by Tim Cockey
A fellow named Clifford was responsible for making the arrangements. Clifford was a compact little man with a Steve McQueen haircut and hands as freckled as a leopard. Clifford wanted a viewing, and he wanted to know if he would be allowed to include in the viewing a few of Mr. Engelhart’s personal possessions.
“Oliver had a grandeur. I don’t want him just . . . lying there in a casket,” Clifford said to me. “That really wasn’t Oliver.”
Well, I hope that really isn’t any of us, but of course I kept that observation to myself. I assured Clifford that he was free to bring along whatever knickknacks he wanted in order to personalize the event. It’s a long story that perhaps I’ll tell some other time, but we once had a live ostrich at a viewing, standing at the head of a casket. The Health Department had wanted us to put a muzzle on the bird, which can be known to take nasty bites out of people with lightning speed. Of course no one knew where to locate a muzzle that could be fitted for an ostrich, so we ended up tying its beak closed with a green satin ribbon. Some of our visitors complained about the ostrich, some complained about the ribbon. This is not a world in which one can expect to be able to please everyone.
Clifford left me with a black-and-white-checked worsted suit (“Oliver’s favorite”) and of course a photograph of Mr. Engelhart, along with an adjective to work with.
“Oliver was the most insouciant man you’ve ever met.”
As soon as Clifford left I popped downstairs and got to work on Mr. Engelhart. It wasn’t until I was halfway through that I remembered my promise to Darryl that he could help out with the wash-down. Oh well. So I had lied. Something told me that Darryl wouldn’t be too upset.
Mr. Engelhart couldn’t have been more cooperative. Just a delight to work with. After draining the man’s blood and replacing it with my own special blend of herbs and spices, I popped upstairs to consult the dictionary.
Insouciant (French) Marked by blithe unconcern; nonchalant.
Well hell, you can’t get more blithely unconcerned than being dead. Sewell and Son’s Parlor for the Newly Insouciant. Works for me. I went back downstairs and wrestled Mr. Engelhart into the black-and-white-checked suit, then started in with the cotton balls and the face massage. Consulting Clifford’s photograph, I worked one of Oliver Engelhart’s eyebrows up into a quizzical arch (this wasn’t easy, but it’s why I get paid the big bucks), and then with my patented invisible Hitch stitch I closed his lips together in an expression that was probably more dour disregard than insouciance. But the cocked eyebrow counterbalanced sufficiently, I thought, and overall I’d say that the result was pretty damned insouciant. A little puff, a little powder, a stinkless spray to hold the hair in place, and the man was as ready as he would ever be.
Pete Munger was kneeling in the middle of the floor of Julia’s art gallery with pieces of wood scattered all around him. A couple of nails were poking out of his mouth. Tough guy. Chews nails. I picked up a hammer by the head, flipped it, caught it niftily by the handle, and started toward him.
“Here, I can take care of those.”
Pete spit the nails onto the floor. He intoned, “Step away from the carpenter.”
I surveyed Pete’s work. He was building a new sales counter for Julia. Julia had been seeing a guy lately she called Eric the Red, and a few days previous he had driven his motorcycle right through Julia’s sales counter around three in the morning. Julia had been riding on the back. What the two of them were doing driving a motorcycle around inside Julia’s gallery at three in the morning was something I was begging Julia not to tell me. At any rate, the counter was a goner and Pete had offered to build her a new one. From what I could see, Pete didn’t appear to be in a hurry.
“Remind me, are you building or destroying?”
Pete gave me the one-eyed glare. “Exactly. You’re looking at a goddamn metaphor is what you’re looking at.”
“It’s a sure thing I’m not looking at a spanking new sales counter.”
Banished from the fiefdom of her sales counter, Julia’s assistant, Chinese Sue, was cooling her heels on one of the large windowsills, taking in the sunshine like a lazy cat. She was reading The Mill on the Floss, large-print edition. The thing was about the size of a phone book. I called out to her, “Hey, Sue!” She looked over at me with her patented opaque stare and said nothing, though she did manage to make a large noise turning a page. I love that Chinese Sue. So bubbly. So engaging.
