Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  “Because that’s better.”

  Sarcasm at that level was not a pretty sight. “It is!”

  “Then how did she get here? Answer me that.”

  “I think Choo Choo.”

  “Oh, great. So it’s a whole big Angelotta—”

  “And Bacigalupo.”

  “—family activity. Like bocce.” Then: “We’re putting her back.”

  I got very quiet. “Not until after the Biscotti all’Anaci.”

  He whirled on me. “I thought you said the Granita something something.”

  “I changed my mind. Oh, wait,” I said, getting in his face, “I changed it again. Not until after the last of the Crazy Club is out the door. And in case you’re wondering,” I added in an airy way, “the front door. This is all nonnegotiable, Beck.”

  He got airy, too. “Oh, really.”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Yes”—I gave him a little push—“really.” Why had I never insisted on malocchio lessons?

  He seemed to chew up the inside of his mouth, then jerked his irritating head toward the rest of the BMW. “Get in the backseat.” His lips were practically clamped shut, he was so angry.

  I stepped back. “What?”

  “You, me, Georgia.” He strafed a hand through his hair.

  What was he suggesting? “Oh, so you’re all Captain America when it’s bodies in a trunk, but when it comes to making out in the backseat of someone else’s car, there’s nothing wrong with an audience”—I got right in his face—“who can’t tell you you’re doing it wrong.”

  Considering the look he gave me, for a moment I had a flicker of doubt that that had been his plan for the backseat, but then I couldn’t take it back.

  “For your information, Angelotta,” said Joe Beck with quiet dignity, “in that scenario, the only corpse in the backseat would be you.”

  “Fine talk that is. Fine talk!” I was growing more Italian by the minute.

  “Give me a hand.”

  Pressing my lips together hard, I got my hands under poor Georgia’s hips, while Dudley Do-Right managed her shoulders and head, and we tugged her up and out of the trunk. In the middle of the operation, Joe gave her a quick once-over, then looked a little puzzled. He was having to entertain the idea that I might possibly be correct in the matter of Georgia Payne.

  I got the rear door open and climbed in first, backward, tugging the hips of the dead, chef-coated Georgia after me. Joe crawled in slowly, balancing the rest of her. And there we were. And just in time. A gaggle of spandexed cyclists came wheeling down the alley toward us, yammering away about stopwatches and water bottles. Joe quickly pulled the rear door shut behind him, which left us a cramped little threesome in the back of Landon’s Beemer.

  “I could use a drink,” he muttered.

  Peering in as they spun past, a couple of cyclists got a load of the situation and whistled at us. Joe gave them a wan smile then turned to me in horror. Georgia was lying in a jangled mess, what with her torso faceup, her hips shifted off the seat, her head and arms lolling, her ballet shoes long gone, her necklace gently swinging. In order to get her balanced back on the seat, Joe set Georgia’s head in his lap—

  “I’ll bet that’s the most action you’ve seen in a while.”

  “Forgetting Kayla?” He gave me a challenging grin.

  —and lifted her arms. Left, right, folding one over the other on her chest.

  Alas, poor Georgia.

  We were huffing quietly then, more from fear and emotional strain, I think, than the exertion. As Joe settled down—and I kept pushing back my hair long after it needed the help—he straightened out Georgia’s sleeves, just to be doing something before we started arguing again.

  Which was when it happened.

  He tilted his head, bringing her left arm closer to his face. Holding her fingers in one hand, he lightly pushed back her sleeve, then folded back the bandage I remember from when the southpaw Georgia and I were slicing mushrooms, which was hanging half off her wrist. “Take a look,” he said softly, his troubled blue eyes on my face. With that, he held out her hand to me. I shot him a quick, questioning look and then brushed aside the tattered bandage.

  What I saw was the shadowy evidence of tattoo removal. Only, what was left was almost as visible as what had once been there. And there was no mistaking it. My heart started pounding.

  There, on Georgia’s wrist, was a scar in the shape of a B.

