Killer Crust (A Pizza Lovers Mystery)

by Chris Cavender

  “I’ll be there in a second, but call Henry Felding and tell him that I’m not paying him until it’s fixed.” She paused, and then added, “Never mind. I’ll call him myself.” She turned back to us as she said, “If you ladies will excuse me,” and pulled out her cell phone to make the call.

  Out in the parking lot, Maddy turned to me and said, “I can’t believe how that fire changed Gina.”

  “Really? I can barely see the scars, and I know where to look for them.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Maddy said.

  I shrugged. “Some folks can change on their own, but it’s been my experience that for most people, it takes a truly traumatic event to jar them out of their lives enough to make them want to reevaluate how they’ve been living.”

  “I’m willing to admit that the very real possibility of being burned alive could do that to a gal,” Maddy said. “And yet it didn’t seem to change you at all.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” I said, remembering how it had led me to the point where I could finally start to let go of Joe and think about another man in my life.

  “Well, if you’ve changed, I can’t see it,” she said.

  “Maybe you just need new glasses,” I said with a smile as we got into my Subaru and drove back to A Slice of Delight.

  A part of me wished that the competition would begin tomorrow instead of three weeks from now. The suspense of who else would be participating, the challenges, and actually everything about the contest was almost more than I could take. But I knew that soon enough, Maddy and I would be drawn back into the joys and problems of running a pizzeria, and my worries about the upcoming competition would all fade, at least for the short term. With Greg and Josh, our two college men who worked when classes permitted, I knew we’d be able to handle just about anything that came our way at the Slice, but I also realized that there was no way I was going to be able to stop thinking about that prize money.

  Even with the hefty cut taken off the top to pay taxes, it was still a lot of money to play with.

  I just hoped that if I did win, I’d keep my promise to spend it on the pizzeria and not myself.

  Chapter 3

  “I keep forgetting just how amazing this place is,” I said to Maddy three weeks later. The appointed eve for the competition to begin was finally upon us, and we’d come with our overnight bags to check into our rooms.

  “Gina did a truly magnificent job,” Maddy said as we both took in the hotel lobby’s elegant yet rustic feel. Low whispers of jazz served as background music, and she’d added more soft lighting and a few large towering plants since we’d been at the grand opening nine days ago. After we checked into our rooms, which were as lovely as promised, Maddy and I headed back downstairs for the cocktail party that would introduce us to all of our competitors.

  Gina and Luigi had decided to host our meet-and-greet party at the smaller and more intimate hotel complex’s atrium annex tonight, since the auditorium had already been set up for the audience, and the kitchens were all organized on the contest stage, so we headed over there.

  Apparently we were early, though, since no one else was there.

  “Should we come back later?” I asked.

  My sister shook her head. “I’m happy right where I am.”

  A waiter approached with flutes of champagne, and though I wasn’t normally much of a drinker, I took one as Maddy grabbed one for herself. “You’re drinking, too?” she asked with a smile.

  “Why shouldn’t I? I’m not driving anywhere this evening, and besides, it might help calm my nerves.”

  “And if that doesn’t work, at least you got to drink some very good champagne.” Maddy took a sip, and then she asked, “I wonder what the guys are up to while we’re here at this elegant soiree tonight.”

  “Do you mean our boyfriends or our employees?” I asked. We’d given Greg and Josh three days off and had shuttered the doors to A Slice of Delight. My two young employees had protested that they could run the pizzeria without us, but I’d had my doubts. We’d certainly lose some money over the next few days of the competition, and maybe even a customer or two, but I didn’t see any way around it. Besides, we had a one in four shot at winning the grand prize, and the lost days of revenue wouldn’t mean much then. If we lost, I’d just write it off as an experiment that hadn’t worked out.

  “Take your pick. Strike that. I’m betting that Greg and Josh are off sulking somewhere because we wouldn’t let them try to run the Slice without us.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Maddy,” I said. “Knowing them, they’re probably skiing in the mountains right now. Their school is on break for the next ten days, and I refuse to believe that they aren’t off somewhere taking full advantage of it.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she said as she took another sip. “How about the other two, though? It’s a shame they’re missing this.”

