The Hearse You Came in On (27 page)

“So how do we do this? You shimmy in through the basement window and then come let me in?”

“You’re not coming in with me.”

“I’m not? You mean I really did just come along for the ride?”

“No. The first thing you’re going to do is to come up with an accent. You’ve got to get the Baltimore out of your voice.”

Accents I can do. The question is, why?

“Why?” I asked.

Kate said, “I don’t want Bowman guessing that you’re from Baltimore.”

“When exactly is it that you don’t want him guessing this?”

“When I’m inside his house and you’re wherever he is, heading him off at the pass if it comes to that.”

“I see,” I said. Although I didn’t. Not exactly. “You want me to run interference?”

“Only if you have to. I don’t want Bowman coming home when I’m going through his things. You’ve got to see to it that he stays away. We’ll set a certain time. I’ll feel completely free up until a preset time and then I’ll go. Your job is going to be to keep him away until that time.”

This was news to me. “Have you thought about how I’ll do this?”

Kate grinned at me. One of those grins that make you gulp.

“I hope you brought along your fake mustache. You’re going undercover, big boy.”

I
f somebody were to tell you about a local bar way the hell up in Maine called The Moose Run Inn, you’d likely figure it to be located somewhere in the general vicinity of a river or a creek or some such waterway sporting the name Moose Run. Wouldn’t you? I would.

Or would you expect to encounter a woodsy sort of place with the full-grown body of a moose (all but the head) protruding from the outside wall while the rest of the moose (the head) looms from the interior wall just above an old Green Hornet pinball machine? These are funny folk up here in Maine, I’m telling you; I don’t think it’s happenstance that we’ve stashed them all off in a corner of the country.

I was having a fairly successful dalliance with the Green Hornet pinball machine at The Moose Run Inn. This was despite the sizable distraction of the gigantic moose head on the wall, directly above the machine. Whoever did the taxidermy on this thing had given it one blue glass eye and one brown one. Somewhere along the line other cutups had affixed a red rubber nose to the beast’s snout, stuck a plaid hunter’s cap on at a jaunty angle between the two enormous antlers,
dangled an unlit cigarette from the poor thing’s mouth and, to complete the offense, fashioned a necklace from empty shotgun shells and draped it around the moose’s stout neck. If it were in the nature of the dead animal to rue, this moose most surely would have rued the day that he ran into this place.

I was slamming and banging the old Green Hornet pinball machine pretty well, getting a ten-second rendition of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” every time I landed the ball in the Green Hornet’s nest in the center of the table. For my first undercover gig I wore jeans by Lee, a simple yet elegant plain white T-shirt offset by a rather bold flannel statement (checked, unbuttoned and untucked) and a forest green baseball cap with “Skoal” embossed on the front. Shit yeah.

After going over John Kruk’s Boston PI’s reports on the daily activities of former Baltimore Police Detective Lou Bowman, Kate and I had determined that the guy was anything but a creature of habit. His days took an infuriatingly random shape. Some days he slept late. Some days he didn’t. Some days he took his boat out into the open sea and went fishing. Some days he sat on his deck with a six pack of Bud and a bag of cigars. Bowman might spend an entire afternoon down on his dock fooling around with his boat or he might knock about all day in his 4x4. He was retired. He could flop around any damn way he chose. The same pretty much held true for his evenings.

What the PI
had
seen, however, was a weekly visit to The Moose Run Inn every Monday night accompanied by mean-looking Molly from the NAPA Auto Parts store. Mondays were apparently mean-looking Molly’s night to let her hair down, such as it was.
Molly’s idea of a good time in Heayhauge was a night of flavored vodka at The Moose Run Inn, followed sometimes by a roll in the hay with former Baltimore Police Detective Lou Bowman, sometimes at his place, sometimes at hers.

It was due to this “sometimes” nature of things that I found myself that Monday night in a love embrace with the Green Hornet pinball machine under the forlorn blue and brown gaze of the mightily maligned moose up there on (in) the wall.

