Something not even Brie en croute could make okay.

"Well?" I demanded.

Dana clicked her tongue. "Oh, that faithless man!"

The rest of them looked like fourteen-year-olds called out for missing curfew.

"Staff?" I said with cool menace in my voice.

Landon started wringing his hands. "It was a surprise for you, that's all."

So they were all in on it. I actually said, "Et tu, Landon?"

"Hear us out," put in Choo Choo. "Next week is June second, and you know what that means: Festa della Repubblica."

"When Italians voted to end the monarchy," piped up Paulette.

"At the end of World War Two-"

"Which made Italy a republic."

"We've been meeting in the mornings," Jonathan explained, "so we could go through the routine."

Landon looked at him with adoration.

"What routine?" I didn't like the sound of this.

Paulette, who had to be close to sixty, actually said, "We didn't want to get out there and suck."

This was getting worse and worse. "At what?" I barked.

They all started talking at once. "The tarantella!" They all looked at me earnestly, their voices tumbling together. What I could make out was anxiety about time running out, reputations to uphold, harder than they thought, spectators, bunions, local TV, and pride. The phrase dance from h.e.l.l was muttered a few times.

When the last one wound down, saying something softly about how they thought I'd be proud, I closed my eyes for a minute, letting them stew, and finally said, "Tell me you're not taking it to the streets."

Choo Choo held up a hand. "Strictly inside. One performance." For a maximal kind of guy, Choo Choo could make the Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse sound like little kids in pony carts.

"But at the height of the dinner rush!" Landon exulted.

Choo Choo shot him a look.

"Okay, okay," I relented. "But I never want you to pull a stunt like this again."

If I could have grounded them, I would have.

Still, they looked contrite.

I sighed. "At least it was just the one key."

I saw a quick, calculating look cross Jonathan's face. He and Dana studied their plates, while Paulette trailed her fingers along the black and brown spots on the cat's belly. Choo Choo tugged at his lower lip and Landon sprang up, brightly announcing that dinner was served.

My head started to throb. "Tell me it's just the one key."

Then Dana had to admit they couldn't all practice on the same mornings, so she had-here she coughed into her hand-copies made.

Once we sorted out who had made copies from their copies, it turned out that all seven tarantella dancers had keys to the Miracolo Italian Restaurant and before-hours rehearsal s.p.a.ce. All five of them experienced a temporary lull in appet.i.te when I mentioned, in a wickedly casual way, that now I'd have to report to detectives Ted and Sally that any one of the wait staff could have been inside the restaurant with the dear departed Arlen Mather.

Although I was hoping for more mileage out of this scare, they were a resilient group who suddenly remembered the purpose of the potluck and worked out a game plan they named Operation Free Maria Pia.

When I pointed out she wasn't in jail, Choo Choo snorted, and Dana drawled, "Well, not yet, darling." Three of them put themselves on neighborhood crawl duty-questioning the shopkeepers on Market Square to see if they had seen or heard anything of interest-and the other two went on background check duty, which meant digging up whatever they could about Mather.

It sounded like a good plan. One they wouldn't have to scheme or trespa.s.s anywhere to do.

I looked at them through my raised winegla.s.s. They were my world at Miracolo. My surprise Festa della Repubblica tarantella dancers. I must confess, I got misty.

5.

Wednesday Maria Pia Angelotta, retired chef, owner of Miracolo, potential murder suspect, and Genovese dragon, stood motionless in the center of her high-end, All-Clad-studded kitchen. She seemed lost in a troubling daydream, holding an espresso maker in one hand. Her front door is never locked-a matter of some alarm for Choo Choo, Landon, and me-so she didn't hear me when I greeted her from the arched kitchen doorway.

"Hi, Nonna."

She turned a look of mild interest toward me, taking in my Ann Taylor black twill capris. "Perhaps your legs are not your best feature," she mused.

Not my best feature, indeed! "I'm a dancer."

"Dancers dance."

"Unless they have to work in the family salt mine," I threw out.

"Which keeps them all in pants, you should only remember."

Had I come to the end of the Angelotta illogic thread? The point in these exercises is simply to utter something, no matter how inane. Last man talking, and all that. Whenever I get into one of these conversations with Nonna, I have a full understanding of what happened to the Roman Empire: they finally heard themselves.

When she swung around to me and slumped, I realized how stiffly she'd been holding herself. My seventy-six-year-old nonna was still kind of a dish, what with her ma.s.ses of springy salt-and-pepper hair, her fine, high cheekbones set in a broad face that could handle every one of those wrinkles, and a nose with the kind of nostrils even money can't buy.

There wasn't a hue on Landon's color wheel that didn't look all the better for simply being near Maria Pia's face. This was a difficult truth when I hit p.u.b.erty and all the boys I was interested in hung around hoping to get a glimpse of my grandmother in her short black-and-red kimono. It's one thing to look like leftover polenta compared to a dance squad babe who's your age; it's another thing altogether to be outdone by your granny.

"Darling," she cried, as if she had just seen me for the first time. Clamping her hands on my shoulders, Maria Pia steered me over to the wood-and-chrome stools that stood around the S-shaped island in the middle of her kitchen.

