by C. R. Corwin
Gabriella zipped onto Hardihood Avenue just as the yellow light turned red. We were going to visit with another member of the Never Dulls that evening, Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy. But when Gabriella pushed the intercom button at the Carmichael House, we heard a younger woman’s voice. A cold, prickly voice. “Come up.”
“That was certainly short and sweet,” I muttered as the door clicked and we went inside.
“I think that was Ariel’s daughter,” Gabriella said. “I didn’t meet her when I did the story but her mother told me what a horse’s patoot she is.”
“She said that about her own daughter?”
“Six or seven times. Those exact words.”
We rode the elevator to the seventh floor. It was Ariel’s daughter. She introduced herself at the door as “Professor Barbara Wilburger.” She was fiftyish, middle-of-the-winter pale. Whatever color hair she was born with, it was very black now. She apologized for her mother’s absence. “She said she’d be back by now. But when mother’s at the foundation—well I’m afraid the real world has to wait.”
“Well, it was very gracious for your mother to invite us over,” I said. “It isn’t easy to talk about the murder of a close friend.”
She tried to smile. “We can wait for her in the living room.”
She led us down a hallway lined with Georgia O’Keeffe prints, into a room as big as my entire house. I absorbed as much of it as I could without appearing nosey. It was cluttered. A bit dusty. The furniture a bit old. Dozens of stained-glass hummingbirds were suction-cupped to the glass slider leading to the balcony.
Before inviting us to sit down, Barbara batted a trio of Persian cats off the sofa. “Sorry about the animals,” she said, raking fur off the cushions with her fingers. “Mother lets them rule the roost.”
Gabriella and I sat. Barbara didn’t. She positioned herself behind one of the matching wingback chairs, resting her forearms on the doily, rolling the cat fur into a ball.
“You live here with your mother?” I asked.
“No way in hell,” she said. Then she quacked a couple of “heh-heh-hehs” in an attempt to make a joke out of something that clearly wasn’t.
I tried to remember what I could about Gabriella’s story, grist for the uncomfortable small talk that was likely to last until her mother arrived. “I understand your mother has an autographed copy of Jane Goodall’s new book.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. She loves all those tree huggers.”
I tried another topic. “Gabriella’s story said you teach at the college.”
“Business ethics.”
“Oh my, that’s got to be interesting.”
“Not to my students,” she said. She launched into a sour rant about how dumb and lazy today’s kids are, all the time shaking that fur ball in her cupped hands like dice in a Monopoly game. “And they’re so damn gullible,” she screeched. “They accept anything as the truth except the truth.”
“The truth is always a tough one,” I said.
“I forgot I was talking to a couple of liberal arts majors,” she said, adding a few more of those duck-like “heh-heh-hehs.”
Her mother was right about her. She was a horse’s patoot. I turned to Gabriella, hoping that she could read the Morse Code that my eyes were twitching at her: Hurry up and say something before I throw a lamp at this insufferable woman!
Gabriella thankfully got the message. “So professor, how well did you know Violeta Bell?”
“Well enough.”
“And Eddie French?” I asked. “Were you okay with him? Driving your mother and her friends all over the place, I mean.”
Her answer was equally cryptic. “With all the money those women have, you’d think they’d hire a limo.”
I pretended to be on the same page. “A cab isn’t very classy.”
This time her response was as clear as Saran Wrap. “What kind of man drives a cab, for God’s sake?”
To my delight, Gabriella proved she was born with that egging-on gene that all good reporters need. “In this case, a man with a long police record,” she said.
“Exactly,” the professor said. She was now grinding the fur ball between her thumb and finger like it was an effigy of Eddie French.
“And now Violeta Bell is dead,” Gabriella said.
“On the other hand,” I pointed out, “the police haven’t been able to pin the murder on him.”
Barbara checked her watch. It was a delicate watch. More than likely an antique. More than likely real gold. “I’m sorry my mother isn’t here yet.”
“We can wait a while longer,” I said.
“I wish I could,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment I simply cannot be late for.”
Gabriella and I followed her to the door. I asked a final question. “One more thing about Eddie French—was it usual for him to come up to your mother’s condo? The condos of the other women? Helping with the things they bought at garage sales? Or their luggage when they traveled?”
Barbara deposited the fur ball into the brass wastebasket under the foyer table. She eyeballed her hair and makeup in the mirror above it. “That was always my biggest worry,” she said.
I poured on the empathy. “Well, thank goodness you won’t have to worry anymore.”
She tried her best to smile. Twisted her wrist to check her watch again.
“That’s such a beautiful watch,” I said.
This time her smile succeeded. But it was a strained, somewhat embarrassed smile. “It’s a Rolex. A very early one.”
