Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  I shifted my weight again, not sure where this was going. “Why should we?”

  “Because it just keeps getting in the way.”

  I looked at the grass. “You’ve been a pretty good lawyer so far.” Oh, Eve.

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about. But you should get yourself another lawyer.”

  Suddenly we were both stepping closer and scowling at each other. The kind of scowl that can take off in interesting directions. I think there was a scowl before the firmament popped up and gases cooled into planets.

  “I don’t want another lawyer,” I said, pressing my lips together. “I want you.” I was pretty sure I was the only one of the two of us who knew I was really talking about two different things. Although the blush jumping right off my face might have sold me out.

  And then Joe Beck slowly leaned in closer as we stood there with our hands on our hips in the gentle June sunlight. In the second before he kissed me, our eyes locked and we grinned at each other. I had a bad moment wondering if that’s as far as we were going to get, nuzzling a nose, feeling the warm breath, that close, then stepping away. After all, it was Eve and Joe, and anything could not happen. We had a history of no history.

  Then a car with a blown muffler roared by. Kids with sticks went yelling through neighboring weeds. A black-and-gold dragonfly buzzed us. When it came, it felt light and playful and sure and earnest, that kiss. Forget distant galaxies and ocean depths and subatomic whatnot. Everything I wanted to know lay in that point of intersection. That kiss. And my hand flew up to the side of his face.

  “No more fake kisses,” he said softly, remembering, I guess, a month ago when we faked our way through a clinch in a tough spot when a patrol car cruised by.

  Time for the truth. “They never were,” I told him.

  His fingers found the small of my back—too soon to tell him how delicious that was—and pulled me just a little bit closer. “Good to know.”

  “Good to know.”

  “So’s this.” We were standing so close maybe the dragonfly could have found a path between us, but nothing bigger.

  All ten of my fingertips tapped his chest. “You called me honey.” Oh, sure, Angelotta, throw that in his face.

  His hands cupped my elbows, and then the man got serious. “I was holding back.”

  “Never hold back.”

  An eyebrow shot up. “I got the cat food,” he said suddenly, and sure enough, in those seconds before we kissed again, he dangled a brown paper bag, which thumped lightly against my back as his arms went around me.

  “I got the cat,” I said, my voice husky, and I wondered what we were talking about, as I held him tight. The bag fell to the ground. I like a man who’s got his priorities straight.

  * * *

  Banking kisses for that rainy day, Joe ended up asking me to that fancy lawyers’ fancy dinner dance on July 5th. I, of course, blurted, “But I thought you were taking Kayla!” After we cleared up that she was coming over earlier that evening just to drop off his weekly share of produce, I accepted the invitation and we got down to work, turning to red-wine spritzers and hard-copy info that could conceivably hold clues to Anna Tremayne’s death.

  Joe lingered over the Belfiere material. Georgia/Anna had made a list of members’ names, when she knew them, maybe half of the total fifty in the society. Maria Pia might recognize more of them—pretty soon, a little too up close and personal, unless I could persuade her to stay out of their clutches. Studying the list hard, I cottoned on to a startling omission: Belladonna Russo herself, mother of Fina Parisi, and—if you want to believe Maria Pia Angelotta—biggest strega in the Tri-State Area. I hadn’t seen her at Miracolo the other night, and Georgia/Anna hadn’t jotted down her name. Joe declared the list “a start,” in case the evidence pointed conclusively in that direction.

  Then there was the rest of Georgia/Anna’s material on Belfiere. Jottings by the names of the members she was able to identify. She talks about the difference between chanterelle mushrooms and false chanterelles like she’s experimented! How?? Worse yet, who?? Another: Something about “harvesting” botulinum toxin. Sick, sick, sick. Another: Overheard her speculating whether the glycoalkaloid poison in potato leaves and stems could be introduced in large enough amounts to kill. And on and on.

  Then there were pages of notes . . . for an exposé on Belfiere. Notes of early questions for herself. Should I go for a few shorter articles blowing this club of ghouls wide open? Or is it more effective to do a book-length thing? Can I fool them enough to get into a position of more power—could give me access to files, photos, stories?? The word Pursue was underlined twice. And then, underlined three times: What’s the danger?

