wrought iron chairs by the window overlooking the outside garden. He covered his face with his hands and cried. “I’m taking Petru home, Maddy.”
“Yes-you should.”
“Such a vile thing, Maddy.”
“Yes-it is.”
“I’ll sprinkle those damn ashes from one corner of Romania to the other.”
I pulled him up by the arm. Pulled him toward the others. “Come on.”
He pulled away. “No-I can’t stand to look.”
I let go of his arm. Called to Gabriella. “Bring your notebook over here. The prince has a quote.”
Gabriella knew enough to come.
I pinched my thumb and forefinger on the prince’s chin and swung his face toward mine. “Tell her exactly what you just told me,” I commanded.
The prince started stammering, unsure of what he’d said.
I gave him a hint. “About sprinkling.”
“Maybe it isn’t such a good idea that I say anything right now,” he stammered, trying to retreat.
I refused to let him. “Maybe it is. Tell her!”
He obeyed. “I told her I’m going to take Petru’s ashes home. To Romania. And sprinkle them from one corner to the other.” Now he embellished a bit. “It’s what she would want, I think.”
I waited until Gabriella stopped scribbling. “You get it all?”
“Of course I got it all,” she said.
Now I called Detective Grant over. Weedy came with him, snapping pictures like a frog in a swarm of flies. “Now Gabriella,” I said, “read your quote to the detective.”
She refused. “I don’t have to run my quotes by the police.”
“This one you do,” I said. “Read!”
And so she read: “I’m going to take Petru’s ashes home. To Romania. And sprinkle them from one corner to the other.”
I looked at Grant. Mentally crossed all my fingers and toes that he knew where I was going. Luckily he did. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you from reporting that,” he said to Gabriella. “But-so there’s no confusion-finding the gun in the ashes is part of an ongoing police investigation and strictly embargoed until I say so.” He looked squarely at Gabriella. “Agreed?”
Gabriella, by now, of course, knew that something was up. Something conspiratorial. More than likely unethical. “I think I’d better call Tinker before I agree to anything,” she said.
I set her straight. “The only call you’re going to make is to the metro desk. You’re going to have them insert Prince Anton’s quote into your story for tomorrow.”
She started raking through her purse for her cell phone. “I’m calling Tinker.”
I had to act fast, as they say. “And of course when they arrest the killer, tomorrow or the next day, Detective Grant will make sure you’re the one who gets the story. Even though Dale Marabout is the police reporter.”
That Gabriella understood. “Well, I can’t muck up an ongoing investigation, can I?”
“No you can’t,” I said. “And neither can you, Weedy.”
Weedy stopped snapping. He knew how to play the game. “It would be great to be on hand when the arrest is made.”
Gabriella called the metro desk. With my help, she gave the night editor a couple of paragraphs to insert in her story for the morning paper. We didn’t have to rearrange the facts much at all:
On an emotional visit yesterday to the Riverbend Moor Family Memory Garden in Bloomfield Township, Prince Anton announced his intention to take his sibling’s ashes back to their Eastern European homeland.
“I’m going to take Petru’s ashes home, to Romania,” he said, staring sadly at the purple urn and other mementoes inside the glass-covered niche in the columbarium. “And sprinkle them from one corner to the other. It’s what she would want, I think.”
23
Wednesday, August 30
Ike shook me awake at three o’clock, just like I’d asked. I took a quick shower and dressed. Dungarees. A tee shirt. A peelable sweat shirt over that. I drank half a mug of much-too-hot tea. I shook Ike awake and reminded him to take James out for his six a.m. pee. Then I drove to the paper. West Apple was empty. It had rained sometime after I’d gone to bed. The dark city glistened like a glazed chocolate donut. Something I wished I had right then, along with the rest of my tea.
Detective Grant was waiting for me when I pulled up. He didn’t have the police van this time. He was driving his own car. It was one of those enormous station wagons they don’t make anymore. I opened the back door. Gabriella, Dale Marabout, and Weedy slid over. Their sleepy, bugged-out eyes made them look like hallucinating toads. Weedy offered me his open box of Entenmann’s Mini Muffins. I took the last three. “God bless,” I said.
Prince Anton was in the front with Detective Grant. He twisted his head and blew me a playful kiss.
Grant sang out, “Wagon ho!”
We pulled away from the curb, made a wide, illegal U-turn and headed out of the city, everyone slurping from a plastic travel mug of something except me.
We were on our way to Bloomfield Township, to the cemetery, to catch Violeta Bell’s murderer. And we were driving there in the middle of the night because we wanted to be in place before the murderer could read the morning paper, then drive like a maniac to the cemetery and remove the little. 22 pistol from the ashes.
It could take weeks for the prince to clear all of the legal hurdles, of course, but Detective Grant and I were working on the assumption that the murderer would panic and want to get the gun out of those ashes as fast as possible.
The murderer had put the gun there thinking it was the best place in the entire universe to hide it. And it was a dandy hiding place. Cops search garbage dumpsters. Cops dredge rivers. Cops scrounge around in ditches and dig up backyards. But poke into the ashes of the deceased? When is the last time you heard of a cop doing that? But then a pretender to the Romanian throne shows up in town. And he’s the brother of the person you’ve killed. And he plans to take those ashes off to his homeland and sprinkle them over hill and dale. And the gun would come tumbling out.
And presumably that gun would be traceable to the killer in some way. Given the planning that must have gone into Violeta’s murder, you wouldn’t think the killer would have been dumb enough to leave fingerprints on the gun. Or a paper trail. But if the killer did show up to retrieve the gun, then most surely there was something that could link the killer to it. It was still dark when we reached the cemetery. We took the looping drive to the maintenance building. We parked behind it, alongside a stack of burial vaults. A couple of cars were already parked there. “Looks like we’re the last to arrive,” Grant said.
We hurried to the columbarium. We used the back door, entering directly into the superintendent’s office. The first thing I noticed was that there were only two chairs in the little room. And both were already occupied by uniformed officers. One officer-the one not monitoring a trio of small video screens-jumped up and offered his chair to Detective Grant. Grant immediately offered it to Prince Anton, who immediately offered it to me. Not being a total fool, I immediately accepted his offer. Grant sat on the corner of the superintendent’s desk. Weedy, Gabriella, Dale, and the prince were forced to sit on the floor.
Grant folded his arms and dug his chin into his chest. “Let me give you a brief overview of our plans this morning. We’ve got one camera fixed on the entrance and another on the exit. Who knows which way the suspect might come in. The other camera is in the ceiling above Violeta’s niche. The only caveat we face is the possibility that the suspect might park somewhere else and come up through the river valley, or the woods on either side. That’s why, as of right now, there’ll be no talking or coughing or sneezing or farting or anything.”
Weedy immediately broke the rules. “No farting?”
I broke the rules, too. “If the murderer is who I think it is, then we won’t have to wait long.”
Grant shushed us and the wait began. It was five o’clock. All over Hannawa drivers were dropping off bundles
