by C. R. Corwin
It was a good opening and I jumped right in. “I doubt as good as you. And I guess that’s why I still find it strange that you didn’t realize Violeta was a man.”
Kay was suddenly defensive. “She wasn’t a man.”
I retreated. “Well, you know what I mean.”
She softened again. “I do know what you mean. And no, she wasn’t mannish. Not physically or mentally. She looked like a woman. She walked like a woman. She talked like a woman. She was a woman. A born woman.”
I started down the long list of questions in my head. “Was she interested in men?”
“Not as interested as me,” Kay said with a wink. “But she liked the company of the opposite sex. You couldn’t get her off the dance floor on our cruises. She could really cha-cha-cha.”
It was hard not to like Kay Hausenfelter. She was funny, brash, what they used to call saucy. If she were fifty years younger she would be one of those girls shaking everything the good lord gave them in those awful music videos. “The police think maybe she was killed by a boyfriend who found out she was a man and went nuts,” I said.
“That Detective Grant is a cutie, isn’t he?”
“So he’s talked to you about this?”
“Honey, he’s talked to me about everything twice.”
The trouble with au gratin potatoes is that they can get cold pretty quick. And there’s nothing worse than gooey cold potatoes. I had no choice but to talk with my mouth full. “So what do you think about his boyfriend theory?”
“He’s the detective.”
I ate more potatoes. “It’s possible then?”
“It’s possible that it’s possible.”
I had a sense from the way she was dragging a cube of chicken back and forth through her Roquefort dressing that she was struggling with that same moral dilemma that has plagued womankind since Eve wiggled out of Adam’s rib-she wanted desperately to talk about things she knew she shouldn’t talk about. I was empathetic. I’d been there a few times myself. But my job was to uncover the naked truth about Violeta. That meant to hell with sisterhood. That meant playing the serpent. Tricking her, if possible, into feasting from the Tree of Gossip. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know there are probably things you told Detective Grant that you might not feel comfortable telling me. About her boyfriend especially.”
Kay Hausenfelter was no innocent Eve. “Good try.”
“Apparently not good enough.”
My admission freed her. She speared the chicken cube and swallowed it after a few quick chews. “There was no boyfriend, Maddy. Not unless she’d been creeping down the halls again.”
I repeated half of what she said. “Creeping down the halls again?”
“I know everybody thinks of the Carmichael House as a warehouse for dried up old prunes,” she said, swinging her eyes toward the two workers from the city water department who had just sat at the counter across from our booth. “And to a certain degree that’s true. But there’s some hanky panky, too.”
“When you say hanky panky-exactly what do you mean?”
She swung her eyes back toward me. “You can’t possibly have forgotten what hanky panky is!”
We laughed. Me, uncomfortably. “I guess I’m asking if Violeta was creeping to meet somebody’s husband.”
“It was years ago, Maddy.”
“And the husband in question will forever remain anonymous?”
“Forever dead, too.”
“I see-and the wife is still very much alive.”
“A very nice gal who doesn’t have a clue.”
“I understand. No more questions.”
We finished our lunches. We spent an enormous amount of time discussing the dessert menu. We gobbled our respective slices of strawberry pie. Hugged in the parking lot. Drove off in our respective cars. Kay in a little red car that looked both expensive and foreign. Me in my old Dodge Shadow.
The minute I got back to the morgue I summoned Eric and his bottle of Mountain Dew to my desk. He pulled up a chair with his foot and slumped into it. “Whatever you’re working on, shelve it,” I told him. “I just had lunch with Kay Hausenfelter and I’m dying to know if I learned anything.” I gave him his marching orders. “First, I need the name of every married couple that’s lived at the Carmichael House during the last eight years. The number of their condo unit and whether they still live there.”
Eric, as I expected, went apoplectic. “No-no-no-no. That building is a regular stairway to heaven. That could take days and days.”
