by Nic Saint
“Oh, hi,” said Hazel, as her eyes keenly swept across the small company that stood on her welcome mat.
“Chase Kingsley. Hampton Cove PD,” Chase grunted, and whipped out his badge, as he’d probably done a million times throughout his professional life.
Hazel’s eyes went a little wider, then she said, “This is about Neda, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Chase. “May we come in?”
“Um, sure,” said Hazel, and stepped aside to allow us passage into her neat little home. “Don’t mind the mess,” she said apologetically as she led us into the living room. “My cleaner comes in on Tuesdays, even though I would have preferred Mondays, of course.”
Why Monday would be a better day for a cleaner to come in than a Tuesday, I really couldn’t say, but then the world of humans still holds many mysteries for me, of course. I’m their always eager student, but sometimes I have a feeling it’s going to take me my whole life to understand even a small snippet of what makes this peculiar species tick.
The living room was probably the most immaculate one I’d ever seen. I could spot not a single speck of dust, mote of dirt, or even a token dust bunny. In fact everything looked very much in order: books standing to attention like obedient little soldiers on their shelves, knickknacks tastefully distributed across every available surface, and even the color scheme was thoughtfully worked out: plenty of beiges and yellows with just a splash of orange here and there.
“Please take a seat,” Hazel breathed, as she gestured to the upholstered beige couch while she gracefully sank down onto an overstuffed chair. Odelia and Chase did as they were told, and after Hazel had directed a scathing glance in my direction and Dooley’s, presumably warning us not to shed even a single hair or else, she called out, “Amadeo!”
A funny-looking little man came shuffling into the room. His back was stooped, he was wearing gray slacks, a gray shirt and the last remnants of a gray mop of hair crowning a square head, and from behind thick glasses pale blue eyes stared out at the world with a perpetually puzzled expression.
“Yes, my dear?” he said in mild tones.
“The police,” Hazel introduced us.
“Police?” asked her husband.
“Neda died, remember? I told you about that. They’re here to ask us about her.”
“Neda?” said Amadeo as he carefully lowered his thin frame in the overstuffed chair positioned right next to his wife’s. They formed part of the same set and were both directed at the large television. “Who’s Neda?”
“Neda Hoeppner. You remember,” said Hazel in the tone of a much-put-upon wife.
Amadeo Larobski directed a vague look at his wife. “Neda… Hopper?”
“Hoeppner. Our choir director?”
“Oh, right,” he said, though it was obvious he was still very much in the dark.
“So it has come to our attention that you and Neda didn’t exactly see eye to eye,” Chase explained by way of introduction, setting the tone of the conversation.
“No, we most certainly did not,” Hazel confirmed. When her husband suddenly grabbed a coffee table book from the coffee table and started leafing through it, she immediately took it from his hands and returned it, then made sure it was exactly aligned with the table’s edge. “She knocked out my husband. Made him lose his marbles.”
“What did you lose?” asked Amadeo with interest.
Hazel opted to ignore him. “She hit him over the head with her baton, he took a bad fall, and he’s been confused and addlebrained ever since.”
“Someone has an adder in his brain?” asked Amadeo, surprised. “Is it someone we know?”
“We talked to Francis Reilly,” said Odelia, “and he told us it was an accident.”
“Of course it was an accident. I don’t think Neda would go and knock people down on purpose,” Hazel said with a touch of annoyance. She’d clearly had this discussion before. “But that doesn’t change the fact that she did it. And that’s the problem: she never admitted her mistake. She never apologized. And she never asked us if there was anything she could do.”
“But you still didn’t quit the choir,” said Chase. “And neither did your husband.”
“St. Theresa Choir is our whole life,” said Hazel as she gave her husband a quick rap across the knuckles when he surreptitiously tried to sneak that book from the table again. “We’ve been in that choir since before we were married. We met in that choir, and got engaged, then married, had three kids…” Her eyes drifted to a set of picture frames on the shelves. They were a wedding photo of a much younger Hazel and Amadeo, and next to that several pictures of kids and grandkids. “The choir sang at our wedding, at every christening, at birthdays, jubilees, but also funerals—my parents and Amadeo’s… Every important moment in our lives is tied up with the choir. You don’t leave something that’s been part of your life just because you don’t like the new conductor, Detective.”
“There will be others,” suddenly Amadeo piped up.
“Other what, Mr. Larobski?” asked Odelia kindly.
“Other… what were we talking about?”
“Choir directors,” said his wife stiffly.
“There will be other choir directors,” said Amedeo with a happy nod.
“That is definitely true,” said Hazel. “And a good thing, too.”
Chase cleared his throat. “Can you please tell us where you both were this morning between eleven-thirty and twelve, Mrs. Larobski?”
“You don’t think we had anything to do with Neda’s death, do you?”
“Simply a routine inquiry,” Odelia explained. “We need to verify people’s whereabouts so we can create a clear picture of Neda’s day.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t part of that picture,” said Hazel, who was sitting ramrod straight, eyes alert. “We had choir practice until eleven, then we came straight home. Isn’t that true, Amadeo?”
