Basil Instinct (30 page)

“When?”

“You, me, Vera, Georgia—poor Georgia—Leo, maybe Corabeth.”

“Oh . . . right,” she said, leaning into Jonathan, but probably not remembering what he was talking about at all.

“We were talking about cars, and from there it went to road accidents—”

“Leo mentioned Matt, right, I remember.”

Jonathan lifted his very attractive shoulders. “Then, what with too much Grief Week—”

“—to lighten the mood,” put in Dana, with a quick smile that was meant to show us how good with people she was—“I mean, there’s just so many dead wives, dogs, and kids we can handle.” Ah, the sensitive Dana Cahill.

“But then it got fun, right?” Jonathan squeezed her shoulder, at which Landon started knocking back toasted almonds with a grim look, and I began to wonder about our sommelier’s sexual orientation. And taste in women. His other hand sketched a marquee in the air: “ ‘Worst Loser Cars We’ve Ever Owned.’ ”

Dana burbled.

Landon rolled his eyes, thinking maybe he was learning more about Jonathan than his crush could take in order to survive.

Me, I found myself strangely riveted. Between the two of them, Dana and Jonathan remembered that Georgia Payne had mentioned having owned a white Cadillac Escalade, at which conspicuous consumption all the rest of them groaned. “If you want a big-ass old-rich-white-lady car, why not just buy a Land Rover?” That was Corabeth.

And Georgia said what made her get rid of it was that it didn’t corner well, practically going off country roads—okay, okay, even if she was doing 55 in a 35 mph zone, still. There were just so many mailboxes and raccoons a girl could take out, said Georgia, making them all laugh, before changing her wicked ways and getting more reliable wheels. Then the rest of them offered up stories about an Optima, a Yugo, and an Aztec from yesteryear.

It turned out to be a packed dining room from
the time we opened the doors until the last diner stuffed her credit card receipt into her purse and toddled out. There were still a few stragglers, happy just to kick back and watch the regulars set up their instruments. Dana was warming up with lame repartee with Leo, who switched to guitar and left the mandolin in an open case, and the lanky, long-haired social studies teacher, who seemed to be engaged in an athletic event just tuning his bass.

The splats of Dana’s jokes went right over the head of Giancarlo, who was smiling benevolently in every direction as he poured after-dinner liqueurs—mainly because Maria Pia was flirting with him. Which was always Nonna’s default when she sensed fences needed mending.

Mrs. Crawford, a vision in knee-length, mint-green chiffon with a gold-colored flapper’s cloche pulled down around her ears, packed up and left to meet a friend for a nightcap. Choo Choo, Vera, Landon, and I were intensely interested in this friend, since it was her first mention in the month she had been our pianist that she had a life outside our four walls. Not that any of us ever doubted it. But this was the closest she had let us come to knowing anything. In a bit of a hurry, off she went at a brisk clip in her towering heels.

I circled behind the bar, brushing by Giancarlo and Nonna, who was ladling it on thick about his
passionate nature, and finding something to interest me in the stack of dirty barware stashed under the bar. It was the closest I could get for staking out the regulars. They had been doing this gig-of-their-own-devising at our restaurant for a few years, but I’d never paid them any attention.

Leo was replacing a mandolin string as I looked up from the fascinating dirty glasses. “Any mandolin tonight, Leo? I just love the boost you give it with the juice.” When he gave me a mild look, I said with some dizzy spirit I hoped would come across as disarming, “Wired for sound!”

“No, not tonight. The wire broke.” And he went back to turning a tuning key.

Dana pulled a bar stool in front of the little clutch of musicians, at which Maria Pia practically trembled, waiting to hear the opening bars of her signature song. As I bent to pick up a stray cocktail napkin from where it peeked out half under the bar, something small glinted at me. My fingers brushed it forward, and then I palmed it. Sure enough, Dana Cahill, acting more like she was announcing the semifinalists in the Miss America Pageant, introduced Maria Pia Angelotta—and her very own self—in that classic song about young Italian love . . .

The music began.

Giancarlo pressed a seemingly reluctant Maria Pia out from behind the bar.

And I opened my palm. What I held looked like the end of a black electrical cord. Maybe two inches, that’s all, cut cleanly through with a pair of scissors. Staring at the cut, all I saw was what was left of two copper wires.

