The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (9 page)

We retreated down Hardihood. The rush hour was over. The landscaping crews had finished their work. I would have been content to think about which South Beach dinner in my freezer I was going to microwave for my supper. But Gabriella had other ideas. “We learn anything worthwhile today?” she asked.

“Good gravy—” I started to scold her but the drive-in movie screen in my cerebral cortex had already switched from cashew chicken with sugar snap peas to that sour-pussed woman rolling that cat fur into an ever-tighter ball. “Well, it was pretty clear our Miss Wilburger didn’t much care for Violeta Bell.”

Gabriella laughed. “Or Eddie French,” Gabriella pointed out. “Or her students. Or her mother. Or us.”

I laughed, too. “You’re saying she may not be the most reliable judge of character?”

We reached West Apple. Puttered through the yellow arrow and headed toward downtown. “She obviously knows them a lot better than I do,” Gabriella said. “I only spent a few hours with them doing my story. But I liked Eddie French. And I thought her mother was terrific.”

“You did say you had an uneasy feeling about Violeta,” I reminded her.

“Yeah—but I liked her.”

I suppressed a yawn. “If I’ve learned anything the past two years, it’s that likeable people murder other likeable people all the time.”

“You’re a regular Confucius.”

“A confused Confucius,” I said.

We stopped behind an unloading bus. A lot of dog-tired people got off. “So we learned bupkiss?”

“Unfortunately we learned plenty,” I assured her. “We learned that Eddie French was very familiar with the building. And we learned that anybody familiar with the building could have easily slipped into the fitness room to ambush Violeta Bell.”

“So maybe Eddie French is guilty after all?”

“Maybe he is.”

Gabriella dropped me off in front of
The Herald-Union
and headed off to have dinner with friends. I went upstairs. Not to catch up on my work. To see if Eric had any more research on the Queens of Never Dull for me. He’d already found all he could on Kay Hausenfelter, Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy, and Gloria McPhee, but he still owed me big, fat folders full of interesting stuff on Eddie French and his sister, and of course Violeta Bell.

Eric wasn’t at his desk. But Dale Marabout was at his. He was typing furiously with his two index fingers. Which meant he was writing an important story. When Dale has a routine cops story, he types with all ten fingers. But when it’s a big story on deadline that requires every bit of gristle in his body and soul to get out fast, it’s just those two fingers.

Dale Marabout is more than a good reporter. He is also my good friend. And if you don’t know already, he and I once had a relationship that went well beyond having lunch. I was a skittish divorcée in my forties at the time. He was just-out-of-college, plump and frumpy, and woefully untrained in the manly arts. We fulfilled each other’s modest expectations for several years. Then a young kindergarten teacher named Sharon moved into his apartment building and I was the odd woman out. But, like I said, we remain friends.

I waited at my desk until Dale clicked off his computer and headed for the elevator. Then I called up his story on my computer. Oh my:

Hannawa—Cab driver Edward French, whom police had characterized as a “person of interest” in their investigation into the July 5 murder of retired antique dealer Violeta Bell, has been released on bail.

The 61-year-old French was arraigned Tuesday on several charges relating to the burglary of Bell’s west side condominium.

Court records show that bail was posted late yesterday by local philanthropist Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy.

That night, after I’d had my dinner, washed my dishes, watched
Antiques Roadshow,
and taken James out for his after-dark pee, I got up the nerve to read that pamphlet Ike gave me. He was right. Sleep apnea was dangerous. The pamphlet said people with it stop breathing hundreds of times during the night, up to thirty seconds at a time. It increases the risk of having a heart attack or a stroke, or a car accident the next day because you’re so damn tired you fell asleep at the wheel. Even if it doesn’t kill you, it can make you irritable, forgetful, even disinterested in sex. “No wonder Ike gave me this damn thing,” I grumbled to James.

8

Thursday, July 20

I never thought I’d hear the words come out of my mouth. “Eric,” I said, “you’ll have to mark up the paper this morning—I’ve got stuff to do.”

And I did have stuff to do. Important stuff I didn’t want to do but had to do.

The first thing I did was call Suzie and tell her I’d be taking the first week of August off. “You, a vacation?” she squeaked in disbelief. “For a whole week?”

“Don’t worry,” I snarled back. “I won’t be having a very good time.”

