The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (6 page)

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?”

6

Sunday, July 16

The minute Ike left for church, I left for the morgue. Not that I was anxious for my computer lesson. Egad and little fishes—I no more wanted to spend my Sunday morning being harangued by Eric than he wanted to spend his watching me hyperventilate. But I’d already given him a ton of research to do on Violeta Bell’s murder, and if I dumped this new question on him, well, I might not get an answer for weeks. And I was far too curious to wait for weeks.

Eric, as I expected, was a half-hour late. He yawned his way to my desk. He had a bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand and a family sized bag of Peanut M&Ms in the other. I shook my head at his baggy shorts and flip-flops. He sarcastically shielded his eyes from my smiley face T-shirt. I summoned him to my desk.

He pulled up a chair with his foot. He immediately went into teacher mode. “Okay, I guess the first thing—”

I stopped him right there. “Let’s say I wanted to find out if someone was royalty or not—how exactly would I do that?”

He glowered at me like a bulldog learning that his Beggin’ Strips weren’t real bacon. “This isn’t me giving you a lesson. This is you bamboozling me into working on the Sabbath!”

“Everybody ought to work at least one day a week,” I said. I put on my drugstore reading glasses and slid them down my nose until my computer screen came into focus. I readied my fingers on the keyboard. “Now tell me how.”

He was smart enough to submit without a tussle. “You know what country?”

“Romania.”

He pointed to the Google box on my toolbar. “Type in the person’s name and then Romania. And then something like royalty or royal family.”

I typed in
Violeta Bell, Romania, royal family.
“Now what?”

He sighed at my ignorance. “Click on the Google Search box.”

I clicked. My computer screen blinked just once and told me it had found 14,600 websites for me to check out. I was amazed. And a little annoyed. Eric always made the research projects I gave him seem like a major chore requiring almost metaphysical skill. “That’s it? I could have James do this for me!” Then I started scrolling down. Clicking on the websites. Reading. Finding absolutely nothing useful. “This could take all day,” I grouched.

Eric forced a handful of M&Ms into his mouth. “Let’s refine it a bit.”

“How do I do that?”

“You need something more specific.”

I stole a few M&Ms from his bag. Popped them in my mouth one by one while I thought out loud. “I doubt that Romania has had a king or queen for a long time. So if there are any living royals, they’re hanging out there like forgotten socks on a clothesline. How about we try
pretenders to the throne?
”

He nodded his approval. I typed it in and clicked the Google Search box again. My computer screen presented me with a whole new collection of websites—430,000 of them in fact. But my dismay was short-lived. The very first site gave me exactly what I was looking for. It listed the modern-day pretenders to the throne for every country in the world. Including Romania.

The would-be king of Romania was, in fact, the former king of Romania, eighty-five-year-old Michael I.

The website also contained a ton of historical background on the Romanian monarchy. I was in seventh heaven. Eric was bored silly. He slid down in his chair and fished a bundle of comic books out of the enormous cargo pocket in his shorts. “Who are you—Captain Kangaroo?” I asked.