The Hearse You Came in On (8 page)

“Let’s talk about this later.”

“Hitch!”

I hadn’t even reached the sidewalk. I turned at the sound of my name. A man in a snappy trench coat, open and flapping, was bounding down the steps toward me. Big smile on his face. It was Joel Hutchinson.

We pounded each other’s shoulders and swapped a hearty handshake, then each took a step back to assess the ravages of the years.

“You look like hell!”

“You look worse!”

We pounded each other’s shoulders again.

“What brings you here,” Hutch asked. “Are you finally fessing up to the bull in the bowling alley?”

“Hey, that was you. I only helped you squeeze him into the service elevator, if you recall. Thank you, Mr. Broken Toe.”

“I deny everything!”

“Christ, Hutch, you never denied
anything.”

“Well I’ve changed all that, buddy boy. Now I deny everything. I’m in politics.”

I gave him another punch on the shoulder. We men love this sort of pummeling. “Aw, that’s a tough break, Hutch. Is there anything I can do to help you out?”

“Very funny, Sewell. Very funny. So how the hell are you doing? I hear you’re burying dead people now?”

“They’re the best kind, ha-ha.”

“And you got married, right? An artist or some such?”

“Extended road test,” I said. “We called it quits after
a year. How about you? Does the woman exist who can break the back of the mighty Joel Hutchinson?”

“You’ll never guess, but she does.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Her name is Christy. She’s got me beaten down, Hitch, and I love it. A mortgage, a couple of cars, two point five children and a golden retriever named Max. It’s Have a Nice Day Sweetie and Honey I’m Home. Leave it to goddamn Beaver.”

“We’re living in an age of miracles, Hutch. That’s what I’ve been hearing.”

He laughed. “It must be.”

We continued sparring in this fashion awhile longer. I knew Joel Hutchinson from college, Frostburg State, a small gray institution of higher education and advanced beer swilling tucked away in the mountains of western Maryland. Every college has its wild man and Hutch had been ours. Hutch was always up for anything. And he was also brilliant, so his escapades rarely hurt his academic standing. Hutch was one of those guys that you figured would end up either dead, in prison, or conducting the business of his vast empire from a beach somewhere on his very own island. I was a little disappointed to hear that he was now a political flack.

Hutch told me that he was the campaign manager for Alan Stuart, who was Baltimore’s police commissioner. The current governor of Maryland was fading into the political sunset, and I had heard rumors that the city’s top cop had been considering a run. Hutch confirmed it.

“Alan’s announcing tomorrow for the governor’s race.”

Alan Stuart was a no-nonsense hard-nosed type, a solid law-and-order man. That’s about all I knew. Now I knew that Joel Hutchinson was going to be coordinating his campaign for governor. He’d either win by a landslide or explode in a scandal. Hutch was no middle-grounder, and my bet was that his candidate wasn’t either.

“Look,” Hutch said, “we’ll have to get together sometime. Though to be honest, I don’t know when. This campaign will be sucking me under, I’m sure.”

“Maybe I’ll come in and lick some envelopes for you,” I said.

Hutch laughed. “I might take you up on that.” He double-pumped my arm. “By the way. What are you doing here anyway?”

“Oh. Nothing.” I told him in briefest form that I had recently had some contact with a fellow who had been found murdered in his home this morning. You know, that sort of thing. Hutch nodded thoughtfully.

“That wouldn’t be Guy Fellows, would it?”

“Well, yes. It would be him exactly. How did you know that?”

“Just a guess. I was inside just now and I caught some of the talk. It’s my job to be nosy. Tennis guy right? Mr. Joe Stud?”

“That’s the one.”

“And so what’s your connection again?”

“None really. I mean, I didn’t know him. He showed for a funeral yesterday. We had a little argument. The guy was a hothead. Anyway, the police wanted to hear my version of it. Fellows wasn’t talking. Obviously.”

Hutch completely missed my joke. He pulled an electronic thingy from his coat pocket and flipped it
open. I prepared to be beamed up, but it didn’t happen. “Look, Hitch. Are you free tomorrow? I’d really love to catch up.” He poked a few tiny keys and pursed his lips as he scanned his thingy. “How about ten-thirty?”

I had no thingy to consult so I rubbed my chin. “Fine.”

“You’re free?”

“If no one dies, yes.”

He gave me a queer look, then got it. “I get it. You’re a regular Bob Hope. So look, do you know Sammy’s? Little coffee shop, just north of the courthouse?”

