by Maria DiRico
Mia gestured with her thumb to the estate they were leaving behind them in a cloud of oyster shell dust. “I just met someone who makes him look sane as you or me. That’s the daughter. The father is a lush, the mother a nutcracker. But back to the daughter, Larkin. She loves her art in a way that she’d walk down the aisle with it if she could. And she’s crazy-angry at whoever stole the missing paintings.”
Jamie glanced at her. “Crazy enough to kill?”
Mia contemplated this. She replayed her time with Larkin Miller-Spaulding. She was off, no doubt about it. But was she all words and emotion? Or might her obsessive passion drive her to action? There was a word for how the disturbed young woman related to her family’s artwork. Mia hunted for it. Anthropomorphic. When people treated inanimate objects as living things.
“Yeah,” Mia said. “I think she’s crazy enough to kill.”
CHAPTER 11
Jamie dropped Mia off at Belle View. As she came inside, she saw a sight that horrified her: Ravello in the
Marina Ballroom, having what appeared to be a friendly chat with Triborough Tribune reporter Teri Fuoco. Mia stomped into the room in time to hear her father tell Teri as he gestured to the view through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Flushing Marina, “You won’t find a lovelier view at any catering hall in Queens.”
Teri seemed skeptical. “I dunno. Versailles on the Park has some pretty lit gardens.”
“You won’t find a lovelier view anywhere in Astoria.”
“That I can buy.”
Mia stormed up to the two. She planted her hands on her hips. “Sorry, Fuoco, we don’t offer our services to low-life reporters.”
“That’s discrimination,” Teri shot back at her.
Mia scowled at Teri, then addressed her father. “Dad, she’s the enemy.”
“Calm down, bella mia,” Ravello said. “I’m giving Miss Fuoco a tour of Belle View. I showed her the whole place. The whole place.” Mia picked up on the crafty tone in her father’s voice. “We even checked for bugs. The kind that spy on you, not the kind you don’t want to find in your food. We’re good on that score. But not so good on the other.”
Ravello reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out a handful of tiny listening devices. Mia fumed. “I knew that Benjy was a plant. No one can be that useless. Those effing Tuteras. They’re trying to get in on the catering action here.”
“Uh . . .” Teri, embarrassed, broke eye contact. She stared at the floor and pushed the carpet back and forth with the front of her sneaker. “He kinda is that useless. Those bugs are mine.”
Ravello looked down at Teri from his six-foot-three-inch height. “Tell us how they got here, dear.”
Mia recognized her father’s tone, threatening but couched with civility. She’d heard it herself many times when Ravello caught her trying to get away with something. There was no lying to him when he sounded like that.
“I told your new hire I was taking pictures for a wedding magazine and he let me go anywhere I wanted,” Teri blurted.
“Argh!” Furious, Mia shook a fist in the direction of Benjy/Cammie’s office. “I curse you, Benjy Tutera! No, I curse Vito Tutera for siccing his idiot grandson on us. I curse both of you!” She grabbed her father by his jacket lapels. “Dad, do something.”
Ravello took his daughter’s hands off his jacket and placed them by her side. “I’ll talk to Vito and see if he can find another job for him. But we cannot fire Benjy. At least, not yet.” He turned to Teri. “Did we miss any bugs?”
“No, sir,” she said. “I swear it.” Mia relished seeing the brash reporter intimidated for a change.
The three left the ballroom. Ravello returned to his office. Mia put a hand under Teri’s elbow and firmly directed her toward the exit. “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good-bye.”
Evans appeared from the kitchen area. He had on the jeans and white T-shirt he usually wore under his chef’s coat and was carrying a motorcycle helmet. “Mia, I found a non-dairy cake recipe for the bar mitzvah. I’m gonna shoot by a kosher grocery store and pick up the ingredients. I’ll make one tomorrow, and you can tell me what you think.”
“Sounds good.”
Teri stared at Evans with a glazed look on her face, then tilted her head and affected an expression that Mia assumed was the reporter’s attempt at flirting. “Hiiii . . .”
“Hey,” Evans said, heading for the door. “See y’all tomorrow.”
