Murder in the Hearse Degree (31 page)

There was a particular day camper named Henry Aranow who stood out for his unique architectural madness. Henry was a chubby and mildly demonic boy who responded to the mass incarceration by rejecting the conventional glued-together Popsicle-stick structures of his peers for more elaborate creations. Henry had vision. His motif was the splinter, the shard, the remnant. Disorder was order in Henry’s world, and in his Popsicle-stick creations this proclivity was manifested by constructions that looked by all rights as if they should crumble immediately, as if in fact they had no physical logic in even standing in the first place. Henry gleefully split his wooden sticks into pieces before even beginning to build his creations; he then worked wonders with glue—lots of glue—to bring forth peculiar little houses and towers and bridges that for all of their weird jutting angles and shredded woodlike appearance were nonetheless structurally sound. While the rest of us were toiling away at right angles and level planes, Henry was out there following his oddly angled Muse. The boy had vision; that was all there was to it.

Another thing about Henry, he was the very first skirt chaser I’d ever met. Certainly the youngest.

I prattle on about all of this by means of explanation as to why it was that when Pete and I pulled into the gravel parking area of the restaurant to which Libby had directed us, my jaw practically dropped into my lap. The building was a Henry Aranow creation. And I don’t mean that figuratively. It
was
a Henry Aranow creation. Henry owned the place, and quite clearly had had a hand as well in its construction . . . or deconstruction, if you prefer.

 

 

“Good Christ,” Pete muttered.

It was all there, just like the Popsicle-stick monstrosities that little Henry used to build as a tot. The place was constructed of unpainted wood, weathered gray and grainy, and it loomed out over a narrow tributary of the Severn River as if it was ready to tumble right in. I was reminded a little of Libby and Mike’s house in that the restaurant itself—a good three-quarters of it—was an open deck. This was the part that actually loomed over the water. The deck was of a vastly irregular shape, as if a blind man had taken a jigsaw to an already amorphous rectangle. But it was the ragged collection of splintery-looking pieces serving to support the thing that really showed the Aranow touch. The large deck was essentially on stilts that went down into the water. The stilts looked like toothpicks. Or long skinny legs.

Henry was no longer the chubby sort but had blossomed into a downright large man with a barrel chest, a big broad face and a proud golden mustache the size of a small propeller. He had an easygoing look to him. His robust smile revealed a gold cap on one of the top teeth and his small blue eyes sparkled with mirth. He was wearing a tattered Greek fisherman’s cap, dirty khakis and a loud Hawaiian shirt.

“This is a hell of a crab shack you’ve got here, Henry,” I said to him after Pete and I had been shown to our seats. Henry had given us a table along the railing, one of the zigzag offshoots seemingly held in the air by nothing other than a prearrangement with gravity. Pete was looking warily over the edge at the river below. His grip on the metal arms of his chair seemed especially secure.

“I think big,” Henry said, rapping his ham hands against his belly for emphasis. He tugged on his cap. “This ‘cap’n’ stuff is pure horse, you know. It’s a good look though. Truth is I’m a landlubber. Can’t stand the water.”

Henry’s wife, Joan, was our waitress. Henry directed Joan to load us up with a couple of platters of oysters and a pitcher of beer. I asked after the crab cakes and Henry told me they were as big as my fist and no filler.

“Bring ’em on, Cap’n.”

It being a Saturday, the joint was jumping. And so was Joan. She was working the tables with a demon energy. When she delivered our pitcher of beer it sloshed over the rim and onto a few of our oysters.

“Sorry. I’ll get you some more.” She grabbed up the several splashed oysters, shoving them into her apron pocket, and hurried off.

“And so laid back,” I said, forking a little snot of oyster into my dish of cocktail sauce. Henry had moved on to work his cap’n shtick on his other customers and Pete and I decided to wait until after our lunch before waving him back over. As we finished up our mollusks, I caught Henry’s eye across the deck. His gold tooth glistened and he made his way back over to our table.

“How was everything?” he asked.

I told him it was supreme. “Can you spare a couple minutes, Henry?” I asked. “We wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“Questions? Sure. What’s up?”

