Digging Too Deep by Jill Amadio Page B

he’s only been a widower for a short time. Isn’t it a little soon to expect him to start dating?”
    “Oh, that’s funny. Please, it’s nothing like that. I’m not the least bit interested in him romantically. Heaven forbid. No, I just admire his music. I wondered if you knew him when he and his wife first came to live here.”
    “Sure, we met the day they moved in. They had to take out that huge front window to get the piano inside. It caused a real commotion, and I was outside watching. Marcia and Jerry Steiner, the previous owners, would’ve had a fit if they’d seen it. The professor is never friendly, though. Very aloof, not like Monica, God grant her peace.”
    “What was she like?” asked Tosca.
    “Meticulous around the house, from the few times I was there,” replied Arlene. “She loved shopping, wore wonderful clothes. ‘Course, she had a terrific figure. But she told me she always had to nag the professor for an allowance. She was kind of flighty. Not much in her head aside from tennis. But he was crazy about her, at least at first. Indulgent as all get out. She could wrap him around her little finger, but then I guess the novelty wore off.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Maybe it was because of his marrying for the first time so late in life and she being a lot younger. They’d have arguments. You could hear it clear down to the end of the street.”
    “He seems so mild. What did they argue about?”
    “Sure, he’s mild, all right. She was the one that did all the screaming. She’d shout him into silence.” Arlene’s voice lowered to a whisper. “I once heard Monica call her husband impotent, but that was years ago. Their rows were mostly on account of her flirting with everyone she met. She was incorrigible. He used to have music students come to the house for lessons, but Monica got too friendly. She’d be joshing with them even before they got inside. You could see it from here. Monica laughed about it when I said something. She told me Haiden finally rented a studio. Only one of his young students came to the house after that, and he was absolutely brilliant. We’d hear that piano sing like an angel.”
    “I’m surprised someone like Monica would marry an older man like that, especially one so obese.”
    “He used to be skinny, and he was famous locally. She liked that. Then, too, there was the cachet of living in Newport Beach and belonging to the Barracuda Bay Club. I think she came from somewhere inland, nowhere fancy. But after they’d been married a year or so, Haiden began to put on weight, and the rows started. Now, he’s as big as a house.”
    “I don’t get the connection,” said Tosca.
    “It was sweet, when you think about it. He did all the cooking, he really got into it. Wish I could say the same for my husband. The professor went out and bought the best kitchen equipment and gadgets he could find and even asked my opinion of food processors. When his cousin and her husband came down from Northern California, Monica invited us over, and Haiden cooked the whole meal.”
    “Why did he do all the cooking?”
    Arlene shrugged. “Monica wasn’t the domestic type. Maybe he liked fixing romantic dinners.”
    “The professor is a premier composer, I hear,” said Tosca.
    “Not any more. My brother-in-law told me his last piano concerto was an awful embarrassment.”
    Tosca wondered how the professor handled the humiliation. Then she took another tack.
    “So the professor has a cousin?”
    “Yes,” said Arlene. “Betty Garrison and her husband, Frank, are both dentists at their clinic in San Francisco, but I only saw them here that one time about three years ago. They were attending a dental convention in Newport Beach, so naturally they spent a few days with the Whittakers on the island.”
    “Did you spend any time with the Garrisons?”
    “No. Monica had us over to the house once for cocktails, and there was the dinner, of course, and one day when Frank went