Authors: Delia Rosen

One Foot In The Gravy (12 page)

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

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“I had Lizzie collect him,” Lolo said. “Then she went home in her car.”

“I see.” At least, I saw another piece. I still had no idea how they all fit.

“I hope to come by the deli soon with the Cozies,” she said. “I simply must have life return to normalcy as soon as possible. Fictional murders are so much less oppressive.”

Particularly for the victims, I thought as she honest to God “toodle-ooed” me and drove off.

I checked my watch. It was just after eleven. I had time to eat a quick brunch and prepare for lunch rush. Plus, I had some equilibrium where Grant Daniels was concerned.

All in all, a good morning.

Chapter 13

As I helped Newt in the kitchen, I ran through the evidence and leads. It was the same way I’d operated when I was still a practicing accountant. I would do something unchallenging—like walking around the city or hitting a Starbucks and playing
Angry Birds
when it was still the hot new thing-to-do—and think.

I had a lot of pieces; they just didn’t make much of a picture . . . unless you care for Jackson Pollock, in which case I had a masterpiece on my hands.

One thing was clear. Most of the people in Lolo’s circle were uncommonly self-absorbed. That complicated things a bit. At some point during our initial time together, Grant had mentioned to me—and subsequent reading bore this out—that most killers tend to be like that. They think they’re the center of the cosmos, so taking a life is not so troublesome as it is for the rest of us.

I say “us” because there were times in my life when I asked myself that question, whether I
could
kill someone. I don’t mean the spontaneous staban-intruder-with-a-fork sort of thing, which I think we’re all capable of, but something premeditated. On numerous occasions, especially during the unhappy parts of my marriage and the onerous parts of my divorce, when I pondered the age-old “If you knew you could get away with it. . . .”

I always came away thinking I wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t. At least, not where Phil was concerned. And I never hated anyone more than I hated him—except maybe my high school boyfriend Esteban, a foreign exchange student. I fell for the accent, the swarthy good looks, and let him take me across the finish line. After which he disappeared from my life except in hateful thoughts. Part of me had really believed the scumbag would continue to be interested in me, if for no other reason than a potential green card.

So there have been two people I’ve hated, and I never got to the point where I felt I could put a knife in either of their dark, Satanic, bloodless, pig-hearts. That told me either someone had to hate Hoppy a whole lot—which was possible, of course, for reasons I had not yet uncovered—or else the killer was a crazy narcissist, of which I had plenty. And was about to acquire one more.

Mollie Baldwin came to lunch with her teenage daughter Poodle. That’s right: like a dog. Not a nickname, not a nom-de-guerre, that was her real handle. Mollie was a big woman, not very tall, but very wide. She was big in breeding and showing circles as well. Naturally, Mollie’s favorite mysteries involved canines. I know that because she once came in all a-quiver, having just acquired a mint condition first edition of the classic Philo Vance novel
The Kennel Murder Case
. I asked why it was so special.

“Dogs are the only creatures unscathed and untouched since the first falling of man,” she said during the course of our little chat. The other Cozies had nodded, not necessarily because they agreed, but because they agreed that Mollie believed that.

The good news was that she never brought any of her babies with her: they only ate filet, and my meats weren’t good enough for them. They were good enough for Mollie and Poodle, though, and they usually came by before their weekly manicure and pedicures.

Poodle was height-weight proportionate, a pretty early twentysomething except for balls of her curly hair affixed to the sides of her head. She didn’t seem self-conscious about it, however; Poodle was every bit as into dogs as her mother. She was also openly, famously into young men; aggressively, like a dog in heat.

Mollie was a little more reserved today than usual. Not that she barked and panted, but she usually had a kind of wide-eyed eagerness about her that was absent today. Either she was still a little shellshocked from the other night, or else one of her dogs had a worm.

I took their order myself. It was a pair of chicken salad platters, not hot dogs. I passed it to Luke, who was bussing, to take to the kitchen. Poodle excused herself and went to chat with a pair of Nashville Electric Service hardhats.

Mollie smiled thinly. “Youth,” she sighed. There was a disapproving tone in her voice, one that suggested that there were probably fights at home like the ones my mother and I used to have. Except when I dated older doctors or lawyers.

“What were you like as a kid?” I asked.

“Not like that.” She leveled a red fingernail at Poodle. “I waited until I was older, then—just between us hens, yes, I made up for lost time.”

Mollie was only in her early fifties, but she had put two husbands in the grave. I was guessing she made up for her time off the market with a vengeance.

“But this—this offering herself,” Mollie sighed. “And then to keep a diary of her experiences.”

“What girl doesn’t?”

“And what mother doesn’t peek?” she asked rhetorically.

Plenty,
I was willing to bet.

“She isn’t bad, you know,” Mollie said.

“Of course not, Mrs. Baldwin. Your daughter is just experimenting.”

Mollie frowned. “I meant as a writer.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, she meets that local fellow once a week for tutoring.”

“Gary Gold?”

Mollie nodded.

My only response was a silent
Oy
. It was time to change the subject.

