Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (4 page)

“The article says here that you had no comment,” Billie said. She looked up from the paper. “That sounds a tad sinister.”

I shrugged. “I had nothing to add.” I’m sure that Jay Adams would simply say that he was being thorough in adding that fact that “Hitchcock Sewell, co-proprieter of the funeral home where the body was delivered, had no comment.” But I suspected he was also taking a little jab at me for my chorus of nopes.

“I’m still not comfortable with our conducting this poor girl’s funeral,” Billie said. “It smacks of opportunism. It feels disrespectful somehow. Am I just being batty?”

I looked across the table at the woman in the flannel robe and pink fuzzy slippers, dipping a Bordeaux cookie into her rum-laced tea. Batty? Come, come.

I reminded her, “We didn’t lobby for the job. It was Kruk’s idea. The sister went along.”

“Do you really think that the killer is going to be so foolish as to show up? Isn’t your detective friend asking for a bit much?”

“When did he become my detective friend?”

She ignored me. “If you killed someone, would you show up at their funeral?”

“Kruk is figuring it a couple of ways. If Helen Waggoner knew her killer well, then he or she
has
to show up. Their absence would put the spotlight right on them. That’s one thought. Another thought is that whoever did it took the effort to bring the body to a funeral home, which would possibly suggest some level of compassion.”

“Not killing her in the first place would suggest some level of compassion.”

“Okay then. Remorse. Maybe something got out of hand, and the next thing you know someone shot her who really hadn’t intended to and then freaked out. I can buy the argument that a person with a guilty conscience would at least deliver the body to a funeral home. It doesn’t exactly make up for them killing the person. But it’s a gesture.”

Billie made a gesture herself. Of dismissal. “They could turn themselves in.”

“Sure. And they still might. That’s also part of Kruk’s thinking. Hold the funeral right where the killer dropped off the body, and maybe the killer will show up. Maybe he’ll attend the funeral and then turn himself in.”

Billie nibbled at her Bordeaux. “I hope we don’t have a drama right in the middle of the service.” She picked up her teacup. “Shall we play for it?”

I shook my head. I had already been thinking about this. “I’ll do it.”

Billie’s cup was raised to her lips. She held it there and eyed me over its rim. “Oh?”

“Yes. Oh.”

“As you wish.”

As a rule, Billie and I play a round of cribbage to determine which of us is going to prep the cadaver and be the front man for the funeral. Not always. Sometimes we have back-to-back-to-backs, and we simply divvy things up equitably and that’s that. But otherwise, we play for it. Billie taught me cribbage after my parents were hit by the beer truck and I had moved in to be raised by her and ugly Uncle Stu. She’s a good player and a good teacher. And I’m a good learner, so we’re pretty even. I’ve scoured antique shops all over the city and have come up with over a dozen different cribbage boards that I’ve presented to my aunt over the years. There’s one in the shape of a figure-eight, one with mother-of-pearl inlay, a triangular one with a large glass eye embossed in the center and a fairly rustic one fashioned out of gouged domino pieces, built by a blind auctioneer from Ellicott City. My best find was a board that is actually a full-size coffee table. Teak. Rivets of rhinestone (six hundred and seventy-one; I counted them once during a deep and relentless funk). The actual board within the table is sort of paisley-shaped, like the inside curl of a conch shell. The table’s legs are rippled and they taper to near-stiletto points, capped in red glass. Goddamn thing set me back eight hundred dollars and is as gaudy as Liberace’s Steinway, but I couldn’t pass it up. Billie calls it Milton, after Milton Berle. Billie names a lot of her possessions. The mirror in her bedroom is Clark. She has a favorite armchair named Hecuba. Her phone is George.

Billie set her teacup back down on its saucer. Lo and behold, George rang. Billie got up and took the call. It was a short call. She returned to the table and dropped heavily into her chair. She picked up her teacup and intoned exactly like Boris Karloff, “The body arrives at noon.”

My ex-wife was being hung in Druid Hill Park, and I had promised to come watch. This might sound like the gloating of a vindictive ex-husband, but that just goes to show how slimy our perceptions can be.

