by Peg Cochran
“Artificial? What do you mean artificial? People have been getting married for thousands of years,” Lucille yelled after her.
Then she sent up a prayer to St. Dymphna, patron saint of those contemplating suicide, because right now she really felt like killing herself.
• • •
Even before Lucille began to boil the water for the pasta, Louis and Millie had taken their places at the table, hands folded patiently on the pristine white cloth. Frankie had put the extra leaf in and had then disappeared down to what was left of the rec room. Lucille could hear the noise of some sporting event on the television drifting up the stairs.
Lucille had marinara sauce simmering on the stove. Mrs. Esposito next door had had real luck with her tomatoes this year and had given Lucille a basketful. She’d been planning to do stuffed shells, and Frankie kept asking when she was going to make manicotti again, but Lucille was too tired. Besides, everyone was getting a free meal, weren’t they?
It’s not like any of them were such a big help. Angela was always the first to jump up and start clearing the table. She probably thought Lucille hadn’t noticed that she never went beyond stacking the dirty plates on the counter. As soon as it was time to wash the pots and pans and serving dishes, she would make some excuse for leaving. You couldn’t expect Grandma Theresa to help at her age, or Father Brennan of course—it wouldn’t be right, a man of the cloth doing the dishes. There was no reason Frankie couldn’t do a little something, but by the time dinner was over he was usually asleep in the armchair in front of the television. And Bernadette? Lucille figured she would fall over dead the day Bernadette offered to help.
Flo usually stuck around, putting one of Lucille’s aprons over whatever dress she had worn to church and at least helping to dry.
Lucille was stirring the sauce when the bell rang, the front door opening simultaneously.
“Yoo-hoo,” Angela called from the foyer.
“In here,” Lucille tossed over her shoulder. As if Angela didn’t know where to find her.
Angela bustled into the kitchen as her husband and son went down the stairs to join Frank in whatever game he was watching. They had brought Grandma Theresa with them, and she immediately went to sit down at the table with Louis and Millie.
“I didn’t see you in church,” Angela said. She peered into the pan of sauce on the stove.
“I overslept.”
Angela frowned. “Really, Lucille.”
Lucille spun around, the wooden spoon in her hand. “I don’t need no grief from you today, okay, Angela?”
“There’s no need to get huffy about it.”
Lucille clenched her teeth and ripped the top off a box of ziti. She dumped the pasta into the pot and winced as a drop of boiling water splashed onto her hand.
“You’re cooking the pasta already?” Angela’s frown deepened. “Everyone isn’t even here yet. It’s going to be overcooked.”
“It’s not going to be overcooked,” Lucille said firmly.
“Fine, fine, whatever you say.” Angela rummaged in her handbag, pulled out her compact and dabbed some powder on her nose. “Everyone was talking about the murder in church today.”
“Sheesh, it hasn’t even made the papers yet.”
“You don’t need the papers when you’ve got the Internet. Stuff spreads like that.” Angela snapped her fingers.
“What are they saying?” Lucille asked as she stirred the pasta in the pot.
Angela shrugged. “Oh, the usual. That Alex was having an affair and wanted to get rid of Donna so he could marry his girlfriend.” She was quiet for a moment. “Michelle Mancini had a different idea.” Angela blew out a puff of air, as if she thought the notion to be ridiculous. “She thinks,” Angela lowered her voice, “the mob had something to do with it. It was meant to be like a warning or something to the husband.”
“He ain’t even Italian. What would Alex Grabowski have to do with the mob?” But even as she said it, Lucille remembered the two goons she’d noticed hanging about the church hall during the reception. Maybe the idea wasn’t so far-fetched after all.
She was about to say something but then decided to keep it to herself.
“Lucille!” Angela exclaimed. “The pasta!”
“Holy shit.” Lucille turned to the stove and quickly lowered the gas. The foam on top of the pan of boiling water slowly subsided. She grabbed the wooden spoon, fished out a piece of ziti and blew on it before taking a bite. Shit! It was definitely more than a hair past al dente.
