5

Saturday, July 15

I had breakfast with Ike at my house then drove to Waldo’s Waffle House for breakfast with Gabriella. I ordered a multigrain blueberry waffle. Gabriella ordered the Big Waldo—scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, hash browns, wheat toast and three buttermilk pancakes. When the waitress put all that food in front of her I was appalled. “You recently have a sumo wrestler’s stomach implanted in you?”

Gabriella started smearing butter on her pancakes. “We Nashes are blessed with a high metabolism.”

“Or tape worms,” I said.

I watched her drench the pancakes with syrup. I didn’t give a diddle how much the girl ate—and frankly I didn’t have much room to talk inasmuch as I was about to put a waffle on top of the oatmeal I’d had an hour earlier—but prattling on about her gluttony did keep me from bringing up the touchy subject I’d lured her there to discuss. So I gave her another zinger. “You may not have anything to worry about now, dear,” I said. “But twenty years from now you’re going to wake up with Big Waldo clinging to your thighs.”

She wiggled her perfect little eyebrows. “And all for just $5.95.”

Yes, Gabriella Nash was a bit too emotional for my taste. Yes, like most young reporters, she was mesmerized by her brilliant future. And yes, I still had a bug up my behind about the things she’d written in the college newspaper about me. “Sprowls,” she wrote, “is the desk-bound gnome who watches over the newspaper’s morgue, where the stories real reporters write are filed away for future reference.” But sitting there that morning, exchanging smart-ass comments, eating that sinfully good food, well, good gravy, what can I say? I liked the horrible girl. “There’s a chance you may be right about Violeta Bell,” I admitted.

“Are you trying to apologize?” she asked, slowly feeding a slice of bacon into her mouth.

“Let’s not use the A-word, Gabriella. That only levels the playing field between us.”

“Okay then—what word should we use?”

I speared a blueberry and dipped it in the mountain of fresh whipped cream atop my waffle. “The R-word. I’ve been reevaluating what you said—about the possibility that your story had something to do with her murder.”

She wasn’t prepared to go there. Her tough-girl veneer began to crack like stale lipstick. “But the cops have the killer. And the motive.”

I patted her hand. “They’ve got squat.” I told her about Eddie French’s aversion to guns. I did not, of course, tell her about Bob Averill’s aversion to Eddie’s sister.

She played with her hash browns, pulling away the crunchy ones on the outside to get to the soft ones inside. “Well, it’s not my story any more, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “But I don’t think either of us want to see that wacky cab driver railroaded for something he didn’t do.”

“You want me to help you interfere with a police investigation?”

“Only if you want to.”

Gabriella tightened her lips until they turned white. Either she was on the cusp of crying or squishing her last remaining pancake in my face. “This isn’t fair, Mrs. Sprowls. You’re trying to play on my guilt.”

“Let’s stay away from the G-word, too,” I said. “You have no reason to feel responsible for anything. And neither do I. When I saw those women piling out of that cab at the garage sale, I knew it would make a good story. And you did a good job with it. A great job.”

Gabriella, thank God, dug into that last pancake. “Now you’re trying to butter me up.”

I had no choice but to tell her more than I should. “I can’t tell you who—but someone uncomfortably close to Mr. French’s situation has asked me to sniff around a little. As a rather complicated favor. And in order to do that favor—well, I’m going to need a little favor from you.”

She shook her forkful of dripping pancake at me. “I can see why they call you Morgue Mama.”

I took the fork from her and devoured the piece of pancake like a snake swallowing a helpless tadpole. “It would be smart to stay away from those particular M-words, too, Gabriella.”

“I will.”

“You bet you will.”

I let her eat in peace—for a minute—then took another bite out of her hide. “Your story on the Queens of Never Dull was really quite good. But there was one important thing you left out.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did.” I wagged my fork at her. “Regarding Violeta Bell’s claim that she was Romanian royalty. You failed to say whether she spoke with an accent or not.”

