Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  Landon shrieked, “You what!”

  I was the only one who saw Joe Beck listening on the back threshold.

  Choo Choo ruffled Landon’s hair. “Not to worry, Lanners. I put her in the trunk. No one’s the wiser. Especially not Nonna, eh.” Very pleased with himself, Choo Choo Bacigalupo moved liquidly around the Miracolo kitchen, looking for tidbits I was pretty sure Weight Watchers wouldn’t approve.

  Paulette held up both hardworking mitts and collected herself, about to deliver the kind of speech a referee makes when someone challenges a call. “Which was exactly what we were all working for, am I right?” Like we had worked together all along.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, sighing, “Nonna in the dark. No mishaps on her big day.”

  At which point, Joe Beck piped up: “Well, not for Maria Pia, at any rate, although the rest of us are in for it.”

  Landon shot me an anxious look like Should we really be talking about this in front of oe-Jay? My cousin Landon can become very proprietorial when it comes to what he believes is Family Business.

  Choo Choo was the first to cotton to it. He laughed—I think the actual word is guffawed—and as he flung back his great head, the track lighting gleamed on all that bald. “Beck, don’t tell me—” My Bacigalupo bad boy slapped his knees like he had just heard the joke about the lizard walking into the bar, which always makes him laugh. “You found her?”

  Paulette and Landon turned horrified faces to Joe.

  Checking his watch, Joe explained, “That Argentine Malbec you ordered, Landon, got stowed in the trunk. I went out for my two bottles.”

  Several questions bombarded him at once. Paulette wanted to know if poor Georgia Payne was still in the trunk. Choo Choo wanted to know if anyone saw him. And Landon wanted to know if he had tasted the Malbec yet. To which my lawyer replied, “No, she isn’t, no, I don’t think so, and”—controlling the sarcasm—“I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “Right, right.”

  Paulette was unsatisfied. “What happened to her?” She said it with a critical edge, like dying in the foyer was some kind of great moral failing on the part of the late Georgia Payne.

  When Joe shot me a look that included a tight little under-the-radar shake of his glorious head, I answered truthfully, “I thought it was her heart.”

  Ohhh, they all moaned. Heart. That explains it. Every untimely, inexplicable death since man started tearing apart fatty animals with his teeth must be due to heart. “Up to the coroner,” said Joe casually, “but for now we’re putting our shoulders into getting Georgia . . .” He looked at me quizzically.

  “Payne.”

  “Payne, back inside where it occurred.”

  “It’s only right,” Paulette muttered to Choo Choo, who seemed to be considering other alternatives, none of which I wanted to hear. Then all five of us went wordlessly out the back and crossed the courtyard. It was a very clear night—one of the last nights poor mysterious glove-selling, Belfiere-hiding Georgia was still above ground—and the stars were just beginning to come out. The sound of our footsteps on the stone patio just added to the silence, and out the gate we went, then in single file behind Joe to Landon’s BMW.

  As he went to swing open the back door, all the rest of us jerked our heads up and down the alley, just to make sure the coast was clear, which had to be the first time in a long time—maybe since high school when I had snuck out of Uncle Dom’s house to meet the thrilling Ronnie Rosa—that I had cared about clear coasts. Joe and I stepped aside and the three others crammed themselves into a tight little adoration group and peered inside. There were murmurs of “aw” and “tch,” the “tch” coming no doubt from Paulette, who varied “tch” with “tsk.” You would think they were viewing a new puppy.

  It was Choo Choo who pushed up his sleeves and set about the removal of Georgia from the back of Landon’s car. I was seriously hoping it was the last removal we’d have to deal with that night—other, of course, than whatever the cops then did. At any rate, the last removal we Angelottas (the others were honoraries) would have to engineer. Choo Choo easily slid her out, unperturbed by Paulette’s backseat driving of the effort—“Watch out, you’ll bump her head; watch out, you’ll tear her dress”—and lifted her away just as her feet clopped to the asphalt.

