The Hearse You Came in On (41 page)

Or might Kate have simply seen red? Had Kate maybe seen in Guy Fellows all of the brutes who had taken their pieces of her over the years? Her father? Alan Stuart? Others? Was the act of sticking a knife into Guy Fellows a belated act of heroism? Did she place herself between the evil man and the helpless little girl? And to even out the odds, had she brought with her a knife?

If, if, if… Maybe, maybe, maybe …

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you to come in out of the rain?”

For a moment I thought that this was just one more of the too many voices in my head screaming
what if maybe.
But it wasn’t. I turned around to see a figure with an umbrella walking toward me along the pier. It was Kate. She stopped about four feet away from me. Her face was half hidden by the umbrella.

“I thought you were in Las Vegas.”

“No. I only flew out of Las Vegas. I sent your telegram from there this morning before I flew back. I took your advice, Hitch. I went to the desert. I went to Death Valley. Zabriskie Point.”

“How ever were you able to withstand all the symbolism?”

“You’re angry.”

“That’s right. You’re not sharing your umbrella.”

She tipped the umbrella away from her and gave it a little toss. It landed upside down in the water.

“You killed Guy Fellows,” I said.

Kate looked back up at me. Her expression was terribly frank.

“Yes. I did.”

“Was it self-defense?”

“You say that like you don’t believe it.”

“You haven’t said it yet.”

“It was.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “He was going to kill me.”

“You mean like Bowman was going to kill you?”

Kate took a deep breath. She wiped some of the rain out of her eyes.

“Carolyn left Guy a suicide note. She left me one too. She was such a lonely girl. I… She wrote to me what I already knew. She told me that Guy had involved her in a blackmailing scheme and that she was scared to death. Literally, as it turned out. She wrote that she didn’t know why it was that she couldn’t just walk away from Guy and from the whole mess. But she couldn’t. He beat her. He abused her. But she couldn’t walk away. I understand that. If I… Carolyn’s note to Guy said pretty much the same thing. It said that this—she meant her suicide—this was the only way she could come up with to get away. And she mentioned me in her note. She said I knew everything that she and Guy had been up to.”

“Why in the world would she do that?”

Kate shrugged. “Stupid, right? I guess it was the
best she could do to get the last lick in. Some little measure of control. Who knows?”

“So he wasn’t happy with you.”

Kate shook her head. “Very much unhappy.”

“What happened?”

“He called me up and said that he had to see me right away. He made it sound like he was all torn up about Carolyn’s having killed herself. He had just gotten back from the funeral. I went. I wasn’t two steps into his apartment and he slugged me. I was afraid he had broken my nose. He was furious. He had the note Carolyn had written to him and he shook it in my face. ‘Why’d she tell you this? What the hell is going on!’ He didn’t give me a chance to read it. He slapped me and then he grabbed me by the hair and yanked me out of the kitchen.”

“Sweet guy.”

“Hitch … he was seeing red. It was ‘bitch this’ and ‘goddamn bitch that’ … I was scared to death.”

“Where did he take you?”

“Right where his body was discovered. In the living room. As I was stumbling out of the kitchen I saw a bunch of knives that Guy kept in a ceramic jar on the counter. I just grabbed blindly and got ahold of one. He didn’t see me do it. I didn’t even know what I had. I just grabbed at any handle I could. It might have turned out to be a little paring knife.”

“But it wasn’t.”

Kate had a large purse hanging from her left shoulder. Her right hand disappeared into it. When it came right back out, it was holding a long narrow knife. Black handle. Serrated teeth.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t a paring knife.”

We stood there a moment, the rain coming down all around us. It was splattering into the water like … well frankly, like bullets. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Kate’s umbrella had tipped sideways and was taking on water. In another few seconds it disappeared below the surface.

I looked down at the knife in Kate’s hand. The blade was shining and dripping with raindrops.

