Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) Read online

I shrugged. “It’s the holidays.”

  “No more drinks, please. Gather them up.”

  While I collected everyone’s glasses, the two cops moved inside and took a look at the victim. It seemed like a pretty indifferent look, but I suppose I give some ho-hum once-overs at corpses myself. The skinny cop gestured toward the parlor.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Another body,” I told him.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “Heart attack.”

  “When?”

  “Not tonight, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You got some sort of table, Mr. Sewell?” the older cop asked. “And a chair?”

  I fetched a card table from upstairs and set it up for him. I rolled in my own chair from my office. Command post. The skinny cop pulled the blanket back down so that the waitress’s face was showing, then he had everyone line up and walk slowly past her to take a good hard look at her before then stepping over to the card table to be questioned by his partner. The dead doctor’s family was still upstairs with Billie. I decided to wait until all of the guests had been interviewed and allowed to leave—out the side door to avoid further “breaching” of the so-called crime scene—before letting the police know about the others. The two cops were as unhappy with this information as they had been with the body’s being moved.

  “What are they doing upstairs?” the gruff cop demanded.

  I indicated the parlor. “That’s their loved one in there. It’s been upsetting enough for them even before the arrival of our mystery guest. I was giving them a little peace.”

  “We have to talk to them too.”

  “Of course you do.”

  The gruff cop glared at me. Fetch.

  The rest of the investigating unit was arriving, everybody grumbling the same thing about the body having been moved. The person with the yellow crime-scene tape wasn’t sure if she should even bother. The photographer took a few pictures of the sidewalk and the front steps then came inside and snapped off a dozen portraits of the waitress. The medical examiner arrived, and after some poking and prodding, announced that the waitress had been dead between two to five hours. “Fresh kill” was how he put it.

  I went up to Billie’s living room to fetch the dead doctor’s family. I led them back downstairs where they each took a turn looking down at the face of the dead woman. No one recognized her.

  “Her name is Helen,” the skinny cop said. “Does the name Helen mean anything to anyone?”

  “Her face launched a thousand ships,” the widow said wearily, then turned and went into the parlor to be with her husband. She was joined by her brother-in-law. The daughter detached herself from her husband’s arm and stepped over to me. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Even so, I could tell that she had her father’s eyes. Unfortunately she had his jaw too. And perhaps even at one point the nose, though I suspected she had had this doctored sometime back. The woman was handsome at best. She wore her straw-colored hair coifed into a perfect bowl. Good skin. Pearl earrings and matching necklace. A well-maintained Guilford housewife. She took my hand—my fingers really—and pinched lightly.

  “Thank you for all you’ve done, Mr. Sewell,” she said in a voice just barely above a whisper. She withdrew her fingers and joined the others in the parlor.

  A short, stocky man with yellow hair and the demeanor of a congenial bulldog was coming through the front door. He was wearing a Humphrey Bogart trench coat and a Humphrey Bogart sneer. He stepped directly over to the body. I met him there.

  “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

  Detective John Kruk let out a soft grunt, from which I was able to extract the words, “You again.” He was looking down at the woman on the couch.

  “Did you know her?”

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  “Any idea why she was left here?”

  “Well, we’re a funeral home. She’s dead. Maybe someone was tossing us a bone?”

  Detective Kruk looked up at me. “You still a smart aleck, Mr. Sewell?”

  “One can never really climb all the way out of the gene pool, Detective.”

  He grunted again and returned his gaze to the dead waitress. He got down on one knee—a short trip—and pulled the blanket back further, down to the woman’s waist. Without taking his eyes off her, he asked me a series of questions.

  “Was she on her front or her back when you found her?”

  “Her side, actually.”

  “Left? Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Which way was she facing?”

  “Sideways, I guess. Is that what you mean?”

  “When you opened the door. Head to the left? The right? Facing the door? What?”

  “I see. Um … her head was to my left. Her right. That would be, facing south.”

  “Feet?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her feet. Her legs. Was she in a fetal position or was she stretched out?”

