Murder in the Hearse Degree

by Tim Cockey

  After Faith got out of the shower I rolled in and watered down the old carcass. Good pressure. Plenty of hot water. Faith was hanging up the phone as I emerged from the bathroom. She gave me a thumbs-up.

  “We’re all set,” she said.

  As we left Faith’s apartment I thanked her for the breakfast. “And all that other stuff, too. You’re a top-rate hostess.”

  I followed Faith in my car. The Fates gave us a pair of parking spots, one behind the other, and we headed down to the harbor. The day was crisp and clear and so was I. Faith floated along next to me.

  “There he is.”

  We had arrived at a place called Pusser’s Landing, a bar and restaurant with tables right on the water. A midshipman was sitting by himself at one of the tables. He was spiffy in his bright whites. He rose as Faith and I approached. I guessed he was around twenty. With the buzz cut and the sailor suit, there was an overgrown-boy look to him. He looked earnest and nervous.

  Faith spoke first. “Bradley, this is the man I told you about. This is Hitchcock Sewell.”

  The middy had a hold of my hand before I knew what was coming. His arm jerked with a piston move.

  “Bradley Hansen, sir!” It’s actually a low-volume shout, the way they snap this off.

  I shouted back, “Nice to meet you, Bradley! And you can skip the ‘sir’ business.”

  “Yes . . . okay.”

  Faith placed a hand on my back and leaned into me. “I’m going to go. I’ll see you later?”

  “Roger,” I said. Her arm trailed down my back. She headed off down the docks, in that floating style of hers. I turned to Bradley.

  “Hell of a tan on that woman, eh?”

  Bradley looked confused. “Sir?”

  “Tan. Woman. Very nice.”

  “Oh . . . yes.”

  I took a seat and signaled for him to do the same. A waiter popped up out of a hole and I ordered coffee. Bradley was fine with his water. Navy man.

  “Faith tells me she ran into you on the street yesterday,” I said.

  The cadet swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “She recognized you from one of the parties that she catered.”

  “That’s right. She did.”

  “You were the one who came up to her and her partner and apologized for teasing one of their workers. The little Polish girl.”

  “It was Hungarian, sir.”

  “Of course. Hungarian. I knew that. Just checking you. Faith tells me you asked about her yesterday. About Sophie.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I did.”

  “Bradley, are you nervous?”

  It wasn’t just his clipped delivery—this was part of his training, after all—but for all that it was a beautiful morning, probably somewhere in the upper sixties, and the boy was sweating like crazy.

  He stammered. “I just . . . she told me Sophie was dead.”

  “And you hadn’t known that.”

  “No, sir. No. Absolutely not.”

  My coffee came. For some reason (probably omelets, mimosas and an audacious dose of Faith) I was feeling extraordinarily calm and mellow. The breeze was perfect. The boats in the harbor were swaying gently. Seagulls were hovering in the air as if suspended on filaments.

  I picked up the little pitcher of milk. “Bradley, did you sleep with Sophie?”

  He answered without hesitation. “Yes, sir.”

  I poured some milk into my coffee. I picked up the spoon and stirred slowly, then placed the spoon back on the table, just so. I took a teensy sip. The midshipman was sitting ramrod straight. He was suffering nobly as I went through the motions of being a jerk.

  “You got her pregnant,” I finally said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She told you that she was pregnant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did you say to her?”

  He finally unfroze. He blinked hard and his head swiveled, as if he was afraid someone might be listening in on our conversation. His skin looked pale against his crisp white uniform.

  “I can’t be a father,” he said. His voice had gone hoarse. He could barely get the words out.

  “Is that what you told her?”

  He nodded. He took a sip of his water.

  “And what did she say, Bradley?”

  “She said she couldn’t have a baby on her own. I . . . I told her, I just can’t. My father went to the Naval Academy. My uncle went here. And my grandfather. I can’t get booted out. I just can’t.”

