by Tim Cockey
“Me? I was the one who didn’t cause any trouble. I was the well-behaved one. But I was the freak. In that family, anyway. And meanwhile, Helen was well on her way to being so much like our mother it’s scary. If she … if this hadn’t happened, she would have been the mother of two fatherless children. Just like Mama.” She looked at me. “Did you know Helen was pregnant?”
“It was in the coroner’s report.”
Vickie let her hands rise and drop onto her lap. “Oh God. What am I going to do about Bo? I don’t know anything about raising children.”
“You’ve got to give it some time,” said Mr. Platitude. “You shouldn’t expect to be up to speed so soon. What about the father?”
Vickie took a slow take on my question. “The father.”
“The boy’s father.”
“Oh. Him.” Vickie shrugged her shoulders. “Like I said the other day, there’s not much to say. Helen hooked up with a loser. She actually made the mistake of counting on the guy for awhile. I guess you could say she learned that from our mother. Making the mistake of counting on losers, I mean. They were both tough women, but they were soft in the center. This guy Helen got caught up with … all he did was drag her through the sewer. You’ve got to understand. Helen and I grew up around men like that. Losers and letdowns. Men have always been a temporary thing with the Waggoner women.” She floated a weak smile. “It’s our legacy.”
I let that one pass. “You said that Helen never knew who her own father was, right?”
“That’s right. I didn’t know who mine was either.” This time the smile was a little braver. “There was a game we used to play when we were kids, where we’d pretend that different men in the neighborhood were our fathers. My father is the man in the grocery store who keeps winking at Mom. My father is the man who drives the M-6 bus. Mine is the ice cream man. It was a game, but it was also longing. That’s obvious enough. For awhile, Helen was convinced that she had actually figured out who her true father was. It wasn’t a game this time.”
Vickie shifted in her chair so that she was looking out the window. The sunlight split her face in two. She continued, “Our mother was seeing a guy at the time. He bartended at one of the clubs where she worked. He was sort of rugged looking, a pretty good-looking guy. Especially to a twelve-year-old, which is how old Helen was at the time. This one was hanging on longer than most of them and Helen got herself convinced that it was because he was her real daddy and that he wanted to be with his family.” Her gaze followed after something out the window. I couldn’t see what it was. “He came over one night. This guy. When our mother was working. He had the night off I guess. He knew she wouldn’t be there. He tried to force himself on Helen. Who knows, maybe he was picking up on her daddy vibes, and he took it the wrong way.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“No. I’m not excusing him. Anyway, our mother had already given both of us the talk about how to defend ourselves if we ever got into trouble. Especially that kind of trouble. Helen was a tough little scrapper. I happened to come home just a few minutes after she had kicked him and he was still on the floor, doubled over. Helen was fighting mad. She was standing over him screaming at him. “You’re not my daddy! You’re not my daddy!” She waited until the guy got himself out of there before she burst into tears. Oh my God, she just turned to water in my arms. I think that’s probably the closest we ever were. In fact, I know it was.”
Vickie stared off at the memory. My phone rang. I immediately hit a button that flipped the call to my answering machine. It was Bonnie. I turned the volume down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
“Well. That was the end of the game, that’s for sure. Helen refused to tell our mother about what had happened, and she made me promise not to tell either. Of course, the guy dumped our mother right after that. She was pretty upset. That’s when she and Helen really started in on their fighting with each other. They were at each other’s throats all the time. It was fire and gasoline, I swear. But like I said, they were basically the same person. Underneath it all, Helen wanted so much for that damn woman to love her. That’s probably why she fought so hard.”
Vickie broke off her story and looked over again at the Magritte.
“What is that?” she asked.
“It’s a Magritte.”
It was Magritte’s Fiddle. A woman seated on a verandah by the shore of a lake with a violin bow in her hand and a fish tucked under her chin. It was a gift from Julia. Vickie squinted at it, as if maybe that would make more sense of it. I could have told her. It wouldn’t.
