Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (5 page)

“Mr. Sewell? I’m Vickie Waggoner.”

She squeezed off a smile of sorts as she took my hand. It appeared to take all the energy she could muster. Vickie Waggoner’s hair was lighter than her sister’s, a sort of bronzy brunette that fell without much fanfare to just above her shoulders. Her lips were painted a ruby red. Her large green eyes faltered as she released my hand. The difficult smile drained away.

“And this is Bo.”

A three-foot tall human appeared from behind her. Blond bangs. Red corduroys. The little boy wore a politely blank expression, tinged with uncertainty. I squatted down on my haunches as Vickie Waggoner added, “Bo is Helen’s son.”

“Hello, Bo. My name is Hitchcock. That’s a funny name, isn’t it.”

“My mommy’s dead,” the boy said.

“I know that. I’m very sorry.”

“She’s getting married tomorrow.”

“Oh?”

I glanced up at the sister. Vickie Waggoner was mouthing the word
buried
even as the tears started down her face.

B
onnie was running through her weather routine. “Now, moving to the latest satellite pictures, we see …”

Sally pointed the remote and turned up the volume on the television set mounted up over the bar. “Let’s see what sort of fantasy your girlfriend has in store for us this time.” She turned to me with a chuckle. There isn’t a mean bone in the woman’s gargantuan body. Sally is my ex–mother-in-law. Julia’s mom. She loves me both like a mother and like a shrewd barkeep who cherishes her paying regulars. On the television, Bonnie was calling for “a clear and cold night.” Sally sang out, “Heat wave!” then whooped like a crane.

Forty minutes later, Bonnie came into the bar. “Nice to see you, Miss Nash,” Sally said to her as she was shrugging out of her coat. “What’ll it be?” Bonnie ordered a draught. Sally’s eyes twinkled as she pulled back the sticks. “Here you go, hon. Clear and cold.”

Bonnie and I took a table near the back. There was a couple off in the corner making out and another two tables away, arguing vehemently. Ah, the humanity.

“I wish I had been there for the questioning.”

Bonnie ran a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass. I reminded her that it hadn’t been a “questioning.”

“She came by to view her sister.”

“You didn’t let the little boy see his mother like that, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s good. How old is the tyke, anyway?”

“Around three.”

“Poor kid. So what did you learn from the sister? Did she have any idea who might have killed Helen?”

“She didn’t really say much on the subject.”

“So what did you two talk about?” Bonnie cocked an eyebrow. “The weather?”

I gave Bonnie the gist of what I had picked up from Vickie Waggoner. Helen Waggoner was the younger of the two sisters, by about two years. Half sisters actually. Different fathers, both absent. Their mother had been, among other things, a dancer, though not of the Martha Graham variety. Ruth Waggoner’s résumé read like a tourist map of The Block, which is the three to four block section of Baltimore Street that in its bygone heyday had been the city’s vibrant and naughty little strip of topless joints and vaudeville fun clubs, but which has since withered to … well, in fact, a block. And a dreary one at that. A mere shadow of its former bump and grind. Ruth Waggoner, as I gathered from her surviving daughter’s terse account, had danced during the decline. Gone down with the ship and then finally bailed, forced to take her trade around to any number of the windowless booze joints around Charm City. The tiny runways. The disco balls. The ubiquitous metal pole. Vickie Waggoner hadn’t gone into any great detail about any of this and, more than once, stopped herself to mutter an apology to me for even going into it at all. She told me that her mother had died just this past summer, a washed up stripper, eaten away by cancer at the age of fifty-six. I gathered from the way she talked about her that Vickie Waggoner had not had a whole lot to do with her mother for quite a number of years. But death can leave a hole where a person once stood, and sometimes the ones who have been left behind find the need to pour the details of the person’s life back into it. That’s what Vickie Waggoner had been doing. And now on top of this, her sister. Vickie Waggoner had
two
holes opening up in front of her. She had stood next to me down in the basement, staring at the drained face of her murdered sister and speaking in a low monotone not so much about Helen, but about the woman who had brought her sister into the world. My take was that she wasn’t anywhere near ready to make sense of her sister’s death. Not until she had tackled the unfinished business of putting her mother to rest.

