The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

by C. R. Corwin

  When the person Hannawa knew as Violeta Bell changed his sex, he also changed his name. He took the name Violeta. Prince Anton’s great-grandmother was named Violeta. But where did the name Bell come from? Bell wasn’t a Romanian name. Why would someone who wore their Romanian ancestry on their sleeve adopt such a non-Romanian last name? Could Violeta have been married to some guy named Bell before coming to Hannawa? Could she have chosen it out of thin air?

  I slid out of bed, stepped over James, and padded into the kitchen. I called Eric. “You asleep, Mr. Chen?”

  “I’m in the middle of a chess game with a guy in Rawalapindi, Pakistan.”

  Eric was a chess player. When not playing with his goofy friends at Borders, he played with goofy strangers on his computer. “Hurry up and lose,” I said. “I need you to Google something for me.”

  Suddenly sleep mattered to him. “Do you realize what time it is?”

  I was adamant. “It’s time for you to lose.”

  The guy from Rawalapindi was more cooperative than Eric. “Damn!” Eric squeaked. “He checkmated me with a pawn!”

  “Good. Now say good-bye and get ready to Google.”

  Eric fussed and fumed but he did as he was told. “Okay, shoot.”

  “I need you to do a translation for me,” I said. “You can do translations, can’t you?” I asked.

  I head a clickety clickety click. “What to what?” he asked.

  “English to Romanian.”

  Clickety clickety click. “What’s the magic word?”

  “Bell.”

  Clickety clickety click. “Bell—clopot. Oh, Morgue Mama! You are soooo good.”

  “Now translate Clopotar into English.” I spelled it for him. “C-l-o-p-o-t-a-r.”

  Clickety clickety click. “One who rings a bell.”

  17

  Thursday, August 10

  Ike and I were in separate but equal pickles. Ike’s pickle was philosophical. Should he, as a good patriotic Republican, close his coffee shop at noon to attend the president’s speech at City Hall? Or should he stay open and sell as much coffee to the crowd as he could? My pickle was more practical. How was I going to get through that crowd for my very important tête-à-tête with Detective Scotty Grant?

  Ike, after much stewing, decided to stay open. Not to make as much money as he could, mind you, but to serve his fellow citizens during their time of need. “Whether you’re the president or just pouring coffee, people need to know you’re there for them,” he explained. For my part, I decided to charge straight ahead, supporters, protesters, police barricades, and Secret Service agents be-damned.

  I left the morgue at noon. The sidewalks along Hill Street were clogged with people. There was an American flag on every light pole. The police had already stopped traffic at both ends of the downtown. There were sirens blaring in the distance. Any minute now the president’s motorcade would be arriving. It took me ten minutes to get to Ike’s. I waved at him through the window but he was too busy to wave back. He just flashed his happy Republican smile at me and went back to making change.

  I fought my way up the hill toward City Hall. That’s where the president would be speaking and the crowd was being sucked in that direction, like dust bunnies into a vacuum cleaner. At Hill and Spring I encountered a row of barricades. To get on the other side you needed an invitation. I showed the policeman the one Ike got from the Chamber of Commerce while he was still dithering whether to attend. The policeman let me through. Apparently I looked like an Ike to him. I squeezed through the crowd to Hill and Court and another row of barricades. From here on you needed a VIP invitation. Ike hadn’t gotten one of those. “Sorry ma’am,” the man in the suit said. From his buzzcut and sunglasses I gathered he was a Secret Service agent.

  “I’ve got to get through,” I said, “I have an appointment at police headquarters. With Detective Scotty Grant. About a murder.”

  He folded his arms, so his elbows were level with my ears. “This is City Hall, ma’am.”

  “And police headquarters is on the other side,” I said.

  “Then you’ll have to go around.”

  My civility was waning. “There are barricades on that side, too. And a goon worse than you, more than likely.”

  “Please move back, ma’am.”

  Now my common sense was waning. “For Pete’s sake! Do I look like the kind of woman the president needs to worry about?”

  Two of the agent’s clones appeared out of nowhere. They let me through the barricade, all right. But not before confiscating my purse and clamping a pair of handcuffs on my dangerous wrists. A minute later I was in a trailer behind City Hall, justifying my very existence to this pair of extremely unfriendly young men. Their names were Canfield and Morris. They took turns bouncing questions off me, like I was a Ping-Pong table.

  “My name is Dolly Madison Sprowls,” I said. “Although I go by Maddy—for obvious reasons—and I’m the head librarian at The Hannawa Herald-Union—that’s the newspaper here.”

  “You have some proof of that?” Agent Canfield asked.

  I pointed to my purse, which he was cradling on his lap. “No, but you do.”

  He blushed and dug out my wallet. He studied my business card and my driver’s license and all the rest. He asked me if I knew my address and my phone number and my Social Security number. I rattled off all three.

