by Maria DiRico
“You mean they flip the houses for profit. Let me see.” Mia scampered halfway down the stoop stairs and opened the chain link gate to the front garden. She bent down next to Elisabetta behind the Virgin Mary and borrowed the binoculars. What she saw didn’t please her. A definite “city type” of a woman pointing to the blueprint that a man who appeared to be a contractor was holding. The woman tossed a dismissive gesture at Rose’s sturdy but unprepossessing two-family home. Mia handed the binoculars back to her grandmother. “Let’s not panic . . . yet.”
Mia decided to mix things up by taking the bus to work. Transportation charges were adding up and she didn’t want Jamie dropping everything to chauffeur her around, which she was afraid he might do. The last thing Mia wanted was to distract him from his studies. The bus meandered its way to Belle View, passing homes that hadn’t been touched in sixty years and ones gussied up by gentrifying new arrivals. The bus lumbered onto a commercial block that told the same tale. A poster slapped over the faded lettering of a butcher shop trumpeted the summer opening of a store with two words Mia never expected to see in the same sentence in Astoria: vegan gelato.
The bus eventually deposited her a block or so away from Belle View. When she got to the catering manor, she went straight to Ravello’s office, where she found him finishing up a phone call. As she waited, she noticed a glass vase filled with an arrangement of pale lavender flowers and baby’s breath on his desk. Her father must have paid a visit to his florist “friend.” “Okay, Detective Hinkle,” he said into the phone. Mia’s stomach lurched at the word detective. “Thanks for the update,” Ravello continued. “I appreciate it.” He ended the call, got up, and came around his desk to give his daughter a kiss. “Ciao, sweetheart.”
“What’s up? Why were you on the phone with Hinkle?”
“Trying to find out if there’s any new intel on the check they found with the body. Nothing yet.”
“You know forensics will show that the million dollars is written in someone else’s handwriting.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Ravello gave a defeated shrug. “A guy like me, they’re always gonna be looking for something.”
“Well, then, boy, are they in for a disappointment when they find nothing,” Mia said with vehemence.
“I’m sorry, bella.”
“For what?”
Ravello threw his arms open. “This. All of it. I never would have dragged you back from Florida for an incubo, a nightmare.”
“Okay, first of all, you didn’t ‘drag me back’ from Florida. I was so done with that place. And second, this isn’t a nightmare. I mean, it’s not not a nightmare, but we’ve been through worse. You doing time, you and Mom splitting up, me and the whole Adam thing. You being framed for murder? It’s nothing. Okay, maybe not nothing, but at least not something we can’t get through together.”
Ravello, his eyes misty, gazed at his daughter with affection. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Don’t be proud of me yet. Save it for when this whole . . . incubo . . . is over.”
Mia gave her father a supportive hug, then went to her office. A red light blinked on the desk telephone, alerting her to messages. She pressed a button and played them back.
“Hello, this is Ira Metzger. We have a bar mitzvah booked for August thirteenth. I’m calling to say we won’t need the facility anymore. . . .”
“Hi, we had my daughter’s quinceañera scheduled for July ninth. We wanted to let you know you can release that date . . .”
“Hey there, I’m calling about the retirement party we were planning to throw on June fourteenth . . .”
Mia groaned and collapsed into her chair. Angie’s murder had put a malocchio—a curse—on Belle View.
It took a few hours but by making a rash of promises Mia had no idea if she could make good on, she managed to save the bar mitzvah and quinceañera. As to the retirement party, it turned out the honoree had passed away in his sleep. Mia convinced the man’s boss to turn the event into a celebration of his late employee’s life, thus salvaging the third event. After she finished the last phone call, she leaned back and closed her eyes, exhausted. She shook it off and stood up. “I’m going to lunch,” she called to her father, then realized he was probably already at Roberto’s, digging into their special of the day. She factored in how long it would take by bus to get to and from the cell phone store where Chris Tinker worked and called a cab. I really have to learn how to drive, she thought to herself as she waited for her ride.