  His face had gone from white to red. The pleading was in his eyes. Along with the fear.

  “I can’t,” he said again, nearly in a whisper.

  “And you weren’t about to just leave the academy on your own and take up with this girl you didn’t even know.”

  He shook his head. More of a tremble, as if his chair was being jostled.

  “I guess you didn’t think of all this when you slept with her, did you?” I said. I said it a little more sharply than I had intended. Having just rolled out of the rack with the ethereal but essentially unknown Faith myself, I have to say it was hardly my place to be lecturing this kid on the responsibilities of the morally upright. But I allow for a little fraudulence when making a point. A strict adherence to the avoidance of hypocrisy would paralyze a person. The issue here was Bradley, not me.

  “It just happened,” Bradley said.

  “You mean sleeping with Sophie. It just happened.”

  “That’s right. I asked her for her phone number at the end of the party. She gave it to me. I met her a couple nights later. We went to a movie.”

  “Good movie?”

  “I guess. She liked it. There wasn’t a lot of action. She said she didn’t like action movies.”

  “It was one of those relationship movies?”

  “I guess so. It was pretty sappy.”

  “And then one thing led to another?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “It’s a story as old as the hills,” I said.

  “She said she would take care of it. I offered to help. That’s the truth. Then I didn’t hear from her again.”

  “I guess now you know why.”

  “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

  “Did you have any contact with Sophie after she told you she’d ‘take care of it’?”

  He took a moment to sip on his water. His eyes flitted about again. “No, sir.”

  “What did you think she was going to do?”

  He lowered his head. He was running his finger absently around the rim of his glass. “I didn’t ask.”

  “Did you kill her, Bradley?”

  His head snapped up. For just an instant, the sad, doughy face was replaced with a look of anger. It was gone as quickly as it had arrived.

  “That’s not funny,” he said.

  “Not a whole lot about this whole mess is.” I skidded my chair back from the table. “Everyone I’ve talked to tells me she was a sweet kid,” I said.

  Bradley swallowed hard. “I liked her laugh. She had a really cute laugh. When we . . . after we, you know, did it, she was laughing. It was weird, because she was also crying. But she was happy. I mean, she couldn’t stop smiling.”

  I stood up. I took a few dollars from my pocket and dropped them on the table. Bradley was looking at his water glass again. That crystal-ball gaze. I squinted at the boats out in the harbor. The crew of the Pride of Baltimore II was readying the ship to set sail. They sail this ship all over the world, as what they call a goodwill ambassador. When I was younger I used to imagine that every port the Pride came into, the docks were loaded with locals who had come out to greet it. All very colorful. Waving handkerchiefs. Cheering. Smiling. I looked back down at Bradley. There was nothing I could think to say.

  CHAPTER

  19

  I stopped off at Faith’s apartment but the angel wasn’t
home. I pulled out one of my cards and wrote a short note on the back. I decided it was too silly so I pocketed it and wrote out a second one. This one was silly too, but it would have to do. At the bottom I added, I’ll call you. With all due respect, it’s a known fact among the caveman set that women go nuts for that line.

  Before heading back to Baltimore I swung by the police station. I was curious to see if there had been any shimmy or shake about the car that had plowed into Tom Cushman. The woman at the front desk remembered me. I remembered her. Judith. Judith told me that Croydon Floyd was out on patrol. Judith also told me that Croydon Floyd’s allergies were acting up today. She told me about her husband’s bowling league. She told me about her laser surgery, about her son’s science project, about a trip the family took recently to the Shenandoah Caverns, about the funny smell she couldn’t get out of her cat’s fur, about getting a pretzel stuck in her ear. . . . I was leaning toward the door like a man in a hurricane but I couldn’t . . . quite . . . get there. I was rescued by acting chief Talbot, who rounded the corner just then. He recognized me from before.

  “You can tell him later, Judith,” he muttered to the receptionist. He motioned for me to step outside.

