Basil Instinct (27 page)

Was I getting anywhere at all in my investigation?

So her parents were crazy about each other.

So I had her birth date.

Were these even baby steps?

I was just about ready to clean up the piles until I could pore over them after my workday was done, when Paulette Coniglio knocked and entered. Looking for a quick, quiet update on my crashing of the Belfiere induction, she perched on the edge of the desk. When I told her I was busted by the zipper on the gown she had so kindly made me, Paulette slapped her forehead and muttered some Italian swear words not even my nonna knew. Then I filled her in on the moonshine and tinctures that were the biggest and baddest that Belfiere has to offer, which made her laugh that throaty laugh that always reminded me, first, of Lauren Bacall and, second, how stupid my father was.

Finally, I waved my hand over the piles of Georgia/Anna’s documents and explained them with one word: “Georgia.”

Paulette cast big, mascaraed eyes over the stacks,
and then they settled on the love letter, where her expression changed. She seemed startled. “Whatcha got here, Eve?” She turned the letter gently with her fingers until it was facing her.

“What do you mean?” I said, sitting up just a little bit straighter.

‘Well,” she shrugged, “Isn’t this Georgia Payne’s stuff? Isn’t that what you just told me?”

“Yeah, but—”

And in the very next moment came a comment that gave me the lead I was looking for.

Paulette was smiling quizzically at the letter Don had written to Annelise. “What’s Georgia Payne doing with an old letter from Dominic?”

*   *   *

Dominic?

My uncle Dominic Angelotta?

Landon’s pop?

My guardian?

What was she talking about?

Could I trust a woman who would wantonly use a zipper instead of buttons?

Nay, I say, nay.

But she was unmovable. Certain that the letter—“Pretty steamy,” she admitted, giving it a quick once-over, adding, “Jeez, Dom,” to a guy who had been dead and buried lo these last eight
years—had been written by the brother of her longtime squeeze, my dad, the great, disappearing Jock Angelotta. Paulette and Dominic had corresponded a lot after Jock had taken off from Quaker Hills and all his responsibilities, and Paulette, devastated, had moved out of town to forget. Dominic kept after her, trying to get her to come back to work at Miracolo, and finally, she relented.

“Sweet guy,” she said softly, “made a total pest of himself.” But it was handwriting she knew well. She pointed to the signature, “Even the splashy way he wrote his own name—it always looked like ‘Don.’ ”

No one knew better than I did just how sweet Dominic Angelotta was. He took over the dad role when my real one couldn’t stick it. But what about this Donald Tremayne that Annelise had listed as the father of Baby Girl Anna? Two different men? It had to be. Did Annelise have a passionate love affair with Uncle Dom? Was Aunt May still alive when it happened? Did I really want the answers to any of these questions? It’s funny how more light—anywhere—just ends up looking like more dark. If Dominic Angelotta had written this letter to Annelise, it just felt like the key to a closet where inside there was only darkness and
l’uomo nero
. All over again.

We took our battle stations and got through the
dinner rush, deflecting as many questions about the murder as we could without getting annoyed or seeming unduly mysterious. Maria Pia had gotten a second wind and was circulating feverishly, stopping by each table, finding something to talk about everywhere she oozed. Corabeth came up with an answer about the origins of zabaglione I suspected she invented, but everyone was delighted.

Jonathan thought outside the wine bin and made some risky recommendations that paid off. Li Wei actually looked for extra things to wash whether they needed it or not. Mrs. Crawford stuck to jazz and, although I missed the “Hokey-Pokey,” I was grateful for what was predictable. Enough surprises for one day. That evening, not a single dish broke, not a single customer argued about the bill, not a single menu item fell flat.

Miracolo, in a word, was back.

Just as the crowd thinned out, the way it usually did around 10 p.m., and Dana Cahill and the regulars came in, carting their instruments and their Grief Week shrine, I slipped off my shoes in the kitchen and positioned one of the stools against the one little bit of wall free of any counter space. Choo Choo left the kitchen to corner Vera Tyndall in the dining room, near the table where Jonathan stood with his elegant arms folded over his tight-shirted chest.

