The Hearse You Came in On (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  “No. It’s men like Joel Hutchinson who ruin the party. I think the first deadly sin ought to be arrogance. You can trace all the others back to that.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Are you a beautiful man-hater?”

  Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. But at the same time, crimson rose to her cheeks.

  “Are you making a pass at me?”

  “I’m just a horny arrogant ape. Programmed to lie, cheat, etc., etc.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “And you didn’t answer mine.”

  “It’s a draw.”

  We clinked glasses. God, this was all getting too cute.

  Two surprises awaited me at the party. Surprise number one appeared some half hour or so after this little buzza-buzza about the transgressions and transparencies of all men. I was three bourbons in and only a few frilly snacks down, so the evening had begun to take on a warm fuzzy glow. The women were all growing prettier and the men were all becoming much less handsome and charming than myself.

  In walked a fellow about as handsome and charming as myself. I vaguely recognized him, the way you recognize a celebrity on the street simply as someone familiar, before actually making the ID. This guy was roughly my contemporary, maybe a few years younger. And about fifteen million dollars richer. He was a good-looking Joe with an easy smile. Of course, give me fifteen million dollars and I’ll bet my smile will be easy too. He was as dashing in his tux as James Bond himself. I muttered to Kate, “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera.” She gave me a sideways look like I was crazy.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  She answered, “Peter Morgan.”

  Of course. Peter Morgan. Of the Baltimore County Morgans. The racehorse Morgans. The new opera house Morgans. The railroad money Morgans. This town has Morgans coming out of its ears. Granddaddy Morgan had been the last of the family to have had to actually roll up his sleeves and squeeze money out of sweat. He had made his bundle in the early part of the century working on the railroads all the livelong day, and his success had left most of the subsequent Morgans happily strumming on the old million-dollar banjo ever since. However, I did recall hearing or reading somewhere that this particular Morgan, this dapper devil who had just come into the room, was one of the ones who still kept a hands-on involvement with the family business. While most of us run our little train sets around the Christmas tree, Peter Morgan ran his around the whole country. At least a goodly portion of it. Interstate transport of goods. It can bring in a few extra bucks. All this and good looks too. Gee whiz. Peter Morgan was a pretty high-profile man-about-town. Known to be something of a lady-killer, his privileged arm was custom-built for wrapping around beautiful women.

  And a particularly beautiful woman was wrapped around it this evening. Her dress was a form-fitting off-the-shoulder number that hugged her hourglass figure from her ample breasts to just below the knees, with a side split that offered a generous peekaboo of commendable thigh. The dress was an aquamarine color, with a print that featured large fishes and seahorses randomly aswim. Her hair was up in a bun and there was a silly tiara perched atop it, obviously glass and glue. Long shimmery earrings that must have set the gal back a good five and a half bucks dangled from her ears. And she was barefoot. I heard a guy make a crack about her as she and Peter Morgan swept into the room.

  “Looks like Peter’s got himself a free spirit weirdo.”

  I jabbed the guy gently in the ribs. “Careful there,” I said. “That’s my free spirit weirdo ex-wife you’re talking about.”

  Julia had come to the ball.

  The pair created a nice little stir. What percentage of the buzz came from the simple fact of Morgan being present and how much from the barefoot bohemian on his arm was difficult to tell. But the combination was killer. Money and art. There’s something undeniably lusty about it.

  Julia was just as surprised to see me there as I was to see her. She gave me the Mae West once-over.

  “Nice suit.”

  “So this is the man you’ve told me so little about.” She introduced me to Peter Morgan. “She’s been keeping you a secret,” I said to the millionaire.

  Julia gave a fake blush. “Well, you know, I don’t like to brag.” She leaned in to me and stage whispered for all to hear, “He’s loaded!”

  I shook hands with the loaded man. Solid grip. He looked me dead in the eye. Seemed friendly enough. I didn’t like him.

  “Nice to meet you, Hitchcock.”

  “Please,” I vamped, “call me Hitchcock.”

  Julia rolled her eyes. “Hitch and I were married briefly,” she offered. “It wreaked havoc on our friendship, so we hurried out of it.” She cocked her head and gave me her Audrey Hepburn smile. Everything but the batting lashes.

