Murder in the Hearse Degree (11 page)

I angled over to the field house and looked at the monument to Tecumseh. The monument was comprised of what had originally been a ship’s figurehead of the Indian chief. The guy looked fierce and pissed off. Who can blame him? I asked a passing cadet what time it was simply to see if he’d give it to me in military time. He didn’t. It was two fifty-five and he told me it was two fifty-five. However, he did add a snappy “sir!” to the end of it. He also pointed out a pay phone for me at the corner of the quad.

I dialed my home phone and retrieved my messages. There was only one. It was a woman’s voice.

She left a phone number. I called it. The same voice answered.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I said.

“Is this Dickie?”

“Afraid not.”

“Who is this?”

“You just called my number,” I said.

“I . . . the Baltimore number?”

“Yes.”

“It was all garbled. I was hoping you were Dickie.”

“I’m not.”

“I need Dickie now, damn it. If I get ahold of him I’m going to kill him. He is really screwing me over.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Who is this anyway?”

I told her my name. There was a pause. There often is.

“Look, I can’t talk. I’m totally swamped here.”

“I won’t keep you,” I said. “I was calling to see if you knew a person named Sophie Potts. She’s—”

“Sophie? Sure, I know Sophie, why? Wait. Hold on.” I heard her speaking with someone on her end of the line.
“No, Judy, the six-inch plates. If you use the eight-inch plates they’re just going to load up on the food. We’ll run out too soon.”

While she was talking the chapel bells began ringing. There was a peculiar echoing sensation in the receiver.

She came back on. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’m really screwed here.”

“Hold on,” I said. “This might sound strange, but could you wave your arm?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your arm. Just wave your arm over your head.”

“What the—”

“Just do it.”

“Okay. Okay, I’m waving.”

I peered out across the quad, toward the white canopy at the far end.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

 

 

The bride was the
first one to go into the water. She was an Irish-Catholic girl, large and boisterous. She kicked off her white shoes and lifted her bustling dress up to her knees and charged down one of the piers at the field house basin and launched herself into the river with a squeal of glee, folding up at the last instant to enter the water like a cannonball. The artillery barrage followed. Some bridesmaids. A couple of ushers. A cousin of the groom. Then the groom himself. He entered the water in a perfect frog dive, feet splayed Charlie Chaplin style, knees and elbows forming perfect diamonds. The wedding party splashed around in the water like they were fending off piranha. Apparently the best man was squeamish. He was half carried and half dragged by several cohorts to the end of the pier. A bouncy thing in a peach-colored dress hippety-hopped behind them, protesting. The best man was taken by the arms and legs and given a one-two-
three
, and tossed into the drink. Miss Hippety-Hop bounced up and down on the end of the pier. One of the cohorts gave her a hip check and in she went.

“Ah, to be young and drunk.”

This came from Stephanie. Stephanie was the caterer I’d spoken to on the phone. She stood about five five. Bristle of straw-colored hair, shoulders of a fullback. She was built low to the ground. I’d seen her yanking cases of beer and booze like they were paper goods. I fully believed that if she got hold of this Dickie character she could put a serious hurt on him.

Her instructions to me had been to pour a good drink.

“The quicker they fall, the quicker we get out of here.”

And they were falling now. Into the Severn. Climbing back onto the pier and launching themselves back into the water. The only wet blanket was Miss Hippety-Hop, who had climbed out of the water and barked at her boyfriend, who had then scrambled out of the water and disappeared into the field house, emerging a few minutes later with a snappy white cadet’s jacket, which he draped over the shoulders of his dearly beloved. The couple came over to the tables where I was tending bar and Miss Hippety-Hop ordered a whiskey, straight. Her lips were blue and her eyes were furious. She threw back the whiskey, gave a raspy cough and asked me for another. She kept one of the furious eyes on me as she took a sip from the second drink. Her boyfriend was looking feeble and uncertain. Unbidden, I poured him a whiskey.

