The Hearse You Came in On (13 page)

“You want a lectern and a pith helmet?”

“Yes! And a pointer! Why not? Put me in a tweed jacket and a bow tie like Indiana Jones’s daddy.”

Gil was shaking his head. “Tweed jacket doesn’t work with the pith helmet.”

“Forget the pith helmet.” I flipped the imaginary helmet out of the discussion with a flick of my wrist. “Professor Stage Manager. That’s the thing. We’ll stick me off in the corner, stage left—”

“I was thinking stage right—”

“Stage right is perfect! You’ve got the eye here, Gil. You’re the director. Maybe you’ll want to give me a pair of Teddy Roosevelt eyeglasses.” I was piling it on now. “I can take them on and off. On when I’m reading—”

“Reading?”

“From my field notes.”

“Right, right, the field notes.”

Gil was staring out into the darkness. The gears were turning. Bow ties and wire-rimmed glasses and pointers were all crunching under the gears and coming back out the other side, unscathed. I sat silently as Gil reinvented the wheel.

He mused, “Maybe we can even save the pith helmet, Hitch. Maybe each time you take
off
your glasses to watch the action, you could put
on
the pith helmet. You’re ‘back out in the field’ so to speak.”

I would look like today’s new idiot doing that, fumbling with glasses and pith helmets every twenty seconds. But what the hell did I care? I had scored my touchdown. I left Gil to savor his new vision and found Julia in the back row of the theater. She was as hung-over as I was buoyant.

“I’m a free man,” I announced as I slid into the seat next to her and threw my long legs over the seat in front, just as she was doing.

“Tell me you didn’t quit. I’ll murder you if you quit.”

“I’m no quitter Mrs. Sewell-no-more. I’m still in. But I don’t have to learn my lines. I’m going to read them, from a lectern.”

“You are going to
read
your goddamn lines?”

“Yes ma’am. It’s a concept.”

“Well son of a bitch. I want a concept like that.”

“Oh I don’t know, Jules. I kind of like the one you’re working on.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “Which one would that be?”

“The debauched, promiscuous, hungover little Emily.”

She placed her head in her hands. “Emily the town whore,” she moaned.

“We could replace your milk shakes with Harvey Wallbangers.”

“Misery loves company, Hitch. And you’re too damned giddy for me this morning. Go away.”

“I’m sorry, darling. I’ll stop crowing. It’s pretty unattractive, I know. So you drank too much free booze last night? Nice party, huh?”

“I can handle alcohol when I have a chance to sleep it off,” Julia said. She pivoted her head tenderly in my direction and gave me the best she could do of a smile. “But I was up all night. How about you, loverboy? None other than the infamous Lady X, eh? And a cop no less. Did she bring her handcuffs?”

“Afraid not.”

“That’s too bad. Did she tell you why she pretends to be dead women? Is it just something that she does for kicks?”

“We didn’t get that far.”

“No offense, Romeo, but it sounds like you didn’t get anywhere at all.”

“You, on the other hand, seem pretty cuddly with your millionaire,” I observed.

Julia ran a hand through her hair. “He wants me to marry him. He’s completely nuts about me.”

“Or maybe he’s just completely nuts.”

“You don’t think I’d make a good wife?”

“It’s the free spirit versus monogamy clash you’ve got to consider. Not to mention, whether or not you love him.”

“I have a great capacity for love.”

“Ergo the clash.”

Gil was calling his actors to the stage.
Clap, clap, clap.
Julia meandered down to the lip of the stage. Michael Goldfarb found his way over and plopped down next to her. The Valkyrie and the puppy dog.

Gil addressed his troupe. “People. We’re going to introduce a new concept to the production today. I want all of you—with the exception of Hitchcock—to start thinking of yourselves as participants in a live-action slide show. I want you to think of our set here as the projection screen, in … in an old boys’ boarding school lecture hall.” Man oh man, Gil moves fast. Julia looked back at me and silently mouthed, “What the fuck?” I’m sure that I looked like
a tomato trying not to explode. I didn’t dare laugh out loud.

Gil was beaming. “This will be good,” he promised. “This will be very good.” To his stage manager he hissed, “See if you can find me a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Like Teddy Roosevelt wore.”

