The Spia Family Presses On (34 page)

As luck would have it, Liz walked by at exactly the moment my mom was beginning to relax.

So much for keeping her calm.

Once Liz walked into my mom’s airspace, Mom began pressing her for information. Liz denied everything, but then Nick stepped in and said, “This is an ongoing murder investigation and we already know your truck was possibly used to run Lisa and her friends off the road. Plus, you were corresponding with the deceased while he was incarcerated. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

Uh-oh!

My mom lunged for Liz. It took all my strength to hang onto her. “You tried to kill my daughter? You got a lot of nerve, you old goat,” Mom hissed.

“You’re the goat. Not me.”

“You better come clean or I’m going to start swinging.”

“You think you scare me?”

Mom broke free and grabbed for Liz, taking hold of her hair and pulling until Liz was down on one knee. Nick tried to break them apart, but my mom had a vice grip on Liz. “Tell the truth, you mean old witch, or you’re going to have a bald spot for the rest of your life.”

“Mom, let go of her. Mom!” I was yelling now.

Liz said, “The way your family treated me, I had to show Mia she couldn’t mess with me.” Nick backed off, and so did I. We simply watched as my mother got Liz to fess up. “I had to show that Jade girl, too, swooping in and spreading lies that she was engaged to Dickey. Too bad that damn smarty-pants Lisa was driving or I’d have showed all three of them. I watched. I was there in the bakery yesterday, listening. Nobody knew. I’m good at disguises. That Jade girl was spreading lies. She wasn’t Dickey’s honey-bear. Lies! And nobody even invited me to Dickey’s party when everybody knew he loved me. Only me.”

“You’re a crazy woman. He never loved you,” my mother roared. “You probably killed him out of spite.”

Mom let go of Liz, and took a step back. Both Lisa and I grabbed onto her, just in case she wanted to lunge at Liz again. No one moved for a moment while Liz rubbed the side of her head where my mom had tried to rip out her hair.

“I ain’t the one with his dead body in my trunk,” Liz grumbled. “Dickey told me all about how he coulda taken back his olive grove if he wanted to, and how you wrote him threatening letters not to do it or you’d have to take drastic measures.”

“That’s a dirty rotten lie,” Mom said as she broke free and tackled Liz to the ground, arms flaying, skirts hiking way too far up for their age group. “Get her,” Hetty yelled as she came up on the girl fight. “Give her a good sock in the jaw.”

Hetty was totally inebriated, a state that didn’t suit her. A state that turned her otherwise somewhat tolerable personality into something the devil dredged up.

Nick tried to break my mom and Liz apart, but he wasn’t successful. Other officers were rushing over. I had to stop this before it got really ugly. I leaned over and wrapped my arms around Mom’s midsection, which seemed to have grown in recent months, and pulled with all my might, but my mom was a hefty force not to be messed with. She purposely pushed back with her hips and I fell right on top of her causing Liz Harrington to get totally squashed under the weight. Her breath came out in a loud whoosh.

“I can’t . . . breathe,” Liz gasped.

I grabbed my mom tight around her oversized waist with both arms, and rolled off Liz pulling my mom with me. She weighed much more than I expected, and kept throwing punches with her short little legs and arms flailing like some beetle turned over on its back trying desperately to right itself. I could feel my lungs tighten with each of her kicks.

“I can’t . . . breathe,” I echoed.

But my mom didn’t stop squirming.

“I’m dying here,” I pleaded to no one in particular.

Lisa charged into action and somehow managed to lift my mom off me and back up on her feet in one fell swoop. Then she swung her into the arms of a burly male officer. “Stay,” Lisa ordered, and my mother obeyed.

Nick knelt between Liz and me. “Are you two okay?”

But neither one of us could speak. We were too busy trying to catch our collective breaths. My mom, on the other hand, was chomping at the bit and ready to attack again. The burley cop held on tight, but it was all he could do to control her. She kept squirming and screaming, “Let me at her. Just one more time. Let me flatten that smug face of hers. I’ll get her to admit she burned Dickey.”

