Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (16 page)

“Are you selling your car?” I asked.

She was pulling on a cigarette. “Nah. Just got it. Why don’t you follow me?”

“Well, I came in the hearse.”

Tracy twisted her neck to look over at the hearse. “I been in one of those,” she said. She looked back at me. “A boy I knew in Morgantown. Guy could party. Git in.”

I wanted to say good-bye to Vickie Waggoner. But she and Terry Haden were already getting into a car. Two cars down, Bonnie and Jay Adams were getting into his. I was climbing into the MG. Something about the pieces on this game board was feeling all wrong to me.

“You paying?”

Tracy Atkins shot through the cemetery gates and turned right on Greenmount. She beat the yellow at North Avenue and took a hard right, still in second, then slipped it into third and slammed down on the accelerator. The little car held the road beautifully. I just hoped the driver could hold the little car.

“For lunch?”

“What do you think?”

“Sure. I’m paying.”

Tracy floated the gearshift into fourth and sunk into her seat. She sliced the car smoothly around a Jeep that was merely doing the speed limit. In no time we were at the Mount Royal Avenue entrance to the expressway. “Hold on.”

The entrance ramp to the expressway is one long right turn. Three quarters of a complete circle. She took it at about fifty.

•••

If I were going to milk someone for an expensive lunch I’m not sure what I would choose. Maybe Peerce’s Plantation out in the county. Or Marconis downtown. Or even Tio Pepes, the intended destination of the recently slaughtered lawyer and his wife. I’d want waiters who discuss the menu items as if they’re eager to sit down and join you, maybe even a chef who pops in from the kitchen to pretend that his entire equilibrium depends on your favorable take on his blend of herbs and spices.

Tracy had different ideas. She back-flipped for Phillips Crab House, a local chain restaurant located in one of the Harborplace Pavilions. Baltimore is a city brimming with crab snobs, and I readily admit, I’m one of them. Of course half of the enjoyment of eating hard-shell crabs is the doing of it in hot weather, at a picnic table covered with newspapers, an Orioles game on the radio and a cooler of cheap beer on ice. The other half is decent-sized crabs that are practically pregnant with backfin. But the dead of winter is not exactly crab season on the East Coast. The winter crabs at Phillips were expensive and disappointing. They were shipped in from the Gulf. Like the restaurant itself, the little fellows were cold and half empty.

“Where’s the meat?” Tracy asked after about ten minutes of cracking and poking and blamming away with the wooden mallet. The crabs had barely enough meat in them to pack a tooth.

“It’s not really the right time of year.”

“But this is Phillips.” Apparently the popular crab eatery was expected to have some extra pull with the Lords of Crustacea. Tracy was starting to wield her wooden mallet with more frustration than precision. She snagged our waiter to lodge her complaint.

“There’s nothing but shells and shit in these crabs. Look at ’em. A person could starve to death trying to eat these things. You got any bigger ones?”

“Those are the bigger ones, ma’am.” The waiter was a high school kid. Light-years away from a fawning professional.

“Well, they stink.” Tracy shot a look across the mountain of dead crabs. “You want any more?”

“How about you get us some crab cakes,” I said to our waiter.

After he had shuffled off, Tracy made an elaborate job of cleaning off her hands with a wet napkin. She looked like a cat giving itself a bath. “We shoulda gone someplace good, like the Sheraton,” she announced. She softened up once our crab cakes arrived. “That’s more like it.” She smothered her plate with tartar sauce.

“You’re not originally from Baltimore, are you?” I asked.

She shoved a forkful of crabmeat into her mouth. “West Virginia. Wheeling. How’d ya know?”

“Lucky guess.”

The next ten minutes were spent in an autobiographical overview of the life and times of the woman from Wheeling. I listened with half an ear. There seemed to be a trailer, some boyfriends, a father, some beer and—no surprise—fast cars. As her story finally pulled into Baltimore I perked up, though a five-minute side trip about a man who done her wrong and what Tracy did to set things right held things up a bit longer. Finally Tracy arrived at Sinbad’s Cave and the subject of her murdered friend.

“I really liked Helen. I’m pissed someone kilt her.”

“Were you and Helen close?”

“Oh. Sure. I mean. Pretty close. I liked her. She had a lot of spunk.” Tracy pointed her fork at me. “I like spunk. She didn’t take shit from nobody.”

