Murder in the Hearse Degree (6 page)

“Yes,” she said. She slipped the photograph into her purse.

Eva and Murray continued poking around the small room for a few more minutes. Libby stood by silently, her hands clasped behind her. She looked nearly as forlorn as Eva. Eva slid open the closet door and stood looking at her daughter’s clothes on hangers. She pulled one dress out and held it up. Her eyes welled with tears. She gazed at it then wordlessly put it back into the closet.

“I’ve got some extra suitcases if you’d like to pack any of this up,” Libby offered.

Eva put her hands on her hips and surveyed the room. “No. Thank you. What’s the point? What am I going to do with it all?”

Potts was stirring some papers on the room’s small desk, over by the window. “What’s this crap?”

Eva and I stepped over. Potts was holding a pamphlet of some sort. A brochure. On the front was a clean-cut all-American family, mom, dad, son, daughter. The daughter was holding a cat in her lap. A golden retriever was parked nearby. “The ARK” was printed up at the top of the pamphlet in bold black letters, and in smaller text beneath it, “The Alliance for Reason and Kindness.” Potts grabbed up a handful of pamphlets. Each had the same pose as on the first one, but the races and ethnicities were different. An Asian family, a Hispanic family, a black family. Only the dog and the cat remained the same. I took a pamphlet and glanced through it. The pamphlet was a fairly straightforward tract promoting brotherhood, motherhood, core family values and regular church attendance. From the bright chipper smiles on the front, I suspected brushing and flossing were implied in there somewhere.

“What’s up with this?” Potts asked. “Was Sophie some kind of Jesus freak?”

“You will not call Sophie names please?” Eva took one of the pamphlets and scanned it. She looked over at Libby. “My daughter was going to church, yes?”

“She did,” Libby answered. “She went to church every Sunday.”

“Do you know this? The A-R-K?” She spelled it out.

“It sounds familiar,” Libby said. “The ARK. It’s one of those religious coalition groups, isn’t it?”

Eva had moved over to the dresser. There was a small green jewelry box. She opened it and began poking through.

“Maybe I will take these,” she said sadly, pulling out several sets of earrings and a few bracelets. As I watched, the woman went pale. She turned slowly to Libby. She was mordant.

“What’s this?” She was holding up a wedding band. Her voice wavered. “Murray?”

Potts went over to her and took the ring from her.

“Jesus Christ.”

Eva’s shoulders sagged. Gravity took hold of her face as well. “I don’t understand. I want to leave. Murray, I just want to go.”

Libby stepped over to the couple. “Can I see that?”

She took the wedding band from Potts and eyeballed it, then gave it back to Eva, who dropped it back into the jewelry box and flipped the lid closed. She glanced once more around the small room.

“My baby girl . . .”

She left the room. Potts started to say something, then thought better of it. He followed after his wife. I turned to Libby. The blood was gone from her face.

“The ring, Hitch. That wedding ring.”

“What about it?”

It took her a moment to focus on my face.

“It’s Mike’s.”

 

 

I had a customer
waiting for me when I got back. His name was Oliver Engelhart. Mr. Engelhart had run one of the antique shops on what is called Antique Row over on Howard Street. In its long-ago heyday, Howard Street was one of Baltimore’s bustling boulevards, south Howard featuring some of the city’s premiere theaters and vaudeville houses. Charm City’s Broadway. I’m all of thirty-four last time I checked, so I can’t exactly start waxing nostalgic about all this, but I’ve seen glossy black-and-white pictures and it looked awfully good to me. Fancy sedans. Furs. Top hats. Excitable marquee lights. By the time I had reached the age of sentience all of that was long long gone, of course, and the only big thing remaining on Howard Street was the large Hutzler Brothers Department Store building, scattered wig shops, and anemic-looking shoe stores. The city has now banned a portion of Howard Street to all traffic except for buses and the light rail. It’s a pedestrian street now, though my imagination fails to come up with too many reasons why anyone would want to be strolling around the old boulevard anymore. That is, except for north Howard Street and its Antique Row. Which is where Mr. Engelhart worked. Which is where my digression began.

