Mozzarella Most Murderous

by Nancy Fairbanks

  Maybe they were criminals. Burglars. Just like me. A hysterical giggle rose in my throat as they snapped at me in Italian. As if I understood a word they were saying! I gave them as blank a look as I could manufacture, considering that I was terrified. Maybe they’d take me for some mentally retarded person who had just wandered in. I tried a bit of nonsensical babble, while smiling at them. What a really bad idea this had been, and I hadn’t found a thing! The red notebook was probably in that locked suitcase. In fact, he’d probably left it in Rome. Or burned it. Why hadn’t I thought of that and stayed safely on my balcony, eating my chocolate cake? In the meantime, my arms had been twisted up behind my back by a short man, as the taller one shoved me toward the door.

  Who were they? “Do you speak English?” I asked, forgetting for the moment that I had just been impersonating an idiot. Evidently they didn’t speak English because they muttered to one another in Italian. Were they kidnappers? Or secret agents of the Italian government? We rode the elevator down to the lobby. I’d made up my mind. As soon as we got into a populated area of the hotel, I’d scream as loud as I could and keep screaming.

  The doors opened; I was hustled out. The doors closed, and I let out a loud shriek. “Help! Help!” I screamed. The two men just kept shoving me along. What was the Italian word for help? I’d read it in the American Express Italian handbook, but I couldn’t remember. “Help!” People were staring, but no one moved to rescue me. Italians must be as bad as New Yorkers in that respect. These two men could shoot me in the head and carry my body out the door, and nobody—wait, actually, if they wanted to get away from the hotel, they’d have taken the elevator all the way down to the road-level entrance.

  By then my chance of rescue had passed because I was pushed through a door into a conference room. One of the men made some remarks in Italian to an older man in a very well-tailored suit. Possibly a designer suit.

  “You are an English speaker, Signora?” he asked.

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “What is your name?”

  Let him find out for himself, I thought, and stood there silently.

  “And what were you doing in my room?”

  “How did you know I was in your room?” I retorted, now rather indignant with the treatment I was receiving. After all, I hadn’t stolen anything. Either these people were hotel security, or the older man was the general from Rome.

  “My room is wired, Signora,” said the older man. “As soon as you entered, an alarm I carry went off. Who was the pregnant woman who ran away?”

  As if I’d rat on Bianca! “I don’t know whom you’re talking about.”

  “Why were you in my room?” he demanded again.

  “I just got the wrong door.” I’d settled on this story while he was questioning me. “It’s rather upsetting to think that the room cards may open all the doors, isn’t it?” I said earnestly. “You should complain to the management.” I thought I was doing very well, handling myself with aplomb. If Jason hadn’t been so disapproving of my occasional involvement in detection, he’d have been proud of me.

  “See if she has a card on her,” ordered the leader. The short, broad man with the mustache let go of my arms, took my purse, opened it, and extracted my room card. Of course, it didn’t have the number on it, so they couldn’t identify me that way. Then the one who had been shoving me hither and yon stuck his hand in the pocket of my blouse.

  “Stop that!” I snapped. “How dare you be so—so familiar.”

  He pulled out the card Bianca had taken from Nunzia’s cart. Oh dear. Nunzia would be discovering its loss just about now.

  “My aide is not trying to be familiar with you, Signora. You are being searched by lawful agents of the Italian government.” Then he ordered the short man to take the cards to the manager and find out what they were and how I might have come by them.

  Worse and worse, I thought. It must be the general. If he’d killed Paolina, he probably won’t hesitate to kill me, even though I made a big scene in the lobby.

  “Have the local authorities lock this woman up, Marsocca.” He waved a hand. His aide nodded, handed the general a credit card slip from my handbag and a credit card, both of which had my name on them, and then pulled me toward the door.

  The mention of local authorities was probably a code for, “Take her out and shoot her.”