  “Thank you for sharing that lovely story.” I introduced Julia and Peter Morgan to Kate.

  “Like Zabriskie Point,” Peter Morgan observed.

  Julia’s eyes flashed. She was clearly having fun. “Oh, are you one of the Death Valley Zabriskies?”

  “Kraków,” Kate said in perfect deadpan. “By way of Hampden.” She turned to Morgan. “Blue blood. Blue collar. We’re quite a diverse little crowd, aren’t we?”

  Morgan actually blushed at this. I guessed it was a little sore spot, his being filthy rich and socially superior. Who would have guessed?

  “Where are your shoes, Julia?” I pointed at her toes. “You have no idea when they last cleaned this floor.”

  Morgan answered for her. “They’re out in the car.”

  “You should see this car, Hitch,” Julia said. “It’s the size of a small country.” She touched her fingers to her tiara. “You like?”

  “Nice. You’ve got a whole Cinderella-at-the-ball motif going on here. Except you’ve lost both your slippers.”

  “Funny. Isn’t this a great dress? I found it in that vintage flophouse on Aliceianna Street and I fell in love with it.”

  “I think it’s pretty,” Kate offered. Julia smiled at this.

  “Thank you. Yours too.”

  Kate shrugged. “Thank you.”

  I didn’t want to be left out of this, so I said to Morgan, “Hey, you look swell too.”

  Morgan gave me sort of a sideways snicker. He took hold of Julia’s arm.

  “It was nice to meet you both,” he said. “We’re going to circulate.”

  “Mill,” Julia corrected, mugging a big face. She couldn’t resist a thoroughly silly over-the-shoulder wave as Morgan tugged her away. A seahorse wiggled on my ex-wife’s fanny as she sashayed off. Alan Stuart had spotted them and was making his way over.

  “Would you mind if we left now?” Kate said. “I’m looking at those railings up there and beginning to imagine throwing people off of them.” Kate gave me a terse look. “That’s the sign of a girl no longer having a good time, don’t you think?”

  As we started for the door, surprise number two made her appearance. She came into the room and made her way directly over to Alan Stuart and was immediately drawn under his arm as he kissed the offered cheek. She was blonde, an extremely pretty blonde woman. Former debutante. Perfect teeth. Perfect poise.

  “She looks familiar,” I observed.

  “That’s Alan’s wife. She’s another Morgan,” Kate said. “Amanda Morgan. Amanda Morgan Stuart. She’s Peter Morgan’s twin sister.”

  “Small world.”

  Amanda Stuart was performing with all of the grace and charm to be expected of her in her role as the wanna-be next first lady of the State of Maryland.

  “She doesn’t look like her brother,” I remarked. “Except maybe in the teeth.”

  “Boy/girl twins aren’t identical.”

  “She does look familiar though,” I said for the second time. I was certain now that I had seen her before, but I just couldn’t place it.

  “Well, she looks a little like Grace Kelly, doesn’t she? Maybe that’s it.”

  Amanda Stuart was laughing at so
mething that her husband had just said. Even across the room I could hear the laugh, like the tinkle of shattering crystal.

  That was it exactly. Grace Kelly. Crossing in front of me and disappearing into the Baltimore Country Club’s mansion. A cool sliver of ice on a warm day. One half of a recent doubles pair.

  Not the half so recently stabbed to death.

  CHAPTER 12

  Kate Zabriskie decided to become a cop on an evening in July when she was eight years old. It was one of Baltimore’s typically miserable Julys, a choking humidity, thick and doughy from the very moment you fall out of bed in the morning until you finally collapse back into it at night.

  The houses in Hampden sit pretty close to one another, so it could have been any one of several neighbors who called the police to complain about the racket next door. Len Zabriskie’s naturally short temper was popping off like Chinese firecrackers in the hopeless July heat. Kate would not be able to recall with any true accuracy what flashpoint events of that particular evening set her father off. Len Zabriskie was apparently a simple man, about as complex as a square box. There didn’t require any intricate pathway from cause to effect. Born stupid and raised dull, he maintained a fairly primal approach to life and especially to life’s obstacles and irritations. Translation: He beat the living crap out of his wife and daughter if they so much as sneezed funny.

