by Celia Kinsey
That sounded rather more like what I suspected Antonio of doing. It probably wouldn’t do a bit of good, but I decided to come right out with my suspicions.
“I don’t think this has anything to do with who is poaching whose customers. What exactly do you have against Arnie?” I demanded. “Clearly, there’s bad blood between you.”
“He talked Hannah into leaving me.”
“Hannah? Arnie’s sister Hannah?”
“We used to be married for a while until that—” Antonio let loose a string of insults that made me want to rethink my strict philosophy of nonviolence. Halfway through Antonio’s tirade, I realized I was gripping the keys for the padlock so hard they were digging into my palm.
“You OK?” said a voice over my left shoulder. “This guy bothering you?”
I turned. It was Hank, from the carwash next door. Hank’s not usually a threatening figure—for one thing, he’s well past sixty and skinny as a rail—but the way he was fingering the front of his denim jacket he wears regardless of the weather made me wonder if he wasn’t contemplating whipping out a firearm and ordering Antonio off the property.
“I’ve called the police,” Hank said, hand poised to reach inside his jacket.
“It’s OK, Hank,” I told him. “I’m not in any danger.”
Hank didn’t seem too sure Antonio wasn’t any threat to me, and Antonio didn’t seem too sure Hank wasn’t any threat to him. If I hadn’t already battened down the hatches on the truck, I’d have offered free fries all around to diffuse the situation.
Hank and Antonio were still staring each other down when a police car tore into the lot and screeched to a halt so quickly that we all got sprayed with gravel.
Officer Scott Finch jumped out. Scott used to be my boyfriend, way back when, and until relatively recently, he never got over it. He’s finally come to terms with the fact we’re never getting back together, but he still has a soft spot for me, and right now he was transparently worried about my safety.
“What’s going on here?” Scott demanded. “Are you harassing this lady?”
“Harassing her?” Antonio said. “That’s a laugh. It’s more like the other way around.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She and her partner are trying to put me out of business.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Somebody dumped out all my pizza toppings in the bushes this morning, so I couldn’t even open. I’m sure they did it.”
“Did you see them do it?” Scott asked. I thought this was a perfectly reasonable question, but Antonio appeared to take it as a personal affront. He turned purple with rage.
“Yes!” He said.
Officer Finch looked taken aback.
“Are you claiming to have seen—with your own eyes—who dumped out the toppings?” I interrupted.
For a few long seconds, I thought for sure the man was going to accuse me to my face, but I guess he lost his nerve.
“It was Arnie,” he said.
“Just Arnie?” Scott pressed.
“Yeah. Just Arnie.”
“Then why are you here yelling at Miss Finnigan?” Officer Finch demanded. “Have you filed a police report?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll take a look at it and see what I can do,” Scott said. “In the meantime, I’d suggest you stay well away from Miss Finnigan.”
Antonio didn’t stick around after that. He shoved his substantial helmet back on his head and pedaled away as if he was being pursued by an angry flock of flamingos.
“I can’t imagine Arnie doing a thing like that,” I told Scott as we watched Antonio pedal past the carwash and disappear around the corner.
“I’ll go straight to the station and take a look at the report,” Scott said. “Want to ride along?”
In years past, I would have refused the offer, but now that Scott and I had an understanding, I was comfortable saying yes.
On the way down to the station, Scott asked me, “So, you and Arnie made it official yet?”
I must have turned the color of an overripe tomato because Scott started laughing so hard I worried his vision might be impaired by his tears of mirth. His amusement only made me more embarrassed.
The truth was, I hadn’t even gotten up the nerve to broach the subject with Arnie. I wasn’t in any hurry to alter the status of our relationship. There was a very real risk that Arnie’s feelings for me were purely platonic, and I didn’t want to ruin my friendship with the best friend I’d ever had.
“You do know that man is crazy about you,” Scott said as we pulled into the parking lot at the station.
