Murder in the Hearse Degree (24 page)

Faith served me breakfast
in bed. She whipped up a Spanish omelet along with some extremely tasty little scones and a bowl of fresh fruit. She made some mimosas into which she plunked a pair of plump strawberries, then sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed and watched me eat.

“Aren’t you going to join me?” I asked.

“I’m a voyeur,” she said. “I just like to watch.”

I was propped up on the pillows with the breakfast tray tucked up to my waist. Faith’s bedroom had sheer curtains that lifted in the soft breeze much in the manner of Faith’s silky blonde hair. The omelet was fluffy. The scone fell into crumbs with a glance. There was a general weightlessness to the entire room.

Faith sat in a short white robe watching me with a simple Mother Earth expression as I gobbled up the goodies. When I was done I announced, “That was superb.” Faith crawled forward and I twisted to my left to place the breakfast tray down on the floor. The beatific expression never left her face. I glimpsed it a few times through the veil of her golden hair as I again gobbled up the goodies. When we were done I announced, “No,
that
was superb.” She smiled and slid out of bed, trailing her robe behind her and letting it drop as she stepped across the floor and out of the room. A moment later I heard a shower running. I found my mimosa glass on the floor and picked it up. One sip left. There was a mirror on the wall above the dresser directly across from the bed. The figure in the reflection looked disheveled and blissed out. I saluted him with my glass.

“I know exactly how you feel.”

After Faith got out of the shower I rolled in and watered down the old carcass. Good pressure. Plenty of hot water. Faith was hanging up the phone as I emerged from the bathroom. She gave me a thumbs-up.

“We’re all set,” she said.

As we left Faith’s apartment I thanked her for the breakfast. “And all that other stuff, too. You’re a top-rate hostess.”

I followed Faith in my car. The Fates gave us a pair of parking spots, one behind the other, and we headed down to the harbor. The day was crisp and clear and so was I. Faith floated along next to me.

“There he is.”

We had arrived at a place called Pusser’s Landing, a bar and restaurant with tables right on the water. A midshipman was sitting by himself at one of the tables. He was spiffy in his bright whites. He rose as Faith and I approached. I guessed he was around twenty. With the buzz cut and the sailor suit, there was an overgrown-boy look to him. He looked earnest and nervous.

Faith spoke first. “Bradley, this is the man I told you about. This is Hitchcock Sewell.”

The middy had a hold of my hand before I knew what was coming. His arm jerked with a piston move.

“Bradley Hansen, sir!” It’s actually a low-volume shout, the way they snap this off.

I shouted back, “Nice to meet you, Bradley! And you can skip the ‘sir’ business.”

“Yes . . . okay.”

Faith placed a hand on my back and leaned into me. “I’m going to go. I’ll see you later?”

“Roger,” I said. Her arm trailed down my back. She headed off down the docks, in that floating style of hers. I turned to Bradley.

“Hell of a tan on that woman, eh?”

Bradley looked confused. “Sir?”

“Tan. Woman. Very nice.”

“Oh . . . yes.”

I took a seat and signaled for him to do the same. A waiter popped up out of a hole and I ordered coffee. Bradley was fine with his water. Navy man.

“Faith tells me she ran into you on the street yesterday,” I said.

The cadet swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“She recognized you from one of the parties that she catered.”

“That’s right. She did.”

“You were the one who came up to her and her partner and apologized for teasing one of their workers. The little Polish girl.”

“It was Hungarian, sir.”

“Of course. Hungarian. I knew that. Just checking you. Faith tells me you asked about her yesterday. About Sophie.”

“Yes, that’s right. I did.”

“Bradley, are you nervous?”

It wasn’t just his clipped delivery—this was part of his training, after all—but for all that it was a beautiful morning, probably somewhere in the upper sixties, and the boy was sweating like crazy.

He stammered. “I just . . . she told me Sophie was dead.”

“And you hadn’t known that.”

“No, sir. No. Absolutely not.”

