C Corwin - The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

“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?”

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 amp;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.