Murder in the Hearse Degree (30 page)

“And you didn’t tell Virginia Larue any of this.”

Mike leaned forward and put a hard look on me. “Let me tell you something. I’ve been living one day at a time here. I don’t know how everything’s gotten so unraveled. No. I didn’t tell Ginny a damn thing. She’s here, Libby’s there, my job is over there. I compartmentalize. That’s how I operate. I keep things separated.”

“It looks to me like they want to all come crashing together.”

Mike said nothing. He gazed at the edge of my desk a few more seconds, finally shook his head slowly and left. I lifted the phone receiver. The red light indicating speaker phone clicked off.

“You catch all that?” I asked.

Munger answered, “Yep.”

“What do you think?”

He paused. I glanced out the window and saw Gellman out on the sidewalk. He bent down and picked up my pen and pencil set.

Pete answered, “Generally? I was unimpressed.”

 

 

Pete dropped into the
chair where Mike Gellman had been sitting. He was showered and looked curiously refreshed. Nothing like a night on somebody’s couch, I guess. He pulled out a cigarette and I threw a chair at him. Well, in fact I didn’t. But I put as much energy into the scowl that I sent across my desk. Munger stuck the cigarette behind his ear.

“I think your friend’s husband speaks with forked tongue,” he said.

“Could be he’s a liar, too.”

“All that crap about keeping the news from his wife because the girl asked him to?”

“Exactly. I thought that was odd, too. Since when does loyalty to a nanny outrun loyalty to a wife?”

“Could be when you’re nailing the nanny behind your wife’s back.”

“I don’t think Mike was sleeping with Sophie,” I said.

“You’re still sold on the midshipman?”

“Call me crazy.”

“Maybe you don’t really have the full story there,” Pete said. “I’ve noticed that about you. You trust people too much.”

“You’re not suggesting that Bradley’s trying to cover for Gellman, are you? That’s a stretch, Pete.”

“I’m just thinking out loud,” he said.

“There’s something else going on here that we’re missing,” I said. I was unable to finish the thought. The phone rang. It was Julia.

“Waffles?”

I responded, “Yes, my lovely little bacon. It’s me, your very own waffles.”

“Funny.”

“That wasn’t a term of endearment?”

“It was an invitation to breakfast.”

I noted that it was almost noon.

Julia said, “Fine. If you want lunch, put a waffle between two pieces of bread. Whatever works for you.”

“Jules, should I remind you that you don’t cook?”

I detected a giggle. “I have my own personal chef.”

“I see.”

“So can you come over?”

“I’ve got Pete with me,” I said.

“Well, he has certainly become your little shadow these days.”

“He’s in between lives right now,” I said, glancing over to see Pete sneering at me.

“Bring him along,” Julia said. “There’s something here that might interest the both of you.”

“Well of course there is. That goes without saying.”

“Don’t be flirting with me, Hitch. There’s a naked man running around my place.”

“Waffles and a naked man. Is this going to be a regular breakfast, Jules, or am I in for something salacious and off-color? I just want to know if I should change.”

“I guess you’ll have to come over and see for yourself,” she said. We were about to hang up when she asked, “Oh, Hitch. One other thing. Could you bring over your waffle iron?”

She uses me. Isn’t that perfectly clear? The woman uses me.

 

Nick Fallon was ravishing in a silk mandarin kimono with turquoise piping and an embroidered dragon on the back. He was standing in Julia’s kitchenette, stirring batter in a ceramic bowl with a wooden spoon. He greeted me cheerfully. “Hey there, mate.”

“Nice duds,” I said, setting my waffle iron down on the counter.

“What’s with the waffle thing?” Nick asked. “She was insistent.”

“They’re Julia’s postcoital breakfast of choice.” I turned to my ex-wife, who was pouring out mimosas. “What happened to your waffle iron?”

She plopped a strawberry into a glass and handed me the drink.

“Burned out.”

I settled into Julia’s hammock as Fallon got to work on scorching the first several batches of waffles. Pete drifted to the window and gazed out in the direction of the harbor. His body language suggested that he would not at all have minded suddenly spreading a pair of wings and drifting out over the bricks. Julia positioned herself in front of me and did a yoga move that by all logic should have crippled her for life. She didn’t even spill her mimosa. Her grin went from Maryland to California.

“You’re a happy clam,” I noted.

She rested the heel of one of her feet just inside the opposite ear and chanted, “I am, I am, I am, I am. . . .”

Fallon finally came through with the waffles. Golden brown. As square as a windowpane. The regulation thirty-six dimples per waffle. We ate on the floor, seated on pillows, except for Pete, who dropped into one of Julia’s butterfly chairs and ate off his lap. Julia propped up canvases behind each of us as a sort of backdrop. This is how the woman decorates a place. Each of the canvases behind Fallon and Julia was from a recent series of her paintings that she was calling inverses. Fallon’s showed a guitar seated on the edge of a fountain, strumming a human. Julia’s canvas depicted a family of forks, knives and spoons enjoying a hearty dinner, using human cutlery. I recognized myself as one of the knives.

I told Fallon that Pete and I had gone to see
The Bells of Titan
the night before. He pinched his nose.

“Stinkpot, isn’t it?”

“Merely imbecilic,” I said. “I ran into Sugar Jenks. She really is an awfully peculiar bird, isn’t she? I didn’t know they made them that shy anymore.”

“Was Crawford there?”

“He was supposed to be but he had to cancel.”

Fallon leered. “How about that shower scene?”