“He dragged me over to the couch,” Kate went on. “He grabbed at the front of my dress. I knew what he was planning to do. I can’t in all honesty swear, Hitch, that I knew he was going to kill me afterwards. Maybe not. I don’t know what a jury would think. But that didn’t matter. He wasn’t going one step further with me. No way. I swung the knife and hacked it against his hand as he ripped my dress. And I didn’t stop there. I lost it. Call it a shark after blood, I don’t care. He wasn’t going to touch me anymore. I was sick of it. I was … I have no idea how many times I stabbed him. He lost his strength pretty quickly and I just kept stabbing until he finally slumped down to the floor. I… I didn’t check to see if he was dead. I fetched the note that Carolyn had written and I located the videotape. It was taped under one of his dresser drawers.”

“Not very original.”

“What can I say?”

“So Carolyn didn’t have a tape.”

Kate shook her head. “No. There never really was the insurance that Alan was so worried about.”

“So what did you do next?”

“I ran. There were only two pieces of physical evidence that could link me directly. This.” She cradled the knife in her palm. “And the other was my own blood, from when Guy hit me. My nose had bled. Some of it got onto his shirt. Forensics took a sample.”

She looked into my eyes and acknowledged my unasked question.

“As they say … it’s gone missing.”

“Gone missing.” I had to shake my head at that one. “But that.” I indicated the knife. “Why didn’t that disappear?”

Kate turned the knife over in her hand. “I can’t really say. I guess I just have a guilty conscience, despite everything. I’m trained to let the system be the final arbiter. I guess … I don’t know. Maybe I was reserving the option of turning myself in.”

“So where did Bowman fit in?”

“Bowman? A fluke. Simple as that. My guess is that he came to town that week in order to shake down Alan for some extra cash. The extra three thousand. I think that Alan’s announcement for governor might have gotten Bowman thinking about the cash value of silence.”

My speculations had run somewhat similar to this.

“So when we went up to Maine …?”

Kate said, “I made a copy of the tape. I stuck it in the
Fantasia
box. That was a mistake, but I didn’t realize it until later. I planted that tape in Bowman’s house when you and I were up there, when I broke in that night. Since Bowman had been in Baltimore the same week that … that Guy was killed, I was hedging my bets. Once Kruk told me that Bowman had taken a shot
at Charley, planting the tape on him seemed… well, like good insurance.”

Kate allowed herself a hard laugh. “When it came out that Alan was behind Bowman’s shooting Charley … Hitch, I almost believed in God again. I had both of them in my sights. Alan and Bowman.”

“Did you kill Bowman to keep him from telling his side? Was that it? Did you kill him to keep him from proving that he didn’t kill Fellows?”

“I killed Bowman in self-defense.”

“Fine. Besides that.”

“He killed my husband.”

“Fine. Besides that.”

“Jesus Christ, Hitch! Besides
what?
Guy Fellows hounds Carolyn James to her death … to her
death,
Hitch. And then he attacks me. Meanwhile Bowman has killed my husband and then he goes after
you.
And now
I’m
supposed to justify what I did? I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the whole damn thing.”

“And Alan Stuart is the source of it all.”

“And the bastard is under arrest.”

“A good day’s work?”

“You’d better damn well believe it.”

She stepped toward me. As she did, the sky lit up like a flashbulb. Kate’s skin looked bloodless blue. Her eyes were black and unreadable. The lightning flickered again and a glint came off the knife. The hand holding it was raising as she took another step forward. Her mouth formed the words
I’m sorry
… but the actual words were obliterated by a ripping snarl of thunder.

She handed me the knife.

We stood there for some time saying nothing. The rain started coming down more heavily. It was impossible for me to tell if there were tears mixing with the rain on Kate’s cheeks. She was searching my face, looking, I suppose, for an indication of what I was thinking, of what I was going to do. Would I take her by the elbow and lead her off the pier? Drive her downtown and hand her—and the knife—over to John Kruk? Good Citizen Hitch?

