One Foot In The Gravy

by Delia Rosen

  “Your property!”

  She did it again: “Your” became “Yoh-ah” and “property”—well, each syllable was accented, the middle one pronounced “puh.”

  “You sassy city thing,” she said, no longer an eagle but a hissing snake. “You didn’t earn that place. You inherited it!”

  I don’t think there’s any need for me to continue parsing her enunciation. You get the idea. Anyway, I admitted she was right about that, then added, “Isn’t that how you got your money?”

  “Good God, no! I divorced for it!”

  “But your former husband was old money. So in a sense you inherited too.” I couldn’t believe I was trying to reason with this lunatic. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with the price of potatoes in Idaho?”

  “Oh, listen to you! Listen to you, you witty urban slut.”

  I closed the gap between us by an inch or two. The “urban”’ part of me, the “Asshole, the line is over here!” part of me, was beginning to boil. “Now look. I didn’t pull off the road to be called names by someone like you—”

  “Someone like me?”

  “A poseur, a society mountebank, a zoyne.”

  She looked at me blankly. She suspected she’d been insulted, but she didn’t know how. I used the break to regroup.

  “Now, was there something else? Because if not, I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”

  She folded her arms daringly. “Do you now?”

  “I do.”

  “Go ahead, Gossip Girl. Shoot to kill!”

  My insults were vocabulary. Hers were the CW. It figured.

  “Actually, it’s funny how this discussion started out, because I wanted to know if you were in love with Hoppy Hopewell.”

  Her eyes became shiny plums. “Love?”

  “Yeah. Rumor has it you two were tight.”

  I swear, it was like I suddenly dropped into Gone With the Wind and Scarlett was about to play one of her parts. Or else it was the Three Faces of Eve and the woman was truly suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. She half-turned, her cigarette hand dropped, and up came her other hand with a handkerchief! Either she always carried one up her sleeve for effect, or she had mastered sleight of hand, in which case the movie would be Houdini.

  “Who—who says such things?” she sobbed, touching her eyes in turn.

  “All of Nashville, including the surrounding suburbs. Maybe some folks in Charleston.”

  She appeared not to hear. “It is true. I loved him, even though he was a decade older than I.” Her eyes and manner became imploring. “Who wouldn’t?”

  Me? Thom? I thought. And if you’re thirty-eight, I’m a Vernicious Knid.

  Rhonda suddenly had a rhapsodic air about her. “Hoppy was funny. He was vivacious in a manly sort of way, he was romantic, he was an amusing lover—”

  “Great,” I cut her off. “The question is, were you a jealous lover?”

  The tears stopped. I swear I heard the squeak of a faucet. “What are you implying?”

  “I hear he was also close to Hildy Endicott.”

  A beat, and then she laughed like Blanche DuBois. “Hildy Endicott! That’s almost comical!”

  “They were in business together.”

  “Were they now?” That seemed to throw her a little, but she recovered. “People cannot be in business without being lovers? Weren’t you and my husband lovers and yet not in business together?”

  I wasn’t sure that made sense, but the laws of physics didn’t really apply to this woman. “Let me put it another way,” I said. “Did Hoppy ever lead you to believe you were exclusive?”

  “Ms. Katz, may I ask you another question?”

  “Go ahead.” She would have asked it anyway.

  “What in the name of the father is this any business of yours? I asked you about Royce because he was my husband. What was Hoppy to you?” The evil Rhonda was back, the handkerchief gone, the cigarette—though now a stub—back between her red lips. “Were you lovers? Did you fancy a man of mine again?”

  “Rhonda, even if I were a nymphomaniac with a sweet tooth, I would have found some other solution.”

  She recoiled as though I’d slapped her. “You rude Northern hussy.”

  “Yeah. Well, that still doesn’t tell me whether you were possessive enough to want to terminate your little slice of Heaven.”

  “I didn’t kill Royce,” she replied.

  “That’s not really a defense. You never loaned Royce money. Did Hoppy borrow? Did he default?”

  “That is none of your business,” she said. “Anyway, I wish you would stop being so tawdry. What is all of this to you?”

