The Hearse You Came in On (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  “I think you have a question,” Kate said, then took her coffee cup into the other room. I followed.

  Kate was sitting on the floor, up against the wall, her head about level with the jade plant on the windowsill of my bay window. She was picking at one fingernail with another. Her coffee cup was on the floor, between her legs. I slid onto the couch. Kate addressed her coffee cup.

  “You want to know if Lou Bowman shot Charley by mistake too, like I did. You want to know if two trained cops can make the same fatal mistake at the same time. You want to know if it was utter coincidence that Lou Bowman took a few steps backwards so that he was essentially behind me when he fired at Charley and that he fired almost precisely when I did. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The answer is no.”

  Kate picked up her coffee mug. She was finally looking a little refreshed. That’s good. She had her detective’s face back on, even if she was half naked in a man’s shirt sitting on the floor with her lovely legs splayed out.

  “Lou Bowman shot my husband on purpose. He knew it was Charley. He shot to kill. He murdered my husband.”

  “Why did he do it?” I asked.

  Kate set the mug back down. “Why don’t we go find out?”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Don’t say anything.”

  “What do you mean don’t say anything? Look at this, it’s pathetic. It’s an insult.”

  “Here, take mine. I don’t want it anyway.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is this is ridiculous. When did they start doing this?”

  “What’s the difference? I’m sure you’ll complain about the taste anyway. Why don’t you look at it this way, they’re giving you half as much to complain about.”

  I looked at the half sandwich in my hand. In a way, Kate was right. Thin white bread, a layer of pink meat spread and a large flake of lettuce. Why the hell would I want two halves of such a sandwich? I wasn’t likely to eat the half that I had been handed as I boarded the plane.

  “I’ll bet the people in first class didn’t get half a sandwich.”

  “There is no first class,” Kate observed. “This is a bargain airline.” She indicated the slender white triangle in my hand. “That’s a bargain lunch.”

  I picked up the miniature cellophane bag of peanuts that accompanied the half sandwich. “These things are usually half full to begin with. Do you suppose there’s even anything in it?”

  “Hitch, you didn’t come here to eat.”

  “But I didn’t come here to be insulted either. Somewhere on this plane is the other half of my sandwich. I’m sharing a sandwich and I don’t even know who I’m sharing it with.”

  “Why don’t you just pretend it’s me?” Kate suggested.

  “What will they do next? Come on over the intercom and tell us they’re only taking us halfway to our destination? Or maybe that the fuel tanks are only half full? Or one of the two engines is out?”

  Kate sighed. “Or that there is no co-pilot?”

  “Yes! Exactly.” I shook the white sandwich wedge in the air. “This could be just the beginning. Maybe the flight attendants dropped out of flight attendant school halfway through and this stupid airline got them on the cheap.”

  The seat belt light came on (no accompanying ding, I noticed). The plane was backing away from the terminal.

  “Do they even give you both parts of the damned seat belt?” I asked, squirming in my seat to locate the strap part and the buckle part. “Look! It’s only the buckle part.” I held up two buckle parts. “Two of them! It’s only buckles.”

  “Hitch, that’s your belt and the one for the seat next to you. Come on, quit it.”

  A stewardess appeared and reached dangerously close to my lap as she freed the strap portion of the belt from under my tushy.

  “Buckle up,” she said cheerfully. She moved on down the aisle. That’s when Kate finally saw that I was sweating like crazy.

  “Hitch,” she said in a tone choked with honest-to-God endearment. “You’re afraid of flying, aren’t you?”

  I sucked on my lower lip and tugged my seat belt as tight as I could get it. I gave the answer that all of us in the brotherhood give.

  “No. I’m afraid of crashing.”

  In a way I was right. About going only halfway. Kate and I got as far as Boston on our bargain airline and then we had to pick up a rental car to continue our excursion.

  “Have you ever seen Boston?” Kate asked as I steered out of the airport. The two signs ahead read “Boston Left Lane” and “Points North Right Lane.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Too bad. Go right.”

