by Tim Cockey
A few tables away, a couple of guys and a girl got up and started playing darts. Kids from the suburbs. Kate glanced over at them, then continued.
“I worked overtime. I stuck my nose into other people’s investigations. I made myself available for stakeouts and as backup. In departmental lingo, I kissed the brass butt. That’s how you climb the ladder. And making detective is definitely climbing a ladder.”
So Kate climbed. She knew it would be a matter of years, but she was okay with that. She and Charley moved in together. “About this same time last year,” she said. “May. We got married in late summer.
“We had to hold off on the honeymoon. Charley had just been assigned a case. An industrial waste dumping scam. Bogs for bucks, he called it. He figured it would take several months. But we made our plans. Mexico. It’s cheap there and we just wanted to go to a beach someplace and flop down on the sand. We got brochures and looked at them a couple of times a week.
“It was about a month or so after we got married that Charley had to take the case undercover. He insisted on not giving me too many details about what he was up to. That’s a smart professional choice when you’ve got two cops who are sharing the same home. The department encourages that sort of demarcation among its married couples. All I really knew was that basically Charley had to pose as a laborer. The work really knocked him out at first. He’d come home completely beat. He assured me that what he was doing wasn’t dangerous. I knew better than to believe him. Still, he said he had complete control over the situation.”
Kate’s eyes were brimming with tears. They came on without warning. She seemed a little surprised herself, and bit down on her lip and looked away. I started to speak, but she held up her hand.
“I was called in for backup one night, over in Sparrows Point. It was a stakeout at a warehouse and it was going all wrong. Two detectives were pinned down. My partner and I hustled over there. You know my partner. Kruk.”
“The golden-haired boy? You were partners?”
“Briefly. Anyway, it was all screwed up. One of the detectives—a guy named Connolly—had been hit in the leg. When Kruk and I got there, Connolly had just gotten outside the warehouse. He was okay. Kruk got to work putting a tourniquet on his leg. I drew my gun and went in. I found Lou, that’s the other detective. Lou signaled me down. There was a guy up on a walkway, about thirty feet overhead. He had a barrel or something he was hiding behind. Lou couldn’t get a clear shot on him. Basically it was a game of chicken.”
The dart players started cheering on each shot. Kate locked onto the action as she continued. Her head didn’t move, but her eyes followed each dart as it hit the cork target.
“All of a sudden, about twenty feet away from me, someone stepped out of the shadows.”
“There were two men?”
“Yes. And this one had the drop on me. I saw his arm rising and I knew he had me. I swung around anyway. Suddenly I recognized his face. But before I could say anything … there was a shot. He dropped.”
Over by the dartboard a chant had started up. It was the girl’s turn. I leaned closer over the table so that I could hear the rest of Kate’s story.
“I spun around to see where the hell the shot had come from. Just as I did, Lou was squeezing off a shot at the guy up on the walkway. It was perfect. Nailed him.”
“Wait. I’m confused. This guy down on the ground, the one who was about to shoot you… who shot him?”
“Apparently the one on the walkway.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Weren’t they in on this together?”
“That’s what you’d figure, right? Though at the time I wasn’t really thinking straight.” Kate’s eyes followed one of the darts as it zoomed though the air. It veered left of the bull’s-eye, missed by a mile. “I was too busy screaming.”
“Screaming?”
“The guy on the ground. I was screaming for him to move.” Kate gave me a dark look over the table. “It was Charley. On undercover. It was my husband. I was screaming for him to move. So that he could show me that he wasn’t dead.”
A huge cheer went up from the dart players. Bull’s-eye. The girl leaped up and down like a game show winner. Kate glared over at the high fives, then she looked back at me. All signs of life had gone out of her eyes.
“I was wasting my breath.”
