by Delia Rosen
There was a little awkwardness as we dressed the next day. For one thing, I hadn’t even cracked the folder he brought. I’m not sure he was convinced how bad I really wanted it. I didn’t tell him it really was all about that. For another, I wasn’t even a little convinced that he had a relationship in mind. That was something a sleepover seemed to hint at, at least to him. I decided to take that bull by the oysters.
“This wasn’t a commitment,” I assured him as we checked ourselves side-by-side in the bedroom mirror before heading out. “I’m talking about what we did, staying over, the whole megillah.”
He didn’t answer at once.
“Is that what you were thinking?” I asked, ramping up the awkward factor.
“No,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘What’s a migeelluh ?’”
We laughed for different reasons. I told him that, technically, it was a big story . . . but in this case, I meant it as everything that had transpired from the time he walked in the door until now.
“Nice,” he said. “It sounds like one of those Japanese monsters. Like Mogera or Mothra.”
I had to admit that now he had me at a disadvantage. We chuckled our way out of that fix and out the door. I imagined the neighbors to be watching, though it was probably too early for any of them. I didn’t care—New Yorkers are used to that—and I hoped it didn’t bother him. It didn’t seem to.
He saw me to my car and gave me a peck on the lips. “I liked it,” he said. “A lot. I’m glad I stayed.”
“So am I.”
“Would it be insensitive to bring up work?”
“Not at all. That’s why you came.”
“It wasn’t, but it was a good excuse. Are you really serious about doing what you said?”
“Serious as death.”
“I’ll let you know what the morning brings,” he said. “I’ve got someone checking on your Anne Miller lead. Could be helpful.”
Another peck and he was gone.
The sun was just rising across the street. It seemed unusually bright this morning, but I knew that was delusional. And that was okay. Sometimes it’s good to be a little sunstruck.
Chapter 24
“Somebody’s walkin’ on sunshine,” Thom observed as I set up the slicer.
“That would be me,” I said.
“Do I wanna know why? You medicated?”
“Hell—heck no,” I said. “This all natural.”
“Your man,” she said.
“Not the pronoun I’d use but, yeah. We had a good night.”
“Stop there!” Thom said, disappearing into the walk-in to stock the tins of shredded lettuce, dressing, and other tools of Newt’s trade.
The morning blew by, the rush was a breeze, and I was planning to give Lolo a shout when Grant called. I took the call in my office.
“We found Anne Miller,” he said. I had gone into the back room expecting a somewhat different, possibly more romantic, opening line, like “I’ve been missing you.” I got mad at myself, not him. You had a great night. Don’t let big, dumb expectations taint it.
“And?” I asked.
“Thirty-two years old and a fugitive from German justice. She’s a member of the Red Army Faction.”
My disappointment was gone with the wind. The day had taken a sharp right into terra incognita.
“How do you know?”
“We have lawyers too,” he said, sounding a little wounded. “We got the power-of-attorney agreement and put the document up on IPABB—the International Police Assistance Bulletin Board. Police computers around the world check it constantly, searching for a match to new, hot ‘red notice’ postings.”
That was fun to know.
“Anne Miller’s signature came up on file with both the Bundespolizei—the German Feds—and Interpol. It was an old sample, from high school, but it’s definitely hers.”
“Germany, eh? That would explain Hoppy’s trip. Question is, what was she to him.”
“An old friend, that’s for sure.”
“Oh?”
“BPOL surveillance caught them together in Berlin seventeen years ago,” he said.
Seventeen years, I thought. She would have been fifteen. The goddamn pig. I wondered if John Russell was with him, just so I could hate him more too.
“Hold on,” I said with sudden alarm. “Are you saying that Hoppy was a terrorist or that he was killed by one?”
“No,” Grant said. “I don’t think he knew about her affiliation and the RAF had no reason to go after him.”
“How do you know?”
“She wasn’t in the group in 1993. She was just a kid who was interested in becoming a florist, according to her high school records. Her older brother Karl was a member. He hated his grandfather, who was a Nazi, and went the other way. Karl is the one who recruited her.”
“Charming.”
“But Hoppy obviously cared about Anne. I don’t know how many times they were together, but she obviously made a big impression for him to leave her the shop,” Grant said.
“Meanwhile, good luck getting a passport.”
“Which is another reason Hoppy may not have had any idea about her affiliation,” Grant said.
“Solly did,” I said.
“Yeah, now.” Grant said. “He probably didn’t find out until he had to execute the will. Probably had contact information from Hoppy.”
“Fast turnaround,” I said. “Hoppy dies, he has the power-of-attorney next day?”
“Germany’s eight hours ahead,” Grant pointed out. “She gets a PDF, signs it, sends it back, it’s filed electronically. The whole thing could take under an hour.”
“Well, at least her terrorist past could explain why Solly warned me off,” I said. “Christ, do you think he was actually looking out for me?”
“Probably not,” Grant said. “He’s just a dick covering his own ass. Not that you aren’t worth looking out for.”
Oooh, that was nice. My good mood came galloping back.
