Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (22 page)

By God, she slapped me again! Harder.
Much
harder. This time with a primal gusto. Rehabilitative. Cathartic. Whatever. The woman practically knocked my teeth out. Her perfect hair flew and wispy strands rose with the room’s static electricity. We glowered at each other like gunfighters in the Wild West. We circled each other without ever leaving our chairs. Bonnie didn’t back down. Not one iota. And good for her. She needed that. And apparently, so did I. I could feel the eyes of every person at the bar. Even Lord Something-or-other looked a little bit smug. Out of the corner of my eye, I detected a waitress, black slacks, oversize men’s white shirt, tray in hand. She was frozen on the spot, too scared to move.

The room set me back a hundred and thirty-five dollars. Every penny worth it.

The newly invigorated couple made plans to find the bad guys. Terry Haden was now officially deposed from his brief reign as Helen Waggoner’s mystery boyfriend. Haden had been cooling his heels in the state lockup in Jessup during the time that Helen had begun showing signs of making free with someone else’s money. On the latter count, however, Bonnie advised that we ought to remain cautious. It was still possible that Helen had come into some money all on her own, and that was what had been prompting her to make noises about quitting the Sinbad’s scene, getting a new place and all the rest of it. I conceded Bonnie her point without a second’s hesitation. The postslap Bonnie Nash was my heroine. Every fiber of the woman was buzzing with newly charged juice.

We were still in our love shack at the Belvedere. Technically we had the place until eleven the next morning. Bonnie was fresh from the shower and was wrapped in one of the Belvedere’s plush towels. We had already determined that we were going to abscond with a few of the towels, for Bonnie. The large burgundy
B
on her towel hit her on the left-side rump, like a brand. I was by the window, wrapped in a bedsheet, looking out at the mere mortals twelve flights down. The two of us looked like a couple of Greek urn ornaments noodling about in the wrong century.

“So we need to cover both possibilities,” Bonnie said. “We need to learn if Helen was onto something that was bringing in some authentic bucks. And we need to learn if there really was a boyfriend in the shadows at all.”

“Somebody got her pregnant,” I reminded her. “Cash alone can’t do that.” Actually, these days it could. But I didn’t bring that up.

“What’s-his-name.”

“Well, that’s exactly the problem,” I agreed. “What is his name?”

“No. What’s
his
name? The big guy. The piano man. At Sinbad’s.”

“Oh, you’re talking about Gary?”

“Didn’t your waitress friend say that Helen and that guy had a thing going on?”

Did I detect a little edge in that phrase “your waitress friend,” or was I just being paranoid? The answers are: yes.

“Tracy Atkins,” I said. “She thought that Helen might have slept with Gary a few times. She didn’t make it sound like she thought it was anything serious.”

“She might not have known if it was serious. After all, isn’t this the woman who can’t even tell you if her close friend was actually seeing somebody?”

“You’re right. Except, I don’t know that Tracy Atkins was in the dark so much as that she’s just not telling all that she knows. I know that she was lying to me about Haden, for example. Though I don’t know why.”

“But why would she lie about that if Haden had nothing to do with Helen’s murder?”

“We don’t think he had anything to do with it,” I reminded her. “We only know that he’s not the one who got her pregnant, and he wasn’t the one who was spending his money on her.”

“So the lying?”

“I don’t know. She’s protecting somebody.”

“Maybe she’s protecting herself.”

“From what? You don’t think
she
killed Helen, do you?”

“She wasn’t at the restaurant that night.”

“I don’t see Tracy Atkins hot-wiring a car in Federal Hill so that she could have a nice cozy place to kill Helen Waggoner.”

The moment I said this however, Tracy’s MG flashed across my brain—over the speed limit. Tracy was clearly fond of the little rusted gem. In fact she had just gotten it back from the shop. If, for whatever reason, Tracy had in fact planned to shoot Helen, she certainly wouldn’t have been foolish enough to do it in her little MG. And as for hot-wiring the Firebird … now that I thought about it, this didn’t seem to be a talent that would necessarily be outside the woman’s scope.

For the time being though, we would shelve the question of Tracy Atkins and her questionable memory lapses. Bonnie and I decided that we needed to have a chat with big Gary.

