The Hearse You Came in On (30 page)

I
t would have been nice if the return address on the FedEx label had given us the exact name and street address of the sender. Hell, actual directions how to get to the place and which bed to look under in case the guy was hiding would have been nice too.

Kate had warned me not to expect too much.

“The package isn’t even being sent directly to Bowman. His name certainly won’t be on it. And if Bowman has taken that kind of precaution, you can bet the sender has too.”

The return address section of the label gave only a post office box and a zip code. The return zip code on Bowman’s package was 21030.

“That’s Hunt Valley, out in Baltimore County,” said Kate.

I was directing the rental car through one of those damnable roundabouts. I had already passed the exit for Boston twice; it was coming up again.

“The industrial park?”

“Yep. You know that all used to be cow country out there. And now … it’s like someone dropped an
atomic bomb in the middle of a cow field and voilà, a thousand acres of office buildings.”

I made the exit. “Pasture,” I said.

“What?”

“Cow pasture. You said field.”

“Whatever.”

“It’s pasture.”

From the back seat, Carol snapped, “Get off it, Bob. What are you, a fucking farmer?”

I glanced the rearview mirror. “Actually, I’m an undertaker.”

Kate added, “And I’m a detective.”

Carol exploded into laughter. “And I’m a college professor, ha-ha. And I don’t even know how to play this game!”

She sat back in her seat to count her money… again. Maybe she thought that it multiplied with multiple countings. I saw in the mirror that she moved her lips as she counted. The peculiar thing was, it
had
multiplied. Not since the first time Carol counted it, but from what Kate and I had expected. Based on the bank statements that Kate had located while snooping around Bowman’s place, we had expected the FedEx envelope to contain five thousand dollars. But when Carol announced her tally after the first counting, it had been eight thousand. Kate and I had no way to account for the uptick.

In a way, we had all wanted to stick around to see Lou Bowman bursting out of the bank in all his distress and fury. I could just picture him ripping up that FedEx envelope and its pink tissue paper.

“He’ll kick the first dog he sees,” I predicted.

“He’ll punch the first person who looks at him sideways,” Kate said.

Carol’s guess was more solemn. “He’ll take it out on the Moose.”

This last prediction had prompted us to pull over so that Carol could phone her bartender to warn him in advance of the possibility of a rough customer on the way. Carol announced as she climbed back into the car, “I told Mike to juice up the cattle prod, just in case.”

“You keep a
cattle prod
behind the bar?” I was astounded. “Is that legal?”

“Hey, Bob, I run a place where people crowd into a dark room to get drunk. If I gotta prod them once in a while to keep them in line, go ahead, sue me.”

After a few minutes of almost silence (I say “almost” because I could hear the crinkling of hundred dollar bills being counted in the back seat… again) Carol had upgraded her statement.

“Excuse me … I
used
to run a place.”

Kate turned in her seat. “You’re not going back?”

Carol waved a handful of money in the air. “Not in this lifetime, honey.”

Carol came with us to Baltimore. She had never been on a plane before. Maybe that’s why she didn’t understand that she was supposed to get sweaty palms, like I did, and find it a little hard to breathe in that skinny tin can. Like I did. Instead, she acted like she enjoyed it. I gave her my half sandwich to go with hers. She brought the two halves together and managed to make it look suggestive.

“I’m a bad girl aren’t I, Bob,” she asked, giggling.

A storm delayed our landing. Oh goody. Kate
explained to Carol that we just circled around until the storm cleared.

“And if we run out of gas?”

Kate aimed her answer at my green face. “Probably a nosedive, don’t you think? Bob?”

We landed. Carol walked off the plane talking about maybe becoming a stewardess. Brimming with all sorts of plans for her new life, she was holding on to that FedEx envelope like it was a spanking new baby.

