Death of an Italian Chef

by Lee Hollis

  “Stop fawning, Leonard, it can’t be helping your heart rate,” Andrea snapped.

  “Christy just arrived last night,” Hayley explained. “She’s here visiting her uncle.”

  “Who’s that?” Andrea wanted to know.

  “Fredy,” Christy chimed in. “He’s a nurse at the hospital.”

  “Never met him,” Andrea said dismissively.

  Leonard sat up in his chair. “I did. He was working the night you brought me there when I thought I was having a heart attack.”

  “Can you be more specific? Your medical emergencies are pretty much a regular occurrence these days,” Andrea spat out.

  “The most recent time, last week,” Leonard said, annoyed.

  Hayley perked up.

  Of course.

  Leonard was at the hospital on the same night Fredy disappeared.

  “Did the two of you have any interaction?” Hayley asked.

  Leonard nodded. “Yes, he brought me a fresh pitcher of water at one point, and a little later he came in while I was watching Stephen Colbert to check my vitals, and then . . . Oh, never mind.”

  Hayley and Christy exchanged quick glances.

  “Never mind what?” Hayley pressed.

  “It’s nothing. I drifted off to sleep at some point and woke up in the middle of the night, and thought I saw something, but I was pretty out of it from the drugs they gave me, so when I woke up the next morning I figured it was just a weird dream.”

  “Why are you wasting our time with another one of your silly dreams, Leonard?” Andrea huffed. She turned to Hayley and Christy. “You would not believe how many hours of my life I have lost listening to him go on about his stupid dreams!”

  Hayley wanted to shove a napkin into Andrea’s mouth to shut her up, but wisely refrained. “No, Leonard, tell us, what did you think you saw?”

  “I like to sleep with a night-light on so it’s not completely dark in the room . . .” Leonard started to explain.

  “Can you believe my forty-four-year-old husband is afraid of the dark?” Andrea lamented.

  “Anyway,” Leonard said, bristling. “I asked Fredy to leave my door open a crack so the light from the hallway could come in and he happily obliged. James Corden was on—he comes on after Colbert, and I find his British accent droning and kind of boring, and so I fell asleep not too long after that . . .”

  “Get to the point, Leonard!” Andrea cried.

  “Will you let me tell the story my way, please, Andrea?” Leonard hissed, cheeks tightening, lips pursed, the base of his neck reddening. Then his face relaxed as he returned his gaze to Hayley and the fetching Christy. “I heard some noise outside my room and when I opened my eyes, that’s when I saw them, Fredy and this other guy.”

  Hayley took a step closer to Leonard. “What guy?”

  Leonard shrugged. “Some big dude, I’d say almost twice as large as Fredy. He had Fredy by the arm, like he was taking him somewhere. When they passed by my door, Fredy tried to stop, but the big guy kept pulling him roughly along by the arm, as if he was forcing him.”

  Christy gasped, alarmed.

  “Can you describe this man?” Hayley asked.

  Leonard shrugged. “Big. Built like a wrestler, you know, like the Rock.”

  “His face, Leonard!” Andrea yelled, unable to remain quiet any longer. “Did you see his face?”

  “No,” Leonard said. “He was wearing one of those medical masks, so I never got a good look.”

  “Leonard, you moron, the man is missing! It’s all over town! Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Andrea wailed.

  “I didn’t think much about it because like I said, I thought I was dreaming!”

  It was obvious to Hayley now that Leonard was describing the same man as Randy had claimed to have seen, which could only mean her brother was absolutely not hallucinating due to his post-surgery sedated state.

  Despite what the police wanted to believe, Randy had indeed witnessed Chef Romeo’s murder.

  And Nurse Fredy may have been an unlucky eyewitness.

  Chapter 21

  When Hayley dragged her weary bones through the back door into her kitchen after driving home from the restaurant, it was already a few minutes past eleven. Leroy was there to excitedly greet her as she stumbled in. She opened the cupboard, grabbed a box of doggie treats, and tossed one toward him, which he ably caught in his mouth. Then, after trying to call Bruce and getting his voice mail, she slowly made the trek up the staircase, an attention-starved Leroy eagerly scampering behind her, and took a long, hot, scalding shower to wash off the dirt and grime and smell of food in her hair.