Nick helped both Liz and me back to our feet. I was completely covered in dirt, again. Just moving stirred it around me in a billowing cloud. I felt a little like Pigpen from Peanuts.

My mother was also covered in dirt, but it didn’t stop her from pounding on the cop, trying to get free. I was impressed with her fortitude, but I could tell the cop was losing patience. He suddenly swung her around and clamped on cuffs, which sent my mother into hysterical overdrive.

“These things don’t belong on me, they belong on her.” She stuck out her chin in Liz’s direction.

Liz seemed a bit dazed and wasn’t paying much attention to my mom. Instead, she was intensely interested in the dirt on her hands, dress and coat. She pulled out an individually wrapped wet wipe from her purse and began washing herself like a cat even as a Sheriff helped her into the backseat of a squad car.

My mom continued with her rage. “She’s the one who tried to kill my daughter. Get these things off me. They’re going to ruin my bracelet.” And as soon as she said it, the silver bracelet slipped from her wrist and fell to the ground. “See what you did. You broke it, and after I spent all afternoon fixing it. You’re a bully, that’s what you are. You can’t do this to me. It’s not fair.”

Then she hauled off and kicked him in the shin.

And with that, the cop carted her away as my mom yelled out my name in some ear piercing tone I’d never heard before. I turned toward her, thinking I could somehow prevent this madness from happening. The very thing I’d been trying to avoid was now about to take place and I was powerless to do anything.

Nick stepped in front of me, picked up the broken bracelet, the bracelet that had been under murdered Dickey’s feet, handed it to me and said. “I think you should let her cool down for the night, and unless you want to join her, you won’t try to stop this. We have a lot of questions for her, and it’s best for everyone if we take her to our facility in Santa Rosa to continue this.”

“And you think you’re going to get information while she’s in custody?”

I slipped the bracelet in my purse. It seemed as though the damn thing kept popping up whenever Dickey was around. At least my mom wasn’t lying about the broken clasp.

“That’s the plan,” he said.

“Good luck with that.”

“You can probably pick her up in the morning, unless we find sufficient evidence that links your mom to the body. Your mom sure seemed to get mad over that bracelet. It mean something special to her?”

I didn’t want to make up something I could get caught up in later so I took the big stroke route, instead of the minor detail that it’s the bracelet that Dickey gave her, Oh, and by the way, did I happen to mention that I found it under his dead body in our barn? “She’s just had it for awhile, that’s all.”

He raised his eyebrows in disbelief, but he let it slide, thank you very much.

He said, “I think we’ve all had enough excitement for one night. Everyone is free to go. But I have a lot more questions, especially now that we found Dickey’s remains. Obviously, the man has been dead for awhile. So don’t anybody leave town. All right?” He was looking directly at me.

I tried to act as if he was totally off base, but I knew better. The fact of the matter was Nick seemed to already know my family pretty well. Which begged the question, would I actually get on that plane Sunday night even though Nick the Cop had told me not to?

The way I was feeling, anything was possible.

Once we were released from the crime scene, I went back inside Cougars and scrounged up every pitted olive I could buy from a friendly night manager who didn’t ask questions. He simply boxed them up and handed them to me, probably happy to see me finally leave the area.

Baked Reggiano
O
lives
– Level Three Or Four

(recipe can be doubled or tripled depending on the need factor)

1 cup grated Parmesan-Reggiano cheese

2 tbs. softened butter

1/2
cup unbleached flour

1/8 tsp. cayenne

3 oz pitted or stuffed olives of choice (can be a mixture of favorites)

This recipe got me through countless nights when I absolutely needed to have a drink or six drinks, one olive at a time . . .

