Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (46 page)

“Of course. I’ll come in right away.”

“I also need to get someone to baby-sit Shrimp down here. I’ve got a date in a few hours.”

“Date? It wouldn’t be with that dancer, would it?”

“It would.”

“Your enthusiasm is underwhelming.”

I grumbled. “We’ll go to a restaurant and she won’t eat. We’ll go to this big dance performance she has choreographed and I won’t get it. Do you hear the theme of ‘unfulfilling’ running through this?”

“What about afterward? Have you two knocked knees yet?” Julia has been racking up euphemisms for sex for as long as she has been racking up sex itself. Ergo, she’s got a ton of them.

I told her that I didn’t know if “yet” was the right word. “Dead end” was pretty much written all over this one.

“Hitch, is there really any reason for you to even go on this date? Why don’t you call her up and give her the perfectly acceptable excuse that you have been called to the hospital bedside of a friend in need?”

I had an answer to that. “A bad date is still preferable to a night drinking cardboard coffee from a hospital vending machine. And Shrimp Martin hardly qualifies as my friend. So look, do you have any idea how I might be able to get a hold of Shrimp’s sister?”

“The chubby girl?”

“Yes.”

“God, she is more tedious than death.”

“I’m not asking for someone to come entertain him. I just want to get someone over here so that I can leave.”

“Mary Ann.”

“Mary Ann! That’s right. Mary Ann Martin. Perfect. I’ll give Mary Ann a call and you get your big beautiful bucket back to town and over to Billie’s.”

“Charming.”

I hung up and dialed Information. With a little cajoling I got the operator to work with me. There were seven “Martin, M”s listed, and I was able to get them all on one request, rather than the usual limit of two. The first four I called were not Shrimp’s sister. This was easy to determine. My opener was “Hi, I’m looking for Shrimp’s sister.” Three of the four simply hung up. The fourth was a man with an Eastern European accent who started griping to me about UFOs and what they were doing to his dog. I struck gold on the fifth call. Nearly gold.

“Hi, I’m looking for Shrimp’s sister.”

“This is Mary.”

“Mary Ann?”

“Mary.”

“Mary?”

“I live here, too. I’m Mary Ann’s housemate.”

“That must get confusing.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Hitchcock Sewell,” I said. “Is Mary Ann there? I need to speak with her.”

“I’m afraid she’s not.”

“Do you expect her back soon?”

Mary said that she thought that Mary Ann would be back within the hour. “She went to a matinee of
My Fair Lady
at The Mechanic.” That brought back memories. The Gypsy Players botched that little gem about four years ago. I was Higgins. My British accent stank. And I sang like a mule. Julia was Eliza. Of course, she was loverly. And an even worse ham than me.
The rine in Spine fools minely oon the pline
.

I told the woman on the phone that Mary Ann’s brother was in intensive care at Union Memorial with a gunshot wound to the stomach, that he was going to be all right but that someone needed to get over to the hospital right away. Mary was duly impressed with my message.

“Shrimp’s been shot? What happened?”

I lied. “I’m not sure. But I can’t really stay here with him much longer. I’ve got to be somewhere in a few hours.”

“Mary Ann has a cell phone. Maybe I should call her.”

I pictured Henry Higgins in the middle of his silly “By jove I think she’s got it!” number when out there in the dark a damn cell phone begins to chirp. By jove,
get it.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“What about I come over? It’s not that far. I’m just over near Lake Montebello. I can leave Mary Ann a message on the kitchen table.”

It seemed an unnecessarily generous offer. I took her up on it. I told her where to meet me at the hospital.

“How will I recognize you?” she asked.

“I’m tall,” I said. “Dark hair. I’ve got one of those little Superman curls that sort of falls—”

“Okay.”

“How will I recognize you?” I asked.

“I’m short.”

“That’s it?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said. “I’ve just got to throw some clothes on.”

Intriguing detail that it was, I let it pass. We hung up. I went back to the molded plastic chair to wait for Mary Ann’s short friend Mary. I went ahead and glanced at the article about putting zing back in the marriage. Guess what? They suggest more frequent sex. Along with candles and wine and surprises. Big shock.

“You must be whatshisname.”

