“If you can manage it.”
“Anybody else while I’m scratching?”
“That’ll do it for now.”
Detective Grant put on his overcoat. I rinsed out my mug. He walked me back to the newsroom. “I don’t know why you’re letting me talk to anybody at all,” I grumbled, “if I’m such a royal pain in the bum.”
“In a word, desperation,” he said. “That’s why I asked Tinker and Averill not to be too hard on you. It’s come down to either calling in a psychic or letting you dig around. And I must admit, you do have some good instincts for this kind of thing.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do.”
It was an opportunity I couldn’t let slip by. “Then let me ask you this-Do you think there might be a link between Gordon’s murder and the 1957 murder of David Delarosa?”
He chuckled deep in his throat, like a man who’d just been swindled out of his life savings. “So that’s why Marabout wanted that cold case file. You’re a real piece of work, Mrs. Sprowls.”
I admitted that I was. Then I told him about David’s murder. That David and Gordon had been friends. That the musician named Sidney Spikes who was questioned about that murder was the same Shaka Bop who’d played at Gordon’s funeral. “So, Detective Grant, do you think it’s possible?”
He answered with a sly smile and an indecipherable shrug.
My tete-a-tete with Detective Grant had been a boatload of fun. But it had left me exhausted. And frightened. And embarrassed. And confused about what to do next. If anything at all. And then there was that green-haired girl. I didn’t know how to feel about her. Should I cause a stink? Call her professors? Scream at her on the phone until she was reduced to tears? Destroy her skyrocketing journalism career while it was still on the launch pad? Or should I call her and thank her for the story? Yes, she’d broken one of the cardinal rules of journalism by not giving me a chance to respond. But everything she wrote was true. And it had forced me to fess up to Mr. Averill and Tinker. Something I should have done from the get-go.
While I was looking up the college paper in the phone book my own phone rang.
“That you, Maddy?”
It took me a few seconds to place the voice. “Gwen?”
“I’m not keeping you from your work, am I?”
“Other people have already accomplished that,” I said.
“Anyhoo-I just wanted you to know how impressed I am. I didn’t hear it myself. But Rollie did.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Gwen.”
“Your trying to find Sweet Gordon’s killer. Charlie Chimera has been talking about you all afternoon. Rollie called me from the office.”
Charlie Chimera has that awful talk show on WFLO. He’s got quite a racket. He reads the morning headlines in The Herald-Union, decides which stories will get his readers’ juices flowing, throws in his own two cents, if that much, then yaps and yaps all afternoon like he’s a goddamned expert on the subject. Apparently he’d seen The Harbinger. “Good gravy! Exactly what is he saying?”
“Oh, you know-how sad it is that the police have to leave solving crimes to little old-”
“Don’t you dare finish the sentence.”
“Anyhoo-I think it’s just terrific that you’re taking an interest.”
The pythons were back in my stomach. “He’s not saying bad things about The Herald-Union, is he?”
She artfully evaded the question. “I’ve told Rollie a million times he’d be more productive if he listened to NPR.”
“That bad, is it?”
“I was thinking, Maddy. Why don’t you come over for lunch one of these days? You haven’t been to the house since we added the lap pool, have you?”
I’d never been to her house at all. Or any of the increasingly bigger houses she and Rollie had occupied over the years. I wasn’t exactly on their A list. Or their B, C, D or E lists. “No, I haven’t,” I said. “And I’d love to come for lunch. You just say when.”
To my surprise she did say when. “How about Tuesday?”
I asked Eric to find everything the paper had ever run on Gwendolyn Moffitt-Stumpf.
Chapter 13
Tuesday, April 10
Eric found a ton of clips on Gwen. There was the huge society page story on her June 1957 wedding to Rollie. There was that horrible Page One story on the plane crash that killed her only child, her 19-year-old son, Rolland Jr. And there was story after story about her good works.
Over the years Gwen had raised her public profile-and the profitability of her husband’s insurance agency-by raising money for good causes. She’d raised money for every hospital in the city. She’d raised money for the art museum. For the symphony. The zoo. For Hemphill College. Over the years The Herald-Union must have run two or three dozen photos of Gwen handing one of those phony tablecloth-sized checks to some thrilled-to-death recipient.
But it wasn’t all hoity-toity, high profile stuff. Gwen also raised money for women’s shelters, for food banks, for inner city scholarships, for poor families whose houses burned down around them. After a spate of rapes downtown in the early eighties, she’d even organized self-defense classes for women through the city’s Adult Enrichment Program. We’d run a number of stories on that, including a photo of her throwing former Mayor Jerry Hazel for a loop in a jujitsu class.
Gwen was also a big supporter of the democratic process. Her fundraising parties for Republican presidential candidates over the years had won her five invitations to the White House. Her parties for Democratic mayoral and council candidates won Rollie’s insurance agency a wheelbarrow full of city contracts.
All in all, Gwen was a real mover and shaker. And even though I’d known her since she was a silly college girl, I was shaking in my boots all the way to her house.
Maybe I’d never been to her house. But I sure knew where it was. It was on Hardihood Avenue, Hannawa’s ritziest quarter-mile. And she and Rollie not only lived on Hardihood, they lived within squinting distance of Trawsfyndd Castle, the grand Tudor-style mansion built in 1911 by Richard Pembrook Hooley, an impoverished Welsh immigrant whose life took a turn for the better when he invented a faster way to bottle beer. Trawsfyndd today is owned by the Hooley family trust. They offer tours seven days a week, at $9.50 a pop. They make you wear those embarrassing elastic booties that look like shower caps.
Gwen and Rollie’s house wasn’t as big as Trawsfyndd, but it was still a castle, a monstrous gray-bricked Georgian with way too many windows and dozens of shrubs trimmed into perfect circles. I parked under the portico.
I was half expecting to be greeted at the door by a stuffy butler. But it was Gwen herself. And a pair of tap-dancing dachshunds.
Gwen made eye contact with my Dodge Shadow before she made eye contact with me. “Maddy-isn’t it good to see you?”
She was wearing a bright yellow cashmere turtleneck and matching silk slacks. She looked like a fancy banana. “And isn’t it good to see you?” I said.
She hugged me. She let me hug her back. She threw back her arm like one of those prize girls on The Price Is Right and welcomed me inside. The floor in the foyer was covered with alternating black and white tiles. I felt like the last remaining pawn on a giant chessboard, cornered by a crafty queen. “This is just beautiful, Gwen.”
She started telling me about the trouble her designer had finding wall sconces that matched the urns she bought on her Aegean cruise, but the dachshunds were begging for attention. I bent as low as I could go and scratched the tops of their flat heads. “And what are your names?”
Gwen introduced them: “This sweet old girl is Queen Strudelschmidt and this handsome fellow is her son and heir, Prince Elmo IV.” They dutifully sat back on their long hind-ends and lifted their stubby right paws, which I dutifully shook.
“You a dog person, Maddy?”
“Sort of.” I told her about my temporary acquisition of James. About my total ineptitude in canine care.