Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) (16 page)

The seafood items were the most expensive on the menu. This woman drove a hard bargain. She was also likely to drive me into bankruptcy.

I left her to decide just how badly she was going to stick it to me, and rounded up plates for the other tables. A few minutes later, the blonde had decided on the linguini with shrimp, as well as the bruschetta appetizer, a side salad, another chocolate cannoli, and a twelve-dollar glass of white wine.
Gee thanks, lady.

The front door opened and Stella returned, her face drooping with disappointment.

“How’d it go at the gallery?” I asked her.

“The guy’s good-looking,” she said, “but he’s older than he looked from over here. He’s like
thirty.
”

She said the word as if it were a disease. I suppose to a young woman who had yet to reach full adulthood, thirty probably did seem ancient.

“Thirty’s not too old for me,” Elena said. “I’ll take him lunch tomorrow.”

Ugh.

“You should go over, too, sometime,” Stella told me. “The place has all kinds of interesting art.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

Business picked up, and all of us were hustling for the next two hours. With the large crowd, and most of them ordering the cannoli for dessert, I wondered if I’d been wrong about the bistro’s earnings. Maybe all of the reported income had been earned legitimately. Maybe Tino wasn’t laundering his money through the restaurant. Of course it was much too soon for me to tell for sure.

While serving minestrone to a couple of diners at a table near the windows, I noticed a man in a green Cyber-Shield uniform walk across the parking lot and enter Gallery Nico. I tensed up for a moment, but realized he was probably going over to try to sell them security services. He hadn’t been carrying a nail gun, after all.

During the peak of the lunch rush, I spotted Benedetta heading to the register with a zippered vinyl bank bag in her hand. The bag was blue and bore the Chase logo. She typed her code into the screen, opened the cash drawer, and removed stacks of bills from the till. After zipping them into the bag, she slid the drawer shut and returned to her office.

I continue to hustle and bustle and bus tables. Despite the fact that I’d worn comfortable shoes, my arches began to hurt. I wasn’t used to being on my feet for hours at a time. I’d have to soak my feet tonight. Or maybe if I took a cannoli to the nail salon the tech would give me a foot massage.

Around half past one, when things had slowed a bit, I overheard Benedetta on the phone behind the bar, taking an order from her husband.

“Of course I saved you a cannoli, Tino,” she said. When I glanced her way, she rolled her eyes in an expression that said
my husband can be such a pain in the neck.
She hung up the phone. “One time in twenty-four years I forget to save the man a cannoli and he won’t ever let me forget it.”

I offered her a shaking head in commiseration. “I’d be happy to take the food next door,” I offered. It would be a chance for me to get my first peek inside Cyber-Shield.

Unfortunately, Benedetta declined my offer. “I can tell your feet hurt. Luisa can get it and you can take your lunch break.”

Was Benedetta truly concerned about my welfare, or was she trying to keep me out of her husband’s office? I had no way of knowing.

She waved a hand toward the kitchen. “Help yourself.”

I wandered into the kitchen and looked over the selections.
Yum.
This job was certainly going to have its benefits.

“What would you like?” Dario said, grabbing a plate and waiting for me to decide.

“Spaghetti marinara,” I told him. “And toss some of those fried mushrooms on top.”

His nose wrinkled in disgust. “Those mushrooms are an appetizer.”

I shrugged. “So?” I’d been known to eat leftover sushi for breakfast. Mixing an appetizer in with my entrée wasn’t going to put me off.

He didn’t bother to argue further, simply conceding with a return shrug. He ladled red sauce over the noodles and used tongs to add a sprinkling of fried mushrooms. “Let me know how it tastes.”

I grabbed a fork and took a bite.
Mmm.
“It tastes delicious.”

“Let me try.” He grabbed a clean fork and scooped up a huge bite, cupping his free hand under his chin as he put it in his mouth. He let the food sit on his tongue for a moment, then slowly bit into it, his chewing speeding up as he formed his opinion. “It’s an interesting combination of crunchy and savory.”

“Yep.” I snagged myself a chocolate cannoli, too. No lunch here would be complete without it.

