Murder in Focus (20 page)

Traffic was light once he got out of the city center, and all going in the opposite direction. He parked about two blocks away from Mrs. Cruikshank's house and began walking slowly toward it. The sun was bright, the sky a thin, clear, washed-out blue—the same colour as that car, he thought, and shivered with guilt and apprehension—and the wind as cold as the nose on an Arctic fox. He turned up his coat collar and tried to look like someone drawn out for a stroll by the sunshine and his curiosity. It was difficult.

As he rounded the corner a gust of wind brought the smell. It was the stench of wet coal tar and old wood, of death and destruction. He hated that smell. He loathed being anywhere near a case where fire was involved, and was damned glad that most of them were handled with expertise and dispatch by the fire marshal. He moved ahead very slowly, sizing things up, and stopped before he got to any official bodies who might be posted to watch for late-arriving voyeurs.

There was a black gap, a rotten hole, in the long line of white clapboard houses that made up this section of the street. Whatever timbers had been left standing by the fire had been thrown down by the force of the hoses or the efforts of the firefighters to break apart the last, dangerous remnants of what was once a building. The house next door was streaked with black smoke; charring along the front corner post testified to the violence of the blaze at its worst.

A bored-looking man in the uniform of a fire department investigator was standing in the front yard and looking at the mess that opened up at his feet. Sanders opened the small gate in the picket fence and walked carefully up the concrete path he had been on the night before. The investigator barely flickered an eye in Sanders's direction before speaking. “Sorry, sir, can't come in here. The site is dangerous and under investigation.” He sounded as bored as he looked.

Sanders extracted his identification and waved it in front of the man. “Sanders, John Sanders. I've been poking around on a case that seemed to involve the owner of this house in a marginal sort of way. Naturally, I was interested when I heard she had gone up with her house.” The man looked impassive, but slightly less hostile. “Rooming house, wasn't it?”

“Mmm,” said the man in front of him.

“Boarders, smoking in bed, I suppose,” said Sanders. “These wooden houses are real firetraps.”

“Not this one,” replied the investigator with considerably more animation. “She was a bit odd, that woman, but she had a healthy respect for fire. House was fitted out with alarms and sprinklers everywhere. If it had been a slow-starting fire, trucks would have been there in plenty of time. Arson, this was. Someone waited until she was alone in the house, they did. Went up like a bonfire.”

“Where were all the boarders?”

“Only two of them now, they say. Funny thing is, the third one, died just this week. An accident at work or something. They were off at the pub boozing. Didn't turn up until it was pretty much all over.”

“Do you think I could poke around a bit?” said Sanders casually. “We're looking for a piece of missing evidence. I was told it was in this house.”

The investigator laughed. “Unless it was made of asbestos you're not going to find it now. Anyway, not a chance I can let anyone onto the site to look around. We're having enough trouble with people interfering with our investigation as it is. That's where my boss is, trying to get rid of a few nuisances right now.”

“What do you mean, ‘interfering with your investigation'?” asked Sanders.

The investigator shrugged. “Anyway,” he went on, “there's nothing much left here to look for. It seems we're trying to find the person she was drinking with last night just before the fire started.” He glanced at Sanders, fixing his look on him for a second or two, and then turned away to gaze back at the ruins of the house. “Well, I don't know,” he said. “Maybe they won't mind if you just look around a bit. Hang on a minute and I'll see if I can get permission to let you onto the site. Don't fall in the cellar while you're waiting or I'll be in deep trouble.” He chuckled and headed off to an official-looking car parked in front of the neighbor's house.

It had taken Sanders a half-second to recognize that look and the fake casual friendliness that followed it. Before the investigator could reach for his radio, Sanders was striding around the corner toward his own car, blessing the prescience that had prompted him to leave it out of sight of the house.

