The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (10 page)

“That’s one theory.”

“You find any matching stocking threads?”

I was suddenly Phyllis Diller. He laughed like a hyena on helium. “You, Mrs. Sprowls, have been watching way too much CSI!”

“How about his cab?” I growled. “Find any blood in there?”

“Do you really think all that stuff on the list would fit in a taxi cab?”

“I suppose not.”

He answered my next two questions before I could ask them. “Yes, he has a truck. No, we didn’t find any blood in it.”

I didn’t know beans about blood, of course, but I gave it my best shot. “Wouldn’t the blood on his shoe have dried by the time he got back to his apartment?” I asked. “It would have been several hours later.”

He was suddenly agitated. Uncharacteristically curt. “When the blood comes back we’ll see what gives—okay?”

I let him have his victory. What choice did I have? “While we’re on the subject of Violeta Bell’s blood,” I said, “anything to her claim that she’s Romanian royalty?”

Grant’s agitation vanished. He giggled like a kid who’d just won a year’s supply of Chicken McNuggets. He fished another photocopy from his folder. Shook it at me. “I don’t know about royalty,” he said, “but her passport here lists her country of birth as Romania.”

“No kidding?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. The passport is a phony.”

“No kidding?”

He shook other photocopies at me. “And so is her Ohio driver’s license and Social Security card. Even her AARP card is a fake.”

“Oh my.” I took the copies from him. Sorted through them. “I don’t see a birth certificate.”

“There’s no record of one,” he said. “Nor could we find her naturalization papers, assuming she had any.”

I sank into my chair. “Let me guess, no last will and testament.”

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?” he said, producing one from his folder. “But—”

I took it from him. “Is it real?”

“Yup. Prepared by J. Albert Ritchey himself.”

Al Ritchey was one of Hannawa’s most prominent attorneys. A million years ago he’d handled my divorce from Lawrence Sprowls. I gave the will a quick read. “She left everything to the Hannawa Art Museum?”

There was that giggle again. “Which, not counting her condo or the things in it, comes to a whopping thirty-five hundred bucks.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. No insurance policies. No stocks or annuities. No CDs or savings accounts. Just a checking account dwindling toward zero.”

“Dwindling? So she used to have more?”

Grant showed me a stack of printouts from the First Sovereignty Bank. It showed very few deposits but oodles of cash withdrawals. Over the past eight years she’d gone through $385,000. “Any tax records?” I asked.

“That’s the fun part,” he said. “She loyally paid her city taxes, but she never paid a penny in state or federal taxes. No sales taxes. No income taxes.”

I went back to her will. In it she requested that her remains be cremated. She named one of her fellow Queens of Never Dull as her executor. “Why do you think she chose Gloria McPhee?” I asked.

Grant shrugged like the Italian he wasn’t. “They were friends.”

I scowled like the librarian I was. “Of course you’re aware that Mrs. McPhee is on the art museum board of trustees.”

He pretended to be surprised. “No kidding? We’ll have to look into that!”

I was trying to see what else he might have in that folder. “Are those photographs of the murder scene?”

“Believe me, Maddy. You don’t want to see these.”

I impatiently wriggled my fingers at him.

He handed me the photos.

There were ten of them in all. They all showed Violeta sprawled out dead on the exercise mat. They were taken from different angles and different distances. I tried to be hard-boiled, the way cops on TV always are. “Tiny bullet holes,” I said.

“Homicide-wise, a .22 isn’t a very reliable weapon,” Grant said. “Sort of a BB-gun on steroids. The assailant apparently understood that. Three quick shots at point-blank range right in the heart there. And only three.”

I knew where he was going. “And the killer wrapped the gun with Violeta’s bathrobe to muffle the sound.”

“That’s right,” said Grant. “Small caliber gun. Middle of the night. Basement. Big, fluffy bathrobe wrapped around and around just to make sure. The assailant was very careful that nobody saw anything or heard anything.”

“And nobody did?”

“Just the asswipe pulling the trigger.”

I continued studying the photos. Violeta was flat on her back. Her arms and legs were spread-eagle, sort of, suggesting she just fell back dead without struggling or suffering. “You think she went pretty quick?”

“Died instantly, as they say.”