  “I was there.”

  “Where?”

  “At Lolo’s party.”

  Judging from her expression, that may have been the most shocking news yet. “You were invited ?”

  “No, I was catering.”

  “Oh.” She seemed relieved. She was relieved. Nashville society was intact. “Still, I don’t understand why you’re so interested—”

  “It was our first party. Unless I become the caterer who solved the murder, I’ll always be the caterer who buried Hoppy Hopewell.”

  “Yes, I see,” she said. “It’s always business with you people.”

  I’m sure she intended that to exonerate me of salacious involvement with Hoppy. With friends like that....

  “Getting back to the other business for just a sec, answer me this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have nothing to hide and you want to prove it to me,” I said. That confused her just long enough for me to ask, “How do you feel about imported vegetables?”

  “I never eat them,” she huffed. “I don’t feel like living in the water closet!”

  That derailed my line of questioning. I thought I had her.

  Rhonda moved closer. Our eyelashes could have weaved each other. “What has that got to do with the price of tea in Nepal?”

  Aha, thought I. “What about exotic tea?”

  Rhonda’s plum eyes had long since shrunk to black olives. Now they became evil, beady things. “What. Do you know. About exotic. Tea?”

  “I only know from Lipton,” I said, recovering. “But I’m guessing you know a lot more.”

  The fixed-nose wrinkled. This close, she looked like a bat. “Why should I know anything about Ceylon Green, Darjeeling Glenburn White Peony or Bolivian Black that any well-bred woman would not?”

  “Because they didn’t give Hoppy Hopewell money to bring them into the United States?” I suggested. “What did he call the company? No, let me guess. Mr. Tea? Tea for the Seesaw? Something designed to get sued?”

  “Model Tea,” Rhonda said. “He said the Ford Motor Company shut him down and it cost him everything fighting them. How did you know? Were you balling him too—?”

  “God, no.” I shivered. Twice. “Because Hildy Endicott gave Hoppy a whopping bunch of money to develop a healthy eating option called Hoppy Meals. A certain fast food chain didn’t like that either.”

  The woman looked like she’d walked into a glass door. Her red lips parted, the filter of her cigarette stuck stupidly to the upper lip. I’d never seen that before.

  “So he got you too,” I said. “And I’m willing to bet there were other ladies in his development fund.”

  “Others?”

  “A whole Cozy Foxload, and maybe beyond. I wonder if there are any spinsters in the state legislature ? Or handmade Kit Kat-loving spinsterly aides to the senators?”

  “So what?” Rhonda said, recovering somewhat. “Hoppy was a businessman.”

  “Apparently not a very scrupulous one—”

  “Businessmen put together deals.” She ran right over my remark. “Not every investor has to know every other investor in different projects.”

  “True, but not every investor is sold a onehundred-percent investment in a fatally flawed corporation,” I pointed out. “You did stake him to the entire claim, didn’t you?”

&nb
sp; “It . . . it was a healthier alternative to coffee,” she muttered.

  “Not for you. And apparently not for Hoppy.”

  Rhonda stepped back. If she had a fan up her sleeve, she’d be batting away the vapors. She leaned heavily against the hood of her car. The impact knocked the cigarette from her lip. She crushed it instinctively as though she’d simply dropped it.

  “Are you saying one of those women killed him?” she asked. Her manner had shifted subtly. She was now in personal survival mode.

  “I’m saying it’s possible that ‘a’ woman killed him.” I looked at her like a field mouse who had decided “Never Again.”

  “I’m sure there’s some other explanation for what happened,” she said, still grinding the butt with her pointed toe.

  “I may have to agree with that,” I told her. “Hoppy was a scumbag who was having money problems.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Is it?”

  “The shop is doing well.”

  “How do you know? Did he leave it to you?”

  “To me? Heavens, no.”

  “Any idea to whom?”

  “Not the vaguest.”

  “So how do you know it was doing well?” I pressed.

  “It was always busy,” she said.

  “People browsing, not buying?” I said.

  “He told me it was doing well,” she insisted.