I closed my eyes. The happy clattering sounds
of Li Wei at work were soothing to me. As the regulars tuned up, making their nightly hunt for an A worth playing, they sounded different to my jaded ears. More acoustic, less electric. Maybe the tail end of Grief Week was entering a folksy phase that left out electrified music. Fine by me.

At the sound of the kitchen doors opening, I eased open one eye. Maria Pia. She fluffed her hair with all ten fingers, then pulled a small can of hair spray out of a dress pocket and spritzed it manically all around her head in a figure eight. I’m pretty sure some off it landed on what was left of the zabaglione. “Nonna,” I said quietly, not making a big deal out of it, “do you remember someone named Annelise?” I wanted to keep it open-ended and just see where the name took her.

The spraying stopped and she got a blank look. “Annelise? Why,
cara
?”

I made a face. “No particular reason, just wondering.”

“Annelise.” Then, again: “Annelise.” Saying the name the same way twice didn’t seem to jog her memory.

We fastened each other with a neutral look.

So maybe Paulette Coniglio was mistaken. Maybe that forty-year-old love letter to Anna T.’s mother was written by her husband, “Donald,” after all.

Just as I was beginning to find some comfort in that notion, Nonna said the fateful word, “Wait.”

“Wait?”

“Wait, there’s something. Annelise.”

“That’s okay, Nonna, you don’t have to—”

She flipped a hand at me. I caught a glimpse of the Belfiere tattoo. “Do you want to hear or not? Why do you ask me if you don’t want to hear? Are you Little Serena?”

“So tell me, Nonna.”

Maria Pia Angelotta looked like she was attempting to communicate with the spirit world, all of whom were living in the twelve-inch jumbo fryer hanging from the rack suspended over Landon’s prep table. “There was a girl who worked for Dominic . . .” With that, my heart slid south. “A long time ago. An employee in his plumbing shop. Nice girl.” Nonna replaced the cap to the hair spray and seemed to reach the end of whatever she had to tell me about someone named Annelise.

“Is that all?” I tried not to sound as disappointed as I felt.

“Please,” she barked. “Of course that’s not all. It’s never all when it’s young love, and Dominic was young, just starting out. I remember being worried, now that I think about it.” Her voice softened. “Annelise Tomaine. Beautiful girl. Very fair.”

“What about Aunt May?”

Nonna made the half-cringing, Italian gesture that says
I’m warding off a vampire only I left my garlic at home.
“May! This was before Aunt May came into the picture.”

“What happened?”

She widened her eyes at me. “Thankfully,
niente
—nothing,” she said with a philosophical toggle of her head. “Before we knew it, Annelise was gone—some thought Baltimore, some thought Philly—who knew? And May Siever came on the scene, and”—she smiled—“my Dominic grew up.”

So why did I feel so sad?

“Believe me, Eve, now that it comes back to me”—here Nonna gripped me by the shoulders in a way that said she was letting me think we were two women of the world—“we were grateful that the worst thing that came from the Annelise thing was a little bit of a broken heart for Dominic.” She pulled experimentally at her hair and turned to head back to the music coming from the dining room. Maybe she could talk the Grief Weekers into thinking her signature song, “Three Coins in a Fountain,” was about a girl who drowned in it. Over her shoulder she flung, “Dominic got some experience—and a boy needs experience—but”—she gave a little laugh—“no lasting reminders, if you know what I mean.”

With that she swept invisible lint from her
charcoal-gray skirt with the pink belt, and murmured. “Little Annelise Tomaine. I had completely forgotten about her.” And she disappeared through the double doors, never pressing to hear where I’d heard the name
Annelise
. Lucky thing. Until I did some more figuring, I didn’t want to spring Uncle Dom’s steamy love letter on her. Reading it, she might have to reconsider whether the lovely Annelise was her sonny boy’s maiden flight into “experience.” He mentioned things I found myself hoping Joe Beck knew. But not from Kayla.

I took a deep breath.

Annelise Tomaine was how Maria Pia remembered her. But it wasn’t Tomaine, it was Tremayne. Which meant Tremayne was her birth name, not her married name. And as soon as I got home, I’d fire up the laptop and see how far I could get researching the elusive “Donald Tremayne,” Baby Anna’s father of record. Slipping off the stool, I went over to the double doors and peered into the dining room.

