Murder in the Hearse Degree (26 page)

“We know that,” I said. “Coroner’s report.”

“Right. Okay. So then what? Next thing we know she ends up in the river. That’s what we’ve got?”

“And there’s also Tom Cushman,” I said.

“Tom who?”

“Cushman. He’s the actor who posed as the father of Sophie’s child when she went to talk with the Larues.”

“But you just told me that the navy boy was the daddy.”

“Bradley sliced it off with Sophie the minute she got pregnant. There’s no way he would have gone with her to meet Larue. Tom took it on as an acting gig. From the sound of it he failed the audition.”

“And where is he now in all this?”

“He’s dead in all this,” I said. “A car ran him over a few nights ago down in Annapolis. The police have it as an accident, a hit-and-run.”

“And you definitely believe the navy boy?”

“I hardly think he’d go out of his way to lie about something like that,” I said. “He wants to stay out of trouble. Why in the world would he say he was the father if he wasn’t?”

Billie piped up. “To protect the real father?”

I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. This kid wasn’t falling on his sword for anyone.”

“What if this Tom character knew navy boy,” Fallon said. “Then he . . . Christ, we’re just running around in circles. I’m more interested in knowing why this girl really went to Larue in the first place. Something’s not kosher there.”

“She was living in Mike Gellman’s home,” I said. “Maybe she found out about Gellman and Ginny Larue.”

“Yeah, but I just told you, that’s a small potato.”

“Sophie wouldn’t necessarily know that,” I said.

“No, it’s something else.” Fallon linked his hands behind his head and sat back in his chair, closing his eyes. “I don’t know what the hell it is. But it’s something else. Give me a minute.”

We did. And he took complete advantage. By the time it arrived Fallon was fast asleep.

 

 

The next day I
got into my car and headed south. The day was warm and I rolled my windows down. On 95 South I passed an exit that read FUTURE. I was sorely tempted, but I resisted. Several years earlier on a visit to New York I’d taken the bait of a sign that read UTOPIA PARKWAY and had surely not found my bliss there. These signs can be misleading.

Two exits past the FUTURE I found myself ingloriously stuck in the present for nearly a half hour. A jackknifed tractor trailer was hogging the road, leaving only half a lane and a narrow shoulder for the rubberneckers to squeeze by. The truck looked like a large animal that had decided to roll over on its side and take a nap. A half dozen policemen and an ambulance crew were standing around scratching their heads when I crawled past, so things didn’t appear to be too dire.

A minute longer in traffic and I would have missed Virginia Larue altogether. As it was she was just coming out of her driveway in her little red sports car as I pulled up. She met me going in the opposite direction and stopped, her window gliding smoothly from sight.

“Good morning,” I said. “Or good afternoon.”

She answered with a wary, “Hello.”

“Do you remember me?”

“I do. Mr. Sewell.” I can’t say that the woman looked me up and down—for of course I was sitting in a car—but she took in the car. “Is this a coincidental meeting? Were you just passing this way?”

“In fact I was coming by to see you,” I said.

“Oh?” The word didn’t come out exactly like a purr. But close.

“I probably should have called.”

“That would have been wise. I’m leaving, as you can see. I have an appointment.”

“It wouldn’t happen to be with a certain assistant D.A. from Annapolis, would it?”

In less time than it takes to blink, Virginia Larue went all hard around the edges. I basked in her icy stare.

“I’m running late. What do you want?”

“I’m not really sure,” I said, glancing in my rearview mirror. A car was coming up on me. “A little chitchat, I suppose.”

Virginia Larue looked as if she had eaten something distasteful. “Two o’clock. The Commodore Hotel. It’s near Union Station.”

“Hotel?”

“They have a restaurant,” she said flatly. “You can buy me lunch.”