  “Like did someone dump her off or lay her down gently?”

  “You can’t know that. You weren’t present. I’m asking what you observed.”

  Kruk’s warm and fuzzy style was all coming back to me now. He had moved the blanket all the way down to her feet and was looking closely at her legs. The cad.

  “I’d say somewhere in between fetal and laid out,” I said.

  Kruk got back to his feet. Aunt Billie had just come into the hallway. A smile blossomed on her face as she came forward.

  “It’s Sergeant Kruk, isn’t it? Why hello.”

  “Lieutenant. Hello, Mrs. Sewell.”

  “We meet again. Isn’t it terrible? The poor girl. Can I offer you anything to drink, Detective?”

  “No. Thank you.” Kruk told us that he and his gang would be there another hour or so. “You might as well go on about your business,” he said. I stepped over to say my good-byes to the dead doctor’s family, who were finally leaving. They all looked terrible. The widow summed it up.

  “It’s a rotten night all around.”

  The dead doctor’s brother gave me a lousy handshake as they were leaving. He took one final glance back toward the coffin, then joined his family at the door. They left, huddled together like a family of turtles. I watched them disappear into the snow. Forty minutes later the dead waitress was hoisted onto a gurney and taken away. She was being referred to now as “Jane Doe,” though it seemed to me that “Helen Doe” would have been—technically—closer to the truth. Kruk’s minions began drifting away. I went into the parlor and battened down the hatches on the doctor’s coffin. That’s when I discovered what the son had been doing when he had reached into the coffin. There on the dead man’s chest was a silver dollar. One of the old ones. This one was dated 1902. I had no idea of the significance, but I’m accustomed to people dumping various memorabilia into their loved one’s coffins at the last minute. My favorite was a small alarm clock, set to go off every day at four in the morning. Billie and I debated all through breakfast the morning of the funeral whether or not to turn off the alarm. In the end, we left it.

  I replaced the silver dollar on the doctor’s chest and closed the lid of the coffin, then I shut off the lights and left the doctor to his last night on Earth. Billie was looking tired and I sent her off to bed. “I’ll lock up,” I told her. Which I did. Then I put on my coat and headed back down the dark street to my place. The wetness had finally gone out of the snowfall. It was down to wind-whipped flurries, silver brush strokes in the gusty night air. And cold. Goddamn it was cold.

  There was a leggy blond woman in my bed when I climbed the stairs to my place. She had a big, sad, bruised look on her face.

  “I hate my goddamn job,” she pouted.

  I shrugged, getting out of my clothes as quickly as possible. “Oh you know, you win some, you lose some.”

  I slid between the sheets. The warmth coming off her body was a rapture. She turned to m
e.

  “I didn’t just ‘lose some,’ Hitch. I called for light fucking flurries and lows in the upper twenties. Have you seen it out there? It’s a goddamn disaster. I fucking stink.”

  I love a woman who swears like a sailor. Bonnie Nash rolled into my arms. Fronts collided. High pressure dominated. We were in for a wild one.

  CHAPTER 3

  The following day was gray and bitter. Greenmount Cemetery was painted in apocalyptic tones. Chalky tombstones angled out of the dingy snow like disordered teeth. Black trees against a gray sky. Low, transparent clouds and a spastic wind slicing hard scars in the air. It was ugly.

  Bone cold, with a threat of vultures.

  Nobody at the doctor’s funeral mentioned the incident of the night before, but it was in everybody’s eyes. Huddled together against the cold on the side of a shallow hill, the mourners looked hungover, unfocused and detached. The coffin hovered above the grave, and next to it was a pile of earth, covered with a tarp, too frozen now to shovel into the hole. After the guests left we’d be calling on the cemetery’s John Deere.

  We zipped through the service and got the hell off that hill. The doctor’s brother escorted Ann Kingman to her car, and she never looked back. I declined the post-funeral bash. I usually do.

