Basil Instinct (19 page)

I nodded to indicate I was with her so far.

“Weddings, department stores, trade shows, restaurants.” She slowly closed the jar of Bag Balm and wiped her hands on a cocktail napkin. “About four years ago, I got hired to play at the Fabulous Fare for Foodies at the convention center in Philly. Two days of demonstrations, samples, freebies, wine and beer tastings, door prizes. You get the picture.”

Again, I nodded. Linda was up to the part where she was telling us she’d been made blue and lied to.

“I was one of the musicians playing while the crowd wandered into the demos . . .” She spread her hands and one hot-pink spaghetti strap slipped off her broad shoulder. “You know the scene.” I did. “Celebrity chef cooks it up for an adoring crowd, plugs his new cookbook, cracks a few jokes, drops a few hints to make time in the kitchen easier for us mere mortals.”

I murmured. Took the opportunity to glower at Giancarlo the Faithless. He seemed unconcerned.

“Which was when I saw her.”

I felt so drugged by the thick air and empty pub, I was having a hard time following her. “Georgia Payne?”

She smiled cryptically. “The artist formerly known as Georgia Payne.”

“The dead artist.”

“So sad.”

Having commiserated with the Miracolo pianist—I wondered whether our Georgia had made the Miracolo Grief Week cut and could join the shrine next year—I pushed on. “What was she doing there?” I asked. What
could
the glove-selling Georgia be doing at a Fabulous Fare for Foodies exposition? “Selling latex gloves for food handling?”

She actually curled her lip at me like I had taken complete leave of whatever senses I had left. “Eve,” she said, drawing out my name like it had many more syllables than I had ever been aware of, “she was the headliner.”

I was confused. “Headliner?” Why was I thinking Las Vegas? I flashed to an image of Georgia Payne in sequins and feathers.

“The main chef. The draw. The hot ticket.”

“Georgia Payne?”
The fortyish gal who showed up at Quaker Hills Career Center for my Basic Cooking Skills class? The pretty blonde petite enough to be schlepped from the foyer to the
semolina bags to the walk-in freezer to the trunk of Landon’s BMW? That Georgia Payne?

And then I remembered the Belfiere
B
.

The shadowy remains of a wrist tattoo after it had been removed.

“Well, that woman, certainly,” said Mrs. Crawford, waggling her head under her broad-brimmed chapeau as though she was about to make a comment on one of Jonathan’s recommended wines. “But she wasn’t called Georgia Payne.”

I think my heart rate slowed. The way it does when the world is about to be revealed as something way different from what you had always thought it had been. One, knowable. Two, friendly. My voice, when it came, sounded smaller than small. Wee, even. “She wasn’t?”

Slowly, Mrs. Crawford shook her head, and all I wanted in the seconds before she told me all, was to crawl under the sheltering brim of her hat, where I’d never have to bother with unanswerables ever again. “No, Eve, she wasn’t.”

“So who was she?”

“Back then,” said Mrs. Crawford, her green eyes glittering, “her name was Anna Tremayne.”

*   *   *

Georgia Payne.

Anna Tremayne.

Why, oh why, was that name ringing a bell?

I jabbed at the pesto and dropped a speck on my tongue—weirdly sweet for an appetizer. As I eyed the empty carton of rice milk, I continued to ponder. So it had to be Anna Tremayne who was inducted into Maria Pia’s culinary cutthroat club. But what had happened? Why had she quit? Or was something else going on? And why had she changed her name and taken up a below-the-radar career as a glove salesperson at Bloomingdale’s? True change of heart? Sick of all things culinary? It happens. There were days when I myself was close. Days when selling gloves was more appealing than I could possibly say . . .

I had to wonder whether Mrs. Crawford got it wrong, but then, I had questioned her closely. The headliner chef she had known back then—Anna Tremayne—had longer hair, pulled back, and bangs, very cute. And—here Mrs. C. had narrowed her eyes as her memory worked hard—Georgia/Anna’s eyes were different. We speculated like a couple of gossiping friends whether she had possibly had “work done.” An eye job. Possibly a nose nip. But the walk and manner couldn’t be altered when the identity shifted. It was the same woman. And now she was calling herself Georgia.