  At that moment, a set of headlights bounced up and down as a car turned in to the alley down at the far end. All of us—except Georgia—stood taller. One of us actually said, “Cheese it.” Someone else snorted. Choo Choo and Joe rapidly set Georgia upright between them and I arranged her arms over their shoulders. Landon darted ahead to open the gate wide, and as the car made unusually fast progress across the potholes, Paulette and I blocked the headlights from spotlighting the five—wait, six—of us like the beginning of an old RKO movie.

  “Nah, not the cops,” opined Choo Choo, who seemed to slow long enough to crane his neck. “Lights too close together.”

  “Can we please keep going?” said Joe through gritted teeth.

  “Hurry, hurry, you useless, pointless—” That was Paulette.

  As we stumbled along in the starry summer night, carrying our burden, sharing our sins, I felt like one of those shapeless, snarling villagers pumping a pitchfork or torch in a Frankenstein movie. Not a pretty sight, but we made it through the gate without attracting any attention from the Smart car that hardly took up half the alley as it skittered past. I closed the gate tight, grateful for the fencing that was overgrown with trumpet vine, which was when I noticed I was shaking.

  Landon sailed back into the restaurant ahead of us, scouting out the territory, and reappeared just long enough to declare Miracolo a Maria Pia–free zone. He held open the door, and as we all squeezed through, I saw his fingers catch hold of Georgia’s necklace for just a couple of seconds, and then let it go.

  “Where does she live?” someone whispered.

  Paulette barked, “Well, we’re not taking her there.”

  “Who’s her next of kin?” I wondered, sad already for that person, who was probably right then having a lovely night watching Letterman or waiting for the Ambien to kick in. Landon gave me a strange look and dropped back while Joe and Choo Choo started across the pristine black-and-white-tiled Miracolo floor, trailing poor Georgia’s shoeless feet pretty much right over the spot where our last corpse had sprawled too recently for comfort.

  “Where’s her purse?” demanded Paulette, who sounded like she was accusing us of something worse than how we had already been spending the evening. Cart corpses, honey, to your heart’s content, but woe is you if you nab a handbag. That’s our Paulette. Nobody answered, but it did set me to thinking. I remembered seeing Georgia’s red purse the day before, for sure . . . but today? Was it anywhere around when I had tumbled to her body in the foyer of Miracolo? She was closing up—everything, including life, as it turned out. So, by all rights, her red purse should be in the restaurant . . . and finding it would answer questions about her home and next of kin.

  “Allow me,” said Choo Choo, with that kind of dignity the Bacigalupos are known for (except for the ones here and there in the last three generations who were institutionalized for one thing or the other). Joe let go just as Choo Choo swept up Georgia in his arms, her blond head lolling back, and her arm dangling—fortunately (I breathed a sigh) not the one with the ghostly mark of membership in the Crazy Club. Choo Choo shouldered his way through the double doors and into the dining room, empty now of our nonna, the resourceful Mrs. Crawford, and Georgia’s former sorority sisters.

  Or—here came the rampant paranoia again—her spymasters.

  Choo Choo swung around toward me. “Where does she go?”

  Joe rolled his eyes—just once, restraining himself.

  I took a deep breath. As Landon stood in the shadows and Paulette grabbed a bar towel to wipe her hands, I opened the inner door and exposed the Miracolo foyer in all its death-deal
ing smallness. A quick look told me I was right: no outlet. Very gently, Choo Choo Bacigalupo went down on one knee and set the body of Georgia Payne on the venerable old tiles of the foyer. The rest of us stared at her as the streetlights seeped through the curtain on the door and noisy late-nighters laughed their boozy way across Market Square, just feet away from what might very well turn out to be a murder scene.

  “How was she lying, Eve?” That was Joe Beck, who held his iPhone, ready to make the call to 911.

  “Can’t we just lay her out across a couple of tables?” I wheedled. “Or on the banquette at table nine?”

  Landon and the others all looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

  Joe said with meaning that I knew was meant for me alone, “They’ll need to see exactly how you found her, Eve.” His hand flopped up at me kind of apologetically.

