Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (39 page)

“Sorry to be the one to sober you up.”

“Don’t be.”

I wasn’t touching any more of the woman’s brandy tonight. The order had now been given, and the fatigue troops were firing away. Ann Kingman could see that I was struggling to stay alert.

“I’ve been worried about Jeffrey ever since Michael was murdered. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Why haven’t you just asked your son?”

“I have. I asked him to tell me what he knew about this girl’s murder. He said he knew nothing.”

“He lied to you.”

“He’s protecting me.”

“Fiercely loyal little cub.”

“Jeffrey’s not a cub, Mr. Sewell.”

“He’s guilty of murder. I don’t really care what you call him.”

Ann Kingman picked up the pistol and bounced it in her palm, as if testing its weight.

“You weren’t supposed to say that.”

“
You’re
loyal. But you’re not stupid. You don’t think the police are going to piece this together?”

“You came over in the middle of the night. Stinking of brandy.” She smiled when she said that. “You’ve come around several times since the funeral. Neighbors spotted you out at the park just a few days ago. You were here earlier today. In your hearse. Don’t think that didn’t draw some attention. Perhaps I had a sense that you were stalking me for some reason? Then tonight you forced your way in. A woman has the right to defend herself.”

“You’ve been reading too many cheap mysteries.”

“I told you, I can’t sleep.”

Sleep. The very sound of the word was acting as a narcotic. Ann Kingman was growing blurry. Even the light that was catching the silver pistol, as she bounced the little gun in her hand, was blurring. I was dropping off. I suppose this might sound peculiar to some people. Not to me. I’m a person who regularly falls asleep in the dentist’s chair. Maybe it’s a denial response, who knows. Whatever the case, the full-scale assault was on, and the last thing I remember was blinking slowly and leadenly, the woman in front of me with the pistol fading out more and more with each slow blink … until finally … she was gone.

T
he cushions on the Kingmans’ couch had slipcovers on them, somewhat like envelopes with flaps, held in place with large plastic buttons. I awoke with my cheek pressed into one of these buttons. I was alone in the living room. It was daylight. A light snow was falling outside. I rolled to an upright position. I picked up the high school photo of Jeffrey Kingman from the nearby end table and squinted at the sliver of my reflection afforded by the gold frame. The plastic button had left a perfect impression of itself on my cheek. I tilted the frame to have a look at my morning hair and my whiskers. I was lovely to look at, no two ways around it.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee came into the room, followed by Ann Kingman. She was out of her robe now and was dressed in slacks and a sweater. There was no pistol in sight.

“Good morning.” She sounded pleasant enough.

“You didn’t shoot me.”

“That’s correct. Would you care for some coffee?”

The inside of my head felt as messed up and gone-to-hell as the outside looked. A hot cup of joe seemed like just the glue to start putting the pieces back together. I followed Ann Kingman into the kitchen. It was large and clean and modern and had a little breakfast nook—an add-on—jutting out into the backyard. We took our coffee there, on a linoleum table, surrounded on three sides by ceiling to floor glass. The coffee traveled all the way to my toes. It was so good I could have kissed the chef, except that she had been holding a gun on me just several hours previous. I held the mug just under my chin and took in the steam.

“How are you feeling? You dropped off like a rock.”

“I had a long day yesterday,” I said. “I’m coming back to life. What time is it, anyway?”

“A little past ten.”

I had no clue if I was supposed to be somewhere or not. My head wasn’t up to speed yet for that sort of thing. I took another few sips of coffee and looked out at the snow coming down. It was a real snowfall, not just a passing flurry. It was sticking. I heard a little voice within me praying that Bonnie had called for snow in her last forecast. The poor woman needed a break. I was feeling very paternal toward Bonnie Nash. Which suggested to me that I was adjusting to the new distance that I gathered had started to grow between us. Sometimes you can just feel these things. I was feeling it.

“I’ve phoned Jeffrey,” Ann Kingman said, interrupting my reverie. “I told him you were making some accusations and I needed him right away. He should be here any minute.”

“Was that such a wise thing to do?”

