Pasta Imperfect (30 page)

A full-blown smile raced across my lips. Okay, this wasn’t so bad. This wasn’t bad at all!

Chirrup chirrup. Chirrup chirrup. Chirrup chirrup.

I dived for my cell phone. “Etienne? I was just thinking about —”

“
Signorina
Andrew?” said the voice on the other end. “Dis Officer Agripino Piccione.
Devo scusarmi.
Our phone line no good today. I have message you want speak wit me.”

I paused, swallowing my disappointment. “I did want to speak to you. Earlier. I had information about Gabriel Fox I wanted to share with you, but since the information isn’t relevant anymore, I guess I don’t need to talk to you after all. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“
Bene, bene.
No boder.
Signor
Lazarus, is he at hotel wit you? His line busy but I need speak wit him
pronto.
”

“He was here a little while ago. Do you want me to try and find him for you?”

“
Si.
You find him, you have him call me. You no find him, you tell guests we question dem eight o’clock tomorrow morning at you hotel.
All
guests. In lobby.”

Unh-oh. “Um — eight o’clock could be a problem. We have a memorial service scheduled for eight o’clock tomorrow morning at the Duomo. Could you possibly come at say, nine-thirty?”

Silence. “We come eight o’clock,
Signorina
Andrew. You tell guests.”

“But…wait a minute! Why do you need to question the guests? I thought you’d ruled Sylvia Root’s death an accident.”

“Not Sylvia Root’s det we question. Philip Blackmore. We no tink he die from accident. He have high level
alcool
in blood. We tink someone do dis him.”

“Al — what?”

“How you say. Alcohol.”

“That’s right. I told you earlier, I watched Philip Blackmore knock back three glasses of Merlot at a wine bar this afternoon. We all saw him get drunk. I feel badly that none of us was brave enough to stop him, but you don’t tell people like Philip Blackmore that he’s over his limit. I mean, can you imagine what —”

“No
vino! Alcool!
The alcohol. It poison him.”

I breathed heavily into the phone. “He drank too much Merlot. You just said that!” I wondered if I’d be better off escorting tours in say, the Mid-Atlantic states.

“Alcohol! Other alcohol —”

I waited for him to continue. “Hello?” Dead air space. “Officer Piccione?” I waited some more. “Hello?”

Silence.

I suspected this was the reason Italians drank so much. Not as an alternative to bad water, but to help them forget the frustration of their lousy phone system.

I set my phone on the bed and stared at it. Philip Blackmore died from alcohol poisoning? How did a two-hundred-pound man suffer alcohol poisoning from three glasses of wine? I’d seen how three quick drinks had impaired his judgment, but poison him? That didn’t seem possible. Unless —

I jackknifed upward. Unless the wine had been some dangerously potent brand. I’d heard an Italian drink called
grappa
could knock you off your feet in no time flat, but Philip hadn’t been drinking
grappa.
He’d been drinking Merlot.

Or had he?

I pinched my eyes shut and reconstructed the scene at the wine bar. Philip had chugged one glass of red wine, then trundled off to buy himself another. He’d downed that one in short order, then asked Duncan to get him a refill. The glasses had looked like Merlot, but could they have been something else? Had he been drinking this other alcohol that Piccione had mentioned? Or could someone have introduced it into the wine without Philip’s knowledge?

My eyes flew open.

Oh, my God. Someone could have tampered with Philip’s drink. But the only person who had the opportunity was…
Duncan.

I sat very still for a heartbeat, disbelieving that Duncan Lazarus was capable of murder. No! I refused to accept that. Not only was Duncan not the murdering type, what possible reason would he have to kill Philip Blackmore? The publishing mogul and the tour guide? There was no connection there. I inhaled a calming breath.

Was there?

I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. NO! I wasn’t going to do this again! I was too suspicious for my own good. There was no evidence to support the accusation that Duncan had killed Philip. Buying a man a drink
did not
earn him killer status.

Except that Piccione had said someone had poisoned Philip. And that meant I’d seen an accident that had been no accident at all.

I’d seen an accident that had been a murder.

Oh, God! I sprang to my feet, worrying my bottom lip as I paced alongside the bed. What if there was a link between the two men? But what could it be? Something personal? Something business-related? Something family-related?