“White gold, I suppose?”
Her smile faded. “The diamonds are real, too. If you’re wondering.”
“I was. I suppose it’s a family heirloom.”
“Just a gift from a friend,” she said.
She opened the door for us. On the way out I stopped to admire the wastebasket. It was the shiniest thing I’d ever seen. Not a bit of tinge. Embossed on the side was a happy cat wearing a huge tam-o’-shanter. It was playing a bagpipe and dancing a jig. “Isn’t that just darling,” I said. “Is it an antique?”
Barbara rolled her eyes. “A gift from Violeta.”
“Then I suppose it is—simply darling.”
Gabriella and I retreated to the elevator. Gabriella pushed the button for the first floor. I cancelled her selection and pushed the B.
“The basement?” she asked.
“It’s time we get to the bottom of this thing,” I answered.
The elevator deposited us at the intersection of two dully lighted hallways. The cement block walls were painted a cheery peach. Every door was painted the same Bic-pen blue. One door was adorned from top to bottom with a huge yellow X made of crime-scene tape. “I’d say that’s it,” I said, locking my arm in Gabriella’s.
“Which one of us gets to play the Cowardly Lion?” she asked as we padded down the stubbly gray carpet.
We reached our destination. Just in case I couldn’t read, Gabriella read aloud the raised white letters on the door: “Fitness Center.”
I squinted along the ceiling for security cameras. There weren’t any. Which meant the police had no visual record of who used that door the night Violeta Bell was murdered inside.
It also meant I could try the doorknob. I took the hanky from my purse and draped it over my hand. Gabriella was horrified, reading for me the black letters on the crime tape: “Police Line Do Not Cross.”
“Good gravy, girl,” I growled, “I’m nervous enough without your narration.”
I tried the knob. As I expected it was locked. I went to the fire extinguisher box on the opposite wall. Opened it. Picked up the key with my hanky hand and returned to the door. I slid the key into the slot on the knob and turned it until I heard the click. The door swung inward.
Gabriella was mystified. “And how did you know there was a key in there?”
I made a stuffy Sherlock Holmes face. Then I winked and explained my clairvoyance. “Remember the other day when Kay Hausenfelter asked us to bring up her
mail? And said there was a skeleton key under the bullfighter? She also told me there were skeleton keys all over the place. ‘With a building full of forgetful old farts there’s a skeleton key someplace for everything,’ she said.”
I reached through the crack in the door and fumbled for the light. Clicked it on with the top of the nail on my thumb. “It’s a good bet lots of people know where those keys are hidden.”
I eased my head into the fitness room. It had the same peach walls as the hallways. There were no other doors. No windows. There were oodles of those shiny contraptions people would rather crucify themselves on than take a good walk. Exercise mats were scattered on the floor. The one closest to the door was splotched with blood.
According to Dale Marabout’s reporting, the police figured that Violeta Bell had been murdered sometime in the early hours of July 5, more than likely between midnight and three. They based that estimate on the condition of the body when it was found later that morning when the yoga instructor unlocked the fitness room door just minutes before her nine o’clock class. Violeta’s wide-open eyes were milky. Rigor mortis was reaching an advanced stage. The police had no way of knowing whether her assailant had forced her into the fitness room at gunpoint, or whether she had been ambushed there. There was also the possibility that Violeta had willingly accompanied her assailant, unaware that her final minutes were ticking down.
The police did know how Violeta Bell died. The assailant had forced her to take off her bathrobe. That bathrobe was then wrapped around the gun in the assailant’s hand, to muffle the three pops that were coming. “We’re pretty certain this was a planned killing,” a police source told Dale Marabout. “If anyone in the building did hear the gunshots, they would figure it was just somebody shooting off the last of his Fourth of July firecrackers.”
I turned off the fitness room light. Closed the door and made sure it was locked. Put the key back in the fire extinguisher box. We took the stairs up to the lobby instead of the elevator, to lower the risk of being seen. I pushed open the stairway door a couple of inches and peeked out. The lobby was empty. We hurried out the front door, into the gooey evening heat. We reached the visitors’ parking lot just as a small black convertible popped out of the underground garage. It was Barbara Wilburger. We waved as she sped by. She lifted her fingers off the steering wheel and wiggled them.
Gabriella squawked with surprise. “Beemer Z4?”
“Interpretation please.”
“That’s pretty sporty for an anal retentive professor, isn’t it?”
I thought about it. The car did seem like a strange fit for the woman we’d just met. I also thought about Bob Averill’s yellow Mercedes. About Ike’s modest Chevrolet and my old Dodge Shadow. About that clown car of Gabriella’s that I was trying to pretzel myself into. “Our cars do give us away,” I said.
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 po
lice 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.”