“It’s about one of your employees,” I said.

“Pull up a chair,” Pete said.

Henry sat down between us. “I hope it’s not Joan. I’ve told her she works too fast. It can get the customer jumpy.”

“It’s not Joan,” I said.

Joan was flying by just then at supersonic speed. She banked hard left and pulled up at our table with a nearly audible squeak of her rubber shoes.

“Is everything all right? Anything wrong?”

“Everything’s fine, Joan,” Henry said soothingly. “How about some apple pie for my friends?”

“Pie.” As if she had uttered an incantation, Joan vanished.

Henry smoothed his walrus mustache. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

“We want to ask you about Cindy Lehigh,” I said.

Henry’s mustache drooped, along with the rest of his face.

“That one. What about her?”

“Is she working here today, Mr. Aranow?” Pete asked.

“Henry.”

“Is she here?”

Henry wagged his head. “Not today and not any other day either. Not anymore she isn’t. And this time I don’t care if she comes crawling back on all fours. Fool me twice, but that’s it.”

Pete and I swapped a glance.

“Do you mind explaining that, Henry?” I asked.

“What’s to explain? Cindy worked for me early in the year. Right before the summer hit she went and quit on me. Crappy timing for me, but that’s how the business goes. She told me she got some other job. She wanted her nights free. So she left.”

“She got a job as a nanny,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s what I heard. Something like that.”

“But she came back recently, isn’t that right?” I asked.

“About a month or so ago, yeah. I guess I’m a pushover. I let her talk me into taking her back on.”

“It didn’t work out?” Pete asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s right.”

“Did she quit again or did you fire her?”

Henry showed us his gold tooth. “Afraid I didn’t get the pleasure. I should have while I had the chance.”

“So then she quit.”

“I suppose you could call it that. The girl didn’t stand on ceremony. What happened is that she just stopped showing up for work one day. I guess you could call that quitting.”

“She didn’t give you a reason?” I asked.

“You mean show common courtesy? Let me take a stab here. You two have never had dealings with the girl. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” I said. “We never had the pleasure.”

“Well, it’s not as much of a pleasure as it seems, trust me. She’s a looker, I’ll give her that. And I guess that carries more weight than it ought to, but there it is.”

“Is that why you hired her back?” Pete asked. “Because she’s a looker?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Was Cindy at least a decent waitress?” Pete asked.

Joan materialized just then. She heard Pete’s question. She skidded a pair of plates in front of Pete and myself—two large slices of apple pie—then dropped a pair of forks noisily onto the table. She shot a look at Henry.

“Thank you, Joan,” Henry said.

She vaporized.

I picked up my fork and took two stabs. One of them was into my pie. “Let me guess. Those two didn’t get on, did they?”

Henry nodded slowly. “You could say that. You can see, Joannie works like the devil. Our little Cindy had . . . well, she had a different style. You’d look up and see her gabbing with customers over here while customers over there are waiting for service. She wasn’t always real punctual either. And she got in a couple of fights with the cooks.”

“Sounds like a model employee,” Pete noted.

Henry grunted. “Model for disaster.”

“So then why did you hire her back?” Pete asked again.

“We were short,” Henry said. “One of my girls had just quit and I happened to run into Cindy in town. She asked if we needed help out here. At least she was already trained. She could hit the ground running.”

“I wouldn’t think it would be that hard to locate good waitresses,” Pete said.

“You’re right. I guess I made a mistake. And I guess I paid for it. The day after she stopped showing up we realized we were short in the till.”

“She stole money from you?”

“Can’t prove it, of course. But I’d say it fits the profile. The girl’s a little goldbricker.”

“We’re trying to locate her, Henry,” I said. “Any idea how we can get ahold of her?”

Henry stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “I can’t help you there. All I know is that she was living with a friend of hers somewhere in town.”

“In Annapolis?”

“Yes. But I don’t have an address.”

“What about Joan?” Pete asked. “Maybe your wife knows how we can get ahold of Cindy.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Wouldn’t hurt to ask though.” Pete started to rise from his chair. Henry placed a hand on his arm.

