You Cannoli Die Once (2 page)

I started shaking.

I staggered over to the wall, where I meant to turn on the lights, but flipped the switch that started the loop of Sinatra music. “My Way” started, and my eyes slid back to the dead guy.

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention …

Melting against the wall, I killed the music and looked around the empty Miracolo kitchen, trembling.

Who did this? And why here, in my place?

My nonna might own the restaurant, swanning around chatting up the regulars and sampling my sauces while trying to convince me I’ll never “catch a man” wearing pants (to which I counter, “How about one wearing a skirt?”), but Miracolo felt like mine.

I pushed myself off the wall and looked more closely at the dead guy, afraid it was somebody I knew—some delivery guy, a regular customer, ex-boyfriend, or maybe even my so-called father. He’d been gone for so many years I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him. We were pretty sure his farewell note, “I can’t take her anymore,” referred to his mother, Maria Pia.

The guy had short, thick white hair and his face had a kind of hard, rubbery look. His eyes were glazed, like he was trying to look out from behind frosted glass. And his mouth was frozen in a look that seemed to say,
I’m not sure this is quite what I had in mind for today
.

One thing was for sure: I didn’t know him. Had never seen him before.

This was an immense relief.

So why were my hands still shaking?

Just tell yourself it’s like having a misdelivered package. Call someone who can come take him away, preferably in the next five minutes, before Landon—

“Someone’s in the kitchen with E-e-eve,” sang out Landon.

Too late.

“Someone’s in the kitchen, I know-oh-oh-oh.” Then he flipped on all the overhead lights … and shrieked.

2

“Landon, Landon, calm down,” I pleaded.

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” His eyes looked wild.

“Stop shrieking,” I said, grabbing his arms.

“I’m not shrieking!”

“Yes, you are.”

Landon was wearing a turquoise unitard under the black pants that are part of the Miracolo “look.” He has a Tuesday-morning theater dance class in Philly, where he signs in as Landon Michaels, his hopeful stage name. But at this moment he didn’t look like he could remember any of his names.

I pointed to the dead body. “Can we focus, please?”

He cautiously ventured a few steps toward me. “Who’s the poor unfortunate?”

“I don’t have any idea. He was here when I arrived—but I keep thinking he’s meant to be somewhere else.”

Landon looked at me anxiously. “Like someone got it wrong?”

“Exactly!”

“Because why would someone dump their—business—in Miracolo? I mean, it’s not like we’re a construction site or anything.”

“Or the Pine Barrens.”

We both shuddered.

“Do you think this is related to the string of local breakins?” he hissed.

In the last three months, a rug shop on the far side of Market Square and an antique shop on East Tenth Street had been robbed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Doesn’t this seem kind of … worse?”

He suddenly sucked in about a quart of air, and then jiggled his fingers mutely.

“What?” I whirled.

“There’s the—the—weapon.”

“Where?”

And then I saw it. About a foot away from the body was the black marble mortar I use for grinding spices. I heroically thrust out an arm to hold Landon back, as if the mortar were capable of independent movement.

“Well. That changes things. It means he wasn’t dumped here.” Oh, God.

“He wasn’t?” Landon’s green eyes were the size of the spangles on my old purple velvet belly dancing belt, back in my former professional life as a dancer.

“No. He was killed here,” I announced, violating my rule about not speaking with authority about anything I’m clueless about—which pretty much sets me apart from half of the Angelottas and all of the Camaratas.

I sent Landon out front to call 911 and our cousin Choo Choo Bacigalupo—I found myself needing Choo Choo’s bald, 300-pound presence to reassure me that the world was still filled with things like fine Italian pastries, and told him to leave informing our nonna to me. If I delegated that to him, the two of them together could give hysteria a bad name.

I stepped away from our “poor unfortunate,” wondering how he—and his killer—had gotten into our restaurant. While I waited for the cops, I mindlessly scooped up some fallen silver sugar pearls that Landon used when he made a cassata cake yesterday, and brushed them off onto the junk mail we throw into the corner of the junk counter.

And when I turned back, that’s when I noticed that the dead guy was lying on one of our Caruso records.

