Murder in the Hearse Degree

by Tim Cockey

  “I hope he’s going to change out of that bathrobe,” Pete muttered.

  “Too disturbing for you, Pete?”

  “He looks like a fruit.”

  Fallon returned—still a fruit. He was holding up a cassette tape.

  I rubbed my hands together. “Oh boy. Zeppelin One?”

  Fallon stepped over to Julia’s stereo. “After we talked the other day I went back to the office and dug this up. Actually, this is a copy. I record every call that comes into me at the paper. Job like mine, you never know.”

  “Is this your call from Annapolis?” I asked. “Sex, lies and Crawford Larue?”

  “After what you told me I thought I should give it another listen, just to see.”

  He popped the tape into the machine and hit the Play button, then retreated to the hammock. The quality of the recording was lousy. At first there was only a crackle of static. Fallon shrugged.

  “We got a low-tech thing going on at the paper. Just hang on.”

  He reached a foot down to the floor to nudge the hammock into a gentle rocking. Eventually the static abated somewhat and Fallon’s voice sounded from the tape player.

  Fallon. Cannon.

  More crackle, then a female voice responded.

  Are you the reporter?

  The voice was dim. Competing against the static. Not terribly easy to make out. Nick’s voice sounded again.

  This is Nicholas Fallon. Who’s this?

  I’ve got a story. Do you want to buy a story? It’s big.

  What kind of big?

  You know ARK, that religious group? You know them? I’ve got some dirt on them.

  Is that so? Why don’t you tell me about it?

  I want to sell you a story. How much can you pay me for a story? These people are hypocrites. They’re liars. They’re really sick. They say they’re antiabortion and all that? It’s not true. These people arrange abortions all the time. For teenagers. And not just that. They’re also sterilizing girls so they won’t get pregnant at all. It’s sick.

  All around the room, eyebrows rose. On the tape, Fallon cleared his throat.

  Why don’t you give me your name? Why don’t we start there?

  There was silence on the tape. Well . . . there was static. Fallon was swinging gently on the hammock. He held up a hand. “Hold on.”

  After several more seconds of silence, the caller spoke again.

  Never mind. Do you want this or not? It’s a story, you can’t tell me that it’s not. If you don’t want to buy it, just say so. I can go somewhere else.

  Fallon’s voice on the tape was clearly sounding exasperated.

  Look, you’ve got the sex, you’ve got the religious thing. That’s all great. But I’m not going to do this on the phone, okay? If you’ve got something for real to tell me . . . and I mean real. Actual evidence. Something I can trust. I’ll listen to you. That’s fair, right?

  I want money.

  Hey, don’t we all?

  I’m serious! I mean this. I thought you liked good stories. These people are perverted sex maniacs and they’re pretending they’re better than everybody. This is a good story.

  Listen, right now you’re just a voice on the phone. I can’t go to my boss with that. If you want—

  The static abruptly stopped. There were a few seconds of dial tone, and then the recording stopped altogether. Fallon got up from the hammock and hit the Stop button. He ejected the tape and turned to us.

  “Like I said before, we get a dozen of these things a week sometimes. You can tell this one wasn’t really much to go on. It just sounded like someone disgruntled. Or a wacko. When there’s really something good you can usually tell. It’ll have just the right stink to it. If I chased down this kind of crap every single time it came in I’d never get any real work done. I dated the tape and tossed it in the files.”

  “So what are you thinking now?” I asked.

  “Well, now we’ve got a dead girl. And you’ve got her linked with Crawford Larue.”

  “So now you’re thinking this one stinks the way you like it?”

  “It’s getting ripe, yeah.”

  I downed my mimosa and got up off the floor.

  “Can I borrow that?”

  Fallon tossed the tape to me. It was a bad toss—wide—and I missed it. I turned in time to see Pete catch it. He held it up to his nose and sniffed.

  “He’s right. It stinks.”

  Mike Gellman was emerging from the front door as we pulled up. I identified him for Pete. Pete grabbed his camera from the backseat and snapped off a few pictures.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “Habit.”

  We waited until Mike had rounded the corner, then we got out of the car and went up to the door. Libby appeared seconds after our knock. She was pale. She looked as if she had just passed the cocktail hour with a vampire.

  “Mike was here,” she said. “You just missed him.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I don’t know about Mike, though. He’s a mess.”

  “Can we come in?”

  Libby pulled the door open wider. “Sure. Why not? It’s visiting hour.”

  A few minutes later we were in the kitchen. Libby was seated at the table, listening to the cassette tape of Fallon’s phone call. The tape ended and I hit the Stop button. Pete was leaning up against the kitchen counter, gazing up at the copper bowls. I was seated across from Libby. I’d been gazing at her face as she listened to the tape.

  “Well, what do you think?” I asked.

  “About that tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “What am I supposed to think?”

  “Sophie had an accent, didn’t she?”

  “Not a thick one. But yes. She had one.”

  “There’s no accent in the voice on that tape,” I said.

  “Well, no,” Libby said. “It’s not Sophie. Is that who you thought it was?”