When I asked our Miracolo pianist why she hadn’t mentioned to us earlier—say, while Georgia
was alive—that she had recognized her from the Fabulous Fare for Foodies gig four years ago, Mrs. Crawford hit me with a slight and elegant shrug. Woman wants to hire on as a sous chef and call herself sweet potato pie, wasn’t her business.
After all, identity is such a personal thing, as shifting as the Sahara, wouldn’t you say, Eve?
At which we smiled at each other in a conspiratorial way.

Actually, I didn’t know what she was talking about since my own personal identity had been as clear to me from the age of five as the silver bell Uncle Dom made for me while he was still doing some silversmithing as a hobby. He’d strike the little bell, which was about the size of a golf ball, hanging in a beautiful burl maple stand he had also made, and say, “This is the sound of you, Eve.”

It was the first I ever knew I had a sound, and it was always the same, and I liked that. “This is the sound of you in the world.” As I grew, I learned my sound was called “A,” and I learned I was surrounded by other notes, and whenever I was sick I struck the little bell, and whenever I was heartbroken, I struck the little bell. By the time I was grown, whenever I struck the silver bell I thought only sometimes of Eve in the world, but mostly I thought of Uncle Dom’s love.

So, when Mrs. Crawford smiled at me like we shared a common understanding about how shift
ing identities can be, I only knew it secondhand. And when I asked her whether Georgia had recognized her as the pianist from the food show, all Mrs. Crawford could do was smile mysteriously, those eyes as crinkled with secret fun as they could get.
Oh, my dear,
she had warbled in her deep, nasal voice,
I was very different back then.

While my hands brushed the strewn basil into a neat little pile, my phone trilled. Twice. A voice mail from Maria Pia told me she was on her way to the Sisters of St. Margaret Retreat Center for a day of R&R, courtesy of Choo Choo, who had borrowed a lovely limousine to transport her, and yes, in case I was wondering, she left a contact number with Detective Sally Fanella, such a
bella ragazza
. A voice mail from Choo Choo told me Junior Bevilacqua sends me his love. I looked wryly at my dessert pesto—whatever love he can spare after scattering it like chicken feed. Did I have to start worrying about unwanted attentions from the sketchy Junior?

Ahead of me was the meeting with what I was sincerely hoping were two frightened CRIBS boys, Mitchell and Slash, who had jolly well better be presenting me with the cashless but otherwise intact red purse of Georgia Payne. Or, since I had no reason to doubt Mrs. Crawford, “Anna Tremayne.” Anna Tremayne. If she was such a hotshot, why hadn’t I heard of her? I wondered.

As I shook the contents of the blender into a storage container like I expected it to give up state secrets, the answer came to me: because I wasn’t in food four years ago. Four years ago I was still happily dancing in New York and wondering whether those brief extra little touches from my dance captain and neighborhood tomcat, Tony Treadwell, “meant” something. Who knew food? Who knew the food world? Not me. I had a freezer full of Stouffer’s Salisbury steaks. My idea of fine Italian cuisine was white pizza.

Anna Tremayne.

When I went to stash the mutant pile of sweet green ooze in my little fridge, the freezer door swung open. Peering inside, I took a step back. I had stuffed the freezer with tray upon tray of what I can only call pestosicles. Toothpick handles stuck up every which way. For a moment, I stared into what was feeling like evidence of the most irresponsible behavior toward perfectly nice basil, then I firmly shut the freezer door, followed by the fridge door, followed by whatever pocket in my brain was grooving to culinary aberration.

I sensibly decided to give Maria Pia a quick call to see if she recognized the name Anna Tremayne. As luck would have it, the one time I actually hoped to get Nonna on the phone, she was incommunicado. Landon. Landon, despite his knowledge of
fine wine and fine art, was a secret pop culture hag and watched the cable TV cooking shows the way other people watch football or Judge Judy.

When I couldn’t get Landon, either—now what?

I wasn’t much one for metaphors, but this pesto outbreak was beginning to feel a lot like my confusion about the murder of the sous chef formerly known as Georgia Payne. How did she die? Why did she die? I peeked into the freezer. The sweet pestosicles were still there. They looked so—so—un-Italian, so very far from anything you’d find on the menu at Miracolo, that I felt strangely pleased. I’d just borrow a cooler and drop one off to everyone I know. The weather was perfect for it. Something “off the menu” in honor of Anna T., who certainly deserved better than a car trunk, even if a BMW’s.

In the waft of freezer air, my head suddenly cleared.

Anna T.

What had Landon told me about someone called Anna T.?

