Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (23 page)

“Man, I don’t know. She was a big deal about protection and everything.”

“Do you know if Helen was seeing someone else?”

“You mean like, on a regular basis?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know. After I got busted by Gloria, I didn’t talk to her much. Gloria might be skinny and everything, man, but she’s a powerhouse. Get on her wrong side and you’re ruined. I do what I have to to keep from tangling with her.”

Except sleeping around. That would be asking too much. The appetite and all.

I cupped my hands around my hot chocolate mug, brought it up to my lips and gently blew the steam over the rim. I was pretty much done here as far as I could tell. Unless the big guy across the table was an Oscar-caliber master of deception, I didn’t see where he had killed Helen. An idea hit me.

“When was the last time you slept with Helen?”

“How long was she pregnant?”

I shook my head. “You first.”

He set his mug down gently on the table and tugged on his beard. “I … I kind of lied to you a minute ago,” he said. He sounded like a little kid confessing.

“About what?”

“About … after I got busted, I did stay away from Helen. That was last summer. Like, July.”

“The last time you slept with Helen was July?” That would certainly take him out of the sweepstakes.

“Well … yeah. Except for one other time.”

“One other time.”

Gary suddenly had everywhere to look but at me. “She was all weird, man. I didn’t know what was going on. I knew she was drunk when she called me. Or something. High on something, I don’t know. She called me up here, at the house, which she had never done before. It was just a miracle that Gloria was out with a bunch of her friends. One of them was getting married. Helen said she had to see me right away. She wouldn’t take no. I asked her if something was wrong, because she was sounding so weird, and she just laughed. But it wasn’t a ha-ha laugh. She told me to meet her at the Charm Inn. That’s right next to Sinbad’s.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“She had a room. I went there. I mean, I had to, you know. She didn’t want to say two words to me, man. She just threw me down on the bed and jumped on top of me.” Gary shook his head in wonder at the memory. “She was a tiger, man. She’d never been like that. She actually scared me. It was a very fucked-up thing, I didn’t like it. I mean, the sex was incredible. But I didn’t like the scene. Helen wasn’t Helen. She was angrier than I’d ever seen her, but she wouldn’t say about what. I don’t know what the hell she needed me for. Any of those traveling assholes at Sinbad’s would have blown their top for a ride like she was giving. Except for that anger thing.” He tugged on his beard some more. “Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe that was why she wanted someone she knew. I guess you go turning weird like that with a stranger, the stranger might turn weird right back. Then you’d have a real problem.”

Gary stopped and looked over at me. “Maybe that’s what happened to Helen, huh? You think? Maybe she got weird like that with some stranger. And he came back and killed her. What the hell is that all about?”

“When was all this, Gary?”

“This thing? Like, a couple of months ago. October. Yeah, it was like right before Halloween.”

“So, about two months ago.”

“I guess.”

“Can I ask you another question?”

“What the hell, man. You can write a book about me already.”

“Did you use protection?”

Gary blinked. One for yes. Two for no. He blinked twice.

“Oh, shit, man. How many months was Helen pregnant?”

I was holding up two fingers.

We had our man, but we didn’t have our killer. Before I left, I had asked Gary “for the record” if he had an alibi for the night that Helen was murdered.

“I told this to the police already,” he said. He was still in shock about Helen having possibly been carrying his child when she was killed.

“I’m not the police. Tell me.”

“I was fucking Tracy Atkins.” He hadn’t said it with pride. He added that Gloria had busted him on that one too. Rather, the police busted him, and she was sitting right next to him when they did.

“What’s the secret of your relationship, Gary?” I asked as I stepped back out onto the porch. “Seems to me you’re beating the odds.”

“Gloria thinks we’re going to be famous. She thinks it’s just a matter of time.”

“What do you think?”

Gary was staring out at the Allman Brothers Band album cover.

“I think we suck.”

•••

While I waited for Bonnie to conclude her ruse interview with Gloria—we had set a time to meet, and it was still forty minutes away—I popped into a bar on York Road for a quick shot of antifreeze. It turned out to be a sports bar. The place was loaded with golden-haired preppies all wearing baseball caps, mostly advertising various colleges. They were drinking and chanting and screaming at several television screens posted around the bar, each of which was tuned to a different sporting event. The guys were, for the most part, fit and athletic-looking and boyish. The women, who looked as if they could have been some of these guys’s sisters, were trim, small-breasted and vigorously attractive, with killer teeth. Overall, a handsome, if not very expansive, gene pool.