“Mh?” said her husband, looking up with a dreamy expression on his face.
“We came straight home after choir practice!” she said, raising her voice and enunciating a little more clearly.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said. “We always do, don’t we? Choir practice and straight home for lunch.”
“You have lunch at eleven?” asked Chase.
“Eleven-thirty. We get up at six and have an early breakfast, which means an early lunch and an early dinner.” She checked her watch. “In fact I was just about to start preparing dinner.”
The message was clear: she wasn’t all that keen on two cops—or one cop and one semi-cop—to come barging in there asking a lot of questions.
“Can anyone verify that?” asked Chase, who wasn’t finished with the questions just yet.
Hazel frowned. “Verify what?”
“When you got back from choir practice.”
“Um…” She thought for a moment, then glanced to her husband, seemed to dispel the notion, and thought some more. Then her face suddenly lit up. “Janice,” she finally said.
“Janice?”
“Our next-door-neighbor. She was looking through the window when we arrived home. Janice is something of a neighborhood snoop,” she explained.
“Janice Malice,” her husband said with a little grin. “That’s what we like to call her.”
“Amadeo, please,” said his wife, embarrassed.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Janice Malice.”
“He once called her that to her face,” Hazel said. “She wasn’t happy.”
“So Janice saw you arrive at…”
“Must have been eleven-fifteen, eleven-twenty.”
“And you didn’t leave the house after that?”
“No, we had lunch and then we were both out in the backyard all afternoon.”
“We like the flowers,” Amadeo explained. “Lots of colors.”
“Yes, Amadeo likes the colors,” Hazel said with an indulgent smile. “The more colors the better. So we plant flowers in the spring, and enjoy a rio
t of color all summer.”
Odelia glanced around. “Do you have… pets?” she asked, then darted a meaningful glance at me and Dooley. We hadn’t dared to move a muscle all through the interview.
“No pets,” Hazel snapped, as if the notion was a ridiculous one.
“We had a goldfish once,” Amadeo said. He was starting to really come into his own, I saw, and following the flow of the conversation. “But we sadly lost him.”
“Yeah, the kids had a goldfish, but that was years and years ago.”
“How old are your kids now, Mrs. Larobski?”
“Well, the youngest is thirty-five and lives right around the corner. Jake is forty, and lives in Boston, and Frieda is in Paris right now. She’s a business consultant,” she explained. You could tell from the tone of her voice that she was proud of her kids.
“We had a hamster, too,” her husband confided.
“Do you have any idea who could have done this to Neda?” asked Chase.
“Look, Detective, if you’re going to flaunt your wealth the way Neda did, it’s only a matter of time before someone is going to try to rob you of it.”
“She was flaunting her wealth?”
“Of course she was. Always with the fancy rings and bracelets, the expensive watches and the latest and most expensive iPhone… showing pictures of her vacations. Cannes, Antibes, Gstaad… She liked to rub it in our faces. I told Amadeo that she was flirting with disaster, and I was right.”
“So you think it was robbery?”
“Of course. Someone broke into her house for the purpose of taking whatever they could find—which was probably a lot—and she got in the way. It’s as simple as that.”
“We had a goldfish once,” Amadeo said happily, showing us that maybe he wasn’t as in tune with the flow of the conversation as I’d thought.
14
That evening, the whole family was gathered outside on the deck for dinner, and of course there was but a single topic of conversation: the murder of Neda Hoeppner. Since Marge and Tex’s home wasn’t furnished yet, they were still living with us, which was nice and cozy, though sometimes a little noisy, as it meant that Odelia’s gran also shared the house with the rest of us, and she has a tendency to get a little loud from time to time.
She was conspicuously absent now, though, which wasn’t her habit.
But then I remembered she’d told us she was meeting her decorator, so perhaps she was still next door, showing this person the lay of the land.
“I talked to Janice Malice, as Amadeo insists on calling her, and she confirmed that the Larobskis were home when they said they were,” said Chase, as he buttered a piece of bread.
“Hazel could still have snuck out of the house through the back,” said Odelia, “and gone over to Neda’s.”
“I don’t think she could have done that without Amadeo giving her away, though. That man simply blurts out anything that pops into his head.”
“He could have taken a nap after their early lunch.”
“Possible,” Chase admitted. “Though Hazel would still have needed to get to her car, which was parked out in front, and Janice would have seen her.”
“It’s probably just as Hazel says,” Marge said as she reached for the saucepan and dribbled a liberal amount of sauce over her pork chops. “A gangster, attracted by stories of Neda’s wealth, decided to rob the place, and was surprised by Neda. There was a struggle, she fell and hit her head.”
“It’s definitely possible,” Uncle Alec agreed as he eagerly ladled more potatoes onto his plate. “Problem with that theory, though, is that it’s going to be very hard to find out who our robber was. And also, there was no sign of forced entry, so Neda must have opened the door for them.”
“I’m sure you’ll catch them, honey,” said his girlfriend, Mayor Butterwick, as she rubbed his arm affectionately. She turned to Tex. “So when is the big day? When are you moving back into your house?”
