Mozzarella Most Murderous

by Nancy Fairbanks

  “You asked Signor Ricci these things?” asked Signor Loppi, who probably had some rank, but we hadn’t really been introduced, so I didn’t know.

  “Well, tactfully,” I replied. “So as not to alert him that I suspected him. I also asked his wife, but she never answered me.” I felt a bit conflicted about implicating Constanza, who could be quite nice and obviously loved her children to distraction. “As I indicated, Signora Ricci-Tassone doesn’t have an alibi since she was not in Catania and didn’t appear publicly here until late afternoon, but she could have been in Sorrento. Her husband was not a faithful man, as I understand it, so she might have gotten fed up and killed his latest mistress, Paolina.

  “And then there was the lover who was supposed to meet Paolina here in Sorrento and called to cancel. I believe I mentioned that. Perhaps he came after all and killed her for whatever reason. He could be anyone.” Oh, dear, that wasn’t very tactful. “And there’s Valentino Santoro, the toxicology expert at the Ricci company. He was madly, evidently hopelessly, in love with Paolina. Maybe knowing about her various lovers just—just pushed him over the edge. Which reminds me, Constanza Ricci-Tassone had hoped that Dr. Santoro would marry their daughter, Elizabetta. Maybe the mother killed Paolina so that Santoro would turn to the daughter for—ah—comfort.”

  “Are you getting all this down, Marsocca?” the general asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Marsocca was very tall and looked quite amusing sitting in a spindly chair, his legs poked up, trying to make notes in a notebook balanced on one pointy knee.

  “Ah! I forgot another possibility. Gracia Sindacco, the office manager at the chemical company, told a friend of mine that she thought Signor Ricci’s father might have hired a hit man to kill Paolina to avenge the honor of his family when she took a lover other than his son. He was evidently a Mafia person in his younger days. Now I gather he’s in ill health and couldn’t have committed murder himself. At least, that’s what Gracia said, and I see no reason for her to lie. She definitely didn’t seem to like him. In fact, she called him an evil old man.”

  “And to whom have you mentioned this information, Signora?” the general asked me.

  “To you. Obviously. Bianca Massoni knows all about it; she’s been helping me with the investigation. To Lieutenant Buglione of the Polizia di Stato, although I can’t say that he seems inclined to act on anything I’ve told him. And I offered my insights to Captain Pagano and Lieutenant Vacci of the Carabinieri. They arrived the second day and said they’d interview me after breakfast, but they never did. They didn’t even come back to the hotel yesterday that I know of, and when they arrived this morning, they went off to breakfast again. That’s what Bianca said, anyway. I was in the gift shop and didn’t see them.”

  “I see.” The general frowned. “Well, you have amassed an impressive number of suspects, Signora,” he said. “We shall certainly look into these people. Have you any last thoughts you’d care to pass on?”

  Is he making fun of me? I wondered. Oh, of course not. Why would he? “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I replied.

  Loppi rolled his eyes. I think he was trying not to smile. “I saw that, Signor Loppi,” I said sternly. “And I see no cause for amusement in the situation. In fact, I take it very seriously. I would not have been assembling information and possibly putting myself if harm’s way if I didn’t.”

  “We appreciate your efforts, Signora,” said the general, “and your evident concern for my daughter.”

  “I was not laughing, General,” protested Loppi, his olive skin flushing, and his rather large, out-flung ears turning bright red.

  “Signora,” prompted the general, ignoring his subordinate.

  “Well, General.” I leaned forward. “It’s my opinion that if you find Paolina’s red notebook, which has been missing since her death, you will find her murderer. I suppose you’ll need warrants to search the rooms of the suspects I mentioned—”

  “Did you have a warrant to search my room?” he asked.

  “No, of course I didn’t have a warrant. I’m not a police officer, but for Paolina’s sake, and considering my suspicions of you, I did feel that the search was warranted.” I was rather pleased with my pun and wondered if he’d caught it. Puns in a language not one’s own are probably difficult to appreciate. “Be that as it may, the room in which you find the red notebook will be the room of the murderer, unless, of course, he or she has planted it in some other room to throw suspicion on someone else. One can’t discount that possibility.”