It was as if she’d just had the Pulitzer Prize taken away from her. “You’re right. That would have been a good touch.”

I pretended to be incensed. In reality I was just playing with her. “A good touch? We’re not discussing your prose here, Gabriella. We’re talking about truth.”

That rankled her. “The story was about four old ladies going to garage sales, Mrs. Sprowls. Not about whether one of them was the queen of Romania.”

“Weren’t you at least a little curious about her claim?”

“Well, sure. But the story—”

I let her off the hook. “All I’m saying is that you should have mentioned whether she spoke with an accent or not.”

Gabriella was finally on to me. “This isn’t about my story. This is about your investigation.”

“Of course it’s about my investigation. Whether Violeta Bell was Romanian royalty might be important.”

“Why would that be important?”

“Anything unusual about a murder victim might be important,” I said. “And claiming to be the queen of Romania is certainly unusual.”

“That it is.”

“Her quotes in your story suggest that the Communists ran her family out of Romania,” I said. “I’m not sure when the Communists took over there. But it was shortly after World War II. That’s when all those Eastern European countries fell to the Communists. Which means she would have been a teenager when she left. Which means she might have had an accent—a trace of one maybe—if she was telling the truth.”

Gabriella folded her hands and leaned over the table as if I was her hard-of-hearing great-great-grandmother. “She did not speak with an accent.”

“Did she sound like she was from Ohio?”

We left Waldo’s in my car. It was nine-thirty already and both the eastbound and westbound lanes of Apple Street were clogging with people frantically trying to get to the supermarket before everybody else did. We turned onto Hardihood Avenue and drove north through the ever-bigger houses. We were heading, of course, to the Carmichael House, to see if we could make a surprise visit to one of the three surviving Queens of Never Dull. I wasn’t exactly proud of myself for making Gabriella come along, but what was I to do? I needed her to get my foot in the door.

“You have a preference who we try first?” Gabriella asked as we wound through the landscapers’ trucks parked on both sides of the street.

I rolled up my window to block out the roar of the mowers racing back and forth across the beautifully manicured lawns like morbidly obese bumblebees. “How about that stripper, Kay Hausenfelter? She sounds like the most fun.”

“That’s some criteria for investigating a murder.”

“Nothing wrong with having a little fun,” I said. “And besides she gave you the best quotes.”

“She was talkative.”

The real reason I wanted to see Kay Hausenfelter first was because she was the only member of the Never Dulls whom Eric had finished researching for me. What he found was now stuffed in my brain, at the ready, in case Kay said something that didn’t jive with the facts.

Kay Hausenfelter was born on a farm in Oklahoma, 76 years ago, to Chester and Eleanor Pull. She was the last of seven children. The Pulls migrated to the fruit fields of California during the Dust Bowl years, to keep from starving. By the time she was seventeen, Kay was shedding her clothes in striptease establishments up and down the West Coast. She was billed as Klondike Kay, “Gorgeous Gold-Digger of the not-so-frigid North.” She’d take the stage covered head-to-toe in an Eskimo parka and knee-high mukluks. By the time she wiggled off the stage, she was down to a furry g-string and papier-mâché pasties painted to look like gold nuggets. It was in Los Angeles that young Harold Hausenfelter caught her act, during the 33rd Annual Bakers & Confectioners Convention. Harold was the shy and impressionable scion of Hannawa bread-baking baron Gottfried Hausenfelter. Harold brought Kay home to Hannawa as his wife. What Gottfried must have thought of his son’s bride is anybody’s guess—albeit an easy guess.

Gabriella and I reached the Carmichael House. It was not a particularly handsome building. A ten-story cereal box with narrow, dangling balconies nobody in their right mind would go out on. Anyone over sixty could live there, if they could afford it, but from what I’d heard it was mostly filled with women whose husbands had done very well before they died. We parked in the visitors’ spaces on the side and followed the pachysandra-lined walk to the front. Gabriella buzzed Kay Hausenfelter’s unit.

