"Move to the left, Bianca!  The left, you numbskull!" 

It's a Thursday night and my sister Connie and I are trying to lug a heavy chair up a narrow stairway and she's barking out instructions with the elegance of a harbor stevedore. I refrain from pointing out that her left is my right since I'm walking backwards.  My hands are throbbing from gripping this two-ton old wing chair for what seems like hours and if I let go, it will fall and pummel poor Connie to the bottom of the flight.

Hmmmm.....

"Why didn't you have your new boyfriend Dylan help out? Or did he dump you already?"  Yes, I can give as good as I get.

She narrows her eyes at me which, in Balducci language, means "Shut up, you traitorous witch, or I'll heave this chair into your 32-A chest."  She gives the chair a nudge to ram home her point.

"Okay, that's it," she pants as we ease the piece through a doorway into a cluttered living room.  Connie's moving, you see, into her first apartment - just above the ramshackle storefront she uses as an office for her detective agency. Except she doesn't call it "ramshackle."  She calls it quaint.

As soon as we set the chair in place, Connie places her hands on her hips and mutters a curse.

"You're welcome," I say, subtly pointing out her lack of thanks.  But my sister is impervious to my jab.  She clomps her way across the room and rummages through some papers on a nearby table. An opera program falls to the floor - she'd just attended her first one with Dylan last week and I'd peppered her with questions about it because our music class is studying opera right now.

She repeats her angry search several times - sweeping books off a bookshelf, slamming open kitchen cabinets and even peering under the sofa. I start to get a case of pre-emptive defensiveness. Whatever she's looking for, chances are she will accuse me of misplacing it as some point. Must have my arguments at the ready.

Finally, she stops, heaving an irritated sigh and crossing her arms over her chest.

"I think my landlord is stealing from me."

"Why?"

"My laptop is missing."  She points to the table. "I know I put it there yesterday."

"Who else has been here?"

"Nobody," she harrumphs.

"Didn't you give a key to Dylan to drop off a coffee table last night when you were working a case?" 

"Yeah. But Dylan didn't stop by. Couldn't make it." She gestures to the room which is full of lots of things, but missing a coffee table.

I plop on the sofa and stare up at her. "How come?"

She shrugs her shoulders which, in Balducci language, means "I probably will end up dumping him."  Then she plops down beside me.  "He called to say his boss gave him a ticket to another opera and he felt he better show up."

"What opera?"

"Puccini's Marriage of Figaro, he said."

"What?"

"Yeah, I wrote it down. I thought he was going to ask me to come and I didn't want to sound stupid so I was going to look it up."

I stand and now it's my turn to put my hands on my hips. "Your landlord didn't take your laptop. It's probably that lying, thieving boyfriend of yours."

***

The next day, Connie makes it official - she dumps Dylan.  That is, after threatening to call the police on him. That's when he handed over the laptop, sheepishly claiming he was only "borrowing" it until he got a new job. Oh yeah, turns out he didn't have a boss who gave him opera tickets. He didn't have a boss at all.  He's unemployed. 

How did Bianca guess that Dylan was the culprit?  Her music class was studying opera. As soon as Connie told her that Dylan had said he was going to Puccini's Marriage of Figaro, she knew he was a liar. Puccini didn't write The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart did. Dylan had access to the apartment - Connie had given him a key to drop off the coffee table - and he swiped the computer when he claimed to have been at the opera.