She drove off before I could respond, leaving me a little puff of oily smoke to chew on. The car behind me honked. On an impulse I turned the wheel and pulled into the Larue driveway. I decided that the swans and the cherub weren’t having sex; they were merely getting to know each other. A squirrel ran along the gravel up to my door, twitched his whiskers at me then bounded off to the lawn and spiraled up a tree. A flash of white off near the rear of the house caught my eye. There was a small lattice structure set back against a pair of large boxwoods. A wooden swing—like a porch swing—hung from a pair of chains. Someone in bare legs was sitting on the swing. The flash of white was from the legs, which appeared and disappeared behind the boxwoods as the swing moved backward and forward.

I got out of the car and stepped across the grass. The legs continued to appear and disappear, and as I approached I could hear the faint creaking of wood from the swinging chains. A pale blue baseball cap was visible on the back swing. I rounded the boxwoods. It was a young woman, head down, reading a book that was open on her lap. She was in cutoff jeans and what looked like a cotton pajama top, loose and formless and patterned with pink angels. Her feet were bare and one of them—the left one—was pushing off the grass each time the swing came forward, to keep it rocking. I cleared my throat. She was very slender. Long neck, no waist, trim pale legs.

“Hello.”

She looked up. For a moment I didn’t recognize her; the baseball cap was pulled low on her head, shading her eyes.

“Hello.” The word didn’t come out much louder than the creaking wood. But I recognized the twang. It was Sugar Jenks. Crawford Larue’s daughter. She pulled the open book up to her chest and hugged it.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “I just . . . ah, I just ran into your mother.” I ticked my head to indicate the street and Sugar gazed off in that direction as if she expected to see something. She stopped kicking against the grass. “I’m Hitchcock Sewell. We met the other day. At the party. Very briefly.”

“I remember.” She seemed uncomfortable holding eye contact for more than a few seconds. She gazed down at her knees.

“What are you reading?” I asked. She mumbled her answer. “Sorry,” I said, “I missed that.”

“Trash.” She made it into a two-syllable word. She looked back up. “I’m just reading trash. It’s about a woman who is an international spy and men fall in love with her.”

“Are you enjoying it?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then it’s not trash. It’s entertainment.”

“Daddy thinks it’s trash.”

“Well then Daddy shouldn’t read it,” I said.

The swing had come to a halt. “I’m not dressed,” Sugar said in a husky whisper.

“Of course you are.”

“No, I’m not. I didn’t expect any visitors.”

“Do you live here?”

She cocked her head. “This is my home.”

“You and your husband?”

“Russell and I live in the east wing. Daddy and . . . my stepmother have the rest of the house. Are you here to see Daddy?”

“Not exactly. I was driving by and I spotted your stepmother as she was leaving. I was just turning around in your driveway and I saw you over here and thought I’d come say hi.”

“Are you friends with Virginia?”

I thought I detected a slight urgency in her question. She pushed the cap farther back on her head and her eyes appeared. Large, dark, and anxious.

“I only met her the other day,” I said. “Same day as I met you.”

“At the party?”

“That’s right.”

“It was a nice party, wasn’t it? There were a lot of people there.”

She was speaking like a child. Or like a child might speak to her stuffed toys. If I’d happened to have a lollipop in my pocket I would have offered it to her. From the far side of the house came the sound of a lawn mower starting up. Sugar’s head flicked again in the direction of the noise.

“Sugar?”

Crawford Larue was stepping from the back of the house. He was wearing slacks and a pink dress shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. He did a lousy job of hiding his frown as he made his way over to us.

“Sugar, honey, what’s going on?”

“Manuel’s mowing the lawn,” she said dreamily.

Larue aimed a pudgy finger at me. “What are you doing here?” He was also doing a lousy job of sounding friendly.

“At the moment I’m enjoying a conversation with your lovely daughter,” I said as unctuously as I could. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Larue. Though I’m surprised. I’d have thought you’d be off at work.”

“I conduct much of my business from home,” Larue said. He turned to his daughter. “Is everything all right?”

Sugar nodded her head. “Yes, Daddy.”

“To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” Larue asked me. I repeated my lie about having been passing by. It wasn’t a very good lie, which Larue seemed to sense. He turned back to his daughter.