Pete was grumbling on the floor. “I can’t get my damn corners to fit.”
“Not to worry. You’re doing this for Julia,” I said. “Her corners never fit.”
“I heard that.”
My ex-wife’s lovely upside-down head popped down from the fireman’s pole in the ceiling. I stepped over to the pole and looked up.
“Hello, sugar beet,” I said. “Did you know you’ve got a man on his knees down here?”
Julia batted her upside-down cows. “Sounds lovely.”
Her head disappeared. A moment later she came down the pole in a languid spiral. Her big bare feet hit the ground and she gave me a smackeroo. Julia was wearing white bicycle pants with the words “Charm City” running up one leg, an oversized black T-shirt with a purple Ravens logo on it and an Orioles cap.
“What are you?” I asked. “The chamber of commerce?”
She performed a little spin, flipping the tail of her T-shirt as she tick-tocked her astounding tush. I was married to that tush for just over a year so I can handle it. I looked over at Pete. He didn’t seem to have suffered a coronary. Or if so, he wasn’t making a spectacle of it. Julia stepped over to where Pete was still kneeling. She stood in a wide-legged Jolly Green Giant stance.
“Interesting.”
“It’s a metaphor,” I explained.
Pete got up off the floor. Pete’s fifty-year-old body is the opposite of a rubber band. It was not a pretty ascension. Pete announced that he needed a drink.
“I’m game,” Julia said.
The three of us went next door to Bertha’s. A guy named Larry was working the bar. Larry didn’t like me. His mother had died several years back, leaving explicit instructions that she be cremated. When I had refused to let Larry talk me out of it Larry had been fit to spit. His anger with me was now a permanent addition to his craw.
Pete noted the waves of hostility that Larry hit me with as I ordered three beers. We took to our stools, Julia in the middle. She explained the story to Pete.
“Hitch cremated Larry’s mother against his wishes.”
Pete leaned forward on the bar to look at me. “You can be a real shit sometimes, can’t you?”
While we waited for our beers, Julia entertained us with a story of a trip she had taken the previous winter to Norway. Julia is a big hit with the Scandinavians. They snatch up her work like it’s chocolate. In fact, as often as they can, they snatch her up like she’s chocolate as well. She junkets there at least once a year for some serious adoration and snatching up. Her story involved a captain in the Norwegian Air Force, a very rare albino moose and very loud sex along the crest of a glacier “beneath the flickering green lick of the Northern Lights.” Julia muddied the details (precisely who—or what—was engaged in the high-volume carnality was never made clear), but she managed to make the story entertaining nonetheless.
Our beers came. Larry set mine down sharply.
I rolled my eyes. “Damn it, Larry, it’s what she requested.”
Julia chattered on a bit more about her Scandinavian junket until finally Pete landed his hand on top of hers and asked her to stop. Julia stuck her tongue out at him and picked up her glass. We fell silent for a bit. Halfway down our beers I asked Julia, “Do you remember Libby Parker?”
Julia rifled her mental Rolodex. “Libby Parker . . . Oh yes, of course I do. That’s the girl you scampered off with right after our divorce.”
“Hitch don’t scamper,” I reminded her. “Hitch lope.
Hitch saunter. Hitch don’t scamper.”
“Hitch don’t talk too well either.”
“Neither.”
“Certainly I remember,” Julia said. “She dumped you and married someone else. As I recall you were simply more fun than the woman could handle. What about her?”
“She’s in Baltimore.”
“That’s just fascinating, Hitch. Wow wee, what a wonderful story.”
“Sarcasm causes wrinkles,” I said. “Makes your hair fall out.” Next to Julia, Pete grunted. I continued, “Libby has left her husband. For now anyway. She’s staying at a friend’s place in Bolton Hill.”