“She blames the mother,” I said to Bonnie, taking a sip of my beer. “She just kept coming back to the mother. How the woman dragged the two girls from club to club. How there was always a strange man at the breakfast table. Or sometimes no man, just a bruised look on her mother’s face and a very, very short fuse. I wasn’t exactly hearing ‘happy childhood.’ ”

“Fine. We’ve all got parents,” Bonnie said. “But that’s ancient history. What’s any of that have to do with her sister getting murdered?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. People tend to ramble when they come into a funeral home. This one had a lot to unload.”

“But it sounds like she didn’t unload much about her sister. Did she have any guesses why someone would shoot Helen?”

“If she did, she didn’t tell them to me.”

Bonnie was tapping her fingernail on the rim of her glass. “What about the boy’s father?”

“What about him? He seems to be out of the picture.”

“You asked?”

“That’s a quote.”

“Well, maybe it was him,” Bonnie said. “Maybe he came back into the picture, and he found out that Helen was pregnant again. Maybe it rubbed him the wrong way. Men can get weird. I’ve seen it.”

“Maybe the second kid was his too and
that
rubbed him the wrong way.”

Bonnie sneered at me over her glass. “And so he killed her. Only a man would come up with that.”

I shrugged. “It’s a wacky world, Wanda.”

“Poor kid, huh?”

“He’s too young to understand what’s going on,” I said. “It’ll hit him later.” Like a meteorite.

Bonnie reached across the table and set her hand atop mine. “Okay then. So the killer could possibly be the father of the little boy, or whoever it was who got Helen pregnant. That would be two suspects right off the bat. So come on, Hitch, did the sister say
anything
about Helen that might give us a clue?”

“I got the sense that she really didn’t have much to do with her sister. In fact, I’d guess that as soon as she could, Vickie Waggoner hightailed it away from her little family altogether. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I got the sense that Helen’s dying young has come as no great surprise to her.”

“So that’s the eulogy.”

I shrugged. “That’s the eulogy.”

Bonnie finished off her beer and set the glass down on the table slowly, like a spacecraft coming in for a soft landing. Her soft face molded into a question mark.

“Hitch? What do you think of me?”

My gears didn’t even grind; they simply sheared right off. “Um. Could you narrow the scope a little?”

“Sure. What do you think of me? Do you think I’m being silly about wanting to solve this murder? Do you think I’m just trying to prove something?”

“You’re trying to prove that you can investigate a story,” I said, picking my words carefully.

Bonnie smirked. “Very diplomatic. But come on, Hitch. Level with me. You know I’m tougher than I look. Is there a part of you that sees a blond bimbo who’s throwing a hissy fit because everybody is patting her on the head and calling her a good little weather girl?”

I didn’t think this was the time to point out that people weren’t exactly calling her a
good
little weather girl. “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder. I don’t blame you for that.”

“I’m too cute,” she said sourly.

I held my palms up to the ceiling. “You’re too cute. It’s a hell of an albatross, but there it is.”

Bonnie skidded her chair away from the table. “We’ll see about that.” She stood up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

As we headed out of the bar, a fat guy by the jukebox called out, “What’s the weather, honey?”

Bonnie snapped back, “Screw you, dirtbag!” She turned to me. “Cute, huh?”

Bonnie and I took the Baltimore-Washington Parkway south to the airport exit. A long time ago the airport went by the name Friendship Airport. It was ten times smaller then, as was the world it serviced. As things developed, the demands of the hemorrhaging population along the Baltimore-Washington corridor required that little old Friendship be swallowed by a gigantic glass and girder terminal along with a whole new pinwheel of departure and arrival gates, the entire affair given a snappy new name: Baltimore-Washington International Airport. BWI to most. “Bweee!” to a few.

