The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

by C. R. Corwin

  Outside, we piled into the long, black police van Detective Grant had requisitioned for our outing. “I feel guilty just riding in this thing,” I said, as we drove off.

  Our first stop was Swann’s, Hannawa’s legendary drive-in, where all of the car hops are muscle-bound college boys in matching green polos and khaki Bermudas. The minute you pull into a parking slot and click your headlights, they run to your car—actually run—and take your order.

  So, for the next forty-five minutes our happy crew huddled inside the van wolfing hamburgers and onion rings and French fries and milkshakes, messing the upholstery and ourselves with catsup and salt and mustard and mayonnaise. It was great fun, even though the last thing my already roiling digestive track needed was a double cheeseburger and curly fries. Not to mention the pineapple shake. The prince graciously paid the bill. We hurried off to Bloomfield Township, to the Riverbend Moor Family Memory Garden, the cemetery where Violeta Bell’s ashes resided, inside a pretty purple urn.

  We climbed the long walkway toward the columbarium. It was a beautiful evening with only the slightest breeze. Prince Anton, however, looked like he was walking into a hurricane. He was bent forward. Each step seemed a struggle. If he were to be believed, he’d spent the greater part of his life thinking his reunion with Petru would be in heaven. Now it was going to be here on earth. Here and now. I took his arm. “It’s quite a climb, isn’t it?”

  He put his hand over mine. “Yes, it is.”

  It would have been a wonderfully bittersweet moment if Weedy hadn’t been orbiting us like a wobbly moon, clicking his pictures. Or if every few steps Gabriella hadn’t stopped to scribble in her notebook. Their callous intrusions were the reason everybody hates the media. And why nobody would want to live without it. I apologized for their behavior nevertheless.

  “They’re just making their way in the world,” the prince said, managing a weak grin. “Like everyone else.”

  We reached the columbarium. Detective Grant held the door open for us.

  Our footsteps on the marble floor banged with a hollow sadness. Weedy stopped orbiting. Gabriella stopped scribbling. We reached the glass cabinets. We found the niche holding Violeta’s urn.

  The prince studied the urn in silence. It would have been impossible to know what he was thinking or feeling. But it was probably a lot of things. That’s always been my experience at cemeteries. Right when you need them at their solid best, your heart and brain go schizo on you.

  I watched the prince’s reflection in the glass. His eyes were meandering from the urn to the objects that the other Queens of Never Dull had placed in the niche. I told him that the ceramic bell was from Kay, the classified section with the garage sales circled from Ariel, the small wooden box from Gloria. “Any idea what’s in it?” he asked me.

  I admitted that I didn’t know. “I never saw,” I said. “And Gloria never said.”

  “Probably something personal. Between the two of them.”

  “Very likely.”

  “Probably wouldn’t mean a hill of beans to any of us.”

  “Probably not.”

  Prince Anton turned to Detective Grant. “Would it be possible to take a look?”

  Grant rubbed his eyebrows. He pulled his thumb and fingers down the bridge of his nose. He stroked his chin. He ran the back of his hand back and forth on his double chin. The body language of an important man who didn’t know what to say. “I don’t have the foggiest what the law books have to say on matters like this,” he finally said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say you don’t have the legal right to touch anything until the probate court gives you custody.” Then he shrugged and added this: “But, if I was in your shoes, well, I wouldn’t give a shit about the law.”

  The prince chuckled. “So, you wouldn’t feel compelled to arrest me?”

  “Not particularly,” Grant answered. “But there is a photographer and a reporter here. Not to mention the world’s nosiest librarian. Whether they’re as attitudinally laissez faire as me, I can’t say.”

  “I don’t see a photographer,” Weedy said.

  “I don’t see a reporter,” Gabriella said.

  “And I don’t see a librarian,” I said.

  “Well, then,” said Grant, “let’s go find the man with the keys. Whoever and wherever that may be.”

  The prince had another idea. “I could just jimmy the lock. Save a lot of time.”

  Grant offered three more useful foreign words. “Que sera sera.”

  The prince gave him a quick, appreciative bow. Then he turned to me. “Wouldn’t have a bobby pin, would you, Maddy?”

  I dug into my purse and produced one. I handed it to the prince. He pried it open, and with the skill of a burglar, inserted it into the tiny lock on the niche’s glass door. He wiggled it back and forth. Then up and down. Then sort of round and round. Clockwise then counterclockwise. Nothing. Grant took over. He, too, wiggled the pin every whichaway. With equal failure. I also tried—it was my bobby pin after all—but after two minutes of frantic jiggling handed the pin to Weedy. It took him about five seconds. “It’s pretty much the same kind of lock they have on our vending machines,” he explained.

  Gabriella was shocked by his criminality. “You steal from the vending machines?”

  “Not steal—get the candy I paid for.”

  The prince opened the glass door. Put his head inside and lowered his nose over the little box. He lifted the lid. Without a smile or a frown he whispered, “Oh my!” He closed the lid. He pulled back his head. Moved his hands to the urn. He stroked it. Then he gently lifted it. Then he cradled it against his chest and kissed the shiny purple lid. “I wouldn’t have expected it to be this heavy,” he said. “Not that I ever held one before.”

