Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (27 page)

On the way back to my car I spotted a figure crouching down next to the fresh grave of Richard Kingman, the doctor we had buried the previous week. I thought at first that it was the doctor’s widow. Recalling our conversation the other day at the little skating ponds in her neighborhood, I thought maybe the woman was finally confronting the fact that her husband wasn’t simply leaving rooms as she entered them, but that he was in fact gone for good. I started for the grave, working up a bromide I’m sure, when the figure rose up from its crouch. It rose too tall to be Ann Kingman. It was her son. The name escaped me. He turned and saw me coming.

“Mr. Kingman,” I said. “Hitchcock Sewell.”

The young man was drawing a blank. Then he got it.

“The undertaker.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt. I was just—”

He waved his hand. “No problem. I happened to be passing by and thought I’d check in on the old man.” He glanced down at his father’s grave, then back at me. He attempted a laugh. “He’s still dead.”

The junior Kingman’s attempt at levity needed some work. His face was too drawn, his entire bearing having given in to gravity. I noted again that, except for the red hair and the glasses, he looked much more like his mother. He crossed his arms in a hug and shuddered. It was strictly for effect.

“Brrr. Can you believe this weather?”

“Yes, it’s something.” I glanced over at the headstone. There was a fresh bouquet of flowers there. If the young Kingman were just “passing by” how fortuitous that he happened to have a clutch of flowers along with him.

“I’m sorry about your father,” I said.

The young man seemed to weigh my words. “Thank you,” he said. “So am I.” He twisted his head to look down at the grave. “I guess it’s an old story.”

“Which one’s that?”

“Fathers and sons. I mean, fathers and sons who never really connected.” Kingman’s shoe had found a wedge of loosened sod at the foot of his father’s grave. He kept his eyes on it as he noodled it about.

“I guess I did my best to ignore him. Or just to stay away from him. I had the feeling that he didn’t really like me.”

“I doubt that was the case. You were his son.”

“Sure. I’m his blood. You’ve got to love family, I guess. But you don’t have to like them.” He looked up at me. “
I
didn’t like
him
.”

There was nothing I could say to that, so I kept quiet. I felt sorry for the guy. He was tall, like his father, but slightly built, the lanky look of a basketball player.

The silence between us was threatening to become awkward. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I get bombarded with names.”

“Jeffrey.”

“Of course. Hitch.” We shook hands. A crow flew overhead. “How’s your mother, Jeffrey? I happened to run into her the other day.”

“She mentioned that. She’s fine. She’s a tough broad, you know?”

“I know that it’s none of my business, but I don’t get the feeling that she’s as tough as she pretends to be.”

“She’s fine,” Jeffrey said again.

“Well, tell her I send my regards.”

“I’ll do that.”

I left the happy camper to his fond memories. For my part, I decided I had had just too much fun in the graveyard for one day. I got the cemetery into my rearview mirror just as quickly as I could.

I wanted to follow up on the idea I’d had while at Helen’s gravesite, but I knew that there was another matter that needed my immediate attention. I drove over to Television Hill, parked in the visitors’s lot and tripped not-so-merrily along the sidewalk into the station. Bonnie’s silver sports car was parked in her slot. The weather lady was in.

I found Bonnie on the set. An architect was going over with her a set of plans he had drawn up for overhauling the weather corner. They do this every three or four years. Put a new face on the old map. Bonnie saw me standing off in the shadows. She held up two fingers to me. Two minutes. For a moment I thought she was going to be holding up just one. Her expression suggested it.

“New set?” I asked when she stepped over.

“Where the fuck were you yesterday?” she hissed. “I waited at the goddamn Belvedere for two hours.”

“We have to talk,” I said.

“No we don’t, I have to yell! Have you heard of a
telephone
, Hitch? Or maybe Western Union? Or say it with fucking flowers? Where the hell were you?”

“I had an emergency,” I said.

“Fine. And did it take you away from
all
forms of communication?”

Would the monster within me cough up a lie? Or would the Boy Scout speak? And make the moment a living hell.

“I couldn’t call you. I was out on a boat.” Oh my God.
Him.
The liar roared and beat his hairy paws against the inside of my chest.

“A boat?” Bonnie blinked. “What boat?”

“Tugboat. A red one.”

