by Tim Cockey
I turned from the window in my king-size toga, unfurling it like Dracula’s cape as I stepped toward the bed.
“Let’s sleep on it.”
“We don’t have time, Hitch.”
“We’ll keep our eyes open.”
The future of lounge music lived together in a small clapboard house a few blocks behind the library in Towson. There was a run-down look about the place. Maybe it was the couch in the front yard, with the stuffing seeping from both arms. Or, maybe it was simply the several missing pickets from the porch railing, itself about as stable as something anchored in Jell-O. Or the screen on the front door, which had a nice curl to it. Maybe they were going for that Allman Brothers Band album-cover look. Trailer-trash-meets-rock-’n’-roll. The screen door rattled under my knuckles. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the rim of a car tire off in the corner of the porch. Of course. Where else would you keep it?
A shadow moved within the house and the front door opened with a Watusi move.
“Hey.”
A big paw came forward. Gary and I were about the same height, but he had me licked in the girth department. It would take two of me to make one of him. I took his hand to shake it expecting a viselike grip and was surprised by his gentle tug. I might have been shaking hands with a minister.
“Come in. It’s cold outside.” Damn, and I had been hoping for a nice sit-down on that groovy couch in the yard.
It was cold inside too. I followed Gary into the living room. I caught sight of our reflection in the large mirror on the facing wall, but I couldn’t make out much on account of the fussiness of the beer logo that spread across the glass.
“You want something to drink? Beer? Water?”
I chose the latter.
“I can make hot chocolate,” Gary added.
“Even better.” Something boiled sounded safer.
I followed him into the kitchen. His ponytail hung down to the middle of his broad back. It was knotted off with a leather lace. He was wearing a green sweater, jeans and boots that looked like a pair of rocks.
“I’ve never met a detective before,” Gary announced, putting a pot of water on the stove and kicking up the flame.
I didn’t break it to Gary that he still had not met one. On the phone I had danced deftly around the point, introducing myself as an “investigator” who was working along with Vickie Waggoner on the matter of her sister’s murder. This was the truth, in essence. If Gary wanted to attach the word “detective” to me, that was his prerogative. It was my prerogative not to correct him.
The kitchen was clean and messy at once. I dropped into a Naugahyde chair at a Formica table. It was warmer in the kitchen. I scooted up to the table. I trusted that my body language would transmit my desire to conduct our interview right here.
Bonnie and I had decided on a plan to get Gloria out of the house so I could talk turkey one-on-one with Gary. Bonnie and the string bean were at this very minute off at Angel’s Grotto, about six blocks away. Gloria was under the impression that Bonnie Nash was interviewing her for a local-interest segment for the news, to be called “Baltimore Women in Song.” I had listened to Bonnie’s side of the conversation when she called Gloria from our room at the Belvedere to set up the interview. “We’ve done Billie Holiday, Rosa Ponselle, Ethel Ennis …” Right. And now we’d have you, babe. Bonnie and I had killed forty minutes before I made my call to Gary. Killed ’em good.
“So, how well did you know Helen Waggoner?” I asked. I figured I might as well get a sense of the big guy’s hedge factor.
“Well, I fucked her a couple of times.”
Ooookay … sounds like an impressively small hedge factor. Right. I went for the whole enchilada.
“Did you kill her?”
“Nope.”
The water for the hot chocolate hadn’t even come to a boil, and we were essentially done.
“Why should I believe you?” I asked.
“About fucking her?”
“The other.”
“Why would I want to kill Helen? I liked Helen.”
“Did your … Did Gloria know that you were seeing Helen?”
Gary pulled a couple of coffee mugs from a cabinet and blew into them.
“I wasn’t seeing Helen. We fooled around a couple of times. That was it.”
“At Sinbad’s?”
“No, man. How would I do that with Gloria there? I mean, okay, we kind of gave each other the message there. Flirted and all. But, like we didn’t sneak off into a corner or something. Well, you know. Except once. Twice. Sort of.” Gary emptied several packets of hot chocolate dust into the cups. “Helen would pass her kid off to a neighbor, and we’d do it at her place.” He picked the teapot off the stove and looked over at me. “I feel kind of weird telling you this, man. What difference does it make?”