H
utch was right. Spencer Davis—the fellow running against Alan Stuart for governor—really does look like a Kennedy wanna-be. He has Kennedy teeth, a dazzling set of chompers that go off like a flashbulb when he smiles. It is a winning smile and it is attached to a face that pulses with sincerity and good intentions. Such a shame the guy is a politician. We’ll never really know the truth.

I was watching District Attorney Spencer Davis up on the TV set in the ceiling corner above the Screaming Oyster’s bar. The volume was off, so I couldn’t hear the platitudes. The news was covering an appearance the candidate had made that afternoon at a shelter for minority homeless women with AIDS-infected children with learning disabilities brought on by toxic groundwater seepage into the plumbing of their methadone clinic whose subsequent closing had only added to the ranks of the jobless… or something. As I said, the volume was down, so the specifics were nebulous. But clearly Candidate Davis and his gigawatt smile thought that some things in this old world of ours needed improving. And he was probably right. Utopia
is still right around the biggest damn corner you’ve ever seen.

Under the guise of “balanced reporting,” the news then followed the Spencer Davis “story” with some footage from the previous evening’s cocktail bash at the Peabody Conservatory Library. No crack babies here, ladies and gentlemen. I pointed up at the TV set.

“Hey, Sally, this is the thing I told you about. That thing. The political thing.” My skills of articulation sometimes astound even me.

“Oooh, do you think my baby will be on TV?”

I noticed that Frank—who was close enough to have heard us—was pretending not to pay attention to the TV. But he was doing a lousy job.

“That’s sweet, isn’t it,” Sally said to me softly. “The old bastard really does care. In his old bastard sort of way.”

Julia didn’t make the news. But Amanda Stuart did. The camera lingered on her ice-sculpture face for about ten seconds, which in TV time is an eternity. She was beaming her best vote-for-my-husband smile.

“Is that the wife?” Sally sniffed.

“That’s her.”

“Looks like someone.”

“Grace Kelly,” I said.

“Grace Kelly. Now there was one beautiful woman. If looks could kill.” Sally moved along down the bar to wake up one of her customers.

The camera zoomed in just then on Amanda Stuart, who apparently noticed it for the first time. Her eyes flicked an infinitesimal dagger—just a filament of irritation—before Jeff Simons’s plastic face suddenly
reappeared on the screen, momentarily yakking into the wrong camera.

I had been drinking beer but now I switched to bourbon. The first one was good. The second one was better. The third one was jealous of the first two.

It can get complicated.

If looks could kill.

I dropped the words into my glass and stirred them in with my pinky.

Looks can kill.

People can kill.

People with looks can kill.

By God, Holmes himself would have been sorely pressed to keep one step ahead of such deductive brilliance. I hadn’t allowed the thought to take form the night before. But it took form now. As the TV news flickered with the images of a Cal Ripken triple and a pissed-off visiting pitcher, the thought came into perfect focus.

Amanda Stuart killed Guy Fellows.

This qualified as a
“Wow.”
Followed by a
“Shit!”

Jesus, what is this world coming to? I poured yet another drink down my throat. Okay. Do your worst, truth serum. Show old Hitchcock the foggy light.

I can no longer remember how it came to be that I chose Frostburg State College as the place to sharpen my three R’s. Maybe it’s just that they were the first college to accept me and I wanted to show my appreciation. It was probably something like that.

As I mentioned earlier, Frostburg is where I met Joel Hutchinson. Hutch was a brilliant student as well as a glorious mischief maker. He was also what I came
to think of as aggressively loyal. Once he had latched on to a person he polished them up like they were a neglected trophy he had just discovered up in the attic. Hutch seemed to operate at his highest pitch when he was encouraging others to go beyond their perceived limits. He was a boundary pusher. Other people’s boundaries.

To be more precise, he was a charming bully.

My actual friendship with Hutch reached its peak the night we left that Brahma bull dropping its loads of steaming shit onto the varnished wood of the student union’s fourth-floor bowling alley. As you can imagine, we felt unconquerable. It took real teamwork to get the bull out of its pasture, loaded into the van that Hutch had appropriated from the college’s Sanitation Services Department, into the student union service elevator and onto the lanes at three in the morning. Why we bothered to do it is irrelevant. It was a moon shot; a mountain climb; do it because it is there. Briefly it made blood brothers of the two of us. Batman and Robin. Butch and Sundance. Humpty and Dumpty. Hitch and Hutch.

