The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

by C. R. Corwin

  “Actually I don’t.”

  “Name?”

  “Maddy Sprowls.”

  It was as if that statue of Roscoe Blough had clanked in and asked her for directions to the men’s room. “Good Lord!” she howled.

  Her surprise didn’t surprise me. In the past two years I’d interfered in two major murder investigations. And made the police look like a pack of doofuses both times. “I’m sure Detective Grant will want to see me.”

  She pushed his extension button with more foreboding than if she were launching a nuclear-tipped missile to start World War III. “Maddy Sprowls is here for you, detective,” she whispered. Then she laughed. “No, she doesn’t have a bomb—that I can see.”

  So I was told where to go. I took the elevator to the fourth floor. It was just as cold up there as the lobby. An officer pointed me toward Detective Grant’s cubicle.

  When Grant saw me coming, he stood up behind his desk and put his fists on his hips Superman-style. He did not, however, suck in his belly, the way most middle-aged men do when anybody remotely female appears. He loudly recited a Bible verse: “Revelations 13:1: ‘I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads.’”

  I like Scotty Grant. He’s comfortable in his own skin. Which is a good thing. He has plenty of it. What he doesn’t have is a lot of hair. Except for his eyebrows. They frame his puffy eyes like the McDonald’s arches. I plunked myself in the chair alongside his desk. “Any way you could have the air conditioning turned up?” I asked. “I can still feel one of my big toes.”

  He sat and took a noisy slurp from his mug. It had a picture of Daffy Duck on it. “I’m sure we don’t have any of the crappy tea you drink, but I can get you an equally crappy cup of coffee.”

  I nodded gratefully. “One, real sugar.”

  He lumbered out, returning in a couple of minutes with a mug with Cinderella on the side. “We didn’t have any real sugar—sorry.”

  “I trust you left it black,” I said, taking a cautious sip. He had left it black. I thanked him with a smile and got down to business. “I need some information on Eddie French.”

  There was no more surprise on his face than if I’d told him that water was wet. “He a friend of yours?”

  I wanted to make it sound like I was there in my official capacity as newspaper librarian. “I’ve been asked to do some research on him.”

  That made Grant grin. “For a second there I thought you were just sticking your shnozola into another police investigation. For no other reason than to make my life more miserable than it already is.” He leaned back in his chair until both of his chins were resting on his chest. He pulled open his bottom desk drawer with his foot. Reached in and retrieved a folder. EDDIE FRENCH was scribbled on the tab. “Bob Averill told me he was going to twist your arm.”

  “Did he now?”

  “We’ve become good friends because of you.”

  Grant loved to play gotcha with me. Even though he almost always lost. I looked the masochistic bastard straight in the eyes. “Then I guess he also told you about Eddie’s aversion to guns.”

  “Indeed he did,” said Grant. “So did Eddie’s sister. And I personally tested him. Played with my service revolver in front of him during our interrogation. Sure enough, he started hyperventilating like a sonofabitch.”

  “You believe it?”

  He opened the folder. Shuffled through the stack of official forms and scraps of paper covered with notes. “It looked real enough. Then again, my wife is deathly afraid of airplanes yet every April flies to Phoenix to visit her folks.”

  “So, Eddie could have overcome his fears long enough to murder Violeta Bell?”

  “Yup.”

  “Or maybe he’s not quite as allergic to guns as his sister thinks?”

  “Yup. Yup.”

  “Or his sister is knowingly telling an untruth?”

  “Yup. Yup. Yup.”

  I went for a fourth “Yup” while he was still so agreeable. “But it really doesn’t matter since you don’t have enough evidence to charge him with the murder anyway?”

  He toasted me with his Daffy Duck mug. Then he set me straight. “When we had enough to charge him with burglary, etcetera, we charged him with burglary, etcetera. When we get enough to charge him with murder, we’ll charge him with murder.”

  I toasted him with Cinderella. Then went straight for his jugular. “Unless I’m wrong, you’ve got no witnesses and no murder weapon. You’ve got no fingerprints or other proof of Eddie French ever being in the fitness room.” The sour look on his face told me that either he’d just swallowed a bug, or I was right on the money.

  I assumed it was the latter and went on. “Now, you do have evidence of him being in Violeta’s condo. Then again, I’m sure you’ve got evidence of him being in the other ladies’ condos, too. He drove them around for years. As for the antiques you found in his apartment—well, I don’t know exactly what you found—but they could have been gifts, just like he said.”

  Grant handed me a sheet of paper from his folder. It listed the antiques they found in Eddie’s apartment:

  Victorian oak shaving stand

  Louis XV Pompadour vanity

  1830s Biedermeier mirror

  Granite Art Deco fireplace

  1850s rosewood cheval mirror

  Stickley rocking chair

  1926 leather club chairs (2)

  Cast iron Godin stove

  Art Nouveau fireplace

  Grueby vases (4)

  The list surprised me. “Fireplace mantles? Cast iron stoves? I was expecting watch fobs and pocketknives. Maybe a silver spittoon or two.”