“Wait, wait!” Teri cried out. She scurried over to him. The reporter smoothed her hair and literally batted her eyes. Mia was transfixed. She felt like she’d fallen into a time tunnel and was watching some dame vamp in the nineteen-fifties. “Are you going anywhere near Ditmars Boulevard? Can I catch a ride?”
“Sure? You okay with riding on the back of a motorcycle?”
“ ‘Okay?’ Uh, yeah.” Teri flipped her hair back. “Love them. I am all about riding hogs.”
Please don’t make a motorcycle sound. I may not be able to control myself.
“Vroom, vroom,” Teri said, miming motorcycle bars. She winked at Evans. Mia burst into a laugh that she tried to disguise as a coughing fit. Teri shot her an angry side eye.
“I keep a spare helmet here,” Evans said, oblivious to Teri’s ham-fisted come-ons. “Hold on.”
Teri gawked as he went off to retrieve the helmet. “He is sooooo hot.”
“Catch a ride to Astoria?” Mia fixed her with a look. “Your car is in the parking lot.”
“I know. I’ll take a Pick-U-Up back here tomorrow to get it. Hey, I’ve never been on a motorcycle before. Is it scary?”
Due to Evans being Mia’s neighbor, he had given her a few heart-stopping rides home on the back of his bike. He drove as if the devil was after him and greeted every pothole with an adrenaline-pumped whoo hoo! “No,” Mia said. “It’s not scary at all.”
Evans reappeared. He tossed a helmet to Teri, who grabbed it and eagerly scurried after him.
Mia strode down the hall. She tapped Pete Dianopolis’s telephone number into her phone as she walked. He answered with an “I’m picking up Cammie’s dry cleaning, whaddya want?”
“I just wondered if you’d followed up on my lead regarding Castor Garvalos, his reaction to Tina’s death, and the possible illegal activity at Versailles on the Park.” I sound so like one of those TV lawyers, Mia thought, impressed with herself.
“I’m trying to remember when you joined NYPD as a lead detective. Oh, that’s right. Never. Son-of-a—I dropped a blouse. Don’t tell Cammie. Back to you. It just so happens that I have some news on that Garvalos lead you so helpfully provided.”
“You do?” Mia said, her body a-tingle with anticipation.
“Yeah,” Pete said, sounding smug. “He has an airtight alibi for the time of Tina Karras’s death. He was at a hospitality conference in Washington, DC. For three days. And on several panels.”
“Oh.” Mia’s first reaction was disappointment. Her second—how do I get on a panel at one of those conferences? “Thanks for letting me know, Pete. I appreciate it.”
“Sure.”
Pete sounded a little less smug. Mia picked up a different inflection in his tone. “There’s something else. What?”
“Nothing. I gotta go. Cammie needs her dry cleaning.”
“For work?” Mia, always hopeful, asked.
Pete burst out laughing. “Yeah, right.”
The call over, Mia walked into Cammie’s office, where she found Benjy behind the desk in Cammie’s office, absorbed in whatever he was typing that she was sure had nothing to do with his job at Belle View. “We need to talk.”
Benjy kept typing. “I’ll be with you in ten. I’m on a roll here.”
Mia stepped into the office and grabbed the keyboard out of his hands, eliciting an outraged yelp. “Look at me, not the computer screen.” Benjy fixed her with a sullen glare. Mia decided to try a different tack with him. “Benjy, have you ever had a job before?”
His angry expression faded. �
�No,” he confessed. “At least not outside the family. Grandpop pays me to take care of his computer. You know, updates, get rid of viruses. The stuff that man clicks on, I cannot tell you. I also help him with his smartphone. Oh, man, he’s always screaming at the thing. He says it’s not working. It works fine. He’s just always pressing the wrong buttons.”
Mia, thinking of her father and grandmother’s adversarial relationship with technology, had to smile at this. “I can relate. Look, you’re new to working in a business; my dad and I are new to running one. Let’s call a do-over to you starting work here. I’ll explain exactly what we need step-by-step, and you tell me whether you can do it. Here’s what we can offer: a flexible schedule with a lunch hour and breaks. If you have a conflict—”
“Like an open mic night at a comedy club? Cuz my act’s almost ready to try out at one of those.”
