The Hearse You Came in On (21 page)

“Alan is still being blackmailed,” Kate said flatly. “Another package of pictures has showed up. No note. No demands for money. This was just a few days ago. Alan called me into his office. Joel Hutchinson was there. Alan wanted to know if I had any leads about Fellows’s partner.”

“Your lead is in the cold cold ground.”

“I failed to mention that to him. Then he showed me a whole new batch of pictures he’d just gotten. He was furious. Alan does not like being toyed with. Not one bit.”

“Who the hell could have sent the pictures?”

“The way Alan and Joel reconstructed it, there must have been some sort of argument over at Guy’s place between Guy and his partner, probably over money or over what to do next with the photographs. They had some sort of argument, it got heated, and the partner grabbed the kitchen knife and ended the argument that way.”

“That’s insane. There
was
no partner by then. Carolyn James was already dead. They were making that all up. Why? Are they trying to throw you off the scent?”

“There’s another option. It’s possible that Joel Hutchinson and Alan don’t really share everything.
One of them could be trying to throw the other off the scent.”

“You mean for example, Amanda Stuart killed Fellows, and hubby is pointing people in another direction?”

“Could be. Or as you keep wondering, maybe Joel got a little overzealous and now he wants to keep up the pretense of this murderous mystery partner.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “Someone is bluffing. This so-called new blackmail letter is pure bullshit.”

“You’re right. It is bullshit. No question about it. But I can tell you this, both of those guys want me to dig like crazy for this partner. That’s why I was put onto the case and Kruk was pulled off. Nobody said this out loud to me of course. But if Alan is involved, he can’t afford for Kruk to bring in a collar who’s going to start shooting his mouth off. It’s up to
me
to locate this partner of Guy’s. And I’m guessing I’ll be under orders to use all due force when I do.”

“But the partner is already
dead
.”

“Hitch … I know that. And you know that. But Alan doesn’t. Don’t you see? Within a week of Guy’s murder Alan gets a fresh shipment of dirty pictures of his wife. And these were dropped off at the front desk. Not mailed. So it certainly wasn’t Guy from the grave. And not Carolyn. You should have seen those two squirming. Alan is running scared. This would bury him.”

“So either Stuart or Hutch is pulling a stunt,” I said. “Or Fellows actually had another partner all along. Besides Carolyn James. Is that it?”

Kate was shaking her head no.

“Then who the hell dropped off the pictures?”

Kate pointed her fork at me.

“That bastard owes me.”

She speared another forkful of cold waffle and put it in her mouth. Angrily. Triumphantly. Before I could even ask her, she was bobbing her head up and down.

That would be a yes.

B
ecause of the arrangement with the fireman’s pole running down from Julia’s studio it’s possible to literally “drop in” to the gallery, if you’re already upstairs. I wasn’t. I used the door.

Chinese Sue was behind the register, reading a copy of
The Village Voice.
She lowered the paper to just under her nose and said, “Not here.”

In the several years that Chinese Sue has been holding down the fort at Julia’s gallery, I have never once heard her utter a single polysyllabic word. I used to try to bait her, ask her leading questions. But Chinese Sue knows her game. I’ve long since given up.

“Any idea where she is?” I asked.

“No.”

“Or what time you expect her back?”

“Don’t know.”

“Or how long she’s been gone?”

“No.”

I wandered around the gallery for a few minutes looking at Julia’s stuff. Julia once told me that she usually didn’t know what she was painting when she started a canvas, and about half the time she didn’t know what she had painted even when she was finished.
These were the paintings to which she gave titles chosen totally at random.
Mr. Green Eats His Bicycle
or
Tunisian Pancake, Part Two.
Julia knows her colors and she knows her shapes and strokes and I think some of her best works are these impenetrable ones with the ridiculous names. (There is a collector out there who is still scouring the city for
Tunisian Pancake, Part One,
which Julia neglected to inform him doesn’t exist.) It is Julia’s other paintings, though, that seem to sell better. A lot of these are what you would call juxtapostional musings: a man with a hen for an ear; a waterfall cascading from the top of an office building; a family of cigars enjoying a day at the beach.

