Murder in the Hearse Degree

by Tim Cockey

  “It’s one of the ways into heaven.”

  “You can punch out now, Hitch. The crunch is over.”

  The white jacket Stephanie had conjured for me to work the bar was built for a lesser man. The sleeves gave up well back on my arms and my shoulders had been trussed all afternoon. I peeled the jacket off and folded it atop a box of chardonnay.

  “So you’re really an undertaker, eh?” Stephanie asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Where I come from, ‘business is dead’ is a good thing.”

  “Must be creepy.”

  “Not really. For one thing, our customers never complain.”

  She laughed. “I never thought of that.”

  A man in an orange sports coat came over to the table and asked for a gin and tonic. I put one together for him. He looked off at the water revelers and wagged his head slowly, then drifted off. I returned to my perch.

  “So what can you tell me about Sophie?”

  Stephanie pulled in her lower lip. “There’s not much to tell, really. She answered an ad that I ran in the paper. She didn’t have any catering experience but she could put one foot in front of the other and she could carry a tray.” A grin grew across her face. “Plus she was cute in her little white dress.”

  “Something about a gal in a uniform?”

  She grinned again.

  “Stephanie, please don’t tell me you corrupted the morals of a shy little Hungarian girl.”

  “Not a chance. For one thing, I don’t do that sort of thing. I’m happily partnered. But there was no sway in that girl anyway. That was obvious. You said you never met her, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me tell you something, she would have melted for someone like you. Sophie was like a kid in a candy shop when it came to tall good-looking guys.”

  I thought of Gary Cooper. I also thought of Mike Gellman.

  “Could you elaborate?”

  “What’s to elaborate? The eyes go wide. The lips begin to tremble. . . .”

  I said, “I’ve been given the definite impression that Sophie was a shy girl.”

  “Oh, she was. Terrifically shy. But you know sometimes that can be pretty appealing. And guys love to flirt with the shy ones. You must know that. Sophie was a pretty little thing. You get a girl like that to blush . . . well, it was cute, watching her get all flustered. In fact it was probably . . . yes, it would have been one of the last times she worked with us. Right here again on campus. We were working some sort of orientation party. All these snappy cadets all over the place. Sophie’s eyes were practically popping out of her head. There was a particular group of them. Four or five. For whatever reason they decided to goof on her. I’m sure it was because she was so easy to ruffle. They got a little game going. Every time Sophie came out with a new tray of hors d’oeuvres they descended on her. They surrounded her and teased her, pretending that she had cooked the food herself and telling her how fantastic it was and all the rest. Their little game was to empty the tray before she had a chance to take a step. It was all just silly. They were having fun.”

  “How did she react to that?”

  “Oh, she blushed like crazy. But I’m sure she loved it. All these good-looking middies? I finally had to step in and tell them to cool it, though. The nice thing about military boys, they’re all ‘ten-hut’ and ‘yes, ma’am.’ They don’t give you any bullshit. One of them even came up to Faith later on to make sure she knew it was all their doing, that Sophie hadn’t been egging them on or anything. It was sweet.”

  “Who’s Faith?”

  “She’s my business partner. She works at one of the restaurants in town. She ought to be along soon to help break down. She can’t always make it to the jobs.”

  We had a return visit just then from Miss Hippety-Hop. Her hair had dried into twisting blonde snakes. She was still wearing the white cadet’s jacket, holding it closed at the neck with one hand. Her eyes were red. She had been crying.

  “I hate goddamn weddings,” she said. “Another whiskey, please.”

  I told her the bar was closed.

  “Closed? As of when?”

  “As of one drink ago. I’m sorry.”

  She tried to kill me with a look. It didn’t even strafe me. She turned and weaved back along her rocky road to her boyfriend.

