“Oh, I don’t place any bets, so it’s not gambling.”
No, just like whatever she’d poured into her Pepsi wasn’t drinking. I knew the answer to the question I was about to ask her, but I wanted Veronica to hear it. “Then what do you call playing the lottery and the slots?”
“Gaming.”
Veronica looked away, but I caught the corners of a grin.
Ruth tipped her can in my direction. “Based on what I know of that crackpot captain, I’m not surprised you’re investigating a crime on his steamboat.”
“Why do you say that?”
“After a few too many rum and Cokes one night, the captain told half the casino that Civil War gold was hidden onboard.” She took a slug of her drink. “I got that straight from Rudy at the craps table.”
Where she wasn’t gambling. “I don’t see the crime.”
“You will. A couple of weeks ago, I heard the old coot threaten a man if he came looking for the loot.”
“Really?” Is that what Nick had been doing? “Did you see the man he threatened?”
Ruth glared at me over her horned rims. “What do you think I am? A nosy parker?”
It was best not to answer.
Veronica bit her lip. “People make a lot of threats. That doesn’t mean they follow through with them.”
I steepled my fingers. “No, but what did he say exactly?”
Her chains began to rock. “He said, ‘You put one boot on my boat, and I’ll acquaint you with a new meaning for the cold shivers.’”
Veronica and I exchanged a look. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve said the captain’s threat was tame. But there was nothing normal about the phrase “a new meaning for the cold shivers” when a man had been found dead in a deep freeze.
5
“Francesca Lucia Amato.” My mother’s shrill voice erupted from the phone and ricocheted off the columns of the recessed entrance to the Civil War Museum. “I haven’t even been gone for half a day, and you’ve already traumatized Luigi.”
A meat slicer whined in the background, so I knew she was at our family deli, probably imagining slicing me like salami. “Are you seriously blaming me for telling him about his cousin’s son? The one he hired me to find?”
“Yes, because you never should have taken that case. It should’ve been obvious that you weren’t to do anything to upset him.”
Incredulous, I walked down the steps and away from the building—in case I needed to make a scene. “I thought you’d want me to help Luigi, since you’re his biggest fan.”
“Do you understand nothing about relationships, Francesca?”
“Apparently not the mother-daughter one.”
“And now she’s back-talking me, Rosalie,” my mother lamented to her best friend and long-time customer of the deli. Rosalie was built like a beer keg on two tree stumps, which fit her steam-roller personality, and she always managed to be on standby when there was an issue she could spin into a juicy story. “Where did I go wrong with her?”
“You let her go to public university instead of a Catholic college,” Rosalie said, rebuke ready. “They give young women way too much freedom.”
“Just like her father.”
“What did I do now?” my dad boomed.
“You always let your daughter do whatever she wanted,” my mother yelled, “and look at the results.”
I thought the results were pretty darn good, especially considering how my brother Anthony turned out. “Hey, Mom, I’m at Confederate Memorial Hall, and they’re staying open late for me. So if you’re going to talk to everyone in the deli, can I let you go?”
She gasped. “Don’t you mouth off to me, young lady.”
“Just hang up, Brenda,” Rosalie huffed. “That’ll show her who’s in charge. And look at these invitations. They say, That’s Amore.”
That’s Amore? The lemon tradition came to mind, and I puckered. Was she…? “Mom, are you planning my engagement party?”
“With a cold-footed groom like Bradley?”
Larry from the deli belly-laughed. “I just got an image of him with big blocks of ice on his feet. That’s funny.”
Yeah. Hilaaarious. My feet paced to walk off some steam. “So who are those invitations for?”
“Your nonna.”
I slipped off the sidewalk and narrowly missed oncoming traffic. “Are you kidding? We don’t even know if they’re dating yet.”
“Of course they are. And at their age, they don’t have much time, so I’m trying to help them speed things along.”
We both knew who she was trying to help, and it wasn’t Nonna or Luigi. “You need to put the brakes on this whole fairy tale you’ve concocted. If you ask me, Luigi has family obligations that—”
“He’s married?” Her pitch was somewhere along the spectrum of shriek and scream.