Dana Cahill, dressed for some reason in a catsuit, but without the ears, was trying out some patter on the four-person “crowd,” muttering suggestively into her hand mike. The crowd pretty much shot her the flat looks that restaurant models get when they interrupt your lunch and private conversation to tell you where you can buy the overpriced getup.
If this four-person audience didn’t like the patter, just wait till Dana started singing.

The regulars, Leo the mandolin player and the others, kept vamping while Maria Pia tried to talk everyone into “Three Coins.” The only one it looked like she convinced was the dependable Giancarlo Crespi. Mrs. Crawford, who was packing up her sheet music and happened to look up—the woman always seems to know when she’s got my attention—crossed her eyes. A terse review of the entertainment. I grinned at her.

Leo’s mandolin, without the amps, sounded like, well, a mandolin, and the bass and guitar and clarinet were apparently performing three different songs. None of it, I decided, needed me, so I waved to Mrs. C., grabbed my little backpack, which held Anna’s documents, and slipped out the back.

The back door Annelise’s daughter had locked the night of the murder.

If she was living her life underground, as Georgia Payne, cat lover, former glove seller, cooking student, who knew her? Especially since she had changed her looks somewhat. Just what kind of enemies could under-the-radar Georgia Payne make in the last two years since she had taken on that fake identity? Not one violent enough to kill her, I was betting.

Which kept bringing me back to her true iden
tity as Anna Tremayne. But, here again, who were the enemies, besides the Belfiere crowd she unreasonably feared and hated? Any moonshining, parlor-game clubbers piqued enough at her to commit murder? Not likely. I think they were happy to see her go, happy to slap an Inactive status on her, and brush the dust from their collective hands.

So the question was . . .

Who was still around from her old life—up to two years ago—as Anna Tremayne, celebrity chef?

And although that seemed to be the key question, I couldn’t get around the fact that she had changed her looks. Changed her looks. As I hurried down the north side off Market Square to my car, hotfooting it around late-night amblers, I found myself stuck with what seemed like a truth I couldn’t shake: even if someone hated Anna Tremayne enough to kill her, how would he even recognize her?
How?

*   *   *

The night was muggy enough that I thought we’d have a storm by morning, so I folded my blue butterfly chair and carried it inside with me. As I felt for the switch that turned on the track lighting in my little house, Abbie swished me as though we’d been friends forever, and I crouched to pet her. Which seemed like an acceptable delay tactic from
me, in her eyes, until I got down to the serious business of a platter of chicken and liver. I speed-dialed Joe Beck and, when he didn’t pick up, left a message about helping me hunt down Donald Tremayne, who might be in his sixties by now.

As I set out a can of cat food on the counter and reached for a spoon, the breeze kicked up and sent something just a little bit moonlit and a whole lot floral through the screened window over the sink. Can the neighbor’s honeysuckle travel that far? Abbie landed on the counter just in case I thought I was going to dive into that chow without her. And then I froze. A shadow swept by the window, maybe ten feet away from the Tumbleweed. Although every instinct made me want to drop to the floor, clutching the cat, trying hard not to whimper, I did something totally counterintuitive: I leaned in for a closer look.

But, at what?

And there it was again. The shadow moved easily toward the front of my house. Setting the cat food on the floor, I frog-walked below the level of the windows, and reached up to flick off the lights. And, like Anna Tremayne that night, locked the door. The problem with my 130 square feet of living space was that it really came up short on hiding places. Or exits. If I survived the night, I was going
to fire off some suggestions to the good folks at Tumbleweed.

But, hair-raising moments being what they are, I crawled into the corner and sat up against the wall, just behind the locked door, considering the situation. Which was when I heard stealthy footsteps come up my steps, and I remembered the Belfiere motto,
Never Too Many Knives
. Suddenly this motto seemed to contain all the really useful wisdom in the world, but any knives I owned that could do anything more helpful at the moment than peel an apple were lined up on the magnetized rack over the sink—and in plain view of the open window.

Abbie chose that moment to start meowing some comments on the fare.

Cats have no appreciation for danger that does not directly involve them.

17

From my spot in the dark I watched the brass doorknob glint as the shadow tried it.