The Hearse You Came in On (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  “I’m Polish,” she reminded me when I made the comparison.

  “But in that getup you look Italian. You look like Gina Lollobrigida.”

  “Then it’s a good getup.”

  We sat in the rental car for about a half hour, getting our feel for the village of Heayhauge. As I said, the inlet harbor here is bulbous, like a teardrop. Along the far shore, opposite the village and the main dock, maybe a quarter of a mile from where we were parked, the land rises steeply. I guess I shouldn’t even say “land.” I should say “rock.” It’s a small cliffside basically, tufted here and there with scraggly outcrop-pings of hard grass and scruffy pine. Along the top of the rocks Kate and I counted seven houses. They were good-sized places, two and three stories, and each with either a large glass front or a wooden deck—or in some cases both—which no doubt afforded a spectacular view of both the Heayhauge harbor and the mighty Atlantic out beyond. A long steep set of wooden stairs led down from each of the houses to the water below. Half of the houses appeared to enjoy a little private beach down there on the water’s edge. All of them enjoyed either a motorboat or a sailboat.

  Kate was scanning the far horizon with a small but powerful pair of binoculars.

  “There!” she said, pointing with her free hand. She handed over the binoculars and guided me in the right direction. The far shore bobbed about in a large circle. For a brief moment the binoculars found a skinny girl in a bathing suit up on one of the wooden decks, shaving her legs. Kate set a finger on the binoculars and lowered them to the water’s level.

  There it was. Just as reported by Kruk’s Boston PI. Proof that at least Lou Bowman had something akin to a sense of humor, twisted as it was. Bowman’s thirty-two-foot pleasure boat sat bobbing in the water, moored to his private dock. The name of the boat was printed in bold red block letters. Life Sentence.

  I lowered the binoculars. Kate had removed her Gina Lollobrigida sunglasses. She was tapping the stems against her teeth.

  “Is that a son of a bitch bastard prick or what?” she said. I think the lady pretty much summed it up.

  We took a room in the waterfront hotel. We were fortunate to have arrived in advance of the season, when both the rates and the occupancy level of the place would skyrocket. Our request for a room facing the harbor was granted. Kate’s anxiety level had increased the moment she got out of the car. There seemed little chance that Lou Bowman would be hanging around the hotel lobby, but Kate remained anxious anyway. I’m sure her fidgety energy fed the imagination of the pimply desk clerk. This lady couldn’t wait to get up to her room. Hoo-wee! I signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sinatra, winked and paid the guy in cash.

  “You get a free hour with a paddleboat, Mr.” —he consulted the book—” Mr. Sinatra.” He turned red, then chuckled softly. “You and Mrs. Sinatra can take advantage of the paddleboat anytime before sundown.”

  Kate and I were sitting out on the small balcony when we got our first glimpse of Lou Bowman. He was making his way down the long steep stairway from his house to the dock below. Kate saw him first and she picked up the binoculars from the little glass table there and took a look.

  “Bastard sighted. Port bow.” She handed me the binoculars.

  There he was. Tony Bennett’s evil twin. Sunbaked skin. Blue polo shirt. Khakis. The kind of guy you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless he was pulling a gun and aiming it at you. Then you might notice.

  I watched as our prey reached the bottom of the steep steps and began making preparations to take his boat out.

  “He’s taking the boat out,” I said. I lowered the binoculars and looked at my lovely detective friend. “Should we go now?”

  Kate shook her head. “Not inside. Not yet. It’s too risky. We don’t know how long he’ll be out. We haven’t even driven by the house. We want to cut down on the unknowns first. There might be a dog.”

  “You’re good with dogs.”

  “I’m good with dogs whose owners like me.”

  “I never said I liked you.”

  Kate gestured. “Give me those.”

