Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  “Mary Ann.”

  “Mary Ann! That’s right. Mary Ann Martin. Perfect. I’ll give Mary Ann a call and you get your big beautiful bucket back to town and over to Billie’s.”

  “Charming.”

  I hung up and dialed Information. With a little cajoling I got the operator to work with me. There were seven “Martin, M”s listed, and I was able to get them all on one request, rather than the usual limit of two. The first four I called were not Shrimp’s sister. This was easy to determine. My opener was “Hi, I’m looking for Shrimp’s sister.” Three of the four simply hung up. The fourth was a man with an Eastern European accent who started griping to me about UFOs and what they were doing to his dog. I struck gold on the fifth call. Nearly gold.

  “Hi, I’m looking for Shrimp’s sister.”

  “This is Mary.”

  “Mary Ann?”

  “Mary.”

  “Mary?”

  “I live here, too. I’m Mary Ann’s housemate.”

  “That must get confusing.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Hitchcock Sewell,” I said. “Is Mary Ann there? I need to speak with her.”

  “I’m afraid she’s not.”

  “Do you expect her back soon?”

  Mary said that she thought that Mary Ann would be back within the hour. “She went to a matinee of My Fair Lady at The Mechanic.” That brought back memories. The Gypsy Players botched that little gem about four years ago. I was Higgins. My British accent stank. And I sang like a mule. Julia was Eliza. Of course, she was loverly. And an even worse ham than me. The rine in Spine fools minely oon the pline.

  I told the woman on the phone that Mary Ann’s brother was in intensive care at Union Memorial with a gunshot wound to the stomach, that he was going to be all right but that someone needed to get over to the hospital right away. Mary was duly impressed with my message.

  “Shrimp’s been shot? What happened?”

  I lied. “I’m not sure. But I can’t really stay here with him much longer. I’ve got to be somewhere in a few hours.”

  “Mary Ann has a cell phone. Maybe I should call her.”

  I pictured Henry Higgins in the middle of his silly “By jove I think she’s got it!” number when out there in the dark a damn cell phone begins to chirp. By jove, get it.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “What about I come over? It’s not that far. I’m just over near Lake Montebello. I can leave Mary Ann a message on the kitchen table.”

  It seemed an unnecessarily generous offer. I took her up on it. I told her where to meet me at the hospital.

  “How will I recognize you?” she asked.

  “I’m tall,” I said. “Dark hair. I’ve got one of those little Superman curls that sort of falls—”

  “Okay.”

  “How will I recognize you?” I asked.

  “I’m short.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said. “I’ve just got to throw some clothes on.”

  Intriguing detail that it was, I let it pass. We hung up. I went back to the molded plastic chair to wait for Mary Ann’s short friend Mary. I went ahead and glanced at the article about putting zing back in the marriage. Guess what? They suggest more frequent sex. Along with candles and wine and surprises. Big shock.

  “You must be whatshisname.”

  A woman with a freckled face and short damp blond hair was standing directly in front of me. Her approach had been pure stealth. Slipped in under the cover of my daydreaming. I stood up. Her freckled nose leveled off around the latitude of my elbow. Pale blue eyes looked up at me. Mine are blue, too. Turns out these were the only two things we had in common.

  “And you must be Mary.” I offered my hand. Hers disappeared into mine. Like a whale swallowing a bonbon. “That was fast,” I said. Though I had no real idea how much time had passed.

  “Twenty minutes. As promised.” She released my hand and ran hers through her damp hair, which was sun-streaked gold and short enough to get away with a finger-brushing. Her face was apple-shaped. If you can picture that in a good way. Farmer’s daughter, with an urban edge. “You’re lucky,” she added. “I was just getting out of the shower when you called.”

  I wasn’t sure why that made me lucky, but I let it pass. I placed Mary in her early twenties, fresh and well-scrubbed. Maybe it was the freckles, along with the pulsing peach tan. The remaining inventory supported this first impression. Simple white V-neck T-shirt, blue jean cutoffs and flip-flops. She was all of five feet tall if she was an inch, toned and glowing, a trim vertical package with well-carved little hips and intriguing breasts. I realize that I’m coming off like an auctioneer, but these are simply the facts. She looked beach-ready and very sure of herself. And as humorless as a stone.

