Murder in the Hearse Degree (7 page)

“Of course that’s what she thinks,” Pete said. “You think a parent can swallow something like that easily?”

“Libby’s not convinced either.”

Munger asked, “But the police are?”

“I couldn’t get a complete read on that. The cop on the scene was pretty tight-lipped.”

Munger shrugged. “Some people are tight-lipped. If everyone talked as much as you do there’d be nobody left to listen.”

“I don’t like it. It turns out the girl was pregnant. No boyfriend that Libby knew of. I think it’d be interesting to at least find out who was responsible for getting the girl pregnant.”

Pete finished off his beer. He signaled for another. “And we’re going to assume that this guy killed her, is that it? You’re a regular bloodhound.”

“Derision is the last refuge of knaves,” I said.

“So I’m a knave. Is that going to kill me?”

“I’ve got a feeling about this.”

Pete pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “The last time you had a feeling about something like this it almost got you killed.”

“But everything worked out.”

“You’ve got too much time on your hands, son. What you need is a hobby.”

“What I really need is for a trained professional to help me out.”

Julia looked over at Munger. “I think he means you, big guy.”

Pete sniffed. “I know he means me. And he knows I’m not interested.”

“No he doesn’t,” I said.

“He does now.” Pete’s beer arrived and he had a brief chat with it.

“How’s this then?” I said, and I told them about Mike Gellman’s wedding ring showing up in Sophie Potts’s jewelry box. Pete came out of his suds with a sneer.

“So okay, now
he
done it. Damn, Sewell, you’re quick. What do you think you need me for?”

Julia took pity. “Did Libby have any explanation?”

“None at all. She has no idea how it got there. She said that Mike never wore it.”

“Maybe the girl stole it,” Pete said.

“Seems like a strange thing to steal.”

Pete shrugged. “There are strange people out there. You know that.”

“Come on, Pete,” I cajoled. “I know you want to help me. I have faith in the true humanitarian beneath this crusty façade.”

The true humanitarian didn’t have much to say about that so I let the subject drop and ordered another beer. A few minutes later I asked Pete about Susan. Susan is Pete’s wife. I don’t really know why I asked the question. Unless it was just to piss him off. The Mungers’ marriage was like one of those relentless monsters in the old movies, the ones that keep taking the bullets but refuse to stop. It just lurches onward. Ever since Pete turned fifty earlier in the summer he’d been trying to figure out why his life stank and what he could do to make it stop stinking. He’d done a bit of noodling around in the self-help universe but so far what he had essentially done in response to his crisis was to begin to dismantle his livelihood—which was private investigation—start drinking more, and fall in love with a woman who wasn’t Susan. As best I could see his life was still in a shambles, but at least now he had more free time, was drunk more often and he had a bittersweet bruise he could push whenever he felt like feeling sorry for himself.

“She’s fine,” Pete said flatly.

I winked at Julia, who turned to Pete. “Okay then . . . So how is Lee?”

He grumbled. “How should I know?”

Julia answered in a singsong voice. “Oh . . . I don’t know. Maybe Hitch said something.”

Pete glared past her at me. “What did he say?”

I leaned forward on the bar to address him. “I said I thought you’re goo-goo for Lee but that you’re determined nonetheless to make your marriage work.” I held up my glass in a salute. “I also said this was driving you insane, not to mention those who get within swatting distance of you.”

“
I’m
insane?”

“In your slow, laconic way.”

Pete ignored this. To Julia he said, “Last I heard Lee was singing at a club down in Annapolis. I don’t know if she still is.”

“Annapolis, huh? Seems to be in the news a lot these days. At least in this bar.”

“Welcome to the small world,” Pete said. He switched to whiskey after his beer. I went ahead and joined him. “Make mine a double,” Pete said to Larry.

I held up two fingers. “Ditto, barkeep.”

Julia called out, “And they’re off!”

Julia told us that she had a date that evening with Eric the Red. She said he was taking her to a tractor pull down in Largo.

I commended her. “You’re really digging your hands into the soil with this one, aren’t you?”