“Oh, well, we don’t have a specific date planned as such,” the good doctor said as he scratched his nose. “Um, first we need to decide about furnishings, wallpaper, decorations and such.” He darted a helpless look in the direction of his wife.
“We don’t see eye to eye on that,” Marge explained. “Tex simply wants to move our old furniture back in and be done with it.”
“At least what’s left of it,” the doctor grumbled as he took a sip from his wine.
“I want him to come with me and pick out a new salon and a new bedroom.”
“And Gran wants to hire an interior decorator and really go to town,” Odelia finished for her mom, who nodded unhappily.
“Where is your mom?” asked Charlene.
“No idea,” said Uncle Alec.
“She’s meeting with the decorator,” I piped up, causing both Marge and Odelia to turn to me in surprise.
“She’s what?!” Marge cried.
“What’s going on?” asked Tex.
“Max says Ma is meeting with the decorator!” Marge said, looking even more distraught now, after receiving this bit of news. “And I specifically told her not to talk to anyone without me!”
“Oh, honey, she’s probably interviewing people. You’ll get to have the last word,” said her husband.
But Marge didn’t look convinced, and nor did Odelia. They both knew Gran, and also knew how impetuous that old lady could be.
Just then, the lady in question came stepping through the opening in the hedge that divides Odelia’s backyard from that of her parents. She was looking happy and chipper to a degree, and as we all looked on, a man came stepping out in her wake. At least I thought it was a man. It could have been a woman, too. He or she was sporting long hair, fashionable orange-framed sunglasses perched on the tip of a sharp nose, thin lips and a sizable chin. I assumed immediately that this was the decorator, and saw that the person was wearing a nice gray suit with orange pinstripe and a pair of shiny new brogues.
“Hi, there,” said this apparition. “Sorry to interrupt your dinner.”
“Family, meet Jason,” said Gran, gesturing to the decorator with a proud sweep of her hand. “Jason Knauff. Who will be the man to bring our home into the twenty-first century and beyond.”
“Hi, Mr. Knauff,” said Marge, though I could tell from the way her eyes were shooting chunks of molten lava in the direction of her mother that she was far from pleased.
“I just saw your beautiful home,” said Mr. Knauff as he waved his hands expressively, “and it is absolutely to die for!”
“Jason says it’s rare that he immediately experiences such a connection to a place,” Gran explained.
“As blank canvases go where I can express my art,” said Jason, “your modest little home is pure perfection.”
“You want to paint our house?” asked Tex. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Knauff, but it’s already been painted, sir.”
“He’s not the painter, Tex,” said Gran irritably. “Jason is an interior decorator and designer. In fact he is the interior designer. He did Gwyneth’s house, didn’t you, Jason?”
“Dear Gwynnie, yes,” Jason murmured, reverently closing his eyes for a moment.
“And Kim’s new beach house, of course.”
“Kimmie…”
“And Alec and Hilaria.”
“Hilariaaaa…”
“And now he’s doing our place,” Gran finished, looking like a cat that got the cream.
“Ma,” Marge said under her breath, “I told you to talk to me first.”
“What do you think I’m doing right now? I’m talking, ain’t I?”
“I think you will be very happily surprised with what I’ve got in store for you, Mrs. Poole,” said this artiste as he waved his hands in the air, conjuring up a vision for the Poole maison as he pictured it.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Tex muttered as he poured another glass of wine then downed it in a single gulp.
15
That night, Dooley and I rode in the car with our loc
al neighborhood watch, and so did Harriet and Brutus.
Gran had confided in me that these watch outings had a tendency to get a little tedious after a while, since unfortunately not a lot of crime was being committed in our neighborhood, or at least not on Gran and Scarlett’s watch, and so all they ended up doing was driving around a little aimlessly, and chatting the night away.
It made for a welcome diversion, therefore, that she had four cats in the car with her, to tackle some other subjects, and distract her from the tedium many crimefighters face when there’s no crime to fight. Even Batman has moments he’s just sitting around his cave, playing Scrabble with Alfred and wondering what’s going on with that Joker.
“So Gran, I had this great idea that I wanted to run by you,” said Harriet.
“Oh, sure, honey,” said Gran, as she kept a keen eye on the house of Neda Hoeppner, now dark and deserted. “Shoot.”
“Well, you know how St. Theresa Choir is having their big concert next week, right?”
“I doubt that’ll happen. With their choir leader bludgeoned to death this morning.”
“She wasn’t actually bludgeoned to death, Gran,” I reminded her. “She fell and hit her head.”
“Fell or was pushed? There lies the difference between murder and an accident, Max.”
Scarlett, who had a hard time following the conversation, yawned. “I really wish you’d translate what they’re talking about, Vesta. It gets annoying for me otherwise.”
“Oh, sure, hon,” said Gran, and obliged her friend by translating Harriet’s words.
“So if that concert goes through,” Harriet continued, “I was thinking that maybe cat choir could join St. Theresa Choir and we could stage a concert with the two choirs.”
Gran frowned. This was clearly a train of thought she’d never considered before. “Huh,” she said finally. “St. Theresa Choir and cat choir together on the same stage.”