  The people who built the roadways in the Boston area way back when devised a little dilemma they dubbed “the roundabout.” Disguised as an efficient means of allowing drivers to head off in any direction they chose from a central point, the roundabout is actually a nasty little joke whereby the uninitiated (Hitchcock Sewell, for one) find themselves in an anxious cluster of automobiles that are orbiting the central point, cut off from any chance of escape by an ever-steady flow of other automobiles entering the circle. Twice I got caught in one of these. The first time I grew old and died; the second time I traveled a few helpless loops and then decided to risk all by steering with my horn and my gas pedal, which is what everybody else seemed to be doing.

  Kate held a map partially unfolded on her lap and tracked our progress with her finger. Once we had cleared Boston and its numerous outskirts, and after our several spins with anarchy in the roundabouts, the traffic thinned out, the roadside crap thinned out and we settled down to a two-lane highway bordered by pines, heading north. The sky opened up in front of us like a large blue and white widow’s peak. Deer-crossing signs appeared, the distance between exits began to increase and the air rushing through my dri-ver’s-side window was developing a bit of a bite, despite its being May, May, the lusty month of May. Maybe I should have packed a sweater.

  It was as a result of Kate’s confab with John Kruk about the missing report that Kate and I were hightailing it to the upper right corner of America.

  Yes, John Kruk had signed out Charley Russell’s investigation file. But if Kruk could be believed—and Kate assured me that Kruk was, if nothing else, a bundle of frankness—he had not been the person who removed that final report from the file. The report had already been removed by the time Kruk got to it. During our hideous plane trip Kate recounted for me her colleague’s explanation.

  According to Kruk, even before his intentional runin with the coroner several weeks after Russell’s death, he had observed what he told Kate was some piss-poor, care-less, do-nothing detective work from one Lottery Lou Bowman. After the death of Charley Russell and the subsequent cover-up of its particulars, Bowman had been assigned the mislabeled silica gel case. The idea of Bowman’s resuming Detective Russell’s undercover operation was obviously out of the question. Not even taking into account Lou Bowman’s age and his girth—neither of which would have slotted him unnoticed into the world of tough young men who load and unload train cars—the entire on-site portion of the investigation was a compromised shambles. So Bowman took up the investigation as a desk jockey, and as far as John Kruk could observe, the veteran detective gave the affair maybe an hour or so a day, if even that. True, no good detective enjoys being partnered with a phone and a desk. But sometimes that’s a part of the job.

  Still, before too long the word was seeping out that the investigation had no legs. Rumors of Charley Russell’s having been on the take seeped out as well—though from exactly where they seeped out was its own little mystery—and the unspoken scuttlebutt on the drums of mislabeled silica gel was that the entire affair was becoming a nonevent, an unsexy investigation of a largely victimless crime. Bowman was clearly feeling no heat about getting to the bottom of the matter. Kate told me that there are always cases that degenerate this way, ending up in the “Who Cares” department. And that
’s where Lou Bowman’s investigation had come to reside by the time Bowman’s aunt conveniently died and left him with enough of an inheritance that he could quit the force. Apparently the unsolved crime was not going to plague the man’s conscience in his early retirement.

  Kruk thought the whole thing stank. From the beginning, Kruk had found himself replaying the events of that November night in the warehouse, never quite liking what he saw. And so after his talk with the coroner, when not only was his hunch about the two bullets confirmed but the additional nugget was unearthed that one of the bullets very likely came from the gun of Lou Bowman, Kruk began to better understand the stink. As Kruk observed Lou Bowman’s lackadaisical attitude toward the continuation of the late Detective Russell’s investigation he found himself forming the opinion that Lottery Lou Bowman was working to hide something. Something even beyond his role in the shooting of Charley Russell.

  And then, Lottery Lou’s ship bearing his dead aunt came in. The detective turned in his resignation and he was gone.

