Cook's Christmas Capers (The Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

by Joanne Pence

"I didn't." Angie tried to wipe her tears but they kept falling. "I no longer have a family." She cried harder.

  "Poverina. Come with me," Serefina said, pulling a handkerchief with embroidered edges from her dress pocket and handing it to Angie. "Let's go to the kitchen. I'll make you a nice cup of coffee. And I have some biscotti."

  "Is it your mother's recipe, with walnuts?" Angie sat at the kitchen table.

  "Of course." Serefina looked at her strangely as she put on the coffee. "How did you know?"

  "I don't know," Angie said glumly, unable to think up any more lies.

  "It's almost Christmas, Angelina. Do you have anyone to share it with?"

  Angie was ready to cry again at the thought. She shook her head.

  Serefina sat across from her and patted her hand. "Then you must come here and have dinner with Salvatore and me."

  "I don't want to impose," Angie said out of politeness, hoping against hope her refusal wouldn't be accepted.

  Serefina studied her. "I insist."

  "Thank you," Angie said. "If I'm still here, I'll come to see you."

  "Bene! It's difficult to be alone at Christmas. Now, the coffee almost ready. Let's have those biscotti."

  o0o

  Nearly an hour later, Angie left her mother and father’s home, her heart filled with her mother’s warmth. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but forced herself.

  Stopping at a phone booth outside a gas station, she checked the Yellow Pages for the Emporium. She was shocked when she saw the address.

  She drove downtown, parked in the Union Square garage—fortunately, some things hadn't changed—and headed for Market Street. Before her was an enormous department store, one that looked nothing like the Nordstrom's that now occupied the space. Its massive windows were decked out for the holidays, and when she entered the store, she was astounded by the enormous, gorgeously decorated tree in its center.

  She rushed to the men's department. She wondered how long it would be before the store closed for good. She should warn her father that he had to find a new job or he would be out of work again.

  She found a spot to hide between some tall clothes racks, and watched the people, mostly women, milling about the men’s department, where every mannequin was dressed in a different colored leisure suit.

  When her father appeared, she was shocked. Her father had a bad heart, and now his color was gray—much as it had been before he had the bypass surgery that saved his life.

  Did they do bypass surgeries in the seventies? And if they did, what was its success rate? Could it be anywhere as good as heart medicine and care in the twenty-first century? She wondered if Sal would get the care he needed, or if...

  It hurt to see her father here like this. It hurt to see him working at a job he so obviously hated, watching customers ignore him, shunt him aside like a sick old man who couldn't possibly know how to sell them cool clothes.

  The Sal Amalfi she knew had been strong and powerful. With the success of his shoe stores, he was able to buy property, starting out with small rentals, and then buying more and more until he owned several apartment buildings in the Bay Area, including the one Angie lived in. As he aged, he developed a heart condition, but received excellent, up-to-date care.

  But this Sal...this Sal...

  She fled the store, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  o0o

  Angie drove to Nona's, A Restaurant, and parked a couple of blocks away so no one there would see Nona's car. She prepared dinner, but her heart wasn't in it. All she could think about was her family, and how much she missed them.

  A fair number of people showed up to dine, to Angie's surprise. The most popular dish on the menu was clearly the curried vegetables and chickpeas served over jasmine rice, with na'an on the side.

  Angie left as soon as she could without waiting for Paavo to finish the bookkeeping. She got into Nona's car and headed for Nona's apartment.

  "Who are you?" asked the elderly rent-a-cop who sat at the front door.

  "I'm sorry to trouble you," she said softly, trying to be friendly and polite.

  "Eh?" The man appeared deaf as a post.

  Angie gave him a warm smile and held out her hand to shake his. "I'm Angelina Rosaria Maria Amalfi," she said, speaking fast. She knew from experience that when she said her full name, most people went completely blank and all they heard were a string of vowels. Judging from the old man's gaping expression, her ploy had worked again. Louder, she explained. "I'm a friend of Nona Farraday's. She asked me to look after her apartment while she's away."

  "A friend of Farraday's you said?"

