Then it started to meow.
This was bad. I tried to develop a superpower in cat mind control but since I’d never had much success with that on humans, I wasn’t very hopeful. I felt the body behind me take a sharp breath and stiffen. Both of our hearts were pounding fast. We swallowed hard at the same time.
Luckily Officer Allegrini chose that moment to grasp the bathroom doorknob in his Firm Manly Grip. Apparently his Firm Manliness was too much for the knob because it came off in his hand.
He looked from the knob to the landlady in horror. She hadn’t seen, so he shifted his weight to hide the fact that he was trying to screw the knob back on.
That’s when the cat struck. For no apparent reason other than I LOVE YOU KITTIES, it went to Officer Allegrini and started trying to crawl up his leg. He was standing on one foot trying to shake it off, while desperately working to reattach the knob behind him. It looked like he was doing a crazy dance, or someone had slipped beetles down his back.
Little Life Lesson 28: If you plan to lose control of your ability not to crack up, try not to be stuck in an armoire that is already stuffed to the gills with someone else.
I nearly choked from laughing, and The Body behind me was squirming in a dangerous way. The landlady was busy monologuing in her own world, saying:
LANDLADY: Yes, I am the protectatrix of my tenants. Of course, this one, she is more than a tenant to me, you understand. In fact, she says to me just in a week—
OFFICER ALLEGRINI: (Shoving doorknob back on.) Grunt.
ARMOIRE: Creak.
LANDLADY: What was that?
OFFICER ALLEGRINI: (Back pressing against door where knob has fallen off again.) Nothing. You said?
LANDLADY: Ah, yes. She says “Gloria”—that is my name, Gloria (giving Officer Allegrini a wink)—“Gloria,” she tells me, “you are like a sister to me.”
Two grunts, one from Officer Allegrini as he finally got the knob to stay on, and one from The Body behind me. The cat had lost interest and wandered out of the apartment.
LANDLADY: She was very silent, so much by herself. Not that I spy, of course. But no matter how many times I tell her she leaves the shutters open and I cannot bother but to see. Always I tell her that all of Cannaregio can see her changing the clothes but she does not care. I see her yesterday night and I think to myself, I will have to say words to her again.
OFFICER ALLEGRINI: (Heading toward Arabella’s desk.) Grunt.
LANDLADY: Just look at this dust on the windowsill! The strangers, they do not understand about shutters. She uses the curtains instead. And you see—this one is missing its rope. Who will pay to replace this, I ask you?
OFFICER ALLEGRINI: (Picking up garbage can and dumping it on top of the desk.) Grunt.
All the garbage had in it was a crumpled piece of stationery and a Q-tip. These items seemed to excite him until he uncrumpled the paper and saw it was blank. He used a word I didn’t know but which I am pretty sure is not considered Nice, then moved on to inspect the other objects on the desk, pulling everything out of the drawers and spilling out the pencil cup. But nothing seemed to satisfy his thirst for knowledge.
LANDLADY: Of course, I wonder if I should blame myself for this. But it is not what she would have wanted. Still, suicide. So much tragic that she is dead.
As she said that, all hilarity ceased. The Body behind me sagged. There was a gasp and I heard a voice whisper, “Dead?” incredulously and a little too loudly. Fortunately this was covered by Officer Allegrini’s response:
OFFICER ALLEGRINI: (In the middle of the room, standing with hands on his hips, glaring around petulantly.) Grunt.
LANDLADY: Did you find the suicide note you are looking for?
OFFICER ALLEGRINI: No.
LANDLADY: I’m sure if it were here, you would have. You are very good at your job I am betting (batting eyelashes).
Officer Allegrini made one last grunt and started moving toward the door.
That’s when I saw it. Sitting and gleaming on the desk next to “The Runt.” A four-inch-tall blown-glass statue of a cat.
With a blown-glass goldfish inside its stomach.
It must have been wrapped in paper and stashed in a back corner, but Officer Allegrini in his zeal had opened it and left it sitting there on the paper in disgust. And I kind of couldn’t blame him. The cat’s head was slightly crooked, one paw was smaller than the other, and I was pretty sure it was leering at me.
It was definitely not the most beautiful clue in the world, but it was mine, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I used my last remaining mental strength to send the telepathic CHiPs-talian message “Scram immediately!” to LANDLADY and OFFICER ALLEGRINI, and after about three trillion years (or two minutes) they got it.
(Exit LANDLADY and OFFICER ALLEGRINI offstage.)
As soon as they’d closed the door behind them, I pushed out of the armoire, assumed my most menacing WWMrTD pose, and turned to face my Armoire Mate.
Chapter Thirteen
I’d been prepared to hit him with “I pity the fool who was spying on me from the armoire” but that seemed kind of harsh when I saw him. My first quick glance showed me a familiar-looking guy a little older than me with reddish-brown hair, a spattering of freckles, and caramel-colored eyes, like what you’d get if you mated a Chuck Taylors/Ben Sherman sweater/worn-in Levi’s jeans–wearer with a golden retriever. He was standing in the armoire, gripping the sides, hard.
