Authors: Delia Rosen

One Foot In The Gravy (18 page)

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

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I took her hand. “Y ’know, I’ve done some pretty nutty things in my life,” I said. “We learn from our mistakes.”

I sounded like a mother, from the platitude to the compassionate tone of voice. I have no nephews or nieces or young employees; that was a first for me. And then I thought something no mother should ever think.

“Poodle, I need to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Were you—
angry
at Hoppy?”

She didn’t answer at first. Her hand suddenly felt clammy. She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “I was when he said he couldn’t see me any more, when he said it was time for me to date young men my own age.”

I didn’t for an instant think he was looking out for her. He was a man and he probably got bored once the novelty of Poodle had worn thin. I didn’t ask if she was angry at Hoppy now. The way she’d said it through her teeth answered that.

“What about your mother?” I asked. “Did she know about—”

“No!” Poodle cried. “At least, I don’t think so! I was so careful. I told her the gifts were from a med student at Vanderbilt who I was supposedly dating. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of what I was doing, not at first, but I knew she wouldn’t approve. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been thinking about that since the night Hoppy was . . . since the night he died. Mother doesn’t like the way I cat around with men. We’ve had some terrible fights about it. I know she was there, at the party, but I wanted to tell you that I don’t think she knew. And even if she did, I don’t think . . . I can’t believe . . . she wouldn’t
do
something like this!”

Poodle was full-out hysterical now. I pulled her to me and held her tight. Thom opened the door a crack, making sure I was okay, then quietly withdrew.

The emotional storm passed in two or three minutes. I gave Poodle some paper towels—I didn’t have tissues but I was always spilling coffee on my desk—and she patted her cheeks and eyes.

“I was so stupid,” she said.

“You were trusting, not stupid. We’ve all been there.” I know I was. The big love of my life, or so I thought, was a lug of a jock of an asshole—stop me if you’ve heard
this
one before—who was three years ahead of me in high school and who happened to have the same dentist, Dr. Murray Stone. And while this gentleman-who-shall-remainnameless wouldn’t be seen dead with a wallflowery type like me around his football buddies, he was only too happy to chat me up while waiting for his time in the chair to get that megawatt smile buffed. We went on a date, I fell for his shoulders and stubble, and when I left his apartment the next morning I never heard from him again—except for one time about a year later when he was horny and drunk. I left the message on my answering machine as a reminder not to
not
bang guys like him, but not to be surprised when they disappeared.

Poodle and I sat in silence while she collected herself.

“In a way, I have to thank Hoppy for introducing me to sex,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have missed out on a lot.”

She was obviously feeling very comfortable, very quickly, with Ms. With-It New York. I tried to act as cool as she thought I was. Inside, I was hoping that she’d stop there.

“I just wish I had known about the others,” she said, the teeth clenching again. “That’s what really bites.”

Poodle left after securing another promise from me never to tell her mother about Hoppy or John. I promised, though I didn’t tell her that it wouldn’t surprise me if Mollie already knew. One thing I’d discovered down here is that the society rich talk, especially about each other. A lot. And not kindly.

I was back on duty in time for the lunch rush. Breakfast seemed like it belonged to another day.

In about an hour, lunch would seem that way too.

Chapter 21

I had been intending to call Grant all day, but work and then Poodle and then more work got in the way. So I was glad when he showed up shortly after two.

I was wiping a table. The cloth smelled of everything on the menu. He didn’t seem to notice, and my gladness evaporated when, approaching me, his expression stayed fixed in cop-neutral.

“Can you get away?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. He was clearly not inviting me for an arm-in-arm stroll through Centennial Park. “What’s going on?”

“Lizzie Renoir didn’t show up for work today,” he said. “C’mon. I’ll tell you as we go.”

I held the rag toward Luke, who was about to start his afternoon strum-from-a-stool concert. He set his guitar aside and hurried over as I rushed out, waving to a puzzled Thom. We got in Grant’s unmarked Dodge Charger and he screeched from the curb.

“Lolo called Deputy Chief Whitman when Lizzie didn’t show up,” Grant said. “She lives in that old mansion near the cul-de-sac on South 6th, which is way out of his jurisdiction. He called us and we sent a cruiser over. We found her on the kitchen floor with her head bashed in, one of those blocky, steel hammers beside her—”

“A tenderizer,” I said.

“Right. She was unconscious but still alive. Best guess is that she’d been there for two, three hours. They’ve got her at VU Medical Center. Lolo’s got a research wing named after her.”

That was a lot to take in. I backed up. “If Lizzie lives in a mansion, why—”

“Sorry. You’re so comfortable I forget you’re new here.”