  “Thank you.”

  We stopped just outside the glass door. Talbot thumbed his belt loop and hitched up his pants. He indicated my bandaged arm.

  “Understand you clipped yourself the other night.”

  I held up the arm. “It’s nothing, really. Small price to pay for still being alive.”

  “I can see your point.” Talbot squinted up at the Maryland state flag snapping smartly atop a flagpole out on the grass. A metal grommet somewhere along the anchor rope was making a pinging sound as it bounced against the pole. Talbot addressed himself to the flag . . . but I could tell who he was talking to.

  “Croydon told me he spoke with you the other day. He said you were questioning the way we’re doing our job. Is that right?”

  “I was calling to ask Officer Floyd for some information as well as to give some information. An exchange of information, if you will.”

  “Croydon says you’re nosing around in the death of that Hungarian girl. We got a call from a Mrs. Pierce who told us that you and a friend of yours went by her house the other day asking a lot of questions.”

  “Is there a crime in that?”

  Talbot broke away from the flag and turned his squint to me. “Fact, there is. Interfering with police business.”

  “I guess I wasn’t aware that there was much police business to interfere with on this one. My impression is that the Annapolis police have laid this case to rest. So to speak.”

  “Lots of people want to play detective, Mr. Sewell,” Talbot said. “I’m going to ask you to stop now. If you have information relevant to the investigation, of course we want to hear it.”

  I suppose a perfectly upstanding citizen would have offered up Bradley Hansen at that point as the father of Sophie’s unborn baby. I didn’t. So much for my upstanding standing. The police didn’t seem to be shaking the bushes and breaking down doors trying to learn a whole lot about Sophie Potts; I kept the information in my pocket.

  “Sophie Potts wasn’t suicidal,” I said. “I think that’s relevant information.”

  Talbot seemed disappointed in me. Not to mention increasingly impatient.

  “I wasn’t aware that you knew the young lady,” he said.

  “I didn’t. Never had the pleasure.”

  “Girl got herself in trouble. Some people aren’t so good at handling trouble.”

  “You mean she was pregnant. But the police didn’t find that out until after she was pulled from the river. Until the autopsy, right? I’m just wondering how come she was marked as a suicide from the very beginning. I’m just curious what you were going on.”

  Talbot worked up a good-old-boy’s smile and tried it out on me. “I thought I just asked you a moment ago to stop playing detective.”

  “I’m playing citizen,” I said, and I gave his fake smile right back to him.

  “Well, then, I’d like you to play citizen back in Baltimore.”

  “Did you know that Sophie Potts was pregnant before the coroner’s report came out?”

  “Mr. Sewell, I believe we’ve spent enough time on this topic.”

  “Fine. Then how about Tom Cushman. The guy who got run over the other night. He was an acquaintance of Sophie Potts.”

  “Croydon passed that information along to me. We appreciate your sharing it with us.”

  “I’m not sure I should have bothered,” I said.

  A pair of policemen were approaching the building. Talbot and I stepped aside to let them pass. They nodded tersely at their boss. Talbot caught the glass door before it swung shut.

  “It’s been nice talking with you, Mr. Sewell.” A patent lie, but I let it slide. “You have a good day now,” Talbot said, then turned and followed the officers inside the building.

  Billie was sitting out on the stoop when I returned to the funeral home.

  “Hitchcock, there’s a man inside to see you. He wanted to know if he could lie down in one of the caskets.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said if he took off his shoes.”

  It was Nick Fallon. He was in our display room, stretched out in an Ambassador model. His arms were crossed behind his head like he was lounging on a chaise. His eyes were closed.

  “Comfortable?” I asked as I came into the room.

  Fallon’s eyes opened slowly. “I feel dead.”

  “You’ve got the moves down.”

  Fallon scooted up in his casket. “There’s some nice padding in this. Real snug. It’s a damn shame you’ve got to waste these things on corpses.”

