The Hearse You Came in On (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  Julia’s eyebrows rose. “Hitch, have you ever seen Kate handle a pistol?”

  I told her that I hadn’t. She rolled her eyes.

  “Wow.”

  I didn’t hear at all from Kate for the next week. I left several messages on her answering machine and once I even drove by her place at night but saw no lights on in the windows. Possibly Kate had taken my suggestion and skedaddled out of town for a while. Her name and photograph were in the papers and on the news again. Anywhere but Baltimore would seem like a smart place for her to be.

  Gil’s final instructions to the Our Town cast on opening night were as follows:

  “I want to thank each and every one of you for the enthusiasm that you’ve all shown in exploring the depths of this wonderful play. And now I want you all to knock it off. Hitchcock is your Stage Manager. He is your pilot. He is your god. Hitch, I’m putting it all on you. The moment you think any of your fellow cast members are getting out of line—or especially inventing a new line—step in. Just start talking. Does everyone understand that? No unscripted soliloquies tonight. This is not the Improvisational Playhouse, it is the Gypsy Playhouse. You are Gypsy Players. Now go out there and act like it!”

  And because Gil is snippy, and lonely, and only human after all, he turned on Michael Goldfarb, who was staring down at his delicate fingers. “That goes for you too!”

  I was barely listening. I was preoccupied. Among the several opening-night cards and flowers that I had received had been a tissue-thin Western Union telegram. It had been sent from Las Vegas.

  Hitch—I’m still thinking. I wish I would stop already. I miss you. Break a leg, if you must. Love—Kate.

  I took the telegram with me onstage and stuck it on the lectern next to my script. Several times during the evening I missed my cue due to my split attention. There really wasn’t much deconstruction I could perform with Kate’s message, but I went ahead and tried anyway. The only truly ambiguous portion of the telegram was its point of origin. Las Vegas. The test tubes of my imagination sputtered and smoked in trying to figure out what the hell Kate would be doing in Las Vegas. As far as the message itself, it was cautious but hopeful; I couldn’t squeeze any more than that out of it.

  As I said, I missed a few of my cues on account of my three hundred glances at the telegram. I also failed to perform the Higher Authority task that Gil had assigned to me. I interrupted on occasion, but, generally speaking, I stood by—looking like an idiot in my pith helmet, wire rims and whip mustache—as the cast of Our Town frolicked like an untrained modern dance troupe through the ashes of Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

  Julia especially enjoyed herself, having waited until this evening to acknowledge the very existence of Michael Goldfarb. And not just acknowledge it. Suddenly he was bread and bad-girl Julia was white-hot butter. Others seemed to follow Julia’s lead, albeit less effectively, and by the end of the evening it almost seemed as if a pheromone gas attack had been launched on the sleepy burg. It was one hopped-up bunch of citizens up there onstage, that’s for sure. At one point I lowered my wire-rim specs to the tip of my nose and took in the full spectacle being wrought. Our Town meets Peyton Place. Gil Vance had himself a peach of a concept, whether he wanted it or not. Personally, I thought it worked pretty well.

  Goldfarb and Julia showed up about an hour into the cast party. I call him “Goldfarb” now instead of “Michael” for the simple reason that whatever it was that transpired between the two between the final curtain and their entrance at Julia’s gallery—where the cast party was being thrown—had forever altered the somber young boy. He sauntered into that gallery like a big-balled bull fresh from his Pasture of Dreams. As for Julia, her face was lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She and I passed a few quick words, in code. Starting with me.

  “Pedestal?”

  “Brute.”

  “Happy?”

  “Yippee!”

  A tipsy Libby Maslin made a pass at me at one point. It fell short. I wouldn’t have caught it anyway. I noticed as I was slipping away early from the soiree that Libby was wiping some wine off the shirt of one of the Gypsy board members, who was already backed up against the wall.

  I headed down to the pier that runs alongside the Screaming Oyster. I went out to the end and looked out over the inky water. The R had gone out of the neon Domino sugar sign across the harbor, giving it a somewhat funky new look: DOMINO SUGA. Other than that, it was the same old harbor that I knew like the back of my heart.

