Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (14 page)

But with the mayor climbing down their necks to come up with the killer—or killers—of the lawyer and his wife, the police might not exactly be hounding Terry Haden for an instant confession about the murder of Helen Waggoner. At least, that seemed to be the message that Kruk was flashing.

I took a left on Eutaw, passing a block from the Arts Tower. You get a clear shot of its clock face from a block away. The Arts Tower building is an exact replica of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The city uses it now to house its office of cultural affairs. It used to house the offices of the Bromo-Seltzer Company. A replica of the famous, blue Bromo bottle once rose some thirty feet above the tower’s turrets. It came down decades ago. The clock face doesn’t read 1, 2, 3. … Instead, B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R is spelled out in Roman-style lettering where the numbers would be.

When I looked up at the clock, it was E minutes past B.

I was halfway to the airport, puttering along in the slow lane, not paying as much attention to my driving as I probably should have been, when—for lack of a better word—a sensation suddenly descended on me.
I am going to find Helen Waggoner’s killer
. This is a little difficult to describe. It filled the entire car. It was a knowing. Forget Bonnie, forget Vickie, forget anything wholly logical. Forget the fact that the dead woman was dumped on my doorstep. These were the tangibles. But this wave that swept through me transcended the tangibles. I really can’t explain it much past that. I was suddenly infused with a clear and indisputable understanding that this was—for the moment anyway—my destiny. It sounds silly, I know. But I was going to figure out who killed Helen Waggoner. It was as simple as that. And with this thought came a sensation that some sort of residue that had been settling over everything the past several days had suddenly been wiped away. The sunlight was brighter. The painted lines on the road surface were sharper, clipping by in perfect unison. The other cars as well, the houses along the hillside overlooking the parkway, the trees flashing by, even my fingernails on the steering wheel … everything had an extra
crispness
, a clarity and perfect outline that hadn’t been there just five minutes before. The same could be said of my mind. It was bizarre. Murders, muggings, rapes, wars, terrorist bombings, natural disasters up the wazoo, rampant infidelities, cronyism, corporate tax cheats, starvation, mass suicides, random acts of violence, cancer, AIDS, the heartbreak of psoriasis … all of it was still running full throttle all over the world, nonstop; twenty-four/seven, as they’re now saying. The planet was one big marble of wretchedness. And as for me, I wasn’t exactly being lifted aloft by Disney bluebirds either. I was wheeling down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in my unexciting car on the fourth record-breaking freezing cold day in a row, tuning in to what seemed to be the preexisting fact that I was going to be tracking down a cold-blooded murderer. Should this really have been a happy-making moment? Or maybe not happy-making.
Vivid
-making? There was no way in hell I could argue that all was right with the world. Yet for about five minutes there, right before I took the airport exit, I experienced a clarity and an apparent understanding of God’s big, bad beautiful plan that was downright embarrassing to me—once it was over. I was glad that nobody had been in the car with me. Lord knows what sort of nonsense I might have spouted.

It passed. By the time I pulled up in front of Sinbad’s Cave—even uglier in the daylight—the world was back to its general state of random disarray. I turned off the engine and sat there a minute seeing if I could pick up the scent of any gas fumes that might have been leaking up from the tank. I couldn’t smell a thing. Okay then, that’s it. Apparently I had had a religious experience.

Funny, I would have thought maybe they lasted a little longer than that.

There are no windows in Sinbad’s Cave. Inside the place, eternal night reigns. The joint looked exactly as it had three nights before, with the exception that right now it was basically abandoned. There were less than a dozen customers scattered about at the tables, quietly eating their lunch. No loud laughter. No leggy women. Nobody piling up glasses in a pyramid. … Dullsville. The sign said to seat myself, so I did. A waitress shuffled over and started to take my order, then recognized me. She pointed her pencil at me.

“You.”

I shot back with a finger-pistol. “You.”

It was Gail. She looked so much more in context running the lunch bunch. The chubby waitress glanced about. “Where’s Bonnie Nash? Told my mother when I got home the other night, and she got all over me for not getting an autograph. She coming to meet you?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s just me today.”

