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?”
6
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.
He pulled up a chair with his foot. He immediately went into teacher mode. “Okay, I guess the first thing-”
I stopped him right there. “Let’s say I wanted to find out if someone was royalty or not-how exactly would I do that?”
He glowered at me like a bulldog learning that his Beggin’ Strips weren’t real bacon. “This isn’t me giving you a lesson. This is you bamboozling me into working on the Sabbath!”
“Everybody ought to work at least one day a week,” I said. I put on my drugstore reading glasses and slid them down my nose until my computer screen came into focus. I readied my fingers on the keyboard. “Now tell me how.”
He was smart enough to submit without a tussle. “You know what country?”
“Romania.”
He pointed to the Google box on my toolbar. “Type in the person’s name and then Romania. And then something like royalty or royal family.”
I typed in Violeta Bell, Romania, royal family. “Now what?”
He sighed at my ignorance. “Click on the Google Search box.”
I clicked. My computer screen blinked just once and told me it had found 14,600 websites for me to check out. I was amazed. And a little annoyed. Eric always made the research projects I gave him seem like a major chore requiring almost metaphysical skill. “That’s it? I could have James do this for me!” Then I started scrolling down. Clicking on the websites. Reading. Finding absolutely nothing useful. “This could take all day,” I grouched.
Eric forced a handful of M amp;Ms into his mouth. “Let’s refine it a bit.”
“How do I do that?”
“You need something more specific.”
I stole a few M amp;Ms from his bag. Popped them in my mouth one by one while I thought out loud. “I doubt that Romania has had a king or queen for a long time. So if there are any living royals, they’re hanging out there like forgotten socks on a clothesline. How about we try pretenders to the throne? ”
He nodded his approval. I typed it in and clicked the Google Search box again. My computer screen presented me with a whole new collection of websites-430,000 of them in fact. But my dismay was short-lived. The very first site gave me exactly what I was looking for. It listed the modern-day pretenders to the throne for every country in the world. Including Romania.