The Unraveling of Violeta Bell mm-3 Page 5

  Kay leaned forward until her elbows, not to mention other things, were resting on her knees. “That’s the other thing,” she said. “I think Eddie was afraid of guns.”

  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 present
ed 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.

  The would-be king of Romania was, in fact, the former king of Romania, eighty-five-year-old Michael I.

  The website also contained a ton of historical background on the Romanian monarchy. I was in seventh heaven. Eric was bored silly. He slid down in his chair and fished a bundle of comic books out of the enormous cargo pocket in his shorts. “Who are you-Captain Kangaroo?” I asked.

  “Captain who?”

  I keep forgetting how old I’m getting, that even someone in their early thirties like Eric would have no childhood memory of the avuncular Saturday morning television star pulling carrots out of his big pockets for Bunny Rabbit. “Never mind, Comic Book Boy,” I hissed. “You just go ahead and fritter your life away with that crap while I make America safe for little old ladies.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said. He buried his nose in an X-men adventure. I started mining the website for answers.

  It was hard for me to believe, but Romania had only been an independent nation since the 1860s. That’s when it pried itself loose from the old Ottoman Empire. In 1881, the Romanian parliament imported a German prince named Charles and crowned him as the nation’s first constitutional king-Carol I.

  Carol I had no living heirs. So when he died in 1914, his nephew, Ferdinand, became king.

  King Ferdinand died in 1927. But his son, named Carol after his great uncle, was more interested in running around Europe with his mistress than running the country. So Carol’s five-year old son, Michael, became king. That’s right, he was five. Talk about dumping more on your children than they can handle. Anyway, little Michael’s reign lasted just three years. In 1930, his playboy father had a change of heart. He booted the boy off the throne and had himself crowned Carol II.

  European dictators were in vogue in those years, and so Carol II dissolved the parliament and ruled as an absolute monarch. Which was absolutely a mistake. He was forced to abdicate in 1940, and Michael, now nineteen, was put back on the throne.

  Michael reigned until 1947, when the Communists forced him to abdicate. He settled down in England with his new wife, a French princess named Anne, and went to work as a commercial airline pilot.

  Romania suffered under a succession of Communist rulers. The last one, Nicolae Ceausescu, was the worst of the lot. A popular uprising drove him from power in 1989. He and his equally hated wife, Elena, were arrested, tried in a makeshift courtroom, and executed just outside the door.

  Today, Romania has an elected president and parliament. It also has a small gaggle of royalists who want to bring the monarchy back. They want a British-style king or queen who presumably would clank around in a turnip-shaped carriage and wave at the people. The website, however, reported that Michael I had little interest in getting his old job back.

  My scroll bar had reached the bottom of the page. I slapped my computer on the side of the head. “Don’t stop there you lazy son-of-a-bee!”

  My screeching brought Eric back to the real world. And he wasn’t happy about it. “What is your problem?”

  “This damn website only lists one pretender,” I said. “You’d think there’d be oodles.”

  “Well, Maddy, there are oodles of other websites.”

  “I can’t spend all day playing with this thing, Eric. I have a cabbage waiting for me at home.”

  Eric dog-eared his comic book. “See all these underlined words in blue sprinkled throughout the text? Those are called links. When you click on a link, another site with more information on the topic comes up.”

  I clicked on Michael I. Another site appeared. “Well, look at that!”

  He told me to “enjoy” and went back to his superheroes. I started scrolling and reading, and taking notes on the back of a corporate missive outlining the most recent changes in our medical coverage: Michael and his wife had four daughters. None of them were named Violeta. None of them were within twenty years of being old enough to be Violeta.

  That website was a dud. But it did have a very useful link to the genealogy of the Romanian royal family. It listed every king, queen, prince, princess, count, and countess going back to the first Romanian king, Carol I. And among them was a Violeta!

  My giddiness was short-lived. “Wouldn’t you know it,” I grumbled. “This Violeta was born in 1873. Which would make her fifty years too old to be our Violeta. And unless she was one of those vampires from Transylvania, much too dead to be our Violeta.”

  I took notes on her nonetheless: Her full name was Violeta Dragomir. She was the daughter of a Romanian cavalry officer of low nobility, and not from the principality of Transylvania, but Moldavia. When she was seventeen, she married Prince Anthony, the twenty-one-year-old son of King Carol I. Prince Anthony died when he was twenty-three and Princess Violeta slipped into oblivion.

  I asked Eric how I could find out if Violeta was a common name in Romania. He looked at me like I was a Ph. D. candidate in English who’d forgotten how to spell cat. “Duh-Google female Romanian names.”