  Bonnie was still there when I got back home. Her disposition hadn’t improved much from the night before. She was wearing my white plush bathrobe and standing at the window when I returned. The robe has a curlicue H embroidered on the front. On a drunken lark a few years ago I checked into the downtown Hilton for the night. A hundred and twenty-five dollars later, I came away with this robe. I could have snagged one at Sears for half that.

  “Looks like a beautiful day,” Bonnie sniffed, looking out the window at the unquestionably lousy weather. “What do you think? Sunny and warm? Highs in the low eighties? Oh! Is that a fucking rainbow I see over there?”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said, giving her a pat on the bumper and a nip to the back of her neck … to show that I wasn’t going to be hard on her. I’m sometimes accused of being patronizing, and I guess I am. But only with people I already like.

  Bonnie turned from the window. “I’m a fucking joke in this town. I might as well stand before the camera and tap dance for two minutes.”

  I stepped into the kitchen to feed Alcatraz. “I didn’t know you could tap dance,” I called out. I filled my dog’s bowl with hard, chunky nuggets, poured in a touch of milk, a half cup of water and mixed the stuff up into an ersatz gravy. I topped it with a garnish of crushed doggie vitamin. Bonnie appeared at the kitchen door. She didn’t appear there amused.

  “I don’t. But I’d probably predict that I was going to tap dance and then break into a goddamn Charleston.”

  Uh-oh. This wasn’t going away. I skidded the food bowl across the floor to Alcatraz and took Bonnie by the shoulders. She tried to look away, but I bobbed and weaved and finally got her to lock on.

  “Look at me. Read my lips,” I said. “Astrologist. Psychologist. Meteorologist. The root word ‘gist.’ Do you know what that means?”

  She shook her head.

  “The gist. The general idea. It means ‘guess.’ Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. The word is imbedded in the profession. You are a prognosticator, not a soothsayer.”

  Bonnie’s big, beautiful blue eyes narrowed. “How much of this are you making up?”

  “Nearly all of it.”

  “God, it almost sounds legit.”

  “I know. Scary, isn’t it.”

  She smiled. Cold front passed. Crisis over. I asked, “You want to walk the pooch?”

  She looked at me with mock suspicion. “Is that something kinky?”

  “It could be. But actually it means I’ve got to take Alcatraz out to pee as soon as he finishes his breakfast. Maybe after we walk the pooch we can come back and walk the pooch. Whatever that turns out to be.”

  She stepped into the bedroom to change. Alcatraz padded over to sit next to his master and watch. There can be little that is sexier than a woman letting a bathrobe drop from her naked body. You see it in the Bond movies all the time. I turned to my dog and growled. “You and your bladder.” He paid me no nevermind.

  I made a special effort to not say anything about how god-awful cold it was outside. A bastard wind kicked out of the harbor a block away and slapped us in the face the moment we stepped outside. Even Alcatraz tensed. I unleashed my best friend and let him skid around on the ice and snow as he sniffed out locales on which to leave his love letters. Bonnie and I linked arms, as much for the combined body heat as for affection, and picked our way down to the harbor. All was calm, all was gray. The seagulls hovering above the docks were barely distinguishable against the dull sky. A bright red tugboat bobbed in the oily water. Opposite the tug, the Screaming Oyster Saloon—capped with a frosting of ice—clung to the side of the pier like a worn old man about to lose his grip.

  Bonnie and I walked along in silence, our only sound the crunch of snow under our feet. The frost from our breathing was like dialogue balloons in a comic strip … but without words. I had no idea where her thoughts were. Mine were on the dead waitress. Helen. I could guess where she was by now. Not all that far away, in fact. She would be out of her black body bag, stretched out on a cold aluminum table in the basement of the medical examiner’s office over on Penn Street. By now the M.E. would have cracked open her breastbone and opened her up to have a look around. The contents of her stomach would be excavated and various tests run to determine what her last meal had been and when it had been eaten. There were organs to be removed and weighed and, of course, a bullet to be extracted. In my mind’s ear I heard the little ping as the bullet was dropped onto a metal tray. Ping. A far cry from the sound it must have made when it came out of a gun sometime last night and slammed into the woman’s chest. A chill spiked my spine.

