The Unraveling of Violeta Bell mm-3 Read online

  “To the hunt!” commands one of the women from under her purple hat. “One-nineteen Plumbrook.”

  “One-nineteen, it is,” French answers, tugging dutifully on the bill of his bright orange Hannawa Woolybears baseball cap. He swings his cab back onto Hardihood Avenue and heads for Greenlawn.

  Ike was busy calculating the current value of his stock portfolio. But somehow my “Damn it!” penetrated his brain. “Something bad, Maddy?”

  “I’ll say. The girl can write.”

  Ike sadly shook his head. “I’ll ask the reverend to say a special prayer.”

  “Thank you-unfortunately I don’t think God will take her talent back.”

  “I was talking about a prayer for you.”

  “I don’t think that one will get through either.”

  We laughed. Winked at each other. Went back to our respective sections of the paper.

  French knows only too well what he’s in for today. Every Saturday for the past five years-from early May to the end of October-he has been driving this spirited foursome on their search for treasure.

  And when he’s not driving them to garage sales, he’s driving them to rummage sales and auctions. Or to charity luncheons and teas. Or to concerts or plays. Or to the airport.

  “They’ve got to be the busiest ladies in Hannawa,” says the bewhiskered, 61-year-old French. “I know I’m the busiest cab driver.”

  And just who are these four always-on-the-go golden girls?

  Wouldn’t you know it. Right when I got to the part of the story I wanted to read most, James let go with his I’m-done-peeing-let me-in howl. I looked at Ike for assistance. Ike pretended he didn’t see me. So I let James in myself. And filled his bowl with his second breakfast of the day. And I poured myself a second cup of coffee.

  “No fresh-up for me?” Ike complained.

  “Sorry, I thought you were dead.”

  I took the empty mug out of his hand and filled it. Finally I sat down to what looked to be one of the best features I’d read in our paper in a long time. Apparently Alec Tinker was not the dunderhead I figured. And even though I was not about to forgive Gabriella for spilling the beans about my investigation into Gordon Sweet’s murder, I had to admit our first week of colleaguedom had gone well enough. She’d waited patiently for the background stories she needed. She’d said nothing more long-winded than “Hi” when we bumped into each other in the cafeteria. Most importantly, she hadn’t called me Morgue Mama to my face-a mistake most new reporters make and then forever regret.

  Collectively they call themselves The Queens of Never Dull.

  “It’s a club without rules or dues,” says Kay Hausenfelter, curled up on the pink loveseat in her sun-washed living room. “We started out as a bridge foursome in the clubroom here. I guess we just liked each other’s company. Before you knew it we were bumming all over town together.”

  While all four of the Never Dulls call the upscale Carmichael House condominiums home, Hausenfelter has lived there the longest, a few months shy of ten years.

  Hausenfelter moved into the pricey, tenstory tower after the death of her husband, Harold Hausenfelter. Before his retirement, he had served as president and CEO of Hausenfelter Bread Company, the city’s largest bakery. They had been married for 41 years.

  “Harold was the sweetest man on earth,” she says, adding quickly that he was also one of the toughest. “He had to be tough to take on a project like me,” she says.

  Hausenfelter met her future husband in 1954, when she was appearing at the Orion Theater on South Main Street.

  “That’s right,” she laughs. “I was a striptease artist. Twenty-four years old and not so fresh out of Elk City, Oklahoma.”

  “Can you believe that!”

  “Believe what, sweetie?”

  Ike’s question almost stopped my heart. He’d never called me sweetie before. Either it was a term of endearment that I wasn’t ready for, or the mechanical response of a widower. I peeked around the paper at him and decided it was the latter. I read the quote to him. “‘I was a striptease artist. Twentyfour years old and not so fresh out of Elk City, Oklahoma.’” Ike partially emerged from his trance. “I thought you were from some little town in New York?”

  “Not me sweetie -this old woman in the paper. I can’t believe the copy desk let a quote like that run. ‘Not so fresh out of Hot Springs.’ Why didn’t we just run a list of all the men she’d slept with?”