  I helped Stephanie and her workers load up the van. Stephanie ran a tight ship. Her workers clearly respected her. Partway into it Stephanie’s partner showed up. Faith was a willowy item, a long-waisted corn-silk blonde with iris-blue eyes and a deep deep tan. Her hair fell down over her ropelike arms like yellow lace and she had a tattoo of a mermaid on her inside right thigh. Not that I was looking, of course.

  Stephanie said, introducing us, “Hitch saved our ass. Dastardly Dickie never showed. Hitch worked the bar like he was born to it.”

  “Dickie is fired,” Faith said.

  “Drawn and quartered if I get ahold of him,” Stephanie said.

  Faith cocked her head and eyed me. “So how did we find you?”

  “I popped up out of a hole.”

  She gave me a long slow look-over. “Must’ve been a very large hole.”

  Stephanie explained that I had been looking for information about Sophie Potts.

  “You remember Sophie, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” Faith said. “I promised her I’d have her over to the inn to sample my Hungarian goulash one of these days.”

  “Too late now,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Stephanie ran her finger along her neck. “Deadskies.”

  Faith’s eyes and mouth turned to zeroes. “Sophie’s dead? What happened?”

  I gave her the lowdown. Faith was in disbelief.

  “Oh, that’s horrible. Poor girl. And she was pregnant? How in the world did that happen?”

  Stephanie grinned. “Well, you know that part that comes after kissing?”

  Faith slapped her lightly on the arm, then turned back to me. The top of her head came up just about to my nose. The part in her hair was as perfectly straight as a runway.

  “Have we met before?”

  “I don’t believe so,” I said. “In fact, I’m sure of it. I’d have remembered.”

  “You look familiar to me.”

  “Maybe you’re thinking of Cary Grant,” I said.

  “You don’t look like Cary Grant.”

  “You should see me in a tux. Changes everything.”

  Faith studied my face a few more seconds. It didn’t bother me a bit. Gave me the chance to study hers. There were yellow starbursts in her eyes. Seven freckles on her nose. A slightly chipped tooth. All this on a neck like the proverbial swan’s.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

  I grinned. “But thanks for shopping.”

  Faith excused herself to go talk turkey with the parents of the bride. She moved with a slow-motion bounce; her hair went this way and her dress went that way. I turned to Stephanie.

  “She likes boys, am I right?”

  Stephanie nodded. “Gee, how did you guess?”

  I tapped my finger against the side of my head. “Hitch Sewell, boy genius.”

  Stephanie and I folded up the bar tables and slid them into the van. Stephanie pulled a fistful of money from her pocket and handed me a hundred dollars. Then she dug in and handed me another fifty.

  “Ass-saving bonus.”

  A few minutes later Faith rejoined us. She mentioned something to Stephanie about the George Washington Inn. Turns out that’s where she worked. I told her that I had a friend who was singing there.

  “No kidding,” Faith said. “Is that Lee Cromwell?”

  “Yes.”

  She said she hadn’t had a chance to catch the show yet, but she had heard it was good.

  “You know, I just thought of something about Sophie,”
Faith said. “She called me a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Is that right? What about?”

  Faith turned to Stephanie. “I guess I never bothered mentioning it to you. It was about Tom.”

  “Who’s Tom?” I asked.

  Stephanie answered. “Tom Cushman. He works for us off and on. He’s an aspiring actor.” She floated her hands in the direction of the other workers. “They’re all aspiring somethings. Tom hasn’t been able to commit much lately. He got a job at one of the local theaters. I can’t remember the show.” She turned to Faith. “Do you know?”

  Faith shook her head. “I don’t remember. Something old.”

  “So what was this call?” I asked.

  Faith tapped a fingernail against one of her front teeth. “Sophie called me up and said she wanted to get ahold of Tom. She wanted to know if I had his number.”

  “Did Tom and Sophie work together?”

  “A little bit this summer, yes.”

  “Did she say what the call was about?”

  “No. And I didn’t ask. I just gave her the number.”

  “He’s not in the phone book?”

  “Tom has a roommate,” Faith said. “The phone’s under the roommate’s name.”

