Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  The stadium is located smack-dab in the middle of a working class neighborhood of brick row houses. The narrow streets shoot off from the stadium like wheel spokes. I found a parking space right in front of Vickie Waggoner’s building.

  “There’s somebody here,” Vickie whispered to me as she pulled open the door. It sounded halfway between an apology and a warning. She was wearing a brown plaid skirt, gray V-necked sweater, with pills, and a tired expression. Or worried. Both, I decided. And it wasn’t from her fanciful rompings in my dreams. What she didn’t look like was a porn star and a stripper. Current or former. Her hair was pulled back off her face and bunched into a large, plastic clip—the same sort of coiff Helen had sported the night she was dumped at my doorstep. I took an extra hard look into her eyes. My mind reading technique. It hasn’t worked yet.

  Vickie’s living room was tidy and unexceptional. More Ethan Allen than Ikea. Secondhand Ethan Allen. The sofa, the chairs, the throw rug, the coffee table … not a virgin in the bunch. The room felt a little musty. The painting on the wall above the sofa was large and lousy, a light-drenched depiction of a mountain, a glen, a river, a pine forest, a deer. The kind of thing you’d pick up at one of those so-called Starving Artist’s Sales for $59.99. Cranking out garbage like this, it’s no wonder the guys were starving. I once watched a fellow on television paint one of these. It took him all of thirty minutes. If he hadn’t been yakking so much he’d have knocked the damn thing out in about half that time. I scanned quickly for any photographs. I saw none. There were no detectable personal touches. This could have been anybody’s living room.

  An archway led into the dining room. A man was seated at the table, along with Bo, who was interacting energetically with a bowl of cereal. Milk and cereal bits all around the boy’s mouth made him look like he was wearing clown makeup. The man looked up as Vickie and I came in from the living room. It took me a few seconds to place the face. He was no longer sporting a full beard, though he appeared to be several days into a patchy new one. His hair was short and bristly, prematurely spiked with gray. The man’s eyes were not as intense as the last time I had seen them. The fires had been dimmed; the whites had gone milky. In fact they looked half asleep. Terry Haden no longer reminded me of Al Pacino in Serpico. He reminded me more of Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III.

  Haden didn’t recognize me. He barely even acknowledged my presence. I thrust out my hand, which he stared at for a moment before taking it. He surprised me with a steel grip. I led off the festivities.

  “Hitchcock Sewell.”

  He murmured, “Terry Haden.”

  Apparently my uncommon moniker didn’t register either. Granted, we had only met a few times, but I would have thought that between my name and my needling him about his flak jacket, I might have landed a place in his recollection. Haden wasn’t wearing a flak jacket now. He looked thinner than I remembered him. Aside from the hair ionizing into gray, the rest of his rugged good looks had gone somewhat sallow. He was smoking a cigarette—it was burning in an overflowing ashtray on the table—which I thought was a cheesy thing to do around a three-year-old eating his breakfast. Haden released my hand and picked up the cigarette and took a drag. He squinted at me through the smoke.

  “Funny name.”

  “It’s short for Terrence, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I meant yours.” He gave me a not very pleasant smile.

  “I know you did.”

  He took another pull on his cigarette and studied me as if I were some sort of surrealistic sculpture. I gathered that he was zonked on something. I smelled no liquor, there were no glasses on the table, no bottle. Whatever it was it probably came in pill form. Or powder. Haden seemed content to simply stare at me. Maybe he was actually asleep with his eyes open. Maybe I was appearing to him as if in a dull dream. Vickie stepped up next to me.

  “I’m going to take Bo in for a bath.” She reached for the boy.

  Haden snapped out of his reverie, waving her off. “Leave him. He’s fine.” He turned to Bo, who was attempting to push his cereal bowl around the table using his spoon. “You’re okay, aren’t you?”

