Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

T
he 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.

Again.

On my way up the street for the doctor’s wake, I slipped on the fresh ice and landed knees-first in a slush puddle. Then my elbow took a hard hit on the iced sidewalk as I slipped trying to get up. The pain ran up and down my arm like a frantic hamster.

“What in the world happened to you?” Billie asked as I came through the door. From the knees down I was a joke.

“Uncontrollable urge to pray,” I muttered, reaching down to flick the stray bits of ice from my pant legs.

“Are you going to change them before the people start arriving?”

“I’m not going back out in that slop to change my clothes,” I said. “Maybe you’d like to lend me one of your dresses.”

My aunt clucked at that. “Oh, I’m too zaftig, dear.”

“Meaning?”

“Big fanny. You’re way too svelte for my wardrobe.” Billie sighed. “You could always hide behind a floral arrangement,” she suggested.

“No flowers please, remember? Send condolences in the form of a contribution to the Heart Association?”

Billie sniffed. “What’s wrong with flowers
and
a contribution? Hitchcock, when I go I want that room in there glutted with flowers, do you understand me? I want a jungle.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Don’t ‘yes ma’am’ me, I’m serious. The funeral of an undertaker should be exemplary in every way.” Billie stepped over to straighten my tie. “You give me flowers. Irises. Orchids. Lilies. Even mums. You can make entire blankets of mums.” She smoothed my lapel.

“Duly noted,” I said, fluffing the silk scarf under her chin. Billie gently slapped my hand away.

“And no black-eyed Susans. I have never understood why people do that.”

“It’s the state flower.”

“I don’t care. This isn’t a constitutional convention, it’s a funeral. The black-eyed Susan is strictly a roadside flower. It has no business at a funeral. At least not mine. Understood?”

I nodded. Billie turned to the wall mirror and began poking her silvery do. My aunt is a handsome little chippy, who would gently slaughter me if I revealed her age (she’s sixty-three). A daughter of the South, she was born with a silver spoon pretty near her mouth but developed fairly quickly into a frustrating disappointment to her high-toned Confederate family. Billie was a socialite rebel. She pretty much ripped it with her aristocratic papa when she showed up at her own cotillion in a pair of riding britches and puffing on a short-stem pipe. It was an offense that she swore—albeit without much vigor—was intended to pay homage to the twin economic pursuits of her dear southern father, namely horse rearing and tobacco farming.

They have a term for this: black sheep.

Billie finished with her hair—it looked exactly the same as before—and turned from the mirror. I had removed my jacket and was rolling up my sleeve to have a look at the elbow.

“Would you like some ice for that elbow? Ice might help, if it’s swelling.”

“Ice is
why
it’s swelling.”

Billie’s nose twitched like a rabbit’s. “Well then, how about some brandy?”

A half hour later, and just after I had salted the sidewalk and the front steps, the friends and relatives of the dead doctor started arriving. We had laid out newspapers beneath the metal coatrack in the front hallway, to catch the runoff. Billie and I were expecting a somewhat smaller than usual turnout on account of the piss-poor weather. My aunt was working the front door. I took up my position near the coffin. I admit, I like to drink in the compliments.

“He looks very nice, Mr. Sewell,” the doctor’s widow said to me, after spending approximately five seconds gazing down at her husband. Her name was Ann. She had arrived with her husband’s brother, along with her daughter and son-in-law, the three of whom immediately set themselves up at the parlor door to start greeting the arriving guests. Ann Kingman was around fifty, short and stocky, a formerly pretty woman gone hard in the eyes and tight around the mouth. She was as heavily made-up as her husband.

“I have your photograph in my office,” I told her. “I can give it back to you before you leave.”

She gestured vaguely. “Keep it. It’s a copy. I have dozens more. We used it for a Christmas card that year.”

“It’s a very good photo. You have a handsome family.”

The woman gave me a frank look. “I know that it is your job to be solicitous, Mr. Sewell. You’re very gracious. But if it is all the same to you, I’d feel better if you would drop the effort.”

She said all this without a trace of bitterness in her voice. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. I do. But to be honest with you, I’m angry with Richard … I know it sounds cold. But the effort of being polite to all the well-wishers tonight is going to exhaust me.” She paused to see if I would react. I didn’t.

“You and I have a strictly financial relationship,” she went on. “And I am officially releasing you from the obligation to tell me that I have a handsome family. The truth is, I have a daughter who hates me and a son who hated his father. Don’t let the photograph fool you.”

I was tempted to tell her that it hadn’t, but I remained silent. She gave me a humorless smile then stepped over to join the daughter who hated her. The son was just arriving. I could see him in the front hallway, shrugging out of his parka.

As expected, the storm did keep the turnout somewhat small, though not as small as I had thought. What with Hopkins being so close, a fair number of the doctor’s colleagues did manage to pop in to pay their respects. From what I could tell, the widow was not requesting polite indifference from anyone but me, and was receiving the sympathies of her guests with apparent authenticity. Her smile was weary and sincere; her occasional laugh was tinged with effort. The daughter, on the other hand, was a slobbering mess. Her husband was dutifully feeding tissues to her from a stash in his jacket pocket.

The son was a little more difficult to read. He was in his late twenties, slender, pale, sandy-haired. He wore a pair of wire-rim glasses. I observed that he looked even more like his mother in real life than he did in the ski-vacation photograph, right down to the thinly disguised look of scorn that he was wearing. His indifference to his sniffling sister was remarkable. After ten minutes or so of meeting and greeting, he broke away from his family and wandered over to take a look at his father. As he reached the coffin he pulled his hands out of his pockets, as if suddenly ordered to—for the umpteenth time—by the imperious old man. His eyes narrowed as he gazed down at his father. I tensed. If a person is going to do something loud and embarrassing at a wake, this is where it will usually happen. At the coffin. I had positioned myself against the wall, trying my best to look like a potted plant. Just as the son’s face was collapsing into tears, I was distracted by a commotion coming from the front hallway. I glanced toward the parlor doors, and when I looked back, the son was reaching his hand into the coffin. The commotion from the front was spilling into the room. I took one step toward the coffin, then the scream rang out. High and shattering.

Our dead waitress had arrived.

S
he was folded unceremoniously on the top step. A bloodstain about the circumference of a drink coaster covered her left breast.

The scream had come from the dead doctor’s secretary, who had been on her way out. “I just pulled open the door and … there she was,” the woman said to no one in particular as we all gathered around the open doorway.

Assessments came swiftly.

“She’s been shot.”

“Stabbed.”

“She’s dead.”

“She might be alive.”

As if by an invisible signal, a half dozen doctors suddenly surrounded the woman and confirmed, with a check of her neck and her wrists, that there was indeed no pulse. One of them said, “Let’s get her inside,” and over the protests of a few who cautioned that we should wait for the police, the woman was lifted by four of the medical professionals and carried inside and laid out on the couch in the front hallway. I went back over to the front door. Before I closed it I peered into the darkness. The various sets of footprints in the slush and snow were—to my eyes—indistinguishable. I saw none that bore the peculiar imprint that said: MURDERER. Maybe if Alcatraz were there he could have put his nose to some use. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to get down on my knees and start sniffing. I glanced across the street at St. Teresa’s. Their Nativity scene was looking out of place, all those folks dressed for desert climes standing around in snow. A yellow North Star on a pole behind the manger had a bad electrical connection and was flickering erratically. Like Morse code:
S-E-N-D M-Y-R-H-H-!