He said into space, “Bella dead? Committed suicide? No. Oh, God, no. I knew this would happen.”
I wanted to know a lot of things, like how he knew it would happen and why he’d been hiding in the armoire to begin with and, oh, who he was, but instead I went into the bathroom and got the (ruffled) tissue box. When I came back he’d sagged and was sitting on the bottom of the armoire between a pair of gold boots and a frog stuffed animal.
He seemed to be losing the fight to hold back tears, but when I offered a Kleenex he shook his head, using his sleeve to wipe his eyes. “I’m good,” he said. “Thank you—”
“Jasmine. Jas,” I said.
“Thanks, Jas. I’m Bobby.”
We shook hands.
After that it was a tad awkward, me standing, him sitting there with his eyes glued to the floor breathing kind of raggedly, neither of us talking. But it gave me a chance to figure out why he looked so familiar—he was Mr. Bitter from the picture I’d found in Arabella’s book. Only now he didn’t look bitter, he looked sad. And younger.
When his breathing started sounding normal I asked, “So, how did you know Arabella?”
A strange expression flickered in his eyes. “She is—was—my sister.”
Oh, hello.
Of course he could have been lying. I mean, that’s just the thing you’d say if you were found inside the armoire of a dead girl and wanted to seem unsuspicious, right? I remembered the essay Arabella had mentioned her brother in. It was called something like “Le summer vacation nightmareo.” I scoured my mind for details—there was something about le boato and something about fishing gone le horribly wrong and her brother—
“Your boat got a leak and you had to plug it with your Joe DiMaggio baseball card,” I blurted.
He stared at me. “Actually it was Pete Rose. But how did you know about it?”
It had been a fairly weak test, but he passed. “Your sister wrote about it in Italian class.”
“She did an essay about that? Man, that trip was the worst. Right after our mom died. Arabella somehow got it into her head that we’d starve to death. So we used mini-marshmallows to fish. No surprise we didn’t catch anything. When the boat sprang that leak, she completely lost it.”
“In Arabella’s version you were superheroic, leaping out of the boat to pull it to shore and her to safety. She even compared you to Aquaman.”
“Yeah, not so much with the swimming-to-shore heroics. God, she had an imagination.” The side of his mouth started to curve into a smile, then got tugged ba
ck. “She was a really good little sister.”
“I bet.”
“Quirky, though. I used to tease her like crazy about her weird habits.”
“You mean like how she used a different color pen for each day of the week?”
He chuckled. “I’d forgotten about that. But, yeah. Did you know about the orange juice? How she had to have three ice cubes in it every morning or she’d get bad news?”
“No, she didn’t tell me that. But she did explain you always had to make sure to eat your food in even numbered bites or you’d get indigestion.”
“When we were growing up, all the knife blades in the house had to point to the right or someone would be mean to her. And she bent the corner of every piece of paper she wrote on because otherwise she thought the message would be misunderstood.”
“I saw her do that, but I hadn’t realized what it was about!”
“She was a kook, my sister. But I loved her.”
After that, things got silent. Dead silent. I decided to try some conversational CPR. “So you came to Venice to visit her? From America?”
“No, I’m spending the year at Oxford. Got to Venice last night. I had a date but I decided to bag it, came here instead.”
“Was she here when you got here?”
“No, I let myself in. She’d sent me a set of keys a few months ago. I crashed on the sofa to wait and—” He stopped himself. It was like he suddenly became another person, his expression going wary and a little mean. He got up and took a step away from the armoire toward me. “Who did you say you were again? And what are you doing here? And why should I be answering any of your questions?”
“Arabella was a friend of mine. From Italian class. She asked me to come.”
He was standing about a foot from me now with his arms crossed. “Oh, really? Did she also ask you to snoop around? And answer her phone?”
I had not been snooping! I was an invited guest! I scoffed at such innuendo. “Excuse me, but which of us was spying on people from the armoire?”
“Yeah, that would be both of us.”
Screeeeeech went the brakes on my Scoffcedes. “That was—never mind. I was here because of this.” I pulled the note from my pocket and handed it to him.
He read it, flipped it over, read it again, then kind of squinted at me. “So this is what you were looking for? Her goldfish?”
I nodded. “And I found it.”
“Where? She doesn’t have a fish.”
“There,” I said, pointing to the glass sculpture on the desk.
He looked at me scornfully. “You expect me to believe that? Tell your boss this was the weakest excuse ever. I know you didn’t get any photos, that’s why I was watching from the armoire, but if anything private about my sister comes out in whatever rag you’re working for—”
“Is there some medication you should be taking?” I asked him. “Do I seriously look like a reporter to you?”
“No, you’re right. You look like one of those parasites who pretended to be her friend because of who our father was.”
“Why, thank you, MAY BE JERKY.”
“What did you just call me?”
“Nothing. Refresh my memory of who your father was so I can remember why I was using his daughter.”
“Nice try.”
“I’m serious, I have no idea.”
“Arabella Neal? You have no idea?”
