The Hearse You Came in On (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  After a few minutes of almost silence (I say “almost” because I could hear the crinkling of hundred dollar bills being counted in the back seat… again) Carol had upgraded her statement.

  “Excuse me … I used to run a place.”

  Kate turned in her seat. “You’re not going back?”

  Carol waved a handful of money in the air. “Not in this lifetime, honey.”

  Carol came with us to Baltimore. She had never been on a plane before. Maybe that’s why she didn’t understand that she was supposed to get sweaty palms, like I did, and find it a little hard to breathe in that skinny tin can. Like I did. Instead, she acted like she enjoyed it. I gave her my half sandwich to go with hers. She brought the two halves together and managed to make it look suggestive.

  “I’m a bad girl aren’t I, Bob,” she asked, giggling.

  A storm delayed our landing. Oh goody. Kate explained to Carol that we just circled around until the storm cleared.

  “And if we run out of gas?”

  Kate aimed her answer at my green face. “Probably a nosedive, don’t you think? Bob?”

  We landed. Carol walked off the plane talking about maybe becoming a stewardess. Brimming with all sorts of plans for her new life, she was holding on to that FedEx envelope like it was a spanking new baby.

  Down at the end of a jut of land along the east side of the Fells Point harbor is a large brick building that used to be a warehouse. It has been converted into pricey condominiums and a high-toned hotel. The rooms are spacious, splashed with sunlight and nicely appointed with prints of clipper ships and framed nautical charts and the like. Personally, for that kind of money I’m not sure I’d care to look out over a harbor that is three-quarters industrial… but hey, I wasn’t buying. Carol was. This was where we installed her. Kate had offered to let Carol stay at her place, but the former proprietess of The Moose Run Inn in Heayhauge, Maine, intended to splurge a little.

  “I want a place where I can pick up the phone and have some cute boy run up to my room with one of those carts like you see in the movies.”

  “You like those carts, do you, Carol?” I teased.

  We got Carol installed in her new temporary digs and then she and Kate went out to shop for some new clothes. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle Carol in anything other than her leather mini, but it looked like I’d have to try.

  The sun was calling it a day by the time I left the girls to their foraging and made my way to the funeral home. I had only been gone a couple of days, but as you can maybe imagine, people keep dying. Aunt Billie was glad to see me.

  “Sad news, Hitchcock,” Billie announced. “Jeffrey Simons passed on. I just got off the phone with Helen. She wants us to handle the arrangements.”

  “That’ll be a media event,” I observed. “A two-parlor number.”

  “Oh it certainly will be. We’re going to have a full house.”

  While Billie made the arrangements for Jeff Simons’s body to be delivered I rushed home to shower and change. I flipped on the TV in time to catch Mimi Wigg already settling in at the solo anchor desk.

  “An institution left the building today,” she intoned. I switched off the set.

  Back at work our phone machine was already clogged with messages from callers trying to get the details of the newsman’s funeral. I even had a tearful message from Tony Marino—offering to play his bagpipes at Jeff Simons’s funeral, for free. Listen, said Tony’s voice and a bleating dirge came out of my machine’s tiny speaker. It took me a moment to pick up on it. It was the news theme for Jeff Simons’s station, slowed down, flattened out.

  I had about a half dozen other messages. Several were from Hutch. His first message asked that I call him as soon as I could. The others carried the same request but with considerably more urgency. Where the fuck are you? I also had a message from Gil Vance, chiding me about missing the last rehearsal and reminding me that there was a run-through of the final act this evening. Apparently I had not yet impressed upon Gil the fact that, as I would be reading my lines directly from the script, I really wasn’t required at all of his rehearsals. Of course it’s true that as swiftly as Gil was thrashing his conceptual machete through new territory, I might want to keep up on the latest twist, otherwise I might well show up on opening night to find the whole damn thing set in Beirut.

  The final message was from Julia.

