Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (2 page)

The wake was a bust. Everybody was crowded into the front hall, leaving the dead doctor to his own devices. One of his colleagues was kneeling in front of the couch, gingerly lifting the bloodstained front of the dress and peering inside. He meant well, but it was a perverse sight.

“Looks like a bullet wound,” he said, confirming the previous guess. “Has anyone called the police?” A half dozen cell phones were suddenly whipped out, but a man off in the corner announced that he had just made the call. He flipped his phone shut and slid it smugly back into his pocket.

The dead doctor’s daughter was standing near the couch. She had a grip on her husband’s lapels and was weeping into his shirt. Who could blame her? I looked about and found the widow and her son standing near the parlor door. Shock had loosened the poor woman’s skin. She looked ten years older. Her brother-in-law stepped over to them. He didn’t look too peachy either.

“We’ve got to get these people out of here,” I muttered to Billie.

“The police will want to talk with them, won’t they? I think everyone should stay put.”

She was right. I looked about to assess the scene. I’m six-three, so I have a decent vantage point for assessing. My instinct was to herd everybody out of the hallway, away from the gruesome new arrival and back into the parlor. But, of course, there was a dead body in there as well. What a mess. I had to take command. The buzz of voices was rising to a din. I hated to do it, but I clapped my hands together loudly, like a schoolteacher harnessing an unruly class. The room fell instantly silent. Impressive. The only sound was the continued soft sobbing of the daughter.

“I’m terribly sorry about this, but I’m going to have to ask everybody to hang tight until the police get here. Make yourselves at … If you could all please be patient, I’m sure that we’ll—” Billie was tugging on my sleeve. She pulled me down to her level and whispered in my ear. Brilliant tactician. I straightened and cleared my throat.

“Would any of you care for a drink?”

A dam of relief burst.

As a certified undertaker and overseer of funerals, I’m deft at crowd control when need be. Aunt Billie had taken the doctor’s immediate family upstairs to her apartment in order to get them away from the nonsense below. I was bartending and butlering the other guests. Doctors are largely a Scotch and soda crowd, though personally I’ve never much cared for the perfumey aftertaste of Scotch. I’m a bourbon man. But then, I wasn’t drinking.

I had fetched a thin blanket from Billie’s linen closet and placed it over the dead waitress. Before I did, I paused and took a long hard look at the woman. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies, so it wasn’t from morbid fascination that I stared overlong at her. I couldn’t place her. She was from none of the restaurants that I frequented in the immediate neighborhood, unless she was brand-new. She had shoulder-length hair, thick and black, which had been gathered up at the back of her head and held there with one of those oversize plastic clips that you can also use to close up a bag of potato chips. With all the jostling she had undergone, the clip was crooked and only holding back a portion of her hair. The loose strands were glued with melted snow against her cheek and her neck. The young woman—I was placing her in her early- to mid-twenties—had high cheekbones, a very distinct widow’s peak and a slightly turned-up nose. She was about five-five, probably around a hundred and twenty or so. She had a small scar on her chin, roughly the same as the one I have just below my lip. Mine came from a sledding fiasco in my youth which, next to bicycle mishaps, probably accounts for 90 percent of the tiny scars on the faces of America’s men. Of course, I had no idea where the dead waitress got hers.

One more thing: How did I know she was a waitress? Simple. She was wearing a short, pale green dress, a pair of white sneakers and a brown-and-white checked apron with a plastic tag attached that read: HELEN.

The police weren’t happy that the body had been moved. The snow still hadn’t let up and the impression that the body had left was already vanishing. The first policemen to arrive were a mixed pair: The older one was large and gruff, his partner skinny and sour.

“Why did you move the body?” the older cop asked me, shining his flashlight on the front steps. Only the slightest trace of blood remained.

“It’s cold out,” I said. “It was still sleeting. She wasn’t wearing a coat.” I didn’t have a good answer.

“The crime scene has been breached,” the skinny guy said.

I scratched my head. “How do you know it’s a crime scene? Nobody here heard any shots.”

A general mumbling of assent from the assembled chorus just inside the door backed me up on this point. The two cops exchanged a look.