I sat in the lounge and ate my fried mushroom spaghetti with my feet propped up on a chair. When I finished, forty minutes of my lunch hour remained. I went to my locker and removed my laptop from my backpack, setting it on the table. A moment later, the system was booted up and I clicked on the icon to search for available Wi-Fi connections. Several appeared. At the top of the list was
BBistro.
Surely that was the link for the restaurant. The second was
CSSecure
. That had to be Cyber-Shield’s. The others included
Portraits2Go, YoloYogu,
and
GalleryN,
which were easily identified as belonging to the photography studio, the frozen yogurt shop, and Gallery Nico.

I went to the door of the lounge and waved a hand to catch Brian’s attention. “I’ve got some homework I need to work on. Can you tell me what the Wi-Fi password is?” I mentally crossed my fingers that employees were allowed access to it.

“Cannoli,” he called back. “Followed by the number 89 and a dollar sign.”

“Thanks.”

I returned to my laptop, clicked to connect to the bistro’s Wi-Fi, and typed in
cannoli89$
when prompted for a password
.
One strike of the enter button and I was in.

Keeping up my façade, I retrieved my marketing textbook from my backpack, opened it on the table next to me, and turned to the second to last chapter. As I came across key terms, I Googled them as if performing an extra bit of research into the core principles taught in the book. Meanwhile, I also took bites of the delectable cannoli, going so far as to lick my fork and the plate clean afterward. If any of Tino’s thugs were watching me through the Webcam today, they’d get an eyeful.

The rest of the day went by in a blur. There was a brief respite in the middle of the afternoon, but it gave us just enough time to rewash the linens and prepare the tables for the dinner crowd. I’d thought my job as an IRS special agent was demanding, but waiting tables took a high toll. Not only did my arches ache, but I’d burned my wrists carrying hot plates, bruised my hip when I’d run into the corner of the brick oven in the kitchen, and accidentally shot lemon juice into my eye when positioning a wedge on a tea glass.

I should get hazardous-duty pay for this.

chapter nineteen

I
Gotta Be Me

I left the bistro on Friday evening with collapsed arches, an aching back, and burn blisters on my arms. On the bright side, I also left with a bag full of scrumptious Italian food and a printout of today’s sales figures, as well as those for the last week and month. I kept a close eye on my rearview and side mirrors, checking for a tail. There was none.
Good.
I felt smug knowing I’d fooled the alleged “wise guys” of the Dallas mafia. Looked like they weren’t so wise, after all.

I drove until I was a couple of miles from Cyber-Shield and pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store. I removed my IRS cell phone from the locked glove compartment and texted Josh.
Bistro’s Wi-Fi password is cannoli89$.
I waited a minute or two until his reply came back.
Got it.
With any luck, he’d be able to hack in right away and access the restaurant’s financial records.

I deleted the texts, pulled the sales data printouts from my pocket, and looked them over, trying to get a realistic estimate of the restaurant’s income. It wasn’t easy. Sales seemed to fluctuate significantly day to day, with the weekend figures being nearly ten times that of the weekdays. To be expected, I supposed. More people ate out on the weekends than midweek. They were also more likely to order an expensive cocktail or glass of wine on the weekend rather than a weekday.

Using the calculator feature on my phone, I multiplied today’s sales number by 365 to get a ballpark estimate of what the bistro’s annual gross revenues would be. I did a similar computation with the weekly sales figure, multiplying it by 52. Finally, I took the figure for the last month and multiplied it by 12. No matter how I estimated the earnings, the numbers fell far short of the amount that had been reported on the restaurant’s tax return last year.

Did that prove that Benedetta was laundering money for Tino? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Other variables could affect the figures. I wasn’t sure whether the data was typical, or whether they reflected seasonal fluctuations. I’d heard that people tended to eat out less over the holidays and in the winter months, while they visited restaurants more often during the summer, when they were enjoying vacations. An economic slump or something as simple as road construction could negatively impact a restaurant’s income, while an economic rally or successful ad campaign could send earnings through the roof. How much the bistro’s catering service brought in was anyone’s guess at this point, too. The figures weren’t broken out on the bistro’s tax return. If Josh could hack into her system, though, we’d have more financial data to analyze and could possibly answer some of these questions.

