Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

boards that I’ve presented to my aunt over the years. There’s one in the shape of a figure-eight, one with mother-of-pearl inlay, a triangular one with a large glass eye embossed in the center and a fairly rustic one fashioned out of gouged domino pieces, built by a blind auctioneer from Ellicott City. My best find was a board that is actually a full-size coffee table. Teak. Rivets of rhinestone (six hundred and seventy-one; I counted them once during a deep and relentless funk). The actual board within the table is sort of paisley-shaped, like the inside curl of a conch shell. The table’s legs are rippled and they taper to near-stiletto points, capped in red glass. Goddamn thing set me back eight hundred dollars and is as gaudy as Liberace’s Steinway, but I couldn’t pass it up. Billie calls it Milton, after Milton Berle. Billie names a lot of her possessions. The mirror in her bedroom is Clark. She has a favorite armchair named Hecuba. Her phone is George.
    Billie set her teacup back down on its saucer. Lo and behold, George rang. Billie got up and took the call. It was a short call. She returned to the table and dropped heavily into her chair. She picked up her teacup and intoned exactly like Boris Karloff, “The body arrives at noon.”
    My ex-wife was being hung in Druid Hill Park, and I had promised to come watch. This might sound like the gloating of a vindictive ex-husband, but that just goes to show how slimy our perceptions can be.
    Julia is a painter. She is wildly popular in all sorts of concentric circles, not only in Baltimore but also in New York and Los Angeles and—peculiarly—in Scandinavia, where, in certain pockets, she has achieved the sort of ill-proportioned cult status that Jerry Lewis enjoys all over France. The brooding suicidal masses just seem to love her. Julia wings off to Stockholm, Oslo or Copenhagen at least once a year to bask in the blond, blue-eyed spotlight. It’s something akin to taking the waters, though in her case with a lot of sex thrown in. Julia has a lover in every Scandinavian port. “My Swede. My Dane. My Norwood.” She returns from these jaunts refreshed and energized and always with a colossal appetite. Still, no amount of gorging in Baltimore’s finest restaurants or lowliest hash houses seems to have any effect on Julia’s salamander figure. Suss out what it is Audrey Hepburn’s got that Sophia Loren ain’t got, and then vice versa. Mix in a little Irish and a faint strain of Cherokee blood, pour it all into a long shapely beaker … and then step back, Jack.
    Julia’s hair is coal black. Today it was cut in short spikes and she was wearing a sixties era Carnaby Street cap. The rest of her ensemble was like something out of the Beatles’s
Yellow Submarine
cartoon, only on Julia the god-awful polka dots and bell-bottoms looked just swell. She was, as usual, barefoot. Luckily for her we were inside.
    “Oh Hitch, I’m really glad you could make it.” Julia’s eyes were made up like a B-movie scream queen. And
still
she looked gorgeous.
    “I always like to support your little hobby.”
    Without their ever closing, she batted her eyes at me. “Sweet man. I’ll have to remember to drop by one of your little funerals sometime soon. It’s been a while.”
    Julia had been commissioned to paint a canvas for the new visitors center at the Baltimore Zoo. The zoo had fallen into neglect back in the late seventies and eighties but as part of the city’s trumpeted resurgence has since received several facelifts. The new visitors center was one of them, and Julia had been tapped to add her two cents to the look of the place. She was paid ten thousand dollars for her two cents, which is a dizzying return on the dollar if you think about it.
    Julia had painted a huge triptych. Three separate canvases to be hung side-by-side-by-side up on the visitors center’s dominant wall. Along with an array of shapes and colors that playfully suggested a menagerie of animals