You know the expression
My blood ran col
d
? Well, by me, that’s not quite how it goes. For blood to run cold, you have to have blood. What I was feeling in that moment was that I had morphed into some other kind of being, something bloodless, something even kind of mineral. I felt beyond a racing heart, beyond prickling skin, beyond even a cold sweat. All I had were eyes, and mine slid to the right by about four feet and settled on the mandolin lying in the open case. Cordless.

The wire broke
.

My breath came in rough little pops drowned out by the song. What was left of the cord sat like a motionless black insect in my palm. At that moment, I slowly looked up and found Leo noodling away on the guitar, his eyes on mine.

By 11:30 Miracolo had emptied out, and a tired staff was wandering off home. It was my turn to lock up, so I made myself scarce in the kitchen, polishing prep tables that had already been polished, trying very hard to keep an open mind about murder. Maria Pia had patted my cheek and then actually let Giancarlo drive her home instead of Choo Choo.

Landon gave me a weary kiss and went home to feed Vaughn and wait for the law. This was spoken with big-eyed paranoia, which I countered with an eloquent eye roll. Corabeth flashed me a peace sign and went out with Li Wei in tow. Paulette prowled around the entire restaurant, which—with only a little bit of irony— she declared a terrorist-free zone, and departed.

While the regulars packed up, chatting in tired mumbles about the set, I slipped a Linda Ronstadt CD into the sound system for a shot of the anti-Dana. Even though Dana herself was still swanning around the dining room long after the onlookers (truer word than
audience
, really) had left. Right after I set a doorstop against one of the open double doors, to clear the kitchen of the last of the dinner aromas, I texted Detective Sally Fanella, hoping she was somewhere conscious with her phone turned on.
Cn u give me date of hit skip on county road third week in June 2 yrs ago.

No immediate answer. I wasn’t sure how everything pieced together—or even whether it would—but I was curious about that information. As I flicked off the switch to the A/C, Dana came running toward me stiff-armed, with tiny little scooting steps in her wedge sandals.

“How was I?” She gushed at me as though she was the one delivering the compliment.

Then she caught my hands and bit her coral-glossed lips.

I went to my default answer—“Same as always”—spoken with enough gusto that it was all she needed.

“Eve, Eve, Eve . . .” She gave me a fond, sidelong look. “My biggest fan.”

Which was really saying something.

Then I slung an arm around her and jogged us girlies on over to the Sub-Zero fridge and pulled out my private stash of coconut water (I am not immune to trends). As I poured us both a short one, since I really didn’t want to encourage Dana to hang around much beyond my pumping her for info, I asked her about poor Leo, keeping it out of earshot of the musicians as I kept one eye on them, still packing up. What was the date of the hit-and-run? Where did it happen? Somewhere out on a county road?

But Dana came up empty of everything except coconut water.

And Sally Fanella was silent.

Then Dana held my face, kissed both cheeks, and loped back out to the dining room to leave with her “boys.” I kept Linda Ronstadt on an endless loop as they all cleared out, the bass clunking through the front doorway, followed by the ghostly Leo, with his two instrument cases, and the clarinetist.

A laughing Dana, slipping into a sparkling little shrug, was last, hard on their heels. Then gone. I dimmed the overhead globe lights, feeling like some kind of minor restaurant god that could change things in my very own firmament. I stared for a rough moment at the two locks on our front door, then got over it and quickly locked up.

Turning back into the dining room, where one of my last official acts of the day was to blow out the votive candles, I saw a stack of papers on the piano. Mrs. Crawford’s sheet music. In her hurry, she’d forgotten it. I put the sheet music on the piano stool, then headed to the closest table, where the votive candle burned low. Suddenly something occurred to me, so I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted Fina Parisi.
Hey, need date of Ann
a’s induction night she ran out on you. Antipasto together this Friday?

I pinched out a couple of candles, snapped up a forgotten set of keys, danced to Linda’s demanding to know “When Will I Be Loved?”, when a soft one-two chime made me grab my phone. It was Fina, texting me back.
June 21 two years ago at dusk never forget it. Yes to Friday.
So Georgia Payne had torn out of the Belfiere meeting, freaked out, at high speed in her white Caddy Escalade, cornering badly, almost slipping off the country road, taking out a mailbox. Maybe a raccoon. Maybe a runner—

Which was when my phone chimed softly again.