Kate and I had kept our eye on Lou Bowman from our hotel room patio. Somewhere around seven-thirty or so, Bowman had climbed into his 4x4 and backed out of the driveway. Kate and I killed about twenty minutes then got into our rented car and cruised by The Moose Run Inn. We spotted Bowman’s 4x4 in the gravel parking lot and gave each other a grim thumbs-up. I drove back to Bowman’s place and dropped Kate off at the driveway. She had vanished even before I could say good luck.

If God was on our side, Kate would break into Bowman’s place and be led directly to the missing report that she was convinced Bowman still had in his possession. It would be sitting out on the kitchen table under a golden celestial spotlight. However, if God was asleep at the wheel—or maybe just not paying too much attention to things that go on in Maine—then Kate would need several hours in which to sift and search. That’s where I came in. We had chosen eleven o’clock as the absolute latest that Kate would stay before having to get her fanny out of that guy’s house. My job was to see to it that Lou Bowman didn’t leave
the bar until eleven o’clock. If it came down to simply having to tackle him—which I hoped it wouldn’t—then that’s what I’d have to do. Kate said that in the event she got out before the deadline, she would phone the bar and have the bartender call out a fictitious name. That would be my cue that I wouldn’t have to tackle Lou Bowman or trip him or otherwise keep him distracted from leaving. I suggested the name Harvey Sprinkle, the name of the prolific seed-sewer I had recently buried.

“Isn’t that sort of a silly name?” Kate asked.

I reminded her, “I don’t have to answer to it. I just have to hear it.”

But standing there playing the Green Hornet pinball machine, I wished we had chosen a more conventional name. The bartender didn’t look like the type who would hesitate to hang up on anyone he thought might be attempting a crank call. He certainly didn’t look like the type who would necessarily hold the phone to his chest and call out, “Hey! Is there a Harvey Sprinkle here?”

Especially since there were just four people in the place so far. Lou Bowman, mean-looking Molly, a bleached-blonde barfly and myself. Things were most definitely
not
hopping at The Moose Run Inn.

It was the bleached blonde that had me worried. Possibly a pretty young thing at one point in her history, she was now somewhere in the northern neighborhood of her forties and had clearly moved on to the hard-maintenance portion of her life. Her cheeks were an unnatural pink, her eyelids an unnatural blue, her eyebrows an unnatural brown and her puckery lips an
unnatural red; the full-palette attempt to conjure up what youth and Nature had once provided for free. Her bottle-blonde hair, anchored by pitch-black roots, fell in large unkempt waves down to around her shoulders. She was wearing a tight leather miniskirt meant for an eighteen-year-old, and a simple white blouse meant for a ten-year-old. A cigarette was smoking itself in one hand and a glass was in the other. The woman’s eyes scanned the dark bar like an exhausted lighthouse beam.

When I had walked into The Moose Run Inn I had made accidental eye contact with the woman—the only person in the place who had bothered to look up—and been swept by those lighthouse beams. Before I could turn away she had launched a challenging smile and teeter-tottered her half-empty/half-full glass at me in an unabashedly provocative manner. My peripheral vision caught sight of Lou Bowman and mean-looking Molly sitting at a table near the bar arguing. They didn’t register my entrance. I spotted the pinball machine beneath the moose head and stepped immediately over to it, praying that God would drop a few quarters into my pocket. He did (or He had) and so there I was, my back to the bar, slamming the hell out of the machine while trying to regain my bearings. I could feel the woman’s overpainted eyes drilling holes willy-nilly into my back.

Quarters are finite. And people are only human. I missed an easy flipper shot on the fifth and final ball of yet another game. I knew, even as I reached into my pocket, that the quarters were now gone. A couple of Abes and Toms played off my fingers but that was it. I
nodded gravely at the bar’s namesake and turned slowly around. The blonde was still looking right at me. She gave me a great big drunken smile and waved an unlit cigarette in front of her face, like an unsteady metronome. Her voice traveled on gin vapors across the uncrowded room.

“You gotta light?”

Lou Bowman chuckled as I stepped past his table on the way to the bar. Mean-looking Molly slapped his hand.

“You look like someone? Who do you look like?”

It was possibly the seventh time that Carol had put that question to me. The first few times I made the mistake of believing that she had an answer on the tip of her tongue. But she didn’t. I learned quickly enough that this was Carol’s way of telling me who she looked like. Or who she thought she looked like.

