Authors: Delia Rosen

One Foot In The Gravy (21 page)

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

10.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

“Someone she knew was there,” Helen said. “They talked in the kitchen. They argued. The individual grabbed the tenderizer in a sudden fury and killed her. Then he went through the house collecting evidence that may have linked him to the woman.”

“Who did Lizzie know well enough to let them in at night?” I asked. “Was she dating?”

“She was a lesbian,” Lolo said. The word did not come out effortlessly, the “L” hanging on like a drum roll. “Lizzie did not share, nor did I ask, that information.”

Scratch that thought about the killer not being in the room. Helen was a good actress, Poodle was man-crazy to a degree that suggested she was trying to not be like her mother, Rhonda looked like she could be game for anything, and Hildy liked tongue, which may not have meant anything at all.

“Lolo, what can you tell us about Lizzie?” I asked. “All I know is that she came from Canada.”

Lolo removed her glasses. She looked out at the dark street and actually struck a pose. Once again, I had a sense that I was in the presence of Lady Macbeth—or at least someone playing the part of the queen whose every word was a little pearl.

“Lizzie came to the country in 1989,” she said. “Her parents owned a liquor store and always dreamed of owning their own vineyard. It never happened. Lizzie immigrated because she got a job. I don’t know what it was; she never shared that information.”

“You didn’t ask for references?” I said, rather incredulous.

“Young woman, I am an excellent judge of character. Should I have asked for papers from the man who wired my new television or repaired my
ceiling
?”

“You were letting someone in your home—”

“To work. If she failed to do so, or if she had proven light-fingered as one of my domestics once did—who, I might add, came festooned with documents—I should have dismissed her. As we all know, papers can be forged or extorted.”

“She spoke with a French accent,” Rhonda said. “That’s why you hired her.”

Lolo ignored her. “Do you have any other questions, or may I continue?” she asked me.

“Please,” I said deferentially.

Lolo settled back into character with a shifting of her shoulders and a slight raising of her spine. “Lizzie’s job ended and she heard that I was now in need of a housekeeper.”

“How did she hear?” I asked.

Lolo did not answer. All eyes, save two, were on the statue she had become.

“I told her,” Helen said, looking at her lap.

Four sets of eyes shifted to the speaker. There was a long silence. I broke it.

“So Lizzie went to work for you,” I said. I didn’t say anything more. I just wanted to get her back on track and break the embarrassment that had settled on the table like an upended wheelbarrow of sauerkraut.

“Lizzie was an excellent worker, very diligent,” Lolo said. For the first time, a trace of emotion had crept into her voice. I couldn’t tell whether it was for Lizzie or for the sacrifice Helen had just made. “We did not discuss her personal life but I cannot think of anyone
I
know who disliked her.”

I looked around the table and there were general nods and murmurs of accord. The only exceptions were Helen, who was still looking down, and Rhonda, who was staring open-mouthed at Helen.

“What about Hoppy?” I asked.

The women all regarded me.

“What about him?” Hildy asked.

“Did he know Lizzie? Was there any connection ?”

The women went silent with thought.

“I don’t see how that matters,” Mollie said after a time. “He obviously was not the one who went to her apartment.”

“But they may have had someone in common,” I said. I was desperate to ask if Poodle may have known Lizzie in any capacity, but I couldn’t reveal what I knew about the young woman and Hoppy.

“Lolo, did Lizzie have any siblings?” Hildy asked.

“Not that I’m aware,” the society matron replied.

“So—no nieces and nephews.”

“She never mentioned any.”

“Then why would she have saved a blue ribbon?”

“Holy crap yeah,” I said.

Lolo was too intrigued with that to chastise me with her eyes. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Is there any way she could have had a child out of wedlock?” Helen asked, emerging from her little cocoon.

“I suppose it’s possible, but what would that have to do with her murder?” Lolo asked.

“I’ve only known one adoptive child who sought out his birth mother to tell her how being given away left him all scarred and rejected,” Rhonda said. “That was my cousin Stymie, and he only found her so he could yell at her. He didn’t kill her.”

“You had a cousin named Stymie?” Mollie said.

“Hey, I
said
he was adopted. He came already named.”

“I don’t mean to defame the dead,” Hildy said, “but if we’re looking for a connection, is it
possible
—and I’m just putting this out there—that Lizzie had a child with Hoppy?”

Lolo and Mollie both made faces.

“He would have to have known her in Canada,” Lolo said. “How many nine- or ten-year-olds want to kill their mothers?”

“Well, there was that Jim Grand story
What’s the Matter With Oedipus?
” Hildy said unhelpfully.

“That was fiction and it was the only one,” Lolo said.

“Besides, she didn’t—well, what interest would Lizzie have had in Hoppy?” Mollie asked, changing course in deference to Helen.

“He could have raped her,” Hildy suggested.

“I would put that in the ‘very remote possibility’ pile,” I said. “Lizzie would hardly have saved a memento of that . . . event.”