  “Hitchenstein. I need your opinion on something. Peter has asked me to marry him. The millions, the mansion, the cars, the whole thing. Can we picture this? What do you think? I’d love your feedback, sugar-cube. Call me. Lord knows you’ve got my number. As nobody else has.”

  I phoned her immediately. She answered on the fourth ring.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Oh … Hitch. Look … listen, I can’t talk right now.”

  “But I got your message.”

  “Not now, Hitch.”

  “Julia, I think—”

  “Hitch.”

  “Oh. He’s there?”

  “He’s in the bathroom.”

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “I thought you guys ended it in Paris.”

  “I thought so too. But he came crawling on his knees and called himself a shit and told me that I was completely right and he was completely wrong. I love it when a man talks that way.”

  “Oh come on, Jules, he’s only saying that to get back into your bed.”

  “Well I guess it worked.” She must have suddenly muzzled the phone. I could hear her garbled voice, and then she came back on, dripping with insincerity. “It sounds like a lovely magazine, darling. But who has time to read these days. Thank you anyway.”

  Click.

  I went ahead and caught up on some of the less sexy parts of my job. I finally called the earnest coffin sales rep in Omaha, hoping to just leave a message. But he was still in. I told him to send me the information on his latest models. “I already did,” he said, sounding disappointed. And so he had. I was looking at the info as we spoke.

  “It must have gotten lost in the mail,” I said. “Send it again.” I then proceeded to explain what I wasn’t interested in, taking my cues from the specs and prices on the papers in front of me. I could practically hear the air going out of him all the way out there in Omaha.

  “Good talking with you, Chet,” I said.

  I heard his voice, tiny and tinny, as I was hanging up. “It’s Curt.”

  Click.

  I called Hutch’s number. An answering service routed me to his pager number and a few minutes later my phone rang. The connection was lousy. He was on a cell phone.

  “Man, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Sorry. My cell phone is in the garage for repairs.”

  Hutch wasn’t in any mood for jokes. “Can you meet me? I need to talk to you.”

  “And what we’re doing now, what’s this? Hand signals?”

  “Face-to-face.”

  “You sound serious, Hutch.”

  “I am. I’m also incredibly squeezed for time.”

  Just then a huge crunching noise sounded through the phone.

  “Hutch, where the hell are you?”

  “Curtis Bay. There’s a big … you’ll get a kick out of this, Hitch. It’s a pyrolysis plant. You know what that is? It turns waste products into energy. Shit mulching, basically. It’s a prototype. Senator Stillman stepped on all sorts of toes and kicked all sorts of asses in the legislature to ram this thing through for the state. Tons of federal bucks. Anyway, there’s a big ribbon cutting tomorrow. Photo op for Alan. I’m just going over the layout. But look, can we meet? I mean, immediately?”

  He gave me a time and a place. I wrote them down on the back of an envelope and hung up. Eight o’clock in front of Baltimore’s Washington Monument. It was hardly something I needed to write down. Especially since it was already seven-thirty.

  Hutch had failed to specif
y what “in front of” means when you’re dealing with a lighthouse-shaped structure. I came up from the south. I located Hutch on the west. The road surface on the circle around the monument is made up of crushed glass mixed in with the asphalt. “Glassphalt” they call it. When light hits it a certain way it sparkles.

  Hutch guided me across the sparkling street to a small park. As we walked, I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, indicating the monument behind us.

  “Until about five years ago my mother’s voice was the one on tape in the little historical display area there,” I said.

  “What happened five years ago?”

  “They renovated the whole thing and got someone else to rerecord the tape.”

  “That’s stupid. Did history change or something?”

  “Hutch, you see it like I do.”

  We took a seat on a bench in the little park. There was a small statue in front of us. A boar devouring a wolf. The statue was called Courage. Frankly, I think Ravage would have made more sense. Hutch wasn’t paying attention to the statue.

  “Hitch, we need to talk.”

  “That’s what you said on the phone. What’s up? This feels vaguely cloak-and-dagger. Why didn’t we just meet at a restaurant? Or a bar? Or is your candidate’s war chest getting low already?”

