Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (38 page)

It took much less than ten minutes. Ann Kingman came to the door only a few minutes after I pummeled the mallard.

“Sorry to disturb you so late,” I said.

“No you’re not.”

“Can I come in?”

She gave me a frank look. “Are you going to give me one good reason why I should? The last time you came in here you accused me of being a murderer.”

“That won’t happen again, I promise.”

She wasn’t convinced. “It’s late. Why don’t you—”

I slammed my hand against the door before she could shut it.

“It’s me or the police, Ann.”

“Don’t threaten me, young man.”

“Look, I’m about to collapse, okay?” I indicated my bum leg. “I wouldn’t be in this condition if it weren’t for your husband.”

Despite herself, she smiled, albeit grimly. “Wasn’t he a sweetheart?” She paused. “Oh what the hell.”

She pulled the door open wide. I waved off the cabby. He flashed his headlights and pulled away. I followed Mrs. Kingman into the house. She was wearing a quilted bathrobe and slippers. But she didn’t look like someone who had just been woken up.

“I’ve been up reading,” she said to me as if she had intercepted my thoughts.

“Anything good?”

She was leading me into the living room. She stopped, her hand on a wall switch, and gave me a sour look. “You’ve come all the way out here in the middle of the night to hear a book review?”

She hit the wall switch and a row of track lighting over the fireplace lit up. She turned a knob and dimmed the lights.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked, starting for the liquor cabinet. A mirthless chuckle followed. “We’ve already done this once today, haven’t we?”

“We have.” Just to break up the pattern, I stepped over to the couch and sat down there. “I’ll take a brandy if you have it,” I said. I wanted something abrasive yet warm. Come to think of it, I often want something abrasive yet warm.

“I do,” she said, and she pulled out a bottle and two small-globed glasses. “I’ll join you.” She poured out the drinks, brought mine over to me and retreated to the chair where I had sat earlier in the day. A day that was feeling to me about a week old at this point. I knew that when exhaustion finally hit me, it was going to hit hard. I could feel it beginning to creep up.

“Just to answer your question about the book I was reading, I can’t even tell you if it is any good. I’m just using it to try to put me to sleep. I haven’t slept well ever since Richard’s funeral.” She raised her glass in a toast. “I’m sure you understand.” We both took a sip of our brandies. Mine could have stood to be a tad rougher. Mrs. Kingman’s sent a flash of red across her face. She set the glass down on the table next to her and folded her hands on her lap.

“Daniel Kingman had nothing to do with Helen Waggoner’s murder,” I said.

“Daniel? Of course he didn’t.”

“You knew that already when I was here this morning, didn’t you?”

She dipped her chin, almost imperceptibly.

“But you let me think he was responsible.”

“If you recall, Mr. Sewell, you were pointing the finger at me and at Daniel. You don’t know me too well. So, perhaps I should tell you. I am an extremely precise person. I had nothing to do with the murder of that girl. That’s really all that I told you.”

“You implied that it was Daniel Kingman,” I said again.

“I don’t happen to know for a fact that Daniel isn’t responsible. Though I seriously doubt it. Daniel was very quick to run to me and warn me that Richard was fathering a child with this Helen woman and that I had better prepare myself for the likelihood that he was planning to leave me. But I never suspected Daniel of seeking such a nasty revenge. What would be the point, after all?”

“Exactly. Or should I say, precisely. What would be the point?”

I took another sip of my brandy. The fatigue that had been waiting in the wings all of this long, long day was indeed finally gearing up for its attack. I could feel the troops moving into place and taking up position.

“Let me ask you outright. Do you know who is responsible for the killing of Helen Waggoner?”

“Ultimately, Richard.”

“I don’t mean ultimately, and you know it.”

“You’re going to believe me if I answer?”

“Yes, I am. I’ve defended your credibility once already today.”

“How chivalrous. You don’t even know me.”

“I realize that. And you can lie through your teeth to me and make it sound legit. I have no doubt about that. But if I didn’t think I had at least a shot at hearing the truth from you I wouldn’t have come all the way out here, would I?”

“Is that supposed to guilt me into telling you the truth? I could cover your cab fare and tell you to get the hell out of my home immediately. We don’t have to be having this discussion.”