Silence once again descended.

“I wonder if she wasn’t a housekeeper when she first came here,” Hildy said. She was just a bundle of ideas.

The group waited.

“She might have been a nanny,” Hildy said. “Not like Fran Drescher, but maybe a mentally unstable one, like in that old Bette Davis movie.”

The group thought. Except for myself and Rhonda, they seemed like a single organism. It was pretty impressive, though. Their brainstorming had produced some useful results.

“Lizzie could be severe, but she was not cruel. I will attest to that,” Lolo said, effectively ending the debate.

“Which doesn’t rule out that she may have been a nanny,” I said, still chewing on that. “Nannies pose with babies and photos are apparently missing.”

“They pose at Disney World too,” Rhonda said. “Maybe Mickey did it.”

The remark was ignored. Rhonda went to the glass-fronted refrigerator behind the counter and got herself an Amstel Light. The rest of us just sat. We seemed to have hit a wall.

My mind was still working, though. I knew things about Hoppy that the rest of them did not. I was sifting through the dates and places and dramatis personae, looking for anything that fit with the Lizzie hypotheses.

And then something started scratching at my brain.

“Let me see that file,” I said. “Not the photos, just the pages. The background report.”

Hildy fished it from the pile and handed it over. I flipped back to the bank records Grant had obtained. They went back eighteen years, the entire time Lizzie had been in Nashville. Since there was no attorney to prevent it, that was pro forma research to find out if someone had been extorting money. There were no withdrawals to suggest that was the case.

“Lolo, how much did you pay her?” I asked.

“What a question!” she said indignantly. “I don’t see how that is relevant.”

“It is, but—fine, fine.” I did the mental math. I was good at that. “Was it less than a thousand bucks a week?”

“It was. Really!”

“Less than five hundred?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

“Cheep!”
Rhonda imitated a bird as she returned to the table. The bottle was already half-empty. The harsh looks suggested her impulsively launched career with the Foxes was on life support.

Lolo’s answer was close enough to a figure that fit. I checked another page. “Lizzie’s rent was three-fifty a month.”

“What does all that mean?” Hildy asked eagerly.

“Thinking,” I said. “If we knock out what she managed to save during her years of working for Lolo and what she spent, the woman managed to save—not earned, mind you—seventy thousand dollars.”

“I still don’t understand,” Hildy said impatiently.

“She’s saying that’s a lot of bread,” Rhonda said.

“It
is
a lot,” I said, “but that’s not what’s interesting.” I was still working the numbers as I went through the bank statements. “She deposited decent-sized checks every June for the last ten years.”

“That’s how long she worked for me,” Lolo said, trying to reclaim control of the discussion.

“Did you give her summer solstice bonuses?” Rhonda taunted.

“Not for $1,023.11,” I said, looking at the last one. “That’s a tax refund.”

“So?” Mollie asked.

“There were no rebates before she went to work for Lolo. And the deposits weren’t weekly, they were sporadic. Once every three months . . . six months. . . .”

“What am I missing?” Rhonda said. “Someone was paying her off the books. That’s how I pay my gardener.”

“Someone was paying her when they had the money,” I said.

I didn’t have to say anything more. They all knew someone who was constantly looking for revenue. They didn’t necessarily know who else among them had been tapped by Hoppy or how, so no one said a word.

“I think this session is over,” Lolo said.

I agreed, and the ladies made a very subdued and hasty end to it. Even Rhonda was unusually quiet, albeit for a different reason.

“I’m confused,” she said, grabbing another beer as the others left.

“Me too,” I admitted.

She chugged half the bottle. “Do we think Hoppy was paying Lizzie for something? For being a nanny?”

I looked at her. From the mouths of boozers—

“Did Hoppy have a kid?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Who knows? I didn’t know Lizzie was a carpet cleaner until tonight.”

I had to call Grant. We may have gotten some things wrong.

I thanked Rhonda for coming and all but pushed her out the door after taking the empty bottle from her hand.

“What’s the hurry?” she asked.

“You’re driving,” I said. “No more drinkee.”

“Oh, balls! You got a date? Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“Not with my ex-husband. . . .” she said threateningly.

“Not with Royce, God, no!”

“Hey, watch your mouth! What’s wrong with Royce?”

A lot,
I thought, but I didn’t have time to go into that now. I managed to get her outside, locked the door, and called Grant.

Chapter 27

I scooped up the file and let myself out. Helen was still parked down the street. I could see her head was bent, her shoulders moving lightly. I didn’t know whether she was relieved because she’d wanted to come out, or whether she was afraid of social consequences for an impulsive act. In any case, I decided to let her be. She was, however, a little less intimidating than she’d been the day before: despite that big play of setting me up and knocking me down, she had the same insecurities and tender spots as li’l ole me.

I had told Grant to meet me at Lizzie’s place. We had stuff to go over.

The apartment was still a crime scene with a patrol car parked out front. I waited in my car until Grant arrived. He walked me in.