  “When Fallon told me about the tape yesterday, yeah, I did. Fallon said he had been able to trace the call back to a pay phone in Annapolis. I just figured it was her. But it’s not Sophie. It wasn’t Sophie who called Nick Fallon with dirt on the ARK.”

  Libby was drumming her fingers on top of the cassette player.

  “I guess you’d like me to tell you who it is then?”

  Pete pushed off of the counter and grabbed a chair. Swinging it around backward he lowered himself into it.

  “If you know that, Mrs. Gellman, it would be helpful.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  I recall a summer back when I was only a few feet tall when I was shipped off each morning to a day camp out in Catonsville. At the time I felt that I had been thoroughly abandoned by my parents, banished to this place from dawn to dusk for what felt like months on end, though I’ve since come to realize that these day camps customarily take up roughly half a day and extend for all of a few short weeks. For the parents they are little more than a brief respite, but for pipsqueaks time has a peculiar interminability. Weeks can seem to last several years, the minutes and hours of the days themselves forever cleaving in half and then in half again to the point where you simply rip up the calendar and gaze hopelessly out the window as the entire galactic dance seems to grind to a complete halt. At any rate this is how I felt during my tortuous several weeks of summer camp, which happened to fall that year during a period of uncustomary rainy weather, day after day of rain and drear, forcing the day campers to remain inside and go slowly nuts with arts and crafts. Popsicle-stick houses were the rage. Our counselors had us building entire subdevelopments of the damn things.

  There was a particular day camper named Henry Aranow who stood out for his unique architectural madness. Henry was a chubby and mildly demonic boy who responded to the mass incarceration by rejecting the conventional glued-together Popsicle-stick structures of his pe
ers for more elaborate creations. Henry had vision. His motif was the splinter, the shard, the remnant. Disorder was order in Henry’s world, and in his Popsicle-stick creations this proclivity was manifested by constructions that looked by all rights as if they should crumble immediately, as if in fact they had no physical logic in even standing in the first place. Henry gleefully split his wooden sticks into pieces before even beginning to build his creations; he then worked wonders with glue—lots of glue—to bring forth peculiar little houses and towers and bridges that for all of their weird jutting angles and shredded woodlike appearance were nonetheless structurally sound. While the rest of us were toiling away at right angles and level planes, Henry was out there following his oddly angled Muse. The boy had vision; that was all there was to it.

  Another thing about Henry, he was the very first skirt chaser I’d ever met. Certainly the youngest.

  I prattle on about all of this by means of explanation as to why it was that when Pete and I pulled into the gravel parking area of the restaurant to which Libby had directed us, my jaw practically dropped into my lap. The building was a Henry Aranow creation. And I don’t mean that figuratively. It was a Henry Aranow creation. Henry owned the place, and quite clearly had had a hand as well in its construction . . . or deconstruction, if you prefer.

  CAP’N HENRY’S CRAB SHACK

  “Good Christ,” Pete muttered.

  It was all there, just like the Popsicle-stick monstrosities that little Henry used to build as a tot. The place was constructed of unpainted wood, weathered gray and grainy, and it loomed out over a narrow tributary of the Severn River as if it was ready to tumble right in. I was reminded a little of Libby and Mike’s house in that the restaurant itself—a good three-quarters of it—was an open deck. This was the part that actually loomed over the water. The deck was of a vastly irregular shape, as if a blind man had taken a jigsaw to an already amorphous rectangle. But it was the ragged collection of splintery-looking pieces serving to support the thing that really showed the Aranow touch. The large deck was essentially on stilts that went down into the water. The stilts looked like toothpicks. Or long skinny legs.

  Henry was no longer the chubby sort but had blossomed into a downright large man with a barrel chest, a big broad face and a proud golden mustache the size of a small propeller. He had an easygoing look to him. His robust smile revealed a gold cap on one of the top teeth and his small blue eyes sparkled with mirth. He was wearing a tattered Greek fisherman’s cap, dirty khakis and a loud Hawaiian shirt.

  “This is a hell of a crab shack you’ve got here, Henry,” I said to him after Pete and I had been shown to our seats. Henry had given us a table along the railing, one of the zigzag offshoots seemingly held in the air by nothing other than a prearrangement with gravity. Pete was looking warily over the edge at the river below. His grip on the metal arms of his chair seemed especially secure.

  “I think big,” Henry said, rapping his ham hands against his belly for emphasis. He tugged on his cap. “This ‘cap’n’ stuff is pure horse, you know. It’s a good look though. Truth is I’m a landlubber. Can’t stand the water.”

  Henry’s wife, Joan, was our waitress. Henry directed Joan to load us up with a couple of platters of oysters and a pitcher of beer. I asked after the crab cakes and Henry told me they were as big as my fist and no filler.

  “Bring ’em on, Cap’n.”

  It being a Saturday, the joint was jumping. And so was Joan. She was working the tables with a demon energy. When she delivered our pitcher of beer it sloshed over the rim and onto a few of our oysters.

  “Sorry. I’ll get you some more.” She grabbed up the several splashed oysters, shoving them into her apron pocket, and hurried off.