Julia is a painter. She is wildly popular in all sorts of concentric circles, not only in Baltimore but also in New York and Los Angeles and—peculiarly—in Scandinavia, where, in certain pockets, she has achieved the sort of ill-proportioned cult status that Jerry Lewis enjoys all over France. The brooding suicidal masses just seem to love her. Julia wings off to Stockholm, Oslo or Copenhagen at least once a year to bask in the blond, blue-eyed spotlight. It’s something akin to taking the waters, though in her case with a lot of sex thrown in. Julia has a lover in every Scandinavian port. “My Swede. My Dane. My Norwood.” She returns from these jaunts refreshed and energized and always with a colossal appetite. Still, no amount of gorging in Baltimore’s finest restaurants or lowliest hash houses seems to have any effect on Julia’s salamander figure. Suss out what it is Audrey Hepburn’s got that Sophia Loren ain’t got, and then vice versa. Mix in a little Irish and a faint strain of Cherokee blood, pour it all into a long shapely beaker … and then step back, Jack.

Julia’s hair is coal black. Today it was cut in short spikes and she was wearing a sixties era Carnaby Street cap. The rest of her ensemble was like something out of the Beatles’s
Yellow Submarine
cartoon, only on Julia the god-awful polka dots and bell-bottoms looked just swell. She was, as usual, barefoot. Luckily for her we were inside.

“Oh Hitch, I’m really glad you could make it.” Julia’s eyes were made up like a B-movie scream queen. And
still
she looked gorgeous.

“I always like to support your little hobby.”

Without their ever closing, she batted her eyes at me. “Sweet man. I’ll have to remember to drop by one of your little funerals sometime soon. It’s been a while.”

Julia had been commissioned to paint a canvas for the new visitors center at the Baltimore Zoo. The zoo had fallen into neglect back in the late seventies and eighties but as part of the city’s trumpeted resurgence has since received several facelifts. The new visitors center was one of them, and Julia had been tapped to add her two cents to the look of the place. She was paid ten thousand dollars for her two cents, which is a dizzying return on the dollar if you think about it.

Julia had painted a huge triptych. Three separate canvases to be hung side-by-side-by-side up on the visitors center’s dominant wall. Along with an array of shapes and colors that playfully suggested a menagerie of animals in near-Biblical harmony, each canvas featured in the foreground a portion of a hippopotamus in profile, trotting. Front, middle and rear. Julia’s conceit was that the canvases were to be rotated monthly so that only occasionally would they actually line up in the logical order of the trotting hippo. On any random month the hippo’s face might be staring at it’s own tail or it’s midsection. Or the rear end might be trotting right out of the scene.

Today, for the unveiling, all three sections were lined up in order. A reception of finger foods and champagne was underway when I arrived. The new visitors’ center features huge glass walls all around, one of which looks out onto a dirt pen where the deer and the antelope play. A curious antelope stood at the glass throughout the reception, staring in with its yellow eyes.

I took a flute of champagne from an expressionless young girl and mingled. It’s wonderful how many people have time on their hands in the middle of the day to attend these sorts of events. I’m so glad I’m one of them. The crowd was a mix of zoo officials—the board, the staff, etc.—some financial bigwigs and people from the mayor’s office. The mayor himself was home with the flu, but he was being represented by his culture czarina, a hawkish woman who stood well over six feet tall and whose face revealed not a tendril of animation. She spoke with aristocratic lockjaw when she stepped to the podium beneath Julia’s canvases and read her spiel. Julia stood demurely behind her and off to the left. She caught my eye once and giggled. The hawk droned on nasally about the zoo and the city and the world. She couldn’t seem to find much to say about Julia’s paintings except—at the end of her spiel—to elevate a mannish hand in their direction and call them “nice paintings.” It sounded like nice
kitties.

I offered Julia a ride home after the affair. Julia doesn’t own a car. She takes taxis or is otherwise squired about. All the drivers at Jimmy’s Cabs know her. I told her I had to swing by the police station on my way home. I had phoned Detective Kruk the day before, after Alcatraz had found the restaurant order pad. Bonnie and I figured that it had likely belonged to Helen Waggoner and that it must have fallen from her apron pocket when she was being delivered to the funeral home. Kruk had merely sighed heavily into the phone when I told him that my dog had fetched the pad from underneath a mailbox on the street.

“You’re telling me it’s been moved from where it was located, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Just like the body. Do you do this on purpose, Mr. Sewell? Just to drive me crazy?”

“It was my dog,” I reminded him.