  “Give me a thumbnail on Tom,” I said.

  Stephanie and Faith shared another look. “That one’s yours,” Stephanie said.

  Faith took her fingers to her chin and gave me an appraising look. “Well, let’s see. Tom Cushman. Tall, but not quite as tall as you. Good-looking.” She smiled. “But not as good-looking as you.”

  Stephanie chimed in. “He’s no Cary Grant.”

  “Any idea why she’d be wanting to call him?” When neither Stephanie nor Faith could come up with a reason, I asked, “Well, how’s this? What are the chances that the two of them were mixing it up while they were working together?”

  Faith was shaking her head. “Not a chance.”

  “You say that with conviction.”

  “That’s because I know,” she said. “It didn’t happen.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked.

  Faith checked me out one eye at a time. An amused vapor was whipping about her face. “Trust me. I know.”

  I looked over at Stephanie, who was trying to keep a leash on her laughter.

  “I see.”

  Even with the tan, the blush came up in Faith’s cheeks. The blue in her eyes deepened. They looked like a pair of deep watering holes into which someone had thrown a couple of rocks. I could almost feel their splash.

  I went ahead and popped into the Naval Academy chapel before I left the campus. I have to say they do like their blue. John Paul Jones is ensconced in the basement level. As we say so hilariously in the trade, he was still dead. The chapel was crawling with visitors. The stained-glass windows were dominated—no surprise—by nautical imagery. Near the altar a young mother and father were trying in vain to placate their baby, whose wailings were offering an impressive display of the chapel’s acoustics.

  I left the chapel and meandered the narrow streets until I found a pay phone. I made a few calls. One was to the local theater. They were running The Seagull by Chekov. I asked the box-office person to run down the cast list for me, and when he read out the name Tom Cushman I told him I wanted a ticket for the evening’s performance. No problem. Curtain at eight, don’t be late.

  I caught up with Lee Cromwell for an early dinner. The club where she worked, downstairs at the George Washington Inn, was called the Wine Cellar. We ate upstairs in the bar. Lee looked great. At forty-seven Lee was in the midst of a new blooming. She had dumped the two-timing husband, dumped the booze, put the statuesque body back into great shape and was up onstage behind the microphone after a twenty-year detour. Lee still smoked. She handled cigarettes like the sex objects they once were. Full head of auburn hair. A laugh like Rita Hayworth’s. Her dinner was a spinach salad. Every few bites she would grimace at me so I could tell her whether she had spinach in her teeth.

  “How’s Peter?” she finally asked.

  I shrugged. “You know Pete. There are a dozen answers to that question.”

  “He’s a shit.”

  “I guess that’s one of them.”

  “I miss him,” Lee said. “Would it kill him to pick up the phone?”

  “Lee, you know he’s completely hell-bent on trying to work things out with Susan.”

  “I know that. I’m not trying to interfere, believe me. Peter has to work all that out. But am I a pariah? The man can’t talk to me?”

  “Maybe he can’t, Lee. It’s not easy for him. Maybe that’s the problem.”

  Lee stirred her salad absently with her fork. “He’s just an irascible old bear, anyway.” She looked up from her plate. Her eyes were glistening. “Well, say hi for me.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  The Seagull. It goes like this:

  A half-talent young playwright spends too much time in a tree house writing tortured melodramas that nobody in their right mind wants to screw their fannies down in a chair and actually sit through. He is smitten by a pretty young thing—an actress named Nina—who hasn’t a clue in her pretty little head that this fellow—his name is Constantin—is completely ga-ga for her, even though his plays are all written with her in mind. Constantin’s mother is a celebrated stage actress who is approaching the apex of her beauty and celebrity. The mother’s amour du jour is a famous writer of whom Constantin, naturally enough, is envious. The first big scene of the play is when Constantin comes down from his tree house and puts on one of his plays—featuring Nina—and it is met with howls. And no, it is not a comedy. Constantin bitches and fumes and condemns everyone else as crass and incapable of recognizing “true art” when they see it. Which of course they haven’t seen from Constantin. Eventually the famous writer leaves Constantin’s mother and runs off with Nina, who becomes a star herself while Constantin and Mother remain home and lick their wounds. Nina eventually ditches the guy, who comes bounding back to Constantin’s mother. Nina returns as well, no longer the unsoiled crystal that once stirred Constantin’s loins and poetry, but now a part of the crass world that Constantin cannot abide. And so he shoots himself.

