It was a little after nine thirty on a bright Tuesday morning when the Uber driver dropped Isabella Morelli off in front of the unemployment building. She’d planned enough time in the schedule to go into the office, check in, go to the bathroom, and exit the rear door to create her alibi.
Four blocks away on Chestnut Street was access to the rear parking lot of Chef Bellini’s stucco one-story restaurant, Lasagna Diner. Layers of Flavor in red neon zapped on and off each evening, attracting hungry patrons to the well-known establishment. Chef Bellini was something of a celebrity. He even had his own television show.
Isabella paid the driver. An enormous yellow floppy hat was pulled low over large sunglasses and a blonde wig that covered her dark hair. As she entered and headed toward the restroom, she ran over the plan again, examining each move. She’d studied and re-studied it obsessively until it seemed a part of her bones.
She removed the hat, wig and sunglasses, placed them in a large tote bag and hid them in the closet she knew to be there from a previous reconnaissance mission. The office was busy, and she nodded at the clerk who usually spoke to her. Back in the restroom she put the wig back on and slipped the strings of a black Lasagna Diner apron over her head. She’d never returned it after her employment ended six months before. She made sure the glass vial was safely wrapped and hidden in the pocket.
As she walked steadily toward Chef Bellini’s restaurant, Isabella couldn’t help thinking about all the things that could go wrong. The celebrity event might be cancelled. The Chef might have altered the time he left for the daily lunch hour. It might not be him driving the truck. Any number of things could thwart her plan for revenge but she purposefully pushed those thoughts away and plowed on.
At the corner of Chestnut and Walnut, she sighed with relief. The Lasagna Diner’s big white food truck was parked behind the restaurant. From across the street, hidden by a bush, she watched as Tony, the cook, loaded stainless steel pans full of steaming hot food. If she timed things right, she’d be in the vehicle before anyone spotted her and before the back door was locked. She waited until Tony seemed to have made his last trip and sprinted toward the parking lot.
She lay down on the floor of the truck so the chef wouldn’t be alerted before it was time. The floor of the food truck smelled of dirty shoes and old grease that never seemed to go away no matter how many times they washed it. She held her breath against the rancid smell and her own fearful agitation over whether the plan would succeed or not.
She thought about Chef Bellini and wondered if the scalding hot water she’d hurled at him had left a scar on his handsome face and body--the body she’d held lovingly and the face she’d kissed breathlessly during their ten tumultuous years of an off-again-on-again relationship. It was the next best thing to putting a bullet through his head, which Isabella would have probably done if not hauled off by the police.
The front door of the food truck opened and she heard Bellini get in, his distinctive heavy breathing confirming it was him. He put the truck in gear and slowly eased the vehicle over the dip in the driveway so as not to jostle the food out of their trays. He turned right onto Chestnut Street.
Isabella managed to get up from the floor into a crouch. She reached into the apron’s pocket and carefully removed the glass vial. In her left hand she firmly grasped a stainless-steel whisk she’d removed from the worktable. She slowly crept toward the front.
“Hello, Nigel.”
“Wha… What are you doing here?” he demanded, glancing back at her briefly.
“Just checking in with my former employer and boyfriend.”
“I have a restraining order!” he said in a tight voice.
“Such a masculine thing to do! But then you always were so… masculine,” she purred.
He turned the wheel toward the curb.
“What are you doing?” she asked, feigning panic.
“Pulling over so you can get out.”
She’d figured he’d do that. She placed the round end of the handle of the stainless-steel whisk against his neck. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Or what? You’ll shoot me with a cooking whip?”
“There are other things I can do to hurt you before I get out.” She dropped the whisk and pulled a gun from under the driver’s seat she knew he kept there for protection. She let him see it in the rearview mirror and placed it against his neck. “Keep going.”
Chef Bellini reluctantly turned the truck back onto the street.
“This is a new low even for you, Isabella,” he snarled. “What do you want?” He trained his eyes on the traffic in front of him.
“I want you to pay for my new restaurant,” she said sweetly.
He laughed in ridicule. “Or you’ll shoot me? No restaurant then.”
“No, or I’ll release this salmonella contagion on your kitchen and food trucks. Sometime, somewhere when you least expect it. To ruin your reputation.” She showed him the vial. “I came up with the idea while I was in prison, and saw a prisoner dumping something into another inmate’s food.”
He glanced at what she held in her hand to the right of his periphery vision.
“How do I even know what that is?” he asked warily.