I put my foot down. “You can do it in an hour. Check the county tax records. I need first names of both the husbands and the wives. List them by year. Alphabetically by last name. That will make the next step easier.”
This time his protest was perfunctory. “The next step. Sheeeesh.”
“Another hour,” I assured him. “Two at the most. Check the husband’s names against our obits for the same eight years. I want to know who’s dead and who’s not. And I want copies of the obits for the dead ones.”
He looked at me like a wild-eyed cat that had just spent a week trapped in a dresser drawer. “Do you have any idea how many obits we run in a year, Maddy?”
“Eight thousand. Now get your lazy carcass off my chair and get to work.”
He slowly unhinged. Stood up straight and stretched. “And what will you be doing while I’m having my nervous breakdown?”
“I’m the head librarian of a major daily newspaper,” I said. “I’ve got major administrative duties to perform.”
Eric dragged himself back to his desk. I hurried to the cafeteria to make my afternoon tea.
Why, if I liked her so much, did I think Kay Hausenfelter was lying to me? To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if she was or not. She admitted that Violeta once had an affair with a married man right there in the Carmichael House. She admitted that Violeta might have been “creeping down the halls again,” as she put it. She gave in to the temptation of answering my questions after resisting me only minutes earlier. Were those signs of an honest woman? Or were those signs of a devious woman? Did she tell me those things because she wanted me to share Detective Grant’s suspicion? Grant had already questioned her about the possibility of a boyfriend gone mad, so certainly she knew what I was getting at from the get-go. Did she want me to snoop as far away from the real reason for Violeta’s murder as possible? Yes, she’d been a stripper in her early days. Yes, she’d been called a gold digger. Yes, she’d been accused of rewriting her husband’s will as he lay on his deathbed. Yes, she’d been accused of being adulterous and uncouth. And yes, she was handy with little guns. But did that make her a liar? Did that make her a murderer? Somebody I couldn’t trust? Somebody I should fear?
My water came to a boil. I poured it over my teabag. Just the smell of those soaking Darjeeling leaves sweetened my mood. Then Gabriella Nash found me. She was crying. Again.
“Good gravy, Gabriella! Don’t you know we’ve got a woman president? Buck up!”
“They want me to do a column,” she said.
“So those are tears of joy.”
She started waaaah-ing like Lucy Ricardo. “No they aren’t.”
I felt like strangling her. I strangled my teabag instead. “Let’s get this straight-you’ve been at the paper for two months and they’ve given you a column? And this is bad news? Most reporters have to wait for twenty years.”
“It’s for the Saturday Home amp; Garden section.”
“Oh.”
“On pets.”
“Oh dear.”
She pulled a paper towel off the roll on the counter and wiped her nose. “I didn’t go to journalism school to write about cats and dogs. Not to mention tropical fish.”
“You’ll still be able to write your features won’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“See there,” I said. “It’s not as bad as you think. Continue to write your features as well as you can and make the column as unreadable as you can. When the veterinaria
ns and dog groomers start to bitch, they’ll give the damn thing to someone else.”
“I guess that’s a plan.”
“You bet that’s a plan,” I said. “Meanwhile I’ll give you an idea for your first column. Does your dog make you sick?”
“That’s a stupid idea.”
I headed for the door. “You think so? Do you know that dog hair can make your tonsils swell up like basketballs? Make you snore? Ruin your last chance at love?”
“Love, Mrs. Sprowls?”
I gave her my best Morgue Mama scowl. “That was an unfortunate slip of the tongue, Gabriella. And if you ever tell anybody, I’ll see to it that your next job is writing want ads.”
The afternoon crawled like an 800-year-old Galapagos turtle. Finally, at 4:30, Eric reported what he’d found. He was quite proud of himself. “There are 120 units at the Carmichael House,” he said. “The turnover rate during the eight years Violeta Bell lived there averaged 7.9 percent a year. That’s 183 owners, total. Seventy-two percent of those owners were single women. Four-point-four percent single men. Married couples, happily or otherwise, 23.6 percent. That’s forty-three couples if you can’t do the math in your head.” He handed me the list I wanted with all the married couples’ names.
