by Mary Leo
“You’re not getting it. I have a really bad feeling about all of this . . . about Angelina.”
“Let it go,” Lisa told me. “Giuseppe handled it, I’m sure.”
I’d told her about what he’d said about relocating the body.
I tried to relax and enjoy the moment, the people, the trees, the bright blue sky.
I spotted the first big ugly California vulture circling overhead and thought it was going to fly right on by, until another one showed up to join in on the circling fun.
“What’s the matter?” Jade asked, moving up next to me. “You look scared, when you should be happy.”
“Don’t draw attention, but when you get a chance, look what’s flying overhead.”
She gazed up just as Lisa grabbed my arm. “Oh my God, the vultures are circling. The last time this happened, your dead cousin Dickey showed up.”
When I glanced up again, there were four birds circling now. It was at that exact moment when both Lisa and I realized why they were circling.
We both said Angelina’s name at the same time and took off running to stop Maryann and Rocco from pulling down those burlap tarps just as my mom said, “It is my pleasure to unveil these beautiful trees that have come to us all the way from the lush hillsides of Southern Italy.”
I yelled for them to stop, but no one could hear me over the cheers and whistles coming up from the crowd.
The next moments were a blur of hyper frenzy as several women screamed, and the entire group tried to clear out of there before my mom knew what had happened. All I could do was stare at beautiful Angelina, as she hung completely motionless on the end of a thick rope from the smaller of the two trees, on my left. Her lovely ruby necklace, with the missing stone, now dangled around her neck, the sun hitting the rubies and making them sparkle. Whoever hung her there, had purposely snitched the necklace from her room and then clasped it on her neck before he or she hung her in the tree . . . but why?
I immediately felt sick to my stomach.
My mother, in some sort of cataclysmic panic, screamed and dropped the microphone on the stage, which caused a horrendous boom. Then, all hell broke loose.
TWENTY
The Oil Thickens
It wasn’t as if we weren’t used to our grove being shut down for a murder investigation, but I knew this time my family had had enough.
Although everyone at first thought it was a suicide, a few of us knew the truth and couldn’t very well keep it to ourselves.
Lisa, Jade, Giuseppe and I didn’t really want to confess to what we knew, but we each realized . . . well, maybe not Giuseppe . . . we had no choice but to spill our guts. The problem arose when we had to come clean to Nick who then told the local police who then shut down Winestock Inn in addition to our place.
I hated when murders snowballed.
We’d all spent several hours being questioned about what we knew. At some point, Leo begged off and went back to the winery, which suited me just fine. Uncle Benny acted as our lawyer and guided us in what we could and couldn’t respond to. It had been grueling, but somehow Lisa, Jade, Giuseppe and I had made it through without being arrested. Still, I couldn’t figure out how Giuseppe made it through, considering he—or someone he’d hired—was responsible for actually moving the body . . . at least that was the impression I had. Since no one asked me about Angelina being moved, I didn’t offer up that information. To quote Uncle Benny: Never volunteer information. I tried to live by that rule.
I had my own set of questions: Whatever happened to the clean mob hit? A Wise Guy would kill someone, and the body would never be found again. End of story. One Wise Guy would then whack another Wise Guy for revenge purposes and everyone could go back to whatever they were doing before all the whacking started.
I longed for the good old days.
And what happened to that guarantee Giuseppe gave me at my mom’s engagement party that he’d taken care of everything? And how I didn’t have to worry.
Yeah, well, I was more than worried, and had moved into the realm of panic attacks.
Apparently, the clean hidden hit wasn’t the case with my family. They seemed to like to drag this whole murder thing out so the police and those special Italian agents that Nick hung out with could get involved. Of course, the case of Angelina took murder to a whole new level. It felt as though someone had purposely planned to sabotage Spia Olive Press, and maybe the entire Spia family . . . and I was thinking that someone might be Bruna DeLombardi, owner of the black hoodie jacket with evidence of my muffins stuffed in the pockets.
I still hadn’t told Lisa and Jade my theory, and I was anxious to do just that, as soon as I could get them alone.
In the meantime, my family called for an emergency Anonimo Cosa Nostra meeting, better known as a Mobsters Anonymous meeting.
Whenever something like this happened, everybody wanted to shoot something or someone to get their revenge. Of course, there was no longer any shooting allowed. We were all upright, law abiding citizens now, running a legitimate olive oil business. So instead, we held bi-monthly meetings to curb the craving for illegal behavior.
“Whoever did this should be shot, and buried in a deep hole while the bastard is still alive,” Uncle Benny proclaimed once he took the floor away from Uncle Ray who tried to moderate the group of irate ex-mobsters with total revenge on their minds. Uncle Benny was apparently so angry he’d lit a brand new cigar, something he rarely did. He was trying to quit his “nasty addiction to tobacco,” and normally kept an unlit stogy dangling from the side of his mouth.
Angelina’s murder was one thing, but to defile an olive tree, specifically an ancient olive tree, with such purposeful disrespect to both the tree and this family, was tantamount to spitting in the face of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses. There were no words to describe the absolute disgust of such a vile act.
“Yeah, shot,” most everyone said, agreeing with Benny.