My coffee came. For some reason (probably omelets, mimosas and an audacious dose of Faith) I was feeling extraordinarily calm and mellow. The breeze was perfect. The boats in the harbor were swaying gently. Seagulls were hovering in the air as if suspended on filaments.

I picked up the little pitcher of milk. “Bradley, did you sleep with Sophie?”

He answered without hesitation. “Yes, sir.”

I poured some milk into my coffee. I picked up the spoon and stirred slowly, then placed the spoon back on the table, just so. I took a teensy sip. The midshipman was sitting ramrod straight. He was suffering nobly as I went through the motions of being a jerk.

“You got her pregnant,” I finally said.

“Yes, sir.”

“She told you that she was pregnant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what did you say to her?”

He finally unfroze. He blinked hard and his head swiveled, as if he was afraid someone might be listening in on our conversation. His skin looked pale against his crisp white uniform.

“I can’t be a father,” he said. His voice had gone hoarse. He could barely get the words out.

“Is that what you told her?”

He nodded. He took a sip of his water.

“And what did she say, Bradley?”

“She said she couldn’t have a baby on her own. I . . . I told her, I just can’t. My father went to the Naval Academy. My uncle went here. And my grandfather. I can’t get booted out. I just can’t.”

His face had gone from white to red. The pleading was in his eyes. Along with the fear.

“I can’t,” he said again, nearly in a whisper.

“And you weren’t about to just leave the academy on your own and take up with this girl you didn’t even know.”

He shook his head. More of a tremble, as if his chair was being jostled.

“I guess you didn’t think of all this when you slept with her, did you?” I said. I said it a little more sharply than I had intended. Having just rolled out of the rack with the ethereal but essentially unknown Faith myself, I have to say it was hardly my place to be lecturing this kid on the responsibilities of the morally upright. But I allow for a little fraudulence when making a point. A strict adherence to the avoidance of hypocrisy would paralyze a person. The issue here was Bradley, not me.

“It just happened,” Bradley said.

“You mean sleeping with Sophie. It just happened.”

“That’s right. I asked her for her phone number at the end of the party. She gave it to me. I met her a couple nights later. We went to a movie.”

“Good movie?”

“I guess. She liked it. There wasn’t a lot of action. She said she didn’t like action movies.”

“It was one of those relationship movies?”

“I guess so. It was pretty sappy.”

“And then one thing led to another?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“It’s a story as old as the hills,” I said.

“She said she would take care of it. I offered to help. That’s the truth. Then I didn’t hear from her again.”

“I guess now you know why.”

“I can’t believe she’s
dead
.”

“Did you have any contact with Sophie after she told you she’d ‘take care of it’?”

He took a moment to sip on his water. His eyes flitted about again. “No, sir.”

“What did you think she was going to do?”

He lowered his head. He was running his finger absently around the rim of his glass. “I didn’t ask.”

“Did you kill her, Bradley?”

His head snapped up. For just an instant, the sad, doughy face was replaced with a look of anger. It was gone as quickly as it had arrived.

“That’s not funny,” he said.

“Not a whole lot about this whole mess is.” I skidded my chair back from the table. “Everyone I’ve talked to tells me she was a sweet kid,” I said.

Bradley swallowed hard. “I liked her laugh. She had a really cute laugh. When we . . . after we, you know, did it, she was laughing. It was weird, because she was also crying. But she was happy. I mean, she couldn’t stop smiling.”

I stood up. I took a few dollars from my pocket and dropped them on the table. Bradley was looking at his water glass again. That crystal-ball gaze. I squinted at the boats out in the harbor. The crew of the
Pride of Baltimore II
was readying the ship to set sail. They sail this ship all over the world, as what they call a goodwill ambassador. When I was younger I used to imagine that every port the
Pride
came into, the docks were loaded with locals who had come out to greet it. All very colorful. Waving handkerchiefs. Cheering. Smiling. I looked back down at Bradley. There was nothing I could think to say.

