Murder in the Hearse Degree (35 page)

I dropped the tape on his lap. “Those were the abortions.”

“Sugar?”

“Sugar.”

“What about the sterilizations?” Fallon asked.

“Just one. Sugar.”

Fallon clambered out of the chair. The sound of the shower ceased. The metal rings of the shower curtain screeched. Fallon waved the tape at me.

“Jesus Christ, Hitch, tell me you’re not kidding with this. This’ll definitely blow ’em out of the water.”

“It’s what Cindy overheard.”

Fallon frowned. “From who? Where did she get all this? It’s no good if it’s just gossip.”

“How does Owen Cutler work for you?”

“Cutler?”

“The ARK’s very own personal lawyer and inside man. Does that work?”

“Hell, that works just fine. But you’re not telling me that Cutler just sat down and told this girl all of this. I don’t care how cute she might be, Owen Cutler knows enough to keep a great big lid on something like this.”

“No, he didn’t sit down and tell her. But she managed to overhear him talking about it.”

“No shit?”

“Shit none.”

“With who?”

Julia stepped into the room. She was in her silk robe. She was running a towel over her head.

“I thought I heard voices. Good morning, Hitch.”

“Hello, sugarbeet.”

“What brings you here?”

“Oh, just a sordid tale of sexual treachery.”

Julia did her best demure. “Why, Nicky, I thought we weren’t going to tell.”

 

 

Life goes on. I
had people to bury.

I dashed home and took a shower. My form wasn’t great but I set a new speed record. I hopped into my somber suit and knotted my somber tie around my neck. Then I remembered today’s funeral and I switched to a snappier tie. Alcatraz was phoning the S.P.C.A. by the time I was ready to leave so I clipped on his leash and dragged him along with me. Halfway down the block I commanded, “Pee!” in my best Charlton Heston–as-God voice. Damned if the dog didn’t oblige. I got to the funeral home just as Sam was loading the casket into the hearse, with the help of Darryl Sandusky.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Darryl.

“Helping out. Where have
you
been?”

“Out game hunting little fellers like you,” I said.

“And I guess you think that’s funny?”

“In fact . . . not really.”

We shoved the casket the rest of the way into the hearse and Sam set about securing it. I reached into my pocket and handed Darryl a twenty.

“Here. Go buy some dope.”

“You are so yesterday,” Darryl said, and we had to leave it there since Sam and I were about to be running late. Aunt Billie came down onto the front steps and called Alcatraz over to her. Darryl went over, too. Billie nudged Darryl to join her in waving at us as we pulled away. They looked like the closing credits of
The Beverly Hillbillies
, which happens to be Billie’s favorite television show in reruns.

We arrived at the church just on time and got the casket inside, front and center. The eulogies were short and for the most part amusing. The dead man sounded like someone I might have enjoyed knowing. Sam and I stood in the rear of the church. I was feeling a little light-headed, the combination of having slept the night in my car, along with the full-body slam of information that Cindy had unloaded on me at the Bel-Loc. Sam asked me at one point if I was okay.

“You look a little like shit,” he said, chuckling behind his hand.

The service ended and we got our guest back into the hearse for his final road trip. On the drive to the cemetery Sam told me a long involved joke that hinged on the teller’s having a decent Scottish accent. His Scottish accent stank. He sounded more like he was speaking in tongues. The poor joke didn’t stand a chance.

As promised, a boom box was produced at the grave site and after a few assertions by the priest that our guest of honor was truly heaven bound, the boom box was switched on and Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” kicked up. Give that song half a chance and you’ve just got to clap along. Our little crowd did, Sam included. It was the happiest funeral I’d been to all month. I’d have loved to attend the postfuneral party but I had places to go and people to see. Sam took a crack at singing “Spirit in the Sky” on the drive back. I wish he hadn’t.