“This is not going to end well,” Aunt Hetty warned from the front row, her graying short hair in its usual state of chaos. Aunt Hetty was almost deaf, but she refused to wear hearing aids because she said “only old people wore hearing aids.” Despite the fact that Aunt Hetty was well into her AARP years, she didn’t think of herself as old, and therefore everyone in the family had to compensate for her impediment. Thus her permanent seat in the front row so she could actually hear the moderator. And, we had all learned to speak up when we personally interacted with her, and when we held our meetings. Fortunately for Aunt Hetty, everyone was so spitting mad that raising their voices wouldn’t be an issue.
I could already hear Zia Yolanda wailing in the back of the room. We all tried to ignore her at these kinds of events, but I, for one, felt like joining her. This one act could potentially be the tipping point for my recovering family.
That was why Uncle Ray and I called for the meeting in our hidden meeting bungalow on our property. Just finding my way to the outbuilding was a trick in itself. There was no direct path to it. No directions posted anywhere. Everyone simply had to know which trail to take and which one to ignore. Like a maze to be conquered.
Most of my family had conquered the maze years ago, while I was relatively new to it. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Ray leading us here tonight, I don’t think we . . . Lisa, Jade and I . . . would have found it.
We had set up six rows of chairs with eight chairs in each row. Most of them were now occupied. Our “family” was growing by leaps and bounds. There were even a few people I didn’t recognize, which was beginning to be quite common at these meetings. In the next few months these new faces would begin working in the various businesses on the property and eventually they would move in . . . or not. Going straight was harder than it looked, and a lot of potential newbies would end up leaving or Uncle Ray and my mom would decide they weren’t ready to join our law-abiding clan. Both of which were fine with me. I already had a hard enough time going over the books to make sure no one was skimming or doing
any number of illegal things with their money.
Not to mention how to handle the occasional gunshot wound or dead body . . . which were the subjects of tonight’s impromptu meeting.
At the far end of the room, coffee and hot water carafes along with bottles of sparkling water sat on a long folding table covered with a white tablecloth. Italian cookies, including cream filled horns and Neapolitans were piled high on paper-doily-clad platters courtesy of Aunt Babe and Aunt Hetty. Various types of domestic and imported cheese, cured olives, and Uncle Federico’s tapenade sat next to the desserts.
Uncle Federico was serving life in Folsom State Prison for murder and attempted murder, but that didn’t deter from us serving his tapenade at our meetings. Uncles came and went, but a good tapenade was hard to replace.
Several bottles of our award-winning oils waited to be poured. A tray of sliced Italian cold meats and several loaves of crusty Italian bread along with another large caprese salad tempted even the strictest of dieters, along with deviled eggs, Italian style, which were harder to make than the normal deviled egg. The eggs would go first. Not that you could find an earnest dieter in this bunch. Good food was our life’s blood, and we had the bodies to prove it. Not that any of us was really obese. Let’s just say that anorexia was not a syndrome anyone in this family would ever have to battle.
And of course, there were several bottles of local wine, all of which I would be more than happy to guzzle, especially after the day we’d had.
Finding Angelina swinging from a tree branch during a ceremony that several hundred people had attended, including our neighbors, was so not good for business. And in this family, our business meant everything.
Most of us had spent a grueling eight hours answering questions and we were completely exhausted. No way would I allow Lisa and Jade to drive back to San Francisco, so they would be spending the night with me in my tiny studio apartment. My mother had been so traumatized by the whole event that she’d demanded my cousin Maryann come home with her and lull her to sleep with some of my mom’s favorite accordion tunes, namely Louis Prima tunes from the fifties. Maryann was more than happy to accommodate considering it was the tree she’d uncovered that Angelina had been dangling from. When Maryann ripped off the burlap, Angelina’s bare feet smacked Maryann right in the head and almost knocked her right off the ladder.
If anyone needed accordion music, it was Maryann.
“We know the dirty rotten shit that hung Angelina from one of Enzo’s trees will be caught,” Uncle Ray said. “Let me just say, this cowardly act will not go unpunished.”
More grunts of anger went up from the group.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” I stood up and shouted over the roar of revenge insanity. “We can’t do any of the punishing. We have to let law enforcement handle this.”
“Like that’s gonna happen,” Aunt Val shouted. “They already have their minds made up that one of us did it, and we all know nobody who lives on this orchard would be stupid enough to shit where they eat.”
Everyone seemed to agree with her, nodding and mumbling their approval.
Aunt Val still bore the tiny scar on her chin from her first husband’s rage when he sliced her with a shrimp knife over the proper preparation of shrimp. He disappeared shortly after that unfortunate incident, and she married Uncle Ray who loathed sea creatures of any kind.
“We all know that Mia solved Dickey’s murder,” cousin Jimmy announced. “Why don’t we let her solve this one?”
All eyes were suddenly on me. “Oh no. That was just a fluke. I wasn’t . . . I mean . . . I can’t . . .”
But it was too late. Uncle Ray stood ready up at the podium with gavel in hand.
“All those in favor of letting Mia solve this, say I,” Ray announced with a flourish to the erupting room. “All those opposed?” He held the gavel up, ready to slam down my fate when a loud voice in the back of the room came to my defense.