The next thing I did was hike down the sidewalk through the heat and haze to Ike’s. I could see him inside filling a Styrofoam cup with coffee for his only customer. I opened the door just wide enough to stick my head inside and yell, “I’ll take the damn sleep test!”

Then I huffed and puffed up Hill Street to police headquarters. I’d passed the monstrous building a million times but I’d never been inside. I sweated my way up the three tiers of steps, skirted the bronze statue of Roscoe Blough, Hannawa’s legendary Roaring Twenties police chief, and pushed my way through one of the revolving doors. The lobby was cold enough to make ice cubes. Some people were actually wearing sweaters. I obediently put my purse on the conveyor belt and stepped through the metal detector. I clopped across the marble tiles to the information desk. The crisply uniformed woman manning the desk was blowing warm air into her hands. “Where can I find Detective Grant?” I asked her.

She was clearly one of those people who didn’t like their jobs. “I suppose you don’t have an appointment.”

“Actually I don’t.”

“Name?”

“Maddy Sprowls.”

It was as if that statue of Roscoe Blough had clanked in and asked her for directions to the men’s room. “Good Lord!” she howled.

Her surprise didn’t surprise me. In the past two years I’d interfered in two major murder investigations. And made the police look like a pack of doofuses both times. “I’m sure Detective Grant will want to see me.”

She pushed his extension button with more foreboding than if she were launching a nuclear-tipped missile to start World War III. “Maddy Sprowls is here for you, detective,” she whispered. Then she laughed. “No, she doesn’t have a bomb—that I can see.”

So I was told where to go. I took the elevator to the fourth floor. It was just as cold up there as the lobby. An officer pointed me toward Detective Grant’s cubicle.

When Grant saw me coming, he stood up behind his desk and put his fists on his hips Superman-style. He did not, however, suck in his belly, the way most middle-aged men do when anybody remotely female appears. He loudly recited a Bible verse: “Revelations 13:1: ‘I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads.’”

I like Scotty Grant. He’s comfortable in his own skin. Which is a good thing. He has plenty of it. What he doesn’t have is a lot of hair. Except for his eyebrows. They frame his puffy eyes like the McDonald’s arches. I plunked myself in the chair alongside his desk. “Any way you could have the air conditioning turned up?” I asked. “I can still feel one of my big toes.”

He sat and took a noisy slurp from his mug. It had a picture of Daffy Duck on it. “I’m sure we don’t have any of the crappy tea you drink, but I can get you an equally crappy cup of coffee.”

I nodded gratefully. “One, real sugar.”

He lumbered out, returning in a couple of minutes with a mug with Cinderella on the side. “We didn’t have any real sugar—sorry.”

“I trust you left it black,” I said, taking a cautious sip. He had left it black. I thanked him with a smile and got down to business. “I need some information on Eddie French.”

There was no more surprise on his face than if I’d told him that water was wet. “He a friend of yours?”

I wanted to make it sound like I was there in my official capacity as newspaper librarian. “I’ve been asked to do some research on him.”

That made Grant grin. “For a second there I thought you were just sticking your shnozola into another police investigation. For no other reason than to make my life more miserable than it already is.” He leaned back in his chair until both of his chins were resting on his chest. He pulled open his bottom desk drawer with his foot. Reached in and retrieved a folder. EDDIE FRENCH was scribbled on the tab. “Bob Averill told me he was going to twist your arm.”

“Did he now?”

“We’ve become good friends because of you.”

Grant loved to play gotcha with me. Even though he almost always lost. I looked the masochistic bastard straight in the eyes. “Then I guess he also told you about Eddie’s aversion to guns.”

“Indeed he did,” said Grant. “So did Eddie’s sister. And I personally tested him. Played with my service revolver in front of him during our interrogation. Sure enough, he started hyperventilating like a sonofabitch.”

“You believe it?”

He opened the folder. Shuffled through the stack of official forms and scraps of paper covered with notes. “It looked real enough. Then again, my wife is deathly afraid of airplanes yet every April flies to Phoenix to visit her folks.”

“So, Eddie could have overcome his fears long enough to murder Violeta Bell?”

“Yup.”

“Or maybe he’s not quite as allergic to guns as his sister thinks?”

