Authors: Delia Rosen

One Foot In The Gravy (11 page)

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

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Rhonda was there with her newly done hair, which looked frighteningly like the oddly windblown hair I saw the day before. So were Grant Daniels and Deputy Chief Whitman, who were standing together beside the door. I nodded to them both. Grant seemed to pay me a hair more attention than he would have before last night. Then he was back checking out the crowd and talking to Whitman.

The only Cozy Fox in attendance was Lolo. Besides myself, she was also the only one there who had also been at the dinner party.

Royce was also there. He was in the back, as far from his former wife as the space would allow. He waved as I entered. I waved back. That was it. He could drop dead.

I walked over and said a quick farewell to Hoppy Hopewell. He looked okay, better than he had the last time I’d seen him. I noticed there were no trinkets, no parting gifts in the coffin. This was not going to be an emotional send-off.

I sat in the middle, on the aisle, my heart trying to convince my brain that Grant shouldn’t be joining Royce on that fiery ferry ride to hell. That was when he surprised me by coming over. My brain agreed to move him off the dock.

“Sorry I had to go,” he said.

“No need to be sorry,” I said. “I was asleep.” My heart was screaming murderously at my braincontrolled mouth.

“I know, but I should have left a note or something.”

“What, like thanks for the Joe?”
Take that,
said my heart, wresting command.

“No, seriously,” he said in a strong whisper. He was trying not to lean close and create the wrong impression, which left him talking almost like a ventriloquist. “The case woke me up around two and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Oh. That worked.
I felt good again. “Thanks, I said.” My brain had the reins again. “What did you wake up thinking about?”

“What I was just discussing with Deputy Chief Whitman, the secrecy surrounding Hopewell’s estate.”

“No duh. I couldn’t even find out who got the chocolate shop.” No duh? What was I, twelve years old? Maybe that was my problem. Grant made me feel like a teen again.

“And you probably won’t find that out,” Grant said. “Solly Granger filed a series of motions, along with the will, pertaining to Section 29-25-104 of the state code regarding probate. It has to do with forestalling the intervention by any thirdperson claimant.”

“In non-legalese?”

“Basically, Granger moved to bar Hoppy’s sister from making any claims against the estate.”

“Really? So she’s not—”

“She’s not.”

That was a little bit of a surprise. I was willing to guess that if anyone had inherited whatever he had, it was Sis. As we were talking, Solly walked in with Father Virgil Breen of St. Joseph’s. That was obviously to protect Solly from any further questioning, which Father Breen could dismiss as inappropriate.

Grant now had an excuse to lean closer: decorum. “Granger also told me this will be the only public event involving Hoppy Hopewell.”

“Not surprising,” I said. “Funerals tend to be private.”

“This is more than private,” Grant said. “I was led to believe that his sister wouldn’t even be there.”

We both sat back as organ music began and Father Breen took center stage and kind words were uttered about the deceased. But, like Grant, my mind was elsewhere, sorting through what little we knew.

I was still sorting when the clergyman finished after about ten minutes, Solly rose and left, and the memorial was, evidently, quite done.

Chapter 12

Rhonda slipped through a side door so I didn’t have to talk to her again. But I did excuse myself from Grant—who gave me a handshake instead of a peck, which sucked the tiniest bit of joy from me—and chased Lolo down in the line filing out.

We emerged into the sunlight together. She looked lovely in a clingy black blouse and kneelength skirt with elbow-length black gloves and a black pillbox hat and veil.

“That was almost lovely,” Lolo said.

Well-said,
I thought. She seemed as nonplussed as I was by the whole thing. I asked how she was doing.

“I feel a little like Lady Macbeth,” she replied.

“Having trouble with spots?”

“No, not that,” she said. “‘What? In our house?’”

High school English came back to me. After conspiring to murder the king with hubbins, Lady Macbeth caused a stir when she was apparently more upset that he died there than that he was dead at all.

“But I don’t apologize,” she said as we walked toward the parking lot. “I enjoyed Mr. Hopewell’s company but I was not a great admirer.”

“Some history there?” I asked.

“Some indeed,” she replied.

When she didn’t elaborate, I said, “Did you invest with him too?”

She turned toward me so fast I could swear her hat shifted. “
You
gave him money?”

“Exotic aphrodisiacs,” I said, trying to think of something he might not have asked her to invest in. “Egyptian pomegranate, century-old ginseng, oysters from Pitcairn Island.” I stopped there because those were the only aphrodisiacs I knew about.

Lolo’s eyes lowered, dragging her face with them. “Then the rumors are true.”

“What rumors?”

“I knew that he was running several businesses on the side, poor man—”

“Why poor man?” I made a mental note not to lose track of my subsets here.

“Because he was always so tired when I wanted to talk about ours,” Lolo said, her eyes on some sad memory. “I thought it was just two or three of the Cozies, maybe a few other wealthy matrons. I didn’t know he had gone to the gentry.”

She didn’t mean to be insulting, so I didn’t take it personally. That was just the way a lot of these old Southern moneyed widows were. “Apparently, he had his fingers in a lot of peach pies. At least I wasn’t romantically involved with him.”

Again, the look. “Who was?”

“I couldn’t say,” I told her. “Those were rumors too.”

She sighed. Her harsh looks were like lightning flashes, scary and then gone. I couldn’t tell whether she was protective, jealous, or both. I was betting on just the first.

“
That
is even more exhausting than business,” she said. “I told Hoppy from the start that I would never become involved with him. For myself, I would never indulge in that sort of thing out of wedlock.”

“I’m sure he appreciated that on many levels,” I said.