  “Are you, Signora, by any chance a reader of detective fiction?”

  “Only occasionally,” I replied, then added modestly, “but I have had some experience in investigating murders.”

  “Have you?” The general gave me a strange look.

  Good heavens, surely he didn’t think I might be a suspect. But probably not, since he thanked me for my input and escorted me to the door himself. He hadn’t even risen to greet me when I arrived, or rather was shoved into his presence. Before opening the door for me, he warned that I should say nothing about the investigation of the Ricci company, and thanked me again.

  28

  Another Good Deed

  Carolyn

  As the general and I stood in the doorway shaking hands, I noticed the Carabinieri striding across the lobby, looking well fed. Had they been at the breakfast buffet all this time? They arrived in front of us and saluted sharply. The general returned their salutes, but said nothing. Just stared at them thoughtfully. Captain Pagano introduced himself and his subordinate. The general introduced me. “But you have already met Signora Blue, haven’t you?” he asked in English. “Several days ago, I believe.”

  Lieutenant Flavia Vacci smiled at me. The captain mumbled something that acknowledged my presence and then told the general how honored they were to have the chance of meeting a man who had done so much to investigate the Mafia in Sicily. “We have come to offer whatever humble assistance we can to you, General Bianconi,” said Pagano.

  “You have interviewed people, gathered information, have you?” asked the general.

  “We are at your command,” said Pagano, eyes shifting uneasily.

  “I believe you had the opportunity to interview this lady,” murmured the general, patting my shoulder. “Did you do that?”

  “We can do it immediately,” said Pagano with alacrity.

  “But there is no need now,” said the general. “I have done it myself. Signora Blue has been most helpful, a very useful source of information. This case has been ongoing since Sunday, and Signora Blue, a foreign civilian, has given it more attention and developed more theories than any of the authorities in whose hands it has rested. So what assistance is it that you propose to offer, Captain Pagano?”

  “Whatever you ask for, General,” said the captain, who had begun to look as if his collar were too tight.

  “Very well then,” said General Bianconi. “You will provide four men of lower rank to keep those who are in some way involved in the crime from leaving the hotel without my permission. Your men will relieve officers of the state police.”

  “At once, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Vacci, you may stay and act as my secretary.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Flavia Vacci, not looking particularly excited with her new assignment.

  “And you, Captain Pagano. I understand you have been investigating the breakfast buffet here at the Grand Palazzo Sorrento.” The general looked at his watch. “Perhaps it is not too late for you to see what the hotel offers for lunch, since that seems to be your area of expertise.”

  The captain’s face turned red, I had to stifle the giggles, and the general, patting my shoulder again, told me that I was free to go to my room.

  I was quite exhilarated after my session with General Bianconi and his session with Captain Pagano. And pleased. Captain Pagano had received his comeuppance, and I felt that I had contributed substantially to the investigation, which was all the more
satisfying because the general’s own daughter, whom I had liked so much, was the victim. Poor man, I remembered him saying that he’d hoped she would marry and provide him with grandchildren. It was hard to imagine the general, who was somewhat intimidating, bouncing a baby on his knee, much less burping one and having it spit up on the shoulder of his beautifully tailored suit. Industrial espionage must pay well. No, industrial espionage was not the right term for the government searching out evildoers in industry.

  Ah well, I had been helpful. That was the point. He’d had his aide write it all down, unlike Lieutenant Buglione, who hadn’t wanted to investigate anyone. I suppose if I’d suggested that a maid killed Paolina, he might have looked into it, but not when my suspicions landed on a general or a rich industrialist. Probably Ruggiero Ricci practiced industrial espionage in its proper sense of the phrase. After all, Jason had said that the meeting was just an excuse to pick the brains of the conferees.