We sat.

Nonna was dressed in a pale pink satin robe and matching peep-toe slippers. Her toenails were polished gold. "Tell me," she said, searching my face for some kind of breakdown she could use as a jumping-off point for her own. She'd been in a culinary dry spell for a while, which I contend explains the likes of Arlen Mather. Whenever she wasn't cooking well, she was at risk of a romance with an unsuitable man.

"Didn't the police give you the details?"

"Only that Arlen was . . . attacked." Her lower lip actually quivered and she looked at me for confirmation.

"Well, bludgeoned." Spare the image, spoil the grandmother, I always say.

Her eyes went wide. "A head wound?"

"Oh, yes." With all the sag of my first panet-tone, the sweet holiday bread.

" 'Wound' always sounds so . . . fixable, don't you think?"

"Well, not when 'fatal' comes in front of it. Believe me, Arlen has eaten his last risotto alla milanese."

I scanned my grandmother's still-beautiful face, certain she was hungering for more, well, description. And when I realized she knew there was no way she could outright ask for it without appearing heartless or-better word-ghoulish, I felt strangely uplifted. "The question, of course, is who killed him."

She looked at me, wide-eyed. "Obviously, cara."

"And how he got inside the restaurant."

"To breathe his last." Shaking our heads, we looked away from each other, pondering for a lengthy nanosecond the cruelty of a world that contains such things as murder and meatb.a.l.l.s.

Maria Pia's hands slid through the voluptuous tangle of her hair and she nodded. "Yes, how he got inside Miracolo. I imagine that's what the police want to know." We sat there companionably while she poured me an espresso, slipping a crescent of lemon rind onto my saucer. "Which is why," she said, sitting up straight, "I'll have to tell them the truth."

The hairs on my arms went on high alert. "The truth?"

She licked her lips, a stalling tactic I knew well. Then she finally lifted her hands in bewilderment. "I let Arlen into Miracolo that morning."

Was the sudden, end-of-the-world clanging only in my head?

"Why?" I finally got out.

"He wanted a look at the opera-come si dice?-stuff." Suddenly she grinned at me, like this was a winning piece of information. Something I had in common with the flattened boyfriend.

My mouth was hanging open. "You left him there?"

"You don't have to call Children's Services on me, Eve. He was a grown man."

And nothing bad ever happens to grown men. "So you just dropped him off?"

"I was on my way . . . to the mall." Why did I feel like she was making it up as she went along? "The dress I'm wearing for Festa della Repubblica? The alterations are done-"

"Saks?" Sound casual.

"Ma certo." An elegant shoulder lift.

Now I could check her alibi.

"So you just let him in to look over my stuff? Couldn't he do that during normal business hours?" This was smelling like the shipment of sea ba.s.s we got last week.

"I didn't think you'd mind. Besides, what harm would come of it?" She gave me a pained look. "Arlen was a perfectly lovely, respectable-"

"Old soul."

"Exactly." She sighed. "I gave somebody at the Courier Times a photo of Arlen and me at the Philadelphia Food and Wine Festival. He was wearing a red ascot"-she bit her lip-"and looked very handsome. I hope I get the photo back."

This from a woman who doesn't own a single photo alb.u.m.

I asked, "Did you see anyone hanging around?" Say, an entire wait staff practicing the tarantella?

She c.o.c.ked her head. "Where?"

"At Miracolo, the morning you dropped Arlen off." I gazed at her over my demita.s.se.

"There were plenty of people around, Eve." She was fixedly sketching circles in the sunlight on the granite countertop. "But no one in particular."

I dropped my spoon noisily into my saucer. "I know about the tarantella, Nonna," I said in a tone that sounded like I was accusing her of cheating on me.

"Oh, you, you, you, you know so much." With her chin high, she blurted, "He said he'd leave the place exactly the way he found it."

"Oops."

"Sometimes you are really too sarcastic," she told me. "Have a biscotto." Like it was an antidote. One manicured hand pushed the plate of her special pistachio biscotti toward me. Even when she was in a culinary dry spell, my nonna could crank out the pistachio biscotti.

I chose one and took my time studying it. "Why did he take down the shadow box with the Caruso seventy-eight?"

"Did he? Maybe he forgot his gla.s.ses." She gave me a typical dramatic shrug, but my c.r.a.p Detector started dinging when she didn't look me in the eye. "And I'm pretty sure I told him he could take things out of those silly little show boxes-"

"Shadow boxes, Nonna."

"-to see things up close, as long as he put them back."

My head felt like slow-drying cement. I tried to picture the scene around the corpse, but couldn't. Except for the Caruso 78 and the busted shadow box kicked into the corner. What else had I missed?

We stared each other down so hard, you'd think we were playing Texas Hold 'Em.

I held out my hand.

She looked at me blankly.

"The key, Nonna. Please."

She slammed her hands down on the table. "Whose restaurant is it?"

"Which is why you can appreciate the need for better security," I retorted. "I'll let you in any time you have a good reason."

She glared at me. "You act like you own the place."