“As a matter of fact, he did. He told me so.”

“What was ‘your’ business?” I asked, eagerly changing the subject.

“Hmm?” She glanced back toward the funeral home. Maybe she really did just like the guy.

“Your business with Mr. Hopewell.”

“Oh. Exotic mystery memorabilia.”

I was expecting plants or pets or something a little more ordinary. Perhaps, given Lolo’s nature, I should not have been surprised.

“What kind of memorabilia are we talking about here? Jack the Ripper’s moustache wax?”

“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” she said, brightening. “No, he found handwritten notes by Mr. Conan Doyle for an unwritten children’s tale called ‘Who Cooked Jemima Puddleduck,’ the flask of Mr. Raymond Chandler—whence he sought comfort while writing of
The Big Sleep
—a fake leg belonging to Cornell Woolrich on which he carved the names of critics who disliked
I Married a Dead Man
—wonderful things like that.”

I was both speechless and dumbstruck. First by the awesome, almost inspirational
chutzpah
it required to tell someone, even someone as gullible as Lolo, that those artifacts were genuine; and second by the fact that she believed him.

“Do you actually possess these items?” I inquired.

“Alas, I do not,” she said. “Do you remember the tragic plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, in April of 2010?”

“The one that killed the Polish president?” I asked.

“Yes, that very one!” she replied enthusiastically. “It so happens that Maria Kaczy

ska, the president’s wife, ran the equivalent of the Cozy Foxes in Warsaw. Those and several other items were part of her personal collection. They were onboard that plane with her—all tragically destroyed.”

“And you had already paid for them,” I guessed.

“I had. Hoppy was working with the insurance company to recover the funds but—well, you worked in the financial world. You know how complicated those international dealings can be.”

“I do indeed,” I said. “Weren’t they going to some kind of memorial service in the middle of nowhere?”

“The Katyn Massacre of 1940,” Lolo said. “Hoppy and I discussed the event. The Russians killed Polish soldiers there, you see. It was terrible.”

“Massacres usually are,” I said. “What did Hoppy say those items were doing on the plane with the first lady?”

“She was bringing them to give to him.”

“Couldn’t he have just flown to Warsaw?”

“Hoppy was going to the memorial anyway,” she said. “He told me he lost a distant relative in the massacre.”

“Let me guess. He canceled his trip when he learned of the crash.”

“Not entirely,” Lolo said. “He got as far as Europe. Then he came back. No sense going to Smolensk if you’re not going to pick up someone’s collection of mystery memorabilia.”

“I guess not. Did he tell you about Maria Kac zy

ska before he left or after he got back?”

“After he got back,” she said. “He didn’t want to trouble me with details of the negotiation until they were finalized.”

“Did you pay for his airfare?”

“Of course, though he offered,” Lolo said. “This was a business venture, my venture. He was going to amass these pieces, let me select a few I wanted to keep, and sell the rest for a profit. I suppose he knew I could never have parted with any of them, but how many business opportunities promise to be so much fun? Think of how exciting the Cozy Foxes gatherings would have been if we’d had Alfred Hitchcock’s eyeglasses on the table.”

I told her I’d try to imagine. Now, at least, it made sense. Hoppy had this scam working and waited for a European air disaster to pin its failure on the demise of Maria Kaczy

ska. He would have let the insurance angle play out for a year or two and finally given up, by which time Lolo would have forgotten all about it.

It spoke again to money problems, though it didn’t seem as if this one had a romantic component. It didn’t need one, and there was only so much of Hoppy Hopewell to go around.

We reached Lolo’s car, a classic Jaguar XKE coupe. People were moving around us, in wide, arcing trajectories like we were magnetically repulsive. Either they were giving Lolo privacy, or they saw her as toxic at worst, a murderess at worse-still.

She gave the car a loving stroke. “It was my husband’s baby,” she said. “I only take it out for special occasions.”

“It’s a pip.”

“Tell me, Ms. Katz. You meet ordinary people every day.”

“I do. I’m one of them.”

She didn’t appear to have heard. “Do you think that what happened will taint me in their eyes?”

The old gal must have noticed the motion of the mourners. It got to her.

“You mean, give rise to the Curse of Baker Plantation or something like that?”

“Exactly like that,” she said.

“I don’t think so. People are easily distracted by things like unemployment, inflation, terrorism, war, their kids.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” she said. “I do so fret about my station in the community. The Bakers have a reputation, you know. I should be horrified if I failed to uphold it.”

“Before you go,” I said, “I was thinking of asking Gary Gold to write a family history for the back of our menu. Is he a good person for that?”

“Gary is a very inventive fellow,” she said. “He is a mystery novelist, you know.”

“I know.”

She had said that almost reverently, as though he had seen the face of God and drew her a picture.

“I own
all
his original manuscripts,” she added. “Two copies of each, in fact. He printed them out for me. It’s very thrilling. That was what got me interested in the idea of possessing other memorabilia.”

“Poe, Hammett, Gary—I can see how it all fits.”

“As for non-fiction, I do not frankly know if facts could contain his imagination.”

“Do you think he would meet with me to discuss it?”

“Oh, I doubt that, at least initially,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“He is a very private man.”

“Really? Because Thom, my manager, said she saw him with you at the deli a while back—”

“I coaxed him to come out, but he wore a mask.”

“What, like the Lone Ranger?”

“
Exactly
like the Lone Ranger! How splendid you said that—I knew he reminded me of someone. Without the hat or silver bullets, of course.”

“Or the faithful Indian companion,” I guessed.

“He has trust issues, I believe. It took me a long, long while to get him to come and see me.”