by Tim Cockey
“You’re saying he doesn’t believe in happenstance?”
“Not that kind. Don’t forget, Hitch, this guy was a detective for fifteen years. He is trained to be suspicious, especially of coincidence.”
“I love coincidence.”
“Which is why you’d make a lousy detective. Hitch, the point is this. Bowman already knows that someone is onto him. He knows that someone plotted to lift that envelope from him. And he’s going to know that it wasn’t Carol acting all by herself. I mean… look.”
Over at the dartboard, Carol was giving the tip of one of the darts a good-luck kiss. She had the full attention of Bob and Al, who had momentarily ceased their bickering.
Kate continued. “Bowman was a good detective. He’s going to remember you hitting on Carol at the bar—”
“I wasn’t hitting—”
“And he’s going to definitely remember your hijinks with the car, when you tried to cut him off. He’ll remember all that. He’ll put it together. Then he’ll nose around the local hotels for anything odd looking. Detectives do that sort of preliminary in their sleep. And I hate to say it, but Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sinatra registering at that hotel qualifies as odd looking. I shouldn’t have let you do that. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Oh come on, Kate. The guy can’t possibly track us down.”
“Did you put the car’s license plate number on the registration form when you checked in?”
“Well yes, but—”
“And didn’t you use your credit card to rent the car at the airport in Boston?”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“Are you beginning to get my drift?”
“Sure. But—”
“Hitch, we don’t have the time to go traipsing from building to building in Hunt Valley looking for Epoch Ltd. in a haystack. Lou Bowman killed my husband. And he knows we’re onto him. That makes him a desperate animal, Hitch. If you think—”
A scream split the air. It was Carol. For a fraction of a second I thought she must have gotten a bull’s-eye. But it wasn’t that kind of a scream. It was, in fact, the kind of scream you let out when a burly guy you’ve just flamboozled out of eight thousand dollars up in Maine suddenly throws open the door of the bar in Baltimore where you are innocently tossing darts.
Kate had just enough time to mutter “Shit” before she dove under the table.
Lottery Lou was back in town.
CHAPTER 32
I think I’ve already described the general layout of the Screaming Oyster Saloon. Only two features in particular are relevant in order to understand what took place in the thirty seconds following Lou Bowman’s entrance. The first feature is that black door down at the end of the bar, the door that leads directly out to the harbor. The second is the weathered old dinghy that hangs from chains attached to the ceiling, chock-full with years and years of empties.
I didn’t mention one other feature. At the time, it seemed totally inconsequential. The bar phone. Over at the far end of the bar. Near the black door. I mention it now for the following reason. At approximately the same moment that Carol spotted Lou Bowman standing there in the door and let out her very impressive scream, the bar’s telephone rang. Sally answered it. It was for me.
“Hitchcock!” Sally called out. Kate had just that instant disappeared beneath the table. Powered purely by reflex, I stood up when Sally called out my name and started for the bar. And that’s what caught Bowman’s attention. That’s what stopped him in his initial lurching in Carol’s direction and caused him to redirect his lurching … toward me.
“Son of a bitch !”
He meant me.
Being closer to that end of the bar to start with and having longer legs anyway, I reached the phone in about five strides. Bowman had the whole length of the bar to travel. He never made it.
The hero of the moment was Edie Velvet. I hadn’t even noticed her sitting there, which of course is what happens when a person becomes a regular fixture in a bar; they come to look as innocuous as… well, as a fixture. Lou Bowman had blood in his eyes. Edie was just emptying the last of her beer into her glass as the Pamplona bull charged past her. I reached the bar and on some inexplicable form of autopilot, calmly took the phone from Sally …
She tossed the empty up into the weathered old dinghy hanging from chains over the bar.
“Hello?”
“Hitchcock?” It was Aunt Billie.
“Yes.”