  He was listening now. Grinning at my fuddy-duddiness. “Times they are a changing, Maddy. Anything goes.”

  It was my turn to grin. At his eclectic command of musical cliches. “Bob Dylan and Cole Porter in the same sentence. Not bad.” I went back to Gabriella’s story.

  I finished reading about the former stripper and bread heiress, and moved on to the next garage sale queen:

  Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy pleads guilty to “being something of an earth mother these days.” Her condo is filled with plants and cats. Atop the stack of books on her coffee table is her prized copy of Jane Goodall’s book, Reason For Hope.

  She proudly shows the inscription to visitors.

  “Ariel,” the famous scientist wrote, “hear your heart.”

  “I’ve always had a noisy heart,” Wilburger-Gowdy admits. “In the old days it was preoccupied with men-most of whom I married. Today it’s animals, organic food and recycling glass bottles.”

  And just how many times has she been married?

  “Four and no more,” she jokes.

  Her first husband, former state senator Walter Wilburger, is the father of her only child, a daughter who teaches business ethics at Hemphill College.

  The Gowdy part of her last name comes not from a former husband, but from her late father, roofing-shingle king Donald F. Gowdy. For the past two decades she has headed the philanthropic foundation he created, the D.F. Gowdy Charitable Trust.

  “I’ve been spending my father’s money all my life,” she says.

  I’d never met Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy, but I certainly knew about her good works. The Donald F. Gowdy Foundation is one of the bright spots in Hannawa’s struggling economy. It provides the seed money for inner-city businesses. It helps poor kids go to college. It supports the arts, helps battered women, teaches English to immigrants, spays and neuters cats and dogs, plants flowers in the city’s dreary parks. Oodles and oodles of worthwhile things.

  I moved on to Violeta Bell:

  If the Queens of Never Dull have a leader, it’s Violeta Bell.

  “I guess I’m the burr under everybody’s saddle,” says Bell. “But the homestretch is no time to slow down.”

  Bell is also the only member of the foursome to admit her age. “I’ll be 73 in August.”

  This brings a disbelieving guffaw from Kay Hausenfelter. “She also claims to be Romanian royalty,” she says.

  The playful Bell pretends to be insulted. “I will be 73 on my next birthday,” she insists again. “And if it hadn’t been for the damn Communists and their crazy ideas, you’d all be curtsying and calling me queen for real.”

  Whether she’s a real queen or just one of the Queens of Never Dull, it is a fact that for nearly three decades the never-married Bell owned and operated Bellflower Antiques.

  She’s lived at the Carmichael House since her retirement eight years ago.

  Bellflower Antiques was once the gemstone of Puritan Square, the snooty shopping centre on West Apple Street designed to look like a quaint English village. I was never inside the shop-its By APPOINTMENT ONLY sign successfully kept riff-raff like me away-but I had driven by it a million times on my way to JCPennys. I read on:

  Gloria McPhee is the only member of the Queens of Never Dull with a husband.

  “It’s strange that Phil and I ended up in this little cubbyhole,” she says, referring to their spacious, glass-walled unit on the top floor of the Carmichael House. “Our whole life together was houses, houses, houses.”

  While McPhee worked as a real estate broker, her hu
sband, Philip, ran a residential pest extermination business. Before they moved into the Carmichael, they lived in an eight-bedroom Tudor on Merman Avenue.

  “Before you think me high and mighty, let me tell you about all the crummy little houses I lived in first,” McPhee says.

  I tried to finish reading Gabriella’s story while Ike showered. But the rattling of the spray on the shower curtain made it impossible for me to concentrate. So I put the paper down for later and washed the breakfast dishes.

  Ike put on his suit and went to church.

  I put on the CELLO EVERYBODY! sweatshirt and took James for his walk.

  The sweatshirt was a gift from Ike. The romantic old fool had given it to me for Valentine’s Day. It came with the Yo-Yo Ma CD he got for pledging $120 to PBS.