  Also in the file were letters from a couple of big publishers. Joe and I raised our eyebrows at each other. Anna had already been going semipublic, with what looked like a book proposal. Both publishers expressed interest in seeing more on her exposé titled Be Careful What You Eat: The Criminal Life of a Secret Society of Chefs. “Dear Ms. Tremayne,” went one, “Your account of the possibly criminal history and practices of Belfiere, a secret cooking society, is compelling. As a Belfiere insider, you are certainly in a position of authority. However, we would need to see a table of contents and sample chapters in order to get a better feel for . . .”

  I held the letters in my hand and stared at them.

  I recalled a line from my nonna’s invitation to join Belfiere. In all things pertaining to Belfiere you must observe omertà.

  Omertà. The code of silence.

  Had Fina Parisi and Belfiere known about Anna T.’s book proposal, an exposé that was “blowing this club of ghouls wide open”? Anna Tremayne had violated omertà in even giving the publishers a brief taste of the sorts of accusations she was making against Belfiere, let alone spilling it all over the course of three hundred shocking pages, which could lead to who knew how many criminal investigations? Oh, Anna.

  Was this why she was killed?

  13

  Munching mint sprigs and contentedly sipping the rest of our spritzers, we studied the couple of restaurant reviews Georgia had written as Anna. Anything there? Possibly. One, Diavolo, in Short Hills, New Jersey, I remember hearing flopped maybe a couple of years ago—thanks to Anna’s acerbic review? Another, Magritte, in midtown Manhattan, shrank to nothing and closed its doors around the same time—thanks to Anna’s tepid review?

  Joe suggested trying to find connections between Belfiere members—female superchefs—and restaurants doomed by Anna Tremayne. This would take some plodding, but I agreed it made sense. We split up Georgia/Anna’s list of Belfiere members, so we each had a dozen names to try to tie to any of the restaurants Anna had dissed in print.

  The problem with discovering a motive for Anna Tremayne’s murder was that it became kind of a wonder she had survived as long as she had, between exposés and damaging restaurant reviews.

  We were just starting to pass the hard copies from Georgia’s personal file back and forth when my phone rang. It was Detective Sally Fanella, who told me the CSI folks would be out of Miracolo late Sunday, when the crime-scene tape would come down. We could reopen for the dinner business on Monday. All good news. Joe looked at me quizzically, and I gave him a thumbs-up. But maybe I was too hasty.

  “Your cousin,” went on Sally Fanella, “Landon Angelotta.”

  Landon . . . “I called and left him a message about checking in with you at the station.”

  “Right. Well, you may have done what you were supposed to”—she took a big authoritative breath—“but he has not.”

  “Oh,” I said kind of faintly, “I’m sure he—”

  “Which,” she overrode me, “beyond a certain point, makes him a person of interest.”

  * * *

  Joe Beck took off to start trying to make connections between Belfiere members and fa
iled restaurants. Me, I brooded about Landon. “A person of interest.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. How could my beloved cousin be at all implicated in this woman’s death? Although, to be fair, he had been acting weird ever since he clapped eyes on her the day she started at Miracolo.

  Jealous because she seemed that good in the kitchen? Aggravated that I hadn’t consulted him on the new hire? Just plain cramped by another sous chef on site, even if temporarily? No, no, no. I knew Landon almost as well as I knew myself, and he was never jealous about anybody else’s kitchen skills, and he pretty much stayed aloof from the actual running of Miracolo.

  But there was something.

  And I just couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

  In the meantime, I was twenty-four hours away from what I could only think of as the point of no return—Maria Pia’s induction into Belfiere. Was Nonna more likely to become like them, these dangerously secretive poisoners . . . or to become the vulnerable new Anna Tremayne, someone appalled by Belfiere, someone committed to bringing it down? I climbed out of my blue butterfly chair and gazed at the weak sunlight far across the yard, glimmering through the trees. About my nonna, I couldn’t feel what was true, but I knew she was at risk, either way.