That thought gave me pause.

Duncan’s sister?

But it was so far-fetched! What connection could Philip Blackmore possibly have to a young woman who may have died in a mountain-climbing accident? I mean, I suspected the closest Philip Blackmore had ever come to hiking up a mountain was publishing a book about it!

I stopped in my tracks as a recent memory jogged loose in my brain.
Oh, my God!

In the next instant I was riffling through my tour papers, throwing aside itineraries, medical forms and Landmark brochures, until I found what I was looking for — a paperbound booklet giving a complete and illustrated history of Hightower Books, from its inception in 1950 until the present. I flipped through the high-gloss pages, hoping the section I needed would be in there. And in one of the back appendices, there it was. A listing of every book and best seller ever published by Hightower Books.

Please, let me be right. Please, let me be right.

I frantically scanned the titles, decade by decade, and when I got to the nineties, I hit pay dirt.

Number one on the best-seller list eleven years ago was
The Thrill of Off-Trail Hiking.
The book Nana said George had read and taken to Yosemite with him. The book he’d dismissed as being too dangerous to try. The book endorsed by a bevy of expert climbers, one of whom, I suspected, was an Englishman named Robert Adcock, who’d endangered himself and his wife by going off trail, and who’d died because of it — because of the book published by Philip Blackmore.

That was it! That was the connection. It
had
to be. Duncan blamed Philip for his sister’s death, and he’d gotten even by poisoning him.

OH MY GOD! Okay, I might be wrong, and I might be sending the police on a wild-goose chase, and I might end up with egg all over my face again, but I couldn’t sit on what I knew. I had to tell someone.

I rooted through my shoulder bag for my Florence guidebook and punched in the digits for the Florence police office.

Dead air. Static. More dead air. If I hadn’t liked my new hairdo so much, I might have plucked every hair out of my head in frustration.

I resumed pacing and worried my lip some more. Okay, now what? I…I should call Duncan. No matter what else happened, he needed to be told about the police coming to the hotel tomorrow morning so he could alert the guests to stay here rather than attend the memorial service. I just hoped when he learned the police were going to conduct an interrogation that he wouldn’t try to skip town. I guess if he did, we’d know for sure he was guilty.

Heart pounding, I punched in Duncan’s number.

BZZ. BZZ. BZZ. BZZ.

Busy signal. Oh, God. I was almost relieved! But I wondered where he was and who he was talking to…and what I was supposed to do now.

Section 2E of my
Escort’s Manual
stated that no matter the situation, the savvy tour escort always prioritized her agenda and took care of first things first.

Okay. I could do that. I scanned the room, visualizing what I needed, then began gathering things into a pile. Post-it notes. Pen. Pocketknife. List of guests with corresponding room numbers. Cell phone.

I think that covered it. Noting the first name on the list, I headed up the central staircase to the third floor and stopped in the deserted hallway before Duncan’s room, but I didn’t knock. Nope. My days of being cornered by crazed killers were over. No way was I going to place myself in harm’s way again. I wasn’t a total moron. I was an Iowan. I was raised to learn from my mistakes.

I punched in Duncan’s cell phone number again.

BZZ. BZZ. BZZ. BZZ.

I pressed my ear to the door.

Silence.

If he was in his room, I’d be able to hear him talking, but I couldn’t hear a thing, which meant his room was empty. He was out. So if I left a note on his door, he’d see it when he got back and could take care of the business at hand without having to talk to me. Yeah. I liked that idea. It sounded much more safe to me than blurting out in the panic of the moment, “You did it!” and being targeted as the next victim to get clobbered.

I scribbled a note in my tiniest writing telling him about the change of plans and indicating that I’d tell the Iowa group to save him the trouble. I slapped the note onto the door and with my knees a little wobbly from nerves, sprinted back down the stairs to the second floor. Okay. That had gone well. With relief adding a little spring to my step, I checked my list again and began knocking on doors.

No answer at Mom and Nana’s room. I left a note.

No answer at the Teigs’ or Stolees’. That’s right. They had dinner reservations. I left a note.

No answer at Alice Tjarks’s room. Another note.

