Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (40 page)

Nobody considered that the driver of the car might have been going too fast on purpose. Or that he might have suddenly jerked the steering wheel as he hit the crest of the bridge. The word “suicide” never entered the picture. Or rather, “self-homicide.” If there was an explanation for the car going off the Falls Road bridge—other than the obvious assumption of snow and ice and tragic carelessness—no one lived to explain it.

After watching Jeffrey Kingman’s car get dragged up the incline and loaded onto the flatbed of the tow truck, I returned home—after asking my cabby to swing by a bank machine; this taxi-taking lifestyle was killing me—and took a long, hot, painful shower. Billie phoned to tell me that Ann Kingman wanted us to handle the funeral of her son. It seemed awfully perverse to me until Billie added that Mrs. Kingman had said something to the effect of wanting some “continuity” and “closure” in the matter of laying to rest both her husband and her son. Billie said that Ann Kingman had instructed the hospital to contact Sewell & Sons to come pick up Jeffrey’s body as soon as it was released. Billie had already contacted Sam. I told her that I really didn’t want to handle this one. I murmured something about my injuries. Billie sensed something in my tone, I’m sure. She volunteered to handle the Kingman funeral. No cribbage on this one. I thanked her and hung up.

I phoned Bonnie at the station. I knew that she’d be at work. The weather slot gets shoved right to the top of the broadcast at the slightest hint of accumulation. The snow had not let up all morning and was now an official “weather emergency.” After being put on hold for ten minutes, Bonnie came on to tell me that she really had no time to talk.

“It’s Jeffrey Kingman,” I blurted. “Now
he’s
dead. His car went off a bridge.”

“Hitch, I really can’t talk right now. Have you looked out the window?”

“It’s snowing,” I said blandly.

“Damn right its snowing. And guess who called it
perfectly
? I’ve really got to run. I’m coordinating a thousand things at once.”

“But, Bonnie, it’s all coming out. Jeffrey Kingman hired someone to kill Helen. Someone went on a virtual killing spree afterward.”

“Call Jay. He’ll know what to do. He can coordinate. I’ve got to go.” She hung up.

I did what she bid. I called Jay Adams at the Sunpapers. Why not? Adams was at his desk. I guess a couple of flakes of snow hadn’t sent the reporter dashing off in a hundred directions at once. I was glad to see someone was showing some perspective.

“Jay? Hitchcock Sewell. Bonnie’s all tied up with the blizzard of the century. I thought maybe you and I could take the opportunity to fight to the death. Plus, I’ve got some information for you.”

“Where and when?”

“Do you know the Screaming Oyster Saloon?”

“I do.”

“Meet me there … in an hour. Can you do that?”

“Do I bring my own weapons or are they being provided?”

As much as I didn’t like the guy, I liked the question. “On the house,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

The last call I needed to make was to Vickie Waggoner. With the big snowstorm, “paralyzing” the area, I was pretty certain that school would have been canceled, especially farther out in the county. I pictured Vickie sitting in her living room looking out at the snow coming down. I thought of Bo. Maybe she and the boy were outside playing; maybe she was showing her nephew how to build a snowman. Did she really need the phone to ring and have it be me bringing her snow day to a grinding halt with the details of just how purposeless and callow the decision to kill her sister had been? I couldn’t even bring Helen’s killer in front of her and say, “Him. He did it.” I also couldn’t present her with Jeffrey Kingman. The junior Kingman had either hit an ice patch as he was rushing in his car to see what his mother needed him for right away, or he had instinctively known that the game was up and had gone ahead and hit the gas as he reached the highest point of the Falls Road bridge. Nobody would ever know. Either way, Jeffrey Kingman was dead. But if I was guessing correctly about Vickie Waggoner, I doubted that she would be finding much solace in that fact.

I didn’t call her. I picked up the phone three times, and three times I set it back down.

An hour later, just before I was about to leave to go meet up with Jay Adams, I finally picked up the phone and dialed. Vickie answered on the fifth or sixth ring. She was out of breath. I cringed inwardly when she said that she had been out back with Bo, building an igloo.

“You should hear him try to say ‘igloo.’ He’s so cute.”

“Igloo,” I repeated. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I shouldn’t have called. I knew it immediately.