I listened to the Italian CD on the remaining drive back to my apartment. I’d moved on from numbers, and was now learning the four seasons.
L’inverno. La primavera. L’estate. L’autunno.

At the apartment, I changed out of my work clothes and dropped them into the stackable washing machine. I’d picked up a splattering of marinara sauce on my blouse and a smudge of creamy Alfredo on my pants. It was hard to stay clean schlepping Italian food.

Benedetta had given me the weekend off from the restaurant. The weekends were probably the bistro’s busiest times, which meant more tips for the servers, and she’d scheduled her daughters to work those prime shifts. Who could blame her? The restaurant was the family’s bread and butter—make that
garlic
bread and butter.

A lively Katy Perry tune carried up to my apartment. I turned the mini-blinds in my living room window to see a handful of the complex’s twenty-something residents gathered around the pool, beer bottles and wine coolers in hand as they celebrated the end of the workweek. It was the kind of thing Alicia and I had done when we’d worked together at Martin & McGee and shared an apartment.

Though those times had been only a few years ago, it felt like a lifetime had passed since then. I suddenly felt old and excessively burdened, the Fabrizio case weighing on me like that overloaded barbell. For all I knew, the man planned to kill another person this weekend, to do harm to another client who’d refused to give in to his salesmen’s unreasonable demands. Other than the kisses Tino had planted on my cheeks yesterday, I’d been unable to get close to the man. I realized I was being much too impatient, that these types of complex investigations can take weeks, months, or even years to complete, but patience had never been one of my virtues. Besides, our plan of attack had been to hit Tino hard, with a large team of agents. Surely that should speed things up, right? One could hope.

I hadn’t had the foresight to pack my bathing suit, but I did have a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops. I quickly changed into them, grabbed a towel, and retrieved the still-warm food from the fridge. I grabbed a stack of the cheap plastic plates that were in the cabinet, along with some silverware and napkins. I carried the whole shebang down to the pool area and set it on an empty table.

“Free food!” I called. The fastest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, but it was also the fastest way to make new friends.

In seconds, a crowd had gathered around and were filling their plates with spaghetti, fettucine, tortellini, and garlic knots. A curly-haired blonde handed me a fuzzy navel-flavored wine cooler. It felt good to relax, to let go of the tension I’d been carrying around all day.

I fixed myself a plate and slid onto a chaise lounge next to my new temporary BFF, who told me her name was Angelique.

“I haven’t seen you before,” she noted, holding her loaded fork aloft. “Did you just move here?”

“Yeah. A few days ago.” I tore a bite from a garlic knot and paused, thinking I should open up in the spirit of making friends like Tori would. “I’m a student at DBU. I had a job as a nanny and lived with the family, but they moved out of the country. It’s hot enough here in Texas. No way did I want to move to the Middle East with them. It’s like a million degrees over there. What about you?”

“I’ve lived here for about three years,” she said. “I’m a physical therapist at Parkland Hospital.”

I gestured to the buildings with my bread. “Which unit is yours?”

Her mouth was now full, so she pointed her fork to indicate an apartment on the first floor, directly under the unit next to mine.

I pointed up to the window from which I’d peeked out at the group. “That’s me up there.”

She introduced me to several of the other residents. One of the guys even flirted with me a little. I flirted right back, though since I was allegedly a student at a Baptist school, I kept my comments PG-rated. No reason to break character or tempt fate.

The crowd dwindled as residents returned to their apartments. I gathered up the dirty silverware and plates, bade Angelique good-bye, and returned to my apartment, where I stuck the dirty dishes in the machine and started it.

I glanced at my phone. It was nearing eight o’clock now. My mother would be arriving at my town house within the hour.

I figured it would be best to leave the Hyundai at my apartment so that it would look like I was home if any of Tino’s men came by to check up on me. Taking my purse with me, I scurried out of my apartment, circled around to the alley, and cut through a strip center to the next block. There, I called for a cab.