  The man was even deafer than Angie had thought. She spoke louder. "That's right. She wants me to check her apartment." She dangled Nona's keys before his eyes.

  "Humph," he said. "Sounds like she's as bossy with her friends as she is with me."

  "I don't mind at all," Angie hollered. "But she should have treated you a lot better."

  He preened. "I think so. Just because a person's old doesn't mean I can't do my job. And you don't have to yell."

  "Of course not," Angie shouted. Just then, the elevator reached the first floor, the doors opened, and she got on.

  o0o

  Nona's apartment was like stepping onto a movie set of an old Doris Day film. Everything was white or pink and frilly. How could Nona live this way? She was the most unfrilly woman Angie had ever met. Everything about her was hard-angled and pristine, or so Angie had thought.

  As Angie walked around the comfortable apartment, she couldn't help but think that Nona was locked up in jail and no one was using it tonight. For all she knew, Nona would be released the next day, but tonight…

  Angie was tired of sleeping on couches, showering in a place where the water turned cold after two minutes, and wearing Connie's crummy hand-me-downs.

  She felt awkward at Connie's, and while she would normally have loved to live with Paavo, staying with this Paavo would have felt like cheating.

  A thought struck. Was she going to spend the rest of her life traveling through time? A gourmet cook version of Doctor Who? If so, she wished she had a Tardis. Or a magic carpet. Anything to take her back to her own time. But this wasn’t really time travel. If it was, her friends wouldn’t be here—they wouldn’t have been born yet! And her parents would be young again. So this must be some kind of alternate reality. A forty-years-behind-the-times parallel universe.

  Who was she kidding? This was a nightmare, a very real nightmare, but a nightmare. Pure and simple!

  She looked in Nona's closet. Nona was taller than Angie—most people were. Actually, she looked like a fashion model, which Angie hated, since she would never be tall or svelte enough to be one, no matter what time period she was in. Not that she was heavy. Other than wishing she was a little more busty, she simply had curves where they should be.

  All of which meant that Nona's dresses, which must have been embarrassingly short on Nona, managed to fit well enough.

  Angie could scarcely believe it when she put on a pair of Nona's bell bottoms. Bell bottoms had made a brief comeback in Angie's time, but were worn mostly by teenagers, and weren't half as wide as these pants. These looked like something used to sail a ship.

  She tried on beaded tops, a tie-dye tee-shirt, and an outfit with a floor-length peasant skirt, a crocheted top, and a long chiffon scarf that she tied around her head like a fortune teller. She laughed for the first time in what felt like a month. The colors were loud and garish, and as she twisted and turned in front of the mirror, watching the skirt swish from side to side, she thought the women of this time were pretty lucky—they could dress up in costumes whenever they wished. None of the clothes of her time were nearly so much fun.

  When she opened up the lingerie drawer, however, she faced a different kind of shock. Most items were designer wear, matching, expensive Schiaparelli and a few other brands that sounded somewhat familiar. Near the bottom of the drawer she pulled out several pairs of red and black laced
panties, bras, and garter belts from Frederick's of Hollywood. Amazing!

  She stuffed those back in the drawer. She shuddered at the thought of Nona wearing any of that stuff. What was the woman thinking? And even worse, was she thinking it about Paavo?

  Angie went into the bathroom and looked longingly at the tub. She wandered back to the living room, but kept feeling herself drawn to the bathtub like a moth to a flame. She could use a little luxury, and Nona kept a huge supply of bath salts, gels and perfumes. Why not go for it? She deserved a nice bath after all she had been through.

  She phoned Connie and left a message on her answering machine that she found somewhere else to stay that night, then ran the water. In no time she was soaking in the tub, bubbles all around her. She slid down so that the water was over her shoulders, then leaned back, her head against the rim of the bathtub.

  Ah, heaven!

  Now, relaxing, she had time to ponder. Why she was here? Not here in Nona's apartment, but here, now? Was she supposed to prove something? If so, what?

  What if it was to prove that Nona was innocent?