  The cereal bowl was taking an uncharted turn, toward the edge of the table. Haden grabbed the bowl and dragged it out of the youngster’s reach. He picked up a cloth toy—a large yellow clown with an ink-stained arm—set it down in front of the boy, then looked back up at Vickie. “He’s fine.”

  “You really shouldn’t smoke around the kid,” I remarked.

  “Well, yes sir.” Haden made a show of jabbing out his cigarette. Then he made a show of his empty hands. Then he made a show of his ugly teeth. It was all a slow motion show. I decided to speed things up. I reached over and snatched up the butt-filled ashtray, took it into the kitchen, emptied it into the trash can, ran the ashtray under the tap to clean it out, then filled it with as much water as it would hold—maybe a quarter inch—and returned to the living room. I set the ashtray back down on the table, carefully, so as not to spill the water.

  Haden glared at the ashtray. “What’s that? I can’t fucking use that. My cigarette’ll get wet.”

  I tapped my finger against the tip of my nose. “Yeah, I’d heard somewhere that Einstein had a roommate.”

  There was nothing slow about the way Haden jumped to his feet. He was about five inches shorter than me, but he did his best to get in my face.

  “Who the fuck are you anyway?”

  “We just met,” I said blithely. “Don’t you remember? One of us had a funny name?”

  “Screw you.”

  Vickie reached for Haden’s arm. “Don’t—”

  Haden whipped around and caught her by the wrist. “Don’t what?” He was twisting her wrist backward. I immediately reached out and clamped my hands over both of the man’s ears and jerked his head so that he was looking straight at me. The limit of my suffering fools is when they start hurting other people. “Don’t be an asshole,” I mouthed. Though, because I had Haden’s ears blocked, he couldn’t tell that I hadn’t actually spoken. He looked confused, which was what I wanted. I jerked my hands, giving him a little taste of whiplash, and he let go of Vickie’s wrist. Immediately I released his ears, keeping my hands up where he could see them. “Can we cool off here?” I asked. I didn’t really intend it to be an actual question. Haden glared at me.

  “You big guys always think you’re tough.”

  I corrected him. “We always think we’re big.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. He looked over at Bo, who had set down his spoon to watch the big people shove each other around. The three-year-old didn’t seem at all bothered by it. “That’s Bo,” Haden said, as if I had just walked in the door.

  “I know. We’ve met.”

  Haden’s gaze lingered on the boy before he turned back to me. He was smiling that ugly smile again. Again I didn’t like it.

  “He’s mine.”

  Haden and I retired to the living room while Vickie took the boy off for his bath. I was guessing that she was probably just looking for an excuse to get Bo away from Haden. A creep like this could carve a nasty impression into an impressionable little mind. It was clear to me that Vickie didn’t want to say a whole lot to me in front of Terry Haden. Her eyes had warned me off from pursuing the issue of his being the boy’s father. In the living room, Haden made a big deal of offering me a cigarette before he shook one out for himself. He gave me a patronizing sneer.

  “Is it okay with you if I smoke in here?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  Haden sniffed at that. “Used to be.”

  He had taken a seat on the sofa, directly underneath the starving artist’s painting of mountain bliss. The smoke from his cigarette curled right up past the deer.

  “So what’s this about Helen’s funeral? You’re the undertaker, right?”

  “All your mortuary needs.”

  “What? You make house calls?” He laughed at his own joke. And he laughed alone.

  “We’ve been
having trouble getting the grave dug in this weather,” I explained. “Murphy’s Law, you know. Everything we’d normally use seems to be broken.”

  “That Murphy is a pain in the ass.”

  “He’s good at what he does.”

  “So, why don’t you burn her?”

  Oh, the charm just oozed from this guy. You just wanted to run up to him and hug him. “In fact that’s what I’m here to discuss with Miss Waggoner,” I said. “By the way, we call it cremation.”

  “I know what you call it.” He leaned back and draped his arms out along the back of the sofa. “I think Miss Waggoner just wants it over with. I think you can go ahead. I mean, with the cremation.”

