Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (11 page)

Julia prattled on a while more, recounting how, after Haden pulled the plug on his pretentious art house masterpiece, he opened shop as a maker of cheesy skin flicks. It was a real life case of
Porn Is Born
with Victoria Waggoner standing in for Esther Blodgett. As I listened to her though, I refused to believe that Haden’s Vickie and “my” Vickie were one and the same. It just wasn’t adding up. Granted, people who make their living in the sex trade don’t exactly walk around during daylight hours wearing a sandwich board advertising the fact … but still. I simply couldn’t match the woman who had sat in my office earlier that same day crying her eyes out with the platinum-blond fleshpot thespian that Julia was describing. It was like trying to force together two magnets of opposite polarities. The two women kept leaping apart the moment they even began to get close. It just didn’t work.

“It’s a different woman,” I said, interrupting Julia’s story. “It doesn’t add up.”

Julia stopped talking. She ran both hands through her short hair.

“But you don’t know that, Hitch. In fact it
does
add up. Take a look at it. Mom and the girls. The stripper, the hooker and the porn queen. There’s a pretty good argument there for nature
and
nurture.”

“How is it that you know all of this, anyway? I mean, once Haden bagged his stupid project and moved on, you certainly had nothing more to do with him. Right?”

“Haven’t laid eyes on him since.”

“So how is it you know so much about the career of so-called Victoria Wagner? Has
People
magazine started putting out a low-life edition I haven’t heard about?”

“I get around.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m convinced that we’re not talking about the same person.”

“Does yours have a tattoo?”

I shrugged. “Tattoo? I don’t know. I didn’t notice one.”

“Mine does. A butterfly tattoo.”

“Where exactly is this identifiable mark on this questionable screen queen of yours?”

Julia’s slender index finger came forward, then swung around and settled lightly on her left breast. “Right here. A small one.”

“I see.”

“Small tattoo that is.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the left breast of your dead waitress’s sister?”

“Nor the right one.”

“Shame.”

“But you saw both,” I said. Julia nodded her head up and down. “In one of her movies?” She shook her head side to side.

“Your little friend has got a pretty active résumé, Mr. Sewell. Several years ago I was entertaining a group of Swedes who were in from Washington. They’d heard of The Block. I tried to tell them this wasn’t no Bourbon Street, but they insisted on going. We ended up at this place called The Kitten Club. Well, who do you think comes strutting onto the stage? I have to say, she wasn’t quite as voluptuous as I had remembered. And the blond had grown out. But I recognized her.”

“Victoria Wagner.”

“In the flesh. I’ve got to tell you Hitch, the woman couldn’t dance to save herself. Terry Haden might have had something going there on the tiny screen, but this girl wasn’t exactly setting the place on fire. My Swedes were not impressed. She just looked tired. Depleted would be a better word. I don’t know if it was booze or pills or what, but the light had definitely gone out. My little finger can be more seductive.” She waggled the digit in question. I didn’t doubt it.

“Was she still with Haden?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him. Unless maybe he was facedown on the bar. And I certainly didn’t talk to her. It was sad. This kid was barely legal and was already burning out.”

“This is when you saw the butterfly?”

“Yes. Right there on the breast. She didn’t have that back when she was modeling. I suppose she picked it up for her films. Or maybe for the act. Believe me, it was the only thing up there with any life.”

I called for the check. I insisted on paying. “You’ve been very entertaining, Miss Finney. As always.”

We left the warm restaurant. Our faces turned immediately to ice. Julia swore.

“When the hell is this cold snap going to end? Has your little girlfriend found a crystal ball that works yet?”

“Don’t kill the messenger.”

She lifted her large purse. Her teeth were chattering. “I have to return this glass.”

I left Julia sashaying through the door of the Admiral Fell Inn and headed straight for the funeral home. Billie met me at the front door. She was on her way out. She told me that Vickie Waggoner had called about an hour before asking about cremation.

“Cremation?”

“She was wondering if that wouldn’t just be the easiest thing to do at this point,” Billie said. “What with our problem getting the grave dug.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her not to make a rash decision. The last thing she’d want would be to have regrets later. I told her you would talk to her about it.”

