C Corwin - The Unraveling of Violeta Bell

Patti the Cabbage woke me up at 5:30. The poor girl had been worn to a frazzle the night before, but now, after eight hours of watching a gaggle of other women sleep, she was wide awake. And way too perky. She started prying the electrodes off me, humming through her nose like a Hawaiian guitar.

“How’d I do?” I asked her.

“You snored.”

I was afraid that was going to be the answer. “How bad?”

“Like a herd of wild pigs.”

“Sorry.”

“For what? I get $18.50 an hour to listen to people snore.”

The night before I’d had to struggle with guilt. Now it was envy. The young twit made fifty cents more an hour than I did! Then again, to be fair, all I did all day was test the upper limits of people’s blood pressure. “I didn’t stop breathing, did I?”

She pried off the last electrode. The one on the top of my head. “Your doctor will give you the bad news.”

I got dressed and headed for the parking lot. Ike and James were waiting for me. They both wanted to kiss me. But I wanted no part of that. I just wanted to go home and shower. I had little blotches of itchy glue all over me. “This might improve your mood,” Ike said, handing me a folded copy of The Herald-Union as we zipped across the empty parking lot. He proudly used the newspaper lingo he’d learned from me. “B-1, below the fold.”

I pulled out the Metro section. I immediately spotted the story Ike wanted me to read. It was a small story:

Blood On Cabbie’s Porch

Not Violeta Bell’s

HANNAWA-The blood found on the second-story porch of cab driver Edward French was not that of slain antique dealer Violeta Bell, police said.

In fact, Police Department Public Information Officer Sgt. Michael Giannone said that laboratory tests determined that the blood was not human at all, but from a rabbit.

Giannone refused to say if French remains a suspect in the 72-year-old woman’s murder.

The rest of the story offered nothing new-just a rehash of Eddie’s arrest and bail. I tore the story out of the paper and stuck it in my overnight bag.

“Looks like Mr. French was telling the truth,” Ike said.

“About the cat at least.”

Monday, July 31

I backed out of my driveway at six on the dot. It was going to be a long day. And a long week. I was driving home to LaFargeville, New York. Not because I wanted to. Or had to. I was going to LaFargeville because it was right next door to another place I was going. To Wolfe Island. To pay a surprise visit to Prince Anton Alexandur Clopotar, vegetable grower extraordinaire, pretender to the Romanian throne. I knew if I drove all that way to see the prince without making a perfunctory pilgrimage to my own hometown, well, I’d be pounding myself on the head in regret for the rest of my life. The way those idiots in the commercials pound themselves for having a plate of Krispy Kremes for breakfast instead of a V8.

I drove out West Apple to Hemphill College then took the Indian Creek Parkway north to I-77. It was still dark but already the traffic was picking up. Sleepy, coffee-slurping suburbanites on their way to their jobs in Cleveland.

I’d asked Ike to close his coffee shop for a week and come with me. But as I expected, he said no. “You know I can’t be taking off willy-nilly like that,” he said, as we stood side by side in front of my bathroom mirror brushing our teeth. “My regulars rely on me.”

Being the proud old bird I was, I could hardly tell him that I was afraid of facing my childhood alone. All I could do was shrug, spit my Tartar-Control Sensodyne into the sink and say, “Okay, but you’re going to miss out on one of the worst experiences of your life.”

Ike did show some concern about my going alone. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving that cranky old Dodge of yours,” he said. “You won’t get to the Pennsylvania line before something under the hood goes kerflooey.”

And that’s why I was floating up I-77 in his big, sensible Chevrolet. Thermos of Darjeeling tea on the empty seat next to me. James in the back seat licking himself. Bush-Cheney ’04 sticker on the bumper.

I must confess that Ike was not my first choice as a travel companion. My first choice, believe it or not, would have been Eric Chen. He’d already taken a couple of road trips with me on past investigations. He was surprisingly easy to handle-as long as I kept him well supplied with junk food and Mountain Dews. Gabriella Nash might have made another good travel buddy. She was afraid of me. She was already up to her eyeballs in my secret effort to learn the truth about Violeta Bell. Unfortunately she’d only been at the paper for six weeks. She could hardly take a week’s vacation. Another possibility was Effie Fredmansky, my old college pal and owner of Last Gasp Books. The previous summer we’d driven to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia together. We had a damn good time even though I suspected her of murder. But Effie, like Ike, had a business to run. And so James got the nod.

Thanks to the heavy traffic, and my decision to pour myself a cup of tea at the worst possible time, I missed the bypass and had to drive straight into downtown Cleveland. I made it around that hellish bend the locals call Deadman’s Curve-not something everybody does successfully apparently-and headed east on I-90, along the southern shore of Lake Erie. The water was just as pretty as it could be.

For a long while I drove past abandoned factories and empty railroad yards. Then little by little I eased into Ohio’s grape country. It isn’t the Napa Valley, but it is still quite impressive. One vineyard after another, for I don’t know how many miles, taking advantage of the warm lake air. I reached Erie, Pennsylvania at nine. Buffalo, New York at 10:30. Buffalo is a big Hannawa. Which doesn’t say much about either city.

I got on the turnpike and headed into the bumpy bowels of upstate New York. At a service plaza outside Rochester I stopped for gas. I bought a rubbery chicken sandwich for my lunch. I found a nice plot of grass for James to irrigate.

I reached Syracuse at two o’clock. I took I-81 north. Ninety minutes later I was in Watertown, population 27,705. What London is to the English and Paris to the French, Watertown is to the people of Jefferson County, New York. The big city they outwardly loathe while secretly lusting to visit.

LaFargeville was just 15 miles up the road. But I’d been driving, and thinking, for ten hours. I was pooped. Physically and psychologically. I got off the interstate and drove downtown. I checked into the Best Western. It was right there on Washington Street. Right about where fifty years before I’d caught the Greyhound Bus to Hannawa and Hemphill College. It was a pet-friendly hotel, meaning that James could stay in my room for an extra ten dollars. I didn’t take him with me into the lobby. I figured they’d take one look at the big bear and charge me an extra hundred.

Tuesday, August 1

I walked James around the hotel grounds until he found just the right spot on the dew-soaked grass to pee. Then we headed up Route 12 toward LaFargeville. Outside Watertown we were immediately surrounded by cow pastures and cornfields. As far as I knew, those were the very same cows and the very same stalks of corn that drove me out of LaFargeville in the fifties.

This narrow plain between Lake Ontario to the west and the Adirondack Mountains to the east is low and scruffy. Which makes it hot and buggy in the summer and absolutely uninhabitable in the winter. The lake winds drive the temperatures low and pile the snow high. There’s not much for people to do up there but make babies and cheese. And they make a lot of both. And both leave as soon as they’re properly aged. I turned onto Route 180 and headed toward LaFargeville.