“You said it yourself last night. If you’ve figured it out, the police can’t be far behind. I want to stay out ahead of this thing.”

I didn’t quite like the sound of that. “What exactly does that mean?”

Ann Kingman was looking up at the snow falling and melting on the glass overhead. She aimed her answer in its direction. “I don’t want my son to go to jail. It seems so … It serves no purpose.”

“A woman was killed,” I reminded her.

“Jeffrey didn’t shoot her.”

“He’s responsible.”

She quit her snowflakes and looked over at me. It wasn’t a friendly look. “I said this to you already last night. Ultimately, Richard is responsible. He started this whole mess in the first place. Richard is now dead. So is Michael. And Sheila, poor girl. That’s three deaths for one. What practical purpose does it serve to drag Jeffrey into this? Or to throw him in jail?”

“The law isn’t about ‘practical purposes,’ ” I said. “People who go around arranging murders are supposed to be hauled in for it.”

“Please. My son doesn’t ‘go around arranging murders.’ You can rest assured that he won’t do something like this again.”

“Am I supposed to tell that to Helen Waggoner’s sister? The boy is sorry? His mother promises he won’t do this sort of thing ever again?”

“I don’t know a thing about any sister. It’s none of my concern what you tell her so long as you leave Jeffrey’s name out of it. Tell her that the man who arranged for her sister’s murder is dead. That is the truth. What more does she want for crying out loud?”

I set down my mug and glared at her. “Mrs. Kingman. Ann.
Lady.
I don’t like you very much.”

“I’ll survive your disdain, I’m sure.”

She got up and took my mug over to the counter to freshen it. Impeccable hostess skills. Shabby values.

“Since you chose not to shoot me—for which, by the way, I am eternally grateful—what do you propose to do about me? I’m a blabbermouth, I’m telling you that right now.”

“We’ll talk about that once Jeffrey gets here. It’s his decision ultimately, after all.”

“Correction. It’s mine.”

“We’ll wait.”

We did. Call me crazy, but I just didn’t see the Kingman clan deciding that the best course of action here was to follow one extremely ill-considered homicide with another. I felt safe enough. Besides, I was bushed.

It occurred to me that almost lost in all of this was the actual triggerman himself. I was nearly positive that it was the fellow Misty had described for me, the fellow she knew only as “Bob.” It appeared that this Bob character had swung by The Kitten Club either right before or right after killing Helen and had kicked old Popeye around the office for one reason or another. Michael Fenwick had also hustled his way down to the strip joint at some point later that same evening and had similarly pitched a fit with the club owner. A good lawyer will fight for his client. A foolhardy—and overly loyal—one will go too far, fight too much. This appeared to be the cut of young Fenwick’s cloth. As for the fear that Ann Kingman had stated about her son’s safety, especially in light of Fenwick’s murder, it dawned on me that she had little to worry about. My guess was that Jeffrey Kingman had several layers buffering him from the ubiquitous Bob. There was Michael Fenwick, and there was Popeye. Both dead now. Both unable to give out Jeffrey’s name to the hired killer, presuming that he had even wanted it anyway. Which I had to doubt. I had a hunch that Popeye himself had never known the identity of the man who asked Fenwick to go out and hire a killer for him. Of course that did nothing to explain how it was that Bob decided to dump his cargo off on the front steps of my funeral home. I still had to work on that. But Jeffrey Kingman was—it would seem—practically in the clear. He could walk right past hit man Bob and neither of the two would even be aware of just how much blood they shared. I decided not to share this theory with Ann Kingman. If she thought her son was in danger of being knocked off by Bob, so be it. Let the woman shake.

A half hour passed, and Jeffrey didn’t show. His mother’s face could have passed for a clock. With each passing minute that her son didn’t show, her expression darkened and the lines around her eyes and her mouth grew deeper. We fell out of conversation and sat waiting. The wind had picked up and shifted the snowfall into a slant. The snow was coming down harder now, the flakes larger and more wet. They were hitting the glass of the breakfast nook with the occasional
splat
, and breaking into icy bits which slid slowly down the glass. Ann Kingman was getting worried. Maybe her son wasn’t as dutiful as she had thought. Maybe he had panicked. Maybe he was heading for the hills.