  “My candidate has deep pockets, that’s not a problem. I just wanted to talk to you somewhere … It’s safer here.”

  “Safer? Hutch, what’s up? This is cloak-and-dagger.”

  “You’re in trouble, my friend,” Hutch said plainly. His arms were crossed and he was tilted back on the park bench, his legs straight out. Like a plank. He was staring into the middle distance. “Deep shit,” he added.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Alan.”

  “Your Alan?”

  “Alan thinks you had something to do with the murder of Guy Fellows.”

  Well there was a piece of work. Alan Stuart thought I was involved? I had the same damn feelings about him. I started to say as much to Hutch, but he hadn’t finished.

  “How well do you know Kate Zabriskie?” He adjusted his question. “How well do you think you know her?”

  “I’m not sure a person can actually answer a question that’s put like that.”

  “Did you know that Alan and Kate Zabriskie are lovers?”

  Hutch reeled in his nowhere stare and looked over at me. It was clear that he felt he was delivering a bombshell.

  “Were lovers,” I corrected him. “She told me all about it.”

  “She told you everything?”

  I shrugged. “That’s a judgment call too, I guess. But she told me plenty. The good, the bad and the ugly. And your boss wasn’t exactly among the good. She told me about Mexico.”

  “Mexico.”

  “How Stuart traveled a thousand miles to sleep with her a few more times, dump her and rough her up a bit for good measure.”

  “And you believe her. Hitch, you barely know her.”

  “I go by gut.”

  Hutch frowned. “She’s working the Guy Fellows case.”

  I told him that this wasn’t exactly a news flash.

  “Has it ever crossed your mind that this involvement between the two of you might be a part of her investigation?” Hutch asked.

  I laughed. Hutch didn’t appreciate it, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Oh come on, Hutch. You need to get out more. Kate is going to get involved with me because I’m a suspect in a murder? What the hell kind of story is that?”

  Even as the words left my lips, my heart skipped a couple of beats. Kate had gotten involved with some-one—Fellows—as part of a criminal investigation. Just who was maybe being naive here? Hutch was pulling something out of his bag. I added, “And besides, why would I kill Guy Fellows in the first place? To drum up business?”

  “You were seen arguing with Fellows at the cemetery, when was that… two weeks ago? Something like that?”

  “I went through all this with Detective Kruk.”

  “I know you did. And right after that he was pulled off the case and Kate was put on.”

  “Office politics,” I muttered. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Hey, don’t kill the messenger, okay? I know you better than Alan does. I don’t think you’re a murderer, Hitch, any more than I am.”

  Small comfort there. Hutch tossed a large brown envelope onto my lap.

  “Guy Fellows was blackmailing Alan. He had a partner working with him. I figured it was that woman that you buried. Alan and I both figured that.”

  “Carolyn James.”

  “Her. But then the next thing we know someone sticks a knife in Guy Fellows and then a few days later … this.”

  He indicated the envelope, which I picked up. I knew what I’d be finding inside.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s the reason Alan Stuart isn’t your biggest fan.”

  “He thinks I sent these to him?”

  Hutch’s eyes narrowed and I immediately recognized my mistake.

  “Sent what to him, Hitch? You haven’t even looked in the envelope.”

  I was able to recover quickly. “You said Fellows was blackmailing Stuart. So … let me guess.” I pulled a pair of eight-by-ten glossies from the envelope. “Well. Dirty pictures of Grace Kelly. Go figure.”

  “Not everything is a joke, Hitch.”

  I slid the pictures back into the envelope and handed it back to him. “I know that. But the future governor of Maryland thinks that an unassuming undertaker from Fells Point is a murderer and a blackmailer … There’s either a joke in there somewhere or a bad punch line.”

  Hutch put the envelope back into his bag. About ten feet away, a one-legged man was hobbling in our direction. He was using a single crutch for balance. His pants were undone and he was barefoot. A filthy white towel was duct-taped to the top of the crutch, for padding. Hutch stood up from the bench.

