Eddie didn’t make a peep until we were on West Apple. Then he sang like a cage full of canaries. “I am truly remorseful for my attitude the other day,” he said, flicking his cigarette ashes out his open window. “But law enforcement matters always seem to aggravate my stressfulness.”
“No need to apologize.”
“Nevertheless I truly appreciate your graciousness in assisting my problematic cause.”
“I’m not being gracious,” I said. “I’m just trying to prove you didn’t murder Violeta Bell.”
“ Comprendo. ”
“You are still insisting that you’re innocent, aren’t you?”
He took a long draw on his cigarette. “That part of my story remains unflinchingly consistent.”
“But other parts don’t?”
“Let’s just say that you came very close to hitting the nail on the head the other day.”
“About you transporting stolen antiques for her?”
“Let’s just say we’re on the same page.”
It was a good time for me to unveil my suspicion. “Any chance that they weren’t stolen, Eddie? That they were fakes?”
He swung onto Hardihood Avenue, using nothing but the heel of his hand. “You do have a way of making the less-than-innocent squirm,” he said.
“It’s one of my specialties,” I said. “So, were they?”
“Given the precariousness of my position, I would prefer to use the word reproductions.”
“Okay, reproductions then.”
“ Merci beaucoup. ”
I could see the top of the Carmichael House in the distance. I had to hurry. “And were they reproductions?”
He ground his cigarette into the ashtray. He popped his glove compartment open. He pulled out a can of Glade and started spraying. A sickening vanilla smell filled the cab. “Ariel is a fierce foe of the tobacco industry,” he said.
I took my voice up a notch. “Eddie-were you transporting reproductions for Violeta Bell?”
He shook several Tic-Tacs into his mouth. “Neither the making nor selling of reproductions is illegal, Mrs. Sprowls. Nor is the transportating. ”
I could see where he was going with this. “As long as everybody knows they’re reproductions?”
“Bingo.”
“But given your record, it might be hard to convince the police that everyone knew?”
“The lady wins a toaster!”
We were one traffic light away from the Carmichael House. “Speaking of the lady-did you know Violeta had once been a man?”
Eddie went right through the red light. “ Mama mia! I simply could not believe what I was reading!”
I pressed him. “You’re a very street-smart man, Eddie. You had no clue at all?”
“May I expire on the spot, I hadn’t the foggiest.” He pulled into the Carmichael House. “I always took her as just another old bird whose time had come and gone-lookwise.”
Gloria McPhee, Kay Hausenfelter, and Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy were waiting on the walk outside the entrance. Gloria, trim as an asparagus spear, was fashionably dressed in a pink three-quarter-sleeve polo shirt and stone- washed capris. Ariel, more on the rutabaga side, was wearing baggy khakis and an oversized tee shirt sporting a cute but dire message about global warming: Penguins On Thin Ice. Kay was wearing red Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless pink western shirt with sparkly, ace-of-spades buttons.
Gloria and Kay squeezed into the back next to me. Ariel sat up front with Eddie. While we’d eyeballed each other at the funeral, we hadn’t formally met. We shook hands across the seat. “I just love penguins,” I said.
“If we can’t save them how are we going to save ourselves?” Ariel answered.
Gloria, apparently, was in charge of our itinerary. She was clutching a folded classifieds section. The garage sales were not circled. “Okay, Mr. French,” she said. “Seventeen-eighty-three South Grabenstetter.”
That address excited Kay. “There’s always good buys in Tudorville,” she said.
Eddie headed back south on Hardihood. We crossed West Apple and wound our way into the dark and hilly Hannawa Heights neighborhood. Not all of the houses were Tudors, but most were. And they were all big. Eddie parked along the curb. He stayed in the cab while we ladies made a beeline for the great clutter of treasure that covered the grand old house’s blacktop driveway.
Gloria headed straight for a table covered with jewelry and other artsy trinkets. Kay went for a box of old LPs. I followed Ariel into the garage, to a table stacked with moldy old books. “I’m always looking for first editions,” she whispered to me. “I found a signed Sound and the Fury once.”
“I remember trying to read Faulkner in college,” I said. “I could never get past the first chapter.”
Ariel laughed. “That’s farther than most people get.” She got busy checking publication dates.
“What kind of things did Violeta look for?” I asked her.
“Anything made in Romania, of course.”
“Of course.”
“She never found much of course.”
“Of course not.”
“But she mainly bought furniture. Old crap that had been antiqued or painted and left in somebody’s basement for forty years.”
I picked up an old Lassie novel. The Mystery of Bristlecone Pine. My niece, Joyce, collected them. “And she’d turn around and sell it for a bundle?”
Ariel stuck a tattered book under her arm and continued down the table. “That’s what you’d expect, wouldn’t you? But she was very honest about it. She’d tell the homeowner what it was worth and then bargain down from there.”
Ariel drifted off to look at a card table sagging with kitchen gadgets. I was left to reconcile the two Violeta Bells. One trafficked in fake antiques. The other was as honest as Abraham Lincoln.
I bought the Lassie book. Ariel bought two old books for herself and an almost-new dehumidifier for the Harvest Hill Homeless Shelter. Kay bought a fifties’ Peggy Lee album, I Like Men. Gloria didn’t buy a thing.
We drove off to 119 Buffington. When we saw all of the plastic toys and tables stacked with children’s clothes, we kept on driving. “Violeta always told us not to waste our time on garage sales with piles of kids stuff,” Kay said. “‘The homeowners are too young to have inherited anything,’ she’d say, ‘and too poor to have accumulated anything worth a damn on their own.’”
We drove on to house number three. Three hundred and six Chancellor Circle. The house was a behemoth. Built in the twenties probably. We hurried up the uneven brick driveway. The woman holding the sale sat in an aluminum lawn chair. She was yakking away on her cell phone. She was surrounded by several perfectly groomed toy poodles. I followed Ariel again. There wasn’t a book table, but there were enough holiday crafts to decorate a landfill. “You and Gloria were good to invite me today,” I said, “and I don’t intend to spend the day peppering you with questions, but-”
Ariel put a finger to her lips to hush me. “You’re wondering if I knew about Violeta’s-what should we call it- previous life?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted, “but not as much about that as why you paid Eddie’s bail.”
She smiled. “You’re more interested in what’s important than what’s sensational. I like that, Maddy.”
I smiled back. I liked her. “You and Gloria obviously trust him. But given what happened and what everybody’s learned about his past-well, good gravy, most people would have dropped him like a hot potato.”
She picked up one of those glass pickles the Germans like to hang on their Christmas trees. She dangled it in front of her eyes, to see if it was an old one or a new one, I suppose. “Violeta knew Eddie long before she moved to the Carmichael House and the four of us started bumming around together. And we knew he did more for her than drive a cab.” I must have squinted or something because she quickly explained herself. “We knew he made deliveries for her.”
I found myself playing with a Thanksgiving turkey candle. It was nearly big enough to stuff and roast. “Did it surprise you that he was arrested?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Considering his police record, he was prime for the plucking.”