“How are you holding up?” I asked.

“I am in mourning, of course,” Mollie said. She pointed to the black Victorian flower pin tacked to the lapel of her beige jacket. Poodle had nothing for show-and-tell. She was apparently less grieved.

“You weren’t at the memorial—”

“It would have been too, too upsetting.”

“Were you very close to the deceased?”

“
Very
close, at one time,” Mollie said. “We were lovers after my first and second husbands passed.”

“That worked out,” I said.

“Hoppy was a great consolation.”

I didn’t know Mollie well, but I decided to push. “Why didn’t you two hook up? Permanently, I mean.”

“I asked, several times,” Mollie said. “But he had another love.”

“Who?”

“He never shared that with me,” she said.

“That seems a little . . . selective, given everything else you shared.”

“Oh, that was just torrid fornication,” she said with a dismissive wave of her thick hand. “There was a lot about Hoppy he kept to himself.”

“Such as?”

Mollie’s brow dipped. “I don’t know. He kept it to himself.”

“I meant personally, professionally, about his past—”

She drank some water, seemed reluctant to say more.

“I don’t mean to pry,” I fibbed. “It’s just that—I remember that when my Uncle Murray died it was good to just talk about him.”

She smiled wistfully. “Ah, Murray.”

Uh-oh,
I thought. I wasn’t going to ask.

“He was a sweetheart,” Mollie said.

Don’t say it—

“I miss him.”

Don’t tell me how much or in what way—

“He used to write folksy songs about my loves,” she said. “
God Bless the Puppy. What a Difference a Dog Makes. You Go to My Tail.
He would sing them to me right where you are standing.”

I relaxed as though cables had been cut. I literally
phewed
. It wasn’t that I begrudged my uncle a sex life. It was just the thought that any part of my gene pool could be amused for very long by someone with a two-track mind.

“Hoppy was different,” she said. “He wasn’t creative. He wasn’t that entertaining, though he imagined he was. He wasn’t even that smart, though he thought he was.”

“In what way?”

“He asked me to invest in some speculative new business about seven or eight months ago, something I knew was bogus.”

“Exotica?”

“You could call it that,” she said. “He told me he had met an artist in Europe who created Pet Chias.”

“Which were?”

“Floral growths that one affixed to the tail of a dog,” Mollie said. “They grew, nurtured by the dog’s own water. He said it was very green.”

That was not the color I would have guessed.

“Did you give him money?”

“Of course,” she said. “There was an earnestness about him one simply could not deny.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “He decided to abandon the business because the Chia Pet people sent him a legal letter.”

“Yes!” Mollie said with a look of surprise. “How did you know?”

“Just a hunch,” I said. I grabbed the water pitcher from Luke, refilled Mollie’s glass, and handed the pitcher back to him. The coquettish smile she gave him made me wonder if I had appeared so obvious and needy to Grant the night before. I resolved to practice my man-looks in a mirror before I went to bed. “Did you know that Hoppy had a number of start-ups that met similar fates?” I asked when Luke had gone.

“I didn’t know for a fact but I suspected,” Mollie said. “He had a lot of ideas. He was an extremely driven man.”

“Is it possible that others didn’t see it that way?”

“How so?”

“Hoppy was taking money and failing to deliver on his promises,” I said. “Do you think that what happened the other night might have been the work of one of his less understanding partners?”

“There are dogs that walk and others that speak and one that plays computer games using bark recognition software,” she said. “I suppose anything is possible.”

“True,” I agreed.

“What I told the police officer was that while I couldn’t imagine who would want Hoppy dead, I could imagine a woman, any woman of a certain age and situation, pining in his absence. Unless, of course, she had distractions.”

I followed her eyes to the blue-collar hunks. As much as the idea of Poodle bird-dogging for them both had its skeevy side—and it did, enough to dry my mouth and chill the skin—I had to admire her pluck. While Mollie was distracted by visions of doggy-style shenanigans, I decided to ask—

“I wonder if Hoppy used the chocolate shop as collateral in any of these dealings.”

“He didn’t with me,” she said, her eyes sizing up the human chew toys. “He wasn’t a particularly courageous businessman. I’m not sure he would have risked something certain for something speculative.”

Poodle returned with an email address written on her wrist. Their food arrived as she was transferring it to her iPhone. I wished them a good day and went to the back to the kitchen, intrigued by three things Mollie had told me. This was the first I had heard of a love in Hoppy’s life—not just a paramour—and the first intimation that someone had realized the chocolate shop, not a family fortune, was the dead man’s financial lifeline.

Scoundrel Hoppy Hopewell may have been, but there was something sad in the story she told.

Chapter 14

If you had told me that Pinky and Jennifer hadn’t moved in twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t have argued. They were wearing the same clothes, doing the same off-loading of pretzels as the day before.

“I guess you sell a lot of those,” I said as I walked in.

“A ton, but all to one guy,” Pinky said.

“An S&M freak,” I suggested.

Both girls froze and fired me a look.

