the name of every married couple that’s lived at the Carmichael House during the last eight years. The number of their condo unit and whether they still live there.”
Eric, as I expected, went apoplectic. “No-no-no-no. That building is a regular stairway to heaven. That could take days and days.”
I put my foot down. “You can do it in an hour. Check the county tax records. I need first names of both the husbands and the wives. List them by year. Alphabetically by last name. That will make the next step easier.”
This time his protest was perfunctory. “The next step. Sheeeesh.”
“Another hour,” I assured him. “Two at the most. Check the husband’s names against our obits for the same eight years. I want to know who’s dead and who’s not. And I want copies of the obits for the dead ones.”
He looked at me like a wild-eyed cat that had just spent a week trapped in a dresser drawer. “Do you have any idea how many obits we run in a year, Maddy?”
“Eight thousand. Now get your lazy carcass off my chair and get to work.”
He slowly unhinged. Stood up straight and stretched. “And what will you be doing while I’m having my nervous breakdown?”
“I’m the head librarian of a major daily newspaper,” I said. “I’ve got major administrative duties to perform.”
Eric dragged himself back to his desk. I hurried to the cafeteria to make my afternoon tea.
Why, if I liked her so much, did I think Kay Hausenfelter was lying to me? To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if she was or not. She admitted that Violeta once had an affair with a married man right there in the Carmichael House. She admitted that Violeta might have been “creeping down the halls again,” as she put it. She gave in to the temptation of answering my questions after resisting me only minutes earlier. Were those signs of an honest woman? Or were those signs of a devious woman? Did she tell me those things because she wanted me to share Detective Grant’s suspicion? Grant had already questioned her about the possibility of a boyfriend gone mad, so certainly she knew what I was getting at from the get-go. Did she want me to snoop as far away from the real reason for Violeta’s murder as possible? Yes, she’d been a stripper in her early days. Yes, she’d been called a gold digger. Yes, she’d been accused of rewriting her husband’s will as he lay on his deathbed. Yes, she’d been accused of being adulterous and uncouth. And yes, she was handy with little guns. But did that make her a liar? Did that make her a murderer? Somebody I couldn’t trust? Somebody I should fear?
My water came to a boil. I poured it over my teabag. Just the smell of those soaking Darjeeling leaves sweetened my mood. Then Gabriella Nash found me. She was crying. Again.
“Good gravy, Gabriella! Don’t you know we’ve got a woman president? Buck up!”
“They want me to do a column,” she said.
“So those are tears of joy.”
She started waaaah-ing like Lucy Ricardo. “No they aren’t.”
I felt like strangling her. I strangled my teabag instead. “Let’s get this straight-you’ve been at the paper for two months and they’ve given you a column? And this is bad news? Most reporters have to wait for twenty years.”
“It’s for the Saturday Home amp; Garden section.”
“Oh.”
“On pets.”
“Oh dear.”
She pulled a paper towel off the roll on the counter and wiped her nose. “I didn’t go to journalism school to write about cats and dogs. Not to mention tropical fish.”
“You’ll still be able to write your features won’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“See there,” I said. “It’s not as bad as you think. Continue to write your features as well as you can and make the column as unreadable as you can. When the veterinarians and dog groomers start to bitch, they’ll give the damn thing to someone else.”
“I guess that’s a plan.”
“You bet that’s a plan,” I said. “Meanwhile I’ll give you an idea for your first column. Does your dog make you sick?”
“That’s a stupid idea.”
I headed for the door. “You think so? Do you know that dog hair can make your tonsils swell up like basketballs? Make you snore? Ruin your last chance at love?”
“Love, Mrs. Sprowls?”
I gave her my best Morgue Mama scowl. “That was an unfortunate slip of the tongue, Gabriella. And if you ever tell anybody, I’ll see to it that your next job is writing want ads.”
The afternoon crawled like an 800-year-old Galapagos turtle. Finally, at 4:30, Eric reported what he’d found. He was quite proud of himself. “There are 120 units at the Carmichael House,” he said. “The turnover rate during the eight years Violeta Bell lived there averaged 7.9 percent a year. That’s 183 owners, total. Seventy-two percent of those owners were single women. Four-point-four percent single men. Married couples, happily or otherwise, 23.6 percent. That’s forty-three couples if you can’t do the math in your head.” He handed me the list I wanted with all the married couples’ names.
“Alphabetically, too,” I said, pretending to be impressed. “Now what about the obits?”
He continued his geeky presentation. “Assuming we ran all their obits, a grand total of eight married men passed on to their heavenly reward during the last eight years.” He not only gave me copies of their obituaries, but a cover sheet listing their names and dates of death.
I sent him back to his desk and got to work on the obits. One husband had died the same month Violeta moved in, so I eliminated him as the likely lover. That left seven. Two had died in nursing homes, which meant they had probably been out of their condos for some time. So I eliminated them. That left five. One of the husbands was ninety-seven when he passed. Men being men, I couldn’t totally eliminate him, but I did put him in the unlikely category. That left four.
I checked those four against the first list Eric gave me. Two wives had sold their units after their husbands died. Two still lived there. Was one of them the nice gal who didn’t have a clue her husband had an affair with Violeta Bell? Or was Kay Hausenfelter lying? Was that husband still alive? And did his wife actually have a clue? Was Kay covering up for her? Or was Kay telling a much bigger lie? Was Kay Hausenfelter covering up for herself? Sending me on a wild goose chase? Looking for a goose that didn’t exist?
And there was an even bigger question: How in the hell was I going to find answers to those other questions?
I fled the morgue at five. Drove straight home. I gave James a quick walk. Boiled a packet of Tabatchnick’s Golden Cream of Mushroom Soup for my supper. Thank God it wasn’t an Ike night. I watched a couple hours of TV, flipping back and forth between the Everybody Loves Raymond marathon on Channel Nine and The Naked Archeologist on The History Channel. I was slipping into my pajamas when the phone rang. It was Detective Grant. “Don’t tell me you’re home from work already,” he said.
I knew he was yanking my chain. “I just walked in the door.”
I was standing in my dark bedroom with one leg in my bottoms and one leg out, but I could see the grin on his big round face. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls,” he said ever-so-nonchalantly, “I’m sitting here behind my big policeman’s desk with a very interesting report from my pointy-eared pals at BCI.”
I hopped into the second leg. “And?”
“Looks like Prince Anton and Violeta Bell are siblings. A ninety-percent likelihood, anyway.”
“A ninety-percent likelihood? That’s the best you can do?”
There was a long silence. Then the sound of something being slurped. “Apparently testing for siblingship, as the elves call it, is not as conclusive as other types of DNA testing. Especially when you don’t have a mother or father to test. Which in this case we don’t.”
To say the least I was disappointed. “Can’t they squeeze out another ten percent?”
“We’re not talking about making lemonade, Maddy. Be happy with the ninety. It’s as close to a slam-dunk as you can get. Then, of course, there’s the scrapbook.”
“The scrapbook?”
“Yeah-she had a scrapbook. Mostly birthday cards and Christmas cards and gooey crap like that. But there
