C Corwin - The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

I nodded gratefully. “One, real sugar.”

He lumbered out, returning in a couple of minutes with a mug with Cinderella on the side. “We didn’t have any real sugar-sorry.”

“I trust you left it black,” I said, taking a cautious sip. He had left it black. I thanked him with a smile and got down to business. “I need some information on Eddie French.”

There was no more surprise on his face than if I’d told him that water was wet. “He a friend of yours?”

I wanted to make it sound like I was there in my official capacity as newspaper librarian. “I’ve been asked to do some research on him.”

That made Grant grin. “For a second there I thought you were just sticking your shnozola into another police investigation. For no other reason than to make my life more miserable than it already is.” He leaned back in his chair until both of his chins were resting on his chest. He pulled open his bottom desk drawer with his foot. Reached in and retrieved a folder. EDDIE FRENCH was scribbled on the tab. “Bob Averill told me he was going to twist your arm.”

“Did he now?”

“We’ve become good friends because of you.”

Grant loved to play gotcha with me. Even though he almost always lost. I looked the masochistic bastard straight in the eyes. “Then I guess he also told you about Eddie’s aversion to guns.”

“Indeed he did,” said Grant. “So did Eddie’s sister. And I personally tested him. Played with my service revolver in front of him during our interrogation. Sure enough, he started hyperventilating like a sonofabitch.”

“You believe it?”

He opened the folder. Shuffled through the stack of official forms and scraps of paper covered with notes. “It looked real enough. Then again, my wife is deathly afraid of airplanes yet every April flies to Phoenix to visit her folks.”

“So, Eddie could have overcome his fears long enough to murder Violeta Bell?”

“Yup.”

“Or maybe he’s not quite as allergic to guns as his sister thinks?”

“Yup. Yup.”

“Or his sister is knowingly telling an untruth?”

“Yup. Yup. Yup.”

I went for a fourth “Yup” while he was still so agreeable. “But it really doesn’t matter since you don’t have enough evidence to charge him with the murder anyway?”

He toasted me with his Daffy Duck mug. Then he set me straight. “When we had enough to charge him with burglary, etcetera, we charged him with burglary, etcetera. When we get enough to charge him with murder, we’ll charge him with murder.”

I toasted him with Cinderella. Then went straight for his jugular. “Unless I’m wrong, you’ve got no witnesses and no murder weapon. You’ve got no fingerprints or other proof of Eddie French ever being in the fitness room.” The sour look on his face told me that either he’d just swallowed a bug, or I was right on the money.

I assumed it was the latter and went on. “Now, you do have evidence of him being in Violeta’s condo. Then again, I’m sure you’ve got evidence of him being in the other ladies’ condos, too. He drove them around for years. As for the antiques you found in his apartment-well, I don’t know exactly what you found-but they could have been gifts, just like he said.”

Grant handed me a sheet of paper from his folder. It listed the antiques they found in Eddie’s apartment:

Victorian oak shaving stand

Louis XV Pompadour vanity

1830s Biedermeier mirror

Granite Art Deco fireplace

1850s rosewood cheval mirror

Stickley rocking chair

1926 leather club chairs (2)

Cast iron Godin stove

Art Nouveau fireplace

Grueby vases (4)

The list surprised me. “Fireplace mantles? Cast iron stoves? I was expecting watch fobs and pocketknives. Maybe a silver spittoon or two.”

Grant grinned victoriously. “Not exactly gift material, is it.”

“No, it isn’t,” I admitted. “And not exactly easy to steal from a seventh floor condominium without being seen.”

“Not easy but not impossible,” Grant countered. “The murder occurred at night and he would have had all night.”

I recapped his hypothesis to make sure we were on the same page. “So you’re saying he forced her to go with him to the basement fitness room-or otherwise finagled her into going-shot her dead and then went back up to her condo and took his good old time taking what he wanted.”

“Yup.”

I read the list again, picturing the wiry little cab driver frog-walking a two-hundred-pound marble mantle down the hallway. “And you’re sure all of these things belonged to Violeta Bell?”

He snatched the list from me. “We didn’t find an inventory list in her condo or anything, the kind people keep for insurance purposes,” he said. “In fact we found no proof of her even having any homeowner’s insurance. But all the items we found in Mr. French’s rat hole do have her little sticker on the bottom somewhere.” He fished another sheet of paper from the folder and held it up for me to read. It was an inky, out-of-focus blowup from a copying machine badly in need of a service call:

Bellflower Antiques

119 West Apple St., Hannawa, Ohio USA

Violeta Bell, Proprietor

“This is your proof?” I huffed.

“Well-yes.”

“No eyewitnesses? No jimmied locks?”

“Well-no.”

“So they could have been gifts?”

Grant rallied. “And I might be invited to join the Olympic bobsled team.”

I smiled. As disagreeably as I could. “According to the reporter who did the Queens of Never Dull story-Gabriella Nash-Violeta Bell’s condo was stuffed to the ceiling with expensive antiques.”

“That it was.”

“And still is?”

He knew what I was getting at. “So why did Eddie take heavy fireplaces and furniture? When he could have stuffed his pockets with jewelry and other more wieldy thingamabobs?”

“It does seem strange,” I said.

“It does. Until you have the stuff appraised. Find the right buyers and you’ve got a good fifty thou in cash.” He enjoyed a long sip of his coffee. “And who knows what he might have fenced before we arrested him.”

“Anything with Violeta’s sticker show up yet?”

He shook his head no. “But we’ve got our eyes peeled.”

The self-satisfied bastard had made some good points. Now it was my turn. “Speaking of things showing up-those blood results back yet?”

“Any century now.”

“Funny about that blood, isn’t it?” I said. “Eddie tracked it back to his apartment but not back to Violeta’s condo.”

“Ever think that maybe he took off his shoes?”

He had me again. I hadn’t thought about that. “So he knew he had blood on his shoes and lugged all that stuff out of Violeta’s condo in his stocking feet?”

“That’s one theory.”

“You find any matching stocking threads?”

I was suddenly Phyllis Diller. He laughed like a hyena on helium. “You, Mrs. Sprowls, have been watching way too much CSI!”

“How about his cab?” I growled. “Find any blood in there?”

“Do you really think all that stuff on the list would fit in a taxi cab?”

“I suppose not.”

He answered my next two questions before I could ask them. “Yes, he has a truck. No, we didn’t find any blood in it.”

I didn’t know beans about blood, of course, but I gave it my best shot. “Wouldn’t the blood on his shoe have dried by the time he got back to his apartment?” I asked. “It would have been several hours later.”

He was suddenly agitated. Uncharacteristically curt. “When the blood comes back we’ll see what gives-okay?”

I let him have his victory. What choice did I have? “While we’re on the subject of Violeta Bell’s blood,” I said, “anything to her claim that she’s Romanian royalty?”