Lucille grabbed her potholders and hefted the pot of boiling water off the stove.
“Is it overcooked? I told you it was going to be overcooked.”
Lucille ignored her sister as she dumped the water and the ziti into a strainer in the sink. The hot steam rose up and bathed her face.
The bell rang as Lucille was transferring the ziti to her pasta bowl. She’d had it so long the design of olives and olive branches intertwined with grapes was beginning to wear off. Somehow she didn’t think the pasta would taste the same in any other bowl and refused to give it up even though Angela had given her a new one for Christmas several years ago.
“Yo, Lucille,” Flo said as she walked into the kitchen. “Sorry I’m late.” She had a white bakery box tied with variegated string in her hand. “Stupid bakery was out of cannolis but I got some biscotti con pignoli and those anise cookies you like.”
“No cannolis? But Frankie likes his cannolis after Sunday dinner.” Lucille ladled sauce onto the ziti and stirred it up.
“Well, I guess Frankie is going to have to lump it then,” Flo said, putting the box on the kitchen table. She put her purse down on one of the chairs. “You worry too much about him, Lucille.” She gestured toward the pasta bowl. “You want me to take that out to the table?”
“What about Father Brennan?” Lucille wiped her face with her apron. “He’s not here yet.”
“Sorry.” Angela rummaged in the refrigerator and pulled out the shaker of parmesan cheese. It was shaped like a chef with holes in its big floppy hat. Angela shook it experimentally. “I think you need to grate some more cheese.” She put the shaker on the counter and went back to the fridge. “Father Brennan isn’t coming. He’s not feeling too good. I guess all that drama yesterday didn’t do his nerves any good. Can’t say I blame him.”
“Sheesh, I hope nothing ain’t going to happen to him.” Lucille couldn’t imagine St. Rocco’s without Father Brennan, even though he scared her witless half the time.
“I’ll take the pasta out to the table.” Flo picked up the bowl and headed through the door to the dining room.
Lucille slid the chicken parmigiana she’d made earlier into the hot oven and threw her oven mitts onto the counter. She smoothed down her T-shirt, grabbed the salt and pepper, which she realized she’d forgotten, and went to join the others at the table.
No sooner had she sat down than the doorbell rang again.
“Now who could that be?”
“Maybe Father Brennan decided to come after all?” Angela said as she helped herself to some ziti.
Lucille pushed back her chair and jumped up. She scurried toward the front door where she could see the outline of someone through the frosted glass panels alongside. It looked to be a man. Maybe Angela was right and Father Brennan had changed his mind.
Lucille yanked open the door ready to say Good afternoon, Father, but she sputtered to a halt when she saw who was standing there.
It was Richie Sambucco.
He smiled apologetically. “Sorry to bother you on the Lord’s Day, Lucille. I hope you don’t mind.” Then, “Can I come in?” as Lucille continued to stand there, openmouthed.
“Sure, sure. I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course you can come in. Have you eaten? Are you hungry? There’s plenty, although I got to admit I overcooked the pasta a little. Still, the marinara sauce turned out real good—”
Sambucco held up a hand. “Thanks a million, but this here ain’t no
social call, I’m afraid. It’s about the murder of Donna Grabowski.” He looked down at his fingernails as if they had suddenly become utterly fascinating.
Lucille tried to catch his eye but failed. What was wrong? Why was Richie acting so strangely? But she pulled the door wider and motioned for him to step inside.
“Everyone’s out in the dining room.” Lucille pointed in that direction.
“I’d rather talk to you alone, if that’s possible.”
Lucille stopped abruptly. “Sure, sure. We can go into the living room.”
Lucille had decorated the living room more than twenty years ago when she and Frankie moved into the house. The furniture still looked as good as new, seeing as how they spent most of their time downstairs in the rec room or sitting at the kitchen table.