I rapped on door number five, relieved to have one of the Severid twins, minus her name tag, gaudy earrings, and high-heeled sandals, answer on the first knock. “I bet I know why you’re here,” she said, inviting me inside. “I bet you want your clothes back. We have everything folded for you and ready to go into your suitcase. We were planning to bring them down to you when we finished packing, but you’re just too efficient. You beat us to it. You were so nice to let us borrow your lovely things, Emily. We’re going to give you very high marks on your evaluation, aren’t we, Barbro?”

“With all our praise, you’ll get a raise!”

I looked from one to the other, marking which twin was which. I also noted their room was even more shabby than mine, with holes in the carpet, wide strips of paint peeling off the wall, and no lighting other than the dull fixture overhead. The only furniture in the room other than the two beds was a small desk in the corner. The only decorative accent in sight was the standard liter of foul-tasting bottled water perched on the desk.
Uff da.
I hoped they were assigned the presidential suite at the hotel in Montecatini to make up for their experience here. They’d been so sweet not to be in my face about the accommodations. I really owed them.

“Actually, ladies, I’m not here to pick up my clothes. I’m here for another reason.” At which point I explained about my recent call from Officer Piccione and how it affected tomorrow’s schedule.

“Why are the police going to interrogate us about Philip Blackmore’s death?” asked Britha. “Didn’t you say you saw the whole thing? That his fall was an accident?”

I smiled wanly. “I don’t seem to be right all the time.”

“Well, it’s too bad we’ll have to miss the memorial service,” Britha fretted. “We attended every funeral service Papa ever officiated, didn’t we, Barbro? He delivered real good eulogies. Always brought a tear to my eye.”

Barbro nodded agreement. “Folks died. We cried.”

“He gave a real memorable one for Harvey Gasser. Do you remember Harvey, Emily? He was the swine farmer off Route 221 who raised that thousand-pound pig. Trouble was, the family brought the pig to the funeral with them and caused all sorts of seating problems. No one wanted to sit with the pig, so it got a pew all by itself, and then there weren’t enough seats for the rest of the friends and relatives. Some folks got pretty irritated because they had to stand, but if you ask me, the pig really needed its own pew. I mean, it was big as a VW bus.”

I nodded, slightly glassy-eyed. “I’m sorry I missed that one.”

Britha smiled. “I think it was before your time anyway, dear. Don’t you think so, Barbro?”

“It happened back in ’69. His wife had been a friend of mine.”

I stared at Barbro Severid, suppressing a sudden urge to scream. “I have been
so
curious about this. I really have to ask. Have you ever been involved in a conversation where you didn’t feel the need to rhyme all your words?”

“Ofcourse, I have!” Barbro said, laughing. “Some words are simply impossible to rhyme. Like silver. And tsetse. And gazebo. Although you can try placebo with gazebo, but, it’s hard to gracefully slip ‘placebo’ into a conversation. What are some of the others, Brit? Oh yeah, panda.”

Britha Severid began ticking off words on her gold-lacquered fingers. “Xylophone. That’s a real hard one. So she usually tries to direct her musical conversations to string instruments. Harps. Fiddles. The percussions and winds can be real stinkers.”

“You try thinking of a word that rhymes with piccolo,” Barbro challenged me. “You’ll get a migraine trying.”

“I can think of a word that rhymes with tuba,” I enthused. “Tuba’s a wind instrument. How about scuba?”

Britha ignored me as she continued her litany. “Chocolate. Celery. Oxygen. She tried using toxin with oxygen once, but it really wasn’t a good fit.”

“Cathedral,” said Barbro. “Phenomenon. Four-syllable words are especially difficult.”

Cuba. Aruba. Hey, two more words that rhyme with tuba! I was pretty good at this!

Britha started in on her other hand. “Breakfast. Modem. Anemone.”

Oh, God. Now I’d gone and done it. I’d opened Pandora’s box. “Are these all your new clothes?” I interrupted, walking over to one of the beds.

The twins rushed over to the bed, where their new togs were laid out in all their garish splendor. “Jackie was so sweet to take us shopping today,” one of them said. “She’s quite the fashion plate. She even took time to show us how to transform our makeup from daywear to eveningwear.”

“Is that the eveningwear you have on now?” I asked, wincing at the peacock blue shading and thick liner above their eyes.