Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (44 page)

Joan Bennett was given the opportunity to attend her brother’s funeral, in police custody. She declined the invitation. Maybe it was me she didn’t want to see. If so, I’m glad for it. The only reason I would have preferred Joan Bennett to be present at Jeffrey’s funeral would have been for the satisfaction of seeing her flanked by the authorities. If ever I have met a person in need of some serious humility, it was Richard Kingman’s daughter, Joan. But like I say, she chose not to attend.

Ann Kingman, of course, was there. So was Jeffrey’s uncle. The two didn’t stand particularly close to one another. Old eagle-eyes Sewell spotted that right away. I found myself wondering about the obstetrician. I wondered if maybe Daniel Kingman felt that had he been more forceful all those years ago, he could have persuaded Ruth Waggoner to go ahead with the abortion. In that case, Vickie would have never been born. And Daniel Kingman might not be standing where he was standing that cold afternoon, at the fresh grave of his nephew. If that’s what he believed, then he could certainly manage to make the argument that this entire mess had been
his
fault practically as much as it had been his brother’s. It wasn’t until after the funeral, when Billie and I were up in her living room talking the matter over that she offered an alternate possibility.

“Hitchcock, it is perfectly plausible that Daniel Kingman didn’t simply fail to dissuade Ruth from deciding to go ahead and keep her baby. It is every bit as possible that, in fact, he was the one who talked her out of aborting the child. Think about it. Whether out of spite against his brother or not, the man is an obstetrician. His training is in bringing children into the world, not destroying them. He might have failed to tell Ann Kingman the truth for the simple reason that he had been the one who convinced Ruth Waggoner to keep his brother’s child in the first place.”

Billie made sense. She often does. Certainly it was something to think about. Every now and then, I still do.

Jeffrey Kingman’s funeral took place on Christmas Eve. I met up with Bonnie later that evening at her place to swap gifts and to make it official that we had come to the end of the line. Bonnie cried a little at one point, but by the time we parted company she was laughing. According to her, the tears were not really because she was wanting us to try to keep working on things between us. She sniffed them back almost as soon as they had showed.

“It’s mandatory. If we’re not going to scream and shout at each other then one of us has to cry at least a little,” she said. “I can’t wait around all night for you to think of it. I’ve got to be at the station in an hour.”

Before I left, I asked her what the next day’s forecast was. She gave an oversize shrug.

“Sunny as hell. Highs in the nineties. How the fuck do I know?”

“There goes that mouth again.”

She reached up and kissed me on the lips. “You’re right. Here it goes.”

She turned and left.

Julia had left a Christmas ditty on my phone machine.

She was right. I couldn’t believe it. It arrived late that afternoon. As soon as I saw it, I ran outside without even bothering to put on a coat. Aunt Billie followed a few minutes later.

“It’s nice having wealthy friends, isn’t it. You do like it, don’t you?”

“Are you kidding? But how did—”

“A man called here while you were in the hospital, asking for you. He said that you had been interested. I mentioned it to Julia. She agreed with me. It was a call from heaven, considering what happened to your poor little car.”

Johnny had polished up the bottle-green Valiant so that it looked like glass. A red ribbon was tied around the antenna. In the rear seat was another plaster elf. I tried to give it to Billie, but she’d have no part of it.

“Merry Christmas, Hitchcock.”

I ran back inside to get my coat. There was a message from Vickie on my machine. She had just gotten back from Memorial Stadium where the Eye Bank of Maryland sells Christmas trees every year.

Bo helped pick it out. But he’s not much help setting it up. I was wondering …

I brought my trusty assistant along for his first ride in the new old car. The valiant Valiant ran like a dream. Alcatraz turned out not to be much help with the tree, but he kept Bo occupied while the boy’s aunt and I set up the tree and decked it out with colored lights. Vickie didn’t have any ornaments, only the lights. I fetched the elf from the car and placed it beneath the tree. Bo plopped down next to the elf and let out a squeal of delight.

Vickie turned off the overhead. We kicked off our shoes and sat down on the couch together to admire our good work. Quite nice. Where the tree touched the ceiling, its shadow ran out in a triangle, fuzzed up with colored bits, red and green and yellow and blue. The shadow stretched to just over our heads. One of the lights on the tree was flickering; it was probably just loose. I started to get up to go fix it, but Vickie placed her hand on my arm.

