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“Eleven-thirty. We get up at six and have an early breakfast, which means an early lunch and an early dinner.” She checked her watch. “In fact I was just about to start preparing dinner.”

The message was clear: she wasn’t all that keen on two cops—or one cop and one semi-cop—to come barging in there asking a lot of questions.

“Can anyone verify that?” asked Chase, who wasn’t finished with the questions just yet.

Hazel frowned.“Verify what?”

“When you got back from choir practice.”

“Um…” She thought for a moment, then glanced to her husband, seemed to dispel the notion, and thought some more. Then her face suddenly lit up. “Janice,” she finally said.

“Janice?”

“Our next-door-neighbor. She was looking through the window when we arrived home. Janice is something of a neighborhood snoop,” she explained.

“Janice Malice,” her husband said with a little grin. “That’s what we like to call her.”

“Amadeo, please,” said his wife, embarrassed.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Janice Malice.”

“He once called her that to her face,” Hazel said. “She wasn’t happy.”

“So Janice saw you arrive at…”

“Must have been eleven-fifteen, eleven-twenty.”

“And you didn’t leave the house after that?”

“No, we had lunch and then we were both out in the backyard all afternoon.”

“We like the flowers,” Amadeo explained. “Lots of colors.”

“Yes, Amadeo likes the colors,” Hazel said with an indulgent smile. “The more colors the better. So we plant flowers in the spring, and enjoy a riot of color all summer.”

Odelia glanced around.“Do you have… pets?” she asked, then darted a meaningful glance at me and Dooley. We hadn’t dared to move a muscle all through the interview.

“No pets,” Hazel snapped, as if the notion was a ridiculous one.

“We had a goldfish once,” Amadeo said. He was starting to really come into his own, I saw, and following the flow of the conversation. “But we sadly lost him.”

“Yeah, the kids had a goldfish, but that was years and years ago.”

“How old are your kids now, Mrs. Larobski?”

“Well, the youngest is thirty-five and lives right around the corner. Jake is forty, and lives in Boston, and Frieda is in Paris right now. She’s a business consultant,” she explained. You could tell from the tone of her voice that she was proud of her kids.

“We had a hamster, too,” her husband confided.

“Do you have any idea who could have done this to Neda?” asked Chase.

“Look, Detective, if you’re going to flaunt your wealth the way Neda did, it’s only a matter of time before someone is going to try to rob you of it.”

“She was flaunting her wealth?”

“Of course she was. Always with the fancy rings and bracelets, the expensive watches and the latest and most expensive iPhone… showing pictures of her vacations. Cannes, Antibes, Gstaad… She liked to rub it in our faces. I told Amadeo that she was flirting with disaster, and I was right.”

“So you think it was robbery?”

“Of course. Someone broke into her house for the purpose of taking whatever they could find—which was probably a lot—and she got in the way. It’s as simple as that.”

“We had a goldfish once,” Amadeo said happily, showing us that maybe he wasn’t as in tune with the flow of the conversation as I’d thought.

14

That evening, the whole family was gathered outside on the deck for dinner, and of course there was but a single topic of conversation: the murder of Neda Hoeppner. Since Marge and Tex’s home wasn’t furnished yet, they were still living with us, which was nice and cozy, though sometimes a little noisy, as it meant that Odelia’s gran also shared the house with the rest of us, and she has a tendency to get a little loud from time to time.

She was conspicuously absent now, though, which wasn’t her habit.

But then I remembered she’d told us she was meeting her decorator, so perhaps she was still next door, showing this person the lay of the land.

“I talked to Janice Malice, as Amadeo insists on calling her, and she confirmed that the Larobskis were home when they said they were,” said Chase, as he buttered a piece of bread.

“Hazel could still have snuck out of the house through the back,” said Odelia, “and gone over to Neda’s.”

“I don’t think she could have done that without Amadeo giving her away, though. That man simply blurts out anything that pops into his head.”

“He could have taken a nap after their early lunch.”

“Possible,” Chase admitted. “Though Hazel would still have needed to get to her car, which was parked out in front, and Janice would have seen her.”

“It’s probably just as Hazel says,” Marge said as she reached for the saucepan and dribbled a liberal amount of sauce over her pork chops. “A gangster, attracted by stories of Neda’s wealth, decided to rob the place, and was surprised by Neda. There was a struggle, she fell and hit her head.”