The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (4 page)

“Good gravy! What does he—”

“Morning, Maddy!”

“Bob! How are you?”

“Fine and dandy—so how long has it been since you and I had lunch?”

Bob Averill is
The Herald-Union’s
editor-in-chief. An overstuffed teddy bear about to turn sixty. Unless you count spearing cheese squares at the newsroom Christmas party, he and I had never had lunch together. “It has been a while,” I said.

“We should rectify that.”

“I suppose we should.”

“How about today?”

“Well—”

“Super. I’ll have Suzie make reservations for us at Speckley’s. Say twelve-thirty?”

I was too shocked to tell him that you don’t need reservations at Speckley’s. That as long as you comply with the NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE sign on the door, they’ll seat you. I told him twelve-thirty would be great. That I would meet him there.

“Meet me? Maddy Sprowls! What kind of men have you been eating with? I’ll drive.”

And so in three hours I was going to have lunch with Bob Averill. And it was no mystery why. He finally had the ammunition he needed to force me into retirement. Or as he once put it: “The common ground you and I need to find
vis-à-vis
your tenure at the paper.”

I was not going without a fight. I grabbed a piece of scrap paper and drew a line down the middle. On the left I listed the various infractions he might bring up: my long lunches, personal long distance calls, my usually foul disposition. On the right I listed explanations or denials. When I got to my snoopfests into the Buddy Wing and Gordon Sweet murders, I noted that while they had been unauthorized, on the sly, and initially troublesome for the paper, they both had resulted in some very good journalism.

Then, while I was pondering how I could good-naturedly threaten filing an age discrimination suit, Gabriella Nash appeared in front of my desk. She announced that she was “totally apoplectic.”

“About what, dear?”

Like a bad actress in a bad movie, she flung that morning’s front page on my desk. “That is my story, Mrs. Sprowls.”

I knew what she meant of course. But with my hours at
The Herald-Union
down to a precious few, I was in no mood for foolishness. Especially hers. I pretended to study the story she was thumping with her finger. “According to the byline, it’s Dale Marabout’s story.”

She curled her lips at my flippancy like a rabid raccoon. “This is serious business, Mrs. Sprowls!” She went on and on how the story shouldn’t have been taken away from her just because it unexpectedly evolved from a “fluffy piece of shit” into a “hard news murder story.”
The Washington Post,
she said
,
didn’t take Redford and Bernstein off the Watergate story when it grew from a third-rate burglary into a constitutional showdown between President Nixon and Congress. She should be allowed to follow the Never Dull story wherever it lead, she said. Redford and Bernstein had been young reporters, too, she said.

I neatly folded the front page and handed it back to her. “In the first place, it was not
Redford
and Bernstein. It was
Woodward
and Bernstein. Robert Redford was the actor who played Woodward in the movie. But I suppose you deserve some credit for at least having heard about Watergate.” Her eyes dropped. I hurriedly crumpled my list of job-saving excuses and slid it off my desk into the wastebasket. “And in the second place,” I said, “you should be telling all this to Alec Tinker—not me.”

She went from rabid raccoon to vulnerable bunny. “I was hoping maybe you’d go with me.”

I showed her the most empathetic smile I could. Then I lowered the boom. “I just don’t see that happening, Gabriella.”

Bob Averill appeared in the newsroom at twenty past twelve. He gave me a big John Wayne thisaway wave. I grabbed my purse and followed him to the parking deck.

Bob is extremely well paid. And his wife comes from money. But he still likes to think of himself as the regular guy he was forty years ago. So he eschews his reserved parking space by the door and deposits his Mercedes wherever he can find a spot. It’s not one of those big roomy Mercedes. It’s one of those sporty, midlife crisis two-seaters. Yellow as a ripe banana. He wedged his 200 pounds behind the steering wheel with the help of a laborious “Augggghhhh.”

We headed toward West Apple Street and Meriwether Square. “You think we can get there in five minutes?” he asked.

“If we don’t get behind too many buses.”

He chuckled like some old soldier fondly recalling the Battle of the Bulge. “I remember when I had to take the bus.”

As we buzzed along, I pictured him that morning calling Suzie and asking, “Any idea where Maddy Sprowls likes to have lunch?” And when she answered Speckley’s, him asking, “Where the hell is that?” And when she said Meriwether Square, him harrumphing, “That figures.”

