The Spia Family Presses On (35 page)

Of course, I didn’t exactly know what “down and dirty” consisted of, but I figured when the time came my unique upbringing would kick in and I’d somehow know exactly what to do.

At least that was the plan of the moment.

Wow! Dream sex was powerful stuff.

When I walked into mom’s kitchen, there were no signs that anyone was around. Of course, that didn’t mean much, her back door was unlocked and an imported gangster had possibly taken up residency on the second floor.

Still, there were no signs that Benny had spent the night, no stogies in the ashtray on the counter, and his pink mug dangled from a hook under a cabinet. Hopefully, Giuseppe had already moved into his own apartment above one of the shops on the property.

What was I thinking?

As I walked to my mom’s room I remembered Dickey’s open suitcase in one of the upstairs bedrooms and wondered if it was still there, the one with all the price tags still on the clothes. Experience told me, from some of the other ex-cons around here, that price tags meant he or she had just been released. My gut told me there was something in that case I needed to see. What that could be, I had no idea, but I wanted to check it out. Once I put the bracelet in my mom’s jewelry armoire I intended to do just that.

No stone left unturned, kind of thing.

First, though, I couldn’t stand how quiet the house was so I pulled the chains on the cuckoo clock to rewind it. Then I set the time, and once I heard that familiar tic tock I felt much calmer.

I slipped into mom’s bedroom and turned on the light. The curtains were drawn, keeping the room dark and free from any family snoopers. Mom owned a fancy antique-white, hand painted jewelry armoire with eight drawers, a flip up mirror, doors on either side that held several necklaces, and tiered drawers to hold rings, pins and her various bracelets and bangles. The top drawer also served as a music box. Whenever I heard Torno a Surriento it reminded me of those lazy rainy days spent with my mom playing with her jewelry.

Mom’s jewelry armoire had been magical to me, filled with fairytales and pixy dust. My mom and I would spend countless hours together trying on all her sparkly jewelry. I’d pretend to be a beautiful princess and Mom the beautiful queen waiting for her handsome king to return from battle.

All those years, waiting, wondering if my dad was still alive, and now . . .

Now I knew why the king never returned. Why be a mere king when you can be the ruler of all the kings?

Much more fun.

But I didn’t have time to waste getting lost in childhood fantasies, or kings and mob bosses, not when my mom was locked up behind a fortress with no one to rescue her but me.

Where the hell was Sir Galahad when you needed him?

As soon as I opened the top drawer, the song immediately began playing, reminding me of the last time I’d heard it . . . while I was standing up on the second floor talking to Dickey.

My stomach twisted in an immediate knot. I wanted to rubberstamp my forehead with a big red “STUPID.”

Of course! That music, and all those noises downstairs made sense now. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Someone had opened this armoire and stolen the codicil almost as soon as I’d put it away. So that meant that person had to know I’d left it there, which meant they had to be in the house in order to hear the music to figure out exactly where I’d stashed the papers.

But that would mean the murder was completely premeditated, not a far stretch for this family, but I was so hoping for a crime of passion, a crime of the heart or something equally as spur of the moment. After all, we were a recovering family! Didn’t that mean anything to these people?

I slammed the drawer shut, locked it and shoved the key into my pocket, angry that I hadn’t thought to lock it that first night. This time, if the killer wanted anything she would have to break the lock.

Besides my mom, there was only one other person who knew I had the papers that night, and only one person who could have heard that music.

On my way out, I took all the keys to the house then locked mom’s house up tight. No one was getting in this time unless they broke in, and that would leave glorious evidence. But at the moment, I was focused on one person. The person who lied, cheated, and had direct access to my mom’s house.

“You killed him,” I said to Hetty as I opened the back door to Dolci Piccoli. She was busy pulling a tray of four perfectly golden Italian breads out of the large oven. Without customers, she only baked enough for family and the pickers.

Aunt Babe was nowhere around.

“After last night, I didn’t expect to see you all day,” Hetty alleged in a calm voice.

I placed my hands on my hips. “You killed Dickey. You were in the kitchen when I stuck my mom’s paperwork in her jewelry box, heard Turno a Surriento and snuck into her bedroom while I was upstairs talking to Dickey. You snatched the documents, read the codicil and decided no way were you going to let Dickey take over the orchard. You pushed him under the millstone then shot him and planted my mom’s bracelet as evidence. Then as an added bonus you stashed grandma’s handgun in a futso. And,”
—
I was on a clue solving roll now
—
“you killed Peter Doyle, although for the life of me I can’t understand why. He was probably a very nice man.”

“He was a thief and a wife beater, but I didn’t whack him.”

She stared at me for a moment. Her hair arranged in its usual clown style, red lipstick radiant from the sunlight that streamed through the bank of windows behind me.

She said, “I just pulled some Amaretto cookies out of the oven about five minutes ago. They’re still warm. How about I fix you a nice plate with a glass of cold milk? You seem a little stressed this morning.”

I stamped my foot. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

She slid the hot bread off of the pan and onto a cooling rack. The entire room smelled delicious and any other time I would have sat right down and took her up on her cookie offer, but at the moment I was busy solving a crime.

“How could I not hear you? Everyone on the property probably heard you. Why don’t you sit down? You’re making me nervous.” She pulled out a wooden bar stool.

“I’m going to call Nick Zeleski in two minutes if you don’t talk to me.” I straddled the stool and pulled out my cell phone ready to dial up Nick, or at least Lisa. I didn’t actually know Nick’s number.

“Let me put the anise cookies in the oven, and then we can talk.”

I agreed but it was a tentative agreement. I still held onto my phone.

