by C. R. Corwin
“True enough. It’s the new moonshine. But his dealing—past and maybe present—does suggest a predilection for making money in less than legal ways.”
“It’s a big leap from marijuana to murder,” I said.
“A leap occasionally made. You are aware of the big monthly nut he has on his kayak business?”
I nodded. “He did say he was having money trouble. And he’s sure eager to sell Gordon’s house and belongings.”
Detective Grant ran his pinky around the inside rim of his empty bottle, collecting the last stubborn drops of tomato juice. He thoughtfully licked his finger like it was a miniature Popsicle. “Eager or desperate?”
I suppose that would have been a good time for me to tell Detective Grant about all those cocoa cans I bought from Mickey. But for some reason he was taking me seriously and I wanted to keep it that way. “Is it really that suspicious?” I asked. I presented him with a plausible scenario: “He hardly knew his uncle. He finds out he’s his heir. He quietly goes about his business collecting what’s legally his.”
“I can buy all that,” said Grant. “I can also buy it the other way.” He gave me his scenario: “He doesn’t know his uncle very well, just as you say. But somehow he does know that he’s his heir. Maybe his uncle actually told him. ‘Don’t worry Mickey, I’ve taken care of you.’ Maybe he snooped around and saw a copy of the will. And maybe he’s a greedy, cold-hearted bastard. The world’s full of them. And he says, ‘Hey, man, I need that inheritance now.’”
“If you can buy my theory, I guess I can buy yours,” I said. “But Gordon was hardly a rich man. He taught at a tiny college. He lived in a tiny house full of junk. I’m sure he must have had some insurance and some savings maybe, but heavens to Betsy, I bet I’m worth more than he was. I doubt any of my relatives are plotting to kill me.”
Detective Grant folded his arms. Puckered his lips. Let his eyes smile. “Well, I can’t offer an opinion on that. I don’t know your family. But I would guess you’ve probably inherited a few bucks here and there yourself, haven’t you?”
Boy, did that infuriate me. “You mean an old bag like me must have a lot of dead relatives?” Then I realized what he was saying. “Oh, I see—maybe Gordon had inherited some money himself?”
“More than maybe,” he said. “Two years ago Gordon and his sister inherited three hundred thousand each from their well-heeled, 92-year-old father.”
“So Mickey would know his uncle at least had that much,” I said.
“You’ve got to figure he did,” he said. “Add that three hundred grand to the value of the house and other assets, and I’d say Mountain Man Mickey will soon be worth a half-million more than he was before dear Uncle Gordon was murdered.”
“Oh my.”
He reached across the table and tapped my knuckles. “That’s why I want you to steer clear of him, Mrs. Sprowls. More than likely he’s just a lucky sonofabitch. But there’s also a chance he’s the kind of lucky sonofabitch who makes his own luck. Which brings us to Kenneth Kingzette.”
“You want me to steer clear of him, too, I gather?”
Detective Grant’s eyes narrowed, darted uneasily. “Don’t you think that theory of yours about the missing toluene is a little—how can I put this without you clunking my noggin with that tea cup of yours—far-fetched?”
I raised my mug playfully. He flinched playfully. I rattled off a string of questions: “Those eighteen drums of toluene are still missing, aren’t they? And the Wooster Pike landfill was one of the sites they checked, wasn’t it? And Gordon was on the EPA team, wasn’t he?”
“All true,” he said. “But there are things about that case you don’t know.”
I bristled. “I know that the president of Madrid Chemical is still missing.”
“Which is a good reason for you to stay away from Kingzette—yes?”
“But not the real reason?”
He smiled wearily. “Just do us both a favor, Mrs. Sprowls. Scratch Mr. Kingzette off your list of human curiosities.”
“Along with Mickey Gitlin?”
“If you can manage it.”
“Anybody else while I’m scratching?”
“That’ll do it for now.”
Detective Grant put on his overcoat. I rinsed out my mug. He walked me back to the newsroom. “I don’t know why you’re letting me talk to anybody at all,” I grumbled, “if I’m such a royal pain in the bum.”