None, so far as I could tell. Besides, I hadn’t really asked him for details, I was just letting him talk. My job teaches me to listen. People will tell all sorts of things to a receptive ear.
“What kind of person was Helen?” I asked.
“Man, I’m not good at that kind of thing. I told you. She was a nice girl. She was sexy. I guess she was kind of lonely.”
“What makes you say that?”
The big guy shrugged. He poured the hot water into the mugs and brought them over to the table. He sat down.
“It wasn’t like she was horny, you know. I mean, the girls who work at Sinbad’s, they don’t have a problem meeting guys who want to take them to bed or anything.”
“You didn’t … You didn’t pay Helen to sleep with her, did you?”
“What do you think? I’m going to pay to get laid?”
“The customers do. At least, that’s what I understand.”
“That’s the customers, man.” He rapped a large hand against his chest. “I’m the entertainment. Helen and I were coworkers, you know? This was like an office romance. And it was only like ten or twelve times anyway. Gloria busted me and I stopped.”
“How did she find out?”
“Hey, what difference does it make? Are you trying to find out who killed Helen or who fucked her?”
“Well, Gary, it might turn out to be someone who did both.”
“Count me out, man. I fooled around with her, I got busted, I quit and that’s aloha, man. I didn’t kill Helen.” He smiled across the table. “I’m a lover, man. Not a killer.”
“You said Helen was lonely.”
“Yeah. Sure. She’s got that kid. She’s got no man in her life. She’s messing with those asshole businessmen to get a few extra bucks now and then. Doesn’t that sound lonely to you?”
“So, she turned to you for some … some what? Companionship?”
Gravity fell over Gary. His face sagged, as if its puppet strings had just been cut.
“Man, I don’t know. I guess so. I … I just figured she wanted to sleep with someone she knew for a change, okay? She probably didn’t even know those assholes’s names that she picked up at the bar. They probably gave her fake ones, I don’t know.”
He dipped into his hot chocolate. He ran the tip of his tongue over his mustache, which had sopped up half of his sip. “Helen, man. She was fun. Real frisky, you know. And then like … I told you, she was lonely. She cried a couple of times when she was with me, right in the middle of everything. She tried not to, and it got her all pissed off that she did it.”
“Did she love you?”
“Hell no, man, it wasn’t like that. What kind of detective are you? Aren’t you listening? I mean, she liked me. And we did it good together, you know what I mean. But I’m with Gloria. Helen knew that. I mess around, I admit it. Women find me sexy. I can’t help it. I’m a big guy, man. I got a big appetite. Helen just … She needed to get out of that place is what the deal was. She needed a better life than all that. I mean, especially with the kid and everything. But it wasn’t going to be with me. She never thought that. I guess those times she cried she just got upset because it must have felt like
, you know, normal for a minute or two.”
Having an affair with a sleep-about like Gary, who was committed to staying with his woman. That felt normal?
I pulled the photograph of Helen out of my pocket and tossed it across the table to him. I watched his expression as he picked it up and looked at it. I wouldn’t say that his eyes moistened, but he gave the photograph a long, considered look. He was genuinely affected by it.
“It really sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Did you take that picture, Gary?”
He handed it back to me. “Me? No way. I don’t even own a camera.”
“Do you have any idea who did?”
“Did what? Took that picture? How would I know that?”
“Did you know that Helen was pregnant?”
“Shit.” His jaw dropped. His eyes took the hit. It was no act. He hadn’t known. “Shit,” he said again. “Pregnant? Oh, man. Oh, Jesus. Whose was it?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Is it possible that it was yours?”
Gary signaled for the photograph again. I handed it over to him. He looked at it hard again, as if maybe he could coax a few words out of the image.
“Man, I don’t know. She was a big deal about protection and everything.”
“Do you know if Helen was seeing someone else?”
