by Delia Rosen
I had thought Grant Daniels was more than that. My brain interrupted to tell me that she had nothing to do with it: the heart had been doing the thinking, which was the problem. I couldn’t argue with that.
I was curious about something, though, and I grabbed Thom when she returned to set out the napkins.
“Was my uncle happy?” I asked.
She stopped and gave me a hand-on-the-hip look. “You got some kinda MapQuest I don’t know about?”
My look told her I didn’t follow.
“How the heck you get to that, girl?”
I saw her point. Two minutes before, we were talking about my broken-hearted fling with Grant Daniels.
“Two things,” I said. “First, I see his keyboard a couple of times a day. He ended up being a dilettante—”
“A who?”
“A dabbler,” I explained. “He never really made music work as a career. Second, as far as I know, he was alone all his life except for my dad. I was wondering how that worked out for him.”
Thom paused and smiled. It was different from her usual big smile for the customers, or her sassy smile for the staff, or her wouldn’t-itbe-wonder ful-if-you-did-some-more-work-aroundhere smile for me. This one was honest.
“Your uncle may have been a dabbler, and he may only have been Luke-level good on his keyboard, but he loved making his melodies. He carried that keyboard everywhere. And I mean everywhere, sometimes to the john. Went through six Double-A batteries every two days. I know ’cause I ordered them by the case.”
“Did you like what he composed?”
“Not a note of it. But I liked that he liked writing it. He came alive.” She looked at me. “Sort of like you did when you got yourself another little mystery to pick at.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s sort of what I was asking,” I said. “Somebody asked me why I cared who killed Hoppy Hopewell and I made up some shi—some sugar about it being bad for business that we catered the death gig.”
“But that’s got nothing to do with it. In fact, we got calls yesterday to cater two other parties.”
“Did we?”
Thom nodded. “A confirmation and a bachelor party. I asked them how they heard of us. The confirmation was from your online menu. The other was from the news reports of Lolo’s party.”
“How about that.”
The world suddenly seemed a little brighter. I wasn’t incompetent. Some part of me had made a right decision, however ill-advised my romp with Grant may have been. Or maybe wasn’t. I had no idea. Heart sulked about that, but Brain was rightpleased with its business decisions.
“Your uncle made us his family,” Thom went on. “Music was his girlfriend. He dated now and then, but if the gal wasn’t into music, he lost interest. If she was, she lost interest.”
“His stuff was that bad?”
“Not so much bad as completely awful.”
I thought about that for a moment, and it still didn’t make sense. “You’re going to have to explain that.”
“His tunes weren’t bad but he thought he would sell songs, if they were—” She looked for the proper word, gave up. “Check out these titles. White Christmas Shoes. When Doves Fly. Great Vibrations.”
“Seriously? He wrote those songs?”
“He wrote them, shopped them around, played them here when I let him—when there weren’t enough customers to scare away—but was so, so sincere about them. He never saw that there were . . . problems.”
My heart was happy to be distracted. It hurt for Uncle Murray.
“How did my dad put up with that?” I wondered.
“I’m guessin’ he just loved his brother and was happy to see him happy. I never met your father, but from what I hear, that was something that eluded him.”
Now my heart hurt for my father. It was more like an emotional bungee jump: it pained me to think that he was chronically unsatisfied. What a sad fate for both my parents. Unhappy together, unhappy apart.
I hadn’t realized my head had dipped. Thom bent and looked up into my eyes. “You okay?”
“Sure,” I lied. There were tears on the way, so I turned to flick on the heat lamps. Thom probably knew better, but she let it go.
“You can’t let yourself dwell on what was or wasn’t,” she said, “on opportunities people missed or were afraid to take. I spent a lot of time doin’ that, regrettin’ how I threw myself at men or family members or employers who didn’t respect me.”
“Then you found Jesus,” I said. I wasn’t being sarcastic; she had.
“Yes, but He was only part of what saved me. The other part was your Uncle Murray. He had this joy about him, this love of each day and each hour in that day. He was a positive man. Whatever delusions he had about his music, he had those same delusions about the folks around him. He thought I looked pretty and smelled nice and treated customers better than they deserved. He saw me fuss about how lettuce or a pickle looked on a plate if it had just been tossed there during a rush. He noticed things and made you feel good about yourself, whether you worked for him or were a customer or just passed him on the street. I think that must’ve been one of the things that sustained your father. I dunno—maybe your mom was jealous of that, the fact that from what I hear she wasn’t able to do that for him. It isn’t enough to love somebody, hon. You gotta enjoy being around them and they you.”
Thom had rounded the bases and my heart and brain were waiting in the dugout with open arms.
“Thanks,” I managed to choke out.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“I did have a good night last night.”
“Of course. Sometimes it’s okay to just want to be held or feel attractive.” She was still smiling sincerely . . . until she wasn’t. “You turn on the grease?”
“Oops.”
And she was gone into the kitchen to flick it on, and get out the eggs and butter and fill the salt and pepper shakers and sugar. I finished at the cash register and went into the office, and shut the door and let it all out. Years of it. I had spent a lot of time crying about my failed marriage, but not about my parents’ failed marriage, or my uncle’s failed career, or looking at the shores of middle age with a slightly scary new home and career and warm but provincial new associates I didn’t know well. And men like Grant and Royce, who were like New York men but without the courtesy to be honest about interest that was only marginal.
