Italian Wedding Murder: Book 4 in Papa Pacelli's Pizzeria Series

by Patti Benning

  “I’ll go tell the guys and gals at the sheriff’s department,” he said, getting up. “We usually order lunch on Fridays anyway. I’ll see if they want to try your calzones.”

  “Half off orders to the sheriff’s department,” Ellie said. “I don’t see how anyone could turn down that offer.”

  “Me either. Thanks for the food, and I’m glad those guys aren’t bothering you anymore. I’m sure you’ll be getting a call from the department soon about those calzones.” He nodded to her, then zipped his jacket and flipped his hood up, pausing to eye the cloudy sky before stepping out into the wet day.

  Just as he was leaving, someone else came in. She gave the sheriff a wide berth, shooting an anxious glance from him to Ellie as she let the door close between them.

  “Don’t worry, Grace,” the pizzeria manager said. “I didn’t mention anything about what you told me.”

  “Thanks,” the woman said, looking relieved. “I’m just so scared he’s going to know I’m onto him. Did you get a chance to talk to your friend at the paper?”

  “I did. She is happy to help, but we really need more to go on. Why do you think one of them was having an affair?”

  “They’ve both acting weird for the past couple of weeks. Laura would cancel lunch together just minutes before she was supposed to be there, or just not show up at all. My brother-in-law started wearing a new cologne, and I swear I heard him tell his assistant that he couldn’t make a meeting because he had a date once. Just little things like that. Maybe they were both having affairs, or maybe Laura knew that he was up to something and was trying to follow him. That’s my guess, though I have no idea why she wouldn’t have told me if that’s the case. Anyway, I came here to give you these.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope, which she put on the table. Ellie reached for it and glanced inside. Photos.

  “It’s from the security camera outside of their house. I convinced the housekeeper to let me see the footage. If you can find out who that woman is, then maybe one of us can go and talk to her. She might know something.”

  Ellie began looking through the pictures. They were all of the same woman, an attractive brunette, at the Martin’s front door. The photos were dated and had time stamps.

  “Wow, she’s been going over there for months,” she said. “You think this is who the mayor was having an affair with? You don’t have any idea who she is?”

  “No, I don’t. I thought your journalist friend might be able to help you with that.”

  “Do you really think he would have killed his wife if she confronted him about this?” Ellie asked.

  “That… or maybe he got tired of leading a double life,” the other woman whispered. “I think that this was premeditated.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we both know that my sister didn’t get food poisoning from the pizzeria.”

  **

  Grace left Ellie with a stack of photos, and a lot to think about. She desperately wanted to go to Russell with everything, but loathed to be the woman who cried wolf. She had been wrong about this sort of thing before. She decided that Grace was right. They needed more proof, some sort of solid evidence of an affair, before going to him. These photos were a good start, but for all she knew the woman was a housekeeper or a real estate agent, or had any number of legitimate reasons for being there.

  She wanted to call Shannon and start looking for the mystery woman right away, but things were starting to pick up in the pizzeria. School had gotten out for the day, and a few bedraggled teens had made their way to the restaurant, and Ellie smelled her very first calzone sale approaching. There would be time to solve murders later.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  The calzones were a huge success. Ellie made a mental note to give Jacob a raise when this was all over; it had been his brilliant idea. Even some of the people who had been avoiding them like the plague since the disastrous party had stopped in to try the new dish, and she had already gotten several requests and ideas for different flavors of calzone.

  The pizzeria was busy right up to closing time, and they were all exhausted by the time they could finally lock up and go home. Nonna had ended up staying all day to help out, something that Ellie wasn’t too happy about. Those were long hours for a woman in her eighties to be working. The pizzeria manager had just enough time to stop by Shannon’s and drop the photos off before driving home and helping her exhausted grandmother into bed.

  The next morning was a quiet one in the Pacelli house. It was a Saturday, so Ellie had no plans to go in to the pizzeria, though she would call later in the day and see how things were going. The success of the calzones had lifted a weight of anxiety off of her chest. The pizzeria wasn’t going to go under; despite everything, they were going to pull through.

  Deciding to take full advantage of her day off, Ellie settled down in the living room with a plate of maple fudge no-bake cookies and the television controls. She flipped through the channels until she found a show that she recognized, then pulled a blanket over her lap and settled in for a long day of nothing but relaxing. Bunny was curled up on the cushion next to her, and Marlowe was perched on the back of the easy chair in the corner, her head tucked under her wing. Nonna was taking a nap in her room, still worn out from her long day the day before.

  It wasn’t long before Ellie dozed off herself. When her phone rang, she woke up with a jolt. The plate of cookies fell off her lap and onto the floor. Rather, the plate fell to the floor. The cookies themselves were nowhere to be found, though the crumbs on the couch cushion next to the papillon told the story of what had happened clearly enough.

