Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (34 page)

“I’m not making you do anything.”

“Don’t get nasty with me, please. I’m not always so sweet.” I let that pass. She settled back on the couch and crossed her legs. She cupped her drink glass in her hands and set them in her lap. “You look like a truck ran you over.”

“I think it was a Lexus.”

“Is your leg going to be all right?”

“I won’t win the swimsuit competition.”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. Yes. The doctors say I should be fine in no time.” We paused. Sizing each other up. At least, that’s how I saw it. “I got run over as a direct result of trying to figure out who killed Helen Waggoner,” I said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes.”

“Are you looking for sympathy?”

“It’s a bad habit of mine.”

“I’m sorry you got run over.” She took a sip of her drink. “I mean that. I’ve been in a very cynical mood lately, but I mean that. I am sorry for your injuries.”

“So am I.”

“So, why exactly are you here, Mr. Sewell? Is it to browbeat me?”

“I don’t browbeat.”

“But I’ll bet you could if you wanted to.”

“How did you find out that your husband was seeing Helen Waggoner? Did he tell you?”

“He didn’t have to. Richard is generally a more convincing liar than his brother. I’m sorry. Was. Oftentimes, however, he didn’t even bother to try.”

“Then he told you.”

“Richard? No. His behavior made it clear that he was fooling around again. I know all the signs by heart. Richard’s schedule was always erratic. A doctor’s wife learns to deal with that or she’s in big trouble from the start. But we also learn—or at least I did—to distinguish professional erratic from recreational. I knew that Richard was off again on one of his manhood rejuvenations. He’s been doing that off and on ever since we were married. What I didn’t know—” She took a sip of her drink and lingered a moment, as if recalling a memory. “What I didn’t know at first was that this time he was planning to leave me.”

“Helen was pregnant.”

She waved her free hand in the air. “Pregnant. What do you think, Richard turned into a saint if he got one of his silly girls pregnant? No. He just sent them over to Daniel and told his little brother to make the problem go away.”

“Which he did. Even though he told me he hated himself for it more than he hated his brother.”

“Well, that’s one of Daniel’s problems. He has always hated himself more than he hated his brother. Richard intimidated Daniel. Daniel always wished he could be more like his brother. He was envious of Richard. Envious of his house, his stature, his reputation. His wife.” She paused. Possibly to give me a moment to linger on the thought. “What I mean is that Daniel hates himself for not being more of a son of a bitch like his brother. He hated that he never stood up to Richard. It was humiliating to him. Just once, he got the best of Richard. But even that fell short.”

“And why was that?”

“Because Richard never even knew about it. Daniel pulled one over on his big brother and then he didn’t even get to enjoy it. We call that, I believe, a hollow victory.”

“What was it?”

“An affair. Only the participants ever knew about it. Daniel, of course …”

I leaned forward in the rocker, tipping a finger to point at her. She nodded.

“And me.”

“I see.” I let the rocker take me back.

The widow continued, “It was only for several months. Daniel and I both had our reasons. Separate reasons.” She let out a small mirthless laugh. “None of which, I suppose, were satisfied. Are you certain you won’t have a drink?”

I was certain. She seemed annoyed with me as she continued.

“I guess Daniel thought he was getting another one over on his brother. By telling me about Richard and this Helen girl. Telling me that she was keeping this baby, with Richard’s blessings and all the rest. I don’t know what it is about men Richard’s age. It’s such a cliché. I actually felt disappointed in him.”

“Disappointed. That’s a tame word.”

“Well, I was. He’s been tomcatting all his life. That’s Richard. Big ego. Big appetite. It was usually some little tramp. Though not always. For God’s sake, when I met Richard he was involved with someone else.
I
was the other woman. So, I’m not exactly a saint in all this myself. But for Richard to decide he was going to be a new father all over again. To take on this new girl and … What was he doing, pretending he could fool the clock? I simply expected better of him.”

“So, why did you have Helen killed, Ann? Your husband had just died of a massive heart attack. I would have thought your sense of—” I stopped. The woman’s expression had turned … ghastly. That’s the only word to describe it. “What’s wrong?”