  “I need her to tell me. She’s the next of kin.”

  Haden took a long pull on his cigarette as he crossed his legs. He was attempting to affect a worldliness of sorts, and it wasn’t working. I was seeing very few traces of the rakish young hustling filmmaker of only a few years back. Haden’s budding Von Stroheim aura seemed to have abandoned him. I suppose veering off into pornography—not to mention uppers, downers and whatever else he was into (or was into him)—can do that.

  “I’m the boy’s father,” Haden said. “Helen and me. Bo. He’s our kid.” He picked something off his tongue. Tobacco, probably. I hope. “So I’m next of kin, too.”

  I corrected him. “Well in fact you’re not. Your son is, but you’re not.”

  “What do you mean? I just told you.”

  “Were you and Helen married at the time of her death?”

  Haden let out a little snort. “What do you mean ‘time of her death?’ You mean like, two days ago?”

  “Were you ever married to Helen?”

  “Hell no. But that’s her fault. Stubborn goddamn woman. The moment she finds out she’s knocked up she shows me the door. Hardheaded bitch. Helen turned into a real pain in the ass, I’ll tell you.”

  He swore again as he savored the memory. Apparently nobody had covered the concept of not speaking ill of the dead with the gentleman on the couch. He took another long pull on his cigarette.

  “Bitch.”

  I’d heard him the first time. “So I take it that you two were madly in love.”

  Haden squinted at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Christ, what was this guy on? “Love. It’s a term of endearment? Affection? I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It was invented by Cole Porter? It means never having to say you’re sorry? Rhymes with June and moon?”

  “What is … ? Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke?”

  “Skip it.”

  “You’re a pretty fucked up guy, aren’t you?” Haden said.

  It was too easy a straight line to even bother with. I simply shrugged.

  “Anyway, what’s love got to do with it?” Haden grumbled, stealing a line from Tina Turner. This spawned an image of Ike. Which—given this guy’s exploitation of Helen Waggoner—maybe wasn’t such an irrelevant image.

  “Skip it,” I said again. “I’m just accustomed to the idea of people being a little upset when someone close to them has been murdered, that’s all.”

  “Helen was shot, man. That’s fucked up. You think I’m some kind of hard-ass? Just because she was killed doesn’t mean I suddenly got all these fond memories of her, that’s all. I mean, we were cool for awhile there, okay? But pain in the ass is pain in the ass. Can’t change that, man.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to, Terry.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? I mean, I heard that Helen was killed and here I fucking am.” He slapped a hand against his chest. “I don’t have to be here.”

  I was tempted to ask him if he’d let me hold his Mr. Congeniality Award sometime. Instead I asked, “How did you hear about Helen’s being killed?”

  “What do you think? I can read. I saw it in the paper. Dead fucking waitress. There was her name.”

  I decided to go fish. “So Vickie didn’t call you to tell you? I mean, as Bo’s father?”

  Haden’s expression screwed up. “Her?”

  “Yes. Her.”

  An ugly grin stretched across his face. “She’s all right, isn’t she.”

  I ignored his appraisal. “Did Vickie know that you were Bo’s father?” I realized that Vickie had skirted that same question the day before in my office. Or maybe she didn’t skirt it; but she didn’t answer it. Neither did Haden now. He stubbed out his cigarette, his gaze wandering to the window.

  “Helen, man … She was a piece of work. Maybe we should have stayed together, you know. I don’t know. Even a pain in the ass the way she was, she was something else. I mean, when she really had it.” He fell back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. “Fucking Helen … Just like her mother.”

  This brought me to attention. “Her mother? What about her mother?”

  Haden steadied his gaze at me. His pupils were doing sidestrokes. “What about her? Ruth Waggoner. Now there was a fucking pistol, man. That woman was something in her day.”

  “Just how far back do you go with this family?” I asked.

  Haden was looking at me as if I had sprouted a gourd. “You were a teenager once, weren’t you? Didn’t you ever go down to The Block? You know, use a fake ID and get in to see a show?”