As we finished our waffles Fallon set his plate down and got up off his pillow. “I’ve got something I want you to listen to.” He indicated Pete. “How much does he know?”

“Pete’s a pretty smart banana,” I said. “Go ahead and try him out on a topic. I think geography is one of his strong suits.”

“How much does he know about this nanny thing?”

“Everything.”

Nick padded off to the rear of Julia’s studio, where a wooden screen cordons off her bed and dresser.

“I hope he’s going to change out of that bathrobe,” Pete muttered.

“Too disturbing for you, Pete?”

“He looks like a fruit.”

Fallon returned—still a fruit. He was holding up a cassette tape.

I rubbed my hands together. “Oh boy.
Zeppelin One
?”

Fallon stepped over to Julia’s stereo. “After we talked the other day I went back to the office and dug this up. Actually, this is a copy. I record every call that comes into me at the paper. Job like mine, you never know.”

“Is this your call from Annapolis?” I asked. “Sex, lies and Crawford Larue?”

“After what you told me I thought I should give it another listen, just to see.”

He popped the tape into the machine and hit the Play button, then retreated to the hammock. The quality of the recording was lousy. At first there was only a crackle of static. Fallon shrugged.

“We got a low-tech thing going on at the paper. Just hang on.”

He reached a foot down to the floor to nudge the hammock into a gentle rocking. Eventually the static abated somewhat and Fallon’s voice sounded from the tape player.

More crackle, then a female voice responded.

The voice was dim. Competing against the static. Not terribly easy to make out. Nick’s voice sounded again.

All around the room, eyebrows rose. On the tape, Fallon cleared his throat.

There was silence on the tape. Well . . . there was static. Fallon was swinging gently on the hammock. He held up a hand. “Hold on.”

After several more seconds of silence, the caller spoke again.

Fallon’s voice on the tape was clearly sounding exasperated.

The static abruptly stopped. There were a few seconds of dial tone, and then the recording stopped altogether. Fallon got up from the hammock and hit the Stop button. He ejected the tape and turned to us.

“Like I said before, we get a dozen of these things a week sometimes. You can tell this one wasn’t really much to go on. It just sounded like someone disgruntled. Or a wacko. When there’s really something good you can usually tell. It’ll have just the right stink to it. If I chased down this kind of crap every single time it came in I’d never get any real work done. I dated the tape and tossed it in the files.”

“So what are you thinking now?” I asked.

“Well, now we’ve got a dead girl. And you’ve got her linked with Crawford Larue.”

“So now you’re thinking this one stinks the way you like it?”

“It’s getting ripe, yeah.”

I downed my mimosa and got up off the floor.

“Can I borrow that?”

Fallon tossed the tape to me. It was a bad toss—wide—and I missed it. I turned in time to see Pete catch it. He held it up to his nose and sniffed.

“He’s right. It stinks.”

 

Mike Gellman was emerging from the front door as we pulled up. I identified him for Pete. Pete grabbed his camera from the backseat and snapped off a few pictures.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Habit.”

We waited until Mike had rounded the corner, then we got out of the car and went up to the door. Libby appeared seconds after our knock. She was pale. She looked as if she had just passed the cocktail hour with a vampire.

“Mike was here,” she said. “You just missed him.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I don’t know about Mike, though. He’s a mess.”

“Can we come in?”

Libby pulled the door open wider. “Sure. Why not? It’s visiting hour.”

A few minutes later we were in the kitchen. Libby was seated at the table, listening to the cassette tape of Fallon’s phone call. The tape ended and I hit the Stop button. Pete was leaning up against the kitchen counter, gazing up at the copper bowls. I was seated across from Libby. I’d been gazing at her face as she listened to the tape.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked.

“About that tape?”

“Yes.”

“What am I supposed to think?”

“Sophie had an accent, didn’t she?”

“Not a thick one. But yes. She had one.”

“There’s no accent in the voice on that tape,” I said.

“Well, no,” Libby said. “It’s not Sophie. Is that who you thought it was?”

“When Fallon told me about the tape yesterday, yeah, I did. Fallon said he had been able to trace the call back to a pay phone in Annapolis. I just figured it was her. But it’s not Sophie. It wasn’t Sophie who called Nick Fallon with dirt on the ARK.”

Libby was drumming her fingers on top of the cassette player.

“I guess you’d like me to tell you who it is then?”

Pete pushed off of the counter and grabbed a chair. Swinging it around backward he lowered himself into it.

“If you know that, Mrs. Gellman, it would be helpful.”

 

 

I recall a summer
back when I was only a few feet tall when I was shipped off each morning to a day camp out in Catonsville. At the time I felt that I had been thoroughly abandoned by my parents, banished to this place from dawn to dusk for what felt like months on end, though I’ve since come to realize that these day camps customarily take up roughly half a day and extend for all of a few short weeks. For the parents they are little more than a brief respite, but for pipsqueaks time has a peculiar interminability. Weeks can seem to last several years, the minutes and hours of the days themselves forever cleaving in half and then in half again to the point where you simply rip up the calendar and gaze hopelessly out the window as the entire galactic dance seems to grind to a complete halt. At any rate this is how
I
felt during my tortuous several weeks of summer camp, which happened to fall that year during a period of uncustomary rainy weather, day after day of rain and drear, forcing the day campers to remain inside and go slowly nuts with arts and crafts. Popsicle-stick houses were the rage. Our counselors had us building entire subdevelopments of the damn things.