The Hearse You Came in On (5 page)

“So do you really run this place?” Guy Fellows asked.

“I run the funeral home.”

He looked me up and down.

“You don’t look like an undertaker.”

“So I’ve been told. So what about you? Do you look like what you do?”

“What do I look like I do?”

It was a straight line that ran all the way to the coast, but I ignored it and shrugged. “Surprise me.”

“I’m a tennis pro,” he said. “Baltimore Country Club. Do you play?”

“I’ve been known to knock the ball over the fence a few times.”

He appraised me. “You’ve got a good physique for tennis. Long arms. Good range. If you’re quick, that’s it.”

I am quick. But I wasn’t at that moment. At that moment I was seeing a pair of tennis shoes and a short white pleated skirt and a pair of long legs slicing back and forth across a clay court while this weasel peppered the ball left and right without even breaking a sweat. I was seeing Lady X toweling off after her lesson, having a few drinks with James Dean here in the clubhouse, then driving down to my funeral home to mess with my head.

Guy Fellows was saying something to me.

“Is there much money in it?”

“In what?”

He held out his arms and pivoted left and right, taking in the cemetery.

“Oh. That. Yes,” I said. “The funeral biz. It’s steady. How about the tennis gig?”

He bobbed his head. “It’s a living.”

He dropped to a boxer’s stance and threw a fake punch my way, missing by a mile.

“No hard feelings, huh?” He reached out and gave me a slap on the arm. “See you around the cemetery.”

He laughed and then walked off. Who could have known how nearly right he was.

I
took my mystery to the Screaming Oyster Saloon. The S.O.S. is a dockside joint, a ramshackle old building that looks as if it might at any minute lean too far and slip right into the oily harbor. There’s a vaguely nautical motif about the place, mainly the sort of flotsam you’d expect to find washed up on the beach in the weeks after a ship has broken apart out on the rocks. Netting, wooden casks, a ship’s bell… junk basically, touched with brine. Dominant in the sunless room is a weathered dinghy that hangs above the bar, a receptacle of years and years of bottles and cans sent there by the deft hook shots of the S.O.S regulars. It’s not uncommon as the night moves along at the Oyster for these hook shots to lose some of their deftness. Bottles and cans bounce off the side of the dinghy and come right back down, sometimes landing harmlessly, sometimes shattering on impact, occasionally cracking open an unsuspecting forehead. Drink at the Oyster long enough and you learn where to stand. That’s the theory anyway.

The Oyster is a mom-and-pop place in the truest sense. The mom and pop who run it are Frank and
Sally Finney. They’re Julia’s parents, my former inlaws. If you’ve read your Mother Goose then you are already familiar with Frank and Sally. They appear in those pages under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat. Sally is as big as a piano, a large round woman with a big round red face, short arms and large meaty hands. Sally’s voice is as big as her body, something which comes in handy when running a bar like this. I’ve seen her break up a fight that was clear across the room just by bellowing at the participants to take the damn thing outside.

Frank, on the other hand, is a tall crooked stick with an Adam’s apple that rivals his nose, and a basset hound face that promises the end of life as we know it at any minute now. Every mug he lands on the bar lands there with the heavy thud of finality. If you’re in a good mood and you don’t want to be, Frank’s your man. He doesn’t even have to speak, he’ll simply open up his bleak vortex for you and down you go.

One other feature of the S.O.S. worth mentioning. There is a black door at the far end of the bar that costs Frank and Sally a biannual payoff to the city building inspectors to keep it operational instead of nailed shut. The little fee is well worth it, though, on those occasions where a friendly neighborhood bar brawl threatens to get out of hand, and Sally is able to herd her unsuspecting pugilists through the black door and right into the harbor outside. It’s a great show, and Sally will usually spot the bar a free round of drafts, laughing like a witch in the wind as she pulls back on her sticks. If you can take her at her word—which I think I do—nobody has drowned yet. In the harbor, that is.

