The Hearse You Came in On (26 page)

What he found was a visit to the NAPA Auto Parts store that included more than a simple nuzzle with mean-looking Molly. During this particular visit, Lou Bowman picked up a small package that had been delivered by Federal Express. Kruk might not have placed any particular significance on the event except for the fact that upon collecting the package, Lou Bowman had proceeded directly to his local bank. When he got home he did no work on the Jeep, which was probably under warranty anyway. So why was this package delivered to a car parts shop? And why take it directly to the bank? Even from all the way up in Maine … the big fish continued to stink.

As Kate and I crossed the Maine border, Kate gave me a bit of a rundown on Lou Bowman. Specifically, she wanted me to know a little something about the man’s attitude toward killing other people, since at least one of her plans would involve my entering into a tête-à-tête with the guy and I should know what it was I was getting into.

Lou Bowman had lots of paper and cloth attesting to
his skills with both rifles and pistols. He was a firing range regular, an NRA member and a man who wore a red-and-black checked jacket in the winters with a plastic license tag pinned to the back fingering him as a certified killer of helpless animals. Over the course of his police career, Bowman was also responsible for the abrupt deaths of three members of the criminal class. Two had been gunned down during the commission of their crime. The third had apparently met his death for looking the wrong way at Detective Bowman while bringing a cellular phone—what Bowman claimed looked like a pistol—to his mouth. Though why the guy would want to whisper something to his pistol before taking aim at a police detective was apparently an issue that never found resolution.

There are some police officers who have to work through a bit of a funk after an in-the-line-of-duty killing of another human being. A real live (real dead) flesh-and-bone person is a whole different thing from a tin target with a paper heart. But apparently Lou Bowman had not been one of those cops. Killing people didn’t gum up his day. He slept well at night. Kate wanted me to know this about Lou Bowman.

The little town—or village—that Lou Bowman had chosen for his retirement was a picturesque place on the coast, called Heayhauge. I’ve no idea how to pronounce it either. A few of the locals pronounced it for me while I was there, but to be honest I’d have had a rough time understanding their pronunciation of the name “Bob.” The closest translation I can come up with is “Hee-Haw.” That’s it. Hee-Haw, Maine.

Heayhauge was born and raised as a fishing village.
A break in the coastline allows the sea to spill into a large natural harbor, shaped like a teardrop; around its bulbous side the commercial portion of the village clusters. This is where the fishing boats are docked. The wharves are extra wide to allow for the offloading of the fish and lobsters that the fisherfolk pull out of the sea. Wooden crates are stacked and scattered everywhere. Dogs too (scattered, not stacked). I would have thought that it was cats that would migrate to the fish wharf—they do in Baltimore. But up here in Maine it’s dog country. Maybe Alcatraz could include Heayhauge, Maine, in his retirement plans. That is of course if he ever gets around to doing anything worth retiring from.

As the fishing industry became more centralized, or as the near-shore pockets of fish and lobsters became increasingly picked over, fishing villages like Heay-hauge began to diversify. Diversify or die. Well past its heyday as a “bustling” commercial fishing community, the shrinking fishing fleet of Heayhauge now shares its harbor with several outfits that take on paying customers for a day of recreational fishing and with something like two dozen slips that harbor the various sailboats and yachts of the town’s more well-to-do residents and visitors. There is a harborfront hotel just to the west of the docks. They have a restaurant patio on the water as well as a fleet of a half-dozen paddleboats so that the hotel residents can get in the way of the larger craft. As with practically any drop of water these days, there are also Jet Skis buzzing all about like very loud oversized gnats. Basically it’s a devil’s deal, pretty common among picturesque places that are no longer able to support
themselves solely by means of the single industry that spawned their existence in the first place. Like the rest of us, they call on their good looks if they possibly can. Shops and cafés that would have been laughable to the town’s original old salts had cropped up along the piers and along the village’s narrow main street: places that sold paper lamp shades and jewelry that no local could afford (nor figure out a local occasion worth wearing it for), varieties of soap, enough scented candles to illuminate an entire Wiccan hoe-down, country club clothes, overpriced coffee from Seattle, the whole thing. The place is still a “bustling” village. It’s just that the bustle now has less to do with the clinking of pulley chains on the docks as it does the clinking of tourists’ change being dropped into cash register drawers.

