by C. R. Corwin
“The inconsistency of my stubbornness?”
“That’s right,” he said, wagging his spoon at me. “We’re choking down this tasteless gruel because of your bad cholesterol—”
“The male species comes with good and bad cholesterol, too, you know.”
“—But you don’t care one iota how many times a night you stop breathing!”
“If I make you eggs will you shut up about my tonsils?”
“Good try.”
“I’m just trying to be consistent, Ike.”
“And I’m just trying to keep you from falling over dead.”
“Good! We’ve met each other half way. Now eat your gruel so I can read the paper.” I snapped the paper open and read the headline across the top of page one:
Stunned Police Say
Slain Woman Born A Man.
I’d already read the story twice that morning—once on the trunk of Ike’s car, where the paperboy had graciously thrown it, and once sitting on my front step—but how can you not read a story like that over and over?
By Dale Marabout
Hannawa-Union Staff Writer
HANNAWA—The autopsy of 72-year-old antique dealer Violeta Bell revealed that she had undergone a sex change operation earlier in life, Police Detective Scotty Grant said.
“We debated long and loud whether to release such a personal detail about the deceased,” Grant told a hastily called press conference yesterday. “But given that Miss Bell’s murderer is still at-large, we decided that public disclosure might facilitate our investigation.”
While Grant refused to discuss what he called the “more intimate details” of the coroner’s examination, he did say that the autopsy report “shows unequivocally that Bell had been born male.”
“Makes you wonder if the other Never Dullers knew,” I said.
Ike scraped the last lump of Cream of Wheat from his bowl. He spooned it into his mouth and pretended to enjoy it. “How could they not know? Every time I see a person of that variety I know it.”
“And how do you know that?”
He laughed at his foolishness. “I guess I wouldn’t, would I?”
“Still, you’ve got to wonder if the killer knew.”
“Yes—you do have to wonder that.”
The phone rang. It was Bob Averill. He was in a tizzy. “You’ve seen the paper, I assume?”
“That, I have, Bob.”
“Did you know?”
“I learned the same time Dale Marabout did. Give or take a couple of hours.”
He hesitated just long enough to take a drink of something with ice cubes in it. “Well, I just want you to understand that this doesn’t diminish my interest in the case.”
“Mine either, Bob.”
Ten seconds after I hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Gloria McPhee. After inquiring about my well being, apologizing for bothering me so early, and then rattling my eardrum with one of the most agonizing sighs I’d ever heard, she got to the matter at hand. “Well, I guess you know what was in the paper this morning.”
“Quite a surprise. But I suppose you already knew.”
“Actually, I didn’t know,” she said. “The possibility never dawned on me. She was as much a woman as you or me. I’m absolutely flabbergasted.”
Her bewilderment sounded genuine. Which meant it was either real or beautifully played. “I imagine it came as a surprise to Kay and Ariel, too.”
“It was. Which reminds me why I called. How would you like to go garage-saling with us today?”
That, I wasn’t expecting. “Well—”
“I could have Eddie swing by and get you in a hour.”
“Eddie?”
“It’s no fun without Eddie.”
A day with those three could be very profitable. It could also be deadly. I twisted the receiver toward Ike, so Gloria could hear my every word: “Ike, dear? Do we have any plans for today?”
And so she could hear Ike’s very manly voice: “For crying out loud, Maddy! You know I’m working today!”
Having established that it would be a bad idea to drive me out to the middle of nowhere and knock me in the head, I accepted the invitation. Fifty-seven minutes later Eddie French pulled into my driveway. Ike had already left for the coffee shop but when I came out, I yelled, “See you later, honey!” anyway. Eddie invited me to sit up front with him but I sat in the back. Harder for him to strangle me while he drove.
I was acting like a paranoid fool. I knew it. Oh yes, garage-saling with Eddie and the surviving Queens of Never Dull was a dangerous thing for me to do. But not physically dangerous. The danger was that I’d be seduced out of my objectivity.
Eddie didn’t make a peep until we were on West Apple. Then he sang like a cage full of canaries. “I am truly remorseful for my attitude the other day,” he said, flicking his cigarette ashes out his open window. “But law enforcement matters always seem to aggravate my stressfulness.”
“No need to apologize.”
“Nevertheless I truly appreciate your graciousness in assisting my problematic cause.”
“I’m not being gracious,” I said. “I’m just trying to prove you didn’t murder Violeta Bell.”
“Comprendo.”
“You are still insisting that you’re innocent, aren’t you?”
He took a long draw on his cigarette. “That part of my story remains unflinchingly consistent.”
“But other parts don’t?”
“Let’s just say that you came very close to hitting the nail on the head the other day.”