“You mean like, on a regular basis?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know. After I got busted by Gloria, I didn’t talk to her much. Gloria might be skinny and everything, man, but she’s a powerhouse. Get on her wrong side and you’re ruined. I do what I have to to keep from tangling with her.”
Except sleeping around. That would be asking too much. The appetite and all.
I cupped my hands around my hot chocolate mug, brought it up to my lips and gently blew the steam over the rim. I was pretty much done here as far as I could tell. Unless the big guy across the table was an Oscar-caliber master of deception, I didn’t see where he had killed Helen. An idea hit me.
“When was the last time you slept with Helen?”
“How long was she pregnant?”
I shook my head. “You first.”
He set his mug down gently on the table and tugged on his beard. “I … I kind of lied to you a minute ago,” he said. He sounded like a little kid confessing.
“About what?”
“About … after I got busted, I did stay away from Helen. That was last summer. Like, July.”
“The last time you slept with Helen was July?” That would certainly take him out of the sweepstakes.
“Well … yeah. Except for one other time.”
“One other time.”
Gary suddenly had everywhere to look but at me. “She was all weird, man. I didn’t know what was going on. I knew she was drunk when she called me. Or something. High on something, I don’t know. She called me up here, at the house, which she had never done before. It was just a miracle that Gloria was out with a bunch of her friends. One of them was getting married. Helen said she had to see me right away. She wouldn’t take no. I asked her if something was wrong, because she was sounding so weird, and she just laughed. But it wasn’t a ha-ha laugh. She told me to meet her at the Charm Inn. That’s right next to Sinbad’s.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“She had a room. I went there. I mean, I had to, you know. She didn’t want to say two words to me, man. She just threw me down on the bed and jumped on top of me.” Gary shook his head in wonder at the memory. “She was a tiger, man. She’d never been like that. She actually scared me. It was a very fucked-up thing, I didn’t like it. I mean, the sex was incredible. But I didn’t like the scene. Helen wasn’t Helen. She was angrier than I’d ever seen her, but she wouldn’t say about what. I don’t know what the hell she needed me for. Any of those traveling assholes at Sinbad’s would have blown their top for a ride like she was giving. Except for that anger thing.” He tugged on his beard some more. “Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe that was why she wanted someone she knew. I guess you go turning weird like that with a stranger, the stranger might turn weird right back. Then you’d have a real problem.”
Gary stopped and looked over at me. “Maybe that’s what happened to Helen, huh? You think? Maybe she got weird like that with some stranger. And he came back and killed her. What the hell is that all about?”
“When was all this, Gary?”
“This thing? Like, a couple of months ago. October. Yeah, it was like right before Halloween.”
“So, about two months ago.”
“I guess.”
“Can I ask you another question?”
“What the hell, man. You can write a book about me already.”
“Did you use protection?”
Gary blinked. One for yes. Two for no. He blinked twice.
“Oh, shit, man. How many months was Helen pregnant?”
I was holding up two fingers.
We had our man, but we didn’t have our killer. Before I left, I had asked Gary “for the record” if he had an alibi for the night that Helen was murdered.
“I told this to the police already,” he said. He was still in shock about Helen having possibly been carrying his child when she was killed.
“I’m not the police. Tell me.”
“I was fucking Tracy Atkins.” He hadn’t said it with pride. He added that Gloria had busted him on that one too. Rather, the police busted him, and she was sitting right next to him when they did.
“What’s the secret of your relationship, Gary?” I asked as I stepped back out onto the porch. “Seems to me you’re beating the odds.”
“Gloria thinks we’re going to be famous. She thinks it’s just a matter of time.”
“What do you think?”
Gary was staring out at the Allman Brothers Band album cover.
“I think we suck.”
•••
While I waited for Bonnie to conclude her ruse interview with Gloria—we had set a time to meet, and it was still forty minutes away—I popped into a bar on York Road for a quick shot of antifreeze. It turned out to be a sports bar. The place was loaded with golden-haired preppies all wearing baseball caps, mostly advertising various colleges. They were drinking and chanting and screaming at several television screens posted around the bar, each of which was tuned to a different sporting event. The guys were, for the most part, fit and athletic-looking and boyish. The women, who looked as if they could have been some of these guys’s sisters, were trim, small-breasted and vigorously attractive, with killer teeth. Overall, a handsome, if not very expansive, gene pool.
