Murder in the Hearse Degree (3 page)

BOOK: Murder in the Hearse Degree
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“Your nanny?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean ‘missing’?”
“Missing, Hitch. She’s gone. She disappeared.”
“When did this happen?”
“Just this past Friday night. Or Saturday morning. I guess it depends how you want to look at it. Her name is Sophie. She’s very sweet. We’ve only had her a month or so. She’s around twenty-two, twenty-three? Great with the children. She’s from Hungary originally. Her father died and her mother remarried an American who brought them both over. She’s very quiet. Pretty much keeps to herself. I’m worried.”
“Have you spoken to her friends? Anything like that?”
“She doesn’t have any. Or if she does she hasn’t brought them around. For the most part, after the children go to bed, Sophie goes to her room and reads or watches videos. Though the thing is this last week she started going out. She didn’t say where she was going and it’s not really my business to pry. It did seem to me though that she was in a peculiar mood. Sort of preoccupied. But I didn’t think anything particular about it.”
“How about a boyfriend?” I asked.
“I suppose it’s possible. She’s shy. Maybe she wouldn’t feel comfortable telling me.”
“So what happened?”
“Like I said, it was this past Friday. Mike was working late. No surprise there. I wasn’t feeling so great. I was coming off a cold I’d had most of the week and I was bushed, so after Sophie and I put the kids to bed I went to bed early. Sophie said she was going out. The next morning I got Toby and Lily up. Mike was up and out already, on his run. He jogs down to the river and across the bridge to the Naval Academy campus every morning. I looked in Sophie’s room and she wasn’t there. Her bed was still made. She hadn’t come home the night before.”
“Has she ever done anything like that before?”
“Never. Our last nanny was a regular party girl, but not Sophie. She’s just the opposite, in fact. Which has been fine by me.”
“Did you call the police?”
“That’s the thing, Hitch. We didn’t. Not right away. And I could kick myself. At first we just waited for Sophie to come back. I wasn’t real thrilled that she would stay out all night like that and not tell us, but maybe she’d suddenly gotten a life. I was still going to read her the riot act, of course. We waited all through Saturday. Nothing. I did want to call the police by late Saturday, but Mike overrode me. He insisted we hold off. Mike deals with the police practically every day. He said they don’t respond to a missing persons call until the person has been missing for forty-eight hours. If they’re an adult, that is. Which Sophie is. So what did I know? I argued with him a little bit, but he kept saying we didn’t want to overreact. He said most of the calls the police get are people overreacting.”
“What about her parents?” I asked. “Maybe she decided to go home for a visit.”
“I’ve been trying that. Her mother and stepfather live up on Long Island. All I’ve gotten is a phone machine. I’m guessing they must be away on vacation or something. And I’m certainly not going to leave a message on their phone machine saying, ‘Hi, your daughter is missing. Call me.’ ”
“Could Sophie have maybe gone on vacation with them?”
Libby shook her head. “I wish I could think so. But there’s no way she’d just take off like that without saying anything. It just doesn’t make sense. So anyway, on Sunday Mike finally did agree we should notify the police and they sent someone out to take a report. It was after the police left that I went into Sophie’s room and started looking around. I hadn’t felt right about it up to then. That’s when it happened.”
“It?”
“That’s when he hit me. Mike came in and saw what I was doing and . . . well, he just went ballistic. He snapped. He started screaming at me that I had no right snooping around in Sophie’s room and all sorts of garbage. I told you, he’s been under a lot of pressure. He just blew. One minute we were standing there screaming at each other and the next thing I knew, I was down on Sophie’s bed with blood coming out of my nose.”
Libby put her fingers lightly against her cheek. “I thought he had broken my nose. It was horrible. Then Mike took off. He just turned around and stormed out of the house.” Her eyes went flinty. “And goddamn it, Hitch, so did I. Maybe he knocked some sense into me. You’re absolutely right. There is no excuse for that sort of thing. And I’m not about to make one for him. I called up Shelly, told her what had happened, and she said we could use the place as long as we needed. She wanted me to call the police but I said no. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I threw some of the kids’ stuff into the car and here I am. I have no idea what I’m going to do next.”