  She knew her night was far from over.

  Usually on the weekends, Hayley would get a head start on her columns for the week so she wasn’t so slammed during office hours while tending to her other duties. But with all that had been going on, she had failed to even crack open her computer. Once she toweled off and threw on some gray sweatpants and a ratty pink T-shirt, she climbed into bed with her laptop and popped it open.

  She stared at the blank screen, impatiently waiting for inspiration to strike, but it never came.

  Leroy snuggled up beside her, instantly falling asleep. As she stared down at him, his little body heaving up and down as he snoozed peacefully, his eyes shut tight, her own eyes became heavy and she couldn’t resist setting her computer down on Bruce’s empty side of the bed and wiggling deep down underneath the white goose-down comforter, joining her little dog in dreamland.

  She had no idea how long she had drifted off to sleep when her buzzing phone on the nightstand next to her suddenly snapped her awake. Hayley shot up in bed as Leroy fitfully shifted his position with a sigh. She grabbed her phone.

  It was Bruce returning her call.

  “Bruce?”

  “Hi, babe. Sorry I missed your call earlier. I was in the middle of a subway tunnel with no service on my way back to Manhattan from Brooklyn.”

  “Are you at your hotel now?”

  “Yeah, I just got back.”

  “Sounds like a long day.”

  “It was, and I have to be at the courthouse in the morning by eight.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hayley said guiltily. “I know today was supposed to be your one day off.”

  “I have a number of ways you can make it up to me when I come home after the trial,” Bruce said.

  She could picture him in her mind leering.

  “Did you find anything useful?”

  “Oh, yeah, I had coffee with Alonzo this morning, and he gave me the names of a bunch of people in the neighborhood to talk to, childhood friends, former restaurant employees. I spent most of the day tracking them all down. Some refused to talk to me for whatever reason, but a few turned out to be fountains of information. I just emailed you some news articles that corroborate what I found. But the bottom line is, Luca Esposito, aka Chef Romeo, ran a very successful restaurant in Bensonhurst. He was kind of famous in his old neighborhood. There really was no reason why he should ever leave.”

  “So what changed?”

  “According to just about everybody I spoke to, Luca opened his first restaurant right across the street from another Italian restaurant, an old neighborhood favorite that had been around for years. Luca knew he had to play hardball in order to compete and stay in business, and so in the words of one of his cooks, he went nuclear. He complained to the city council that the rival’s building was not up to code and was a fire hazard and needed to be shut down immediately. He called in a favor to an old high school buddy who worked for the New York State Liquor Authority and got him to challenge their license for serving free wine to people waiting outside for a table. He even wrote to U.S. Immigration claiming they were hiring undocumented workers. He was pretty relentless and wore the owner down until he finally closed his doors and went out of business after nearly forty years.”

  “Do you know anything about the owner?”

  “Well, the place was called Caruso’s,
so I’m assuming that was his name. Apparently, he was an older guy, in his seventies, who grew up in Brooklyn and dedicated his whole life to running his family-style restaurant. But after Luca began targeting him, he finally just gave up, figuring it just wasn’t worth all the aggravation, and so he shut his doors and retired. I tried to track him down, but it turns out Old Man Caruso died earlier this year. His kids filed a lawsuit against Luca, but Luca enlisted the help of another high school chum, now a fancy lawyer, and got the whole case dismissed.”

  Hayley gently rubbed the top of Leroy’s head as she took all of this in. “I don’t understand. If he won and drove out competition, then why did he leave Brooklyn?”

  “He got greedy,” Bruce said. “He was riding high on his success of one restaurant, and decided he wanted to expand and open another, this one in Bay Ridge. But he needed capital to grease the wheels and get it started, so he decided to get a loan. Even though money was coming in, he was still carrying a lot of debt, and he couldn’t get a bank to work with him, so he borrowed the cash from a guy by the name of Rocco Mancini.”

  Hayley only had to hear the name to know where Bruce was going with this. “Uh-oh. Let me guess. Mob-connected?”