We both jumped when the phone rang. Ann jumped higher than I. It had been forty minutes since she had told me that Jeffrey would be here “any minute.” She got to the phone before the second ring.

“Hello? … Yes it is.”

I happened to glance out at the backyard before looking over at the counter where Ann Kingman was standing with the receiver to her ear. Two things hit me at exactly the same time. One was that the woman’s skin had gone every bit as white as the snow that was covering her spacious backyard. The other thing that hit me was that she was holding the phone just the way that a person might who was holding a gun to their head and about to pull the trigger. It must have been her expression more than the actual pose that triggered the image. She was standing there in a silent scream. Eyes wide, mouth open, no sound coming out. I stood up. She turned her head, letting the arm holding the receiver drop to her waist.

“It’s Jeffrey,” she said to the large kitchen. “He’s dead.”

I
never actually saw what remained of the car that my parents had been driving on their way to the hospital when they met—squarely—with the unsuspecting beer truck at the intersection of Broadway and Eastern Avenue. Certainly I wasn’t present when they were pulled from the wreckage and rushed up the street to Hopkins, where they were pronounced dead, dead and forevermore, dead. I was never given the choice. I had just been dropped off at Aunt Billie’s and ugly Uncle Stu’s after a family outing at the B&O Railroad Roundhouse Museum over on Eutaw Street. My mother had started cramping in the middle of a laughing fit that was brought on by a little prank she and I had just pulled inside one of the vintage trains in the huge roundhouse. Dropping me off on the way to the hospital had been a last minute decision so I could tell my aunt and uncle that the big moment had arrived. We were to hop in a cab and join up with my father at the hospital. Ugly Uncle Stu had already purchased a box of pink cigars and a box of blue ones. That was how I told them that my mother had gone into labor. I rushed up to their apartment and grabbed up the two boxes from the sideboard by the front door. “Guess what!” Later on, there were some who would try to placate me by telling me how lucky I had been not to have been in the car when it veered—for reasons no one who knew would live to explain—into the path of the oncoming beer truck. This little logistical tidbit was supposed to make me feel better, but, of course, it didn’t even come close. I had a little logistical tidbit that I could throw right back at them. If my parents hadn’t taken the time to drop me off in the first place, we’d have all been safely through the intersection of Broadway and Eastern a full five minutes before the fateful beer truck even appeared on the scene. Looked at through
that
lens, dropping me off to deliver the good news set the stage for the onset, just a few short minutes later, of the worst news of my life.

I stood next to the tow truck as the signal was given by the men down below the bridge to let her rip. Wooden blocks had been wedged in behind the rear tires of the truck but even so, the chassis rose up like a stretching cat as soon as the cable went taut. Extra time had been taken when the truck first arrived to clear away the snow and chip away the thin layer of ice that had formed on the roadway, all this to give the truck as much traction as possible. Still, the big truck slid several inches closer to the embankment as the cable tightened around its metal spool and began slowly cranking. Several men down below were working their way up the hill alongside the broken car. They couldn’t exactly guide the thing—it weighed some several thousand pounds—but they each kept a gloved hand on the side of the car nonetheless, as if they were comforting a large animal being helped by Samaritans out of a ditch into which it had fallen. Like I said, the procedure was taking a while. Nobody was really in any great hurry. The car had skidded off the road, broke through the bridge’s old stone guardrail and plunged into the Jones Falls tributary leading out from Lake Roland several hundred feet away. The person behind the wheel had been removed already and taken to the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where he had been pronounced dead. His mother had been called. She had been waiting for her son, sharing coffee in her kitchen with, of all people, an undertaker. There are those, I’m sure, who would find that detail creepy. Frankly, I’m one of them.

Of course, it was considered an accident. The snow was fresh and wet. The road surface was pure ice. The county’s salt trucks—ironically, housed less than a mile away from the scene of the accident—had not yet iced the Falls Road bridge. They usually get to it last, just before the trucks pull in to load up on more salt.