Murder in the Hearse Degree

by Tim Cockey

  “Yes. Mike got the call. I was up here. In Baltimore.”

  “It’s possible Mike said something to the police at that point. I mean, maybe he steered them toward the idea that Sophie committed suicide. That’s possible.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  Even as the question left her lips, Libby’s expression darkened. From down the hallway came the sound of canned laughter from the television. Lily’s laughter sounded along with it.

  I asked, “Has Mike ever cheated on you, Libby? That you know of?”

  “That’s what you think, isn’t it? You think Mike slept with Sophie.”

  “I don’t think you should be naïve, Libby. Mike is not dealing straight here. I think that’s obvious.” I realized that I might have no choice but to tell her what I had seen the night before. Libby had dropped her head and was lacing her fingers over and over. A long low rumble of thunder sounded from outside. I waited.

  “Yes.” Libby spoke to her hands. “He did cheat on me. He had an affair.” I started to speak but she silenced me. “No. Let me just tell you. It was a little over a year into our marriage. There was a woman in the D.A.’s office. Maggie Mason. Technically she was Mike’s superior. I found out about it. Actually, a friend of mine saw them having drinks together at a bar outside town and she called me up. It wasn’t just drinks. My friend said they were all over each other. Don’t ask me how a couple of prosecutors can be so reckless, but there it was. We already had Lily at the time, I couldn’t just hop in the car and rush off to confront them. My friend’s description was very specific. I knew who it was. She called me back up when the two of them left the bar together. I looked up Maggie Mason’s number in the phone book and kept calling the number and hanging up when the phone machine answered. Finally the woman answered and I asked very calmly if I could speak to my husband. She tried to bluff, but I told her to save her breath. ‘He’s right there,’ I said. ‘I know it.’ And I named the bar where they had been earlier. Mike was home in fifteen minutes. It was not a pretty scene, Hitch. He was furious. I was furious. He said I could cost him his job. He tried to convince me that I was wrong, that my friend had been mistaken about what she had seen, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I could tell he was lying. Then he tried to blame her. Maggie Mason. He said they were working on a case together. She was putting the pressure on him. It was a mess, Hitch. I nearly left him. I was that close. And Mike saw that I meant it. He begged me to forgive him. He swore he’d never do anything so stupid again.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Here’s what happened. About a week after this whole thing I discovered I was pregnant with Toby.”

  “Nice timing.”

  “Tell me. But that’s really what held us together. You have no idea. It was like being slapped sober. We made a clean start. It was like a miracle. It was made a lot easier when Maggie Mason took a new job in San Diego.”

  “Nothing like putting an entire country between the two of them.”

  “Toby came along and everything was great. Of course Mike is a workaholic, I’ve always had to put up with that. He’s so incredibly driven, it can get scary. And there’s no way you ever forget someone doing that to you. It damaged things between us, no question about it. I told him that if he ever did something like that again I would kill him.”

  My thoughts settled on an image of Ginny Larue and Mike in the dancing light of the Gellman family hot tub. In the image, they were both draped over the tub. Not moving. My ears were hot with guilt. I should tell her. It was her right to know. Why in the world was I protecting Mike Gellman of all people?

  Libby was crying. Her eyes welled up and a tear traveled uncertainly down her cheek.

  “He did it again,” she said, nearly in a whisper. “After all that, the bastard did it again.” She attempted a smile. She failed. “And I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even confront him.”

  “When was this?”

  “This summer. Just . . . oh my God. I’ve been trying to put it out of my head, but it was just this summer. I started to say something about it to you yesterday in the park.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Cindy.”

  “Cindy?”

  “Our other nanny. The one before Sophie.”

  This time the long low rumbling wasn’t thunder; it was coming from my own stomach.

  “Mike was sleeping with your other nanny? What is wrong with this guy?”

  “The thing is, Hitch, I don’t know for absolute certain. I could be paranoid. I guess I could be making the whole thing up. I never had the smoking gun on the two of them. But there was definitely something strange going on. You just had to see them together.”

  “What kind of strange?”

  Libby fell back on the couch and took hold of her scalp. There’s a yoga move where you do this and you vigorously move your scalp all around as if you’re trying to yank it clear off your head. That’s not what Libby was doing. Almost the opposite, in fact. She looked as if she was trying to keep her head from blasting off.

  “I hate this.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know what there is to tell, that’s the problem. Cindy was definitely a party girl. She wasn’t like Sophie. You’d never catch her sitting around reading books in her free time. It was always off to the bars. Off dancing. Off whatever. I couldn’t begrudge her going out, of course. But still. I had to give her the lecture a couple of times. It wasn’t so much her coming home late like she sometimes did, but in the morning, that’s when I really needed her. What I didn’t need was someone I had to drag out of bed. A hungover nanny is not exactly part of the bargain. Cindy’s one of those tall and slinky types. She’s pretty. She’s vain. And of course Mike can be such a flirt. That’s a dangerous combination right there.”

  “Why didn’t you let her go?”

