The Hearse You Came in On Read Online Free PDF Page A

they always are. That’s the fun of it. Another Gypsy Players tragedy. Now scoot.”
    She goosed me and gave me a peck on the cheek. I hugged the pole and stepped into the void. I landed in the gallery. There were no customers, only Chinese Sue behind the cash register leafing languidly through a magazine. Chinese Sue isn’t really Chinese. She’s from Dundalk, which is about as blue-collar as you get in Baltimore. But she wears velvet jackets and cuts her hair in bangs and stares at you as if she hasn’t a clue what you just said, and that furthermore, she doesn’t care. I’ve no explanation for her. That’s what people call her. And she runs Julia’sgallery. Anyway, when I came down the pole, she didn’t even look up.
    As it turned out, I didn’t have to root like a pig to locate Carolyn James. She was waiting for me when I got back to the office. Aunt Billie handed me the paperwork the moment I walked in the door.
    “Suicide,” she said. “Asphyxiation. It just breaks my heart.”
    I hurried down to the basement, where we prep our customers. A waifish redhead was stretched out in front of me, a slightly agonized look forever etched into her freckled face. She was about five four, and thin as a rail. The skin above her left cheek was discolored, almost green. She had recently suffered a black eye.
    I had never seen her before in my life.

CHAPTER 4
     
    T he details on the dead woman were few. She had lived in an apartment in Charles Village, over near Johns Hopkins University and had been found in a garage in the alley behind her building, in the front seat of a Honda Civic that was idling very high, filling the garage with its deadly exhaust. There was no doubt that the death was intentional; several towels had been stuffed along the bottom of the garage door. If that weren’t convincing enough, then the rippled plastic tubing that ran from the exhaust to the crack in the driver’s-side window was pretty persuasive. It came from a vacuum cleaner that the police found while inspecting Carolyn James’s apartment. It’s doubtful that she was just clearing the air. As far as the police were concerned, the case was shut before it even had a chance to open.
    As far as
they
were concerned.
    Carolyn James, aged twenty-seven, had been employed as a caterer’s assistant. The head of the catering company said that she was a diligent, responsible worker who did as she was told, no more, no less. She had been employed for about a year, her first job since moving to Baltimore from somewhere out west.She had no family that anyone could find, and was single, though apparently there was a man in her life. The exact nature of the relationship was a little fuzzy. The head caterer described the fellow to me as “a cocky bastard son of a bitch Grade-A prick.” If this caterer cooks like he swears, I want some.
    “He’s a good-looking guy. A real Joe Stud type,” he said to me. “Which was why I could never quite figure the two of them out. Carolyn was a nice kid and all, but she wasn’t exactly Sophia Loren.”
    It seemed to me that he was setting the bar kind of high, but I remained silent.
    “I wouldn’t exactly describe her as homely, but she didn’t really have a lot of personality. She was shy, basically. And this guy of hers … well, he came on strong. It never made much sense to me.”
    My little chat with the head of the catering company took place in Parlor Two, where we had laid out the unfortunate caterer’s assistant for her viewing. Billie had a wake going over in Parlor One, for a beloved old high school teacher. Popular enough in fact to have almost warranted pulling open the plastic curtain, had we not been conducting a doubleheader. As for Carolyn James, she pulled a miserably small crowd. Aside from the head of the catering company and a few of her co-workers, there was the man who had discovered her in the exhaust-filled garage, a butcher from the Eddie’s Supermarket where she had done her