Widow - Anne Stuart [26]
7
The crash that followed the old lady’s question couldn’t have been timed worse, Maguire thought irritably. One bombshell was perfect—he could have sat there and watched everyone’s expression once Antonella had brought up the idea of murder, and within a matter of moments he would have learned a great deal. Maybe even who could have done the deed.
But Lauretta was on her way out to the kitchen, and the plate she was carrying smashed to the floor, drawing everyone’s gaze, giving them all a chance to hide their initial reaction. A moment later Tomaso appeared behind her, looking unnaturally disturbed.
Maguire was fast enough, well trained enough to have caught lightning-fast impressions. Gia must have suspected he’d been murdered—she barely blinked when Madame Antonella asked who killed him.
There was no doubt about Lauretta’s reaction, of course. Shock and horror made her drop the platter, and she stepped over the cake to Antonella’s side, an angry expression on her plain face. “You shouldn’t say such things, madame,” she said fiercely. “Pompasse’s death was an accident. Who would want to kill him?”
“Probably everyone who ever met the man,” Maguire said, just to see what kind of reaction he would get.
Lauretta turned on him in a fury. “How would you know? You didn’t meet him, did you?”
“Never had the pleasure,” he said. “If I had, I’d probably be a suspect along with the rest of you.” He was doing a piss-poor job of acting like an insurance investigator but he didn’t care. He’d be gone before they figured it out, and in the meantime he liked putting the cat among the pigeons.
His pronouncement made up for any lost ground. They all stared at him in shock, even crazy old Antonella.
After a moment Charlie rose. She was pale, visibly shaken. He’d been watching her carefully all through dinner, and she’d barely touched her food. It was no wonder she looked half starved. Give her another twenty pounds or so and she’d be an impressive figure of a woman. Right now she seemed barely female. And yet, female enough to distract him more than he was willing to be distracted.
“I think we’ve had enough of this conversation,” Charlie said in her deceptively calm voice.
Lauretta and Tomaso were already hustling Madame Antonella away from the table, carrying on a muttered, hectoring conversation in colloquial Italian that Maguire couldn’t understand a word of, no matter how hard he tried.
“You don’t really think he was murdered, do you?” Gia asked him.
“Enough!” Charlie said again, this time sounding a little ragged around the edges, and before he could respond she left the room, closing the French doors behind her as she disappeared into the warm Tuscan night.
He turned to look at Gia. She’d been paying him far more attention tonight than she had previously, and he wondered whether she’d suddenly realized what a handsome, charming bloke he was, or whether Charlie’s entrance into the house had anything to do with it. Gia had taken Charlie’s place with Pompasse, or at least she’d tried. Maybe she needed to make sure that no man looked at her nemesis while she was around.
Not that Maguire was interested in Gia, with her morosely beautiful face and her skinny little butt. He’d flirt with her a bit, see what kind of information he could pry out of her, but he didn’t expect much. Gia Schiavone was too self-centered to notice much outside her own orbit, and if the old man really had been murdered, she wasn’t the one who killed him. At least, that’s what his instincts told him, and he’d been relying on his instincts for most of his thirty-five years.
But she might know something and not realize it. A little judicious flattery might get him some useful information. Particularly since his time here was limited. Sooner or later, someone was going to figure out that he wasn’t who he said he was and he’d be out on his ass. He just had to make sure he had enough for a book before they caught on to him.
Gia could wait. But Charlie was a different