of papers. The route rats who delivered those papers at fifteen cents per were busy filling the back seats of their cars.
The truth of the matter was that I didn’t have one suspect in mind that morning. I had two. One was just as likely to pop up on the video monitor as the other.
After ten minutes or so, Gabriella, Weedy, and the prince rested their heads against the cement block wall and closed their eyes. I would have loved to scrunch down in my chair and take a nap myself, but I figured snoring was another one of Detective Grant’s verboten noises.
For a while I watched the second hand on my watch slowly circle Betty Boop’s sexy cartoon face. I’d bought the watch from the National Public Radio catalog that comes every fall. Every year I feel guilty and order something dumb I don’t need. That past fall, I’d actually ordered a couple of dumb things, the watch for myself and a pair of green Mountain Dew “Do The Dew” boxers for Eric Chen. I know that underwear is the last thing you should buy a subordinate, but how could I have resisted? Given his addiction to that horrible stuff? Anyway, it was a big mistake. Every time he wears them, which is at least twice a week, he pulls up the elastic and snaps it. “Got your undies on,” he says.
After watching my watch, I watched Detective Grant’s dangling feet. Either he had some terrible twitch or he was keeping time to some crazy tune in his head. I also watched the officer who’d dutifully given up his chair. He was leaning against the wall next to the inside door. The tips of his fingers tucked into the front of his thick gun belt. His eyes were fixed on Gabriella. His mind was, well, you know where his mind was.
My own eyes eventually focused on the calendar on the wall. It was one of those pathetic calendars that men insist on putting up in their workspaces. This one featured a girl in short-shorts suggestively perched on a giant riding lawnmower. Each month’s photo, I supposed, featured a different half-naked nymph with another gargantuan piece of lawn-care equipment. Admittedly, mowing a 200-acre cemetery must be a lot more mind-numbing than mowing your grass at home, but never once while mowing my eighth of an acre have I fantasized about sex.
I slid my eyes to the other purpose of the calendar, the dates. I tried to see how many of them I could connect with somebody’s birthday, or death, or wedding, or divorce. I came up with only six. Then I remembered Gabriella’s very first story on the Queens of Never Dull. In that story Violeta said she was going to be seventy-three on August 17th. I dug a piece of paper out of my purse-a bank ATM envelope-and wrote a note to Prince Anton: What was the day and month of Petru’s birth? I handed him my pen along with the note.
The prince scowled at me then scribbled his answer. He handed the envelope and pen back to me. His answer: 8 February.
I smiled thanks and averted my eyes so I couldn’t see his. We already knew that Violeta had lied about her age, that she was not seventy-two at the time of her murder, but seventy-eight. And we knew she’d lied about a ton of other things. So it was not surprising that she’d also lied about the date of her upcoming birthday. Or had she lied? Was the 17th of August indeed her birthday? The day Violeta Bell was born? The day of her sex change surgery? None of this mattered, of course. Violeta was dead. Prince Anton was her brother. But when you’re waiting for a murderer to show up-well, you have to nip your anxiety in the bud with something, don’t you?
Another equally useless thing came to me while we waited. It was my own version of that tasteless ethnic joke about how many whatevers it takes to screw in a lightbulb. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Three. One to hold the bulb. Two to turn the ladder.
My version of the joke was this: How many people does it take to catch a murderer? The answer was eight. One old Romanian prince. Three policemen. Two reporters. One librarian. One photographer to capture all the fun.
And why did Detective Grant allow so many unnecessary people to come along on his stakeout? He told me he wanted Prince Anton there so he could keep an eye on him. He said there was still a remote chance that the prince was the murderer. “I don’t want his highness sneaking off while I wait for nobody,” Grant told me when he called me at midnight to make sure I didn’t oversleep. Weedy was there because both Grant and Alec Tinker wanted plenty of pictures. And if there’s a photographer, there’s got to be a reporter to make sure everybody’s name is spelled right. And why two reporters? Both Gabriella and Dale Marabout? Because there would be a very easy murder to solve if only one of them were invited. And why was I there? Because I’m Morgue Mama.
“Car.”