I may have huffed—or possibly growled—as I hastily exited the passenger seat of the patrol car before Scott could say any more on the subject.
Inside the station, Officer Finch pulled up the police report. It described the incident just as our crowd of hungry regulars had.
“There’s no mention of Arnie at all,” I pointed out.
“Mr. Scarpello clearly stated that he discovered the toppings had been dumped 20 minutes after he arrived at the food truck,” Scott said, ”He also stated that he had no idea who might have dumped them. Antonio will have a very hard time pinning the vandalism on Arnie since it clearly contradicts what he told police at the scene.”
I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t.
Arnie had mentioned something about Antonio having just gotten out of prison. When I told Scott, he seemed to be hearing this for the first time. He tapped away at the desk computer for a few minutes.
“Fraud,” Scott told me. “Antonio Scarpello served 18 months in state prison for fraud. I don’t know what the story behind his conviction was all about without looking into it further, which I will, but I’m betting a simple internet search of news stories would tell you most of what you need to know. When scammers get caught, it tends to capture the public’s imagination.”
I stayed up late that night, poring over news articles. Scott had been right about the case stimulating a great deal of public interest. It seemed that Antonio Scarpello had been the ringleader in a scheme to bilk a large number of retirees out of their life savings. He’d done it by selling them units in a nonexistent condominium community in Costa Rica. Antonio had used photographs of the construction of someone else’s development to keep the “investors” mollified through endless fabricated delays and setbacks, but the scheme had finally caught up to him when he’d tried to con his own father-in-law, who’d ended up instigating an investigation into Antonio’s scheme.
I thought back to Emmaline’s comment to Tanisha about how Antonio and Tanisha’s father didn’t get along. It couldn’t be Arnie and Hannah’s father who’d been involved. He’d been dead for ten years. Perhaps, however, there was yet another ex-wife.
It was so late when I finally drifted off into a fitful sleep that I was half an hour late getting to the food truck.
When I arrived, I was surprised to see a crowd of regulars queued up at the window.
“Did Antonio’s not open again today?” I asked Prue, who was hanging around at the back of the line, trying to decide between a tuna on rye or chili cheese fries.
“It was poo this time,” said Prue.
Prue tends to use the wrong words sometimes, so I tried again.
“What do you mean by ‘poo’?”
“Surely you know what ‘poo’ is,” said Prue. “I don’t like to use that other word people call it. I think that’s crude.”
Chapter Five
“When Prue says ‘poo,’” Patsy chimed in, “she means exactly that.”
“Horse poo, to be exact,” said Fitz, then started laughing so hard he had to pause before he could go on. “Somebody put horse doodoo inside the pizza oven.”
“When Antonio fired it up, it made a terrible stink,” said Prue.
“I don’t know how he’s ever going to clean it,” Patsy added. “He had to close up for the day, obviously.”
I�
�d heard of some creative acts of vandalism in my time but putting horse poo in a pizza oven took the cow pie.
“Does Antonio have any idea who did it?” I asked.
The line got suddenly silent. Nobody said a word.
“He’s telling you all Arnie did it, isn’t he?” I whispered to Prue.
“Yes,” she said. “But don’t worry. Nobody believes a word of it.”
The lunch hour passed without incident other than we were busier than we’d ever been. Evidently, Antonio’s smear campaign against Arnie was having the opposite of his intended effect.
During the mid-afternoon lull, I walked down to the Pick and Quick on the corner, bought Arnie and myself each a cold drink and loitered out front to make a phone call. What I had to say was too complicated to communicate by text.
“I have a question about your friend Tanisha,” I told Emmaline as soon as she picked up. “Her ex-husband Antonio has been—”
I didn’t know how to describe what Antonio had been doing. I didn’t have to.
“Say no more,” Emmaline told me. “I don’t know if Tanisha will be willing to talk to you, but I’ll ask her and pass on your number.”
