Death of an Italian Chef

by Lee Hollis

  “I promised Gemma I won’t nod off like I usually do during any kind of long musical,” Bruce said.

  “Just make sure you stay awake during Conner’s solo. He knows exactly where we’re sitting, so I’m sure he’ll have his eyes trained right on us.” Gemma laughed.

  “I’m jealous,” Hayley sighed. “I wish I was there with you two right now.”

  “Me too, babe,” Bruce said with a wink. “What are your big plans for tonight?”

  “Liddy and Mona are on their way over for dinner. I’m doing a dry run preparing my spaghetti carbonara before the face-off with Chef Romeo tomorrow afternoon,” Hayley said. “I need to get the dish perfect, or I will never live it down.”

  “I’m not even going to pretend to know what you’re talking about, Mother,” Gemma said, chuckling.

  “I’ll explain everything over dinner,” Bruce said.

  “We’re coming up on the restaurant now. Bye, Mom!”

  Hayley waved at them. “Goodbye! Enjoy! Love you both!”

  “I’ll call you after court is dismissed tomorrow,” Bruce promised, waving back.

  And then they were gone.

  Hayley felt a little lump in her throat.

  With her husband and daughter gallivanting all over Manhattan, having a wonderful time after months of painstaking worry about Gemma and Conner’s safety there during the pandemic, Hayley found this moment bittersweet. She, of course, was excited to see Gemma thriving in the big city, her wedding plans with Conner restarted, her career as a food critic and columnist back on track, and she was happy for Bruce to be covering possibly the biggest assignment of his career, but at the same time, she felt stuck at home alone, missing out on these memorable moments.

  But instead of feeling sorry for herself, Hayley stood up from the kitchen table and got to work on her spaghetti carbonara, whisking the eggs and cheese together in a bowl and frying the bacon in a pan on the stove until brown and crispy. She popped open a bottle of Pinot Grigio, which, in her opinion, was the perfect companion to her pasta recipe, and as if on cue, Liddy and Mona ambled through the back door, hands out for glasses of wine. By the time she had stirred in the garlic, pasta, egg mixture, and was seasoning with salt and pepper to taste, the three women were on their second glass. Doling out a healthy portion of the carbonara for all of them, they sat down at the dining room table, Hayley anxiously awaiting the verdict.

  “Well?” Hayley asked, eyeing both of them as Mona shoveled a forkful into her mouth.

  “Oh, Hayley, it’s divine,” Liddy cooed.

  “Thank you, Liddy, but you would say that no matter what. Mona is the one I really trust because she never holds back punches.”

  Mona swallowed, stared straight ahead, and then slowly nodded. “Not bad.”

  “High praise indeed,” Liddy cracked.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Hayley said happily. “Coming from Mona, that’s a rave review.”

  Mona’s mouth suddenly dropped open, her eyes watering, and she quickly buried her face in her elbow and erupted in a giant sneeze, startling both Hayley and Liddy.

  “I’d go easy on the pepper next time,” Mona suggested.

  “Noted,” Hayley said.

  Liddy twirled some more spaghetti on her fork and shook her head. “I don’t understand why this Chef Romeo is making you jump through hoops to prove you make a better spaghetti carbonara. What’s the point?”

  “He’s very competitive and he’s used to being the best, so when I challenged him . . . well, his ego couldn’t resist calling me out to prove it,” Hayley said, before taking another bite of her dish, savoring it. “It is really good, isn’t it?”

  Mona reached for the bottle of white wine and upended the rest into her own glass before slamming it back down on the table. “Got any more of this?”

  “Yes, in the pantry,” Hayley said, standing up from the table and removing the empty wine bottle from the table.

  Mona gulped down the rest of her wine.

  “Don’t you have to be up at like four in the morning to haul your lobster traps tomorrow?” Liddy asked, eyebrows raised.

  Mona shook her head. “Is that your way of saying I’m drinking too much?”

  “No, that goes without saying,” Liddy quipped. “I’m just asking.”

  Hayley was in the kitchen uncorking the bottle of wine, but could still hear their exchange.

