Free Chocolate Quake by NANCY FAIRBANKS Page B

her.”
    “Hasn’t she got a husband to help her? Or a son? Is she a widow?”
    “Divorced,” I replied.
    “Bruno, you can’t marry a divorced woman!” Mrs. Rovere warned.
    “What the church don’t know, don’t hurt,” said Mr. Valetti. “So, you think my sweet professora killed the woman here?”
    “Sweet professora, my sainted aunt Agata. But no, I don’t think she killed Denise. She’s not big enough.”
    “My thought exactly,” I agreed. “My mother-in-law, if she wanted to stab someone to death, would have to pick on a dwarf. And since you’re on our side, Mrs. Rovere, could I use your telephone? In return—” I sighed at what I’d agreed to do. “In return, I’ve promised the director to teach a class to make chocolate-walnut cakes for the anniversary celebration.”
    “You know how to bake?” she asked suspiciously.
    “She’s-a the famous food writer in the newspaper,” said Mr. Valetti proudly. “She gonna put one-a my pizza recipes in her column. Maybe you nice to her, she put one of Alberto’s gelato recipes in, too.”
    “Alberto keeps his secret,” said Mrs. Rovere, “but she could print one of our Food Stamp Gourmet dishes. Those poor girls are hard to motivate. Who wouldn’t be, trying to make decent meals out of government surplus and no money.” She beamed at me. “My telephone is yours. You teach the dessert class, put one of our recipes in the paper, and get copies for our girls, and I’ll even help you find out who killed Denise.”
    Although I thought that I might be giving more than I was getting in this bargain, I allowed myself to be waved into her office. It was very small with shelves of recipe books in various languages and loose-leaf notebooks that evidently held class rolls of cooking students. After removing a stack of calendars penciled with the names of teachers and class hours, I sat down and dialed the first number for Nora Farraday Hollis.
    Would you believe it? The director had given me two wrong numbers. One wasn’t a working number, and the other connected me to an astrologist. A phone book lay on the window seat of Nutrition Central, so I tried that. Without success. Maybe she had an unlisted number or was listed under her husband’s name. Or maybe the director made her up as an excuse for evading my request while tricking me into teaching welfare mothers.
    When I left the office, Mr. Valetti was gone, and Mrs. Rovere was having a heated discussion with the banana-and-cheese instructor. When she noted my forlorn presence outside her office, she bustled past me to make a call. “Alexi, this is Alicia Rovere. Give that little Italian fellow your sign-in book. We need to photocopy a couple of pages. . . . Don’t argue with me, or I’ll tell the director you’ve been sending your son to sit in for you evenings so you can get overtime without working it yourself. . . . Just tear out a sheet, and have people sign in on that. You can tape it back when Bruno returns the book.”
    She hung up and waved me in. “Russians are such sneaks. He couldn’t get away with that scam if the director ever showed her face here after five in the afternoon. Still, his boy wants to go to Cal Tech. If the overtime gets him there, I guess it’s in a good cause, but I’ll tell you, if Denise hadn’t been killed, she’d have turned him in and put a stop to it. She was really worried about the money. Told me there should have been more in our accounts.”
    “You’re the second person who’s said that,” I murmured. “I wonder if someone killed her over center money.”
    “I doubt it,” said Mrs. Rovere. “She was just too new to the job to realize how much this old building eats up in maintenance.”
    Having had one theory shot down, I kept to myself the thought that Mr. Timatovich might have killed Denise Faulk to keep her from revealing his overtime scam. “The director seems to have given me the wrong numbers for the chairwoman of the center’s