“Hitchcock. A man was just here looking for you. I mentioned that he might try the Oyster. But now—”
I never heard the rest of it. What Sally had been crabbing would happen for so many years that we had all long ago ceased even hearing her… happened. And it happened quickly. I remember seeing a pair of tiny explosions of plaster dust up where the chains holding the dinghy were attached to the ceiling. And then it was all noise.
CRASH!
The dinghy came down partway onto the bar and partway onto Edie and partway onto Lou Bowman, who had just passed Edie’s barstool. The old boat exploded into splinters on contact as hundred and hundreds of bottles and cans—and a few other interesting items—burst into the air, over a dozen years of shrapnel launching out in all directions. I took a bottle to the head and one to the mouth. Sally’s arms wind milled madly as she staved off the barrage of cans flying at her. Frank got clunked right between the eyes, dropping where he stood. Others in the bar avoided the direct attack, but many got caught in the push of others who were leaping back from the explosion. Something akin to a wave gently mowed them all down. I saw Carol go under.
Edie Velvet and Lou Bowman had caught the brunt of it. The two of them lay half buried on the floor beneath chunks of wood and the hundreds and hundreds of empties. I’ll allow you only about three seconds to picture the tableau, for that’s about how long it took before Lou Bowman stirred. His nose was bleeding and a gash had opened up over his left eye. His mouth was bloody too; he was literally tasting blood. And I could see that he wanted more. He wanted mine.
I acted without thought. Years of witnessing Sally’s swift mobilizations probably helped.
“Sally!” I barked. “The door!” And Sally knew exactly what I meant.
Even as I waded into the cans and bottles that half buried Bowman and Edie, Sally had flipped up the hinged end of the bar counter and yanked open the black door. Lap lap lap went the harbor.
I grabbed hold of Bowman’s collar with one hand and his belt with the other. Bowman’s attempt to stand—slipping and sliding on the debris—simply propelled him toward the door. I helped him along. The two of us shot forward, me like the guy who is pushing the bobsled up at the start of the track, he like the sled. And thus it was that within thirty seconds of Lou Bowman’s entering the Screaming Oyster Saloon, I literally ran the bastard right back out.
Alas, there was no time to savor the moment.
“Kate! Carol! Let’s go!”
Kate had already popped up from beneath the table. Carol was extricating herself from the human tide.
“Move!”
As I picked my way through the bottles and wood and cans I paused to look down at Edie. She hadn’t yet moved.
“Go!” Sally yelled. I turned and saw her plant a chubby shoe on Lou Bowman’s forehead and push him back into the water.
Kate and Carol and I raced out of the bar. Taking great gulps of air, I managed to gasp, “Follow me!”
They did. We moved swiftly across the square and over to Julia’s gallery. It was closed. I checked the windows overhead. Dark.
“Damn!” And then I remembered. Rehearsal. “Come on!”
In another minute we were all safely inside the Gypsy Playhouse.
“Well, well, well, we were beginning to wonder,” Gil’s voice sounded from somewhere in the theater.
The stage was lit. About a dozen amateur actors were seated in folding chairs on the left-hand side of the stage, hands on their knees, staring stonily forward. I’ve seen this look before,
or at least the look that the amateurs were attempting. They were playing dead. Gil had stupidly arranged the chairs in pairs, with an aisle space between the pairs. It looked like the seating on a bus. Occupying Emily’s seat up front, which in this ridiculous arrangement made it look like the bus driver’s seat, was none other than Chinese Sue. Sue wasn’t playing dead; she was playing bored. For that matter, she probably wasn’t playing. On the right side of the stage stood the remainder of the cast, the living, holding on to their open black umbrellas. The locksmith from Lutherville was standing in for me at the lectern. He was wearing my pith helmet.
“Well, we all thought that you had forgotten about us, Mr. Sewell,” Gil said. “So glad you could join us.” I could see him now, he was seated in the middle of the house. He was shading his eyes with his hand. A clear affectation; looking in our direction, there was no light that could possibly be in his eyes.