Bonnie and I followed the airport tradition of misreading the signs on our first pass, and we found ourselves cruising by the passenger pickup area not once, but twice. At this hour it was pretty much empty. We read the traffic signs out loud this time, pointed left and right and finally took an exit that swung along past the commercial hangers and out onto a frontage road. Once we had passed the Ramada, the Marriott and the Airport Sheraton, things took a turn for the dingy, and we pulled up in front of a motel that time had forgotten. The Charm Inn appeared to have started life as a Holiday Inn, back in the days when their wedge-shaped signs were as ubiquitous as the golden arches. Now the word “Holiday” had been replaced with the big fib, “Charm.” The rooms were laid out in a two-story, single horizontal strip looking out onto a parking lot and a metal fence-enclosed swimming pool that was covered with a tarp for the winter. Or possibly forever. The curtains in all the rooms were pulled shut. The fluorescent light on an ice machine was blinking spasmodically.

“Lovely. I’ll have to remember this place the next time I’m contemplating suicide.”

Some thirty feet to the left of the motel—sharing its parking lot—was a rectangular, windowless stucco cube, trimmed with brown plastic shingling and landscaped with dead dwarf shrubbery. A yellow spotlit sign on the side facing the frontage road read SINBAD’S CAVE, painfully spelled out in letters resembling sabers. Below this the sign promised “Music, Dining, Entertainment.”

“Are you ready for Señor Sinbad?” I asked.

Bonnie was smearing off most of her makeup. She gobs it on for television. She found an Orioles cap in my glove compartment and put it on, tucking her hair in it as best she could. She pulled up the collar on her Burberry coat and popped a piece of gum into her mouth. She gave me a thumbs-up.

“Let’s do it.”

If I were expecting a motif—some sort of Arabian pirate decor—I was disappointed. Sinbad’s Cave looked like any other uninspired restaurant lounge out on any other airport’s frontage road. Dim lighting. Drop ceiling. Several dozen tables on the main floor, half as many in the small, elevated section to the left as you walked in. The bar ran along the far wall, lit in ugly amber lighting. Muffled music pulsed from a jukebox.

“Up or down?”

Bonnie chose up. “The view.” For what it’s worth.

We took a table at the railing. At the far end of the main floor stood an electric piano, a pair of amplifiers and an empty stool with an acoustic guitar propped up against it. I pointed this out to Bonnie.

“You know those old movies where the couple go to the nightclub in New York or Los Angeles and sit at their table and watch the floor show?”

“Yes.”

“I think this is going to come up short.”

The place was half empty. Or half full. Depending on your mood. Here and there I spotted some locals, some big-haired gals, some Budweiser boys. But primarily the clientele appeared to be businessmen, out-of-towners from the nearby Ramada and Marriot and … shudder, Charm Inn. Loud talking and loud laughing is a big part of the game when businessmen get together to unwind on the company’s expense account, as is the clinking of glasses and a never-ending spiral of meaningless toasts. Plenty of this was going on. A beefy fellow at one of the tables was giddily stacking a pyramid of empty glasses to the forced amusement of the poor man’s Ivana Trump who was clinging to his shoulder. A few tables over a triad of business buddies were swapping war stories at a fever pitch. A mute redhead packed into a tight paisley dress was seated at the table, patiently tracing circles with her fingernail around the rim of her glass. I watched as one of the waitresses—dressed exactly as Helen Waggoner had been dressed the night she was dumped off at my door—lingered over at the bar to chat up two salesman types. One of them told a joke. Funny or not, all three laughed.

I turned to Bonnie, whose eyes were also darting everywhere at once, and asked, “Do you see it?”

She nodded. “Meat Market. The people here are way too pumped up.”

Tucked into practically every other table being occupied by these garrulous minions of industry was at least one woman who didn’t quite look like she belonged. Or rather,
did
look like she belonged. They were easy to spot. The large, false laugh. The long steady stare. The touchy-feely …

Our waitress came over to take our order. She too was dressed exactly like Helen Waggoner had been the other night. The similarity ended there. She had bad skin, a round flat face, steel-wool hair and a boxy figure. Apparently she had some dust in one of her contact lenses. Her mouth hung open as she stood poking her finger into her eye. She looked like the village idiot. Her name tag identified her as “Gail.”

“Something to drink?”
Poke. Poke.

I ordered a whiskey. So did Bonnie. I realized I was hungry, so I also ordered a grilled cheese with bacon and an order of fries. Bonnie ordered a salad. Gail wrote down our order and left. She was still poking her eye.

“Your heart’s going to love you in about ten years,” Bonnie said.