  “I demand to see a representative of the American government,” I said bravely. “Everyone in the lobby saw me dragged in here. You’ll never get away with this.”

  “There are no representatives of the American government closer than Naples,” said the general.

  I was now sure that’s who he must be.

  “However, I’m sure Lieutenant Buglione of the local Polizia di Stato can call Naples for you.” Then he nodded again to his aide. “Take her away.”

  “The local authorities know all about you, General,” I said, trying to slow my unwilling progress toward the door by going limp and dragging my feet, which is not at all a comfortable process. “That’s who you are, isn’t it? No matter how important a person you are in Rome, they know you met Paolina here secretly last July. I told them, and other people as well. Quite a few.” Ah, that caught his attention. “If you do away with me, everyone will know you came back to kill her Monday night. No one will ever believe it was suicide or an accident, not when—”

  “Sit down, Signora,” said the general. “Pull up a chair for her, Marsocca. I think this woman may have something of interest to tell us.”

  26

  “She Was a Free Spirit”

  Carolyn

  “I have been interviewing visiting chemists, Riccis, employees of their company, employees of the hotel,” said the general, “and you, Signora, are the only person to impart any information on the death of Paolina Marchetti. I find that very interesting. How did you, an American, find out that the young woman who died met me here in July?”

  “I asked,” I replied coolly.

  “Whom did you ask?”

  “Well, actually, I asked earlier if Paolina had ever been here before with a man. The person I asked thought so but couldn’t remember who, until you came this morning.”

  He nodded. “And who was this person?”

  Goodness, I don’t want to get Jill in trouble. They might kill her or arrest her. “I really can’t say,” I replied. “Just someone at the desk.”

  “You’ve talked to this person, presumably a hotel employee, several times about this subject, yet you can’t remember who it was?” He stared at me. I stared back. “Very well, here is a more pertinent question. Why were you asking about Paolina Marchetti?”

  The general looked very grim, as if he thought I might have killed her. Of course that couldn’t be, since he was the murderer. “Because she was my friend.” As I said it, a rush of grief hit me; Paolina had been such fun. I’d really enjoyed our afternoon exploring Sorrento. I’d spotted a number of things I wanted to buy and had expected that she and I would shop the next day. And the dinner. As horrible as it was, we’d laughed heartily at the plastic duck and the giant, soggy meatballs. I felt tears rising and blinked them back.

  He was eyeing me suspiciously from under thick, dark eyebrows, as dark as his hair was silver. “I see.” He frowned at me. “You had known the victim how long? A previous acquaintance perhaps?” The tone was sarcastic.

  “No,” I admitted defensively. “We met the day before. We went sightseeing, and we had dinner together. I liked her a lot. We—we had a lot in common.”

  “Indeed.” He looked highly skeptical. “An instant rapport. Is that what you are saying?”

  Oh, these Europeans! They think you have to know someone for twenty years before you can be friends. “And then I discovered her body in the pool. It was a terrible shock, and the—”

  “What was it you had in common?” he demanded.

  “Well, we both like the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She told me how she read it while she was in convent school, an
d I told her how I read it while—while my mother was dying. And I promised to send her the new Millay biography, Savage Beauty. And we liked to window shop. We were going to buy things the next day. And we hated the food here.” Again I choked up. “It’s so sad to think that her last dinner was that awful roast duck.” Why was I telling him all this? He actually looked rather upset. Perhaps because he now saw that I’d had reason to look for her killer. “And don’t think you’re going to get away with killing my friend,” I announced, staring right back at him. “The police here in Sorrento may be afraid of offending the Riccis and you because you’re a big shot from Rome, but you can’t get away with killing me too. I intend to see that you—”

  “Enough, Signora,” said the general wearily. “I was neither the lover nor the murderer of the woman you knew as Paolina Marchetti. I was her father.”

  “Her—” I didn’t believe that! Of all the nerve! Telling me that he was her father. Did he think I was stupid? “If you’re Paolina’s father, why did you have to meet her here secretly? Under assumed names?”

