Deadly Appearances (14 page)

Howard finished his drink and put the empty glass carefully on the centre of his coaster.

The waiter came and asked if we were ready to order.

Howard looked at me hopefully. “They are reputed to do a first-rate Chateaubriand here, but it’s a dish for two and I’m always a one. Would Chateaubriand be acceptable?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, then, we’ll have that and –” he pointed out a bottle of Bordeaux on the wine list “– a half litre of that.”

When the waiter left, he turned back to me. “About the initials – what do you make of them?”

“I guess the most obvious assumption is that they’re wedding initials – Andy and Eve. But whoever put that poem in the portfolio killed Andy. I’m sure of it. Do you think Eve Boychuk is capable of murder?” It was the first time I’d said the words aloud, and I felt a shiver of apprehension.

We had chosen a table close to the fireplace. The rosy light turned Howard’s drink to fire, and cast flickering shadows across his old hawk’s face. He looked like a man to talk to about murder.

“I don’t know, Jo. I’m not one of those cynics who says that everyone’s capable of murder. There’s a threshold there that most of us could never cross. But Eve’s had such a hell of a life, I just don’t know.”

The waiter brought our wine. Howard absently gave it his approval, and the waiter filled our glasses. “You know, Jo, I’m glad we’re talking about this. It may ruin our dinner, but since Andy died, I’ve had more than a few ruined dinners. You see, I think if it weren’t for me, Andy would never have met Eve.”

The salad arrived and Howard brightened. “Now does this meet with your approval? You will note, recognizable chunks of everything, a good garlicky dressing, and they have the wit here to bring your salad before dinner when you’re not too loaded to eat it.

“Anyway, back to the beginning, and the beginning was my thirtieth birthday, April 17, 1963. That was the day I arrived in Port Durham, Ontario, and that was the day I met Eve Lorscott.”

When he said that name, I felt as if I had lit up a pinball machine – lights and bells everywhere. “You mean Eve is a Lorscott – one of the Lorscotts of the Lorscott case? I remember it from when I was at U of T, but how come no one ever told me it was Eve?”

Howard speared a piece of tomato and smiled. “Because, my friend, it was none of your business. Really, Jo, it was no one’s business. After all, Eve hadn’t committed a crime, and she had come out here to make a new beginning, so what was to be gained?

“Anyway, on April 17, I arrived in Port Durham, and for a Ukrainian boy from Indian Head it was like landing on the other side of the moon. Two days before, Ray Lewis had called me from Toronto. He was my prof at the law school in Saskatoon, and he’d followed my career a little so he knew that I’d made a bit of a specialty of the laws governing the insane. Not a bad preparation for politics, come to think of it. Anyway, Ray called and said he had a case that he thought I could be a real help with and, in the process, make a name for myself in the east. It seemed like a hell of a great idea at the time.

“Anyway, I was on the first plane out. Ray picked me up at the airport and drove me to Port Durham. You know, Jo, I’ll remember that drive till the day I die.” He sipped his wine and smiled. “Rural Ontario on an April day. It’s hard to believe the same God that made the prairie made those gentle hills and the little rivers and the ditches filled with wildflowers. And those farms –” he shook his head in disbelief. “All those farms with the new paint on the barns and the fuzzy sheep and fenced-in fields – they looked like something you’d give a kid to play with. We got into Port Durham around noon – pretty little place, have you ever been there, Jo?”

“Once, for a weekend with a friend from school.”

“Well, Ray took me to the hotel for lunch and filled me in on what I could expect to find at the Lorscott house. Tudor Lorscott, the father, was in Port Durham Hospital. He was badly hacked around the face, neck and groin, but he was going to live. His wife, Madeline, had lost four fingers on the left hand when she tried to stop the attack. The fingers were gone – kaput – but she would be released from hospital later in the week. Nancy Lorscott, the daughter who had, as the papers said, ‘wielded the axe,’ was in the hospital ward of the Port Durham Correctional Centre, a two-years-less-a-day provincial jail, which also served as a remand centre. Nancy was crazy as a bedbug but physically okay. Eve Lorscott, the younger daughter, the one who had called Ray and asked him to handle things, was waiting for us at the house.

“The ‘house’ – Ray tossed that word off so casually, but it was wholly inadequate. I was thirty years old but I had never been in a rich man’s house – God, Jo, that house made you see why people get the hots for money.”