  But there was something about the big neon sign being even so slightly altered that seemed to match my feelings. I was feeling restless. I was feeling out of sorts, or rather, out of synch, as if something was just not right. It was the feeling of the other shoe not having yet dropped, even though you are staring at two shoes that have already come crashing down to earth and are sitting right there side by side. There they are. They’ve dropped. So what’s the problem?

  The problem began to come to me. I had thought as I stood there gazing out over the black water that I was clearing my mind, that I wasn’t really thinking of anything in particular. And maybe that’s so. Or at least on the conscious level that was so. But down deeper, that second shoe that had dropped must have begun to come into clearer focus. And as it did, the source of my restlessness began to come into focus with it. It was the wrong goddamn shoe. It didn’t match the first one. The real other shoe hadn’t dropped at all.

  And then it did. Nearly beaned me.

  Kate had told me that immediately upon hearing of Carolyn James’s suicide she had entered the woman’s apartment and located Carolyn’s copy of the nefarious videotape featuring Amanda Stuart. The assumption was that whoever it was who killed Guy Fellows a few days later—Lou Bowman—had taken Fellows’s copy of the tape, perhaps as a future bargaining chip, perhaps simply to while away the hours counting the number of freckles on Amanda Stuart’s bare bum. It made perfect sense to me that someone like Bowman would think to pocket the notorious tape after killing Guy Fellows. Forget even the boredom of those lonely Heayhauge nights when mean-looking Molly was being especially pissy. Consider the flexibility that would be Bowman’s to enjoy by having possession of the tape. Especially since once Alan Stuart had announced for governor, the value of the tape had certainly gone up. Was it possible that the extra three thousand dollars a month that was being stuffed into Bowman’s FedEx package had in fact been the result of Bowman’s blackmailing Alan Stuart? Essentially picking up where Guy Fellows was forced—at serrated knife point—to leave off?

  No. That made no sense. It was already determined that Bowman’s extra bonus was his payment for killing Guy Fellows in the first place. That being the case, of what practical value was the videotape? For that matter, wouldn’t one of Alan Stuart’s instructions to Bowman have been to locate the tape after killing Guy Fellows and to deliver it to him? Of course it would. That would also explain why Bowman used a knife instead of a gun to kill Fellows. He would need time to search for the video, time he would not have had were the neighbors to have reported hearing a gunshot coming from Guy Fellows’s apartment.

  I must have been standing out on the end of the pier longer than I realized. Or was so lost in thought that I simply hadn’t noticed a fog coming in over the harbor. As I came out of my own haze, I saw that the Domino Suga sign was surrounded by a silver and pink mist. I felt the dampness on my own skin as the mist tumble weeded right over me. Halos formed around the streetlights. The more distant lights and buildings disappeared altogether. Those in the middle distance lost some of their edges. The night sky was gone, replaced by a low cloud cover, as black and gray as a nun with a dirty habit, so to speak. A distant rumbling of thunder sounded… and then another, not so distant. Within a minute, I was standing in the pouring rain.

  And down came the shoe.

  Kate Zabriskie had killed Guy Fellows. Not Lou Bowman. Lou Bowman would have brought along his own knife, not relied on finding a knife in Fellows’s kitchen. I
’m no detective, but murder by kitchen knife does not denote—at least in this instance—premeditated murder. Certainly not a contract killing. It denotes crime of passion. Or self-defense. Or both.

  Kate’s killing of Lou Bowman, especially as outlined for me by Julia, had been both. She had provoked Bowman into firing first. Kate’s first shot, then, might well qualify as self-defense. But shots two, three, four, five? Ripping through Bowman’s lung, kidney, throat and, finally, his heart? I’ll let you judge that for yourself.

  It wasn’t my speculation about the kitchen knife, however, that led me to my conclusion. It was that mismatched shoe that had dropped. But I should stop talking about shoes, and talk instead about videotapes. Kate’s videotape, lifted from Carolyn James’s apartment, was disguised as a Pinocchio video. The tape in Bowman’s house was a Disney match. Fantasia.