  “Right. Hoppy Hopewell never lied to anyone.”

  “No!” she shot back. “There has to be another explanation for this . . . this. . . .”

  “Subterfuge?” I said. “What, like there was a Hoppy from another dimension? A twin brother who was going around scamming people while kind-hearted, hardworking Hoppy ran a business he really knew very little about?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “He was the candy king!”

  “He was full of fudge,” I said. “You’re still being a sap, Rhonda. The guy was a con man. He had no regard for anyone, for the truth, or even for chocolate.”

  “But he studied the art of German chocolate cake in Weimar!”

  “If he was in Weimar, that’s not the batter he was whipping up,” I said. “Rhonda, Hoppy stank like week-old lox. The question is whether one of his investors was off-the-wall angry enough to kill him or whether there’s some other reason.”

  “Hoppy,” she said wistfully. The woman was suddenly Greta Garbo. Her head went back and she said to the football stadium, “I want to be by myself, please.”

  “Believe me, so do I. Just tell me where—”

  “I will tell you nothing more,” Rhonda said. “If you wish to see me again, contact my attorney.”

  She was becoming defensive. Her mourning period had definitely ended; it was time to cover her ass.

  “Is that where you were going?” That was what I’d wanted to ask before she cut me off. She gave me another way in.

  “Where?”

  “To see Solly?”

  “Who?”

  “Solomon Granger, Esquire.”

  The nose wrinkled again as if she’d smelled that spoiled lox. “The New England attorney? Lord, no. Of all the ideas. I have no interest in him!”

  I was being uncharacteristically slow here. I forgot that in her world, every business associate was a potential lover.

  “My attorney is Jefferson Davis Forrest,” she said. “As for myself, I’m going to have my hair done. For the memorial,” she added, as though that justified vanity at a time of mourning.

  “Oh. Do you know when it is?”

  “I do not,” she admitted. “I wish to be prepared.”

  Rhonda got in the car with “pre-pay-uhh-ddd” trailing behind her. She drove off without another word.

  I stood there in the waning sunlight wondering at what point I’d fallen down the rabbit hole. Because everyone I’d talked to about this was definitely “out there.” I got in the car and continued to my original destination. Maybe, I thought, outside this ridiculous world of the Southern aristocracy, Gary Gold would prove to be surprisingly, refreshingly normal.

  I don’t have to tell you how wrong I was.

  Chapter 9

  I checked in with Thom as my GPS squired me along Shelby Avenue.

  “How’s everything?” I asked.

  “Slowish,” she said.

  “Coincidence?” I asked.

  “I don’t think people’re avoiding us,” she said. “I don’t imagine most of ’em know.”

  “It was pretty dead at Hoppy’s place.”

  “That’s different,” Thom said. “That’s the house of the dead.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh, yeah. They take that stuff seriously down here.”

  “Wow. Up North, a mob guy gets bumped off at a steak house, it’s booked solid till the next hit somewhere else.”

  Thom tsked me. “You got some funny ways up there. No respect for the dead.”

  “Not for those who deserve it.”

  “Or privacy.”

  She had me there. “We’ve got ten million people living and working in side-by-side stacks. We hear strangers’ cell phone conversations, read their iPad newspapers, walk through their cigarette smoke. What the hell is privacy?”

  Thom sighed. “No wonder you have the mouth you have, always gettin’ elbowed and havin’ your foot stepped on.” I didn’t tell her that my “mouth” was mild by comparison to most. The shock might kill her sweet, Baptist soul. “I’m guessin’ our afternoon customers were just hangin’ by their TVs or computers, waitin’ for the next shoe to drop on the Belle Meade crowd. Stuff like that is blood sport down here.”

  “Literally.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll tell you somethin’ else. No ordinary person would do Hoppy in like he was done.”

  “By ‘ordinary’ you mean—”

  “That was a rich person’s freak-out,” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They can’t kill people as themselves. That would be a mark on their status. They have to become someone else, like a blue-collar worker—”

  “An electrician?”

  “Exactly. They’d have to playact to do something that gruesome.”