  That’s when Detective Grant had his epiphany. “Oh shit!” He coaxed the urn out of the prince’s hands and gently put it on the floor. He got on his knees and bent over the jar. The rest of us bent over him. He unscrewed the lid. He took a pair of latex gloves from his jacket. He wiggled his fingers into them. He undid the twist-tie on the plastic bag inside the urn. He held his breath and pulled the bag open. He slowly drilled a finger into the ashes. He slowly pulled out a small pistol.

  Prince Anton had been a regular Rock of Gibraltar since the day he arrived in Hannawa. Sweet and patient. A gentleman. Now he went crazy.

  And why wouldn’t he go crazy?

  Can you imagine standing in that cold columbarium looking at the ashes of someone you’d missed horribly every minute of your life for fifty years? Then see that pistol emerge through those lifeless ashes like some ghastly demon? Good gravy, can you imagine it?

  “What the hell kind of a country is this?” he screeched. “What kind of people?” He was grabbing at the pipe in his shirt pocket. I swear if it had been a knife he might have driven it through his heart.

  Grant held the pistol just above the bag of ashes while Weedy snapped his pictures. While Gabriella furiously took her notes. I tried to comfort the prince. “What a horrible shock,” I kept repeating. I walked him to a pair of wrought iron chairs by the window overlooking the outside garden. He covered his face with his hands and cried. “I’m taking Petru home, Maddy.”

  “Yes—you should.”

  “Such a vile thing, Maddy.”

  “Yes—it is.”

  “I’ll sprinkle those damn ashes from one corner of Romania to the other.”

  I pulled him up by the arm. Pulled him toward the others. “Come on.”

  He pulled away. “No—I can’t stand to look.”

  I let go of his arm. Called to Gabriella. “Bring your notebook over here. The prince has a quote.”

  Gabriella knew enough to come.

  I pinched my thumb and forefinger on the prince’s chin and swung his face toward mine. “Tell her exactly what you just told me,” I commanded.

  The prince started stammering, unsure of what he’d said.

  I gave him a hint. “About sprinkling.”

  �
�Maybe it isn’t such a good idea that I say anything right now,” he stammered, trying to retreat.

  I refused to let him. “Maybe it is. Tell her!”

  He obeyed. “I told her I’m going to take Petru’s ashes home. To Romania. And sprinkle them from one corner to the other.” Now he embellished a bit. “It’s what she would want, I think.”

  I waited until Gabriella stopped scribbling. “You get it all?”

  “Of course I got it all,” she said.

  Now I called Detective Grant over. Weedy came with him, snapping pictures like a frog in a swarm of flies. “Now Gabriella,” I said, “read your quote to the detective.”

  She refused. “I don’t have to run my quotes by the police.”

  “This one you do,” I said. “Read!”

  And so she read: “I’m going to take Petru’s ashes home. To Romania. And sprinkle them from one corner to the other.”

  I looked at Grant. Mentally crossed all my fingers and toes that he knew where I was going. Luckily he did. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you from reporting that,” he said to Gabriella. “But—so there’s no confusion—finding the gun in the ashes is part of an ongoing police investigation and strictly embargoed until I say so.” He looked squarely at Gabriella. “Agreed?”

  Gabriella, by now, of course, knew that something was up. Something conspiratorial. More than likely unethical. “I think I’d better call Tinker before I agree to anything,” she said.

  I set her straight. “The only call you’re going to make is to the metro desk. You’re going to have them insert Prince Anton’s quote into your story for tomorrow.”

  She started raking through her purse for her cell phone. “I’m calling Tinker.”

  I had to act fast, as they say. “And of course when they arrest the killer, tomorrow or the next day, Detective Grant will make sure you’re the one who gets the story. Even though Dale Marabout is the police reporter.”

  That Gabriella understood. “Well, I can’t muck up an ongoing investigation, can I?”

  “No you can’t,” I said. “And neither can you, Weedy.”

  Weedy stopped snapping. He knew how to play the game. “It would be great to be on hand when the arrest is made.”

  Gabriella called the metro desk. With my help, she gave the night editor a couple of paragraphs to insert in her story for the morning paper. We didn’t have to rearrange the facts much at all:

  On an emotional visit yesterday to the Riverbend Moor Family Memory Garden in Bloomfield Township, Prince Anton announced his intention to take his sibling’s ashes back to their Eastern European homeland.

  “I’m going to take Petru’s ashes home, to Romania,” he said, staring sadly at the purple urn and other mementoes inside the glass-covered niche in the columbarium. “And sprinkle them from one corner to the other. It’s what she would want, I think.”