And then Hutch kidnapped Professor Smollett on my behalf, and that soured things between us.

Professor Alfred Smollett, in his early fifties, was considered something of a guru in the Frostburg sociology department. The reason for this is that some six or seven years earlier he had published a book that briefly caught the country’s popular imagination. Entitled
She Sings, He Swings,
it made the argument for separate evolutionary paths for the human male and the human female, the core premise being that the female of the species has traveled further from her ape ancestors
than we brutish males. The book opens with a totally absurd CHAPTER about body hair and takes off from there. As the underlying thesis of a purportedly scholarly rumination, it’s pretty damned weird. But weird sells, and
She Sings, He Swings
swung onto the
New York Times
best-seller list. Professor Smollett hopped around the country on a promotional book tour, during which he apparently discovered the rock-star status that is sometimes awarded the published author. It certainly didn’t hurt that his book was basically high praise to women and a man-slammer all at once. In other words, the guy got laid
a lot.
He came back from his tour, filed for divorce from his evolutionary-superior wife and got a pretty bad hair weave. The book slid off the best-seller list after a few more months, and Professor Alfred Smollett settled into a career of feeding from the female ranks of the freshman class, for whom
She Sings, He Swings
was, naturally, required reading for the Sociology 101 general requirement credit.

I had a beef with Professor Smollett. As an inferior ape myself, I considered it patently unfair that while I had to preen and prance and bring forth great gushes of charm and cajolings in order to get the occasional Frostburg coed to go to bed with me, Alfred Smollett and his rice-paddy hair weave could sit back in his dusty little office and pull off his celebrity Svengali game with much less effort and considerably better success overall. I’m not accusing all the Frostburg women of mindlessly goose-stepping into the creep’s bed, mind you. But fledgling coeds are easy targets for creeps like Smollett. It was a game for him. Shooting fish in a barrel.

It especially irked me when he aimed his disgusting old pistol at Angela Poe. That was my beef. Angela Poe was the sweetest, shyest, doe-eyed girl/woman you could ever hope to have a silly crush on. She was in one of Smollett’s classes with me. Sophomore year. I can’t speak for fish or koalas or spider monkeys, but men fantasize. And it’s not always just whips and chains. My classroom fantasies about Angela Poe were pure enough to stuff a cloud with. Angela Poe didn’t even know how pretty she was, or how her quiet voice and her large dark eyes and her nervous smile made me want to set up police barricades around her desk so that I could warn everyone to just stay away, move on please, let this one pass through. Fantasies, like I say. We get them. Angela Poe was the perfect virgin and I wanted her to stay that way, haughty presumptive idiot that I was. The difference between me and Alfred Smollett was that he didn’t want her to stay that way.

And she didn’t. And that was my beef.

The day that I saw Angela Poe sitting in class with a faraway look of shock and shame on her pretty face, I knew that something terribly abrupt and life-altering had taken place. I suspected that I knew the source. When I saw the look that flickered between Angela Poe and the great professor as he strode into the room… I knew what had happened to her and with whom.

But that was a day for
me
to react, if I so chose. Not Hutch.

But it was Hutch, loyal Hutch, who got hold of the same van we had used to squire around the Brahma bull. It was Hutch who got Alfred Smollett from behind and taped a bandanna over his eyes and hustled him into the van. And it was Hutch who drove the
randy professor around for hours, haranguing him on a bullhorn—compliments of the Athletic Department. “You fuck with
them,
I’ll fuck with you!” The bullhorn—aided by a slight German accent—disguised his voice sufficiently. Alfred Smollett sat balled up in the rear of the van, helpless. Hutch never once mentioned Angela Poe by name, but Smollett must have gotten the point. Hutch spent several hours bouncing his amplified voice off the thin tin of the van, reviling Alfred Smollett up, down and through the middle for leading young innocents into his bed. He jerked the van wildly, sending his captive flopping helplessly from one side of the van to the other.