  I typed it in. Several websites agreed that Violeta was a rather common name in Romania. Next, I Googled her last name. Bell didn’t sound very Romanian to me, but you never know. Again I got several websites with long lists of Romanian surnames. Bell wasn’t on any of them. Neither was Bellescu, or Belleanu, or Bellici, or any other names that might be Americanized to Bell. “You do any of that research on Violeta yet?” I asked Eric, with a pretty good notion of what the answer would be.

  “It’s only been four days, Maddy.”

  “I was just wondering if she was ever married.”

  “Didn’t Gabriella’s story say?”

  “Violeta told her no,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I tell people no sometimes, too.”

  I went back to the Romanian genealogy website. I scrolled up and down through the dozens of royals listed, both the living and the dead, in the hope of finding something to justify the late Sunday dinner Ike was going to get.

  Then there it was. A very curious adjective. In the comments next to King Carol II. You remember him, don’t you? The one who let his five-year-old son be king? So he could cavort with his mistress? Anyway, it said this: “When Carol renounced his right to be king, his recognized heir, Michael, was crowned instead.” The curious adjective, of course, was the word recognized. Did that mean there was an unrecognized heir or two?

  I started clicking links like a madwoman. And I found the website of a man who claimed to be the great-grandson of King Carol I, and therefore the rightful heir to the Romanian throne. “Well, would you look at this, Mr. Chen! Pretender number two!”

  Eric didn’t answer. And that’s because he was no longer sitting next to me reading comic books. I scanned the newsroom. Some time during the last half hour or so he’d wandered off to play with the boys in the sports department. They were throwing one of those stupid Nerf footballs around. But I didn’t bitch at him. A-it wouldn’t do any good. B-it appeared I’d pretty much mastered the Googling arts, anyway.

  The name of this second pretender was Prince Anton Alexandur Clopotar. There was a photo of him. He had a healthy thatch of white hair. A huge white mustache. He was wearing a polka dot bowtie and a double-breasted blazer with an emblem on the pocket. He was standing in front of a huge red, yellow, and blue flag. A long, straight-stemmed pipe was clenched in his teeth. I read what he had to say about himself:

  He was seventy-five. Born in Bucharest. He’d fled to Canada with his parents and older brother at the end of World War II when it looked like the Soviet occupation of Romania was going to be permanent. Unlike his rival, Michael I, who had only daughters to give his country, he had three sons and seven grandsons. Best of all, he offered direct lineage to King Carol I, while Michael was only a distant nephew.

  I was confused. I
checked my notes. According to what I’d read earlier, Carol I had left no living heirs. That’s why his nephew, Ferdinand, was given the throne. I read on:

  Prince Anton’s father, Dumitru Clopotar, was born in 1916. His grandfather, Constantin Clopotar, born in 1891, was the son of Prince Anthony and one Violeta Dragomir.

  That’s right, Princess Violeta. The cavalry officer’s daughter who married Carol I’s son. The young widow who slipped into oblivion. According to Prince Anton: “Perhaps we will never know whether my great-great-grandfather was aware that Princess Violeta was with child when he banished her. It is clear that he was distraught when his son and heir, Prince Anthony, was taken so unexpectedly. The royal biographies are not ambiguous on that point. Regrettably, there is also evidence in the king’s diaries and letters that he did not approve of his son’s betrothal to a native Moldavian of insufficient nobility.”

  Prince Anton went on to explain in his stuffy way that some months after giving birth to Constantin, the destitute Princess Violeta married a commoner named Gavril Clopotar, who gave the boy his name and raised him as his own. Wrote Prince Anton: “Inasmuch as my older brother, Prince Petru, is no longer living, it is clear that I am the rightful heir to the throne, should the hereditary monarchy be reinstated by the Romanian people. Let me state further, to those who may doubt my claim, that I am prepared to assist wholeheartedly in any and all scientific inquiries deemed necessary.”

  The prince also wrote glowingly about his sons and late wife, Agnes. About his satisfying career in the Canadian civil service. About his wonderful home and vegetable garden outside Kingston, Ontario. “Here on my beloved Wolfe Island I will await, with respect and patience, the judgment of my fellow Romanians.”

  Good gravy! I knew Wolfe Island. It was the largest of the famous Thousand Islands. It was on the western lip of Lake Ontario. Where the waters of the Great Lakes squeeze into the St. Lawrence River for their long trek to the Atlantic Ocean. I was born very close to there, in LaFargeville, on the New York side of the river. Oh yes, I knew Wolfe Island very well.