Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (6 page)

When Gail brought our drinks, her gaze snagged on Bonnie.

“I know you. You look familiar.” She was flattening her empty tray against her breasts and rocking slightly. Bonnie tugged on her cap, avoiding eye contact.

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes I do! You’re the one does the weather on TV, aren’tcha? Wow.”

Bonnie conceded that she was.

“Wow! That’s cool. Were you like, on TV tonight and all?”

“I was.”

“Cool.”

Gail continued to stand there, hugging her tray and staring at Bonnie as if this was her brand-new occupation. The waitress was probably around the same age as Bonnie—twenty-five—which was both a sad and frightening thought. Bonnie made a silent appeal to me from beneath the Orioles cap. I downed my whiskey in a single burning gulp. Ouch. House brand. Sinbad’s finest rot. I held my empty up to the hypnotized girl.

“Gail, how about another whiskey. And could you make this one a Wild Turkey? For that matter …” I reached over and slid Bonnie’s untouched drink to the edge of the table. “How about we upgrade Miss Nash while we’re at it?”

“Sure.” Gail scooped up our glasses and set them on her tray. “Two Turkeys,” she said, then left. I cocked an eyebrow at Bonnie.

We went back to scanning the room. I spotted four other waitresses, all dressed like Helen. It was a little creepy. The waitresses each wore nylon fanny packs, in this case used as money belts, to make change right at the tables. I pointed this out to Bonnie.

“Helen wasn’t wearing a money belt when we found her.”

“I hardly think somebody killed her for a handful of cash. Those things can’t carry all that much.”

I agreed. Whoever killed her might have grabbed the money belt because it was there, but that certainly couldn’t have been the motive. At least I hoped not. I looked about the room again. I’ve always heard that after the first or second business trip, the luster evaporates. It all becomes TV at the bar or cable in the room … long-distance calls back home and an early night with a John Grisham. Apparently though, for the more lusty and indiscriminate, it is also places like Sinbad’s Cave with its low lights and working gals. I had no doubt that for all the smiles and coos going on down there on the floor, these were strictly business propositions being conducted under the amber lights. Supply and demand was clearly in supply and demand.

Bonnie was right on my wavelength. “Do you think Helen was turning tricks?” she asked.

“That’s what I was just thinking. It’s certainly possible.”

“You know that saying, about the fruit not having far to fall?”

“You’re thinking about the mother.”

Bonnie shrugged. “I don’t want to stereotype.”

“I don’t know why not. It’s more useful than people like to admit. Helen Waggoner certainly didn’t grow up behind a white picket fence. This place might be tame by comparison to some of her mother’s job sites … but it’s still got a nice veneer of sleaze happening. Maybe we should ask our lovely waitress.”

Gail was returning with our drinks. She set them down on the table.

“No charge for the first ones. I took care of that.” She smiled hugely, revealing quite a set of Chiclets.

Bonnie cleared her throat. “Listen, Gail. Would you mind if we asked you a few questions?”

“Sure. About what?”

“About Helen Waggoner.”

Gail’s pan-shaped face seemed to sag at the mention of the dead waitress’s name. Her voice dropped. “Ain’t that horrible?”

“Did you know Helen?” I asked.

Gail was hugging the tray with both arms now. “I’m pretty new here, actually. I’ve only been here a couple months. My uncle got me this job. He knows the owner. I live in Catonsville. So it’s not too far to come in.”

Bonnie pressed. “Helen?”

“I mainly work afternoons. Helen was on at night. They haven’t replaced her yet, so they asked if any of us who work days could do some extra shifts. I’m going to college at night, but I told them I could do a couple. I could use the money.”

I asked, “Do you like it here, Gail? Is it a good place to work?”

Gail glanced in the direction of the bar before leaning forward to answer. “Not really,” she said in a loud whisper. “I don’t fit in too good.”

“What do you mean?”

She glanced quickly around the room again. “I just don’t. It’s different working nights. I don’t think my uncle’s ever been in here. I mean, at night. It’s
different
.”

“Were you here the other night, Gail?” Bonnie asked. “When Helen … on Helen’s last night?”

“You know, I was here. I was subbing for Tracy. That’s a friend of Helen’s who works here too. She called in sick I think.”

