Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  Falling off the stage at the New Amsterdam Theater four years ago was looking like a blip on the screen of my life. Maybe I had bailed too soon. So what, my leg broke in two places and it had been a slow recovery. I was just thirty-two and I could sell my Tumbleweed Tiny House and boogie back on down the road into Manhattan and buy myself some righteous—curse those two benighted CRIBS kids—private dance rehab.

  What was I thinking, playing a mob babe as performance art for the benefit of two troublesome students? What was I thinking, trying to keep the unpleasantness in the Miracolo foyer from the consciousness of my tough-as-nails nonna? She should jolly well be trying to keep it from me!

  My judgment was beginning to look about as emulsified as my blended basil. Was I honestly preparing to go seek out Fina Parisi, daughter of that strega Belladonna Russo, head of that Belfiere band of culinary cutthroats, the one the frightened Georgia Payne had avoided that day? What exactly was my plan with Fina? Hurl accusations over caramel macchiatos? Where were you on the night Anna Tremayne got electrocuted? And oh, by the way, would you mind explaining to me how you managed it?

  No, on the subject of the beautiful Fina Parisi, I needed to be smart.

  And being smart certainly did not include any solo trips up to her front door on Gallows Hill Drive. Snooping around her House of Edible Terrors would have to wait until I could find a foolproof way of sneaking around the premises looking for . . . well, suspicious things. This was a plan. A plan about as well formed as aimlessly stuffing my freezer full of pestosicles. In the meantime, I could pose a delicate question or two to Fina under some pretext or other. For now, I had Georgia/Anna’s address off her driver’s license, and as I zipped south of town toward a modest apartment complex, I was pretty sure I was one step ahead of Detective Sally.

  Parking out front, I tried three of her keys until I found the one that opened the door to the building. A fragile-looking older woman with thin white hair and oversize blue-framed glasses passed me with an anxious glance. Behind me came a buff thirty-something guy in a seen-better-days peacoat with a springy little Chihuahua on a rhinestone-studded pink leash. After we sorted ourselves out in the doorway, I plunged into the lobby, where I scanned the building directory for Payne: number 302. Up the carpeted stairs I went three flights, then followed a hardware-store, black-and-silver arrow that pointed the way to units 301–306.

  The dimly lit hallway was empty. Of people, for sure. Of the smell of boiled cabbage, not so much.

  But as I tried the keys in the lock, I heard a small sound coming from inside Georgia Payne’s apartment. When a key fit, and I thrust open the door, the source of the sound became clear. A little black cat with bold yellow-green eyes was quick to rub herself against my legs. The audio portion of the welcome consisted of some meows that seemed to convey that the absence of the human for almost two foodless days is actionable. And then I remembered what Georgia had said about her “significant other” that day we were prepping together at Miracolo.

  “You must be Abbie,” I said, crouching to pet her sleek fur and run a hand up her short but quite sensible tail. She bounded ahead of me to Georgia’s kitchen, rightly pegging me for one not unacquainted with cat food, where I searched the cupboards until I happened on a likely can of tender chicken morsels in gravy. As I dished it up, I put the little cat’s new, ownerless plight from my mind. She dug in.

  On a day when murder blew in with the rain, and bad boys wanted to become worse boys, and I had no beautiful garlic cloves to sauté in my Miracolo kitchen for even the most modest of pomodoro sauces, feeding Georgia’s Abbie made me happy. It was, finally, something useful I could do. Something real. And it made me nearly as happy as hearing Joe Beck call me honey (I assume before he could stop himself).

  And then I snooped.

  Although “snoop” sounds kind of leisurely, riffling through mail, probing desk drawers without too much fear of discovery. Abbie seemed to trust me, posing no questions whatsoever about the absent Georgia and content to wash up. But since I had sudden visions of neighboring cabbage-boilers pounding on Georgia’s front door and demanding an explanation for my presence—not to mention suddenly coming face-to-face with Detective Sally Fanella, who might have a reasonable question or two to ask of me—I tugged on a pair of thin latex gloves and worked fast. My hands felt twitchy and my eyes bug-eyed as I went through Georgia/Anna’s stuff.

