Pasta Imperfect (18 page)

Brandy Ann glanced at me, her expression not exactly mirroring delight. “The writing’s coming along. We helped each other tie up some loose ends yesterday, finished up our proposals last night, and dropped them into the box in the lobby this morning. So it’s over except for the waiting.”

I wondered if “tying up loose ends” could be a metaphor for “knocking off the competition.” “You two are really fast. Sounds like rooming together worked out pretty well for you.”

“Yeah,” said Brandy Ann in a tight voice. “It was unfortunate about Cassandra, but what are you going to do? We had to make the most of it.”

“We were lucky to get
any
writing done yesterday though,” Amanda complained. “We were taking the stairs back down from the top of the Duomo yesterday afternoon when that Bowles woman fell, so we got stopped by the police for questioning when we reached the bottom. We both remembered seeing her on the gallery because she was with that snot, Keely, but neither one of us spoke to her. The police were insistent that we had to know more, though, so the questioning went on forever. I was afraid they were going to haul us to the police station for more interrogation, but they finally let us go.”

“After taking our names, local address, and passport numbers,” Brandy Ann added. “I mean, what was the point? We had to have been halfway down the stairs when she took her leap. How could we have affected anything? Telekinesis?”

“Hey!” Amanda snapped her fingers. “That might make a good story. The first parapsychological romance. Could be groundbreaking.”

“Where was Fred?” I asked. “Didn’t he climb to the top with you?”

“Fred is such a dweeb.” Amanda gave her nose a dangerous rub. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t need stitches afterward. “He has like…no self-esteem. We found him moping around the baptistry, so we asked him if he wanted to join us, and he thought that might be okay, but first, we had to apologize to him for taking off without him yesterday morning. The guy is such a loser. I can’t believe he knows the first thing about writing a romance.”

I shrugged. “I thought that’s why he signed up for the trip. To learn from the experts.”

“Well, he’s not going to learn anything, is he?” said Brandy Ann. “Not with everyone’s lecture notes going up in smoke. He was all over us for pointers yesterday, but it was way too hot on those stairs to talk shop.”

“So where was he when Jeannette fell?” I asked.

Brandy Ann pumped her arm unconsciously, giving her biceps a practiced caress. “He wanted to stay a little longer up on the gallery, so Amanda and I headed down before him. Kind of surprised me that he wanted to stay longer. He has a thing about heights.”

So Fred had stayed behind? Hmm.

Amanda stopped suddenly, looking me up and down. “There’s something different about you today, but I can’t figure out what.”

Oh, boy. People were noticing! I primped my freshly shorn locks. “I got my hair cut.”

She studied my shiny new coif. “Nah. That’s not it.”

“Have any of you seen restroom signs?” Jackie asked, pulling up behind us as we rounded a wing of the cathedral.

Up ahead, the umbrella stopped moving, and those of us at the rear of the pack slowed our pace, spreading out along the paved terrace at the front of the cathedral. Fifty feet in front of us stood the Leaning Tower, in all its crooked glory. “Duh tower took one hundreyd seventy-seven years to build,” Giovanna shouted out to us. “In tirteen fifty, it leaned one-point-four meters off vertical. In nineteen ninety-tree, it was leaning
five
-point-four meters off vertical.”

Wow. Five meters off vertical. I imagined the statistic would be even more impressive if I knew how long a meter was.

“If you need a restroom, I think it’s over that way,” Amanda whispered to Jackie, indicating a long butterscotch-colored building north of the cathedral. “Duncan pointed it out on our way in.”

With a nod to me, Jackie pattered off, her latex-soled sandals barely making a sound on the stone terrace. Poor Jackie. Her feet must be really sore to be wearing flats today, especially since heels would have looked much better with her new trumpet-skirted sundress. Or maybe it was a question of balance. Considering her insomnia last night, she might have fallen off her stilettos.

“Duh tower was closed to duh public in January of nineteen ninety,” Giovanna continued. “But duh engineers work hard to correct duh tilt, so it will reopen agayn next year, in Deceymber, a full tirty-eight centimeters straighter.”