Gail did nothing to hide her disappointment. “Shoot. Say, you guys married or anything?”

“We’re just friends.”

Gail snapped her gum. “Uh-huh.” She poised the pencil over her order pad. “So what can I get you?”

I ordered a turkey club, split pea soup and a Cobb salad. Thirty-four years old and I wasn’t even sure what a Cobb salad was. I’d always figured it was something they named after Ty Cobb.

“Cup or bowl on the soup?”

“A cup’ll be fine.”

“And to drink?” She made a conspiratorial face. “Can I get you a Wild Turkey?”

“It’s a little early for that,” I said. I glanced around the room. In here it could be any time you wanted it to be. “A cup of coffee’ll be fine.”

Gail scribbled down my order. “Oh. Thanks for the tip the other night. You went a little overboard though, don’t you think?”

“Forget it.”

“Forty dollars for two drinks? Are you kidding? I was a hero. You made my night.” She added, “They don’t really expect me to pull in big tips.”

“Well, I guess we showed them.”

She went off to put in my order. Rather, to put in the last order that Helen Waggoner had taken. Of course, I hadn’t expected a bolt of lightning to hit me just for ordering the same thing that Helen’s final customer had ordered, but I had to start somewhere. Gail came back with my coffee.

“We didn’t get you in any trouble the other night by the way, did we?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“No reason. Listen, Gail. Something you said the other night. About Helen Waggoner.”

“What’s that?”

“You said she really got into it with one of her customers a month or so ago. You said they were yelling at each other. Are you positive it was a customer?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could it have been an argument between two people who already knew each other?”

“You mean like a friend?”

I was thinking of Haden, of course. “Friend” isn’t exactly how I would have characterized the creep. “Something like that. Think back. Was there anything specific that Helen said to this guy that you can remember?”

Gail whirled her gears. Nothing was coming out.

“What about the man? What did he look like?”

Gail put the effort of remembering into her face; she tried hard. But she came up blank again.

“I’m sorry. It’s dark in here, you know. And the guy was off at one of the back tables. There’s not much light back there. I really don’t remember what he looked like. Just another customer is what I was thinking. You know, a businessman, coming over here to … you know, to get lucky.”

I let it drop.

“You said that Helen had been making noises about quitting. Do you think she meant it, or was she just blowing off steam?”

Gail poked her pencil into her steel-wool hair, where it disappeared completely. “I don’t know. I think she sort of meant it.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, it wasn’t just that time, that night she argued with that customer. The other night … the night she was killed and all. I mean, it was like it was on her mind or something. She kept saying, ‘I don’t need this place anymore. Forget this dump.’ You know. Like that. Over and over.”

“Like she didn’t need the work anymore?”

This woman had been two months pregnant and on her own. I had to think that she needed all the money she could get. That just ain’t quittin’ time.

“Kind of. I don’t know. Like I said, Helen had a temper. Maybe it was like you said, just her way of blowing off steam. I really didn’t know her. But it sounded real to me. You really ought to talk to someone like Tracy. She’d know a lot better than me.”

“Tracy?”

“That’s who I was subbing for the other night. Tracy is … was a friend of Helen’s. You know? Sometimes she’d baby-sit for Helen’s boy. Stuff like that. She’d know better than me.”

“Tracy. Does she have a last name?”

Gail looked at me like I was a two-headed rabbit. “Yeah. Who doesn’t?”

Cher, for one. Madonna. Roseanne. The Amazing Kreskin …

“And that would be?”

“Tracy Atkins.”

“Do you know how I might get ahold of her? I mean, other than here?” It was occurring to me that I would probably be wise not to become known as the guy who snoops around Sinbad’s asking questions.

Gail was shaking her head. “No. But you can ask the bartender. Ed would know.”

“Is that Ed?” I asked. The guy behind the bar was about forty. Receding hair, shoe polish black, combed back with a liberal dose of greasy kid’s stuff, as the commercials used to say. He was wearing a black vest over a red shirt, and a black tie. He could not have looked more bored.

“That’s him,” Gail said. “He’s the manager here. He’s the one who hired me.”