“In a word, desperation,” he said. “That’s why I asked Tinker and Averill not to be too hard on you. It’s come down to either calling in a psychic or letting you dig around. And I must admit, you do have some good instincts for this kind of thing.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do.”
It was an opportunity I couldn’t let slip by. “Then let me ask you this—Do you think there might be a link between Gordon’s murder and the 1957 murder of David Delarosa?”
He chuckled deep in his throat, like a man who’d just been swindled out of his life savings. “So that’s why Marabout wanted that cold case file. You’re a real piece of work, Mrs. Sprowls.”
I admitted that I was. Then I told him about David’s murder. That David and Gordon had been friends. That the musician named Sidney Spikes who was questioned about that murder was the same Shaka Bop who’d played at Gordon’s funeral. “So, Detective Grant, do you think it’s possible?”
He answered with a sly smile and an indecipherable shrug.
***
My tête-à-tête with Detective Grant had been a boatload of fun. But it had left me exhausted. And frightened. And embarrassed. And confused about what to do next. If anything at all. And then there was that green-haired girl. I didn’t know how to feel about her. Should I cause a stink? Call her professors? Scream at her on the phone until she was reduced to tears? Destroy her skyrocketing journalism career while it was still on the launch pad? Or should I call her and thank her for the story? Yes, she’d broken one of the cardinal rules of journalism by not giving me a chance to respond. But everything she wrote was true. And it had forced me to fess up to Mr. Averill and Tinker. Something I should have done from the get-go.
While I was looking up the college paper in the phone book my own phone rang.
“That you, Maddy?”
It took me a few seconds to place the voice. “Gwen?”
“I’m not keeping you from your work, am I?”
“Other people have already accomplished that,” I said.
“Anyhoo—I just wanted you to know how impressed I am. I didn’t hear it myself. But Rollie did.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Gwen.”
“Your trying to find Sweet Gordon’s killer. Charlie Chimera has been talking about you all afternoon. Rollie called me from the office.”
Charlie Chimera has that awful talk show on WFLO. He’s got quite a racket. He reads the morning headlines in The Herald-Union, decides which stories will get his readers’ juices flowing, throws in his own two cents, if that much, then yaps and yaps all afternoon like he’s a goddamned expert on the subject. Apparently he’d seen The Harbinger. “Good gravy! Exactly what is he saying?”
“Oh, you know—how sad it is that the police have to leave solving crimes to little old—”
“Don’t you dare finish the sentence.”
“Anyhoo—I think it’s just terrific that you’re taking an interest.”
The pythons were back in my stomach. “He’s not saying bad things about The Herald-Union, is he?”
She artfully evaded the question. “I’ve told Rollie a million times he’d be more productive if he listened to NPR.”
“That bad, is it?”
“I was thinking, Maddy. Why don’t you come over for lunch one of these days? You haven’t been to the house since we added the lap pool, have you?”
I’d never been to her house at all. Or any of the increasingly bigger houses she and Rollie had occupied over the years. I wasn’t
exactly on their A list. Or their B, C, D or E lists. “No, I haven’t,” I said. “And I’d love to come for lunch. You just say when.”
To my surprise she did say when. “How about Tuesday?”
I asked Eric to find everything the paper had ever run on Gwendolyn Moffitt-Stumpf.
Chapter 13
Tuesday, April 10
Eric found a ton of clips on Gwen. There was the huge society page story on her June 1957 wedding to Rollie. There was that horrible Page One story on the plane crash that killed her only child, her 19-year-old son, Rolland Jr. And there was story after story about her good works.
Over the years Gwen had raised her public profile—and the profitability of her husband’s insurance agency—by raising money for good causes. She’d raised money for every hospital in the city. She’d raised money for the art museum. For the symphony. The zoo. For Hemphill College. Over the years The Herald-Union must have run two or three dozen photos of Gwen handing one of those phony tablecloth-sized checks to some thrilled-to-death recipient.