  “Believe it or not, David said something about them having dinner together before they join us here later,” I said. “I can’t believe Luigi would exclude them, even for this portion of the evening. It’s not really fair.”

  “And that surprises you in what way, exactly?” She glanced around the room, which was finally starting to fill up, and then she asked me, “Where is our grinning host, anyway? You’d think that after shelling out all of this money, he’d at least be on hand to bask in the glory of it all.”

  I looked around the room and saw three other sets of people that had to be our fellow contestants, though no group had strayed enough to speak to another. It was amazing how eight people just disappeared in the space designed to hold about three times that. “Maybe he’s off somewhere trying to figure out a way to cheat us all out of the grand prize,” I said with a smile.

  I was just joking, but Maddy took it seriously.

  “If it happens, let me just go on the record right now to say that it wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” my sister said. She was interrupted from adding anything more by a nice-looking couple as they finally got up the nerve to approach us.

  “Excuse me, but aren’t you Eleanor Swift?” the woman asked, extending her hand. She was tall, nearly six feet, and willowy, with long, straight blond hair and hazel eyes.

  “I am,” I said. “I’m sorry, but if we ever met, I don’t remember you.”

  She laughed gently, a sound that reminded me of wind chimes in a summer breeze. “There’s no reason in the world that you should. I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your pizza.”

  I smiled at her and admitted, “Well, I can’t hear that enough, so I appreciate your compliment. Are you one of the competitors?”

  “We are,” the man with her said as he stepped forward. “We’re the Clarkes. I’m Jeff, and this is Sandy. It’s no secret why you’re in the competition. I agree with my wife. Your pizza is delicious.” Jeff was several years older than his wife, if my guess was right. He was rather nice looking, with gray coming in at his temples, and piercing blue eyes.

  “You must be here for a good reason as well,” I said.

  Jeff grinned at his wife. “Isn’t that odd? Why is it that neither one of us introduced our pizzeria?”

  Sandy shrugged good-naturedly. “I’ve long given up on trying to figure out some of the things we do.” She turned back to me and added, “We own the Grinning Cat Pizzeria in downtown Asheville.”

  “Really? I’ve been there,” I said, suddenly excited. “I love your pizza, and your restaurant, and I’m not just saying that.” I turned to my sister and said, “I told you we should have introduced ourselves to the owners when we were there.” Maddy and I had taken a day trip to Asheville a few months before to shop for Christmas presents, and while we’d been in town, we’d stopped in and had the most delicious pizza for lunch, something that was our normal habit while visiting other cities and towns.

  “It’s true. We were jealous,” Maddy said after she introduced herself. “I don’t know which I loved more, your sauce or your brigh
tly decorated pizzeria. It’s really eclectic, isn’t it?”

  Sandy laughed at the observation. “Most places we’d stick out like a sore thumb, but since we’re in Asheville, we fit right in. One of our customers was wearing a T-shirt the other day that sums our town up perfectly. It said, ‘If you’re too weird for Asheville, you must just be too weird.’ The city isn’t all eclectic, but our favorite parts of it certainly are.”

  “The mosaic mural you have on the back wall is perfect,” I said. “I take it you are both Lewis Carroll fans, given the name and the prominence of cat memorabilia. Why not just call it the Cheshire Cat outright?”

  “Honestly, we both love the Alice books,” Sandy said, “but our inspiration was actually our own cat. He had the oddest habit of holding his mouth so that it looked like he was grinning all of the time.”

  “He sounds delightful,” I said.

  “He was indeed,” Sandy answered, a little subdued.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “How could you know? He’s been gone awhile, but we still miss him,” Jeff said. After patting his wife’s shoulder lovingly, almost as though he was reassuring her that he was right there beside her, he waved a hand around the room. “What is this all about, anyway? Is George waiting for everyone to get here so that he can make a big entrance?”

