by Delia Rosen
“I prefer our balance of freedom and paranoia,” I said.
Grant smirked. “You’re a strange New Yorker.”
“Come again?”
“I thought all you people were liberals.”
“Okay, listen.” I looked at him flush in his big blues. “First, when you say ‘you people,’ that is taken to mean Jews.”
“It is?”
“It is. Trust me. It’s perceived as a pejorative.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “Second, not all New Yorkers are liberals. It only seems that way because they have the biggest mouths. Some of us are centrists and some are even conservatives.”
“What are you?” he asked.
“That’s fourth-date information,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait.”
“Not too long, I hope.”
“That’s up to you,” I said. I heard myself sounding unusually butch. What’s up with that? I wondered. Are you getting cold feet now that he’s actually showing interest?
That wasn’t something I needed to consider at this time. He asked if the Cozy Foxes meeting was set, I told him it was a go, and then I gave him a little—okay, maybe a somewhat forceful—push toward his car with a fullabaloney story about having to get back to work. But it scared me. I wondered if the ghost of Phil were still hanging over me, ready to haunt any kind of man-happiness I might conceivably find.
Don’t go there, I warned myself. You’re not in that relationship, you’re not in the city, you’re not anywhere near “that place.”
The pep talk barely got through the top layer of skull, so I went back and involved myself in the winding-down operations and started to organize my night-in with the ladies.
Chapter 26
Lolo arrived first.
Before leaving, Thom had explained—after assuring me that Lolo had agreed to pay for dinner—that, as far as anyone knew, that was a precedent established by the society queen herself when the Cozy Foxes began gathering.
“Nobody arrives on time, and the royalty is supposed to come last, right?” Thom said. “With the egos and vanity we got here, somebody would try to outlast Lolo . . . so she decided to show up first. That way, anyone who mattered would want to be there pretty early in order to enjoy the radiance of her company that much longer.” It made the same kind of cockamamie sense as everything else pertaining to Nashville’s elite.
Lolo was driven by her full-time chauffeur. Harold Jenkins lived on the grounds, in a guest house out back; he had been off the night of the murder, however, his presence at the local multiplex confirmed by several witnesses, a ticket stub, his son Gordon who attended a local trade school and went with him, and a summary of the Jason Statham film he’d gone to see. I had seen Jenkins drive her up before, but I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. He was—why was I not surprised?—an older African-American man. The whole setup was straight out of Driving Miss Daisy—which, as it happens, I had seen on Broadway with my Uncle Murray. He had come north for a visit and had gotten tickets by mail when he mistakenly thought it was a musical. He sat through it manfully if restlessly, trying to hide his disappointment that it was a drama. I loved it, though, and that made him glad. It was the last show we ever saw together, a string of tuners that began in 1988 with Phantom of the Opera. His sheer joy with musical theater led me to the natural assumption that he was gay, though my mother said no . . . he just liked music.
I felt a sudden twinge for the home town. I beat it back with a club. I did not want to backslide to where Helen Russell had left me.
As it happens, I still did not meet the chauffeur since he did not come in with Lolo. I offered but she declined.
“I fear the check is already made out in the correct amount,” Lolo said rather snippily, I thought, as she handed it to me.
I offered to feed him for free.
She said that would demean Harold.
I got the ultra-clear impression that whatever I offered, she’d have a reason to refuse. There was no way in hell a servant was going to dine with her.
God, I hope you killed Hoppy, I thought as she walked to her table, which was the biggest and roundest and most visible in the establishment. Next to Solly, there was no one here I wanted to see fry more.
Hildy Endicott, Mollie Baldwin, and Helen Russell arrived within two minutes of Lolo and within a minute of each other. They drove themselves. Rhonda obviously had not read the How and Why Wonder Book of Lolo, so she did not arrive until 7:20, by which time I had already served the sandwiches. I had also not informed Lolo she was invited until she walked through the door.
“I thought this was a members-only event,” Lolo said to no one in particular, though, after glancing around, her eyes rested accusingly on me.
“My deli, my guest,” I said, feeling a little persnickety myself. “I didn’t think anyone would mind. She was at your party, after all.”
“Of course we don’t ‘mind’!” Lolo beamed as Rhonda walked over, her handbag swinging low like an ax, her expression Amazonian, her high heels going click-clack as though she were wearing anklets of human teeth. “How are you, dear?”
“Carnivorous,” Rhonda said. “I just took an hour spin class.”
Taking her at her word, I gave her the same deluxe pastrami on rye platters I’d given everyone else. The Cozy Foxes always ate first and gossiped, and despite the murder of someone near to one of them, they did not change their routine. Rhonda ate her sandwich with mustard, actually aiming a kind of vulpine snarl at the squeeze bottle of mayonnaise I’d put on the table for Hildy. Rhonda finished eating at the same time as the others.
“Before we begin, I move that we offer membership to our guest Rhonda Shays,” Lolo said.
The others rubber-stamped the motion by rapping the knuckles of their right hand on the table. I have no idea how that evolved; probably from some Perry Mason Case of the Rapping Right Knuckles story.
“Thanks,” Rhonda said. “Do you have to have actually read a mystery to be a member?”