“We’re going to have to question everyone here,” the skinny cop said. “I hope you didn’t let anybody leave.”

His partner looked past me at the milling guests. “Why are they drinking?”

I shrugged. “It’s the holidays.”

“No more drinks, please. Gather them up.”

While I collected everyone’s glasses, the two cops moved inside and took a look at the victim. It seemed like a pretty indifferent look, but I suppose I give some ho-hum once-overs at corpses myself. The skinny cop gestured toward the parlor.

“What’s in there?”

“Another body,” I told him.

“Man or woman?”

“Man.”

“How’d he die?”

“Heart attack.”

“When?”

“Not tonight, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You got some sort of table, Mr. Sewell?” the older cop asked. “And a chair?”

I fetched a card table from upstairs and set it up for him. I rolled in my own chair from my office. Command post. The skinny cop pulled the blanket back down so that the waitress’s face was showing, then he had everyone line up and walk slowly past her to take a good hard look at her before then stepping over to the card table to be questioned by his partner. The dead doctor’s family was still upstairs with Billie. I decided to wait until all of the guests had been interviewed and allowed to leave—out the side door to avoid further “breaching” of the so-called crime scene—before letting the police know about the others. The two cops were as unhappy with this information as they had been with the body’s being moved.

“What are they doing upstairs?” the gruff cop demanded.

I indicated the parlor. “That’s their loved one in there. It’s been upsetting enough for them even before the arrival of our mystery guest. I was giving them a little peace.”

“We have to talk to them too.”

“Of course you do.”

The gruff cop glared at me. Fetch.

The rest of the investigating unit was arriving, everybody grumbling the same thing about the body having been moved. The person with the yellow crime-scene tape wasn’t sure if she should even bother. The photographer took a few pictures of the sidewalk and the front steps then came inside and snapped off a dozen portraits of the waitress. The medical examiner arrived, and after some poking and prodding, announced that the waitress had been dead between two to five hours. “Fresh kill” was how he put it.

I went up to Billie’s living room to fetch the dead doctor’s family. I led them back downstairs where they each took a turn looking down at the face of the dead woman. No one recognized her.

“Her name is Helen,” the skinny cop said. “Does the name Helen mean anything to anyone?”

“Her face launched a thousand ships,” the widow said wearily, then turned and went into the parlor to be with her husband. She was joined by her brother-in-law. The daughter detached herself from her husband’s arm and stepped over to me. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Even so, I could tell that she had her father’s eyes. Unfortunately she had his jaw too. And perhaps even at one point the nose, though I suspected she had had this doctored sometime back. The woman was handsome at best. She wore her straw-colored hair coifed into a perfect bowl. Good skin. Pearl earrings and matching necklace. A well-maintained Guilford housewife. She took my hand—my fingers really—and pinched lightly.

“Thank you for all you’ve done, Mr. Sewell,” she said in a voice just barely above a whisper. She withdrew her fingers and joined the others in the parlor.

A short, stocky man with yellow hair and the demeanor of a congenial bulldog was coming through the front door. He was wearing a Humphrey Bogart trench coat and a Humphrey Bogart sneer. He stepped directly over to the body. I met him there.

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Detective John Kruk let out a soft grunt, from which I was able to extract the words, “You again.” He was looking down at the woman on the couch.

“Did you know her?”

“I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“Any idea why she was left here?”

“Well, we’re a funeral home. She’s dead. Maybe someone was tossing us a bone?”

Detective Kruk looked up at me. “You still a smart aleck, Mr. Sewell?”

“One can never really climb all the way out of the gene pool, Detective.”

He grunted again and returned his gaze to the dead waitress. He got down on one knee—a short trip—and pulled the blanket back further, down to the woman’s waist. Without taking his eyes off her, he asked me a series of questions.

“Was she on her front or her back when you found her?”

“Her side, actually.”

“Left? Right?”

“Right.”

“Which way was she facing?”

“Sideways, I guess. Is that what you mean?”

“When you opened the door. Head to the left? The right? Facing the door? What?”

“I see. Um … her head was to my left. Her right. That would be, facing south.”

“Feet?”

“Excuse me?”

“Her feet. Her legs. Was she in a fetal position or was she stretched out?”