  Grant grinned victoriously. “Not exactly gift material, is it.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I admitted. “And not exactly easy to steal from a seventh floor condominium without being seen.”

  “Not easy but not impossible,” Grant countered. “The murder occurred at night and he would have had all night.”

  I recapped his hypothesis to make sure we were on the same page. “So you’re saying he forced her to go with him to the basement fitness room—or otherwise finagled her into going—shot her dead and then went back up to her condo and took his good old time taking what he wanted.”

  “Yup.”

  I read the list again, picturing the wiry little cab driver frog-walking a two-hundred-pound marble mantle down the hallway. “And you’re sure all of these things belonged to Violeta Bell?”

  He snatched the list from me. “We didn’t find an inventory list in her condo or anything, the kind people keep for insurance purposes,” he said. “In fact we found no proof of her even having any homeowner’s insurance. But all the items we found in Mr. French’s rat hole do have her little sticker on the bottom somewhere.” He fished another sheet of paper from the folder and held it up for me to read. It was an inky, out-of-focus blowup from a copying machine badly in need of a service call:

  Bellflower Antiques

  119 West Apple St., Hannawa, Ohio USA

  Violeta Bell, Proprietor

  “This is your proof?” I huffed.

  “Well—yes.”

  “No eyewitnesses? No jimmied locks?”

  “Well—no.”

  “So they could have been gifts?”

  Grant rallied. “And I might be invited to join the Olympic bobsled team.”

  I smiled. As disagreeably as I could. “According to the reporter who did the Queens of Never Dull story—Gabriella Nash—Violeta Bell’s condo was stuffed to the ceiling with expensive antiques.”

  “That it was.”

  “And still is?”

  He knew what I was getting at. “So why did Eddie take heavy fireplaces and furniture? When he could have stuffed his pockets with jewelry and other more wieldy thingamabobs?”

  “It does seem strange,” I said.

  “It does. Until you have the stuff appraised. Find the right buyers and you’ve got a good fifty thou in cash.” He enjoyed a long sip o
f his coffee. “And who knows what he might have fenced before we arrested him.”

  “Anything with Violeta’s sticker show up yet?”

  He shook his head no. “But we’ve got our eyes peeled.”

  The self-satisfied bastard had made some good points. Now it was my turn. “Speaking of things showing up—those blood results back yet?”

  “Any century now.”

  “Funny about that blood, isn’t it?” I said. “Eddie tracked it back to his apartment but not back to Violeta’s condo.”

  “Ever think that maybe he took off his shoes?”

  He had me again. I hadn’t thought about that. “So he knew he had blood on his shoes and lugged all that stuff out of Violeta’s condo in his stocking feet?”

  “That’s one theory.”

  “You find any matching stocking threads?”

  I was suddenly Phyllis Diller. He laughed like a hyena on helium. “You, Mrs. Sprowls, have been watching way too much CSI!”

  “How about his cab?” I growled. “Find any blood in there?”

  “Do you really think all that stuff on the list would fit in a taxi cab?”

  “I suppose not.”

  He answered my next two questions before I could ask them. “Yes, he has a truck. No, we didn’t find any blood in it.”

  I didn’t know beans about blood, of course, but I gave it my best shot. “Wouldn’t the blood on his shoe have dried by the time he got back to his apartment?” I asked. “It would have been several hours later.”

  He was suddenly agitated. Uncharacteristically curt. “When the blood comes back we’ll see what gives—okay?”

  I let him have his victory. What choice did I have? “While we’re on the subject of Violeta Bell’s blood,” I said, “anything to her claim that she’s Romanian royalty?”

  Grant’s agitation vanished. He giggled like a kid who’d just won a year’s supply of Chicken McNuggets. He fished another photocopy from his folder. Shook it at me. “I don’t know about royalty,” he said, “but her passport here lists her country of birth as Romania.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. The passport is a phony.”

  “No kidding?”

  He shook other photocopies at me. “And so is her Ohio driver’s license and Social Security card. Even her AARP card is a fake.”

  “Oh my.” I took the copies from him. Sorted through them. “I don’t see a birth certificate.”

  “There’s no record of one,” he said. “Nor could we find her naturalization papers, assuming she had any.”

  I sank into my chair. “Let me guess, no last will and testament.”

  “You wouldn’t think so, would you?” he said, producing one from his folder. “But—”

  I took it from him. “Is it real?”

  “Yup. Prepared by J. Albert Ritchey himself.”

  Al Ritchey was one of Hannawa’s most prominent attorneys. A million years ago he’d handled my divorce from Lawrence Sprowls. I gave the will a quick read. “She left everything to the Hannawa Art Museum?”

  There was that giggle again. “Which, not counting her condo or the things in it, comes to a whopping thirty-five hundred bucks.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. No insurance policies. No stocks or annuities. No CDs or savings accounts. Just a checking account dwindling toward zero.”

  “Dwindling? So she used to have more?”

  Grant showed me a stack of printouts from the First Sovereignty Bank. It showed very few deposits but oodles of cash withdrawals. Over the past eight years she’d gone through $385,000. “Any tax records?” I asked.