  3

  Wednesday, July 5

  Eric Chen pulled the Mountain Dew bottle off his lips and sniffed at my hair like a truffle-hunting hog. “You’re not spontaneously combusting are you?” he asked.

  We were clicking our way up the tile-walled stairway to the third floor. The building has an elevator, of course, but it’s as slow as molasses. Anybody who has to get to a desk before noon takes the stairs. “I take it you didn’t come downtown for the fireworks last night,” I said, pulling my head out from under his.

  “And you did?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  It took the young genius half a flight of steps to put two and two together. “Ah-you went with Ike.”

  “He’s a Republican. What can I say.”

  Eric opened the door for me. “So that’s your smoldering love I smell.”

  We started across the empty newsroom toward the morgue. “No-that’s the smoke and ash from $40,000 worth of fireworks you smell. There was a damn temperature inversion halfway through the big show. It was like Pompeii.”

  I couldn’t blame Eric for being surprised. Or for teasing me. For years I’ve been poooh-poohing the city’s schemes for luring suburbanites downtown. The annual Fourth of July “Star-Spangled Salute to the American Family” is its most atrocious effort. They cram Main Street with carnival rides and booths. The city surrenders the sidewalks to rock bands and hip-hoppers. They befoul the already tenuous air with barbecue sauce and overflowing Port-a-Potties. They finish off the four-day extravaganza with The Hannawa Symphony’s stale tribute to John Philip Sousa and, of course, the damn fireworks, the stench of which I couldn’t shampoo out of my hair.

  Eric went to his desk to do whatever it is that he does. I went to mine to get my mug. The message light on my phone was blinking. It was Suzie Burns, the newsroom secretary. Her sugary southern Ohio twang almost always signals a hellish turn of events. “ Hiya, Maddy. It’s Suzie. Mr. Tinker wants to see you in his office-right away please!”

  “Good gravy,” I growled. “Doesn’t anybody realize a woman my age needs to ease into her day slowly?”

  I went to the cafeteria and made my tea. Then, with my mug in front of me like a Crusader’s shield, I headed for Tinker’s office.

  Tinker was not alone. Police reporter Dale Marabout was there. Features editor Nancy Peale was there. And Gabriella Nash was there, bawling like a three-year-old who’d ridden her tricycle off the end of the porch.

  Tinker smiled weakly at me. “I was hoping you could help Miss Nash through this.”

  My first thought was that they’d fired her. That she’d made up a lot of stuff in her story. My second thought was that this was no time for me to gloat. That there’d be plenty of time for that later. I kneeled by Gabriella’s chair and patted her shoulder. “What’s this all about, dear?”

  Tinker answered for her. “One of the garage sale ladies was murdered.”

  That brought an anguished squeal from Gabriella and a fresh gush of tears. My knees were already beginning to hurt but I stayed put. I even offered the girl a sip of my tea-which she actually accepted. “That’s just terrible,” I said. “Which one?”

  Dale provided the facts. “Violeta Bell. They found her on a mat in the fitness room. In her undies. Shot three times in the chest.”

  Nancy provided the context. “Gabriella is afraid her story had something to do with the murder.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I snarled. I took my mug away from Gabriella. Struggled to my feet and headed for the door. “I’ve got work to do.”

  Nancy bristled at me. “It was her first story, Maddy.”

  I bristled right back. “Let’s hope it’s her last.”

  Tinker’s hairless head turned into a giant salad tomato. He let me have it. “She admires you, Mrs. Sprowls. For some reason.”

  After hearing that you’d think I’d feel awful and apologize, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t feel awful and I sure didn’t apologize. I just fumed while Tinker called me every name in the book. Gabriella, strangely enough, sniffed back her tears and came to my defense. “Leave Mrs. Sprowls alone. I wish I had her backbone.”

  Now I did feel awful. I reached out and gently scratched Gabriella behind her ear, the way I scratch James when he surprises me with respect. “What do you say you and I take a walk to the cafeteria,” I said. “Get some fresh tea and maybe one of those big cookies in the vending machine.”