Kay must have had her finger an inch off the intercom button. There was an instant “Halloooo!”

“This is Gabriella Nash, Mrs. Hausenfelter. From The Herald-Union. I was wondering how you’re getting along. After everything that’s happened.”

Kay’s Oklahoma twang wasn’t helped by the tinny speaker box. “Well, aren’t you a sweetheart. I’m just fine. You’ll come up for something, won’t you? A Diet Coca-Cola or something?”

“I’ve got a friend with me,” Gabriella informed her. “If that’s okay.”

“Man friend or woman friend?”

“Woman friend.”

“Oh, good. I won’t have to put on a better robe—oh hell, I’ll put on a better robe anyway.”

And so the tower’s impressive brass-covered door hummed and clicked and we went inside. We hadn’t taken two steps toward the elevator when the phone in the lobby rang. Gabriella was content to let it ring. I was not. I hurried to the end table it was on, picked it up. It was Kay Hausenfelter. “That you, Gabriella?”

“This is her friend, Maddy Sprowls.”

“Oh, good—I was hoping you girls could bring my mail up with you. The boxes are right there by the door.”

I told her we’d be happy to.

“The boxes are locked,” she said, “but there’s a skeleton key under the bullfighter.”

I scanned the lobby for the bullfighter. He turned out to be a foot-high ceramic statue on the table at the other end of the sofa. He was waving his red cape at a bowl of York peppermint patties. “I see him.”

“Oh, good—I know it’s not the safest thing, but with a building full of forgetful old farts, there’s a skeleton key someplace for everything.”

I got the key and opened her mailbox. Checked out the envelopes all the way to the fifth floor. Nothing but doctor bills and enticements for credit cards.

The hallway was a tribute to blandness: beige walls, even beiger carpeting, sleepy landscapes in ugly gold frames. The building’s rulebook did, apparently, allow residents to express their individuality by decorating their identical beige doors. Most bore wreaths of fake flowers. A few had those atrociously cute wooden cutouts you find at church craft fairs—a bunny in overalls watering smiling carrots, a mama duck holding an umbrella over her babies, a WELCOME SIGN spelled out in tiny blue hearts. Kay Hausenfelter’s door sported a cutout of a buxom woman in an itsy-bitsy-yellow-polka-dot bikini.

After loudly smooching our cheeks, Kay sat us in that bright red loveseat Gabriella mentioned in her story. “I guess the first order of business is to get something cold in our paws,” Kay said, swaying her behind toward the kitchen. “What’ll it be, ladies?”

Gabriella and I both chose those Diet Cokes she’d mentioned on the speaker. Kay’s tumbler had something tan in it. She sat across from us in a white armchair. From the happy relief in her eyes as she studied me, I could tell she approved of my drabness. “That’s a pretty robe,” I said.

“Thanks. But I wasn’t exactly going for pretty.” Which was putting it mildly. It was as pink as the insulation in my attic. The fuzzy hem almost reached her knees and the loose, low-cut top showed more of her ampleness than anyone needed to see. What she was or wasn’t wearing under that robe was anybody’s guess. Her hair was much too long for a woman of her age and it was much too blond. And she should have spent more time touching up her roots and less time on her toenails. But having said all that, she was a naturally beautiful woman with good skin and bright green eyes.

Having read Gabriella’s story, I was prepared for the red loveseat. I was not prepared for the art on the walls: black-and-white photographs of a much younger Kay Hausenfelter wearing almost nothing, publicity shots from her years in burlesque. Above the mantle hung a huge portrait of her, totally nude, hugging a bundle of baguettes, a very personal memento from her years as the wife of local bread mogul Harold Hausenfelter, I figured.

Kay pointed at the portrait. “I was a fine looking broad, wasn’t I? The artist didn’t have to exaggerate a damn thing.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I said the silliest thing I’d ever said to anyone. “I still buy Hausenfelter’s bread.”

