You Cannoli Die Once (4 page)

Gender.

*

Not a deal breaker.

Not when she played “Tiger Rag” like it was the last piece either of us would hear in this lifetime, so it had better be great. When she finished, I clapped like I used to when I was hysterical that Tinkerbell would die, pushed the contract at her, explained I couldn’t pay her anywhere near what she was worth, and signed her up.

As she slipped on her white fishnet gloves and adjusted the wide-brimmed hat, I trotted to the refrigerator out front and pulled out a single lavender rose, which I presented to her. Mrs. Crawford lifted an eyebrow, inclined her head, and turned on her dyed-to-match heels.

I watched her head north on Market Square, past Akahana the Japanese bag lady, making her wandering way along the wide sidewalk, past Mr. von Veltheim the baker, adjusting his blue awning, past the Bucks County Community College student twosomes.

I cleaned up the rest of the wreckage of violets, cramming plants into new pots I found stashed in the back room, and swept. The four-tiered display stand was now a three-tiered display stand, but other than that, it didn’t look too bad. Maybe my good-neighbor discount would apply to the violets …

While I swept, I wondered about the keys to Miracolo.

One was on my key chain. But what about the one I stashed at Jolly’s? I suddenly felt queasy about it, but there was nothing I could do until I got through my to-do list. As I swept the last of the spilled potting soil out the front door, I gazed longingly at Sprouts, where the tunes of Joni Mitchell escaped from the doorway.

If I sniffed really hard, I swear I could smell the lentil salad.

And then my cell phone rang. I pulled it out of the bar apron I had found on a hook in the back room and flipped it open.

“ ‘O blind lust! O foolish wrath! Who so dost goad us on—’ ” my grandmother began oratorically.

Oh, God, not Dante. He was her fallback guy, the go-to poet she turned to in life’s toughest moments. (Me, I read bumper stickers.) She liked him so much she even forgave him for being born in Florence, which fell south of my Genovese grandmother’s weird equivalent of a Mason-Dixon line.

“Nonna?” I took a breath. “I’m glad you called.” So, two new things in one day. Dealing with dead bodies, happy to hear from difficult grandmother. I glanced down the street, where one of the black-and-white cop cars had left, replaced by the coroner’s van.

But she wasn’t done. I could picture her eyes closed as she went on poetizing about ramparts and centaurs, and although I couldn’t quite find the connection—unless Arlen had features I was unaware of—I could tell it was her way of memorializing her boyfriend. I just had to wait her out.

“Oh, Eve,” she said as she abandoned the recital, “my poor Arlen.”

Her voice sounded so small that my heart started pounding. Maria Pia is nothing if not larger than life. “I’m sorry, Nonna,” I said, feeling helpless. This kind of comfort might be beyond me. “Since I never met Arlen, I didn’t recognize him.”
Dented like a can of cannellini on my kitchen floor
. “I mean, you weren’t seeing him all that long, right?”

“In some ways I’ve known Arlen forever, Eve. He was a soul older than old. A soul that dragged itself out of the primordial … ” Here her vocabulary failed her and she finished with, “whatnot.”

Some of that primordial whatnot was on my kitchen floor.

“I get the idea, Nonna.” Couldn’t I have a grandmother who made brownies and sold crap on eBay?

All of a sudden her voice dropped and she sounded urgent. “Eve,
cara mia,
I have to see you. I have to talk to you.”

“Sure. I’ve got some time after four.” Must call the wait staff, the uniform vendors, the carpet cleaners, the wholesalers—

“It’s
important.
” She sounded like I was arguing with her. “I don’t know how much longer I can—”

“I promise I’ll come by as soon as I can, but right now I’ve got to go, Nonna.”

“I can’t possibly see you today, Eve,” she huffed. “What are you thinking? I need time to grieve.”

I rolled my eyes. “I understand.”

“Come tomorrow. Early. Say, eight. I’ve got a nine o’clock massage.”

So she’d wedge grief in between espresso shots and hot stones.

“Darling, ever since I heard the news”—what, an hour ago?—“my back has felt as—as—clumped as that
strega
Belladonna Russo’s
panna cotta
.” The witch in question, Belladonna Russo, was her cooking archrival in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Maria Pia expelled a breath that sounded like the first wind of all time. “And I’m not in the mood for lunch.”