  While she snooped on Lou Bowman, I snooped a moment on her. It’s just so damned peculiar how it is that a person suddenly shows up in your life out of nowhere and in what really amounts to practically no time at all you are sitting with them on a motel balcony in Maine, making plans to break into a nouveau-riche man’s house across the water. Kate had piled her hair up and made it stay there in that mysterious way that women do. She was all neck and legs and arms, slender and taut. Her cool empress’s profile was continuing to look inexplicably sexy as she peered into the binoculars, her lips slightly parted. Her toes were partially curled around the iron railing of the small balcony. I wished I had a camera. I was sitting there in boxers and an Orioles T-shirt.

  “Put your clothes on,” Kate said suddenly, as if misreading my mind.

  “Take yours off.”

  Kate gave me a tsk-tsk look. “I think all this fresh air is getting to you, Mr. Sewell.”

  “That’s Frankie boy to you,” I said. “And it is. I love this air.” I tilted my head in the direction of the room. “I like the air in there even better. Wink Wink.”

  “We didn’t come all this way just to lie around in bed,” Kate said, getting up from her chair.

  “Who’s talking about lying around?”

  “Hitch,” she snapped. “This isn’t a damn vacation.” She slid open the screen and went into the room. A few seconds later, my shirt came flying out.

  Like hell.

  We took the main road that runs through the town and loops up to the rocky overlook that Lou Bowman shared with his neighbors. These weren’t spectacular houses actually, not in the sense of being outrageously opulent and show-offy. These places were spectacular first and foremost for the view afforded from their rocky perches. Their location location location was wow wow wow. As Kate and I drove slowly along the road, we caught glimpses of the view, the long, slowly curving coastline with its tumbles of rocks and boulders, sea spray bursting on them at regular intervals like exploding white fireworks. And of course beyond all that, the gunmetal blue ocean and the huge half-bowl of sky.

  Once we had located Lou Bowman’s house and pulled to the end of his driveway, Kate and I were treated to an additional view, that of the teardrop inlet below, the picture-postcard town and the tiny armada of sailboats and windsurfers. Sails of many colors tilted this way and that into the wind, or at least into the hope of wind. The day was unusually still.

  “He’s got himself a nice view,” I remarked.

  “And he bought it with my husband’s blood.”

  Well. Okay. That was it for the sightseeing tour. Maybe Kate was right, I was getting too much clean air all at once. We weren’t here for nice views and fun and frolics. Kate had a real weight on her and I was to try to help lift it off.

  We cased the joint. It turned out there was no dog, and that was good. I did spot a box turtle at the base of the back steps leading up to the kitchen, but I didn’t consider it much of a threat. Kate went up onto the wooden deck in back and determined that none of the neighbors could see through the trees that sheltered the property. She put her sexy nose to the glass door. She was looking—among other things—to see if there was an alarm system. As best she could tell there wasn’t.

  “What do you see?” I asked, joining her on the deck.

  “I see the usual sloppy bachelor’s pad.”

  We went around to the far side of the house. Kate pointed out a row of three narrow windows on the ground level, behind some unkempt shrubbery.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think they could use some trimming.”

  “The windows, wise guy. Do you think I can fit through one of those windows?”

  “It would be tight.”

  “But I could do it.”

  “Why these windows?” I asked her. “There are a lot of big windows in this place. Is slithering a requirement of stealth?”

  “I’m g
uessing all of the windows are locked,” was Kate’s answer. “But if I have to break one of these, it’s very possible Bowman won’t even notice it for a couple of days.”

  “Why do you care if he notices?”

  “I don’t want him to see right away that someone has broken into his place. This isn’t the movies, Hitch. I’m not going to break in, go to the guy’s study, find what I’m looking for in fifteen minutes and pop right back out. I mean, I might. But I might not. I might have to come back a second time.”

  “So how do we do this? You shimmy in through the basement window and then come let me in?”

  “You’re not coming in with me.”

  “I’m not? You mean I really did just come along for the ride?”

  “No. The first thing you’re going to do is to come up with an accent. You’ve got to get the Baltimore out of your voice.”

  Accents I can do. The question is, why?

  “Why?” I asked.

  Kate said, “I don’t want Bowman guessing that you’re from Baltimore.”

  “When exactly is it that you don’t want him guessing this?”

  “When I’m inside his house and you’re wherever he is, heading him off at the pass if it comes to that.”