  “Well, my boys are covering for me for a while,” Mona muttered, not exactly overjoyed to be sharing this news.

  “Why? Are you taking a vacation?” Hayley asked as she returned to the dining room with the fresh bottle of wine.

  “Nope. They keep yammering on about how they’re grown men now and can run the business, and how it doesn’t make sense for their dear, aging mother to be doing so much hard labor,” Mona snorted. “Can you believe that nonsense?”

  Hayley poured Liddy some more wine.

  Liddy swished it around in her glass as she spoke. “Yes, I can! Your sons are big, strong, strapping men now, fully capable of the physical demands of running a successful lobstering business. Why should you and your tired, crumbling old bones be out on that rickety, leaking boat in the icy waters of the Atlantic every day at some ungodly hour?”

  “It’s all I know!” Mona wailed.

  “You can still run the business from home,” Hayley said. “Take orders over the phone, look after the books . . .”

  “You both know I flunked every math class they made me take in high school. Besides, my daughter Clara’s much smarter than me when it comes to numbers. I let her keep track of all that. If I stop hauling traps, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

  “Find yourself a hobby,” Liddy said.

  “I’m not the knitting circle type, okay?” Mona moaned.

  Hayley reached over and lightly touched Mona’s hand. “Look, all we’re saying is, maybe it’s time to take a step back, just a bit. Relax and enjoy your life a little more.”

  “I’m bored already just thinking about it,” Mona spit out, glowering.

  “You should be grateful you can afford to do it,” Liddy said. “The real estate market has been in the toilet lately. I haven’t had a sale in months; I’m bleeding money; I have credit card payments overdue; I am close to the point of having to augment my income with a second job. Maybe I should be the one out there hauling traps.”

  Hayley and Mona exchanged a look, then busted up laughing.

  “All right, it sounded just as ridiculous to me as I heard myself saying it, but I’m going to have to do something soon or I’ll be filing for bankruptcy. I can just hear my mother now if it comes to that!” Liddy wailed.

  “You could try living on a budget,” Mona suggested.

  There was a tense silence in the dining room before Liddy exhaled a long breath. “I am just going to pretend you did not say that.”

  Mona lifted her glass, toasted Liddy, then gulped down the rest of her wine.

  Hayley sat back in her chair. “My whole adult life I have always been on the lookout for ways to make more money, but over the last couple of years all of that has suddenly changed. Marrying Bruce essentially doubled our income; I’ve got an empty nest with the kids gone and on their own; and well . . . financially speaking, things have gotten easier, but . . .”

  “But what?” Liddy asked.

  “I don’t know. Something’s missing. Don’t get me wrong: I never expected to get married again, but I love being married to Bruce. That’s not it . . .” Hayley sipped her wine thoughtfully. “I guess I wish my job at the Island Times was more fulfilling.”

  “You can’t quit your column!” Liddy cried. “Do you know how many people all over the island can’t wait to read you every day!”

  “It’s not the columns! That’s my favorite part of the job. It’s the office managerial duties. They’ve become so monotonous and, not to be too dramatic, but a little soul-crushing. I’m so tired of handling customers’ subscription complaints, and even more demean
ing, keeping the coffeepot full throughout the day.”

  “Sal would be lost without you,” Mona remarked.

  Hayley nodded. “I know . . .”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  She shrugged. “I have no idea. The only plan I currently have is to kick Chef Romeo’s butt tomorrow with this spaghetti carbonara recipe! Which reminds me—there is enough for three more helpings.”

  Liddy threw her hands up in the air. “Ladies, we all know excessive carbs solve nothing!”

  Hayley collected their plates and headed back to the kitchen, overhearing Mona say, “No, a salad solves nothing. Spaghetti carbonara solves everything!”

  Chapter 3

  Chef Romeo opened his mouth wide and shoveled the forkful of Hayley’s spaghetti carbonara into his mouth, a few long noodles dangling behind, so he pursed his lips and sucked them in. He chewed slowly, methodically, his twinkling blue-green eyes darting back and forth wildly as he let his taste buds get to work.