“Sugar and monosodium glutamate,” I said.

They relaxed, snorted, then air-high-fived me. I dual-handed them back.

“Did I miss you at the memorial?” I asked.

“We didn’t go,” Pinky said. “We’re both hourly. I wasn’t giving up seven-and-a-quarter to see someone dead who I saw for free alive.”

“Me too,” Jennifer agreed.

Pinky looked at me suspiciously. “Hey, you’re not asking us for a reason, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“
You’re
not the new owner, are you? Scoping us out, like, undercover?”

Both girls were suddenly alert, like flamingos who think—if flamingos think—a floating log might be an alligator.

“I’m definitely not the new owner,” I said.

“Yeah, because, like, honestly—when we were talking about it later, we didn’t think you really came in here to place an order yesterday,” Pinky said.

“You’ve got a good sense of things,” I said appreciatively. “If things do go south here, you can come work for me.”

I meant it too. I was thinking about how few hard hats came to the deli and how these two could make a difference.

“Hey, thanks,” Pinky said. “Sorry if we were, like, weird about that.”

“Not a problem,” I said. Solly could probably go after me for allegedly raiding the ranks, but I decided not to worry about it. My offer was contingent.

“So did you really want to place an order?” Pinky asked.

“No,” I admitted.

The girls high-fived.

“I was the caterer at the party where Hoppy died. I saw your boss crash-land about as close as you are to me.”

“Too bad you didn’t shoot that,” Jennifer said. “Probably would’ve been top video on YouTube for, like, a week.”

“Probably,” I said. It also might have helped us solve the crime, but I didn’t want to confuse the matter. “Anyway, that’s why I’ve been asking about Hoppy.”

“Like, to finish the story,” Pinky said. “You saw part two, you want to see part one.”

“
New Moon
without
Twilight,
” Jennifer said. “Could frustrate.”

“Exactly.”
Christ, was anything real to these girls, to that generation?

“So what do you want to know now?” Pinky asked.

“Hoppy took a trip,” I said, incongruously reminding myself of a movie my dad once made me watch—what was it? Hopalong Cassidy served something. “I was wondering if you remembered when that was and where he went.”

Pinky held up a finger. She came around the counter and went to a door in the back, one that was painted, jamb and all, to look like a gingerbread house.

“Let me check the calendar,” the young girl said. “He used to write important stuff for us there.”

“Write” I thought, then suddenly remembered “writ.”
Hoppy Serves a Writ.

“Mr. H was gone in October,” she shouted from the back.

“What does it say exactly?”

“It says, ‘H in Europe,’ and it has a line from October 17 to October 24. He wanted to be back for Halloween, which is our busiest time.”

That didn’t work out. “What about before that?” I asked.

“He was gone in the spring,” she said. “Let’s see—that was April 11 through the 23rd.”

Those dates coincided with the crash in Smolensk ; or rather, they followed it closely. My guess was that he heard about it and got out of sight
tout de suite,
so he could tell Lolo he was going to meet the Polish First Lady.

“Do you happen to know where he went that first time?” I asked.

Pinky emerged from the back. “No, but I remember thinking that it wasn’t, like, a beach or anything.”

“Why?”

“Because he came back as pale as when he left.”

That wasn’t much help. He could have gone to Memphis.

“Do you know if he arranged the trip through a travel agent?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” the girls said in unison.

“Okay, what am I missing here?”

“Paul McCartney,” Pinky said. “McCartney Travel Agency.”

“He’s always playing Beatles songs on his car boom box.”

Obviously, I needed to go to a few Lions Club meetings, or whatever kind of business networking went on down here. I would have remembered a name like that. “Let me guess,” I said. “He drives a Jetta.”

The girls looked at me like I was Kreskin. “How did you know?”

“A bug,” I said. When they didn’t get it, I added, “A beetle?”

“Ohhhhh,” they said as one, nodding with wonderment as though I’d worked out a proof for trisecting an angle.

I was surprised they knew the Beatles. I asked if they knew Mr. McCartney.

“Do not,” Pinky said.

“He’s kinda creepy,” Jennifer added. “Looks at us like we’re peppermint patties.”

They gave me the location of his storefront, which was just two blocks away, and I thanked them for their time and trust.

“You want a chocolate chip before you go?” Pinky asked, pointing to the tray they’d just filled.

“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” I said. “I’m more of a yogurt raisin kinda gal.”

“Health food, huh?” Jennifer said.

“I don’t know about that,” I told her. “I guess I just don’t like comfort foods that crunch.”

“Diggin’ that,” Pinky said. “Your heart’s breaking, you, like, don’t want to be reminded of that with every bite.”

“I guess,” I said.

I left trailing that hollow tinkle again, thinking Mountain Jim’s ice cream . . . cheesecake . . . yogurt raisins. Soft and smooshy. Maybe the girl had hit on something.

A valuable reminder, I thought, not to equate youth with a lack of savvy.

Or the reverse, I thought with visions of Rhonda and Lolo and her Cozy Foxes in my head.

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

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