“We talked to Francis Reilly,” said Odelia, “and he told us it was an accident.”
“Of course it was an accident. I don’t think Neda would go and knock people down on purpose,” Hazel said with a touch of annoyance. She’d clearly had this discussion before. “But that doesn’t change the fact that she did it. And that’s the problem: she never admitted her mistake. She never apologized. And she never asked us if there was anything she could do.”
“But you still didn’t quit the choir,” said Chase. “And neither did your husband.”
“St. Theresa Choir is our whole life,” said Hazel as she gave her husband a quick rap across the knuckles when he surreptitiously tried to sneak that book from the table again. “We’ve been in that choir since before we were married. We met in that choir, and got engaged, then married, had three kids…” Her eyes drifted to a set of picture frames on the shelves. They were a wedding photo of a much younger Hazel and Amadeo, and next to that several pictures of kids and grandkids. “The choir sang at our wedding, at every christening, at birthdays, jubilees, but also funerals—my parents and Amadeo’s… Every important moment in our lives is tied up with the choir. You don’t leave something that’s been part of your life just because you don’t like the new conductor, Detective.”
“There will be others,” suddenly Amadeo piped up.
“Other what, Mr. Larobski?” asked Odelia kindly.
“Other… what were we talking about?”
“Choir directors,” said his wife stiffly.
“There will be other choir directors,” said Amedeo with a happy nod.
“That is definitely true,” said Hazel. “And a good thing, too.”
Chase cleared his throat.“Can you please tell us where you both were this morning between eleven-thirty and twelve, Mrs. Larobski?”
“You don’t think we had anything to do with Neda’s death, do you?”
“Simply a routine inquiry,” Odelia explained. “We need to verify people’s whereabouts so we can create a clear picture of Neda’s day.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t part of that picture,” said Hazel, who was sitting ramrod straight, eyes alert. “We had choir practice until eleven, then we came straight home. Isn’t that true, Amadeo?”
“Mh?” said her husband, looking up with a dreamy expression on his face.
“We came straight home after choir practice!” she said, raising her voice and enunciating a little more clearly.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said. “We always do, don’t we? Choir practice and straight home for lunch.”
“You have lunch at eleven?” asked Chase.
“Eleven-thirty. We get up at six and have an early breakfast, which means an early lunch and an early dinner.” She checked her watch. “In fact I was just about to start preparing dinner.”
The message was clear: she wasn’t all that keen on two cops—or one cop and one semi-cop—to come barging in there asking a lot of questions.
“Can anyone verify that?” asked Chase, who wasn’t finished with the questions just yet.
Hazel frowned.“Verify what?”
“When you got back from choir practice.”
“Um…” She thought for a moment, then glanced to her husband, seemed to dispel the notion, and thought some more. Then her face suddenly lit up. “Janice,” she finally said.
“Janice?”
“Our next-door-neighbor. She was looking through the window when we arrived home. Janice is something of a neighborhood snoop,” she explained.
“Janice Malice,” her husband said with a little grin. “That’s what we like to call her.”
“Amadeo, please,” said his wife, embarrassed.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Janice Malice.”
“He once called her that to her face,” Hazel said. “She wasn’t happy.”
“So Janice saw you arrive at…”
“Must have been eleven-fifteen, eleven-twenty.”
“And you didn’t leave the house after that?”
“No, we had lunch and then we were both out in the backyard all afternoon.”
“We like the flowers,” Amadeo explained. “Lots of colors.”
“Yes, Amadeo likes the colors,” Hazel said with an indulgent smile. “The more colors the better. So we plant flowers in the spring, and enjoy a riot of color all summer.”
Odelia glanced around.“Do you have… pets?” she asked, then darted a meaningful glance at me and Dooley. We hadn’t dared to move a muscle all through the interview.
“No pets,” Hazel snapped, as if the notion was a ridiculous one.
“We had a goldfish once,” Amadeo said. He was starting to really come into his own, I saw, and following the flow of the conversation. “But we sadly lost him.”
“Yeah, the kids had a goldfish, but that was years and years ago.”
“How old are your kids now, Mrs. Larobski?”
“Well, the youngest is thirty-five and lives right around the corner. Jake is forty, and lives in Boston, and Frieda is in Paris right now. She’s a business consultant,” she explained. You could tell from the tone of her voice that she was proud of her kids.
“We had a hamster, too,” her husband confided.
“Do you have any idea who could have done this to Neda?” asked Chase.
“Look, Detective, if you’re going to flaunt your wealth the way Neda did, it’s only a matter of time before someone is going to try to rob you of it.”
“She was flaunting her wealth?”
“Of course she was. Always with the fancy rings and bracelets, the expensive watches and the latest and most expensive iPhone… showing pictures of her vacations. Cannes, Antibes, Gstaad… She liked to rub it in our faces. I told Amadeo that she was flirting with disaster, and I was right.”
“So you think it was robbery?”
“Of course. Someone broke into her house for the purpose of taking whatever they could find—which was probably a lot—and she got in the way. It’s as simple as that.”
“We had a goldfish once,” Amadeo said happily, showing us that maybe he wasn’t as in tune with the flow of the conversation as I’d thought.
14
That evening, the whole family was gathered outside on the deck for dinner, and of course there was but a single topic of conversation: the murder of Neda Hoeppner. Since Marge and Tex’s home wasn’t furnished yet, they were still living with us, which was nice and cozy, though sometimes a little noisy, as it meant that Odelia’s gran also shared the house with the rest of us, and she has a tendency to get a little loud from time to time.
She was conspicuously absent now, though, which wasn’t her habit.
But then I remembered she’d told us she was meeting her decorator, so perhaps she was still next door, showing this person the lay of the land.
“I talked to Janice Malice, as Amadeo insists on calling her, and she confirmed that the Larobskis were home when they said they were,” said Chase, as he buttered a piece of bread.
“Hazel could still have snuck out of the house through the back,” said Odelia, “and gone over to Neda’s.”
“I don’t think she could have done that without Amadeo giving her away, though. That man simply blurts out anything that pops into his head.”
“He could have taken a nap after their early lunch.”
“Possible,” Chase admitted. “Though Hazel would still have needed to get to her car, which was parked out in front, and Janice would have seen her.”
“It’s probably just as Hazel says,” Marge said as she reached for the saucepan and dribbled a liberal amount of sauce over her pork chops. “A gangster, attracted by stories of Neda’s wealth, decided to rob the place, and was surprised by Neda. There was a struggle, she fell and hit her head.”
“It’s definitely possible,” Uncle Alec agreed as he eagerly ladled more potatoes onto his plate. “Problem with that theory, though, is that it’s going to be very hard to find out who our robber was. And also, there was no sign of forced entry, so Neda must have opened the door for them.”