“I’m sure I can find it.”

“Meet me there at ten-thirty. We can catch up some more. Then I’ll take you to a bona fide political rally. Do you think you can stand the excitement?”

“I’ll get to bed early.”

Hutch slammed me on the shoulder. “Tomorrow then.”

“Tomorrow.” I slammed him back.

Hutch headed off down the sidewalk. As he moved, he pulled a little black phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Hutch was all up-to-date, that’s for sure. He was well into a conversation by the time he had crossed the street and vanished around the corner.

So I had two appointments for tomorrow. Sammy’s and the big blue Matisse.

I wondered for a moment if I should pop back into the police station and ask Detective Kruk if they had chosen a funeral home to handle the arrangements for Guy Fellows. But I decided that might look to be in poor taste.

T
rouble was brewing in
Our Town.
It was coming in the form of a triangle, that most time-honored chestnut of romantic bliss and woe. In this case, however, the thing was twisting into something more closely resembling a rhombus.

It should come as no surprise that my ex-wife was in the middle of it. Young Michael Goldfarb, the nice Jewish boy who was playing George Gibbs, was smitten. Michael had been in several Gypsy productions already. Anyone familiar with Michael’s earnest but hopelessly wooden acting style could have spotted the depth of his infatuation immediately upon observing his first read-through of the play’s soda fountain scene. The soda fountain scene is the falling-in-love scene and Michael Goldfarb aced it. Or at least he oozed it. Julia sat center stage in Pocahontas braids, her elbows on a sawhorse representing the soda fountain counter, sucking air through a straw while Michael Goldfarb melted all over her. Julia had steadfastly refused to make eye contact with the smitten boy, which only served to stoke his fires. The more disinterestedly Julia cast her black eyes where Michael wasn’t looking, the more eagerly he had bobbed and weaved in his
attempts to trap her gaze. The result was a very peculiar dance between the two, effusive versus elusive. It absolutely shot the scene all to hell. It’s not supposed to be about lust. But of course our Zen director did nothing about it. And why should he? He was in love as well. Not with Julia, but with Julia’s erstwhile Romeo.

“He’s marvelous, isn’t he?” Gil whispered breathlessly from his director’s station in the ninth row. “Have you ever seen someone emote so?”

The answer was yes, and he was sitting in the director’s station in the ninth row in near ecstasy.

To complete our unhappy rhombus, it was becoming apparent that Libby Maslin, the medical transcriptionist who was playing the part of George Gibbs’s mother had also crossed the line and was panting over the young man who was portraying her son. Ah, theater. Where hormones come to play.

“What has he got that I ain’t got,” I asked Julia during a break in rehearsal. Her answer was extraordinarily direct.

“His virginity.”

“What?
How do you know that?”

Julia leveled me with a look. “Trust me on this. I know them when I see them.”

“Well, he’s certainly eager to lose it.”

She sighed. “I know. He is.”

“Jules, you look sad. I would have thought you go for this sort of thing. In fact I
know
you go for this sort of thing.”

“I just can’t right now, Hitch.” She was clearly frustrated. “I know it sounds ass-backwards, but I just don’t have the energy or the time to sit up on the
pedestal while Michael Goldfarb adores the living hell out of me. Do you have any idea how much whimpering at my feet that poor boy would subject himself to if I took his silly cherry? Flowers and phone calls and bad poems and sweet little gestures every five minutes.”

“I never did any of that.”

“No. You’re a much more practical romantic.”

“If that makes any sense.”

“It doesn’t. But that’s what you are. Or at least you were. I think there might be a new you emerging. I haven’t decided.”

Libby Maslin was crossing the stage just then holding a paper cup in each hand. She found Gil and Michael seated on the lip of the stage, no doubt discussing Michael’s subtext. Libby stood there like a faithful hound until Michael finally noticed her. She handed him one of the paper cups. Gil gave her a look like a sour prune.

“I’m staying out of all that,” Julia said. “I’m too old for it. Frankly, I wish I had said no to Gil in the first place.”

“We’re ego gluttons, Julia. Admit it.”

“I know. But I can’t understand why sex doesn’t take care of that.”

“It’s too private. Too one-on-one. You need the adoring crowd. Speaking of which.”

Michael Goldfarb had left his little confab with Gil Vance and was approaching us. He stopped in front of Julia. He said nothing. He just stood there looking at her. If I say it was creepy, I’m saying the truth. Julia turned to me and made a shoulder-shrugging face. She looked preposterously sexy in those double braids.