  “Not just connected. The Mancinis are one of the most notorious New York crime families down here. Everyone tried talking Luca out of it, but he refused to listen, and just plowed ahead full steam. He got himself in hock for about a hundred K. Unfortunately, the Bay Ridge restaurant was in a bad location and went bust not long after the grand opening.”

  Hayley breathed in slowly. “Leaving him owing the Mafia over a hundred-thousand dollars.”

  “Which was compounding daily at thirty percent interest,” Bruce added. “What his first place was bringing in wasn’t nearly enough to cover it, so he kept putting Rocco off, making up excuses, promising to make good on the debt if given a little more time. But you’ve seen this movie before. Those Mafia loan sharks aren’t known for their patience, so Rocco dispatched a couple of his thugs to send a clear message.”

  “By blowing up his house and the poor innocent old lady who lived next door, according to Alonzo.”

  “Yeah, she was sadly collateral damage,” Bruce said.

  “That certainly would be enough to scare him into skipping town, changing his identity, and showing up in a remote part of Maine to start over,” Hayley surmised.

  Her mind began to race.

  Was the big man Randy had seen murdering Romeo and Leonard had seen hustling Nurse Fredy away, one of Rocco Mancini’s thugs? Had the Brooklyn Mob family somehow discovered Luca Esposito’s whereabouts and sent a coldhearted assassin up to Maine to rub him out? It sounded like a Sopranos plotline. Almost too fantastical to believe.

  She heard Bruce yawning on the other end of the call.

  “Get some sleep, honey. You deserve it. I can’t thank you enough for all this,” Hayley said.

  “Love you, babe.”

  “Back at you,” Hayley said, ending the call and putting the phone back down on the night table. She then reached over and flipped open her laptop, checking her email. Bruce had attached a file, which she immediately downloaded and opened. It contained mostly supplemental information to what Bruce had already informed her about: local advertisements for Luca’s two restaurants, the Caruso family lawsuit against him and its dismissal by the court, various articles about the Mancini family, their philanthropic endeavors to the community, perhaps to cover up their other illegal activities.

  Hayley came across a gushing article from a local paper about the generosity of the Mancinis donating the money to build a children’s playground in nearby Dyker Heights. Accompanying the story was a photo of the Mafia don himself, Rocco Mancini, posing with his wife in front of a freshly painted seesaw and large jungle gym. Hayley chuckled at how much Mancini, in a long coat and wearing a fedora, looked exactly like the Mob bosses in all those old Hollywood movies. He was a foot shorter than his wife and could probably pass as Joe Pesci’s younger brother.

  That’s when Hayley focused on Mrs. Mancini.

  Why did she look so familiar?

  Towering over her husband, a somewhat forced smile plastered on her face, drowning in a fur coat that was open enough to show off the colorful designer dress she had stuffed herself in. That’s when it suddenly hit her. She looked familiar because Hayley had met her—recently, in fact.

  Although the photo was probably nine or ten years old, Mrs. Rocco Mancini was not just a dead ringer for Chef Romeo’s self-proclaimed paramour and business investor Connie, who had come to see him in the hospital, they were without question one and the same.

  Chapter 22

  Hayley had to swallow a frightened gasp at the scary-looking creature who stood in the doorway, gripping a mug of steaming hot coffee. The woman’s wild black hair was flying in all different directions. Smudged mascara made her look like an angry raccoon and ruby-red lipstick was smeared across her lips with little thought of stopping at the outer edges. She looked like a clown that had just been mugged. The woman eyed Hayley warily as she raised her mug of coffee and slurped, her abnormally long nails polished to match her lips, a few of them chipped and cracked.

  “What do you want?” Connie snarled.

  Hayley could see her eyes were watery, as if she had been crying. She sniffed, wiping her nose with a wadded-up tissue in her free hand.

  “I was hoping you might have a few minutes to talk to me,” Hayley said pleasantly, trying to ignore the woman’s startlingly haggard appearance.

  Connie closed the pink sweater she was wearing over a silk cream-colored nightgown in front of her, as it was a chillier than usual morning.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not in the mood for visitors right now. Come back later,” Connie snapped, moving to shut the door.