  “Because she also worked for me,” he replied.

  “Ha! Now I know you’re lying,” I retorted triumphantly. “She worked for Ruggiero Ricci. She was his secretary.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “She was his secretary, and she was investigating his company.”

  “Why would she be doing that?” I asked suspiciously, at the same time remembering the Mafia connection. “It’s just a chemical and pharmaceutical company. Isn’t it?”

  “A very profitable one,” he said. “We’ve been investigating them for several years.”

  “But what for?” I tried to think of what the old, evil Mafia father might have been up to, with or without Ruggiero’s knowledge. “Drugs! Were they refining heroin or something like that? Or making methamphetamines? That’s a chemical process.” Then I had a terrible thought. “Oh, my goodness. The radioactive waste! They weren’t making atomic bombs, were they? And selling them to terrorists? I assumed that it was medical waste, but—”

  “You have a very lively imagination, Signora, but as far as we know, their profits were coming from watered down prescription drugs and substances labeled as prescription drugs that had no medical value whatever. These were packaged and then sold to third world countries.”

  “Oh my goodness! That’s unconscionable! Sick people were dying because they didn’t get the drugs they thought they were paying for? Druggists have done that in our country. You wonder how such people—”

  “And there’s the possibility that they were planning to ship illegal narcotics disguised as items on their regular product list.”

  Of course I immediately thought of Sibyl and Hank and their new containers. If the toxic waste fumes couldn’t get out, then drug enforcement dogs probably couldn’t sniff the narcotics inside one of those containers. I’d have to warn Hank not to do business with Ruggiero. “Do you have any identification to prove that you are an Italian spy of some sort?” I asked. After all, he could have made all this up.

  There was a knock on the door, and the short, mustachioed man entered. “The lady is Signora Carolyn Blue, General,” he said. “One of the cards is her room card, unless she stole it and the credit card. The other is a card the maids use to get into the rooms for cleaning purposes. That was undoubtedly stolen unless the maid was an accomplice.”

  He spoke English! And he’d been pretending not to while he was twisting my arm and pushing me around! What a sneak! And now that he wanted to threaten me with the information he’d gathered, he spoke English. “Nunzia had nothing to do with it,” I said angrily. “I took the card from her cart because I expected to find Paolina’s red leather notebook in your room, General.”

  “Explain that, please,” said the general.

  “She carried it with her all the time and wrote poetry in it. You did know that she was a poet?” I studied his face, looking for signs that he, like all the other men in her life, had had no idea of Paolina’s depths and talents. “And I would like to see ID, please.”

  “Loppi, Marsocca, show her some ID,” said the general.

  “What about you?” I asked. The general opened his wallet and took out a photograph from a pocket that was hard to get into. It was of Paolina and said, “A Papa,” and was signed, “Lucia.”

  “Her name was Lucia, Lucia Bianconi. I am Luca Bianconi, her father, and I did know that my daughter wrote poetry. I had a book of her poetry published for her twenty-fifth birthday.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling more tears about to embarrass me. “But why would you let her do something so dangerous? Perhaps that’s why she’s dead—because of her job.” Then I had a thought. “But maybe it wasn’t murder. Oh, dear, maybe it’s my fault!” All three men stared at me, gimlet-eyed. “I mean, I didn’t kill her, but I did tell her how Edna St. Vincent Millay died. Of a fall down stairs after the death of her husband. And Paolina, I mean Lucia, had had a disappointment. A—a male friend stood her up. You don’t think she threw herself down the waterfall, thinking her favorite poetess had committed suicide over love, so—”

  “It was murder,” said the general sharply. “Lucia was not the type to commit suicide, certainly not over a man. You ask why I let her join my organization. She was a wild girl, promiscuous, in fact.”

  “She was a free spirit,” I corrected him indignantly.