The cab deposited Mia in front of a store that had once been Kidz Town, a children’s clothing store, and now housed an authorized dealership for a range of cell phones. She looked inside. The shop was empty of customers. Chris Tinker lolled against a counter, checking his phone. He wore a light blue polo shirt with the store’s logo on the breast pocket. Mia faltered for a moment. Then she repeated a mantra that her Miami yoga instructor had her students repeat at the end of each class—I am smart, I am strong, I am all I need to be—and stepped inside the store. “Hi. Chris, right?”
Chris looked confused and then it came to him. “The girl from Belle View. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you right at first.”
“No worries. It can be weird seeing someone out of context.” Chris responded with a blank look. Mia got the feeling he had maxed out on his intellectual potential. “You mentioned at the bachelor party that you worked at this phone store.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.” Mia knew Chris had too few specific memories of the night to call her bluff. “I’ve been thinking about getting a new cell phone and thought I’d see what you’re selling here.”
“Cool.” Chris picked up the exact phone Mia already owned. “We’ve got a great data plan going with the model. If you add an extra line, which you don’t even have to use, you get rollover minutes that you can apply to a credit or your balance . . .”
Tinker droned on with the kind of cell-phone-sales-speak that made Mia’s eyes cross. She pretended to listen and understand what he was talking about while looking for an opportunity to steer the conversation to the bachelor party. “I like the whole data thing you’re talking about. I burned through a lot of it at the bachelor party, dealing with everything that was going on.” Mia affected her best dim Barbie doll attitude. She leaned toward Chris and said in a stage whisper, “Can you believe what happened that night?”
Chris hesitated. Then he said, also in a stage whisper, “Can you keep a secret?” He didn’t wait for Mia to nod yes. “John and me knew that chick, the one in the fake cake. We ran into her at this bar in the city—”
“Queens is the city.”
“I’m talking about Manhattan, the real city. She came on to us and John made out with her a little— you know, getting it out of his system before the wedding—and she invited him home with her. But when he found out she was a hooker, he passed. I mean, he’s got Alice. Why pay for what you can get for free, right?”
Mia was saved from calling him out on his sexist attitude by a customer entering the store. As Chris went over to offer help, Mia was struck by his odd gait, which she hadn’t noticed at the bachelor party when he was staggering drunk. He walked duck-footed, as her mother would call it, with his feet facing out at a forty-five-degree angle. Mia flashed on a memory. When she was eight, her mother enrolled her in ballet classes, which Mia loved, and beauty pageants, which she hated but Gia loved. The two extra-curriculars proved antithetical to each other because the dance classes gave her the duck-footed gait that so many ballerinas had once they got offstage, the result of spending years in first position. Since this was not the stride of a pageant winner, the ballet classes went away. Mia recalled with smug satisfaction how the pageants went away when she was eight, after she reached the end of a runway during the Little Miss Astoria contest, pulled down her pants, and mooned the audience.
While Chris waited on the customer, Mia pretended to browse. She mulled over the new information he’d shared. What if Angie approached John a second time and he didn�
��t pass on the chance for a premarital fling? Could she have pulled a version of the stunt she tried to pull on Ravello? Coitus first with John, an unexpected bill later. Angie showed up on the same night as the bachelor party. Was that coincidence or a plan?
She wandered back to the counter, where Chris was completing a transaction. “If you’re paying cash there’s a five-dollar service fee on all prepaid telephone cards,” he told his customer, a feral-looking guy whose twitchy behavior indicated a drug problem. Mia instantly recognized Chris’s scam. Someone bought a prepaid phone card; he entered the legitimate amount into the store’s system while pocketing the cash “service fee.” The corporation never saw a “service fee” charge to question and the clients doing business in cash weren’t the type to ask questions. She knew several Family wannabes who had run this racket, “service fee-ing” themselves into designer duds and pricey wheels. Higher-ups like her father didn’t take too kindly to these low-levels blatantly bilking the poor.
A new angle to Angie’s murder occurred to her. Being that Angie was a lady of the evening, Mia assumed she ran an all-cash business. What if she’d tried to buy a phone card from Chris, caught on to what he was doing and one grifter to another, demanded a piece of the action to keep her mouth shut?
