by Amy Korman
“You should stick to trying to hustle old ladies into spending thirty-six thousand bucks on ceiling tents!”
“Um, guys, let’s breathe for a second,” I said. I was still kind of mad at Bootsie for casting me in the role of not-very-bright minion to Scooter Simmons, but I was determined to get this day over with as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Also, I had the sense that against all odds, we were actually making progress and uncovering a few clues about the Vicino incidents and even, at the same time, possibly figuring out what exactly Barclay and Scooter were up to.
“We had a long day yesterday, and it’s only natural that we’re all a little tired. And, Bootsie, have you had your protein bar yet this morning?” I asked her calmly.
“No,” she said grumpily.
“Okay, let’s get you a snack,” I told her in my best kindergarten teacher voice. “I think there are a couple of Clif Bars left in the glove compartment. Joe, do you need something to eat, too?”
“I guess so,” he whined.
“How about some water, too?” I suggested, handing around some bottles of Poland Spring that Martha had thoughtfully placed in the car as we were leaving. We all munched and sipped for a few minutes, listening to the Escape spa music channel on Bootsie’s Sirius radio.
“Everyone okay now?” I asked. Joe and Bootsie nodded.
Sugar, salt, chocolate, and whatever the heck else is in a Clif Bar coursed through my veins, and I felt somehow renewed myself. At the same time, I had a sudden realization: I need to go home to Bryn Mawr. If we could just figure out who was wreaking havoc around Magnolia Beach, I’d head home to the frosty, sleety weather and not have to referee these bullshit arguments or listen to Sophie’s legal woes and Holly’s Howard problems.
I summoned every ounce of patience I had left and tried to think of how best to rally the troops, such as they were. I leaned and spoke in encouraging tones into the front seat.
“Okay, Bootsie, do you still think we should try to find the pizza delivery guy who took the sandwich to Barclay?”
“Of course I do,” Bootsie said, balling up her Clif Bar wrapper, grabbing mine and Joe’s, and dunking the little bundle into a trash can just outside her car window. She even did a little fist pump, so I knew she was back in peak form. “I’ve got a few twenties ready to get this guy talking. Unlike the police, who aren’t supposed to pay for information, I have no such restrictions. We’ll bribe him and find out everything he knows.”
“I’ve always wanted to bribe somebody,” said Joe, who perked up, chugged some Poland Spring, and started entering the address of Broadway Pizza into Bootsie’s navigation system. “There isn’t much bribery in decorating,” he told us. “I mean, you might get your fabric order in a little sooner if you take the rep out for drinks, but that’s about it.”
He pondered the pizza guy scenario for a minute as the nav ordered Bootsie to turn left and head over the Intercoastal bridge.
“Maybe we can get him to talk by threatening to get him in trouble with his boss, too,” Joe said hopefully. “Or, know, tell him we’re going to follow him home and tell his mom he’s in big trouble? That could be fun.”
“Let’s find this pizza kid and scare the crap out of him!” shrieked Bootsie.
“I SWEAR ON my grandma’s life—all I did was drop off a hoagie to the dude,” said Andy the pizza guy.
We’d found Andy outside his workplace heading for the Broadway Pizza van, toting three large pies in a special insulated pizza carrier.
Bootsie had ordered Andy over to one of Broadway Pizza’s few outdoor tables, where the unlucky target of her investigation had looked nervously inside to make sure his boss didn’t see him dawdling instead of delivering.
“Er, I really need to get these pizzas to the Jaguar dealership,” he told us. “They have a standing order.” Andy was a tanned surfer type, wearing flip-flops, long shorts, and a ball cap on backward. Mafia hit man was a hard role to imagine Andy playing.
“This will just take five minutes,” Bootsie said. “And hold on a sec, I need to place a quick order.” She dashed inside Broadway Pizza and was back in under a minute.
“I already told the police everything,” Andy told us, squirming. “All I did was get handed a sandwich yesterday afternoon by my manager, and the order ticket with the address over on Seagrape Lane on the island.”
“Had you ever been to that house before?” asked Joe.