“Whoa. Slow down there.”

Pete glanced over at me, then back at Henry. “Problem there, Cap’n? I just want to ask your wife a question.”

“I told you, she doesn’t know anything.” Joan was dumping a tray of crabs onto a table across the deck from us. Her eyes weren’t on the job. They were on her husband. “Look, I’d as soon you not bring Cindy up to Joan, okay?”

Pete smiled ruefully as he pushed his chair back. “I’ll be right back.” He got up and headed across the deck.

“That was the precisely wrong thing to say,” I said to Henry. Henry let out a low groan. “What’s the problem, Henry?” I asked.

“Aw, shit, Hitch, the girl was a looker, what can I say? She’s a little manipulator is what she is.”

“Did Cindy lure you over to the Dark Side, Henry?” I asked.

“Easy for you to make a joke.” Across the deck, Pete and Joan were chattering away. Henry tugged on his mustache again. “Good thing I’ve got a comfortable couch in my office.”

“Did Cindy really walk, Henry, or did your wife fire her?”

“No. She vanished, that’s the truth.”

Pete was headed back to our table.

“Nothing personal, Hitch, but I wish you and your friend just hadn’t showed up. I’ve been cooling Joan off for a month now.”

“She seems like a nice lady,” I said.

“She is. I’m just a shit.”

Pete arrived at the table.

“Let’s go.”

He pulled some bills from his wallet and dropped them onto the table.

“No, no,” Henry said. “It’s on the house.”

“It’s for our waitress.”

Henry looked at the bills. “That’s a big tip.”

Pete smiled. “Tit for tat.”

 

Joan had given Pete the name of a bar where she thought we might have some luck locating Cindy. The Swan. She told him that Cindy frequented the Swan.

“Sounds like Cap’n Henry frequented the Swan, too,” Pete said as we made our way into town. He stared glumly out the window. A minute later he muttered, “I guess I shouldn’t talk.”

The Swan was located a few blocks west of the statehouse, not terribly far from the home of Kathy Pierce, Sophie’s employer for a year. It was a wood-sided colonial affair painted black with white trim. The sign outside heralded local brews. There was outdoor seating. The several people taking in the late-afternoon sun were only a couple of decades past diapers.

“This is going to be your crowd,” Pete said to me. “An old fart like me goes in there and starts asking questions it’s going to look strange. This one’s all yours, cowboy.”

It seemed to me that it was too early to be nosing around the bar. Pete agreed.

“You want to wait until the place fills up a little. Right now it’s just the bartender and a couple of customers. That’s no good.”

We decided to give it a few hours.

“Do you want to go see what Stella Gibbons is up to?” I asked. If Pete thought this was funny he did a bang-up job hiding it. We parked the car near the bar and walked the several blocks back up toward the George Washington Inn.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” I said as we rounded the corner by the statehouse. “Of all the gin joints in all the cities in the world, what are the odds that we’d each have a girl working in the same damn place?”

Pete stopped to pull out a cigarette. He lit it, holding the lit match a few seconds and giving me a hard look.

“For one thing,” he said, “this isn’t a gin joint.”

“I know that. I just never pass up a chance to quote Bogie.”

“For another thing, this isn’t irony. People are always using the word ‘irony’ the wrong way.”

“I know,” I said. “Isn’t that ironic?” Munger looked like he wanted to put his cigarette out on my cerebral cortex. “And another thing?” I asked.

Pete pawed the air. “Forget it.”

“No. Go on. There’s something else.”

Pete gazed up at the dome of the statehouse—or possibly right through it, on out into deep deep space. Something was clearly on his mind. He finally brought his gaze back down and put it on me.

“I was never like you are,” he said.

“I’m sure you weren’t,” I responded. “But what exactly does that mean?”

“I mean about women, okay? I got married straight out of college. That’s where I met Susan. Sophomore year we started dating and then when we graduated we got married right off the bat and started a family. Of course we had our rough patches. That’s inevitable. When I quit being a lawyer, all the crap around that. That was rough. That was very rough for both of us. We had some real problems back around then.”