Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  I had Sam for the day. He could always use the cash, and I needed a driver. What was left of my Chevy Nothing—now less than nothing—was already off in a junkyard somewhere. I’d have to pick up a new set of wheels as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I had the hearse and the human wall to drive me around. A little hint about hearses: Turn on the headlights at intersections and you can cruise right through the red lights. Sam is especially good at this. We covered the distance between the hospital and Cathedral Street without stopping once. Sam pulled over to the curb and pulled out a book.

  “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “It’s new.” He showed me the cover. I didn’t recognize the title.

  “What’s it about?”

  “A guy and a girl. They get together.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, taking hold of my cane. “I think I heard something about that one.”

  Walking on the injured leg didn’t kill me. It just hurt like hell.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked me. She was behind a sliding glass window. She wore cat’s-eye glasses and a permanent pucker and was flipping through a magazine of people wearing nothing but their underwear. She gave me a slow once-over. Probably imagining me in my Calvins. Or wondering about the cane.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” I said. I had intended it to sound like the joke it was, but between the cane and the banged-up face, I apparently needed to put more levity into my delivery. She frowned, and I bagged it.

  “I don’t have an appointment. Just give him this.” I handed her the little prescription container. She took it from me as if it were a urine sample and disappeared through a door behind her. She reappeared almost immediately.

  “The doctor will see you now.”

  “How about that,” I said, and she buzzed me through the door next to her window. I hobbled into the office.

  Daniel Kingman didn’t rise to greet me. He remained in his chair, his hands out in front of him on the desk as if he were handcuffed. The prescription container sat just beyond his knuckles. The two-inch high container held the doctor’s complete attention.

  “Come in,” he finally said, without looking up. I was already in. I dropped into the leather chair in front of the desk and hooked my cane on the arm. Richard Kingman’s brother finally pulled his gaze from the little container and looked sadly across the desk at me. Of course, I remembered him from his brother’s wake and funeral. I especially remembered his outlandishly blue eyes, the only part of him that really showed any spark. He looked even paler now than I remembered, but that might have had something to do with the overhead fluorescent lighting in his office. Then again, it might have had to do with the plastic prescription container sitting there on his desk.

  “I wondered when someone would show up,” he said finally. “I figured it would be the police.”

  “Nope. Just me.”

  He let out a large sigh. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Well, so much for that. The doctor picked up the prescription bottle and looked at it. He lingered on the label. I lingered too.

  “That wasn’t so smart, I guess,” he said at last.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Writing out a prescription. Paper trail.” He tried out a smile, but it didn’t work.

  “What wasn’t so smart about it? You just said you didn’t kill Helen. So, why would you have thought about not leaving a paper trail?”

  “My brother.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted a paper trail.”

  “Maybe you’d better explain this to me.”

  The doctor sighed. “I suppose I owe an explanation to the police.”

  “Consider this a practice run.”

  Kingman leaned back in his chair. Despite his silver hair, there was a slightly boyish look to his face. Or possibly I simply imagined it from the expression he was wearing, which was that of a person who has most definitely been caught and who most definitely feels small and rotten about it.

  “My brother …” he began. “He … I know it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead. But Richard could be a real bastard sometimes. Most of the time actually. Even as a boy, he had a very forceful personality. Everyone knew that Richard would make a big success at whatever he chose to do. Which, of course, he did. Richard was one of the best heart men they’ve seen at Hopkins. He was terrifically gifted.”

  He paused and brought his fingers together, holding them up to his lips. He might almost have been praying.

  “I won’t bore you with all of the sibling rivalry silliness I had growing up as Richard’s younger brother. It was there. That’s all you really need to know. I became a doctor as well. Like Richard. Like our father in fact. But I became …” His fingers moved out like a pair of wings, indicating the various framed diplomas that were on the walls of the office. “I became an obstetrician. The baby doctor. I have a solid practice. Richard, of course, went into cardiac medicine, the so-called sexy stuff. I bring lives into the world. Richard saved them.” He paused, and the slightest of smiles brushed his lips. “One thing though. I saved Richard.”

  “What do you mean, you saved him?”

  “I saved him. I got him out of trouble. Numerous times.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not following.”

  Kingman picked up the prescription bottle and rattled it. He made a curious face and twisted the cap off. “What’s this?”

  “Colored glass,” I said. “Helen’s son keeps colored glass in it.”

  “God forbid he swallow it.”

  “Childproof lid,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “So you were saying, Doctor?”

  Kingman set the prescription bottle back down. “Yes. I was saying. My brother. Richard had what is euphemistically called a roving eye.”

  I know this euphemism. It means he had a roving weenie. “He had affairs,” I said. No big surprise. Affairs happen. Just ask anyone.

  “I’m not sure I would even characterize them as affairs. Flings might be more like it. Affairs are something that a person might actually take seriously. They’re also something that loved ones might actually worry about.”

  “And you are referring to his wife?”

  “I am. Yes.”

  “She knew about his … flings?”