Down at the end of a jut of land along the east side of the Fells Point harbor is a large brick building that used to be a warehouse. It has been converted into pricey condominiums and a high-toned hotel. The rooms are spacious, splashed with sunlight and nicely appointed with prints of clipper ships and framed nautical charts and the like. Personally, for that kind of money I’m not sure I’d care to look out over a harbor that is three-quarters industrial… but hey, I wasn’t buying. Carol was. This was where we installed her. Kate had offered to let Carol stay at her place, but the former proprietess of The Moose Run Inn in Heayhauge, Maine, intended to splurge a little.

“I want a place where I can pick up the phone and have some cute boy run up to my room with one of those carts like you see in the movies.”

“You like those carts, do you, Carol?” I teased.

We got Carol installed in her new temporary digs and then she and Kate went out to shop for some new clothes. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle Carol in anything other than her leather mini, but it looked like I’d have to try.

The sun was calling it a day by the time I left the girls to their foraging and made my way to the funeral home. I had only been gone a couple of days, but as you can maybe imagine, people keep dying. Aunt Billie was glad to see me.

“Sad news, Hitchcock,” Billie announced. “Jeffrey Simons passed on. I just got off the phone with Helen. She wants us to handle the arrangements.”

“That’ll be a media event,” I observed. “A two-parlor number.”

“Oh it certainly will be. We’re going to have a full house.”

While Billie made the arrangements for Jeff Simons’s body to be delivered I rushed home to shower and change. I flipped on the TV in time to catch Mimi Wigg already settling in at the solo anchor desk.

“An institution left the building today,” she intoned. I switched off the set.

Back at work our phone machine was already clogged with messages from callers trying to get the details of the newsman’s funeral. I even had a tearful message from Tony Marino—offering to play his bagpipes at Jeff Simons’s funeral, for free.
Listen,
said Tony’s voice and a bleating dirge came out of my machine’s tiny speaker. It took me a moment to pick up on it. It was the news theme for Jeff Simons’s station, slowed down, flattened out.

I had about a half dozen other messages. Several were from Hutch. His first message asked that I call him as soon as I could. The others carried the same request but with considerably more urgency.
Where the fuck are you?
I also had a message from Gil Vance,
chiding me about missing the last rehearsal and reminding me that there was a run-through of the final act this evening. Apparently I had not yet impressed upon Gil the fact that, as I would be reading my lines directly from the script, I really wasn’t required at all of his rehearsals. Of course it’s true that as swiftly as Gil was thrashing his conceptual machete through new territory, I might want to keep up on the latest twist, otherwise I might well show up on opening night to find the whole damn thing set in Beirut.

The final message was from Julia.

“Hitchenstein. I need your opinion on something. Peter has asked me to marry him. The millions, the mansion, the cars, the whole thing. Can we picture this? What do you think? I’d love your feedback, sugar-cube. Call me. Lord knows you’ve got my number. As nobody else has.”

I phoned her immediately. She answered on the fourth ring.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Oh … Hitch. Look … listen, I can’t talk right now.”

“But I got your message.”

“Not now, Hitch.”

“Julia, I think—”

“
Hitch
.”

“Oh. He’s there?”

“He’s in the bathroom.”

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Is it any of your business?”

“I thought you guys ended it in Paris.”

“I thought so too. But he came crawling on his
knees and called himself a shit and told me that I was completely right and he was completely wrong. I love it when a man talks that way.”

“Oh come on, Jules, he’s only saying that to get back into your bed.”

“Well I guess it worked.” She must have suddenly muzzled the phone. I could hear her garbled voice, and then she came back on, dripping with insincerity. “It sounds like a lovely magazine, darling. But who has time to read these days. Thank you anyway.”

Click.

I went ahead and caught up on some of the less sexy parts of my job. I finally called the earnest coffin sales rep in Omaha, hoping to just leave a message. But he was still in. I told him to send me the information on his latest models. “I already did,” he said, sounding disappointed. And so he had. I was looking at the info as we spoke.

“It must have gotten lost in the mail,” I said. “Send it again.” I then proceeded to explain what I
wasn’t
interested in, taking my cues from the specs and prices on the papers in front of me. I could practically hear the air going out of him all the way out there in Omaha.

“Good talking with you, Chet,” I said.

I heard his voice, tiny and tinny, as I was hanging up. “It’s Curt.”