  “I can’t believe you took those right off the plate, your sneaky little dog,” Ellie grumbled as she fumbled for her cell phone. The number was the pizzeria’s. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Pacelli, you have to come and see this, right now!”

  It was Clara. She sounded panicked.

  “What is it?” Ellie asked, sitting bolt upright. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not hurt, it’s the pizzeria… oh, you have to see it for yourself. Please, hurry. I’m going to call the police.”

  She was up in a flash, quickly putting the macaw back in her cage and pulling on her jacket over her old t-shirt. She shoved her feet into a pair of boots, and hurried out the door. Scenarios kept playing through her mind, getting steadily worse as she wove through the scant traffic on her way into town.

  She pulled into a spot on the street in front of Papa Pacelli’s and leapt out of the car. She didn’t have to look for long to find out what had caused the panicked call minutes before. There was something red splattered across the front windows of the pizzeria, and spray painted in big, black letters across the door was the word murderer.

  “Oh my goodness,” she breathed, putting a hand out to lean on her car for support. The spray paint was bad enough, but what was that red stuff? Blood?

  “Pizza sauce,” a voice from behind her said, making her jump.

  She spun around and saw Russell. His truck was parked right behind her car. She must not have seen it in her hurry to reach the pizzeria.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. He nodded.

  “Bethany and I got here a couple of minutes ago. She’s inside taking a statement from Clara right now. If you get closer, you can smell it. It’s definitely pizza sauce. I know it must be hard to see your place like this, but I promise we’re going to do everything that we can to find out who did it.”

  “I know who did it,” Ellie said, her voice shaking with rage. “Jeffrey and Xavier.” Who else would have splashed gallons of pizza sauce on the front of her restaurant?

  “We’ll question them as soon as we’re done here,” he promised. “Listen, I know you might want to do something to get even with them, but it isn’t worth it. Things will just keep escalating until someone gets hurt. They committed a crime, and it’s in the hands of the law now. Understand?”

  Gritting her teeth
, she nodded. “Do you think they did this because we started selling calzones?”

  “If I had to guess, yeah. I’d say that’s what drove them over the edge.”

  He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “I’m really sorry about this, Ellie. I can help you clean up —”

  “No,” she said. “Thanks, but we can handle it. I don’t want to keep you from questioning the two guys over at Cheesaroni. The sooner you get a confession from them, the better.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll stop by later and see how things are going. In the meantime, maybe start doing some research on security systems. If you had them on camera doing this, charging them would be a lot easier.”

  Ellie was shaking with anger the entire time that she and Clara were cleaning off the building. She had no regrets about selling calzones and competing directly with Cheesaroni. If anything, she was more certain than ever that she had made the right choice. She had the feeling that this was the beginning of a long war between the two restaurants, but she was confident that Papa Pacelli’s could come out ahead. Once this whole murder and food poisoning scandal blew over, she was certain that the addition of calzones to her menu would make the pizzeria more popular than ever. Cheesaroni Calzones wouldn’t stand a chance unless they stopped focusing so much on her restaurant, and started focusing more on their own.

  The pizza sauce was easy enough to hose off, but the spray paint was a different story. They ended up having to scrape it off the glass, and it took hours. When the front of the pizzeria at long last looked normal again, Ellie breathed a sigh of relief. Realizing that she had left in such a hurry that she had forgotten to leave a note for her grandmother, she returned to her car and fished her cell phone out of her purse. She was surprised to see three missed calls, all from Shannon.

  “What is it?” she asked when she called her friend back.

  “I spent the morning searching online,” Shannon said, her voice tinged with excitement. “And I found her, Ellie. I found the woman in the photos.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  After making sure that Clara and Rose were comfortable keeping an eye on the pizzeria alone after what had happened, Ellie got back into her car and drove to Shannon’s house. James answered her knock and welcomed her in.

  “Shannon’s in her office,” he said. “I have no idea what you two are doing, but she practically burst my eardrums with her squeal of excitement earlier this morning. She must be on to something good.”

  Ellie hurried through the house and knocked on the closed door to the room that her friend used as a home office. Shannon answered immediately, telling her to come on in.

  “You found her?”

  “I did. It didn’t even take that long,” her friend said.

  “How? Who is she?”

  “Well, I figured that regardless of whether or not she’s having an affair with the mayor, he must know her somehow. So I began looking through old newspapers, looking for photos of her with him. I found this one of him at the last election. Look, she’s in the background.”

  Ellie glanced at the paper. Sure enough, the brunette was standing behind the mayor’s left shoulder.