  Alcatraz was enjoying his romp, which featured several four-legged splits—like Bambi on ice—as he trotted about in search of love. I’ve done a few splits myself in search of love. Who hasn’t?

  “Everybody loves my father.”

  I was jerked from my reverie. Bonnie and I hadn’t spoken for several minutes. I looked down at her lovely profile.

  “You love your father,” I reminded her.

  “But I don’t want to be him,” she said. “I don’t want to follow in his footsteps, damn it. It’s just so frustrating.” She made as if to count off on her fingers, but she was wearing mittens, so it didn’t work so well. “One. Everybody loved him, and he’s an impossible act to follow. Two. I’m not doing what I want to be doing anyway. Three. I’m not doing it well. In fact, I’m doing it horribly. Look.” She spread her arms to take blame for the entire world. “He would have called it right.”

  And there was the rub. Lewis Nash. Bonnie’s father had been Baltimore’s preeminent television weatherman since before the Stone Ages. The man started back when bow ties were a fashion, not a fad. That long ago. You can scour a Boy Scout manual to come up with the adjectives you need for what a loyal, trustworthy, congenial, caring, honest guy Lew Nash was. Baltimore loved Lewis Nash. He had been everybody’s favorite uncle.

  Bonnie never intended for the weather slot to be anything but a rung on the ladder. She wanted to cover hard news not light flurries. But we live in a patronizing and capitalizing culture and Bonnie Nash is a drop-dead darling of a palomino blonde. Genetically perky face. Bright blue schoolgirl eyes. And a body like Everyman’s dream of the perfect stewardess. From the moment the station tried her out at the tender age of twenty—the perky blonde in the pumps and tailored suits—the glass ceiling was immediately lowered into place. The fact that Bonnie couldn’t forecast a sneeze in a pepper factory didn’t mean a damn thing.

  “Everyone wants me to be Daddy’s little goddamn girl, Hitch. I’m fucking sick of it.”

  “Why don’t you just quit?” It wasn’t the first time I had suggested this.

  She snapped right back. “And do
what? I’m pigeonholed. I’m Lew Nash’s kid. I’m a pair of breasts that tells you what the weather is going to be tomorrow. Maybe. And the more I screw that up the less likely I’ll ever be taken seriously as a reporter anyway. I’m so fucking frustrated.”

  She drew up short from her fit and gave me a plaintive look. Bonnie was wearing one of those dead-animal Russian caps. Her cheeks were as red as the tugboat in the harbor behind her, and her lips were quivering.

  “We should get back,” I said. “You’re freezing.”

  She snapped. “Don’t try to change the subject!”

  I tried to point out to her—gently—that there was no subject. “Are you trying to make an actual decision here or are you simply lamenting?”

  Her expression grew vulnerable. “You’re tired of hearing me complain, aren’t you? You think I’m just a whiny girl.”

  “I don’t think you’re a whiny girl. I think you’re a frustrated young woman.”

  Bonnie came back to me and pretzeled our arms together. Alcatraz was melting some snow over near the Oyster. I tried to whistle to him, but my whistle was frozen. And a clapping of gloves—especially impeded by Bonnie’s arms—didn’t amount to much either. Bonnie curled her tongue under her teeth and brought forth a piercingly loud whistle. Alcatraz nearly snapped his neck at the sound.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” I said.

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

  I lowered my nose into the dead Russian animal. Bonnie squeezed my arm. Unfortunately, this was all the foreplay we could afford. A noon whistle from across the harbor pierced the air. My Bonnie lass had to get back to work.

  Just before we got back to my place I told Bonnie about the events of the previous evening. I suppose it might seem peculiar that the fact of a dead waitress being dropped at my front door hadn’t been the first thing I blurted out when I got home the night before, but you can blame Bonnie’s loving embrace for that.

  Bonnie’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding. She’d been shot?”

  “I don’t think she was shot there. I think someone brought her there and dropped her off.”