“Has Mike contacted you?”
“You’d better believe it. I let him know where I was. I didn’t want him filing a missing persons on
me
. He’s called. He wants me to come back, of course. He apologized for hitting me, but every conversation has still ended in a yelling match. It’s really no good, Hitch.”
“And still no word from your nanny?”
“None. I feel responsible for her. I could shoot myself for letting the whole weekend go by without contacting the police. What the hell was I thinking?”
Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes. She looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll be damned. I am
not
going to cry.”
I got up from the couch and handed her a handkerchief. No self-respecting undertaker leaves the house without one. She took it and buried it in her lap.
“Look, Libby, maybe I can help with this. I can’t promise you anything, but I know someone who has got some experience in tracking down missing persons. He’s a private investigator. Maybe I can talk to him.”
She shook her head. “That’s very kind, Hitch. But there’s no reason for you to get involved in this. I’m just being silly.”
“It couldn’t hurt just to ask.”
Libby poked at her eyes with my handkerchief then wrapped her arms around herself and began to cry in earnest. She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no.
I usually take that as a yes.
 
 
I won’t go so
far as to say that the Fell’s Point section of Baltimore is an area that time forgot, though I do think it’s fair to say that time hasn’t made nearly as much of an impression here as it has on other sections of town. Our buildings are on the small side and have been around long enough to settle at slight angles, giving the impression that they’re leaning against each other in order to keep from falling. It’s a posture that you can see somewhat mimicked—especially on weekends—by the hordes who descend on Fell’s Point’s poorly cobbled streets to negotiate the numerous dockside bars that proliferate in the neighborhood. Fell’s Point used to be a sailors’ haven and many of these bars have changed little from that time. The counters are scarred, the floors are uneven, the air is smoky and stale. They filmed a popular police show in this area for a number of years. The show got a lot of bang for its buck when it came to local color. Whenever there was a crowd scene to be filmed, the production crew let groups of locals bunch together in the background to gawk on cue. I come across the show in reruns sometimes when I drag my television out of the closet and fire her up. It’s like having a little magic window onto the neighborhood, seeing my neighbors there on the tube, all of them working hard to get their crowd-scene-gawker Emmy. The show is gone now, but they did leave behind a false door down at the maritime building that has “Baltimore City Police” stenciled on it. You can yank on that thing all day if you’d like to—I’ve seen people do it—but if you’re looking for the affirming balm of law enforcement, you’re not going to get it there.
The funeral home that I run with my Aunt Billie is a couple of blocks in from the harbor. It’s called Sewell and Sons Family Funeral Home, but don’t let that fool you. There was never a son in the game; Aunt Billie and my ugly Uncle Stu never had any knee nibblers, they simply thought the name would be good for business. I moved in with the two of them when I was twelve, after the beer truck made its quick work of my parents and my sister. One thing led to another—which is, after all, the nature of things—and came a day that ugly Uncle Stu was dead and I was a licensed mortician all ready to take his place. I took a stab at convincing Billie to rename the place Harold & Maude’s. To Billie’s credit, she almost bought it.
Aunt Billie and Darryl Sandusky were sitting on the front steps of the funeral home smoking cigarettes as I came up the sidewalk.
“Hey, Sewell,” I said to Billie. “What’s with the runt?”
“I’m not a runt,” Darryl said.
“How tall are you?” I asked.
“Five feet one and a quarter inches.”
“That’s a runt.”
Darryl snorted. “Give me a break. I’m only twelve.”
“I forgot. The cigarette makes you look older. Gee, I guess that’s the point.”
Aunt Billie shaded her eyes to look up at me. “Darryl and I are discussing the state of the world.”
“It stinks,” Darryl said. He took a humongous drag on his cigarette.
“Shouldn’t you be off chasing cars with your friends?” I asked.
The kid squinted up at me. “What do you think I am, a dog?”
“Does your mother know you’re sitting here with an old lady putting nails in your coffin?”
“Huh?”