Or what if the knife were to slip from my fingers—oops—and spiral slowly to the bottom of the harbor? So easy. One little toss—and time, silt and silence—assigns the entire sad affair to history.

I looked over at Kate. Her eyes were empty. Alone. She was already serving her sentence. Even if she were to go scot free for the killing of Guy Fellows and Lou Bowman, she would always have a haunted heart. So then what did it really matter? Why not just toss the knife aside and take the woman into my arms? Maybe I could give her what she seemed to have been looking for ever since she leaped over her father and into the arms of her savior cop. Maybe I could make the noble effort to be Kate’s big hero.

Except that “noble effort” in the face of certain failure is not really noble at all. It is just plain stupid.

Something which I’m not.

Kate was still standing at the end of the pier, head bowed, as I made my way down Thames Street toward The Dead End Saloon and a welcome whiskey. And a plate of steaming mussels. Maybe two whiskeys. Why the hell not? I had no one to bury tomorrow. And I sure as hell had something to bury tonight.

I made my way down the street. Collar up. Rain dancing all around me. Low thunder and the throbbing of live music coming from the squatty bars …

The knife was back in Kate’s hand.

I wished her luck.

Tim Cockey
is the author of the award-winning “Hitch” series:
The Hearse You Came In On, Hearse of a Different Color, Hearse Case Scenario
, and
Murder in the Hearse Degree
. He has been a story analyst for many major film and television companies, including American Playhouse, ABC, and Hallmark Entertainment. He grew up in Baltimore and now lives in New York City.

The dead waitress had beautiful eyes. Large, chocolate and lovely. Of course, this was something I couldn’t possibly know until some time later, once I had the chance to see them in a photograph. As usual with me, I get them when the spark has gone out and they’re already losing their looks. Aunt Billie has a term for this. She calls it “occupational disappointment.”

The waitress couldn’t have arrived at a more inopportune moment. Baltimore was right in the middle of an unscheduled pre-Christmas blizzard and Aunt Billie and I were right in the middle of a wake. A heart surgeon from nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital had gone out in a blaze of irony two days previous, struck down by a heart attack, no less, while in the middle of performing a triple bypass. His name was Richard Kingman. Dr. Kingman had been in his late fifties, played tennis several times a week, hadn’t touched a cigarette for decades, ate sensibly, drank politely and all the rest, and yet there it was. The needle suddenly skidded across his heart, and he collapsed in the operating room. He had been a robust fellow, judging by the photograph provided to me by the man’s widow. Ruddy. Expansive
smile. Big healthy mop of rust red hair as wavy as a small ocean. The photograph had been snapped during a skiing vacation the family had taken out west some fifteen years previous. It featured the now-dead patriarch in the center, flanked by his then-teenage son on one side and his daughter and wife on the other. Everybody looked nurtured and well fed. The son bore only a thin resemblance to his father, his face a little longer and his smile considerably less natural. Unlike his sister’s smile, which—like Father’s—was wide and exuberant. As for Mom, her bland expression revealed nothing. Or, for that matter, in its nothingness, everything.

“Everybody loved Richard,” the widow said flatly when she handed me the photograph. She made it sound like a bad thing.

This weather of ours, it wasn’t simply bad. It was a wet, ugly, bitter, nasty and thoroughly crappy, stinking god-awful slop of a miserable night. A cold front from hell (if you can withstand the oxymoron) had skidded into town without warning. Poor Bonnie, over at Television Hill, was probably in tears. Again. During the six o’clock news—pinwheeling her arms all around the map of Baltimore and the vicinity—she had promised that the real shit (my term, not hers) would be passing well to the north. But no sooner had the anemic December sun packed it in for the night than the bottom fell out of the thermometer and huge amoebas of sleet began dropping out of the sky, accompanied by crisscross gusts of wind that were flinging the mess in all directions at once. Now Bonnie would have to come back on at eleven and hold on to an iron smile as her on-air colleagues jovially ganged up on her.