CHAPTER 13
One of our chief suppliers of coffins, based in Nebraska, was rolling out several new models. He had been trying to get me on the phone to make his pitch. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a hard sale. I’m no pine box purist, mind you, but I do happen to feel that if the basic realities of dying haven’t changed much over the course of the history of mankind, then the need to constantly upgrade the exigencies of burial is a little difficult to justify as being for anything other than a profit. The implication that we’ve been getting it wrong for over a thousand years now … well, that’s something I just find difficult to swallow. Give me a sturdy box and a soft pillow and let’s call it a deal.
I avoided the supplier’s calls all day.
That night I made my pitch to Gil Vance for a lectern. The idea struck me as I crossed the square on my way to the Gypsy Playhouse.
“The audience is a voyeur, Gil, am I right? They’re sitting out there, hidden in the dark, watching the goings on of this town, peeking in. Our town is in a goldfish bowl.”
Gil’s eyes went wide. Christ. He was seeing a literal goldfish bowl up onstage. I’d be giving my lines dressed in a Diver Dan getup.
“Okay. Gil, look. As it stands now you have the Stage Manager tramping around out there, unseen by the characters on the stage, but in full view and conversational mode with the members of the audience. But the Stage Manager literally moseying about on the fringes of the action like that… well, it sort of muddles things up, don’t you think?”
Gil was taking this all in with some very serious head nods. Which meant he had no idea in hell what I was saying. “How does it muddle things up?” he asked.
“The Stage Manager is … he’s in the way,” I declared. “He is standing in front of the action. Is he part of the play or is he part of the audience?”
“Both,” said Gil.
“Muddle,” said I.
“Hitch, why don’t you tell me what you’re saying,” Gil suggested.
I threw myself at his feet. “Give me a lectern, Gil. We’ve got a nice one at the funeral home that I can appropriate if you need it. Plant me off to the side. Let me read my lines as if I am giving a lecture. Or a sermon. Or… or like an anthropologist. Giving a slide show! That’s it. That’s what I’m saying, Gil. The Stage Manager is an anthropologist. He is reading from his field notes, delivering a lecture about the feeding and mating habits of the New England WASP, circa blah blah blah. It makes perfect sense.” I took a deep breath. “Give me a pith helmet.”
“You want a lectern and a pith helmet?”
“Yes! And a pointer! Why not? Put me in a tweed jacket and a bow tie like Indiana Jones’s daddy.”
Gil was shaking his head. “Tweed jacket doesn’t work with the pith helmet.”
“Forget the pith helmet.” I flipped the imaginary helmet out of the discussion with a flick of my wrist. “Professor Stage Manager. That’s the thing. We’ll stick me off in the corner, stage left—”
“I was thinking stage right—”
“Stage right is perfect! You’ve got the eye here, Gil. You’re the director. Maybe you’ll want to give me a pair of Teddy Roosevelt eyeglasses.” I was piling it on now. “I can take them on and off. On when I’m reading—”
“Reading?”
“From my field notes.”
“Right, right, the field notes.”
Gil was staring out into the darkness. The gears were turning. Bow ties and wire-rimmed glasses and pointers were all crunching under the gears and coming back out the other side, unscathed. I sat silently as Gil reinvented the wheel.
He mused, “Maybe we can even save t
he pith helmet, Hitch. Maybe each time you take off your glasses to watch the action, you could put on the pith helmet. You’re ‘back out in the field’ so to speak.”
I would look like today’s new idiot doing that, fumbling with glasses and pith helmets every twenty seconds. But what the hell did I care? I had scored my touchdown. I left Gil to savor his new vision and found Julia in the back row of the theater. She was as hung-over as I was buoyant.
“I’m a free man,” I announced as I slid into the seat next to her and threw my long legs over the seat in front, just as she was doing.
“Tell me you didn’t quit. I’ll murder you if you quit.”
“I’m no quitter Mrs. Sewell-no-more. I’m still in. But I don’t have to learn my lines. I’m going to read them, from a lectern.”
“You are going to read your goddamn lines?”
“Yes ma’am. It’s a concept.”
“Well son of a bitch. I want a concept like that.”