A fellow named Clifford was responsible for making the arrangements. Clifford was a compact little man with a Steve McQueen haircut and hands as freckled as a leopard. Clifford wanted a viewing, and he wanted to know if he would be allowed to include in the viewing a few of Mr. Engelhart’s personal possessions.

“Oliver had a grandeur. I don’t want him just . . .
lying
there in a casket,” Clifford said to me. “That really wasn’t Oliver.”

Well, I hope that really isn’t any of us, but of course I kept that observation to myself. I assured Clifford that he was free to bring along whatever knickknacks he wanted in order to personalize the event. It’s a long story that perhaps I’ll tell some other time, but we once had a live ostrich at a viewing, standing at the head of a casket. The Health Department had wanted us to put a muzzle on the bird, which can be known to take nasty bites out of people with lightning speed. Of course no one knew where to locate a muzzle that could be fitted for an ostrich, so we ended up tying its beak closed with a green satin ribbon. Some of our visitors complained about the ostrich, some complained about the ribbon. This is not a world in which one can expect to be able to please everyone.

Clifford left me with a black-and-white-checked worsted suit (“Oliver’s favorite”) and of course a photograph of Mr. Engelhart, along with an adjective to work with.

“Oliver was the most insouciant man you’ve ever met.”

As soon as Clifford left I popped downstairs and got to work on Mr. Engelhart. It wasn’t until I was halfway through that I remembered my promise to Darryl that he could help out with the wash-down. Oh well. So I had lied. Something told me that Darryl wouldn’t be too upset.

Mr. Engelhart couldn’t have been more cooperative. Just a delight to work with. After draining the man’s blood and replacing it with my own special blend of herbs and spices, I popped upstairs to consult the dictionary.

Well hell, you can’t get more blithely unconcerned than being dead.
Sewell and Son’s Parlor for the Newly Insouciant.
Works for me. I went back downstairs and wrestled Mr. Engelhart into the black-and-white-checked suit, then started in with the cotton balls and the face massage. Consulting Clifford’s photograph, I worked one of Oliver Engelhart’s eyebrows up into a quizzical arch (this wasn’t easy, but it’s why I get paid the big bucks), and then with my patented invisible Hitch stitch I closed his lips together in an expression that was probably more dour disregard than insouciance. But the cocked eyebrow counterbalanced sufficiently, I thought, and overall I’d say that the result was pretty damned insouciant. A little puff, a little powder, a stinkless spray to hold the hair in place, and the man was as ready as he would ever be.

 

Pete Munger was kneeling in the middle of the floor of Julia’s art gallery with pieces of wood scattered all around him. A couple of nails were poking out of his mouth. Tough guy. Chews nails. I picked up a hammer by the head, flipped it, caught it niftily by the handle, and started toward him.

“Here, I can take care of those.”

Pete spit the nails onto the floor. He intoned, “Step away from the carpenter.”

I surveyed Pete’s work. He was building a new sales counter for Julia. Julia had been seeing a guy lately she called Eric the Red, and a few days previous he had driven his motorcycle right through Julia’s sales counter around three in the morning. Julia had been riding on the back. What the two of them were doing driving a motorcycle around inside Julia’s gallery at three in the morning was something I was begging Julia not to tell me. At any rate, the counter was a goner and Pete had offered to build her a new one. From what I could see, Pete didn’t appear to be in a hurry.

“Remind me, are you building or destroying?”

Pete gave me the one-eyed glare. “Exactly. You’re looking at a goddamn metaphor is what you’re looking at.”

“It’s a sure thing I’m not looking at a spanking new sales counter.”

Banished from the fiefdom of her sales counter, Julia’s assistant, Chinese Sue, was cooling her heels on one of the large windowsills, taking in the sunshine like a lazy cat. She was reading
The Mill on the Floss
, large-print edition. The thing was about the size of a phone book. I called out to her, “Hey, Sue!” She looked over at me with her patented opaque stare and said nothing, though she did manage to make a large noise turning a page. I love that Chinese Sue. So bubbly. So engaging.

Pete was grumbling on the floor. “I can’t get my damn corners to fit.”

“Not to worry. You’re doing this for Julia,” I said. “Her corners never fit.”