  She caught me staring. At least it seemed she did. She crossed her arms over her intriguing breasts and frowned up at me.

  “So what happened?”

  I told her. “Shrimp Martin called me up a couple of hours ago and said he’d been shot. I called nine-one-one. They got him here, he lost a kidney and a lot of blood, but he’s going to live.” I left out the detail that it was a friend of mine who shot him. It’s always good to hold something back, in case the conversation sags.

  The damp head was tilted and she was squinting slightly. The woman seemed to be judging my credibility. “So where are the police?” she asked. Her tone was clearly challenging.

  “The police?”

  “He was shot. Where are the police?”

  “A cop was here earlier,” I said. “He left.”

  My little friend was unimpressed. “So who shot him?”

  “Why would I know who shot him?” I said. I sounded defensive. Which I was. I’m usually good with my poker face. But for some reason the frank blue eyes already had me on the ropes. Also, my neck was cricking looking down at her.

  She batted her critical blues. “You said Shrimp called you. Maybe he said something?”

  “It was … everything’s under control,” I stammered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She was making no effort now to conceal her disapproval with how things were being handled. Or not being handled.

  “It was a domestic shooting,” I said lamely.

  The woman’s eyebrows went up, like a stretching cat. “Uh huh …”

  “The person who shot Shrimp is with my aunt.” I added, “At the funeral home.”

  “Funeral home?”

  “My aunt and I run a funeral home.”

  She studied my face. About a three-second deconstruction. The term “tough little cookie” was beginning to form in the judgment corner of my brain. Mary said, “Okay, so now what? You’re here in case Shrimp dies? That’s a little eager, isn’t it?”

  I took a step backward and kneaded my neck. Mary took it the wrong way. She took a step back as well. “What are you doing now, measuring me?”

  “No. I just … nothing.”

  Mary shifted her weight over to one hip and tilted her head in the opposite direction. The eyebrows went up again—this time both—and a look of complete mistrust slotted onto her face. Now I know what Goliath must have felt like. This pipsqueak’s body language was pebbling me to death before I even had a chance. I was reduced to a single bleat.

  “What?”

  “Would you mind not looking at me that way?” she said.

  “What way?”

  She made a huffy sound. “You big guys. You’ve got such a thing for small women.”

  “Excuse me? Who said I’ve got a ‘thing’ for small women?”

  She uncurled her arms and raised a hand. “Down here? That was me?”

  I pulled up. My lightning-speed calculation concluded that there was nothing to be gained in joining an argument with a total stranger with a height complex. At least not in a hospital waiting room. In a bar, maybe, but not here. She stood there, slingshot-ready.

  “I think w
e’re sliding off the track,” I said. “Look. Thanks for coming down. Let me give you my card. When Mary Ann gets here, have her call if she wants. I might not be in, but she can talk to my aunt.”

  I produced a card and held it out. She glanced at it then tucked it into the rear pocket of her cutoffs. Any thicker and the card couldn’t have possibly fit. She rubbed her bare arms. I hadn’t noticed, but in fact it was pretty cold in there. They had the AC cranked and she was dressed for the sun. She squinted up at me again.

  “ ’Bye.”

  Like that, she turned and walked away. Poof. I raised my hand for a half-wave but it was to thin air and I let it drop. I did look to see if I could spot my business card. I couldn’t, of course. But the effort was pleasing. My guess was that she knew I was looking. Julia tells me that they always know we’re looking.

  I traveled the length of the corridor and pushed the button for the elevator. As I waited, I glanced back. Mary was seated in one of the plastic chairs, trim tanned legs crossed, leafing through the magazine. She’d be learning those zing tricks for dulled marriages. I willed her to glance up from the magazine, but she didn’t. The elevator arrived and I got on, squeezing in between a pair of gurneys carrying two pale vapors in human form. The doors were slow in closing. I faced front and again willed the irritating woman at the end of the hall to look up. She wet her finger and turned a page of her magazine. She didn’t look up. Her foot waggled. The elevator doors slid shut.