“You know that lady on
M*A*S*H
who likes to kiss everybody?”

“Hot Lips.”

“Yeah. Her. I look like her.”

Okay. Fair enough.

“Remember Jayne Mansfield? She was in that cowboy movie? You know her? I look like her too. How about another drink?”

Carol was slamming gin. I was sticking to beer and she was calling me a sissy for it. I told her that the last time I touched hard liquor I killed five people. She laughed. She thought that was a riot.

“I kill people every day,” Carol told me. “But they don’t know it.”

She aimed a finger pistol at Lou Bowman and fired. She was right. He didn’t even notice.

At some point she asked me about my accent, which I was still in the process of perfecting.

“Where are you from?”

I took a bite off my beer. “Idaho.”

“Everybody from Idaho sound like you?”

“What do I sound like?”

“You sound like a
sissy”

A number of other people had finally drifted into the bar. I noticed that a few of them—mainly the men—glanced over at us with an undeniable expression of relief. The Moose Run regular had new blood. Carol was body-languaging the hell out of me. She wanted me to see her legs and she wanted them to accidentally brush mine every few minutes. I had taken the stool on her right, so that I could look past her and keep an eye on Lou Bowman. Bowman and his friend appeared to be in a heated argument about something. I couldn’t make out what.

“Whatta you do for a living, Bob?”

I had given her an easy name to remember.

“Why don’t you guess?”

Behind Carol, Lou Bowman suddenly slammed his fist down on the table. “Get over it!” I heard him snarling.

“Traveling shoe salesman,” Carol was saying.

“Excuse me?”

“I said traveling shoe salesman. That’s what you do.”

I’m pretty sure the word “shoe” got in there by accident, but I wasn’t going to quibble.

“Well, you’re a smart lady. That’s exactly what I do.”

Carol grinned and hiccuped at the same time. Behind her, mean-looking Molly was snapping at Bowman, who very blithely held up his middle finger at her.

“Ask me what I do,” Carol slurred at me. The fingers of her right hand were toying again with the buttons of my shirt. I had already pulled Carol’s fingers away from my buttons about a dozen times already, but now it seemed as if she was using them to steady herself. Her swaying had picked up considerably in the last five minutes or so.

I obliged. “Carol, what do you do?”

She gave me a catbird-seat smile and pitched forward as if to whisper her answer. I grabbed her shoulders to keep her from falling off the stool. What she gave was a stage whisper at best; loud enough even for the dead moose across the room to hear.

“I
fuck
traveling shoe salesmen.”

Things happened fast just then. Whatever it was that Molly and Bowman had been arguing about reached its peak. Mean-looking Molly didn’t throw her glass at Lou Bowman. But she did flip its contents into his face. Immediately he reached across the small table and slapped her—not once, but twice—and then bolted up from his chair. I stood up too. Rather, I slid off my barstool, the result being that Carol continued to pitch forward. She fell unceremoniously off her stool and onto the floor, landing with an audible thud. I kneeled down and yanked the woman up into a sitting position on the floor, her back up against the bar. Her eyelids were half open and her lips were attempting to form a word—I’m guessing it was “sissy.” She was breathing. That’s all I had to determine.

I looked up and saw that Bowman was making his way out of the bar. He was halfway to the door. Molly was right behind him. I looked at my watch. It was only nine-thirty. Shit.

“Nice meeting you, Carol,” I muttered hastily, then started for the door.

“Hey!” The bartender jerked a thumb at my and Carol’s drink glasses. “Is Rockefeller comin’ by to pick this one up?”

I pulled out a fistful of bills from my pocket and tossed two twenties onto the bar. I bounded for the door.

“Hey, it isn’t
that
much,” the bartender said.

“Use the change to call her a cab.”

The bartender laughed. “She don’t need a cab. She lives upstairs.”

I had reached the door. I stopped, my hand on the doorknob, and turned around. “She what?”

The bartender waved his hand in the air. “She owns this place. That’s my boss.” He leaned far over the bar so that he could see the nearly comatose Carol sitting on the floor. “How ya doin’, boss?”

I hurried outside. Lou Bowman was standing next to his 4×4, snarling at mean-looking Molly, who was snarling right back. Really, they made a lovely couple.