She turned back to me.
“I brought you something.”
She unsnapped her purse and reached in and pulled out a photograph. She leaned forward and slid it onto the desk. I picked it up. The photograph was, of course, of Helen Waggoner. It was of Helen and her son, Bo. It appeared to have been a recent photograph, for the boy looked pretty much as when I met him the previous day. The two had their faces pressed together. Helen was giving her son a big bear hug. This was when I was able to make my assessment. The dead waitress had beautiful eyes. Large, chocolate and lovely.
“It was just taken in October,” Vickie said. “Bo’s third birthday.”
The pair in the photograph looked like the happiest, healthiest, most wholesome pair of people on the planet. The photograph had been taken outside. There was something about it that seemed familiar to me. Then I saw what it was. In the background was a large, slanted pane of glass reflecting the green of trees as well as something that I couldn’t exactly make out, something brown and white.
“Did you take this?”
“Me? No. I found it in Bo’s room when I was packing his things for him to come over to my place.”
“This was taken at the zoo.”
“It was? How do you know that?”
“Here. Look.”
She rose partway out of her chair to lean over the desk for a look. “In the background, see? That’s the new visitors center. I was out there just the other day for its opening. That’s an antelope, I think, in the reflection.”
Vickie dropped back into her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. The sun was angling in through the window behind her, slicing a golden streak diagonally across her lap. A partial corona hovered about her hair.
“It’s a good picture of my sister,” she said simply.
I agreed it was. But what was I supposed to do with it? I suppose this was how Vickie Waggoner wanted to remember her sister, despite everything. Smiling and happy on a beautiful autumn day with her son. What I had down in the basement was a ravaged wreck, halfway gutted and stitched back up with a crude Frankenstein scar. I couldn’t work the magic that would return Helen Waggoner to the pretty, smiling woman in the photograph. I had done what I could. But my best shot could never be good enough.
Vickie Waggoner was crying softly. I hadn’t even heard her start.
“My sister deserves better than this,” she said in a small voice. “This is so unfair. She … to live the kind of life she was living, and then end up like this. My stupid, stupid sister. She deserves to be alive. She …”
The floodgates opened. The woman hunched over in my small armchair and brought her hands to her face and wept with abandon. About time, I’d say. My guess is that she had been holding it all in. Maybe for the sake of the boy. That’s no good. I let her have her cry, sliding a box of Kleenex to the corner of the desk. It would have been rude of me to just sit there and look at her so I picked up the photograph and studied it again. I agreed with Vickie Waggoner. This woman didn’t deserve to die. She was all of twenty-five. She had this little boy and another child on the way. She was carving out her place in the world. Helen Waggoner looked out at me from that photograph with a large, happy, going-to-live-forever smile, a smile she would never smile again. Not in this life anyway. Now she was simply a ruined creature in the dark basement directly below us.
Heavy stomping sounded from overhead,
followed by laughter and a high-pitched squeal. I knew what Billie was up to. Her old Bride of Frankenstein routine. She probably had Bo cornered and was tickling him unmercifully. I looked back down at the photograph. Somebody out there was responsible for making an orphan of this little boy. His mother would never again hear her son’s high-pitched squealing or his laughter. She would never again be there when he cried. All that was already over.
It was totally unacceptable.
“I’d like to help you find out who did this.”
I wasn’t even certain that I had spoken out loud until Vickie looked up from her tears and blinked her red-rimmed eyes at me. A mixture of uncertainty and grief. And a bruised look from the running makeup.
“I don’t really know what I can do. But … but I want to help. Is that okay with you?”
That’s when I learned that Vickie Waggoner also had a beautiful smile. Just like her sister’s. It was the first time that she’d shown it to me.
The tears on my cheeks weren’t mine. They were Vickie’s. They got there when she wrapped me in a grateful hug as she was leaving my office.