That afternoon, Arnie left early to take his nephew, Porter, to swimming lessons.
I was just contemplating calling it a day when a family of Texan tourists with nine children all crammed into an enormous van pulled up on the lot. They all piled out and queued up at the window in order of age.
A maroon sedan containing the world’s most indecisive elderly gentleman pulled in right behind them.
I got the Texans squared away in record time. You’re not allowed to be indecisive in a family that big, otherwise you run the risk of someone else making your decisions for you. It was hotdogs, burgers, and fries all around. The mother of the troupe was the only dissenting voice. She ordered tuna on rye with a side of coleslaw.
I got the Texans' enormous order grilled up and dispensed, and still, the man at the counter had not made his selection. He gave Prue a run for her money in the wishy-washy department.
While Monsieur Wishy-Washy was studying the menu board as if it contained all the vast secrets of the universe, Hank came over and started filling me in on the local gossip. Apparently, the new-and-improved municipal fireworks display had hit a snag. Several of the key rockets, worth upwards of a thousand dollars each, and highly dangerous in the hands of an amateur, had been stolen from the Parks Department storage. Apparently, the community of Bray Bay was destined to be deprived of the promised spectacular come Independence Day.
My conversation with Hank was interrupted by the youngest Texan’s request for ketchup. I’d always thought lone-star-staters were partial to BBQ sauce, but this little longhorn was set on ketchup and unprepared to accept any substitute.
We usually keep at least half a dozen squeeze bottles of ketchup around, but a quick survey of the tables yielded nothing. Neither were there any bottles of ketchup on the stainless-steel counter in front of the food truck window, although there were two twenty-dollar bills tucked under the napkin dispenser. In the end, I had to resort to spooning a mound of ketchup into a paper bowl. We still possessed a full contingent of regular mustard, hot mustard, mayo, relish, and BBQ sauce, but every last one of the red squeeze bottles containing ketchup had vanished into the ether.
“You guys leave some money on the counter?” I asked as I set the paper bowl down on the table.
I could tell the Texans thought I was touched in the head. What kind of burger joint didn’t have ketchup at the ready, and what kind of businesswoman didn’t keep track of twenties?
While I was dealing with the ketchup shortage, Monsieur Wishy-Washy had evidently cracked under the strain of too many choices and taken off, because when I looked around for him, he was pulling out of the parking lot.
“You know who that man was?” I asked Hank as he wound up his story of the filched fireworks.
“That guy who just drove off in the maroon sedan?
“Yeah.”
“That was Dr. Smith. Sidney Smith.”
“Never saw him before in my life,” I said.
“Well, you wouldn’t have had any call to have any dealings with him,” Hank said. “He’s a pediatrician. I only know who he is because my wife and I used to take our kids to see him. I always got the impression he wasn’t very social. Not antisocial, exactly. More like he was shy.”
By closing time, I’d gotten a text from Tanisha, saying she was off work at six. I asked her to meet me at eight at the coffee shop around the corner from Whispering Palms.
I didn’t tell Arnie that I was meeting Tanisha. I hadn’t even told him that Antonio was going around telling people he’d put horse poo in his pizza oven.
Tanisha was waiting for me at a table in a quiet corner when I arrived.
“I know what Antonio is saying about your cook,” she said as soon as I sat down. “That’s typical of him, I’m afraid, but I wouldn’t worry too much. He lies all the time, so nobody who knows him puts much faith in anything he says.”
But people who didn’t know Antonio did believe him, I wanted to say. They had no reason not to. Antonio had managed to lie a whole slew of seniors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars before anyone had put a stop to it. Which brought me to my main question.
“Is your father the one who exposed Antonio’s bogus Costa Rican condominium scheme?”
Tanisha nodded stiffly.
“I know this is super personal, but is that why you guys broke up?”
“That was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Tanisha looked like she could have said a lot more, but she fell silent. I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t spill my guts to a perfect stranger either.
