“I’m saddled with my ex’s name, too.”
She glued an electrode to the top of my head. “I recognized your name on the test order. You’re that newspaper woman who solves murders.”
Unfortunately, The Herald-Union had glowingly reported my role in solving the Buddy Wing and Gordon Sweet murders. “Just my luck,” I cracked. “A polysomnographic technologist with a newspaper subscription.”
Patti pushed up my pajama legs and glued an electrode to my calf, to record, she said, how much kicking and squirming I did in my sleep. “That’s got to be exciting. Solving murders, and all.”
“It’s a pain in the ass.”
She held up the last of her electrodes. Devilishly swayed it back and forth.
“Oh no you don’t!”
She glued it on my other calf. “Why did you ask if I was Romanian?”
It was time to obfuscate. “Names intrigue me.”
She hooked a small plastic tube under my nose, to monitor my breathing. “I thought maybe you we looking into the death of that woman who claimed to be a queen or whatever.”
Now it was time to lie. “Heaven’s to Betsy, no.”
“One of my uncles is married to a Romanian.”
I pretended not to be interested. “I had an uncle who married a Lithuanian. They’re both dead now, of course.”
“My uncle and his wife are still alive. In Youngstown.”
“That’s only half alive, dear.”
Patti was finally finished with me. “Comfy?”
“With all these wires I feel like a fly caught in a spider’s web.”
She smiled at me-just like a spider-and headed for the door. “You’ll be surprised how well you sleep.”
I hadn’t been very nice to her and I was struggling with an emotion that rarely bubbles up in me. Guilt. I called out to her. “Kapustova is a very pretty name!”
This time she smiled at me like a puppy. “You know what Kapustova means in Slovak, Mrs. Sprowls? Cabbage! Patti the Cabbage! Nighty night!” She pulled the door shut behind her. I clicked off my lamp and closed my eyes. I twisted this way and that until I was comfortable.
You’d think I would have used that opportunity to wrestle with the few facts I had about Violeta Bell’s murder, wouldn’t you? The skeleton keys. The lack of blood everywhere but on Eddie’s porch. Eddie’s aversion to guns. Kay Hausenfelter’s pretty pistol. Violeta’s fake Social Security card and surprising poverty. But all I could think about was Ike and why I was taking that damn sleep test for him. I didn’t like what my inner voice was telling me. Not one iota.
Saturday, July 29
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.”
12
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.