Comfortable?
Jeez. That’s one not designed to make you smile when you roll it over in your memory. I backed up over that speed bump and replayed the words he said after:

“It’s not a mansion now, it’s apartments,” he said. “The fourteen bedrooms were converted about three years ago, when Lizzie moved here.”

“From?”

“Montreal.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask why she doesn’t live with Lolo.”

“I didn’t have time to read her interview. The cop who talked to her said she wanted to have her independence. I can’t blame her. Would you want to live with Lolo?”

Probably not. In fact, I wasn’t sure I wanted to live with anyone ever again. Especially not someone who called me “comfortable.”

“Clues?” I asked.

“So far, nada. I’ve been trying to think of a motive. That’s why I hijacked you.”

Would the compliments never cease?
What the hell,
thought the proactive me. We had a matterat-hand and I was going to focus on that.

I said I’d have to ponder that one. Then I told him about Gary Gold’s visit and what Dag had discovered.

“Anne Miller?” Grant said. “Wasn’t she a movie star?”

“A dancer,” I said. “But it’s not her.”

“Any ideas?”

“None,” I said.

Then, after getting him to swear to keep it confidential, I told him about Poodle.

“I had heard that John Russell had exclusive tastes,” Grant said.

I tensed a little when he said that. Some things just don’t deserve to be euphemized. Taking advantage of defenseless teenage girls was one of those. “Happily,” I said, “that piece of shit is gone and Hoppy won’t be pimping for any more like him.”

My tone drew a surprised look from Grant. He was savvy enough not to say anything else on the matter. We drove the rest of the way in silence. Not that I was taking in the scenery. I was thinking about Lizzie and the fact that she wasn’t at the party. What reason would anyone have to take her out, unless she had found something in the house afterwards.

And then did what with it? Tried to blackmail someone?
That didn’t seem to fit. Even if it did, if the killer came after her, she or he probably took the thing with them.

I paid absolutely no attention to the rest of the fifteen-minute drive. I missed the house because I was still inside my head—alternately thinking about the attack and how I’d like to never see Grant again—and I didn’t emerge until we were inside the kitchen.

I wasn’t prepared for the crime scene. Yet the sight of blood smeared across the white tile wasn’t the most disturbing thing. It looked like a broken bottle of ketchup. It really did. The watery kind we don’t use at Murray’s. What upset me was the way everything in the place had been overturned.

The apartment consisted of a kitchen—a kitchenette really—a bedroom, a bathroom, and a very small den. Officers and plainclothes personnel, fourteen of them altogether, were moving with silent purpose through the residence. Grant’s arrival was acknowledged, when it was at all, with nods.

Police tape had been strung from cabinets to appliances to mark off the spot where Lizzie’s body had been found. We stepped gingerly around it and went to the den. Grant walked over to a sergeant who was waiting for a photographer to finish taking pictures.

“Sergeant O’Rourke,” Grant said.

“Detective,” the other replied. The burly sergeant gave me a who-the-hell-are-you look but didn’t say anything.

Grant asked, “Who was first on-scene?”

“Officer Bolton,” he said.

Grant looked around, saw the man in the bedroom. “I heard there was a hammer? A tenderizer,” he added.

“Bagged and on its way to the lab,” he said. “But first pass was clean.”

“Thanks,” Grant said, and we went over.

The young officer was moving clothes aside with a pen. They had been spilled from a drawer which lay on a rug.

“Officer,” Grant said.

The young man stood. “Sir.”

“Anything?”

I have to admit, I wasn’t used to this shorthand. It didn’t strike me as familiar necessarily, but respectful. They were guests in someone’s home and were behaving as such.

“Whoever did this was thorough and quiet,” he said. “The drawers are intact, they weren’t thrown aside.”

“Neighbors might have heard,” Grant said. “Any of them see or hear
anything
?”

“Melody is taking statements in the rental office,” he said. I gathered that was his partner. “It’s just inside the front door.”

“Yeah, saw it when we came in.”

“I helped get everyone down there,” Bolton went on. “Mix of college kids and the elderly. Everyone seemed shocked as heck—most of them were probably asleep and, like I said, whoever did this was pretty quiet.”

“The door was jimmied,” Grant said.

“That was me,” he said. “It was intact when I got here. Locked but not bolted. The windows were also locked.”

“She let them in,” Grant said.

“That’d be my guess.”

“Video anywhere?”

“We’re running plates that were picked up by the cameras at the stadium,” he said. “That’s the closest.”

That would be Shelby Avenue, where Rhonda and I had our confab. It was a main drag, not likely to tell them anything.

Grant took me back to the den, where we found a quiet corner. “I don’t think she was trying to extort anyone, do you?”

“Not likely,” I agreed. “Where does Rhonda live?”

“Why?”

I told him about our encounter up the road.