“Leave it.”

If you enjoyed
Hearse of a Different Color
, be sure to catch Tim Cockey’s newest novel,
The Hearse Case Scenario
, coming in February 2002 from Hyperion.

A
pparently I was the first person Shrimp Martin called after Lucy Taylor shot him. It was a Saturday afternoon. Early June. The sun was high and I was low. I had a wicked toothache and I had just gotten off the phone with a guy named Roger, who was taking my regular dentist’s calls while my regular dentist was away at his vacation house in Jackson Hole, poor guy. Roger sounded gung-ho to see me. He was going to fit me in that afternoon, between a root canal and an extraction. Well, good for Roger. Me, I had no gung-ho at all, just the sore tooth. Just before we hung up, Roger had asked me quite earnestly how my gums were. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I was still pondering it when the phone rang.

“Sewell and Sons.”

The voice on the other end was raspy and hoarse. Like someone whispering and gargling with glass at the same time. “Who’s this?” it rasped.

“Excuse me?”

The voice croaked again. “Who’s … this?”

“You called me,” I pointed out. “Sewell and Sons Family Funeral Home. Now. Your turn.”

There was a pause. I leaned back even farther in my chair and recrossed my legs, which were up on my desk. Lately, that’s where they had been spending a lot of their time. Up on my desk. Not a lot of people were dying these days. My aunt and I were suffering a beginning-of-summer drought. Currently we had only one customer on ice, down in the basement. Mrs. Rittenhouse, from around the corner. Shakespeare Street. Her next-of-kin was due by any minute to drop off a dress for the viewing. A fact that was about to make this phone call all the more interesting.

A hissing sound was coming over the phone, like air going out of a balloon. I asked again. “Who is this?”

“
Ssssssssss
. … Shrimp Martin.”

Shrimp Martin. Nightclub owner. Blatant self-promoter. Borderline sleaze. A legend in his own mind.

“Shrimp? This is Hitchcock Sewell. What’s up? What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Lucy,” he croaked.

“Lucy?” My heart iced. Nine out of ten people who call me at work are calling to talk about a corpse.

“Lucy.”

“Lucy. I got that part. What about Lucy?”

“She’s … not … here.”

I switched ears and glanced out the window. Sam and some kids from the neighborhood were hosing down the hearse. Actually, the kids appeared to be hosing down Sam. Who didn’t appear to be minding much. Sam’s just a big kid anyway. Two hundred and ninety pounds worth.

“Shrimp, why don’t we start this whole conversation over? I’m not looking for Lucy. I didn’t call you, okay? You called me. So what’s up?”

Shrimp sighed again. He sounded irritated. “Who’s this?”

Now
I
was getting irritated. “I told you. It’s Hitchcock Sewell, Shrimp. What the hell is going on?”

“Lucy,” Shrimp said again. “She’s gone. She … left me. She—” He interrupted his own sentence with another groan. This one stretched out in sort of a singsong fashion, almost a humming. It sounded as if Shrimp was channeling a tone-deaf drunk. Which was the conclusion I was beginning to reach. Not that Shrimp was channeling, but that he was definitely coming to us from the Land of Liquor.

“What do you mean, she’s gone?”

Aunt Billie had just stepped into my office. She was holding a rat by the tail, at arm’s length. Presumably dead. If not, then faking it nicely.

“Who’s gone?”

I palmed the mouthpiece. “Shrimp Martin says that Lucy Taylor has left him.”

Billie sniffed. “Lucy Taylor has a brain.” She leaned sideways and dropped the dead rat into my brass spittoon. I don’t spit. I use it to keep the door propped open. And, apparently, for storing dead rats.

“Mrs. Rittenhouse is all done,” Billie announced. “Pretty as a picture. I’m just waiting on her dress.”

At that precise instant, the front door opened. I could see a pair of arms wrapped around a blue chiffon number. Well, I call it chiffon. I don’t really know these things. It was blue. I made the “voilà” gesture (one-handed version) and Billie floated out to the lobby to do her thing. Shrimp was still gurgling into the phone.

“I’m sorry, Shrimp. I missed that. What were you saying?”