There was a snapshot of distress on the faces of the other women.
“Or does Nancy Drew count?” Rhonda asked quickly.
“She does,” Lolo said, exhaling lightly. “Very much so.”
I had been watching this drama from behind the counter, where I ate my own egg salad platter. While the other Cozies welcomed their new member—who, surprise-surprise, was loving the attention—I walked over with the folder and handed it to Lolo. She seemed surprised.
“Will Deputy Chief Whitman or the other one be joining us?” she inquired.
“No,” I said. “This is—”
“An unofficial inquiry,” Hildy offered. “A roundtable without warrant.”
“Exactly,” I said.
Mollie and Helen nodded, obviously familiar with the phrases or the works from which she had plucked them. Rhonda looked at me as if to ask where the wine course was.
“I have a question before we begin,” Hildy went on. “Do we know, or do we assume, that the murders of Hoppy Hopewell and Lizzie Renoir are related?”
“In fact, we do not know that,” I said. “We assume it.”
“Based solely on their close chronology and proximity?” Hildy asked.
“Sure, that and the fact that dear Lolo is common to both,” Rhonda said with a smile so sweet, it caused her eyes to pinch.
“By association, we all have low cardinals of separation from the deceased,” Mollie pointed out.
“Thank you, Mollie,” Lolo said.
“I never met your housekeeper,” Rhonda said.
“Can you prove that?” Hildy challenged.
“Ladies, come on—have I met any of your housekeepers ?”
“I’m sorry . . . did you say housekeepers or husbands ?” Mollie asked.
“We have a crime to solve!” I interjected. “Bitchslap not on the agenda.”
Lolo cleared her throat at my language. I didn’t mind when Thom objected; whe
n Lolo did it, I felt like Belle Watling.
Lolo’s reading glasses hung from her neck. She put them on and took a moment to study the official stamp and bar code, to feel the heft of it, then carefully slit the blue tab on the side, which I had fashioned from a Post-it to make it seem virginal and special.
I cleared away her plate and she laid the folder on its slim, accordion spine. She turned the pages carefully, from the top right corner, even though they all sat loosely. The other women looked on patiently.
“Perhaps if you passed them around?” I suggested.
“Yes, of course,” Lolo said. She handed the first few pages to Hildy, who was on her left. Within a few minutes, the contents of the entire folder were circulating. There was only one photo of Lizzie’s corpse in the batch, and Grant had cropped the printout in mid-chest. All the Cozies could see was a headless woman in a robe, her arms akimbo as though she were power-walking and her legs curled fetus-like into her belly. There were “tsks” and averted eyes and quick turnovers as that image made its way around. No one failed to react—save Lolo. Her demeanor throughout was one of composure. It was not serenity; her eyes were moving, her mind was obviously working, and her lips were a tight line. I couldn’t tell whether it was her broad-net sense of noblesse oblige, or the sudden realization that this was the death scene of someone who had been close to her—physically, at least—for several years.
“See here,” said Hildy with a hint of excitement. From the moment she walked in, she had seemed the most eager to engage this thing. “This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t?” I asked, moving behind her.
She shuffled between two photographs then returned to the first. “This photo caption says the door was jimmied with a four-inch blade.” I looked over her shoulder. It showed a close-up of the impression a knife had made in the softwood. There was an overlaid dotted line with “4 inches” on top and an arrow showing the direction of the thrust. Hildy held up the photo so the others could see. “Why isn’t the paint scratched?”
I moved around for a better look. She was correct.
“Because it’s an old jimmy,” Helen said.
“I knew one of those,” Rhonda remarked.
“The intruder could have been very careful,” Lolo said. Her role in this gathering was obviously that of Devil’s Advocate.
Hildy went to the other photo she had been examining. “No, because—look. The abrasion on the outside of the strike plate is tarnished.”
Bless her Foxy little eyes, she was right. The door had been jimmied once and the point of the blade had scratched the latch element. In which case the newly exposed brass should be shiny. This wasn’t.
“The door has been opened and closed many, many times since it was illicitly pried,” Hildy said.
“Most likely by the occupant who forgot their keys,” Mollie suggested. “Otherwise, it would have been reported as a break-in and replaced. This”—she pointed to the first photograph—“was simply painted over.”
“There’s something else I noticed,” Helen said. She pushed her plate aside—I quickly removed it and the others to another table to give her room—and spread out photographs of the living room and bedroom. “Do you see anything strange?”
The other women leaned forward as one.
“She was renting a furnished apartment?” Rhonda said, crinkling her nose at the decor.
“Cushions and pillows,” Hildy said.
The others nodded.
“What about them?” I asked. I felt like I did as an undergraduate when I walked in on two of my professors debating the relative importance of micro- versus macroeconomics.
“They are undisturbed,” Lolo explained. In addition to the devil, she was obviously the interpreter. “The report speculates that an intruder was looking for something. That may be. If so, it was not something Lizzie hid but something she had.”
“Couldn’t the thing have already been found so it wasn’t necessary to—”
“Nonsense,” Lolo interrupted me. “One finishes a room before moving to the next. The bedroom and living room were both disturbed but the fluffy contents were not.”