“I don’t really think it’s going to last much longer,” Julia said. “I’m not cut out to be a biker chick.”

I licked my finger and drew an invisible hash mark in the air. “Onward.”

Julia took off to get ready for her date and Pete and I kept the bar stools company a while longer. I had been practicing card tricks lately and I pulled a deck from my pocket and tried out a few on Pete. He picked-a-card-any-card and after a couple of goof-ups I was able to produce the card from my shoe. Pete was unimpressed. Tommy Haircut had come into the bar with pretty Maria and the two of them were sitting off at a table under the neon Guinness sign. I went over to chat with them, then came back to the bar and cajoled Pete into picking another card. He did and I shuffled the deck. I asked Larry for four shots of Jameson’s, and when they arrived I called Tommy and Maria over.

“One, two, three, down the hatch.”

We tossed back our shots, then I reached into Tommy’s pompadour and produced a card. I held it up to Pete.

“Is that your card?”

Pete smirked. “Okay, so you’ve got a hobby.”

As the place began to fill up with the predinner crowd Pete and I migrated to my outdoor office, the rotting pier at the west end of Thames Street. We had a quarter bottle of Maker’s that I had confiscated from behind the bar when Larry wasn’t looking. The sun was dipping below the horizon, pulling a soft blue sky behind it. Pete and I took turns sighting the Domino Sugar sign across the harbor, using the bottle as our telescope. The red neon was brown and murky for a while, but after numerous sightings it began to clear up . . . which is more than I can say for Munger and Sewell.

We talked mainly about girls. Despite his earlier balking, Pete talked mainly about Susan. He gave me his theory that marriage is like a brick wall that both partners must beat their heads against equally if it is going to succeed. I had to admit that I didn’t find it to be a terribly hopeful theory, but when I said this to Pete he pooh-poohed me.

“I’ve been married for twenty-six years. It’s no easy sprint to the finish, believe me. You’ve just got to grapple your way forward somehow.”

“So marriage is about grappling and about beating your head against the wall,” I said. “You’re very inspiring, Pete.”

Eventually I rolled our conversation back around to Sophie. When I brought up Mike’s wedding ring for the second time Pete dropped a paw on my arm.

“Do you know what your problem is?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s your problem.”

“Your insight is blinding.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. You want to get the drop on this guy. That’s it. You want to impress the old girlfriend.”

“Listen. Pete. I asked Libby some questions. I got some names from her of a few people we could talk to. Just to get a better picture of things.” Pete said nothing. “Oh, come on, Pete. You’re the old pro at this. You can keep me from looking like an absolute idiot.”

Pete tried to raise an eyebrow at this, but the mechanism wasn’t quite working. He rubbed his hand over his jaw.

“I don’t get you, Sewell.”

“There’s a dead girl, Pete. That’s what it comes down to. She got in twenty-three years and then she dropped into a river. That’s it. Her story has ended. And her mother wants to know why. It makes perfect sense to me. Her girl is gone and she wants to be able to make some sense out of it. Even if Sophie did jump, her mother at least deserves a reason. You can’t argue with that.”

“And you’re the one who is going to give it to her?”

“Give me one honestly good reason why I shouldn’t give it a try. A real one, Pete. An honest reason.”

“Besides the fact that it’s none of your business?”

“The woman asked me. She invited me to make it my business. You tell me what you would say if someone did that.”

Pete lit a cigarette and aimed his first drag up at the sky. Our bottle of inspiration was empty. We took in the night. A few flickering stars were penetrating the depleted ozone. A sharp brackish breeze came off the water in waves. A car alarm somewhere off in Little Italy was running through its routine. I recalled a time when dinosaurs roamed the planet . . . then remembered that I hadn’t been around at the time. I was glad the bottle was empty. Pete took a few hard drags on his cigarette then tossed it into the black water. The water sizzled its thanks.

Pete sighed heavily. “All right,” he said. “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll swing by your place.”