“I’m thinking our attorney friend took Hoppy at his word whenever the will was drawn up, that she was an old friend. Now that he was going to be her de facto counsel, he did a quick due diligence.”
“How did he get through all the movie star Anne Miller clutter? Special lawyer filter?”
“In a way,” Grant said. “All he had to do was type in her name and ‘criminal record.’ That’s what we did.”
“Tricks of the trade,” I said, annoyed that I hadn’t thought of that. “So he was afraid of being linked to violent, left-wing urban guerrillas,” I said. “Then why did Solly contact her at all?”
“He had no choice. The probate process ensures that all the terms of the will are carried out to the letter. If Solly screws up, he can be disbarred and jailed.”
I reveled in that prospect for just a few seconds. “So where are we now? Where do the German police stand on all this?”
“Right—I’ve only told you part of that story. The BPOL lost her in 2002.”
“How’d they manage that?”
“She went to ground. Got a fake ID, a new name—not legal, mind you, because that would have shown up on official records. They picked up her brother in 2001 and would have loved to find Anne. But she buried herself well. I’m guessing— and this is just my gut talking—that she had lost interest even before Kurt was pinched. She chose to go inactive because she never really believed in the cause. A lot of radicals do that, especially when the heat is on. And with Hoppy as a potential sugar daddy she might have renewed her dream of being a florist or becoming the perfect hausfrau.”
“Question: why, then, did she use her real name on the power-of-attorney?”
“Solly’s activities would have had no legal authority otherwise,” Grant said. “Hoppy probably told her what he did, whenever he wrote that will, and she would have known what she’d need to do. She just never expected a document from Nashville to end up in the hands of the BPOL. And even if it did, there’s no address other than Solly’s�
�”
“Of course!” I gasped. I had been chewing on something he’d said a minute before.
“What?”
“A new identity. New papers. A new passport.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The money!” I said. “Hoppy needing it, cheating people to get it. That time period—it’s about when he started rolling the older women.”
“Shit. Good one. I think I love you.”
“Don’t joke,” I warned.
“I wasn’t. You know I have a sucky sense of humor.”
That was true, but I didn’t want to lose my groove by sprouting wings and flying off into relationship fairy land.
“If he knew she went underground, he would have had to know about her past,” Grant said. “That would have left him open to arrest and extradition. Did Hoppy have that kind of courage, even for love?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t know about that past.”
“You lost me.”
“She was underage when they met. They had an affair, a relationship, something that was more than a fling. You know what I would have told my lover under those circumstances?”
“Do I want to know?” Grant said.
Whoa! Grant was hittin’ that stuff hard today. I told myself it didn’t mean anything. He was just turned on by the Nick-and-Nora-ing. “I would have said, ‘Herr Hoppy, mein papa found out about us and wants to kill you and put me in a convent. I have to get away from him.”
“But she was in her mid-twenties when she changed her name. Why would she have waited nine or ten years to run away?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. That was a problem with my whole scenario. Regroup, brain: what do you know for sure? Hoppy met and fell in love with an underage girl when he was in Germany, at a time when he thought he still had a fortune. He came home to start the chocolate shop to stabilize his own finances. At some point, he reconnected with Anne Miller. Maybe that wasn’t until 2002. She expressed a desire to come to the U.S. but had a problem. Her thinking: if I can get to the U.S., it’ll be easier to stay lost from the BPOL. Maybe she loved Hoppy, maybe she didn’t. He tries to help her with money—
“And connections,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“There’s something else that fits,” I told Grant. “Hoppy sucking up to local politicians. Maybe he was trying to convince them to get their counterparts in Congress to pull strings for him. Or set up face time for him.”
“Possible,” he said thoughtfully. “Damned possible. Constituent meetings are a matter of public record. I’ll check.”
The data flood was a lot more to process than anything we’d come across so far, as was the idea that Hoppy might actually have cared about one of his little chicks. It softened my regard for him just a little, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. Then it dawned on me: maybe Anne was his first. You’ve got a poor little rich kid, a stunted adolescent from all I could tell, falling in love with a girl who was his own mental age. He fell for Anne just like Poodle did for him. It didn’t take a shrink to see that Hoppy cutting a swath through the young ladies of Nashville was his attempt to recapture that lost feeling of love and acceptance.
Unlike John Russell, who was simply a goddamn perv.
But then I realized something else:
“You know,” I told Grant, “all of this might have nothing whatsoever to do with Hoppy’s death.”
“I was just thinking that,” Grant replied. “Well, I’m going to turn Solly over to the Feds and let them worry about him and Anne and the estate.”
“Can’t you just go over and bust down the door?”
“Afraid not. The FBI is the only law enforcement entity with the legal authority to execute claims against individuals by foreign police services on American soil.”
“That’s a mouthful of disclaimers,” I said. “Do we at least have gloating privileges?”
“We’ll see how that pans out. As far as we know, our obstructionist friend hasn’t done anything illegal.”
“No, he’s just representing the interests of a member of the Baader-Meinhof Group.”