“Nobody like who?”

“Nobody like anybody. You been out to Sinbad’s right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you seen it. Guys come in there think every woman in the place is a piece of candy. How many times a night you think I tell a guy drinks don’t come with extras, you know? I mean, I’m polite and all. I’m not an idiot. I work for tips.”

“But Helen wasn’t always so polite?”

“Oh sure. She worked for tips too. You gotta please the damn customer. But you get tired. You know what my mother used to say to me? Food goes to a man’s stomach but liquor goes to his hands. She got that right, didn’t she.”

“Tracy, can I ask you a blunt question?”

Tracy set her fork down and gave her red mane a little toss. “Shoot.”

“Did Helen sleep with the customers? I mean, that happens there sometimes, doesn’t it?”

She snorted. “More like sometimes it don’t. You born yesterday? Tips only go so far. Ever try to make ends meet waiting tables?”

“I missed that one.”

“Well, it ain’t easy, trust me. You probably make good money yourself, burying people and all, but not everyone can do that. These businessmen? Now
they
got money to burn. They got time to kill.” Her eyes narrowed. “And they got a hotel room, too. Already paid for. You want me to spell it out for you?”

“I’m only trying to get an idea of who might have killed Helen.”

Tracy’s eyes went wide. She was mushing her crabcakes, before eating them. “You think one of the customers mighta done it?”

“Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. What do you think?

“I dunno. I guess it’s possible. Fruitcakes come in all sizes, don’t they?”

“Did Helen have any regulars? That you can think of?”

“Helen had that kid. She was a good mother to that kid. She wouldn’t just go off sleeping around and leave the kid with a baby-sitter all night. I’m not saying she didn’t need the extra cash. But she was a good mother to that boy. You seen him? Cute little thing.”

“So Helen didn’t have any regulars.”

“I didn’t say that.” She shoveled another forkful of crab into her mouth. “Truth is, I don’t know for sure. It’s none of my business.”

I had the feeling that the gal from Wheeling was protecting her dead colleague, though from what I wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just being careful not to speak ill of the dead. It just seemed to me that Tracy was the type to make her business anything she damn well pleased.

“Helen had an argument with someone at the bar,” I said. “This was about a month ago. Were you there?”

Tracy wiped her nose with the back of her hand. A little dab of crab remained on her cheek. “Helen had plenty of arguments with people. I told you, men just think they can paw you half to death. She was a tough girl when she had to be. She wouldn’t put up with a lot of crap if she wasn’t in the mood. Simple as that.”

I tried out a different angle. “Did Terry Haden ever come in to the restaurant?”

“Who’s Terry Haden?”

I put my fork down. “I thought you said you were friends with Helen. Terry Haden. He was at the funeral just now. He’s Bo’s father.”

“That’s news to me.”

“You mean Helen never talked to you about her son’s father?”

“I don’t pry. I told you, her business is her business.”

She was lying. Her face was practically twitching with the effort of keeping it as expressionless as she could. Why she would lie about something like that was a matter I’d have to think about later. Tracy’s eyes went wide as saucers as I reached across the table and dabbed the crab off her cheek. I buried it in my napkin.

“Well … that guy at the funeral, the one standing next to Helen’s sister. Do you ever remember seeing him at Sinbad’s?”

Tracy gave it some thought. At least that’s what it looked like she was doing. She might have been noodling over Fermat’s Last Theorem for all I could tell.

“Could’a. I don’t pay attention to faces. I can’t say I remember seeing him there. But he could’a been. Helen and I didn’t always work together.” She took another biteful of crab. She shook her fork at me while she chewed. “I tell you what, though. ’Bout regulars? Helen
was
seeing someone. I mean, someone she was involved with.”

“Are you talking about Gary?”

Tracy made a face. “Gary? Oh hell, Gary doesn’t count. Gary’ll sleep with anything’s got two legs.”

“But he’s involved with whatshername, right? The singer? Don’t they live together?”

“Gloria. Yeah. Now you know why he’s so desperate to sleep around.” She cracked up at her own joke. There was an unappealing little snort that went along with her laughter.

“I take it you don’t think a whole lot of Gloria.”