“Look—the hem of the bedspread was not thrown up,” Mollie said, laying out another photograph. “It was all shelves, drawers, and closets.”
“Here’s something,” Rhonda said.
She was tapping a red nail on a photo of a throw rug in the bedroom. We all leaned over the image. There was a scrap of blue ribbon lying on it.
“From one of the overturned drawers?” I guessed, pointing to the chaos of clothes that began on the edge of the rug.
“Do you keep two-inch pieces of fabric with your panties?” Rhonda asked.
“A memento,” Hildy said.
“Not from one of the drawers,” Mollie said. “You keep scraps . . . in a scrapbook!”
We went back to the photos of the living room. There was a bookshelf with volumes of French poetry and books about Canadian history.
“Several books are missing,” Lolo said.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“Lizzie abhorred a vacuum,” she said. “Look there.” She pointed with a bony finger. “She filled an empty space on the lower shelf with a bust of Prime Minister Diefenbaker.”
“I wondered who that was,” Helen said.
I hadn’t. And still didn’t. “So books were removed,” I said. “But if someone were looking for books, why wreck the rest of—”
“Not just books,” Lolo said. “Photographs. Photographs too damning to leave behind.”
“And,” Hildy said enthusiastically, “we now know the order in which the apartment was ransacked. The perpetrator went right to the bookshelf, took those volumes, then went to the bedroom to search for any other keepsakes.”
“Then why tear up the kitchen?” Rhonda asked.
“The kitchen wasn’t searched,” Lolo said. She pulled out one of the images that showed the floor with utensils strewn about. “They were thrown. In a rage.”
“Honey, wouldn’t someone have heard that?” Rhonda asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said, making my first useful contribution. “Four college kids lived above her. Two were at their girlfriends’ apartments that night and the other two were drunk. The police have their statements. And the liquor bottles.”
There was a momentary lull in the discussion. Everyone was involved. No one seemed self-conscious or evasive. I had a feeling the killer was not in this room.
Lolo was still considering the kitchen photo. “Lizzie made her own Canadian bacon from pork belly. I’ve seen her do it in my kitchen. You see the bowls in the sink? They were probably for wet brine. The tenderizer was out to dry after she used it to add seasoning.”
“Someone she knew was there,” Helen said. “They talked in the kitchen. They argued. The individual grabbed the tenderizer in a sudden fury and killed her. Then he went through the house collecting evidence that may have linked him to the woman.”
“Who did Lizzie know well enough to let them in at night?” I asked. “Was she dating?”
“She was a lesbian,” Lolo said. The word did not come out effortlessly, the “L” hanging on like a drum roll. “Lizzie did not share, nor did I ask, that information.”
Scratch that thought about the killer not being in the room. Helen was a good actress, Poodle was man-crazy to a degree that suggested she was trying to not be like her mother, Rhonda looked like she could be game for anything, and Hildy liked tongue, which may not have meant anything at all.
“Lolo, what can you tell us about Lizzie?” I asked. “All I know is that she came from Canada.”
Lolo removed her glasses. She looked out at the dark street and actually struck a pose. Once again, I had a sense that I was in the presence of Lady Macbeth—or at least someone playing the part of the queen whose every word was a little pearl.
“Lizzie came to the country in 1989,” she said. “Her parents owned a liquor store and always dreamed of owning t
heir own vineyard. It never happened. Lizzie immigrated because she got a job. I don’t know what it was; she never shared that information.”
“You didn’t ask for references?” I said, rather incredulous.
“Young woman, I am an excellent judge of character. Should I have asked for papers from the man who wired my new television or repaired my ceiling?”
“You were letting someone in your home—”
“To work. If she failed to do so, or if she had proven light-fingered as one of my domestics once did—who, I might add, came festooned with documents—I should have dismissed her. As we all know, papers can be forged or extorted.”
“She spoke with a French accent,” Rhonda said. “That’s why you hired her.”
Lolo ignored her. “Do you have any other questions, or may I continue?” she asked me.
“Please,” I said deferentially.
Lolo settled back into character with a shifting of her shoulders and a slight raising of her spine. “Lizzie’s job ended and she heard that I was now in need of a housekeeper.”
“How did she hear?” I asked.
Lolo did not answer. All eyes, save two, were on the statue she had become.
“I told her,” Helen said, looking at her lap.
Four sets of eyes shifted to the speaker. There was a long silence. I broke it.
“So Lizzie went to work for you,” I said. I didn’t say anything more. I just wanted to get her back on track and break the embarrassment that had settled on the table like an upended wheelbarrow of sauerkraut.
“Lizzie was an excellent worker, very diligent,” Lolo said. For the first time, a trace of emotion had crept into her voice. I couldn’t tell whether it was for Lizzie or for the sacrifice Helen had just made. “We did not discuss her personal life but I cannot think of anyone I know who disliked her.”
I looked around the table and there were general nods and murmurs of accord. The only exceptions were Helen, who was still looking down, and Rhonda, who was staring open-mouthed at Helen.
“What about Hoppy?” I asked.
The women all regarded me.
“What about him?” Hildy asked.