  It felt really hard. And because it felt really hard, I saw suddenly just how shaken up I really was by Georgia’s death here at Miracolo—charred fingertips or not. Heart or—something else. I had been busy all day long, between moving the body, hunting for the body, and prepping scallop and veal, and I hadn’t stopped to just feel something.

  I allowed myself one quick sniff. That was public. Later I’d pour myself a reliable Laphroaig back at my place and shake and cry until I was damn done. That was private.

  So, with a little nod, I crouched next to Georgia, trying to recall how I found her. I gently set a hand on her chef jacket, sad that she had apparently been so accomplished as a chef that she’d been tapped for Belfiere maybe twenty years sooner than others get the nod. Georgia’s chef jacket could get stashed away somewhere—like my tap shoes, the ones I’d been wearing when I went clear off the stage of the New Amsterdam Theater, another example of wasted talent. I remember thinking she looked like she had collapsed to her knees and folded over, dead. So I turned her over onto her stomach, raised her hips, turned her head to the left, and stretched out her right arm.

  “That’s it,” I said, finally, sitting back on my heels. Paulettte wanted to know if she had been lying on her left arm like that. Joe wanted me to be sure whether her head was turned to the left or the right. And Choo Choo, a man colossally uninterested in footwear, practically broke down at the loss of her shoes and started to grill me.

  “When was the last time you saw them?”

  “I think while she was in the storeroom. No, wait, maybe the freezer—”

  Like he had caught me out, he said a little snidely, “Well, which was it?”

  “I don’t know, I’m telling you. I’m not sure.”

  “Go easy on her.” That was Paulette.

  I gave my Bacigalupo cousin a shove. “Go follow the footwear trail, Giuseppe. Call me crazy, but I’m guessing you’ll find the little ballet shoes somewhere between the storeroom and the car trunk.”

  He pushed his big hands all over his face, then went in search of Georgia’s flats.

  “Well, then,” said Joe, who raised his phone and looked from Paulette to me. “Are we ready?”

  We nodded, he dialed—and in that moment I realized Landon Angelotta had slipped out of the shadows . . . and was nowhere in sight.

  9

  The universe, you may have noticed, is the original multitasker. Just as Joe Beck, who had waited under the streetlights out front, was escorting the Quaker Hills firefighter paramedics down the alley to the back door of Miracolo, I experienced some serious déjà vu. The front doorknob rattled. A few muttered imprecations in Italian left no doubt as to the identity of the rattler. “Nonna?” I yapped. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the foyer. Clearly, none of her Belfiere Bat Association sisters had offered her a lift home . . .

  “Eve? What’s going on?”

  Choo Choo barreled back into this tiniest of foyers, which meant I had Nonna ahead of me, the authorities closing in, and my wild-card cousin showing Georgia Payne something nice in a flat. Always unflappable, Choo Choo eyeballed the shoes and when I recalled that they had half slipped off her feet when I discovered her there this morning, he gently made the modifications.

  I looked around helplessly. “Just a minute, Nonna!”

  Where was Landon? Why had he just up and disappeared on us?

  Now she was knocking hard on the door, her shadow blocking out the streetlights. “What’s the fire department doing here?”

  Paulette touched my shoulder. “We have to let her in, Eve,” she said in a fierce whisper. “This is more serious than the cannoli we got to serve when she wasn’t around to stop us.”

  From outside came “Who’s that? Paulette?”

  I sighed, then raised my voice. “Go around to the back, Nonna.”

  She got high-handed, always a bad sign. “I am not going around to the back of my own restaurant.”

  “You do it every day.” Bingo.

  “Well, I am not doing it when I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Ah, an Angelotta Illogic Thread was beginning. . .

  “But the back door was the first one Grandpa Camarata installed when he built Miracolo, remember? That’s what you told me.”

  It worked. “That’s true,” she admitted.

  I pressed my point. “Isn’t the first door really more the ‘front’ door than the front door?’ ” I rolled my eyes at Paulette, who was giving me a look that involved lifting half her face in unadulterated scorn.

  On the other side of the door, Maria Pia struggled only a few seconds with the dominant gene of Camarata pride that pretty reliably trumped every other human emotion. Then: “Very well.” Off she went, moving out of the light that played feebly over the corpse of our late, lamented sous chef.