“I try not to. She’s uppity. She sings like crap and she don’t even know it. Listen to her talk you think her and Gary are about one inch away from being superstars. All I can say is she’s got the attitude part down, anyway. Somebody ought to tell her that a little talent wouldn’t hurt either.”

“So was Helen sleeping with Gary?”

Tracy shrugged. “She might have given him a toss. He’s not so bad looking, really. Big guy, too.” Her eyes sparkled at me across the table. “Like you.”

“Gary’s got a good twenty or thirty pounds on me.”

“Yeah, but you’re tall, like him. You’re not a squirrel. A girl gets tired of squirrels, you know?”

I didn’t. And I didn’t want to.

“Were Gary and Gloria playing at the restaurant the night Helen was killed?”

Tracy pointed her fork at me again. “You know you oughtta be a detective. They sure as hell weren’t there, come to think of it. They were off that night. You think Gloria mighta kilt Helen? Damn.”

“What do you think?”

“Sure. I could see that string bean taking a shot at Helen. I really don’t know what the hell it is Gary sees in her anyway.”

“Help me out here, Tracy. When you said just now that Helen was seeing someone, you weren’t referring to Gary, right? If she was sleeping with him, that was just …”

“ ’Cause it was fun,” Tracy said flatly. And with that, I had a pretty good red-haired idea who
else
had taken the time to sneak around behind the back of a certain string bean singer.

“So you’re saying Gary wasn’t Helen’s regular guy.”

“Not a chance.”

“So who was?”

“I don’t know.”

It was coming to me that I might not end up getting my crab cake’s worth out of this woman. Though she was certainly getting her crab cake’s worth out of me. These Sinbad’s women apparently ran a pretty good hustle.

“How do you know she was seeing someone?” I asked, proud of myself for keeping my growing weariness out of my voice. “Did she tell you? Did you see her with someone?” Reading tea leaves? Come to you in a dream?

Tracy ticktocked her head. “Uh-uh. She never brought anybody to that place. Are you kidding? Sometime around, I can’t remember exactly, sometime in the fall, I guess. All of a sudden, Helen’s got this whole new attitude going on. Suddenly she’s buying new clothes, and she’s getting new things. New car. Stuff for the kid. I mean, suddenly it’s like she’s won the lottery or something.”

“What was it?”

“She wouldn’t say. I asked her right out, you got a rich boyfriend or something? But she was all mysterious about it. I mean, Helen sure didn’t go out and rob a bank or anything. It was a guy. But she was clammed up about it.”

“And you never saw her with someone at Sinbad’s who you thought might have been this guy.”

“No way. Whoever he was, she was keeping him clear of that place. I don’t blame her either. She was talking about getting a new apartment. She was talking all the time about quitting. But she was still real closemouthed about it all. All I knew was something was happening there. And she was happy.” Tracy shook her head sadly. “It’s a bitch, isn’t it? Nobody’d kill her when she was struggling. They gotta wait til she’s happy.”

I called for the bill. I paid with cash. For no particular reason—maybe because I was dining with a waitress—I left a large tip. Tracy stared at the money as I tucked it partway under the place mat.

“Christ. All he did was serve you some lousy food.”

I walked her across the street to the parking lot. At the car, she pulled open the driver’s side door. It caught a little. “They’re supposed to fix that,” she muttered. She got in. Her fingers snaked around the steering wheel. She looked up at me.

“You want to go somewhere or something? I got the whole afternoon off.”

I pulled out my trusty lie. “I’ve got a dentist appointment. The office is just over on Eutaw.

She made a face. “I hate dentists. I knew one in Wheeling. Drank like a skunk. He thought he was a real Romeo. So you know, what if you canceled?”

“It took me five months to get this appointment.”

“Maybe some other time, huh?”

“Sure.”

“I’m serious. Call me sometime.” She leveled me with a look. “I know you got my number. Ed told me.”

She turned the key, gave me a wave and fishtailed out of the parking lot. I hurried back across the street and phoned a cab. If it was possible, the temperature seemed to be dropping even more. While I waited for the cab I popped into a Harborplace shop that sold only scarves. I spent way too much money on a silk scarf that was mauve and peach and red and green and gold and blue and yellow. I had the saleslady gift wrap it for me in red and gold cellophane, then ran outside and hailed my good man.