He showed me a blog post. That’s right. A blog for . . . victims of cults.

Then I remembered:
Belfiere.
And I got a chill straight up my arms that had nothing to do with Joe Beck.

I remembered that the post seemed hysterical. She had witnessed something, something about a deadly poison game and a collapsing member, something that never got reported to the authorities. And Anna T. had been scared for her life, and run out. Only she hadn’t felt safe, had she? Is that when she had started a new life, a life as Georgia Payne? And then I remembered something that made me sit right down on my kitchen floor. Sit before I passed out. I saw it all again, the day Maria Pia had walked into the kitchen at Miracolo, on Georgia’s first day, and announced that Fina Parisi was coming the next afternoon to check out the preparations. What could have gone through Georgia’s mind when she heard that?

Then she had called in sick with a toothache the next day. To avoid the visit by Fina.

What must that have been like for Anna Tremayne, wanting the shot at a job at Miracolo, maybe hoping to get back into cooking, only below the radar, this time—wanting the job, but suddenly finding herself up against the thing she dreaded—Belfiere?

When had Fina spotted her?

I pulled myself up and hugged the counter top. How could so much go on right under our noses without our knowing? All that anger and fear. All that hiding out, all that careful plotting. Behind
the hard, bright smiles. It made me shudder. Making the rounds with my pestosicles would just have to wait. I quickly cleaned up the kitchen and washed my hands. As I dried them, I realized I was about to do something possibly more stupid than sweetening and freezing an industrial-size batch of pesto. I was going to go behind the hard, bright smile.

I was going to confront Fina Parisi about the matter of Anna Tremayne.

Right after I rendezvoused with the bad boys of Quaker Hills. Well, two of them.

*   *   *

Who, as it turned out, were waiting for me outside the back gate in the alley behind Miracolo. First I checked my watch, then I pulled to a stop in exactly the spot where Joe Beck and I had spent quality time in the backseat with the dead Georgia. And now I was going to take the hand-off of Georgia’s red purse from the knuckleheads who had swiped it. Did that make me a receiver of stolen goods? Nah. Not possibly. I was her employer and I was receiving her stolen purse—no, had to reframe that—retrieving vital evidence I planned to turn over to Quaker Hills’ finest. Even if that was the first it had occurred to me . . .

Still, I thought as I got out of the car, and
looked around, this spot was becoming a bit of a magnet for sketchy—okay, criminal—behavior. Tumbling electrocuted corpses into car trunks. Handing off key property of murder victims. I was going to have to give some serious thought to why Eve Angelotta happened to turn up at all of those events, but it might have to wait until my next batch of pestosicles.

Mitchell Terranova had tied his dreadlocks back at the nape of his neck, which really made clear how much he resembled a ferret with acne. Slash was wearing a clean black-and-white T-shirt that said in small lowercase letters,
ask me about my complete lack of interest.
He had dressed for the occasion. Jiggling like they had put off a trip to the john just a killer five minutes too long, they were eyeing the weeds along the fence line. I strolled right up to them, then planted my feet. “You’re early,” I noted.

“’Ey, we got places to go,” said Mitchell.

“It just worked out this way,” added Slash, defensively.

In that moment I realized that in their weird little world it was hard to know which was worse—being late, or being early. Either way, they run the risk of disrespect. I felt a pang of pity for the little creeps. “Got the purse?” I crossed my arms and waited.

Slash gave me a luxurious eye roll and brought it out from behind his concave back. I held out my
hand, at which he slapped it into my palm. A little too hard, but I didn’t break eye contact. Mitchell, on the other hand, winced. I took my sweet time opening Georgia’s purse and thumbing through the contents. A pair of drugstore cheaters in a Vera Bradley case. A Clinique lipstick. Travel hairbrush. Tube of Advil. Wet Ones. A Jeffery Deaver paperback. Receipts for a latte, some dry cleaning, and the Jeffery Deaver paperback.

Pay dirt came in the shapes of an iPhone, a set of keys, and an Etienne Aigner wallet with a Pennsylvania driver’s license. The wallet, aside from a collection of cards that let Georgia Payne borrow books, buy on credit, see a doctor, get money from a machine, work out at a gym, and visit her local wholesale club, was empty—as promised—of cash. Since I’d never be able to prove how much Georgia had had on her when she died, it was a waste of time pressing the thieves for either the answer—or the cash.