“Who’s married?” my father barked in his nervous-indigestion voice.
“Bradley.” Rosalie belted out his name so the whole deli would hear. “He remarried that ex-wife of his.”
I cringed. That was more than a spin—it was a runaway Tilt-A-Whirl.
“Yo, Joe.” Larry’s tone had turned Italian-American mafioso. “Maybe we should replace those ice shoes with cement?”
“Sounds justified,” an unknown man said.
Great. They’re chatting with customers about killing my boyfriend. I went and sat on the steps. “So, Mom? Could you help me out here and tell them we’re talking about Luigi?”
She covered the receiver. “It’s not Bradley, everyone. But that would’ve been better.”
“Mom! What are you saying?”
“I just meant that you’ve got more time than your nonna does, dear. Although, if you want to have children, not much. Now what are these family obligations Luigi has?”
I had to ungrit my teeth to respond. “All I meant was that an elderly man with a produce company probably wouldn’t be in a hurry to remarry. I’m sure he has heirs to think about.”
“Well, he couldn’t have made much from a grocery store produce job.”
I decided to tell her, since she would find out eventually. “He owns Little Palermo Produce, the major corporation?”
“Little…Palermo?” She spoke like her lungs had sprung an air leak. “That’s…our…Lu…i…giiii?”
Several loud bonks told me the phone receiver had hit the floor—and maybe my mother as well. Either way, she wouldn’t be returning to the conversation.
Hm. I should shock her more often.
I dropped the phone into my bag and climbed the steps to the imposing red-brick building. When I’d googled the address, I read that Confederate Memorial Hall had opened in 1891, which made it the oldest museum in Louisiana. The Romanesque Revival style gave it a fortress feel, which was appropriate given its contents.
I opened the heavy door, and the inside was just as imposing. In the middle of the room was a cannon, and not a replica like the one at Washington Artillery Park. The walls were done in dark wood paneling lined with glass cases containing uniforms, weapons, and various documents. Above them hung paintings of Confederate generals and framed flags. And the peaked roof and rear stage backed by stained-glass windows were reminiscent of a chapel, hence the museum’s nickname, The Battle Abbey of the South.
“You must be Franki Amato, the one who called about the missing Civil War gold.”
I looked around for the source of the voice.
A forty-something male rose from underneath the cannon with a rag in his hand. He wore a gray button-down shirt and suspenders, and he had a bizarre beard that grew only under his chin and jaw.
“Oh, hair—I mean, hi.”
He tucked the rag into his back pocket and extended his hand. “Jefferson Davis, at your service.”
We shook, while I tried to figure out whether that was his real name or whether he was in character as the president of the former Confederate States. “Perfect name for the work you do.”
“I’m also a Civ
il War reenactor in the Battle of New Orleans.”
That sounded about as fun as reenacting Hurricane Katrina, but I feigned a look of enthusiasm. “Was that the one where Andrew Jackson enlisted the help of the pirate Jean Lafitte?”
“That was the first Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. General Jackson led a ragtag army of militia fighters, frontiersmen, slaves, Indians, and Lafitte’s pirates to defeat a vastly superior British Army.”
“Oh, I never made the connection that there had been two major war battles here.”
“Yes’m.” He sucked his tobacco-stained teeth. “And if you’re wondering, I’m a progressive.”
I hadn’t been, but okay. “I haven’t met many modern-day Democrats who are so into the Civil War.”
“You think I’m a Liberal? Good God, no.” His words came out like a rebel yell. “A progressive is what we call a hard-core authentic—someone who’s period-appropriate down to their drawers—flannel or osnaburg, which is a course, inexpensive linen.”
“Ah.” I glanced at a sword to discourage an underwear reveal.
His mouth twisted, and he stared into the distance. “The Farbs call us stitch-counters, but what can you expect from guys who show up at a Civil War battlefield wearing polyester and eating po’ boys?”
“Right?” I said as though “Farb” was a term I knew and used in everyday conversation.