  I was in love.

  Not really.

  The doe-eyed boy in tights was shooting invisible arrows in all directions from an invisible bow. His victims clutched their hearts, their stomachs, their necks, flinging themselves to the ground and tumbling in somersaults, three, four, five rotations, then leaping to their feet to live another day. Or at least another several seconds. The doe-eyed boy himself was a show-off, leaping up onto a boulder, twirling his feet in midair, shooting off-balance, even tumbling along sometimes right beside his victims. His stash of invisible arrows was endless. In all, a very sprightly massacre.

  “Here she comes.”

  “She” was a waifish girl done up in the same tights and the same doe-eyed makeup as the homicidal Cupid. She appeared atop the boulder, up on her toes, her pipe-cleaner arms snaking upward. In her hands was cupped a large opalescent disk. The moon. The nifty part was that when the girl came down off the boulder—her steps were like those of someone sticking their toe in the water to see how cold it is—the disk remained suspended in air. I tried, but I couldn’t see the wires.

  I’ll skip the blow-by-blow. Bottom line is that the boy’s invisible arrows had no effect on Moon Girl whatsoever. He fired away at an increasingly frantic pace while she pranced around mockingly, making an easy target of herself. Her invulnerability infuriated the boy, then exhausted him, then finally drove him to tears (invisible, like his armaments). Any minute I expected Moon Girl to sit down on the boulder and start doing her nails, ho-hum. In the end—I could have almost predicted this—the boy made a very melodramatic scene of handing over his invisible bow and an invisible arrow to the waif, and then he got up on the boulder and reached up to take hold of the moon, sticking his bony chest out so that the girl couldn’t possibly miss the mark. She took aim and shot him. The moon came out of the sky in the boy’s hands as he tumbled off the boulder … and the stage went black.

  There was a finger-food-and-wine reception after the performance. The performers were there, looking like alien beings at a getting-to-know-you conference. My date for the evening—we’ll call her Clarissa because that’s what everyone calls her (she was christened Debbie)—spent nearly the entire reception with her fingers laced in a ball that she kept pressed tightly against her breast. Clarissa had only warm words for the performers, the most frequent one being “wonderful.” Everything was “Wonderful!” Clarissa’s face is one of the most expressive I have ever seen and she lavished it on the young performers, most of whom blushed and demurred at her fawning. This was what they had worked so hard for over the past several months. Clarissa had opened a dance studio over on Read Street early in the year and was trying to put a company together. Tonight was the premiere of Dance of the Protégés and the dancers had been so eager to please. If you could judge from Clarissa’s liberal scatterings of wonderfuls, they had succeeded.

  Clarissa reserved her largest fawning for the two principals, pulling out an entirely fresh set of superlatives for the doe-eyed boy and his twinlike murderess. Clarissa goosed up the boy in particular, who wallowed shamelessly in his teacher’s praise. From the young girl, however, I detected a whiff of coldness. Competition, perhaps. The gristle of ego in a slow grind. The young dancer definitely had a bug up her ass about Clarissa. She was as skinny as a toothpick. Her eyes, which were lined like those of an Egyptian princess, were dark and mean. Clarissa smiled her effervescent pearlies right through the young dancer’s pointed indifference, then didn’t wait until we were out of the girl’s earshot before saying to me, “So what did you think of the little bitch?”

  Ah … showbiz.