“You can take your chances and find out, or you can give me what I want. What I earned working for you, slaving for you, loving you for ten years of my life without much of a salary or anything else to show for it except jail time. Three months jail time. You have the money. Your new book, which I helped you write, is a best seller. You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” he said, and snaked out his hand to take the vial and jerked the wheel to the right then back left.
Isabella fell down and the vial and gun went flying onto the floor. She managed to pull herself upright.
“Now look what you made me do!” she screamed.
“I’ve never made you anything, Isabella. It was all you, all your own stinking decisions.”
“You son of a bitch!” She picked up the stainless-steel whip and began beating him on the head.
“Isabella! Stop! I can’t see the …”
WAM! BAM! Isabella was flung to the side and then the back of the truck. Her head hit the stainless-steel counter and everything went completely, utterly black.
Lights and sounds slowly pierced the groggy grayness of her coma. The doctor shining a light into her eyes smiled and said, “Welcome back, sunshine.”
“Wha… What happened?” she managed to whisper.
“The food truck you were in sped through a red light and was struck by a twenty-foot long box truck.”
She vaguely remembered the chef sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Nigel? Chef Bellini?” she whispered.
“Gone, I’m sorry to say. Too bad. I really liked his TV show.”
Oh, she thought listlessly. “How long have I…”
“Three months,” he said cheerily. “We weren’t sure you were going to make it, but here you are.”
He gave orders to the nurse and Isabella slipped back into unconsciousness.
The lawyers sat across from each other at the conference table of Langley Peach & Sloane Esq.
“We want five million in damages,” her lawyer was saying. “You can clearly see my client’s condition, and so will a jury if we go to court.”
“You still haven’t answered what she was doing in the truck,” the lead attorney said across the table. “Mr. Bellini had a restraining order.”
“That’s irrelevant, as I’ve said numerous times. Chef Bellini was driving, and his truck ran a red light, getting hit by a semi-truck, and causing my client’s injuries.”
“If she hadn’t been there in the first place, she wouldn’t have been injured. And it wasn’t a semi-truck, it was a box truck. And we have a witness that says Ms. Morelli was striking Mr. Bellini just before the accident.”
“So you say, but you’ve never been able to provide that witness. Five million dollars and this all goes away.”
“Nigel, if he were alive, would Never agree to this,” Harry said, fuming. He had been Nigel’s latest restaurant and personal partner. “She constantly hounded and harassed him for the better part of ten years until he couldn’t take it anymore.”
“That is merely hearsay,” Isabella’s attorney said. “Chef Bellini, sadly, is Not here to voice his True opinion. The fact remains he was driving. It was his truck, his liability. Five million dollars is due my client. Or we can take this to court and ask for triple that.
“$750,000,” the lead attorney said.
“Over my dead body!” Harry declared, pounding the table with his fist.
“One other thing,” Isabella’s attorney continued. “We’ve clearly shown that the recipes Chef Bellini became famous for were formulated by Ms. Morelli. You have the original recipe books in her handwriting from her college days in evidence, and if we were to sue and show this in court, she would be, I’m sure, awarded much more than you’re offering. A large part of his multi-million-dollar estate, in fact.”
Harry sputtered. “You can’t do that!”
“My client can and will sue for the amount earned as a result of her recipes being stolen by Chef Bellini. However, she is willing to take five million dollars and let the rest go, with the proviso that she may use those recipes in her own restaurant, which she plans on opening soon.”
The lawyers across the table looked at each other and at Harry.
“Give us a moment,” one of them said.
“No! I won’t allow it,” Harry cried emphatically as they ushered him from the room.
Isabella didn’t speak. Her lawyer said something in soto voice, but she wasn’t listening.
“One point five million,” the lawyer said when they returned and had seated themselves. “That’s the last offer.”
“Three million,” her attorney responded.
The main lawyer looked at Harry. “Done.”
“And the right to use her recipes in her own restaurant.”
The lawyers watched Harry sigh in defeat. “As long as she doesn’t publicly go around saying that Chef Bellini stole her recipes, she is free to use them in her own restaurant.”
Isabella gave her attorney a barely perceptible nod.
“I’ll draw up the papers and have them on your desk this afternoon,” her attorney said.
“And may we say, Ms. Morelli, how sorry we are.”
They could be nice, now that the bargaining had been completed.
Isabella wheeled herself out in her wheelchair. Three Million Dollars! After the lawyer’s cut, she’d still have two million to put a down payment on the space she had her eye on and build the specially designed kitchen she’d need for her new “condition”.
Spaghetti Café was well on its way to serving hundreds of hungry people all the recipes Nigel had stolen from her. Buon Apetito!
Copyright August 2021 Laura Deane LLC
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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