“Like did someone dump her off or lay her down gently?”

“You can’t know that. You weren’t present. I’m asking what you observed.”

Kruk’s warm and fuzzy style was all coming back to me now. He had moved the blanket all the way down to her feet and was looking closely at her legs. The cad.

“I’d say somewhere in between fetal and laid out,” I said.

Kruk got back to his feet. Aunt Billie had just come into the hallway. A smile blossomed on her face as she came forward.

“It’s Sergeant Kruk, isn’t it? Why hello.”

“Lieutenant. Hello, Mrs. Sewell.”

“We meet again. Isn’t it terrible? The poor girl. Can I offer you anything to drink, Detective?”

“No. Thank you.” Kruk told us that he and his gang would be there another hour or so. “You might as well go on about your business,” he said. I stepped over to say my good-byes to the dead doctor’s family, who were finally leaving. They all looked terrible. The widow summed it up.

“It’s a rotten night all around.”

The dead doctor’s brother gave me a lousy handshake as they were leaving. He took one final glance back toward the coffin, then joined his family at the door. They left, huddled together like a family of turtles. I watched them disappear into the snow. Forty minutes later the dead waitress was hoisted onto a gurney and taken away. She was being referred to now as “Jane Doe,” though it seemed to me that “Helen Doe” would have been—technically—closer to the truth. Kruk’s minions began drifting away. I went into the parlor and battened down the hatches on the doctor’s coffin. That’s when I discovered what the son had been doing when he had reached into the coffin. There on the dead man’s chest was a silver dollar. One of the old ones. This one was dated 1902. I had no idea of the significance, but I’m accustomed to people dumping various memorabilia into their loved one’s coffins at the last minute. My favorite was a small alarm clock, set to go off every day at four in the morning. Billie and I debated all through breakfast the morning of the funeral whether or not to turn off the alarm. In the end, we left it.

I replaced the silver dollar on the doctor’s chest and closed the lid of the coffin, then I shut off the lights and left the doctor to his last night on Earth. Billie was looking tired and I sent her off to bed. “I’ll lock up,” I told her. Which I did. Then I put on my coat and headed back down the dark street to my place. The wetness had finally gone out of the snowfall. It was down to wind-whipped flurries, silver brush strokes in the gusty night air. And
cold.
God
damn
it was cold.

There was a leggy blond woman in my bed when I climbed the stairs to my place. She had a big, sad, bruised look on her face.

“I hate my goddamn job,” she pouted.

I shrugged, getting out of my clothes as quickly as possible. “Oh you know, you win some, you lose some.”

I slid between the sheets. The warmth coming off her body was a rapture. She turned to me.

“I didn’t just ‘lose some,’ Hitch. I called for light fucking flurries and lows in the upper twenties. Have you seen it out there? It’s a goddamn disaster. I fucking stink.”

I love a woman who swears like a sailor. Bonnie Nash rolled into my arms. Fronts collided. High pressure dominated. We were in for a wild one.

T
he following day was gray and bitter. Greenmount Cemetery was painted in apocalyptic tones. Chalky tombstones angled out of the dingy snow like disordered teeth. Black trees against a gray sky. Low, transparent clouds and a spastic wind slicing hard scars in the air. It was ugly.

Bone cold, with a threat of vultures.

Nobody at the doctor’s funeral mentioned the incident of the night before, but it was in everybody’s eyes. Huddled together against the cold on the side of a shallow hill, the mourners looked hungover, unfocused and detached. The coffin hovered above the grave, and next to it was a pile of earth, covered with a tarp, too frozen now to shovel into the hole. After the guests left we’d be calling on the cemetery’s John Deere.

We zipped through the service and got the hell off that hill. The doctor’s brother escorted Ann Kingman to her car, and she never looked back. I declined the post-funeral bash. I usually do.

Bonnie was still there when I got back home. Her disposition hadn’t improved much from the night before. She was wearing my white plush bathrobe and standing at the window when I returned. The robe has a curlicue
H
embroidered on the front. On a drunken lark a few years ago I checked into the downtown Hilton for the night. A hundred and twenty-five dollars later, I came away with this robe. I could have snagged one at Sears for half that.