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

in near-Biblical harmony, each canvas featured in the foreground a portion of a hippopotamus in profile, trotting. Front, middle and rear. Julia’s conceit was that the canvases were to be rotated monthly so that only occasionally would they actually line up in the logical order of the trotting hippo. On any random month the hippo’s face might be staring at it’s own tail or it’s midsection. Or the rear end might be trotting right out of the scene.
    Today, for the unveiling, all three sections were lined up in order. A reception of finger foods and champagne was underway when I arrived. The new visitors’ center features huge glass walls all around, one of which looks out onto a dirt pen where the deer and the antelope play. A curious antelope stood at the glass throughout the reception, staring in with its yellow eyes.
    I took a flute of champagne from an expressionless young girl and mingled. It’s wonderful how many people have time on their hands in the middle of the day to attend these sorts of events. I’m so glad I’m one of them. The crowd was a mix of zoo officials—the board, the staff, etc.—some financial bigwigs and people from the mayor’s office. The mayor himself was home with the flu, but he was being represented by his culture czarina, a hawkish woman who stood well over six feet tall and whose face revealed not a tendril of animation. She spoke with aristocratic lockjaw when she stepped to the podium beneath Julia’s canvases and read her spiel. Julia stood demurely behind her and off to the left. She caught my eye once and giggled. The hawk droned on nasally about the zoo and the city and the world. She couldn’t seem to find much to say about Julia’s paintings except—at the end of her spiel—to elevate a mannish hand in their direction and call them “nice paintings.” It sounded like nice
kitties.
    I offered Julia a ride home after the affair. Julia doesn’t own a car. She takes taxis or is otherwise squired about. All the drivers at Jimmy’s Cabs know her. I told her I had to swing by the police station on my way home. I had phoned Detective Kruk the day before, after Alcatraz had found the restaurant order pad. Bonnie and I figured that it had likely belonged to Helen Waggoner and that it must have fallen from her apron pocket when she was being delivered to the funeral home. Kruk had merely sighed heavily into the phone when I told him that my dog had fetched the pad from underneath a mailbox on the street.
    “You’re telling me it’s been moved from where it was located, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Just like the body. Do you do this on purpose, Mr. Sewell? Just to drive me crazy?”
    “It was my dog,” I reminded him.
    “Dogs can be taught,” he said. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
    Julia was giving the inside of my car the once-over. She was wrapped in an ankle-length leather coat. She wasn’t barefoot now but wore a pair of Army boots.
    “You must have the most boring car in America,” Julia said as we took the North Avenue exit off the beltway.
    “I don’t believe in one’s car as an extension of who they are,” I answered her.
    “I can see that.”
    A car in front of me braked suddenly. I jerked the wheel of my Chevy Nothing and hit the brakes. We skidded on an ice patch and slid deftly past the stopped car at a diagonal. I let off the brake and hit the gas and we shot through the intersection a full five inches in front of a slowly skidding city bus. Julia laughed.
    “But it’s got your moves.”
    I pulled the order pad out of my pocket and tossed it onto her lap.
    “Does this belong to your dead girl?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. It seems likely.”
    Julia squinted at the pad. “Turkey club. Cobb salad. Some sort of soup.”
    “I think it’s split pea,” I said. Actually it was Bonnie who had made the deduction.
    “Was she pretty, your dead waitress?”
    “Everyone keeps asking me that. Why is that?”
    “Oh Hitch, come on.