It being early afternoon, the Oyster was pretty sparsely inhabited. Frank was working the bar alone, so the general atmosphere was subdued. Nearly dead, in fact. Tony Marino was on his usual stool at the end of the bar stirring his Scotch with his pinky. Another Oyster regular, Edie Velvet, was parked midway down the bar, gazing up at the television in the corner. Barely taller than her barstool and very nearly its weight, Edie predated even Frank and Sally Finney at the Oyster. Her father, a third-rate jockey named Bud Velvet, owned the place back before Frank and Sally, a hedge against his consistently poor showings at Pimlico. When he sold the place to the Finneys, his daughter apparently came with the deal. I liked old Edie a lot. If you could get past the mass of wrinkles and the ill-fitting clothes, there were remarkably soft and friendly eyes in there. As I entered the bar, Edie raised her glass an extra inch in the air by way of greeting and soundlessly said my name before returning her gaze to the TV.

A soap opera was on. Ken and Barbie knockoffs were snarling at each other up on the screen. I slid onto a stool and asked Frank to draw me a Guinness. I glanced back up at the television and the pretty couple were already kissing. Man, they move fast on TV.

“Who’d you bury today, Hitchcock?” Tony asked. He stopped taking his drink’s temperature and puckered a sip. “I saw you leaving for the cemetery. Didn’t seem like much of a crowd.”

“It was only about a half dozen. A young woman. Suicide.”

He shook his head sadly. “They didn’t want the pipes, huh?”

“They barely wanted the casket. This was a real nobody, Tony. No friends. No family.”

Tony grimaced. “God, that’s terrible.”

I glanced back up at the television. The Barbie was crying now and her boyfriend was looking very uneasy. Frank dropped a coaster in front of me.

“Thank you, Frank,” I said. A low rumble sounded from somewhere in the back of the barkeep’s throat. “Did Julia tell you that we’re going to be in another play together over at the Gypsy?” I said with excessive cheer, just for counterpoint. “They’re doing
Our Town.”

Frank clawed the towel off his shoulder and swatted at a fly on the bar.

“Whore.”

Uh-oh, he was in
that
mood. It was a lost battle, but I gave it a volley anyway.

“You shouldn’t judge her so harshly, Frank. Julia’s a free spirit. It takes all kinds to make a world.”

Frank was unimpressed with my defense of his daughter, as I knew he would be. I guess it’s hard for some fathers to watch their daughters develop into comely devils.

“Who is Julia seeing now?” Tony asked. Frank turned to him and counted off silently on his long bony fingers—one, two, three, four—then he looked over at me with his watery eyes. He
was
interested in the answer.

“Actually, I don’t know,” I said. “She told me that she’s seeing a real nice fellow, but wouldn’t tell me his name.”

“You should have held on to that woman, Hitchcock,” Tony said.

“Try holding on to the tail of a tornado,” I said. It’s possible that Edie smiled at this, though her large glass was obscuring her tiny face. Frank set my Guinness in front of me. I took a sip. It was warm and perfect. God love the Irish.

Silence fell over the bar, except for the TV set. The guy up there was slamming the door behind him. The girl took a quivering close-up as the screen went blank. A commercial for Jell-O came on. Edie skidded her glass across the bar for a refill.

I switched to bourbon after my second Guinness and found myself once more thinking about the woman I had just buried. She was out there this very minute, already being forgotten by the handful of people who had bothered showing up to pay her their last respects. Normally I would be detaching at this point, throwing the ropes onto the deck and letting the little craft drift off and away. But it wasn’t happening. The fake Carolyn James—Lady X—had slipped one of those ropes around my ankle, and I was being pulled into the drink. I looked up at the mirror behind the bar and imagined that I saw her there. I imagined her sliding onto the stool next to mine, gesturing toward my drink, telling Frank she’d have what I was having. I imagined her turning towards me on her stool, lifting the glass to her lips, shooting me again with her eyes.
Well…?

I ordered another bourbon from Frank and glared straight ahead at the mirror. I was aware by then that the bourbon was doing a lot of the thinking for me. Of course that was the whole idea.

T
he next day, nursing a hard-cotton head from the previous day’s meditations at the Oyster, I drove my Chevy Nothing over to Carolyn James’s apartment building. She had lived in a section of the city known as Charles Village, so named for Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a wealthy Baltimore landowner and New World aristocrat and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Carolyn James had lived on Calvert Street (Lord Calvert, a buddy of Chuck’s), midway between Hopkins University and the now vacant Memorial Stadium. Mr. Castlebaum buzzed me in.

