One Foot In The Gravy

by Delia Rosen

  “Warren Whitman sent someone over to talk to the housekeeper, Ms. Renoir. She wasn’t there that night but she had access.”

  “And?”

  “We can’t arrest someone for being a crab.”

  “I’m guessing she didn’t hold anything back?”

  “Hated Hoppy and said so. Called him rude and arrogant.”

  “Based on?”

  “He gave hand-dipping classes to the ladies at Lolo’s house.”

  “By that you mean?”

  “Fruit. Strawberries, apricot slices, and his specialty—”

  “Let me guess. The banana.”

  “The banana,” Grant said. “Covered in chocolate and ground nuts.”

  “Who attended these classes?”

  “All the Foxes—Lolo, Mollie, Helen, and Hildy. Plus one other gal, Ms. Pinky Donovan.”

  “Who is—?”

  “The new assistant manager of Hoppy’s shop.”

  “Talk to her yet?”

  “That very night,” Grant said. “She was home watching TV.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Like someone being told she’d have to look for a new job.”

  “So there was no personal connection.”

  “Not that she let on,” Grant said.

  I snickered. “Gotcha. I assume the shop is open?”

  “My guess is yes, and there will be a lot of transactions that don’t end up in the cash register,” Grant said.

  “Discount for cash,” I said. “Of course. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “You’re a peach.”

  “Dipped in the finest chocolate,” I said. That was another word that seemed to fit his golden Tennessean tongue just so.

  I hung up and went to the bathroom to wash my face and hands and apply a little lotion. A careful application of lanolin can hide even the most stubborn deli meats.

  Sweet Hoppy’s was located on Charlotte Avenue in the Capitol Hill area. The rent was high but the traffic was good. His distinctive dark brown bags and glittery boxes were a common sight around the fountain. Gift baskets were always moving here and there as state officials rewarded workers or lobbyists thanked secretaries.

  As I parked a few doors down, it only just occurred to me—Sweet Hoppy’s. Hoppy Meals. The “Hoppy” handkerchief in his pocket. The deceased was nothing if not a world-class narcissist. To some, like yours truly, that could be a killing offense. Though it made me wonder something; maybe Pinky would have some insights if I could get her to share.

  There were two workers in the shop, no customers. One of them was a slender blond girl, about twenty-one, twenty-two, with a tattoo of a harp on her neck. The other was a healthy-looking girl about the same age with blue hair streaked bright pink and a silver nose ring. Both were carefully removing white chocolate-covered potato chips from a baking tray.

  There were no customers in the shop. That seemed unusual for the tail end of lunch hour on a pleasant afternoon. I would have thought the gawkers would be out. Then again, maybe the politicians, hearing murder, decided to stay far, far away. Blood had a way of splattering even the innocent. It probably would have bruised Hoppy’s ego to learn that his last and biggest social activity had been a colossal bust.

  “Can I help you?” the skinnier girl asked with a lilting, almost musical accent.

  “I’m here to see Pinky,” I said.

  “I’m Pinky.”

  Naturally. The blonde. “Hi, I’m Gwen Katz—owner of Murray’s, the deli.”

  “Hi,” she said taking a stab at bonhomie. Either it was foreign to her, or she was in mourning. “What can I do for you?”

  “I would like to place a special order for a catering job,” I said. I was becoming very, very impressed with my ability to extemporize.

  “What and when?” she asked.

  “Truffles for Friday,” I told her.

  She made a shifty little face. “I, uh—have you heard about the owner? Like, what happened last night?”

  “Yes,” I said with as much gravitas as I could manage. “It’s terrible. But I assume the shop will continue to operate. There must be provisions—”

  “We don’t know,” the other girl said.

  Pinky sighed. “It’s unclear.”

  “But you’re both here. . . .”

  “I got a call from Mr. H’s attorney, who told me to, like, open as usual,” she said.

  “Solomon Granger.”

  Pinky brightened, like someone had thrown her a life preserver. “You know him? You got any info?”