  But neither Guy Fellows nor Carolyn James had hidden the tape in Carolyn’s apartment in a Pinocchio box or with a Pinocchio label. The night that Kate showed the tape to me she had taken credit for the simple yet effective disguise. It had been her extra measure of security, a way of hiding the evidence in plain sight.

  As the night sky unloaded on me, I saw how simply it had all taken place. I couldn’t piece together the scenario of the actual killing, of course, but the rest of it came into an all-too-clear focus. Knowing the lengths to which Kate had considered going to get Carolyn James out of the abusive clutches of Guy Fellows—the harebrained scheme to arrange a fake funeral for her—I can well imagine that Carolyn’s suicide had not exactly set well with Kate. Maybe Fellows mouthed off about the suicide and Kate’s temper snapped. Or maybe it was Fellows whose temper had snapped. It’s possible that he had learned that Kate was sleeping with him on the direct orders of Alan Stuart, and had then gone after her.

  Or might Kate have simply seen red? Had Kate maybe seen in Guy Fellows all of the brutes who had taken their pieces of her over the years? Her father? Alan Stuart? Others? Was the act of sticking a knife into Guy Fellows a belated act of heroism? Did she place herself between the evil man and the helpless little girl? And to even out the odds, had she brought with her a knife?

  If, if, if… Maybe, maybe, maybe …

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you to come in out of the rain?”

  For a moment I thought that this was just one more of the too many voices in my head screaming what if maybe. But it wasn’t. I turned around to see a figure with an umbrella walking toward me along the pier. It was Kate. She stopped about four feet away from me. Her face was half hidden by the umbrella.

  “I thought you were in Las Vegas.”

  “No. I only flew out of Las Vegas. I sent your telegram from there this morning before I flew back. I took your advice, Hitch. I went to the desert. I went to Death Valley. Zabriskie Point.”

  “How ever were you able to withstand all the symbolism?”

  “You’re angry.”

  “That’s right. You’re not sharing your umbrella.”

  She tipped the umbrella away from her and gave it a little toss. It landed upside down in the water.

  “You killed Guy Fellows,” I said.

  Kate looked back up at me. Her expression was terribly frank.

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Was it self-defense?”

  “You say that like you don’t believe it.”

  “You haven’t said it yet.”

  “It was.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “He was going to kill me.”

  “You mean like Bowman was going to kill you?”

  Kate took a deep breath. She wiped some of the rain out of her eyes.

  “Carolyn left Guy a suicide note. She left me one too. She was such a lonely girl. I… She wrote to me what I already knew. She told me that Guy had involved her in a blackmailing scheme and that she was scared to death. Literally, as it turned out. She wrote that she didn’t know why it was that she couldn’t just walk away from Guy and from the whole mess. But she couldn’t. He beat her. He abused her. But she couldn’t walk away. I understand that. If I… Carolyn’s note to Guy said pretty much the same thing. It said that this—she meant her suicide—this was the only way she could come up with to get away. And she mentioned me in her note. She said I knew everything that she and Guy had been up to.”

  “Why in the world would she do that?”

  Kate shrugged. “Stupid, right? I guess it was the best she could do to get the last lick in. Some little measure of control. Who knows?”

  “So he wasn’t happy with you.”

  Kate shook her head. “Very much unhappy.”

  “What happened?”

  “He called me up and said that he had to see me right away. He made it sound like he was all torn up about Carolyn’s having killed herself. He had just gotten back from the funeral. I went. I wasn’t two steps into his apartment and he slugged me. I was afraid he had broken my nose. He was furious. He had the note Carolyn had written to him and he shook it in my face. ‘Why’d she tell you this? What the hell is going on!’ He didn’t give me a chance to read it. He slapped me and then he grabbed me by the hair and yanked me out of the kitchen.”

  “Sweet guy.”

  “Hitch … he was seeing red. It was ‘bitch this’ and ‘goddamn bitch that’ … I was scared to death.”

  “Where did he take you?”

  “Right where his body was discovered. In the living room. As I was stumbling out of the kitchen I saw a bunch of knives that Guy kept in a ceramic jar on the counter. I just grabbed blindly and got ahold of one. He didn’t see me do it. I didn’t even know what I had. I just grabbed at any handle I could. It might have turned out to be a little paring knife.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  Kate had a large purse hanging from her left shoulder. Her right hand disappeared into it. When it came right back out, it was holding a long narrow knife. Black handle. Serrated teeth.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t a paring knife.”