“Dogs can be taught,” he said. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Julia was giving the inside of my car the once-over. She was wrapped in an ankle-length leather coat. She wasn’t barefoot now but wore a pair of Army boots.

“You must have the most boring car in America,” Julia said as we took the North Avenue exit off the beltway.

“I don’t believe in one’s car as an extension of who they are,” I answered her.

“I can see that.”

A car in front of me braked suddenly. I jerked the wheel of my Chevy Nothing and hit the brakes. We skidded on an ice patch and slid deftly past the stopped car at a diagonal. I let off the brake and hit the gas and we shot through the intersection a full five inches in front of a slowly skidding city bus. Julia laughed.

“But it’s got your moves.”

I pulled the order pad out of my pocket and tossed it onto her lap.

“Does this belong to your dead girl?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It seems likely.”

Julia squinted at the pad. “Turkey club. Cobb salad. Some sort of soup.”

“I think it’s split pea,” I said. Actually it was Bonnie who had made the deduction.

“Was she pretty, your dead waitress?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that. Why is that?”

“Oh Hitch, come on. Everyone cares more about a pretty corpse than a plain one. Don’t be coy.”

“You’ll be a beautiful corpse one day, Julia,” I said, sliding gently through a yellow light.

“Thank you, Hitch. That’s sweet.” She looked down again at the order pad in her hand. “Shot in the heart, isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“That could be symbolic, couldn’t it? It could point toward a lover.”

“Or just someone with smart aim.”

Julia looked over at me. “You disappoint me, Hitch. You used to be more of a romantic. A girl gets shot directly in the heart, and you want to go out looking for a sharpshooter. Are you getting to be a pragmatist in your old age?”

“I’m thirty-four.”

“Bad habits now can be difficult to shake later, you know.”

“Not to worry. I plan to get all my pragmatism out of the way as quickly as I can. When the time comes, I wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of the full blossoming of my senility.”

Julia leaned her head against the window. “I’m just kidding about your not being a romantic, you know. I see behind your curtain.”

“Sweetie pie, you have a backstage pass. You always will.”

She looked over at me and grinned. “Ditto, dodo.” She waved the order pad in the air. “So. Pretty? Good enough to shoot?”

I nodded. “Pretty.”

“And right on your doorstep. Mr. Sewell, you are some kind of magnet.”

“They do sort of flock to me, don’t they.”

Julia tossed the pad onto the tilted dashboard. It slid to the floor.

“You don’t even have a real dashboard. It’s a marvel I ever married you, isn’t it?”

“Real men have dashboards?”

“Please. There aren’t any real men. Just fantastic boys.”

I turned left on Charles Street. The snow had been plowed off to the sides of the road burying the cars that were parked there. The road surface was scarred with salt, like Jackson Pollock with a box of chalk. Julia’s head was resting against the window.

“I could use some sex. Are you still seeing that weather girl?”

“Yes I am.”

“And you’re faithful, even though it’s just a fling?”

“Who said it was just a fling?”

“I did. So you’re still a serial monogamist, I assume?”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“No you’re not.”

Kruk wasn’t in, so I left the order pad with the cop at the front desk.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s possible evidence in a murder case,” I said.

The officer frowned. “Why isn’t it bagged?”

Helen Waggoner was waiting for me when I got back. So was a little piece of information provided by the medical examiner.

“She was pregnant,” Aunt Billie whispered to me as I was taking off my coat.

“Pregnant?”

“Yes,” Billie whispered. “Two months. It was discovered during the autopsy.”

“Billie, why are we whispering?”

The answer rose from the couch. The same couch where two nights before we had laid out Helen Waggoner. Billie cleared her throat.

“This is Helen’s sister.”

If I said that the woman was a dead ringer for her sister, I might be accused of making a cheap joke and, for that matter, getting it wrong. She wasn’t. But she was close. Same widow’s peak. Same general shape of the face. Same nose. Of course, she was alive, which put more color in her cheeks. She had a small birthmark, or maybe it was a tiny mole, on the side of her nose, a little blueish blemish, vaguely star-shaped—up near her left eye. Like her sister, she was full-figured. Of the two, this one was probably the slightly more
zaftig
, though “Rubenesque,” I suppose, is the more accurate description. Or, as we simple folk say, “built.” I sensed the promise of an alabaster cello beneath her highly touchable wool sweater and simple brown skirt as she moved forward to shake my hand.