  “Some of them, yes. She did. You see, Richard didn’t always go to any great lengths to cover his tracks. The word you need to plug in here, Mr. Sewell, is ‘arrogant.’ My brother was extremely arrogant. You find this a lot with gifted people, these people who have been told since childhood how special they are. Richard always insisted that the world come to him. It’s as simple as that. And he had the charisma to make it happen. As well as the power. On those occasions when he got a girl in trouble—” He smiled thinly. “I’m afraid I’m addicted to euphemisms. When Richard got a girl pregnant, a woman pregnant, he sent her to me. The family obstetrician.”

  “And euphemistically speaking, you took care of things?”

  “My brother had his own personal abortionist handy whenever he bloody well needed it. That’s how it was.”

  “You don’t sound like you were too crazy about that arrangement.”

  “That would be one way of putting it.”

  I glanced about at the diplomas on the wall. “I know this is none of my business, but if it bothered you so much, why didn’t you just say no? Why didn’t you refuse to help him out? Tell him to get some other sap to do his dirty work.”

  “Sounds simple enough, I know. But … let’s just say, I didn’t. He had his sap, and his sap was me.” The doctor paused again. “Brothers, Mr. Sewell. Rivals. And at the same time … Well, you don’t need to hear a lot of analytical nonsense. As much as I hated myself for doing it for him, I did it. That’s all. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “How often are we talking here, Doctor?”

  “This is something
I really do not want to discuss with you further. Richard was … I’ll just say, prolific.” He tilted back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Richard was what would probably be called these days a sexual predator. He preyed on women, usually women he felt were well beneath him. These weren’t affairs of the heart, Mr. Sewell. They were … let me be blunt. For Richard, they were snack food.”

  “So there were a lot,” I said.

  He nodded gravely. “There were a lot.”

  The way the man was sitting there with his arms crossed so tightly, he looked as if he were wearing a straitjacket.

  “So, then Helen,” I said. “Just the latest in a long line?”

  “No. Helen Waggoner was different. Yes, Richard sent her to me. But this time he wasn’t asking me to bail him out. He wasn’t asking for an abortion. This time was different. A first. Richard asked me to take the woman on as a patient.”

  Kingman loosened his grip on himself. He came forward in his chair and picked up the prescription bottle again.

  “He said that he wanted me to look after her pregnancy, to give her the best treatment I could provide, and when the time came, deliver her baby. Naturally I was stunned. As far as I could tell, it meant only one thing. He was leaving Ann.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “I guess I haven’t made myself clear. Richard didn’t share information with me. That wasn’t how our relationship worked. There was no dialogue going on. Richard was always brusque, always curt. This was not a man who felt he had to explain himself to anyone.”

  “So, you were just speculating that he was leaving his wife for Helen.”

  “Yes.”

  “So then … what?”

  He gave a shrug. “So, I took her on as a patient. Just as Richard requested. This prescription was nothing out of the ordinary. Prenatal vitamins. She was doing fine.”

  I didn’t really want to hear any more. The doctor’s melancholy was creeping along his desk in my direction. I wanted to get out of there before it took hold of me. But I had to hear it all.

  “When Helen showed up murdered at your brother’s wake, what did you think?”

  “What did I think? I didn’t know what to think. It surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you that. Good Lord. Mr. Sewell, I have no idea who killed that poor girl, and that’s the honest truth. And I have no idea how she ended up at your funeral home. I was absolutely shocked.”

  “Logic says that somebody besides you knew about Helen and your brother.”

  “Yes. Logic would most definitely say that. But I don’t know who it would be.”

  “You don’t suppose your brother confessed his affair to his wife, do you? I mean, if he really was planning on leaving her, he would have had to come clean at some point.”

  Kingman sat with my question a moment. He looked completely knotted up inside. Despite the complete tawdriness of what he had agreed to do—act as his brother’s convenient abortionist over the years—I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the man. He seemed like a nice enough fellow. Only pathetically weak and spineless.

  “Ann didn’t know,” he declared.

  “How can you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  “I don’t mean to rough you up here, Dr. Kingman, but that wouldn’t really hold as a one hundred percent lock. How do you know?”

  “If Richard had told Ann that he was planning to leave her, she would have told me. Ann and I are close. In our own, separate ways, we’ve been victims of Richard. There’s a certain bonding in that.”

  “Does she know about the arrangement you had with her husband?”

  He directed his answer to the floor. “No.”

  I got to my feet. “Remind me never to bond with you, Doctor.” I picked up the prescription bottle and rattled it. Kingman looked up at me. He looked as if he were about to cry.

  “So, why haven’t you told all of this to the police?” I asked. “I’m sure it occurred to you that they might find some of this a little interesting.”

  “Of course they would. I was thinking … it was Ann, if you really want to know. I simply didn’t want to throw open the whole sordid mess of Richard and his infidelities to the police. You know how Baltimore is. It’s a big small town.”

  “You must have known it would come out eventually.”

