“Anyhoo-I just wanted you to know how impressed I am. I didn’t hear it myself. But Rollie did.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Gwen.”
“Your trying to find Sweet Gordon’s killer. Charlie Chimera has been talking about you all afternoon. Rollie called me from the office.”
Charlie Chimera has that awful talk show on WFLO. He’s got quite a racket. He reads the morning headlines in The Herald-Union, decides which stories will get his readers’ juices flowing, throws in his own two cents, if that much, then yaps and yaps all afternoon like he’s a goddamned expert on the subject. Apparently he’d seen The Harbinger. “Good gravy! Exactly what is he saying?”
“Oh, you know-how sad it is that the police have to leave solving crimes to little old-”
“Don’t you dare finish the sentence.”
“Anyhoo-I think it’s just terrific that you’re taking an interest.”
The pythons were back in my stomach. “He’s not saying bad things about The Herald-Union, is he?”
She artfully evaded the question. “I’ve told Rollie a million times he’d be more productive if he listened to NPR.”
“That bad, is it?”
“I was thinking, Maddy. Why don’t you come over for lunch one of these days? You haven’t been to the house since we added the lap pool, have you?”
I’d never been to her house at all. Or any of the increasingly bigger houses she and Rollie had occupied over the years. I wasn’t exactly on their A list. Or their B, C, D or E lists. “No, I haven’t,” I said. “And I’d love to come for lunch. You just say when.”
To my surprise she did say when. “How about Tuesday?”
I asked Eric to find everything the paper had ever run on Gwendolyn Moffitt-Stumpf.
Chapter 13
Tuesday, April 10
Eric found a ton of clips on Gwen. There was the huge society page story on her June 1957 wedding to Rollie. There was that horrible Page One story on the plane crash that killed her only child, her 19-year-old son, Rolland Jr. And there was story after story about her good works.
Over the years Gwen had raised her public profile-and the profitability of her husband’s insurance agency-by raising money for good causes. She’d raised money for every hospital in the city. She’d raised money for the art museum. For the symphony. The zoo. For Hemphill College. Over the years The Herald-Union must have run two or three dozen photos of Gwen handing one of those phony tablecloth-sized checks to some thrilled-to-death recipient.
But it wasn’t all hoity-toity, high profile stuff. Gwen also raised money for women’s shelters, for food banks, for inner city scholarships, for poor families whose houses burned down around them. After a spate of rapes downtown in the early eighties, she’d even organized self-defense classes for women through the city’s Adult Enrichment Program. We’d run a number of stories on that, including a photo of her throwing former Mayor Jerry Hazel for a loop in a jujitsu class.
Gwen was also a big supporter of the democratic process. Her fundraising parties for Republican presidential candidates over the years had won her five invitations to the White House. Her parties for Democratic mayoral and council candidates won Rollie’s insurance agency a wheelbarrow full of city contracts.
All in all, Gwen was a real mover and shaker. And even though I’d known her since she was a silly college girl, I was shaking in my boots all the way to her house.
Maybe I’d never been to her house. But I sure knew where it was. It was on Hardihood Avenue, Hannawa’s ritziest quarter-mile. And she and Rollie not only lived on Hardihood, they lived within squinting distance of Trawsfyndd Castle, the grand Tudor-style mansion built in 1911 by Richard Pembrook Hooley, an impoverished Welsh immigrant whose life took a turn for the better when he invented a faster way to bottle beer. Trawsfyndd today is owned by the Hooley family trust. They offer tours seven days a week, at $9.50 a pop. They make you wear those embarrassing elastic booties that look like shower caps.
Gwen and Rollie’s house wasn’t as big as Trawsfyndd, but it was still a castle, a monstrous gray-bricked Georgian with way too many windows and dozens of shrubs trimmed into perfect circles. I parked under the portico.
I was half expecting to be greeted at the door by a stuffy butler. But it was Gwen herself. And a pair of tap- dancing dachshunds.
Gwen made eye contact with my Dodge Shadow before she made eye contact with me. “Maddy-isn’t it good to see you?”
She was wearing a bright yellow cashmere turtleneck and matching silk slacks. She looked like a fancy banana. “And isn’t it good to see you?” I said.
She hugged me. She let me hug her back. She threw back her arm like one of those prize girls on The Price Is Right and welcomed me inside. The floor in the foyer was covered with alternating black and white tiles. I felt like the last remaining pawn on a giant chessboard, cornered by a crafty queen. “This is just beautiful, Gwen.”
She started telling me about the trouble her designer had finding wall sconces that matched the urns she bought on her Aegean cruise, but the dachshunds were begging for attention. I bent as low as I could go and scratched the tops of their flat heads. “And what are your names?”
Gwen introduced them: “This sweet old girl is Queen Strudelschmidt and this handsome fellow is her son and heir, Prince Elmo IV.” They dutifully sat back on their long hind-ends and lifted their stubby right paws, which I dutifully shook.
“You a dog person, Maddy?”
“Sort of.” I told her about my temporary acquisition of James. About my total ineptitude in canine care.
My misery made her laugh. “All you’ve got to do is love them,” she said.
“Apparently wiener dogs don’t have digestive systems,” I said.
Dog talk out of the way, Gwen gave me the nickel tour of her million-dollar house. There was one white- walled room after another, every one of them filled with white rugs and white furniture. The only room that even came close to feeling comfortable was Rollie’s den. But even that looked more like a display in a fancy furniture store than a real room. The walls were covered with expensive paneling. The drapes and rugs were hunter green. The pillows on the leather sofa bore the embroidered heads of horses. There was a pair of battered duck decoys on the coffee table. It was a man’s room, no doubt painstakingly put together by Gwen to give poor Rollie a bit of self- confidence. The wall behind the enormous oak desk was filled with his many awards for selling insurance. The mantel above the fireplace was lined with Rollie’s college debate trophies. They were as shiny as the day he won them. I went to admire them. “With Rollie’s gift of gab I always figured he’d go into politics,” I said.
Gwen scowled. “Thank God he got that dream out of his system.”
She led me through the solarium-a tad bit more opulent than the one in Chick Glass’ house-to the natatorium and the new lap pool she’d bragged about on the phone. “It was hugely expensive, as you can imagine,” she said. “But Rollie simply had to have it.”
Well, I knew who simply had to have it. Gwen simply had to have it. To keep her husband healthy, wealthy and by all means alive. I crept across the fancy green tiles and peered into the clear, blue-tinged water. I could imagine poor Rollie churning through the water, back and forth and back and forth, while Gwen sat in a lounge chair timing his laps with a stopwatch.
Finally we made it to the kitchen. It was as big as my entire house. Newly remodeled, too, like one of those gourmet pleasure palaces they create right before your eyes on HGTV. She sat me at a tiny bistro table by the bay window overlooking their outdoor pool. She bustled to the kitchen, returning with two crystal bowls filled with unappetizing brown balls. To my relief, she put them on the floor for the dogs. Her second trip to the kitchen produced two steamy black plates, which, to my joy, she put on the table. She introduced me to my lunch: “Poached salmon with basil mayonnaise, saffron rice, and a medley of snow peas, yellow bell pepper and Portobello mushrooms.”
“Beats the vending machines at the paper,” I said, wishing I hadn’t.
