“Move!”
As I picked my way through the bottles and wood and cans I paused to look down at Edie. She hadn’t yet moved.
“Go!” Sally yelled. I turned and saw her plant a chubby shoe on Lou Bowman’s forehead and push him back into the water.
Kate and Carol and I raced out of the bar. Taking great gulps of air, I managed to gasp, “Follow me!”
They did. We moved swiftly across the square and over to Julia’s gallery. It was closed. I checked the windows overhead. Dark.
“Damn!” And then I remembered. Rehearsal. “Come on!”
In another minute we were all safely inside the Gypsy Playhouse.
“Well, well, well, we were beginning to wonder,” Gil’s voice sounded from somewhere in the theater.
The stage was lit. About a dozen amateur actors were seated in folding chairs on the left-hand side of
the stage, hands on their knees, staring stonily forward. I’ve seen this look before, or at least the look that the amateurs were attempting. They were playing dead. Gil had stupidly arranged the chairs in pairs, with an aisle space between the pairs. It looked like the seating on a bus. Occupying Emily’s seat up front, which in this ridiculous arrangement made it look like the bus driver’s seat, was none other than Chinese Sue. Sue wasn’t playing dead; she was playing bored. For that matter, she probably wasn’t playing. On the right side of the stage stood the remainder of the cast, the living, holding on to their open black umbrellas. The locksmith from Lutherville was standing in for me at the lectern. He was wearing my pith helmet.
“Well, we all thought that you had forgotten about us, Mr. Sewell,” Gil said. “So glad you could join us.” I could see him now, he was seated in the middle of the house. He was shading his eyes with his hand. A clear affectation; looking in our direction, there was no light that could possibly be in his eyes.
“Who have you got there with you?”
“Two more bodies,” I said.
Gil was delighted. “Oh good. Living or dead?”
I looked down at both Kate and Carol. In perfect unison, they both shrugged.
Despite all the excitement, Carol drifted off to sleep during the rehearsal. Gil had placed her in one of the dead seats so it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. From my place at the lectern I saw her eyes flutter and her chin begin to dip. I made eye contact with Kate, who was doing a superb job as one of the mourners;
she looked deeply troubled, dark and beautiful beneath her umbrella.
Gil approached me afterward to commend me on our two new cast members.
“Where did you find them, Hitchcock?”
I told him, in all seriousness, “Between a rock and a dead place.”
I phoned a cab company from the lobby. Hats borrowed from wardrobe pulled low, Kate, Carol and I scurried into the cab and directed the driver to take us to Carol’s new temporary digs. For the time being this was our official safe house.
Carol rallied only for the length of the short taxi ride back to her place, then passed out anew on her king-size … queen-size … her royal family-size bed. Kate saw to her disrobing and called me in to help tuck the gal under the sheets.
Kate and I had some thinking to do. We did it out in the living room. As Kate had predicted—almost to the second—Lou Bowman had clearly flexed his investigatorial muscles upon the discovery of pink tissue paper where crispy greenbacks should have been. Even though Kate had walked me though the process by which the police veteran had come up with my name and address, I was still mightily impressed.
“He must have gotten an A in detective school.”
“Routine stuff,” Kate assured me.
The implication of Bowman’s colorful return to Baltimore was clear. Unfortunately. It was more sobering than the coffee I’d been gulping down over at the Oyster.
“He wants to kill me.”
If I was hoping that Kate would pooh-pooh my conclusion I was doubly disappointed.
“Right now I would guess that killing you is Lou’s single purpose in life.”
I gave her a grimace. “Feel free to throw in a gray area there if you’d like.”
“I’m sorry I dragged you into all this. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”
“You didn’t drag me. I insisted. Remember?”
“Still, I should have said no.”
“I’m just so damned irresistible, what can I tell you?”
“You’re in deep shit, dear, that’s what you are.”
It seemed I had recently been told this exact same thing. The smile wiped right off my face.
Kate was trying to piece everything together. She was pacing the carpeted floor. Barefoot, as if charging her batteries from the static electricity off the rayon plush. I remained seated, uncomfortably perched on the edge of a leather Eames knockoff.