“Who have you got there with you?”
“Two more bodies,” I said.
Gil was delighted. “Oh good. Living or dead?”
I looked down at both Kate and Carol. In perfect unison, they both shrugged.
Despite all the excitement, Carol drifted off to sleep during the rehearsal. Gil had placed her in one of the dead seats so it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. From my place at the lectern I saw her eyes flutter and her chin begin to dip. I made eye contact with Kate, who was doing a superb job as one of the mourners; she looked deeply troubled, dark and beautiful beneath her umbrella.
Gil approached me afterward to commend me on our two new cast members.
“Where did you find them, Hitchcock?”
I told him, in all seriousness, “Between a rock and a dead place.”
I phoned a cab company from the lobby. Hats borrowed from wardrobe pulled low, Kate, Carol and I scurried into the cab and directed the driver to take us to Carol’s new temporary digs. For the time being this was our official safe house.
Carol rallied only for the length of the short taxi ride back to her place, then passed out anew on her king-size … queen-size … her royal family-size bed. Kate saw to her disrobing and called me in to help tuck the gal under the sheets.
Kate and I had some thinking to do. We did it out in the living room. As Kate had predicted—almost to the second—Lou Bowman had clearly flexed his investigatorial muscles upon the discovery of pink tissue paper where crispy greenbacks should have been. Even though Kate had walked me though the process by which the police veteran had come up with my name and address, I was still mightily impressed.
“He must have gotten an A in detective school.”
“Routine stuff,” Kate assured me.
The implication of Bowman’s colorful return to Baltimore was clear. Unfortunately. It was more sobering than the coffee I’d been gulping down over at the Oyster.
“He wants to kill me.”
If I was hoping that Kate would pooh-pooh my conclusion I was doubly disappointed.
“Right now I would guess that killing you is Lou’s single purpose in life.”
I gave her a grimace. “Feel free to throw in a gray area there if you’d like.”
“I’m sorry I dragged you into all this. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”
“You didn’t drag me. I insisted. Remember?”
“Still, I should have said no.”
“I’m just so damned irresistible, what can I tell you?”
“You’re in deep shit, dear, that’s what you are.”
It seemed I had recently been told this exact same thing. The smile wiped right off my face.
Kate was trying to piece everything together. She was pacing the carpeted floor. Barefoot, as if charging her batteries from the static electricity off the rayon plush. I remained seated, uncomfortably perched on the edge of a leather Eames knockoff.
“Now the good part, if Lou can stay rational, is that he’ll want to know how the hell it was that you caught on to those FedEx deliveries. I’m sure he didn’t talk it up around old Heayhauge.”
“His lady friend knew,” I reminded her.
Kate shook her head. “No. She knew he got the packages. That doesn’t mean she knew what was in them. And I’m sure she didn’t know why. But that doesn’t really matter. The question for Lou is, who the hell are you? Carol he knows, and I’m sure he figures she’s basically in the dark about all this. You used her to get hold of the money and that’s about as far as she goes. But you … Once Bowman got ahold of your name and saw that you were from Baltimore, you can bet the alarm bells went off. That’s why he got down here so damn fast. He knows that you know something. But what he doesn’t know is how much you do know.”
“You mean how much I don’t know.”
“Same thing. But see, our advantage right now is that Bowman can’t be sure how much of the truth you’ve learned. Right now he has to assume … or he has to worry, that you know everything. He has to assume that you’ve got the whole story. Whatever that is. That means that you know what’s going on with Epoch Ltd. and that they’ve been paying him off for killing Charley.”
“But I don’t know any of that. And you don’t either. You’re just guessing at all of this.”
“Hey, I got an A in detective school, all right? I know I’m right. Epoch Ltd., whatever the hell that is, set this guy up nice and comfy up there in picture-postcard Maine and they’ve been keeping his pockets filled on a monthly basis ever since. Why? Bowman did a job for them. It’s as simple as that.”
