The Da Vinci Cook (13 page)

Unfortunately, the phone remained silent.

“Damnation.” Yosh was about to drop back into his chair when he froze midway. Officer Justin Leong approached, looking as if he’d just won the lottery. He held a plastic bag high in his hand.

“This is definitely not a good idea, Angie,” Cat complained as her sister practically carried her around the block to a back alley that led to the rear entrances of the restaurants and shops along the Via Porta Cavalleggeri. It was about fifteen minutes before Da Vinci’s opened.

“It’s a great idea. Trust me,” Angie said. The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she remembered how people who knew her best—Connie, her closest friend; Stan, her neighbor, and others—often called them “words of doom.”

“Hah!” was Cat’s only remark. Angie could almost hear Connie warning Cat about the noose around her neck, the steel trap at her feet, or the band striking up a funeral dirge.

“You said you wanted to talk to Marcello,” Angie pointed out, trying not to think of how even good friends misunderstood her. “This is a whole lot better than sitting in the dining room stuffing our faces and hoping he shows up. That could take days. And maybe he’d never let us see him. Once we’re inside, we’ll find a way to look through papers, check phone records, do whatever it takes to lead us to Marcello.”

Cat balked at the alleyway. “You may have a point, but there’s got to be a better way to go about it.”

“Name one,” Angie challenged.

Cat paused. “Something will come to me soon.”

“Look at it this way,” Angie said, hurrying her sister into the soot-filled and littered alley, “you want to go home. I want to go home. Enough said?”

At the back door to Da Vinci’s, Cat squared her shoulders. “I’ll try it, but if things get dicey, I am out of there.”

Angie was already knocking on the door. A skinny fellow with a black toupee opened it. She’d seen him bussing dishes the night before. “I’d like to see the manager,” she said.

“Sì, sì.
” The man bobbed his head nervously before he turned and ran back inside. Angie and Cat exchanged glances and waited.

Before long the short, round, bald-headed man who had waited on them came to the door. “You wish to see me, Bruno Montecatini?” he asked, resting his hands against a bulbous belly. “I remember you both from last evening. What can I do for you?”

“To tell the truth,” Angie said, “we’re looking for work. That’s why we were asking about Mr. Piccoletti last evening. Marcello told us that if we were ever in desperate straits and needed a job, to come to his restaurant. We’re desperate now.”

“Desperate?” Bruno looked from one to the other, taking in their clothes, shoes, and handbags. Their outfits might be wrinkled, but they still screamed money.

Angie saw the doubt in his eyes. “Something terrible has happened. Back in the States, someone in the family emptied out all our bank accounts and ran off. The banks found out and closed our credit cards. Until it gets straightened out, for a few days we have no money and no credit.”

“What? They can do that?” Bruno looked appalled.

“Yes. We know you’ve heard how uncivilized and lawless the U.S. is. This proves it. Marcello will understand. We’d explain it to him, if we could find him, but we haven’t been able to. And we haven’t even eaten today.” At the thought of food, her stomach growled.

“Marcello’s a dear friend of mine,” Cat added in a sweet, guileless tone. “Very dear. We’ve worked together in San Francisco. He would never turn us away. Please,
signore
.”

“What will I do with two people who don’t speak Italian?” Bruno asked, his arms extended, palms up. “Most of our customers are not tourists.”

“Parliamo un po
’d’italiano,
” Angie said.

“You speak a little Italian?” Bruno looked skeptical. “I’ll have to check with Marcello first . . . in San Francisco. You come back later.”

With that, he shut the door in their faces.

Officer Justin Leong had overheard witnesses saying they’d seen a priest near Marcello Piccoletti’s house about the time of the murder, so when he found a priest’s black shirt and Roman collar in some bushes nearby, he brought it to Paavo. One thing about it was especially interesting: it was a fake. It came from a costume shop called Mandell’s.

Paavo drove straight there.

The shop was small and dark, with costumes and masks of every kind filling the walls, shelves, and racks. The manager was a short, stocky fellow with a long brown moustache that looked like a costume accessory. When he spoke, saliva collected at the corners, giving him a watery lisp. A fake moustache never would have stayed on. Paavo showed his badge and asked to see the records of everyone who’d recently rented a priest’s costume.

The manager went to his records. “I sold one last week, but I can’t help you. It was a purchase, not a rental, and the man paid cash. ”

The manager’s answer made more sense than someone having to answer all the questions a rental required. “Do you remember the customer?”

“Not especially.” He grinned. “I can only say he probably looked nothing like a priest.”

Chapter 16

“I read about the murder in the morning paper and immediately checked our records. Marcello Piccoletti is a client,” Peggy Staggs said as she led Paavo into her office. A petite, green-eyed blonde, she owned the Assurance Security Company. Standing up to greet them as they entered was a hundred-pound brown and white dog with long floppy ears and the widest, most gargantuan nose Paavo had ever seen.

“What kind of dog is this?” he asked, stroking the dog’s soft brow.

“An Italian
spinone,
” Staggs said with a smile. “He’s not much of a watchdog, but he’s fun. His name’s Guido.”

“Italian? Is he from Italy?”

Staggs’s jaw tightened ever so slightly. “As a matter of fact, he is. The breed is very special to me.” She sat behind a large oak desk and faced her computer. “As for Mr. Piccoletti, he signed on as a client only two weeks ago. I’m calling up his records.”

Paavo sat facing her, and she swiveled the computer monitor so he could see it. “It shows that his alarm system hadn’t been activated. Either the owner was home or he forgot to turn it on. If it’s not activated, there’s nothing we can do. Especially when there’s movement in the house.”