“So, an undertaker who makes house calls. Should I be concerned?”

Cute. “Yes. I thought I’d swing by and measure you.”

He invited me into his apartment and offered me a cup of tea. “It’s just tea,” he told me as I eyeballed his ancient furniture. “None of this fancy crap. It’s just tea.”

I chose a buxom armchair. “Just tea is just fine,” I assured him.

As Mr. Castlebaum puttered about in the kitchen, he called out to me in the living room.

“So let me guess. You want to know more about my neighbor. You’re upset that such a young woman would take her own life like that and it’s been bothering you ever since the funeral. It just doesn’t make sense. Am I right so far?”

Basically he was and I told him so. I spotted a large black cat with army green eyes staring at me from a windowsill. It didn’t seem to particularly care for me. A second cat came into view on the couch. Then two more over by the radiator. The room began to purr ominously. Mr. Castlebaum was moving about in the kitchen gathering the tea paraphernalia.

“So you can’t get her out of your mind and now you think you’re falling in love with her. You are becoming obsessed. Am I still right?”

I respected his imagination but I thought I had better cut him off there.

“Actually, Mr. Castlebaum, I was sort of curious to learn more about her relationship with Guy Fellows.”

I could hear the disappointment in his voice. “Oh. The bum.”

“Yes. The bum.”

Mr. Castlebaum poked his head in from the kitchen.

“Sugar? Lemon? I take a little rum and honey with my tea when I get a cold. You feeling sick?”

“Sugar’s fine,” I said. “And milk.” The black cat shifted, eyeing me suspiciously. I was invading his dairy cache.

Mr. Castlebaum came back into the room with a tray, which he set down atop a pile of old
Look
magazines on the coffee table.

The tea was sour.

“He’s a bad man,” Mr. Castlebaum said, settling onto his couch. “I heard him a lot, you know. Yelling. He was bad to her. He came and he went at all hours of the day and night. He slammed the doors, he didn’t care that there are other people living in the building. And he hit her.”

“He hit her?”

“That’s what I said. I would see her sometimes in the hallway or out walking on the street. I could see the bruises. And sometimes she is wearing sunglasses on the days when there is no sun. You tell me what that means. I’ll tell you it doesn’t mean she was a movie star. It means that her eyes are black. You saw him. You saw how he behaved at her funeral. He hit me.”

“He hit me too.”

The old man’s arms went into the air. “He hits everyone. He thinks he is Joe Louis. He’s a bully, that’s all. And he killed her.”

“What do you mean when you say that, Mr. Castle-baum? You don’t mean that he literally killed her?”

“What’s the difference? So he didn’t hand her the keys to the car. But she was a sad young woman and he did nothing but give her more reason to be sad. A person needs hope, don’t they? You can’t have hope when somebody comes by at three in the morning and takes a swing at you. Would that give you hope?”

I assured him that it wouldn’t. He eyed my teacup.

“So drink. It’s getting cold.”

So I drank.

I asked him a few more questions about Guy Fellows. He exercised his invective but didn’t really tell me anything new. Then I turned the earth.

“Mr. Castlebaum, do you ever recall seeing a woman visit next door? On the tall side? Black hair?”

His head bobbed up and down. “I saw her.”

“You did?” My sudden movement startled the black cat, who leaped down from the windowsill. “You’re sure? Hazel eyes? Kind of a small mouth?”

“Did I tell her to stand still so that I can draw her picture? Three, maybe four times I noticed a visitor who was not the bum. She was a tall woman with dark hair. I don’t know from the mouth.”

Lady X.

“You didn’t happen to catch her name did you?” I asked. Mr. Castlebaum sipped at his tea. He made a face.

“This tea is sour. I apologize.”

“Her name?”

He sat back on the couch and looked at me with a tiny smile on his face. Great. He had definitely spent too much time with these cats. Now he was going to toy with me.

“You are interested in this woman?”

I nodded.

“So you are not interested in my neighbor?”

“Your neighbor is dead,” I reminded him.

“You buried her,” he reminded me right back.