Sally Fanella. For some reason—maybe at those times when we feel the presence of a weighty inevitability, something we wonder we didn’t notice earlier, although it’s hard to say what good it ever does—I swallowed hard before reading her text. In the dim lights of Miracolo, I held up my phone and read:
Cold case county hwy 8 runner left 4 dead 9:21 p.m. June 21. Witness saw white SUV couldn’t catch plates. Y?
County Highway 8 ran through Pendragon, Pennsylvania. How far from Fina’s house was Anna Tremayne when, in the failing light, she hit Matt Cardona? Did she even realize it? Would we ever know?

What I knew for certain—and here my whole body felt like the weighty inevitability that had only skulked around outside me until that very moment—was that Georgia Payne had shown up, as luck would have it, to work at Miracolo. And miracle it was for a father still grieving his dead son when casual conversation about loser cars solved for him what the cops had filed under cold cases. There she was, his for the killing.

First the cutting of the power cord for the mandolin, then the stripping back of the insulation, then pulling apart the wires, then the wait. The wait outside on the sidewalk, finding what shad
ows he could, until he saw her just inside the front door, ready to lock up. All he had to do was plug the cord into the outdoor outlet, and at just the right moment—

My phone rang, startling me. I looked: Dana.

—all he had to do was touch a wire to each metal lock as Georgia’s hands met them on the inside, where she completed the circuit—

“Eve?”

“Dana.”

Just to stay busy, my trembling fingers pinched out the final candle, near the center of the empty dining room.

“Eve, just to let you know, I told Leo about all your interest in Matt and what happened. How you were asking about things I couldn’t answer—I always hate letting you down—you know, like the day, the time, the place. He’ll get back to you. It’s always good to go straight to the source, don’t you think?” And then: “Eve?”

Which was when I realized I saw a shadow in the kitchen, and, with a tumbling heart, I eased closer to the nearest table and slipped the phone—leaving it on—out of sight behind a candle holder. I heard a faint “Eve?” coming from it, hoping to hell Dana would just, for once in her life, shut up. Through the open kitchen door came Leo Cardona. I used to joke that Dana Cahill was going
to be the death of me, but I never thought she was going to be the
death
of me.

“Leo!” I said loud enough to alert my phone that I wasn’t alone.

Leo Cardona was backlit by the bright lights of the little chrome and stainless steel kingdom I was missing already. It wasn’t quite like having the burly, menacing Raymond Burr swaying in the doorway at the end of
Rear Window
, but I wasn’t about to underestimate a man who could cold-bloodedly electrocute someone. I was taller and younger than the mandolin player, but he outweighed me by about a pound and a half was my guess, and it was hard to gauge just what kind of advantage that would give him.

“Why couldn’t you leave it alone?” he asked softly.

Too late to play dumb. No
Whatever do you mean?
was going to fly. I debated screaming outright, but it was possible Dana had gotten bored and hung up, and I needed to conserve my strength. As he took a step toward me, hands in his shapeless pockets, saying something about Matt, something about the driver who ran him down and left him for dead, all I could see was the way the lights from the kitchen threaded through the white wisps of his thin wavy hair that seemed to be standing up in shock at what he did. And at what he was about to
do. He was closing fast when I finally got out, “So you killed Georgia Payne,” talking loud enough for dead phones and extinguished votive candles and a piano I would never hear again.

He was close enough to me now that I could see his pale, doughy face and light, limpid eyes, a face where I could never read the extent of the grief because it had always looked like it was grieving, anyway. “Didn’t you?” I yelled just as he leaped at me, screaming, “You’re damn right I did!” At the last second, I turned just enough that the weight of him didn’t knock me over, but I got pushed into a violent back bend against a table as a chair fell over and I saw a glint of wire in his hands. The wire. The stripped cord. The murder weapon.

We were caught in a fierce, total-body struggle of snarls and yelps. As the cord went around my neck, I realized with horror that I couldn’t throw him off. I couldn’t angle my legs in any position to cause him pain. I couldn’t jam my fingers into his determined eyes. Overhead the beautiful dim globes of Miracolo seemed hazy as I worked my desperate fingers under the tightening cord around my neck.