I smiled. Howard had, since I’d known him, lived well, but he always talked as if he had to return his pop bottles to pay for his next meal.

Howard caught my smile and grinned. “I know, I know, Jo, but you should have seen the Lorscott place – another order of things altogether. The house was a beauty – clapboard, I guess, and painted a shade of grey that looked sometimes grey and sometimes – what’s that shade of light purple?”

“Lavender?”

“Yeah, lavender. And lilacs. The lilacs were everywhere – great masses of them all around the house – white and purply pink and …” He smiled. “Lavender. Gentle – a gentle house for gentle people, but a week before in this gentle house, the twenty-five-year-old daughter had tried to hack her old man’s head and nuts off with an ax and, when Mum tried to stop her, had chopped off Mum’s fingers.”

“Oh, God, Howard, no.”

“We rang the bell and, as we were standing there in the sunshine waiting, Ray Lewis said something I’ve repeated to myself a thousand times. ‘Don’t let the splendour get to you, kid; when they’re scared, they dirty their drawers just like the rest of us.’ Words to live by, I guess, but when I stepped into that front hallway, it was hard to believe anybody ever dirtied anything around there. Marty and I had just bought our first house – it was about three blocks from Mieka’s new place, close to the Catholic school, of course, for Marty. Anyway, we were fixing it up and we thought it was really special, but next to the Lorscott place it was pathetic – a real dump.

“The housekeeper walked us down a hall as long as a bowling alley. The walls on both sides were hung with discreet pictures of the family – the ancestral line, I guess. I was feeling more and more like the dumb bohunk from the sticks, when I saw yellow police tape blocking off the entrance to a room with a big desk and a globe and a lot of books – the old man’s office – the scene, as we say, of the crime. But the housekeeper just marched us right on by and at the end of the hall, she opened a door and we were in the sunroom – the atrium, she called it. In the centre of the room was a bunch of wicker furniture, some chairs with flowery cushions and a round table. Sitting there waiting, as sweet as a little girl at a birthday party, was Eve.

“And here,” he said, “is our dinner. Do I get to pick the restaurant from now on?”

“Till the day we die,” I said. “That is a beautiful piece of meat.”

The Chateaubriand was nicely charred on the outside, pink inside and covered in a good Béarnaise sauce made with fresh tarragon. The waiter sliced the beef and arranged it and our vegetables well and without fuss on oval pewter plates.

“You know, whatever you want to say about Eve, and over the years we’ve all said plenty, she is a beauty. That day she was beautiful enough to stop your heart. She must have been about twenty, and her hair was still black. It didn’t turn grey until after the car accident. She wore it kind of fluffed out the way women did in 1963. The housekeeper – Mrs. Cartwright – God, Jo, half the time I can’t remember where I parked the car, but I can remember the name of a housekeeper I met for maybe three minutes more than twenty-five years ago. Anyway, Mrs. Cartwright brought us our scones and tea, and everything was very civilized. Eve was cool as a cucumber, pouring the tea, passing the butter, all that stuff, and she told us the history of the house and then, in that same flat little voice, she told us what happened that night.”

“How did she deal with it?”

“She made one hell of a witness – every detail, no stumbling, no hysteria. She even put in all the disclaimers, ‘and then I believe my sister said,’ and, ‘then, to the best of my recollection, my father moved rapidly toward the window.’ Anyway, she told her little story, and it wasn’t very nice. Her sister alleged, to use Eve’s word, that the old man had made improper advances to her – Eve’s words again – from the time she was a little kid and now she couldn’t hold her head up and then, so help me, Jo, Eve kind of giggled the way you do when you’re getting near the punch line, and said, ‘My sister said if she couldn’t hold her head up, my father shouldn’t be allowed to, either, so she took this axe and started whacking at his head and his private parts.’ Then she laughed, and I swear, Jo, she was surprised when we didn’t join in.

“Anyway, apparently when the mother tried to stop Sister Nancy, Sister Nancy chopped her through the fingers.”

I swallowed the rest of my wine and filled our glasses. “And Eve saw it all?”