Grant twirled off the desk and leaned over the officer watching the monitors. “Very nice,” he whispered. “It’s show time.”
I checked my watch. It was only 6:15. There was no way in hell the killer could have gotten the paper at home, read Gabriella’s story, digested the gravity of it, and then driven way out there by a quarter after six. Which meant one of three things. One, that the killer was not one of the two people I thought it was, but an employee of the paper. Two, that the killer had been tipped off. Three, that the murderer was one of that evergrowing percentage of Hannawans who read the paper for free on our website. My betting was that it was three. The murderer got up early, as always, went online to read hellohannawa. com, as always, and got a big, big surprise.
I leaned back in my chair and tipped my head back until I could see the video monitors. I remained frozen in that awkward position for a good five minutes until the camera hidden above Violeta’s niche showed a blurry but very recognizable Barbara Wilburger. Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy’s totally unlikeable, tight-assed professor daughter. I gave myself a pat on the back. Not a real one. An imaginary one. I’d been right. She was one of the two possible murderers I’d expected to show up to dig the pistol out Violeta’s ashes. The other, of course, was Phil McPhee.
Barbara stopped in front of Violeta’s niche. She looked this way and that, like a school kid about to cross a busy street. She was wearing jeans and a man’s oxford shirt with the tails hanging out, the kind of outfit a woman wears when she’s going to repaint the bedroom. She was carrying a canvas beach bag.
Now, why did I suspect Violeta Bell’s murderer was either Barbara Wilburger or Phil McPhee? Like Detective Grant, I’d found no direct evidence. But I had found those little balls of pet fur. First, in Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy’s condo. In that beautiful brass wastebasket in the foyer. Second, in Phil McPhee’s office. In that kitschy wastebasket with the hand-painted ants. The common denominator, of course, was Barbara. That day Gabriella and I had visited Ariel’s condo, Barbara had made a huge, unnecessary fuss over the cat fur. She’d rolled the fur she’d raked off the sofa into a tight tiny ball. The peculiar habit of someone visibly uptight and angry. Someone with a high opinion of themselves and a correspondingly low opinion of others.
So when I later spotted those tiny balls of Shih Tzu fur in Phil McPhee’s wastebasket, I knew Barbara Wilburger had been there. And not just once. You don’t roll dog fur into tiny balls on your first visit. No, Barbara felt very much at home in the McPhees’ condo. Specifically in Phil’s office.
Phil McPhee was an experienced philanderer. He knew the dangers of romancing his lovers in the bed he shared with his wife. The daybed in his office was a much safer venue. And so were the mats in the fitness room. I was sure that’s why Violeta Bell showed up down there in the middle of the night in her frilly underwear. She was expecting to find Phil. Instead she found Barbara. And Barbara made her take off her robe. And she wrapped it around her little. 22 pistol. And she shot Violeta Bell dead.
Phil McPhee was a lot like my late husband. Way too much testosterone. Precious little conscience. Multiple mistresses were the norm. If my theory was right, Phil was carrying on with Barbara Wilburger and Violeta Bell at the same time. Violeta was hardly a spring chicken and Barbara anything but sexy. But a snake like Phil would get a thrill out of bedding one of his wife’s best friends at the same time he was bedding the daughter of another friend.
At some point, Barbara found out about Phil and Violeta. Instead of dumping Phil, or murdering Phil, although either in my book would have been the sensible thing to do, she opted to murder Violeta. Clearly the professor of business ethics was not one of those people who practiced what they preached.
And the fitness room was the perfect place to kill Violeta. If indeed it was where Violeta often met Phil for their monkey business, all it would take to get her there at that hour, on the Fourth of July when firecrackers were booming all over Hannawa, was a note under the door, or an email, or whatever signal Phil used to summon Violeta to the mats. Barbara certainly had a key for the Carmichael House, and from what Gabriella and I saw that day we visited, permission to use the parking garage. Barbara also would have known about all the skeleton keys hidden all over the place. Oh yes, the fitness room was the perfect place.
And not only because of the ease in luring Violeta there. It would let Phil know in no uncertain terms that hence forth, his only woman on the side would be one Barbara Wilburger. Forever and forever. And now a hidden