I asked Chinese Sue what she was reading. Again the paper lowered to her nose. “Shit,” she said. Back up went the paper. Back out the door went Hitch.

Aunt Billie had asked me to help out with her wake that afternoon. It was one of those ugly situations, where the death—in this case of an elderly woman—forces the two feuding factions of a family to lay down their arms and try to get along under the same roof—ours—for an hour or so. You’d be surprised, we get this a lot. My task at these affairs is usually less the conventional one of facilitating grief than it is running interference. What I’ve learned is that you’re likely to get your most volatile exchange somewhere in the vicinity of the coffin itself. That’s to say, this is where your actual yelling—sometimes even hitting—is most likely to take place. The poor dead thing in the box just has to lie there and take it. Billie and I double up sometimes on these feud jobs, and we can run ourselves ragged, slicing every which way across the room in an attempt to insert ourselves between the antagonists.

Aunt Billie’s testy clan gathering proved fairly manageable. No full-fledged fights broke out. We did have to put out a couple of brushfires, but all in all it was a low-key affair. We were even honored with a surprise visit from Edie Velvet. Edie did this occasionally, festoon her ninety-pound frame with ten pounds of costume jewelry and come onto the scene like Norma Desmond seeking her close-up. Sometimes this can be a little off-putting to the bereaved; Edie comes on a bit too gothic for some people’s tastes. But on occasions like this one, where the level of melancholy was pretty damned low to start with, a visit from the bejeweled Miss Velvet wasn’t going to bother anyone. Edie made her way up to the coffin and admired the corpse, shook a few hands, gathered a few confounded stares, then made her way back out of the room. She signed the guest book as she always does—
E. Velvet/E. Baltimore
—gathered her bags and returned to the streets.

“It was nice to see Edie again, wasn’t it,” Aunt Billie remarked during our postmortem up in her apartment. “She was looking well.”

Billie and I were parked in front of the television set. My aunt was indulging in one of her dirty little secrets: soap operas. She’s hooked. Murder. Rape. Incest. Abortion out the wazoo. Stampeding infidelities. Billie can’t get enough of it. In an effort to disguise what she readily admits to as a tawdry indulgence, Billie will sometimes prepare a tea service on a silver tray for her afternoon’s viewing, complete with little cakes or fussy overpriced pastries. She’s like a duchess at a whorehouse, sitting there with her bone china, tittering away at the serial depravity unfolding in front of her.

Billie had just been bringing me up-to-date on one of the storylines (“Dimitri’s temporary insanity is a ploy to win back his stepsister from his amnesiac half brother”) when the program was interrupted by a news bulletin. Mimi Wigg’s big head suddenly filled the screen. Her expression was deadly serious as she reported in a tortured monotone that Jeff Simons had just been taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital after having suffered a heart attack. The beloved newsman’s condition, Mimi told us sonorously, was not known at this time, though there was a report—unconfirmed—that he had stopped breathing.

“We call that dead,” Billie observed. “Poor Helen.” Meaning Jeff Simons’s mother. I noticed that the card table was set up, cribbage board ready and waiting.

On the screen, Mimi Wigg was gently and thoroughly chewing up the scenery—in this case, the set—as she asked the citizens of Baltimore to pray for Jeff Simons. Her own little hands were already clasped together, in case we had forgotten how it’s done.

“We will… of course … keep you posted.”

Mimi Wigg’s image vanished and in its place Dimitri appeared again, still temporarily insane. He was on one knee, his arms raised beseechingly to a potted plant high up on a bookshelf. A rail-thin blonde was spying on him from the doorway.

“That’s Gloria,” Billie whispered conspiratorially, pouring herself a fresh cup of tea. “I believe she killed the mayor last year. Or had his child. I can never remember.”

K
ate was standing at my front door wearing a thin blue dress and holding a large wooden bowl.

“Couscous,” she said.

“Couscous to you, too,” I responded. “In my country we say
Aloha.
Come in.”

Kate pulled a manila folder from her bag and dropped it onto my coffee table before she set about dishing out the couscous. It sat there conspicuously as we ate. I complimented her on the food.