  “I see,” I said. Although I didn’t. Not exactly. “You want me to run interference?”

  “Only if you have to. I don’t want Bowman coming home when I’m going through his things. You’ve got to see to it that he stays away. We’ll set a certain time. I’ll feel completely free up until a preset time and then I’ll go. Your job is going to be to keep him away until that time.”

  This was news to me. “Have you thought about how I’ll do this?”

  Kate grinned at me. One of those grins that make you gulp.

  “I hope you brought along your fake mustache. You’re going undercover, big boy.”

  CHAPTER 29

  If somebody were to tell you about a local bar way the hell up in Maine called The Moose Run Inn, you’d likely figure it to be located somewhere in the general vicinity of a river or a creek or some such waterway sporting the name Moose Run. Wouldn’t you? I would.

  Or would you expect to encounter a woodsy sort of place with the full-grown body of a moose (all but the head) protruding from the outside wall while the rest of the moose (the head) looms from the interior wall just above an old Green Hornet pinball machine? These are funny folk up here in Maine, I’m telling you; I don’t think it’s happenstance that we’ve stashed them all off in a corner of the country.

  I was having a fairly successful dalliance with the Green Hornet pinball machine at The Moose Run Inn. This was despite the sizable distraction of the gigantic moose head on the wall, directly above the machine. Whoever did the taxidermy on this thing had given it one blue glass eye and one brown one. Somewhere along the line other cutups had affixed a red rubber nose to the beast’s snout, stuck a plaid hunter’s cap on at a jaunty angle between the two enormous antlers, dangled an unlit cigarette from the poor thing’s mouth and, to complete the offense, fashioned a necklace from empty shotgun shells and draped it around the moose’s stout neck. If it were in the nature of the dead animal to rue, this moose most surely would have rued the day that he ran into this place.

  I was slamming and banging the old Green Hornet pinball machine pretty well, getting a ten-second rendition of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” every time I landed the ball in the Green Hornet’s nest in the center of the table. For my first undercover gig I wore jeans by Lee, a simple yet elegant plain white T-shirt offset by a rather bold flannel statement (checked, unbuttoned and untucked) and a forest green baseball cap with “Skoal” embossed on the front. Shit yeah.

  After going over John Kruk’s Boston PI’s reports on the daily activities of former Baltimore Police Detective Lou Bowman, Kate and I had determined that the guy was anything but a creature of habit. His days took an infuriatingly random shape. Some days he slept late. Some days he didn’t. Some days he took his boat out into the open sea and went fishing. Some days he sat on his deck with a six pack of Bud and a bag of cigars. Bowman might spend an entire afternoon down on his dock fooling around with his boat or he might knock about all day in his 4x4. He was retired. He could flop around any damn way he chose. The same pretty much held true for his evenings.

  What the PI had seen, however, was a weekly visit to The Moose Run Inn every Monday night accompanied by mean-looking Molly from the NAPA Auto Parts store. Mondays were apparently mean-looking Molly’s night to let her hair down, such as it was. Molly’s idea of a good time in Heayhauge was a night of flavored vodka at The Moose Run Inn, followed sometimes by a roll in the hay with former Baltimore Police Detective Lou Bowman, sometimes at his place, sometimes at hers.

  It was due to this “sometimes” nature of things that I found myself that Monday night in a love embrace with the Green Hornet pinball machine under the forlorn blue and brown gaze of the mightily maligned moose up there on (in) the wall.

  Kate and I had kept our eye on Lou Bowman from our hotel room patio. Somewhere around seven-thirty or so, Bowman had climbed into his 4x4 and backed out of the driveway. Kate and I killed about twenty minutes then got into our rented car and cruised by The Moose Run Inn. We spotted Bowman’s 4x4 in the gravel parking lot and gave each other a grim thumbs-up. I drove back to Bowman’s place and dropped Kate off at the driveway. She had vanished even before I could say good luck.