Click.

I called Hutch’s number. An answering service routed me to his pager number and a few minutes later my phone rang. The connection was lousy. He was on a cell phone.

“Man, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Sorry. My cell phone is in the garage for repairs.”

Hutch wasn’t in any mood for jokes. “Can you meet me? I need to talk to you.”

“And what we’re doing now, what’s this? Hand signals?”

“Face-to-face.”

“You sound serious, Hutch.”

“I am. I’m also incredibly squeezed for time.”

Just then a huge crunching noise sounded through the phone.

“Hutch, where the hell are you?”

“Curtis Bay. There’s a big … you’ll get a kick out of this, Hitch. It’s a pyrolysis plant. You know what that is? It turns waste products into energy. Shit mulching, basically. It’s a prototype. Senator Stillman stepped on all sorts of toes and kicked all sorts of asses in the legislature to ram this thing through for the state. Tons of federal bucks. Anyway, there’s a big ribbon cutting tomorrow. Photo op for Alan. I’m just going over the layout. But look, can we meet? I mean, immediately?”

He gave me a time and a place. I wrote them down on the back of an envelope and hung up. Eight o’clock in front of Baltimore’s Washington Monument. It was hardly something I needed to write down. Especially since it was already seven-thirty.

Hutch had failed to specify what “in front of” means when you’re dealing with a lighthouse-shaped structure. I came up from the south. I located Hutch on the west. The road surface on the circle around the monument is made up of crushed glass mixed in with the asphalt. “Glassphalt” they call it. When light hits it a certain way it sparkles.

Hutch guided me across the sparkling street to a
small park. As we walked, I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, indicating the monument behind us.

“Until about five years ago my mother’s voice was the one on tape in the little historical display area there,” I said.

“What happened five years ago?”

“They renovated the whole thing and got someone else to rerecord the tape.”

“That’s stupid. Did history change or something?”

“Hutch, you see it like I do.”

We took a seat on a bench in the little park. There was a small statue in front of us. A boar devouring a wolf. The statue was called
Courage.
Frankly, I think
Ravage
would have made more sense. Hutch wasn’t paying attention to the statue.

“Hitch, we need to talk.”

“That’s what you said on the phone. What’s up? This feels vaguely cloak-and-dagger. Why didn’t we just meet at a restaurant? Or a bar? Or is your candidate’s war chest getting low already?”

“My candidate has deep pockets, that’s not a problem. I just wanted to talk to you somewhere … It’s safer here.”

“Safer? Hutch, what’s up? This
is
cloak-and-dagger.”

“You’re in trouble, my friend,” Hutch said plainly. His arms were crossed and he was tilted back on the park bench, his legs straight out. Like a plank. He was staring into the middle distance. “Deep shit,” he added.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Alan.”

“Your Alan?”

“Alan thinks you had something to do with the murder of Guy Fellows.”

Well there was a piece of work. Alan Stuart thought
I
was involved? I had the same damn feelings about him. I started to say as much to Hutch, but he hadn’t finished.

“How well do you know Kate Zabriskie?” He adjusted his question. “How well do you
think
you know her?”

“I’m not sure a person can actually answer a question that’s put like that.”

“Did you know that Alan and Kate Zabriskie are lovers?”

Hutch reeled in his nowhere stare and looked over at me. It was clear that he felt he was delivering a bombshell.

“Were
lovers,” I corrected him. “She told me all about it.”

“She told you everything?”

I shrugged. “That’s a judgment call too, I guess. But she told me plenty. The good, the bad and the ugly. And your boss wasn’t exactly among the good. She told me about Mexico.”

“Mexico.”

“How Stuart traveled a thousand miles to sleep with her a few more times, dump her and rough her up a bit for good measure.”

“And you believe her. Hitch, you barely know her.”

“I go by gut.”

Hutch frowned. “She’s working the Guy Fellows case.”

I told him that this wasn’t exactly a news flash.

“Has it ever crossed your mind that this involvement
between the two of you might be a part of her investigation?” Hutch asked.