A woman with a freckled face and short damp blond hair was standing directly in front of me. Her approach had been pure stealth. Slipped in under the cover of my daydreaming. I stood up. Her freckled nose leveled off around the latitude of my elbow. Pale blue eyes looked up at me. Mine are blue, too. Turns out these were the only two things we had in common.

“And you must be Mary.” I offered my hand. Hers disappeared into mine. Like a whale swallowing a bonbon. “That was fast,” I said. Though I had no real idea how much time had passed.

“Twenty minutes. As promised.” She released my hand and ran hers through her damp hair, which was sun-streaked gold and short enough to get away with a finger-brushing. Her face was apple-shaped. If you can picture that in a good way. Farmer’s daughter, with an urban edge. “You’re lucky,” she added. “I was just getting out of the shower when you called.”

I wasn’t sure why that made me lucky, but I let it pass. I placed Mary in her early twenties, fresh and well-scrubbed. Maybe it was the freckles, along with the pulsing peach tan. The remaining inventory supported this first impression. Simple white V-neck T-shirt, blue jean cutoffs and flip-flops. She was all of five feet tall if she was an inch, toned and glowing, a trim vertical package with well-carved little hips and intriguing breasts. I realize that I’m coming off like an auctioneer, but these are simply the facts. She looked beach-ready and very sure of herself. And as humorless as a stone.

She caught me staring. At least it seemed she did. She crossed her arms over her intriguing breasts and frowned up at me.

“So what happened?”

I told her. “Shrimp Martin called me up a couple of hours ago and said he’d been shot. I called nine-one-one. They got him here, he lost a kidney and a lot of blood, but he’s going to live.” I left out the detail that it was a friend of mine who shot him. It’s always good to hold something back, in case the conversation sags.

The damp head was tilted and she was squinting slightly. The woman seemed to be judging my credibility. “So where are the police?” she asked. Her tone was clearly challenging.

“The police?”

“He was shot. Where are the police?”

“A cop was here earlier,” I said. “He left.”

My little friend was unimpressed. “So who shot him?”

“Why would I know who shot him?” I said. I sounded defensive. Which I was. I’m usually good with my poker face. But for some reason the frank blue eyes already had me on the ropes. Also, my neck was cricking looking down at her.

She batted her critical blues. “You said Shrimp
called
you. Maybe he
said
something?”

“It was … everything’s under control,” I stammered.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” She was making no effort now to conceal her disapproval with how things were being handled. Or not being handled.

“It was a domestic shooting,” I said lamely.

The woman’s eyebrows went up, like a stretching cat. “Uh huh …”

“The person who shot Shrimp is with my aunt.” I added, “At the funeral home.”

“Funeral home?”

“My aunt and I run a funeral home.”

She studied my face. About a three-second deconstruction. The term “tough little cookie” was beginning to form in the judgment corner of my brain. Mary said, “Okay, so now what? You’re here in case Shrimp dies? That’s a little eager, isn’t it?”

I took a step backward and kneaded my neck. Mary took it the wrong way. She took a step back as well. “What are you doing now,
measuring
me?”

“No. I just … nothing.”

Mary shifted her weight over to one hip and tilted her head in the opposite direction. The eyebrows went up again—this time both—and a look of complete mistrust slotted onto her face. Now I know what Goliath must have felt like. This pipsqueak’s body language was pebbling me to death before I even had a chance. I was reduced to a single bleat.

“What?”

“Would you mind not looking at me that way?” she said.

“What way?”

She made a huffy sound. “You big guys. You’ve got such a thing for small women.”

“
Excuse me?
Who said I’ve got a ‘thing’ for small women?”

She uncurled her arms and raised a hand. “Down here? That was me?”

I pulled up. My lightning-speed calculation concluded that there was nothing to be gained in joining an argument with a total stranger with a height complex. At least not in a hospital waiting room. In a bar, maybe, but not here. She stood there, slingshot-ready.

“I think we’re sliding off the track,” I said. “Look. Thanks for coming down. Let me give you my card. When Mary Ann gets here, have her call if she wants. I might not be in, but she can talk to my aunt.”

I produced a card and held it out. She glanced at it then tucked it into the rear pocket of her cutoffs. Any thicker and the card couldn’t have possibly fit. She rubbed her bare arms. I hadn’t noticed, but in fact it was pretty cold in there. They had the AC cranked and she was dressed for the sun. She squinted up at me again.