  “I do know him. In fact, we were discussing the place this morning.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That there was a new owner,” I said. Then I lied. “I naturally assumed it would be you.”

  Pinky shook her head. “I don’t know who it is, but I’m not it.”

  “Did you hear anything else?” the other girl asked.

  “No,” I said, deciding not to tell her about the pending sale. Solly might try to sue me for interference with commerce or some baloney.

  “So, look,” Pinky said. “I can, like, take your order and a deposit and assume it will be businessas-usual . . . but who knows? Do you want to do that?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to have to order truffles and this was a good out. “Maybe I’ll just come in Friday and buy whatever’s in stock.”

  Pinky nodded. “Good plan.”

  “It’s too bad about Hoppy,” I went on reflectively. “I wanted to take his dipping class, but it conflicted with Pilates.”

  “You didn’t miss much,” Pinky said. “Before I worked here, I shopped here. He wasn’t a very good chocolatier.”

  “No? What about all this?” I gestured grandly.

  “This is from some do-it-yourself DVDs I once caught him watching in the back,” she told me. She noted my surprised expression. “He thought I’d gone home, didn’t see me picking up sprinkles behind the big showcase. I think he kept them in the safe. He took them home after I busted him.”

  “What about the cow patties?” I asked. The famed ice cream turds that were the rage of Tennessee State University.

  Pinky laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “His older sister Melanie surprised him one day, came in with her grandkids in tow. While he, like, gave them chocolate lollipops and a little attention, she talked to us, which I thought was, like, pretty nice. I don’t remember how it came up, but one of us said something about the shop being popular, and she said she was surprised because her brother knew as much about the kitchen as she knew about flying the space shuttle. Mr. H got all protesty and puffed up and pointed to the frozen display case with the patties. That’s when she said, ‘Oh, right. You probably pulled them out of someone else’s ass.’ Which I thought was pretty funny. So did the rugrats.”

  “Hello!” the other girl said. “PG-13!”

  “How did her brother take that?” I asked.

  “He got real red. He reminded her that he had studied in Europe after she had left the house.”

  “Left for—?”

  “I don’t remember,” Pinky said.

  “Someplace, South Carolina,” the other girl told me. “She married some rich hotel guy, said that whoever invented them, she was glad she didn’t have to slave over hot bubbling vats of fake cow dung like her brother.”

  “Wait—I thought the Hopewells had money.”

  “Well, she did,” the girl said. “I don’t know about Mr. H.”

  “Yeah, he didn’t really talk to us about his private life and personal finances,” Pinky said. “To him, we were just wage slaves.”

  “Eye candy for the state senators.”

  Pinky air-high-fived the other girl—who, by this time, I was tired of thinking of as ‘the other girl.’ I shifted a little so I could see her name tag: Jennifer.

  “Yeah, those were, like, the kind of people he talked to,” Pinky went on. “Big shot politicians. Whenever they came in he was,
like, really supernice. He told us that we should be too.”

  With the form-hugging shirts they were wearing—white with brown sequins that spelled “Hoppy” across their chests—I didn’t imagine it mattered how nice they were. But I was glad for the opening: that was what I’d been intending to ask when I first arrived.

  “Do you think he had political aspirations?” I asked.

  Pinky didn’t express an opinion, and deferred with another glance at Jennifer, who raised a shoulder and let it drop.

  “The only things I ever saw him show any interest in was women and money,” Jennifer said.

  “In that order?” I asked.

  “In that combination,” Jennifer replied, beyond her years.

  Pinky was still standing there. Her forearms were resting on the top of the display case. She was looking at a wall. “He definitely struck me as a wannabe,” she said, apparently still thinking about my question and, by association, her late boss. “Why else would someone pay high rent to be near the capitol and look at a statue of some old-days dude on a horse?”

  The “guy” was Andrew Jackson, but I decided not to give them a history lesson. They’d given me a lot to think about, and I took it all in while I glanced around the shop. Now that she’d mentioned it, the place lacked any love, any real inspiration. An interior decorator had probably done the dark chocolate walls and swirly, white chocolate drizzle wainscoting. The display cases, stands, trays, even the rug were strictly catalogue.