Dale had correctly reported that Violeta was wearing only her underwear when her body was found. He had not, however, reported that it was a fancy red bra and matching panties. “She wasn’t—”

Grant answered brusquely, “There’s no evidence of this crime being sexual in any way.”

“Well, that’s something at least,” I heard myself say. I handed the photographs back to him. I moved on to another subject. “So, what did you think when Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy bailed Eddie out? You couldn’t have been overjoyed.”

“Bad guys getting out on bail stopped bothering me long ago,” he said. He put the folder back in his desk drawer. Closed the drawer with his foot. “Anything else the Hannawa Police Department can do for you today, Mrs. Sprowls?”

I was not disappointed that our chat was over. Between the black coffee and the damn air conditioning, I was fighting a losing battle with my bladder. I put the Cinderella mug on the corner of his desk. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with nothing, but are you looking into that queen of Romania nonsense?”

Grant knew me too well. “Which means you are.”

“Not exactly looking,” I said. “But it is interesting, isn’t it? A few days after she publicly claims to be the queen she’s dead.”

It was clear from Grant’s patronizing smirk that the Hannawa Police Department was not giving much credence to her claim. “I think this case has a lot more to do with good old, garden variety American greed than European history,” he said. “But if you learn something interesting—”

“You’ll be the first to know.” I stood up to leave. He remained in his chair, swiveling back and forth. “It was good seeing you, Maddy.”

“It was good seeing you.” I was telling the truth and I think he was, too.

Grant stood up now. He stretched his arms until his shirttail popped out. He walked me to the elevator. “You’re going to behave this time?”

“I always behave,” I said. “Sometimes badly, but I behave.”

“I don’t want you getting yourself into trouble.”

I knew he was getting at something. “And how might I do that?”

He pushed the down button for me. “Oh, I don’t know—illegally entering a crime scene maybe.”

“That’s illegal now, is it?”

He smiled like a mischievous elf. “Don’t let this go to your noodle, Maddy, but we didn’t know about those skeleton keys.”

I rode the elevator to the main floor. Used the ladies’ room. Successfully spun myself through the revolving doors into a blast of hot wind. It felt as if The Almighty, for some reason, had decided to punish our sinful city with a giant hair dryer. I slipped past Roscoe Blough. Headed back to the paper.

Detective Grant is one of my favorite human beings. But between you and me, I’m always relieved when our jousts are over. He’s just too good a match. He’s just as willful as I am. Just as unpredictable. Just as exasperating. And that morning I knew he’d bested me in all three. He not only knew I was sticking my
shnozola
in another murder, as he put it, he didn’t much care that I planned to stick it in even farther. Which meant he wanted me to stick it in farther. Which meant he had his own doubts about Eddie French’s guilt. Good gravy! He didn’t even care that I’d stuck my head inside the fitness room at the Carmichael House. Which meant he’d hidden a video camera somewhere. No doubt to catch the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. To retrieve or erase some little piece of evidence, maybe. He even volunteered that his department didn’t know about the skeleton key in the fire extinguisher box. His way of admitting that he needed me, you think? And how about all that stuff he told me about Violeta Bell? No birth certificate. Fake Social Security number. All that. It sure confirmed Gabriella’s suspicions. Not to mention mine.

I reached the paper. Pushed my face against the red-hot glass door so Al Tosi, our rickety security guard, could see me. He buzzed me in. Called after me as I drooped past him toward the elevator. “Scorcher today, no?”

9

Friday, July 21

I spent the afternoon redoing Eric’s mark-up of Thursday’s paper, making sure he heard my cussing. Actually, he hadn’t done a bad job at all, but Morgue Mama does have a reputation to protect, doesn’t she? Anyway, just when I was gathering up my stuff to get the hell out of there, Bob Averill appeared in front of my desk eating a Snickers bar. The wrapper was pulled back like a banana skin. “Everything hunky-dory, Maddy?”

“As hunky-dory as it was yesterday, Bob.” It was the umpteenth time he’d pestered me about my progress that week. He always did so without mentioning Eddie French, or Violeta Bell, or anything else relating to the case. I suppose he figured just flapping around me like a bat was intimidation enough.

He tried again. “Doing anything interesting this weekend?”

“Hopefully not,” I said. I headed for the stairs.