He headed south, one eye on the rearview mirror, away from Ottawa, until he was sure that no one was interested in his movements. He pulled into a gravel side road and waited for five minutes. Nothing. A tractor pulling a wagon moved slowly by, a red sports car whipped past too fast to notice him; otherwise the highway was deserted. He flipped on the radio in time for the twelve o'clock news. The international situation got a minute—as much as it deserved, no doubt—and the current prime minister got another minute. The leader of the opposition was granted a mere forty-five seconds. Nicely calculated, that, thought Sanders, who was staring at his watch and looking at the road at more or less the same time. Then a minute for local news before the weather. There was still nothing along that road that could be looking for him. He put the car in gear and almost as quickly slammed his foot on the brake again. “Foul play,” the boyish voice of the announcer was saying, “has not been ruled out. Police are currently looking for her drinking companion of the night before, believed to be a man representing himself as a police officer from the Toronto area. Anyone knowing the whereabouts—” Sanders turned off the radio with a vicious click that almost dislodged the knob from its stem. Dammit, he swore softly to himself. This was going to take a little bit of thought.

He backed up until he was parked on the other side of a small hill from the highway, no longer visible to anyone but a field of cows on his right. He pulled out his notes from the night before and began to study them with some concentration.

If he remembered correctly, and he thought he did, those pages had had a very familiar air. The last item on the page that he had been studying had been something about “ferret to O. r/v file #3 . . .” and some more numbers that he could almost see. “Advance payment given—amount not stated, but above $10,000?—on take-out target unspecified but specialized. 1700 Joe +1.” It was a style of note taking—not his own, but familiar. And it belonged to a professional. Not a snitch, but a sober, conscientious undercover officer with a gift for playing the stupid drunk, who had left something in semi-clear because he was uncertain of getting through to his usual contact. The notes seemed to say that he had turned up a professional hit man after a big target for big bucks under one of the rocks he had turned over. And the hit was to be at 1700 hours on Joe + 1—Friday. Today? Next week? And Don Bartholomew had once worked—some time in the past—with Inspector Charlie Higgs, because Higgs had laughed with real affection for a moment over the memory of that strange phrase. And the next expression on his face had been sorrow, Sanders was positive about that.

As he thought, he penciled in notes against the paper in front of him until the thin point on his pencil broke. He sighed and reached into his pocket to see if he had another one stuffed in it. His fingers curled around a piece of stiff paper instead. He pulled it out. The bottom half of the bill from the restaurant in Brockville, and on it the telephone number that Scarface had been calling—maybe.

He took out his map and looked for the nearest town that might have a restaurant and yet not be too close to the beaten track. In fifteen minutes he was inside a suitably grubby one. He ordered a cheeseburger and headed back to the telephone.

When he got his partner on the line at last, Dubinsky sounded irritable. Sanders fed a pile of quarters into the machine and started talking, fast. “Look, Ed, I want you to check reverse listings for Ottawa and tell me what this number is.” He read it carefully into the receiver. “Call me back as soon as you've got it. It's important.”

“I don't have to check anywhere, John. That number is sitting on my desk right here in front of me. It's the number I'm supposed to call if I find out where you are, so be a pal and don't tell me, eh?”

“So, whose number is it, for chrissake?”

“It's the goddamn RCMP, that's who it is. And what in hell is going on? The whole world is looking for you. Did you really put a bullet through the head of some woman out in Stittsville? And shoot her dog, too? I told them you might have killed the woman, but not the dog, so if the same weapon got both of them they could forget it.”

Sanders didn't laugh. “Which branch?”

“Security. Operations. And no, I don't have a name, just a department. Sorry. Look, sweetheart, I'm busy. But keep in touch if you can and let me know what's happening.”

Since this was the first time his partner had ever called him sweetheart, Sanders deduced that someone had wandered, too close and too curious, in the direction of Dubinsky's telephone. More troubling than that, however, was the other question this telephone call had raised. What had Scarface been doing calling the RCMP before heading off—presumably—to kill Don Bartholomew? Bartholomew, who had once worked for the RCMP. Unless, of course, someone else at the coffee shop had called that number often enough for the mynah bird to get attached to the melody.