  “Fire her? Believe me, I wanted to. But I just kept putting it off. Giving her another chance. The children really did get along wonderfully with her. I guess I was just avoiding the confrontation. And all the hassle of locating a replacement. And then this thing with Mike started up. Like I said, it wasn’t something I could specifically put my finger on. It was just . . . sometime during the summer the vibrations between the two of them just started to get very strange.”

  “Strange. In what way?”

  “It just began to feel creepy when the two of them were in the same room together. As if they were making an extra effort to appear normal. It just felt very much like they were putting on an act in front of me. Like they were trying too hard. That sort of thing. Of course that set off the alarm bells right away.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “I know it sounds lame but the truth is I really tried to push it away. I just wasn’t ready to go through it all with Mike again. That whole thing with Maggie Mason . . . it was all still a bad taste in my mouth. I tried to tell myself that maybe I was just a little bit envious of Cindy and that was it. Young and pretty and running around all the time. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit.”

  “So then what was the end of it? Why did Cindy stop working for you?”

  “She quit. It was all very sudden. I came home one day and Cindy was packing up her stuff. She said she was quitting and going back to her old waitressing job. No explanation. She just said she wanted a change. It was incredibly unprofessional, of course, but frankly I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t canned her earlier. Fine. Go. Get the hell out. I was tired of baby-sitting the baby-sitter. When Mike got home that night and I told him that Cindy had quit, he tried to look surprised. But he couldn’t pull it off.”

  “He knew?”

  “He knew. And that’s when I knew. Or figured I did. Either she had told him in advance or they had talked sometime during the day after she left.”

  “Why didn’t you put it to him at that point? Confront him.”

 
“I know, I know. But where’s my proof? He could simply deny it and tell me that I was being paranoid. I was just happy to have her gone. Turns out the little sweetie stole some of our silver on her way out. Just a real class act all around.”

  “You’re kidding. Did you contact the police?”

  “Mike did. Or maybe he didn’t, who knows? He told me he had. It was stuff from his side of the family. Frankly I didn’t even care at that point. I just wanted that girl out of my life.”

  Libby stood up suddenly and stepped down the hallway to check on the kids. I watched her as she stood at the door and spoke to them, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She came back down the hallway and stopped just inside the entrance. Her arms were coiled tightly against her chest. She looked either like she was hugging herself or like she was wearing a straitjacket. Both, I suppose.

  “I hate this,” she said.

  Aunt Billie had been an embalming machine.

  “Where have you been, nephew?” she asked me when I came through the door. “They’ve been dropping left and right.”

  Two new customers had come in. Billie had handled them both. They were in the basement, chock-full of formaldehyde, glycerin, phenol, borax, alcohol, and water. Billie mixes a mean cocktail. She took me downstairs to introduce me to our customers.

  “Woman named Brenda. Tripped over her cat at the top of the stairs and fell all the way to the first floor. She broke three ribs, her collarbone, ankle, and dislocated her shoulder.”

  “She should be in a hospital,” I said. “Not a funeral home.”

  “Well,” Billie said, “there was also the neck.”

  Brenda was a hairdresser from Woodlawn. As bald as a billiard cue. Billie told me that some of the women from the shop were due by any minute to work on her.

  “They asked if they could do the makeup. They’re bringing some wigs.”

  Our other customer was named Lenny. Lenny was a butcher at the Eddie’s in Charles Village. His heart gave out while loading a pound of pastrami onto the scales. Billie and I flipped a coin. Billie won the bald hairdresser. Lenny was mine. I was in my office flipping through trade journals when the hairdresser’s colleagues arrived. There were three of them, each in a primary color. Red. Blue. Yellow. Each was holding a wig. Blonde. Brunette. Redhead. Each had a little square purse that matched one of the others’ dresses. Billie met them at the front door and brought them into my office. I guess she thought the place could use a little color. They were all three speaking at once, a sort of barnyard chatter, and I couldn’t quite make out which words were coming from which woman. My inability didn’t seem to be of much consequence. Two of the three women were giving me the whammy, I just couldn’t latch on for sure to which two it was. I smiled at whatever was being said. They were all three holding on to their wigs like muffs. Billie ushered them out after a minute or so. A deathly silence fell over my office. The place suddenly looked so . . . pale.

  Lenny’s son and daughter showed up soon after. They brought along a dark suit and a request.

  “There’s a song Daddy loved,” the daughter said. “It’s from the seventies.”

  Her brother chimed in. “It’s called ‘Spirit in the Sky.’ ”

  “Norman Greenbaum,” I said.

  “Yeah. Wow. How do you know that?”

  I tapped the side of my head. “Stuff flies in, doesn’t fly out.”

  They wanted to know if they would be able to bring along a boom box and play “Spirit in the Sky” at their father’s graveside. I told them they could.

  “Really?”

  “Just as loud as you want.”

  “Daddy would love that,” the butcher’s daughter said.

  “Then by all means, Daddy should have it.”

  After my satisfied customers left I swung by Julia’s gallery to see if she wanted to join me for an early dinner. Chinese Sue was seated behind her new counter. She was finished with George Eliot and was on to something new.

  “What’cha reading?” She tilted the book so that I could read the title. Peptides of Passion. “Are you enjoying it?”

  She nodded.

  “What’s it about?”