  “Why did you threaten the president?” asked Agent Morris.

  “I did not threaten the president,” I said. “I merely asked the other agent if I looked like the kind of woman the president needs to be concerned about.”

  Agent Canfield corrected me. “You said ‘worry about,’ ma’am.”

  “I suppose in your business worry sets off more alarms than concern,” I conceded. “In mine they’re pretty much tweedledum and tweedledee.”

  “So you had no intentions of confronting the president?” Agent Morris asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “The agent at the line felt you were exhibiting anger,” said Agent Canfield.

  “Poop! I was just worried—concerned—about getting to my appointment with Detective Grant.”

  Asked Agent Morris, “And who is Detective Grant?”

  “Chief homicide detective with the Hannawa Police,” I said.

  “And why was it,” Agent Canfield wondered, “that you wanted to see a homicide detective at the very location where the president was about to speak?”

  “I’m helping him solve a murder.”

  “This Detective Grant needs help solving murders, does he?” asked Agent Morris.

  “All the help he can get,” I said.

  I was convincing enough that Agent Canfield called Detective Grant to confirm our meeting. Which was, as they say, problematic. I didn’t actually have an appointment with Grant. I’d just planned to pop in and ruin his lunch, as usual.

  Canfield put the phone down. He pulled his sunglasses down so I could see his cold eyes. “He said he’s never heard of you.” Then he smiled somewhat humanly. “Actually, Mrs. Sprowls, he’s on his way to take custody of you.”

  “Take custody! What do you mean take custody?”

  Ten minutes later Grant and I were fighting our way across the front of City Hall. The president’s motorcade had just pulled up and the crowd was going nuts. “Had you bothered to call for an appointment, you would have found out that I was on security detail today,” Grant yelled into my ear.

  “Does this mean we can’t talk?” I yelled back.

  “We can talk,” he assured me. “If you don’t mind sharing the stage with the president of the United States.”

  “If the president doesn’t mind, I don’t mind.”

  And so my meeting with Detective Grant was held on the top step of City Hall, surrounded by the Hemphill College Marching Bear Cat Band. On a makeshift stage fifty steps below us stood the president, the governor, the mayor, two U.S. senators, a gaggle of congressmen, a herd of local politicians. Below them was a great h
orseshoe of Hannawans, some with signs, some with children on their shoulders, all thrilled to pieces to be participating in this unimportant historic event. I waited until the president got to the podium then got to the business at hand. “So, Scotty—have you questioned Eddie again?”

  Grant’s eyes were on the backsides of the politicians in front of us, but at least his mind was on me. Some of it, anyway. “Again and again,” he said.

  “But nothing new to report?”

  “Nothing new to report.”

  The president was getting a resounding cheer about something. I raised my voice. “What about the sex change thing? Getting anywhere with that?”

  “We’re still working it.”

  “In other words, nothing new there either.”

  “Nothing new there either.”

  The president was now saying something about the American can-do spirit. The crowd was wildly agreeing. “You know what your problem is, Scotty?” I said. “You’re getting too much sleep. It makes the mind sluggish.”

  He knew I was playing with him. And he knew he had no choice but to play along. “Been lying awake nights, have you?”

  “Thinking and thinking.”

  “I’ve been meaning to try that myself.”

  “You should. It can help you unravel the most interesting mysteries.”

  “For instance?”

  Now the president was saying something about the future. The crowd was all for it, apparently. “Well, for instance, who Violeta Bell was before she was Violeta Bell.”

  Grant was done playing. “You know for sure?”

  “Not 100 percent sure,” I admitted. “But I think there’s a very strong possibility that the late Violeta Bell was, once upon a time, the late brother of Prince Anton Clopotar, pretender to the throne of Romania.”

  It was as if I’d just told him he’d won the state lottery and then explained that it was a $5 scratch-off ticket. “Good God, Maddy, you’re not still climbing that family tree, are you?”

  First I told him what I knew for sure. That Prince Anton lived on an island in the St. Lawrence River. That clopot in Romanian means bell. That the prince’s great-grandmother, Violeta, had married a man named Clopotar. That fifty years ago the prince’s older brother, Petru, took the family boat out on the river and was never seen again. That the Canadian police ruled it an accidental drowning even though they hadn’t recovered a body. That the prince, after half a century, still continued to insist that his brother’s death was a suicide. That while there was little chance Romania would ever restore the monarchy, the Clopotar family was in the running if they did.

  Then I got to the fun part—my theory. “Until a couple of days ago I thought maybe the prince had killed his brother to get him out of the picture. And then learning that another pretender to the throne was alive and well and living in Hannawa, Ohio, made sure that she, too, was out of the picture. The prince’s father died a bit suspiciously, too, by the way.”

