She curled her lips at my flippancy like a rabid raccoon. “This is serious business, Mrs. Sprowls!” She went on and on how the story shouldn’t have been taken away from her just because it unexpectedly evolved from a “fluffy piece of shit” into a “hard news murder story.” The Washington Post, she said, didn’t take Redford and Bernstein off the Watergate story when it grew from a third-rate burglary into a constitutional showdown between President Nixon and Congress. She should be allowed to follow the Never Dull story wherever it lead, she said. Redford and Bernstein had been young reporters, too, she said.
I neatly folded the front page and handed it back to her. “In the first place, it was not Redford and Bernstein. It was Woodward and Bernstein. Robert Redford was the actor who played Woodward in the movie. But I suppose you deserve some credit for at least having heard about Watergate.” Her eyes dropped. I hurriedly crumpled my list of job-saving excuses and slid it off my desk into the wastebasket. “And in the second place,” I said, “you should be telling all this to Alec Tinker-not me.”
She went from rabid raccoon to vulnerable bunny. “I was hoping maybe you’d go with me.”
I showed her the most empathetic smile I could. Then I lowered the boom. “I just don’t see that happening, Gabriella.”
Bob Averill appeared in the newsroom at twenty past twelve. He gave me a big John Wayne thisaway wave. I grabbed my purse and followed him to the parking deck.
Bob is extremely well paid. And his wife comes from money. But he still likes to think of himself as the regular guy he was forty years ago. So he eschews his reserved parking space by the door and deposits his Mercedes wherever he can find a spot. It’s not one of those big roomy Mercedes. It’s one of those sporty, midlife crisis two-seaters. Yellow as a ripe banana. He wedged his 200 pounds behind the steering wheel with the help of a laborious “Augggghhhh.”
We headed toward West Apple Street and Meriwether Square. “You think we can get there in five minutes?” he asked.
“If we don’t get behind too many buses.”
He chuckled like some old soldier fondly recalling the Battle of the Bulge. “I remember when I had to take the bus.”
As we buzzed along, I pictured him that morning calling Suzie and asking, “Any idea where Maddy Sprowls likes to have lunch?” And when she answered Speckley’s, him asking, “Where the hell is that?” And when she said Meriwether Square, him harrumphing, “That figures.”
In case you haven’t spent much time in Hannawa, Ohio, Meriwether Square is our city’s version of Greenwich Village. It’s a four-block strip of coffee shops, thrift shops, and hole-in-the wall bars, each geared toward a particular sexual orientation. The strip is surrounded with wonderful art deco apartment buildings and once-grand turn-of-the-century houses. The brick streets are lined with shaggy oak trees and badly buckled sidewalks. Dale Marabout calls it Differentdrummerville. And he’s pretty much on the mark. Meriwether Square is lousy with angst-riddled college students, old hippies, even older Beatniks, artists who never sell anything, writers who never get published. It’s a real bouillabaisse of daydreamers, outcasts, and kooks. And I just love the place. And I just love Speckley’s. I’ve been going to that wonderful old diner since my college days.
Bob found a parking space right in front. But he couldn’t find any quarters in his pocket for the meter. “It’s on me,” I said.
Inside, he announced his name to the waitress. “Averill.”
She squinted at him the way James squints at me when he’s trying to decipher the strange sounds coming out of my mouth. Finally she figured it out-or at least thought she had. “I don’t think we got any of them,” she said. “But I’ve got some Tylenol if that would help.”
It was Bob’s turn to imitate James’ squint. I came to the rescue. “He doesn’t have a headache,” I told the waitress. “He has a reservation.”
“Oh, he’s the one,” she cackled. “We all thought that was a prank call.” She grabbed a pair of menus from the counter. “Right this way, Mr. Averill. Your table’s waiting.” She gave us a booth by the eight-foot plastic bipedal cow statue drinking a chocolate milkshake.
I talked Bob into ordering the diner’s legendary house special-meatloaf sandwich, au gratin potatoes on the side. I told the waitress I’d have hot tea. Bob pointed at the plastic cow and said, “I’ll have what she’s drinking.”
Good gravy I was nervous. I decided to take the bull by the horns. “Bob,” I said, “I know why we’re here.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do! Now shoot!”
He cringed. “Shoot? Don’t you think that word is maybe a bit inappropriate under the circumstances?”
I attacked. “Come on, Bob. Give me your best shot. Then I’ll give you mine. Then we’ll enjoy the meatloaf.”
He dug his elbows into the Formica. Propped his chin on his fist. Looked me straight in the eyes. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“My retirement. What else would I be talking about?”
His face withered until it looked like one of those old cooking onions I keep on top of my refrigerator. “Oh no, Maddy Sprowls-you can’t retire now. I need you.”
It was my turn to look him straight in the eyes. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Eddie French.”
“That cab driver they arrested? What does that have to do with me?”
The waitress brought our beverages. Bob pounded the wrapper off his straw. “Nothing to do with you-not yet, anyway-but unfortunately it does have something to do with me.”
I zeroed in on the most pertinent part of his answer. “Not yet, anyway?”
He drilled his straw into his milkshake. Took a long suck. “I need your help with something, Maddy.”
I finally knew where he was headed. “Absolutely not!”
He grabbed his temples. Grunted in pain. At first I thought he had an aneurysm in his brain that just popped. But when he started gasping like a beached fish, I realized he was just having a brain freeze from the milkshake. I laid into him without pity. “I’m not a detective, Bob. I’m a damn librarian.”
The pain on his face slowly subsided. The self-confident, always-in-command Bob Averill I’d known for fifteen years was gone. “It seems that Eddie French is the worthless older brother of Tippy’s sorority sister,” he said.
Tippy was Bob’s wife. Several years younger than him, trim and pretty. A real ballbuster. Bob would still be writing high school sports at that little weekly in Coshocton County if she hadn’t rescued his dormant potential from the dustbin of happiness. “And this sorority sister knows her worthless brother couldn’t possibly have murdered Violeta Bell?”
Bob took a much more modest sip from his shake. “She was on the phone half the night crying to Tippy about it. Which meant Tippy was crying to me the other half.”
“And now you’re crying to me?”
“You know how irascible Tippy can be.”
I did know how irascible Tippy could be. I also knew it would be smart to stick to the facts. “According to Dale Marabout’s story, the police found Bell’s stuff in his apartment. And he’s got quite a record, too.”
“Yes they did, and yes he does,” Bob admitted. “But sorority sisters are sisters for life and, well-”
I finished the sentence. “And I owe my shaky future at the paper to your good graces?”
The Bob Averill of old would have gone ballistic over a remark like that. The new one only got more docile. “I can’t put Marabout or some other reporter on this. That would be unethical. This is a personal matter.”
“But you can put me on it?”
“No putting. Begging.”
The waitress arrived with our platters. The meatloaf was stacked high inside huge Kaiser rolls. The enormous globs of au gratin potatoes were steaming. “Frankly, it feels more like putting,” I said.
Bob hadn’t learned his lesson from the milkshake. He filled his mouth with potatoes, getting a dandy cheese burn on the roof of his mouth. “Look Maddy, I know this stinks. I’ve spent the last two years trying to stop you from snooping into murders and now I’m asking you to do exactly that. But for some reason you’re good at it.”