Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  Leo was replacing a mandolin string as I looked up from the fascinating dirty glasses. “Any mandolin tonight, Leo? I just love the boost you give it with the juice.” When he gave me a mild look, I said with some dizzy spirit I hoped would come across as disarming, “Wired for sound!”

  “No, not tonight. The wire broke.” And he went back to turning a tuning key.

  Dana pulled a bar stool in front of the little clutch of musicians, at which Maria Pia practically trembled, waiting to hear the opening bars of her signature song. As I bent to pick up a stray cocktail napkin from where it peeked out half under the bar, something small glinted at me. My fingers brushed it forward, and then I palmed it. Sure enough, Dana Cahill, acting more like she was announcing the semifinalists in the Miss America Pageant, introduced Maria Pia Angelotta—and her very own self—in that classic song about young Italian love . . .

  The music began.

  Giancarlo pressed a seemingly reluctant Maria Pia out from behind the bar.

  And I opened my palm. What I held looked like the end of a black electrical cord. Maybe two inches, that’s all, cut cleanly through with a pair of scissors. Staring at the cut, all I saw was what was left of two copper wires.

  You know the expression My blood ran cold? Well, by me, that’s not quite how it goes. For blood to run cold, you have to have blood. What I was feeling in that moment was that I had morphed into some other kind of being, something bloodless, something even kind of mineral. I felt beyond a racing heart, beyond prickling skin, beyond even a cold sweat. All I had were eyes, and mine slid to the right by about four feet and settled on the mandolin lying in the open case. Cordless.

  The wire broke.

  My breath came in rough little pops drowned out by the song. What was left of the cord sat like a motionless black insect in my palm. At that moment, I slowly looked up and found Leo noodling away on the guitar, his eyes on mine.

  By 11:30 Miracolo had emptied out, and a tired staff was wandering off home. It was my turn to lock up, so I made myself scarce in the kitchen, polishing prep tables that had already been polished, trying very hard to keep an open mind about murder. Maria Pia had patted my cheek and then actually let Giancarlo drive her home instead of Choo Choo.

  Landon gave me a weary kiss and went home to feed Vaughn and wait for the law. This was spoken with big-eyed paranoia, which I countered with an eloquent eye roll. Corabeth flashed me a peace sign and went out with Li Wei in tow. Paulette prowled around the entire restaurant, which—with only a little bit of irony— she declared a terrorist-free zone, and departed.

  While the regulars packed up, chatting in tired mumbles about the set, I slipped a Linda Ronstadt CD into the sound system for a shot of the anti-Dana. Even though Dana herself was still swanning around the dining room long after the onlookers (truer word than audience, really) had left. Right after I set a doorstop against one of the open double doors, to clear the kitchen of the last of the dinner aromas, I texted Detective Sally Fanella, hoping she was somewhere conscious with her phone turned on. Cn u give me date of hit skip on county road third week in June 2 yrs ago.

  No immediate answer. I wasn’t sure how everything pieced together—or even whether it would—but I was curious about that information. As I flicked off the switch to the A/C, Dana came running toward me stiff-armed, with tiny little scooting steps in her wedge sandals.

  “How was I?” She gushed at me as though she was the one delivering the compliment.

  Then she caught my hands and bit her coral-glossed lips.

  I went to my default answer—“Same as always”—spoken with enough gusto that it was all she needed.

  “Eve, Eve, Eve . . .” She gave me a fond, sidelong look. “My biggest fan.”

  Which was really saying something.

  Then I slung an arm around her and jogged us girlies on over to the Sub-Zero fridge and pulled out my private stash of coconut water (I am not immune to trends). As I poured us both a short one, since I really didn’t want to encourage Dana to hang around much beyond my pumping her for info, I asked her about poor Leo, keeping it out of earshot of the musicians as I kept one eye on them, still packing up. What was the date of the hit-and-run? Where did it happen? Somewhere out on a county road?

  But Dana came up empty of everything except coconut water.

  And Sally Fanella was silent.

  Then Dana held my face, kissed both cheeks, and loped back out to the dining room to leave with her “boys.” I kept Linda Ronstadt on an endless loop as they all cleared out, the bass clunking through the front doorway, followed by the ghostly Leo, with his two instrument cases, and the clarinetist.

  A laughing Dana, slipping into a sparkling little shrug, was last, hard on their heels. Then gone. I dimmed the overhead globe lights, feeling like some kind of minor restaurant god that could change things in my very own firmament. I stared for a rough moment at the two locks on our front door, then got over it and quickly locked up.

  Turning back into the dining room, where one of my last official acts of the day was to blow out the votive candles, I saw a stack of papers on the piano. Mrs. Crawford’s sheet music. In her hurry, she’d forgotten it. I put the sheet music on the piano stool, then headed to the closest table, where the votive candle burned low. Suddenly something occurred to me, so I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted Fina Parisi. Hey, need date of Anna’s induction night she ran out on you. Antipasto together this Friday?