The reason that Cindy Lehigh had thought that I was going to kill her when I had approached her earlier that morning was that ever since hearing that Sophie Potts had been pulled from the Severn River, Cindy had been afraid for her own life. The day that the papers identified Sophie by name, mentioning that the young woman had been employed in the household of Michael Gellman of the Annapolis District Attorney’s office, was the day that Cindy grabbed her handful of cash from Henry Aranow’s cash register and performed her vanishing act. She told me that she had had no trouble convincing Paula’s brother to let her crash at his place. Without elaborating, Cindy told me that James had “been only too happy” to accommodate. I am assuming, of course, that this means Cindy had promised she would serve him some nice home-cooked meals for his troubles. What Cindy insisted to me was that she had never served Mike Gellman any home-cooked meals. I had asked her straight out.

“Were you sleeping with Mike Gellman?”

She told me that she was not. She admitted to there having been a little mild flirting now and then, especially at the beginning.

“That’s who he is. He’s always after the women. I never knew how his wife put up with it.”

Whether I completely believed Cindy’s assessment that there had never been a successful pass completed between her and Mike wasn’t terribly relevant. More to the point was the fact that the person with whom Cindy had overheard Owen Cutler discussing the sordid facts of Sugar Jenks and Jack Barton was, in fact, Mike Gellman. The discussion had taken place out on Gellman’s deck. I knew the logistics. Mike had apparently thought that the coast was clear. Libby and the kids were gone, and a quick check of the house had told Mike that the nanny was also not at home. As it happened, Cindy had been in the basement folding laundry when Mike and Cutler had arrived and she had just stepped outside the basement door for a cigarette when Mike popped downstairs to see if anyone was there. She had still been outside when she heard her employer and Owen Cutler come out onto the deck a minute later. With the words “Okay, there’s no one here. We can talk,” Cindy had been all ears. By the end of the conversation Cindy had been wracked with fear that she would be found out a mere twenty feet below where the two men were sitting. She hadn’t dared budge, not even to scratch a persistent itch in the small of her back. It was a week later that Cindy had approached Mike while he was in his bedroom polishing his shoes and calmly told him that she wanted a thousand dollars from him or else she would tell everything that she had heard him discussing with Owen Cutler, first to Libby and then to whoever else was interested in listening.

“He was real businesslike about it,” Cindy had told me at the Bel-Loc. “He gave me the money the very next day. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. He just handed it over to me. He even made me shake on it. But before he let go of my hand he said to me that if I ever told anyone, especially Libby, he’d kill me. But you know, I thought he was joking.”

 

Libby answered the door. The expression on her face was oddly blank.

“They indicted Mike,” she said. “He called. He’s going to be arrested.”

I ignored her. “I know about Lily,” I said.

“Lily? What are you talking about? What about Lily?”

“She’s adopted. You and Mike adopted her.”

Libby looked momentarily confused. “We . . . well, yes, we did. We adopted her as a baby. That’s not a secret.”

“You never mentioned anything.”

“Well, why should I?” she asked defensively. “It never even occurred to me. I’ve raised Lily since practically the day she was born. It’s nothing Mike and I even bother talking about anymore. She’s our daughter, pure and simple. Every bit as much as Toby is our son.”

“Is he—?” I stopped myself. “Did you adopt him, too?”

She snapped, “No! If it’s any of your business, Hitch, no. I got pregnant with Toby. I told you that already.”

“I know you did.”

“Then why the question?” She crossed her arms tightly on her chest and gave me a stormy look.

“I’m just trying to get the picture, Libby, that’s all.”

“Well, the picture is that it’s one of the little ironies of couples who have trouble conceiving. You adopt a child and the next thing you know you can get pregnant after all. Practically overnight. It’s a pretty damned bittersweet irony if you want to know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s one of those things. And it happened to us. But what’s this all about anyway? Who told you that Lily was adopted? Was it Mike? It must have been.”

“No,” I said. “It was Cindy Lehigh.”

“Cindy?
”

“Yes.”