“Yup. Yup.”

“Or his sister is knowingly telling an untruth?”

“Yup. Yup. Yup.”

I went for a fourth “Yup” while he was still so agreeable. “But it really doesn’t matter since you don’t have enough evidence to charge him with the murder anyway?”

He toasted me with his Daffy Duck mug. Then he set me straight. “When we had enough to charge him with burglary, etcetera, we charged him with burglary, etcetera. When we get enough to charge him with murder, we’ll charge him with murder.”

I toasted him with Cinderella. Then went straight for his jugular. “Unless I’m wrong, you’ve got no witnesses and no murder weapon. You’ve got no fingerprints or other proof of Eddie French ever being in the fitness room.” The sour look on his face told me that either he’d just swallowed a bug, or I was right on the money.

I assumed it was the latter and went on. “Now, you do have evidence of him being in Violeta’s condo. Then again, I’m sure you’ve got evidence of him being in the other ladies’ condos, too. He drove them around for years. As for the antiques you found in his apartment—well, I don’t know exactly what you found—but they could have been gifts, just like he said.”

Grant handed me a sheet of paper from his folder. It listed the antiques they found in Eddie’s apartment:

Victorian oak shaving stand

Louis XV Pompadour vanity

1830s Biedermeier mirror

Granite Art Deco fireplace

1850s rosewood cheval mirror

Stickley rocking chair

1926 leather club chairs (2)

Cast iron Godin stove

Art Nouveau fireplace

Grueby vases (4)

The list surprised me. “Fireplace mantles? Cast iron stoves? I was expecting watch fobs and pocketknives. Maybe a silver spittoon or two.”

Grant grinned victoriously. “Not exactly gift material, is it.”

“No, it isn’t,” I admitted. “And not exactly easy to steal from a seventh floor condominium without being seen.”

“Not easy but not impossible,” Grant countered. “The murder occurred at night and he would have had all night.”

I recapped his hypothesis to make sure we were on the same page. “So you’re saying he forced her to go with him to the basement fitness room—or otherwise finagled her into going—shot her dead and then went back up to her condo and took his good old time taking what he wanted.”

“Yup.”

I read the list again, picturing the wiry little cab driver frog-walking a two-hundred-pound marble mantle down the hallway. “And you’re sure all of these things belonged to Violeta Bell?”

He snatched the list from me. “We didn’t find an inventory list in her condo or anything, the kind people keep for insurance purposes,” he said. “In fact we found no proof of her even having any homeowner’s insurance. But all the items we found in Mr. French’s rat hole do have her little sticker on the bottom somewhere.” He fished another sheet of paper from the folder and held it up for me to read. It was an inky, out-of-focus blowup from a copying machine badly in need of a service call:

Bellflower Antiques
119 West Apple St., Hannawa, Ohio USA
Violeta Bell, Proprietor

“This is your proof?” I huffed.

“Well—yes.”

“No eyewitnesses? No jimmied locks?”

“Well—no.”

“So they could have been gifts?”

Grant rallied. “And I might be invited to join the Olympic bobsled team.”

I smiled. As disagreeably as I could. “According to the reporter who did the Queens of Never Dull story—Gabriella Nash—Violeta Bell’s condo was stuffed to the ceiling with expensive antiques.”

“That it was.”

“And still is?”

He knew what I was getting at. “So why did Eddie take heavy fireplaces and furniture? When he could have stuffed his pockets with jewelry and other more wieldy thingamabobs?”

“It does seem strange,” I said.

“It does. Until you have the stuff appraised. Find the right buyers and you’ve got a good fifty thou in cash.” He enjoyed a long sip of his coffee. “And who knows what he might have fenced before we arrested him.”

“Anything with Violeta’s sticker show up yet?”

He shook his head no. “But we’ve got our eyes peeled.”

The self-satisfied bastard had made some good points. Now it was my turn. “Speaking of things showing up—those blood results back yet?”

“Any century now.”

“Funny about that blood, isn’t it?” I said. “Eddie tracked it back to his apartment but not back to Violeta’s condo.”

“Ever think that maybe he took off his shoes?”

He had me again. I hadn’t thought about that. “So he knew he had blood on his shoes and lugged all that stuff out of Violeta’s condo in his stocking feet?”