  I pinched out a couple of candles, snapped up a forgotten set of keys, danced to Linda’s demanding to know “When Will I Be Loved?”, when a soft one-two chime made me grab my phone. It was Fina, texting me back. June 21 two years ago at dusk never forget it. Yes to Friday. So Georgia Payne had torn out of the Belfiere meeting, freaked out, at high speed in her white Caddy Escalade, cornering badly, almost slipping off the country road, taking out a mailbox. Maybe a raccoon. Maybe a runner—

  Which was when my phone chimed softly again.

  Sally Fanella. For some reason—maybe at those times when we feel the presence of a weighty inevitability, something we wonder we didn’t notice earlier, although it’s hard to say what good it ever does—I swallowed hard before reading her text. In the dim lights of Miracolo, I held up my phone and read: Cold case county hwy 8 runner left 4 dead 9:21 p.m. June 21. Witness saw white SUV couldn’t catch plates. Y? County Highway 8 ran through Pendragon, Pennsylvania. How far from Fina’s house was Anna Tremayne when, in the failing light, she hit Matt Cardona? Did she even realize it? Would we ever know?

  What I knew for certain—and here my whole body felt like the weighty inevitability that had only skulked around outside me until that very moment—was that Georgia Payne had shown up, as luck would have it, to work at Miracolo. And miracle it was for a father still grieving his dead son when casual conversation about loser cars solved for him what the cops had filed under cold cases. There she was, his for the killing.

  First the cutting of the power cord for the mandolin, then the stripping back of the insulation, then pulling apart the wires, then the wait. The wait outside on the sidewalk, finding what shadows he could, until he saw her just inside the front door, ready to lock up. All he had to do was plug the cord into the outdoor outlet, and at just the right moment—

  My phone rang, startling me. I looked: Dana.

  —all he had to do was touch a wire to each metal lock as Georgia’s hands met them on the inside, where she completed the circuit—

  “Eve?”

  “Dana.”

  Just to stay busy, my trembling fingers pinched out the final candle, near the center of the empty dining room.

  “Eve, just to let you know, I told Leo about all your interest in Matt and what happened. How you were asking about things I couldn’t answer—I always hate letting you down—you know, like the day, the time, the place. He’ll get back to you. It’s always good to go straigh
t to the source, don’t you think?” And then: “Eve?”

  Which was when I realized I saw a shadow in the kitchen, and, with a tumbling heart, I eased closer to the nearest table and slipped the phone—leaving it on—out of sight behind a candle holder. I heard a faint “Eve?” coming from it, hoping to hell Dana would just, for once in her life, shut up. Through the open kitchen door came Leo Cardona. I used to joke that Dana Cahill was going to be the death of me, but I never thought she was going to be the death of me.

  “Leo!” I said loud enough to alert my phone that I wasn’t alone.

  Leo Cardona was backlit by the bright lights of the little chrome and stainless steel kingdom I was missing already. It wasn’t quite like having the burly, menacing Raymond Burr swaying in the doorway at the end of Rear Window, but I wasn’t about to underestimate a man who could cold-bloodedly electrocute someone. I was taller and younger than the mandolin player, but he outweighed me by about a pound and a half was my guess, and it was hard to gauge just what kind of advantage that would give him.

  “Why couldn’t you leave it alone?” he asked softly.

  Too late to play dumb. No Whatever do you mean? was going to fly. I debated screaming outright, but it was possible Dana had gotten bored and hung up, and I needed to conserve my strength. As he took a step toward me, hands in his shapeless pockets, saying something about Matt, something about the driver who ran him down and left him for dead, all I could see was the way the lights from the kitchen threaded through the white wisps of his thin wavy hair that seemed to be standing up in shock at what he did. And at what he was about to do. He was closing fast when I finally got out, “So you killed Georgia Payne,” talking loud enough for dead phones and extinguished votive candles and a piano I would never hear again.

  He was close enough to me now that I could see his pale, doughy face and light, limpid eyes, a face where I could never read the extent of the grief because it had always looked like it was grieving, anyway. “Didn’t you?” I yelled just as he leaped at me, screaming, “You’re damn right I did!” At the last second, I turned just enough that the weight of him didn’t knock me over, but I got pushed into a violent back bend against a table as a chair fell over and I saw a glint of wire in his hands. The wire. The stripped cord. The murder weapon.

  We were caught in a fierce, total-body struggle of snarls and yelps. As the cord went around my neck, I realized with horror that I couldn’t throw him off. I couldn’t angle my legs in any position to cause him pain. I couldn’t jam my fingers into his determined eyes. Overhead the beautiful dim globes of Miracolo seemed hazy as I worked my desperate fingers under the tightening cord around my neck.

  Landon will never get over it.

