Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (24 page)

“So I’ve learned.”

“Well, you saw how he was at my place. The guy is a mess. He wants nothing at all to do with the police.”

“So, you weren’t thinking that he’d hightail it because he might have had something to do with Helen’s murder?”

“I don’t think he was involved in that at all.”

“Do you have a reason to think that? Or is it instinct?”

“Instinct.” She added, “That’s my reason.”

Vickie’s hope that her little telephone deception had worked had been immediately doused when Haden announced that he was taking Bo with him.

“He wouldn’t listen to reason. I tried to convince him that the boy needed to stay with me. His mother had just been buried that morning. I asked him where he was taking Bo. He didn’t say. He had no clue. All he knew was that he was leaving immediately. He just grabbed Bo off the floor and ran out the door.”

“And you followed.”

“I couldn’t let Bo go off with that man. I don’t care if he’s his father or not. What kind of an aunt would that make me? So, yes. I grabbed my purse and Bo’s coat, and I took off after them.”

“You left your place unlocked.”

“I didn’t even think.”

“Where did he take you?”

“Atlantic City.”

“Atlantic City? What for?”

Vickie sighed. She looked very tired. “Gambling? Casinos? Who knows why he went there? He didn’t even know. It’s not here, that’s probably about it. On the way there he rambled on and on about winning all sorts of money and flying off somewhere. He kept asking me where I wanted to go. I told him, back to Baltimore. No, he kept saying. Where else? Anywhere in the world. I’ll show you the world. That kind of thing. He was nuts. A couple of times he called me Helen. This guy just isn’t right in the head.”

I thought about asking her at this point if she was aware—and could explain—her sister’s use of her name in her … professional capacity. But I didn’t.

“So then what happened? You three went all the way to Atlantic City and then came back?”

“Haden got a motel room, about a mile or so away from the casinos and the boardwalk and all that. I don’t know if you know Atlantic City. The moment you step away from the glitz, you’re in a run-down, depressed little town that is essentially broke.”

In the shadows of the corporate-fed casinos, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are changing hands, the city of Atlantic City is starving to death. I’ve been there. It’s a whole new level of depressing.

“Haden tried to get me to go to bed with him. He didn’t try very hard. I just held on to Bo and stared him down. His batteries were about out. Finally he just dropped onto one of the beds and went right out. Bo and I walked back into town and found the bus station. We got back into Baltimore a few hours ago.”

“Where’s the boy now?”

“I left him with my neighbors. He’ll be fine. They’re an older couple.”

“Then you came here.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The woman’s shoulders rose and fell in a large sigh.

“I don’t know.”

Funeral home: not a place to lift one’s spirits.

Bar: just the place.

Or at least, the place to try.

Vickie looked about the dark interior of the Screaming Oyster Saloon like she was either intrigued with the barnacle feel of the place or like she was trying to figure her best escape route. I fetched two beers from Sally and steered Vickie toward one of the tables in the rear.

Vickie was exhausted from her Atlantic City odyssey and from her bus trip.

“I’d better drink this slowly.” She took the glass from me after she sat down. “I’m likely to pass out.” She took a small sip then set the glass down. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I don’t mean for the beer. Thank you for … taking an interest in Helen.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I can’t begin to tell you how … the guilt that I’ve been feeling ever since I got the call that my sister had been murdered. This is silly. But at first … I thought that I was being indifferent to the news.”

“How so?”

“Not really reacting. Not feeling it. I went ahead and collected Bo and took him back to my place and then waited to feel something.”

I reminded her, “You felt something in my office that day. That was far from indifference.”

“Yes. Well, it turns out not to be indifference at all that I’ve been feeling. I’ve been numb. I guess that’s what has been protecting me from my guilt. It started last summer actually, when my mother was dying of cancer. I knew she was sick. I knew she was dying. I … I didn’t go see her. A couple of times I started to, but I always made some excuse to myself each time and ended up not going. She was right up the street here. At Hopkins. Meanwhile there’s Helen, who had fought and fought with the woman every step of the way … who was always yelling at her and telling her how much she hated her … and Helen was there for her. She was the one who visited her. Helen called me a couple of times to say that I ought to get on up there. But I didn’t. In the end, it was Helen who ended up being the dutiful daughter. Not me.”