“And I take it you’ve seen her?”
I told her I had and I gave the two of them a rundown on my visit to Annapolis with Libby. Pete appeared to be only half listening. He seemed to be more interested in the play of molecules on the rim of his glass. But he looked up when I explained how Libby’s nanny had been fished out of the Severn River and was having the word “SUICIDE” stamped on her forehead.
“You sound like you’ve got a problem with that,” he said.
“Fact is, Pete, I do.” I explained how Eva Potts was convinced that her daughter wouldn’t do such a thing.
“Of course that’s what she thinks,” Pete said. “You think a parent can swallow something like that easily?”
“Libby’s not convinced either.”
Munger asked, “But the police are?”
“I couldn’t get a complete read on that. The cop on the scene was pretty tight-lipped.”
Munger shrugged. “Some people are tight-lipped. If everyone talked as much as you do there’d be nobody left to listen.”
“I don’t like it. It turns out the girl was pregnant. No boyfriend that Libby knew of. I think it’d be interesting to at least find out who was responsible for getting the girl pregnant.”
Pete finished off his beer. He signaled for another. “And we’re going to assume that this guy killed her, is that it? You’re a regular bloodhound.”
“Derision is the last refuge of knaves,” I said.
“So I’m a knave. Is that going to kill me?”
“I’ve got a feeling about this.”
Pete pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “The last time you had a feeling about something like this it almost got you killed.”
“But everything worked out.”
“You’ve got too much time on your hands, son. What you need is a hobby.”
“What I really need is for a trained professional to help me out.”
Julia looked over at Munger. “I think he means you, big guy.”
Pete sniffed. “I know he means me. And he knows I’m not interested.”
“No he doesn’t,” I said.
“He does now.” Pete’s beer arrived and he had a brief chat with it.
“How’s this then?” I said, and I told them about Mike Gellman’s wedding ring showing up in Sophie Potts’s jewelry box. Pete came out of his suds with a sneer.
“So okay, now he done it. Damn, Sewell, you’re quick. What do you think you need me for?”
Julia took pity. “Did Libby have any explanation?”
“None at all. She has no idea how it got there. She said that Mike never wore it.”
“Maybe the girl stole it,” Pete said.
“Seems like a strange thing to steal.”
Pete shrugged. “There are strange people out there. You know that.”
“Come on, Pete,” I cajoled. “I know you want to help me. I have faith in the true humanitarian beneath this crusty façade.”
The true humanitarian didn’t have much to say about that so I let the subject drop and ordered another beer. A few minutes later I asked Pete about Susan. Susan is Pete’s wife. I don’t really know why I asked the question. Unless it was just to piss him off. The Mungers’ marriage was like one of those relentless monsters in the old movies, the ones that keep taking the bullets but refuse to stop. It just lurches onward. Ever since Pete turned fifty earlier in the summer he’d been trying to figure out why his life stank and what he could do to make it stop stinking. He’d done a bit of noodling around in the self-help universe but so far what he had essentially done in response to his crisis was to begin to dismantle his livelihood—which was private investigation—start drinking more, and fall in love with a woman who wasn’t Susan. As best I could see his life was still in a shambles, but at least now he had more free time, was drunk more often and he had a bittersweet bruise he could push whenever he felt like feeling sorry for himself.
“She’s fine,” Pete said flatly.
I winked at Julia, who turned to Pete. “Okay then . . . So how is Lee?”
He grumbled. “How should I know?”
Julia answered in a singsong voice. “Oh . . . I don’t know. Maybe Hitch said something.”
Pete glared past her at me. “What did he say?”
I leaned forward on the bar to address him. “I said I thought you’re goo-goo for Lee but that you’re determined nonetheless to make your marriage work.” I held up my glass in a salute. “I also said this was driving you insane, not to mention those who get within swatting distance of you.”
“I’m insane?”