He fished in his pocket for more change. The number at the Mary Jo Motel rang twice before he got a hesitant answer. “It's me,” he said. “Anything going on there I should know about?”

“Some,” said Harriet. “I don't know how critical it is, though. I've been rooting around about the Echo Drive house. It's owned by a Mrs. Muriel Smythe, according to the old city directory. I called, got switched to another number, and got some female iceberg on the other end who said that Mrs. Smythe was unable to take telephone calls. I tried to find out where she lived—I mean, if she lived in the house—and the iceberg hung up on me.”

“Where were you calling from?”

“Oh, I got myself a nice quiet pay phone at the library. Called Scott first and got him to get the stuff from the directory. I didn't feel like making a whole lot of phone calls from here, for some reason. Anyway, that's it. Did you get anything?”

“Lots,” said Sanders, rather grimly. “Why don't we meet someplace quiet and unobtrusive?”

“Quiet and unobtrusive?” She paused for a moment to think. “How about the south end of Dow's Lake? That's nicely pastoral. Will that do? And do you want me to bring you a sandwich?”

He looked over at his table. On it reposed a cold, dried-out, greasy-looking cheeseburger. Anything but that. “Yes, bring me a sandwich and some coffee and we'll figure out what to do next.”

As Sanders stepped out of the car, his ears were assailed by the combination of birds singing and the gentle lapping of water against the concrete barrier that hedged off the lake. Such bucolic sounds definitely belonged to another sort of day, not to the one he was having. He looked around in time to see Harriet making a razor-sharp left into a parking space, cutting off a modest line of traffic as she did so. There was a certain amount of horn honking that she appeared to ignore while waving cheerfully at him.

“Just one more left turn like that last one and off we go, lady,” said Sanders as he jumped in her car.

“Hey, what about your car? You just going to leave it there? They'll probably tow it away. The law can be vicious up here.”

“Good riddance,” said Sanders. “I was getting tired of it. The floor mats are muddy and someone put cigarette butts in the ashtray. So, first priority: out of here, abandoning car. Second priority: where's my sandwich? I'm starved.”

“You get stranger and stranger, John Sanders, and that's saying a hell of a lot. Because you were pretty odd to begin with,” said Harriet. She put the car in gear and whipped into a small break in the traffic. “And it's on the backseat. There are napkins in the bottom of the bag. I think you'll need them.”

“Thanks,” he muttered as he reached into the large white paper bag and searched around for whatever it offered. “Did you think I was incredibly hungry, or are you eating as well?” he said, as his fingers encountered numerous paper packets inside the bag.

“I'm eating as well. Do I have to eat and drive at the same time?”

“War demands sacrifices from all of us, my love. Are they all the same?”

“Yes. Except that some of them are coffee. And where are we headed? Or do you want me to keep going south until I hit the border?”

Sanders put a pile of paper napkins in her lap, and then carefully handed her one half of a hot pastrami sandwich with mustard, left in its thermal wrapping for easier handling. “I'll decant the coffee later,” he said, wrapping his own half-sandwich in a couple of napkins. “And back to Carleton. I was perhaps a little too casual about your friend the blond man in the picture. It's time to look him up again.”

“But it's too late. Last night was the final banquet, wasn't it? Or am I going crazy?”

“No, you just don't see the logic of holding the final banquet the evening before the final lectures. That way everyone will come. Otherwise they all take off early and refuse to buy expensive tickets for a bad dinner and a lot of dull speeches. All conferences work that way.”

“You mean the conference is still going on?”

“Of course. Otherwise I would have been much more concerned about our friend the blond man last night, wouldn't I? I, too, know how to use the telephone, my dear Harriet.”

“Don't be insufferable.” She brought the car to a sudden halt, waited briefly at a red light, and made an illegal turn in front of a wall of oncoming traffic before her signal had changed to green—quite. “Which parking lot?” she asked.

Sanders opened his eyes again. “The cheap one at the end. If he's been there for the whole conference, that's where he'll be leaving his car.”