Murder in the Hearse Degree

by Tim Cockey

  “Is that them?” the man said, indicating the Pottses. Eva was looking back in our direction.

  Libby moved to place herself in front of the man. “Yes. And I refuse to have you speak with them. I know you mean well, Owen. You always do. But this is unacceptable. Mike should be here. He’s not. It speaks volumes.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Libby,” the man said in a soft patrician tone.

  “You can tell Mike that you tried. Tell him that bitchy Libby refused to let you run his errand.”

  “You’re upset. You and Mike need to talk.”

  “Don’t start, Owen. Not here. I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here for nothing. But please, I’d like you to leave.”

  The man paused then turned away. As he did he caught my eye. He smiled warmly at me.

  “Hello. I’m Owen Cutler.” He gave me his hand. It was a surprisingly firm grip.

  “Hitchcock Sewell,” I said.

  “Are you with the police?”

  Libby answered for me. “He’s with me, Owen. He’s a friend of mine. That’s all you need to know.”

  I concurred. “I’m with her.”

  Owen Cutler’s gaze rested on me an extra second then he pulled it in and headed back down to his car without another word. He opened the door and got in behind the wheel. Never once had he acknowledged Croydon Floyd.

  Before I could ask, Libby said, “Owen is Mike’s uncle. As you can tell, they’re very close. Mike adores him like a father, he always has. The two are as thick as thieves. It’s so typical of them.”

  “He seemed earnest.”

  “Absolutely, they don’t get much more earnest than Owen. He’s a sweet man, really. I hated to snap at him like that. Owen has helped Mike and me out quite a lot. He’s a very influential person. Owen is in a big law firm in D.C. He’s one of those people who knows everybody.”

  “Now he knows me.”

  Libby managed a smile. “Yes. And just wait until he tells Mike.”

  Eva and Murray Potts remained at the guardrail for about ten minutes. At one point Eva leaned so far over the railing that I was afraid she was going to lift her heels and plunge into the river herself. When they finally left the guardrail and made their way back to where we were waiting, Eva seemed to be making a special effort to keep her chin up. Her eyes were dry and clear.

  “Was that your husband?” Potts asked Libby.

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t.”

  Before Potts could respond, a bird began chirping in his pocket. It was his cell phone. He pulled it out and answered it.

  “Yeah. Hold on.” He looked at his wife. “I’m going to take this.” He headed down the bridge toward the cars. Eva turned to the police officer.

  “You will find who killed my daughter?” Her tone was both imperious and imploring.

  The officer gave her that flat look of his. “We have no reason at this time to assume that your daughter was murdered, ma’am.”

  “Sophie did not do this.”

  Floyd held her gaze. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  Libby turned to the officer. “All the woman is asking is that you find out what happened to her daughter. She’d like you to do your job.”

  Floyd looked a little uncomfortable. He took care of the problem by pulling a pair of aviator sunglasses from his shirt pocket and putting them on. Now he was unreadable.

  “We’re doing our job, ma’am. There’s a protocol here.”

  Somebody let out a snicker. It was me. Officer Floyd turned his head in my direction. Two slightly concave reflections of my own pretty mug floated in front of me.

  Eva was shaking her head. “This is how her father died. He fell. Do you understand? From a building. Sophie was only six. It was the ruin of our lives. She would not do this to me. I know this. A mother knows her daughter.”

  Floyd repeated, “Ma’am, I’m sorry. But—”

  “No! This is something else. Somebody did this to Sophie.” She turned to me. “My daughter was a quiet girl. She does not think this way. I know this. You have a friend? You said you have a friend who would help you look for Sophie? Will you find out who did this to my daughter? This is not how Sophie will leave the earth. It is not. I will pay.”

  I didn’t respond immediately. I watched a ladybug crawling slowly along the collar of the woman’s blouse. I honestly didn’t know what to say to her. Eva was searching my face with an urging that was damned close to ghastly. Her eyes darted down and she flicked the ladybug away. When she raised her eyes again, the urgency in them had been replaced by something else. It looked for a moment like fear, but it wasn’t. I realized what it was. Loneliness.