Mix cheese and butter. Add flour and cayenne and blend until the mixture is well combined and thick. Line up your olives in a row. (Not that you have to, but this gives you more stuff to do) To turn this recipe into a level four, stuff the olives yourself with a sliver of red pepper that’s been roasted, skinned and drenched in olive oil, or stuff with a sliver of garlic, or a sliver of roasted jalapeño pepper, or cream cheese, or whatever you think might make a tasty olive. This process can take several hours and is proven (by me) to get you through those pity-party moments, or those self-aggrandizing fantasies when you think you deserve to party all night long.

Drop batter by tablespoons onto a sheet of wax paper and carefully mold around each olive, then place the olives on a baking sheet that has been rubbed with olive oil. *Note: Make sure you use a sheet with sides, or these little puppies will roll right off. Bake at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm.

I went home with Leo, utterly scared to go anywhere near my apartment. Despite Leo’s corporal allure, I slept in his guest bedroom, alone. Although I was incredibly tempted, I wasn’t feeling as though sex was the answer to my problems. Basically, I was thinking sex would simply serve as another complication to my already overly complicated life. Therefore, I did the grown up thing and gave him a blow job and sent him on his way.

In my dreams.

In reality, he drove us to his house, and I was out of his car and in his guest room faster than a speeding bullet, or so it seemed. The only sex we had . . . hot and heavy with a lot of clutching and grabbing, and copious amounts of loud moans . . . was during an exceptionally long dream I had sometime in the early morning hours, while I dozed at his kitchen table. I had stayed up for most of the night baking olives, alone, in Leo’s kitchen.

I awoke a few hours later in bed, in the guest bedroom (I didn’t remember how I got there) satisfied that dream sex had been better than the real thing. Real sex would have led to mental anguish that I already had an abundance of, and any more would certainly cause my head to explode.

I showered, dressed in old ripped jeans I had left at his house before our second breakup, a borrowed flannel shirt and a pair of Uggs I had totally forgotten about. I slapped on minimal makeup, thought about food, but decided tea and a slice of white toast with butter was about all I could handle, and maybe a baked olive or two. Someone, most likely Leo’s housekeeper, had cleaned up the kitchen, leaving the platter of about a hundred baked olives sitting on the counter.

I barely remembered making them.

It had been a very long night.

Leo drove me home around nine, after we decided to take this thing slow, whatever this “thing” was. I apologized for thinking he’d lied about talking to Dickey on his porch, and he apologized for the last five years.

He dropped me off in my mom’s private parking lot
—
the chain still ran across the public driveway
—
and I gave him a long slow kiss then told him I’d call him when I landed in Maui. I was determined to be on that plane Sunday night despite the events of the previous evening.

I sprinted up my mom’s back stairs, eager to return her bracelet. I didn’t want it hanging around in my apartment. There was no telling who would show up to steal it so they could further incriminate her, if that was possible. Nick finding Dickey in her trunk seemed to lock up her guilt perspective rather easily, at least it seemed that way last night.

At any rate, I was hopeful that the slashed tire didn’t quite fit into the case-closed theory. I mean, why would my mom slash her own tire? Obviously, the killer was still trying to set her up, but by some stroke of cosmic fate, Nick was there to see it this time.

Still, I wasn’t taking any chances with anything else going wrong.

My sudden clear head was probably due to the great dream sex, or, I was obsessed with solving this whole murder thing because for one thing, my mother was not going to do time for something I knew she did not do, no matter what the evidence against her proved. Secondly, I had every intention of being on that flight to Maui Sunday night. Either way, I had a mission and heaven help the person who got in my way. This time I was determined to come up with the right Wise Guy or Wise Girl.

I’d read somewhere that mob wives and grandmothers were taking up the sword in Naples and Calabria when the men were either shot down or carted off to prison. Some of these gun toting grandmas were even more vicious than the men, and would shoot at each other in drive-by wars. Not that I had any intention of taking my vendetta against Dickey’s murderer to a firearm level, but I certainly intended to ferret out the creep by any and all other means I had available to me. If that meant I had to get down and dirty, then so be it.