Howard was grim. “And Eve saw it all, but here’s the kicker, Jo. She wouldn’t let us use any of it. She said, ‘Now you know the truth, and that should help you arrange’ – that was her word, ‘arrange’ – ‘what they tell you. But what you’ve heard here must not go out of this room,’ and she walked out and left us sitting there, the hired help smelling the pretty flowers.”

Howard speared the last of his steak, and the waiter came to remove our plates. Howard asked him to bring us both coffee and B&B, and sat back contentedly.

I was on the edge of my seat. “Well, what happened?”

“Not much. Ray and I tried every tack we could think of, but Eve wouldn’t testify. Mum and Pop and Sister Nancy lied through their teeth – said it was an accident, some sort of aberration. Little Nancy had always been delicate, blah, blah, blah, so that was that. Nancy went to a toney sanitarium in upper New York State – the kind of place where you can stash your resident psycho if you’ve got the money. The Americans are better at understanding that kind of thing than we are. And Mum and Pop went back to the house at the lake and lived happily ever after. Every so often I still see Old Man Lorscott’s picture in the
Globe
– appointed to the board of this or that.” He shook his head, then looked up. “Jo, do you want to split a piece of cheesecake? They make one with Amaretto here that you would really love.”

I groaned. “Howard, if we have cheesecake, that will push the number of calories for this meal into six figures.”

“Jo, forget the calories tonight. Yes or no?”

“Yes – now tell me, how did Eve get here?”

“She just came. After the trial I got a cheque signed by Eve Lorscott. If I hadn’t needed the money so much for the new house, I would have framed it, but it was a generous cheque and Marty wanted to fence in the backyard. Anyway, I’d see Ray Lewis at bar association meetings, and the first few times I saw him we’d talk about the Lorscotts and then, you know how it is, we both had other stories. Anyway, the Lorscotts kind of drifted to the back of my mind.

“Then one day, about five years later – I think it must have been 1968, or one of those years when the world was blowing up, I was walking across the university campus. There was a demonstration against the war in Vietnam, and there, marching along together, were Eve Lorscott and Andy Boychuk. They were a striking couple. Andy looked pretty much the way he did when you knew him – longer hair, of course. Eve in 1968 was very different from the woman we know now. Remember how the kids then used to talk about being free? Well, that day Eve was free. She wasn’t the wound-up little doll Ray Lewis and I had met in Port Durham, and she wasn’t the fragile woman you and I know. She was free and she was very beautiful.

“Andy was in my criminal law class. He waved, came over and introduced Eve. You know, Eve always surprises. I was prepared to play dumb and ignore the connection, but Eve – cool as you please – slipped her hand into mine and said, ‘Howard and I have met. In fact, he’s the reason I’m here. After all that trouble with Nancy, I needed a place to escape to – and I was sitting there one day, and Saskatchewan just came to mind. I mean whoever would pursue anybody here?’ And she beamed and put her arm around Andy’s waist and lay her head on his shoulder. They were such a striking couple. Then they got married, and you know the rest. That awful accident …” He picked up the little lamp that had a candle burning inside it. “As I said, Eve Boychuk has had one hell of a life.”

“I wonder how she survived,” I said.

“That’s a question for a shrink or a philosopher, Jo. I’m just a washed-up politician; I don’t have answers for questions like that.”

I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Not so washed-up,” I said.

The Amaretto cheesecake was as heavenly as Howard promised it would be, but he was subdued as we ate it. When we finished, he leaned across the table and looked at me hard.

“Jo, I guess everyone at that picnic is a suspect. Did you have any special reason for asking about Eve?”

“No – at least no more reason to ask about her than about any of us. And don’t forget, there were five thousand people there. I know the police have got the big push on, and I keep hoping I’m going to turn on the radio and hear they’ve arrested some poor crazy person who killed Andy because he got out of the wrong side of the bed that morning or because God told him to. But we have to face facts. It’s been eleven days now, and the police are still coming up empty. What if it’s not some anonymous psycho? What if it’s somebody we know? What if it’s one of us?”

Howard tossed back the last of his drink. “I don’t know, Jo. Do you remember that
TV
show that used to open with the police sergeant saying, ‘Be careful out there’? I guess that’s all you can do. Be careful.”

Mieka, perfect Mieka, had unpacked my suitcase and hung up my skirt and blouse for the next day. She had even thrown my nightgown and robe on the bed.