  So to be strictly accurate, I wasn’t snooping, I was tearing around in some crackpot manner that to any outside observer might appear worrisome. Lucky thing the apartment didn’t contain a whole lot of crap from years past. “Storage unit?” I asked Abbie, who blinked and went back to the important matter at hand, namely, face washing. The bedroom yielded zero, which pretty much summed up my usual bedroom yield in other ways. But the scratched kneehole desk that looked to me like Georgia Payne had scored off Craigslist was a treasure trove. There, in the lowest drawer, I found a file folder secured with an elastic band on which she had scrawled the word BELFIERI! Somehow she restrained herself to a single exclamation point. Ah, reading material for my loft, later, Petzl headlamp strapped to my forehead, alone again in the empty bed. While I quickly thumbed through the Belfiere file, I found myself thinking maybe I should downsize to a twin-size mattress in the Tumbleweed loft—get rid of the queen—after all, I could use the extra space for important things like sweatpants and bargain cookbooks.

  Belfiere could wait until later.

  The only evidence of a significant other was a cat carrier and a litter box, which I took a minute to clean. Abbie declared it acceptable.

  Georgia’s laptop was a nonstarter since I didn’t have the password. And I couldn’t find a helpful little pile of stapled Post-it notes with scribbled passwords. Clearly, she had a system that in no way resembled my own.

  Her dresser-top jewelry box had a few nice pieces, but nothing with any telltale engraving like Love you forever until you ditch me and I have to electrocute you, signed Bob 212-932-0406.

  I couldn’t find a checkbook or bank statements. So Georgia was an online denizen, comfortable with all things digital.

  And the walls didn’t hold anything of her life as the illustrious Anna Tremayne. Just the sort of generic metal-framed things you can pick up at Bed Bath & Beyond when you buy a kitchen trash can. But I scored a file of some pieces clipped from magazines. Anna Tremayne as the “sizzling” newcomer to the culinary world. Anna Tremayne writing as a restaurant critic. (Motive for murder there?) Anna Tremayne in the lineup of the “sizzling” new Top Chef. It made me sad how none of these saved glory notices would have any meaning for anyone else, now that Anna T. was dead. Even if she had a family—and nothing I had come across in that apartment led me to that conclusion—how many relatives hang on to clippings from a life not their own?

  Feeling about as 007 as I could stand without requiring an Aston Martin with front-firing rockets, I took pictures of everything with my phone. The most interesting things on Belfiere. The biggest ouchies in the way of her restaurant reviews. Her birth certificate. A couple of love letters. I was just replacing the last of the Belfiere originals back in their file folder when I happened to look out the window—and jumped back out of sight. Two Quaker Hills PD patrol cars had just pulled up out front. My legs tingled, probably in an attempt to get me to run.

  Since legs are usually correct in these things, I did a quick dash to check my trail—happy to report no-trace snooping—and then I saw Abbie sitting in that composed way cats have when they believe their world is just one big fat sublime routine. She shot me a cross-eyed look that seemed a little flirtatious. Were the cops just going to leave her there until some nonexistent family member grudgingly takes her? Or would they just cart her off in chains to . . . the shelter?

  I blustered at her in a state of terrible indecision. For a moment.

  Then I stuck the litter box in Georgia’s empty laundry basket, topped it with an a
stonished Abbie I had grabbed and unloaded into her carrying case, all of which I covered loosely with a couple of sheets pulled from the linen closet. Slapping my sunglasses onto my face, and thinking fondly of Corabeth Potts, I rubber-banded some hanks of hair into a Shrek ’do on the top of my head. Then I hefted the laundry basket and dashed for the door.

  I just made it into the hall when I heard the cops make it to the third-floor landing, chatting it up. One of them was the Ted guy, Sally Fanella’s partner, I was sure of it, I recognized the voice, so I turned on my heel, affected a walk that would have looked better on any of the T-Birds from Grease, and headed unhurriedly—despite the low growling coming from the laundry basket— toward the rear stairs as they came down the hall behind me.

