Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (25 page)

I was playing cards like a blind man. I kept trying to bat away from my mind the image of Vickie Waggoner, blue as ice, warm as fire, soft as snow. The effort was certainly not being made any easier by the literal presence around me of those very elements. Vickie Waggoner was all over the room. So was Bonnie Nash. Well, if not all over the room, right at my shoulder. Picking out the lousy cards I was playing. If I didn’t pull it together quickly, I’d be spending this lovely snowy afternoon down in the basement, draining blood from a corpse. Something not likely to do a whole lot of good for the mood I was already slipping into.

“Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, a pair for eight, a run for eleven and the right jack is twelve.” Aunt Billie moved her peg twelve spaces farther down the board. She glowed. “It was the best of times, it was the best of times.”

I grumbled, “A pair.”

Billie dealt. As I sorted painfully through another dead hand, Billie was already slapping down her crib. She cut the deck. An ace. “Yum. Does that ace help you at all?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Hold on, I’ll get a pan for your tears.”

I gained a few points on the run, but my hand was still flat. Billie’s was only a little better. But her crib was downright festive. In my mind, I was already pulling on my rubber gloves. I was unfurling the tubes and laying them on the metal table.

Correction. In my mind,
Bonnie
was pulling on the gloves. The dead guy stretched out on the table? That was me.

I pulled it together. Billie detected something as I was shuffling the cards. A certain snap was back in my wrist. “Just what exactly are you thinking, young man?”

“I’m thinking we make our own luck, good or bad.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see.” I dealt the cards. I fanned mine out to have a look. The entire royal family was crowded into my hand. In duplicate. Billie cut the deck and turned up a five.

Ten minutes later, it was over. I reached across the board and tweaked my auntie’s pink cheek.

“Have a good funeral.”

Vickie met me at Helen’s apartment. We didn’t mention anything about the night before. We didn’t touch, we didn’t kiss. We glanced at each other like the two awkward strangers that we, in essence, were.

Helen’s apartment was small and messy. How much of the mess was Helen’s and how much was due to the Baltimore City Police Department’s investigatorial toss-around, I couldn’t say. Vickie had been here already herself, when she came over to gather up some of Bo’s clothes and toys. She had told me earlier that it had been her first visit to her sister’s home. This one would be her last.

We were looking for two things at Helen’s apartment. At least, I was. I was hoping that we could determine the name of the obstetrician Helen had been seeing about her pregnancy. Even with the likelihood that Gary had been the one who got Helen pregnant, I was still clinging to the possibility that if Helen had been seeing someone else perhaps that person had gone ahead and footed the bills for her. If we could talk with Helen’s doctor, we might get a clue as to the fellow’s identity. The idea seemed weaker now than it had when I first came up with it. But it still seemed worth the effort.

The other thing I was hoping to find was a photograph of Terry Haden. The slow fuse of logic had finally ignited as I was leaving Aunt Billie’s after giving her my good cribbage whopping. If I could locate a photograph of Haden and show it to Gail out at Sinbad’s Cave, I could either confirm or dismiss Haden as the person with whom Helen had been having her loud argument at the bar. That argument had been looming larger in my head lately. Whoever killed Helen Waggoner lured her out of the bar with a phone call. Chances were pretty good, I felt, that the killer had at some point been to Sinbad’s. Whoever Helen had been arguing with on the night that Gail had described, a month before her murder, I liked him for the killer.

We came up with nothing. No photo. No indication as to who Helen had been seeing about her pregnancy. Vickie was able to gather up a few more of Bo’s belongings, but the pulsing red
X
that was supposed to be resting atop the all-important clue failed to show itself. Vickie and I brushed shoulders several times as we moved about the small apartment. Nothing came of that action. At least, nothing that either of us cared to draw attention to. Naturally I can’t speak for Vickie. I could only speculate as to what she was feeling about the previous evening when the two of us had gone bump in the night. All I could read in her expression with any certainty was that she honestly did not want to go into any of it right now. I could respect that, as a man and a coward and a pragmatist.

