Murder in the Hearse Degree (20 page)

I made my way cautiously along the perimeter of the lawn out to the far edge of the property, where the grass met the woods. Though partially obscured by tree branches, I had a better view of the deck from here. I could make out two people sitting in the hot tub. The blue-green glow was coming from a light—or lights—that were in the tub itself. The glow danced and wobbled, throwing off liquid shadows across the deck and onto the high branches above the deck.

One of the people in the tub stood up. It was Mike Gellman, dressed just as he had been on the day he was born. He grabbed a towel and crossed the deck, passing into the shadows. I heard the sound of the sliding glass door open. Soon after, the other person rose up from the tub. It was a woman. Her back was to me. Can’t say I recognized the back. It wasn’t Libby’s, I could tell that much. Steam from the tub rose up with her. She stepped out of the tub and across the deck into the house. Swiftly, I made my ever-so-stealthy path back to the driveway where, not sure what to do next, I stood behind the shrubs like an uncertain lawn ornament. I waited less than ten minutes. The front door opened and Mike and the woman emerged. Mike was positioned so that I couldn’t get a clear view of the woman as she slid into the driver’s seat. Mike bent down. Unless Mike and the woman were biting down on the same piece of taffy I’m going to assume they were kissing. Mike pulled back from the car. The headlights went on—along with the engine—and the car pulled away.

I had to wait until Mike got back inside the house and had closed the door, then I moved as quickly as I could up to my car and took off down the road. I picked up the taillights of the red sports car before we had hit the main road. I kept my distance. The car went right. Twenty seconds later, so did I.

I was able to remain fairly far back. The red sports car was easy to keep in sight. We headed west and then slightly south. I tapped the cassette tape hanging out of the machine. The tape disappeared, and a second later, Rosie Flores appeared. Julia’s tape. I remembered it like it was yesterday. Which, in fact, it had been.

Forty minutes later the red sports car took a left turn into a driveway. I was a block behind. I watched as the car’s headlights swept briefly over a small stone fountain. Maybe one day I’d have to get a closer look. But to my eyes, the chubby cherub was still screwing the two swans.

And Mike Gellman was screwing Ginny Larue.

And presumably, vice versa.

 

 

My alarm clock licked
my face every hour on the hour, starting at one of the ungodly ones. I resisted the rousing call until finally I feared my dashing good looks would be slobbered entirely from my skull. Can’t have that. On feet of lead I made my way to the shower, then afterward lowered my head into a bucket of caffeine. I pride myself on being in pretty good shape (I do a push-up on Tuesdays, on Thursdays I jog down the steps to the sidewalk, and on an average of once a month I pull my old Dunlop racquet from the closet and plunk on its strings banjo-style while jogging in place), but I suppose the gymnastic of diving out of the path of an oncoming car isn’t the sort of thing for which even a hale and hearty carcass like mine stands at the ready. I sat at my kitchen table with that old hit-by-a-freight-train feeling and contemplated the dull life of the undertaker. Not for the first time in my life I reflected warmly on the idea of curling up inside a soft, quiet casket and pulling the lid closed.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and a Terrapins sweatshirt. I skipped shaving and took my mug of coffee down to the front step, where I sat and watched Alcatraz distributing While You Were Out notes up and down the block.

I tried to focus on the events of the previous evening, but unfortunately my brain was working like a loosely screwed-in bulb. On a frayed wire. Dangling in the wind. I could flicker, but that was about it. The image of Ginny Larue rising naked from the steaming water of Mike Gellman’s hot tub . . . that image flickered a fair number of times. In slow motion. In stop action. Zoom in, zoom out. The dancing blue light from within the tub. The steam swirling about Ginny Larue’s hips. What it all told me beyond the fact that Mike Gellman was indeed a dog, I couldn’t say, but as far as images go, it wasn’t a bad one. Far better than the image of Tom Cushman lying motionless atop a faux-antique wrought-iron ice cream parlor table bathed in a chopping red light. With each flicker of this particular image—the girl standing next to the table in a horrified scream—a queasy feeling came over me, along with a stab of guilt and an unsettling spasm of anger. As I sat there, a trio of Jehovah’s Witnesses came down the street and calmly discussed Armageddon with me until I finally cried uncle. I was told that God would welcome me into His Kingdom and that all who had not joined in the righteous battle would be destroyed.