  Kate didn’t entertain me with a wealth of details, so I won’t either. When the police came into the little house this particular July evening—not their first visit—Kate’s mother was unconscious on the floor, a tiny red river making its way from the nasty cut on her head to a newly forming pool on the carpet. Len Zabriskie was sitting on a chair in the little linoleum kitchen, crying his eyes out and refusing to give up to the police the dark-haired eight-year-old daughter he was bear-hugging so hard she could barely breathe.

  “That was his version of being tender,” Kate said ruefully. “Hugging me so tight that he literally cracked one of my ribs. I heard it pop. So did he. It only made him squeeze me tighter.”

  Len Zabriskie had no intention of releasing his daughter as he sat there blubbering and babbling. Kate implored him to let her go, and she implored the two police officers to help her. But it was when they grabbed at the big man’s arms that he had crushed his daughter tighter and cracked her tiny rib. So it was a standoff. The older of the two cops went back into the front room to tend to Kate’s mother, and the younger cop pulled up a chair—setting it some five feet away from Len Zabriskie—and began to taunt him. In a calm, steady monotone the young police officer called Len Zabriskie every name in the book, as if he were reading from a list of one thousand insults. He held a steady cadence as he pounded away against the man’s character, race, nationality, sexual proclivities, the whole seven, eight and nine yards. Whether it was in the relentless hammering itself or whether the young man finally hit upon a specific insult that inflamed Len Zabriskie to the erupting point, Kate honestly doesn’t know. What she does know is that suddenly she was being dumped on the floor and her father was all over the young cop, one hand on his throat, the other slamming into his face. “Run!” the officer managed to gurgle, but Kate had remained right where she had been dropped, transfixed and horrified that the stranger coming in off the street had offered himself up as red meat to her rabid-dog father.

  Len Zabriskie put a pretty good beating on the young policeman before the cop’s partner came rushing in and handled the big man with his billy club. A little more bad dancing among the three of them and Len Zabriskie was finally facedown on the floor, his hands cuffed behind his back. The young cop’s face was already swelling up. His mouth had filled with blood. With a magician’s move, he reached into his mouth and came out with a large shiny tooth, which he held up for the startled Kate to see. “What do you think this will fetch from the tooth fairy?” he asked her, giving up a great big bloody smile. Kate sprang to her feet, leaped over her father lying there on the floor and, ignoring her own cracked rib, threw herself into a hug with the young hero.

  And that’s one of the ways that cops are born.

  Kate told me her story at the Screaming Oyster. After leaving the Alan Stuart love fest at the Peabody Library, I had confronted her on the front steps.

  “Something is not kosher in Pickleville. Are you going to explain what’s been going on here or am I going to have to beat it out of you.”

  Bad choice of words, I know. But I didn’t know it then. Kate had followed me in her car down to the Screaming Oyster.

  The Oyster was awash with the regular crowd. Tony Marino was keeping his stool at the end of the bar from floating away. Edie Velvet was parked beneath the hanging dinghy. Sally and Frank were fricking and fracking behind the bar. The TV was on, the jukebox was playing, the pinball machine by the door was ringing and clicking like a spastic robot. Bookstore Bill and Al the video guy—two more S.O.S. regulars—were at their usual table, arguing as usual. The day these two stop disagreeing on everything is to be Earth’s final day, I’m convinced. Having grabbed a beer and a lemonade, I had steered Kate over to a table in the rear of the bar. Once we sat down, the noise cloud remained just above our heads, allowing us to have our little chat without resorting to too much yelling.

  Kate had to work at not letting her story catch in her throat. I suspected it wasn’t a tale that she spun on a regular basis. Her voice was low and largely without inflection as she described the abrupt and violent ways of her father. When she got to the part about little Kate leaping over her father to hug her hero, the moment when she decided in that place beneath conscious knowing that she was going to do this same sort of work when she grew up, Kate leaned back in her chair and ran her hand through her hair. She stubbed out her umpteenth cigarette and pushed the overflowing glass ashtray away from her.