  No one seemed to care that Nona was sitting in jail and hadn't killed anyone. No one seemed to recognize that but Angie. What was wrong with these people? Is that what her role was? To prove that the one person she would gladly see rot in a jail did not deserve to be there?

  Was this some sort of cosmic joke?

  Crazy as it was, she knew if she didn't try to free Nona she couldn't live with herself. Nona was innocent, and shouldn't be in jail.

  If no one else took up the case, Angie would.

  Maybe that would be her ticket home.

  Her eyes grew tired and she was just about to shut them when she heard a noise.

  She became immediately alert, and never felt more vulnerable. Words from the horrible Zodiac letter sprang to mind.

  Suddenly, the lights went out.

  Scarcely breathing, Angie stayed stark still, wondering where she should go, what she should do, when she heard music from a long distance away.

  Someone was playing "Sea of Love" on a saxophone. Come with me, to the sea…

  Angie stayed absolutely still, listening for footsteps coming closer.

  But then she realized that was stupid. If someone did come in, what would she do? Rub soap in his eyes?

  She quietly climbed out of the bathtub, and felt around the unfamiliar room for the bathrobe hanging from a hook on the door. She put it on, then groped in the drawers of Nona's vanity for something to use as a weapon to protect herself.

  Fortunately, Nona owned one of the largest hair dryers Angie had ever seen (or, in this case, felt). She imagined Nona's arm must have ached holding it to dry her hair. Angie continued to search, and was glad she was being very careful when she found a women's razor, but its blade would make any self-respecting crook laugh. Other than hair spray, which she could try to aim into his eyes, she couldn't find anything else.

  Finally, Angie tiptoed from the bathroom and went through the apartment.

  She didn't see, hear or sense anyone else inside.

  The saxophone continued to play "Sea of Love." She couldn't tell where the sound came from.

  What was with all the saxophone players around her suddenly?

  Was she being plagued by John Coltrane wannabes?

  She wasn't even all that sure who John Coltrane was, but she had heard the name too many times to forget it.

  Thankfully, the lights came back on, and Angie felt very foolish standing there with her "weapons" in hand due to nothing more sinister than a power glitch…or so she tried to convince herself. Pacific Gas and Electric was forever having blackouts, brownouts, and generally miserable power in her time, so why would it have been any better in the 1970's? If anything, it was probably worse!

  She made sure the apartment was locked up tight, and went to bed with the hair spray, dryer, and a big kitchen knife at her side under the covers.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next morning, Angie drove Nona's Volvo to the Russian Hill apartment building where she lived in "her world." It had no doorman in the twenty-first century, so for sure, it had none now, even though one apartment was cordoned off as a crime scene.

  Earlier, she called The Chronicle and learned Stan wasn't at work that day. Since she didn't know his home phone number, and the Chronicle wouldn't give it to her, she did the next best thing. She knocked on Stan's apartment door. She wanted to talk more about his neighbor, Aloysius Starr—the mystery man in all this.

  The door opened, but it wasn't Stan who stared at her, it was a short, older man wearing a yellow shirt, brown polyester slacks, and a thick brown curly-haired toupee. Earl White!

  Angie could have fallen over in a dead faint.

  "Earl! What in the world are you doing here? Where's Stan?"

  Earl looked confused. "Where's whozit?"

  "Stan Bonnette. This is his apartment, isn't it?"

  "Hell no. Dis is me and my friends place. Who're you, lady? An' how do you know my name's Oil? 'Ey, Vinnie, dis here broad t'inks we don't belong here!"

  "Who's she?"

  Earl pulled the door open wider. A short, stocky, sixty-something year old with a stogie in his mouth and basset hound bags under his eyes stared at her.

  "Vinnie Freiman," Angie said walking into the apartment. "Calm down, you don't want to get your blood pressure up any higher than it is."

  Vinnie looked at Earl. "How the hell she know about my blood pressure?"

  Earl shrugged. "How da hell she know your name?"

  Vinnie stoked his chin. "True. So, lady, what'dya want?"

  "I want to know about the man next door. The dead man in my apartment."

  "In who's apartment? I t'ought he was in his own place," Earl said.

