The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (19 page)

Phil kept us laughing throughout our lunch. And his salmon salad was as good as his jokes. After sherbet and coffee Gloria gave me a tour of the condo. The bedrooms were spectacular. Their bathrooms were too magnificent to use. Gloria and Phil both had an office—not converted spare bedrooms but actual offices with built-in bookcases, daybeds and massive desks. I particularly liked Phil’s desk. It was an old roll top with three long rows of pigeonholes. I also liked his wastebasket. It was covered with hundreds of hand-painted ants going every which-away. “Our oldest daughter, Carol, made it for him. For Christmas. Probably ten years ago. She’s an art teacher in Buffalo of all places.”

I took a closer look at the ants. They were all wearing little gas masks. I also took a closer look at what was in the wastebasket. Nothing but several little tightly rolled balls of fur.

16

Monday, August 7

I was determined to have an easy day. I’d mark up the weekend papers, dawdle over my mail, have a long lunch at Ike’s, and then in the afternoon do a little personal research on the relationship between dogs, enlarged tonsils, and snoring. Dr. Menke usually knew what he was talking about—I’d been going to him for twenty-five years—but this business about James possibly causing my sleep apnea was a bunch of baloney.

Eric Chen quickly changed my plans. “I’ve got that stuff you wanted on the prince’s brother, et al.,” he said, falling in next to me as I headed back to the morgue with my morning tea. I’d only given him the weekend to investigate the Clopotar clan. I hadn’t expected him to get it done that fast. “No there there?” I asked.

Before he could give me one of his smart-ass answers, Louise Lewendowski swept past us with a manic smile. “You guys hear?” she squealed. “The president is coming to Hannawa! On Thursday!”

I cringed. “This Thursday?”

She was nodding her head like a Pez dispenser with Tourettes. “Isn’t it exciting?”

“With a capital E,” I said.

Presidents don’t generally come to Hannawa, Ohio. In fact you can count presidential visits to our city on one hand, even if you don’t have a thumb: Abraham Lincoln visited twice, once on his way to Washington to be inaugurated and once on his way home to be buried. Calvin Coolidge once gave a commencement speech at Hemphill College. Ronald Reagan once made a campaign stop at Hyker Hydraulics to tout American competitiveness. Two weeks after Reagan’s re-election, Hyker announced it was moving all 1,300 of its well-paying jobs to Mexico.

Contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t at the paper for the Lincoln or Coolidge visits, but I was here for Reagan’s. Pandemonium doesn’t begin to describe it. For three days I had one damn request after another. “What do we have on this?” “What do we have on that?” “I’m on deadline, Maddy!” “I need it yesterday, Maddy!” Good gravy! You’d have thought the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were spotted galloping up Main Street!

All of this over-kill reporting on the president’s visit would be coming right in the middle of our shameless coverage of Violeta Bell’s sex change. For Sunday Dale Marabout had written a 3,000-word analysis of how the revelation was affecting the police department’s investigation. That morning’s paper featured medical writer Tracy Winkler’s snip-by-snip explanation of gender reassignment surgery. For Tuesday Tracy was examining the psychological impact of such surgery on family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. A feature on a local transgender college professor was slated for Wednesday. A huge package of stories was being planned for the weekend. The working title: JUST WHO WAS VIOLETA BELL? No doubt about it, my plans to take it easy were out the window.

By ten o’clock no less than eight different reporters had come crying to me about the stories they’d been assigned to write about the president’s upcoming visit. Gabriella’s request was the worst of all. “They want me to do a story on how the paper covers a presidential visit,” she whined as I scrolled through another indecipherable roll of microfilm. “I thought maybe you could give me a quote.”

“There’s nothing I can say that the paper could print.”

“Perfect,” she said. She scribbled it down and scampered back to her desk.

It took Eric and me until two o’clock to make everybody happy. Then we went out to lunch. To the Midas Muffler shop on Orange Street. If I wanted an update on his research on the prince’s family, I’d have to sit with him in the waiting room, eating stale snacks from the vending machine, while the rusty belly of his old Toyota pickup truck was fitted with a new exhaust system.

