18
Wednesday, August 16
I wasn’t exactly having the easiest of weeks. Oh, don’t worry. I was still keeping to my in-at-nine-out-by-five work schedule. And I was still taking my good old time getting back from lunch. But a multiplicity of intertwining troubles, all of my own making, were beginning to take their toll on my already shaky disposition.
First of all, I was still getting grief about my run-in with the Secret Service. The paper had actually reported it as part of their coverage of the president’s visit. It was a little story on an inside page-SECRET SERVICE STOPS HERALD-UNION STAFFER-but everyone saw it. Everyone in the newsroom saw it. Everyone on my street saw it. All the clerks at the supermarket saw it. That rightwing nut on the radio, Charlie Chimera, saw it. Even the clucks at TV23 saw it. I was the laughing stock of Hannawa, Ohio.
Managing Editor Alec Tinker, to his credit, did have the good sense to warn me of his decision to run the story. “If anyone else in our circulation area had been held by the Secret Service we would have published it,” he said.
“But it was just a stupid misunderstanding,” I argued. “They let me go right away.”
“We have to demonstrate that we’re a part of the community,” Tinker said. “Not above it.”
The other thing churning away at my insides was that damn DNA sample. Detective Grant had warned me that the results probably wouldn’t be back from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification for a week. “It might even take longer if things get backed up over there,” he cautioned.
I growled at him like a bear that hadn’t eaten all winter. “Can’t you tell them it’s important?”
“Oh, we will,” he said. “And so will every other police department in the state about their samples. Everybody wants it yesterday. So my advice, Maddy my dear, is to take a chill pill and wait for the test tube elves at BCI to do their magic.”
On top of those two things, Bob Averill was continuing to pester me about Eddie, and Ike was continuing to pester me about my tonsils. So I couldn’t get away from the morgue fast enough that noon.
I pulled into Speckley’s ten minutes late. I hurried inside and scanned the crowded booths. Kay Hausenfelter was already there, studying the menu while everyone else was studying her.
Kay was actually dressed somewhat conservatively for our lunch-for Kay that is. She’d squeezed her ample top into a pink scoop-neck jersey and hidden her equally plentiful bottom under a red peasant skirt. Her hoop earrings were big enough for a gymnast to perform on. The straps on her sandals were trimmed with glass diamonds. Her fingernails matched the jersey. Her toenails matched the skirt.
I apologized for being late and recommended the house specialty to her, the meatloaf sandwich, au gratin potatoes on the side. She wrinkled her nose and asked me if the Cobb salad was edible. “I’ve never had it,” I said. “But if it’s on the menu it’s probably good.”
We engaged in the usual Ohio small talk until our lunches came. How hot the summer has been. How the fall is our favorite time of the year. How winter’s always a bitch.
It was Kay who finally got the ball rolling. “I suppose you invited me to lunch to talk about something more than the weather.”
I folded my hands and got as comfortable as I could. “I thought maybe we could talk about sex.”
Kay Hausenfelter forked a slice of avocado and snipped off the end with her perfect whiter-than-white teeth. “My favorite subject,” she said.
I took a bite of my meatloaf. “I don’t want you to think I’m talking to you about this because-”
She could see I was having trouble finishing the sentence. She laughed. Devoured the rest of the avocado. “Because I dress like a hootchie?”
“Because I figured you’d be more comfortable with the subject than Ariel or Gloria.”
She laughed again. Went after a sliver of radish with her fork. “You’re obviously a good judge of people.”
It was a good opening and I jumped right in. “I doubt as good as you. And I guess that’s why I still find it strange that you didn’t realize Violeta was a man.”
Kay was suddenly defensive. “She wasn’t a man.”
I retreated. “Well, you know what I mean.”
She softened again. “I do know what you mean. And no, she wasn’t mannish. Not physically or mentally. She looked like a woman. She walked like a woman. She talked like a woman. She was a woman. A born woman.”
I started down the long list of questions in my head. “Was she interested in men?”
“Not as interested as me,” Kay said with a wink. “But she liked the company of the opposite sex. You couldn’t get her off the dance floor on our cruises. She could really cha-cha-cha.”
It was hard not to like Kay Hausenfelter. She was funny, brash, what they used to call saucy. If she were fifty years younger she would be one of those girls shaking everything the good lord gave them in those awful music videos. “The police think maybe she was killed by a boyfriend who found out she was a man and went nuts,” I said.
“That Detective Grant is a cutie, isn’t he?”
“So he’s talked to you about this?”
“Honey, he’s talked to me about everything twice.”
The trouble with au gratin potatoes is that they can get cold pretty quick. And there’s nothing worse than gooey cold potatoes. I had no choice but to talk with my mouth full. “So what do you think about his boyfriend theory?”
“He’s the detective.”
I ate more potatoes. “It’s possible then?”
“It’s possible that it’s possible.”
I had a sense from the way she was dragging a cube of chicken back and forth through her Roquefort dressing that she was struggling with that same moral dilemma that has plagued womankind since Eve wiggled out of Adam’s rib-she wanted desperately to talk about things she knew she shouldn’t talk about. I was empathetic. I’d been there a few times myself. But my job was to uncover the naked truth about Violeta. That meant to hell with sisterhood. That meant playing the serpent. Tricking her, if possible, into feasting from the Tree of Gossip. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know there are probably things you told Detective Grant that you might not feel comfortable telling me. About her boyfriend especially.”
Kay Hausenfelter was no innocent Eve. “Good try.”
“Apparently not good enough.”
My admission freed her. She speared the chicken cube and swallowed it after a few quick chews. “There was no boyfriend, Maddy. Not unless she’d been creeping down the halls again.”
I repeated half of what she said. “Creeping down the halls again?”
“I know everybody thinks of the Carmichael House as a warehouse for dried up old prunes,” she said, swinging her eyes toward the two workers from the city water department who had just sat at the counter across from our booth. “And to a certain degree that’s true. But there’s some hanky panky, too.”
“When you say hanky panky-exactly what do you mean?”
She swung her eyes back toward me. “You can’t possibly have forgotten what hanky panky is!”
We laughed. Me, uncomfortably. “I guess I’m asking if Violeta was creeping to meet somebody’s husband.”
“It was years ago, Maddy.”
“And the husband in question will forever remain anonymous?”
“Forever dead, too.”
“I see-and the wife is still very much alive.”
“A very nice gal who doesn’t have a clue.”
“I understand. No more questions.”
We finished our lunches. We spent an enormous amount of time discussing the dessert menu. We gobbled our respective slices of strawberry pie. Hugged in the parking lot. Drove off in our respective cars. Kay in a little red car that looked both expensive and foreign. Me in my old Dodge Shadow.
The minute I got back to the morgue I summoned Eric and his bottle of Mountain Dew to my desk. He pulled up a chair with his foot and slumped into it. “Whatever you’re working on, shelve it,” I told him. “I just had lunch with Kay Hausenfelter and I’m dying to know if I learned anything.” I gave him his marching orders. “First, I need