“About you transporting stolen antiques for her?”
“Let’s just say we’re on the same page.”
It was a good time for me to unveil my suspicion. “Any chance that they weren’t stolen, Eddie? That they were fakes?”
He swung onto Hardihood Avenue, using nothing but the heel of his hand. “You do have a way of making the less-than-innocent squirm,” he said.
“It’s one of my specialties,” I said. “So, were they?”
“Given the precariousness of my position, I would prefer to use the word reproductions.”
“Okay, reproductions then.”
“Merci beaucoup.”
I could see the top of the Carmichael House in the distance. I had to hurry. “And were they reproductions?”
He ground his cigarette into the ashtray. He popped his glove compartment open. He pulled out a can of Glade and started spraying. A sickening vanilla smell filled the cab. “Ariel is a fierce foe of the tobacco industry,” he said.
I took my voice up a notch. “Eddie—were you transporting reproductions for Violeta Bell?”
He shook several Tic-Tacs into his mouth. “Neither the making nor selling of reproductions is illegal, Mrs. Sprowls. Nor is the transportating.”
I could see where he was going with this. “As long as everybody knows they’re reproductions?”
“Bingo.”
“But given your record, it might be hard to convince the police that everyone knew?”
“The lady wins a toaster!”
We were one traffic light away from the Carmichael House. “Speaking of the lady—did you know Violeta had once been a man?”
Eddie went right through the red light. “Mama mia! I simply could not believe what I was reading!”
I pressed him. “You’re a very street-smart man, Eddie. You had no clue at all?”
“May I expire on the spot, I hadn’t the foggiest.” He pulled into the Carmichael House. “I always took her as just another old bird whose time had come and gone—lookwise.”
Gloria McPhee, Kay Hausenfelter, and Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy were waiting on the walk outside the entrance. Gloria, trim as an asparagus spear, was fashionably dressed in a pink three-quarter-sleeve polo shirt and stone-washed capris. Ariel, more on the rutabaga side, was wearing baggy khakis and an oversized tee shirt sporting a cute but dire message about global warming: Penguins On Thin Ice. Kay was wearing red Bermuda shorts
and a sleeveless pink western shirt with sparkly, ace-of-spades buttons.
Gloria and Kay squeezed into the back next to me. Ariel sat up front with Eddie. While we’d eyeballed each other at the funeral, we hadn’t formally met. We shook hands across the seat. “I just love penguins,” I said.
“If we can’t save them how are we going to save ourselves?” Ariel answered.
Gloria, apparently, was in charge of our itinerary. She was clutching a folded classifieds section. The garage sales were not circled. “Okay, Mr. French,” she said. “Seventeen-eighty-three South Grabenstetter.”
That address excited Kay. “There’s always good buys in Tudorville,” she said.
Eddie headed back south on Hardihood. We crossed West Apple and wound our way into the dark and hilly Hannawa Heights neighborhood. Not all of the houses were Tudors, but most were. And they were all big. Eddie parked along the curb. He stayed in the cab while we ladies made a beeline for the great clutter of treasure that covered the grand old house’s blacktop driveway.
Gloria headed straight for a table covered with jewelry and other artsy trinkets. Kay went for a box of old LPs. I followed Ariel into the garage, to a table stacked with moldy old books. “I’m always looking for first editions,” she whispered to me. “I found a signed Sound and the Fury once.”
“I remember trying to read Faulkner in college,” I said. “I could never get past the first chapter.”
Ariel laughed. “That’s farther than most people get.” She got busy checking publication dates.
“What kind of things did Violeta look for?” I asked her.
“Anything made in Romania, of course.”
“Of course.”
“She never found much of course.”
“Of course not.”
“But she mainly bought furniture. Old crap that had been antiqued or painted and left in somebody’s basement for forty years.”
I picked up an old Lassie novel. The Mystery of Bristlecone Pine. My niece, Joyce, collected them. “And she’d turn around and sell it for a bundle?”
Ariel stuck a tattered book under her arm and continued down the table. “That’s what you’d expect, wouldn’t you? But she was very honest about it. She’d tell the homeowner what it was worth and then bargain down from there.”
Ariel drifted off to look at a card table sagging with kitchen gadgets. I was left to reconcile the two Violeta Bells. One trafficked in fake antiques. The other was as honest as Abraham Lincoln.
I bought the Lassie book. Ariel bought two old books for herself and an almost-new dehumidifier for the Harvest Hill Homeless Shelter. Kay bought a fifties’ Peggy Lee album, I Like Men. Gloria didn’t buy a thing.