  If God was on our side, Kate would break into Bowman’s place and be led directly to the missing report that she was convinced Bowman still had in his possession. It would be sitting out on the kitchen table under a golden celestial spotlight. However, if God was asleep at the wheel—or maybe just not paying too much attention to things that go on in Maine—then Kate would need several hours in which to sift and search. That’s where I came in. We had chosen eleven o’clock as the absolute latest that Kate would stay before having to get her fanny out of that guy’s house. My job was to see to it that Lou Bowman didn’t leave the bar until eleven o’clock. If it came down to simply having to tackle him—which I hoped it wouldn’t—then that’s what I’d have to do. Kate said that in the event she got out before the deadline, she would phone the bar and have the bartender call out a fictitious name. That would be my cue that I wouldn’t have to tackle Lou Bowman or trip him or otherwise keep him distracted from leaving. I suggested the name Harvey Sprinkle, the name of the prolific seed-sewer I had recently buried.

  “Isn’t that sort of a silly name?” Kate asked.

  I reminded her, “I don’t have to answer to it. I just have to hear it.”

  But standing there playing the Green Hornet pinball machine, I wished we had chosen a more conventional name. The bartender didn’t look like the type who would hesitate to hang up on anyone he thought might be attempting a crank call. He certainly didn’t look like the type who would necessarily hold the phone to his chest and call out, “Hey! Is there a Harvey Sprinkle here?”

  Especially since there were just four people in the place so far. Lou Bowman, mean-looking Molly, a bleached-blonde barfly and myself. Things were most definitely not hopping at The Moose Run Inn.

  It was the bleached blonde that had me worried. Possibly a pretty young thing at one point in her history, she was now somewhere in the northern neighborhood of her forties and had clearly moved on to the hard-maintenance portion of her life. Her cheeks were an unnatural pink, her eyelids an unnatural blue, her eyebrows an unnatural brown and her puckery lips an unnatural red; the full-palette attempt to conjure up what youth and Nature had once provided for free. Her bottle-blonde hair, anchored by pitch-black roots, fell in large unkempt waves down to around her shoulders. She was wearing a tight leather miniskirt meant for an eighteen-year-old, and a simple white blouse meant for a ten-year-old. A cigarette was smoking itself in one hand and a glass was in the other. The woman’s eyes scanned the dark bar like an exhausted lighthouse beam.

  When I had walked into The Moose Run Inn I h
ad made accidental eye contact with the woman—the only person in the place who had bothered to look up—and been swept by those lighthouse beams. Before I could turn away she had launched a challenging smile and teeter-tottered her half-empty/half-full glass at me in an unabashedly provocative manner. My peripheral vision caught sight of Lou Bowman and mean-looking Molly sitting at a table near the bar arguing. They didn’t register my entrance. I spotted the pinball machine beneath the moose head and stepped immediately over to it, praying that God would drop a few quarters into my pocket. He did (or He had) and so there I was, my back to the bar, slamming the hell out of the machine while trying to regain my bearings. I could feel the woman’s overpainted eyes drilling holes willy-nilly into my back.

  Quarters are finite. And people are only human. I missed an easy flipper shot on the fifth and final ball of yet another game. I knew, even as I reached into my pocket, that the quarters were now gone. A couple of Abes and Toms played off my fingers but that was it. I nodded gravely at the bar’s namesake and turned slowly around. The blonde was still looking right at me. She gave me a great big drunken smile and waved an unlit cigarette in front of her face, like an unsteady metronome. Her voice traveled on gin vapors across the uncrowded room.

  “You gotta light?”

  Lou Bowman chuckled as I stepped past his table on the way to the bar. Mean-looking Molly slapped his hand.

  “You look like someone? Who do you look like?”

  It was possibly the seventh time that Carol had put that question to me. The first few times I made the mistake of believing that she had an answer on the tip of her tongue. But she didn’t. I learned quickly enough that this was Carol’s way of telling me who she looked like. Or who she thought she looked like.

  “You know that lady on M*A*S*H who likes to kiss everybody?”

  “Hot Lips.”

  “Yeah. Her. I look like her.”

  Okay. Fair enough.

  “Remember Jayne Mansfield? She was in that cowboy movie? You know her? I look like her too. How about another drink?”