  This whole snap, crackle, pop was taking place in the lobby area outside the auditorium of the High School for the Performing Arts, where Clarissa had arranged to stage her show. Air kisses were flying with the frequency of the evening’s invisible arrows. I wasn’t having me an especially bang-up time. Could you tell? And it wasn’t just the cheap wine. Part of it was my tooth, which had now begun to take on a personality all its own. And not one that I particularly liked. Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the U.N. comes to mind. But another big part of it was Clarissa. This was our third time going out together and the chemistry was still proving as so-so as on the first two shots. Even so, I had the sense that this was the evening where the mad blind plunge into the sack had now risen to the top of the docket. This was a big night for Clarissa, after all. God knows how much she had spent on the dress she was wearing, but elegance and glitter like that doesn’t come cheap. For my part, I had come through in my big bad tux and I looked like a goodly portion of a million bucks myself. A couple as sharp-looking as the two of us—on a night of no small importance to one of us—is not a couple who are expected to peak at a Gallo and Gouda gala in a high school lobby. There are rules about these things, and it was only a matter of whether Clarissa or I—more specifically, I—were going to break them or not.

  When the time came for the toasts and the little speeches, I took the opportunity to duck outside for some air. It must have been nearing nine-thirty. Venus and her friends were blinking and twinkling brightly in the night’s blue veil. There was a pay phone near the corner. I stepped over to it and dug out a quarter. I dialed my number. After my own voice told me that I wasn’t in, I cupped my hands to the mouthpiece and yelled, “Alcatraz! Sit!” Without a spy on the premises, I’ll never know if my lowly hound dog actually does sit when I do this. I punched in the code to retrieve my messages. There was only one (besides the one I had just left). It was from Billie, telling me to call her. I had planned to do just that. And I did.

  “Oh, Hitchcock, there you are. I’ve been trying to figure out how to find you.” Billie sounded agitated. Billie is hardly ever agitated. “That woman you left at the hospital …”

  “Mary.”

  “Yes. Mary. That’s her. She called here looking for you. It’s Shrimp Martin.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “He’s what!” I switched ears. “What do you mean he’s dead, Billie? He was fine when I left him. I mean, they told me he was fine. The doctor told me—”

  Billie cut me off. “You’d better get down there, Hitchcock. According to— Apparently they had a little problem.”

  “A little problem? I’ll say. The guy’s dead, for Christ’s sake. They had a big problem.”

  “That’s not what I mean. According to this Mary, somebody went into Shrimp Martin’s room and killed him.”

  “Billie, what are you talking about? Right there in the h
ospital?”

  “That’s what the girl told me on the phone.”

  “This is insane. Who the hell … Put Lucy on, will you?”

  There was a pause.

  “Hitchcock, Lucy’s not here.”

  “Where is she? Did she go down to the hospital?”

  “I don’t know where she is, dear. I was in the kitchen making vichyssoise and she slipped out. I thought she was still sleeping.”

  I didn’t like this. “Billie, did Julia come by?”

  “No, dear. I’m afraid I haven’t seen her.”

  Didn’t like it at all. “When did Lucy leave?”

  “It’s close to two hours now,” Billie said.

  “And when did you say Mary called from the hospital?” I looked up at Venus. They say that the atmosphere on Venus is so thickly packed that light bends in ways we can barely imagine here on Earth. In theory, you can be looking straight ahead and staring at the back of your own head at the same time. That’s about what I felt I was doing right then.

  Billie answered, “That was about an hour ago.”

  I was halfway to Union Memorial before it occurred to me that I had forgotten to ask Billie about the gun Lucy had brought over. To see if it was still there on my desk.

  I was three quarters of the way there before it hit me that I hadn’t even said good-bye to Clarissa.

  A hand grabbed hold of my arm the moment I stepped off the elevator.

  “You’re under arrest.”

  I plucked the hand from my arm as if it were a dead rat (which reminded me). “What’s the charge?”

  “Perfect attendance at all my murder scenes.” John Kruk gave me the sneer that for him passes for a smile. He might even have chuckled. Kruk gave an up-and-down to my tux.

  “I was just out for a jog,” I said as I surveyed the scene. The intensive care ward was like a department store on Christmas Eve. People were going in all directions, yelling to be heard above the din, arms waving, urgent gesturing. If there was any order here, I was missing it. Uniformed police were milling about. Notebooks were at the ready. Questions were being asked. Some mild flirting with the nurses was going on.