But it wasn’t all hoity-toity, high profile stuff. Gwen also raised money for women’s shelters, for food banks, for inner city scholarships, for poor families whose houses burned down around them. After a spate of rapes downtown in the early eighties, she’d even organized self-defense classes for women through the city’s Adult Enrichment Program. We’d run a number of stories on that, including a photo of her throwing former Mayor Jerry Hazel for a loop in a jujitsu class.
Gwen was also a big supporter of the democratic process. Her fundraising parties for Republican presidential candidates over the years had won her five invitations to the White House. Her parties for Democratic mayoral and council candidates won Rollie’s insurance agency a wheelbarrow full of city contracts.
All in all, Gwen was a real mover and shaker. And even though I’d known her since she was a silly college girl, I was shaking in my boots all the way to her house.
Maybe I’d never been to her house. But I sure knew where it was. It was on Hardihood Avenue, Hannawa’s ritziest quarter-mile. And she and Rollie not only lived on Hardihood, they lived within squinting distance of Trawsfyndd Castle, the grand Tudor-style mansion built in 1911 by Richard Pembrook Hooley, an impoverished Welsh immigrant whose life took a turn for the better when he invented a faster way to bottle beer. Trawsfyndd today is owned by the Hooley family trust. They offer tours seven days a week, at $9.50 a pop. They make you wear those embarrassing elastic booties that look like shower caps.
Gwen and Rollie’s house wasn’t as big as Trawsfyndd, but it was still a castle, a monstrous gray-bricked Georgian with way too many windows and dozens of shrubs trimmed into perfect circles. I parked under the portico.
I was half expecting to be greeted at the door by a stuffy butler. But it was Gwen herself. And a pair of tap-dancing dachshunds.
Gwen made eye contact with my Dodge Shadow before she made eye contact with me. “Maddy—isn’t it good to see you?”
She was wearing a bright yellow cashmere turtleneck and matching silk slacks. She looked like a fancy banana. “And isn’t it good to see you?” I said.
She hugged me. She let me hug her back. She threw back her arm like one of those prize girls on The Price Is Right and welcomed me inside. The floor in the foyer was covered with alternating black and white tiles. I felt like the last remaining pawn on a giant chessboard, cornered by a crafty queen. “This is just beautiful, Gwen.”
She started telling me about the trouble her designer had finding wall sconces that matched the urns she bought on her Aegean cruise, but the dachshunds were begging for attention. I bent as low as I could go and scratched the tops of their flat heads. “And what are your names?”
Gwen introduced them: “This sweet old girl is Queen Strudelschmidt and this handsome fellow is her son and heir, Prince Elmo IV.” They dutifully sat back on their long hind-ends and lifted their stubby right paws, which I dutifully shook.
“You a dog person, Maddy?”
“Sort of.” I told her about my temporary acquisition of James. About my total ineptitude in canine care.
My misery made her laugh. “All you’ve got to do is love them,” she said.
“Apparently wiener dogs don’t have digestive systems,” I said.
Dog talk out of the way, Gwen gave me the nickel tour of her million-dollar house. There was one white-walled room after another, every one of them filled with white rugs and white furniture. The only room that even came close to feeling comfortable was Rollie’s den. But even that looked more like a display in a fancy furniture store than a real room. The walls were covered with expensive paneling. The drapes and rugs were hunter green. The pillows on the leather sofa bore the embroidered heads of horses. There was a pair of battered duck decoys on the coffee table. It was a man’s room, no doubt painstakingly put together by Gwen to give poor Rollie a bit of self-confidence. The wall behind the enormous oak desk was filled with his many awards for selling insurance. The mantel above the fireplace was lined with Rollie’s college debate trophies. They were as shiny as the day he won them. I went to admire them. “With Rollie’s gift of gab I always figured he’d go into politics,” I said.
Gwen scowled. “Thank God he got that dream out of his system.”
She led me through the solarium—a tad bit more opulent than the one in Chick Glass’ house—to the natatorium and the new lap pool she’d bragged about on the phone. “It was hugely expensive, as you can imagine,” she said. “But Rollie simply had to have it.”