I sipped my beer. I said nothing. She wanted my ear, not my opinions.

“You knew that my sister was a stripper for awhile?”

I nodded.

“And pornography? That’s where she and Terry Haden hooked up.”

“I know about that too.”

“God, he was terrible to her. He got Helen all mixed up with drugs and with prostitution. I think he was also her pimp. This guy hates women, don’t make any mistake about that. I mean, Helen was walking right in our mother’s footsteps. Terry Haden was just another in a long line of sleazeballs like the ones who hung around our mother.”

“Haden told me he was a big fan of your mother.”

“The whole thing is sordid. He dragged Ruth Waggoner’s daughter through the mud. Some tribute, huh?”

“I have to ask you a question,” I said. The time seemed right to get this out of the way. “Your name.”

“My name?”

“Helen used your name. When she was stripping and when she and Haden were making their movies. She called herself Victoria Wagner. Do you … You knew about this, right?”

Vickie had gone visibly stiff. “How did you hear about that?”

“A friend.” I left it at that.

Vickie’s plump lips drew back in a line. The way she was looking at me across the table I thought for a moment that she was either going to storm out of the bar or throw her beer in my face. Or both. Even in the bar’s darkness, I could see the roiling in her pupils.

“I can explain that,” she said at last.

“You don’t have to. I just—”

“No.” She held a hand up. “No. I want to. It’s really not all that complicated, in fact.” She brought her hands together in a fist on top of the table and stared down at them. One thumbnail was digging into the other. She took a deep breath. “I told you about the incident with one of my mother’s boyfriends? The guy who tried to take advantage of Helen?”

“I remember. She kicked him.”

“She sure did.” A glimmer of a smile touched her lips, then was gone. “And I told you how Helen really became a handful for my mother from that point on? That this was when Helen started fighting with her tooth and nail and never obeying her and all the rest?”

“Yes.”

“That’s also when Helen and I started to drift apart. She—” Vickie unlocked her hands. She took a long look around the bar. She was determined to keep the tears from flowing this time. “Correction. Helen hated my guts after that incident. The part that I didn’t tell you is that about a week after the incident, after the guy had dumped our mother … he saw to it that she was fired from the club where the two of them had been working. Not long after that, our mother got Helen and me up early one morning and the three of us got into a cab. We came down here in fact. Or near here. To the harbor. There were a group of men out on one of the piers, getting a boat ready. I don’t even know what kind of boat it was. She had the two of us stand at the foot of the pier while she walked over to the men. She came back to us a few minutes later and one of the men was with her. I remember he was wearing these big, black rubber boots that came up over his knees, and a big loose sweater. He wasn’t all that good-looking, though he had a nice enough smile. His skin was pretty bad and there was a big scar that ran along his head, right over his eyes. Our mother introduced us to him. She said his name was Mr. Donovan. She told him our names and he shook both of our hands and asked us how we were. None of it made any sense to me. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than two minutes. I remember he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It seemed like a funny question and I didn’t really have an answer. I don’t even remember what I said. But I remembered that he didn’t ask Helen the same question. In fact, he definitely paid more attention to me. I could feel that. And then he said good-bye and went back over to his boat and we got back in the cab. On the way back, our mother turned around in the front seat and said, in this totally fake voice, ‘Victoria, Mr. Donovan is your father. He told me to tell you that it was very nice to meet you.’ But she was looking straight at Helen when she said it.”

Vickie fell silent. She lowered her chin. When she raised her head again, I was surprised to see how calm she looked.

“I never saw the man again. And to be honest, I don’t even know if my mother was telling me the truth. But in a way, it didn’t really matter. The whole thing had been to get back at Helen. It certainly wasn’t for my benefit.