My ex-wife’s lovely upside-down head popped down from the fireman’s pole in the ceiling. I stepped over to the pole and looked up.

“Hello, sugar beet,” I said. “Did you know you’ve got a man on his knees down here?”

Julia batted her upside-down cows. “Sounds lovely.”

Her head disappeared. A moment later she came down the pole in a languid spiral. Her big bare feet hit the ground and she gave me a smackeroo. Julia was wearing white bicycle pants with the words “Charm City” running up one leg, an oversized black T-shirt with a purple Ravens logo on it and an Orioles cap.

“What are you?” I asked. “The chamber of commerce?”

She performed a little spin, flipping the tail of her T-shirt as she tick-tocked her astounding tush. I was married to that tush for just over a year so I can handle it. I looked over at Pete. He didn’t seem to have suffered a coronary. Or if so, he wasn’t making a spectacle of it. Julia stepped over to where Pete was still kneeling. She stood in a wide-legged Jolly Green Giant stance.

“Interesting.”

“It’s a metaphor,” I explained.

Pete got up off the floor. Pete’s fifty-year-old body is the opposite of a rubber band. It was not a pretty ascension. Pete announced that he needed a drink.

“I’m game,” Julia said.

The three of us went next door to Bertha’s. A guy named Larry was working the bar. Larry didn’t like me. His mother had died several years back, leaving explicit instructions that she be cremated. When I had refused to let Larry talk me out of it Larry had been fit to spit. His anger with me was now a permanent addition to his craw.

Pete noted the waves of hostility that Larry hit me with as I ordered three beers. We took to our stools, Julia in the middle. She explained the story to Pete.

“Hitch cremated Larry’s mother against his wishes.”

Pete leaned forward on the bar to look at me. “You can be a real shit sometimes, can’t you?”

While we waited for our beers, Julia entertained us with a story of a trip she had taken the previous winter to Norway. Julia is a big hit with the Scandinavians. They snatch up her work like it’s chocolate. In fact, as often as they can, they snatch
her
up like she’s chocolate as well. She junkets there at least once a year for some serious adoration and snatching up. Her story involved a captain in the Norwegian Air Force, a very rare albino moose and very loud sex along the crest of a glacier “beneath the flickering green lick of the Northern Lights.” Julia muddied the details (precisely who—or what—was engaged in the high-volume carnality was never made clear), but she managed to make the story entertaining nonetheless.

Our beers came. Larry set mine down sharply.

I rolled my eyes. “Damn it, Larry, it’s what she
requested
.”

Julia chattered on a bit more about her Scandinavian junket until finally Pete landed his hand on top of hers and asked her to stop. Julia stuck her tongue out at him and picked up her glass. We fell silent for a bit. Halfway down our beers I asked Julia, “Do you remember Libby Parker?”

Julia rifled her mental Rolodex. “Libby Parker . . . Oh yes, of course I do. That’s the girl you scampered off with right after our divorce.”

“Hitch don’t scamper,” I reminded her. “Hitch lope. Hitch saunter. Hitch don’t scamper.”

“Hitch don’t talk too well either.”

“Neither.”

“Certainly I remember,” Julia said. “She dumped you and married someone else. As I recall you were simply more fun than the woman could handle. What about her?”

“She’s in Baltimore.”

“That’s just fascinating, Hitch. Wow wee, what a wonderful story.”

“Sarcasm causes wrinkles,” I said. “Makes your hair fall out.” Next to Julia, Pete grunted. I continued, “Libby has left her husband. For now anyway. She’s staying at a friend’s place in Bolton Hill.”

“And I take it you’ve seen her?”

I told her I had and I gave the two of them a rundown on my visit to Annapolis with Libby. Pete appeared to be only half listening. He seemed to be more interested in the play of molecules on the rim of his glass. But he looked up when I explained how Libby’s nanny had been fished out of the Severn River and was having the word “SUICIDE” stamped on her forehead.

“You sound like you’ve got a problem with that,” he said.

“Fact is, Pete, I do.” I explained how Eva Potts was convinced that her daughter wouldn’t do such a thing.