“Former member.”
“Not in the minds of Nashvillians.”
“You’ve an evil bent,” Grant said playfully.
“Only when it comes to rat-bastards who tried to steal my property,” I said.
“Fair enough. But let’s stay focused. You’re right: this discovery may not tell us anything about who killed Hoppy, and it doesn’t seem to help at all with Lizzie Renoir. I’ve gotta tell you, though—you homered this one, Gwen.”
“Thanks. I’ll hold off on any victory laps until we’re done.”
He said he would call with any other breaking developments.
I hung up, savoring the little croutons of joy in that big, big salad. I did that because Grant’s attention was nice, Solly’s pain was a delight, and who knew when I’d have the chance again. This was the Louisiana Purchase of information, and it was going to take a lot of time and mental energy to wade through it. Plus, I had a Cozy Foxes meeting to check up on.
Chapter 25
I called Lolo as soon as the hour was decent. For her, that was after noon.
“Everything’s set,” she said joyously. “The Foxes will convene at the deli at seven.”
“Wonderful,” I said, trying to match her gushquotient.
“What will you be bringing to the party?” she asked.
I knew she didn’t mean kosher pickles. She was telling me that in order for a plebian non-member to attend, I better have tribute for the queen.
“The Nashville Police file on Lizzie Renoir’s murder,” I said coldly.
“Poor Lizzie,” she said. “We will find the assassin!”
I had to wonder if it was just spinsters and widows, or if every rich person in Nashville had an overwrought sense of theatrics.
Lolo asked if I would mind having sandwiches prepared, and I told her I would have Thom call to set it up. My manager would make sure she knew this was a paying gig, or they’d be eating candy bars and soda from the newsstand down the street.
I had assigned myself boiling oil duty during lunch: fries, onion rings, all things crisped in grease. It was hot and bad for the skin but it was mindless, robotic. I would go to the mini-freezer behind me, dump the pre-measured portions into the wire baskets, watch them bubble for two or three minutes depending on what they were, then pull them up when the timer went off. Then Whap, whap, whap—lightly bump the basket against the back of the fryer, below the fan, to knock off excess oil and then dump it in the tray to scoop, plate, and serve.
As I tried to organize the facts of the case, something my mother used to say popped into my brain:
The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
Too true. This case was like one of those paintings they used to show us in Art 101, like “The Murder of Crows” by Degas. The heart of the thing was defined by negative space. What we knew about the killings came from the things we could eliminate. That was progress, but it was a frustrating kind. Fortunately, whenever it threatened to drive me crazy, my brain went to the happy place of Solly’s woes and the sun came out, a little.
After lunch, I told Thom about the after-hours gig and she asked if I wanted her to stick around.
“I can handle it,” I said. “Let’s just make sure the food is ready and the register isn’t closed out.”
“Will your other friend be attending?” she asked with a wink.
At first, I wasn’t sure who she meant. When I did, I said, “Sugar!”
“You forgot to invite him?”
“Not him,” I said, and scooted into the back. I put in a call to Rhonda Shays. She wasn’t a member of the literary group but I thought it would be useful to have her there. She would keep the Foxes from becoming too cozy.
“You are inviting me to something social?” she said. Her tone was a cross between shock and bemusement.
“I am,
” I said. “On behalf of Lolo.”
“Why doesn’t she call me herself ?”
“I’m afraid her outreach skills are a little brittle due to the murder of her housekeeper,” I said.
I could hear Rhonda suck air through her teeth. “Oh, dear, of course. How thoughtless of me. Yes, yes, I’ll be there. Anything we can do to help find the culprit must be done, must it not?”
“It must.”
Excellent, I thought. Having one more crazy lady in the room would keep everyone off balance. If anyone were hiding something, there was a good chance they’d slip. If not, the agitation might help enflame their deductive skills.
Seven o’clock took forever to arrive.
After a day of chewing over the same-old same-old, I was hungry for any fresh scraps I could find. Grant had stopped by at five. There was no peck this time, but that was fine; I knew, and he probably noticed, that Thom was watching. Also, I probably smelled like old, soggy funnel cake.
We stepped outside so I could air out. He said he had just been given a videoconference briefing by an agent from the Memphis field office of the FBI.
“Our attorney friend is doing things by the book,” he told me. “Cooperating with the local Feds, giving them access to whatever information they are entitled to.”
“Anne Miller’s address?”
“Hasn’t got that,” Grant said. “As I suspected, all contact was limited to email. They’re going to try and track that down. But if she was using a local cyber cafe in a big city, that may not help very much.”
“Wouldn’t she have had to pay with a credit card?”
“Some of them use access cards that you buy on-site. Those can be paid for with cash.”
“Which is exactly what a terrorist would use. I’d’ve thought they would shut those kinds of anonymous Internet things down.”
“BPOL says they’re trying. Whatever the equivalent of the ACLU is in Germany, they’re fighting it. Any intrusions on privacy and personal rights are not taken lightly by the children of their postwar, post-Soviet society.”