“Lockeland Springs,” he told me. “Big place on the golf course east of here. Even if she turns up on surveillance, it won’t mean squat.”

“Fine. That aside, I think it’s fair to say that Lizzie stumbled on a piece of evidence that someone was afraid would implicate them. This wasn’t planned.”

“No,” Grant agreed. “The tenderizer was an impulse.”

It annoyed me how he used that word now, like it had always been part of his vocabulary, like he had known what the hell to call it before I told him. “Comfortable” made bigger waves than I expected.

“She may not have known the item was important and was just being nice,” Grant said. “Maybe they came to pick it up. Maybe that’s when Lizzie realized it wasn’t as innocent as she thought.”

“Or else the attacker was afraid she knew more than she let on,” I suggested. “I only met her a few times, but Lizzie had a kind of reserve that someone might have interpreted as secretive.”

“And that could’ve cost her,” Grant said.

More than he knew. As we stood there looking at the place, waiting for a eureka moment, he got a call from the hospital.

Lizzie had died.

Chapter 22

People talk about emotional roller coasters, but that doesn’t really describe anything. A roller coaster is made of a little anxiety and anticipation, a bunch of nervous laughter, and the rest of it’s pretty level.

What we should really be talking about are emotional boxing matches. You mostly take a lot of blows and maybe land a few yourself, and unless you’re really lucky, the entire experience is mostly painful, occasionally exhilarating, but primarily just draining.

That’s how I felt when Grant dropped me back at the deli. We hadn’t spoken for most of the ride. I was pretty much over his stupid man-vision view of our relationship. Despite what I’d told Poodle about being worldly-wise and guarded, I had let
his
shoulders in, among other things, without the proper safeguards being in place. That was my fault, and now I was paying the price of feeling emotionally abandoned. Let the buyer beware.

I was not, however, over the death of Lizzie Renoir. I felt it would be appropriate to pay Lolo a courtesy call. Grant was going to go straight to the hospital to talk to her—she had arrived shortly after Lizzie did; I would wait until after we closed. I wanted to work. I also wanted to avoid the press that were beginning to arrive as we were driving off. They were sure to be at the hospital and at Lolo’s for at least an hour or two. I didn’t want any further identification with the fallout from Lolo’s party. About the only thing Grant had said on the way back was that at least he and Deputy Chief Whitman would be able to play “This Cop, That Cop,” which he explained as an advantage of having a case spread across two jurisdictions. Each lead detective could tell the press that the other was in charge of releasing information, with the result of being able to bat them back and forth and say nothing for hours. There was nothing worse for an investigation, Grant said, than being pressured from above when they were taking heat from the press.

One of my projects since arriving had been to add some healthier choices to the menu. People didn’t come to Murray’s to lower their cholesterol or chow down on roughage, but some of the people who came with those other people might want dishes that had greens and soy instead of egg or meat or dairy. I charted the sales of those menu specials and, when there was something that seemed to spike, I made it a permanent fixture. I was reviewing those figures now, standing behind the counter. I didn’t feel like closing myself in the office—not after spending an hour in Lizzie’s place, which had been claustrophobic with cops and tape and just plain bad karma.

As part of my newly confident self, I made the first move and, toward the end of the day, told my manager that everything was fine with me. I didn’t open up with anyone, but she had been there for me the day before and I wanted to keep that door ajar. There were things I wanted to know about her life, and one day soon I hoped she’d share them. Whatever badness had visited me the previous afternoon, good came out of it.

It was six-thirty when I pulled up to Lolo’s house. There were other cars in the driveway, one of them an inexpensive model; probably a temporary housekeeper, I guessed. Lolo didn’t look like the kind of woman who ran her own dishwasher.

I’d brought a quart of potato salad from the deli. I didn’t know if gentiles brought food the way Jews did making a shiva call. If not, it didn’t matter. It was one of the sides we’d made for her.

The door was ajar; I later learned this was the way Society acknowledged the loss of a domestic—sort of like riding boots reversed in the stirrups to symbolize the loss of a warrior. It had a certain patronizing charm. The first thing I noticed upon entering was that the roof had been seamlessly repaired and the hall floor waxed and polished. Hoppy had been plastered over and scrubbed away.
Good riddance,
thought I.

I could see seven other people besides Lolo. I didn’t know any of them, but a few seemed to know me from the deli. I pretended to recognize them.

Lolo seemed genuinely upset, which was hardly surprising. Two murders in one week, a party guest and an employee; tragic and, from a purely functional perspective, it could have a real chilling effect on her social life. And that’s what Lolo was mostly about, directing the A-list of Nashville society from its peak . . . not from a base camp. Right now, she had to feel like she was in Everest’s Death Zone.