  “I’m sorry. Who is George, exactly? Is he another contestant?” I asked.

  “Luigi, I should have said,” Jeff said quickly, trying to brush the question off.

  “Hang on,” Maddy said. “You’re not getting off the hook that easily. Why did you call him George?”

  Sandy looked uncomfortable about the direction the conversation was taking, but Jeff clearly wasn’t a fan of our host, so he didn’t mind sharing a little dirt about him. “I’m not surprised you didn’t know. He makes a big deal out of keeping it a secret, but his real name is George Vincent. He thought Luigi sounded more authentic for a pizza maker before he moved to North Carolina, so he started calling himself that, and it stuck. I didn’t think you could successfully give yourself a new nickname, but he somehow managed to do it. What I still don’t get is how he has the nerve to call himself Laughing Luigi. What a joke.” He gestured with his champagne glass toward us and asked, “Have you two ever seen him laugh, or even smile, unless he had something on the person he was talking to, or most likely, about? I know I haven’t.”

  “He can be a bit abrupt at times, can’t he?” I asked.

  Maddy shook her head. “Sis, that’s the nicest way I can imagine anyone describing the man. He’s a boil on the nose of the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Jeff laughed at the description, and then he told Maddy, “You I like.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my sister,” I said. “She has a habit of saying whatever’s on her mind, regardless of the circumstances.”

  “That’s just one of my charms. You can’t deny that I speak the truth, though,” Maddy answered.

  “Most likely more than you know,” Jeff said softly. I wasn’t entirely sure that particular comment had been meant for us at all.

  “Isn’t this resort lovely?” Sandy asked quickly, clearly trying to change the subject. I had to guess that her spouse had started drinking before this little soiree, since he hadn’t been there long enough to ingest enough to get drunk already.

  Jeff, suddenly realizing that he was distressing his wife, immediately obliged. “I don’t mean to be rude to your hometown, ladies, but this place is just a little too grand for the likes of Timber Ridge, isn’t it?”

  “Jeff,” Sandy said reprovingly. “You should apologize to Eleanor and Maddy. That’s not a polite thing to say.”

  “But it’s true enough,” Maddy agreed. “We have a reclusive millionaire in town who built it for his niece.”

  “We don’t know that’s the full motivation behind it,” I said. “I’m sure Nathan had other reasons to do it as well.”

  “Eleanor, you have to admit that it didn’t hurt that Gina wanted to run a place like this, though,” Maddy answered.

  “Whatever the reason he had,” Sandy said, “it’s truly magnificent.”

  The other two duos must have noticed that we were chatting, because they drifted over to where we stood, and soon enough, introductions were made all around.

  Maddy and I were offered extended hands by a set of twin men in their early thirties. The men had matching dark hair and eyes, and were both about fifteen pounds overweight. How had they managed to do that in sync as well? I knew that twins shared a great deal that the rest of the world couldn’t fully understand, but was it reasonable to think that they’d have the same eating habits? Beneath the surface of their jocularity, there was a feral look about them, and I wondered if it was based on their dispositions or their genetics.

  “Hi, there. I’m Todd,” one of them said.

  “And I guess that makes me odd,” the other twin said with a grin. It was clear it was a standard line of theirs by their practiced ease of delivering it.

  “We’re the Blackwell brothers,” Todd explained, “And his real name is Reggie.”

  “Well, it’s not my real name. For that, you’d have to call me Reginald Hallsworth Standard Blackwell.”

  “It sounds like there’s a story that goes along with that name,” Sandy said politely.

  “There is,” was all that Reggie would say in response, effectively killing the conversation.

  Todd spoke up in the growing silence, though, and added, “We own the Pizza Pie Factory in Raleigh.”

  “And we’re from Pizza Top in Charlotte,” the other man said. “I’m Kenny Henderson.”