“Now the good part, if Lou can stay rational, is that he’ll want to know how the hell it was that you caught on to those FedEx deliveries. I’m sure he didn’t talk it up around old Heayhauge.”
“His lady friend knew,” I reminded her.
Kate shook her head. “No. She knew he got the packages. That doesn’t mean she knew what was in them. And I’m sure she didn’t know why. But that doesn’t really matter. The question for Lou is, who the hell are you? Carol he knows, and I’m sure he figures she’s basically in the dark about all this. You used her to get hold of the money and that’s about as far as she
goes. But you … Once Bowman got ahold of your name and saw that you were from Baltimore, you can bet the alarm bells went off. That’s why he got down here so damn fast. He knows that you know something. But what he doesn’t know is how much you
do
know.”
“You mean how much I don’t know.”
“Same thing. But see, our advantage right now is that Bowman can’t be sure how much of the truth you’ve learned. Right now he has to assume … or he has to worry, that you know everything. He has to assume that you’ve got the whole story. Whatever that is. That means that you know what’s going on with Epoch Ltd. and that they’ve been paying him off for killing Charley.”
“But I don’t know any of that. And you don’t either. You’re just guessing at all of this.”
“Hey,
I
got an A in detective school, all right? I know I’m right. Epoch Ltd., whatever the hell that is, set this guy up nice and comfy up there in picture-postcard Maine and they’ve been keeping his pockets filled on a monthly basis ever since. Why? Bowman did a job for them. It’s as simple as that.”
“So why not just give him a huge one-time payoff? Why dribble it out every month like that?”
“I thought about that,” Kate said. She stopped at the sliding glass door and looked out onto the night. “I’ve got a couple of guesses.”
“Throw one at me.”
“One guess is that this is the way it’s done, for insurance reasons.”
“Insurance? You don’t mean insurance insurance?”
Kate was still looking out the sliding glass door. Her reflection was looking back at me.
“No. I mean to ensure that Bowman remains quiet. Suppose he gets one big payoff and he basically blows it all. He’d come asking for more and they’d have to give it to him. But this way it’s actually very smart. They throw him a big bone up front, a nice chunk of change, but not really enough to set him up for life. Then they dribble out the five grand a month. It’s the hand that feeds him. He’s not going to bite it.”
“And your second guess?”
“Not as interesting. But maybe true. A great big payoff shows. It’s on the books somewhere. Whoever this Epoch Ltd. is, they probably couldn’t risk that kind of unaccounted-for expense. But five thousand is chump change. Petty cash.”
“So you think we’re looking at a fairly substantial company. Deep pockets.”
“Do you want to hear my third guess?”
“Does the pope poop on the bear?”
Kate turned back around. “Lou Bowman is on a retainer.”
“A retainer?”
“Yep. Let’s keep aware of what we do know. Lou Bowman gunned down a fellow officer and then got paid off and sent away. This is known in my profession as … are you taking notes? A hired killer.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
“You’re welcome. Now we should stop thinking of Bowman at this point as a bad cop or a crooked cop or any sort of cop at all. That’s just obscuring things. Lou Bowman is a hired killer. That’s what he left town as.
A hired killer. You pay him enough, he will kill for you.”
“So you don’t think this was a one-time thing?”
“I have no idea whether it was or it wasn’t, Hitch. All I’m saying is that we ought to keep this in mind. The man killed for money. He is getting money every month. I think they’ve got him in a position where he’s their heavy if they need one. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s actually kind of funny.”
“Joke please.”
“Think about it. He can blow the whistle on them, they can blow the whistle on him. It’s like two guys yelling ‘Freeze!’ They’re each pointing a pistol at the other.”
“A Mexican standoff.”
“Exactly. My guess though is that this Epoch Ltd. has definitely got the upper hand. Whoever they are, they could probably hang Bowman out to dry if it really came to that. He fired the gun. And they’ve clearly gone to some lengths to hide their involvement. My guess is that this is a pretty damned uneasy alliance. Bowman is being paid to keep his mouth shut as well as to be available in case they need him again. That’s what I mean by his being on a retainer. Look, Hitch, we’ve focused on Lou Bowman’s shooting Charley. We have nothing that tells us he hasn’t done this sort of thing before. I told you already how trigger-happy the guy is.”