“What exactly did you see? Did you see anything suspicious?”

“I told all this to the police already. I didn’t see anything. Nobody did.” Gail shifted her weight and squinted in the direction of the bar. “Helen was down on the floor taking an order. Table six. Someone called her. On the phone. Ed took the call. Ed was the bartender that night. It wasn’t even like five seconds and Helen threw down the phone and just ran right out the door. Didn’t stop to put on her coat or nothing. And it was cold that night. That was the big storm.” Gail gave Bonnie a knowing look. “You know that storm.”

Bonnie offered a steel smile. “I know it.”

“So nobody saw or heard what it was that made Helen go outside like that?” I asked. “She just took a call and off she went?”

“That’s what happened.”

I pressed. “Do you have any guesses at all, Gail? Did you remember seeing any strange customers? Someone who might have been harassing Helen?”

“No.”

Bonnie jumped in. “Did Helen have anything going with any of her customers, Gail? Did you see anything like that? Maybe she rubbed one of these guys the wrong way?”

“I don’t know if Helen was involved with anyone like that. Like I said, I mainly work days. It’s … it’s a lot different here in the days. You know? We get a lunch crowd and that’s about it.” She looked nervously over toward the bar. Her voice lowered. “This isn’t a lunch crowd.”

No, I thought. But they do have an appetite.

“Did Helen ever talk about her personal life?” Bonnie asked.

“Not with me. We didn’t talk much, the couple times we were on the same shift. Though …” she trailed off.

“Though what?”

“Well … I do know she was talking about quitting.”

“Quitting her job?” Bonnie gave me a look across the table.

“Yeah,” Gail said. “I remember once I was here, about a month ago, when she
really
went off about it. She got all hot and was telling everyone she was going to quit. Said she didn’t need this place anymore. Stuff like that. I remember, because she got into a big fight that night, with one of the customers. That was when she really started on about quitting.”

Bonnie perked up. “What kind of fight?”

“You know. An argument.”

“Do you have any idea what they were arguing about, Gail?”

Gail hugged the tray tighter against her breast. “Not word for word or nothing. But … I mean, I don’t know exactly. I didn’t hear them.”

“Gail, was he trying to pick her up?” Bonnie asked. “Is that what they were arguing about?”

Gail remained tight-lipped. “I don’t know.”

I asked, “This guy, have you seen him in here before? Was he a regular?”

“The one she was arguing with? No. I’ve never seen him.” She added, “But like I said, I mainly work days.” She glanced nervously about the room. “It was kind of quick. They were talking. He was at a table. Suddenly Helen just slapped his glass off the table and yelled something at him. Then she slapped him and stormed off to the kitchen. The guy left. That was it. She didn’t say anything about him. But later on she was going on about how she was going to quit and everything. That’s when she kept saying she didn’t need this place. Actually, she called it a dump.”

Imagine.

I asked, “This man … he wasn’t by any chance in here the night that Helen was murdered, was he? Do you remember seeing him?”

Gail shook her head. “I didn’t see him. Look, I gotta get back to my other tables. I’m … it’s a lot busier working nights than what I’m used to. I don’t want to get fired. Can I get you folks anything else?”

I told her we were fine and Gail moved on to her other tables.

“Let’s go,” Bonnie said.

“You don’t want your salad?”

“I’ll live. Just leave enough to cover the bill and let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

I pulled out a twenty and dropped it on the table. A large man with a ponytail and a ginger beard had peeled away from the bar. He was the size of a small truck. He stepped over to the electric piano and started flipping switches, then tapped a finger against the microphone that was mounted atop the keyboard. “Test. Test.” A skinny woman wearing white bell-bottoms and a powder blue halter top appeared from the shadows and mounted the stool. She was about as wide as one of the guy’s arms. She slid the guitar strap over her bony shoulders and got to work tuning the guitar. Her hair was straight and black and fell down to her waist. Her cheeks were sunken, though possibly this was simply the effect of the shadows thrown by her oversize nose. She gave her head a toss, letting the hair fan out over the neck of her guitar. She wasn’t Cher, but she was working on it.

“Don’t you want to stay for the show?” I asked Bonnie.

“I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.”