  “Please,” she whispered. “My daughter.”

  We headed back to the cars. Eva Potts dropped sideways onto the passenger seat of the rental car, her feet out on the road. She began to cry. Libby sent me to fetch some tissues that were in her glove compartment. She knelt next to the distraught woman. Murray Potts was leaning up against the squad car. As Floyd reached him, I heard Potts say, “That thing’s been squawking for you.” The officer pulled open the door and leaned in. He took up his radio and spoke briefly. I was too far away to make any sense of the crackling that came back over the radio. But Potts wasn’t.

  “What!”

  For a little man he moved fast. Potts shoved himself off the car and barreled toward Eva and Libby. I dropped the tissues and darted quickly to insert myself between him and the women. Potts was bellowing.

  “The girl was pregnant! Under your goddamn stinking roof and she’s goddamn pregnant?” The man’s ears were beet red. “What the hell is going on here?”

  From the passenger seat of the rental car, Eva Potts let out a low, horrid, spiraling moan.

  Eva wanted to see where her daughter had been living. Croydon Floyd offered to accompany us to Libby and Mike’s house but Eva said that she preferred he didn’t. She and her husband traded a few sharp words, but Eva held her ground. The officer didn’t look too crushed about being packed off. Libby and I climbed into her car and led the way.

  “The police are ready to just write this off,” I said as we started across the bridge. “You know her, Libby. Does it make sense to you? Do you think she jumped?”

  Libby shook her head. “I don’t know, Hitch. But I don’t think so. Sophie was a hard girl to get a handle on, but . . . no. It doesn’t make sense. It sounds wrong to me.”

  I twisted in my seat. The Pottses were directly behind us. Eva was staring out the window. Her husband was on the damn phone again.

  “How the hell do some people get together?” I wondered out loud. Straightening in my seat I looked over at Libby. She was adjusting her mirror.

  “You might want to ask someone else.”

  We took a right off the main road and wound through a series of wooded lanes. The houses were large and set back off the road. Libby and Mike’s house sat at the bottom of a short driveway. It was a modern house with large windows and no single plane you could definitively call a roof. The general impression of the house was horizontal. It was built on the side of a gentle slope that spilled down into the woods. Eva and Murray Potts took a few seconds to survey the property. Potts was doing his best to appear unimpressed.

  We entered on what was essentially the mezzanine level; upstairs to the main bedrooms or downstairs to the rest of the house. We went downstairs. A large living room greeted us. The far wall was nearly all glass and offered a striking view of the woods that bordered the property. There was a dining area and a large open kitchen. The décor was modern without being tacky. The walls were alternately yellow and a pale orange. In a far corner was a flat stone basin where a perpetual dribble of water burbled and splashed. On the opposite wall was an elevated stone fireplace.

  “Some shack,” I muttered to Libby. “How can you stand it?”

  “Where is Sophie’s room?” Eva asked.
/>   “I’ll show you,” Libby said.

  She led them down a hallway past the kitchen. I lingered. Best way I know to snoop. I stepped over to a set of sliding glass doors and looked out onto a redwood deck. It was a large deck, built out over the drop-off. At the far end I spotted something that was either a vat for squishing grapes into wine or a hot tub. The Sewell dollar went down on the latter.

  I slid open the door and stepped out onto the deck. The trees bordering the property cut off any view of the neighbors on either side. The backyard down below held a sandbox and a plastic swing set for the kids. At the far corner of the property stood a small wooden toolshed. As I stood there, a yellow butterfly swooped in front of me, setting off floods in central China if you buy that sort of thing.

  I stepped back into the house as Libby appeared from the hallway. She was pressing her palms against her temples like she was trying to keep her head from exploding.

  “Aren’t you going to join us, Hitch?” she asked, forcing a smile. “We’re having so much fun.”

  As we headed back down the short hallway together, Libby muttered, “I can’t take much more of that man.”

