Dale was digging into the story beyond what the police were officially giving him. He had already cultivated a source. The obvious candidate was Detective Scotty Grant. Grant was always leaking little gems like that when it served his purposes. But it could be someone else. Someone close to the investigation in some other way. Someone who knew there was something more to this story than Scraggly Cabbie Kills Rich Old Woman.
I printed out copies of Gabriella’s feature and the two police stories Dale had written so far. I put them in a fresh manila folder. I wrote NEVER DULL on the tab. Then I picked up the phone and punched Gabriella’s extension. “I apologize for being snippy this morning,” I said. “I had a lot on my mind.”
She swiveled in her chair and waved at me across the newsroom. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been such a noodge.”
I took that proverbial deep breath. “What do you say we start fresh with breakfast Saturday morning?”
5
Saturday, July 15
I had breakfast with Ike at my house then drove to Waldo’s Waffle House for breakfast with Gabriella. I ordered a multigrain blueberry waffle. Gabriella ordered the Big Waldo-scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, hash browns, wheat toast and three buttermilk pancakes. When the waitress put all that food in front of her I was appalled. “You recently have a sumo wrestler’s stomach implanted in you?”
Gabriella started smearing butter on her pancakes. “We Nashes are blessed with a high metabolism.”
“Or tape worms,” I said.
I watched her drench the pancakes with syrup. I didn’t give a diddle how much the girl ate-and frankly I didn’t have much room to talk inasmuch as I was about to put a waffle on top of the oatmeal I’d had an hour earlier-but prattling on about her gluttony did keep me from bringing up the touchy subject I’d lured her there to discuss. So I gave her another zinger. “You may not have anything to worry about now, dear,” I said. “But twenty years from now you’re going to wake up with Big Waldo clinging to your thighs.”
She wiggled her perfect little eyebrows. “And all for just $5.95.”
Yes, Gabriella Nash was a bit too emotional for my taste. Yes, like most young reporters, she was mesmerized by her brilliant future. And yes, I still had a bug up my behind about the things she’d written in the college newspaper about me. “Sprowls,” she wrote, “is the desk-bound gnome who watches over the newspaper’s morgue, where the stories real reporters write are filed away for future reference.” But sitting there that morning, exchanging smart-ass comments, eating that sinfully good food, well, good gravy, what can I say? I liked the horrible girl. “There’s a chance you may be right about Violeta Bell,” I admitted.
“Are you trying to apologize?” she asked, slowly feeding a slice of bacon into her mouth.
“Let’s not use the A-word, Gabriella. That only levels the playing field between us.”
“Okay then-what word should we use?”
I speared a blueberry and dipped it in the mountain of fresh whipped cream atop my waffle. “The R-word. I’ve been reevaluating what you said-about the possibility that your story had something to do with her murder.”
She wasn’t prepared to go there. Her tough-girl veneer began to crack like stale lipstick. “But the cops have the killer. And the motive.”
I patted her hand. “They’ve got squat.” I told her about Eddie French’s aversion to guns. I did not, of course, tell her about Bob Averill’s aversion to Eddie’s sister.
She played with her hash browns, pulling away the crunchy ones on the outside to get to the soft ones inside. “Well, it’s not my story any more, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “But I don’t think either of us want to see that wacky cab driver railroaded for something he didn’t do.”
“You want me to help you interfere with a police investigation?”
“Only if you want to.”
Gabriella tightened her lips until they turned white. Either she was on the cusp of crying or squishing her last remaining pancake in my face. “This isn’t fair, Mrs. Sprowls. You’re trying to play on my guilt.”
“Let’s stay away from the G-word, too,” I said. “You have no reason to feel responsible for anything. And neither do I. When I saw those women piling out of that cab at the garage sale, I knew it would make a good story. And you did a good job with it. A great job.”
Gabriella, thank God, dug into that last pancake. “Now you’re trying to butter me up.”
I had no choice but to tell her more than I should. “I can’t tell you who-but someone uncomfortably close to Mr. French’s situation has asked me to sniff around a little. As a rather complicated favor. And in order to do that favor-well, I’m going to need a little favor from you.”
She shook her forkful of dripping pancake at me. “I can see why they call you Morgue Mama.”
I took the fork from her and devoured the piece of pancake like a snake swallowing a helpless tadpole. “It would be smart to stay away from those particular M-words, too, Gabriella.”
“I will.”
“You bet you will.”
I let her eat in peace-for a minute-then took another bite out of her hide. “Your story on the Queens of Never Dull was really quite good. But there was one important thing you left out.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you did.” I wagged my fork at her. “Regarding Violeta Bell’s claim that she was Romanian royalty. You failed to say whether she spoke with an accent or not.”
It was as if she’d just had the Pulitzer Prize taken away from her. “You’re right. That would have been a good touch.”
I pretended to be incensed. In reality I was just playing with her. “A good touch? We’re not discussing your prose here, Gabriella. We’re talking about truth.”
That rankled her. “The story was about four old ladies going to garage sales, Mrs. Sprowls. Not about whether one of them was the queen of Romania.”
“Weren’t you at least a little curious about her claim?”
“Well, sure. But the story-”
I let her off the hook. “All I’m saying is that you should have mentioned whether she spoke with an accent or not.”
Gabriella was finally on to me. “This isn’t about my story. This is about your investigation.”
“Of course it’s about my investigation. Whether Violeta Bell was Romanian royalty might be important.”
“Why would that be important?”
“Anything unusual about a murder victim might be important,” I said. “And claiming to be the queen of Romania is certainly unusual.”
“That it is.”
“Her quotes in your story suggest that the Communists ran her family out of Romania,” I said. “I’m not sure when the Communists took over there. But it was shortly after World War II. That’s when all those Eastern European countries fell to the Communists. Which means she would have been a teenager when she left. Which means she might have had an accent-a trace of one maybe-if she was telling the truth.”
Gabriella folded her hands and leaned over the table as if I was her hard-of-hearing great-great-grandmother. “She did not speak with an accent.”
“Did she sound like she was from Ohio?”
We left Waldo’s in my car. It was nine-thirty already and both the eastbound and westbound lanes of Apple Street were clogging with people frantically trying to get to the supermarket before everybody else did. We turned onto Hardihood Avenue and drove north through the ever-bigger houses. We were heading, of course, to the Carmichael House, to see if we could make a surprise visit to one of the three surviving Queens of Never Dull. I wasn’t exactly proud of myself for making Gabriella come along, but what was I to do? I needed her to get my foot in the door.
“You have a preference who we try first?” Gabriella asked as we wound through the landscapers’ trucks