Kay threw her arms open and sang like Ethel Merman. “If it ain’t Hausenfelter’s, it just ain’t bread!”

Everybody in Hannawa of a certain age knows that line. It’s the tagline from the Hausenfelter’s Bread Song. When Kay married Harold, Hausenfelter’s was the city’s number three bread brand, behind Yodel’s and Swann’s Golden Crust. Soon after Kay wrote that jingle, and sang it in radio and television commercials, Hausenfelter’s was no. 1, Yodel’s a distant no. 2, and Swann’s Golden Crust out of business. “Boy,” I said, “didn’t that little ditty ruffle a few feathers.”

Kay’s eyes sparkled. “It sure did, didn’t it?”

The ruffled feathers, of course, belonged to the librarians and teachers who didn’t appreciate a business using that evil non-word ain’t in their jingle, not only once but twice. Old Gottfried, however, stuck by his daughter-in-law and her jingle. “We ain’t changing it,” he told The Herald-Union. And that was that. The company is still using it today.

I looked for a way to get the conversation back on track. “I can tell that you’re a woman of few pretensions. And frankly so am I.”

Kay was startled. “Don’t tell me you got a naked picture, too?”

“Heaven’s to Betsy, no,” I said, “but I do prefer to get right to the skinny. And the truth is, I’m not tagging along with Gabriella today. She’s tagging along with me. I’m here about Violeta Bell.”

Kay shifted her eyes between Gabriella and me while she jiggled the ice cubes in her tumbler. “So you’re doing another story on us old broads? One that won’t be so fun?”

“No story,” I assured her. “Not by us anyway.” I’d just told her how open and truthful I liked to be, but already I found myself obfuscating like a congressman. “The idea for Gabriella’s story came from me,” I said. “And I guess I’m feeling a little responsible. A little guilty even.”

“Unless you helped Eddie pull the trigger, I wouldn’t worry about feeling either of those things,” Kay said. Then she laughed. “You didn’t, did you?”

Gabriella answered for me, with exactly what I was preparing to say. “The question is whether Eddie pulled the trigger.”

“It looks like the cops think he did,” Kay said.

I couldn’t let her get away with a wishy-washy answer like that. “And that’s okay with you?”

She took a quick, nervous sip from her tumbler. “I don’t know if it is or not.”

“I suppose you’ve read about his police record.”

Her next sip was steadier. And longer. “I’ve always liked Eddie,” she said. “And he was very open to us about his past. The same way I’m open about mine.”

My crazy brain flashed a fanciful image of Eddie’s apartment, the walls plastered with his various mug shots, the way hers were plastered with her old publicity photos. “So you had a sense that his life of crime was behind him?” I asked. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yes. I guess I am.”

I was dying to know if she knew about Eddie French’s aversion to guns. But I knew I had to be careful how I broached the subject. If Eddie didn’t kill Violeta Bell, then somebody else did. And if somebody else did, then maybe that somebody was Kay Hausenfelter. And I sure didn’t want to toss a bone like that to a possible suspect. Instead, I asked, “Do you know if Eddie owned a gun?”

Kay leaned forward until her elbows, not to mention other things, were resting on her knees. “That’s the other thing,” she said. “I think Eddie was afraid of guns.”

I was smart enough to play dumb. “Afraid of guns? Why would you say that?”

She laughed into her tumbler. “Because when I showed him mine, he got so fidgety I thought he was going to piss his pants.”

Gabriella was shocked. “You’ve got a gun?”

I was merely intrigued. “When was this?”

Kay headed for the kitchen with her empty tumbler. “Not recently—if that’s what you’re thinking.” The refrigerator opened and closed, ice cubes rattled. She returned to her armchair with her filled-to-the-brim tumbler in one hand and a massive red leather purse in the other. The Diet Coke bottle was under her arm. She topped off our drinks. Took a healthy sip of hers. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a shiny pistol.

