The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (21 page)

***

By the time I got back to the paper I was shaking like a maraca. I’d just met the president of the United States. I’d been hassled by Secret Service agents. Been serenaded at close range by a marching band. I got off the elevator and headed straight for the women’s room.

Eric stopped me in the hallway. I was trying not to look like I needed to get there in a hurry but he’d worked with me long enough to know I did. “I’m done checking into that bread truck business,” he said.

With everything that had happened in the last two weeks, I’d forgotten all about that old Hausenfelter bread truck that Eddie French claimed no one owned. Of course, I wasn’t going to admit it. “And?”

Eric leaned against the wall to block my escape. He slowly opened his notebook and studied his notes. “Let’s see now—Hausenfelter Bread Company maintains a fleet of thirty delivery trucks. It routinely replaces five every year. The old ones are sold to a used truck dealer on Cleveland Road. W.E. Richfield & Sons.”

“Did you call them?”

His deadpan face told me he was enjoying my discomfort. “Of course I called them, Maddy. I’m an enterprising young man. A self-starter extraordinaire. Not to mention a multi-tasker of the highest order.”

“What you are is an idiot,” I snarled. “Just tell me what you’ve got before I explode.”

He dragged out a long, long, “
Wellllllllllll
—if the good ole boys at Richfield & Sons don’t sell the trucks in a year they put them in the crusher and sell the metal for scrap.”

“So obviously someone bought that old truck Eddie drives,” I said.

“Obviously. But they wouldn’t give me any names. Company policy.”

I tried to step around him. “Check the title bureau.”

He moved to the middle of the hallway, blocking me again. “Already have. But there’s no record of Eddie French ever buying a truck from the Richfields or anywhere else.”

Another thirty seconds of this torture and I’d be dancing like James before his morning walks. “So we have no idea who owns that truck in his backyard?”

His straight face was beginning to warp. “We don’t know for sure about that particular truck. But somebody interesting did buy a used Hausenfelter truck from Richfield & Sons eleven years ago.”

I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t be Kay Hausenfelter. I liked her too much for her to be the murderer. “Who bought the bread truck, Eric?”

“Jeanette Salapardi.”

“No!”

“She also buys the license plate stickers every year.”

“No!”

18

Wednesday, August 16

I wasn’t exactly having the easiest of weeks. Oh, don’t worry. I was still keeping to my in-at-nine-out-by-five work schedule. And I was still taking my good old time getting back from lunch. But a multiplicity of intertwining troubles, all of my own making, were beginning to take their toll on my already shaky disposition.

First of all, I was still getting grief about my run-in with the Secret Service. The paper had actually reported it as part of their coverage of the president’s visit. It was a little story on an inside page—SECRET SERVICE STOPS HERALD-UNION STAFFER—but everyone saw it. Everyone in the newsroom saw it. Everyone on my street saw it. All the clerks at the supermarket saw it. That rightwing nut on the radio, Charlie Chimera, saw it. Even the clucks at TV23 saw it. I was the laughing stock of Hannawa, Ohio.

Managing Editor Alec Tinker, to his credit, did have the good sense to warn me of his decision to run the story. “If anyone else in our circulation area had been held by the Secret Service we would have published it,” he said.

“But it was just a stupid misunderstanding,” I argued. “They let me go right away.”

“We have to demonstrate that we’re a part of the community,” Tinker said. “Not above it.”

The other thing churning away at my insides was that damn DNA sample. Detective Grant had warned me that the results probably wouldn’t be back from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification for a week. “It might even take longer if things get backed up over there,” he cautioned.

I growled at him like a bear that hadn’t eaten all winter. “Can’t you tell them it’s important?”

“Oh, we will,” he said. “And so will every other police department in the state about their samples. Everybody wants it yesterday. So my advice, Maddy my dear, is to take a chill pill and wait for the test tube elves at BCI to do their magic.”

On top of those two things, Bob Averill was continuing to pester me about Eddie, and Ike was continuing to pester me about my tonsils. So I couldn’t get away from the morgue fast enough that noon.

I pulled into Speckley’s ten minutes late. I hurried inside and scanned the crowded booths. Kay Hausenfelter was already there, studying the menu while everyone else was studying her.

Kay was actually dressed somewhat conservatively for our lunch—for Kay that is. She’d squeezed her ample top into a pink scoop-neck jersey and hidden her equally plentiful bottom under a red peasant skirt. Her hoop earrings were big enough for a gymnast to perform on. The straps on her sandals were trimmed with glass diamonds. Her fingernails matched the jersey. Her toenails matched the skirt.

I apologized for being late and recommended the house specialty to her, the meatloaf sandwich, au gratin potatoes on the side. She wrinkled her nose and asked me if the Cobb salad was edible. “I’ve never had it,” I said. “But if it’s on the menu it’s probably good.”

We engaged in the usual Ohio small talk until our lunches came. How hot the summer has been. How the fall is our favorite time of the year. How winter’s always a bitch.

It was Kay who finally got the ball rolling. “I suppose you invited me to lunch to talk about something more than the weather.”

I folded my hands and got as comfortable as I could. “I thought maybe we could talk about sex.”

Kay Hausenfelter forked a slice of avocado and snipped off the end with her perfect whiter-than-white teeth. “My favorite subject,” she said.

I took a bite of my meatloaf. “I don’t want you to think I’m talking to you about this because—”

She could see I was having trouble finishing the sentence. She laughed. Devoured the rest of the avocado. “Because I dress like a hootchie?”

“Because I figured you’d be more comfortable with the subject than Ariel or Gloria.”

She laughed again. Went after a sliver of radish with her fork. “You’re obviously a good judge of people.”

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 & 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 veterinarians and dog groomers start to bitch, they’ll give the damn thing to someone else.”