After she slid two trays of cookies into the large oven, she poured a couple tall glasses of milk, and assembled a plate of various cookies, amaretto being one of them, and sat down next to me. Her flour covered arms pressed flat on the high table.

I reluctantly snitched a cookie off the dish, not wanting them to go to waste.

“You’re right about the codicil,” she said. “I’d heard about it, but never knew exactly what it said, so yeah, I pinched it. My future was at stake, and your mom never liked to tell me nothing. I had a right to know the truth. It was no secret that you went and fetched her paperwork that morning, and as soon as I saw you clutching that folder, I knew exactly what you were carrying. Only problem was, you wouldn’t just hand it over no matter how much I might of asked.”

She had a point.

“You left me no choice but to swipe it. And you made it so damn easy. Who puts something that important in a place with a loudspeaker? We all know the song your mom’s jewelry box plays.”

I ate two more cookies amazed that getting a confession out of Hetty could be so easy.

“So Aunt Babe was right all along.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just because I snitched the codicil doesn’t mean I killed the prick.”

I put the yummy cookie I was about to triumphantly devour back on the plate, and spoke with loud bravado, not wanting to repeat myself. “Why not? You love this place, and love this bakery. You had motive. After all the years of lies you’d told Aunt Babe you sure as hell didn’t want Dickey spilling the truth that you were simply jealous that he was two-timing even you. Although, moving that millstone must have been quite the challenge.”

I waited for a full confession, just like crime shows on TV where the villain comes clean in the end. I especially wanted to hear how she moved the millstone.

“Are you not listening to me? I had nothing to do with that murder.” She leaned in closer to me. “Here’s how it went down, and this is God’s honest truth. I swear.”

“On what?”

“Come again.”

“What do you swear on?”

“I don’t swear. Your Aunt Babe has the potty mouth, not me.”

I didn’t want this to happen again. I took a deep breath and spoke as succinctly as I could. “If you’re going to swear that you’re telling me the truth, I need you to swear on something that matters to you.”

“Humph,” she scoffed. “You always want more than anybody wants to give.”

“Then I won’t believe anything you say.” I began dialing Lisa’s number.

She reached over and grabbed the phone. “Okay, okay. Don’t go calling any cops. I swear on this bakery that I didn’t kill the bastard. I’d thought about it plenty of times. Even thought about how I’d do it, while the bastard was sleeping. I hate confrontations. But when I left him in the barn, he was still upright.”

“You met him in the barn?”

“Didn’t everybody?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then you didn’t know what a big stink that codicil caused with the family.”

She noticed the flour on her arms and proceeded to brush it away. It billowed around her then fell to the table in a fine white layer.

“It shouldn’t have. Dickey told me he didn’t care about this orchard. That he just wanted to marry Jade and start a new life.”

“And you believed him?” Her eyes sparkled with amusement.

“Had no reason not to.”

She leaned in closer to me. “How about because he’s gangster?”

“Okay, so that was all a lie, but still
—
”

“Look, all I did was barrow the codicil. Nothing else.”

“Did somebody steal it from you?”

“No.”

“Then how did it end up in Peter Doyle’s mouth?

“I don’t know. I gave it to Jimmy.”

Her words sent a rush of heat through me and I sat up stick straight. “You gave it to Jimmy? Why?”

“Because he wanted it.”

“But how did he know you had it?”

“I showed it to him almost as soon as I took it. I wanted to make sure I understood what I’d read.”

“And how did Jimmy react to it?”

“He didn’t.”

“Could you be more specific?”

A bell rang. Hetty stood. Something needed to come out of the oven. “I don’t see what this has . . . ”

I threw her my-daughter-of-a-mobster look, not quite as bad as her evil eye, but I’d been told that it could be intimidating under the right circumstances. I was hoping this was one of those circumstances.

“. . . okay. Don’t be giving me no evil eye. You know I haveta be careful what I say out loud if I don’t want to end up like Dickey. No place is safe until the killer either disappears or we forget about all of this.”

“Neither of which is going to happen so you may as well spill it.”

She walked over to the large oven, grabbed two industrial sized oven mitts, opened the oven and proceeded to pull out several trays of golden rolls, then slid them onto a tall cooling rack. The smell of the warm bread was intoxicating and if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d just heard that sweet cousin Jimmy was looking more and more like a murderer I would have sat right down and eaten an entire tray of rolls, along with a stick of real butter. I was in desperate need of warm comfort.

She pulled the mitts off, let out a loud sigh and said, “He folded it up, slipped it into his pocket and told me that I never saw it.”

Red Mob flag.

My stomach clenched tight. Suddenly the smell of warm bread was nauseating. When one of these Wise Guys told someone they “never saw it” that meant the problem would be taken care of, no matter what the cost.

Rounding up Hetty as the killer was one thing, but rounding up and proving that Jimmy was the killer was in a totally different category. He would not go down easy, plus, I would need much more evidence if I was going to present this to the family. They would have to be convinced before they turned one of their very own over to the police, no matter how slack the “family” strings were.

Case in point, Uncle Sal:

It had been easy to kick Uncle Sal off the property three years ago for that little episode of pimping when suddenly three different women started hanging around the tasting room and leaving with some of our regular male customers. Besides, Sal wasn’t technically an uncle, more of an uncle of a cousin of an aunt who wasn’t a true aunt, but just a friend of Uncle Ray’s sister’s husband.

We had a family meeting and decided not to turn him into the Feds. He was having a problem getting the business off the ground anyway. The women were full-figured ladies, which wasn’t going over as well as he had expected, so instead we bought him and his girls plane tickets to New York City.