We drove off to 119 Buffington. When we saw all of the plastic toys and tables stacked with children’s clothes, we kept on driving. “Violeta always told us not to waste our time on garage sales with piles of kids stuff,” Kay said. “‘The homeowners are too young to have inherited anything,’ she’d say, ‘and too poor to have accumulated anything worth a damn on their own.’”
We drove on to house number three. Three hundred and six Chancellor Circle. The house was a behemoth. Built in the twenties probably. We hurried up the uneven brick driveway. The woman holding the sale sat in an aluminum lawn chair. She was yakking away on her cell phone. She was surrounded by several perfectly groomed toy poodles. I followed Ariel again. There wasn’t a book table, but there were enough holiday crafts to decorate a landfill. “You and Gloria were good to invite me today,” I said, “and I don’t intend to spend the day peppering you with questions, but—”
Ariel put a finger to her lips to hush me. “You’re wondering if I knew about Violeta’s—what should we call it—previous life?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted, “but not as much about that as why you paid Eddie’s bail.”
She smiled. “You’re more interested in what’s important than what’s sensational. I like that, Maddy.”
I smiled back. I liked her. “You and Gloria obviously trust him. But given what happened and what everybody’s learned about his past—well, good gravy, most people would have dropped him like a hot potato.”
She picked up one of those glass pickles the Germans like to hang on their Christmas trees. She dangled it in front of her eyes, to see if it was an old one or a new one, I suppose. “Violeta knew Eddie long before she moved to the Carmichael House and the four of us started bumming around together. And we knew he did more for her than drive a cab.” I must have squinted or something because she quickly explained herself. “We knew he made deliveries for her.”
I found myself playing with a Thanksgiving turkey candle. It was nearly big enough to stuff and roast. “Did it surprise you that he was arrested?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Considering his police record, he was prime for the plucking.”
“You knew about his record then?”
“Not until I saw it in your paper.”
Ariel put the pickle down. I hung onto the turkey. I figured Ike could use it to spiff up the coffee shop that coming fall. “You’re confident he didn’t kill her?”
She sorted through a stack of Easter baskets. “Obviously. I made his bail.”
“And you don’t think he stole those antiques from her either?”
“I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt,” she said.
I didn’t tell her about Eddie’s confession to me that morning about his role in Violeta’s fake antique business. She and the other Never Dullers would have to learn that from someone else. I wanted my day with them to be as friendly as possible.
We moved away from the crafts, to a table covered with ceramic flowerpots and old board games. There were also several Slinkys. “You’d think one would be enough,” I said.
I not only bought the turkey candle for Ike, I bought a Slinky for Eric. Gloria bought a Ziploc bag of assorted safety pins. Kay brought a set of imitation jade chopsticks. Ariel went away empty handed.
We drove on to the next house. It was a big fifties’ ranch on Plumbrook. White with gray shutters. There was a charming stone wishing well in the front yard. The shrubs and hedges were immaculately trimmed. My target this time was Kay Hausenfelter. I followed her to a cardboard box filled with picture frames. Kay bent over the box so the back end of her red Bermudas was sticking out like a huge ripe tomato. “I have so many pictures of myself that deserve a proper hanging,” she joked.
She seemed in the right mood for the questions I had in mind. “I’ve been dying all morning to ask you about Violeta’s sex change. Were you surprised?”
“Nothing surprises me,” she said. She held a backless silver frame over her face and puckered her lips like Marilyn Monroe. “What do you think?”
“Very nice. You had to be a little surprised.”
“She always looked like a real woman to me.” She slid the frame up her arm like it was a bracelet. It was a keeper, apparently. “And as far as I’m concerned she was a real woman. Who you are is how you live. Not how you were born.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
She studied my eyes to see if I really believed that. She smiled. Then she frowned. “I just hope it wasn’t the reason she died.”
I eased into my next question. “There are so many little things about Violeta’s death, aren’t there? Interesting things that more than likely have nothing to do with anything. The sex change thing. All that silly queen of Romania stuff. Eddie’s ongoing relationship with her.”
Kay ran another frame up her arm. “Ongoing relationship? What on earth are you suggesting?”
I’d gotten the reaction I wanted. “Not that,” I said. “If Violeta was having that kind of relationship with anybody I’m sure it wasn’t with Eddie French.” I gave her one of those pregnant pauses you see in the movies. “Actually, I was referring to Eddie delivering antiques for her.”
Kay seemed relieved. “Oh. We all knew about that. He’d been doing that for years. When she still had her
shop I guess.”
I laid my little Morgue Mama trap. “Ironic.”
As I expected, she misunderstood my meaning. “That he worked for her all those years then ended up driving for us? Nothing ironic about that at all. She’s the one who got him driving us around.”
“No, dear. I was referring to the bread truck.”