I cried into my open hand until I heard customers. I washed my eyes with warm water, let hair fall over them to hide the red, and went out to help Newt on the grill. Luke was peeling potatoes for early morning latkes—done shredded, hashbrown-style, instead of pureed so we could sell them as hash-browns—and I worked the toaster.
There was no idle talk during rushes, and that suited me perfectly. I needed the distraction. The regulars kept coming through 9:30, after which it slowed enough for me to duck out and change. My head was back in the game, “my” White Christmas Shoes, the desire to figure out who killed Hoppy Hopewell. I found myself even more motivated than before. Rational or sane, fueling my darker emotions or not, I really, really wanted to figure this sucker out before Grant Daniels or his fellow officers did.
The memorial was like a wake.
I was expecting people to be talking to one another or popping over to the open coffin to say good-bye to the Chocolate King. They were doing anything but. There were thirty-odd people in the funeral home chapel, and that included the three black-suited ushers. Neither Pinky nor Jennifer was present, I didn’t recognize anyone from the state legislature—though they may have been there; I just didn’t know those people—and Solly was sitting with his junior partner, a young lady with pearls, blond hair, and a headband holding it in place. A couple of local merchants were present, probably to network.
Rhonda was there with her newly done hair, which looked frighteningly like the oddly windblown hair I saw the day before. So were Grant Daniels and Deputy Chief Whitman, who were standing together beside the door. I nodded t
o them both. Grant seemed to pay me a hair more attention than he would have before last night. Then he was back checking out the crowd and talking to Whitman.
The only Cozy Fox in attendance was Lolo. Besides myself, she was also the only one there who had also been at the dinner party.
Royce was also there. He was in the back, as far from his former wife as the space would allow. He waved as I entered. I waved back. That was it. He could drop dead.
I walked over and said a quick farewell to Hoppy Hopewell. He looked okay, better than he had the last time I’d seen him. I noticed there were no trinkets, no parting gifts in the coffin. This was not going to be an emotional send-off.
I sat in the middle, on the aisle, my heart trying to convince my brain that Grant shouldn’t be joining Royce on that fiery ferry ride to hell. That was when he surprised me by coming over. My brain agreed to move him off the dock.
“Sorry I had to go,” he said.
“No need to be sorry,” I said. “I was asleep.” My heart was screaming murderously at my braincontrolled mouth.
“I know, but I should have left a note or something.”
“What, like thanks for the Joe?” Take that, said my heart, wresting command.
“No, seriously,” he said in a strong whisper. He was trying not to lean close and create the wrong impression, which left him talking almost like a ventriloquist. “The case woke me up around two and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”
Oh. That worked. I felt good again. “Thanks, I said.” My brain had the reins again. “What did you wake up thinking about?”
“What I was just discussing with Deputy Chief Whitman, the secrecy surrounding Hopewell’s estate.”
“No duh. I couldn’t even find out who got the chocolate shop.” No duh? What was I, twelve years old? Maybe that was my problem. Grant made me feel like a teen again.
“And you probably won’t find that out,” Grant said. “Solly Granger filed a series of motions, along with the will, pertaining to Section 29-25-104 of the state code regarding probate. It has to do with forestalling the intervention by any thirdperson claimant.”
“In non-legalese?”
“Basically, Granger moved to bar Hoppy’s sister from making any claims against the estate.”
“Really? So she’s not—”
“She’s not.”
That was a little bit of a surprise. I was willing to guess that if anyone had inherited whatever he had, it was Sis. As we were talking, Solly walked in with Father Virgil Breen of St. Joseph’s. That was obviously to protect Solly from any further questioning, which Father Breen could dismiss as inappropriate.
Grant now had an excuse to lean closer: decorum. “Granger also told me this will be the only public event involving Hoppy Hopewell.”
“Not surprising,” I said. “Funerals tend to be private.”
“This is more than private,” Grant said. “I was led to believe that his sister wouldn’t even be there.”
We both sat back as organ music began and Father Breen took center stage and kind words were uttered about the deceased. But, like Grant, my mind was elsewhere, sorting through what little we knew.
I was still sorting when the clergyman finished after about ten minutes, Solly rose and left, and the memorial was, evidently, quite done.
Chapter 12
Rhonda slipped through a side door so I didn’t have to talk to her again. But I did excuse myself from Grant—who gave me a handshake instead of a peck, which sucked the tiniest bit of joy from me—and chased Lolo down in the line filing out.
We emerged into the sunlight together. She looked lovely in a clingy black blouse and kneelength skirt with elbow-length black gloves and a black pillbox hat and veil.
“That was almost lovely,” Lolo said.
Well-said, I thought. She seemed as nonplussed as I was by the whole thing. I asked how she was doing.
“I feel a little like Lady Macbeth,” she replied.
“Having trouble with spots?”
“No, not that,” she said. “‘What? In our house?’”
