It could take weeks for the prince to clear all of the legal hurdles, of course, but Detective Grant and I were working on the assumption that the murderer would panic and want to get the gun out of those ashes as fast as possible.
The murderer had put the gun there thinking it was the best place in the entire universe to hide it. And it was a dandy hiding place. Cops search garbage dumpsters. Cops dredge rivers. Cops scrounge around in ditches and dig up backyards. But poke into the ashes of the deceased? When is the last time you heard of a cop doing that? But then a pretender to the Romanian throne shows up in town. And he’s the brother of the person you’ve killed. And he plans to take those ashes off to his homeland and sprinkle them over hill and dale. And the gun would come tumbling out.
And presumably that gun would be traceable to the killer in some way. Given the planning that must have gone into Violeta’s murder, you wouldn’t think the killer would have been dumb enough to leave fingerprints on the gun. Or a paper trail. But if the killer did show up to retrieve the gun, then most surely there was something that could link the killer to it. It was still dark when we reached the cemetery. We took the looping drive to the maintenance building. We parked behind it, alongside a stack of burial vaults. A couple of cars were already parked there. “Looks like we’re the last to arrive,” Grant said.
We hurried to the columbarium. We used the back door, entering directly into the superintendent’s office. The first thing I noticed was that there were only two chairs in the little room. And both were already occupied by uniformed officers. One officer-the one not monitoring a trio of small video screens-jumped up and offered his chair to Detective Grant. Grant immediately offered it to Prince Anton, who immediately offered it to me. Not being a total fool, I immediately accepted his offer. Grant sat on the corner of the superintendent’s desk. Weedy, Gabriella, Dale, and the prince were forced to sit on the floor.
Grant folded his arms and dug his chin into his chest. “Let me give you a brief overview of our plans this morning. We’ve got one camera fixed on the entrance and another on the exit. Who knows which way the suspect might come in. The other camera is in the ceiling above Violeta’s niche. The only caveat we face is the possibility that the suspect might park somewhere else and come up through the river valley, or the woods on either side. That’s why, as of right now, there’ll be no talking or coughing or sneezing or farting or anything.”
Weedy immediately broke the rules. “No farting?”
I broke the rules, too. “If the murderer is who I think it is, then we won’t have to wait long.”
Grant shushed us and the wait began. It was five o’clock. All over Hannawa drivers were dropping off bundles of papers. The route rats who delivered those papers at fifteen cents per were busy filling the back seats of their cars.
The truth of the matter was that I didn’t have one suspect in mind that morning. I had two. One was just as likely to pop up on the video monitor as the other.
After ten minutes or so, Gabriella, Weedy, and the prince rested their heads against the cement block wall and closed their eyes. I would have loved to scrunch down in my chair and take a nap myself, but I figured snoring was another one of Detective Grant’s verboten noises.
For a while I watched the second hand on my watch slowly circle Betty Boop’s sexy cartoon face. I’d bought the watch from the National Public Radio catalog that comes every fall. Every year I feel guilty and order something dumb I don’t need. That past fall, I’d actually ordered a couple of dumb things, the watch for myself and a pair of green Mountain Dew “Do The Dew” boxers for Eric Chen. I know that underwear is the last thing you should buy a subordinate, but how could I have resisted? Given his addiction to that horrible stuff? Anyway, it was a big mistake. Every time he wears them, which is at least twice a week, he pulls up the elastic and snaps it. “Got your undies on,” he says.
After watching my watch, I watched Detective Grant’s dangling feet. Either he had some terrible twitch or he was keeping time to some crazy tune in his head. I also watched the officer who’d dutifully given up his chair. He was leaning against the wall next to the inside door. The tips of his fingers tucked into the front of his thick gun belt. His eyes were fixed on Gabriella. His mind was, well, you know where his mind was.
My own eyes eventually focused on the calendar on the wall. It was one of those pathetic calendars that men insist on putting up in their workspaces. This one featured a girl in short-shorts suggestively perched on a giant riding lawnmower. Each month’s photo, I supposed, featured a different half-naked nymph with another gargantuan piece of lawn-care equipment. Admittedly, mowing a 200-acre cemetery must be a lot more mind-numbing than mowing your grass at home, but never once while mowing my eighth of an acre have I fantasized about sex.
I slid my eyes to the other purpose of the calendar, the dates. I tried to see how many of them I could connect with somebody’s birthday, or death, or wedding, or divorce. I came up with only six. Then I remembered Gabriella’s very first story on the Queens of Never Dull. In that story Violeta said she was going to be seventy-three on August 17th. I dug a piece of paper out of my purse-a bank ATM envelope-and wrote a note to Prince Anton: What was the day and month of Petru’s birth? I handed him my pen along with the note.
The prince scowled at me then scribbled his answer. He handed the envelope and pen back to me. His answer: 8 February.
I smiled thanks and averted my eyes so I couldn’t see his. We already knew that Violeta had lied about her age, that she was not seventy-two at the time of her murder, but seventy-eight. And we knew she’d lied about a ton of other things. So it was not surprising that she’d also lied about the date of her upcoming birthday. Or had she lied? Was the 17th of August indeed her birthday? The day Violeta Bell was born? The day of her sex change surgery? None of this mattered, of course. Violeta was dead. Prince Anton was her brother. But when you’re waiting for a murderer to show up-well, you have to nip your anxiety in the bud with something, don’t you?
Another equally useless thing came to me while we waited. It was my own version of that tasteless ethnic joke about how many whatevers it takes to screw in a lightbulb. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Three. One to hold the bulb. Two to turn the ladder.
My version of the joke was this: How many people does it take to catch a murderer? The answer was eight. One old Romanian prince. Three policemen. Two reporters. One librarian. One photographer to capture all the fun.
And why did Detective Grant allow so many unnecessary people to come along on his stakeout? He told me he wanted Prince Anton there so he could keep an eye on him. He said there was still a remote chance that the prince was the murderer. “I don’t want his highness sneaking off while I wait for nobody,” Grant told me when he called me at midnight to make sure I didn’t oversleep. Weedy was there because both Grant and Alec Tinker wanted plenty of pictures. And if there’s a photographer, there’s got to be a reporter to make sure everybody’s name is spelled right. And why two reporters? Both Gabriella and Dale Marabout? Because there would be a very easy murder to solve if only one of them were invited. And why was I there? Because I’m Morgue Mama.
“Car.”
Grant twirled off the desk and leaned over the officer watching the monitors. “Very nice,” he whispered. “It’s show time.”
I checked my watch. It was only 6:15. There was no way in hell the killer could have gotten the paper at home, read Gabriella’s story, digested the gravity of it, and then driven way out there by a quarter after six. Which meant one of three things. One, that the killer was not one of the two people I thought it was, but an employee of the paper. Two, that the killer had been tipped off. Three, that the murderer was one of that evergrowing percentage of Hannawans who read the paper for free on our website. My betting was that it was three. The murderer got up early, as always, went online to read hellohannawa. com, as always, and got a big, big surprise.