“How the hell did Cindy know?” Libby’s entire body seemed to sag. “Oh, God. Mike told her.”

“Not exactly, Libby. She overheard him talking about it with someone.”

“Mike? With who?”

“And she told me something else as well, Libby. She told me who Lily’s natural mother and father are.”

As if on cue, Lily herself appeared just then in the hallway. She was dragging her giraffe. She recognized me standing in the doorway and a huge smile broke out on her face. A look of complete bewilderment had settled onto Libby’s face. No. Correct that. Not settled. Placed there with all the delicacy of a shovel being swung into her face.

“Cindy told you who her natural
parents
are?”

I nodded. Tears had come into Libby’s eyes and she did nothing—or could do nothing—to stop them from flowing freely down her cheeks. Her entire body began shaking. In the hallway, Lily started toward us.

“Mommy?”

Libby’s voice, when she spoke, was a hoarse hollow whisper.

 

 

On the way down
to Annapolis to hang Mike Gellman up by his fingernails over a vat of boiling pork fat (Libby devised this plan, along with about a dozen others), I told Libby the details of what Cindy had overheard. She was horrified.

“Oh my God. That poor girl.”

I asked Libby to explain to me the circumstances of her and Mike’s coming to adopt Lily. It was not something she felt like discussing, focused as she was on skewering her husband twelve different ways the moment she set eyes on him, but I cajoled her into sketching it out for me. Specifically I wanted to know how Owen Cutler fit into the whole picture.

“Right in the goddamn middle,” Libby fumed. “It was Owen who set up the whole adoption in the first place. He was the go-between.”

Libby explained to me how Mike’s uncle, aware that the couple had been trying since the beginning of their marriage to conceive, had announced one day that he knew of a woman who was due to give birth in a matter of weeks and who was going to be unable to keep the baby.

“Did he explain what he meant by that?” I asked.

“No. He just said that she couldn’t keep it. He told us that the mother was young and healthy and that she had been under a doctor’s care all through her pregnancy. All he would say was that there were ‘circumstances’ that made it impossible for the woman to keep the child and that arrangements were being sought to . . . well, to get the baby into a family.”

“And he didn’t say who the mother was?”

“No. He said that was a matter of privacy. The mother wasn’t asking for any contact with the child after the adoption, so her identity really wasn’t important. It crossed my mind for a minute that maybe it was a woman whom Owen had gotten pregnant. But that was crazy. That’s not Owen. Anyway, the real truth is I didn’t care. Owen said he had a baby for us and we jumped on it. You have no idea what this meant to us.”

“So then along came Lily?”

“We got her when she was two days old. Hitch, I was in love with that child even before I saw her. The moment I was actually holding her it didn’t matter to me who her natural parents were. Owen or anybody else. She was mine. She was my daughter.”

The cars on Route 2 seemed like pylons to me. Maybe that’s because they were going the speed limit. I was spinning the wheel like a drunken sea captain in a gale, dodging in and out between the other cars with a grace and beauty that I’m sure was going completely unappreciated.

I asked Libby if she thought that Mike knew all along the facts behind Lily’s parentage.

“It’s so morbid,” she said. “It’s so sick. I can’t believe he knew.”

“Uncle Owen apparently knew.”

“Hitch, that poor girl. It’s horrible. How could her father just look the other way and let that bastard do that to his daughter? He deserves to be strung up. Along with that pervert.”

She leaned her head back in disbelief and took fistfuls of her hair.

“They
all
deserve to be strung up. Larue, Owen, Mike. . . . God, Hitch, I just want to kill them all.”

She folded her arms across her chest and scowled out the windshield.

“Starting with Mike.”

Before we got to her house I came clean with Libby on another matter. I told her about my spying on Mike and Ginny Larue sharing the hot tub several nights previous. She took the information with a grim silence, her fingertips pressed against her lips. I seriously doubted that she was in prayer.