The Hearse You Came in On (17 page)

“There is undercover and there is undercover. Alan couldn’t have any paperwork on this. An official assignment would have meant a file. Reports. Those photographs would have had to go into the file. The basic facts of the top cop’s wife boffing the tennis pro would have had to go into that file. Even under normal circumstances, this would have been a little rough for Mr. Stuart. In light of a gubernatorial campaign, it was a nonissue. There would be no files.
There would be nothing to leak to the press, or to the other campaign. It was all to be handled off the books. The only way I could do that was to take a leave of absence.

“And so I did. I did my boss’s bidding. I went out and got myself a nice little country club wardrobe. Behind the scenes, Alan quietly made the arrangements with the club. I have no idea what he told them. But voilà. Instant member. No background checks of my Mayflower ancestry. Nothing. Katie Zabriskie from Thirty-eighth Street in Hampden, member in good standing of the Baltimore Country Club. Wouldn’t my father have gotten a roar out of that! I almost wished he were still alive, just to see it.”

I noted the “almost” of that last statement. I think she noted me noting it. We didn’t mention it. She went on.

“The rest is pretty simple and, frankly, none of your business. I did my job. I infiltrated. I contacted my target. This is the lingo we use. I have to say, the contact part was pretty damned easy. Guy was an outrageous flirt. He was running a real number at that club, I can tell you.”

“So then Amanda Stuart wasn’t his only, uh, extracurricular student?”

“Hitch, you’re such a pilgrim. No, she wasn’t. He was on the make with any number of women there. Some of them weren’t married, so you have to pretty much dismiss them. Or at least downgrade them.”

“What do you mean?”

“As suspects.”

“Suspects?”

“Murder. Hitch, are you forgetting that we’re talking about a man who has been murdered?”

Holy moly, and I used to think I was a smart little pumpkin. It had never even occurred to me that there might be someone out there completely unrelated to Alan and Amanda Stuart who might have held a murderous grudge against Guy Fellows. Other lovers. Other pissed-off hubbies.

Kate continued. “He was sleeping with a number of other women. He might have been blackmailing any one of them as well. Who knows? That’s a part of what I had to investigate. What did you think, my entire task was to go to bed with this guy and squeeze the name of his partner in crime out of him? I don’t mean to sound offended, Hitch, but I’m offended. I’m a detective.”

I muttered an apology. Though I wasn’t exactly certain what I was apologizing for.

“Let me just get this all clear,” I said. “Alan Stuart, your boss, very possibly the next governor of this state, calls you into his office and tells you that some huckster tennis pro is screwing his wife and is threatening to go public with dirty videos and that he—Stuart—wants you to go out there and slither in between the guy and his sheets as part of your
job?
That’s in your job description? Fetch coffee, seduce suspects?”

“I don’t fetch coffee,” Kate said flatly.

“I’m sorry, but am I misguided here in thinking that something about all of this maybe, just maybe, puts Alan Stuart in a somewhat unfavorable light?”

“Did you hear me say I was happy about it?”

“I’m just—”

“I wasn’t then and I’m not now. And I’d appreciate your not sitting there on my couch taking cheap shots at me.”

“I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t mean to be doing that. I
just don’t see where this guy gets the authority to tell you to go to bed with a blackmailer.”

Kate took a deep breath and stared out the window. I had looked out of it earlier. There is nothing to see. A Street. Cars driving by. Rows of brownstones across the street.

Kate turned back to look at me. Her anger was gone. She looked pale and uncertain.

“He doesn’t have the authority, hitch. There are strict departmental regulations about that sort of thing.”

“Then how—” I cut myself off. She was going to tell me. I didn’t need to badger.

“It wasn’t an official investigation,” she said slowly. “It was strictly off the books. There were no regulations to follow. I had to be as free as I needed to be to get as close to Guy Fellows as I needed.”

She came away from the window.

“It wasn’t an official investigation,” she said again. “There is no paperwork. Alan called me into his office and then into his confidence. He asked me to go after Guy Fellows and to root out everything that I could.” She sighed. “He asked me to do it as a personal favor to him.”