His face softened. “Hey, next January you should come out to the battle. We could use a nurse or a flag-sewer.”
“Didn’t women fight in the Civil War? I thought I read somewhere that a few did.”
He went as stiff as his beard. “We don’t talk about that.”
And he calls himself a progressive. “So, is this whole missing gold story true?”
“Depends on who you ask. Some of the Confederate assets were spent paying the soldiers and funding their retreat from the Union forces. But eighty-six thousand dollars in gold coins and bullion was entrusted to Navy Paymaster, Lt. Cdr. James A. Semple to be deposited in a bank in Liverpool to fund the revival of the Confederacy. Historians think the turncoat went and divided it up with two of his friends.”
I could see whose side he was on. “Any chance some of it is hidden on the Galliano steamboat?”
“There’s a rumor to that effect, but I don’t buy it. Old Captain Jack was quite the tall-tale teller.”
“You mean, Giacomo Galliano, the original captain of the steamboat?”
Jefferson gave a curt nod. “He went by ‘Jack’ after he came over from Palermo. Said he was related to Giuseppe Galliano, the hero of the First Italo-Ethiopian War that the liqueur is named after. He also claimed he’d fought with Garibaldi and his thousand men, which was hogwash.”
Luigi had said that Galliano’s service on Garibaldi’s army was how he came to fight in the Civil War. “So, he wasn’t one of the Sicilian soldiers sent here to fight for the Confederacy?”
“He fought in the Civil War, all right, but a genealogist proved he was part of an antebellum wave of Sicilian immigration to New Orleans.”
“I had no idea Sicilians came here back then.”
“They kept coming, too. After the Civil War they replaced freed slaves on the sugar plantations. Eventually, they went from harvesting sugar cane to truck farming and sold their produce at the French Market in the Quarter.”
Like my nonna and nonnu, and Luigi.
“In fact, in the early 1900s, the French Quarter was known locally as Little Palermo.”
Pride surged in my chest. That must’ve been where Luigi got his company name.
“The Sicilians were behind the creation of Bourbon Street. They set up illegal gambling operations in the backrooms of bars and clubs, things like pinball and poker machines, all of it controlled by the mob.”
Some of my pride surged out.
He pulled a plastic baggie from his front pants pocket. “Care for some hardtack?”
When it came to food, I was definitely a Farb. “I ate some, uh, salt pork before I came.”
“That’s good eatin’,” he said, swallowing my story. He popped a bite of the biscuit into his mouth and tucked it back into his pocket. “Anyhow, Galliano ran with the Bourbon Street mob, and there’s some evidence that he bought the steamboat with proceeds from an illegal bookmaking scheme. So if he did hide loot on the boat, I’d say it was gambling money.”
The current captain, Rex Vandergrift, apparently believed otherwise.
Jefferson put his hands on his hips. “So, are you part of some sort of festival or theme party?”
“I’m not following you.”
“Well, I can count on one hand the number of people who’ve asked me about Captain Galliano and the gold, and both of you have come in today.”
That was kind of weird. “Maybe it’s because the Galliano steamboat just came to town.”
“Or maybe the other lady hit her head one too many times roller-skating.”
The woman who’d been talking to the Dancing Hand Grenade skated through my mind. “Why would you say that? About the roller-skating?”
“She came into the museum on a pair of skates. I had to ask her to take the darn things off.”
An interest in Captain Galliano’s gold could’ve been a coincidence, but those skates weren’t. “I think I know who you’re talking about. Was she wearing a wig too?”
He massaged his chin, which didn’t disturb his beard underneath. “Yeah, a red one. And a floppy hat pulled down real low.”
She hadn’t wanted to be recognized. “Did you get her name?”
“Said it was Goldie.”
The name hit me like a musket blast, not so much because of the Civil War gold but because of Nick Pescatore’s final text, Galliano gold. The fact that she’d come to Confederate Memorial Hall after she ran from me raised two big questions. Was this Goldie a treasure hunter? And if so, had she killed Nick to stop him from finding it?