“How do you want to do this?” I asked. “According to Tracy Atkins, Gary is pretty much a howling wolf when it comes to women. Do you want to try the Mata Hari approach?”

“You mean seduce him?”

My cheek tingled. “No, no. Of course not. I was just thinking if you got him into a conversation you might be able to draw some information out of him.”

“How do I do that, Hitch? Do I ask him if he got the dead girl pregnant? Or do I just go right to the point and ask him if he killed Helen?”

I turned from the window in my king-size toga, unfurling it like Dracula’s cape as I stepped toward the bed.

“Let’s sleep on it.”

“We don’t have time, Hitch.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open.”

The future of lounge music lived together in a small clapboard house a few blocks behind the library in Towson. There was a run-down look about the place. Maybe it was the couch in the front yard, with the stuffing seeping from both arms. Or, maybe it was simply the several missing pickets from the porch railing, itself about as stable as something anchored in Jell-O. Or the screen on the front door, which had a nice curl to it. Maybe they were going for that Allman Brothers Band album-cover look. Trailer-trash-meets-rock-’n’-roll. The screen door rattled under my knuckles. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the rim of a car tire off in the corner of the porch. Of course. Where else would you keep it?

A shadow moved within the house and the front door opened with a Watusi move.

“Hey.”

A big paw came forward. Gary and I were about the same height, but he had me licked in the girth department. It would take two of me to make one of him. I took his hand to shake it expecting a viselike grip and was surprised by his gentle tug. I might have been shaking hands with a minister.

“Come in. It’s cold outside.” Damn, and I had been hoping for a nice sit-down on that groovy couch in the yard.

It was cold inside too. I followed Gary into the living room. I caught sight of our reflection in the large mirror on the facing wall, but I couldn’t make out much on account of the fussiness of the beer logo that spread across the glass.

“You want something to drink? Beer? Water?”

I chose the latter.

“I can make hot chocolate,” Gary added.

“Even better.” Something boiled sounded safer.

I followed him into the kitchen. His ponytail hung down to the middle of his broad back. It was knotted off with a leather lace. He was wearing a green sweater, jeans and boots that looked like a pair of rocks.

“I’ve never met a detective before,” Gary announced, putting a pot of water on the stove and kicking up the flame.

I didn’t break it to Gary that he still had not met one. On the phone I had danced deftly around the point, introducing myself as an “investigator” who was working along with Vickie Waggoner on the matter of her sister’s murder. This was the truth, in essence. If Gary wanted to attach the word “detective” to me, that was his prerogative. It was my prerogative not to correct him.

The kitchen was clean and messy at once. I dropped into a Naugahyde chair at a Formica table. It was warmer in the kitchen. I scooted up to the table. I trusted that my body language would transmit my desire to conduct our interview right here.

Bonnie and I had decided on a plan to get Gloria out of the house so I could talk turkey one-on-one with Gary. Bonnie and the string bean were at this very minute off at Angel’s Grotto, about six blocks away. Gloria was under the impression that Bonnie Nash was interviewing her for a local-interest segment for the news, to be called “Baltimore Women in Song.” I had listened to Bonnie’s side of the conversation when she called Gloria from our room at the Belvedere to set up the interview. “We’ve done Billie Holiday, Rosa Ponselle, Ethel Ennis …” Right. And now we’d have you, babe. Bonnie and I had killed forty minutes before I made my call to Gary. Killed ’em good.

“So, how well did you know Helen Waggoner?” I asked. I figured I might as well get a sense of the big guy’s hedge factor.

“Well, I fucked her a couple of times.”

Ooookay … sounds like an impressively small hedge factor. Right. I went for the whole enchilada.

“Did you kill her?”

“Nope.”

The water for the hot chocolate hadn’t even come to a boil, and we were essentially done.

“Why should I believe you?” I asked.

“About fucking her?”

“The other.”

“Why would I want to kill Helen? I liked Helen.”

“Did your … Did Gloria know that you were seeing Helen?”

Gary pulled a couple of coffee mugs from a cabinet and blew into them.

“I wasn’t seeing Helen. We fooled around a couple of times. That was it.”