“I don’t give a damn what color it was, Hitch. Why didn’t you call me before you went out on a goddamn tugboat? Why were you on a tugboat anyway?”

“Can we go somewhere?”

“Not until you give me a satisfying answer.”

Her blood pressure was up. Her cheeks were crimson. I realized that having crossed her Rubicon the other day, Bonnie was not beyond another well-placed smack to my cheek if I gave her even half a reason.
Beast. Speak.

“Do you know Joe Donofrio?” I asked. I already knew that she didn’t. I had just made up the name.

“No.” She made a two syllable word of it.

“Joe Donofrio. He used to … run one of the tugs. Years ago. Retired. He died. The other day. Shoveling snow.” (Might as well toss one bit of half-truth into this sham.) “We had him cremated. His wish was that his ashes be spread in the harbor. That’s where I was.”

Bonnie’s eyes narrowed. “You never mentioned anything about this.”

“With everything that’s been happening, it just slipped my mind. Besides, it’s shoptalk. You don’t want to hear about every corpse that walks through the door.”

Bonnie softened. “I don’t know, Hitch. The cremation of a tugboat captain and a burial at sea? That’s sort of interesting. I mean, I could see a human interest story in that. If it has the right elements. Did he leave behind a widow? Maybe I could interview her.”

“No widow,” I said quickly. Too quickly. “No family at all. In fact, Joe was pretty much an old crank. He didn’t have many friends. It was a pretty bleak event all around.” The beast was pawing at my throat. It wanted to elaborate. It always wants to elaborate. That’s why the beast is not your friend. I bit down on my tongue.

“I should have called you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I got caught up.”

Bonnie smirked. “I forgive you. Which means I own you.” She slipped her arm through mine. “What’s that noise?”

“My stomach.” The beast lumbering back to its lair.

“Let’s go eat.”

“Honeybunch, whatever you say.”

Bonnie and I parked it at Frazier’s, a low-ceiling dive of exquisite repute in Hampden. We ordered the spaghetti special. Their garlic bread is a killer. I put away an entire loaf. Penance. And insurance against the temptation to run off and kiss the wrong girl again.

It is a known fact that the wronged woman becomes all the more beautiful, especially to the eye of the bastard who has foisted that status upon her. But not exclusively to him. Guilt can gild, so to speak, and certainly it was doing so at Frazier’s. Bonnie glowed. Most everyone in the small restaurant recognized Bonnie Nash from TV. She even signed a few autographs while we waited for our spaghetti. Sometimes her celebrity bothers her, but tonight she positively shimmered at the fawning. I had ordered a half carafe of Frazier’s lousy red wine—Bonnie was abstaining due to her need for clarity at the weather map in a few hours—and, when it seemed to empty too swiftly, I ordered the second half. As our waitress was making the switch, I noted, “Half empty, half full.”

About midway through our spaghetti I told Bonnie my idea. I didn’t bother to tell her that it had germinated from the cloud of oily smoke coming out of Pops’ backhoe. “So here’s the question,” I said.

“Where is her car?”

“Whose car?”

“Helen Waggoner’s. Where’s her car?”

“I don’t know. What are you saying?”

“She had to get back and forth from home to work. Right? There’s no convenient bus that I know of that runs to the airport from Woodlawn. Plus she had a child to tote around and another one on the way. The woman had to be able to get around. Where is her car?”

Bonnie shrugged. “Who says she didn’t have a car?”

“I didn’t see one.”

“Didn’t see one where?”

I looked across the table at my lovely friend. No beast. I crawled out onto the limb all alone.

“Vickie Waggoner and I met at Helen’s place this afternoon. We were looking for something that might tell us what obstetrician Helen was seeing.”

Bonnie’s voice carried no inflection. “You didn’t mention this.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“I just … There’s so much going on.”

“I see. Did you and Miss Vickie find what you were looking for?”

“It was a bust. But it occurred to me later, this thing about the car.”

“Hitch, how important is it whether or not Helen Waggoner owned a car?”

“I don’t know. It might not be important at all. But a car is a large thing to go missing.”

“If it has.”

“If it has.”

Bonnie was looking just a tiny bit less like an angel by the time we finished our dinner and paid up and left. She was not sounding like one either. We were on the sidewalk out in front of the restaurant.