“Pretty fancy.”

“It’s grain,” she said. After my second heaping helping, I finally asked Kate about the folder.

“Charley’s?”

She nodded.

We set the dishes to the side.

“Do all investigations get one of those?” I asked her. “Is that how it works?”

She told me that they did. “They’re all kept on file. You have to sign them out.”

“How long was your husband working on this case?”

“Months. Four? Five? I think I told you, Charley
didn’t go undercover on it right away. He started off doing basic legwork. But too much overt snooping and asking questions can end up tipping off the very people you need to open up. You can kill an investigation if you show the wrong people that you’re interested.”

She was eyeing the folder. She was torn between knowing and not knowing … and not knowing which of the two was the better.

“I’m being silly, right?”

“No. You’re being scared. And I don’t blame you.”

Kate tossed her head. “Okay. Let’s get this done.”

We moved to the couch. Kate took a deep breath and leaned forward to flip open the folder.

Apparently it all started when the wheels came off the cart. Though in this case the cart was a train, which in fact came off the track. But you see what I’m saying.

It happened in Indiana. The train was bound for Iowa, originating in Baltimore. According to the first report in the file there was nothing particularly notable about a train derailing. It happens with much more frequency than John Q. is aware of. Because most derailments are trains carrying stuff and not people, they don’t usually make the news. This derailment was one of those. The train that was bound for Iowa hit some sort of a snag as it started over the Wabash River just outside Terre Haute and four of its boxcars left the track and tipped over. Three of the four cars were carrying inexpensive stereo equipment. Boom boxes that retail for around a hundred bucks. These were of little
interest. The purchaser of the boom boxes would reject the shipment and they would be sold to a discount chain.

It was the fourth boxcar that drew more attention. This boxcar contained several hundred steel drums. The label on the drums read “silica gel.” Silica gel is not a gel at all, but more like a powder. Or better yet, like sand. The most distinguishing feature of the stuff is that it draws moisture out of anything with which it comes in contact—providing that there is any moisture there in the first place. The most common brush that people have with silica gel is in the buying of electronic equipment. It’s what is in those little packets that look like sugar packets. The packets are there to keep ambient moisture out of the box. Apparently the stuff is also good for drying flowers.

As many as three dozen of the drums on the fourth derailed boxcar broke open when they tumbled onto the tracks. What spilled out of the drums and began marching toward the river, however, was not sandlike silica gel. What spilled out was dirt. Or more precisely, mud. Dark and slimy, very moist and apparently quite terribly aromatic.

The logical first step was to contact either the sender or the receiver to inform them of the derailment and to determine what to do with the hundred steel drums marked silica gel, at least three dozen of which contained this slime-choked dirt. It was at this point that the discovery was made that the drums did not contain any information concerning the source of the so-called silica gel and only listed its intended recipient as a warehouse in the railyard outside Des Moines. No individual or company was listed on the labels. That’s
a problem. And the problem was seeping into the Wabash River. After some testing was performed it was determined that the dirt seeping out of these barrels was, in fact, toxic.

And that’s a crime.

Kate looked up from the file. “Here comes Charley.”

The point of origin being Baltimore, the Baltimore Police Department was notified. Detective Charles Russell took the call. It became his case. Russell filed his reports. Along with whatever hard facts that the detective was gathering, the reports also included his own thoughts and speculations, such as they were. Acting on one such speculation, Russell took a trip out to Des Moines where he was escorted to the railyard warehouse that had been the ill-fated barrels’ intended destination. What he found were not one hundred, not two hundred, but over
four hundred
steel drums bearing the exact same label as the bogus silica gel that was currently poisoning the bottom feeders of the Wabash River. Charley didn’t even have to pop the lid on the barrels to determine that they likewise contained slimy dirt. Some hundred or so of the barrels were stacked in the fenced-in area outside the warehouse, where the forces of nature had done a number on a lot of them, swelling, rusting and rupturing them. The stuff was oozing out. In Detective Russell’s own simple words: “You could smell it in the air.”