When I turned the Mustang around the corner to my house, the sun was setting over the cemetery. I imagined my irate mom emptying the bones from a mausoleum so she could put me in it, and then I rolled my eyes toward the fourplex.
And hit the brakes.
Fiats filled the driveway and spilled into the street, which meant the nonne had converged on my apartment. It also meant that I was in violation of an amendment to Glenda’s visitor policy that permitted only two nonne at any one time to give Glenda a reasonable chance of avoiding being “tied up” with an apron. The policy was ironic considering that she was standing in the yard with Veronica in an outfit made of whips.
My text tone sounded.
I pulled my phone from my bag. I’d gotten two texts. One was from Bradley, who’d learned of Nick’s death on the news and wanted me to call him, and the most recent was from Marv, who’d gotten me a kitchen position on the Galliano starting the next morning. Compared to what awaited me on the lawn and in the house, a haunted and dangerous steamboat sounded nice.
I climbed from the car and walked toward my first hurdle. “Hey, Glenda. I’m sorry about the meeting of the nonne.”
She puffed from a spiked cigarette holder. “Miss Ronnie says they’re mourning Mr. Luigi’s kin, so I’ll overlook it. Just like I’ll overlook that winged head with three legs covering my Mardi Gras decorations.”
My eyes shot to the second-floor balcony. Nonna or one of her friends had covered Glenda’s giant breasts with the Sicilian flag. “That’s the symbol of Sicily, the Trinacria. The head is Medusa, and the legs represent the three points of the island.”
“I just thought it was kinky, sugar.” She stuck out her tongue and touched the tip to her lip.
Veronica giggled, and the fur muff she held moved.
My eyes widened, and her Pomeranian Hercules’s snout emerged from the whitish fur. Somewhere in that dog’s DNA was the key to the cure for baldness. “I’d better go in and talk to Luigi.”
Veronica put Hercules on the ground. “I’ve already offered my condolences, but if you w
ant, I can come with you.”
“That’s all right. If he’s up to it, I’m going to ask him some more questions about the case.”
Glenda stubbed out her cigarette with a stripper shoe that said I spank. “Well, I’ve got to go change out of my errand outfit and get my writing look on. Maybe that’ll help me figure out what to call my memoir.”
Veronica smiled. “I suggested Lorraine Lamour: My Life in the Limelight.”
The Red Light is more like it. “That doesn’t quite capture her essence.”
“Let me know if you have any ideas, Miss Franki. You know me—I’m open.”
A Southern Belle Jezebel came to mind, but I didn’t say it. “I will.”
I opened the door to my apartment. The air was somber and filled with the odor of garlic and fried meat, which was awesome because contrary to what I’d told Jefferson Davis, I hadn’t eaten salt pork for dinner—or anything since the beignets at breakfast.
Santina, Mary, and ten other nonne were in the living room in full mourning dress. Their eyes were shut tight as they worked the beads of their rosaries. But every now and then, an eye would open and steal a glance at Nonna and Luigi, who sat as stiff as uncooked lasagna noodles at the Baroque dining table in the kitchen. And the prayers would become more fervent.
I crept past them and entered the kitchen, where a nonna cooked at the stove and Napoleon begged at her feet, oblivious to my presence. I approached Luigi. “Can I get you anything?”
“Thanks, kid. But I got a houseful of women trying to feed me. And your nonna has been a real comfort.”
I almost fell into my chair. To my memory, no one had ever described Nonna that way.
Luigi’s gaze lowered to a plate of antipasti. “I talked to the police a half hour ago. When the medical examiner is done with his investigation, I’m going to follow Nicky’s wishes and have him cremated.”
Nonna lifted her black lace veil. “But-a first they gotta wait-a for him to defrost-a.”
I could see what a comfort she was.
“Cremato!” a nonna cried, and the others wailed in unison.
The nonne were lamenting Nick’s cremation, and I wasn’t surprised. Not only did the Catholic Church frown on keeping loved ones in urns for fear of idolatry, the practice also meant that they couldn’t throw themselves on the casket.
Galliano Gold (Franki Amato Mysteries Book 5) Page 6