“Why don’t you give me a kiss then go inside and get dressed. You’re half naked.”

Sugar rose from the swing, her arms still wrapped around her book. I shot her a smile but it didn’t seem to penetrate. Larue presented his chubby cheek and Sugar leaned forward and dutifully kissed it.

“That’s a good girl.” Larue pulled the cap from Sugar’s head and tucked it between Sugar and her book. “You want to take a shower, honey. Say good-bye to Mr. Sewell.”

The peep of a bird would have been louder. The woman’s eyes traveled well past me. Sugar stepped heavily across the grass and disappeared into the house.

“She’s a pretty girl,” I said.

Larue made an indifferent face. “Nowhere near as pretty as her mother.”

Larue escorted me back to my car. Before I got in I asked him, “Mr. Larue, are you aware that the man who was here the other week posing as Sophie Potts’s lover was hit by a car a few nights ago?”

Larue took a beat before he answered. “I don’t know how such information would have come my way.”

“He was killed.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

I slid in behind the wheel and closed the door. “I just thought you might find that interesting.”

Larue placed his hands on the open window. “What I find interesting, Mr. Sewell, is that it appears to be your habit to show up at my door with stories of persons who have recently died.” He smiled and added, “I have to say, sir, I am becoming a little concerned myself about being of your acquaintance.”

 

I had some time before my lunch date with Virginia Larue, so I killed it at Union Station, nosing around the shops there and pestering the clerks with my collection of bad foreign accents. I picked this habit up from my father, who, I have to say, was much better at it than I am. He was especially adept with his Russian accent and in my more gullible pipsqueak years I actually believed he was a spy for the Russians and that he had another family just like ours stashed over in Russia. I pictured a little Russian Hitchcock in a huge fur hat goose-stepping back and forth in front of the onion-domed Kremlin and I would draw pictures of myself and my mother and of the neighborhood, sticking them into my father’s jacket pocket so that he could take them over to Russia with him when he left “for work” in the morning. (My geographic skills were slow in percolating.) I would write on the drawings,
For Hitchcock, From Hitchcock,
and upon my father’s return from work in the evening he would pull the drawings out of his pocket and announce, “Well, look at this. I’ve got something here for someone named Hitchcock,” and he’d hand them to me. Naturally, I hoped for a drawing from my Russian brother, but of course I never did get one.

Virginia Larue was already seated when I arrived, at one of the tables next to a window off near the rear. I spotted her when I entered and I waved. She did not wave back.

The restaurant was nearly empty. It was the tail end of the lunch crunch. Virginia Larue sat stone-still as the hostess walked me over to the table. She was wearing a ruffled blouse under a burgundy blazer. The blouse was two buttons open, revealing a small gold cross on a thin chain around her neck. She looked like she was practicing her posture. Her eyes followed me as I settled into the chair opposite her, but the book did not fall off her head.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

I could swear that the woman’s lips had not even moved. It was as if she snapped this off to me through telepathy.

I saw that she was drinking a white wine and I asked the waiter who had sashayed over if I could have the same. The waiter suggested a carafe. I gave my lunch partner an inquiring look, but it bounced right off her.

“A carafe sounds fine,” I said to the waiter. His nameplate said his name was Andrew. He wore a burgundy vest and a black bowtie.

“I should have worn something burgundy,” I said after Andrew had vamoosed. “Seems to be the theme.”

I broke no ice with that nonsense.

“You seem a little uptight,” I said, snapping my napkin and setting it onto my lap. The fact is, Virginia Larue’s full frontal venom was unsettling, but I wasn’t about to let it show.

This time the lips moved. “You haven’t answered my question.”

The hand moved, too. It took hold of the wineglass and brought it to the lips. I feared she was going to take a bite out of it, but she only sipped. A pudge of lipstick remained on the rim of the glass. Her eyes were on me like a laser beam. If they blinked, I didn’t notice.

“That’s a nice blouse,” I said, killing her with kindness.