“We could check Daniel’s personnel file. From the restaurant,” BeBe said.
“What would that prove?”
“A lot. His last place of employment, his last address. Next of kin.”
“He’d probably list one of his brothers. I know he’s got one named Derek, who’s a plumber, and one named Richard, who drives a big rig.”
BeBe finished the last of her drink. “Do you want to do this or not?”
“Yeah,” I said, throwing the ice-cream carton in the trash. “Let’s do it.”
BeBe’s office at Guale was in a tiny room just off the kitchen. She flicked on the overhead light and pointed to a file cabinet. “Personnel records.”
BeBe opened the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and thumbed through the contents until she came up with the file she was looking for.
“Here it is,” she said. “Stipanek, Daniel F.”
“Quick,” I said, “what’s the F for?”
“Francis,” she said, leafing through the papers inside. “What else do you want to know?”
“Give me that,” I said, taking the file and sitting behind her desk.
“Hey,” she said. “This is my office and that’s my chair.”
She sat in a chair in the corner and sulked.
“Last place of employment was the Huguenot House in Charleston,” I said.
“No good calling them,” she said. “They went out of business.”
“His references don’t sound too interesting,” I said, reading on. “Here it is; next of kin: Paula Gambrell. And there’s an address in Columbia, South Carolina.”
“Does he have any sisters?” BeBe asked.
“No,” I said. “Just two brothers.”
“Maybe it’s his mom,” she said.
“Or a cousin.”
“I know that name,” BeBe said. “Gambrell. But I can’t think why.”
She picked up the phone.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“Emery Cooper,” she said, winking at me.
“Your funeral director boyfriend?”
“Emery literally knows where all the bodies are buried in this town,” she said, winking again. “He’s very well connected. And well endowed.”
She fluffed up her hair and put on some lipstick while she was waiting for her call to be connected.
“Emery?” she cooed. “Darlin’, how in the world are you?”
Her tinkly laugh echoed in the office.
“You are the naughtiest man I have ever known,” she said. “And I would do something about that condition of yours if I didn’t have other pressing business to attend to right now.”
She gave me another broad wink. I considered leaving the room.
“Darlin’, what does the name Paula Gambrell mean to you?”
“Yeah. Gambrell, with two ‘l’s.”
“I’m checking on a prospective employee’s references,” she said. “So the name does mean something to you?”
“Oh,” she said, putting her hand to her mouth. “That’s right. Hoyt Gambrell. Good heavens, I’d forgotten all about that man. Whatever happened to him?”
“You don’t say. And you think he’s still in prison?”
I sat up a little straighter at the mention of prison.
She listened a little longer. “Well, that’s a sad, tragic story,” she said finally. “All right, lover. Yes. Just as soon as I get through with business.”
She hung up the phone.
“What did Emery say?”
“Do you remember that thing with Hoyt Gambrell? He was some kind of assistant vice president over at the sugar plant, years ago, back in the eighties, I believe.”
“I was in parochial school in the eighties,” I reminded her.
“At the time it happened, I was just old enough to know it was the juiciest thing to hit Savannah in years,” BeBe recalled. “Mama hid the newspaper so I wouldn’t read all the trashy stuff that was going on, but the other kids at school filled me in, because, of course, Gambrell’s kids went to school at Country Day with me.”
“What was so juicy about Hoyt Gambrell?” I asked.
“He was married to the daughter of one of the company founders, but he had a roving eye. There was a young woman, Paula Stipanek, who worked on the plant floor, in the bag room. She was attractive and raising a passel of little kids by herself. She caught Hoyt Gambrell’s eye, and he had her transferred to his office. One thing led to another, and pretty soon they were ‘dating.’ ”
“But you don’t get sent to jail for adultery,” I said.
“No,” BeBe said, “but you do get sent to jail for extorting kickbacks from vendors—if you get caught. Which Gambrell did. The whole thing might have blown over, since he was married to the boss’s daughter, except that after he got caught, he was quietly invited to leave the company. But Gambrell went berserk when they fired him, called up his former father-in-law and threatened to burn the plant to the ground. That’s when the law got involved.”
“And when he got sent to jail,” I said.
“Yep. He had actually rigged some kind of bomb to go off in the executive dining room, but the thing was a dud. Right before the shit hit the fan over the extortion thing, Gambrell figured out that the company’s lawyers might try to get Paula Stipanek to testify against him, since she was his secretary and presumably knew a lot about the kickback scheme. Damn if he didn’t get a quickie divorce from Miss Sugar Princess and marry Paula.”
“That way she couldn’t testify against him.”
“From what I remember hearing, she wouldn’t have done that anyway,” BeBe said. “Hoyt went off to a federal prison in Florida, and Paula followed him down there.”
“She left her kids?”
“Yes, ma’am,” BeBe said.
“My God,” I said. “Daniel wasn’t kidding when he said he and his brothers raised themselves. How awful.”
I handed Daniel’s personnel file back to BeBe. Now I wished I’d never seen it. Families suck, he’d told me, and I’d been sure he hadn’t meant it. But now I knew he did mean it, and I knew why, and I wished I didn’t.
“Let’s go,” I told BeBe. “I feel like I need a bath.”