You Cannoli Die Once Part 3

"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 c.r.a.p 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 ma.s.sage."

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 att.i.tude 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 cafe tables were dotted with fake candles. In the warm weather, the entire gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses, then tugging at his creased pants legs as he sat, "what brings you across the street?" We picked up our drinks and touched our gla.s.ses 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 pet.i.te, 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 subst.i.tute. They would doubtless end up at the creperie 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 c.o.kes-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 gla.s.s" 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!"

I gave him a playful little kick in the shin. Just a love tap.

I'd rather have the 78 than the gloves, but Caruso memorabilia doesn't come on the market very often. Caruso collectors are an elusive bunch, worse even than a secret society, since they guard their ident.i.ties even from each other.

Mark checked his gold watch-he must be good at day trading, whatever that is. "I'd like to see you work sometime, Eve," he said softly, green eyes back to full twinkle mode. In my head, I subst.i.tuted work with naked.

"Sure thing, Mark, anytime." Nail him down. "A week from tonight?" Would the crime scene tape be gone by then?

He leaned in closer. "Nothing sooner?"

"Friday?" I blurted. Never stand in the way of a good-looking man whose only fault is that he wants to see you sooner.

"You're on." He grinned and gave me a peck on the cheek before I knew it was coming and could intercept it with my lips. The man was fast-and elusive. Catching my breath, I got tangled in a swirl of his cologne, something by Serge Lutens that I recognized because I'd snagged a sample card at Saks.

My eyes followed him as he strode up the street. At this rate, the snow would be falling before he and I experienced anything half as cheap and pointless as my onetime adventure with the FedEx man.

My contribution to the Happy Food Potluck at Landon's was a salmon ball.

"Anything, but anything, with horseradish is not happy food, Eve," Landon lectured me. "Don't you have sinuses?" I followed him into his granite and Italian tile kitchen, where everything seemed suspended from the high ceiling: a Casablanca fan, a winegla.s.s rack, hooks for his gleaming copper Calphalon cookware.

Landon is a trust fund baby whose six-room condo is in the upscale Innerlight Estates complex overlooking Pensey Park on the south side of town. Maria Pia's younger son, Dom Angelotta, made a fortune in plumbing supplies, which pretty much offset her pique when he announced he was not going to work in the family business. Landon is his only child.

And Landon is the greatest art hag I have ever met. If there's a gallery opening anywhere in the borough of Manhattan, Landon is there with a bottle of Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino for the owner. He also likes small dance companies and dignified poetry readings.

Four of Miracolo's "human resources" were collected on the leather sofas in the living room, eating happy appetizers, which turned out to be edamame dumplings and caramelized onion Brie en croute. Apparently the dumplings and Brie didn't cut it with Landon's handsome tabby cat, Vaughn, who was stretched out on his back pretending to be asleep.

Gathered were Choo Choo, Paulette, Jonathan, and the treacherous Dana, all stakeholders. Paulette Coniglio was one of my father's former lady friends, who had waitressed all her life and still needed a paycheck. I liked her. Jonathan Bolger was still in a closet that appeared to be painted shut, but he was an excellent sommelier, and Landon had hopes.

"Vera will get here when she can," Choo Choo explained, balancing a strangely empty plate on his lap. "She's taking her brother to an AA meeting." We all knew she had finally talked him into going. Redheaded Vera Tyndall was a little younger than my thirty-two, putting herself through Temple University part-time, taking care of her brother, and an all-around good egg. The kind of person you can totally trust with your goldfish and house plants. And she actually liked Maria Pia, who was as difficult as she could be charming.

Landon brought me a plate and a big gla.s.s of red wine, probably not from a bottle of the Giacomo Conterno. "And poor, dear Alma will be late, too. She's got her grief support group until eight." Alma Toscano was a hard-luck friend of my grandmother's. When her husband killed himself two years ago, Alma underwent what Maria Pia called a "circ.u.mstance revision"-read: she fell on hard times and came to work at Miracolo. She kept going to the support group because they had all bonded, so now it was something social, only without having to learn Mah Jongg.

Working at Miracolo was an answer to grief, tuition, habit, empty nests, man trouble, underemployment, and performance dreams, since both the food and the company were wonderful.

I was chewing an edamame dumpling, waiting for the bliss to happen, when Dana spread a wide smile all around, then folded her hands and turned to me. "So," she said conspiratorially, "tell us what we can do to help."

"Well, Dana," I said, touching a gold c.o.c.ktail napkin to the lips I was saving for Mark Metcalf, "first, you can tell me why you talked Reginald Jolly out of my spare key."

I expected to hear Dana's sudden intake of breath.

I didn't expect Choo Choo's, Paulette's, Jonathan's, and Landon's, as well.

Something was afoot.