“Productive night?” he asked—a little condescendingly, I thought.

I gave it to him between the eyes, told him what the Foxes had figured out. He was impressed and, I think, a little embarrassed. His mouth definitely assumed a scrunching posture when he glanced at the door.

“We’ve been circling some of that ourselves,” he said, a tad defensively. “We’ve got requests out with the RCMP, checking into any reason she might have left Canada. The IRS is looking into her tax records. We also found out that Lizzie occasionally frequented a girls-only bar in—”

“All useful but none of that gives us Hoppy Hopewell.”

“Gwen, we can’t assume a serial killer based on Lolo as a common link. I’ll grant you there
may
be a connection—”

“I’m not the press, Grant. You
will
admit it would be a humungous coincidence if these killings are unrelated.”

“Yes.”

“Then we need to fit them together somehow. Starting, maybe, here.”

I took him to the bedroom, showed him the blue ribbon on the edge of the carpet.

“Yeah, we saw that,” Grant told me. His hands went defiantly to his hips. “Let me explain something. We have a methodology, the way we remove and categorize evidence. That goes from eventrelated—the body, the murder weapon, the blood, hair and fingerprints from the immediate murder vicinity—”

I cut him off. “Can I borrow your pen?”

“Sure.” He lifted his lapel and I lifted his ballpoint. It was imprinted with the name of a local realtor, Stacey Paul. I knew her. I frowned.

“What?” he asked.

“She’s a walking advertisement for breast enhancement.”

“Oh, please. It’s a good time to buy.”

“Homes or implants?” I asked.

I couldn’t help myself. He put on a give-me-a-break look and I went back to work. I squatted and touched the top of the pen to the ribbon. Nothing happened. I used the plunger to flip the ribbon over. I touched the top to the ribbon. It stuck. I lightly shook it free and rose. I handed him back his pen.

“There was a baby at some point,” I said. “This was taped in an album, an album it obviously slipped from, an album that was taken.” I looked at the bed and the trail of scattered clothes. I took a rain boot from the corner, weighed it with my hand, and tossed it on the bed. It bounced off. “Our killer walked in here, flopped the album on the bed, didn’t count on it flying to the floor, and scooped it up quickly as he went to check the dresser.”

“The perp didn’t see it fall out,” Grant said.

I ignored his obvious conclusion. “Racy” Stacey had gotten under my skin.

“Let’s assume, for the purpose of this discussion, that Hoppy fits in this scenario some way,” I said. “How?”

“Well, if there is a baby and Lizzie didn’t have it—”

We looked at each other. I tried to speak but my brain was frozen with the realization:

“Hoppy had a kid with Anne,” Grant said. “
She
may not have been the one he was supporting.”

Thanks, brain,
I thought.
Now he gets the points for that.

My brain didn’t care. It had a gender and an age range and was compiling a list. There was Gar y Gold. My own Luke. Lolo had said the electrician was a boy—did he know the back way in? Most likely, since that was how servants entered in Lolo’s world. And what about the chauffeur’s son Gordon. Maybe his father was covering for
him
.

Idiot! Hoppy and Anne wouldn’t have had an African-American baby.

How do you know he’s African-American? Maybe Gordon adopted a white child!

Stop! I yelled at myself.

“But let’s put ’er in reverse,” Grant went on. “Even if there is a child, we don’t know where he lives or whether he killed either of them. Or whether someone else knows what we know and is trying to frame said hypothetical child. This is a town full of—what’s your word?”

“Yentas,”
I said. There was the annoying “you people” again.

“That’s the one. Hell, Gwen, we don’t have anything
approaching
a motive, other than that Hoppy was a tomcatting swindler.”

“What about insurance?”

“That’s a negative,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I called in a favor from Clancy at Ryan & Clancy Insurance, had him make some calls. Hoppy had a policy that expired two years ago. He terminated it for the cash value, about twenty-five grand.”

Ouch.
So Grant was holding back from me the same way I held info from the Foxes. He seemed to read my mind.

“I received that call during your tête-à-tête with the Foxes.”

We stood there again in silence. Standing in the bedroom, her clothes strewn around us, I couldn’t help but think about poor Lizzie. The only thing we knew for sure was that the butler didn’t do it.
But why was she involved? Who did she let in?

“Two years ago, you say?”

He took out his notebook. “January 2009.”

“A little over two years,” I thought aloud. “You know, there is one thing the killings have in common.”

“What’s that?”

“The tenderizer to the head, the drill to the brain—in both cases the murder weapons were handy.”

“Okay—the crimes weren’t planned. I agree with that.”

“They’re also different,” I said. “The first one may have been a crime of passion, the second one of reluctant necessity.”

“Possible,” Grant said. “What has that got to do with the two-year thing?”

“Hold on.” Something else hit me. I turned and ran to the living room.

“They’re not here,” I said.

Grant had followed me in “What’s not here?”

Heart and brain were together on this one: they did not feel like sharing. “I’ll tell you when I check something.”