“But what about my dog?” I asked. “Who will feed him?”

No one seemed willing to answer that one for me, at least not in the five seconds I gave them before pulling open my screen door and heading back inside. The dog in question bounded past the Witnesses and stumbled excitedly back up the stairs. I plodded behind him. I scooped some mush into his bowl, poured myself another mug of coffee and was asleep before it was quite half done. I woke up in my easy chair nearly an hour later with a neck that refused to swivel to the left.

“Get a gun,” I said to Alcatraz. “Shoot me.”

 

Maryland license tag number PVA910 was registered to a Howard Small of Severna Park, which is just outside of Annapolis. Howard Small was six feet five and fifty-three years old and I have to figure that if he hasn’t heard every single riff on his name commensurate with his height then he simply isn’t listening. Mr. Small runs a pest-control business in the Annapolis area called BUG OFF! He employs three field-workers and a secretary named Florentine. When the police had arrived in mid-morning to question Mr. Small as to the whereabouts of his car the night before, the pest-control man pulled out a checkbook and said, “All right, I knew this was coming. Just give me a figure.” One of the two officers had exploded, “A check? You want to give us a damn
check
?” at which point Mr. Small had reached into a desk drawer and pulled a handful of cash from a metal box. The same officer spotted a pistol in the metal box. He immediately drew on the tall man and ordered him to raise his hands and to step away from the desk. When Florentine saw this, she went into a fit. Apparently Florentine could throw a world-class fit. Ten minutes later the police car pulled away from BUG OFF! with Howard Small
and
Florentine in the backseat. Small was bellowing for his lawyer and Florentine was simply bellowing. Matters got straightened out at the police station. It turned out that Howard Small had amassed unpaid traffic fines totaling three hundred and forty-five dollars and he had assumed when the police showed up that they had come to BUG OFF! to collect. The gun was found to be legally registered. Small was furious. Fortunately for the two police officers, Florentine turned out to be an acquaintance of one Croydon Floyd, and the officer had been able to talk Florentine into persuading her boss to let the matter drop. In return for the favor, Croydon Floyd had a date with Florentine for the following weekend.

My information came from Croydon Floyd himself. After I woke up a second time I phoned the Annapolis police station and asked to be put through to Floyd if he happened to be there. He was. I asked him if he remembered me and he said he sure did. He said he had noticed my name in connection with the hit-and-run last night. He sounded a lot friendlier on the phone than he had been in person the other day.

“That Florentine has got a mouth on her,” he said. “You’ve never heard a person screech so loud.”

“It sounds like you saved the day,” I said.

“Yeah, saved the day and messed up my Saturday night. Florentine wants me to take her dancing.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You’ve never seen Florentine dance. There’ll be about a dozen medical emergencies before the night’s over, I can tell you.”

I steered the officer back to the original issue.

“So what about the hit-and-run?” I asked. “What about Small’s car?”

“Describe the car again. The one that hit you.”

“It didn’t hit me.”

“Describe it.”

“Dark. I’m pretty sure it was blue. A midsize. Nondescript. Cars like that all look alike these days.”

“Honda? Toyota? Saturn? Saab?”

“Yes,” I said. “All of those. Any of them. I didn’t see the name of the car. I was focusing on the tag. PVA910. I’m sick of it. It’s like a bad song I can’t get out of my head.”

Floyd said, “Howard Small drives a Land Cruiser.”

“A Land Cruiser.”

“They’re pretty big,” Floyd said. “More like a truck. Definitely not a midsize.”

“I see.”

“His Land Cruiser is white.”

“White.”

“That’s right,” Floyd said. “And not on the dark side of white. Just regular old white. We’re running the other combinations. Maybe it was PUA. Or maybe you inverted the numbers. Maybe it was 019.”