Kate and I took all of this in from inside our rental car, which we had pulled over at the townside of the metal drawbridge that reaches out over the natural break in the coastline. We were afforded a nice view of both the mighty Atlantic on our right, and the town harbor and docks to our left and behind us. Kruk’s private investigator from Boston had noted this particular spot in his report; we weren’t onto anything new here.

The reason that we remained in the rental car was simple. Kate could not risk being spotted by Lou Bowman. To ensure against this, prior to pulling into town Kate had wrapped a scarf around her hair and donned a pair of black cat’s-eye sunglasses. To my eye she looked as incognito as an Italian movie star attempting to look incognito.

“I’m Polish,” she reminded me when I made the comparison.

“But in that getup you look Italian. You look like Gina Lollobrigida.”

“Then it’s a good getup.”

We sat in the rental car for about a half hour, getting our feel for the village of Heayhauge. As I said, the inlet harbor here is bulbous, like a teardrop. Along the far shore, opposite the village and the main dock, maybe a quarter of a mile from where we were parked, the land rises steeply. I guess I shouldn’t even say “land.” I should say “rock.” It’s a small cliffside basically, tufted here and there with scraggly outcrop-pings of hard grass and scruffy pine. Along the top of the rocks Kate and I counted seven houses. They were good-sized places, two and three stories, and each with either a large glass front or a wooden deck—or in some cases both—which no doubt afforded a spectacular view of both the Heayhauge harbor and the mighty Atlantic out beyond. A long steep set of wooden stairs led down from each of the houses to the water below. Half of the houses appeared to enjoy a little private beach down there on the water’s edge. All of them enjoyed either a motorboat or a sailboat.

Kate was scanning the far horizon with a small but powerful pair of binoculars.

“There!” she said, pointing with her free hand. She handed over the binoculars and guided me in the right direction. The far shore bobbed about in a large circle. For a brief moment the binoculars found a skinny girl in a bathing suit up on one of the wooden decks, shaving
her legs. Kate set a finger on the binoculars and lowered them to the water’s level.

There it was. Just as reported by Kruk’s Boston PI. Proof that at least Lou Bowman had something akin to a sense of humor, twisted as it was. Bowman’s thirty-two-foot pleasure boat sat bobbing in the water, moored to his private dock. The name of the boat was printed in bold red block letters.
Life Sentence.

I lowered the binoculars. Kate had removed her Gina Lollobrigida sunglasses. She was tapping the stems against her teeth.

“Is that a son of a bitch bastard prick or what?” she said. I think the lady pretty much summed it up.

We took a room in the waterfront hotel. We were fortunate to have arrived in advance of the season, when both the rates and the occupancy level of the place would skyrocket. Our request for a room facing the harbor was granted. Kate’s anxiety level had increased the moment she got out of the car. There seemed little chance that Lou Bowman would be hanging around the hotel lobby, but Kate remained anxious anyway. I’m sure her fidgety energy fed the imagination of the pimply desk clerk. This lady couldn’t
wait
to get up to her room. Hoo-wee! I signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sinatra, winked and paid the guy in cash.

“You get a free hour with a paddleboat, Mr.” —he consulted the book—” Mr. Sinatra.” He turned red, then chuckled softly. “You and
Mrs. Sinatra
can take advantage of the paddleboat anytime before sundown.”

Kate and I were sitting out on the small balcony when we got our first glimpse of Lou Bowman. He was making his way down the long steep stairway from his
house to the dock below. Kate saw him first and she picked up the binoculars from the little glass table there and took a look.

“Bastard sighted. Port bow.” She handed me the binoculars.

There he was. Tony Bennett’s evil twin. Sunbaked skin. Blue polo shirt. Khakis. The kind of guy you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless he was pulling a gun and aiming it at you. Then you might notice.

I watched as our prey reached the bottom of the steep steps and began making preparations to take his boat out.

“He’s taking the boat out,” I said. I lowered the binoculars and looked at my lovely detective friend. “Should we go now?”