“That was it for me and my sister. Helen never forgave me for knowing who my father was. She hated me for it, and she hated our mother for it too. So did I. Our mother had pitted us against each other. After that, Helen became completely unmanageable. She picked up the wild burr. Boys. Booze. Drugs. All of it. Our mother couldn’t even begin to control her. How could she? Her daughter was following in her footsteps. She had practically shoved Helen’s nose in them. She’d taunt her. ‘You’re just like me. You’re exactly like your fucking old lady.’ That’s what she said. It drove Helen nuts. Mainly because it was becoming so true. Meanwhile, I was the good daughter. Our mother rubbed that in too. She knew it dug deep. Everything Helen did that was bad or wrong or mean was thrown back in her face. ‘Look at Victoria. Victoria would never do that. Why can’t you be more like your sister?’”

She looked down at her hands again. “She ruined us as sisters. Helen was a wildcat. I almost think she followed in our mother’s footsteps as much out of spite as anything, you know? ‘You think I’m bad, I’ll show you how bad I can be.’ She was … Helen was arrested, for the first time, when she was fourteen. For prostitution. Solicitation, to be exact. She had no remorse about it at all. None. In fact, you’d have thought it was the proudest day of her life. And she made sure that she stuck the knife in as deep as she could. She had no identification on her when the police picked her up but she gave them her address and her phone number immediately. Then she gave them a fake name.”

Vickie chased a lock of hair away from her face. Violently. She gave me a grim look across the table.

“She gave them my name.”

I had missed my rendezvous with Bonnie. I failed even to call her up. She would have gone to the Belvedere and sat in the room, her anticipation turning steadily to anger before finally having to head back over to the station to smile her pretty smile for all of Baltimore and vicinity. I don’t know what she was predicting for the five-day forecast, but I knew
my
forecast. Very hot water.

Vickie was drained. She left her glass of beer half empty—not half full—as we left the bar. Outside, she began to cry. I brought her into my chest and let her cry there. It was dark out now and about two degrees with the wind chill. I wrapped my long arms around her as much to try to keep her a little warm as to contain the rattling of her shoulders as she sobbed. Tony Marino, the lovelorn Italian, crossed nearby on his way into the Oyster. He shared his sad face with me, misreading in every way possible what he thought he was seeing.

Vickie’s sobbing finally started to subside. “I have to get back and pick up Bo,” she said in a small voice.

“Of course.”

She slid to my side, remaining under my arm as we made our way up Thames then took a left on Wolfe. The bitter wind vanished as soon as we rounded the corner.

Vickie’s car was parked in front of the funeral home, half a block past my place. She drove a pale blue Honda Accord. I could see it from my window on the second floor, as I was messing with the blinds. Vickie pointed it out to me. She was warmer now. But she was still trembling. In the ambient light sifting in the window, her skin was a pale blue. Her eyes and her lips were black.

“I have to go,” she said again. This time in a whisper.

“I know you do.”

A half hour later, she did.

“S
omeone finally died!”

Billie was all bustling and fussy when I got over to the funeral home. The dead person about whom my aunt was so giddy was pretty standard, an elderly man who had suffered a heart attack while shoveling his front walk. Billie and I played a game of cribbage to see who would take the lead on this one. The events of the past twenty-four hours—especially those most recent—refused to leave my head and I fell behind in the game.

“Is it the cards, Hitchcock, or is it you?” Billie asked, pegging her way around the corner, well ahead of me. “You stink today.”

Billie had gotten a fire going in her small fireplace and had introduced a pair of Baileys on ice into the room. Alcatraz lay at her slippered feet, his way of thanking her for the cold soup she had put in his bowl when we arrived. My dog is a soup nut. A light snowfall was underway outside, sifting down past Billie’s lace curtains as a visual counterpoint to the Bach sonata playing over the radio. Overall, the room was toasty, with a single thread of chill meandering through from the window in the next room, cracked open an inch.

Bonnie wasn’t returning my calls. I had left several messages first thing in the morning on the phone machine at her home and on her voice mail at the station. I apologized for missing our rendezvous at the Belvedere and for not calling to let her know that I wasn’t going to be able to make it. “Something came up,” I offered lamely.