“PVA910,” I said. “It’s tattooed on my brain. Maybe someone stole the plates.”

“Stole the plates? And then what? Returned them later?”

“Right.”

“Why would someone do that?” Floyd asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe that way, if anyone spots the tags, which they did, you trace them and they go nowhere. Which they haven’t. It’s a regular old hit-and-run.”

“Same question. Why would anyone do that?”

“Well, that’s my point. It’s
not
a regular old hit-and-run. The fellow who was killed last night? Tom Cushman? He knew Sophie Potts.” Floyd didn’t respond. “Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you.”

“Interesting, isn’t it? Girl dies under mysterious circumstances and a few days later an acquaintance of hers is mowed down by a car.”

Floyd cleared his throat. “I guess you could call that interesting.”

“Is there anything new on the Sophie Potts investigation?” I asked.

“We have no new information.”

“Except now. This is new information.”

“What is? The fact that an acquaintance of the deceased got hit by a car? People get hit by cars every day.”

“So you think this is just a coincidence?”

“I can’t say either way, can I? I appreciate you passing on the information.”

“Let me ask you something. Why is it that you’re so convinced that this girl killed herself?”

“I could ask you why you’re so sure she didn’t.”

“But I asked first.”

The officer was losing patience. “Look. We have the report from her employer that the deceased was behaving erratically prior to her disappearance. She was then—”

“Wait. What are you talking about? Mrs. Gellman mentioned to me that Sophie kept to herself. That’s hardly ‘erratic.’ ”

“I interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Gellman when I took the original missing persons report,” Floyd said flatly. “We followed up, of course, after the body was found.”

“Followed up with who?”

The officer paused. “Who do you think?”

“I don’t think anything. I’m asking.”

“We followed up with the Gellmans, of course.”

“Both of them?”

“I don’t really have the time for all of this. Yes. Both of them. Mr. and Mrs. Gellman. What do you think we are down here, the Hardy Boys? We know how to do our job.”

“And the Gellmans told you that Sophie Potts was . . . what did you say, unsteady? Erratic?”

“I assure you we are doing everything necessary to determine what happened.” He sounded as if he were reciting from a script.

“Don’t assure me, Officer. Assure the mother.”

“Are you through giving me orders?”

“That hit-and-run last night was no accident. That’s all I’m saying. I was there. That car veered right toward us.”

“Maybe you should consider yourself lucky then,” Floyd said. “Sounds like that could’ve been you in the morgue instead of the other guy.”

He hung up. I looked at the receiver as if maybe I expected it to sing “Swannee River.” It didn’t. I hung up and dialed Pete’s number. He answered on the third ring.

“Hi,” I said.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Mr. Lucky.”

There was a pause. “Not when I get through with you.”

 

Following Pete’s instructions, I parked my car on Sulgrave Avenue and walked around the corner to the next block and tried to look inconspicuous as I strolled down the street to near the middle of the block, where Pete’s white Impala was parked. I got in the passenger side.

“Afternoon, Chief,” I said.

“Don’t call me Chief.”

Pete was sitting behind the wheel with a cup of coffee in one hand and a glazed doughnut in the other. A box from Dunkin’ Donuts was on the seat next to him, along with a pack of cigarettes.

“You really do this by the book, don’t you?” I said. “I suppose you’ve got binoculars, too.”

He shoved the box of doughnuts. Sure enough. A small pair of Minolta binoculars was on the seat.

Pete was on a stakeout. Even though he had disbanded his private detection company in the spring, Pete still needed to put the old flank steak on the table now and then, so until he discovered what he wanted to be when he got to the other side of his crisis, he accepted the odd snooping job. He was keeping an eye on a house near the far corner of the street. A mid-level executive for a local home-heating-oil firm was out on workman’s compensation for injuries allegedly suffered on the job. Pete didn’t know all the details. In addition to the compensation claim, the man had filed a lawsuit. The home-heating-oil company, along with the insurance carrier, smelled a rat. That’s where Pete came in.