  I thanked the young ladies for their time.

  “By the way,” I asked Pinky, “how’d you get your nickname?” It wasn’t important, but I always have time to scratch a brain itch.

  “From the way I hold this finger when I play harp,” she said, holding up the little finger of her right hand like a crook. “It’s, like, kind of my trademark.”

  “Nice hobby,” I said.

  “I play at gigs, if you’re ever catering one with music,” she offered.

  “I’ll remember that,” I promised. And I would. I was a soft touch for kids who follow a dream.

  I left with a hollow tinkle—even the bell over the door was bottom-of-the-line mail order—and the sense that while I hadn’t uncovered much except a treasure chest of “likes,” I knew Hoppy a little better. I had a theory. Not a unified theory, more like an impression. He made a decent amount of money from this shop and used that, and his own fortune, so he could be around people of influence. Not just movers and shakers on the hill here, but also in society. Whether he pursued women to pursue women, or pursued women to pursue access, I had no idea. But it was something worth investigating.

  Chapter 7

  I decided to go home. I didn’t want to be distracted while I re-Googled the dead man. Now that he was a victim of homicide, all the top searches would be about that. I wanted stuff I didn’t know.

  I word-searched Hapford Hopewell Melanie.

  Duh. That still gave me his death and the nextof-kin. I added the word fortune. That gave me a biography in the Dessert Professional online magazine. I skimmed.

  “Hapford Hopewell, Jr. Born 1963, father was—aha. Father was the founder of the Checkers Sugar Corporation of Greenville, South Carolina. So he probably gets—got—his raw material at cost. Father died in 1998, mother committed suicide a month later—that’s love or debt—and Hopewell spent two years traveling the world—oh, this is rich—studying chocolate-making techniques while preparing to open his shop.”

  I brought up online Battleship, a habit I acquired during my accounting days to get my mind off numbers. I played while I considered that.

  “Hoppy lied about his interest in chocolate. He probably went around the world blowing his inheritance. But sister—”

  I minimized the game, looked up Melanie Hopewell. I added the word nuptials so I wouldn’t get more “survived by” references. There was an announcement in the Charleston Post and Courier from May 1981. I had to register with the website to read it—and remember to uncheck the box that would have sent me free offers—but it was worth it.

  “Melanie Hopewell married Dollarama Motel founder Waldo Tidyman in a ceremony . . . blah blah . . . daughter of. . . .”

  And there it was. Her mother’s name in blue. I clicked on it and was taken to an article about her death, which was still eighteen years off. The temporal magic of the Internet! I scanned it:

  “Barbara Cox Hopewell was found dead from an overdose of prescription barbiturates by her chauffeur . . . alerted by the barking dog . . . said to be depressed over financial woes revealed during a proxy battle following the death of her husband Hapford Sr.”

  Hello Ruth Madoff ! Hubby crashes and you find out you’re in the hole?

  I looked up Checkers Sugar, found out that the Agriculture Undersecretary investigated them in 1996 for driving up prices of cane and beet sugar by purchasing and shutting down domestic refiners in the United States to make their monopoly on raw Brazilian imports more desirable. The investigation caused stock prices to plummet, and sent Checkers into a borrowing frenzy. The three-year loans were personally guaranteed by Mr. Hopewell.

  “Oh, my.”

  So Hoppy Jr. only had the money on his back. He probably was on a round-the-world jaunt when he got the news, and decided to stay out of the country so he wouldn’t be dragged into it. According to another article, Checkers went public in 2001. I looked up the SEC filings—now I was in familiar territory—and guess who sold all their shares for one lowly nickel on the dollar? The Hopewell children.

  I went back to Battleship.

  What Hoppy thought was ten million dollars was actually one-twentieth of that. That’s half a million bucks. Not bad, but not what he thought he had to play with.