  We stood there a moment, the rain coming down all around us. It was splattering into the water like … well frankly, like bullets. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Kate’s umbrella had tipped sideways and was taking on water. In another few seconds it disappeared below the surface.

  I looked down at the knife in Kate’s hand. The blade was shining and dripping with raindrops.

  “He dragged me over to the couch,” Kate went on. “He grabbed at the front of my dress. I knew what he was planning to do. I can’t in all honesty swear, Hitch, that I knew he was going to kill me afterwards. Maybe not. I don’t know what a jury would think. But that didn’t matter. He wasn’t going one step further with me. No way. I swung the knife and hacked it against his hand as he ripped my dress. And I didn’t stop there. I lost it. Call it a shark after blood, I don’t care. He wasn’t going to touch me anymore. I was sick of it. I was … I have no idea how many times I stabbed him. He lost his strength pretty quickly and I just kept stabbing until he finally slumped down to the floor. I… I didn’t check to see if he was dead. I fetched the note that Carolyn had written and I located the videotape. It was taped under one of his dresser drawers.”

  “Not very original.”

  “What can I say?”

  “So Carolyn didn’t have a tape.”

  Kate shook her head. “No. There never really was the insurance that Alan was so worried about.”

  “So what did you do next?”

  “I ran. There were only two pieces of physical evidence that could link me directly. This.” She cradled the knife in her palm. “And the other was my own blood, from when Guy hit me. My nose had bled. Some of it got onto his shirt. Forensics took a sample.”

  She looked into my eyes and acknowledged my unasked question.

  “As they say … it’s gone missing.”

  “Gone missing.” I had to shake my head at that one. “But that.” I indicated the knife. “Why didn’t that disappear?”

  Kate turned the knife over in her ha
nd. “I can’t really say. I guess I just have a guilty conscience, despite everything. I’m trained to let the system be the final arbiter. I guess … I don’t know. Maybe I was reserving the option of turning myself in.”

  “So where did Bowman fit in?”

  “Bowman? A fluke. Simple as that. My guess is that he came to town that week in order to shake down Alan for some extra cash. The extra three thousand. I think that Alan’s announcement for governor might have gotten Bowman thinking about the cash value of silence.”

  My speculations had run somewhat similar to this.

  “So when we went up to Maine …?”

  Kate said, “I made a copy of the tape. I stuck it in the Fantasia box. That was a mistake, but I didn’t realize it until later. I planted that tape in Bowman’s house when you and I were up there, when I broke in that night. Since Bowman had been in Baltimore the same week that … that Guy was killed, I was hedging my bets. Once Kruk told me that Bowman had taken a shot at Charley, planting the tape on him seemed… well, like good insurance.”

  Kate allowed herself a hard laugh. “When it came out that Alan was behind Bowman’s shooting Charley … Hitch, I almost believed in God again. I had both of them in my sights. Alan and Bowman.”

  “Did you kill Bowman to keep him from telling his side? Was that it? Did you kill him to keep him from proving that he didn’t kill Fellows?”

  “I killed Bowman in self-defense.”

  “Fine. Besides that.”

  “He killed my husband.”

  “Fine. Besides that.”

  “Jesus Christ, Hitch! Besides what? Guy Fellows hounds Carolyn James to her death … to her death, Hitch. And then he attacks me. Meanwhile Bowman has killed my husband and then he goes after you. And now I’m supposed to justify what I did? I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the whole damn thing.”

  “And Alan Stuart is the source of it all.”

  “And the bastard is under arrest.”

  “A good day’s work?”

  “You’d better damn well believe it.”

  She stepped toward me. As she did, the sky lit up like a flashbulb. Kate’s skin looked bloodless blue. Her eyes were black and unreadable. The lightning flickered again and a glint came off the knife. The hand holding it was raising as she took another step forward. Her mouth formed the words I’m sorry… but the actual words were obliterated by a ripping snarl of thunder.