I ordered two shots of Jack Daniel’s and a beer. I poured one of the shots into the beer. A Jack-in-the-Box. A guy standing next to me wearing a TARHEELS cap watched me mixing the two brews.

“Does that work?” he asked.

“Works for me.”

“All right! I’m trying that next!”

I was glad I could launch the boy on his Jack-in-the-Box career. A blond girl materialized at his side. Her cap read HOPKINS. Her sweatshirt read GOUCHER. Maybe Billie and I should be putting out sweatshirts and baseball caps, I thought. Tasteful, of course. An image floated into my mind. A coffin next to an open grave, along with the slogan:
WE’LL TAKE IT FROM HERE
.

The bar was insanely noisy. Even so, I was able to think. It’s a simple matter of switching your head to a different frequency. The Jack helps. I considered my talk with Gary. Even while one issue appeared to have been resolved—Gary was very possibly the father of Helen’s unborn child—there remained more questions than answers. High up on the list was the nagging question of whether or not there really was a so-called mystery boyfriend at all. Gary had failed to acknowledge knowing about one. And I didn’t feel that he would have bothered to lie on that point. Of course, Tracy Atkins had been convinced that Helen was seeing someone and spending gobs of his cash. But Tracy had not only failed to provide definitive proof—such as a name, a conversation with Helen about the guy, or an actual sighting—her general credibility was sliding.

I took a long sip of my drink. Or was it possible … was it possible that I was simply being duped? I had to look at it. Tracy Atkins’s alibi for the night that Helen was murdered was the guy who had gotten Helen pregnant. Gary’s alibi was a woman who was willing to sleep with him and who was an easy liar to boot. Should this tidy arrangement have been setting off alarm bells in my head? And then there was still Gloria. “Out with her friends” Gary had said, referring to the night that Helen was killed.

A larger question grew right in front of me. What was I to make of Gary’s story about the night that Helen went psycho on him? By his account of it, something pretty severe would seem to have happened to Helen sometime around the night she allegedly jumped the big guy’s bones with such a combination of anger and desperation. Gary’s account of the evening certainly sounded to me like that of a person who had snapped. And Gary was right when he wondered aloud about the danger of Helen behaving this way with a total stranger. I thought about the waitress, Gail, and her account of Helen’s dustup at the bar a month before her murder. I had been tending to slap Terry Haden’s face—or even the face of the mystery boyfriend—onto Helen’s antagonist. But what if it really was a customer? What if Helen had gotten tangled up and gone nutso with some guy who had a few ballistic buttons of his own?

Bonnie was waiting for me at the Howard Johnson’s about a mile up York Road.

“Do you know what the capital of North Dakota is?” she asked as I squeezed into the booth. She had a hand pressed flat against the paper place mat in front of me.

“It’s pronounced ‘peer,’ ” I said.

“Ha! That’s the capital of
South
Dakota. The answer is Bismark. I tricked you. I knew you’d go for the weird answer.”

“Proud of yourself, aren’t you.”

“Damn straight.” She lifted her hand from the place mat. Yep. There it was. Pierre, South Dakota.

I ordered a coffee from the waitress. Bonnie and I both noted—grimly—the woman’s name tag. HELLO. I’M HELEN.

“What did you learn?” Bonnie asked, inching forward in her seat.

“This, that and nothing,” I said. I gave her the rundown of my talk with Gary. She listened as I gave my impressions. I told her that I believed him. Gary had crumbled so quickly on his one lie, that he had not been with Helen since the previous summer, that I really didn’t think he had lied about any of the rest of his story. Certainly he had been forthcoming about Tracy Atkins. Bonnie agreed with me that Gary didn’t sound like much of a suspect for Helen’s murder. She also agreed with me that Tracy Atkins was no George Washington when it came to telling the truth.