I studied my aunt’s expression. Such as it was. She added, “This is your funeral, not mine.”

I went inside and went directly down to the basement. Helen was right where I’d left her. Naturally. I pulled the sheet down to her waist. Between the bullet wound and the medical examiner’s knifeplay, her body was pretty hacked up. But now that I knew what I was looking at, the little blue-and-red bruise I had noticed on the woman’s left breast didn’t look so much like a bruise to me anymore. It looked like what it was: the wing of a butterfly tattoo.

Helen was Vickie. Or Vickie was Helen.

Or I was Genghis Khan.

Somebody was lying.

I
needed to take my thoughts out for a walk. I brought the King of All Things Laconic along with me. Alcatraz and I zigzagged through the hood, encountering very few others out on the street. Apparently these five-degree days weren’t the rage. The usual smell of baking bread from the H&S Bakery was absent as we rounded the corner to Bond Street. Whether they weren’t baking or the cold simply failed to carry the smells, I wasn’t sure. I stopped at a market on the corner and picked up a ten pound sack of potatoes, then Alcatraz and I made our way on down the street. Bond runs into Thames, which dead-ends at an abandoned pier. I’m always a little surprised to see that the city hasn’t put up a fence and a sign to warn people away from the pier—which is crumbling—or simply torn the thing down altogether. Whatever planks aren’t rotting straight away are kicked out by neighborhood kids or removed by the local street population, who take them over to the ruins of a brick building that occupies a small dirt patch right next to the pier. Smoke was curling up from the ruined building. As Alcatraz and I swung around to the harbor side I could see a bonfire on what used to be the ground floor and a half dozen or so men standing around warming themselves. I recognized one of them as the ponytailed gravedigger from the cemetery. He jerked his head in a nod to me as I picked my way over the bricks to the fire. A few of the others shuffled their feet. Somebody grunted. Without anyone actually seeming to move, a place opened up for me and my dog to get next to their bonfire. Several large planks of wood were crossed in an
X
at the center of the blaze. These were from the pier; they were too rotten and slime-covered to actually catch fire, but they served to center the pile of more flammable debris and scraps that the men had piled up. The heat coming off the fire was a joy. The guy with the ponytail picked up a brick and tossed it into the flames sending a flurry of cinders kicking up and spiraling swiftly into the air. Someone tossed on another brick. Same thing. Another man kicked a cardboard box into the fire. The box caught immediately. It curled into itself, went black as a shadow and was gone. A wet plank whistled as it burned. The men stood silently and watched.

That’s entertainment.

Alcatraz made his rounds. The men broke their frozen poses to give the insistent hound the scratching and rubbing he so whorishly demanded. I dumped the sack of potatoes onto the ground. There were a few grunts of gratitude as the bag was pulled open and potatoes affixed onto whatever was handy, large splinters of wood, a skinny metal pipe … whatever. To a person standing off a ways, say by the rotting pier, it might have looked like a bizarre marshmallow roast. But it was a potato roast. I didn’t join in. I had money in my pocket and a place to go home to; I wasn’t going to insult these guys by hanging around in the freezing cold and sharing their potatoes with them. Although I’m sure nobody would have said anything if I did. One of the guys pulled something out of his pocket—I couldn’t see what it was—and offered it to Alcatraz, who greedily gobbled it up. The timbers shifted in the fire and a huge spray of sparks leaped into the air. If these men had been boys, there might have been an “Ooooh … Ahhhh.” But they gave no such reaction, simply tilted their heads and watched as the sparks turned black against the gray sky and then vanished before having really gotten too far. I gathered up my hound dog and headed back toward home.

I had two messages on my answering machine, both from Bonnie.
Do you hate me because I’m beautiful or because I stayed for lunch with Jay Adams? I apologize if I was an ass. Watch me at six.

The second message was the more terse of the two.
You knew about that damn car already, didn’t you? I know you did. Are you really going to be a shit about this?