“ ’Bye.”

Like that, she turned and walked away.
Poof
. I raised my hand for a half-wave but it was to thin air and I let it drop. I did look to see if I could spot my business card. I couldn’t, of course. But the effort was pleasing. My guess was that she knew I was looking. Julia tells me that they always know we’re looking.

I traveled the length of the corridor and pushed the button for the elevator. As I waited, I glanced back. Mary was seated in one of the plastic chairs, trim tanned legs crossed, leafing through the magazine. She’d be learning those zing tricks for dulled marriages. I willed her to glance up from the magazine, but she didn’t. The elevator arrived and I got on, squeezing in between a pair of gurneys carrying two pale vapors in human form. The doors were slow in closing. I faced front and again willed the irritating woman at the end of the hall to look up. She wet her finger and turned a page of her magazine. She didn’t look up. Her foot waggled. The elevator doors slid shut.

I was in love.

Not really.

The doe-eyed boy in tights was shooting invisible arrows in all directions from an invisible bow. His victims clutched their hearts, their stomachs, their necks, flinging themselves to the ground and tumbling in somersaults, three, four, five rotations, then leaping to their feet to live another day. Or at least another several seconds. The doe-eyed boy himself was a show-off, leaping up onto a boulder, twirling his feet in midair, shooting off-balance, even tumbling along sometimes right beside his victims. His stash of invisible arrows was endless. In all, a very sprightly massacre.

“Here she comes.”

“She” was a waifish girl done up in the same tights and the same doe-eyed makeup as the homicidal Cupid. She appeared atop the boulder, up on her toes, her pipe-cleaner arms snaking upward. In her hands was cupped a large opalescent disk. The moon. The nifty part was that when the girl came down off the boulder—her steps were like those of someone sticking their toe in the water to see how cold it is—the disk remained suspended in air. I tried, but I couldn’t see the wires.

I’ll skip the blow-by-blow. Bottom line is that the boy’s invisible arrows had no effect on Moon Girl whatsoever. He fired away at an increasingly frantic pace while she pranced around mockingly, making an easy target of herself. Her invulnerability infuriated the boy, then exhausted him, then finally drove him to tears (invisible, like his armaments). Any minute I expected Moon Girl to sit down on the boulder and start doing her nails, ho-hum. In the end—I could have almost predicted this—the boy made a very melodramatic scene of handing over his invisible bow and an invisible arrow to the waif, and then he got up on the boulder and reached up to take hold of the moon, sticking his bony chest out so that the girl couldn’t possibly miss the mark. She took aim and shot him. The moon came out of the sky in the boy’s hands as he tumbled off the boulder … and the stage went black.

There was a finger-food-and-wine reception after the performance. The performers were there, looking like alien beings at a getting-to-know-you conference. My date for the evening—we’ll call her Clarissa because that’s what everyone calls her (she was christened Debbie)—spent nearly the entire reception with her fingers laced in a ball that she kept pressed tightly against her breast. Clarissa had only warm words for the performers, the most frequent one being “wonderful.” Everything was
“Wonderful!”
Clarissa’s face is one of the most expressive I have ever seen and she lavished it on the young performers, most of whom blushed and demurred at her fawning. This was what they had worked so hard for over the past several months. Clarissa had opened a dance studio over on Read Street early in the year and was trying to put a company together. Tonight was the premiere of
Dance of the Protégés
and the dancers had been so eager to please. If you could judge from Clarissa’s liberal scatterings of
wonderfuls
, they had succeeded.

Clarissa reserved her largest fawning for the two principals, pulling out an entirely fresh set of superlatives for the doe-eyed boy and his twinlike murderess. Clarissa goosed up the boy in particular, who wallowed shamelessly in his teacher’s praise. From the young girl, however, I detected a whiff of coldness. Competition, perhaps. The gristle of ego in a slow grind. The young dancer definitely had a bug up her ass about Clarissa. She was as skinny as a toothpick. Her eyes, which were lined like those of an Egyptian princess, were dark and mean. Clarissa smiled her effervescent pearlies right through the young dancer’s pointed indifference, then didn’t wait until we were out of the girl’s earshot before saying to me, “So what did
you
think of the little bitch?”