  The elevator, for which I had been waiting, arrived, and Hank stepped out. After we greeted one another, he apologized for his conduct the night before, and said, “I hope I didn’t offend you, Carolyn. I’m one of those people who forgets his manners when he’s had too much to drink.”

  It occurred to me that if Sibyl had heard him bragging about his sexual prowess, she would have been even more offended than I. But then, if Hank was talking that way to reassure himself that she wasn’t interested in Jason—well, I could hardly blame him for being jealous. I had been. Obviously, I had to forgive him, which I did.

  He had been holding the elevator door for me, and I was about to get on when I remembered. “Hank,” I said urgently. A couple tried to get past me and through the door, so I stepped back and pulled him aside. “I wanted to warn you.”

  “Warn me?” He looked puzzled.

  “Yes, about Ricci. You shouldn’t make any deals with him.”

  “Why not?” he asked, even more puzzled, frowning, in fact.

  “He’s being investigated by the general and his aides for industrial crimes, even suspected of planning to deal in drugs.”

  “He makes drugs,” Hank pointed out.

  “I meant bad drugs, illegal drugs. You know. It would be terrible if he used your containers to transport them and you got arrested.”

  “I see. Did you tell the general—”

  “Of course not. I know you’re just interested in the toxic waste, but you can’t control what Ricci does with your containers once he’s bought them. He could take the toxic waste out and put in heroin or something.”

  Hank looked quite upset at the prospect. “Thanks for the heads-up, Carolyn. That would be embarrassing. To be caught in Ricci’s mess.”

  The elevator was gone by then, so he pressed the button and put me in the next one when it came. Another good deed done, I thought, and advised him to say nothing about what I’d told him to anyone from Catania. He promised not to, and I rode up to Eight, ready for a nice late-afternoon nap. I’d had a stressful day. And I hadn’t had lunch. Maybe I’d send for Room Service, although I shuddered to think what they might provide. Left over giant meatballs? A plastic duck sandwich?

  29

  A French Invitation

  Carolyn

  “Carolyn, where the devil have you been?” demanded my husband, who, much to my surprise, was seated with his laptop on his knees. “I’d have been trying to find you by now if our phone service hadn’t been cut off and all of us confined to our rooms.”

  “No phones?” I asked, surprised. I’d been able to call Bianca this morning, although I wasn’t supposed to leave the room.

  “Only Room Service, and cops answer the calls. Why aren’t you stuck in the room like the rest of us, or did you sneak out? I’ve been going crazy, cooped up here all day, wondering where you were.”

  “Did you try sitting on the balcony? The view is spectacular.”

  “Right, and the wind must be blowing thirty or forty miles an hour, which doesn’t tell me where you’ve been.”

  “Well, I didn’t sneak out.” Actually, I had, but I wasn’t going to tell Jason that I’d been caught burgling the general’s room. “I’ve just returned from my interview with the general.”

  “For all this time?” Jason looked amazed. “Mine took about five minutes.”

  “Well, I had information for him.”

  Jason groaned. “Carolyn, have you been accusing someone of killing the secretary?”

  “Actually, she wasn’t a secretary. She was an undercover agent investigating the Ricci company. They’re doing all sorts of bad things, such as sending fake drugs to third world countries.”

  “I might have known,” said Jason with disgust. “This is as bad a meeting as I can remember attending, and don’t tell me about the great location. If we can’t get out of the hotel, you’re not going to be doing any more sightseeing.”

  I nodded glumly. That hadn’t occurred to me in all the excitement of helping the Italian government. “And Paolina was his daughter,” I added.

  “Whose daughter?” asked Jason, closing down his computer program. “You want to try for Room Service? I didn’t get any lunch because the line was busy.”

  “Me either, but if the hotel provided it, rather than Constanza’s chef, it was probably awful anyway. Poor Constanza. She’s going to be so upset when they arrest Ruggiero.”

  “The sooner, the better,” my husband muttered. “Then we can go home.”

  “No,” I said, “we can go sightseeing. You didn’t get to because you were stuck in Paris.”