  Another hunch. Down went Battleship, up came the names of the sugar companies Checkers had forced to shut down.

  Score.

  Dryfoos Brands, based in Nashville. Purchase price: fifty grand. And with that, the title to all the recipes. Including, I was willing to bet, the cow patties.

  “He didn’t mention that in Dessert Professional,” I said.

  There was a footnote that cited a confidentiality agreement signed by all parties, probably crafted so that Dryfoos could never spill the cocoa beans.

  Up came Battleship. I blew up, and put on my forensic accountancy hat while I rebooted.

  “So let’s say the shop is a break-even proposition, solid volume but high overhead,” I thought aloud. “The man was low on cash, needs to start another revenue stream. Maybe he went to his sister, maybe he didn’t. Maybe she came to Nashville to tell him no to his face. Maybe she knew he was a lying sack and didn’t trust him. So he puts the touch on Hildy to start another business, it flops—”

  On purpose? I wondered suddenly. Tell me, Mr. Bialystock. Did you build in failure so you could keep most of the money ? Did you tip McDonald’s off yourself so you could tell Hildy you spent all the money fighting their lawyers ?

  It was possible. But was it enough to make her want to kill him?

  I still didn’t know. Worse, among the other things I didn’t know was whether she was an isolated case or whether, as Jennifer had suggested, collecting checks and wooing available women were all part of the same scheme.

  There was only one way to find out.

  I saved my game, went to the online White Pages, grabbed the unfinished bagel from that morning, and went out.

  Chapter 8

  My next person of interest—and I use that term loosely because I wasn’t the least bit interested in her as a person—saved me the trouble of figuring out a reason to talk to her. She found me.

  I had intended to go to the Confederate Hill home of Gary Gold, whose role in the entire matter had not yet been examined much less thought about by me. He was the local mystery author whom Lolo had commissioned to write the scenario for the party. I would get there—but not just yet.

  Rhonda Shays was driving her BMW along Korean Veterans Boulevard when she spotted me. It was more like an eagle
catching sight of a field mouse, her head rotating as though her sternomastoids were made of putty. We were in the middle of the Cumberland River when it happened. Her reflective sunglasses fixed on me, followed me as I headed away from downtown, and a moment later my cell phone rang.

  “Wait for me on the other side,” she growled and hung up.

  Ordinarily, I don’t respond well to commands, unless they involve mustard or mayo or some other condiment. But, as I said, I did want to talk to Rhonda. I also had a real good idea why she was so angry, and saw this as a good opportunity to put that behind us. If it was possible to put anything behind an insane person.

  There are a series of parking lots on the other side of the river. They service LP Field, home of the football Titans. I know that because Thom’s a big, big fan. Me? I know nothing about sports. I pulled into one of them, got out of the car, and waited.

  I don’t know where and how Rhonda turned, but she arrived about a minute after I did. She parked diagonally across two spots—a habit born, no doubt, from years of selfishly protecting BMWs. There was most definitely a Cruella De Vil vibe happening. She was wearing a poufy white blouse, a dark black skirt, stiletto heels, and the smoke from a cigarette curled about her straight black hair. It had the definite aspect of a mushroom cap. But when she yanked off her sunglasses as though she were Clark Kent about to change, those eyes blazed through it as she stalked over.

  “Are you in love with my ex-husband?”

  If I’m ever asked that question again, I’ll have a better answer. Something like “Why, are his friends asking for me?” or “Yes, and they’re going to be twins!” All I said was, “What?”

  She stopped inches from my face. She’s only five-three, but the heels brought her eye level. “Are you. In love with. My ex. Husband?”

  “No,” I said. I wonder if she could see me shudder.

  “Liar!” she charged. It sounded more like a Katharine Hepburn “Li-ah!” I wondered if the rest of her sounded that way. This was the first time in our lives we’d ever spoken, though I’d heard about her from Royce and at the deli.

  “I really did just have sex with him,” I assured her. “But if I did love him, why would it matter? You were already on the way to being divorced, weren’t you, when he tried to buy my property.”