She was seated in a big armchair in her huge living room, which was lit by a chandelier the size and brilliance of the
Close Encounters
mothership. She was dressed in black and drinking red wine. This was also a salute to Lizzie, who—she explained while her new helper got me a glass, which I had initially declined, then accepted when the reason was forthcoming—kept the wine cellar stocked with the best of the Canadian vineyards.

“I was told by dear Lizzie that the Canadians are the top vinifiers of imported grapes,” she said.

I wasn’t sure that was a great distinction, but maybe it was.

“I’m going to miss her,” Lolo went on as a gentleman scootched along the adjoining sofa so I could sit beside Lolo. “She was a steadfast companion.”

Like Tonto,
I thought, but for a Lone Ranger who couldn’t ride, shoot, rope or do anything much except display his silver bullets.

I let my eyes take a turn around the room, then asked with sudden cagey inspiration, “Has Anne Miller been here?”

Lolo’s blank expression wasn’t an act. “Who, dear?”

“A-a friend,” I stuttered. No one else seemed to react to the name, except for the man to my left who asked if it was the movie star.

“No Ms. Miller has been here,” Lolo said. Unless—”

Lolo tinkled her dinner bell, which sat on the chair table to her right. A black woman came in from the kitchen. “Ma’am?”

“Are you Anne Miller?”

“I’m Sabrina Brown, ma’am,” she said.

“Thank you,” Lolo said. She looked at the container in my lap. “Would you like her to take that?”

“No,” I said. “I was taking it home.”

Lolo dismissed the servant and returned the bell to its place. I don’t know what disgusted me more, her making the point that my friend must be a servant or that she didn’t know the servant’s name. I was about to get up to go when Lolo raised a finger as if to forestall any thought of departure or extraneous conversation.

“I heard from Officer Clampett that you were at Lizzie’s apartment,” Lolo said.

All the whispered, respectful conversation going on around us winked out, like the passing of demure little clouds. Every eye shifted in my direction.

“I
was
there,” I said. “I didn’t see him there.”

“He heard it from Deputy Chief Whitman. Why were you there, dear?”

This time, “dear” sounded accusatory, like “You little busybody” or “Yankee.” Maybe it was just my imagination. Or maybe Lolo was genuinely ticked off. She had been nice enough when we were planning the menu for her party, she was pleasant when she and her Cozy Foxes slummed it at the deli, but now I was in her club and bound by her rules.

“Detective Daniels had some questions for me,” I said as I was trying to formulate a reason.

“How thrilling for you,” Lolo said. “May I inquire, were those questions about my party?”

There was definitely some ice in her voice now. Society stuck together, even when one of their own banged young girls or took his own life. Could she also count on the discretion of the gentry?

“Noooo,” I said, dropping my voice about an octave as if that would dispel any such notion. “The officers—well, this is rather tawdry.”

“My ears have heard much.”

I edged closer. “You know how she was killed.”

“Certainly.”

“Detective Daniels wanted to know if I could tell them anything about the tenderizer before they moved it. The pulverizing capacity per square inch—you know, could it have done the damage or was it a plant.”

The leader of the Cozy Foxes considered my testimony. “Very clever,” she said.

I didn’t know whether she meant me or Grant. “Wasn’t it?” I said generally.

The conversation resumed around us as people drifted away. Obviously, nosiness had a shelf life in high society. But thinking of the Cozy Foxes again gave me a sudden inspiration. “There is one thing that occurred to me while I was there, in poor Lizzie’s kitchen.”

“What was that?”

I leaned forward to make sure the others would not hear. “Detective Daniels seemed a little stymied at the crime scene. Wouldn’t it be interesting, thought I, if the Cozy Foxes had a go at it?”

“At what, the bloody scene of the crime?”

“No, no. Not in person, but—at the deli, say. What if I could convince the detective to let me have the file and we all review it. Would that fall under the charter of what your literary club can do?”

It was as though I’d attached alligator clips to her big toes and turned on the juice. She literally trembled with excitation.

“Could you manage such a thing?”

“I believe I could.”

“We would meet . . . after hours?”

“No one else there.”

She sipped the wine, her mind no longer on who had purchased it—if it ever was. “I love that idea, Gwen Katz. I love it to the marrow.”

“Then why don’t we plan it for tomorrow?”

“I will phone the others at once and tell them to be there,” she said.

I didn’t doubt that they would be.

Her manner was considerably more respectful now that I’d shown some kind of fealty, and she was still giddy with delight as I rose to go. She extended her hand knuckles-up for me to clasp rather than shake.

“Tell me something, though,” I said. “I hear that a lot of the women at your party didn’t especially like Hoppy Hopewell.”

“That is true,” she admitted.

“Then why did you invite him?”

She smiled sweetly. “Simply to see whether my party was more important than their hate.”

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

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