  As I made it through the door to the stairs, my heart beating wildly, I peeked back through the narrow window. The Ted guy and a uniformed cop were knocking at Georgia Payne’s door. I made it down the three flights of stairs and out the back door to my Volvo, all on a single breath. Once inside, I swiped the sheets off the laundry basket and peered into the carrying case at Abbie, whose yellow-green eyes were the size of quarters. I made reassuring noises, but I was wondering two things.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  And could I blame it on Choo Choo?

  * * *

  “Hey, Beck.” I had just exploded back into my Tumbleweed and let the cat out of the carrying case when I decided a call to my lawyer was in order. I figured if Georgia/Anna had died accidentally, I could certainly make a case for going through her stuff—notifying next of kin, very appropriate—and probably even making off with her cat. Wouldn’t the cat rescue people do the same? But if hot-wiring Georgia had been someone else’s idea, then the cops might take a dim view of my pawing through her stuff on the sly. It could look, well, suspicious.

  “Angelotta,” he replied, obviously forgetting his “honey” slip of the day before. In much the same way as I had forgotten throwing myself sniveling into his arms at the re-creation of my discovery of Georgia Payne’s body. Perhaps these revealing things—I thought, sniffing nobly— are better left undiscussed and unrepeated.

  Right away I knew I couldn’t support that point of view.

  “Joe,” I went on, wondering about the background sounds of machinery on his end, “I’ve got some new information about Georgia Payne.” Was he weed-whacking? Ah, the secret life of Joe Beck.

  “Hold on,” he said to me, then laughed with somebody. I heard a lame joke about pole beans, countered by a lamer joke about big zucchini.

  “Where are you?” I yelled.

  He came back on. “Home,” he said. “Almost done here. Want to say hello to somebody?”

  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when the person you call puts you on the phone with someone else. It should be apparent that if I had wanted to talk to—

  “Hi, cuz,” said the bane of my existence, and I don’t mean Choo Choo.

  —Kayla, I would have called Kayla. I felt deeply and infantilely offended. She was using that tone that’s meant to make you think you share dirty secrets. It was my life’s work not to have so much as a cheap cup of coffee with my cousin Kayla, let alone a dirty secret.

  In my best pious saint’s voice I had learned at my nonna’s knee, I came back, “Hello, Kayla.” What was the strega doing at Joe Beck’s? A split second later, I silently screamed, Do you really have to ask that? It was a summer Saturday morning and love and pestilential cousins were in the air. I kept my eyes on Abbie as she slunk around, low to the ground, anxiously checking out her new, temporary digs. “Okay, then, cuz,” I sounded all sorts of merry, “could you please put Joe back on?”

  “Okey-dokey, back to work.”

  Making zucchini grow big, apparently.

  “Hey,” came Joe Beck.

  Be positive. “What’s Kayla helping you with?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  Surprise? “For whom?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Aren’t lawyers supposed to be more, oh, effusive? Gabby, if you will?

  To the business at hand. “Can we meet? I’ve got information about Georgia Payne, Joe.”

  “Then call the cops.”

  The man was forever trying to get me to call the cops. What’s the point of having a lawyer? That’s what I want to know. I took a deep and patient breath. Abbie was checking out the litter box I had set in the bathroom, cramping the tiny three-by-six-foot space. “It requires finesse.”

  I guess Kayla was cheek to jowl (the jowl being hers) with Joe because it was her voice that came on and said in that conspiratorial way that leads to the overthrow of bedsheets, “Most things do, babe.” Then they laughed together. She always finds her own “jokes” uproarious and declares other people’s “lame, lame, lame.”

  “Kayla,” I spoke quietly into the phone, “I’ll see you on Monday with the day’s order. Put Joe back on.” I felt overly dignified in a dramatic sort of way. Like Scarlett O’Hara in the moment she pulls up a rotten turnip and vows she’ll never go hungry again. Only in my scenario, I was brandishing some part of Joe Beck’s anatomy.

  When I heard his voice, I asked him if he thought he could hold the four-ounce phone without Kayla’s assistance, and when he said he thought he could, I brought him up-to-date. The dead and possibly murdered Georgia Payne was really Anna Tremayne, hotshot chef until she fell off the radar two years ago, and Anna Tremayne was “Anna T.,” the hysterical blogger who—

  I finally had his attention. “—who blew the whistle on your grandmother’s club.”