“Alphabetically, too,” I said, pretending to be impressed. “Now what about the obits?”
He continued his geeky presentation. “Assuming we ran all their obits, a grand total of eight married men passed on to their heavenly reward during the last eight years.” He not only gave me copies of their obituaries, but a cover sheet listing their names and dates of death.
I sent him back to his desk and got to work on the obits. One husband had died the same month Violeta moved in, so I eliminated him as the likely lover. That left seven. Two had died in nursing homes, which meant they had probably been out of their condos for some time. So I eliminated them. That left five. One of the husbands was ninety-seven when he passed. Men being men, I couldn’t totally eliminate him, but I did put him in the unlikely category. That left four.
I checked those four against the first list Eric gave me. Two wives had sold their units after their husbands died. Two still lived there. Was one of them the nice gal who didn’t have a clue her husband had an affair with Violeta Bell? Or was Kay Hausenfelter lying? Was that husband still alive? And did his wife actually have a clue? Was Kay covering up for her? Or was Kay telling a much bigger lie? Was Kay Hausenfelter covering up for herself? Sending me on a wild goose chase? Looking for a goose that didn’t exist?
And there was an even bigger question: How in the hell was I going to find answers to those other questions?
I fled the morgue at five. Drove straight home. I gave James a quick walk. Boiled a packet of Tabatchnick’s Golden Cream of Mushroom Soup for my supper. Thank God it wasn’t an Ike night. I watched a couple hours of TV, flipping back and forth between the Everybody Loves Raymond marathon on Channel Nine and The Naked Archeologist on The History Channel. I was slipping into my pajamas when the phone rang. It was Detective Grant. “Don’t tell me you’re home from work already,” he said.
I knew he was yanking my chain. “I just walked in the door.”
I was standing in my dark bedroom with one leg in my bottoms and one leg out, but I could see the grin on his big round face. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls,” he said ever-so-nonchalantly, “I’m sitting here behind my big policeman’s desk with a very interesting report from my pointy-eared pals at BCI.”
I hopped into the second leg. “And?”
“Looks like Prince Anton and Violeta Bell are siblings. A ninety-percent likelihood, anyway.”
“A ninety-percent likelihood? That’s the best you can do?”
There was a long silence. Then the sound of something being slurped. “Apparently testing for siblingship, as the elves call it, is not as conclusive as other types of DNA testing. Especially when you don’t have a mother or father to test. Which in this case we don’t.”
To say the least I was disappointed. “Can’t they squeeze out another ten percent?”
“We’re not talking about making lemonade, Maddy. Be happy with the ninety. It’s as close to a slam-dunk as you can get. Then, of course, there’s the scrapbook.”
“The scrapbook?”
“Yeah-she had a scrapbook. Mostly birthday cards and Christmas cards and gooey crap like that. But there are several pages of clippings on Prince Anton and his sons. From Canadian newspapers and magazines.”
I screeched at him like a cuckolded wife. “And you’ve had this all along?”
He hemmed and hawed. “Actually-no. After I got the BCI report this afternoon, I went back to Violeta’s condo. To make sure we hadn’t overlooked something. Seems we weren’t as thorough as we should have been.”
I forced myself to simmer down. Not an easy task. “So, the DNA and the scrapbook pretty much make the case?”
“Yes, they do.”
“And I was right.”
“Yes, you were.”
“And you were wrong. Not to mention sloppy.”
“Yes and yes.”
I had oodles of questions for him. I asked the only one that counted. “What do we do now?”
Said Grant, “That was going to be my question to you.”
“I suppose the polite thing would be to tell the prince first,” I said. “Before you leak it to the media.”
“I agree.”
“To see how he reacts to the news.”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s what we’ll do then.”