  “That’s the fun part,” he said. “She loyally paid her city taxes, but she never paid a penny in state or federal taxes. No sales taxes. No income taxes.”

  I went back to her will. In it she requested that her remains be cremated. She named one of her fellow Queens of Never Dull as her executor. “Why do you think she chose Gloria McPhee?” I asked.

  Grant shrugged like the Italian he wasn’t. “They were friends.”

  I scowled like the librarian I was. “Of course you’re aware that Mrs. McPhee is on the art museum board of trustees.”

  He pretended to be surprised. “No kidding? We’ll have to look into that!”

  I was trying to see what else he might have in that folder. “Are those photographs of the murder scene?”

  “Believe me, Maddy. You don’t want to see these.”

  I impatiently wriggled my fingers at him.

  He handed me the photos.

  There were ten of them in all. They all showed Violeta sprawled out dead on the exercise mat. They were taken from different angles and different distances. I tried to be hard-boiled, the way cops on TV always are. “Tiny bullet holes,” I said.

  “Homicide-wise, a .22 isn’t a very reliable weapon,” Grant said. “Sort of a BB-gun on steroids. The assailant apparently understood that. Three quick shots at point-blank range right in the heart there. And only three.”

  I knew where he was going. “And the killer wrapped the gun with Violeta’s bathrobe to muffle the sound.”

  “That’s right,” said Grant. “Small caliber gun. Middle of the night. Basement. Big, fluffy bathrobe wrapped around and around just to make sure. The assailant was very careful that nobody saw anything or heard anything.”

  “And nobody did?”

  “Just the asswipe pulling the trigger.”

  I continued studying the photos. Violeta was flat on her back. Her arms and legs were spread-eagle, sort of, suggesting she just fell back dead without struggling or suffering. “You think she went pretty quick?”

  “Died instantly, as they say.”

  Dale had correctly reported that Violeta was wearing only her underwear when her body was found. He had not, however, reported that it was a fancy red bra and matching panties. “She wasn’t—”

  Grant answered brusquely, “There’s no evidence of this crime being sexual in any way.”

  “Well, that’s something at least,” I heard myself say. I handed the photographs back to him. I moved on to another subject. “So, what did you think when Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy bailed Eddie out? You couldn’t have been overjoyed.”

  “Bad guys getting out on bail stopped bothering me long ago,” he said. He put the folder back in his desk drawer. Closed the drawer with his foot. “Anything else the Hannawa Police Department can do for you today, Mrs. Sprowls?”

  I was not disappointed that our chat was over. Between the black coffee and the damn air conditioning, I was fighting a losing battle with my bladder. I put the Cinderella mug on the corner of his desk. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with nothing, but are you looking into that queen of Romania nonsense?”

  Grant knew me too well. “Which means you are.”

  “Not exactly looking,” I said. “But it is interesting, isn’t it? A few days after she publicly claims to be the queen she’s dead.”

  It was clear from Grant’s patronizing smirk that the Hannawa Police Department was not giving much credence to her claim. “I think this case has a lot more to do with good old, garden variety American greed than European history,” he said. “But if you learn something interesting—”

  “You’ll be the first to know.” I stood up to leave. He remained in his chair, swiveling back and forth. “It was good seeing you, Maddy.”

  “It was good seeing you.” I was telling the truth and I think he was, too.

  Grant stood up now. He stretched his arms until his shirttail popped out. He walked me to the elevator. “You’re going to behave this time?”

  “I always behave,” I said. “Sometimes badly, but I behave.”

  “I don’t want you getting yourself into trouble.”

  I knew he was getting at something. “And how might I do that?”

  He pushed the down button for me. “Oh, I don’t know—illegally entering a crime scene maybe.”

  “That’s illegal now, is i
t?”

  He smiled like a mischievous elf. “Don’t let this go to your noodle, Maddy, but we didn’t know about those skeleton keys.”

  I rode the elevator to the main floor. Used the ladies’ room. Successfully spun myself through the revolving doors into a blast of hot wind. It felt as if The Almighty, for some reason, had decided to punish our sinful city with a giant hair dryer. I slipped past Roscoe Blough. Headed back to the paper.

  Detective Grant is one of my favorite human beings. But between you and me, I’m always relieved when our jousts are over. He’s just too good a match. He’s just as willful as I am. Just as unpredictable. Just as exasperating. And that morning I knew he’d bested me in all three. He not only knew I was sticking my shnozola in another murder, as he put it, he didn’t much care that I planned to stick it in even farther. Which meant he wanted me to stick it in farther. Which meant he had his own doubts about Eddie French’s guilt. Good gravy! He didn’t even care that I’d stuck my head inside the fitness room at the Carmichael House. Which meant he’d hidden a video camera somewhere. No doubt to catch the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. To retrieve or erase some little piece of evidence, maybe. He even volunteered that his department didn’t know about the skeleton key in the fire extinguisher box. His way of admitting that he needed me, you think? And how about all that stuff he told me about Violeta Bell? No birth certificate. Fake Social Security number. All that. It sure confirmed Gabriella’s suspicions. Not to mention mine.