As we skidded back our chairs, the keyboardist hit the first chords of “Let It Be.” The woman on the stool leaned into her microphone. Bonnie was halfway to the door before the singer began crooning about times of trouble and what she does when she finds herself there. I spotted Gail at the service end of the bar. She was bobbing her head up and down as another of the waitresses appeared to be delivering a lecture to her. Gail took her gum out of her mouth and tossed it in the trash.

I added another twenty to the first one and left.

I
stood at the base of one of the small hills in Greenmount Cemetery and listened to Pops explaining to me why we might not be able to bury Helen Waggoner the next day. After three days of gunmetal gray, sunshine had finally broken out; like an egg being cracked in the sky, it dripped bright and yellow from one horizon to the next. But even with old Mr. Sun back on the scene, it was still brutally cold. We were in a frigid lockdown. And that was the problem.

“Maybe if I had some dynamite I could make a dent, you know? ’Cept I don’t figure that’d go over real good with some people.” Pops let his gloved hands drop against his sides. “I can’t remember ever having to dig a hole in ground this cold. It’s like permafrost, you know what I mean? I took a pickax to it myself before you got here and the damn thing bounced right off and nearly went right into my forehead. I don’t think you got insurance for that kind of thing, kid.”

I had a gruesome image of Pops lying dead on the ground with a pickax sticking out of his head and his blood soaking into the snow. “Insurance isn’t the point, Pops,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to see you die in the line of duty.”

“You’re a real gentlemen, kid.”

The cemetery’s backhoe had thrown a rod and Pops’s backup, his pneumatic drill, was also on the fritz. Pops’s two assistant gravediggers were working on the hard earth with blowtorches. But you can only hope to soften up the topsoil with these; you’re sure as hell not going to burn away a hole six feet deep and seven feet long.

“I’m telling you, kid, this is a grave that just doesn’t want to be dug. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

I looked up into the sky. Large, shredded clouds were moving slowly along under a beautifully toned blue bowl. Despite the dazzling light, I knew that this was not the sort of sunshine that would provide any real help with the thawing.

One of Pops’s workers lit a cigarette off the flame of his blowtorch, then pinched off the fuel and came over to where Pops and I were ruminating.

“For shit,” he announced. The guy had a scraggly beard and mustache, both of which were caked with ice. His hair was greasy and long, tied off in a loose ponytail that poked out from his wool watch cap like a raccoon’s tail. He took a long pull on his cigarette. Practically burned it down to half. His hard eyes looked from Pops to me and back to Pops. He might have been daring us to tell him to get back to work on the frozen ground.

Pops looked to me. “Good men, bad tools. I’m sorry, kid. We can’t dig your hole. Not in this weather.” Bonnie was forecasting no let up in the temperature. And this time it looked like she was getting it right. It wasn’t even cracking the teens.

“I’ll work on the generator,” Pops said. “We’ll get the blanket back on her. And I’ll see what the hell’s up with my drill. You can forget the backhoe right now though. I’m sorry.”

I told him not to sweat it and to just do what he could. Luckily, Billie and I had nobody else back at the funeral home waiting for burial. Only Helen Waggoner.

“Looks like we have a guest for an extra day,” I told Billie when I returned from the cemetery. “I’ll have to call the sister and tell her.” I was at my desk, rubbing my hands together in an attempt to hurry along the hot pinpricks of thawing. Billie was standing in the doorway.

“You don’t have to call her. She’s here.”

“She’s here?”

Billie grimaced. “She brought a photograph.”

I returned her grimace. Like identical twins, Billie and I had just shared an entire conversation without saying a word. Photographs. Relatives of the dead just
love
photographs.

Billie went to fetch Vickie Waggoner from upstairs, where she was waiting along with her nephew. We were beginning to double as day care on this one. I wondered whether this woman didn’t have any better place to take the kid than a funeral home. Especially a funeral home that has his own mother lying dead in the basement. Am I nuts or do people not think things through?

As Vickie Waggoner stepped into my office I rose from my chair. The move seemed to throw her for just an instant, as if maybe I was rising to tell her to get the hell out, or to leap across my desk and go for her throat. I opted not to shake her hand—chilled fingers on an undertaker can’t feel all that pleasant—and indicated the small armchair next to the window.