“Maybe she and Helen were rivals for Gary,” Bonnie offered. “I’m not saying that she killed Helen because of it. But maybe that’s why she didn’t mention it. Or why she’s pretending to be such a close friend of Helen’s.”

“Gail told me that Tracy and Helen were friends.”

“Gail is lagging behind things, Hitch. That girl doesn’t really know what she knows.”

“But Tracy Atkins does know more than she’s saying. I can tell. I just don’t know if we can pull it out of her.”

Helen arrived with my coffee. I watched her as she returned to the counter. I tried to picture her taking a telephone call then rushing out into the parking lot. I glanced out the window to my left. No idling Firebird. No killer leaning sideways to push open the door.

“So, how about you?” I said, snapping out of it. “How was your ‘Baltimore Woman in Song?’”

Bonnie shook her head. “That’s one nasty viper, that woman. And remember, she was trying to impress me—I was getting her best behavior. She’s convinced that she’s the next big thing. She says this whole Sinbad’s gig is just to keep her voice tuned. Apparently she and Gary have written a whole lot of original songs.”

“Gosh, we should have stayed longer the other night.”

“No. You didn’t hear me. Apparently she and Gary have written a whole lot of original songs.”

I stared out at the empty parking lot. “Shit. We have nothing.” I took a sip of my coffee. It tasted like cardboard. “What have we got. Helen pissed somebody off. That’s the bottom line. She pissed off somebody enough that they decided to kill her. Haden. Some guy she was sleeping with. Someone. Or maybe it really was our ‘Baltimore Woman in Song.’ I didn’t push that with Gary. But I certainly got the impression that this is a gal who comes out swinging. What if Gloria learned about Gary getting Helen pregnant? You tell me, would a woman kill over something like that?”

Bonnie didn’t think so. “The woman I just met? I doubt if she’d kill for love, if that’s the actual question. Maybe if Helen’s presence was threatening to break up the act. But it doesn’t sound that way. According to you, the big oaf didn’t even know she was carrying his child.”

“No. It looks like Helen was resigned to doing this whole thing on her own. Just like Mama.”

Bonnie squinted at me across the table. “A man did this, Hitch. Okay? Let’s use sexism responsibly here. Some man killed Helen Waggoner. Some man she pissed off. The killer is from your planet mister, not mine.”

Bonnie had to get back to the station. I needed to check in with Billie. Surely
somebody
new had died by now.
We’ll Take It from Here
. Bonnie and I agreed to meet at the Belvedere between her two evening newscasts. Might as well get our money’s worth.

“What’s going on around here?” Billie wanted to know when I got back to the office. “Suddenly nobody is dying. What is this,
Death Takes a Holiday
? That phone hasn’t rung once all day. Where are all the dead people?”

“Stubbornly holding on to life?”

“Bah! It’s ridiculous. Maybe the phones aren’t working.”

Billie followed me into my office. I dropped into my chair and picked up the phone. “Dial tone,” I announced.

“Try a call. Maybe the dial tone is the only thing that’s working.”

“Billie, it’s possible that no—”

“Dial!”

Vickie Waggoner’s phone number was scribbled on my blotter. I dialed it. I didn’t expect there to be any answer. There wasn’t. I let the phone ring. Four ringy-dingies. Five ringy-dingies. As I held the phone up so that Billie could hear the ringing, Billie was moving aside to let someone step into the room. It was Vickie Waggoner. I hung up the phone.

“I was just calling you,” I said.

Her tired smile filled the room. “Here I am.”

I
understood everything. Within limits, of course.

The early-setting sun ignited the far wall. Its brassy light tracked steadily across Magritte’s
Fiddle
as Vickie Waggoner, in the chair by the window, told me her story. Her head was outlined in a brilliant copper corona. On the wall across from her, just to the left of the Magritte, was her shadow. It moved whenever she moved.

As I had pretty much figured, Vickie told me that no sooner had she set down the receiver than Terry Haden had announced that he was getting the hell out of there.

“That was just fine with me,” Vickie said. “In fact, that’s what I had hoped he would do. That’s why I pretended you were the police.”

“You knew he’d scram if he thought the police were on their way?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“I don’t know if you know this or not, but Terry Haden just got out of prison. He was in jail for child pornography.”