Grant tickled my eardrum with his happy little laugh. “No-that’s what you’ll do. You already know the man. You can better judge his reaction.”
Now I laughed in his ear. “You still don’t believe it’s possible that Violeta was killed because of her royal blood, do you?”
There was another long silence. Another slurp. “Frankly, your theory is just too far-fetched for me to devote my department’s resources to it,” he said. “Especially since I’ve got a couple of much better leads to spend the city’s money on. And then there’s the political ramifications of the thing.”
“Political ramifications? Who gives a flying frog about political ramifications?”
His irritation was growing. “He’s a Canadian, Maddy. And Canada the last time I checked is another country. And I’m not too crazy about getting our fair city into an international brouhaha unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“And I’m not too crazy about getting myself killed,” I snarled.
He snarled right back. “Do you really think I’d let you go ahead with this if I thought you were in any danger?”
“Yes, I think you would,” I said, joking but not joking. “I’ve been nothing but a burr in your saddle since the day we met.”
“Actually well before that happy day,” he said, also joking but not joking. Then he turned into a teddy bear. “Look, Maddy, I don’t think you’re going to be the one finding the murderer this time-the gods do owe me this one-but your interference in the case has already done a lot of good.”
“Good? I haven’t discovered diddly.”
“But you have, Maddy,” he said. “You discovered who Violeta Bell really is. Or really was, I should say. And you found out what actually happened to the prince’s brother. He’ll be grateful as hell. Probably fall head-over-heels in love with you and whisk you away to some smelly old castle in Transylvania.”
It’s always fun sparring with Scotty Grant on the phone. Especially when I get the last jab. “So, while I’m writing my guess-who-your-brother-was letter to the prince, you’ll be following up on your other much-better leads?”
“That’s my plan.”
“Including which one of those two dead husbands was Violeta having an affair with?” I asked. “And whether they’re really dead?”
I’m sure if a cringe made a noise, my ear would have been ringing like the Liberty Bell. “Actually, when I went over the list I counted three husbands,” he sa
id.
“You’re counting the ninety-seven-year-old?”
19
Thursday, August 17
Dear Prince Anton,
Thank you so much for your hospitality the other day. And for the autographed photograph. Given that I showed up at your door like a beggar, you didn’t have to be so kind. You were truly a gentleman.
Sorry to say, I was not exactly a lady. When you weren’t looking, I stole one of your teaspoons and then one of your pipes. I’ll return both when I get them back from the police.
I gave them to the police to have your DNA checked. Not because I doubted your royal lineage, mind you, or suspected that you might be somehow involved in Violeta Bell’s death. I just wanted to see if Miss Bell was truly a member of the Romanian royal family, as she claimed before her murder.
As it turns out, you and Miss Bell are siblings.
It’s all very complicated, but the coroner’s autopsy found that Miss Bell had undergone a sex change operation. Which means your brother faked his death and then sometime afterward had the aforementioned surgery.
I realize that this startling news will be hard for you to believe. And while it would be impolite to discuss the details of my research into the life and death of your brother/sister in this letter (some of those details are a little on the disappointing side, I’m afraid) I will be more than happy to share what I’ve learned with you, should you be interested.
Dolly Madison Sprowls
Head Librarian
The Hannawa Herald-Union
20
Saturday, August 26
Ike and I arrived at the Salapardis’ at six. The invitation was for five. We parked on the street and hiked up the winding asphalt drive toward the house. It was one of the biggest houses in Yellow Creek Township. Which was saying a lot. Yellow Creek is where Hannawa’s new money lives. In houses so showy that even the old money shakes its head.
Most of the new homes in Yellow Creek are fanciful reproductions of the golden past-plantation-style colonials, pointy-roofed Tudors, Victorians with gobs of gingerbread. The Salapardis’ house, however, was quite modern. It was comprised of a dozen or so glass boxes stacked this way and that like the pieces in a Jenga game.