“I’m so fucking sick of my goddamn job. Hitch, we’ve
got
to figure out this murder. I
have
to bring in a scoop to the station, I just have to. I can’t grow old spitting out the goddamn barometric pressure. And the fact is, I won’t. The shelf life for a female television personality is pretty goddamn short.”

“We’ll come up with the killer.” I sounded about as confident as I had when I’d said the same thing to Vickie earlier in the day. Which wasn’t saying much. Bonnie must have been reading my mind.

“Who will? You and me? Or you and the sister?”

Before I even had time to form the thought, I blurted, “You told Jay Adams about Gail.”

“What?”

“Going out to Sinbad’s.”

“Who told you that?”

“The Jaybird himself. I went to see him this afternoon.”

“Well, so what if I did? Jay is a colleague. We share information.”

Then she blushed.
She blushed!
Bonnie held her gaze on me, but I could tell that she wanted to turn away. Well son of a bitch.

“Are you sleeping with Jay Adams?” I asked.

Her answer was immediate. “I don’t have to answer that. Are you sleeping with Vickie Waggoner?”

“I don’t have to answer that.”

Now neither of us dared turn away. But it was too damn cold—and ridiculous—to stand there on the sidewalk in front of Frazier’s and have a staring contest. It was Bonnie who blinked first.

“I’ll withdraw the question,” she said.

“Good.”

“Aren’t you going to withdraw yours?”

“If you’d like.”

“I’d like.”

Cautiously, we holstered our weapons. But we were still circling.

“Maybe I’ll come see you after I get off work,” Bonnie said. She was using a testing-the-waters tone.

“Uh-huh. Maybe I’ll be there.”

“Maybe you’d better.”

“Is that a warning?”

“Maybe it is.”

T
he following morning, while Bonnie was taking a shower, I phoned Vickie Waggoner. Alcatraz sat on the floor in front of me giving me his disappointed look. Vickie wasn’t in. I left the vaguest of messages—“I’ll call you later”—and hung up. When Bonnie stepped into the room some minutes later, rubbing her hair with a towel, Alcatraz let out a pair of bubbly barks. It’s a good thing Bonnie doesn’t speak dog. My hound was telling on me. Anything to ingratiate.

I am the King of Breakfast. My general philosophy is to front-load your day with as much of the good stuff as you can manage so that if and when the day slips away from you later, at least you have something worthy to look back on. I bombarded Bonnie with a colossal fruit smoothy, orgasmically perfect coffee, Belgian waffles—which I understand are no more Belgian than French fries are French or English muffins are English—and Jones’s little link sausages, plump and bursting. My array of jams included boysenberry, huckleberry and plum; my syrup was 101 percent pure maple from the Green Mountain State; and my plates were authentic Ming Dynasty wannabes from the Wal-Mart in Glen Burnie. Bonnie’s eyes went wide as she stepped into the kitchen.

“Hitch. I’m not really hungry.”

And that’s why we have dogs. Bonnie took a cup of coffee and the corner of a Belgian waffle. Alcatraz pigged.

I put the pans and dishes and cups and the rest in the sink, filled it with hot water and left it. God forbid a bus runs you over and you wasted your final morning washing dishes you’d never again use.

Our pillow talk had included a plan of action for the day. After I showered and dressed I phoned the number on a cocktail napkin that I had left on my desk several days before. Bonnie was watching me closely as I arranged a rendezvous with the person on the other end of the line.

“You’re a pretty smooth operator,” she said after I hung up.

“You knew that already.”

“It’s different when you get to see it in action on somebody else.”

I fetched my car keys. Bonnie was sliding into her coat. “I notice you didn’t mention that you weren’t coming alone.”

“Sometimes it’s better to catch people off guard.”

“I guess we’ll see.”

We caught Tracy Atkins off guard. Luckily I hadn’t been so “smooth” that the woman was waiting for me in a lace teddy. Still, her disappointment at seeing that I was accompanied by some blond chick registered immediately as she pulled open the door. It lasted only a second—the disappointment—and was quickly replaced with hostility.

“Who’s she?”

“You don’t recognize Bonnie Nash? From TV?”

“No.” It was probably a lie.

“Can we come in?” I asked, smiling my biggest we’re-all-happy-here-aren’t-we smile.