  “This was the one that really helped, though. It’s at the fourth of July parade. She’s standing behind him again, but look under the photo. The photographer listed the names of everyone on the stage.

  “Karen Becker,” Ellie read. “That’s her?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Do you think Grace is right? Are they having an affair?”

  “There’s no way to tell,” Shannon said. “She’s known him for a while, judging by these pictures, and she’s obviously gone to his house quite a bit over the last couple of months, but beyond that, we don’t know anything.”

  “I should tell Grace,” Ellie said, reaching for her friend. “She’s going to want to go talk to this woman.”

  “Wait,” her friend said, putting a hand on her arm. “I don’t know how safe that would be. I know she thinks her brother-in-law killed his wife, but if he is having an affair with this Karen woman, then we have to consider her as a suspect, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Ellie, come on. Are you really telling me that you can’t think of a single reason why a man’s mistress might want to kill his wife?”

  “Well, if you put it that way,” Ellie said, sighing. “I agree that Grace shouldn’t go to question her alone. But what should we do?”

  “We could go to the police,” Shannon said. “Russell could look into this. I mean, we have evidence that they know each other, proof that she went over to his house alone, multiple times, and a name. That should be enough for him to at least question her on her involvement with the guy.”

  “But Grace is worried about Mayor Martin going after her, if he gets wind that someone’s been talking to the police about his personal life. I don’t want to put her in danger.”

  “Well, she’s going to be in danger if she goes to talk to this lady on her own,” her friend pointed out.

  Ellie thought about it, then agreed reluctantly. “Okay, we can tell Russell. Grace seemed pretty determined to uncover all of this, and I don’t think she’ll listen to our concerns for her safety. But I’m still going to tell her after we tell the sheriff, so she can be on her toes.”

  “All right, I guess that’s a good compromise,” Shannon said. “Do you want to call him, or should I?”

  “I’ll do it. I want to see if he’s made any progress with those jerks at Cheesaroni yet.”

  Shannon raised her eyebrows. The pizzeria manager realized that she hadn’t had a chance to tell her friend about the vandalism yet. She gave her a quick summary while Sheriff Ward’s number rang. When he answered, she put him on speaker phone and began to tell him all about her conversations with Grace Camper, and the amateur detective work that she and Shannon had done.

  “Didn’t I ask both of you to stay far away from all of this?” the sheriff asked when she had finished catching him up. He sounded caught between amusement and annoyance.

  “Well, she approached me,” Ellie said. “I didn’t feel like I could turn her away, not when she’s grieving the death of her sister.”

  “And all I did was go through some old newspapers,” Shannon added. “I’m a grown woman, Russ. I know James wants you to keep me out of trouble, but honestly, this is what I enjoy doing.”

  Russell sighed, and Ellie could imagine him running his hands through his hair. “I’ll look into it,” he said. “We’ve got a few of our own leads, but I’ll at least give your theory a once-over. That’s all I can promise, though. Even if she was having some sort of an affair with the mayor, well, cheating on your spouse isn’t illegal. Being immoral doesn’t necessarily mean that either of them are killers.”

  With that, he hung up. Ellie and Shannon traded a look.

  “He’s not taking this seriously at all,” the journalist said.

  “To be fair, last time I tried to convince him someone was a murderer, I was completely wrong about it all and almost got myself killed,” Ellie said. “I don’t really blame him for having his doubts.”

  “Well, it may not bother you, but I’m tired of him thinking he can tell me what to do just because he’s my brother-in-law and the sheriff. I’ve always wanted to be some sort of investigator, you know that. I love digging for the truth. I’m not the sort of woman that’s going to be happy just sitting around here while a man does all of the work. Not to mention that I hate it when people don’t take me seriously. Just because I’m not a fifty-year-old man with a gun, doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “What are you saying?” the pizzeria manager asked. “Should we go question this lady ourselves?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Shannon said with a grin. “Call up Grace, too. There’s safety in numbers. If it turns out that Karen is the guilty one, well, she can’t murder all of us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *<
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  Grace was glad to hear the news that the woman in the photos had been identified. She was even happier when Shannon invited her to meet them at the car pool lot to go with them to talk to Karen Becker. It hadn’t been hard to track down more information about her; she was a psychologist who lived in Kittiport, but had an office in Benton Harbor. She had office hours until five that evening; the perfect opportunity for the three women to go and talk to her.

  They decided to wait and go see her as close to five as possible, figuring that the best time to catch her would be right after her last patient of the day left. They spent the few hours beforehand at the Pacelli house, making more no-bake cookies and going over the questions that they wanted to ask the woman. Even Nonna got involved, and it took Ellie a while to convince her grandmother that she had to stay home.