“Oh I don’t know, Jules. I kind of like the one you’re working on.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “Which one would that be?”
“The debauched, promiscuous, hungover little Emily.”
She placed her head in her hands. “Emily the town whore,” she moaned.
“We could replace your milk shakes with Harvey Wallbangers.”
“Misery loves company, Hitch. And you’re too damned giddy for me this morning. Go away.”
“I’m sorry, darling. I’ll stop crowing. It’s pretty unattractive, I know. So you drank too much free booze last night? Nice party, huh?”
“I can handle alcohol when I have a chance to sleep it off,” Julia said. She pivoted her head tenderly in my direction and gave me the best she could do of a smile. “But I was up all night. How about you, loverboy? None other than the infamous Lady X, eh? And a cop no less. Did she bring her handcuffs?”
“Afraid not.”
“That’s too bad. Did she tell you why she pretends to be dead women? Is it just something that she does for kicks?”
“We didn’t get that far.”
“No offense, Romeo, but it sounds like you didn’t get anywhere at all.”
“You, on the other hand, seem pretty cuddly with your millionaire,” I observed.
Julia ran a hand through her hair. “He wants me to marry him. He’s completely nuts about me.”
“Or maybe he’s just completely nuts.”
“You don’t think I’d make a good wife?”
“It’s the free spirit versus monogamy clash you’ve got to consider. Not to mention, whether or not you love him.”
“I have a great capacity for love.”
“Ergo the clash.”
Gil was calling his actors to the stage. Clap, clap, clap. Julia meandered down to the lip of the stage. Michael Goldfarb found his way over and plopped down next to her. The Valkyrie and the puppy dog.
Gil addressed his troupe. “People. We’re going to introduce a new concept to the production today. I want all of you—with the exception of Hitchcock—to start thinking of yourselves as participants in a live-action slide show. I want you to think of our set here as the projection screen, in … in an old boys’ boarding school lecture hall.” Man oh man, Gil moves fast. Julia looked back at me and silently mouthed, “What the fuck?” I’m sure that I looked like a tomato trying not to explode. I didn’t dare laugh out loud.
Gil was beaming. “This will be good,” he promised. “This will be very good.” To his stage manager he hissed, “See if you can find me a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Like Teddy Roosevelt wore.”
CHAPTER 14
Hutch was right. Spencer Davis—the fellow running against Alan Stuart for governor—really does look like a Kennedy wanna-be. He has Kennedy teeth, a dazzling set of chompers that go off like a flashbulb when he smiles. It is a winning smile and it is attached to a face that pulses with sincerity and good intentions. Such a shame the guy is a politician. We’ll never really know the truth.
I was watching District Attorney Spencer Davis up on the TV set in the ceiling corner above the Screaming Oyster’s bar. The volume was off, so I couldn’t hear the platitudes. The news was covering an appearance the candidate had made that afternoon at a shelter for minority homeless women with AIDS-infected children with learning disabilities brought on by toxic groundwater seepage into the plumbing of their methadone clinic whose subsequent closing had only added to the ranks of the jobless… or something. As I said, the volume was down, so the specifics were nebulous. But clearly Candidate Davis and his gigawatt smile thought that some things in this old world of ours needed improving. And he was probably right. Utopia is still right around the biggest damn corner you’ve ever seen.
Under the guise of “balanced reporting,” the news then followed the Spencer Davis “story” with some footage from the previous evening’s cocktail bash at the Peabody Conservatory Library. No crack babies here, ladies and gentlemen. I pointed up at the TV set.
“Hey, Sally, this is the thing I told you about. That thing. The political thing.” My skills of articulation sometimes astound even me.
“Oooh, do you think my baby will be on TV?”
I noticed that Frank—who was close enough to have heard us—was pretending not to pay attention to the TV. But he was doing a lousy job.
“That’s sweet, isn’t it,” Sally said to me softly. “The old bastard really does care. In his old bastard sort of way.”