  Sophie was in love with Gary Cooper. That much was clear the instant I stepped into her room. The actor was all over the place. Without bothering to count I’d have to say there were easily two dozen pictures of the lanky actor plastered on the walls of the room. Two black-and-white posters dominated. One showed Coop in his cowboy getup looking off to his left with that perfectly placid disarming expression of his. The other poster was from his Capra movie, Meet John Doe, seated on a doorstep with his fedora pushed back on his head, aiming a moony bemused look at Barbara Stanwyck, who was standing in front of him in the midst of flamboyant chatter. The other pictures looked to be primarily pulled from magazines. Cooper with Marlene Dietrich. Cooper lighting a cigarette. A bare-chested Cooper swinging a sledgehammer. Cooper in the French Foreign Legion. Above the bed, an aging Cooper gazed longingly at the doe-eyed Audrey Hepburn. Eva Potts was standing there looking up at the poster.

  “Love in the Afternoon,” I said.

  She turned. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s the name of the movie.”

  Eva placed a hand on the picture. “Sophie always loved Audrey Hepburn. This is who she wanted to be like.”

  Murray Potts was standing near the poster of Cooper sitting on the stoop. It occurred to me that Potts himself looked like the sort of portly character actor that might have had a small role in the film. He jerked a thumb at the poster.

  “Well, she liked this guy, too,” Potts said. “But he’s dead so it wasn’t him that knocked her up.”

  There are certain reptiles that have a poisonous spit. They can send it out some fifty feet or more. Eva Potts looked as if she’d have found that trait handy.

  “You can talk nicer about Sophie?”

  Potts avoided his wife’s look. Instead he turned to Libby. “And you still claim to know nothing about who Sophie was hanging around with?”

  Libby was looking terribly strained. “I told you, Mr. Potts, I’m not ‘claiming’ anything. Sophie pretty much kept to herself. You can see, she liked to read.”

  Indeed. Next to the bed were two stacks of books, each over a foot high. I picked up the top book from one of the stacks. Raging Comfort. There was a couple on the cover, swooning together against a maple tree. Or maybe it was an elm. The woman’s raven hair tumbled down onto a pair of ridiculously heaving breasts. Her partner was none other than Fabio. He looked like a sated lion. His eyes appeared slightly crossed. The woman was either in an ecstatic throe or Fabio had just stomped on her foot.

  I looked at a few of the other books. Isle of Temptation. Passion Winds. Craven Heart. Eva took this last one out of my hand and gave it a glance. The tiniest of smiles played over her face. She tossed the book onto the bed.

  “This is not Tolstoy,” she said.

  She picked up a framed photograph that was on the bedside table. She looked at it a moment, then turned to me.

  “Sophie’s father was crazy for her. He loved his little girl,” she said. “I could never see them together that Sophie was not up riding on Janos’s shoulders. Janos built buildings. He was very powerful.” She paused, allowing her eyes to drift in the direction of her husband. “Janos was very powerful,” she said again. “But with Sophie he was gentle as a baby. She was his angyalkam, his little princess. When he fell . . . it was from a building. When he is in the hospital, Janos did not want Sophie to see him like that. His back was broken and he could not put her on his shoulders and ride her around. Janos was not even awake a lot because of the pain. It was two days before he died. But Sophie never saw him. Her memory of him is always . . .”

  She trailed off. Tears came to her eyes but she blinked them back. “We were a happy family,” she said, nearly in a whisper. “I don’t know why this has happened.” She handed me the photograph then moved next to me to look at it, her shoulder leaning ever so slightly against mine.

  The photograph was in color but had faded. It showed a younger Eva laughing alongside a handsome dark-haired man wearing an open shirt. A pair of sunglasses had been pushed up on his head and from his expression he appeared to be singing a song. From Eva’s expression in the photo he also appeared to be singing it badly, but entertainingly. In between the two, cradled in both their arms, was a baby. Itsy-bitsy Sophie. She looked like a little pug dog in a bonnet. There was a lake visible behind them. Eva was in a swimsuit. She had magnificent shoulders. The smile was vivacious. The pair of them—Eva and her husband—were pretty enough to be movie stars.

  “Nice-looking family,” I said.

  Eva took the photograph back and looked at it again. Her face softened somewhat. A slight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

  “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 mov
ed 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.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  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.