  “What can I tell you? Each day that has passed without the connection being made was another good day as far as I was concerned.”

  “So then this hasn’t been such a good day.”

  “No. It hasn’t. Though to be honest, I feel relieved. This hasn’t been such a pleasant experience, holding on to this information.”

  “You can’t hold onto it anymore. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” He rose suddenly and thrust out a hand. I took it. I recalled his grip the night of his brother’s wake. It had been fishy. This one was firm. This one had something behind it.

  “It’ll all be for the better, in the end,” I said. It sounded like a silly platitude, but I believed what I was saying. As I snared my cane, the baby doctor asked me what happened to me. “I met a man I didn’t like.” I touched the cane to my brow and left his office. I closed the door quietly behind me and waited. I heard nothing at first. Then I heard the doctor’s voice. Muffled, because of the closed door, but clear enough nonetheless to make out what he was saying. He was making a phone call. The person he was calling had apparently been the one who answered the phone. He said a name. That was all I needed to hear.

  •••

  Rockwell, Breughel, Currier & Ives were all still being well represented by the pastoral display of frolickers and skaters out on the frozen ponds in Ann Kingman’s neighborhood. A few of the snow bunnies paused in their revelries to watch as a ruby hearse inched slowly along the road bordering the park. We weren’t creeping along for effect. Sam and I were looking for house numbers.

  “There it is.”

  The number we were seeking was half-hidden by the ivy on a small stone gate at the entrance to an uphill driveway. I told Sam to park out on the street rather than attempt the driveway, which looked icy. He parked the hearse and offered to help me up the terraced steps to the front door. I opted for pride and recklessness over safety. I took a firm grip on my cane.

  “Read your book, Sam. I’ll be fine.”

  Three days later—so it felt—I reached the summit. Like half the houses in Homeland, the Kingmans’ digs were impressive, a stately Georgian brick number with a columned front step, kelly green shutters, a large bay window bulging from the bricks to the left of the front porch and an overall sense of money well thrown around. The door knocker was brass, in the shape of the head of a mallard. I took hold of the brass bill and … I guess I rapped its gullet against the door. A moment later, the door opened. A boy looking a little like the future king of England was standing there looking at me as if he was already weary with me. I tagged him for around thirteen. Since he was giving me the bold once-over, I did the same. On his feet were those rubber shoe-boots that look like encrusted mud. He was wearing brown corduroy pants, a cranberry turtleneck and an indolent expression far more rich and deep than even your standard thirteen-year-old’s indolent mug. I couldn’t decide whether to go down on one knee or take a roundhouse swat at his head with my cane. I saw him look past me and figured he was seeing the hearse parked out front. I was tempted to intone, “It is time. Prepare yourself.” But I refrained. My sensitivity training kicked in. I had concluded that this was probably a Kingman grandson. Death jokes might not cut it just yet.

  “Good afternoon, young man. Is the lady of the house available?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is your granny home?”

  Before he could answer—and it looked like he was working up a zinger—a woman I recognized as Richard Kingman’s daughter came into the hallway behind him.

  “Mr. Sewell,” she said. She stepped up to the boy and touched him on the shoulder. “Thank you, Marcus. Did you introd
uce yourself to Mr. Sewell?”

  The boy offered me his paw and muttered a Swahili curse. Or maybe he introduced himself. “And this is Mr. Sewell,” the woman said, when I failed to remember my one line.

  “How do you do, Marcus,” I said.

  “Mom?”

  “We’re leaving in five minutes. Go find your coat.”

  The kid retreated on his mud-encrusted shoes, inexplicably leaving no trail. “Won’t you come in?” his mother said, stepping backward. I stepped over the threshold. “Oh. Your leg. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you. I had a little spat with an oncoming car.” I offered her my hand. “I’m sorry. I …” I was making the international face for “Now-what-was-the-name-again?”

  “Joan Bennett,” she said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. The names pour in.”

  “I understand. Please, come in. Is my mother expecting you?” She closed the door (the mallard clicked) and made a move for my coat.

  “I don’t think she is,” I said.

  “Well, she’s upstairs. Marcus and I just dropped by to look in on her. We’re on our way into Towson for some last minute Christmas shopping.”

  “I take a forty-four long,” I said, handing her my coat. She blanked for a moment, then got the joke. The resemblance to her darling son rose as she winced a fake smile.

  “How is your mother doing?” I asked.

  “As good as can be expected.” She turned from the hall closet. I recalled then the veritable torrent of tears that this woman had unleashed at her father’s wake.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  She took a beat. “Same answer, I suppose. You must hear this so often that it’s nothing but a cliché to you. But I can’t believe my father is dead. It is still such a shock.”

  “Clichés are nothing but irrefutable truths. Of course it’s still a shock. Your mother told me you were close to your father.”

  “Yes. We were very close. I suppose I was Daddy’s little princess.”

  “Do you think I could see your mother?”

  “Do you mind my asking what it is you need to see her about?”