Julia didn’t make the news. But Amanda Stuart did. The camera lingered on her ice-sculpture face for about ten seconds, which in TV time is an eternity. She was beaming her best vote-for-my-husband smile.
“Is that the wife?” Sally sniffed.
“That’s her.”
“Looks like someone.”
“Grace Kelly,” I said.
“Grace Kelly. Now there was one beautiful woman. If looks could kill.” Sally moved along down the bar to wake up one of her customers.
The camera zoomed in just then on Amanda Stuart, who apparently noticed it for the first time. Her eyes flicked an infinitesimal dagger—just a filament of irritation—before Jeff Simons’s plastic face suddenly reappeared on the screen, momentarily yakking into the wrong camera.
I had been drinking beer but now I switched to bourbon. The first one was good. The second one was better. The third one was jealous of the first two.
It can get complicated.
If looks could kill.
I dropped the words into my glass and stirred them in with my pinky.
Looks can kill.
People can kill.
People with looks can kill.
By God, Holmes himself would have been sorely pressed to keep one step ahead of such deductive brilliance. I hadn’t allowed the thought to take form the night before. But it took form now. As the TV news flickered with the images of a Cal Ripken triple and a pissed-off visiting pitcher, the thought came into perfect focus.
Amanda Stuart killed Guy Fellows.
This qualified as a “Wow.” Followed by a “Shit!”
Jesus, what is this world coming to? I poured yet another drink down my throat. Okay. Do your worst, truth serum. Show old Hitchcock the foggy light.
I can no longer remember how it came to be that I chose Frostburg State College as the place to sharpen my three R’s. Maybe it’s just that they were the first college to accept me and I wanted to show my appreciation. It was probably something like that.
As I mentioned earlier, Frostburg is where I met Joel Hutchinson. Hutch was a brilliant student as well as a glorious mischief maker. He was also what I came to think of as aggressively loyal. Once he had latched on to a person he polished them up like they were a neglected trophy he had just discovered up in the attic. Hutch seemed to operate at his highest pitch when he was encouraging others to go beyond their perceived limits. He was a boundary pusher. Other people’s boundaries.
To be more precise, he was a charming bully.
My actual friendsh
ip with Hutch reached its peak the night we left that Brahma bull dropping its loads of steaming shit onto the varnished wood of the student union’s fourth-floor bowling alley. As you can imagine, we felt unconquerable. It took real teamwork to get the bull out of its pasture, loaded into the van that Hutch had appropriated from the college’s Sanitation Services Department, into the student union service elevator and onto the lanes at three in the morning. Why we bothered to do it is irrelevant. It was a moon shot; a mountain climb; do it because it is there. Briefly it made blood brothers of the two of us. Batman and Robin. Butch and Sundance. Humpty and Dumpty. Hitch and Hutch.
And then Hutch kidnapped Professor Smollett on my behalf, and that soured things between us.
Professor Alfred Smollett, in his early fifties, was considered something of a guru in the Frostburg sociology department. The reason for this is that some six or seven years earlier he had published a book that briefly caught the country’s popular imagination. Entitled She Sings, He Swings, it made the argument for separate evolutionary paths for the human male and the human female, the core premise being that the female of the species has traveled further from her ape ancestors than we brutish males. The book opens with a totally absurd CHAPTER about body hair and takes off from there. As the underlying thesis of a purportedly scholarly rumination, it’s pretty damned weird. But weird sells, and She Sings, He Swings swung onto the New York Times best-seller list. Professor Smollett hopped around the country on a promotional book tour, during which he apparently discovered the rock-star status that is sometimes awarded the published author. It certainly didn’t hurt that his book was basically high praise to women and a man-slammer all at once. In other words, the guy got laid a lot. He came back from his tour, filed for divorce from his evolutionary-superior wife and got a pretty bad hair weave. The book slid off the best-seller list after a few more months, and Professor Alfred Smollett settled into a career of feeding from the female ranks of the freshman class, for whom She Sings, He Swings was, naturally, required reading for the Sociology 101 general requirement credit.