  “Belfiere, right.”

  He let out a long whistle. “So naturally you’re thinking there’s a Belfiere explanation for Georgia’s death.”

  “What with the tattoo removal, the cosmetic surgery, the name change, the career change . . .” I paced my tiny “great room.” “Joe, I’m convinced she was hiding out from the Crazy Cooks Club. She ran out of that meeting, remember? She had the goods on a suspicious death of one of their fifty who keeled over that night.”

  “A death that didn’t get reported.”

  “Right. And I’ve got my hands on a file she kept on Belfiere—” Oops.

  “What? And how did you do that, might I ask?” And we had been doing so well.

  I was mad. No, I was already mad. Now I just sputtered, “Oh, Kayla can do naked handsprings all around your yard, but me, I do just a little research—using my employee’s own key—to help solve the crime and you’re all over me.” I held the phone about a foot from my face and yelled into it. “And not in a good way.”

  “Okay, listen—”

  “I need some help here!” Does a one-dollar retainer not mean anything these days?

  His voice dropped, and I have to admit, it sounded good. “For your information, she’s not doing naked handsprings.”

  “Cartwheels, then.” I felt belligerent.

  “She’s making a garden. And if she was doing naked handsprings, it would only get my attention—”

  “See! See!”

  “In kind of an appalled way, to tell you the truth.”

  “Huh.”

  “I’m coming over,” he said suddenly and decisively. “I’m not going to have this conversation with you over the phone. Is there anything you want?” Then: “Wine? Beer? Lunch?”

  I felt my eyes slip very far away. As he waited, I thought how a thrill is really a subtle thing, not a spectacle, not even a great racket of nerve endings. It’s the second the sun peeps above the horizon and all the light everywhere suddenly looks different. And you just missed it, even though you hadn’t looked away, not for a second, and missing it coursed through you as a thrill. Out the open window I could almost see myself doing naked handsprings across the yard. When I spoke, my voice sounded soft to me. “Cat food,” was all I said.

  * * *

 
Twenty minutes later I had set up my blue butterfly chair and a tray table in the grass about ten feet away from my front door. Next to them I had set up a yellow butterfly chair. A place for Joe Beck. For whatever he had to say. Probably something legal and disapproving. On the table before me I had spread printouts of some of the most intriguing photos I had taken of Georgia’s stuff on Belfiere and her life as Anna Tremayne. The table also held two red-wine spritzers with mint sprigs, although, depending on what Joe had to say, I was prepared to drink them both myself. If, for instance, he so much as mentioned the name Kayla. I considered bringing out some pestosicles, then decided the wine spritzers were a safer bet. I have never known basil to dull pain.

  There I waited, barefoot and cross-legged in my butterfly chair.

  A black Subaru turned in to the gravel path I call a drive. It came to a stop well before my beloved Volvo. A pang. Maybe he wasn’t planning on staying very long. Just because naked handsprings by Kayla might appall him didn’t exactly mean Kayla herself appalled him. On that score, he and I could be extremely different. Maybe he just didn’t like acrobatics. Maybe he liked her just fine, just fine indeed, and all he wanted to tell me was to treat their relationship (here I choked on the mint sprig) with respect, thank you very much.

  So I watched him get out of the car and stand stock-still just looking at me for a moment, dressed in jeans and a faded, charcoal-gray T-shirt that had no right looking that good. I found myself hoping it didn’t mean anything that a cloud drifted in front of the sun. As he started over, something made me get out of the chair. The closer he got, the more decisive he seemed, and with my arms folded tight across my chest, I met him halfway.

  Two feet away from me, Joe stopped, and pushed at the back of his golden hair, which was too short to go anywhere. I waited while he looked at the sky, the little house, the hedge one hundred feet away. Finally, he spoke. “You’ve got to stop thinking I’ve got something going with Kayla.”

  I shifted my weight. “You did,” I pointed out.

  Joe stuck his hands on his hips, an effective move that made me consider his hips. “Not one of my better moves.” Oh, talking about Kayla. “Let’s get past it, okay?”