are full of stealable stuff.”
Kay answered with a question of her own. “Why would he wait until now? He’s been carting us around for years.”
“Maybe the temptation got too much for him. Or maybe he needed more money than usual.”
She brought her glass to her lips with both hands. She took a long, steady sip, with her eyes closed and both pinkies sticking out. Then she said this: “If it turns out Eddie did it—then I hope he really did—that’s all I’ve got to say.”
That strange sentence puzzled me at first. And so did the sudden bitterness in her voice. But after my brain was finished sorting through Eric’s research, I could only agree with her. “Me, too.”
What Kay was referring to, of course, was the very public squabble she’d gotten in over her husband’s will.
Her brother-in-law, Gottfried Jr., had contested it. He claimed she didn’t have either a legal or moral right to her late husband Harold’s fifty-one percent of the Hausenfelter Bread Company. He claimed that Kay had bamboozled his brother into signing the new will while he lay dying of pancreatic cancer. He told the judge that Harold and Kay had been living apart for years. That Harold, fed up with her repeated infidelities, had wanted to divorce her. He brought up Kay’s years as a stripper, her drinking and public ribaldry. Kay conceded that she sometimes drank too much, and occasionally did embarrassing things in public, and she conceded living apart from Harold, he there in Hannawa and she at their ocean-front house on Fripp Island, in South Carolina. Their estrangement was the result of his infuriating stubbornness, not her infidelities, she said. And the new will, she said, was Harold’s idea. His older brother, he worried, had never showed a lick of interest in the bakery and would more than likely sell it the first chance he got. The probate court sided with her. The headline in The Herald-Union put it this way:
Kay Gets the Bread,
Gottfried Gets Out of Town
The conversation drifted to Kay’s days in burlesque. She told us oodles of hilarious stories. Gabriella and I finished our Diet Cokes. She finished whatever she was drinking. At the door I asked her one last question. “Did you believe that stuff about Violeta being Romanian royalty?”
Kay Hausenfelter’s mouth wobbled into an intoxicated smile. “She sure believed it.”
I drove Gabriella back to her car at Waldo’s Waffle House. Then I drove to Artie’s supermarket for ground pork and a head of cabbage, for the pigs-in-a-blanket I promised to make for Ike on Sunday. When I got home I called Eric Chen. “How’d you like to give me a computer lesson?” I asked.
“Who is this really calling?”
I told him I was serious. That I felt bad about dumping so much research on him. That it was about time I learned a few of his research tricks. So he’d have more time to read his comic books on company time.
He can’t resist me when I talk like that to him. “Not today I hope.”
“Good gravy, no,” I assured him. “It’s Saturday. How about tomorrow?”
6
Sunday, July 16
The minute Ike left for church, I left for the morgue. Not that I was anxious for my computer lesson. Egad and little fishes—I no more wanted to spend my Sunday morning being harangued by Eric than he wanted to spend his watching me hyperventilate. But I’d already given him a ton of research to do on Violeta Bell’s murder, and if I dumped this new question on him, well, I might not get an answer for weeks. And I was far too curious to wait for weeks.
Eric, as I expected, was a half-hour late. He yawned his way to my desk. He had a bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand and a family sized bag of Peanut M&Ms in the other. I shook my head at his baggy shorts and flip-flops. He sarcastically shielded his eyes from my smiley face T-shirt. I summoned him to my desk.
He pulled up a chair with his foot. He immediately went into teacher mode. “Okay, I guess the first
Kay answered with a question of her own. “Why would he wait until now? He’s been carting us around for years.”
“Maybe the temptation got too much for him. Or maybe he needed more money than usual.”
She brought her glass to her lips with both hands. She took a long, steady sip, with her eyes closed and both pinkies sticking out. Then she said this: “If it turns out Eddie did it—then I hope he really did—that’s all I’ve got to say.”
That strange sentence puzzled me at first. And so did the sudden bitterness in her voice. But after my brain was finished sorting through Eric’s research, I could only agree with her. “Me, too.”
What Kay was referring to, of course, was the very public squabble she’d gotten in over her husband’s will.
Her brother-in-law, Gottfried Jr., had contested it. He claimed she didn’t have either a legal or moral right to her late husband Harold’s fifty-one percent of the Hausenfelter Bread Company. He claimed that Kay had bamboozled his brother into signing the new will while he lay dying of pancreatic cancer. He told the judge that Harold and Kay had been living apart for years. That Harold, fed up with her repeated infidelities, had wanted to divorce her. He brought up Kay’s years as a stripper, her drinking and public ribaldry. Kay conceded that she sometimes drank too much, and occasionally did embarrassing things in public, and she conceded living apart from Harold, he there in Hannawa and she at their ocean-front house on Fripp Island, in South Carolina. Their estrangement was the result of his infuriating stubbornness, not her infidelities, she said. And the new will, she said, was Harold’s idea. His older brother, he worried, had never showed a lick of interest in the bakery and would more than likely sell it the first chance he got. The probate court sided with her. The headline in The Herald-Union put it this way:
Kay Gets the Bread,
Gottfried Gets Out of Town
The conversation drifted to Kay’s days in burlesque. She told us oodles of hilarious stories. Gabriella and I finished our Diet Cokes. She finished whatever she was drinking. At the door I asked her one last question. “Did you believe that stuff about Violeta being Romanian royalty?”
Kay Hausenfelter’s mouth wobbled into an intoxicated smile. “She sure believed it.”
I drove Gabriella back to her car at Waldo’s Waffle House. Then I drove to Artie’s supermarket for ground pork and a head of cabbage, for the pigs-in-a-blanket I promised to make for Ike on Sunday. When I got home I called Eric Chen. “How’d you like to give me a computer lesson?” I asked.
“Who is this really calling?”
I told him I was serious. That I felt bad about dumping so much research on him. That it was about time I learned a few of his research tricks. So he’d have more time to read his comic books on company time.
He can’t resist me when I talk like that to him. “Not today I hope.”
“Good gravy, no,” I assured him. “It’s Saturday. How about tomorrow?”
6
Sunday, July 16
The minute Ike left for church, I left for the morgue. Not that I was anxious for my computer lesson. Egad and little fishes—I no more wanted to spend my Sunday morning being harangued by Eric than he wanted to spend his watching me hyperventilate. But I’d already given him a ton of research to do on Violeta Bell’s murder, and if I dumped this new question on him, well, I might not get an answer for weeks. And I was far too curious to wait for weeks.
Eric, as I expected, was a half-hour late. He yawned his way to my desk. He had a bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand and a family sized bag of Peanut M&Ms in the other. I shook my head at his baggy shorts and flip-flops. He sarcastically shielded his eyes from my smiley face T-shirt. I summoned him to my desk.
He pulled up a chair with his foot. He immediately went into teacher mode. “Okay, I guess the first
Similar Books