  Kruk opened up his own investigation. He began to dig. And before he had even shoveled out more than a bucket’s worth of dirt, he got his first piece of the puzzle. Bowman’s story proved to be such a pathetically shallow hole that Kruk truly marveled at the man’s ballsiness in even trotting out such a charade. There was no rich aunt. There was no rich anybody. The Bowman clan were solidly working class, with not a bon vivant in the crowd. Lou Bowman stood to inherit the debts that his ailing mother had inherited from Bowman’s deceased father. That was it. Ten more years on the force and Bowman’s full pension would have arrived and with it he could have chipped away at that obligation.

  It was at this point that Kruk had pulled the folder on Charley Russell’s investigation of the mislabeled silica gel drum barrels. Kruk read through the exact same reports that Kate and I had pored over. Like us, he noticed that Charley Russell had been on the cusp of discovering the source of all those barrels of toxic dirt. And like us, Kruk suspected that Charley’s final report had been pulled from the file. Kruk knew full well who the last person in possession of that file folder was. Lou Bowman. If a missing report existed, Lou Bowman had it.

  All of which brings us back to a small four-door rental car zipping along a relatively quiet two-lane highway in the upper right corner of these United States. Kate and I were headed for Maine. Kate wanted that report. And then she wanted Lou Bowman’s ass in a sling. I wanted to help her, because I had sort of grown to like the lady. Helping to nail the guy who shot your lover’s now-dead husband is one of those little things that you can do to earn a special place in her heart. It most definitely qualifies as a smooth move.

  Kruk had contacted a Boston-based private investigator friend of his and out of his own pocket hired the guy to take a few weeks’ vacation up in Maine—” America’s Vacationland,” I was now noting on the license plates around me—where he could visit the lighthouses if he wished, or contemplate the cold Atlantic’s incessantly dramatic relationship with Maine’s rocky coastline, so long as he kept his private eye on the comings and goings of one Lou Bowman, new homeowner, new 4x4 Jeep owner, new boat owner and happy new early retiree. The PI tailed Bowman and made a detailed report of his every activity: his food shopping, his nights at the local bar, his numerous fishing excursions, his rapid progress into the bed of a mean-looking woman named Molly who worked at the local NAPA Auto Parts store … Kate had the report with her. It was a fairly unremarkable report on the face of it; a retired cop enjoying his recreation and his leisure and his recreation and his leisure, day in, day out, day in … like the tides. The PI returned to Boston at the end of his two weeks and that would have seemed to have been the end of it. But a month later, in March, Kruk sent him back. Having gone over the PI’s report and accustomed himself to the general cadence of Lou Bowman’s activities, Kruk wanted the PI to gather another two-week sample, for comparison. Kruk was looking for an anomaly, or a pattern, or … he didn’t know what exactly he was looking for. But he hoped to recognize it when he saw it. That’s how it’s done. Sift the shit. And apparently Kruk found what he wanted. Or at least he found a part of it.

  What he found was a visit to the NAPA Auto Parts store that included more than a simple nuzzle with mean-looking Molly. During this particular visit, Lou Bowman picked up a small package that had been delivered by Federal Express. Kruk might not have placed any particular significance on the event except for the fact that upon collecting the package, Lou Bowman had proceeded directly to his local bank. When he got home he did no work on the Jeep, which was probably under warranty anyway. So why was this package delivered to a car parts shop? And why take it directly to the bank? Even from all the way up in Maine … the big fish continued to stink.

  As Kate and I crossed the Maine border, Kate gave me a bit of a rundown on Lou Bowman. Specifically, she wanted me to know a little something about the man’s attitude toward killing other people, since at least one of her plans would involve my entering into a tête-à-tête with the guy and I should know what it was I was getting into.