“It was a couple of years ago,” she said, “when Eddie was driving us downtown to the Amtrak station—you know how that damn train to New York doesn’t come through until three in the morning—and when he asked if we were afraid to be going down there in the middle of the night, I pulled out my snubby nosed baby doll. And he just about—well, like I said, he nearly pissed himself.”

I grew up on a farm in wild and woolly upstate New York. Somebody’s always shooting something. So I had no concerns about my own bladder. I asked to see the gun.

Apparently Kay could see that I was squinting at the tiny numbers engraved on the barrel. “It’s a Colt Commander XXE .45 semi-automatic,” she said. “Violeta was killed with a .22.”

I handed it back to her. “I wouldn’t know one gun from another.”

She slid her fingers over the wood insets on the handle. “That’s real rosewood,” she said. “Pretty, isn’t it?” She put it back in her purse, raking her collection of makeup tubes over the top like dirt over a grave.

I asked her the one question I’d prepared in advance. “Let’s say Eddie French did kill Violeta—during a robbery gone bad, presumably—why would he choose her? Why not you? Or Ariel? Or Gloria? You’re all pretty well heeled. I’m sure all of your condos are full of stealable stuff.”

Kay answered with a question of her own. “Why would he wait until now? He’s been carting us around for years.”

“Maybe the temptation got too much for him. Or maybe he needed more money than usual.”

She brought her glass to her lips with both hands. She took a long, steady sip, with her eyes closed and both pinkies sticking out. Then she said this: “If it turns out Eddie did it—then I hope he really did—that’s all I’ve got to say.”

That strange sentence puzzled me at first. And so did the sudden bitterness in her voice. But after my brain was finished sorting through Eric’s research, I could only agree with her. “Me, too.”

What Kay was referring to, of course, was the very public squabble she’d gotten in over her husband’s will.

Her brother-in-law, Gottfried Jr., had contested it. He claimed she didn’t have either a legal or moral right to her late husband Harold’s fifty-one percent of the Hausenfelter Bread Company. He claimed that Kay had bamboozled his brother into signing the new will while he lay dying of pancreatic cancer. He told the judge that Harold and Kay had been living apart for years. That Harold, fed up with her repeated infidelities, had wanted to divorce her. He brought up Kay’s years as a stripper, her drinking and public ribaldry. Kay conceded that she sometimes drank too much, and occasionally did embarrassing things in public, and she conceded living apart from Harold, he there in Hannawa and she at their ocean-front house on Fripp Island, in South Carolina. Their estrangement was the result of his infuriating stubbornness, not her infidelities, she said. And the new will, she said, was Harold’s idea. His older brother, he worried, had never showed a lick of interest in the bakery and would more than likely sell it the first chance he got. The probate court sided with her. The headline in The Herald-Union put it this way:

Kay Gets the Bread,
Gottfried Gets Out of Town

The conversation drifted to Kay’s days in burlesque. She told us oodles of hilarious stories. Gabriella and I finished our Diet Cokes. She finished whatever she was drinking. At the door I asked her one last question. “Did you believe that stuff about Violeta being Romanian royalty?”

Kay Hausenfelter’s mouth wobbled into an intoxicated smile. “She sure believed it.”

I drove Gabriella back to her car at Waldo’s Waffle House. Then I drove to Artie’s supermarket for ground pork and a head of cabbage, for the pigs-in-a-blanket I promised to make for Ike on Sunday. When I got home I called Eric Chen. “How’d you like to give me a computer lesson?” I asked.

“Who is this really calling?”

I told him I was serious. That I felt bad about dumping so much research on him. That it was about time I learned a few of his research tricks. So he’d have more time to read his comic books on company time.

He can’t resist me when I talk like that to him. “Not today I hope.”

“Good gravy, no,” I assured him. “It’s Saturday. How about tomorrow?”