  “And I’m Anna Wright,” the woman added. He was barrel-chested, and sported a mustache that matched his hair a little too perfectly, while his partner was a mere slip of a girl, barely into her twenties from the look of her, with mousy brown hair and eyes.

  “Are you a couple, too?” Maddy asked.

  They both looked instantly appalled by the suggestion. Kenny spoke up first. “No, it’s nothing like that. Not at all. She’s my assistant, and only my assistant.”

  Anna just nodded her agreement, and now the room was definitely filled with awkward silence.

  No one seemed willing to add anything else of substance to the conversation after that, and we stood around a few minutes, each struggling to make small talk, when Luigi finally joined us. As I studied him approaching us, I realized that he did in fact look more like a George than he ever had a Luigi, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud about the name and persona he’d taken on.

  “Excellent. I see that you’ve all met,” Luigi said. I made up mind to keep thinking of him as Luigi and not George, even though I knew better. It was the only way I could keep from laughing in his face. Still, it was good knowing that there was a chink in the man’s armor.

  He continued. “Please excuse my tardiness, but I’ve been seeing to some last-minute details about tomorrow in the auditorium. Gina Sizemore asked me to extend her apologies. I’m afraid we have to make a few adjustments to the setups before we’re ready to begin. We’ve been tweaking everything all day to make sure that every station is identical, and we’ve modified the rules just a touch before we get started as well.” Several of us were about to ask what the changes were going to be, but he held up his hands and added, “The adjustments we’ve made are outlined in the new packets you’ll receive tonight in your rooms.”

  Two men walked in hurriedly, and Luigi gestured them over to our little group. It was clear that he’d been waiting on them, and I didn’t doubt that he hadn’t been thrilled about being upstaged like that.

  “Come on. Get over here,” he commanded, and they both dutifully joined us.

  As they did, Luigi introduced them. “I’d like you to meet Jack Acre, my VP of Marketing and Sales, and Frank Vincent, our head of production.” Jack Acre was handsome, not movie-star good-looking, but quite a bit above average. Even if I hadn’t just found out that Luigi’s last name
was Vincent, it was obvious that he and the other man were brothers. I had to wonder if there was any resentment between them. After all, Jack had been introduced as a vice president, but Luigi had gone out of his way to tell us that Frank wasn’t at that level.

  At least Jack’s smile was friendly, though there wasn’t much warmth to it, while Frank just nodded in our general direction, keeping his gaze on the carpet.

  “Jack, I need you to fetch my medication. It’s in my room,” Luigi said.

  “Why don’t you let Frank get it?” Jack said easily. “I’d like to have a word with the contestants myself.”

  “Because I asked you,” Luigi said firmly as he gave Acre his key. “Frank, I’m sure there’s something you need to be doing right now as well,” he added, dismissing both men as effectively as if he’d ordered armed guards to throw them out. Jack seemed to take it all in stride, but for a brief flash, I saw a look of anger on Frank’s face. It appeared he wasn’t all that fond of being ordered around by his brother.

  “What about those changes?” Kenny Henderson asked. “Why can’t we get them now?”

  I knew that I was going to have to start thinking of a way to associate these people with the cities they were from, or I’d be constantly confused. From now on, he’d be Kenny Charlotte in my mind, and his assistant was going to be Anna Charlotte. The Blackwells would be Todd and Reggie Raleigh, and Jeff and Sandy Clarke would be the Ashevilles. It probably would have sounded like a weird system to anyone other than my sister, but it had worked for me in the past, and I was going to stick to it.

  “You’ll all get them at the same time, and it will be in plenty of time,” Luigi said as he glanced at his watch. “However, I’m afraid there’s no time to go into that now. We have guests waiting, and besides your loved ones, there are members of the press here, as promised, so I ask you all to be civil to anyone who asks you any questions tonight. Have fun, and I’ll see you all tomorrow afternoon for the first stage of the competition.”

  With that, he left us, despite questions being posed from us as he walked away. Luigi gestured to a pair of guards standing at a red velvet rope, and motioned for them to let the waiting crowd join us.