“Skip it.”
“Darryl wants to be a mortician,” Billie said. “I’ve been explaining to him the vagaries of the profession.”
“Are you trying to squeeze me out, kid?” I said.
“I’ll be dead one day, Hitchcock,” Billie said. “Perhaps Darryl could be your new partner.”
“Sandusky and Hitch? I don’t know. Sounds like a bad cop show.” I considered Darryl again. “You look pretty scrawny to me.”
“You were scrawny at his age,” Billie remarked.
“Yeah,” Darryl said.
“I’ll tell you what, next body we get you can help me scrub it down.”
Darryl flicked his cigarette into the street. He looked over at Billie. “Is he shittin’ me, Mrs. Sewell?”
“No, Darryl. Hitchcock is a man of his word. I’m sure he’s not ‘shittin” you.”
“All right!”
“Don’t go planning on any big busty blondes,” I warned him. “You take what you get in this business.”
Darryl pawed the air. “You’re nuts.”
Who told him?
Billie finished her cigarette and handed it to Darryl. The boy flicked it out into the middle of the street. Billie smiled up at me.
“My minion.”
I went inside to my office and leafed through my mail. Big yawn there. I had a fax dangling out of the machine. A mortician in Columbus, Ohio, was being sued by the family of a customer who—there is no way to put this delicately—had blown up about a week after his interment in the family’s mausoleum. It’s rare, but it happens, and when it does it usually suggests a lousy embalming—or no embalming whatsoever. The explosion can be surprisingly powerful. In this case the door of the mausoleum had literally cracked when a piece of the concrete vault slammed into it at mach speed. The mortician was professing his innocence in the grisly event and was faxing newspaper articles concerning the trial to his colleagues all over the country. I wasn’t quite sure how we were supposed to show our support. Were we expected to travel to Columbus in our hearses and ring the courthouse? As best I could tell the guy had simply botched the embalming and that was pretty much the end of it. Naturally, he was being sued for millions. Nobody sues for reasonable amounts anymore; it’s all this bonanza seeking. Anyway, I set my feet up on my desk, skimmed the latest installment, then balled the fax and missed the three-point attempt into my doorstop spittoon.
About an hour later I popped down the street to my place and changed out of my suit, then swung down to the Cat’s Eye Saloon to see if pretty Maria was playing. She wasn’t. The Ferguson Brothers were playing. Neither of them is particularly pretty. I chewed on a mug of Guinness then angled over to John Steven’s for a plate of mussels and an argument with Greasy Kevin about which member of the 1966 World Series–winning Orioles, Paul Blair or Frank Robinson, had almost drowned in a swimming pool during a team party about midway through the season. Kevin swore that it was Blair. My money went on Frank Robinson, who had been acquired that year from Cincinnati to help the Birds nab the pennant. Kevin could simply not stomach the idea that a man who was batting a season average of .316, a slugging average of .637 and who was well on his way to MVP and Triple Crown honors could not negotiate a backyard swimming pool. We both agreed, however, that it was the O’s catcher, Andy Etchebarren, who had noticed the floundering ballplayer in the deep end and had dived into the pool to save him, but that was about all we could agree on. After that it was rankle, rankle, rankle.
Alcatraz was working on a quantum physics problem when I got back home, but he managed to shove all the papers into a folder and stow it away before I closed the front door behind me. He looked for all the world like a long-sleeping hound dog when I came in.
There were three messages on my phone machine. One was from my ex-wife, Julia. She was calling to tell me a joke she’d just heard but she couldn’t remember how it went. “It was
very
funny,” she said on the machine, and she laughed hysterically at the memory. The second message was a recorded voice telling me that I had a free hotel room waiting for me at a resort somewhere in Florida if I acted now. I didn’t act. Neither then nor later.
The third message was from Libby. I was standing on one leg pulling off my shoes when her voice came on.
“Hitch? Hello, it’s me. Listen, I appreciate your offer to help out this afternoon and everything, but . . . well, it looks like you don’t have to. Sophie’s been found.”
BOOK: Murder in the Hearse Degree
2.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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