  Hayley took a deep breath, nervously awaiting the final verdict. Romeo’s eyes stopped flitting about and he zeroed in on Hayley as he swallowed. There was an agonizingly long silence, and Hayley began to tap her foot restlessly. It looked as if Romeo was on the verge of blurting out his final assessment of her dish, when he suddenly slammed the fork back down on the plate and began twisting it violently, winding more noodles around and around like a ball of yarn until he had so much on there that he had to drop his jaw even wider to fit the entire mound of spaghetti into his mouth. He snapped his lips shut, a dollop of cream caught in his thick black beard, and repeated the entire process, chewing, considering, chewing some more, before dramatically swallowing and slamming the fork back down on the table yet again. Hayley was on pins and needles, not sure she could endure the time it would take him to eat another bite.

  Chef Romeo closed his eyes and sighed as he grabbed a cloth napkin and lightly patted his lips and beard. He had not done that before, so Hayley hoped they finally might be close to some kind of proclamation. She was dead tired from a long day at the office, having been up late for girls’ night with Liddy and Mona.

  After rushing over to the restaurant when she was finished with work, armed with her covered dish, she had found Romeo alone in his kitchen, scribbling tomorrow evening’s specials on a chalkboard since the restaurant was closed on Mondays. She was hoping the whole food challenge initiated by the chef would be short and sweet, and she would be home in time for the local news, a winner or a loser. Either outcome would be just fine by her, if truth be told.

  “Yours is better!” Romeo blurted out.

  “What?” she gasped.

  “Honestly, I’m amazed, just stunned,” Romeo said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How can you take a dish that’s so easy to make—let’s face it, at the end of the day it’s just spaghetti, with eggs and cheese and a fatty cured pork—how can you take something so simple and turn it into something this special?” He scooped up his fork to go at it again.

  “I’m thrilled you like it,” Hayley said, beaming.

  “Like it? This puts my family recipe to shame. My great-great-grandmother is, right at this moment, spinning around in her grave. You’re not even Italian!”

  “No, I did that whole AncestryDNA thing where you mail in some of your spit and get a whole readout of your family history. I thought for sure I must be part Italian, given how much I love pasta and wine, but the results came back zilch. Nada. Nothing. I’m mostly English with a dash of Scottish and Irish thrown in for good measure!”

  “Blasphemy! How can you be descended from the people responsible for steak and kidney pie, not a drop of Italian blood coursing through your veins, and come up with something as bellissima as this?”

  Hayley assumed the question was rhetorical, so she just smiled and accepted the compliment.

  “I want you to come work here!” Romeo declared.

  Hayley giggled, assuming he was joking.

  “I am serious, Hayley. I need someone to help me in the kitchen. We’re getting busier by the day and I can’t handle it all myself. Of course, my name is on the door, so I will still be head chef, but I will give you credit on the menu board. We can start tomorrow with Hayley’s spaghetti carbonara, then introduce more specials as you create them. I will give you free rein; you can prepare whatever you want.”

  “I’m flattered, Romeo, really, I am, but—”

  “How much are you making at the paper?”

  “It’s not about the money—”

  “I will double your salary!”

  Hayley nearly choked after swallowing the wrong way.

  She had always dreamed of receiving an offer like this, but never seriously thought she would ever hear the words I will double your salary. That only happened in TV shows and movies. But maybe this was a sign. Just hours earlier, she had declared to Liddy and Mona that she wanted to do something more fulfilling than just being office manager at the Times. And now this opportunity was presenting itself out of the blue.

  Still, would it be worth the huge increase in pay to work alongside the mercurial, egoistical, demanding Chef Romeo, who had not been in town for very long but had already cemented a difficult reputation? Taking this job could very well turn out to be her worst kitchen nightmare.

  “It’s a very tempting offer, Romeo, but—”

  He smashed a pudgy finger over her lips. “Don’t say no. Not yet. Just take some time to think about it. There is no rush. I’m not going anywhere. We just opened.”

  Hayley nodded, then Romeo removed his finger from her lips and used it to sop up some cream left on the plate and slurp it off with his tongue. “But fair warning: I will not stop. I will wear you down until you tell me your secret ingredient!”

