Free Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) by Tim Cockey

frozen sidewalk. Holding hands. I dabbed at my cheek. A smear of black came off on my fingers.
    “It’s mascara.”
    Billie glanced out the door as I was closing it. “Oh. I see.”
    “It’s not what you think,” I said.
    Billie clucked. “I’m not worrying about what
I
think.”

CHAPTER 7
     
    A waterpipe under the street in front of the Oyster had cracked and ruptured from the cold. The flow had been shut off, but not before a large ice sculpture had formed on the edge of the street and up on the sidewalk. Depending on who you listened to—and from what angle you viewed the ice—the frozen mass resembled a large hawk in flight, a castle, Abraham Lincoln’s profile, or a pair of obese copulating angels. Baltimore Gas & Electric had ringed the tabula rasa with plastic tape, which only served to make the frozen chunk even more of an attraction. By the time I saw it, someone had already placed a Christmas wreath on one of the jagged points.
    “Ain’t that shit?” Sally said to me as she pulled the door open wide. I had an armload of logs. I carried them into the bar and over to the far wall and dumped them atop the pile next to the small fireplace. I made three more trips to my car to fetch the rest of the wood. A mother was crouched down next to her son, who was staring at the ice hemorrhage with pie-pan eyes. Someone else was snapping its picture. Two teenage girls were approaching, giggling. One carried a string of gold tinsel.
    Sally whipped up some hot chocolate while I got a fire started for her. I used some empty liquor cartons for kindling and soon had a roasty toasty going. We pulled up a pair of chairs and gave the flames a good look. I’ve always held that if music itself could get up and dance, it would make these sorts of moves. Sally had poured a taste of rum into our hot chocolates. It was an atrocious addition. But the bite was nice. After a few minutes, there was a low rumble from outside. I turned my head just in time to see several pounds of snow falling from the roof past the bar’s window.
    “There’s my signal,” I said. “Time to go.”
    “Good talking with you, Hitchcock,” she said. “Thanks for the wood.”
    I rounded the corner to find my good friend John Kruk reading the riot act to a group of sullen-faced policemen out on the street. The first piece of hard evidence in the murder of Helen Waggoner had showed up. It was on Anne Street, one block over from the funeral home. Actually it didn’t show up, it had been there all along. It was a car. A white Pontiac Firebird. I recalled Alcatraz sniffing around the car during one of his romps. I had assumed he was looking for love in all the wrong places. I hadn’t realized he was sleuthing.
    The car had been parked illegally, directly in front of a fire hydrant. Because of the mild anarchy brought on by the recent storm, it had taken several days before a patrol car had noted the violation and run a routine check of the car’s plates. That was when it was discovered that the car had been reported stolen several days before, the same day that Helen was murdered. And that’s when the gears started rolling.
    Helen had been shot in the front seat of the Pontiac. Traces of her blood were recovered from the front seat. A pair of bullet holes were located, one in the floorboard and one in the door. Helen’s fingerprints were all over the door handle and the window.
    Kruk was ballistic. His officers should have spotted the car the night Helen’s body was dumped off. The entire area should have been canvassed. In fact, it
had
been canvassed. Sloppily, it now appeared. The miserable icy, slushy, snowy, windy, bitter, crappy weather of that evening would no doubt be floated as an excuse. Kruk would no doubt give less than two seconds to such an excuse. The stolen white Pontiac Firebird, illegally parked, containing the murder victim’s blood and fingerprints on the seat, door handles and passenger window had “lousy police work”