Chris’s dubious customer darted out of the store and he turned his attention back to Mia. “So, where were we? Would you like to continue this conversation over lunch? I can hang up the CLOSED sign and we can go over to Roberto’s Trattoria. They have great daily specials. A daily special for a girl who’s special daily.” Chris punctuated this lame line with a suggestive grin and a wiggle of his eyebrows.
“I know Roberto’s. My father eats lunch there every day. Maybe you’ve met him. Ravello Carina?”
Chris’s eyebrows froze, and his grin disappeared. “You’re—you’re—Ravello Carina’s daughter?”
Mia flashed an angelic smile. “Yes. He’s Belle View’s new owner and my very overprotective daddy.”
Beads of sweat sprouted on Tinker’s forehead. “Uh . . .” He typed away furiously on a computer. Mia peeked and noticed he wasn’t even writing actual words. “Hey, I found a great special. The phone is free, and so is everything that comes with it. You can’t beat that, huh? Please tell me you can’t beat that.”
A half hour later, Mia ambled toward the exit carrying two bags that included a new phone plus every available accessory; she didn’t even know what some of them did. “Thanks, Chris. Oh, and you might want to knock off that ‘service fee’ scam of yours. My father wouldn’t be too happy about it.” She left the store before Chris could respond.
Mia decided she’d earned herself a treat. She popped into La Guli Pasticceria, a Ditmars Boulevard institution. She was enveloped by the scents of sugar, vanilla, anise, chocolate, and a dozen other delicious pastry aromas as soon as she stepped inside. Each scent brought back memories of every family event she went to before moving to Palm Beach; all featured an array of La Guli’s delicious Italian sweets.
“Ciao, Mia,” Julie, the woman behind the counter greeted her. Julie, a buxom woman in her sixties, had been filling the Carina family’s orders and stomachs for decades. “Welcome home. What can I get you?”
“Ciao, Julie. Let me see. So many choices.” Mia perused the dark wooden cases, original to the eighty-plus-year-old store. They were filled with a dazzling assortment of cookies and pastries: biscotti, butter, pignoli, and tri-color cookies, sfogliatelle, mille foglie, and of course, cannoli shells, some dipped in chocolate, some not, all waiting to be filled with sweet, fresh ricotta cream and dotted with tiny chocolate chips. “Let me have a cookie assortment to bring back to Belle View. And a cannoli for me.”
“You got it.” Julie pulled out an empty cannoli shell and piped it full of filling. She dipped the ends into chocolate chips, then handed the cannoli to Mia, who bit into it. Heaven. “I heard your dad took over Belle View. That’s a very, very good thing.”
Something about the way Julie said this sent an alert to Mia. “I think so, but I’m his daughter. Why do you?”
“The guy who he got it from? Bad news. His name was Boris or Bouras or something. My cousin went to an event there, a twenty-first birthday party, and she said the guy was a lowlife who was running the place into the ground. Of course, being that it was a twenty-first birthday party, everyone was too blasted to notice. But my cousin, she noticed. Anyway, we’re all glad it’s back in good hands.”
“Thanks, Julie. What do I owe you?”
“Nothing. Consider it a business-warming present.”
Mia was about to argue when her cell phone rang. She hastily ate the last bite of cannoli, then dug her phone out of her purse. She recognized Guadalupe’s number. “Hi, what’s up?”
“You need to get back to Belle View.” Guadalupe’s voice sounded strained. “The police are here. They cornered Giorgio, who stopped by to pick up his check.”
“I’m on my way.”
Mia thanked Julie, grabbed the cookie assortment, and typed in a rideshare request as she raced out the door. When she got to the catering hall, she ran inside and was greeted by the sight of Detectives Dianopolis and Hinkle leading a handcuffed Giorgio out of the main kitchen. He looked more angry than terrified, and Mia got the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d found himself in cuffs. “I told you a million times, I didn’t kill the chick.”
Dianopolis snorted. “You’re in the system, Giorgio. We got your prints on the check. Seems to me like you did it, right, Hinkle?”