  And so we went to the cafeteria. I made the tea and Gabriella bought the cookie. We sat at the table by the plastic bamboo plant. I snapped the cookie in two and gave her the bigger half.

  She took a chipmunk-size nibble. “I guess I’ve set the women’s movement back a few years, huh?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a cute back-and-forth. I just wanted to scare some maturity into the girl and get back to my desk. I took the biggest bite of cookie I dared. “That story you wrote wasn’t about you, Gabriella. It was about those four crazy women and that scraggly cabbie who hauls them around.”

  “One of them was murdered.”

  “So what?”

  “What if it was because of my story?”

  “Again, so what?”

  She slid down in her chair until she looked like a five-year-old sulking at the dinner table. “I guess I had a feeling about her.”

  “Good gravy, girl! You talk to some old woman for twenty minutes and you get emotionally involved? You sure this is the right profession for you?”

  That got Gabriella’s dander up a bit. Which, I must admit, I liked. “Not that kind of feeling,” she said. “It was just-I don’t know-like she was somebody other than who she said she was.”

  I laughed and, unfortunately, sprayed the table with cookie crumbs. “So you don’t think she was really Romanian royalty?”

  “I didn’t believe that or anything else she said.”

  I liked that, too. “Your shit detector start beeping, did it?”

  For the first time that morning she smiled. “Yes, it did. And it just wasn’t the things she said. It was her-what’s a good word for it?”

  I’m an old woman. I gave her an old word. “Her countenance?”

  “Yeah-her countenance.”

  I had no reason to doubt the reliability of Gabriella’s shit detector. It had certainly worked that day I went to see her at the student newspaper office. She’s seen right through my cock-and-bull story about wanting to rummage through the paper’s old files to see what I could find about my own years at Hemphill College. She knew I was digging into Gordon Sweet’s murder. “So why the tears when you heard that Violeta Bell had been murdered? If you had such a bad feeling about her?”

  She corrected me. “I didn’t say I had a bad feeling about her. She was a lot of fun. Just like the other three. But I had the sense she was hiding something. Or hiding from something.”

  I took a more modest bite of cookie and studied her countenance. Inside that snip of a girl lived a wise woman. “Why would she do the interview then?” I asked. “The pages of a newspaper aren’t exactly the best place to hide. Although nobody reads newspapers any more.”

  Gabriella pulled her tea bag from her mug. Let it swing back and forth like a body dangling
from a noose. “I think maybe she just wanted to be loved.”

  “Just wanted to be loved? For Pete’s sake!”

  “I know that sounds like a lot of mushy psychobabble, Mrs. Sprowls. But I think maybe that was it. On the outside she was confident and classy. Inside, totally a mess.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “Just the opposite of me, you’re saying?”

  She looked at me the way Aubrey McGinty used to look at me. With exasperation. “I’m saying that maybe she was one of those excruciatingly insecure people who need to be the center of attention no matter what.”

  “And so she did the interview knowing she probably shouldn’t?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you did the interview knowing she probably shouldn’t, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because it was your first story and you didn’t want to blow it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And so when you heard she’d been murdered-”

  “Yeah.”

  4

  Thursday, July 13

  I retrieved my morning paper from the azalea bushes. Which was nothing to grumble about. Too many mornings it’s on the roof. On my way back to the kitchen I read the headlines. The news couldn’t have been better:

  Suspect Arrested In

  ‘Never Dull’ Murder

  By Dale Marabout

  Hannawa-Union Staff Writer

  HANNAWA-Police Wednesday arrested a “person of interest” in their investigation into the murder of retired antique dealer Violeta Bell.

  Bell, 72, was found dead July 5 in the fitness room of the Carmichael House condominiums where she lived. She had been shot three times at close range, police said.

  The murder weapon, believed to be a. 22 pistol, has not been found, police confirmed.

  There was no Ike waiting for me at the breakfast table this morning-which was either a good thing or a bad thing depending which side of the independence versus companionship argument you come down on. I ate my oatmeal and read:

  Police identified the man they took into custody as cabdriver Edward “Eddie” French.