“You didn’t have to let me in in the first place.”

“True.”

“Besides, you can’t sleep anyway. Why not chew the fat with your friendly neighborhood undertaker for awhile?”

“Why not indeed.”

“So?”

Ann Kingman stood up from the chair and went over to a desk that stood in the corner. One of those antique desks whose angled front folds down to become the desktop. She brought the desktop into place and reached into a small cabinet drawer. I couldn’t tell what she was fetching until she turned back around and returned to her chair and sat down. She set a small silver pistol on the table beside her, next to her brandy glass. She crossed her hands again onto her lap.

“So.”

Even if I had wanted to act quickly, I couldn’t have. The marshaled troops of fatigue had begun their march. Besides which, even at full speed the distance between the couch and the chair where Ann Kingman sat was too great. All I would have accomplished in lunging forward would be to give her a larger target. And the distance to the doorway was even greater. My back is large. Hard to miss at that range. The woman had me neatly pinned down. And we both knew it.

“That’s not the gun that was used to kill Helen Waggoner,” I said.

“No, it’s not. At least … to be precise, to the best of my knowledge it’s not.”

“Trust me. It isn’t.”

“You say that with some sense of authority, Mr. Sewell.”

“Helen Waggoner was killed by a professional. Or at the very least, a semiprofessional. I’m not very well versed in this, but I don’t think professionals use popguns like that.”

“You think this is a ‘popgun?’ I’ve fired this pistol, Mr. Sewell. There were a spate of break-ins several years ago, here and in Guilford. Richard bought this pistol for me. For my safety. He was, after all, out of the house quite a lot. I took lessons in how to shoot it.”

“You aim it and pull the trigger. Right?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“Are you expecting a break-in tonight, Mrs. Kingman?”

“Call me Ann.”

“Whatever you say, lady. You’re the one with the gun.”

“I’m not expecting a break-in. However, a man I barely know
has
showed up at my door in the middle of the night demanding to be let in.”

“You sound as if you’re practicing your lines.”

Her hand reached over to the table. She picked up her brandy glass. “I hope I’m not.”

“Look. Ann. This is all getting too arch for me. You’re not going to shoot me for no good reason, are you?”

“Now
you’re
the one being precise. No. I’m not going to shoot you for no good reason. All you have to do is convince me that I have no good reason, and that will be that.”

Several advancing snipers within me were squeezing off shots. The brandy had been a mistake. I felt as if my blood was being rapidly replaced with sludge. It might be hard to imagine a man yawning while a woman in the same room has a pistol sitting next to her. But I did.

“Who do
you
think killed that woman, Mr. Sewell?”

“A hired killer.”

“And who do you think hired him?”

“Michael Fenwick.”

“That’s what I think too.”

“And I think the same guy came around a few days later and killed Fenwick along with his wife, who had the great misfortune of being at his side at the time.”

The woman nodded. “But you think even more than that, don’t you?”

“Yes I do.” That’s when my increasingly sluggish brain finally guessed at the reason for Ann Kingman’s having introduced a pistol into our little talk.

“What is it that you think?” she asked.

“You’re a fiercely protective mother lion, aren’t you, Ann?”

“The mistake was mine. I should never have told Jeffrey about that girl. I mean, that she was pregnant. Or that Richard was going to leave me. That was my mistake.

“I never expected him to get so incensed. Yes, I
am
a fiercely protective mother lion, as you put it. And Jeffrey is a fiercely loyal son. Loyal to his mother anyway. Jeffrey has always been at war with his father. Richard could make himself very easy to hate. Trust me on that. Jeffrey was somewhat like his uncle in that regard. Except that Jeffrey has a lot more fire in him than Daniel. A lot more anger. I told him what Daniel had told me, and he went … well, berserk. I tried to rein him in but he was absolutely furious with his father. Jeffrey has known in the past about some of his father’s little affairs. But it was the idea that Richard would actually leave me this time, that he would do that to me, throw it in my face, make such a public mess. That’s what Jeffrey could not abide. I wouldn’t tell him the name of the woman. I wasn’t sure what he would do. But he got it out of his uncle easily enough. Jeffrey told me that he tracked the woman down and demanded that she abort that child and that she have nothing else whatever to do with his father. I gather she laughed in his face.”