“So why not just give him a huge one-time payoff? Why dribble it out every month like that?”
“I thought about that,” Kate said. She stopped at the sliding glass door and looked out onto the night. “I’ve got a couple of guesses.”
“Throw one at me.”
“One guess is that this is the way it’s done, for insurance reasons.”
“Insurance? You don’t mean insurance insurance?”
Kate was still looking out the sliding glass door. Her reflection was looking back at me.
“No. I mean to ensure that Bowman remains quiet. Suppose he gets one big payoff and he basically blows it all. He’d come asking for more and they’d have to give it to him. But this way it’s actually very smart. They throw him a big bone up front, a nice chunk of change, but not really enough to set him up for life. Then they dribble out the five grand a month. It’s the hand that feeds him. He’s not going to bite it.”
“And your second guess?”
“Not as interesting. But maybe true. A great big payoff shows. It’s on the books somewhere. Whoever this Epoch Ltd. is, they probably couldn’t risk that kind of unaccounted-for expense. But five thousand is chump change. Petty cash.”
“So you think we’re looking at a fairly substantial company. Deep pockets.”
“Do you want to hear my third guess?”
“Does the pope poop on the bear?”
Kate turned back around. “Lou Bowman is on a retainer.”
“A retainer?”
“Yep. Let’s keep aware of what we do know. Lou Bowman gunned down a fellow officer and then got paid off and sent away. This is known in my profession as … are you taking notes? A hired killer.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
“You’re welcome. Now we should stop thinking of Bowman at this point as a bad cop or a crooked cop or any sort of cop at all. That’s just obscuring things. Lou Bowman is a hired killer. That’s what he left town as. A hired killer. You pay him enough, he will kill for you.”
“So you don’t think this was a one-time thing?”
“I have no idea whether it was or it wasn’t, Hitch. All I’m saying is that we ought to keep this in mind. The man killed for money. He is getting money every month. I think they’ve got him in a position where he’s their heavy if they need one. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s actually kind of funny.”
“Joke please.”
“Think about it. He can blow the whistle on them, they can blow the whistle o
n him. It’s like two guys yelling ‘Freeze!’ They’re each pointing a pistol at the other.”
“A Mexican standoff.”
“Exactly. My guess though is that this Epoch Ltd. has definitely got the upper hand. Whoever they are, they could probably hang Bowman out to dry if it really came to that. He fired the gun. And they’ve clearly gone to some lengths to hide their involvement. My guess is that this is a pretty damned uneasy alliance. Bowman is being paid to keep his mouth shut as well as to be available in case they need him again. That’s what I mean by his being on a retainer. Look, Hitch, we’ve focused on Lou Bowman’s shooting Charley. We have nothing that tells us he hasn’t done this sort of thing before. I told you already how trigger-happy the guy is.”
“So we’re back to where we started,” I said.
“Where we started?”
I fell back in my chair. Suddenly I didn’t like detective work anymore. I just wanted the pretty girl and to be a hero, but not all of this. I just wanted to go back to burying people who had died because it was their time to die.
“Lou Bowman doesn’t leave town until I’m dead.” I gave a hollow laugh. “I guess I’d better tell Billie to clear some space.”
Kate didn’t respond immediately. She came over and knelt down next to my chair. Her eyes went wide and searching. I locked onto them and we played a sort of visual patty-cake with each other. Smoke began to rise. Kate’s plump lips parted.
And then, well…
At the end of it, breathless, I opened my eyes and gazed out the sliding glass doors. The nighttime harbor looked beautiful; the sailboats with their mast lights, the pink glow from the Harbor Place promenade. Even the inky blackness of the water itself was impressive; it looked like an elaborate shard that had dropped from the night sky. The sizzling red glow of the neon Domino sugar sign set the water quietly on fire. It was all insanely beautiful.