“Right,” Hinkle said through a yawn.
“Close the book, my friend Giorgio, ’cuz that’s all she wrote,” Pete said. “Ooh, good line. I gotta put it in one of my mysteries.”
“No, no, you’re wrong,” Giorgio insisted. “Yeah, I tried to frame Carina, but I swear on my own grave, I did not kill that girl.”
“Lucky for you, they axed the death penalty in this state. But my partner and I have made our peace with that. We’ll be happy with a nice life sentence without the possibility of parole.”
Now Giorgio looked terrified.
Chapter Ten
Mia stepped aside to let the detectives pass with their charge. Then she ran into the kitchen, where she found Guadalupe and Evans.
“Are those from La Guli?” Guadalupe asked. She took the assortment from Mia and ripped open the cellophane. “Excellent. I need to do some stress eating.”
“And here’s a new cell phone,” Mia said. “I’m fine with the one I have. Take whatever you want.” She emptied the bags from Chris’s store onto the counter. “Tell me everything that happened.”
“Like the detective said, Giorgio was already in the system,” Guadalupe said, her mouth stuffed with cookies.
“Yes. Pick up the story from there.”
“They took him into your father’s office, which backs up against the wall next to the oven, so I can hear everything.”
“If she holds a cup to the wall and listens through it,” Evans chimed in. He held up a phone accessory. “I need a new case. Can I have this?”
“All yours.”
“I’ll take the phone,” Guadalupe said. She opened the box and looked inside. “Oooh, it’s rose gold. Pretty. Where were we?”
“Holding a cup to the wall,” Mia prompted, “You heard everything. Then what?”
“Giorgio told the cops that our man Cody asked him to make sure the stripper was in the pop-out cake, and when he looked inside it, he saw Angie. He figured out she was dead and saw an opportunity to frame your dad.”
Mia scrunched her face, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. “Why? Why would he want to frame Dad?”
“Turns out Giorgio is the nephew of Andre Bouras,” Evans said. “The guy who had to give up this place to your dad as payment for some serious gambling debts.”
Her face cleared. “Ah. Giorgio was trying to get revenge on his uncle’s behalf.”
Guadalupe nodded. “He ran down to Ravello’s office and found a check
Ravello had signed but not filled out. He wrote in a number, then dropped it in the cake next to Angie.”
Note to self: get a better lock for Dad’s door. Second note to self: tell Dad never, ever do that check thing again. And possibly have him tested for early onset dementia.
“Plus,” Guadalupe continued, “it also turns out Giorgio has a rap sheet. Small stuff, shoplifting, disorderly conduct. But it put him in the system.”
Third note to myself: never take another employee recommendation from the catering place that recommended Giorgio.
“So,” Guadalupe said, “the police came, then left with Giorgio. I guess that’s it. Murder solved.”
“Right.”
Guadalupe eyed her. “You don’t sound convinced.”
Mia sighed. She picked up a chocolate biscotti, put it down, then picked it up again. “Since I touched it, I guess I have to eat it.” She took a bite and chewed. Guadalupe poured her a glass of milk and she took a few sips. “Here’s the thing. I’ve spent my whole life watching people lie. My father, my brother, their friends, their ‘associates,’ other relatives. This has given me kind of a superpower to separate lies from the truth. The cops were bringing Giorgio out when I was coming in. I heard them say they had his prints on the check, which was stupid on his part, but makes sense if a person makes an impulse move to frame someone. But I didn’t hear the cops say anything about his prints on the knife—you know, the murder weapon. Giorgio thought to wipe off the weapon and then blew it by not doing the same for the check? While I’m happy to see the heat off my father, any halfway decent lawyer will point out that this is a big hole in the police’s case. Giorgio said he dropped the check in the cake to get back at my dad and denied killing Angie. I think he was telling the truth when he said both those things.”
Guadalupe and Evans exchanged a look. “Then if Giorgio isn’t the killer,” Guadalupe said, “who is?”
Mia threw up her hands. “I wish I knew. Because as soon as Giorgio’s released for lack of evidence, the heat is right back on my father.”