“I am opposed,” Giuseppe bellowed from the back row. I turned as he stood to challenge Uncle Ray’s gavel. “It is too dangerous. This person who would hang the lovely Angelina from a blessed olive tree è un diavolo! I will find this person who would do such a disrespectful thing and take care of it, my way.”
I stood and faced him, fists clenched, anger surging through my veins. “Oh, no, you don’t.” I said it in a clear determined voice so everyone could hear me.
“What are you doing?” Lisa said, trying to pull me back into my seat. “He’s right. This stuff is way too dangerous.”
“He’s not going to take care of anybody,” I told her, and everyone else in the room. “Not as long as you live on this property. That was your agreement. We are one-hundred percent legal in everything we do.”
I knew that in the past few days that statement wasn’t exactly true. We’d taken a few liberties. And where did it get us? To this precarious point, which only served to tell me once again that trying to hide a crime doesn’t pay.
“Things, they have changed,” he said.
“No, they haven’t. Not for the Spia family, and last time I checked you are not part of the Spia family. You belong to the Nardi family.”
“But you are my betrothed, so our families are as one.”
“I don’t like what happens to your betrotheds . . . they end up dangling from a rope. I’m no one’s betrothed. I never agreed to marry you.”
“Your papa has agreed, and he is the head of your family.”
“No, he’s not. If anyone is the head of this family it’s Uncle Ray. And that’s only because he’s the elected mayor. That could all change with the next vote. We’re a democracy.”
“But I like being mayor,” Ray countered.
Giuseppe grinned. “We will talk of our marriage another time. Right now, we will make right by Angelina. I will do whatever you say. I will find this person and turn them over to the polizia. I do not wish to cause this family any more trouble.”
He actually agreed with me . . . or did he? Whether or not he meant it, made being angry at him difficult. Still, I knew I couldn’t trust him. He had whacking in his blood. I had to try to figure this out before he did, or at least make sure that I was glued to his side whenever he went looking.
“We can work together,” I told him without really thinking about all the ramifications of this deleterious statement.
“Me too,” Lisa said, standing. Ah, my best friend, always on my side.
“And me,” Jade added. “We’re in this thing together, remember? We’re a team.”
And just like that, Uncle Ray’s gavel came down with a loud clack. “The ayes have it!” he said. “Meeting adjourned.”
Everyone shot up from their chairs and headed for the food and wine table in the back of the room. Lisa, Jade and I sat there trying to absorb what had just happened.
“So, like, does this mean you and Giuseppe are getting married?” Jade asked, a wide grin on her pretty young face.
“Does Leo know?” Lisa chimed in, reminding me of reality.
“With all of that . . . the fact that we have to find Angelina’s killer, all you guys can think of is whether or not I’m going to marry a mobster?”
“Well, yeah,” Jade said. “That’s a big deal.”
“She’s right, you know,” Lisa said.
I sat back down, a big glass of Cab would help a lot right now . . . perhaps the entire bottle or several bottles.
Deviled Eggs, Italian Style – Level Two
2 Tbs. Robust Master Blend Extra Virgin Olive Oil (or any extra virgin olive oil)
1 dozen large eggs
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
1 Tbs. capers, chopped
1 Tbs. kalamata olives, pitted and chopped
1 Tbs. sundried tomatoes, chopped
2 Tbs. fresh basil, minced
1 tsp. caper brine
salt and pepper to taste
Place eggs (organic if possible, they have a much better flavor) in a me
dium saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil and cook for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the eggs sit in the hot water, covered, for 10 minutes.
Cool and peel eggs under cold running water. Take your time, and make sure you get all the tiny bit of shell off the egg.
Slice the eggs in half carefully, remove the yolks and place in a medium bowl. Then remove yolks from bowl and place on a large flat plate. Mash yolks with a fork, until smooth, taking out any daily anger on the yokes, so you can really press on that fork. Using a spatula, return the smashed yokes to the medium bowl.
In a small food processor, combine the mayonnaise, mustard, capers, olives, sundried tomatoes, olive oil, basil, and caper brine and blend until mostly smooth, leaving some lumps.
Fold the mayonnaise mixture into the mashed egg yolks until smooth and season with salt and pepper to taste.
Pipe or spoon mixture into the egg white halves. (Piping takes more time, and looks much prettier. Since cooking is a nice distraction from craving a drink, doing the piping is a far better option.) Can sprinkle with a bright red paprika for a lovely garnish.
Serve cold from the fridge or at room temperature and enjoy!
TWENTY-ONE
The Long And Winding Road
Lisa and Jade decided to go home after the meeting. Spending the night sharing my bed or sleeping on a sofa hadn’t much appealed to either of them.
Walking back to Lisa’s car we made plans for hooking up the next day after my hair appointment with Gianna, who I just realized hadn’t attended the mandatory family meeting. I figured she must have had a good excuse or she would’ve been there.
Anyway, the goal of our meet up tomorrow would be to plan out how in hell we were going to trap an elusive killer. We knew this was going to be tough, but as Jade reminded everyone, we were a team and this team could not fail.