I wondered how much that was. A couple of inches or something? I angled my head to the pitch of the tower, then slowly returned to vertical. I appreciated the problem that the tower might be in imminent danger of collapsing, but I wondered if anyone had stopped to consider the economic disaster that would occur if the engineers got too successful. I mean, who was going to slap down money to see the Lineal Tower of Pisa?

Chirrup chirrup. Chirrup chirrup.

Hurrying away from the group, I snatched my phone from my shoulder bag. “Hello?”

“
Buon giorno, mi amore,
” Etienne said in his beautiful French/German/Italian accent. Unh, I
loved
it when he whispered Italian to me. Made my toes curl like a fresh perm.

“A friend in the department owed me a favor, so I have the information you asked for.”

“Great!” I scurried to the farthest end of the terrace to be out of hearing range of Giovanna’s narration. “Okay, shoot.”

“Brandy Ann Frounfelker. We found no listing for occupation other than bodybuilder. Monthy income is zero. I believe bodybuilders earn income by winning regional and national contests, and she hasn’t won any recently. She seems to be living off five credit cards and pays the minimum balance each month out of savings. She’s behind on rent, utilities, telephone, car payments, and gym membership, and is only a half step ahead of the bill collectors. No criminal background.”

“Okay.” Soft voice. Big muscles. No financial expertise.

“Amanda Morning. She works as a dance instructor and recently applied for a bank loan, but her income was too low to cover the size of the loan, so her application was rejected.”

“What did she want the loan for?” I slanted a look to my left to find Giovanna cutting a path through the center of the group and making wide gestures toward the arched colonnades of the cathedral.

“She wanted to open a —” He paused as if double-checking his notes. “It says here a tattoo and body-piercing parlor. Can that be right?”

“Afraid so.”

“Criminal record. Let’s see. She received a ticket for jay-walking in California three years ago and never paid it. No other violations.”

In the background I watched Giovanna motion the group to follow her toward the cathedral.

“And finally, Keely Mack.”

I watched the activity on the terrace as people marched toward the entrance of the cathedral, but surprisingly, Nana and George lagged behind, asking one of the Severid twins to snap a picture of them against the backdrop of the tower. Aw, how cute. Boy, Nana was growing mellow! Any other time she’d be sprinting to the front of the line to be first inside. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so much her growing mellow as it was George’s inability to walk faster than a shuffle with his ailing back.

“Ms. Mack is the manager of a Mr. Bulky candy store,” Etienne continued.

I guess that explained the endless supply of bubble gum. I saw Marla Michaels shoot a quick picture of the tower and suspected she must have been shopping at the street market because she was carrying a shoulder bag that I know I’d seen in one of the stalls yesterday. It was oversized, triangular, and made of delicious purple leather that I swore I could smell from here.

“She earns a decent wage, pays all her bills on time, owns her car outright, attends weekly church services, and she’s never had so much as a parking ticket. She appears to be something of a paragon.”

How come it was always the obnoxious ones who were the bastions of virtue?

“She even operates an online critique service that supposedly helps would-be romance writers perfect their first chapter. Did you know she’s won every regional first chapter contest in the nation?”

I rolled my eyes.

“It’s a fee-for-service operation, and it looks as though she’s raised her prices recently to keep pace with declining subscriptions. I’m no prognosticator, but I suspect if she doesn’t find some way to boost her client base, she’ll have to close up shop. Perhaps if she had more impressive literary credentials.”

Credentials like having a published novel under her belt?
Uff da!
It looked to me as if
everyone
was suspect. Including someone whose safari hat was nowhere in sight and a man who had the potential of making Casanova look like a wallflower. “Could I ask another favor?”

“Anything,
bella.
”

I felt a little fluttery sensation arrow downward from my navel. I gave him two more names. “Find out whatever you can about them. Dig as deeply as you can.”

A hesitation. “It sounds as if you’re involved in more than a contest, Emily. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Was this a good time to change the subject, or what? “Are you still at your great-aunt’s?”

“I had to move to my cousin’s apartment actually. Too much smoke damage at my aunt Philomena’s.”

“Smoke damage? Oh, my God! The birthday cake. The burning tablecloth. What happened?”