  * * *

  I was just about as creeped out as I’d ever been. I sat back on the leather seat and slanted my eyes toward that ghost of a Belfiere B on my dead sous chef’s left wrist. Suddenly this was no longer a problem on the order of, say, whether I could safely substitute tarragon for dill in a recipe. No, Georgia’s old B meant that (a) she was a member of Belfiere, and that (b) she had gone to some trouble to hide that fact. But just from me? And if so, why?

  No, it made about as much sense as Nonna’s dating that coal miner half her age for three loco weeks around two years ago. It wasn’t so much his youth, or complete lack of conversation, that made the rest of us Angelottas refer to this fling in her life as “that time,” it was the fact that he packed himself the same thing in his lunch box every day: a cold Vienna sausage sandwich on Wonder Bread with yellow mustard. After about a week of sleepovers at a sketchy roadside place (we followed them) close to Philly called Outen Inn, Nonna saw the light and skulked back home. Even Maria Pia Angelotta yields, finally, to what does or does not make sense.

  But Georgia Payne, Belfiere member? All I remembered about her personal history was that she had breezily gotten out of a culinary career somewhere and pursued glove sales at Bloomingdale’s. Was it all a lie? And then paranoia nibbled at the edges of my mind. Had she come, well, undercover to Miracolo? Had Georgia Payne found out that Eve Angelotta was teaching a cooking class at Quaker Hills Career Center and signed up, just hoping for an opportunity to weasel her way into our restaurant? To do what, exactly? Was she a spy for Belfiere? A mole? Was that it? Did they send in their agents to scope out the kitchen lives of their inductees, just to be sure they weren’t using Stella d’Oro shortcuts in their tiramisus?

  Maybe.

  Paranoia can be extremely persuasive.

  And I had been fooled. Fooled but good. Blond little Georgia had shown me just enough natural talent to hire her, but not so much that I’d question her modest report of her past work life. And then it struck me. If she had been a Belfiere member, and she was only in her late thirties, Georgia Payne was more than just a fine chef who had delivered excellent and imaginative cuisine down the long years of a stellar career—Georgia was a cooking prodigy. Someone extraordinary enough for the Cooking Crazies to induct her into their exclusive international society.

  What was she doing at Miracolo? What—

  When I heard a sharp intake of breath, I looked up. Joe Beck seemed to have shifted into high alert. He was holding Georgia’s right hand about six inches from his face. “Eve,” he said in a low, tight voice, “I thought you said she wasn’t murdered.” His lips were pressed together, hard.

  My heart sank further and faster than my very first panna cotta after I had opened the oven door prematurely. No, no, no. “No blood, no obvious wounds, no—” I had to make him believe me. It was one thing to keep a corpse dead from natural causes from crashing the most important meal in my nonna’s life. But it was quite another thing altogether to have a second murder within a month at the Angelotta family restaurant that had been in our family—and abiding all the laws of the state of Pennsylvania—for eighty years.

  With a pained and disbelieving look, Joe Beck slowly rotated both of Georgia’s hands toward me as we sat there, cramped in the backseat of Landon’s car. At first, I didn’t see it. But then, what was I looking for? Joe could tell. “The fingertips,” was all he
said. With my two thumbs, I pressed against the inside of Georgia’s fingers, until the tips straightened up and I could see them clearly. They were much darker than the rest of her skin, that was for sure. Practically blackened. I leaned closer to the fingertips, squinting at them, then raised my eyes to Joe’s. Had poor Georgia burned herself somehow? “They look charred.”

  And I could see from his expression that he was trying to figure out how to break it to me. “They are charred, Eve,” said Joe quietly. Then: “This woman’s been electrocuted.”

  8

  Charred?

  Electrocuted?

  These are words that never play well when coupled with a human being.

  I don’t mind telling you that over the next couple of hours, all Eve Angelotta wanted was for some kind soul to bean her with a frying pan, just in the event the grappa she planned on drinking failed. During our final minutes in Landon’s backseat, Joe Beck was offering neither. “So? It doesn’t mean she was murdered!” I cried. “Say she just got hold of a live wire somehow.”