“Kate …” I hesitated, seeing the forlorn look that had come over her face. “Oh, Kate, isn’t that an awfully large favor?”

She sighed. “Yes it is.”

“Could you have just said no?”

She lowered her head. I could barely hear her answer. “I owed him.”

I stood up from the couch—finally—and went over
to her. I touched her on the arm and she looked up into my face. God, she looked exhausted.

“You
owed
him? You owed him what?You owed him a favor? Kate, how big a favor can you owe a person?”

She searched my face, but it was clear she wasn’t finding what she needed there. She stepped past me and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard a cabinet door being shut. She reappeared, holding a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glasses.

“Would you do the honors?”

I didn’t move. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m asking you to pour me a drink. I’m in my own home, for Christ’s sake.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hitch, I’m not sure of anything, okay? That’s the whole problem. But maybe if I can get everything out on the table I can start to sort it out better. I’m sorry … I’m sorry if this stuff helps me do it, but right now it does. So do you want to lecture me or be my friend?”

I didn’t really think that the two choices she offered me were the only ones that should be available. She didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Never mind. I can pour.” She sat down on the couch and poured two inches into one of the glasses. She looked up at me. “For God’s sake, don’t make me drink alone. Please.”

I motioned for her to pour out a second glass. She did. I picked it up. She picked up hers as well and held it just beneath her chin. She had trouble getting her words out.

“The reason … the favor that I owed Alan. The … reason he could feel so confident in calling me in and
asking me to … to do his dirty work for him …” She took a tiny sip.

“I lied to you, Hitch. I lied to you the other night, about my husband.”

“The shoot-out?”

“That part was true. The shoot-out was true. The bungled stakeout. All that was all true. It just happened a little differently from how I told you. The guy up on the walkway? The one who I said shot Charley?”

I nodded.

“He didn’t shoot Charley. He shot me. He shot me in the shoulder. That was the scar you were so polite not to ask me about last night.”

It was this morning, but I didn’t quibble.

“Okay,” I said. “So he shot you. And your … whoever he was, the other cop—”

“Lou. Lou Bowman.”

“Bowman. He shot the guy up on the walkway. Was that part true?”

“That part was true.”

“So what am I missing, Kate?”

“You’re missing Charley. That’s what you’re missing. You’re missing my husband who is lying on the ground bleeding to death.”

“But you’ve just said that the guy on the walkway didn’t shoot him.”

Kate held up her glass, out at arm’s length. “You see how steady that is? Do you see how the glass isn’t shaking? We’re trained to be steady like that. Hours and hours at the firing range so that if and when the time comes, we’ll come up with our guns as steady as I’m holding this glass. And pow, pow, pow.”

She was absolutely right. The glass was as steady as
could be. She finished off her drink, then set the glass back onto the table.

“The guy up on the walkway didn’t kill my husband,” Kate said. “He didn’t shoot Charley.” She whispered. “I did.”

In a movement so swift I barely saw it, Kate snatched up her glass and aimed it at me like a pistol.

“Pow.”

G
od, what a sad mess. I don’t mean my apartment, I mean Kate Zabriskie and the numerous tangles that were doing their number on her. My apartment
was
a mess, though as usual I pinned the blame on Alcatraz, lovably clumsy Clydesdale that he is. I actually need a bigger place or a smaller dog. But I’m happy with both of what I’ve got, so I manage.

After Kate’s shocker, she had asked me to leave. When I asked if she was going to be all right she had said “No. But I’ll be worse if you’re here trying to be nice to me. It’s a mess, Hitch. You don’t even know the half of it.”

She had gone to a nice old rolltop desk and pulled a thick envelope from one of the drawers and handed it to me.

“Is this the half of it?” I had asked.

“I can’t talk about this anymore today. Tonight. Whatever. I’m exhausted. Read these. It’s mainly fiction, but you’ll get some idea of… well, just read it.”

The envelope was filled with newspaper clippings. I spread them out on my bed and sat Buddha-style on a pillow as I went over them. They were all from the previous
fall. I sorted them by date. I tried to keep in mind what Kate had told me: mainly fiction.