“Her last name was Randolph.”
That stumped him for a second. “I guess that’s right. She was using Mom’s name here. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t tell you. You’ve heard of Ned Neal?”
“The globe-trotting tycoon? Who started the space airline?”
“You got it. Billionaire. Businessman. Bastard. That’s our dad.” He was starting to resemble the photo more. “Nothing anyone did was ever good enough for him. Except Arabella. She was his perfect princess. Probably why she couldn’t deal with his death.”
I remembered reading articles about that: Ned Neal, brilliant entrepreneur, found dead in his palace in Venice. It had happened a few months before we got there, in early summer. “It was a heart attack, right?”
“Arabella didn’t think so. She decided he’d been murdered. Because it was so hard to believe that a fifty-five-year-old who worked twenty hours a day would have a massive coronary.”
“Couldn’t he have been killed? I mean, it wasn’t impossible.”
“Yep, pretty much. He was locked up all alone in his office, like always, when it happened. They had to bash the door down to even find the body. But Arabella kept coming up with absurd theories about how it could have happened, anyway.”
“Like what?”
“Snakes through the air vent. Someone using a vacuum to suck all the air out of the room so he suffocated. Poisonous spiders. And we’d hire all these experts to look into them, and at the end we’d be back where we started. At a heart attack.” He was clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke. “For what? At the end of it he was still dead and gone. And now so is she.” He shook his head as if he could shake away the thought and said, “I should probably call Beatrice.”
“Is that the woman I talked to on the phone? She said she was your father’s secretary, but if he’s dead—”
“She’s more like the glue that’s been holding us all together for the last year. She and Bella were especially close. She’ll be devastated that my sister committed suicide.”
“She didn’t.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe she committed suicide.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “No, of course not. You wouldn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you’re like Arabella. She wouldn’t have trusted you if you weren’t. And that means you’ll have some elaborate theory to explain it.”
“I don’t. But it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, see, actually, it does. The reason I came to Venice? Bella called me and told me she finally figured out how Dad was offed, and I had to get here right away.”
“Really? She said she knew who did it? Did she tell you anything else?”
“Only that it would le blow my mindo.”
“That sounds like her. But why does that make you think she killed herself?”
“Every time she was wrong about this she’d get really depressed. Suicide-watch depressed. And I’m sure this was just another one of those. Another mess-up. And she got depressed again. Only this time she let it carry her away.” He took a deep breath. “Besides, who would want to kill her? She was harmless.”
I thought about that. “I’m not so sure.” A snippet from my phone conversation with her the night before came back to me then, her saying, I asked someone the wrong question…. I wish I knew which one….
My heart started to pound, fast. “What if you’re wrong and it went the other way?” I started walking around the room. “What if she actually did figure out who your father’s murderer was and she let it slip, so they killed her to keep her quiet?”
“You sound just like her. That’s exactly the kind of crazy stupid thing she would say.”
I stopped walking. “But it’s true. Maybe one of Arabella’s theories was right. Maybe this murderer is smart and creative and managed to hide his crimes by making them look impossible.”
“How would you go about investigating that?”
“I don’t know. Arabella said she was going to Prada. I’d probably start there. Then maybe—”
“You just won’t stop, will you?” he said tightly.
“Don’t you want to know the truth?”
“The truth? I know the truth.” He took a step toward me. I took a step back. “The truth is that my dad died of a heart attack, and Arabella killed herself because she couldn’t accept it.” He took another step toward me. I took another step back. “Because she kept looking for answers where there weren’t any questions.” He stepped forward. I stepped back. “And you’re doing the same thing.”
My back hit the wall. He was standing only inches from me and I could see the anger and the pain in his eyes. I said, “I don’t think—”
“That’s right. Don’t think. Don’t ask. No more questions. Why can’t you just stop asking questions and accept things and be happy? Why couldn’t you just listen to me?”
It was me he had pinned against the wall, but it wasn’t me he was seeing. It was Arabella. The sister he thought he’d failed to protect.
“Bobby, there was nothing you could have done.”
He pulled away like I’d burned him. “Get out of here.”
I was so shocked I couldn’t move.
“Go. Leave.”
“But—”
“You want to know who killed her? I did. Me.”
“Don’t be ridiculo—”
“I should have stopped her before she tried another one of her theories. Stopped her before it failed. And I didn’t. So I’m your murderer.”
Maybe it was the leather pants. I have no idea where the words came from but it was like all the pent-up anger I felt at Dadzilla for moving us to Venice, and the Evil Hench Twins for being evil, and myself for not listening to Arabella, and Officer Allegrini for not listening to me, and even Jack for going off with Candy, which I’d been repressing, came spilling out of me. “I think you want to believe she killed herself because then you can hang around here and feel bad. Like a failure. Fulfilling everything your dad ever said. But I’m not going to help you. I have a cunning murderer to find.”
“I told you to go.”
“I am.” I pushed off of the wall. “My last name is Callihan and I’m staying at the Grissini Palace Hotel. Call me when you stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
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