Well, I knew who simply had to have it. Gwen simply had to have it. To keep her husband healthy, wealthy and by all means alive. I crept across the fancy green tiles and peered into the clear, blue-tinged water. I could imagine poor Rollie churning through the water, back and forth and back and forth, while Gwen sat in a lounge chair timing his laps with a stopwatch.
Finally we made it to the kitchen. It was as big as my entire house. Newly remodeled, too, like one of those gourmet pleasure palaces they create right before your eyes on HGTV. She sat me at a tiny bistro table by the bay window overlooking their outdoor pool. She bustled to the kitchen, returning with two crystal bowls filled with unappetizing brown balls. To my relief, she put them on the floor for the dogs. Her second trip to the kitchen produced two steamy black plates, which, to my joy, she put on the table. She introduced me to my lunch: “Poached salmon with basil mayonnaise, saffron rice, and a medley of snow peas, yellow bell pepper and Portobello mushrooms.”
“Beats the vending machines at the paper,” I said, wishing I hadn’t.
She trotted to the serving island for a bottle of blush wine and two slender goblets. “I admire your decision to be a career woman, Maddy. And stay in that same job all those years. It’s all I can do to get Rollie out the door in the morning.”
The lunch was delicious. The conversation was sometimes hard to digest.
“Are you really investigating Gordon’s murder?” she asked as soon as our forks were clinking. “Or is that all just a bunch of media hooey?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it an investigation,” I said, trying to spear a wedge of the flaky salmon. “I’m just curious about a few things.”
She was having no trouble at all with the salmon. “Aren’t we all.”
My goal that afternoon, of course, was to get more out of Gwen than she got out of me. To do that I’d have to watch what I said. And listen carefully to what she said. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m worried that the police will start barking up the wrong tree.”
“Barking up Chick’s tree, you mean?”
She was taking me in the direction I wanted to go. I proceeded gingerly. “Up any number of wrong trees. Though Chick could find himself out on a rather flimsy limb, couldn’t he? That fight with Gordon at the Kerouac Thing, I mean. Over that damn cheeseburger.”
Gwen snapped a snow pea in half with her big white expensive teeth. “They got into that same fight every year.”
�
��This was the first year Gordon ended up dead,” I pointed out.
Gwen grew a little testy. “You weren’t there, Maddy. This year or any of the others.”
I retreated. “You’re right. I wasn’t. But neither were the police. I want to make sure they see that little annual brouhaha in the right light.”
She retreated, too. “Their argument was a little more intense than other years, I guess.”
“Really got into it, did they?”
She put down her fork. Folded her hands in her lap. “More than they should have, let’s say that.”
“They didn’t actually slug each other, did they?”
“No, but Chick did throw a bowl of baked beans into the fireplace.”
“That’s not too bad,” I said.
“It was Gordon’s bowl of beans,” she said.
“I see. Were they drinking?”
“We were all drinking. But no one was intoxicated. Not especially.”
“When exactly did the argument start?” I asked her. “Was it right away? Later in the evening?”
“It was a week night. So the party started early. Six-thirty. I suppose they started arguing about nine. After the poems and storytelling.”
“What time did the beans go into the fire?”
“Maybe nine-thirty.”
Maybe I hadn’t been to a Kerouac Thing in thirty years, but I’d attended any number of retirement parties at the Blue Tangerine. The party room there was very fancy and very small. It would have been impossible for Chick and Gordon to keep their argument to themselves. “It sure must have put the kibosh on the fun, huh?”
“At first it was amusing—you know, Chick and Sweet Gordon at it again—but it got uncomfortable after awhile. Embarrassing.”
I asked her what happened after the baked bean incident.
She tried not to giggle. “They tried to throw each other into the fireplace. I know it’s not funny, but they looked like a couple of bulimic sumo wrestlers.”
I had no trouble picturing those two old skinny men pushing at each other. “Did anybody try to stop them?”