“Keep up,” I whispered to him as I handed him the glass. His date glared angrily over her shoulder at me as they moved off.

“You ever think about bartending full-time?” Stephanie asked me.

“I’d have to say, it’s certainly different from this side.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Stephanie said, pouring herself a ginger ale. She took a seat on one of the ice chests. “You saved my ass.”

“It’s one of the ways into heaven.”

“You can punch out now, Hitch. The crunch is over.”

The white jacket Stephanie had conjured for me to work the bar was built for a lesser man. The sleeves gave up well back on my arms and my shoulders had been trussed all afternoon. I peeled the jacket off and folded it atop a box of chardonnay.

“So you’re really an undertaker, eh?” Stephanie asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Where I come from, ‘business is dead’ is a good thing.”

“Must be creepy.”

“Not really. For one thing, our customers never complain.”

She laughed. “I never thought of that.”

A man in an orange sports coat came over to the table and asked for a gin and tonic. I put one together for him. He looked off at the water revelers and wagged his head slowly, then drifted off. I returned to my perch.

“So what can you tell me about Sophie?”

Stephanie pulled in her lower lip. “There’s not much to tell, really. She answered an ad that I ran in the paper. She didn’t have any catering experience but she could put one foot in front of the other and she could carry a tray.” A grin grew across her face. “Plus she was cute in her little white dress.”

“Something about a gal in a uniform?”

She grinned again.

“Stephanie, please don’t tell me you corrupted the morals of a shy little Hungarian girl.”

“Not a chance. For one thing, I don’t do that sort of thing. I’m happily partnered. But there was no sway in that girl anyway. That was obvious. You said you never met her, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Let me tell you something, she would have melted for someone like you. Sophie was like a kid in a candy shop when it came to tall good-looking guys.”

I thought of Gary Cooper. I also thought of Mike Gellman.

“Could you elaborate?”

“What’s to elaborate? The eyes go wide. The lips begin to tremble. . . .”

I said, “I’ve been given the definite impression that Sophie was a shy girl.”

“Oh, she was. Terrifically shy. But you know sometimes that can be pretty appealing. And guys love to flirt with the shy ones. You must know that. Sophie was a pretty little thing. You get a girl like that to blush . . . well, it was cute, watching her get all flustered. In fact it was probably . . . yes, it would have been one of the last times she worked with us. Right here again on campus. We were working some sort of orientation party. All these snappy cadets all over the place. Sophie’s eyes were practically popping out of her head. There was a particular group of them. Four or five. For whatever reason they decided to goof on her. I’m sure it was because she was so easy to ruffle. They got a little game going. Every time Sophie came out with a new tray of hors d’oeuvres they descended on her. They surrounded her and teased her, pretending that she had cooked the food herself and telling her how fantastic it was and all the rest. Their little game was to empty the tray before she had a chance to take a step. It was all just silly. They were having fun.”

“How did she react to that?”

“Oh, she blushed like crazy. But I’m sure she loved it. All these good-looking middies? I finally had to step in and tell them to cool it, though. The nice thing about military boys, they’re all ‘ten-hut’ and ‘yes, ma’am.’ They don’t give you any bullshit. One of them even came up to Faith later on to make sure she knew it was all their doing, that Sophie hadn’t been egging them on or anything. It was sweet.”

“Who’s Faith?”

“She’s my business partner. She works at one of the restaurants in town. She ought to be along soon to help break down. She can’t always make it to the jobs.”

We had a return visit just then from Miss Hippety-Hop. Her hair had dried into twisting blonde snakes. She was still wearing the white cadet’s jacket, holding it closed at the neck with one hand. Her eyes were red. She had been crying.

“I hate goddamn weddings,” she said. “Another whiskey, please.”

I told her the bar was closed.

“Closed? As of when?”

“As of one drink ago. I’m sorry.”