  “And so laid back,” I said, forking a little snot of oyster into my dish of cocktail sauce. Henry had moved on to work his cap’n shtick on his other customers and Pete and I decided to wait until after our lunch before waving him back over. As we finished up our mollusks, I caught Henry’s eye across the deck. His gold tooth glistened and he made his way back over to our table.

  “How was everything?” he asked.

  I told him it was supreme. “Can you spare a couple minutes, Henry?” I asked. “We wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “Questions? Sure. What’s up?”

  “It’s about one of your employees,” I said.

  “Pull up a chair,” Pete said.

  Henry sat down between us. “I hope it’s not Joan. I’ve told her she works too fast. It can get the customer jumpy.”

  “It’s not Joan,” I said.

  Joan was flying by just then at supersonic speed. She banked hard left and pulled up at our table with a nearly audible squeak of her rubber shoes.

  “Is everything all right? Anything wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine, Joan,” Henry said soothingly. “How about some apple pie for my friends?”

  “Pie.” As if she had uttered an incantation, Joan vanished.

  Henry smoothed his walrus mustache. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

  “We want to ask you about Cindy Lehigh,” I said.

  Henry’s mustache drooped, along with the rest of his face.

  “That one. What about her?”

  “Is she working here today, Mr. Aranow?” Pete asked.

  “Henry.”

  “Is she here?”

  Henry wagged his head. “Not today and not any other day either. Not anymore she isn’t. And this time I don’t care if she comes crawling back on all fours. Fool me twice, but that’s it.”

  Pete and I swapped a glance.

  “Do you mind explaining that, Henry?” I asked.

  “What’s to explain? Cindy worked for me early in the year. Right before the summer hit she went and quit on me. Crappy timing for me, but that’s how the business goes. She told me she got some other job. She wanted her nights free. So she left.”

  “She got a job as a nanny,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I heard. Something like that.”

  “But she came back recently, isn’t that right?” I asked.

  “About a month or so ago, yeah. I guess I’m a pushover. I let her talk me into taking her back on.”

  “It didn’t work out?” Pete asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she quit again or did you fire her?”

  Henry showed us his gold tooth. “Afraid I didn’t get the pleasure. I should have while I had the chance.”

  “So then she quit.”

  “I suppose you could call it that. The girl didn’t stand on ceremony. What happened is that she just stopped showing up for work one day. I guess you could call that quitting.”

  “She didn’t give you a reason?” I asked.

  “You mean show common courtesy? Let me take a stab here. You two have never had dealings with the girl. Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “We never had the pleasure.”

  “Well, it’s not as much of a pleasure as it seems, trust me. She’s a looker, I’ll give her that. And I guess that carries more weight than it ought to, but there it is.”

  “Is that why you hired her back?” Pete asked. “Because she’s a looker?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Was Cindy at least a decent waitress?” Pete asked.

  Joan materialized just then. She heard Pete’s question. She skidded a pair of plates in front of Pete and myself—two large slices of apple pie—then dropped a pair of forks noisily onto the table. She shot a look at Henry.

  “Thank you, Joan,” Henry said.

  She vaporized.

  I picked up my fork and took two stabs. One of them was into my pie. “Let me guess. Those two didn’t get on, did they?”

  Henry nodded slowly. “You could say that. You can see, Joannie works like the devil. Our little
Cindy had . . . well, she had a different style. You’d look up and see her gabbing with customers over here while customers over there are waiting for service. She wasn’t always real punctual either. And she got in a couple of fights with the cooks.”

  “Sounds like a model employee,” Pete noted.

  Henry grunted. “Model for disaster.”

  “So then why did you hire her back?” Pete asked again.

  “We were short,” Henry said. “One of my girls had just quit and I happened to run into Cindy in town. She asked if we needed help out here. At least she was already trained. She could hit the ground running.”

  “I wouldn’t think it would be that hard to locate good waitresses,” Pete said.

  “You’re right. I guess I made a mistake. And I guess I paid for it. The day after she stopped showing up we realized we were short in the till.”

  “She stole money from you?”

  “Can’t prove it, of course. But I’d say it fits the profile. The girl’s a little goldbricker.”

  “We’re trying to locate her, Henry,” I said. “Any idea how we can get ahold of her?”

  Henry stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “I can’t help you there. All I know is that she was living with a friend of hers somewhere in town.”

  “In Annapolis?”

  “Yes. But I don’t have an address.”

  “What about Joan?” Pete asked. “Maybe your wife knows how we can get ahold of Cindy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to ask though.” Pete started to rise from his chair. Henry placed a hand on his arm.

  “Whoa. Slow down there.”

  Pete glanced over at me, then back at Henry. “Problem there, Cap’n? I just want to ask your wife a question.”

  “I told you, she doesn’t know anything.” Joan was dumping a tray of crabs onto a table across the deck from us. Her eyes weren’t on the job. They were on her husband. “Look, I’d as soon you not bring Cindy up to Joan, okay?”

  Pete smiled ruefully as he pushed his chair back. “I’ll be right back.” He got up and headed across the deck.

  “That was the precisely wrong thing to say,” I said to Henry. Henry let out a low groan. “What’s the problem, Henry?” I asked.