  “I’m not the world’s greatest spy. All you need to do is ply me with some of your homemade spumoni and I’m sure you’ll get me to talk.”

  Romeo closed his eyes and threw his head back as he erupted in laughter. He reopened his eyes while catching his breath, and his broad, happy smile slowly faded as his eyes fixed upon something behind her.

  Hayley spun around to see two men entering the kitchen. She recognized both of them. Vic Spencer, short and round, bald head and a thick, graying goatee, a local contractor with a sour disposition, twice divorced, and for good reason, Hayley suspected. He was there with his head foreman, Chuckie Rhinehart, relatively new to town, a tall, muscular kid, kind of brutish and angry by nature, with a shaved head and a similar goatee, as if he was trying to emulate his boss and bond with him. But poor Chuckie couldn’t quite grow any facial hair properly, so he was left with a patchy attempt that looked as if he had trimmed it either drunk or blindfolded.

  “How you doin’, Hayley?” Vic said with a sneer.

  “I’m fine, Vic, thank you. Hi, Chuckie,” she said.

  Chuckie seemed surprised that she was addressing him at all and grunted an unintelligible reply.

  “Chef, I was wondering if we might have a word with you . . . in private?” Vic inquired, eyeing Hayley with a dismissive scowl.

  His answer was emphatic. “No.”

  Hayley made a move to leave. “You know, I should be going anyway . . .”

  Before she had the chance, Romeo stepped forward ahead of her, unintentionally blocking her exit from the kitchen.

  The chef poked Vic in the chest with the same pudgy finger he had used to lick the last of Hayley’s carbonara sauce off his plate. “You and your two-bit thug here can turn around and leave my restaurant right now because I have nothing to say to you!”

  “You owe me,” Vic seethed. “Fifteen hundred bucks! That’s your remaining balance. I got the invoice right here!” He reached into his shirt pocket and yanked out a folded-up piece of paper, shoving it toward the chef. Romeo slapped it away and it floated to the floor. Chuckie bent down to pick it up and hand it back to his boss, but Vic testily waved him away.

  “Niente! You get nothing! Not one cent!” Romeo bellowed, his face
suddenly flushed with anger. “I already paid you over twenty grand to remodel this kitchen and you botched the job royally!”

  “I stand by my work,” Vic growled, insulted.

  “Oh, really?” Romeo scoffed. “First of all, you finished two months later than you originally stated in the contract! I had to push back my opening, which cost me thousands of dollars in lost revenue.”

  “You can’t fault me for unexpected delays!” Vic barked.

  “How about shoddy work, then?” Romeo roared before pointing to a wall of cabinets. “You nailed those storage cabinets in place instead of screwing them so they’re loose and unwieldy, not to mention cheap-looking. And how about the new floor? You ran it up to all the appliances but not underneath them! So you cut corners whenever you could, and let’s talk poor drain connections and unsafe and illegal electrical work! Should I go on?”

  “You signed the contract,” Vic warned. “You need to pay in full for services rendered. Don’t make me get my lawyer involved.”

  “Go ahead, sue me. I don’t care. I will take this all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to! You are not getting another dime out of me! It’s already going to cost me a hell of a lot more than fifteen hundred dollars to repair the mess you made in my kitchen!”

  Chuckie lumbered forward, breathing hard through his nose, chest puffed out, fists clenched. “We’re going to get paid one way or another,” he said in a low, intimidating voice.

  Romeo glared at Chuckie for a moment and then busted out laughing again. “You think you can scare me? What a joke! Chuckie, you’re about as intimidating as a baby penguin! Now get out of my kitchen!”

  Chuckie held his ground, pouting. Then, in a burst of anger, he thrust out his giant flat hands, pushing Romeo, who stumbled back in surprise.

  Romeo roared like a wild animal and lunged forward, this time surprising Chuckie, and the two began grappling with each other.

  “Stop it! Both of you!” Hayley heard herself screaming.

  Neither man heeded her order.

  Fists were flying.

  There was lots of grunting and cursing.

  Crashing into pots and pans.