  “I’m going to quit one day,” she said.

  “If you don’t get them, they’ll get you.”

  Kate frowned. “I’m not talking about smoking. I’m talking about quitting my job.”

  “Your job? You’d give up being a cop?”

  “I’ve lost my edge. I became a cop because a cop rescued me from my father. It was such a … I don’t know, such a noble thing to do. ‘Don’t hit her, hit me.’ That’s how he handled it. God, what a hero, you know what I mean? And I thought, this is what the world needs, more people like that. More people who will stick out their own necks for others. That’s nuts, isn’t it.”

  “What’s nuts about it?”

  “Wanting to be someone who volunteers to take somebody else’s punches? You don’t think that’s a little misguided?”

  “It’s very Christ-like,” I noted.

  “I’m Jewish.”

  “So was he.”

  She pulled out another cigarette. “You want to hear some more stories?”

  “Do you know any bedtime stories?”

  She lit her cigarette and let the match drop to the floor. She blew her smoke just over my head. “Only if you want bad dreams.”

  When Kate Zabriskie met Charley Russell he was already a detective. Kate was still a uniformed police officer.

  “I was a patrol car cop. A glorified traffic director. I handed out parking tickets and speeding tickets, I told the frat boys at Johns Hopkins to turn their stereos down. In between all that excitement I also handled my share of bad guys. Mainly muggers and petty thieves. The occasional murderer. I ordered men twice my size to put their hands on the hood and spread ‘em.” She paused and looked over at me. “No wisecracks?”

  I shrugged. Too easy. She went on. She told me that she made her arrests, offered her testimony in court, helped to add a layer or two of scum to that which was already festering there behind bars.

  She also got to realize her dream. She got to barge into houses and apartments in the greater Baltimore metropolitan area and play the hero for women and children whose husbands and daddies were beating up on them.

  “It felt great at first,” she told me. “All noble and ri
ghteous and powerful.”

  But as the domestic disturbance calls continued, became in fact all too frequent, Kate realized that for all of her intervening there was always going to be another brute across town somewhere harassing his supposed loved ones. She was a blue Band-Aid at best. She tried to remind herself that this was a job that she had to take one day at a time. “Step between just one ballistic jerk and his human punching bag and you’ve done a good thing. I knew that.” She knew that the young cop who had poked his chair into her father’s cage and drawn his wrath had done a good thing, a hell of a good thing. He might even have saved her life. And yet Kate found herself growing more and more despondent.

  “I didn’t want to be the cavalry anymore. Coming to the rescue was fine, but it was too little too late. Mopup work. I would see the expressions on the faces of those women and children and it was always the same expression. It was gratitude, sure. But it was mainly this scared, shell-shocked look that said, ‘Where the hell have you been all this time?’ It was ‘Thanks, but the damage has been done.’ And I understood that. I’d cuff these bastards and I’d wish that somehow I could have done this earlier too, yesterday or a year ago, before the trouble even got started. Before the hitting. Or worse.”

  Kate finished off her lemonade and slid the glass angrily across the table. “We can’t arrest men who badger or belittle their wives or their girlfriends. That’s the problem. That’s where I wanted to stop it. Not after the bruises started to rise. Somehow I’d like to have been able to spot the guys on the street right before they even met their future wives and girlfriends. I wanted to be able to stick my pistol into their face and tell them not to even think about it, buster. It’s absurd, I know. But I got real tired of climbing in at the tail end of the problem. It wasn’t enough for me.

  “Then I met Charley and we started dating. He was a detective. He had started off as a patrolman, like me, then worked his way up. And I’d listen to what he was doing and it sounded a lot better than what I was doing. Detectives get to identify a problem and go after it closer to the source. They don’t bust a kid for smoking dope on the corner. They seize shipments at the docks and drag off Mr. Big in cuffs. They get to come into the station and throw the big fish down onto the floor. The stuff you get trophies for. So I decided to become a detective. Of course, it had no real connection with any new ability to head off a wife beater at the pass, or a child abuser. But it just seemed more rewarding overall, trying to root out the nest itself, whatever it was, instead of just slamming the vipers with my club one at a time.”