*

Before saving enough money to open Miracolo in 1937, Great-Granddad chauffeured around a Metropolitan Opera tenor. When the tenor had to blow town—publicly touting the glories of Il Duce, Mussolini, led to the haste—he presented his chauffeur with his personal collection of 78s. One of the rarities was a recording of “Your Eyes Have Told Me What I Did Not Know,” the only song recorded in English by Enrico Caruso.

I had mounted a few shadow boxes holding opera memorabilia on the beautiful old brick walls lining Miracolo’s dining room, and Caruso singing in English was my prize.

It was all I could do not to slide the precious record out from under the dead guy’s hips before it ended up as evidence, crammed into some dark file cabinet at the police station. Cracked into five helpless pieces. That record hadn’t survived flooded basements, lousy housekeeping, even a small house fire, over the course of four generations, only to get tossed willy-nilly into an evidence box.

At the sound of raised voices, I left the kitchen.

The inner door to Miracolo opened to a chorus of gasps, revealing Landon’s back and what looked like my rubbernecking cousin Kayla and my pal Dana Cahill, carrying on like they were waiting for the doors to open for one of Loehmann’s especially competitive sales. I pulled the inner door shut and walked over to them.

To hear Kayla babble, you’d think the unpleasantness described by Landon was somehow affecting the entire escarole crop on the East Coast.

But Dana just asked me softly, “Problem?”

Dana’s one of those supremely confident people who never seems to need long hours of girlfriend therapy involving margaritas and prank calls to loser men. Her husband, Patrick, owns an entire block of buildings on Market Square, though not ours—which keeps things friendly and simple.

I folded my arms across my chef jacket and started to answer their questions, like would I say it’s more gruesome than ghastly, how deep is the dent in the skull, and just how close I might be to puking up my breakfast.

And then, suddenly my face froze. Except for my lower lip, which started to quiver. Oh, no. Not here. Not now.
Not ever
. Five years ago, I had survived a fall that broke my leg in two places and pretty much ended my Broadway dancing career, without blubbering. And I’d survived Nonna’s triumph when—broke and a little bit broken—I had capitulated and joined the family business.

Dana stepped up close, but then Dana always steps up close. Her sense of her own personal space lies well within your own. Most days, I don’t mind. She pushed a lock of my wavy chestnut hair behind my ear. “Tough morning, darling? Shall I run to Starbucks and get you something with lots of foam?”

Really, the terrible thing about kindness is that it comes when you most need it.

My shoulders slumped … and I started bawling. Then I flung myself, wailing, at Dana and the Versace scarf around her neck. Landon and Kayla closed in, going for a group hug that yielded a veritable potpourri of Lady Speed Stick (Kayla), Skin So Soft (Landon), and Opium (guess who) applied a little freely for early afternoon.

As I heard dueling sirens wail to a stop outside Miracolo, I came to my senses. “Landon, grab the bag from the butcher. It’s just inside the kitchen doors.
Quick
!” A bag holding ten pounds of flank steak for braciole sitting out on the murder floor, where I’d dropped it earlier, wouldn’t survive who knew how many days of the Quaker Hills version of
CSI
.

Landon broke away from the group force field and disappeared in a dash of turquoise through the inner door. My cousin Kayla started spouting harebrained theories about the identity of the dead guy and motives for the crime, while Dana pulled a compact out of her handbag. The two of them took turns checking hair and lipstick, baring their teeth to expose any seeds or spinach still hanging around after lunch.

We couldn’t afford to close down for days while the cops did their thing behind yellow crime scene tape, but what could we do? “Landon, hurry,” I called, then peeked out the street door as two black-and-whites disgorged four cops to the sound of radio crackle.

I was just about to head them off at the pass—do a little meet-and-greet out there on the sidewalk—when Landon sprang back into our little group, brandishing the bag of flank steak. I fell back, mashing poor Dana’s left foot, and took a huge breath when the street door swung open.

The marines had landed.

*

They dutifully checked out for themselves that there was indeed a dead guy in the restaurant, where, I reflected, the previous most exciting thing was the time I had sex in the back office with the FedEx guy. Although that had turned out to be one of those “what was I thinking?” moments, at least what happened in the back office stayed in the back office.