“Like an open mic night. We’ll do whatever we can to work around it. But—and this is huge—during your work hours, I need you to do exactly that. Work. For us. With a hundred percent attention on what you’re doing for us. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” Benjy said, sounding more resigned than enthusiastic.
Mia handed back the keyboard. “Good. I’ll give you a ten-minute break. There are just a few work hours left today. You can spend them doing whatever you haven’t done yet that I or anyone else here asked you to do. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mia cringed. “Ugh, I hate being called that. Just make it ‘Mia.’”
Mia finished her own workday by updating the Belle View website with photos of the setups she’d used to snag a meeting with the Millers. They were such an impressive ruse that they’d now be featured as real options for future customers. She sent out an e-blast to the facility’s mailing list to publicize the new additions and within minutes received event inquiries. She set up tours for the interested parties and then powered down.
She left her office and started down the hall. As she passed Benjy, she saw the young man typing slowly and looking miserable, which she took to mean he was finally doing his job. “Quittin’ time, Benjy.”
Relief flooded his face. “Thank you. I was trying to figure out how many glasses you get from a bottle of wine and then how many bottles you’d need for a hundred people and it’s so boring.”
This kid is not destined for a career in hospitality, Mia thought. But she gave him a thumbs-up and said, “Good work, buddy.”
She found Ravello on the phone in his office. His moony expression told her that Lin Yeung, his girlfriend was on the other end of the call, so she stepped back into the hallway to give her father privacy. When she was positive the call was over, she came into the office. She plopped down in the toile-print upholstered club chair with brass nail trim that faced Ravello’s desk. “I’m clocking out soon but wanted to tell you, nice job handling Teri. I think you scared her away for a while.”
“I’m not sure if away is the operative word here,” Ravello said. “I saw her zoom off on the back of Evans’s bike.”
“Yeah, that’s a new one. But at least if she comes around, it’ll be for a different reason than trying to drag our butts through the fire.”
“True.” Ravello threaded his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. “How’d it go at the Miller place today?”
Mia raised her eyebrows. “Place couldn’t be a more casual way to describe it. You know those houses on steroids people built when they had buckets of money back in the olden days? This was one of those. And like, three people live there. It’s nuts. But,” she acknowledged, “it’s drop-dead gorgeous.”
“Did you find out anything interesting?”
“That if you’re super rich, you can act any way you want, which I kind of already know from the place I worked in Palm Beach, Korri Designs, home to the world’s most overpriced leather goods. Larkin, the daughter who runs the Collection, is definitely off. Obsessed with the art to the point where I can see how she might kill, either from rage or to protect it. By the way, she invited me to an exhibit opening to see how the Collection functions as an event space. If she’s not the murderer, I think we have a shot at getting some work from her.”
Ravello pursed his lips as he considered this. “Bella mia, Mia bella. I understand why it’s important to you to help Linda and Nicole. I’m fond of them, too. But I want to make sure you’re taking precautions.”
“I am, Dad. Jamie was with me at the Millers, on call the whole time I was there.” Mia stood up. She lapped the room as she spoke. “I’m not just doing this for the Kar-rases. I’m doing it for Belle View. The painting being found, Tina’s body being found . . . both of those things happened here. In a way we’re lucky Pete thinks it’s a crime of passion, ex-wife versus current wife, but still, I feel like we’re being used. And that ticks me off.”
“Agreed. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
The two fell silent, each absorbed in speculation about the crime. Mia flashed back to Castor Garvalos’s reaction to the news of Tina’s death. “There’s this guy, Castor Garvalos. He’s the G.M. at Versailles on the Park.”
“Fancy.” Ravello said this with a sardonic smile.
“He had a huge reaction to Tina’s death, which I found very suspicious. But Pete just told me that he’s got an airtight alibi for her time of death, so the cops won’t be digging around for more dirt on him, I guess, at least not right now. In other news, Garvalos is dying to buy Belle View. Says he has an investor, I thought it might be Vito and that he planted Benjy here to run the place down to get a better price for it—” Ravello burst out laughing. He roared until he wheezed. “What?” Mia said, insulted. “It’s not like that couldn’t have happened.”