  “That’s a kind way to put it, Signora. You evidently didn’t know her as well as you thought you did. However, I had hoped to satisfy her need for excitement and intrigue by giving her the job until such time as she matured enough to marry and give me grandchildren.” He sighed. “It was a mistake. And now, just to clear this matter up, Signora, where were you when my daughter was murdered?”

  “Asleep, I imagine,” I replied. “As I said, we went sightseeing in Sorrento, had dinner together, hugged one another when I got off the elevator on the eighth floor, and then I went to bed. I didn’t see her again until I went out to the pool for coffee and spotted her body lying under the water. I dragged her out and tried to revive her, but I think—” I sniffed back tears. “I think she’d been dead for quite a while.”

  He studied my face, nodded, and said, “Thank you for your friendship to my daughter on her last day. You may go now.”

  “Go? Really, General, if you didn’t kill Paolina—Lucia, I should say—I have several other ideas. I have been investigating this, you know.”

  27

  Theories of the Crime

  Carolyn

  I would have been hesitant to tell her father my theories about Paolina’s death since each involved her having slept with a different man, but since he already knew—that thought disappeared from my head when a shocking idea occurred to me. Had he told his daughter to sleep with Ruggiero Ricci? He must have known that she was using her charms, as it were, to get information from the president of the company. Which seemed a little tacky and melodramatic.

  But maybe she had fallen in love with Ruggiero, a handsome older man who perhaps reminded her of a father who had always been too busy waging war and running spy organizations to pay any attention to her. After all, he’d left her in a convent school. What a terrible dilemma for her—to be in love with the very man she was betraying to her father.

  It sounded like an opera plot. One of the beautiful, new sopranos could sing Paolina; a tenor for Valentino, singing of unrequited love, maybe one of the new tenors from Mexico or South America; a baritone for Ruggiero, the lover-villain; and a bass for the general.

  “You were going to make some suggestions, Signora,” prompted the general. He wasn’t singing.

  What would a female sleuth in an opera be? I wondered. A mezzo? Jason had bought a CD by a fabulous new mezzo, very nice looking. She could play me.

  “Signora?”

  “Oh, yes. Well, I don’t want to embarrass you, General, but Paolina was Ruggiero Ricci’s mistress. Maybe he discovered that she was a spy. Or, and again I mention this with hesitation, b
ut his office manager says she slept with someone else the night before she came to Sorrento, someone who visited Ricci in his office and stopped to talk to Paolina on the way out.”

  “And did the office manager say who this visitor was?” asked the general.

  Now this was touchy. “Well, she said it was a foreigner who spoke Italian and was perhaps an American, perhaps a participant in the conference, but that can’t be, because the only Americans are my husband, who doesn’t speak Italian, except for a few phrases from Italian opera, of which we’re very fond, especially Verdi, although Puccini—”

  “Yes, yes,” said the general impatiently. “Everyone loves Italian opera.”

  “Not so many Americans, actually, although I think opera is becoming more popular in our country. A number of the smaller cities have companies that do a few performances a year. El Paso, for instance. That’s where Jason and I live.”

  “Signora.”

  “Yes. Well, back to Jason; he was in Paris until the evening of the next day, as was Sibyl Evers, another American, a professor from Rutgers and, of course, being female and not even knowing Paolina, she wouldn’t have killed her. Sibyl’s husband Hank Girol is the third American, but he drove in from Rome the morning I found Paolina’s body, so I don’t think Gracia could have been right about the person being an American.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Signora Blue.”

  “I’m not through,” I protested. “I haven’t even gotten to the better suspects, the more likely ones. If Ruggiero knew that Paolina took a new lover, he might have killed her out of jealousy, even if he didn’t know that she was a spy. He says he was in Catania that night, but who knows? I didn’t see him until late in the afternoon after she died, but he could have been here, and since he admits his wife was out of town, she can’t vouch for him, nor he for her.”