We spilled out onto Market Square.

It was a warm early afternoon in late May and a few lunch stragglers still loitered under the green awning at Sprouts, the vegetarian café two doors down.

Dana rubbed all of our shoulders.

Landon practiced some
pas de bourrée.

I shredded a croissant and stuffed the flaky pieces in my mouth. Landon had to remind me to chew.

Kayla stood utterly still with her eyes closed. I could swear I heard her annoying mantra—
noof
—buzzing around us. Or maybe she was just winding up a good
malocchio
—the Italian evil eye—against the murderer responsible for shutting down Miracolo before she got paid.

Dana chewed her French-manicured nails and watched me pace.

A crowd, of course, gathered.

And a man sauntered to a stop. “Hello, Kayla.”

It was Joe Beck, dressed today in jeans and a well-worn orange and gray plaid shirt. Landon murmured something about a blond Ryan Reynolds, and Dana countered with something about Eric Bana, only subtract the waves and add a dimple a girl could disappear into like Alice down the rabbit hole. All of which I think Joe heard. Although I happened to agree with her about the dimple, I kept it to myself.

First, corpses.

Now the real embarrassment: my friends and family.

“Joseph,” Kayla said with a flip of her newly colored red and professionally curled hair.

That seemed to conclude the joyful reunion between the two lovers. Somehow I expected more from people who, for three nights, had shared the ultimate intimacy—underwear—together. But about this Beck guy, I knew next to nothing except he scares easily and can tell the difference between a parasol and an umbrella.

He was taking in the cop cars, the crowd, and me. “Carbon monoxide?” He turned his blue eyes to me inquiringly.

“Dead guy,” I said and crossed my arms. “Smashed skull. We have good monoxide detectors.”

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Those won’t help much with blunt objects.”

“Mortar and pestle,” I added. “Well, just the mortar.”

Joe Beck crossed his arms. “So who is he?”

“Don’t know him, never saw him.”

Joe Beck thrust out his lower lip kind of skeptically, I thought. Then he gave a little shrug. “Why would some total stranger—”

Just then a girl in pink spandex, with enough metal on her face to jam navigation systems everywhere, sidled up from the crowd and gave him a gum-chewing once-over, followed by a thumbs-up, which made him smile.

Kayla started unloading vegetables from the back of her blue van emblazoned in yellow script with Kale & Kayla Organics, the name of her farm. “Wait, wait, Kayla!” What was I going to do with five crates of eggplants, escarole, peppers—

Dana started answering the crowd’s morbid questions about the dead guy, though of course she had no answers.

Choo Choo. Where was Choo Choo? He was good at crowd control.

Kayla hauled another crate out of the back of the van of plenty. “Kayla, stop,” I yelled, “I can’t possibly—”

Joe Beck shifted his weight and tried again. “Why would some total stranger break into Miracolo just to shuffle off this mortal coil?”

I put my hands on the hips that were somewhere under the chef jacket. Doesn’t anybody design alluring chef wear? “Are you saying the guy’s a suicide?” I shot him a challenging look. “Then how come his head was bashed in when I found him lying on ‘Your Eyes Have Told Me What I Did Not Know’?”

Joe looked confused. “What’s ‘Your Eyes Have Told Me—’ ”

I stood up straighter. “ ‘Your Eyes Have Told Me,’ ” I said in my prissiest manner, “is a song recorded by Enrico Caruso in 1925. In English. The only one. It’s a treasure in opera memorabilia.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

I checked out the rest of us refugees from the family business. What on earth was I going to do with them? Being barred from the restaurant for a couple of days was going to be a serious problem. What about payroll? I groaned.

“Well,” said Joe, “your day is pretty effectively screwed.”

I gaped. “And people pay you for that kind of insight?”

“Four hundred an hour.”

“I guess it’s easy to mistake cost for value.” Oops, out of my mouth before I could stop it.

He started to laugh.

Which made me stamp my foot. “I’ve got to interview an applicant for the pianist position in forty-five minutes, and no place to do it now—let alone a piano!”

“You can use James’s other room while the cops sample the physical evidence in your restaurant. He’s away at the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK. How’s that?”