I pressed my lips together. “Murder’s a terrible thing.”

“So’s prison,” she said with a trace of the Philly accent and attitude she had worked hard to get past. And then she hung up.

4

Jolly’s Pub is one of those pleasantly dark places you look for when you decide to go out for intrigue with somebody you’d rather not see too closely. Me, I go solo, for the Sam Adams Boston lager and the beer nuts. Not that I tell Maria Pia that. Hearing that anyone makes even a single non-Italian food choice produces such a look of hurt bafflement in her, you’d swear she’d just heard that Enrico Caruso was really a Hungarian mezzo-soprano named Magda who just had a very good costumer.

There was a long bar that gleamed like a grand piano and, even though it was only 4 p.m., the empty café tables were dotted with fake candles. In the warm weather, the entire glass front wall is moved up and out of sight, like a garage door, and the crowd spills out onto Market Square.

Reginald Jolly, a tall, lean Brit somewhere in his seventies, sat at a table in the darkest corner, working on what looked to be a schedule.

I led with, “You heard?”

“I heard.” He set down his pen. “Big trouble at your place, eh?” Reginald had a pencil mustache even when pencil mustaches weren’t cool, which was pretty much always. His stand on facewear filled me with confidence in the man, and if I couldn’t honestly say I’d trust him with my life, I did at least trust him with my key.

“I’ll say.”

He made a move out of his seat. “A Laphroaig on the house?”

He has a fine line of single malts. Better than Miracolo’s. “Does the queen like corgis?” I asked in our little routine. While he slipped behind the bar and reached for the bottle, I stared at one of his framed maps of this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

“So, Eve,” he said, setting down the two shot glasses, then tugging at his creased pants legs as he sat, “what brings you across the street?” We picked up our drinks and touched our glasses together in the faintest of clinks.

Since he didn’t seem to want any of the gruesome details about the discovery of poor Arlen, I blew right past it. “Just doing a little key inventory.” I sipped the smoky Scotch.

He lifted his eyebrows at me.

“You still have the spare key?” It wasn’t really a question.

Reginald did his one-shoulder shrug that never alters the line of his blindingly white shirt. “The key you gave me, yes?”

“Yeah. You have it, right?”

“I keep it locked in the smallest drawer in my office desk.”

This is what I wanted to hear. Trust the guy with the pencil mustache anytime.

“Wonderful.” I smiled and started to down the rest of my Laphroaig.

“Until that one bird came for it, oh, two weeks ago.”

My heart sank. “What?”

“The one you sent to get the key. So they could practice in the mornings.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Practice?” Practice what?
“Who?”

“You didn’t send her?” He dabbed his mouth with a cocktail napkin.

“No. No, I didn’t. What did she look like?” What if it wasn’t even someone I knew? How would I ever figure out who had my spare key?

Reginald narrowed his eyes, thinking back. “She was what you would call petite, with straight dark hair that comes to here”—a motion under his chin—“narrow shoulders, slim hips”—I could tell he was warming to his subject—“a woman no more than forty. She had a voice that was soft like good cashmere, but with a steel pipe wrapped up inside.”

I sat staring blindly.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Dana Cahill had tricked him into giving her my spare key.

Did she think I wouldn’t find out?

Or was she hoping to return the key first?

I was baffled.

*

While I stood outside, leaning against the wall between Jolly’s Pub and Tattie’s, a souvenir shop, trying to figure out a next move that did not involve killing Dana, certain things happened on Market Square.

Across the street at Miracolo, all the official city cars were gone—and with them, Arlen Mather. While I’d been cleaning up my African violet mess, the coroner’s van must have roared off in a wash of May sunlight.

Even Flasher Man had moved on, probably heading toward Pensey Park, a mile south, where he could do his best work. And Ted the detective had stopped by the flower shop to give me a receipt for “Your Eyes Have Told Me What I Did Not Know,” which somehow didn’t fill me with confidence.