It was hot dog night at the Sewell household. Boiled to the precise moment of splitting, then removed from the heat, served on a bed of white bread and drowned in an insouciant puree of ketchup. A real palate pleaser. For the Canis familiaris, dry crunchy bits, allegedly chicken flavored. And my plate to lick clean. A five-star experience all around.

I watched the six o’clock news. Mimi Wigg, the pint-size news anchor with ten pounds of hair, had her serious face on as she led off with a story about the execution-style killings of a lawyer and his wife in the Mount Vernon section of the city. The police had no motive yet for the killing, but they were investigating a possible connection to one of the lawyer’s former clients. Mimi threw it over to a reporter on the scene who offered no new information except that neighbors were shocked and that the lawyer and his wife were being described as “just regular people.” I’m sorry, but this isn’t news. I spotted a familiar yellow-haired detective in the background, chewing out a uniformed cop. No surprise to me that the reporter on the scene had been unable to get Detective Kruk to say anything on camera. The reporter threw it back to Mimi in the studio, who thanked him with a well-honed solemnity and then burst into giggles and goo as she turned to other news.

“In Owings Mills today, a happy ending for six senior citizens and the amusement park they call home. The city has decided that—”

I hit the mute button so that Alcatraz and I could sup in silence. It was a little too silent, so I invited Eliane Elias to play the piano for us while we ate.
The Three Americas
. The beautiful Brazilian chanteuse delivered up the goods. Alcatraz likes her too. He abandoned his crunchy chicken-flavored bits and curled up right next to one of the speakers.

Bonnie came on after sports. I turned the sound back on. She looked—as always—pert, perky, scrumptious, honest. As Bonnie talked about what was going on “in other parts of the country,” my mind finally squared off for a look at what Julia had told me at the Admiral’s Cup. Allowing her story about Terry Haden and “Victoria Wagner” to simmer quietly in a far corner of my brain had done little to give me any real insight. I had to assume that, despite the name, the woman who Haden had put in his dirty movies and who Julia and her Swedes had seen up on the stage of The Kitten Club was Helen Waggoner, not her sister. The butterfly tattoo would seem to cinch it. How likely was it that
both
sisters had the exact same tattoo of a butterfly on their left breast? Maybe if they had been closer with each other, I could see it. Teenagers running off one afternoon to get tattooed. But by Vickie Waggoner’s account the two sisters were oil and water; it was unlikely that they had shared such a peculiar bonding experience. No. The woman laid out down in the basement at the funeral home had to be the person Julia was referring to. I couldn’t come up with any explanation for her having called herself by her sister’s name, but as for the rest of it, the modeling, the bleached hair, the sliding into the world of flesh peddling … That all had to be the dead waitress. Mama’s girl.

Questions rained down. What about Vickie? How much of her sister’s past did she know? Any? All of it? Was she aware of the appropriation of her own name? Or was Vickie Waggoner really as much out of the loop as she was suggesting? Did I have a pocketful of information here that was all news to her? If so, was it something I really ought to share with her? And what about Sinbad’s Cave? Did she know about the sorts of things that went on out there? And was any of this really any of my business in the first place? A lot of questions. And each one was spawning a whole new set. An exponential experience. What I needed were some answers.

I poured myself some bourbon and let it wash through my system.

Of course, the bourbon didn’t clarify a damn thing. But it simulated clarity pretty well, and that’s sometimes good enough for the short term. It all kept coming back to my needing to have a talk with Vickie Waggoner. The woman had to have the answers to at least some of these questions.

I almost missed Bonnie’s little message to me. She had just finished with the five-day forecast.
Freezing. Freezing. Freezing. Slightly less freezing. Freezing.
She turned to Mimi Wigg and slapped her little pointer against her palm.

“Looks like a record-breaking week without a hitch, Mimi. Well. One hitch, I suppose.”

She threw a deadpan at the camera. It landed right in my lap.

“Did you get my message?” Bonnie asked an hour later as she came bounding up the steps.

“The conflicting ones on the phone?”

“My nice one. On TV. ‘One hitch.’ That was for you.”

“I got it.”