  “True, but I got a lot of good chemistry done.”

  I glared at him, remembering the seductively scientific Sibyl.

  “So whose daughter is she—Paolina?”

  “The general’s. She worked as an undercover agent for him.”

  “God,” said Jason. “He’s got a shock coming when he finds out that she was sleeping with everyone in sight.”

  “He knows it.”

  “You mean she was doing it for him?”

  “No, not exactly.” I really didn’t want to talk about Paolina’s wild streak, of which Jason did not approve. Not that I did, but I had liked her. “You mustn’t mention the general’s investigation of the Ricci company,” I admonished Jason. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but since you’re my husband—well, shall we see if we can get something to eat?” I asked, to divert his attention from Paolina and my own activities.

  We tried and had a hard time ordering from the policeman because he spoke little English. I really had no idea what would arrive, and it was pretty bad, a boring pasta in a watery tomato sauce, a cold, sliced duck salad, the duck probably left over from Paolina’s last supper, and some soupy ice cream of indeterminate flavor. Perhaps the general had ordered this meal specially to force one of us to confess, but more likely it was another production from the hotel’s Swiss chef.

  Jason hardly seemed to notice. Over dinner he told me about an invitation he’d received from Adrien Guillot—to come to Lyon to give seminars, followed by a meeting that Guillot’s university was hosting in Avignon.

  “You want to visit the Guillots?” I asked, horrified. “I can’t stand Albertine Guillot. Her dog urinated on our door this morning, and I slipped and fell right into it. Then we had an unpleasant confrontation at the desk downstairs and—”

  “Okay,” said Jason. “So I guess you don’t want to go to the meeting with me.”

  “Still,” I said, reconsidering, “the papal court was in Avignon for two hundred years. I’d like to see the papal palace. And then there’s the Albigenesian heresy to consider.”

  “The what?”

  So I had to tell Jason all about the new slant on Christianity that had arisen in southern France, and the Pope’s call for a crusade to put it down, and the French king and his knights riding off from Paris to attack various cities and fortresses in the south. “Southern France might have been a different country today if it weren’t for that crusade,” I said, finishing my explanat
ion.

  “So you do want to go?”

  “I don’t know. How long would it be? I don’t think I could stand a couple of weeks with the Guillots.”

  Jason sighed. “Then you don’t have to go.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want me to?” I asked suspiciously. “I suppose Sibyl will be there.”

  “I have no idea, and it’s obvious that I can’t win no matter what I say.” He stared at me as he finished off his melted ice cream. “Carolyn, you’re not going through menopause, are you?”

  “Of course I’m not,” I snapped, insulted. Then I had to wonder if I was. I’d never distrusted Jason before. But on the other hand, I was only in my forties. It was too early for menopause.

  Jason went to bed, and I sat down to write a column, but I didn’t get very far because I remembered a part of the Millay biography. Using food as a symbol for sex as it’s viewed in Christian cultures, she’d written a play about a society in which it was socially unacceptable to talk about food in public, and people only ate in private. The idea made me so uneasy that I didn’t want to write about food just then.

  After I’d closed my computer, column unfinished, I thought again about poor Paolina. Had her obsession with sex led to her murder, or was it her investigation of crime? I’d better not mention that thought to my husband. He had enough objections to my own investigations. Of course, I wasn’t an undercover agent. I was just a nosy faculty wife and writer about food. I decided to go to bed and listen to the wind hammering against the balcony doors until I fell asleep.

  Sleep brought me a terrible dream. The Christian Coalition or someone like that called for a boycott of my column because it said everyone knew what I was really writing about, and it wasn’t food. Then my book, Eating Out in the Big Easy, came out, and I was having a book signing when a crowd of angry ladies stormed in carrying signs about banning books on sex and chased me out into the parking lot, where the National Rifle Association, although how they got into it I can’t imagine, was hiding behind cars and taking shots at me. I had just narrowly missed death by dropping behind a Ford Explorer when a very loud explosion woke me up. The wind had blown the balcony doors open.