“I could lead this one over a cliff.” To Michael she said, smiling brightly, “Michael? Hello, dear. Would you like to follow me over a cliff?”

He didn’t say no, he didn’t say yes. Out from behind his back came a box of chocolates.

“They’re kosher,” he said.

Julia’s eyebrows ascended. “Meaning?”

“They’ve been blessed by a rabbi.”

Julia opened the box and held it out to me. “Do you want one, Hitch? They’ve been blessed by a rabbi.”

I picked a chocolate out of the box and turned it around in my hands. Somewhere out there a rabbi actually blesses boxes of chocolates. It’s almost too much. What a big beautiful world. Sometimes.

I rolled out of bed, walked Alcatraz around and around the block, then headed downtown.

Sammy’s Coffee Shop on Calvert Street couldn’t give a damn for the late twentieth century. It especially couldn’t give a damn for its industrial solvents and cleaning products, the ones which might have managed to eat through the decades of ground-in grit and soot sealed into its linoleum floors and tiny tabletops in a permanent dead-dishwater patina. Apparently Sammy also keeps his wait staff sealed in a time vault. Beehives in hair nets, eyeglasses on chains and faces like those repellent little troll dolls that were once so inexplicably popular. Sammy himself mans the counter, a disagreeable old guy dragged along by a toothpick. The younger version of his face, seemingly sucking the same toothpick, can be seen in the several hundred black-and-white photographs tacked up all
around the place, posing with the various celebrities and politicos and mobsters who have dallied with acid indigestion at Sammy’s over the years.

Hutch pointed out Police Commissioner Alan Stuart’s photograph. It was hung on one of the side walls.

“When he wins the election, Sammy will move it nearer to the cash register. That’s your prime real estate.”

“Right up there next to Cher,” I said. “That would be peachy.”

We were seated at one of the tiny tables. I had gone to put a matchbook under one of the short legs to keep the table from wobbling and had found another matchbook there already. The Pep Boys. Manny, Moe and Jack. All your automotive accessory needs. My dad had voiced a few of their commercials way back when. Our waitress came over to take our orders. Late breakfast for each. She fetched a coffeepot that had been sitting on the burner since the Hoover administration and filled us up. I took a sip and asked Hutch how he was so sure his man was going to take the election.

“He’s it,” Hutch said. “There is no other choice. Look who the Democrats are putting up. Spencer Davis?”

“Didn’t he once have a blues band?”

“
That
Spencer Davis would be a better choice. At least he could keep them grooving. Nah, this guy is a noodle. He’s the district attorney. He’s got a little Kennedy complex.”

“You mean members of his family keep dying tragically in between sex scandals?”

Hutch laughed. “Not quite. But he comes from money like that. He spends all his energies propping up
the poor. Thinks he’s the next Bobby. Sounds swell, I know. But we’re not electing a social worker, we’re electing a governor. Davis thinks on a single track. Flip the power from the haves to the have-lesses as often as you can and you’ve reset the balance. That’s his whole agenda. That’s not justice, it’s payback politics. It’s two wrongs make a right. But they don’t. We learned that in kindergarten. Everything you need to know, right? Spencer Davis is a good-looking rich boy, everybody’s chum. He thinks that the noblest form of political behavior is slumming. I’m sorry, but in politics especially I just don’t buy the do-gooder act. He’s pretending he’s something he’s not. Dress it up any way you like, but I still call that dishonest.”

It was quite a nice speech, except that it didn’t say anything about why Alan Stuart’s shit didn’t stink.

“And your man?” I asked. “He invented sliced bread?”

“My man invented the means of protecting it, which is ultimately just as important. Look, Alan Stuart is a tough, edgy son of a bitch, you’re not going to hear me pretend otherwise. He can turn on the charm when he wants to, just like Spencer Davis, but he rarely feels the need to. Alan likes to mix it up with people. He’s a head-knocker. Unlike Davis, you can never be sure which heads he’s going to be knocking together from one day to the next. That’s what makes him so effective. He’s multidimensional. He just wants to solve problems, period. He doesn’t want to be your friend, he just wants to solve the problem. You’ve seen what he has done as police commissioner. He gets his man. It’s pretty basic. And he instills that ethic in his soldiers. People are wary of Alan. They
know that they’d better play it straight around him because he’s always carrying his big club. Spencer Davis is a dinner guest. Alan Stuart killed the steer. That’s the difference.”