“Naw, man, people in Magnolia Beach almost never order from us,” Andy told him.
Joe looked at Bootsie and made a hand gesture that indicated it was time to peel off some bills, so Bootsie shrugged and handed Andy a twenty. He looked intrigued, but unsure if he should take it.
“Did anyone ask you to go attack the guy—Barclay Shields is his name?” Bootsie asked. “You know—maybe someone paid you to hit him in the head?”
“Absolutely not!” Andy said, holding up both hands in protest. “Seriously, I’m getting a degree in marine biology at Florida Atlantic. I’m not some hit man, lady. I literally rang the doorbell, handed the guy the meatball hoagie, extra cheese, and took his money. Guy was a good tipper. He handed me twelve bucks, and the sandwich was seven.”
“Did you see anyone else at the house on Seagrape?”
“No one,” Andy said. “Except there was a really tall, muscular woman with a blond braid jogging past me when I got there, but she was already out on the street and heading toward Ocean Boulevard.” Gerda.
“No scary guys, no one parked in the driveway, no hookers waiting outside in their cars?”
Andy again held up both hands. “No one, and definitely no scary dudes . . . or hookers,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know if I could tell a girl was a hooker, but there weren’t any women there at all.”
Bootsie held up a couple more twenties and dangled them in front of Andy. “Andy, this is my last question, because I’m getting hungry, and I don’t want your boss to get mad at you for letting those pies get cold. Is there anything else at all you want to tell us about yesterday?”
Andy’s blue eyes darted around nervously for a second, then he jumped up and jogged to the van. “Naw, sorry, that’s it!” he shouted, jumping in and peeling out toward his delivery van.
“Uh, ma’am, you with the flowered outfit? Your calzones are ready,” said a girl who leaned out of the pizza place’s front door to Bootsie. “One pepperoni, one spinach, one cheesesteak filled, and the plain mozzarella-ricotta. That’ll be twenty-two bucks.”
Chapter 19
“ANDY’S LYING,” BOOTSIE said in the car a minute later, biting into a gooey spinach calzone as cheese dripped down onto a paper plate and a pile of paper napkins in which she’d mummified her lap. Joe handed around the Diet Cokes, grabbed a plastic knife from the bag, cut the three other calzones in half, and offered me my choice of cheese-filled mound of dough. I went for half of the plain, though I’d secretly wanted to try the spinach one. Too late—Bootsie had almost finished inhaling it.
“He’s leaving something out,” Joe said, chewing on his half of the cheesesteak calzone. “I’m not getting mafia vibes from this kid. It’s more like he got caught up in something stupid, and now he’s too scared to tell anyone.”
For once, I was on the same page as Joe and Bootsie.
“Should we follow him?” Bootsie asked hopefully.
“No,” I said firmly. “Bootsie, please. You’ve lied to everyone in Magnolia Beach and most of Palm Beach at this point, and I don’t want you to start stalking.”
“I need to get over to Adelia’s and check on how the sconces look,” sighed Joe. “The bribing was fun, though.”
Bootsie was looking wistfully in the direction that Andy had zoomed off toward, but she sighed as she put the Range Rover into gear. “We need to finish going through Scooter’s zoning papers anyway,” she
agreed, swinging out of Broadway Pizza. “I’m actually running out of lies at this point.”
“Head back to Hermès first,” Joe told her. “I’ll show the pic of Gianni to Carly and see if she thinks he’s the guy who bought the man-scarf. Bootsie, you stay in the car. No offense, but Carly hates you.”
“I NEED TO go to The Breakers, find Holly, and get her to apologize to Howard,” I told Bootsie. “Can you drop me there?”
Joe had reported that Carly was pretty sure Gianni wasn’t her customer from earlier in the week. After Hermes, we tried in vain to think of other suspects as we crossed the bridge toward The Breakers. I’d texted Holly to meet me in the lobby of the hotel, and as we approached the palm-lined driveway, Joe’s phone pinged, too.
“It’s Channing,” he told us. “He and Jessica decided to shut down Vicino for a couple of weeks.”