Eric’s lunch consisted of Strawberry Twizzlers, Chili Cheese Fritos, and his umpteenth Mountain Dew of the day. I chose the Fig Newtons and a slurp of tepid water from the drinking fountain next to the restrooms. We found a pair of empty chairs by a pyramid of windshield wiper fluid and got to work.

Eric licked the chili cheese off his fingers and opened the geeky backpack he’d brought with him. He handed me copies of the news stories and police reports on Petru Clopotar’s drowning. “Looks like they never found the guy’s body,” he said.

“And yet they ruled it accidental?”

“The anchor was missing along with him.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” I said, nibbling on my cookie. “Prince Anton told me the anchor had been tied around his brother’s feet.”

Eric tore open the Twizzlers package with his teeth. “The police figured he must have gotten tangled up in it and fell overboard.”

“Accidents do happen.”

“There were also fishing poles and live minnows on the boat,” he added. “And there was a cooler with sandwiches and beer.”

I shook the cookie crumbs off the police report. Mixing lunch and work is never tidy. “It makes you wonder why the prince insists it was a suicide, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe he’s afraid that his brother’s bones will still be found some day,” Eric suggested. “With a bullet rattling around in his skull or something.”

I finished his thought. “Which would make it either suicide or murder.”

Eric finished mine. “So the prince killed his older brother and made it look like a suicide. So he would be the heir and not just the spare.”

I told him about my own research. “When Petru went overboard in the fifties, there was real hope that the Communists would be driven out of Romania. Hungary was in open revolt. People in other Eastern European countries were grumbling. It would be just a matter of time before the monarchy was restored. That was only pie in the sky, of course, but nobody knew that then.”

“What about now? It’s still pie in the sky, right?”

“Where there’s sky there’s pie. Now, what about the prince’s father? Dumitru. Where, when and how did he die?”

Eric handed me an old Associated Press story. “Heart attack. January 1968. Skiing in Austria with his son, Prince Anton.”

My cynicism—as it has a tendency to do—was soaring like a runaway birthday balloon. “Father and son all alone on a remote slope in the Alps, no doubt.” I read the AP story. I hadn’t been that far off. The prince had found his father’s body on the floor of his hotel room when he went to get him for dinner. “What about the prince’s mother? She can’t possibly still be alive.”

“Old age. June, 1996.”

“And the prince’s three sons? Anything about them we need to know?”

Eric handed me his research. While I read, he gave a thumbnail sketch of each son: “Christopher. Age fifty. High school science teacher by trade. Currently Labor Party member of Parliament. No public views on Romanian monarchy….

“Anthony. Age forty-three. Assistant deputy minister of tourism for Ontario. No public views on Romanian monarchy….

“Simon. Age thirty-eight. Hosts an all-night bluegrass radio show in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. No public views on Romanian monarchy.”

I didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved. “Two politicians and a ne’er-do-well. They don’t sound very sinister, do they?”

Eric moved on to another one of my requests—whether Prince Anton had left Wolfe Island shortly before Violeta Bell’s murder. “The ferry operators know him well. They don’t think he’s been off the island since his wife died.”

I wasn’t about to let Eric off that easy. “I suppose he could have his own boat.”

He was more than ready for me. “Nope. Nope. And nope.”

“What questions do the last two nopes belong to?”

“Nope there isn’t an airport on Wolfe Island—not even for puddle jumpers—and nope he doesn’t know how to swim.”

I laughed at him. And myself. “You’re making that last nope up, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

The mechanics lowered Eric’s truck from the rack. We drove back to
The Herald-Union
for more insanity. Among the oodles of phone messages waiting for me was this one from Detective Grant:
“You were right, Maddy. We had an expert look at that stuff from Eddie’s apartment. All fakes. Thanks.”

When I got home, Ike had supper waiting. Green pepper and onion omelets made with fake eggs. Sugar-free lime Jello topped with sugar-free Cool Whip. We walked James. We watched TV. We went to bed.

At two o’clock I was still awake, listening to
Coast to Coast
on the radio. You can’t believe a word that anyone on that show says but I just love it. It’s a welcome relief from real life where you’re not quite sure whether you should believe someone or not. George Noory’s guest was an Indian medicine man named Red Elk who said alien lizard people were living inside the earth. Occasionally these lizard people snatch humans and grind them into a powder that makes them live longer.