High school English came back to me. After conspiring to murder the king with hubbins, Lady Macbeth caused a stir when she was apparently more upset that he died there than that he was dead at all.
“But I don’t apologize,” she said as we walked toward the parking lot. “I enjoyed Mr. Hopewell’s company but I was not a great admirer.”
“Some history there?” I asked.
“Some indeed,” she replied.
When she didn’t elaborate, I said, “Did you invest with him too?”
She turned toward me so fast I could swear her hat shifted. “You gave him money?”
“Exotic aphrodisiacs,” I said, trying to think of something he might not have asked her to invest in. “Egyptian pomegranate, century-old ginseng, oysters from Pitcairn Island.” I stopped there because those were the only aphrodisiacs I knew about.
Lolo’s eyes lowered, dragging her face with them. “Then the rumors are true.”
“What rumors?”
“I knew that he was running several businesses on the side, poor man—”
“Why poor man?” I made a mental note not to lose track of my subsets here.
“Because he was always so tired when I wanted to talk about ours,” Lolo said, her eyes on some sad memory. “I thought it was just two or three of the Cozies, maybe a few other wealthy matrons. I didn’t know he had gone to the gentry.”
She didn’t mean to be insulting, so I didn’t take it personally. That was just the way a lot of these old Southern moneyed widows were. “Apparently, he had his fingers in a lot of peach pies. At least I wasn’t romantically involved with him.”
Again, the look. “Who was?”
“I couldn’t say,” I told her. “Those were rumors too.”
She sighed. Her harsh looks were like lightning flashes, scary and then gone. I couldn’t tell whether she was protective, jealous, or both. I was betting on just the first.
“That is even more exhausting than business,” she said. “I told Hoppy from the start that I would never become involved with him. For myself, I would never indulge in that sort of thing out of wedlock.”
“I’m sure he appreciated that on many levels,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, he did. He told me so.”
“What was ‘your’ business?” I asked, eagerly changing the subject.
“Hmm?” She glanced back toward the funeral home. Maybe she really did just like the guy.
“Your business with Mr. Hopewell.”
“Oh. Exotic mystery memorabilia.”
I was expecting plants or pets or something a little more ordinary. Perhaps, given Lolo’s nature, I should not have been surprised.
“What kind of memorabilia are we talking about here? Jack the Ripper’s moustache wax?”
“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” she said, brightening. “No, he found handwritten notes by Mr. Conan Doyle for an unwritten children’s tale called ‘Who Cooked Jemima Puddleduck,’ the flask of Mr. Raymond Chandler—whence he sought comfort while writing of The Big Sleep—a fake leg belonging to Cornell Woolrich on which he carved the names of critics who disliked I Married a Dead Man—wonderful things like that.”
I was both speechless and dumbstruck. First by the awesome, almost inspirational chutzpah it required to tell someone, even someone as gullible as Lolo, that those artifacts were genuine; and second by the fact that she believed him.
“Do you actually possess these items?” I inquired.
“Alas, I do not,” she said. “Do you remember the tragic plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, in April of 2010?”
“The one that killed the Polish president?” I asked.
“Yes, that very one!” she replied enthusiastically. “It so happens that Maria Kaczyska, the president’s wife, ran the equivalent of the Cozy Foxes in Warsaw. Those and several other items were part of her personal collection. They w
ere onboard that plane with her—all tragically destroyed.”
“And you had already paid for them,” I guessed.
“I had. Hoppy was working with the insurance company to recover the funds but—well, you worked in the financial world. You know how complicated those international dealings can be.”
“I do indeed,” I said. “Weren’t they going to some kind of memorial service in the middle of nowhere?”
“The Katyn Massacre of 1940,” Lolo said. “Hoppy and I discussed the event. The Russians killed Polish soldiers there, you see. It was terrible.”
“Massacres usually are,” I said. “What did Hoppy say those items were doing on the plane with the first lady?”
“She was bringing them to give to him.”
“Couldn’t he have just flown to Warsaw?”
“Hoppy was going to the memorial anyway,” she said. “He told me he lost a distant relative in the massacre.”
“Let me guess. He canceled his trip when he learned of the crash.”
“Not entirely,” Lolo said. “He got as far as Europe. Then he came back. No sense going to Smolensk if you’re not going to pick up someone’s collection of mystery memorabilia.”
“I guess not. Did he tell you about Maria Kac zyska before he left or after he got back?”
“After he got back,” she said. “He didn’t want to trouble me with details of the negotiation until they were finalized.”
“Did you pay for his airfare?”
“Of course, though he offered,” Lolo said. “This was a business venture, my venture. He was going to amass these pieces, let me select a few I wanted to keep, and sell the rest for a profit. I suppose he knew I could never have parted with any of them, but how many business opportunities promise to be so much fun? Think of how exciting the Cozy Foxes gatherings would have been if we’d had Alfred Hitchcock’s eyeglasses on the table.”
I told her I’d try to imagine. Now, at least, it made sense. Hoppy had this scam working and waited for a European air disaster to pin its failure on the demise of Maria Kaczyska. He would have let the insurance angle play out for a year or two and finally given up, by which time Lolo would have forgotten all about it.