  The End.

  Tom Cushman played the role of Constantin, the anguished half-talent playwright. It would be too easy for me to state that Tom Cushman was a half-talent actor, so I won’t. Maybe it was an off night. Or maybe he was doing such a convincing job of portraying the half talent of Constantin that the overall glow of half talent simply encased him. That is, if “glow” can encase. Or for that matter, if half talent can glow. Whatever the case, I really don’t think that what Chekov had in mind was for the audience to applaud when Constantin shoots himself at the end of the play.

  As it happened I played this role once myself. I’m a Gypsy Player, which doesn’t mean that I wear dye-running scarves and travel about on donkey carts, but that I throw my hand in now and again with the local amateur theater troupe in my neighborhood who mount extravagant fiascos and the occasional gem at the Gypsy Playhouse, a few doors down from Julia’s place. In fact, Julia appeared in the Gypsy’s Seagull as well. She found Nina to be an insufferably clueless child and so she finagled the role of Constantin’s mother. We played beautifully opposite each other (we always do), even with the idiotic conceit that we were mother and son.

  I asked at the box office how I could get backstage after the show and was told to go outside and around to the back of the building, down a short flight of stairs, along a hallway, through a couple of doors and to watch out for the low-hanging pipes. Being an amateur ham myself, the atmosphere backstage was all too familiar to me. Clusters of people stood waiting for their thespian friends to emerge from their dressing areas. Members of the stage crew crisscrossed swiftly, carrying props and pieces of costumes along with an urgency to wrap it up quick and get the hell home or off to the nearest bar. The
re was a large bulletin board with schedules pinned to it, notes, cartoons, a few reviews, a comic collage made up from magazine pages, the usual backstage flotsam. The green room was a pale blue. I shared it with several people who stood there gazing at the ceiling.

  The first actor to emerge was the one who had played Nina. Onstage she had seemed to have it in her head that Nina should move about like a ballerina. In my view, Nina is ditsy enough already without giving to her character the additional weightlessness of someone who does all their emoting while up on the balls of their feet. But then who paid me to judge? In her role as a human being, the actress was a lot more solidly attached to the ground. She appeared from her dressing room in a sleeveless T-shirt, baggy capri pants and a sweatband snapped tight around her head, her hair pulled back into a bronze ponytail. On her shoulder she carried a black bag large enough to contain a small automobile. She was slender, but her biceps betrayed—perhaps “ballyhooed” would be a better way of putting it—hours spent in the gym carving away with weights and machines. Her name was Shannon. The couple who were there for Shannon let out a little cry. The woman was holding a bouquet of flowers, and as Shannon widened her arms and came forward for the hugs and kudos, the woman handed the flowers over to her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was, who stuck his nose into the flowers while he stood waiting his turn for the hug.

  The rest of the cast was emerging. I had seen in the program where the fellow who portrayed the famous writer had been doing plays at this theater since before the lightbulb was invented. The actor emerged from the hallway, a fedora pulled down low over his nose and trailing a scarf that might nearly have tripped him. He was followed by Constantin’s mother, who in my view had been the best actor of the lot. She was pulling on a cigarette and making a beeline for the door. Tom Cushman appeared next. Shannon called him over and introduced him to her friends, who heaped all sorts of praise on the actor, to his obvious delight.

  I stepped over.

  “Excuse me. Tom?”

  The actor turned my way with the expectant smile of a happy puppy.