I was afraid to go to sleep. Not because the lizard people might crawl up through the heating ducts with their mortars and pestles. Because I’d start snoring like a Clydesdale. I’d wake up Ike and he’d start pestering me to have my tonsils out. Which I was not going to do.

So there I lay, hands folded on my belly like a corpse, listening to Ike’s soft breath and Red Elk’s unbelievable stories, thinking about Violeta Bell.

All of Hannawa was buzzing about the sex change thing and Detective Grant seemed to think it could have something to do with her murder. Which I did not think. There was no evidence that Violeta had a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or any other kind of friend or friends that would be so psychologically discombobulated by learning she had once been a he that he or she or they would kill her. No, there was no evidence like that at all. There was, however, strong evidence that she was trafficking in fake antiques. But would someone kill her over a fake fireplace mantel?

Could Eddie French be the murderer after all? He was in business with her. Presumably he knew more about her dark ways than most. But Violeta Bell hadn’t been stabbed or strangled or knocked over the head. She’d been shot. And Eddie had an aversion to guns. Or did he?

Kay Hausenfelter, on the other, was very comfortable around guns. And Gloria McPhee was the executor of her estate. And Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy paid Eddie’s bail. And wouldn’t you think at least one of them would be in an emotional dither about Violeta’s secret past? Their unruffled reaction to the news simply wasn’t believable. Good gravy, I had a harder time accepting that Ike was a Republican than they were having with the coroner’s revelation that Violeta had been born with a you-know-what.

And what about Prince Anton? A few days after Violeta told the world she was the queen of Romania she was dead. Could she really have been a Romanian royal? Surely her claim was as fake as the antiques she sold. As fake as the name on her driver’s license. But what if it were true? And what if Prince Anton knew it? Had he so wanted to be king—if ever there was to be a king—that he killed her? Or had her killed? Two other pretenders to the throne standing in his way had met mysterious deaths. His brother and his father.

Of course if the prince knew that Violeta Bell really was a royal, then he also would have known who she really was. That once upon a time she’d been a he. Was she a cousin perhaps? Distant or otherwise?

When the person Hannawa knew as Violeta Bell changed his sex, he also changed his name. He took the name Violeta. Prince Anton’s great-grandmother was named Violeta. But where did the name Bell come from? Bell wasn’t a Romanian name. Why would someone who wore their Romanian ancestry on their sleeve adopt such a non-Romanian last name? Could Violeta have been married to some guy named Bell before coming to Hannawa? Could she have chosen it out of thin air?

I slid out of bed, stepped over James, and padded into the kitchen. I called Eric. “You asleep, Mr. Chen?”

“I’m in the middle of a chess game with a guy in Rawalapindi, Pakistan.”

Eric was a chess player. When not playing with his goofy friends at Borders, he played with goofy strangers on his computer. “Hurry up and lose,” I said. “I need you to Google something for me.”

Suddenly sleep mattered to him. “Do you realize what time it is?”

I was adamant. “It’s time for you to lose.”

The guy from Rawalapindi was more cooperative than Eric. “Damn!” Eric squeaked. “He checkmated me with a pawn!”

“Good. Now say good-bye and get ready to Google.”

Eric fussed and fumed but he did as he was told. “Okay, shoot.”

“I need you to do a translation for me,” I said. “You can do translations, can’t you?” I asked.

I head a
clickety clickety click.
“What to what?” he asked.

“English to Romanian.”

Clickety clickety click.
“What’s the magic word?”

“Bell.”

Clickety clickety click.
“Bell—
clopot.
Oh, Morgue Mama! You are soooo good.”

“Now translate Clopotar into English.” I spelled it for him. “C-l-o-p-o-t-a-r.”

Clickety clickety click.
“One who rings a bell.”

17

Thursday, August 10

Ike and I were in separate but equal pickles. Ike’s pickle was philosophical. Should he, as a good patriotic Republican, close his coffee shop at noon to attend the president’s speech at City Hall? Or should he stay open and sell as much coffee to the crowd as he could? My pickle was more practical. How was I going to get through that crowd for my very important tête-à-tête with Detective Scotty Grant?