THE HOLLY WHO was waiting outside the hotel was a shell of her usual upbeat self. Not only was her marriage on the rocks but the restaurant she and Sophie had put so much money into was closing down as well, even if it was supposedly just a temporary shuttering. She looked miserable, but she was channeling her low mood into obsessive exercise.
“You’re just in time for the afternoon Glutenator class,” she told me. “I got you some workout clothes and sneakers at the hotel shop. Let’s go!”
We zoomed through the gorgeous hotel toward the ocean and the pool—make that pools, since I could count at least three separate bodies of water, including one with fabulous people lunching and cocktailing around it. Palm trees and umbrellas shaded these lucky folks, and a gorgeous breeze wafted in from the ocean. I gazed longingly at the mojito-sipping crowd, but Holly sternly ushered me into the spa and fitness area, where she quickly signed us in at the front desk.
An hour later, thighs screaming in pain and hair soaked, I emerged into the sunlight. Other than my few sessions at Booty Camp, a horrible fitness program Holly sometimes drags me to when we’re home in Bryn Mawr, and one tennis lesson I’d taken from Bootsie last year, I’d never experienced such physical agony in my life.
“Please don’t ever ask me to do that—wait,” I interrupted myself, pausing beside a majestic pillar and indicating a table hidden over near the outdoor bar.
Olivia from Gianni Mare was eating a salad as she talked animatedly with an attractive older woman and a guy in his late twenties. While the guy wasn’t sitting close to Olivia—he was across from her and the older woman—the three clearly knew each other well. They sat with informal posture, heads together as they talked and ate.
“We need to know who’s sitting with Olivia,” Holly said, appearing to have been perked up a little by the class. “I’ll be right back.” She returned a moment later with Stefan the concierge in tow.
“Who’s that guy in the green polo shirt?” Holly asked Stefan. “And the other woman, do you know her?”
“That’s Daniel Ainsley,” Stefan said. “Good guy, very ambitious. Lives down in Gulfstream and runs a few businesses. He’s in construction and owns part of a marina. A local guy, and self-made.”
“And the woman in the yellow dress? Not Olivia—the other one.”
“Ah, yes, Olivia,” said Stefan wearily. “Keeps showing up at the salon last minute without an appointment and throws a fit until one of the stylists agrees to blow-dry her hair. She also likes to order room service, but she’s a terrible tipper.” He looked more closely at the woman with Olivia and Daniel.
“Will take me five minutes or less to find out who she is, where she lives, and what she does for a living,” he told us, disappearing inside the hotel again.
“That lady is Olivia’s mother,” Stefan said a minute later. “She’s been a fifth-grade teacher in West Palm Beach for more than thirty years. One of my parking valets was her student some years back. She’s a well-respected lady, he says.”
I hadn’t known that Olivia was a Palm Beach native, and thought it must be helpful to Gianni to have a girlfriend who knew the area so well. She looked happy sitting with her mom and Daniel—which was a big change from her usual expression when she was with Gianni. I was just surprised she’d been able to get away from Gianni to spend time with her mom.
“Can you find out what the relationship is with Daniel Ainsley and Olivia?” Holly asked in a very Bootsie-like manner. Stefan nodded, stepped back into the lobby, and returned within moments.
“High school sweethearts,” he said. “About ten years ago. I guess they’ve stayed friends.”
Holly and I exchanged significant glances. Once again, it seemed one of Gianni’s younger girlfriends might have found herself an outside love interest or, in Olivia’s case, reunited with an old flame.
We followed Stefan back to the lobby, and I was just about to start begging Holly to call Howard’s hotel room when I noticed the Colketts were at the bar.
“We think Gianni might have asked one of the Colketts to buy that Hermès scarf,” I told Holly.
She headed the designers’ way, and they rose and greeted her happily. Somehow, I noticed, Holly still looked flawless after the horrible workout class. Her hair was perfect, and she didn’t seem to have perspired.
As Holly chatted with Tim and Tom, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bootsie’s theory that they’d somehow gotten entangled with Gianni. If the pair really was having financial troubles, maybe they were desperate enough to have gotten on Gianni’s payroll, and had delivered the bad clams and sabotaged the air-conditioning.