  “I’m glad you like it. You’d be surprised how many people have one in their homes.”

  “No kidding. Their own personal coffins?”

  I named a well-known actress.

  “No shit,” Fallon said.

  I named a local sports figure.

  “Him?”

  I named a popular writer of self-help books and his rock-star wife. “Matching caskets,” I said. “His-and-hers.” I was making it all up, of course, but I saw no reason to spoil Fallon’s fun.

  Fallon clambered out of the coffin.

  “You’ve got to give me the whole scoop here, padre. I could pull a story out of this.” Fallon leaned up against the wall and started to put his shoes on. He didn’t appear to be too steady on his feet. Rather, his foot.

  “You look beat,” I said. “What brings you here?”

  The answer walked into the room. “I do.”

  It was Julia. She floated forward on an invisible cloud. Her smile was the size of Wisconsin. Fallon had one shoe on, one shoe off. He waved the loose shoe in Julia’s direction.

  “That woman isn’t human.”

  “She’s a national treasure, isn’t she?”

  Fallon met his foot halfway and worked on the shoe. “Jesus. You have no idea.”

  Julia came over to me and tipped her head onto my shoulder.

  “Oh, he does.”

  All three of us were starving. Billie had come back inside and she offered to whip up a lunch for us. Julia said she would help. I gave Fallon the nickel tour. The highlight of the nickel tour is our embalming room, downstairs in the basement. Nick studied the table with a jaundiced eye as I explained the process. Some people find it fascinating, others go as green as a Granny Smith. Fallon was leaning toward the Granny, so I kept the explanations tame.

  “What’s with the posters?” Fallon asked.

  He was referring to a pair of posters on one wall of the room. One of them showed Groucho Marx in a pith helmet down on one knee, arms spread. Directly next to it was a poster of Sophia Loren in a tight peasant dress.

  “Stand here.” I positioned Fallon at the opposite side of the embalming
table. “Now, picture a corpse laid out in front of you. You’re going to be down here with it for at least an hour. Maybe longer. Just you and silent Joe. And let’s face it, you’ll be doing some pretty strange stuff when you stop and think about it. Okay? You got all that?”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, look up.”

  He looked up from the table at Groucho and Sophia. His eyes flitted from one to the other.

  “I got it.”

  “Let’s go eat.”

  Billie and Julia had put together a platter of BLTs and Billie was still whipping up a large bowl of potato salad. We gathered around Billie’s kitchen table and started in on the sandwiches. Fallon ate like a feral child having his very first indoor meal.

  “I’ve got news,” I announced.

  “So does Nick,” Julia said.

  “Mine’s about the nanny,” I said.

  Fallon had a mouthful of sandwich. He bobbed his head madly and waved a thumbs-up. Julia translated.

  “So is his. I told Nick last night why you and I were at Crawford Larue’s party. I told him all about Sophie Potts.”

  “Well, I know who got her pregnant.”

  They listened as I told about Faith’s running into the midshipman the day before and how she had immediately inferred something having transpired between Bradley and Sophie. I told how Faith had arranged for Bradley to be at Pusser’s Landing so that I could meet him, and I described how guileless the young man had been, how cooperative and readily truthful.

  “So did you get the feeling that the guy was getting it off his chest?” Fallon asked.

  “That was definitely part of it.”

  “He knocks her up and leaves her out to dry. Maybe the girl threatened to make a stink. His future is on the line. He’s feeling the pressure.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Take a look at it,” Nick said. “That bridge. It’s awfully damn close to the academy. Watery grave? What do you think? I can see the navy angle on this one.”

  “Nick, you’re thinking like a cheesy tabloid writer.”

  The cheesy tabloid writer made a face. It had “duh?” written all over it.

  I went on. “I figured that finding the guy who slept with Sophie would clear things up,” I said. “But that was when I figured it would turn out to be Gellman or even Tom Cushman. Frankly, the navy boy was something of a wild card.”