He stood up. Rather, he made it to as level a position as he was likely to make for the evening, then made his way back down the pier. He looked like a man walking on a water bed. Some twenty minutes later I took up the empty bottle and aimed it at the Domino sign. Missed it by about four thousand feet.

 

 

We crossed into Annapolis
on the Naval Academy Bridge. The Severn River was a deep blue and rippled with diamonds. My head was feeling a little rippled as well. Sailboats were out on the water. Also a pair of scullers, slicing cleanly through the water, trading the lead like the tips of cross-country skis.

When Pete picked me up earlier I had told him that my head felt like it was in two pieces. He requested that they be two silent pieces, so I crunched up against the passenger-side door and went back to sleep until we reached the bridge. Frank Sinatra was singing when I woke up, backed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. “Street of Dreams.” Munger was singing along. Or humming. Or muttering. Whatever he was doing I knew he wouldn’t want me catching him doing it, so I came up stretching and yawning.

“Nice sleep?” Pete asked, turning down the Frank.

“I feel like a new man.”

Pete looked me over. “You’re not.”

The Naval Academy chapel appeared to our left as we crossed the bridge. Pete asked me if I knew who was buried there. I didn’t.

“Who?”

“John Paul Jones.”

“John Paul Jones. Wait,” I said. “I can get this.”

Pete shook his head. “You’d think someone in your line of work would be up on where the famous people in the area are buried.”

“I am. I know where Poe is buried. And Francis Scott Key. And John Wilkes Booth. Almost no one knows that one.”

“Good for you.”

“And Mencken,” I went on. “And the lead singer for the Ashtrays.”

“Who are the Ashtrays?”

“The Ashtrays. Great garage band. They used to play at the Marble Bar during my misspent youth.”

“What happened?”

“I grew up. Got staid and boring.”

Munger looked over at me. “I jerk this wheel, we take a bath.”

“The lead singer of the Ashtrays fell off a wooden fence and broke his neck,” I said. “No one could quite figure out how he did it. The band was nothing without him. They folded.”

Pete raised a professorial finger. “ ‘I have not yet begun to fight,’ ” he proclaimed. “John Paul Jones.”

We were coming down off the bridge. A motorcycle raced through the intersection in front of us. A paper cup was skipping across the street. I raised
my
finger.

“ ‘Don’t spit on my heart.’ Ashtrays.”

Annapolis is the state capital of Maryland. The original city hugs a small and picturesque harbor and runs gently uphill from there on several narrow streets of small brick and clapboard houses along with the wide Main Street, with enough little shoppes to fill your little shoppe needs. At the crest of the hill sits the statehouse, a handsome colonial brick building with an elongated wooden dome, more of a cupola really. It is the oldest continual-use statehouse in the nifty fifties and it is where the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, officially calling an end to the Revolutionary War and declaring the pesky colonists winners and all-around champeens. What they were doing signing a Treaty of Paris in Annapolis is something I must have slept through during high school history class. The building is also where George Washington officially stepped down as generalissimo of the U.S. Army so that he could begin laying the groundwork to pose for the dollar bill.

I learned all this from reading a metal plaque that was planted on the statehouse grounds. Pete had double-parked in front of a deli to run in and buy a pack of cigarettes and I had wandered off to the statehouse to drink in a little history. When Pete came back he leaned on the horn. When he did, a flock of seagulls took flight.

“For that,” I told him as I was getting back into the car, “I’m not going to tell you what I learned.”

Pete slid in behind the wheel. “For that, I’m grateful.”

The Annapolis Visitors Center was only a few blocks away. We swung by and picked up a map. It turned out the place we were going was only a few blocks away, on Calvert Street. I had called ahead, first thing in the morning. Even so, the woman who met us at the door seemed a little uncertain. She remained behind the screen door while she checked us out.

“Mrs. Pierce? I’m Hitchcock Sewell. We spoke on the phone this morning?”

Pete had his wallet open and was pressing it against the screen. It identified him as a bona fide private investigator. I had a card, too, but all it did was prove that I buried people for a living. I decided to keep it in my wallet.