“I’m sorry.” Tears rolled down Ravello’s cheeks. He laughed so hard that he stopped making noise. His body simply shook. After a minute, he regained control. “It’s thinking of that boy Benjy being part of a devious plot. I have to tell Vito. He’ll find it hysterical.”
“Don’t give him any ideas.”
“Good point.” Ravello pulled a tissue from a box and blew his nose. “Back to this Versailles guy. Thoughts?”
“Tina threw Nicole’s gonzo shower at Versailles. Garvalos almost passed out when I told him Tina died. I don’t care what Pete says, there’s some connection there, but I don’t know what. Ooh, I have an idea. I’ll be right back.” Mia dashed to her office, grabbed her cell phone, and ran back to Ravello. “I’m gonna call Garvalos and tell him that you and I talked, and you’re open to meeting with him to hear his offer on Belle View, but he has to come here. That way we’ll get him to the scene of the crime, so to speak. And you can meet him and see what you think.”
“I like it.”
Mia scrolled through her call history and found the general manager’s cell number. She entered it. “Huh. It’s like someone answered and then hung up. I’ll try again.” She reentered the number. “Now I’m blocked.”
Ravello put an elbow on the desk and rested his chin on his fist. “From wanting to buy Belle View to blocking you. Hmmm.”
“Look up the general number for Versailles,” Mia said. “I’ll try going through that.”
Ravello looked up the number and read it to her. She entered it in her phone. After working her way through the voicemail options, she finally heard a human voice. “Will Longwood, acting general manager. How can I help you?”
“Yes, hi. I’d like to speak to Castor Garvalos. I met with him to talk about Versailles’ event packages and I have a few questions.”
“He’s not here and won’t be available for a few days.”
Mia raised an eyebrow at this news. “Really? Is he okay?”
“I’m sure he will be. But he’s in the hospital.”
This news initiated a raise of both eyebrows. “The hospital? Wow. I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
His replacement paused, and then said, “Someone conked him on the back of the head. He’s got a pretty bad co
ncussion.”
“Conked on the back of the head?” Mia repeated this for Ravello’s benefit, who responded with an eyebrow raise of his own. “That’s terrible.” She held the phone slightly away from her ear so Ravello could listen in. “Do the police know what happened?”
“If they do, they’re not telling us. Everyone here thinks it was a robbery attempt gone wrong.” Suddenly remembering he had a potential client on the phone, the acting G.M. returned to a professional tone, “But I’ll be happy to answer all your questions.”
“Oh, someone just walked into my office. I’ll call you back.” Mia ended the call.
“So, this Garvalos character was attacked,” Ravello said. “That’s an interesting development.”
“You know it. And I didn’t see it coming.” Mia knit her brow. “Hmmm . . . Garvalos takes one to the head. Justine Cadeau, the art dealer at Nicole’s shower, turns out to have been a party crasher, and now she’s disappeared. Both things happen after Garvalos and Cadeau learned Tina was killed. She seems to have a bad effect on people, both in life and death.”
“Hmmm . . .” Ravello drummed his fingers on the desk. “Tina Karras was a flight attendant. I wonder what airline she flew for. And whether she worked international flights.”
“Good questions, Dad.”
Mia’s cell rang. She checked and saw an unfamiliar number. “I wonder if Garvalos is calling back from a burner phone.” She answered the call. “Mia Carina.”
“Hey,” a man responded. “This is Liam O’Dwyer. I hear you have some questions for me.”
“Liam O’Dwyer,” Mia repeated for her father’s benefit. The sole captured member of the Miller Art Collection heist gang had gotten back to her. Ravello gave her a triumphant thumbs-up. “Thank you so much for getting in touch. I’d love to talk to you. When are you free?”
“If it’s not too last minute, I can meet tonight. I just got off work.”
“That would be great. Where do you work?”
“Manhattan. I’m a security guard at the Rockwood Museum of Art.”