The Colketts are good guys, though! Tom and Tim had helped us during last spring’s crime spree back at home, dishing up information about Channing, Jessica, and Gianni that hadn’t turned out to be all that important but had at least been true. They’d had nothing to do with the attacks on Sophie’s ex and on Gianni, even though Gianni had given them reason to want to go after him. Meanwhile, Holly had seated herself next to Tim, who had his iPad out and a pitcher of Bloody Marys at the ready.
“Hi, doll, have a seat,” he said, politely pulling out a chair for me. “Bloody?”
“Sure!” I said, wanting to go with the flow and also thinking that the cocktail looked quite refreshing. “By the way, I really love your design for the Gianni Mare. The chef and Olivia must be so happy with the way things turned out.”
“So far, Gianni’s only screamed at us once this week,” Tom told us. “Now Olivia . . .” He looked around to make sure she wasn’t anywhere in the bar. “Her temper is actually making Gianni look good.”
“Olivia’s really a pain,” Tim Colkett said. “We’re honestly just in this project for the exposure and for our design portfolio. And, well, the money. Not to brag, but the restaurant is a total career-maker.”
“We’ve been on the phone a few times with Elle Decor, and they’ll be sending down a team next week to photograph the restaurant,” Tom said. “Unfortunately, we have to share credit with Sienna for this job”—here, he made a face that indicated he had less than full respect for the Restaurant in a Weekend star—“but that’s just because of the HGTV angle. After this job, we’re rebranding ourselves as Colkett Interior and Landscape Design.”
“Plus,” Tom added, “not to sound conceited or anything, but Tom and I are both pretty darn handsome, and HGTV is all about looks. They love remodelers who work as a duo, too.”
I momentarily forgot my suspicions that the Colketts might have tried to run down Holly and the Vicino management team the week before. If they got their own show, it would put Joe in the kind of spiral that often leads to spending several months in a quiet sanitarium.
“That was weird that the realtor got sick on Saturday at Vicino, wasn’t it?” I said. I felt horrible bringing up the incident again, not to mention implying that it was Channing and Jessica’s fault.
But since I wanted the Colketts to start talking, I went one step further. “I mean, Channing allowing bad clam
s in his restaurant was the first nail in the Vicino coffin!” I said bitchily. “Sorry, Holly.”
“That’s okay!” she said, throwing the young chef under the bus. “I’m not too happy that Channing let that happen. And now the restaurant’s temporarily closed.”
“Yeah, we heard about that,” said Tim, nodding. “But Gianni’s such a star. Poor Channing isn’t in his league.”
“We don’t have any malice toward Chan, of course,” Tom said, shrugging. “The guy’s nice. It’s just that Gianni’s star power, combined with our blue-and-white design, is unstoppable.”
I considered this for a moment as we sipped and nodded assent. Maybe the Colketts really were as unconcerned with Vicino as they seemed to be. They didn’t seem like running-people-over-in-an-alley types, either, but since I was already channeling Bootsie’s nosiness, I decided to find out if they’d been anywhere near Magnolia Beach on the night of the trash can incident of the week before.
“So you two have been down here for a week or so, right?” I said, aiming for a casual tone. “Putting together the restaurant had to have taken some time.”
“I don’t think it’s been a full week,” Tim said blandly, seeming blasé about the length of their visit, probably because (like myself) he had someone else footing the bill. “I guess we’ve been here about six days now? We did all the buying for this place while we were still up in Pennsylvania, so it was basically just overseeing painting, tiling, and installation once we got down here.”
If they’d arrived Thursday or Friday, that was too late to have run down Jessica and Holly in the alley on Tuesday night.
“The days get away from you down here, don’t they?” Tom added happily, pouring himself more of the Bloody Mary from the frosty pitcher in front of us. “Island time!”
We thanked them for the drinks and rose to leave. I honestly couldn’t imagine the Colketts running down Jessica and Holly. Maybe Bootsie was right and Gianni had wielded the Chevy and personally tried to scare Jessica out of town. I followed Holly, who was zooming out of the lobby.