In case you haven’t spent much time in Hannawa, Ohio, Meriwether Square is our city’s version of Greenwich Village. It’s a four-block strip of coffee shops, thrift shops, and hole-in-the wall bars, each geared toward a particular sexual orientation. The strip is surrounded with wonderful art deco apartment buildings and once-grand turn-of-the-century houses. The brick streets are lined with shaggy oak trees and badly buckled sidewalks. Dale Marabout calls it Differentdrummerville. And he’s pretty much on the mark. Meriwether Square is lousy with angst-riddled college students, old hippies, even older Beatniks, artists who never sell anything, writers who never get published. It’s a real bouillabaisse of daydreamers, outcasts, and kooks. And I just love the place. And I just love Speckley’s. I’ve been going to that wonderful old diner since my college days.

Bob found a parking space right in front. But he couldn’t find any quarters in his pocket for the meter. “It’s on me,” I said.

Inside, he announced his name to the waitress. “Averill.”

She squinted at him the way James squints at me when he’s trying to decipher the strange sounds coming out of my mouth. Finally she figured it out—or at least thought she had. “I don’t think we got any of them,” she said. “But I’ve got some Tylenol if that would help.”

It was Bob’s turn to imitate James’ squint. I came to the rescue. “He doesn’t have a headache,” I told the waitress. “He has a reservation.”

“Oh, he’s the one,” she cackled. “We all thought that was a prank call.” She grabbed a pair of menus from the counter. “Right this way, Mr. Averill. Your table’s waiting.” She gave us a booth by the eight-foot plastic bipedal cow statue drinking a chocolate milkshake.

I talked Bob into ordering the diner’s legendary house special—meatloaf sandwich, au gratin potatoes on the side. I told the waitress I’d have hot tea. Bob pointed at the plastic cow and said, “I’ll have what she’s drinking.”

Good gravy I was nervous. I decided to take the bull by the horns. “Bob,” I said, “I know why we’re here.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do! Now shoot!”

He cringed. “Shoot? Don’t you think that word is maybe a bit inappropriate under the circumstances?”

I attacked. “Come on, Bob. Give me your best shot. Then I’ll give you mine. Then we’ll enjoy the meatloaf.”

He dug his elbows into the Formica. Propped his chin on his fist. Looked me straight in the eyes. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“My retirement. What else would I be talking about?”

His face withered until it looked like one of those old cooking onions I keep on top of my refrigerator. “Oh no, Maddy Sprowls—you can’t retire now. I need you.”

It was my turn to look him straight in the eyes. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Eddie French.”

“That cab driver they arrested? What does that have to do with me?”

The waitress brought our beverages. Bob pounded the wrapper off his straw. “Nothing to do with you—not yet, anyway—but unfortunately it does have something to do with me.”

I zeroed in on the most pertinent part of his answer. “Not yet, anyway?”

He drilled his straw into his milkshake. Took a long suck. “I need your help with something, Maddy.”

I finally knew where he was headed. “Absolutely not!”

He grabbed his temples. Grunted in pain. At first I thought he had an aneurysm in his brain that just popped. But when he started gasping like a beached fish, I realized he was just having a brain freeze from the milkshake. I laid into him without pity. “I’m not a detective, Bob. I’m a damn librarian.”

The pain on his face slowly subsided. The self-confident, always-in-command Bob Averill I’d known for fifteen years was gone. “It seems that Eddie French is the worthless older brother of Tippy’s sorority sister,” he said.

Tippy was Bob’s wife. Several years younger than him, trim and pretty. A real ballbuster. Bob would still be writing high school sports at that little weekly in Coshocton County if she hadn’t rescued his dormant potential from the dustbin of happiness. “And this sorority sister knows her worthless brother couldn’t possibly have murdered Violeta Bell?”

Bob took a much more modest sip from his shake. “She was on the phone half the night crying to Tippy about it. Which meant Tippy was crying to me the other half.”

“And now you’re crying to me?”

“You know how irascible Tippy can be.”

I did know how irascible Tippy could be. I also knew it would be smart to stick to the facts. “According to Dale Marabout’s story, the police found Bell’s stuff in his apartment. And he’s got quite a record, too.”

“Yes they did, and yes he does,” Bob admitted. “But sorority sisters are sisters for life and, well—”

I finished the sentence. “And I owe my shaky future at the paper to your good graces?”