“Antonio told me he used to be married to Arnie’s sister, Hannah. Is that true?”
I really ought to be asking Arnie that question, or Hannah, but I lacked the nerve.
“Yes. Hannah was wife number two.”
“Were you number one or three?”
“Four.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Antonio looked to be barely thirty. If he’d first married at twenty, that worked out to a new wife every 2.5 years. It was impossible to chalk that up to bad luck unless you looked at it from his ex-wives’ perspectives. It certainly had been unlucky for them.
“Why is Antonio back in Bray Bay?” I asked Tanisha. “Does he have family here?”
Tanisha was silent for a long time before she answered.
“He wants us to get back together,” she said. “At least that’s what he tells me. He says that’s why he opened up a business next to Whispering Palms, so he can see me every day.”
“But why a food truck?”
“That was his dad’s idea,” Tanisha said. “Antonio is pretty much broke and unemployable, so his dad bought him that food truck. The Scarpello family are all in the restaurant business, and cooking is one of the few things that Antonio is actually good at unless you count conning people.”
“By the way,” I asked Tanisha as I rose to leave, “What’s your Dad’s name?”
“Sidney Smith,” she said. “Most people call him Dr. Smith, though, because half the people under fifty in this town used to have him as their pediatrician.”
After I went home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about Antonio and trying to figure out what he was up to. I was confident that Antonio was no long-term threat to my business, but I was far from certain that he was no short-term threat to Arnie, or, indeed, the residents of Whispering Palms.
Antonio claimed he was camped out next door to Whispering Palms because he wanted to get back together with his ex-wife, but I wasn’t so sure. Tanisha was so completely over Antonio that she was happily engaged to another man. Besides, Antonio didn’t seem the type to fixate on any one woman, especially one who was so clearly onto his tricks.
What if Antonio was positioning himself to launch some new scheme to bilk a fresh crop of seniors out of their life sa
vings? It was exceedingly odd to be giving out stock tips with pizzas. I couldn’t help suspecting that the slimy lizard was priming the population of Whispering Palms to view him as some financially savvy guru. I was betting Antonio’s investment advice wasn’t nearly as good as his pizzas were.
I was on time the next morning, which was fortunate because Arnie hadn’t shown up. Arnie is the picture of punctuality, so when he still hadn’t arrived by 11:30 and hadn’t answered any of my texts, I was starting to worry.
I was putting ketchup into a whole new set of red plastic squeeze bottles that I’d fetched from the backup supplies I keep stashed in my garage at home when Hannah drove up.
“You’d better sit down for this,” she said.
I went hot and cold. I felt like I’d swallowed a brick. Was Arnie dead? Had he been in some terrible accident? Was he lying in a hospital bed with a coma?
“Arnie’s been arrested,” Hannah told me.
Chapter Six
“Arrested?” My voice sounded high and weirdly hoarse. “Why has Arnie been arrested?”
“Antonio claims Arnie beat him up.”
I knew Arnie hated Antonio, but I found it hard to wrap my mind around Arnie becoming violent.
“Do you think it’s true?” I asked Hannah.
“I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I don’t want to believe it, but if Arnie didn’t beat up Antonio, someone else did.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Arnie? Yes. I had stopped by his house this morning to pick up something Sammy left behind when the police came to arrest him. I’ll be able to post bail for him this afternoon.”
“I meant have you seen Antonio. You seem so sure that someone attacked him.”
“I did see Antonio,” Hannah said. “After Arnie was arrested, I went over to Antonio’s house to get his side of the story. Antonio isn’t seriously injured, but he has a lot of cuts and bruises. There’s no question somebody attacked him.”
It had crossed my mind that Antonio might have dumped his own toppings in the bushes and put horse poo in his own pizza oven in an attempt to frame Arnie, but injuring oneself badly enough to get somebody arrested was a whole ‘nother level of crazy. Still, I had to ask.
