Until the Night (30 page)

All this information was easy, if time-consuming, to collect. Cardinal, no tech whiz, took a blank sheet of paper and drew three columns, into which he copied the names and dates.

He entered all three names together in the Google search field: Keith Rettig, David Flint and Frank Gauthier. No results.

He spent the next hour accessing business databases. It was no problem to get executive lists for all the various companies that were still extant. But he didn’t know where to find “historic” staff lists or where to look for information on companies that were defunct. Delorme would know. But Delorme was not here, and Delorme was behaving strangely, and Delorme was angry with him.

He opened the To Do list on his computer, and just below
Call Ronnie B
. he added
Lise re corporate histories
.

He looked again at his handwritten table. At the top of it, he wrote:
U of T, 1980
. That was the year of the photograph in the
Varsity
, three grinning postgrads with what looked like a tin insect. None of the three career columns had any entry earlier than 1984.

Leonard Priest opened the fridge, took a large bowl from it and nudged the door shut with his elbow. He took two large goblets from the cupboard and filled them both just under halfway and handed one to Delorme. He raised his glass and she clinked with him. They both took a sip.

“Very nice,” she said. In contrast to Richard Rota, with Priest she had to look up to meet his eye.

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Neither did I,” Delorme said. Thinking, Boy, is that the understatement of the year.

“What made you change your mind?”

Priest’s calling her twice over the course of the day might have had something to do with it. Message one: He had some information relevant to her case that he wanted to share with her. Message two: He had failed to mention in his first message his most important attribute as far as women were concerned—no irony intended: he was a very good cook. The worst she could expect was a bang-up meal and a first-class bottle of wine.

“I was hungry,” she finally said.

“Fair enough. I hope you won’t be disappointed. Let’s sit.” He tilted his glass toward the living room, the couch. “Don’t worry, I’m on best behaviour.”

Priest sat on the couch. Delorme chose an armchair.

“I’m sorry I don’t have anything for an appetizer. I’d given up hope.”

“You don’t seem the type to give up hope.”

“Yeah, I’m probably an optimist, generally speaking—enjoy a challenge, admire commitment and determination. But I don’t like feeling like an idiot, either, pursuing someone in the face of repeated rejection. Hard to tell the difference sometimes—between commitment and stupidity, I mean. How’s work going these days?”

Delorme shrugged. “Challenging.”

“In general? Or for a woman in a man’s world?”

“Both.”

“I can imagine.” He looked at her and shook his head. “God, I’m an idiot.”

“For which thing?”

“For behaving the way I did. I know you think I’m just playing you—”

“Yes.”

“Right, then. Apology is on the table. Next business …” He picked up a remote from the glass-topped table and pointed it at the largest TV screen Delorme had ever seen. The logo of a cable station came up and he froze the image. “This is
Up to the Minute
—Toronto news show. Tends to be a little fluffy, but it does have the virtue of being live.”

He hit Play and the announcer did his intro. “Today is Tuesday, January third, and you’re watching
Up to the Minute
.”

Priest hit Pause. “I’m assuming the date is of interest.”

“The day Marjorie Flint was abducted.”

“And the time, no? The show airs at five o’clock.”

“And the time.”

Priest reached for the wine and topped up their glasses. He hit Play again and the show continued.

“There he is,” he said, “in all his glory.”

The interviewer asked first about music, any plans for a solo album. No, but Priest said he was honoured to have been asked to play bass on Daniel Lanois’s latest effort. There was no mention of Priest’s clubs, and after a few more pleasantries they went into the nature and makeup of an anti-poverty group he was involved with.

“You don’t need to hear the whole thing,” Priest said, and switched off the TV. “Excuse me a second.”

He went out to the kitchen and bent to peer through the oven door, putting on a pair of glasses to do so. He took them off and came back.

“Dinner is served.”

Cardinal put his dishes in the dishwasher and sat down at the kitchen table again and scrolled through the contact list on his cellphone. He dialed Ronnie Babstock at home. He’d already tried him at work and been told he was on his way back from a business trip to Brussels.

“Ronnie. John Cardinal. Something I want to ask you. Give me a call back when you get a chance—it’s kind of urgent. Hope Brussels was good.”

He went into the living room and picked up the TV remote and just held it in his lap. He thought about his day. Loach coming in and yelling at him in Chouinard’s office.

Loach: Am I lead on this case or not? Because if I am, then I want everyone to pull their weight.

Chouinard (to Cardinal): You didn’t do your follow-up?

Cardinal: I’m working on something that actually promises to go somewhere. These women are all connected through their husbands, who were at school together. I think they must have worked together, too, at some point, and if we can find that point, we might be able to discover who exactly it is that they’ve pissed off so bad.