I ordered two shots of Jack Daniel’s and a beer. I poured one of the shots into the beer. A Jack-in-the-Box. A guy standing next to me wearing a TARHEELS cap watched me mixing the two brews.
“Does that work?” he asked.
“Works for me.”
“All right! I’m trying that next!”
I was glad I could launch the boy on his Jack-in-the-Box career. A blond girl materialized at his side. Her cap read HOPKINS. Her sweatshirt read GOUCHER. Maybe Billie and I should be putting out sweatshirts and baseball caps, I thought. Tasteful, of course. An image floated into my mind. A coffin next to an open grave, along with the slogan: WE’LL TAKE IT FROM HERE.
The bar was insanely noisy. Even so, I was able to think. It’s a simple matter of switching your head to a different frequency. The Jack helps. I considered my talk with Gary. Even while one issue appeared to have been resolved—Gary was very possibly the father of Helen’s unborn child—there remained more questions than answers. High up on the list was the nagging question of whether or not there really was a so-called mystery boyfriend at all. Gary had failed to acknowledge knowing about one. And I didn’t feel that he would have bothered to lie on that point. Of course, Tracy Atkins had been convinced that Helen was seeing someone and spending gobs of his cash. But Tracy had not only failed to provide definitive proof—such as a name, a conversation with Helen about the
guy, or an actual sighting—her general credibility was sliding.
I took a long sip of my drink. Or was it possible … was it possible that I was simply being duped? I had to look at it. Tracy Atkins’s alibi for the night that Helen was murdered was the guy who had gotten Helen pregnant. Gary’s alibi was a woman who was willing to sleep with him and who was an easy liar to boot. Should this tidy arrangement have been setting off alarm bells in my head? And then there was still Gloria. “Out with her friends” Gary had said, referring to the night that Helen was killed.
A larger question grew right in front of me. What was I to make of Gary’s story about the night that Helen went psycho on him? By his account of it, something pretty severe would seem to have happened to Helen sometime around the night she allegedly jumped the big guy’s bones with such a combination of anger and desperation. Gary’s account of the evening certainly sounded to me like that of a person who had snapped. And Gary was right when he wondered aloud about the danger of Helen behaving this way with a total stranger. I thought about the waitress, Gail, and her account of Helen’s dustup at the bar a month before her murder. I had been tending to slap Terry Haden’s face—or even the face of the mystery boyfriend—onto Helen’s antagonist. But what if it really was a customer? What if Helen had gotten tangled up and gone nutso with some guy who had a few ballistic buttons of his own?
Bonnie was waiting for me at the Howard Johnson’s about a mile up York Road.
“Do you know what the capital of North Dakota is?” she asked as I squeezed into the booth. She had a hand pressed flat against the paper place mat in front of me.
“It’s pronounced ‘peer,’ ” I said.
“Ha! That’s the capital of South Dakota. The answer is Bismark. I tricked you. I knew you’d go for the weird answer.”
“Proud of yourself, aren’t you.”
“Damn straight.” She lifted her hand from the place mat. Yep. There it was. Pierre, South Dakota.
I ordered a coffee from the waitress. Bonnie and I both noted—grimly—the woman’s name tag. HELLO. I’M HELEN.
“What did you learn?” Bonnie asked, inching forward in her seat.
“This, that and nothing,” I said. I gave her the rundown of my talk with Gary. She listened as I gave my impressions. I told her that I believed him. Gary had crumbled so quickly on his one lie, that he had not been with Helen since the previous summer, that I really didn’t think he had lied about any of the rest of his story. Certainly he had been forthcoming about Tracy Atkins. Bonnie agreed with me that Gary didn’t sound like much of a suspect for Helen’s murder. She also agreed with me that Tracy Atkins was no George Washington when it came to telling the truth.