The Bob Averill of old would have gone ballistic over a remark like that. The new one only got more docile. “I can’t put Marabout or some other reporter on this. That would be unethical. This is a personal matter.”

“But you can put me on it?”

“No putting. Begging.”

The waitress arrived with our platters. The meatloaf was stacked high inside huge Kaiser rolls. The enormous globs of au gratin potatoes were steaming. “Frankly, it feels more like putting,” I said.

Bob hadn’t learned his lesson from the milkshake. He filled his mouth with potatoes, getting a dandy cheese burn on the roof of his mouth. “Look Maddy, I know this stinks. I’ve spent the last two years trying to stop you from snooping into murders and now I’m asking you to do exactly that. But for some reason you’re good at it.”

He was right about that. For some reason I
was
good at it. “What if I say no?”

Despite his weakened condition, he still had enough sense not to answer my question directly. “To tell you the truth, Maddy, I’ve never cared much for Jeannie. That’s Tippy’s sorority sister. Jeannie Salapardi. She’s full of herself and full of ideas for making me a better husband.”

I’m sure my eyebrows went up about a foot. “Salapardi? Of the Honda-Toyota-Mitsubishi dealership Salapardis?”

Bob grinned a bit. “That’s right. She’s married to Dave ‘Drive You Crazy’ Salapardi—”

Again I finished the sentence. “The paper’s largest advertiser.”

His grin wobbled into a frown. “I’m far more afraid of my wife than losing a million dollars a year in advertising.”

“You’re an honest man, Bob.” I wasn’t being sarcastic. He was an honest man. And almost as afraid of me as he was of his wife. I knew he wouldn’t be asking for help unless he was in a real pickle. I summed things up. “So, you don’t like Jeannie Salapardi, and you want me to prove that her brother didn’t murder Violeta Bell?”

Bob’s cheeks were stuffed full of meatloaf. He nodded as he chewed. “Actually, I’d consider it a personal victory if her brother were convicted. If he’s guilty.”

That surprised me. “If he’s guilty?”

The tortured husband gave way to the truth-loving newspaperman. “When Eddie French was twelve years old he shot his best friend in the foot. With a pellet gun. Accidentally. Gangrene set in and the boy lost half his foot. The boy was the star of the junior high school basketball team. Destined to be a star in high school and college. Maybe even the pros. That’s how good the kid was, apparently. Jeannie says that Eddie was so riddled with guilt that he smashed his pellet gun with a sledgehammer. He developed a physical aversion to guns of any sort. When he was drafted into the Army, during Vietnam, he refused to even touch a rifle. He spent the rest of his basic training shuffling between the psycho ward and the guardhouse. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge.”

I interrupted with the obvious. “But he’s a convicted criminal.”

Bob was really chewing and nodding now. “Yes, he is. Burglary. Auto theft. Fencing. Bad checks. Dealing the evil weed. But nothing that ever involved guns.”

I did not want to be intrigued. Not for all the Darjeeling tea in India. But I was intrigued. “And Violeta Bell was found shot full of holes.”

Bob didn’t get me back to the paper until three o’clock. I immediately summoned Eric Chen. He dropped into the chair next to my desk and slid down until his neck was resting on the back. “Heaven’s to Betsy,” I barked, “this is a place of business. Show a little professionalism.”

He crossed his legs and wiggled his dangling foot. He stuck out his pinky finger when he took a sip from his bottle of Mountain Dew. “That better?”

“Much better.” I told him I’d just had lunch with Bob Averill. He told me that the entire newsroom was buzzing about it. That the boys in sports were offering odds on when my last day would be.

“I hope you put your money on When Hell Freezes Over.”

He smiled at me like Buddha. “As a matter of fact I did.”

Eric is the perfect assistant. Lazy and loyal. When Bob hired him fifteen years ago, it was not only to oversee the computerization of the morgue, it was to be my eventual replacement. But my refusal to retire hasn’t bothered Eric in the least. He plays with the computers, reads his comic books, drinks his Mountain Dews, and collects a very good paycheck. I got down to the nitty gritty. “Bob’s in something of a pickle.”

“Which means you’re in a pickle, too?”

“And you,” I said. “And probably a whole lot of other people before we’re through.”