She seemed to be having trouble getting air. Suddenly she let out a brittle cackle. “You
must
be joking! Oh, my goodness. Is
that
why you’re here?” She threw her head back and lifted a toast to the ceiling. “God help us all.” She looked back at me. “Oh, my … Mr. Sewell.
I
didn’t have that poor girl killed. Please, tell me you’re joking.”

“Who did?” I knew I had turned completely red. I could feel the tingles in my cheeks. Unless she was a damned good actress, Ann Kingman was telling the truth. “Who killed her?” I asked again. “You do know, don’t you?”

“Definitively? No. I don’t have any signed confessions I can hand to you.”

“But you do have a damned good guess.”

“So do you.”

“Help me out. I just accused you.”

“Do the math,” she said softly. “Who knew about this girl? Besides, of course, herself and Richard?”

“Apparently only you and—”

Suddenly I was thrown back in time. Not too far back, only about five minutes. I leaned forward in the rocker again, this time I tipped my finger to point off into the distance.

She nodded. “I haven’t talked to Daniel about it. I refuse to. I want to know nothing. The whole damn thing simply makes me ill.”

I got to my feet. I snatched up my cane. “Ill? Well, maybe you should see a doctor, Mrs. Kingman. A person can get over ‘ill.’ The ‘whole damn thing’ made a young woman
dead
.”

She set her glass down on the coffee table. She was totally implacable. “You can’t see a doctor for that now, can you?”

I left the house without answering.

I
should have gone directly to the police station, handed the whole ugly mess over to Kruk and then just gone back to the merry work of draining blood from cadavers and sticking them into the ground. If it turned out that Daniel Kingman was responsible for the murder of Helen Waggoner, then Kruk’s warning to me had nearly come true. I did practically jump up and down waving my arms in the face of a killer. However, if Daniel Kingman killed Helen, he also had an accomplice, someone who was willing to drop off Helen’s body at Richard Kingman’s wake. I thought about this as Sam steered the hearse out of Homeland. If Kingman had an accomplice to drop off the body, it seemed to me a better than even chance that the spineless pediatrician had an accomplice to actually do the deed itself, to murder Helen Waggoner.

“The whole damn thing simply makes me ill.”

I had Sam make a left turn onto Charles Street.
I
was getting ill. If Daniel Kingman truly was the man in the middle here, what did it all mean? I gazed out the window watching the bare trees pass by. I dreaded taking this information to Vickie. What was I supposed to tell her? That her sister had been slaughtered by a peevish obstetrician as a final—and strictly symbolic—snub to a brother whose shadow he had never escaped? That was worth a death? My heart sank even further as I thought of Helen’s body out there on the front steps, out in the snow. What was Kingman thinking when he decided to have Helen’s body dumped off at his brother’s wake? Was this some sort of latent reflex, displaying the proud kill to his brother’s widow? I couldn’t decide if I was horrified or incensed. Both, I decided. That’s what was making
me
ill.

I didn’t go to the police station. I didn’t go to see Vickie and tell her what I had uncovered. I nearly went to see Julia, who has time-tested methods to make me drop out of the world for a few hours. But I didn’t go see Julia either. And I didn’t go to Bonnie. In fact, it seemed there were a lot of places I didn’t go. I didn’t even go to the Oyster, though my thirst was deep and profound. But the Oyster wouldn’t do either.

Sam turned onto Coldspring Lane and headed over to the expressway. We passed by Alonso’s. It was conceivable that Bonnie was in the bar this very minute, swapping shoptalk with her work chums. Or with Jay Adams. Despite a stoplight directly in front of the bar, Sam flipped on the high beams and the hearse slid right by without pausing.

Much like the last time I had been out there, Sinbad’s Cave was pretty much dead in the afternoon. The seedy lounge was for night crawlers. All of three people were at the bar when I went in, and not too many more were scattered at several tables on the floor. The bartender—Ed—recognized me as the guy who had given him forty dollars to cough up Tracy Atkins’s phone number.

“First one’s on the house,” he said to me, slapping down a napkin and a tumbler of Turkey. I wasn’t in the mood to play grateful. Fishing for a tip by giving away management’s booze is not exactly putting yourself out there. I downed the drink in two pulls.