“Is that ink?” Billie asked, coming up to me at the front door. Vickie and Bo were making their way carefully down the frozen sidewalk. Holding hands. I dabbed at my cheek. A smear of black came off on my fingers.
“It’s mascara.”
Billie glanced out the door as I was closing it. “Oh. I see.”
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
Billie clucked. “I’m not worrying about what I think.”
CHAPTER 7
A waterpipe under the street in front of the Oyster had cracked and ruptured from the cold. The flow had been shut off, but not before a large ice sculpture had formed on the edge of the street and up on the sidewalk. Depending on who you listened to—and from what angle you viewed the ice—the frozen mass resembled a large hawk in flight, a castle, Abraham Lincoln’s profile, or a pair of obese copulating angels. Baltimore Gas & Electric had ringed the tabula rasa with plastic tape, which only served to make the frozen chunk even more of an attraction. By the time I saw it, someone had already placed a Christmas wreath on one of the jagged points.
“Ain’t that shit?” Sally said to me as she pulled the door open wide. I had an armload of logs. I carried them into the bar and over to the far wall and dumped them atop the pile next to the small fireplace. I made three more trips to my car to fetch the rest of the wood. A mother was crouched down next to her son, who was staring at the ice hemorrhage with pie-pan eyes. Someone else was snapping its picture. Two teenage girls were approaching, giggling. One carried a string of gold tinsel.
Sally whipped up some hot chocolate while I got a fire started for her. I used some empty liquor cartons for kindling and soon had a roasty toasty going. We pulled up a pair of chairs and gave the flames a good look. I’ve always held that if music itself could get up and dance, it would make these sorts of moves. Sally had poured a taste of rum into our hot chocolates. It was an atrocious addition. But the bite was nice. After a few minutes, there was a low rumble from outside. I turned my head just in time to see several pounds of snow falling from the roof past the bar’s window.
“There’s my signal,” I said. “Time to go.”
“Good talking with you, Hitchcock,” she said. “Thanks for the wood.”
I rounded the corner to find my good friend John Kruk reading the riot act to a group of sullen-faced policemen out on the street. The first piece of hard evidence in the murder of Helen Waggoner had showed up. It was on Anne Street, one block over from the funeral home. Actually it didn’t show up, it had been there all along. It was a car. A white Pontiac Firebird. I recalled Alcatraz sniffing around the car during one of his romps. I had assumed he was looking for love in all the wrong places. I hadn’t realized he was sleuthing.
The car had been parked illegally, directly in front of a fire hydrant. Because of the mild anarchy brought on by the recent storm, it had taken several days before a patrol car had noted the violation and run a routine check of the car’s plates. That was when it was discovered that the car had been reported stolen several days before, the same day that Helen was murdered. And that’s when the gears started rolling.
Helen had been shot in the front seat of the Pontiac. Traces of her blood were recovered from the front seat. A pair of bullet holes were located, one in the floorboard and one in the door. Helen’s fingerprints were all over the door handle and the window.
Kruk was ballistic. His officers should have spotted the car the night Helen’s body was dumped off. The entire area should have been canvassed. In fact, it had been canvassed. Sloppily, it now appeared. The miserable icy, slushy, snowy, windy, bitter, crappy weather of that evening would no doubt be floated as an excuse. Kruk would no doubt give less than two seconds to such an excuse. The stolen white Pontiac Firebird, illegally parked, containing the murder victim’s blood and fingerprints on the seat, door handles and passenger window had “lousy police work” written all over it.
I stood on the corner and watched the police going over the inside and outside of the Pontiac trying to pick up additional clues. Kruk ordered two of his men to practically crawl on their hands and knees from the car all the way around the block to the front door of Sewell & Sons. It wasn’t too likely that whoever brought Helen down here bothered to drag her body all that way. More likely she had been dumped off, and then the car had been pulled around the corner and abandoned there. The inch-by-inch assignment carried the whiff of penance.