  “I’ve got to be going. Fund-raising dinner.”

  “Gee, and I wasn’t invited?”

  “A thousand dollars a plate.”

  “Gee, and I just remembered I’m busy?”

  The one-legged man had reached us. He shook a paper coffee cup at Hutch; the few coins in the cup made a sad echo. Hutch dug into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, which he tucked into the man’s cup. He looked over at me. “I’m not heartless.”

  The beggar continued on his way. “Hitch, I really don’t know what’s going on here. I’m thinking you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that’s all. I’ve tried to convince Alan of that, but Alan’s not exactly in a reasonable mood about any of this. Somebody out there has got him by the balls. The man is seeing red. I just want to warn you, as a friend, to keep an eye out.”

  It was occurring to me that sometimes there’s an awfully thin line between a warning and a threat. I hated myself for feeling it, but I couldn’t shake the sense that my political-operative buddy was traveling deftly along that line.

  I stood up. “Have a good dinner, Hutch. Make sure you clean your plate.”

  I phoned Kate and left her a message to meet me at the Oyster. I didn’t mention my meeting with Hutch. Not on the phone. I wanted to see her reaction to the news that her follow-up blackmailing efforts were apparently yielding high dividends. I also wanted to hear from her just what she was planning to do next. I hadn’t yet decided for certain how many of Hutch’s suspicions I would share with her. I was certain that his speculation about Kate and Stuart still being involved was ill-founded. As was his suggestion that Kate was playing me like a fiddle.

  I had another ticket on my car. I’m sleeping with a cop, for Christ’s sake. Shouldn’t I be able to have these taken care of? I stuffed it into the glove compartment to keep the others company.

  I swung by Carol’s new temporary digs to see how she was settling in. She met me at the door in a straw hat, a pair of white bell-bottoms and a low-cut blue-and-white strip
ed T-shirt with three-quarter sleeves. In other words, she was dressed like a Venetian gondolier.

  “Do you like my toes?” she asked.

  She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted like confetti.

  “How much do people charge for that?” I asked.

  She guffawed. “Eight thousand bucks. I’m broke!”

  We headed over to the Oyster. Kate was waiting for us. Carol looked around the dark bar. A shiver went through her.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m homesick. Goddamn it.” She fetched a drink from the bar and drifted over to the dart-board. Bookstore Bob and Al the video guy were there. Arguing as usual. I watched as Carol took a dart from each of them, then turned to the target and took aim.

  Kate had come up with a name. Epoch Ltd.

  “I went out to the Hunt Valley post office this afternoon and flashed my badge around. I had to do some quick double-talking to explain why a city detective was out there in the country nosing. But eventually I got what I wanted. The P.O. box on Bowman’s FedEx package belongs to something called Epoch Ltd. That’s who has been sending him the money.”

  “Who the hell is Epoch Ltd.,” I asked. “Or what?”

  “I don’t know. The post office didn’t have an address on file. Or they couldn’t find one. They didn’t even have a phone number. I tried information, but they didn’t have a listing.”

  I thought about this for a minute. “Well, whatever Epoch Ltd. is, it must be located in Hunt Valley, right? It’s in one of those buildings.”

  Kate agreed. “Sure, but do you have any idea how many office buildings there are out there? And how many different businesses are in each one?”

  “You don’t think we could just go from building to building checking the floor directory in each of them?”

  Kate shook her head. “There are hundreds of buildings.”

  “So? We split up. We’ll make some sort of map and we’ll each take a section each day. Maybe we can get Carol to help out.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bowman,” Kate said. “Bowman is not going to just sit up there in Maine with his pink tissue paper, you know. We set the clock running when we snitched his money. Bowman’s going to know full well that Carol didn’t just happen to peek into his FedEx package or just happen to have a bunch of pink tissue paper with her. He’ll know that he didn’t just happen to get a flat tire right after he happened to pick up Carol hitchhiking.”