknowledged my attempt at humor. He cleared his throat. “I haven’t seen Celeste since she was a baby. Tanis, my ex-wife, lied to get sole custody. She convinced me that it was best for the child, that it was only a technical thing, that I could see Celeste every day. I believed her. Then she left for Europe as soon as our divorce was final.”

Nicholas had taken me on what he’d billed as “a teenage date” in the carnival atmosphere of the Santa Monica Pier, just a few blocks west of my little house on Eleventh Street. First, a mobile dinner of fish and chips wrapped in newspaper and seasoned with a sprinkling of malt vinegar, after which we rode the Ferris wheel and the whirling cups, and tried to work off our meal by climbing the Pier’s rock wall feature. Nicholas beat me to the top by only one foothold—my new personal best.

We were sitting on the beach below the Pier, listening to the music and laughter floating down from above as we watched little diamonds of moonlight sparkle on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It had been a wonderful evening, up until now. The cone of chocolate frozen yogurt I’d been devouring with such pleasure a moment ago dripped in my hand. Dollops of melting yogurt splattered onto my new tan slacks. Raw silk. The pants were cut so artfully that they managed to make my hips look smaller, and they were the perfect shade with my new butter yellow cashmere sweater. I laid my cone down in the sand and dabbed at the dark spots with a napkin, but I knew the slacks were ruined.

Nicholas put his cone beside mine and carefully covered them both with sand. I wondered if that counted as littering.

“Celeste called me from Vienna, where she’s living with her mother,” he said.

I filled the awkward silence that followed with a question. “Is this the first contact you’ve had with her since she was a baby?”

He nodded. “Over the years I tried to talk to her countless times, but Tanis made sure I was always one step behind them.” He half smiled. “Del, Celeste wants to see me.”

“That’s marvelous,” I said, genuinely happy for him.

His face split into that grin he saved for special triumphs, as when one of his crime stories in the
Los Angeles Chronicle
was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “My daughter’s coming to LA. She arrives tomorrow. And she wants to live with me.”

“Don’t you watch daytime-TV talk shows? It’s a known fact that the biggest threat to a romantic relationship is a man’s daughter from a previous marriage.” Liddy Marshall shook her head as she reached down to pet my big black standard poodle, Tuffy, who was lounging next to her chair at my kitchen table. “Mark my words,” Liddy said, “this girl will be trouble.”

“I know you mean well, but I don’t believe that.” I was thinking of my honorary daughter, Eileen O’ Hara, and the joy I’ve had being her “mother-person,” as she calls me, during the years that her own mother was ill and couldn’t be with her. “I’d like to be her friend. With her mother so far away, she might need an older woman to talk to.”

“Hah!” Liddy threw up her hands. “Good luck! You and Eileen are close because you’re not in love with her father. Teenage girls are more territorial than hungry lionesses.”

I smiled at her with affection. “Have you been watching Animal Planet, too?”

“Scoff if you like, but you heard it here first: your ‘love boat’ is heading for choppy waters.”

“Nicholas and I have been through a lot and our relationship has only gotten stronger. We’re going to be fine,” I said.

Liddy had been one of my closest friends for more than twenty years, and she had the kindest heart of anyone I knew, but I reminded myself that she was inclined to be melodramatic. An attractive natural honey blonde—a former Miss Nebraska—Lydia Nelson had come to California to be an actress, but had fallen in love with a cute young dentist named Bill Marshall. She traded movie dreams for a happy life as a wife and mother of twin sons. Now that the boys were away at college in the East, Liddy amused herself by working as an extra in TV shows and movies. As she liked to say, it gave her the fun of being on sets and around actors, but she didn’t have to stay superthin or worry about aging.

Liddy turned toward the computer on my desk in the corner. It was in the kitchen because I used it to plan my TV shows and the cooking classes I taught on weekends. She asked, “What did you say his ex-wife’s name is? It was something weird.”

“Tanis.”

“What did you find out when you Googled her?”

“I didn’t. That’s spying. There is no way I would invade Nicholas’s privacy like that, and I don’t want you to do it either. Promise me.”

“Okay, I promise.” Liddy sat down and clicked onto the Internet. “I’m all for scruples, but we still need information of a nonspying nature.”

Peering over her shoulder, I saw what she was typing.

“Oh, Liddy—you’re not going to look up what her name means. That’s not information.”

“I believe that names are predictors of personality. Della means ‘cheerful’ and ‘happy.’ That’s you. ‘Lydia’ means ‘life.’ Do you know anyone who enjoys life more than I do?”

“Coincidence. Names are given to infants before they show any traits.”

She ignored my argument, found a meaning-of-names site, and scrolled through the “Ts.” “Does she spell her name with one ‘N’ or two?”

“No idea. It sounds made-up to me.”