“Now that we’ve gotten that one out of the way, let’s get a tab going.”

My leg ached. The doctor had told me to start off slowly and to keep it elevated as much as possible the first couple of days. I wasn’t doing a great job of following his instructions. I had been given some sort of pills to take if I found it difficult to sleep at night, or if the pain simply became too aggravating while I was awake. I wasn’t to drive tractors or operate any other heavy machinery if I took the pills during the day. I hadn’t taken any yet. I decided I would try the Wild Turkey cure first.

I didn’t want to think about Bonnie and Vickie. Or Vickie and Bonnie. Or any other combination of the two. Closer to the surface than I cared to concede floated the growing sense that my time with the lovely Miss Nash was drawing to a close, and that my time with Vickie Waggoner had already concluded. I knew I could be wrong. Or I could try to do something to alter it. But I could also simply be right, and maybe there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do.

I pulled my bottle of painkillers from my pocket, opened it and poured the pills onto the bar. I pulled out Helen Waggoner’s prescription bottle and emptied Bo’s collection of colored glass alongside the pills. I added my two photographs to the little altar, the one of Helen and Bo at the zoo—taken, I now assumed, by Richard Kingman—as well as the Kingman family ski-trip photo. I noted that Jeffrey had ditched the tortoiseshells by the time the family traipsed off to Vail or Telluride or wherever they had gone. He had the wire rims already. He looked much more like he did now than in that goofy high school picture.

A third drink came along. It left before long, and another was forced to take its place. There was no mirror behind the bar at Sinbad’s. That’s smart for a place like this. Fantasy and imagination are three quarters of sex. Especially sex with a stranger. Slap a mirror up there so that a guy can see how pathetic he looks picking up a woman who can barely conceal her true indifference and you’ll blow the whole game. It being the middle of the afternoon, I didn’t have that problem. Nobody was hanging on my arm or popping gum next to my ear. I was grateful there was no mirror simply because I didn’t want to see myself. I should have listened to Kruk. Finding Helen’s killer wasn’t making me feel good. Or whole. Or self-satisfied. Or powerful. Just the opposite. I see way too many dead people as it is in my line of work. But at least for the most part they die a better death than the one Helen Waggoner died. I suppose I should have been proud of myself for discovering the details of her murder. I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be the messenger of that kind of information. I had no choice now. The best I could do—short term—was to kill the messenger. Or more accurately, get him stink-ass drunk and put off the delivery a little longer. Smashed up leg, smashed up car, smashed up relationship … I was warming nicely to my pity party.
I
was smashed, or well on my way. Eyeing the electric piano in the corner, I swore to myself that if I were still on this barstool by the time Gary and Gloria came on to set the world on fire … well, I’d start ordering doubles simply to get it all over with. In fact, why wait? I beckoned Ed over to ask for another pair of nails in my coffin—ha, ha—but before I could ask he picked up one of the photographs from my little scrapbook.

“That’s Helen,” he said. I was gone enough at that point, it took me a moment to recall how it was that this guy would know who Helen was. Shit. That’s right. She worked here.
Here.
This was the last place where Helen saw people she knew who weren’t about to kill her. This guy, this bartender. Ed. Ed had been here that night. A thought (amazing) occurred to me.

“Ed. That night that Helen was killed.”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“Who took the phone call for her?”

“I did. Why?”

I took the picture from him. “What did the guy say? On the phone. The guy who called. For Helen.” It felt like climbing steps in lead boots just to get a question out.

Ed shrugged. “He asked for Helen. What? You think he said is Helen there, send her outside so I can shoot her?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Well, you know what champ? He didn’t.”

“Fuck, Ed, don’t bust my chops. I just asked you a question.” I guess the bartender saw his tip going down the tubes.

“Is that all?” he said.

Ed rubbed his pointy jaw. “I said she’s working. We don’t like these girls taking personal calls. This guy said it was about her kid.”

“About Bo?”

“Sure. So I called her over.”

“Did you happen to hear her end of the conversation?”

“Do you happen to think you’re being nosy enough?” I rode that one out. He went on. “I didn’t. She didn’t talk long anyway. She just slammed the phone down and said something about the kid being sick and out she went.”