Loach: We have a recording of the guy’s
voice
, D.S., the guy’s
voice
. I say that trumps any ancient history between the victims’ spouses.

Cardinal: Let me follow this, D.S.

Chouinard: They live in three different cities, these husbands. Do they have any recent connection?

Cardinal: Not that I know of. Not yet. But it may not have to be recent.

Loach: We have a voice on the line confessing to murder and you don’t want to pursue it. That’s your opinion, I don’t care. D.S., we’re going to need some manpower from OPP to make up for the slack around here.

At that, Cardinal had turned to Loach and totally lost it, calling him a pompous little twit and a prima donna and any number of other things until Chouinard booted him out of the office. In the movies it always looked so satisfying to tell someone off. Why in real life did it feel like shit? In the end, Loach got his OPP assistance. Cardinal couldn’t wait to hear from Jerry Commanda on how that was going.

He turned on the television and it tried to sell him a Volvo and he turned it off and put the remote aside. Delorme would be good right now.
Have her sitting on that couch with her feet up. Small feet, white socks. She’d called in sick again and hadn’t returned any of his calls. None of Loach’s either. Loach was turning out to be an albatross, but he had reason to be frustrated with Cardinal and Delorme.

He picked up his land line and dialed Delorme’s home number.

“It’s John. Pick up, Lise. I’m worried about you. I got in royal shit today with Loach and Chouinard. Love to tell you about it. Hope you’re okay.”

He switched off the light and went to stand at the window. The moon hung low over the lake. It was nearly full and he could see the dark shadows of the Manitous out in the middle of the ice.

He went to the bathroom and turned on the shower and then to the bedroom to get undressed. He got his shirt off and stood there holding it. After a minute he put it back on and went back to the bathroom to turn off the water. Then he got his coat from the hall closet and headed out.

The night was clear and twenty-something below and the heater in his Camry was not as efficient as it once was. He drove up the hill across Rayne Street and up to Delorme’s. Her lights were off and there was no car in the driveway.

“Stupid,” Cardinal said—about himself, not Delorme.

He turned the car around and headed back down the hill. At the stop sign, he had a change of plan and made a left toward the downtown. It was a quiet night, not many cars about and too cold for many pedestrians except the odd dog walker. He thought about getting a dog, a living being to come home to, but he had never been much of a pet man. When Kelly was a little girl, they’d had a dog, a floppy-eared mutt named Gizmo that she loved passionately. But the dog developed a brain tumour that changed him from an affectionate goof into a biter. Cardinal had been forced to have him put down, and the memory of breaking his daughter’s heart had spoiled dogs for him forever.

He pulled into the parking lot of the Quiet Pint and sat for a minute. He didn’t recognize any of the vehicles.

Perfect beef tenderloin with a red wine reduction, arugula salad, and for dessert a lemon cream concoction that Delorme could have eaten four times more of.

“Well, you were right,” she said, raising her glass. “You are one hell of a cook.”

“Thank you,” Priest said. “Why don’t you go sit in the living room and I’ll bring us some port. Much underrated, port is.”

He had announced when they sat down that he wanted no discussion of police business during dinner, and they’d been almost entirely successful in avoiding it. Delorme asked him questions about the music industry, and they’d moved on from there to talk of movies and books. She was finding it a lot harder to believe Priest had ever killed anyone. She was feeling pretty comfortable, considering, and you would never have known, to look at her, that she was breaking every rule in the investigator’s handbook.

Priest himself noted this at one point. They had shared a laugh over an amusing scene in a Tom Cruise movie and he suddenly said, “Seriously, Lise—aren’t you being a little irresponsible? If you ever
did
bring a case against me, you’d be in a lot of shit, wouldn’t you? Having fraternized with the accused?”

Delorme shrugged. “Algonquin Bay is small. There’s not a single detective on the squad who hasn’t had to arrest a neighbour or someone they went to school with.”

“Not quite the same, is it?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

He came into the living room now with a dusty bottle of port and sat beside her on the couch and poured them each a glass. When they were about to toast, Delorme’s phone rang.

“Sorry. Hold on, I’ll switch it off.”

“I shut mine away in a drawer when I don’t want to be bothered.”

“I’d love to, but we have to keep them with us at all times.” She put the phone back in her purse and set the purse beside her on the couch. She reached for her glass again. “Sorry about that. Cheers.”

Delorme had never tasted port before, never tasted anything like it.

“Was this made by some monks high on a mountain somewhere?”

“Not bad, is it.” Blue eyes flecked with firelight.

He set his glass down and reached for a slim green folder, then sat back and opened it. Delorme didn’t know why, but his every move was attractive to her in some elemental way. To counter this, she thought of the black mask, Régine Choquette’s contorted body, Fritz Reicher’s “games.”