  With that, I heard my strangled roar, and I tried sinking my teeth into this surprisingly strong mandolin player. No luck. Cardona. Cardona. If he was Italian, then Maria Pia would never get over it. I jerked my body just enough to overturn the table, and the weight of an insane Leo Cardona and me pushed the table screeching across the tiled floor until we hit another table. And still he hung on.

  My fingers were clutching at the cord as I ran out of breath and the last thing I felt was the beginning of tears. I guess, when it comes right down to it, you never know when you’ve had your very last saltimbocca. Or kiss . . . I was just letting my mind stray to the image of Joe Beck to block out a killer that was filling my field of vision. Just as I felt my fingers slacken on the cord, another shadow eclipsed a hazy globe of light, and in a wide, dark arc an arm swung toward us and I heard the air knocked out of my assailant. Again the dark arc swung, this time downward, once, twice, like faceless fate, and the killer of my cousin Anna Tremayne fell off me and slumped in a heap to the floor.

  I gagged attractively for half a minute, clutching my throat, my fingers plucking at the cord. When my vision cleared, I looked up. It was Mrs. Crawford, still in her mint-green flapper girl dress and gold cloche. She stood looking down at me, one hip thrust out, in something like amusement. “I forgot my music,” she said in that deep, nasal voice. Then she extended an arm to flourish her weapon at me. It was my leather portfolio stuffed full of a class roster and ten good rocks. She seemed philosophical. “He was a terrible musician,” she drawled. Together we turned to look at the inert form of Leo Cardona. “Consider this”—she held up the portfolio to the unresponsive Leo—“my review.”

  * * *

  Within the hour I had more company. First a couple of uniformed cops carted off Leo Cardona, which helped my trembling a lot. Maria Pia gave me one of her strands of pearls to cover the bruises on my neck, and she kept her composure admirably. She had Giancarlo to hold and pat and squeeze her hand, because, no matter what the crisis, for her faithful Giancarlo, it was always about her.

  And I had Landon, who was so manically relieved about so many things that he chattered incessantly and made up some canapés of cream cheese, cilantro, hot pepper jelly, and caviar. When I told him his sister Anna’s cat, Abbie, was now his to keep, he was radiant. I watched Paulette discuss the fine points of effective blows with rock-loaded cases with Mrs. Crawford. And Choo Choo, who had come running, bare-chested, in his striped pajama pants, hummed while he pulled espresso shots.

  Then there was Detective Sally Fanella, taking down the fine points of the story from Dana Cahill, who was plenty jazzed that she had stayed on the line, heard threats from Leo—“Leo! You think you know a person!”—and called Quaker Hills finest. I had a bad moment wondering if I was going to have to be indebted to Dana Cahill for the rest of my natural-born days. I guess it showed on my face, because Joe Beck whispered, “It’s okay, Eve, Mrs. Crawford was your first responder.”

  We clinked espresso shots, and looked each other in the eye. I felt tired, but as I sat there with everyone I loved around me, sat there in my new pearls, I smiled. Joe Beck brushed the hair out of my face, and if we weren’t all suddenly singing a rousing crackpot version of “Those Were the Days,” I’m pretty sure he would have kissed me. Tomorrow I’d invite him over for drinks . . . and some pesto.

  Definitely some pesto.

  Choo Choo Bacigalupo’s Recipe for Gorgonzola and Spiced Walnuts in Port Wine Syrup

  SERVES 4

  “How hard can it be?”–Choo Choo Bacigalupo

  3 cups port wine

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter

  1/2 cup walnut halves

  1/2 teaspoon cayenne

  1/2 teaspoon black pepper

  1/2 teaspoon salt

  2 teaspoons sugar

  8 oz. Gorgonzola cheese

  In a saucepan, bring the wine to a boil. Cook over medium heat until reduced to 1/2 cup, about 12–15 minutes. Allow to cool.

  In an 8-inch sauté pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the walnuts, cayenne, black pepper, salt, and sugar. Sauté until well coated and lightly toasted, 2–3 minutes. Set aside to cool.

  Divide the cheese among four plates and spoon nuts over each portion. Drizzle the wine syrup over each plate and serve with crusty bread.

  SHELLEY COSTA is an Edgar® Award–nominated and internationally published author of short fiction; her stories have appeared in anthologies and journals including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Blood on Their Hands, and Crimewave from the U.K. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is the author of The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. You Cannoli Die Once and Basil Instinct are the first two novels in her Miracolo Restaurant mystery series. A former New Yorker, she lives near Cleveland and is on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she teaches fiction writing and screenwriting. Visit www.shelleycosta.com.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Shelley-Costa

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  You Cannoli Die Once

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Shelley Costa

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  First Pocket Books paperback edition July 2014

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  Cover illustration by Brandon Dorman

  ISBN 978-1-4767-0936-9

  ISBN 978-1-4767-0938-3 (ebook)