  "Does Butch live here too?" Angie asked.

  "Vinnie," Earl whispered, "she knows Butch, too."

  "Scary, ain't it?" Vinnie admitted. "Who the hell is she?"

  "Damned if I know," Earl admitted.

  "How'd you know us?" Vinnie asked.

  Angie was afraid to say. In her world these guys were petty thieves who had served time and now ran a restaurant, Wings of an Angel, as in the old song, "If I had the wings of an angel, o’er these prison walls I would fly…" The three hadn't wanted to become restaurateurs, but the establishment happened to be next door to a jewelry store...and its vault….

  But that was another story.

  Angie managed to break up the heist and became good friends with the three men. The very limited menu that their cook, Butch Pagozzi, served was actually quite delicious. Butch had cooked when he was in the army as well as in stir, so he knew all about cooking in quantity, and for people you didn't want to make angry by serving food they didn't like.

  Angie pretended to be indignant. "I can't believe you don't remember me, but it really doesn't matter—"

  "Was she one of yours?" Vinnie asked Earl.

  "No way. But she might be one a Butch's."

  Vinnie looked her up and down. "You ever have trouble with your feet?"

  "I beg your pardon!"

  "We're noises," Earl said.

  "Noises?" Angie frowned with confusion. "What kind of noise do you make?"

  "We don't make noise, we are noises. We woik down at St. Francis Hospital. Butch woiks wit' patients who have problems wit' deir feet—like a physical t'erapy type noise. Me an' Vinnie do general noising. We learned in da army."

  Vinnie drew himself up as tall as his short, elderly body could go, then proudly jabbed his thumb against his chest as he added, "Not all nurses are women, you know. Our guy patients are glad to see us come in."

  Angie pressed her hand to her cheek. "You expect me to believe that you three are nurses?"

  "Why not? You think just because I'm short I can't be a nurse?" Vinnie shouted. "I think she's bein' mean to us, Earl."

  "Dat's discrimination!"

  Angie needed to take control of this madness. "What do you know about the apartmen
t next door? Do you remember when I lived in it?"

  "You? No way, lady," Vinnie said. "That's been Professor Starr's place for years."

  "He woiked in Boikley," Earl added. "At da university."

  "Do you have any idea who would have wanted him dead?"

  "Hell no," Vinnie said. "He was a nice guy. Still had a lot of life left in him, matter of fact. He was planning to go to some class or retreat or something in Mendocino."

  "ISMI?" Angie asked.

  "Is you what?" Vinnie asked.

  "Forget it. All I can say is Starr's death wasn't an accident."

  "He was moidered?" Earl gasped.

  "Do you know who's gone to visit him lately," Angie asked. "Or maybe people he knew, places he went?"

  "I never saw nobody. Whadabout you, Earl?"

  "I didn't see nobody neit'er. Oh…but he did like to go to Nona's restaurant."

  "Oh? Do you think he knew Alan Trimball?"

  "Who?"

  "Keep thinking about it. I'll be back," Angie said.

  Earl looked at Vinnie. "I'm t'inking we should get outta here. What if da moiderer t'inks we saw him?"

  "Or," Vinnie said, nodding his head toward Angie, "her."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Angie headed across the Bay Bridge to the University of California in Berkeley. What was really strange here, perhaps the strangest thing of all she'd experienced so far, was that the people in Berkeley looked exactly the same as they did in her time, with long hair that was either stringy or bushy, headbands, sandals, jeans and flowing tops. She used to feel she was stepping back in time whenever she went there, and now she knew her feeling had been right.

  She entered Sproul Plaza. The Student Union building stood on one side, the administration building on the other, and in between were tables of groups pushing their agendas. CORE, SNCC, SDS, and lots of other initials she had never heard of were represented.

  She located the Sociology department office, and there, she flashed her wallet with hand-written "Press Pass." She had learned from Paavo (the real Paavo) that few people read the badges and I.D.s waved at them. He'd been right. She quickly put it away and told the two female clerks she was there to write the obituary of Professor Aloysius Starr for the San Francisco Chronicle.