  He looked weary. “Or stuck her paring knife into a socket.” I was frankly too worked up to take him to task for mocking me. Also because I wasn’t sure he was. Besides, I thought fleetingly, if sticking her paring knife into electrical outlets was something Georgia Payne did, then the really big mystery was how she ever got invited to join Belfiere. Even if they were homicidal, they probably frowned majestically on any member who shows such scant regard for the tools of their trade. I was thinking of the three knives rampant on the field of the Belfiere “crest.”

  “Is there an outlet in the foyer of Miracolo?” He opened his hands wide and actually tried to think of some possibilities that could keep Georgia’s demise securely in the Accident category.

  I tried to picture the space. A space I’d crossed practically every day—which tells you just how pathetic my social life is—for the last four years. Was there an outlet? A dangerous outlet? Why would there be? The foyer was a small space. Nobody did anything in it except stamp their galoshes in the bad weather and then open the inner door to the special place that’s Miracolo. “No,” I told him. I managed a small shrug. “There’s no outlet.”

  Joe actually reached across Georgia’s body and brushed a hank of hair off the side of my face. “You know what you have to do.”

  “I have to put her back.” I bit my lip. I refused to entertain any scenarios that included lugging Georgia through the dining room anytime over the next hour. Maria Pia’s shock and humiliation . . . the flight of the Belfiere Bat Association . . . the cops, the coroner’s van, the local paparazzi . . . I’d do whatever I had to—even if I enjoyed it—in order to keep Joe Beck from pressing that point.

  If it wasn’t an accident—here my shoulders sagged—if it wasn’t, then more than fifty pairs of feet had crossed that foyer since Georgia died, which was certainly not the cops’ first choice in terms of how to preserve valuable evidence. More than fifty pairs of feet. And a bevy of cops railing about the crime scene. An already crappy day was about to get so much worse that no amount of Landon’s heavenly Granita di Caffè con Panna would help.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, the guests had let down their masks and loosened the belts underneath their midnight-blue satin Belfiere gowns and were—from all reports coming back to the kitchen—gossiping in four different languages about who’d slept with what famous chef. It must have been the wine. I had lit a tiki light for Joe Beck and settled him at the table at the back of the Miracolo courtyard, where he was staring moodily into a dry vodka martini and biding his time.

  Biding time, really, for the three of us—himself, Landon, and me, for whenever the last member of the Belfiere Bats departed, dragging her mask and hitching up her pants, making her unsteady way up the street to wherever the limos had been tucked, noodling over revelations about lovers shared.

  Meanwhile, I shucked my chefwear long enough to do two things. Invade Giancarlo’s domain and mix a drink—unlike 007, stirred not shaken—myself. Some of the cutthroat culinary sorority sisters looked me over wonderingly. I went for mysterious. Maria Pia didn’t even catch sight of me, although Fina Parisi’s eyes seemed to follow me like those creepy paintings you used to be able to buy on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

  She seemed friendly enough, just curious. I was in no mood for overtures. Of any sort. The second thing I did without drawing much attention was to sidle up to Mrs. Crawford where she sat inscrutable at the piano and was seamlessly playing a medley of Madame Butterfly’s suicide aria and “My Mama Done Tol’ Me.”

  “Mrs. C.,” I whispered so lightly I wasn’t sure she’d catch my words.

  She elevated her right eyebrow, waiting.

  “I need to see you for a minute.” Then: “In the kitchen,” I added.

  With a flourish that sounded a lot like “Chopsticks,” she rose silently and followed me into the kitchen, where I cornered her. “Dear?” was all she said. I was momentarily distracted by the little gray pearl studs in her earlobes, which were shaped like perfect little sand dollars. Who knew? Her wiry guess-my-color hair always covered what turned out to be her finest feature.

  I grabbed her sleeves. “You’ve got to get them”—I jerked my head toward the dining room, to leave no doubt in her mind just which “them” I meant—“out of here, out of here, out of here.” I had her interest, I could tell.

  “It is going on rather long, isn’t it?”

  “Did they not eat Landon’s granita?” said I, plaintively. “Surely there’s enough sugar in it to match the annual production of Jamaica. Why aren’t they twitching and sugar-high-fiving their weird little way on out of here?”

