Murder in the Hearse Degree Read Online Free Page B

speed. The mortician was professing his innocence in the grisly event and was faxing newspaper articles concerning the trial to his colleagues all over the country. I wasn’t quite sure how we were supposed to show our support. Were we expected to travel to Columbus in our hearses and ring the courthouse? As best I could tell the guy had simply botched the embalming and that was pretty much the end of it. Naturally, he was being sued for millions. Nobody sues for reasonable amounts anymore; it’s all this bonanza seeking. Anyway, I set my feet up on my desk, skimmed the latest installment, then balled the fax and missed the three-point attempt into my doorstop spittoon.
    About an hour later I popped down the street to my place and changed out of my suit, then swung down to the Cat’s Eye Saloon to see if pretty Maria was playing. She wasn’t. The Ferguson Brothers were playing. Neither of them is particularly pretty. I chewed on a mug of Guinness then angled over to John Steven’s for a plate of mussels and an argument with Greasy Kevin about which member of the 1966 World Series–winning Orioles, Paul Blair or Frank Robinson, had almost drowned in a swimming pool during a team party about midway through the season. Kevin swore that it was Blair. My money went on Frank Robinson, who had been acquired that year from Cincinnati to help the Birds nab the pennant. Kevin could simply not stomach the idea that a man who was batting a season average of .316, a slugging average of .637 and who was well on his way to MVP and Triple Crown honors could not negotiate a backyard swimming pool. We both agreed, however, that it was the O’s catcher, Andy Etchebarren, who had noticed the floundering ballplayer in the deep end and had dived into the pool to save him, but that was about all we could agree on. After that it was rankle, rankle, rankle.
    Alcatraz was working on a quantum physics problem when I got back home, but he managed to shove all the papers into a folder and stow it away before I closed the front door behind me. He looked for all the world like a long-sleeping hound dog when I came in.
    There were three messages on my phone machine. One was from my ex-wife, Julia. She was calling to tell me a joke she’d just heard but she couldn’t remember how it went. “It was very funny,” she said on the machine, and she laughed hysterically at the memory. The second message was a recorded voice telling me that I had a free hotel room waiting for me at a resort somewhere in Florida if I acted now. I didn’t act. Neither then nor later.
    The third message was from Libby. I was standing on one leg pulling off my shoes when her voice came on.
    “Hitch? Hello, it’s me. Listen, I appreciate your offer to help out this afternoon and everything, but . . . well, it looks like you don’t have to. Sophie’s been found.”
    I yanked the shoe off. The power of the pull sent me falling against the wall. I had to play back the message to be sure I’d heard the final part.
    I had.
    “. . . she’s dead.”

 
CHAPTER
4
     
    Sophie Potts’s life ended in the Severn River. An account executive for a local radio station had gone down to the river to do his morning stretches out on his boat pier and had seen what appeared to be a human leg bobbing against the roots of an old hickory tree that stood half in and half out of the water. The account executive was enterprising enough to fetch a ten-foot pole from his neighbor’s pool house and prodded around the vicinity of the leg until suddenly an entire body rose to the surface, but he wasn’t strong enough to haul the body out of the water. In fact, he had been forced to slip the pole’s net around the head and shoulders to keep the body from drifting from the shore and back into the current. He used his cell phone to call 911, and when the ambulance arrived the account executive was nearly epileptic from the strain of holding the body against the morning currents of the