“With the food editor of the Sun. She’ll be here at eleven-thirty.”

Calm, controlled, Juliet pulled out her itinerary of the San Diego stop. She skimmed it, though she knew every word by heart. “I don’t seem to have anything listed here.”

“It came up at the last minute. I called your hotel at nine, but you’d already checked out.”

“I see.” Should she have expected Elise to phone the television studio and leave a message? Juliet looked into the personality-plus smile. No, she supposed not. Resigned, she checked her watch. The setup could be dealt with in time if she started immediately. Carlo would just have to be paged. “How do I call mall management?”

“Oh, you can call from my office. Can I do anything?”

Juliet thought of and rejected several things, none of which were kind. “I’d like some coffee, two sugars.”

She rolled up her sleeves and went to work.

By eleven, Juliet had the range, the island and the ingredients Carlo had specified neatly arranged. It had taken only one call, and some finesse, to acquire two vivid flower arrangements from a shop in the mall.

She was on her third coffee and considering a fourth when Carlo wandered over. “Thank God.” She drained the last from the styrofoam cup. “I thought I was going to have to send out a search party.”

“Search party?” Idly he began looking around the kitchen set. “I came when I heard the page.”

“You’ve been paged five times in the last hour.”

“Yes?” He smiled as he looked back at her. Her hair was beginning to stray out of her neat bun. He might have stepped off the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. “I only just heard. But then, I spent some time in the most fantastic record store. Such speakers. Quadraphonic.”

“That’s nice.” Juliet dragged a hand through her already frazzled hair.

“There’s a problem?”

“Her name’s Elise. I’ve come very close to murdering her half a dozen times. If she smiles at me again, I just might.” Juliet gestured with her hand to brush it off. This was no time for fantasies, no matter how satisfying. “It seems things were a bit disorganized here.”

“But you’ve seen to that.” He bent over to examine the range as a driver might a car before Le Mans. “Excellent.”

“You can be glad you’ve got electricity rather than your imagination,” she muttered. “You have an interview at eleven-thirty with a food editor, Marjorie Ballister, from the Sun.”

He only moved his shoulders and examined the blender. “All right.”

“If I’d known it was coming up, I’d have bought a paper so we could have seen her column and gauged her style. As it is—”

“Non importante. You worry too much, Juliet.”