“At Sinbad’s?”

“No, man. How would I do that with Gloria there? I mean, okay, we kind of gave each other the message there. Flirted and all. But, like we didn’t sneak off into a corner or something. Well, you know. Except once. Twice. Sort of.” Gary emptied several packets of hot chocolate dust into the cups. “Helen would pass her kid off to a neighbor, and we’d do it at her place.” He picked the teapot off the stove and looked over at me. “I feel kind of weird telling you this, man. What difference does it make?”

None, so far as I could tell. Besides, I hadn’t really asked him for details, I was just letting him talk. My job teaches me to listen. People will tell all sorts of things to a receptive ear.

“What kind of person was Helen?” I asked.

“Man, I’m not good at that kind of thing. I told you. She was a nice girl. She was sexy. I guess she was kind of lonely.”

“What makes you say that?”

The big guy shrugged. He poured the hot water into the mugs and brought them over to the table. He sat down.

“It wasn’t like she was horny, you know. I mean, the girls who work at Sinbad’s, they don’t have a problem meeting guys who want to take them to bed or anything.”

“You didn’t … You didn’t pay Helen to sleep with her, did you?”

“What do you think? I’m going to
pay
to get laid?”

“The customers do. At least, that’s what I understand.”

“That’s the customers, man.” He rapped a large hand against his chest. “I’m the entertainment. Helen and I were coworkers, you know? This was like an office romance. And it was only like ten or twelve times anyway. Gloria busted me and I stopped.”

“How did she find out?”

“Hey, what difference does it make? Are you trying to find out who killed Helen or who fucked her?”

“Well, Gary, it might turn out to be someone who did both.”

“Count me out, man. I fooled around with her, I got busted, I quit and that’s aloha, man. I didn’t kill Helen.” He smiled across the table. “I’m a lover, man. Not a killer.”

“You said Helen was lonely.”

“Yeah. Sure. She’s got that kid. She’s got no man in her life. She’s messing with those asshole businessmen to get a few extra bucks now and then. Doesn’t that sound lonely to you?”

“So, she turned to you for some … some what? Companionship?”

Gravity fell over Gary. His face sagged, as if its puppet strings had just been cut.

“Man, I don’t know. I guess so. I … I just figured she wanted to sleep with someone she knew for a change, okay? She probably didn’t even know those assholes’s names that she picked up at the bar. They probably gave her fake ones, I don’t know.”

He dipped into his hot chocolate. He ran the tip of his tongue over his mustache, which had sopped up half of his sip. “Helen, man. She was fun. Real frisky, you know. And then like … I told you, she was lonely. She cried a couple of times when she was with me, right in the middle of everything. She tried not to, and it got her all pissed off that she did it.”

“Did she love you?”

“Hell no, man, it wasn’t like that. What kind of detective are you? Aren’t you listening? I mean, she
liked
me. And we did it good together, you know what I mean. But I’m with Gloria. Helen knew that. I mess around, I admit it. Women find me sexy. I can’t help it. I’m a big guy, man. I got a big appetite. Helen just … She needed to get out of that place is what the deal was. She needed a better life than all that. I mean, especially with the kid and everything. But it wasn’t going to be with me. She never thought that. I guess those times she cried she just got upset because it must have felt like, you know, normal for a minute or two.”

Having an affair with a sleep-about like Gary, who was committed to staying with his woman.
That
felt normal?

I pulled the photograph of Helen out of my pocket and tossed it across the table to him. I watched his expression as he picked it up and looked at it. I wouldn’t say that his eyes moistened, but he gave the photograph a long, considered look. He was genuinely affected by it.

“It really sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Did you take that picture, Gary?”

He handed it back to me. “Me? No way. I don’t even own a camera.”

“Do you have any idea who did?”

“Did what? Took that picture? How would I know that?”

“Did you know that Helen was pregnant?”

“Shit.” His jaw dropped. His eyes took the hit. It was no act. He hadn’t known. “Shit,” he said again. “Pregnant? Oh, man. Oh, Jesus. Whose was it?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Is it possible that it was yours?”

Gary signaled for the photograph again. I handed it over to him. He looked at it hard again, as if maybe he could coax a few words out of the image.