Outside Helen’s apartment we stood awkwardly next to Vickie’s car. The snowfall had stopped, leaving only a light dusting. Even chances for a white Christmas. Vickie Waggoner was looking anything but jolly.

“I guess that’s that,” she said. She pulled open the car door and tossed a bag of her nephew’s clothes onto the front seat.

“We’ll find out who killed your sister,” I assured her. Though at this point my doubts were beginning to seriously outweigh my hopes. I wasn’t at all certain what to do next, but I didn’t want to let Vickie know that. Vickie got into the car and rolled down the window.

“I wonder if it’s really so important,” she said, fumbling with her keys.

“Of course it’s important.”

“But why? I mean, ultimately. Finding out who killed her isn’t going to bring her back. And … let’s be honest about this. How much contact did I really have with my sister these last couple of years? Practically none. I don’t even know if it’s fair for me to say that I miss her.”

“You’re being a little rough on yourself, don’t you think?”

“Maybe I’m just wanting to find out who killed Helen so that I’ll feel a little less guilty about having abandoned her.”

“You didn’t abandon your sister.”

“But I could have tried to keep in contact. I could have tried to get over some of the garbage that our mother put between us.”

“It’s too easy after the fact to start moaning about what you might have done. Helen could just as easily have reached out to you, you know. That wasn’t your responsibility alone. People do grow apart. It’s not a new thing.”

Vickie wasn’t ready to be convinced. “Still. I feel guilty.”

I crouched down so that we were face-to-face. “Look, even if it is a sense of guilt that’s driving you to find out who did this to your sister, so what? It’s not too often that guilt comes in as a good thing. Some bastard shot your sister. Whatever your reason is for wanting to find out who did it is good enough.”

She turned the key and had some trouble getting the engine started. When it finally turned over a great cloud of oily blue smoke belched from the exhaust pipe. I straightened. Vickie winced apologetically as the cloud passed over me.

“Apparently there’s a crack in the engine block,” she explained. “The mechanic I took it to said the crack can’t be welded. It’s aluminum. I really need to get another car. I just can’t afford it right now.”

“What is it you do for a living, anyway?” I asked. I had been wanting to know this since she first walked into my office. “I mean, if I can ask. It’s none of my business.”

“I think you can ask,” she said in a small voice. This was as close as either of us had come to acknowledging the previous evening. “I’m a schoolteacher. I teach fourth grade at Owings Mills Elementary.”

“A schoolteacher?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I suppose I am. Though I don’t know why I should be. I don’t know any other schoolteachers, maybe that’s it.”

“Hitch, I need to ask you something. What are you doing this for? Why are you trying to find Helen’s killer?”

“Your sister was left off on my doorstep.”

She wasn’t convinced. “Is that really a compelling reason? It’s Christmas. You must have better things to do with your time than running around looking for the killer of someone you never even knew.”

“Well, you’d think so.”

“Yes, I would.”

We shared a moment of awkward silence. Across the street a couple of boys were piling up snowballs on the hood of a car. I smelled an ambush.

Vickie reached a hand out the window and touched my arm. “Whatever … thank you.”

She started to say something, then thought better of it and stopped herself. She rolled her window closed and put the car into gear and pulled away. The blue plume chased her down the street and around the corner. So did a few snowballs. They didn’t come close.

•••

When I returned from the fruitless search of Helen Waggoner’s apartment, there was a message waiting for me to swing by the police station at my earliest convenience. The message that
wasn’t
waiting for me there was nearly as succinct. In its very absence. The unleft message was that I swing by hell at my earliest convenience and consider just staying there. I shoved the issue of Bonnie back into a corner of my brain and headed downtown.

Kruk was making better headway with his several murders than I was making with my one. Of course, he had the resources of the Baltimore City Police Department to assist him, along with twenty-some odd years of Charm City crime fighting to call on. I’m just an amiable undertaker with a sleepy hound dog. Most of my dead people arrive with the particulars of their demise already typed up on an accompanying death certificate.