“I’ve heard it somewhere before. Oh, right—here it is. One ‘N.’ It’s from the Greek name ‘Tanith.’ ” Liddy jabbed at the screen. “Ah-ha! It’s derived from Semitic roots meaning ‘serpent lady.’ ”

“It’s also the name of the Phoenician goddess of love, fertility, the moon, and the stars,” I read from the screen. I was instantly sorry I’d seen that part.

Liddy exited Google and returned to the kitchen table and her coffee. She had to step over Tuffy, who was watching us with the intense interest he displayed when he and I were on my bed, watching a movie with a dog in it.

“What did Nicholas say about his wife?”

“
Ex
-wife,” I said. “Not much. She was a rich girl—inherited a fortune—but he didn’t want them to touch her money. He got her to promise they would live on what he made as a reporter.”

Liddy gave a cynical snort. “I bet that didn’t last long.”

“As far as he knows, she kept her word, until they had the baby. Then she started buying all kinds of luxuries for herself and Celeste. She told him she was leaving because she didn’t want to have to keep lying to him about what things cost, or feel guilty about having money.”

“That doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to divorce when you have a baby,” Liddy said.

“Nicholas didn’t think so either. He was willing to forget her promise not to spend her money, but she said that wasn’t good enough any longer because she’d come to see that they were incompatible personalities. Nicholas told me that he tried to talk her out of the divorce, but he had to admit that she was right. They had different views on almost any subject.”

Liddy grimaced. “You’d think they would have figured that out before they got married. Sometimes I think love is not only blind but deaf, too.”

I didn’t want to think about their
love
. “Nicholas wanted to spend time with their child, but the day the divorce was final she moved to Europe. It broke his heart. He said that’s why he hadn’t told me about his daughter until now.”

“Tanis is a bitch. Did he tell you how they met? Or what made him fall in love with her?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Liddy looked at me narrowly. “Does he still have feelings for her?”

“I don’t think so. . . . No, I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“And his daughter knows about you?” Liddy asked the question as though expecting her worst suspicions were about to be confirmed.

“Nicholas wants to introduce us ‘casually.’ He’s going to bring her to the taping of the live show Thursday night.”

Liddy raised her eyebrows. “To achieve exactly what?”

I’d wondered the same thing, and didn’t like the thought that had occurred to me. “He didn’t say explicitly, but I believe he thinks that if she sees me doing a TV show it will impress her.”

That got another snort from Liddy.

“I admit it hurt a little when he told me how he wanted to introduce us, but he hasn’t seen the girl since she was a year old. I think he’s nervous. He wants everything to be perfect.”

“The poor fool.”

“Come on, Liddy. I want this to work out for him.”

“I know, and I do, too,” she said. “I like Nick—so I’m going with you. To be your second.”

“My second what?”

“Like in the old days when people had duels. Each of the duelists had a second. You know, to hold their coats.”

“What you mean is that they were there to cart off the body of the loser.”

“Let’s not think negatively.” With forced optimism in her voice, she added, “Thursday night might go very well. But whatever happens, I’ll be there with you.”

After Liddy left I took Tuffy for a long walk. While he explored the neighborhood and visited his favorite trees and bushes, I thought about Nicholas and what the arrival of his daughter might mean to us as a couple. I had meant it sincerely when I told him it was marvelous that she’d broken a seventeen-year silence and called. In spite of Liddy’s grim warning, I really was looking forward to meeting Celeste.

Two weeks ago, in early October, Nicholas and I reached the one-year anniversary of the day we met. Recalling how enthusiastically we’d celebrated that milestone sent a shiver of delight through me. Late that night, Nicholas again brought up the subject of marriage. As I had when he’d asked me before, I told him I was partial to the idea, but we agreed there was no rush. While we managed to spend a satisfying amount of romantic time together, we both had busy careers and separate homes. That lack of pressure had produced a happy relationship composed of sexual compatibility, mutual respect, and love.

Now I wondered if I should have done what Nicholas had wanted, and rushed off to the nearest minister.

Nicholas didn’t call that day, or that night. I was sure Celeste had arrived—otherwise he would have let me know—and I hoped that things were going well between those two strangers who were father and daughter. Still, I was disappointed, and a little miffed, that I hadn’t heard from him.

On Wednesday, I kept myself busy planning the next four-week cycle—twenty episodes—of
In the Kitchen with Della
, my cable TV cooking show on the Better Living Channel.

While I was going through recipes and choosing themes for the broadcasts, an inspiration struck. I phoned Phil Logan, head of publicity for the cable network.

When I got through to him, he answered with a sunny, “How’s the best-looking cook on television?”

“Giada De Laurentiis is seven or eight years younger than I am and probably twenty pounds thinner, but I appreciate the compliment.”