“Hitch, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“How are you feeling?” It took me a moment to realize that she was referring to my injuries. It came back to me, the image of Vickie seated at my hospital bedside, facedown, sharing a corner of my pillow, fast asleep. It seemed like centuries ago.

“I’m fine,” I said again. “Much better. A little banged up, but … I’m fine.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You sound strange,” she said.

“I’ve got some news.”

“News?”

“About Helen. I have the whole story, Vickie. At least as much of it as I think we’re ever going to know.”

She didn’t say a word for about twenty seconds, maybe longer. When she did speak, it was to Bo. Something about his boots. I think she had lowered the phone to speak to the boy.

“Hitch, I’d like to hear it,” she said back into the phone.

“I’m about to run out to meet up with someone,” I said. “I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

“Neither do I. I can come over.”

“No. Don’t do that. The snow and … you’ve got the kid. Don’t go driving in this mess. Please.”

“When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure. I’m meeting a guy right down the street. I’ll call you when I get back in. How’s that? I’ll come out.”

“Do that. But call first,” she said. “And Hitch?”

“Yes.”

“Never mind. I’ll be here. Call me as soon as you get back.”

We hung up. I got into my foul weather gear and went out into the foul weather. I was in a foul mood as well. And I had no gear for that.

Jay Adams was already at the bar when I arrived. So was Julia. She was behind the bar. My spirits soared at the sight of my former bride. Adams, of course, couldn’t keep his eyes off her, though he was doing his best to be discreet about it. Trying for a peripheral ogle. Most men just sit and stare. The reporter got a few points in my book simply for his efforts.

I hopped onto the stool next to him and jerked a thumb in Julia’s direction.

“That one? I threw her back.”

Adams took the opportunity to turn his head and give a full frontal stare to the lady behind the bar.

“You should seek professional help.”

Julia came over to us, walking cowboy-style. She whipped her dishcloth at the counter in front of me.

“What up?”

“What’s he drinking, Agnes?” I asked.

“Him?” Julia gave Jay Adams her slow-motion smile. “You can’t touch what he’s drinking, Mister. Tell you what. I’ll give you some milk, and I’ll put it in a dirty glass for you. How’s that?”

I picked up Adams’s glass and sniffed it.

“What
is
that?”

Adams answered, “Seltzer.”

“And?”

“And ice.”

Julia reacted as if a shiver had just gone down her spine. “Ice. On a day like this. You see? I tried to warn you what you were up against.”

“Thank you, Gerty. How about a simple old-fashioned beer.”

“If you say.” She grabbed a glass and stuck it under a draught spout. “I prefer Agnes.”

“I prefer Julia, but I don’t want to give this guy any inside information. He’s a professional snoop as it is.”

Julia overpoured my beer and then sipped it down a half inch before setting it down in front of me. She got a beer foam mustache.

“We were married once,” she explained to Adams, licking the foam away. “But correction. He didn’t throw me back.”

“It was mutual,” I agreed.

Julia grinned her best grin. “Would you boys like any nuts?”

“Don’t answer that,” I said to Adams. “It’s a trick question.”

Julia sighed. “Ho-hum.” Then she moved off down the bar to torture someone else.

“She’s beautiful,” Adams said.

“Even a blind man can see that.” I took a sip of my beer. “Okay, let’s get to it. You’re the expert here. Or so Bonnie keeps telling me. I’m going to tell you what I’ve got, and then you can tell me what I’ve got. How’s that sound?”

“Fire when ready.”

I gave the reporter the entire enchilada. Some of it he knew already, due to his own sleuthing as well as Bonnie’s periodic updates to him. But a lot of it was fresh, and he listened with the placid eagerness of a hungry person who waits patiently for all of the dishes to be set down on the table before commencing to gorge. I told him how a surly creep known to me only as “Bob” showed up in a foul mood at The Kitten Club the night of Helen Waggoner’s murder and proceeded to use the club’s owner as a punching bag. I told him how, sometime later, Michael Fenwick had also showed up at The Kitten Club in a highly agitated state. Clearly
something
had gone awry that evening. And whatever it was, Popeye was taking the brunt of it. The fact that both Popeye and Fenwick were murdered within the next week, both by the same gunman—almost certainly Mr. Bob—seemed to confirm that whatever it was that went awry, Bob wasn’t going to stand for it. Locating Bob would be the only way of discovering what the problem had been. On that count, I told the reporter, I had no leads and no intention of looking for any. Kruk’s warning that I stop making myself an easy target for a killer was finally taking hold. I was ready to cash in my chips.