  Choo Choo oozed out of the foyer, followed by Paulette, and with that I knew the jig was most definitely up. “Eve?” Joe Beck was standing in the dining room, rubbing back his short golden hair with his forearm. I looked up at two strangers, a man and a woman in blue T-shirts and pants, carrying equipment. In the dim light I could hardly make out their faces. All I felt was gratitude that it wasn’t Nonna’s body I was crouching next to in the sweet old foyer of Miracolo. “Honey,” said Joe Beck, taking a step toward me, “come on out of there.”

  The side of my face tingled. I stood up, feeling like I was abandoning Georgia to an unknown fate—although, truth be told, she would probably have fewer postdeath adventures now—and my arms hung at my sides. All of them waited while I stood there uncertainly. Joe added softly: “Just let them do their job.”

  With a huge huff, I did the thing I discovered as a kid would sometimes keep me from bursting into tears: I walked straight into Joe Beck’s arms, my own arms pinned tightly against my chest. There I sobbed, and sobbed even louder when Maria Pia burst onto the scene, invoking half the saints and the spirits of her father, the poet Dante, and Frank Sinatra.

  Someone handed me a tissue—I’m assuming Paulette, who among women is the “always prepared” Boy Scout, unless anyone she deems able-bodied asks for a hand across the street. Someone else patted my back. I twisted my face into some semblance of Eve Angelotta’s public face.

  Twisting my neck just enough to see what was coming down, I saw Maria Pia actually push the medics aside. Getting what she thought was the full picture of what we had in the foyer, she propped her hands on her midnight-blue satin Belfiere costume and started nodding some big nods. I could almost guess what was coming but didn’t have the strength to step out of Joe’s arms. “So, Georgette, you’re—what?” she addressed the body, jerking her proud chin at her. “Ten hours late for work and this is the best you can do?”

  * * *

  All told, once it sank in, Maria Pia took the news of Georgia Payne’s death well. New employee, bad heart, whaddya gonna do? Then, a little embarrassed at her mistake, she got all airy and philosophical, delivering the opinion that it’s not easy to tell the difference between life and death in some peopl
e. Especially (here I cringed) if they’re not Italian. At that, the medics—whose names, as luck would have it, were Kaplowitz and Mahoney—turned slowly to look at her. Paulette jumped in, offering to help the Philosopher of Quaker Hills out of her Belfiere gown, which offered maybe two minutes of distraction as Nonna relived the success of the evening.

  The mood changed, though, as soon as I raised the bar on the truth.

  Choo Choo, who from the look on my face could tell what I was about to do, headed straight for the kitchen for the bag of Cheetos he keeps stashed on a shelf behind the coffee grinder.

  Paulette held the cast-off costume in a stony reverie.

  Joe Beck smiled at me and opened his hands wide. Your story, your show.

  You know the expression All hell broke loose. This sentence always conjures up the kind of chaos only a great artist or a terrible ruler can create. But the kind of hell that can break loose has a real measure of subtlety. The crack in the ice, the one drink too many, the casual fib. Hell starts small. The rest of us just can’t keep it small. The news of the death of the person whom Nonna waffled between calling Georgina and Georgette was manageable. Hovering near the medics, Nonna said surprisingly few words, mostly about how she supported the referendum to build a new fire station in Quaker Hills.

  But then all hell broke loose.

  It started at 10:37 p.m. on Friday, June 20. And it may have had something to do with my stepping up and announcing, in the kind of clear and concerned voice you hear in commercials about erectile dysfunction, “I found Georgia Payne in that position, and in that spot, at 12:03 this afternoon.”

  Maria Pia looked like she had swallowed a cannoli, whole. She was unable to speak, which is not in itself a bad thing.

  Paulette’s stony reverie cracked a little, but she withstood it.

  The kitchen emitted a quavering groan. In between Cheetos.

  The medics gave me a keen look like they had possibly never seen such a fine example of a duck-billed platypus. “Go on,” said one of them slowly.