  Lou Bowman had lots of paper and cloth attesting to his skills with both rifles and pistols. He was a firing range regular, an NRA member and a man who wore a red-and-black checked jacket in the winters with a plastic license tag pinned to the back fingering him as a certified killer of helpless animals. Over the course of his police career, Bowman was also responsible for the abrupt deaths of three members of the criminal class. Two had been gunned down during the commission of their crime. The third had apparently met his death for looking the wrong way at Detective Bowman while bringing a cellular phone—what Bowman claimed looked like a pistol—to his mouth. Though why the guy would want to whisper something to his pistol before taking aim at a police detective was apparently an issue that never found resolution.

  There are some police officers who have to work through a bit of a funk after an in-the-line-of-duty killing of another human being. A real live (real dead) flesh-and-bone person is a whole different thing from a tin target with a paper heart. But apparently Lou Bowman had not been one of those cops. Killing people didn’t gum up his day. He slept well at night. Kate wanted me to know this about Lou Bowman.

  The little town—or village—that Lou Bowman had chosen for his retirement was a picturesque place on the coast, called Heayhauge. I’ve no idea how to pronounce it either. A few of the locals pronounced it for me while I was there, but to be honest I’d have had a rough time understanding their pronunciation of the name “Bob.” The closest translation I can come up with is “Hee-Haw.” That’s it. Hee-Haw, Maine.

  Heayhauge was born and raised as a fishing village. A break in the coastline allows the sea to spill into a large natural harbor, shaped like a teardrop; around its bulbous side the commercial portion of the village clusters. This is where the fishing boats are docked. The wharves are extra wide to allow for the offloading of the fish and lobsters that the fisherfolk pull out of the sea. Wooden crates are stacked and scattered everywhere. Dogs too (scattered, not stacked). I would have thought that it was cats that would migrate to the fish wharf—they do in Baltimore. But up here in Maine it’s dog country. Maybe Alcatraz could include Heayhauge, Maine, in his retirement plans. That is of course if he ever gets around to doing anything worth retiring from.

  As the fishing industry became more centralized, or as the near-shore pockets of fish and lobsters became increasingly picked over, fishing villages like Heay-hauge began to diversify. Diversify or die. Well past its heyday as a “bustling” commercial fishing community, the shrinking fishing fleet of Heayhauge now shares its harbor with several outfits that take on paying customers for a day of recreational fishing and with something like two dozen slips that harbor the various sailboats and yachts of the town’s more well-to-do residents and visitors. There is a harborfront hotel just to the west of the docks. They have a restaurant patio on the water as well as a fleet of a half-dozen paddleboats so that the hotel residents can get in the way of
the larger craft. As with practically any drop of water these days, there are also Jet Skis buzzing all about like very loud oversized gnats. Basically it’s a devil’s deal, pretty common among picturesque places that are no longer able to support themselves solely by means of the single industry that spawned their existence in the first place. Like the rest of us, they call on their good looks if they possibly can. Shops and cafés that would have been laughable to the town’s original old salts had cropped up along the piers and along the village’s narrow main street: places that sold paper lamp shades and jewelry that no local could afford (nor figure out a local occasion worth wearing it for), varieties of soap, enough scented candles to illuminate an entire Wiccan hoe-down, country club clothes, overpriced coffee from Seattle, the whole thing. The place is still a “bustling” village. It’s just that the bustle now has less to do with the clinking of pulley chains on the docks as it does the clinking of tourists’ change being dropped into cash register drawers.

  Kate and I took all of this in from inside our rental car, which we had pulled over at the townside of the metal drawbridge that reaches out over the natural break in the coastline. We were afforded a nice view of both the mighty Atlantic on our right, and the town harbor and docks to our left and behind us. Kruk’s private investigator from Boston had noted this particular spot in his report; we weren’t onto anything new here.

  The reason that we remained in the rental car was simple. Kate could not risk being spotted by Lou Bowman. To ensure against this, prior to pulling into town Kate had wrapped a scarf around her hair and donned a pair of black cat’s-eye sunglasses. To my eye she looked as incognito as an Italian movie star attempting to look incognito.