  Hayley stuck a foot in the doorway to stop her from slamming the door in her face. “Please, Mrs. Mancini, it won’t take long, I promise.”

  The mention of the name Mancini stopped Connie cold. She dropped her mug, which bounced off the floor and splashed coffee everywhere. Her eyes began darting back and forth, as if she was checking to make sure there were no spies hiding in the nearby bushes outside. Then, she grabbed Hayley by the arm and yanked her past the threshold inside the cottage.

  Locating Connie Mancini had been easy. Chef Romeo had mentioned that she was just in Bar Harbor for the summer, which suggested to Hayley that she was probably renting a property, and no one was more plugged into the summer rental scene than Liddy. Hayley had called Liddy earlier that morning, waking her up, but it had been worth it. With just a few strokes of her computer keyboard, Liddy had managed to find a quaint seafront cottage just off West Street with a sweeping view of Frenchman Bay and the town pier that had been rented by a Connie Toscano from New York in late April. Toscano, according to the information Bruce had sent her, was Connie’s maiden name.

  Hayley felt guilty showing up so early in the morning, but she was crunched for time. Randy was scheduled to be released from the hospital later in the day, and she also had to put in an appearance at the office before her boss Sal filed a missing person report.

  Connie nervously scanned the surrounding property, as if expecting some kind of imminent military invasion, before she swung the door shut, locked it, and whipped around to Hayley. “How did you know my name was Mancini?”

  “I’m looking into the death of Chef Romeo Russo, and my husband happens to be in New York, so I had him do a little digging—”

  “Why? Romeo died from a heart attack.” Her eyes welled up with fresh tears at the mention of his name.

  Hayley explained what Randy had claimed to have seen the night Romeo died.

  Connie’s mouth dropped open in shock. “Y-you think he was murdered?”

  “That’s what my brother says, and I’ve never known him to lie,” Hayley said quietly.

  Ignoring the spilled coffee, Connie wandered over to the bay window and stared out at the stunning ocean view. “And so you’ve b
een investigating and found out who I really am, and now you think I may have had something to do with it?”

  “N-no, at this point, I—I don’t know what to think,” Hayley stammered, not wanting to set her off. She had seen just how unhinged Connie Toscano-Mancini could be when she had first met her at the hospital.

  Her back still to Hayley, she heard Connie whisper, “I would never do anything to hurt Luca—I mean Romeo.” She slowly turned around, tears now streaming down her cheeks. “I loved him . . . And I still can’t believe that he’s gone.”

  “Did you follow him up here to Bar Harbor?” Hayley asked.

  Connie sighed, then nodded. “Yes. I was hoping to rekindle what we once had. Oh, I was so foolish, so naive. I thought that bankrolling his restaurant here would make him fall in love with me all over again. What an idiot I was.”

  Chef Romeo had been telling the truth about Connie.

  They were not romantically involved.

  He had just neglected to mention that they had been once, back in Brooklyn. He also had conveniently left out the part about Connie being the wife of a dangerous and powerful Mob boss, key information that opened a whole boatload of new questions.

  “Did your husband find out about your affair with Luca, and that’s why he fled Brooklyn and moved here to Maine under a different name?”

  “Everybody back home assumed Luca ran because he couldn’t pay back the debt he owed Rocco, but that wasn’t it at all. Given time, Luca would have managed to pay him back. What really happened was Rocco got suspicious and had one of his goons spy on me, and he got video of me and Luca through the window of the storeroom at his Bay Ridge place. He had set up a mattress and some scented candles; he was always trying to be romantic, which was sweet,” Connie said with a wistful smile. “Anyway, once Rocco saw the video, that was basically a death sentence for poor Luca. So he skipped town.”

  “Did Romeo—I mean Luca—tell you where he was going?”

  Connie shook her head. “No, of course not. He was scared to death. He didn’t tell anyone. He was literally running for his life. He cut off all contact with me, which of course broke my heart.” Connie sniffed again. “I said all the right things to Rocco, how Luca had been just a harmless fling, how I was willing to do anything to regain his trust, be the best wife I could possibly be. I can be very sexy and charming and persuasive when I want to be, which is why Rocco married me in the first place.”