I saved my last piece of information, well … for last, where it belonged. I told Adams about Jeffrey Kingman. I told him about the man’s lifelong disdain for his father. I explained how the younger Kingman had pitched a fit when his mother confided to him the latest exploits of his father, and how Jeffrey had gone out to Sinbad’s Cave to try and do a number on Helen Waggoner, to try and coerce her to abort the child she was carrying and to just disappear into the sunset.

“Clearly he didn’t know Helen,” I said. “I’ve gotten a pretty good portrait this past week. This is not a woman who would take kindly to this sort of crap. The
last
thing she would have done would have been to fold her tent and slink away.”

I finished off my beer. The devilish angel behind the bar drifted over to see to our liquid needs.

“How about you?” she said to Adams. “Are you ready for a refill?”

He was, and Julia filled his glass from a nozzle. Her eyes traveled back and forth between Adams and myself as the glass filled.

“Is everyone having fun?” she asked.

“Where are Sally and Frank anyway?” I asked. “What puts you behind the bar?’

“Daddy hurt his back shoveling the snow. Sal has a cold. Daughter to the rescue. Will that be all, gentlemen?”

Adams picked up his glass, gave a terse nod to Julia and sipped. “You pull a mean seltzer.”

Julia had him in her pocket. “Thank you, sir. Let me top you.” The reporter set his glass back on the counter. Julia fired two quick shots into it, taking it right to the very rim.

“You gentlemen need anything else, just call. I’ll runneth over.”

After she left, I asked Adams what was up with the seltzer. “Is it a no drinking on duty thing?”

“It’s a no drinking period thing.”

“You no like?”

“I love. I no stop.”

“I see,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He waved it off. “Forget it. Turns out I enjoy actually recalling whatever it was I was doing the night before. I’m fine with it now. Salut.” He tapped his glass against mine.

“Tell me about you and Bonnie,” I said.

He met me with a simple and unthreatening refusal in his almond-shaped eyes. “Finish your story.”

I did. I drained half my beer and then finished off the story.

“Jeffrey Kingman and Michael Fenwick went to college together. Constance Bell told me. Old buddies. It was Jeffrey who connected Fenwick’s firm with his father. That’s the link. As I see it, Jeffrey Kingman’s fuse lit after Helen slapped him in the bar and told him to mind his own goddamn business. Here was his father in the ultimate screw over of his mother and, for that matter, the rest of the family. Dumping Mom for this saucy waitress. I can’t know it exactly, but my guess is that when Richard Kingman keeled over in the middle of the operating room, that spun it for Jeffrey. Michael Fenwick was his good friend. Fenwick must have told Jeffrey about the change in the will, about Kingman carving up the pie in a new way to include Helen Waggoner. I have no idea how Jeffrey talked Fenwick into it. The way I see it, he asked Fenwick, being a lawyer and all that good stuff, if he maybe knew how to get ahold of the kind of person who would take care of a little unseemly business in an unseemly fashion. For a nice nickel, of course.”

“I’m sure. Maybe Fenwick was getting a piece of that action, who knows?”

“Have you learned anything about Fenwick in your snooping that suggests the guy maybe didn’t always play it straight?”

“Reporting,” Adams said.

“What about it?”

“That’s what it’s called. It’s not ‘snooping.’ ”

“Is that what I said?”

“It’s what you’re always saying. I’m a reporter. I ask questions. I investigate.”

“That’s different from snooping?”

“I like to think so.”

I tapped his glass with mine. “Well, Merry Christmas, Jay. I’ll give it to you. In your
investigation
, did Fenwick come up stinky?”

“Inconclusive, I’m afraid. People I talked with called him ambitious. Not all of them said it in a complimentary tone. I think Fenwick was fine with stepping on toes when he had to. I gather he was gung ho to prove himself to the old man.”

“So, it works for you then? The idea that Fenwick might be the type to … overexert himself?”

“Do something illegal?”

I placed the tip of my finger on the tip of my nose. Adams chuckled into his seltzer.