“So we’re back to where we started,” I said.
“Where we started?”
I fell back in my chair. Suddenly I didn’t like detective work anymore. I just wanted the pretty girl and to be a hero, but not all of this. I just wanted to go back to
burying people who had died because it was their time to die.
“Lou Bowman doesn’t leave town until I’m dead.” I gave a hollow laugh. “I guess I’d better tell Billie to clear some space.”
Kate didn’t respond immediately. She came over and knelt down next to my chair. Her eyes went wide and searching. I locked onto them and we played a sort of visual patty-cake with each other. Smoke began to rise. Kate’s plump lips parted.
And then, well…
At the end of it, breathless, I opened my eyes and gazed out the sliding glass doors. The nighttime harbor looked beautiful; the sailboats with their mast lights, the pink glow from the Harbor Place promenade. Even the inky blackness of the water itself was impressive; it looked like an elaborate shard that had dropped from the night sky. The sizzling red glow of the neon Domino sugar sign set the water quietly on fire. It was all insanely beautiful.
But when Kate finally stirred, when she slid her leg down off of mine and backed away from me, placing her hand on my chest… when she whispered in the dark, “Oh, Hitch. Be careful,” my perfect moment dislodged. What light there was coming into the room glistened off Kate’s moist skin and literally rolled down her cheeks along with her tears.
She whispered it again, her voice deliciously husky. “Be careful.” Then she got to her feet and walked across the floor—an absolute vision—and disappeared into the bathroom.
I felt like a man who had just been served his last meal.
K
ate and I discussed the situation the next morning over breakfast.
“Can’t we just have him arrested?
Hell, can’t
you
arrest him?”
“On what grounds?”
“How about murder? And strong suspicion of intent to murder some more.”
“Where’s my evidence?”
“For murder? There’s the coroner’s reports. Two bullets. Two police bullets. How about that?”
“Who is to say they didn’t both come from my gun? Bowman and I used the same caliber gun.”
“But it didn’t. You only fired once.”
“Hitch, I left my pistol behind when I followed Charley to the hospital. Bowman told me to. It was evidence at a crime scene. He could have easily taken it outside and fired off another shot. The ballistics report shows two shots fired. And I can’t account for that. The point is, I can’t pin Charley’s death on Bowman. I’ve got nothing to arrest him on. This is even presuming that he’d let me get close enough.”
“You think he’d kill you?”
“How can I open your eyes here?” Kate was frustrated.
You could see it in the lousy way she was buttering her toast. “Bowman is desperate. His whole little bubble has been exploded. The man has got nothing to lose right now. His arrangement with Epoch Ltd. has been found out. You’ve tapped him for five thousand … no, eight thousand dollars. What next? You either want more money or you’re planning to blow the whistle on him.”
“Yes! Blow! Let’s blow the whistle. Let’s tell all and then duck out of the way.”
“We don’t know all yet. That’s the problem, Hitch. We have to track down this Epoch Ltd. And I think I figured out a way. It’s very simple, really. It hardly takes detective school to figure it out.”
Right. I knew her “simple.”
“Tax records,” she said. “Epoch Ltd. has got to file a corporate tax statement of some kind.”
“If they’re legit, I suppose. But what if they’re not legit, Kate? I mean, all we know about them is that they have apparently been mailing a hired killer a big bag of money every month. How legit are they going to be?”
“The question is, how smart? If there even
is
such an entity as Epoch Ltd., they’d be fools not to file a tax statement. Face it, Hitch, you and I are just a couple of irritating pests compared to the Internal Revenue Service. If whoever they are want to steer clear of trouble, they’ll keep their noses clean with the IRS. You can count on it.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“A little research. There’s bound to be somebody around the station who has got an in with someone at the IRS. Or a favor to be returned. I ought to be able to
dig deep enough to find something out.” She gave me her best false smile. “Don’t forget, Hitch. I’m a trained professional. Meanwhile, my suggestion to you is that you keep your big ugly head out of sight.”
Sweet girl.