  So that gave me twenty-four hours to figure out how I was going to infiltrate her induction into the mah-jongg club at Fina Parisi’s home on Gallows Hill Drive.

  * * *

  Certain things I knew for sure.

  Notwithstanding the lovely kisses, Joe Beck was not going to approve of the plan. So I wasn’t going to give him the opportunity.

  Landon would be a great undercover agent but I couldn’t smoke him out.

  Choo Choo was never inconspicuous, so that let him out of the evening’s agenda.

  Aside from Paulette Coniglio, there was no one else I trusted. I might get to that point with Mrs. Crawford, but we weren’t there yet. So I called Paulette, who was in the middle of getting her roots done, and laid out the plan for her, which she approved in principle. It wasn’t a question of getting her to come along with me—on that score, I had decided it was wise to travel light—no, I needed her to do an emergency sewing job: running up a second Belfiere gown in midnight-blue satin . . . this time, for me. She declared the assignment “easy peasy,” and thrilled to the challenge of fashioning the “extraordinarily silly” silver mask.

  Over the next twenty-four hours, Joe called to report that Milo, his assistant, had made a tentative link between one of the Belfiere members—an Elodie Tichinoff—and Magritte, the failed Manhattan eatery. Apparently, Elodie’s son Dimitri was head chef there, although he didn’t own a piece of it. I made encouraging noises at Joe—the kind that lead in the direction of more research, not the bedroom—and told him I was, well, ordering a new outfit (true). Keeping me terrific company during this time was Abbie, who was exploring the few surfaces in my little Tumbleweed, settling on the window seat as the choice place for general lounging and luxuriating.

  Choo Choo checked in with me to let me know he had picked up Nonna from her one-day getaway at the Sisters of St. Margaret Retreat Center, and would drop her off later at Fina Parisi’s place for the Belfiere induction. Just far enough up the road that she could appear to be arriving on foot and alone. Count on Choo Choo Bacigalupo to figure the angles.

  Maria Pia herself called me, high on whole grains and meditation, just to touch base. When she mentioned something vague about being interested in trying a “cleanse” after the induction was behind her, I came close to telling her the induction itself might produce the same effect. But I told myself, I’d be her own personal “special ops,” on hand to keep an undercover eye on her so she wouldn’t fall afoul of any of the highly suspicious Belfiere activities that were afoot. Afoul and afoot. Even my language was changing . . .

  I oohed and ahhed at everything Nonna told me, so as not to tickle her flawless antennae for grandchild crap. Nothing new to exchange about the police investigation into Georgia Payne’s death. Yes, yes, business as usual as of Monday morning, when Miracolo could reopen. After such a momentous evening at Fina Parisi’s, Maria Pia was planning on arriving at Miracolo a couple of hours later than usual (I mouthed “Yes!” at Abbie, who blinked with perfect feline understanding).

  And then I remembered. “Nonna, before you go, Georgia Payne wasn’t her real name.”

  “Who?” she barked. So much for whole grains and meditation. Nonna was back.

  “Georgia. The dead woman. The victim.”

  “Yes?” she said in a clipped, get-on-with-it way. “Yes?”

  “Georgia’s real name was Anna Tremayne.” Start her out small. “I understand she was a chef.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” she replied. My nonna was a woman who believed—maddeningly—that if she didn’t know something already, then it wasn’t worth knowing, that it was inconsequential and possibly subject to review by a team of experts. “But the name . . .” she said in a high, vague way. “What did you say it was again?”

  “Anna Tremayne.”

  She hummed. “Rings a bell, Eve. I’ve heard it before, but I can’t remember where.” Then, she tried it out again: “Tremayne.”

  Just then I heard an insistent rap at the front door. But Maria Pia’s comment was interesting to me. If she didn’t recognize the name Anna Tremayne from the culinary world—where, then? Georgia Payne she didn’t know. But Anna Tremayne—maybe she did. And not from their lives as chefs.

  At the same time, we both said, “Gotta go,” and hung up.