I remember Gail telling me how she landed this job. “Is that the guy who your uncle knows?”

Gail shook her head. “No. Uncle Lenny knows one of the owners. It’s like a company or something that owns this place. You know, a bunch of people.”

“A partnership?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess. Something like that.”

Gail brought me my food about ten minutes later. A Cobb salad is a plate of spicy chicken chunks, blue cheese, avocado and tomato on a bed of greens, doused with bacon-buttermilk dressing. Now I know.

“You need anything else?”

“This looks fine. Thanks.” Gail lingered. “What?” I asked.

She was holding her tray up against her breast. I guessed that as a child, little Gail had probably been the security-blanket type. Possibly there was even a one-eyed teddy bear in her past. The love of her life.

“Something else about Helen,” she said, lowering her voice.

“What’s that, Gail?”

“Please don’t tell anyone I said this.”

I zippered my lips and threw away the key. This satisfied the waitress. Gail leaned closer. “I don’t know this for sure. But I got the feeling Helen was fooling around.”

Somebody should have scolded Uncle Lenny for dropping such a lamb into this den of wolves. The chubby waitress was probably the only one in this tawdry joint who
wasn’t
fooling around.

“I got the feeling she was fooling around with Gary,” Gail said.

“Gary.”

“He’s the guy on the keyboard. He was here the other night.”

“The big guy. With the lovely sidekick.”

“That’s Gloria. They’re together.”

“Together. You mean as a duo.”

“I mean they’re a couple. They live together and everything.”

“I see what you’re saying. You think Helen might have been nosing in on—”

“Gloria. Uh-huh.”

“Interesting.”

“But I’m not sure. I mean I kind of think something like that was going on. But I don’t know. Please don’t say I said anything. I could be all wrong about it.”

I reprised the lip-zipping move. “Thank you, Gail.” Before she headed off I asked her, “So what are you studying, Gail?”

She beamed. “Computers. I’m gonna be a geek. I can’t wait.”

My soup was salty. My Cobb salad was unlike any Cobb salad I had ever had before. The turkey club was dry. I ate half, left half, then went over to the bar. Ed the bartender made half an effort to look eager.

“What’ll it be.”

“I’m looking for Tracy,” I said to him. “Is she working tonight?”

“Who’s asking?”

Um … how many choices do we have here? “Is she?”

“Why do you want to know about one of my workers?”

“I just said, I’m looking for her.”

“Yeah? And?”

“Have you heard of Guaranteed Mutual Life Insurance?”

He said that he hadn’t. Which would only make sense. I had just made it up.

“Well that’s who I work for,” I said. “I’ve got some questions I need settled before we move forward with a claim on a Helen Waggoner. She was employed here.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I need to speak with Miss Atkins about the claimant.” I wondered if I sounded as stupid to him as I did to me.

“The claimant is dead. You gonna throw money down a hole?”

“There is a son and there is a sister.”

“So what do you need from Tracy?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential,” I said.

The bartender shrugged with his eyebrows, then stepped over to the service end of the bar and consulted a sheet of paper that was tacked next to a calendar. He came back over to me.

“She’s off tonight.”

“Have you got a number where I can reach her?”

“We don’t give that out.” His tone suggested that this was hardly the first time he had stated this policy.

“Can you make an exception?”

“Why would I want to do that?” Ed leaned forward on the bar. “Are you and me cousins or something?”

“I told you. I’m with Guaranteed Mutual.”

“You got a card?”

“They’re being printed.” I winced. Ed was working up a knowing chuckle, the way some people work up a cough.

As I headed back up the parkway toward the city, I tried to remember where the nearest cash machine was downtown. A quick calculation of my two visits to Sinbad’s Cave suggested they were doing something right. Forty dollars for two drinks and some information the other night. Ten today for lunch. Plus another forty. The going rate for phone numbers these days. Or so I was learning.

“W
e’re all set.”

Pops clapped his gloved hands together. I was kicked back at my desk, my feet up on a mess of papers next to the telephone. Three tries so far to reach Tracy Atkins. No answer.