 

 

I stopped off at
Faith’s apartment but the angel wasn’t home. I pulled out one of my cards and wrote a short note on the back. I decided it was too silly so I pocketed it and wrote out a second one. This one was silly too, but it would have to do. At the bottom I added,
I’ll call you
. With all due respect, it’s a known fact among the caveman set that women go nuts for that line.

Before heading back to Baltimore I swung by the police station. I was curious to see if there had been any shimmy or shake about the car that had plowed into Tom Cushman. The woman at the front desk remembered me. I remembered her. Judith. Judith told me that Croydon Floyd was out on patrol. Judith also told me that Croydon Floyd’s allergies were acting up today. She told me about her husband’s bowling league. She told me about her laser surgery, about her son’s science project, about a trip the family took recently to the Shenandoah Caverns, about the funny smell she couldn’t get out of her cat’s fur, about getting a pretzel stuck in her ear. . . . I was leaning toward the door like a man in a hurricane but I couldn’t . . . quite . . . get there. I was rescued by acting chief Talbot, who rounded the corner just then. He recognized me from before.

“You can tell him later, Judith,” he muttered to the receptionist. He motioned for me to step outside.

“Thank you.”

We stopped just outside the glass door. Talbot thumbed his belt loop and hitched up his pants. He indicated my bandaged arm.

“Understand you clipped yourself the other night.”

I held up the arm. “It’s nothing, really. Small price to pay for still being alive.”

“I can see your point.” Talbot squinted up at the Maryland state flag snapping smartly atop a flagpole out on the grass. A metal grommet somewhere along the anchor rope was making a pinging sound as it bounced against the pole. Talbot addressed himself to the flag . . . but I could tell who he was talking to.

“Croydon told me he spoke with you the other day. He said you were questioning the way we’re doing our job. Is that right?”

“I was calling to ask Officer Floyd for some information as well as to give some information. An exchange of information, if you will.”

“Croydon says you’re nosing around in the death of that Hungarian girl. We got a call from a Mrs. Pierce who told us that you and a friend of yours went by her house the other day asking a lot of questions.”

“Is there a crime in that?”

Talbot broke away from the flag and turned his squint to me. “Fact, there is. Interfering with police business.”

“I guess I wasn’t aware that there was much police business to interfere with on this one. My impression is that the Annapolis police have laid this case to rest. So to speak.”

“Lots of people want to play detective, Mr. Sewell,” Talbot said. “I’m going to ask you to stop now. If you have information relevant to the investigation, of course we want to hear it.”

I suppose a perfectly upstanding citizen would have offered up Bradley Hansen at that point as the father of Sophie’s unborn baby. I didn’t. So much for my upstanding standing. The police didn’t seem to be shaking the bushes and breaking down doors trying to learn a whole lot about Sophie Potts; I kept the information in my pocket.

“Sophie Potts wasn’t suicidal,” I said. “I think that’s relevant information.”

Talbot seemed disappointed in me. Not to mention increasingly impatient.

“I wasn’t aware that you knew the young lady,” he said.

“I didn’t. Never had the pleasure.”

“Girl got herself in trouble. Some people aren’t so good at handling trouble.”

“You mean she was pregnant. But the police didn’t find that out until after she was pulled from the river. Until the autopsy, right? I’m just wondering how come she was marked as a suicide from the very beginning. I’m just curious what you were going on.”

Talbot worked up a good-old-boy’s smile and tried it out on me. “I thought I just asked you a moment ago to stop playing detective.”

“I’m playing citizen,” I said, and I gave his fake smile right back to him.

“Well, then, I’d like you to play citizen back in Baltimore.”

“Did you know that Sophie Potts was pregnant before the coroner’s report came out?”

“Mr. Sewell, I believe we’ve spent enough time on this topic.”

“Fine. Then how about Tom Cushman. The guy who got run over the other night. He was an acquaintance of Sophie Potts.”

“Croydon passed that information along to me. We appreciate your sharing it with us.”