  Paulette Coniglio brushed past me into my tiny home, muttering something Paulette-ish, like, “Good thing you’re not claustrophic.” In her arms she carried a dark, shimmering garment that could only be my disguise. She chucked her purse into my one club chair and did a quick survey of the premises, remarking, “You got a cat.”

  “It’s Georgia’s.”

  “Ah.” Her face was burnished with the June sun, and the color job on her hair looked expensive and expert. Why things had never worked out between her and my deadbeat dad—other than the fact that he was my deadbeat dad—I’ll never know. I’d swear she was still carrying a torch for the guy, long after I, the daughter, the only child, had personally given up on him, but she always pushed off my comments on this score. And pushing off the comments usually entailed thwacking me playfully with a white linen napkin from Miracolo.

  Paulette worked out religiously and dropped a pretty penny on personal grooming just, I think, to keep from looking not a day older than the last time she’d seen the wayward Jock Angelotta, seventeen years ago. Just to be prepared for that inevitable moment when he’d walk back into the restaurant, fall to his knees, and beg for her forgiveness.

  Where he’d stand on my forgiveness was not, I think, part of her fantasy. She was that kind of faithful woman that beggars common sense, a woman who keeps the home fires burning long, long after the worthless man has stopped thinking about the home, the fires, or the woman herself. “So,” she asked, shaking out the voluminous robe she had “run up” on her machine, “are you going to try this on? I haven’t got all day.”

  I slipped into the Belfiere robe, tried retracting my tattoo-less wrist up inside the long sleeves—success!—and twirled the stick she had glued to the right side of the “extraordinarily silly” silver masks we had seen times fifty just the other night at Maria Pia’s dinner. Paulette had fashioned a great fake, what with silver spray paint and glitter. I held it up to my face. “How do I look?”

  “As flat-out creepy as all the others.”

  I lowered the mask. “Then I’ll fit in just fine.”

  Paulette turned me in pushy little half-circles, eyeballing her work. Then she cast a quick look of concern at me. “All you can hope for tonight at Fina Parisi’s House of Belfiere Horrors,” she said, her broad, pretty lips stretched out thin, “is that no one’s counting heads”—s
he gave me a tight hug—“and that their crazy mugs are hidden the whole time by their masks. She held me at arm’s length and fixed me with a hard, bright smile, “Otherwise, darling, you’re up the Amazon without a fly swatter.”

  * * *

  You know the scene toward the end of The Wizard of Oz when the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion—Toto, too, I think—fall in behind the Wicked Witch’s soldiers as they march across the footbridge and into her castle? That’s precisely how I felt when I drifted into a loose cluster of robed Belfiereans converging on the home of Fina Parisi. From my reconnaissance point about one hundred feet down Gallows Hill Drive I had watched Choo Choo pull up—still driving Junior Bevilacqua’s limo—and dispense our nonna, who batted away his attempt at kisses and headed up the long driveway.

  I waited until she was far enough ahead of me and Choo Choo had eased on down the road to lock up the Volvo, slip the key into a tiny waist pack strapped underneath the gown, and follow the robed Maria Pia into what I could only think of as potential hell but with a fabulous menu, if you overlook the alleged poisons.

  But at 9:55, just after nightfall, what kind of late-night goodies or diabolical food games was Fina planning? Why did my mind keep skulking around the words human sacrifice? Maybe Maria Pia Angelotta wasn’t really here so much to be inducted as offered up to the Fates, Clotho and the other two Weird Sisters mentioned on the invitation.

  Fighting off the trembling, I marched up the driveway and fell in behind a small group of robed Belfiereans, masks raised, voices low and sporadic. The moon wasn’t up yet, but there were solar-powered lamps lighting the way. I thought I spotted Nonna up ahead, her thick salt-and-pepper hair bouncing with each unsuspecting step. Behind us a souped-up car blasted by, windows down, music with a pounding bass line disturbing the night. Right about then, though, I would have preferred to take my chances with Mr. Metallica instead of whatever lay ahead of me. When an old, wavery voice back on the sidewalk started encouraging something called Fritzie to “Make!” I felt uplifted. I could be back on Market Square in Quaker Hills, it suddenly felt so familiar.