She tried to kill me with a look. It didn’t even strafe me. She turned and weaved back along her rocky road to her boyfriend.

I helped Stephanie and her workers load up the van. Stephanie ran a tight ship. Her workers clearly respected her. Partway into it Stephanie’s partner showed up. Faith was a willowy item, a long-waisted corn-silk blonde with iris-blue eyes and a deep deep tan. Her hair fell down over her ropelike arms like yellow lace and she had a tattoo of a mermaid on her inside right thigh. Not that I was looking, of course.

Stephanie said, introducing us, “Hitch saved our ass. Dastardly Dickie never showed. Hitch worked the bar like he was born to it.”

“Dickie is fired,” Faith said.

“Drawn and quartered if I get ahold of him,” Stephanie said.

Faith cocked her head and eyed me. “So how did we find you?”

“I popped up out of a hole.”

She gave me a long slow look-over. “Must’ve been a very large hole.”

Stephanie explained that I had been looking for information about Sophie Potts.

“You remember Sophie, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Faith said. “I promised her I’d have her over to the inn to sample my Hungarian goulash one of these days.”

“Too late now,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

Stephanie ran her finger along her neck. “Deadskies.”

Faith’s eyes and mouth turned to zeroes. “Sophie’s
dead
? What happened?”

I gave her the lowdown. Faith was in disbelief.

“Oh, that’s horrible. Poor girl. And she was pregnant? How in the world did that happen?”

Stephanie grinned. “Well, you know that part that comes after kissing?”

Faith slapped her lightly on the arm, then turned back to me. The top of her head came up just about to my nose. The part in her hair was as perfectly straight as a runway.

“Have we met before?”

“I don’t believe so,” I said. “In fact, I’m sure of it. I’d have remembered.”

“You look familiar to me.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of Cary Grant,” I said.

“You don’t look like Cary Grant.”

“You should see me in a tux. Changes everything.”

Faith studied my face a few more seconds. It didn’t bother me a bit. Gave me the chance to study hers. There were yellow starbursts in her eyes. Seven freckles on her nose. A slightly chipped tooth. All this on a neck like the proverbial swan’s.

“Hmmm,” she said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

I grinned. “But thanks for shopping.”

Faith excused herself to go talk turkey with the parents of the bride. She moved with a slow-motion bounce; her hair went this way and her dress went that way. I turned to Stephanie.

“She likes boys, am I right?”

Stephanie nodded. “Gee, how did you guess?”

I tapped my finger against the side of my head. “Hitch Sewell, boy genius.”

Stephanie and I folded up the bar tables and slid them into the van. Stephanie pulled a fistful of money from her pocket and handed me a hundred dollars. Then she dug in and handed me another fifty.

“Ass-saving bonus.”

A few minutes later Faith rejoined us. She mentioned something to Stephanie about the George Washington Inn. Turns out that’s where she worked. I told her that I had a friend who was singing there.

“No kidding,” Faith said. “Is that Lee Cromwell?”

“Yes.”

She said she hadn’t had a chance to catch the show yet, but she had heard it was good.

“You know, I just thought of something about Sophie,” Faith said. “She called me a couple of weeks ago.”

“Is that right? What about?”

Faith turned to Stephanie. “I guess I never bothered mentioning it to you. It was about Tom.”

“Who’s Tom?” I asked.

Stephanie answered. “Tom Cushman. He works for us off and on. He’s an aspiring actor.” She floated her hands in the direction of the other workers. “They’re all aspiring somethings. Tom hasn’t been able to commit much lately. He got a job at one of the local theaters. I can’t remember the show.” She turned to Faith. “Do you know?”

Faith shook her head. “I don’t remember. Something old.”

“So what was this call?” I asked.

Faith tapped a fingernail against one of her front teeth. “Sophie called me up and said she wanted to get ahold of Tom. She wanted to know if I had his number.”

“Did Tom and Sophie work together?”