He sounded strained and defeated. “Lucy,” he mumbled again. For a man who was refusing to come to a point, he was driving one home nonetheless.

“Yes. Lucy. You just said that she left you. When, Shrimp? When did Lucy leave you?” I was beginning to overenunciate, the way you do when you’re trying to get through to a foreigner. Or a child.

“Half … hour.”

“A half hour ago? Jesus, Shrimp, come on. A half hour isn’t really an awfully long time.”

Billie was coming back into the office. She showed the dead woman’s next of kin—granddaughter—to the chair in front of my desk. The young woman plopped down into the chair, the blue dress bunched in her arms like a bag of groceries. I held up a hand to indicate that I’d be right with her. Shrimp finally got to his point.

“She shot … me.”

“She what?” I don’t even remember it happening, but my feet were suddenly on the floor and I was standing at my desk. The phone felt tiny in my hand, like it was a child’s toy. My sore tooth exploded with pain. “What are you talking about?”

Shrimp wheezed, “Lucy …” I sank slowly back to my chair as Shrimp struggled to locate enough air to conclude his short sentence. “… shot me.”

“When, Shrimp?” I said, cocking an eyebrow at my guest. I noticed that there was a smudge mark on her cheek, the ripening of a fresh bruise. “When did she shoot you?”

Shrimp’s answer was depressingly deadpan. “Right before … she left.”

There was a pause, then he added, “I think I’ve lost a lot of blood.”

And the line went dead.

Bad sign.

“Shrimp? Shrimp, are you still there?” I did what they do in the movies. Rattled my finger up and down on the little jiggywazzits where you hang up the phone, then I hung up the phone. The young woman in front of me was shifting the dress in her lap. Her hand emerged from underneath it and she set something blue and ugly on my desk.

“How’s he doing?” she asked.

I steepled my fingers and lighted my chin on the tippy top. Undertakers have a knack for being able to draw their faces into a blank. That’s what I did. Then I reached down with my index finger and swiveled the barrel of the little pistol so that it wasn’t aiming directly at me. We’re also not idiots. Then I resteepled.

“Well Lucy, I wouldn’t say he’s sounding terribly chipper. If that’s what you’re asking.”

L
ucy Taylor and I go way back. She’s an old friend of mine and of my ex-wife, Julia. We were kids together. The three of us grew up within rock-throwing distance of each other down here in the Fell’s Point section of Baltimore, which is where all three of us still live. I mean that literally by the way, the rock-throwing distance. When I was twelve and Lucy was nine I beaned her just above the right eye with a rock as she was stepping out the front door of her father’s house on Shakespeare Street to take out the trash. I wasn’t aiming at her specifically; I was having an especially bad day and was just throwing rocks indiscriminately at the world. Poor Lucy. It is
so
like her to have this sort of thing happen. Crazy girl was just born to fall into puddles. Anyway, when I beaned her she went down like a small sack of potatoes and I got her up the street to Hopkins as fast as I could. The doctors patched her up with a few stitches then gave me a lecture about how I might have blinded my little friend and should be more careful in the future and all the rest of it. Lucy didn’t hold it against me. She knew I had been upset that day and she was completely understanding. But still. I felt terrible, of course, and I doted on Lucy for weeks afterward. I took her to the movies, I plied her with banana splits, I sneaked her down to the basement of my aunt and uncle’s funeral home and let her see a dead body. (Let it never be said that I can’t show a girl a good time.) I even badgered Julia to badger her parents to let me open a tab for Lucy at the Screaming Oyster Saloon; any old time she wanted, Lucy could go into the Oyster, saddle up to the bar and drink Coca-Colas to her little heart’s content. Lucy Taylor loved her Coca-Colas, and in practically no time she was making the trip to the S.O.S. three and four times a day, sometimes more. She’d climb up on the barstool and plant her pointy elbows on the bar and pull nonstop on the twisty straw, then sing out for a refill. I didn’t really have the cash to pay my tab, nor did I have the heart to suggest to Lucy that she maybe slow down a little. It seemed to make her so happy, knocking back free Cokes at the Oyster. I offered to Sally, Julia’s mom, to do some chores around the place if that would help any, and Sally’s response was to hang her large head—no doubt to hide the grin—and ask me only that I’d promise to come visit her and Frank and Julia once they got shipped off to the poorhouse.