  She opened and closed her mouth. “Peptides.”

  “Where does the passion come in?”

  She lowered the book slightly and focused on the wall directly behind me. Chinese Sue answers a lot of questions with this blank stare. It has crossed my mind more than once that perhaps she is deeply committed to some sort of spiritual discipline that places a severe restriction on verbiage. Or possibly she is just hopelessly dense. Either way, I didn’t feel like lollygagging the next hour or so until Chinese Sue emitted her next sound, so I snaked my way up the spiral staircase to Julia’s studio.

  Julia was standing at her easel. She was wearing a pair of bright yellow gym shorts and a Batman T-shirt snipped off just below the breasts. Her hair was in a half dozen cigar-plug pigtails that on anyone else would have looked ridiculous.

  “How far did you have to chase Batman to get that shirt?” I asked.

  “Ha ha.”

  I stepped over to have a look at her canvas. It was a still life. A glass bowl on a table. In the bowl was an orange, some grapes, two apples and several naked figures balled up, hugging their knees to their chests. There was a wineglass next to the bowl, three-quarters filled with red wine. Hands and part of a face were pressing against the inside of the glass, submerged in the wine.

  “I’ll never figure out you artsy types,” I said.

  “No,” she said, smiling. “You never will.”

  “I like your funny-looking hair.”

  “Thank you, Hitch.”

  I dropped into Julia’s hammock.

  “Don’t go making yourself comfortable,” Julia said. “I’m about to go out.”

  “Say it ain’t so, Joe. I was going to ask you to join me for dinner.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got a date. You want to guess with who?”

  “Rosemary Clooney.”

  “That would qualify as a . . . wrong answer. It’s Nick Fallon.”

  “Fallon? No kidding? Our intrepid reporter?”

  “Yes. He left four messages on my machine. And he sent me those.”

  She pointed with her paintbrush at a huge bouquet of flowers in a vase on the floor next to the hammock.

  “There’s a very charming note. Read it.”

  I swung myself on the hammock and plucked the note from the flowers.

  We must mate. Nick

  “Sweet,” I said. “And so subtle. Well, then, I’d better push off. You need to get dressed.”

  “Oh, I’m dressed,” Julia said.

  “Of course you are. Silly me.”

  Julia stepped over as I got out of the hammock. I kissed her on the cheek.

  “Be gentle,” I said.

  She was still laughing as I slid down the fireman’s pole.

  I grabbed a quick bite at the Wharf Rat. Bill was working the bar. Bill used to work at the steel plants until he lost both of his legs there in an accident. Bill mans the bar from a series of padded stools. His upper-body strength is so massive he can whip himself from one stool to the other faster than a person with legs. He can also twist around and grab a bottle off the back counter and land it on the bar in around half a second. Incredibly limber.

  I asked Bill if he could make me a Hairy Dog. I don’t know exactly what goes into one of Bill’s dogs, but they do the trick if you’ve been tipping too many afternoon glasses. I was right as rain and pleased as punch by the time I left the Rat. I swung by my place to get into my somber suit. I had a phone message on my machine. The message was intriguing on several counts. I called back and also got a machine, so I left a message of my own.

  We held the wake for the bald hairdresser that evening. Billie wasn’t feeling too hot-n-tot, so I stood in for her. The hairdresser’s colleagues had set
tled on the redheaded wig. They had applied enough makeup to shame a drag queen. The wake went off without incident. When it was finished I went back home and changed into comfort clothes and drove down to Annapolis. I had a lovely meal at the George Washington Inn. Sea bass stuffed with crab imperial and a clever little pyramid of stringed vegetables with some sort of raspberry vinaigrette. The plate was dabbed with mystery sauce in a sort of Jackson Pollock mélange. The food was quite good. So was the dessert.

  Then I went home with the chef.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Faith served me breakfast in bed. She whipped up a Spanish omelet along with some extremely tasty little scones and a bowl of fresh fruit. She made some mimosas into which she plunked a pair of plump strawberries, then sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed and watched me eat.

  “Aren’t you going to join me?” I asked.

  “I’m a voyeur,” she said. “I just like to watch.”

  I was propped up on the pillows with the breakfast tray tucked up to my waist. Faith’s bedroom had sheer curtains that lifted in the soft breeze much in the manner of Faith’s silky blonde hair. The omelet was fluffy. The scone fell into crumbs with a glance. There was a general weightlessness to the entire room.

  Faith sat in a short white robe watching me with a simple Mother Earth expression as I gobbled up the goodies. When I was done I announced, “That was superb.” Faith crawled forward and I twisted to my left to place the breakfast tray down on the floor. The beatific expression never left her face. I glimpsed it a few times through the veil of her golden hair as I again gobbled up the goodies. When we were done I announced, “No, that was superb.” She smiled and slid out of bed, trailing her robe behind her and letting it drop as she stepped across the floor and out of the room. A moment later I heard a shower running. I found my mimosa glass on the floor and picked it up. One sip left. There was a mirror on the wall above the dresser directly across from the bed. The figure in the reflection looked disheveled and blissed out. I saluted him with my glass.

  “I know exactly how you feel.”