Kate shook her head. “Not inside. Not yet. It’s too risky. We don’t know how long he’ll be out. We haven’t even driven by the house. We want to cut down on the unknowns first. There might be a dog.”

“You’re good with dogs.”

“I’m good with dogs whose owners like me.”

“I never said I liked you.”

Kate gestured. “Give me those.”

While she snooped on Lou Bowman, I snooped a moment on her. It’s just so damned peculiar how it is that a person suddenly shows up in your life out of nowhere and in what really amounts to practically no time at all you are sitting with them on a motel balcony in Maine, making plans to break into a nouveau-riche man’s house across the water. Kate had piled her hair up and made it stay there in that mysterious way that women do. She was all neck and legs and arms, slender and taut. Her cool empress’s profile was continuing to
look inexplicably sexy as she peered into the binoculars, her lips slightly parted. Her toes were partially curled around the iron railing of the small balcony. I wished I had a camera. I was sitting there in boxers and an Orioles T-shirt.

“Put your clothes on,” Kate said suddenly, as if misreading my mind.

“Take yours off.”

Kate gave me a tsk-tsk look. “I think all this fresh air is getting to you, Mr. Sewell.”

“That’s Frankie boy to you,” I said. “And it is. I love this air.” I tilted my head in the direction of the room. “I like the air in there even better. Wink Wink.”

“We didn’t come all this way just to lie around in bed,” Kate said, getting up from her chair.

“Who’s talking about lying around?”

“Hitch,” she snapped. “This isn’t a damn vacation.” She slid open the screen and went into the room. A few seconds later, my shirt came flying out.

Like hell.

We took the main road that runs through the town and loops up to the rocky overlook that Lou Bowman shared with his neighbors. These weren’t spectacular houses actually, not in the sense of being outrageously opulent and show-offy. These places were spectacular first and foremost for the view afforded from their rocky perches. Their location location location was wow wow wow. As Kate and I drove slowly along the road, we caught glimpses of the view, the long, slowly curving coastline with its tumbles of rocks and boulders, sea spray bursting on them at regular intervals like exploding white fireworks. And of course beyond
all that, the gunmetal blue ocean and the huge half-bowl of sky.

Once we had located Lou Bowman’s house and pulled to the end of his driveway, Kate and I were treated to an additional view, that of the teardrop inlet below, the picture-postcard town and the tiny armada of sailboats and windsurfers. Sails of many colors tilted this way and that into the wind, or at least into the hope of wind. The day was unusually still.

“He’s got himself a nice view,” I remarked.

“And he bought it with my husband’s blood.”

Well. Okay. That was it for the sightseeing tour. Maybe Kate was right, I was getting too much clean air all at once. We weren’t here for nice views and fun and frolics. Kate had a real weight on her and I was to try to help lift it off.

We cased the joint. It turned out there was no dog, and that was good. I did spot a box turtle at the base of the back steps leading up to the kitchen, but I didn’t consider it much of a threat. Kate went up onto the wooden deck in back and determined that none of the neighbors could see through the trees that sheltered the property. She put her sexy nose to the glass door. She was looking—among other things—to see if there was an alarm system. As best she could tell there wasn’t.

“What do you see?” I asked, joining her on the deck.

“I see the usual sloppy bachelor’s pad.”

We went around to the far side of the house. Kate pointed out a row of three narrow windows on the ground level, behind some unkempt shrubbery.

“What do you think?”

“I think they could use some trimming.”

“The windows, wise guy. Do you think I can fit through one of those windows?”

“It would be tight.”

“But I could do it.”

“Why these windows?” I asked her. “There are a lot of big windows in this place. Is slithering a requirement of stealth?”

“I’m guessing all of the windows are locked,” was Kate’s answer. “But if I have to break one of these, it’s very possible Bowman won’t even notice it for a couple of days.”

“Why do you care if he notices?”

“I don’t want him to see right away that someone has broken into his place. This isn’t the movies, Hitch. I’m not going to break in, go to the guy’s study, find what I’m looking for in fifteen minutes and pop right back out. I mean, I might. But I might not. I might have to come back a second time.”