  The president was now warning some country or the other to stop doing whatever it was doing, lest we be forced to do something about it. I waited for the applause to die down. “But obviously, the prince couldn’t have killed his brother back then if his brother was also Violeta Bell,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be the easiest thing,” Grant agreed.

  He was being a smart ass. I ignored him and went on. “I now think the prince really believed his brother drowned. And I think he really believed it was suicide. Petru must not have been very happy in his own skin. But instead of wrapping himself in an anchor and jumping overboard, Petru only made it look that way. He swam to shore. He went somewhere and had a sex change. Took the name Violeta Bell. Moved to Hannawa and opened an antique shop.”

  Grant seemed more relieved than intrigued. “So, the prince didn’t kill his brother fifty years ago.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And there’s no evidence he killed his father.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Which means you have no evidence that Prince What’s-his-name is the murdering type.”

  “I never said I did.”

  “Which means you’re finally off this royalty stuff.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “What if the prince had been happy that his brother drowned? Even if he had nothing to do with it? Then all these years later he realizes his older sibling still might be alive. He does some digging. Figures out what I’ve figured out.”

  Grant corrected me. “What you think you’ve figured out.”

  And I corrected him. “I’m sure the prince knows his Romanian. How many nano seconds after he saw the name Violeta Bell in Gabriella Nash’s story would it take his frontal lobes to start flashing Violeta Clopotar?”

  “I suppose it’s a possibility.”

  Both the president and I were really feeling our oats now. “You bet it’s a possibility,” I snapped over the roar of the crowd. “And if the prince wasn’t surprised that his brother committed suicide, he might not be surprised to learn he faked his death and had a sex change.”

  “And the prince liked it better when his brother was dead and so he kills him now?”

  “Kills her—but yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  Grant now reminded me why he was the detective, and I a lowly librarian. “It’s a nice theory, Maddy, I’ll give you that. But you’ve no real evidence. Not that the prince killed Violeta Bell. Not that Violeta Bell was really his sister or brother or whatever.”

  It was time to confess. “I may have gone to see the prince during my vacation.”

  I could see the headache wiggling across his forehead, like a million invisible worms wielding tiny sledgehammers. “Judas H. Priest! Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “I was curious. And I wasn’t killed.”

  He almost screamed at me. “You’ve just spent twenty minutes telling me what a cold-blooded killer the prince is!”

  I pressed my finger across his lips to shush him. “Good gravy, Scotty. The Secret Service is going to wrestle you to the ground.” I gave him a few seconds to cool down. “I know I shouldn’t have gone. But you’ve been pooh-poohing the Romanian thing from the get-go. And I had to get a read on the guy—”

  Grant started raking his eyebrows with his fingernails. “A read on the guy?”

  “That’s right. And maybe stumble and bumble into something important.”

  Grant was wilting in front of me like a bone-dry petunia. “And did you, Maddy? Did you stumble and bumble into something?”

  “Well, for a few seconds there I thought he was going to give me a nice sample of his DNA.”

  “His DNA? Judas H.—”

  “To compare with Violeta’s,” I explained. “To see if they were related.” I took the photo the prince had given me from my purse. I handed it to Grant. “He almost licked the envelope. But then he didn’t. You can get DNA off an envelope, can’t you?”

  Grant pulled the photo from the envelope and studied it. “Yes, you can.”

  “And I imagine you have Violeta’s DNA.”

  “The coroner routinely takes a DNA sample during an autopsy,” he said, beginning to un-wilt a bit. “In fact, we used Violeta’s DNA to back up the coroner’s finding that she’d once been a he. All that X and Y chromosome stuff I’ve never understood.”

  “Well, it’s too bad the prince didn’t lick the envelope,” I said. I reached back into my purse. I pulled out a Ziploc sandwich bag. “Of course he did lick this teaspoon. Can you get DNA off that?”

  Grant took the bag. Held it in front of his face. “You’d think it would be impossible. Slick surface and all. But sometimes you can.”

  I pulled out another bag. “Surely you can get some from this.” It was one of the prince’s smoking pipes. “There’s enough stinky old spit in the stem to gag a buzzard.”

  Grant was a much happier man now. “I suppose the prince just didn’t give these things to you.”

  “I realize you probably can’t use any evidence from
them in court,” I said. “But if you can have the DNA checked—well, we’d at least know if I was on the right track, wouldn’t we?”

  The president had finished speaking. The crowd was going insane. The Marching Bear Cat Band was blasting the theme from Rocky. “That we would,” Grant bellowed. “That we would.”

  The president waved good-bye to the crowd. Started moving up the steps toward us, fervently shaking hands with all the local pols and their well-scrubbed families. Before I could get out of the way, the president was eyeball-to-eyeball with me, smiling like I was a favorite sister. “So good to see you,” the president said to me.