Lucille perched on the edge of the sofa. She’d bought it because she liked the flower print, but it was stiff and had never been too comfortable. Sambucco took the armchair opposite Lucille, pulling it slightly closer. It hadn’t been moved in a long time—Lucille could see the deep dents left in the carpet by the legs.
Sambucco sat with his hands dangling between his knees, his eyes on the floor. Lucille wished he’d get on with it. Her pasta was getting cold, and she really needed to check on the chicken in the oven. She glanced over at the door to the dining room. That seemed to get Sambucco going.
“It’s about the murder of Donna Grabowski,” Sambucco said again.
“Yeah, I kind of figured seeing as how you said this wasn’t no social call.”
“We’re pretty much at sea as to why she was killed. A public place like that—there’s no use trying to look for fingerprints. Besides, if it was some kind of domestic thing, the perp’s fingerprints aren’t likely to be on file anyway.”
Lucille nodded, wondering when he was going to get to the point.
“As I said, not much to go on.” Sambucco sighed and slapped his knees. “But I did manage to persuade a contact of mine at the phone company to look up the records for Donna’s cell phone. And let me tell you, getting someone to do that on a Sunday ain’t easy. Fortunately she owed me one.”
Lucille couldn’t help wondering who she was and what she looked like and what on earth she could owe Sambucco for.
“Anyway, as I was saying, there’s not much to go on, but we did find two interesting things.”
The way he said it made Lucille’s head shoot up. She had a feeling she wasn’t going to like this.
“First off, we checked on who was the last person to call her. The call came not too long before Donna was seen heading over to the church. The dry cleaner across the street saw her car pulling into the lot so we know what time she arrived.”
Her pasta would be stone cold by now, Lucille thought. And she could smell the chicken parmigiana in here. She hoped it wasn’t burning. It was bad enough that the ziti was overcooked. She couldn’t afford to do no more damage to this meal.
“Yes?” Lucille said by way of encouragement.
“Do you know who the call came from?” Sambucco asked, but Lucille knew it was one of them questions you weren’t really supposed to answer so she kept her mouth shut and her hands clenched in her lap.
Sambucco heaved another sigh as if the words pained him. “The call came from you, Lucille.”
Chapter 9
“Yo, Lu, you okay? What’s Sambucco doing here?” Frankie suddenly appeared in the doorway.
Lucille realized she had uttered a small shriek at Sambucco’s words. Surely he didn’t think she had something to do with . . .
“Put your head down,” Sambucco commanded, reaching out and pushing Lucille’s head between her knees.
She stayed that way until the gray haze that threatened to envelop her retreated.
“Lucille. What are you doing? Dinner is getting cold, and when I checked on the chicken parmi—” Angela said from the doorway.
“Leave it, Angela, okay?” Frankie said with such a sharp tone to his voice that Angela spun on her heel with a soft hmmph and retreated back to the dining room.
“What’s going on?” Frankie’s fists were clenched, his shoulders stiff and his jaw set. He turned to Sambucco. “Why are you bothering my wife?”
All she needed was for Frankie to take a swing at Sambucco and end up in the slammer. Lucille put up a hand. “Take it easy, Frankie. Everything is fine. Richie just has a few questions about what happened yesterday. Okay? You go back and eat your dinner before it gets cold. And tell Angela to take the chicken parmigiana out of the oven, would you?” she yelled after his retreating back.
She could hear him grumbling under his breath as he made his way back to the dining room.
Sambucco waited until they heard the scrape of Frankie’s chair. “As I said, the last phone call recorded on Donna’s cell phone was yours, Lucille.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with—”
“It’s like this.” Sambucco spread out his hands. “The chief seems to think that you called Donna and asked her to meet you at the church. Easy enough to do. You wanted her opinion on the flowers or the seating or one of them things you women worry about. And from what people have said, Donna was always more than happy to give her opinion.”
“But that don’t mean . . . I mean I didn’t . . . you can’t say that I . . .”
“It’s not me.” Sambucco pointed at his own chest. “It’s the chief, see. He thinks you lured Donna to the church and then killed her.”