“In your slow, laconic way.”
Pete ignored this. To Julia he said, “Last I heard Lee was singing at a club down in Annapolis. I don’t know if she still is.”
“Annapolis, huh? Seems to be in the news a lot these days. At least in this bar.”
“Welcome to the small world,” Pete said. He switched to whiskey after his beer. I went ahead and joined him. “Make mine a double,” Pete said to Larry.
I held up two fingers. “Ditto, barkeep.”
Julia called out, “And they’re off!”
Julia told us that she had a date that evening with Eric the Red. She said he was taking her to a tractor pull down in Largo.
I commended her. “You’re really digging your hands into the soil with this one, aren’t you?”
“I don’t really think it’s going to last much longer,” Julia said. “I’m not cut out to be a biker chick.”
I licked my finger and drew an invisible hash mark in the air. “Onward.”
Julia took off to get ready for her date and Pete and I kept the bar stools company a while longer. I had been practicing card tricks lately and I pulled a deck from my pocket and tried out a few on Pete. He picked-a-card-any-card and after a couple of goof-ups I was able to produce the card from my shoe. Pete was unimpressed. Tommy Haircut had come into the bar with pretty Maria and the two of them were sitting off at a table under the neon Guinness sign. I went over to chat with them, then came back to the bar and cajoled Pete into picking another card. He did and I shuffled the deck. I asked Larry for four shots of Jameson’s, and when they arrived I called Tommy and Maria over.
“One, two, three, down the hatch.”
We tossed back our shots, then I reached into Tommy’s pompadour and produced a card. I held it up to Pete.
“Is that your card?”
Pete smirked. “Okay, so you’ve got a hobby.”
As the place began to fill up with the predinner crowd Pete and I migrated to my outdoor office, the rotting pier at the west end of Thames Street. We had a quarter bottle of Maker’s that I had confiscated from behind the bar when Larry wasn’t looking. The sun was dipping below the horizon, pulling a soft blue sky behind it. Pete and I took turns sighting the Domino Sugar sign across the harbor, using the bottle as our telescope. The red neon was brown and murky for a while, but after numerous sightings it began to clear up . . . which is more than I can say for Munger and Sewell.
We talked mainly about girls. Despite his earlier balking, Pete talked mainly about Susan. He gave me his theory that marriage is like a brick wall that both partners must beat their heads against equally if it is going to succeed. I had to admit that I didn’
t find it to be a terribly hopeful theory, but when I said this to Pete he pooh-poohed me.
“I’ve been married for twenty-six years. It’s no easy sprint to the finish, believe me. You’ve just got to grapple your way forward somehow.”
“So marriage is about grappling and about beating your head against the wall,” I said. “You’re very inspiring, Pete.”
Eventually I rolled our conversation back around to Sophie. When I brought up Mike’s wedding ring for the second time Pete dropped a paw on my arm.
“Do you know what your problem is?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s your problem.”
“Your insight is blinding.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. You want to get the drop on this guy. That’s it. You want to impress the old girlfriend.”
“Listen. Pete. I asked Libby some questions. I got some names from her of a few people we could talk to. Just to get a better picture of things.” Pete said nothing. “Oh, come on, Pete. You’re the old pro at this. You can keep me from looking like an absolute idiot.”
Pete tried to raise an eyebrow at this, but the mechanism wasn’t quite working. He rubbed his hand over his jaw.
“I don’t get you, Sewell.”
“There’s a dead girl, Pete. That’s what it comes down to. She got in twenty-three years and then she dropped into a river. That’s it. Her story has ended. And her mother wants to know why. It makes perfect sense to me. Her girl is gone and she wants to be able to make some sense out of it. Even if Sophie did jump, her mother at least deserves a reason. You can’t argue with that.”
“And you’re the one who is going to give it to her?”
“Give me one honestly good reason why I shouldn’t give it a try. A real one, Pete. An honest reason.”