“Movement? What do you mean?” Paavo scanned the information, but it was all in code.

She handed him a company brochure. “We have a service where, say, a person lives alone, we can listen in to make sure they aren’t hurt or sick. It’s sort of like OnStar’s car service. You can call OnStar, but also they can listen to you whenever they want to. That’s how, for example, if you’re in an accident and the air bag is deployed, they’ll try to talk to you. If you don’t answer, they’ll call the nearest 911 to see what’s going on. We do the same thing for people living alone.”

“Are your installers able to listen to what’s going on inside the homes?” Flipping through the brochure, Paavo thought it looked like a good system except for the major loss of privacy that resulted from using it. Did Piccoletti realize that was part of the package?

“Only while they’re doing the installation—to be sure everything works properly. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.” The dog came over and laid his head on Paavo’s knee, his golden eyes questioning. Paavo petted him. “If a home has a safe in it, do you do any special monitoring of the safe?”

“We usually put a silent alarm on it, and sensors on a safe to alert us whenever it’s opened.”

“If it is opened, then what?” He tried to hand back the literature, but Staggs indicated it was his to keep.

“If the home owner hasn’t punched in a code to tell us the opening is legitimate, we phone the home to make sure the opening was authorized. If not, we contact the police to investigate.”

“Can you tell when Piccoletti’s safe was last opened?”

She examined the record. “For some reason, Piccoletti didn’t want us to monitor the safe—he had no alarm system connected to it. However, that doesn’t stop the sensor from recording when the safe was opened.” She tapped the screen.

“Really?” Paavo leaned closer.

Staggs gave a shrewd smile. “Absolutely. People often make requests in the heat of the moment, and later they wish we had information they’d asked us not to keep. We find it easier to keep information we don’t use than to resurrect something from nothing. The last time the safe was opened was Tuesday, 1:26 p.m.”

That was around the time of the murder. Since someone had called Cat’s boss that morning about the chains having been stolen, the safe should have also been opened earlier that day. “What about earlier Tuesday or Monday night?”

Staggs scrolled through the data. “Interesting. It was also opened less than a half hour earlier at 1:03. Before Tuesday afternoon, let’s see . . . the prior Thursday, five p.m.”

That couldn’t be right. “You’re sure?”

“Our system never lies.”

No, he thought, but someone does. “How did you get the Piccoletti job? Do you know why he chose your company?”

“Yes. He said his realtor referred him. She had an odd name. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it reminded me of one of my favorite singers from my younger days, before he got a little—what should I say?—weird.” She smiled. “I’m talking about Cat Stevens.”

Paavo swallowed hard. “Do you have the name of the installer at the Sea Cliff house?”

“Len Ferguson. He’s been with us about two years.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Late twenties, about five-eight, blue eyes, curly sandy-colored hair, a bit overweight.”

The description was somewhat similar to the “teddy bear” a witness saw near the Piccoletti home. “Does he drive a black truck?”

“Ferguson? No, not that I’ve ever noticed. He usually comes to work in an older Honda sedan—green and fairly banged up.”

“Do any of your employees have a black truck?”

“Yes. You can see it from the window.” They went to the window, which looked down on the firm’s parking lot. Staggs pointed out a black Ford F-250, ten years old. “The installers leave their cars and trucks here and take the company vans when they work.”

Paavo excused himself and went outside to the truck. As he used his cell phone to take pictures and send them to Yosh’s phone, he felt like a college kid. They were the ones who used features like cellular photographs the most. He wouldn’t even own such a high-tech phone if it weren’t for Angie, who enjoyed giving him the latest gadgets. Whenever he got a new electronic toy, Yosh, a complete technophile, got one for himself.

But even Paavo had to admit that the phone was useful in this line of work.

Within ten minutes, Paavo got a call back from Yosh. The truck looked exactly like the one that had been parked near Piccoletti’s at the time of the murder.

Paavo returned to Staggs’s office and asked to speak with both Ferguson and the truck’s owner.

Ferguson had called in sick that day, but Ray Jones was on a job. Paavo took down Ferguson’s home address and phone number, then tracked Jones down at a St. Francis Woods home undergoing a complete remodeling.

Jones had gotten a page from his boss and was told to sit tight and cooperate. He did.

He was twenty-four years old, clean-cut, and pleasant. He said that he’d loaned his truck to Len Ferguson on Tuesday to get himself some lunch because his car was acting up.

“What time did he take the truck?” Paavo asked.

“About twelve-thirty.”

“What time did he return?”

“That’s the thing.” Jones looked hesitant for a moment, and then explained. “I thought he was just going down to Quiznos, so he should have been back in twenty, thirty minutes. But at one o’clock, when I had to go out on my next install, he still hadn’t returned. We use Assurance vans on our installs, so I left. But I was kind of worried about my truck, so at two I called back to the office. Helen, the secretary, said Len was back—but that he’d just arrived, maybe five minutes before. He should have been docked an hour’s pay, except that the boss wasn’t around and Helen felt sorry for the guy. He’d already used up all his sick time.”

All of which meant that Len Ferguson was unaccounted for during the time of the murder . . . and was driving a black truck. Paavo could hardly wait to pay Ferguson a visit.

Chapter 17

“I donna care if you are friends with Marcello!” The fat man yelled, his arms rotating like windmills. “You donna touch Luigi’s food! This is my kitchen! You put one bay leaf, one pepperoncini, one grain of salt in anything, and I chop off your hand!”