  She smiled broadly. “You know how mah-jongg clubs can be.”

  “Can’t you do something? I’ve got some”—here came the understatement—“terribly pressing business to take care of . . . out there . . . and I need to get rid of the . . . mah-jongg ladies.”

  The resourceful Mrs. Crawford studied the ceiling fan and lifted a hand toward Landon, who still didn’t know what was in the trunk of his precious BMW, and Choo Choo, who probably did. Finally, she jutted her chin at me and wrinkled her nose. Some pancake makeup cracked. “I’ll see what I can do.” At which she sashayed back out through the double doors to resume her place at the piano.

  What followed was a lively medley of goodbye songs, beginning with “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” Not so much, I thought, but I could see what Mrs. C. was aiming for, and as the servers brought the last of the dishes into the kitchen, I shook my cell phone at them, saying something regretful about a rumor of a gas leak. Mrs. Crawford had moved on to an up-tempo version of “Good Night, Irene” by the time I agreed with all our servers that it had indeed been a magical evening, positively magical, and that they should all get some sleep safely away from what could blow sky-high at any moment.

  With a high heart and no further explanations I started to herd Corabeth, Li Wei, L’Shondra, Vera—too bad, Choo Choo—and Jonathan out the door. Landon watched him go with the kind of bereft longing you see on the faces of mothers sending sonnies off to war. I caught Corabeth’s butt in the back door as I closed it a little too soon. She laughed, saying something about how she doesn’t need those two pounds, and scooted into the night. To find the stolen bike, most likely.

  From the dining room came what I could only think were the hopeful sounds of the Crackpot Club rustling around, getting ready to depart. I heard many comments about the menu—everything from “understated elegance” to “masterful blend of innovation and tradition” to “yummy”—and several comments about looking forward to Maria Pia’s formal induction into Belfiere on the 22nd.

  Soon enough, the hundred feet that had already pretty much shot to hell the crime scene in the foyer of the restaurant went back the same way—and to that number you could add Giancarlo’s, whose hat I plopped on his wispy
-haired head with a kiss, and then shoved him along . . . and Maria Pia’s, who seemed set on following her newfound knife-wielding sisters down the south side of Market Square. I was hoping she’d climb into some limo and disappear into the night along with the delegates from someplace, oh, two states away.

  Mrs. Crawford was packing up some sheet music, and I flashed her a grateful glance.

  She could find her own way out, and I’d lock the door later.

  And then I remembered: I could probably leave that to the police. The mere thought made me sag.

  Stepping back into the Miracolo kitchen, where Landon and Choo Choo and Paulette were rinsing and stacking dinnerware and blurting the occasional positive comment about Maria Pia’s big night—“Did you see the size of the teeth on that gal from Maryland?” tells you something about the level of discourse—I clapped my hands. For want of anything better to do. Or smarter. Or more original.

  All three of them turned. I clasped my hands in front of my waist and prepared myself to shock them. Well, all except Landon. And probably Choo Choo. So, at least Paulette Coniglio was in for a big surprise. “Georgia Payne has”—here I happened to glance at Landon frantically mouthing died, died! at me—“has died,” I said with the kind of sepulchral voice you hear at funerals and in the locker rooms of the losers.

  In unison Choo Choo and Paulette said, “I know.”

  Then we all gasped and looked at each other with our fists at our mouths. You would think Choo Choo had just spotted a spider. Practically doubled over with relief that the burden wasn’t his and mine alone anymore, Landon yammered on about how I discovered poor Georgia this morning and together we moved her to the storeroom—

  Paulette crossed her arms, nodding. “To the bags of semolina. Right. Get on with it.”

  “So that was you!” I blurted, moving in close to the others.

  Paulette, never one to hog credit, held up a warning finger. “And Vera.”

  At that, Choo Choo beamed at his beloved’s prowess, then chuckled. “Okay, so then I found the stiff”—Landon, Paulette, and I cringed—“in the freezer and got her out to Landon’s car—”