“One of the relatives grabbed what she thought was apple juice to extinguish the flames. Unfortunately, it turned out to be brandy.”

I saw movement from the tail of my eye and pivoted my head to find a handful of people still milling about the terrace, snapping shots of the tower and each other from every angle. And wasn’t that handy. One of them just happened to be Keely.

“Etienne, would you excuse me? I see something that needs my attention. I’ll get back to you later. Okay?”

“Ofcourse, darling.” And then in a throaty, seductive undertone, “
Ti vorrei mangiare per colazione. Ti voglio. Ti amo.”
Click.

“Etienne? Wait! WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?” I was pretty sure
ti amo
meant “I love you,” but I had no idea what the other words meant. Nuts! Maybe Jackie would know.

I stashed my phone, dug out my camera, and scrambled across the terrace to find the group lined up at the door of the cathedral and passing through quickly. I caught Keely’s attention and waved my camera at her. “You want me to take your picture?”

“I’d rather you just keep your distance,” she said, backing away from me.

“It’s the skin thing, isn’t it? Hey, I’m on a new medication. It’s under control.”

“Yeah, well, I was itching a lot last night, and if it turns out to be fatal, I’m suing!”

I smiled serenely and nodded at her tight slacks and skimpy top. “Looks like you spent some time shopping yesterday.”

She glanced down at her outfit and popped a huge pink bubble that she sucked back into her mouth. “Duh? I had to go shopping after what you pulled on me yesterday.” She scratched her shoulder and worked her way across her collarbone to her throat.

“Looks as if a lot of people went shopping,” I said, indicating the stragglers in their new togs filing through the cathedral door. “But I guess Jeannette Bowles never found the time.”

“Jeez. Jeannette. Too bad about her accident. She was hanging around Gabriel so much yesterday, I thought I’d never get him alone, and then…
splat.
Gross way to die.”

“I heard the three of you climbed the Duomo together.”

She worked her gum as if it were a wad of chewing tobacco. “Yeah, we were both following him around yesterday, but she cornered him at the baptistry, so when I saw them get in line at the cathedral, I hopped right in there behind them. Did she ever hog the conversation though. Yak yak yak about her food columns and stupid awards. Talk about being a shameless self-promoter.”

“Sounded to me as if she’d won as many awards as you.”

“My awards actually
mean
something in the romance world. So she gets a food critics’ award. Who cares what she thinks of the foot-long hot dogs on Mount Washington? What does that have to do with romance?”

Nope. I wasn’t going there. “She’d won a few romance awards. Seemed to me she was providing you with some pretty stiff competition.”

“No way. She was way out of her league. I’m a veteran at this.”

“Were you on the gallery when she fell?”

Keely slitted her eyes at me. “Who are you? The police? Jeez, you ask more questions than they did. No, I wasn’t on the gallery when she fell. I got sick of listening to her brag about herself, so I split. But I split too late to avoid the police. I guess they hadn’t identified the body yet, so they wanted to know if I was missing a companion. But even when I told them no, they still needed a bunch of information from me. What a pain.”

“So the last time you saw Jeannette, she was on the gallery with Gabriel?”

“She was telling him how wonderful her writing was. It was nauseating.” She blew another bubble. “I probably could have been more helpful if the police had told me that the woman who jumped was wearing a peach sweaterdress, but they said she was wearing orange.”

“It was coral.”

“Unh-uh. Peach.”

“It was coral! I should know. It was my dress!”

“No kidding?” She scratched the back of her neck. “Well, I’m not surprised the police said orange. Men never get their shades right. They think almond is beige. Rust is red. Good thing electrical wiring comes in primary colors. That’s probably added decades to the life expectancy of male electricians.” She sighed. “That was some hot dress though. Gabriel even mentioned how great it looked on her…when he could get a word in edgewise.”

“And she never mentioned it was
my
dress?”

Keely’s eyes shifted nervously. She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Well, she might have said something about the dress being yours, but I was pretty much tuning her out.”

“So she told you the dress was mine, and you never bothered to tell her about my contagious skin condition?”

“Hey, you said it was under control!”