  “You truly believe that.”

  “I do,” she said.

  After my encounter with Rhonda, I wasn’t about to dismiss momentary schizophrenia as a component of this crime.

  “You find anything out while you been nosing around in something that I still don’t see is any of your business?”

  “Just what you knew from the start,” I told Thom. “That Hoppy was no damn—I mean, no darn good.”

  “Hah. You see? There’s no grapevine like the service industry for reliable information. You bettin’ on any horses yet?”

  “Too early,” I told her. “I’m off to Confederate Hill to see the writer now. Your grapevine tell you anything about him?”

  She chuckled. “He came in here once about a year ago as a guest of the Cozy Foxes. At least, I think it was him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I gotta go,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I pressed.

  She replied, “He was the right man for this job.”

  I wasn’t able to extrapolate anything from Thom’s parting comment, so I filed it away as I drove to his home. It was on the also unhappily named Fatherland Street. Just seeing the street sign gave me shuddering racial memories. The address was a small, newish little bungalow—I’d put it about 1960, which was about a century younger than some of the other places in the neighborhood. I got out when the GPS told me I’d arrived and walked up the short, narrow concrete path. There was a simulated gold bar hanging from the black lamppost in place of a number sign. The mailbox beside the front door was painted gold. I guessed this was indeed the place, and rang the bell.

  An intercom crackled. I hadn’t seen it, cobwebcovered under the mailbox. “Leave it by the screen door.”

  “I’m not a delivery person, Mr. Gold.”


  “Who are you?”

  “Gwen Katz. We haven’t actually met—”

  “What do you want, Gwendolyn?”

  “Actually, it’s Gwenette.”

  “Is that French or something?”

  “I think it’s Welsh. My mother was fond of Dylan Thomas.”

  “Then she should have named you Myfanwy or Christmas, should she not have?”

  “I can’t say and sadly I can’t ask her, since she is deceased. Mr. Gold, I’d like to—”

  “Katz is Hebraic, though,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “Gold is not,” he mentioned. “It’s short for Goldholdt. That’s German.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “Mr. Gold, these pleasantries aside, I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

  “We’re talking. What are we talking about?”

  “The Baker party,” I said patiently. “I believe you wrote the murder scenario—”

  “You believe? It’s true! But are you true? How do I know you’re not a process server?”

  “I told you, I’m Gwen Katz, owner of the Nashville Katz deli. You’ve eaten there.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Are you expecting a summons for any reason?”

  “One never knows, does one?” he asked.

  It would take another minute of this before I kicked in the door and beat him with the gold bar from the walk. So, once again, I lied.

  “Mr. Gold, I’m thinking of hosting a murder party and I would like to read what you wrote for Mrs. Baker. She recommended you highly.”

  “I am emailing her as we speak to make sure that she did, in fact, send you to me.”

  “Great, fine. In the meantime, do you have a copy of the scenario? Something I could read?”

  “Hard copy or PDF?”

  “A printout, if you have one,” I told him. I didn’t want to leave without it. I didn’t ever want to talk to the man again.

  “I am making one as I type to Lolo Baker and as we speak.”

  I could hear the printer chugging. When it stopped I heard a door open and close.

  “It is around back, on the patio, in the milk box,” he informed me.

  I went back there and saw a single sheet of paper sticking from under the metal lid. I took it, made sure it was what I wanted, and left. I left jogging toward the car. I guess some people are writers for a reason—creative drive and an antisocial nature were the two I would have guessed before coming here. Add to that lunacy. When I had Googled Gary Gold back at the house, it had listed him as the author of several children’s books published by a small local press in the 1990s, Policy Press with only a P.O. Box. They were ghost stories like Wagner and the Spook and Carl Is Afraid of the Closet. Lolo had hosted publishing parties for both at the estate. One newspaper archive had a photo of the author, from the back, signing copies for guests. I was morbidly curious to find those now. Just as I was to read the mystery scenario he’d written. But not as much as I was to get back across the River, to which I sped like Ichabod Crane racing for the covered bridge.