  23

  Wednesday, August 30

  Ike shook me awake at three o’clock, just like I’d asked. I took a quick shower and dressed. Dungarees. A tee shirt. A peelable sweat shirt over that. I drank half a mug of much-too-hot tea. I shook Ike awake and reminded him to take James out for his six a.m. pee. Then I drove to the paper. West Apple was empty. It had rained sometime after I’d gone to bed. The dark city glistened like a glazed chocolate donut. Something I wished I had right then, along with the rest of my tea.

  Detective Grant was waiting for me when I pulled up. He didn’t have the police van this time. He was driving his own car. It was one of those enormous station wagons they don’t make anymore. I opened the back door. Gabriella, Dale Marabout, and Weedy slid over. Their sleepy, bugged-out eyes made them look like hallucinating toads. Weedy offered me his open box of Entenmann’s Mini Muffins. I took the last three. “God bless,” I said.

  Prince Anton was in the front with Detective Grant. He twisted his head and blew me a playful kiss.

  Grant sang out, “Wagon ho!”

  We pulled away from the curb, made a wide, illegal U-turn and headed out of the city, everyone slurping from a plastic travel mug of something except me.

  We were on our way to Bloomfield Township, to the cemetery, to catch Violeta Bell’s murderer. And we were driving there in the middle of the night because we wanted to be in place before the murderer could read the morning paper, then drive like a maniac to the cemetery and remove the little .22 pistol from the ashes.

  It could take weeks for the prince to clear all of the legal hurdles, of course, but Detective Grant and I were working on the assumption that the murderer would panic and want to get the gun out of those ashes as fast as possible.

  The murderer had put the gun there thinking it was the best place in the entire universe to hide it. And it was a dandy hiding place. Cops search garbage dumpsters. Cops dredge rivers. Cops scrounge around in ditches and dig up backyards. But poke into the ashes of the deceased? When is the last time you heard of a cop doing that? But then a pretender to the Romanian throne shows up in town. And he’s the brother of the person you’ve killed. And he plans to take those ashes off to his homeland and sprinkle them over hill and dale. And the gun would come tumbling out.

  And presumably that gun would be traceable to the killer in some way. Given the planning that must have gone into Violeta’s murder, you wouldn’t think the killer would have been dumb enough to leave fingerprints on the gun. Or a paper trail. But if the killer did show up to retrieve the gun, then most surely there was something that could link the killer to it. It was still dark when we reached the cemetery. We took the looping drive to the maintenance building. We parked behind it, alongside a stack of burial vaults. A couple of cars were already parked there. “Looks like we’re the last to arrive,” Grant said.

  We hurried to the columbarium. We used the back door, entering directly into the superintendent’s office. The first thing I noticed was that there were only two chairs in the little room. And both were already occupied by uniformed officers. One officer—the one not monitoring a trio of small video screens—jumped up and offered his chair to Detective Grant. Grant immediately offered it to Prince Anton, who immediately offered it to me. Not being a total fool, I immediately accepted his offer. Grant sat on the corner of the superintendent’s desk. Weedy, Gabriella, Dale, and the prince were forced to sit on the floor.

  Grant folded his arms and dug his chin into his chest. “Let me give you a brief overview of our plans this morning. We’ve got one camera fixed on the entrance and another on the exit. Who knows which way the suspect might come in. The other camera is in the ceiling above Violeta’s niche. The only caveat we face is the possibility that the suspect might park somewhere else and come up through the river valley, or the woods on either side. That’s why, as of right now, there’ll be no talking or coughing or sneezing or farting or anything.”

  Weedy immediately broke the rules. “No farting?”

  I broke the rules, too. “If the murderer is who I think it is, then we won’t have to wait long.”

  Grant shushed us and the wait began. It was five o’clock. All over Hannawa drivers were dropping off bundles of papers. The route rats who delivered those papers at fifteen cents per were busy filling the back seats of their cars.

  The truth of the matter was that I didn’t have one suspect in mind that morning. I had two. One was just as likely to pop up on the video monitor as the other.

  After ten minutes or so, Gabriella, Weedy, and the prince rested their heads against the cement block wall and closed their eyes. I would have loved to scrunch down in my chair and take a nap myself, but I figured snoring was another one of Detective Grant’s verboten noises.

  For a while I watched the second hand on my watch slowly circle Betty Boop’s sexy cartoon face. I’d bought the watch from the National Public Radio catalog that comes every fall. Every year I feel guilty and order something dumb I don’t need. That past fall, I’d actually ordered a couple of dumb things, the watch for myself and a pair of green Mountain Dew “Do The Dew” bo
xers for Eric Chen. I know that underwear is the last thing you should buy a subordinate, but how could I have resisted? Given his addiction to that horrible stuff? Anyway, it was a big mistake. Every time he wears them, which is at least twice a week, he pulls up the elastic and snaps it. “Got your undies on,” he says.

  After watching my watch, I watched Detective Grant’s dangling feet. Either he had some terrible twitch or he was keeping time to some crazy tune in his head. I also watched the officer who’d dutifully given up his chair. He was leaning against the wall next to the inside door. The tips of his fingers tucked into the front of his thick gun belt. His eyes were fixed on Gabriella. His mind was, well, you know where his mind was.