  “I never needed a fake ID,” I said, unable to keep my own smarmy smile off my face. I stretched my legs out, just in case he forgot how much taller than him I was. If this guy wanted to talk about pain-in-the-ass, I can get in my licks.

  My efforts sailed right past him. “Well, if you missed Ruth Waggoner, man, you missed the real deal. She could’ve gone places, you know, except by the time she came up they were already closing down the fucking Block. It’s shit now. I hate that place. Ruth could’ve been another Blaze Starr. You know Blaze Starr, right?”

  Sure. The Two O’clock Club. Stripper, proprietor and philanderer of southern governors. The last big thing on The Block. She has long since hung up her strings and retired to the family home in West Virginia.

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “Well, Ruth had some of that shit going. Most of these girls you see now, man, they’re idiots. They’re just pretending. It’s all fucking coo coo coo and wrap themselves around the goddamn pole. Big deal. Ruth was for real. She gave you your money’s worth.”

  I needed to straighten out the scenario. “So … when you met Helen you already knew that her mother was Ruth Waggoner? Your childhood idol?”

  “Hey, what’s your fucking problem, man?”

  “I just asked a question.”

  “No, I didn’t know who the hell she was. I just met her. I flipped when I found out though. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  Interesting way to put it. “But Ruth wasn’t still … she wasn’t still dancing by then, was she?” I asked. “She must have retired already.”

  Haden chuckled at that. “She pulled her clothes off for a living. You want to call that dancing, go ahead. She was a working girl, man.” Haden pulled out another cigarette, then forgot to light it. It remained in his fingers.

  “No man, when I met her she was beat. Saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Here’s this woman who did a real number on me when I was a kid, you know? I mean, Ruth Waggoner. A kid’ll take a woman like that home in his dreams in a fucking heartbeat. I hook up with her daughter and so I go and meet her … and she’s a wreck.”

  “The years took their toll, did they?”

  “The hell with the years. The booze took its toll. The pills took their toll, man. And then the cancer on top of it all. She was a mess. All that good stuff she used to strut around on that stage, man. … I told Helen flat out. I told her look at your mother. I told her she better make sure she didn’t end up like that. Fucking Helen never listened to anybody though. A goddamned kid. She was already pill crazy. I mean, you know, there’s nothing wrong with a little pick-me-up, but keep a handle on it for Christ’s sake. I mean, Jesus …”

  He trailed off. He looked down at the cigarette in
his hand like he didn’t know how it got there. Then he looked over at me the same way. I got the feeling that whatever it was he was on had suddenly clicked into its next phase. Whatever handle he had on the situation looked like it had just dropped off. He had the gaze of a goat. Just then, Vickie stepped into the room. She stopped just inside the archway, looking at the two of us as if we were at a dance and she was deciding which was going to be the lucky one.

  “I put Bo down for a nap,” she announced.

  “We were just talking about your mother,” Haden said, snapping back to life. “The one and fucking only.”

  Vickie stiffened. “What about her?”

  “I was just going down memory lane. Back to the good old days.”

  “That’s what some people might call them.”

  “Don’t you know it’s not right to speak bad of the dead? Your mother made a lot of people happy in her day. What the hell’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with that,” Vickie said in a tight voice. “So did Helen. They made the world a happier place.”

  “Goddamn right.”

  “They just didn’t stick around to enjoy it themselves.”

  Vickie spat this last comment directly at the man on the couch. I saw the color flare up in her cheeks. Haden didn’t seem to notice.

  “Yeah, what do you want to do about Helen anyway?” he asked. “You want to cremate her? This guy’s got to do something with her. He can’t just keep her on ice until spring.”

  I got to my feet. “I’m pretty sure we can get a grave dug by tomorrow,” I said to Vickie. I hadn’t spoken with Pops again, but I knew he would be doing everything in his power. “It’s your call. If you want cremation, I’ll arrange it for you.”