“In fact, she slapped his face.”

Ann Kingman raised an eyebrow. “Is that so? Jeffrey didn’t tell me that.”

“Did he tell you that he planned to have her killed?” Ann said nothing. “I don’t know about you, but that seems to me to be an awfully drastic reaction to a little slap.”

“Please don’t be cute, Mr. Sewell.”

“So he did tell you.”

“I have had no discussion with my son on the matter.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“Frankly I don’t care what you believe. It happens to be the truth.”

“Tell me this much. When Helen appeared at your husband’s wake, did you know who she was?”

“Believe me, I was as shocked as anyone else when that happened. I didn’t know for a fact that this was the woman. I had never seen her. I had no idea what she looked like. But I did know her name: Helen. And there it was, on that damned little name tag of hers. It was disgusting. The whole damned thing is disgusting.”

“But, of course, Jeffrey had seen her. He had gone out to the place where she worked and tried to strong-arm her for you. Are you trying to say that you didn’t ask your son if this was the woman who your husband had been planning to leave you for?”

“I didn’t have to. One look at Jeffrey’s face and I knew.”

“But you didn’t
say
anything to him?”

“For one thing, Jeffrey wasn’t in the car with us coming home. He was following in his own car. I rode with Joan and the children. Lord …
that
one started to get hysterical. Joan. I thought I was going to have to smack her. Her
children
are in the car, for god’s sake, and she’s shrieking, ‘Who was that woman! What’s going on here?’ I think I told you, Joan was daddy’s little girl.”

“You did.”

“Yes. Well, she didn’t take too terribly kindly to this …
person
ruining her daddy’s wake. I finally had to yell at her to shut her up. I told her that this woman had nothing to do with us and that was the end of it.”

“She believed you?”

“She settled down. We agreed that the smart thing was to call our lawyer. Joan was concerned anyway when Michael hadn’t made an appearance at Richard’s wake. That surprised me as well. It turns out he was in some sort of accident on the way there. The roads were horrible, if you recall.”

“So you phoned him?”

“Joan did on her cell phone. Michael was at Mercy Hospital. He got to the house not long after we did. Jeffrey was a mess by then. Michael had us all gather here, in the living room. Minus Joan’s children, of course. He sat right where I’m sitting now. He said that the smartest and the safest thing to do at the moment was to remain completely silent on the matter of that woman. He made no implications. Michael was a smart young man. He simply said that we clearly had an unusual situation here, and for the time being, as our lawyer and a concerned family friend, he insisted that we not discuss the matter, not even amongst each other. On that point he was adamant. He reminded us that there was the likelihood of a trial somewhere down the road. He said it quite plainly. ‘You cannot testify to something that you did not hear.’ ”

“He was telling you that the persons responsible for Helen’s murder were right in this room.”

“Michael was setting the agenda. He implored us not to discuss the matter. And I took his counsel. As have the rest of my family. Believe that or not.”

I was shaking my head. “Ann … You’re asking me to believe that because your lawyer told you to stick a gag order on this thing, that you didn’t discuss it with your family?”

“I did discuss it with Daniel. Once. That’s true.”

“But not with
Jeffrey
? Not with your daughter?”

“Joan and I could not pass two words in a week and neither would be the sadder.”

“But Jeffrey, Ann. No disrespect here, but this guy’s a mama’s boy. Right?”

“I told Jeffrey that I was going to obey Michael’s request, and that I wanted him to do so as well.”

“And the obedient boy clammed up.”

“I would appreciate your not running down my son in my own house, Mr. Sewell.”

“But you suspected him of being involved in Helen’s murder. Come on now. This is ridiculous.”

“Mr. Sewell.” She sighed. “Of course I did. It took me a little while to put it together that Jeffrey must have requested Michael’s help in finding someone who would … do that. It wasn’t until Michael was killed that I figured that part out. I was in a bit of a daze right after the funeral.” She picked up her brandy glass. “I deliberately put myself in one, if you must know. It’s been easier that way.”