Akahana was working her serpentine way back down the street, stopping to check out any trash can that might yield dinner. And young boys fell out of the front door of Head in the Game, a video-game emporium just down the street from Miracolo. At that moment, a slim brunette with an alligator-skin headband holding back her shoulder-length hair, wearing a green see-through shirt with a ruffled collar and black silk pants, and carrying a spangled handbag big enough to hold a small African nation, arrived at Flowers by Beck.

The way she worked the key in two seconds flat, opened the door, and disappeared inside led to some pretty fine detection. This was not a cleaning service. This was a wife. So—I narrowed my eyes speculatively—either the flower-arranging James or the reasonably nice Joe had a stylish wife who had clearly rejected the idea of breast implants. Was there no end to the mysteries on this block?

It hurt to look at Miracolo, where gawkers were trying to see inside the shuttered window. I watched what appeared to be Main Liners stop at my door. They looked like people about the right age to know their way around a true antipasto. They also looked like people who might actually have heard of Eve Angelotta before the Incident of October 23, 2009. But the yellow-and-black tape shouting Crime Scene Do Not Cross, strung across the closed door, was just the sort of bad PR that could have lasting effects. I bet they were thinking the head chef probably couldn’t tell the difference between a flounder and a blowfish.

I sighed as I watched them move down the street, looking for a substitute. They would doubtless end up at the crêperie around the corner, where the picture of the owner, Eloise Timmler—whose entire former restaurant experience consisted of asking customers if they wanted to up-size their fries and Cokes—was the newest thing on the menu.

As I pushed myself off the low windowsill where Akahana always liked to spend a couple of hours in the evening, someone ran into me, making me stagger.

“Hey! Hi!” It was Mark Metcalf.

The day was suddenly looking up, like maybe I could pull it—stinking just a little—out of the Dumpster that was May 27. High points so far? Bawling freely on Dana—before I found out about her treachery. Hearing about that sweet good-neighbor discount from the Beck guy. Hiring that piano-playing tiger of mysterious gender, Mrs. Crawford. And now, Mark Metcalf.

Mark was someone I was forever running into. It was as if the cosmos wanted us to, well, do things together. The first time, about a month ago, I ran into him coming out of Starbucks.

He was one of those all-American hotties I secretly yearn for because I feel I owe it to the great, disappearing American cowboy. Like a public service, even. The Marlboro Man without the silly hat or the cigarettes. One of those men who are born tan. Green eyes that, yes, twinkled. Close-cut hair, because who needs long hair when you’ve got a chin that says you know what you’re doing, and lips that say they’ll kiss you up right good, missy.

Not that Mark Metcalf and I had gotten to that point.

It would help if our dates weren’t always on the run. We had had three of them so far. Drinks always led to food somewhere on the fly, like it was a threesome: Mark, me, and power-walking somewhere while chewing. The good-nights had all ended up strangely nowhere—near a park entrance, a performance just letting out, and a random tree—with me edging away when all I really wanted was to be a flying squirrel splayed against the screen of Mark Metcalf.

I was nothing if not perverse.

Was he gay?

Landon—whom I enlisted to casually walk by one time—declared no.

Was he married?

He once comfortably mentioned an ex-wife out West who was what she termed “an artist in glass” and what he termed achingly neurotic. And that was as much as I got. Mark himself was a day trader whose idea of Italian cuisine involved Chef Boyardee and a can opener.

We had a big laugh.

“So what’s going on?” Mark jerked his handsome head toward the other side of the street. I’m pretty sure I had seen Clint Eastwood make the very same move in
High Plains Drifter,
but I think maybe his wool poncho was irritating him.

“Oh, well, murder,” I said, waving it away, like it was the second one already this week.

The green eyes twinkled a little less. “Anyone you know?”

“No, it looks like some kind of weird breakin.” Technically, I didn’t know the dead guy, so I didn’t feel like I was lying to someone who could possibly become my husband.

“Anything stolen?”

“Stolen? No.” Terrible thought. “Unless you count the Quaker Hills PD making off with the precious Caruso seventy-eight lying under the body.” When he looked at me narrowly, I had to explain. “I’ve got a bunch of opera stuff over there,” I said, wondering if it would be the last I’d see of him.

“Cool,” he said.

“I’ve even got the gloves Caruso wore in
Rigoletto
in his first season at the Met.”

Mark gasped dramatically. “Not the gloves!”