“But why would I . . . ?” Lucille felt as if the world around her was disintegrating. Or like she was falling into one of them sinkholes down in Florida they kept showing on the news.
“Why? Only the killer knows that,” Sambucco said, leaning back in his chair. It creaked under his weight.
“So you don’t think I . . .”
Sambucco cracked his knuckles. “It’s like this, Lucille. In a murder investigation we got to go by the clues and the evidence. Feelings, they don’t enter into it. The way it looks, you called Donna, got her to go on over to St. Rocco’s and then you killed her. Simple as pie.”
Lucille started to open her mouth but Sambucco stopped her.
“You don’t happen to have an alibi, do you?”
Lucille thought back to the day before. She remembered leaving the house, checking on Mrs. S. and Mrs. P over in the kitchen at St. Rocco’s, then going to the church. She was missing something.
“Macy’s,” she shouted suddenly. “I went to Macy’s to buy a pair of pantyhose. You have no idea how hard it is to find a—”
“Anyone see you? Anyone who can vouch for you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the salesgirl might remember me.”
“You didn’t happen to glance at her tag and maybe catch her name, did you?”
Lucille shook her head.
“Do you have the receipt? Sometimes they put the time as well as the date on them now that they’ve got all these computers and such.”
“Sure. I put it in my purse. Let me go get it.”
Lucille trotted over to the hall closet and retrieved her handbag. She sat on the sofa with it on her lap and began to riffle through the contents. “Here’s my wallet,” she said, putting it down on the coffee table. “I know I didn’t put it in there. I should, Frankie is always telling me to pay more attention to things, but I was in a hurry and just threw it in my purse.” She continued to dig around in her handbag. “Here’s my lipstick and compact and a packet of tissues.” She pulled out a crumpled piece of paper with a cry of triumph. She smoothed it out. “Here it is.” She handed it over to Sambucco.
He pulled a pair of reading glasses from his pocket. “The time and date are missing from this here receipt.” He waved the paper at Lucille. “Looks like the clerk tore it off wrong. See.” He held it out toward Lucille. “This part here looks like it belongs to the person who bought something before you.”
Sheesh, Lucille thought. For once she didn’t lose the receipt and here it wasn’t going to do her no good.
“But you can see I did go to Macy’s,” she said and gestured toward the paper in Sambucco’s hand.
“Sure, sure. It just doesn’t prove you went on Saturday while Donna Grabowski was being murdered.”
Lucille felt sick to her stomach. She was glad she hadn’t eaten no lunch yet. Suddenly she smacked herself on the forehead. “I went to the Clip and Curl to get my hair done. How could I forget? Any of the gals there will tell you that’s true. Carmela, she washes my hair—Rita, she does my cut and—”
“This was after you went to Macy’s?”
“Yeah. Right after.”
“How long did your trip to Macy’s take?”
Lucille thought back to Saturday morning. She had had to drive around a bit to decide where to park, then she had had a job of it finding the hosiery section in Macy’s. “An hour? Hour and fifteen maybe?”
“What time was your hair appointment?”
“It was at eleven thirty a.m. Normally I go on a Tuesday, but because of the wedding—”
“So you left for Macy’s at—”
“Right after I called Donna. The mall had just opened when I got there so it must have been a little before ten.”
Sambucco pursed his lips. “I wish I could say that helps, Lucille. I really do. But the dry cleaner saw Donna’s car pulling into the church parking lot around ten o’clock. He said he noticed it because it’s not every day you see a Mercedes like that. That was about fifteen minutes after your call to her cell. You could have easily met her there, killed her and still made it to your hair appointment.”
“But, but . . .” Lucille sputtered.
“And,” Sambucco said, holding up a hand, “Donna’s cell phone is missing. It wasn’t in her purse, her car or anywhere at the church. See how that makes it look? The killer calls her on the phone and then steals the cell so that we can’t find it. They don’t know about my gal over at the phone company. She was able to tell us you were the last one to call the victim.”
• • •