“You are a vengeful god,” I told Kruk.
He ignored the compliment.
“I’m disgusted. We should have discovered this car that night.”
“I don’t know. White car in a snowstorm. I think your men could make a decent case.”
“I’m not in the mood for you right now, Mr. Sewell.”
I didn’t bother asking if he ever was. Instead I asked, “So the car was stolen?”
“It was called in around noon the day of the murder. Taken right off the street in Federal Hill. Guy was having lunch at Sissons. Comes out, car’s gone.”
“So what do you make of that?”
Kruk shrugged. “The murder was probably planned. The killer picked up the car with the intention of getting Helen Waggoner into it. You can bet we won’t pull the killer’s prints off the car.”
Kruk was watching his two foot soldiers as they made their way s-l-o-w-l-y up the block. If a person can look both pissed and pleased at the same time, Kruk did. I noticed, not for the first time, that the short detective was underdressed for the extreme temperatures. No scarf, no gloves, only a flimsy overcoat. It didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe it was all the bad precinct coffee that coursed through his veins. Internal insulation.
“So, if it was preplanned does that count out crime of passion?”
Kruk lit a cigarette and pocketed the match. “It rules out an argument that just got out of hand. That will mean something when it gets to trial. It doesn’t get me any closer to the killer.”
“So the car doesn’t help you, does it?”
Kruk shook his hammy head. “Not really. No.”
I let the disgruntled detective go about his business. He ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape that had been stretched around the car and knocked a few more heads together. The two officers he had dispatched to cover the turf between the Pontiac and the funeral home reported back to him. They had found nothing. Kruk hadn’t really expected that they would, though I heard him chewing the men out anyway. “A fucking dog found more evidence than you did!” I’d have to remember to congratulate my celebrated pooch.
The scene was a bust. The tow truck Kruk had called in arrived to take the car away. The Pontiac was winched up onto a flatbed truck and secured with chains. As the truck moved down the street, it let out a huge backfire.
I met with Bonnie at Alonso’s Bar on Coldspring Lane. Alonso’s is a dark, toasty bar just across the expressway from Television Hill.
People from the station have been hanging out here since the time of Jesus. The outside of the building is comprised of glass bricks and a heavy wooden door with a porthole window. There is a small package liquor section in the front, a long horseshoe bar right past that and a half dozen booths in the rear, off the open end of the horseshoe. The rest rooms are beyond the booths, and beyond them is the kitchen. Moscow is about eleven thousand miles past that. If we want to go that far.
Bonnie was at a booth. As expected. Jay Adams was there with her. Not such a nice surprise. The Sunpapers reporter gave me a smirking smile as I squeezed in next to my honey bunch. Bonnie and I didn’t kiss or otherwise show any outward signs that we were sharing the same sheets. Bonnie is rigid on this; she doesn’t want her personal life on display for gawkers. She reached over with her hand under the table and goosed me. That’s fine. Better than a peck on the cheek anytime.
“Jay is reporting on the Waggoner case,” Bonnie said to me.
“I know. We’ve spoken.”
Adams grinned out of one side of his mouth. “As I recall, you didn’t have a lot to say when we spoke.”
“Nope,” I answered. “I didn’t.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
“Do you have any more to say now?”
I shrugged. “You know what I know. Probably more at this point.” Of course, this wasn’t the case and I knew it. I knew about the white Pontiac. I decided to hold on to that tidbit for the time being.
Bonnie spoke up, “Jay thinks that you know more than you’re telling, Hitch. That’s why he called me.”
“Why didn’t he just call me?” I turned to the man himself. “Why didn’t you just call me?” I added, “Were you afraid I wouldn’t ask you out to lunch?”
“Hitch, I asked Jay to join us. He can help,” Bonnie said.
“Bonnie told me about your visit out to the airport last night,” Adams said to me.
“Well, I know how to show a girl a good time.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”