He fell in alongside me. He’d finished the candy bar. Now he was licking the chocolate off the wrapper. “Suzie told me you signed up for a week’s vacation.”

He was about ready to implode with frustration and I was loving it. “Actually, I’m thinking of changing it to two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“I’ve got five coming.”

The great man crumbled. He put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. He dug his chin onto his chest. “Maddy, please,” he whimpered, “Jeannie Salapardi has been calling every night.”

I patted his hand. Removed it from my shoulder. “That must be terribly annoying,” I said. “Have a great weekend, Bob.”

I fled into the stairwell. Hurried down to the parking deck. I got into my car and got the hell out of there. I didn’t even take time to turn on the air conditioning.

My intention that afternoon was to go straight home to James, Alex Trebek, and the last fillet of that tilapia Ike had brought me in lieu of flowers or candy. Instead, I caught myself taking a left turn onto Hawthorne Avenue.

Hawthorne is very typical of the streets surrounding Meriwether Square. It’s paved with bumpy bricks. It’s lined with big oaks. There’s not a house on it built later than 1925. I pulled to the curb just shy of the dilapidated monstrosity that Eddie French called home. My intention was simply to see where he lived and how he lived. Before I found the courage to actually knock on his door on some future date. It’s a tactic I often employ. Years ago when I was pursuing the assistant librarian’s job at
The Herald-Union,
I circled the building like a buzzard for two hours before going inside to apply.

According to the research Eric gave me, the house was divided into four apartments. Two down and two up. Eddie had rented 2A for the past nine years. Dale’s story said the police found traces of blood on his porch. That meant Eddie’s apartment was atop an outside stairway. Unfortunately, I could see no such stairway from my car. No doubt it was at the back of the house. I got out of my car and crept up the driveway. I’d never heard such noisy gravel in my life.

I reached the back of the house. I snuggled against the siding and peeked around the corner. Most of the backyard had been turned into parking spaces for the tenants. Eddie’s cab was parked there. So was a rusty Hausenfelter bread truck. So was a shiny silver Volvo. It’s not unusual to see Volvos in Meriwether Square—there are oodles of them in fact—but it was a bit surprising to see one less than twenty years old.

“You need help?”

It was not exactly the voice of God. But it was a voice from above. From the small deck atop the wooden stairs that zigzagged up the side of the house. It belonged to Eddie French. I recognized his gray whiskers and his rumpled Woolybears ballcap. He was sitting sideways on the railing, flicking cigarette ashes into a coffee cup. I had no choice but to turn my scouting mission into a full-fledged visit. “Mr. French?”

His voice was sleepy. Nasal. “In the flesh, madam.”

Gabriella in her ignorance had said he talked like an old hippie. Actually, it was more of a fifties’ hipster voice, sculptured more by black coffee and nicotine than funny mushrooms and Pepsi-Cola. “I hope you don’t mind me dropping by,” I said, before realizing I hadn’t introduced myself yet. “I’m Maddy Sprowls, by the way.”

He’d heard of me. “Oh yes—the buttinsky responsible for my current conundrum.”

I advanced to the bottom of the stairway. “I am somewhat responsible,” I admitted.

He flicked a caterpillar of ashes into his cup. “And I am resoundedly irresponsible,” he said.

It took me a few seconds to translate his particular brand of English. Even then I wasn’t 100 percent sure of what he meant. I eased myself onto the first step. “For Violeta Bell’s murder, you mean?”

“Is there somebody else I didn’t kill?”

Had I actually planned on confronting Eddie that afternoon, I would have been prepared for his hostility. But I hadn’t, and I wasn’t. I found myself stammering like a little girl who’d just been caught drawing on the wall with her mother’s bright red lipstick. I moved up another step. “No, no. Of course not, no. And there are people who don’t think you killed Ms. Bell, either.”

He flipped his spent cigarette in my direction. “Including the diminutive apparition sneaking up my backstairs?”

Before I could answer, the screen door to his apartment banged open. A woman came out. She was fiftyish. Impeccably and expensively dressed in white slacks, a melon crepe tee and designer flip-flops. She, too, was wearing a baseball cap, a bright pink one. A perky blond ponytail stuck out the back. She just had to be the owner of the silver Volvo. “Are you Jeannie?” I asked.