The murder of Popeye, the strip club owner, by the same shooter who had shot Michael Fenwick and his wife, had given Kruk something to work with. Kruk assumed that there was some sort of “mopping up” going on. Both Popeye and Fenwick, Kruk determined, were killed for a related reason. Once Kruk located the connection, the dominoes would begin to fall, presumably ending up at the feet of the killer.

“This killer is definitely sending a message to someone. This bullet to the foot routine … that’s intended to let someone know loud and clear that the killer is working off a list of some sort. First the lawyer, then this Popeye fellow.”

“You think there’ll be more?”

Kruk nodded emphatically. “It’s possible that it was a very short list, but I’d bet my hat on it that there’ll be more.” There wasn’t a topper in sight. It must have been out getting blocked and cleaned. Kruk went on, “So, I guess you’re wondering why I’ve asked you to come down here.”

“Let me guess. You want to know if I marched into Martick’s yesterday, shot the old man in the heart and the foot, then circled the block, ditching the murder weapon in a trash can, and showed up twenty minutes later doing my best innocent bystander imitation.”

Kruk raised his palms toward the ceiling. “And I was going to beat around the bush.”

“If you’ve got a confession typed up for me to sign, you can probably go ahead and take the rest of the day off.”

“Yeah, well, unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. What I really want, Mr. Sewell, is to warn you off the Waggoner case. I’ve been too lenient with you already.”

“Warn me off? What does that mean?”

“What part don’t you understand? It’s very simple. My job is to serve and protect. This is the protect part.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You’re snooping around, you’re trying to dig up some information about Helen Waggoner. I can’t stop you from doing that. Snooping is protected by the constitution. But your snooping around yesterday almost put you at the scene of a murder just before it happened. A half hour earlier and you might have been sitting at the table with that old man, harassing him—”

“Hey!”

“—about Terry Haden and Helen Waggoner or whatever it is you think you’re doing. You could have been killed.”

“Why? The guy was gunning for Popeye, not me.”

“He was also probably just gunning for Michael Fenwick last week and not his wife. But look who’s not around today to enjoy being a widow.”

I started to protest but Kruk cut me off.

“Frankly I would have thought you might have learned something from the last time you stuck your nose into a murder investigation, Mr. Sewell. Unlike you, I’m paid by the city of Baltimore to be curious. And I’m trained in how to protect myself from the consequences of my curiosity. But you’re stumbling around. You might well stumble onto Helen Waggoner’s killer and only know it when he’s aiming his gun at you. And you’re a large target. I’m telling you right now, if I find myself investigating
your
murder anytime soon, I’m not going to be happy about it.”

“Neither will I. But it’s nice to know you care.”

“You’ve got my message then. Stay away from The Kitten Club. Stay away from Terry Haden. Stay away from Sinbad’s Cave.”

“What happened to my constitutional right to snoop?”

Kruk let out a sigh. “These are police matters. If you have any information you would like to pass along to us, I would be happy to hear it.”

“Will that be all?”

Kruk dismissed me with a backhanded wave. I stood up from my uncomfortable chair and started for the door. As I reached it, Kruk said, “Do I have your word?”

I stopped and faced him. He took in my expression in about two seconds. He growled. “I didn’t think so.”

A parking ticket was tucked under my windshield wiper when I returned to my car. I decided to leave the car where it was—get a little something for my investment—and flatfoot it up Calvert Street to the offices of the Sunpapers. I asked the receptionist to direct me to Jay Adams’s desk (“Elevator, fourth floor, first left, second right, ask there.”) and found myself in a large open room filled with cubicles and people lounging about and chatting with each other. Here and there was a person either hunched over a keyboard or aggressively engaged in a phone conversation, but for the most part the place seemed to be involved in a permanent coffee break.

I found Jay Adams at his desk. He was on the phone, at the keyboard
and
chatting with someone who was seated just inside his cubicle. Actually what I saw first as I approached were his visitor’s legs, slender, brown, crossed at the knees, one foot wagging. Adams saw me coming. He wrapped up his phone call and slid his keyboard off to the side. Adams said something to his visitor, and the foot attached to the brown leg stopped wagging.