TWO KILLED IN WAREHOUSE SHOOTING
Police Trap Turns Deadly

UNDERCOVER COP KILLED IN CROSSFIRE
Police Investigating Possible Ambush

POLICE WIFE SHOT HUSBAND’S KILLER
Detective Took Out Husband’s Killer
Seconds After Fatal Shot

BITTER JUSTICE FOR WIDOW
Commissioner Stuart Calls Officer Zabriskie
a Hero; Funeral Set for Tomorrow

HERO WIDOW BIDS FAREWELL TO HERO HUSBAND
Huge Turnout for Det. Chas. Russell;
Katherine Zabriskie Cleared in Killing
of Husband’s Murderer

A thin red line was ripping the horizon by the time I finished going over all of the clippings. The men of the purple dawn had already come by and rattled the neighborhood’s trash cans into their truck. The seagulls were awake, sending their laughter through the sky. All across Baltimore, razors and toasters were doing their thing.

Kate told me that she had shot and killed her own husband. By mistake of course. Crossed wires and botched communications and who knows what else had landed Charley Russell on the wrong side of a
police stakeout, and even more cruelly, his nearly new wife on the other side, pistol at the ready, steady as a mountain—per police training—squeezing off a single shot in the second before recognizing her target as her own beloved husband. She told me this much, and this much only: “I saw a man coming up with a gun and I shot him. He dropped immediately. A second later I took a bullet in the shoulder from the guy up on the walkway. Lou—he was the detective there with me—Lou nailed him. And that was the end of the truth.”

The clippings included a standard police academy mug shot of Katherine Zabriskie, a remarkably bland photograph in my view, just another earnest smiling face under a slightly too-large police hat. There was a picture of her husband as well. He was a solidly handsome guy with a tidy little policeman’s mustache. Two kids in love. It was a heartbreaker.

It finally dawned on me that I really needed to get some sleep. I flipped off the light, only to find that it had ceased doing any good about an hour ago. Day had dawned. I put a pillow over my head and suffocated myself to sleep.

I
had a funeral slotted for the morning. The Webster funeral. Though when I got to my office, the paperwork on my desk said it was the Weber funeral. It was a typo. God, I hoped the gravestone was right. There’s nothing you can do with a misspelled headstone that reads “Weber” except to keep it to the side and wait to see if anyone named Weber kicks and drops. Though it dawned on me that I could call up a guy I used to know named Weber and see if he had any interest. We used to be good friends, but we had a falling out some years back over something small and petty. I don’t suppose a phone call from me offering him a misspelled gravestone with his name on it would do much to thaw the ice between us.

Moot point anyway. When I got to the cemetery the gravestone read “Webster,” not “Weber.” The funeral went off without a hitch. Or with just one, if you’re referring to me. I shook a half-dozen Webster hands and lent my hanky to the widow. As we were leaving the cemetery I saw one of the guests, a stocky balding guy with a thick Norse-looking beard, pull out a tobacco pipe from his coat pocket, load it and stoke it.
After a few puffs he tapped his pipe against the coffin then put it back in his pocket. A little ashes-to-ashes thing. You’d be surprised how many people have their little personal rituals. This guy wandered back over to his wife, who poked him lovingly in the gut. They headed off to their car with their arms around each other.

After I got back from the funeral I went out to the end of the pier that runs past the Screaming Oyster Saloon and gazed out over the harbor. I’ve been doing this ever since I was a kid. It’s not really much of a view, but for some reason it has always worked for me as the place to do my hard thinking. The busy world of commerce was well under way. Across the harbor, a long, low-riding barge pulled slowly away from the Bethlehem Steel plant, where turn-of-the-century chimney stacks were belching steam out into the sky. My mother used to try to convince me that this is where clouds were made.
You see, Hitchcock? You see? There they are! Look. Brand-new!
Just beyond the Beth Steel plant is the Domino sugar sign, a huge rectangle of steel and pink neon. And beyond that, the big spindly cargo cranes over at Sparrows Point. Somewhere back there, Kate Zabriskie had shot her husband.