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MELANIE FOGEL

On our last Tuesday Scrabble night, Mrs. D. handed me a sealed lavender envelope and asked me to keep it, “in case.” Two days later she was dead.

She was the type who always looked like she was on her way to church: lipstick, permed white hair, twin set and modestly high heels. For years we’d crossed paths in the building, at the mailboxes or in the lobby, never exchanging more than a nod hello. When we finally got into a conversation in the laundry room, she introduced herself as “Mrs. DesRochers.” I countered with “Annie Sapp”—let her figure out my marital status.

“You live in the basement, don’t you?” she asked as she pulled folded clothes from a baby blue plastic basket, shook them out and placed them in the washer.

I answered in the affirmative, upending my green-garbage laundry bag into the machine beside hers.

“I guess you don’t get much light down here,” she commented sympathetically. “Does the traffic bother you?”

“You get used to it.” What the hell was she after?

When she invited me up to her place to wait while Coin-a-Matic laboured for us, I guessed she was lonely. I prefer a limited circle of acquaintances, and nosy old ladies are pretty far outside the perimeter. But I was also itchy for another dose of the computer Scrabble game I’d been playing for six straight hours, so to prove to myself I wasn’t addicted, I said okay.

She lived on the third floor, overlooking the parking lot. As we approached her door, a bird started chirping. “That’s Bijou,” she said, smiling with a pride that could be mistaken for maternal. “He always recognizes my footsteps.”

Her furniture looked like she did: old, solid, highly polished; a Turkish rug for colour and lace antimacassars that probably dated back to the days of hair oil. She greeted Bijou, a turquoise and yellow budgie who welcomed her with an enthusiasm worthy of a Pomeranian, then went into the kitchen to make tea. I took the opportunity to read her bookshelves. Mostly historical romances and royal biographies. And The Official Scrabble® Players Dictionary.

We spent most of the twenty-two minutes talking Scrabble. I discoursed on the delights of playing against a computer, but Mrs. D. wouldn’t take the hint; she wanted a Scrabble date. She preferred afternoons, and I being a self-(i.e. rarely) employed librarian, could have said yes. But I like afternoons for the web, since it’s slow in the evenings, so I lied about wanting to be home should a client call. We decided on Tuesday because it’s a lousy TV night.

Mrs. D. proved an excellent opponent—better, in some ways, than my computer version, whose sound and graphics lacked the charm of her wit and hospitality. Despite the heavy old furniture, her apartment was bright and airy—a nice change from my Goodwill-eclectic pit. At first I went easy on her, but when she played mangabey and flitch back to back, the kid gloves came off.

That last Tuesday, she was distracted. Didn’t bat an eye when I put enquirer on a triple word. During the four months we’d played, we’d rarely gotten personal, so I didn’t ask what was wrong. She gave me the envelope as I was leaving, and I said “sure” without comment. Then, on Thursday, I met the super in the garbage room and he told me she’d died. “Damn!” I said, somehow resentful she hadn’t consulted me. Then, “Who’s going to look after her bird?”

He shrugged. “She was your friend,” he accused.

Acquaintance, I corrected silently. But she had a couple of my books, as well as a key to my flat, as I had to hers, in case one of us locked herself out. “One of her relatives might take him. If she has any,” I said to a face neither hopeful nor helpful. “If he doesn’t starve to death first.”

“Well…” He went back to emptying the blue box. He wasn’t going to do anything for a tenant who couldn’t tip.

I returned to my flat thinking I’d better retrieve my books before they got packed with whatever her next of kin would be taking. I could feed the bird at the same time.

The super hadn’t told me about the police tape. I debated crawling under it, but that wouldn’t tell me why it was there. So I called Bernie, the only cop I knew and the man who was likely handling the case, and for a change didn’t have to leave a message.

“It’s just a formality,” he explained. “I’m sure it was natural causes.”

The paper boy had found her that morning. When she hadn’t responded to his knock as usual, he’d tried the knob. Bernie’s scenario was that Mrs. D. had fallen, as old ladies are wont to do, and hit her head on the cast-iron radiator.

“C’mon,” I said. “There’s nothing by the radiator she could trip over.”

“At that age, you don’t need anything. A dizzy spell, your knee buckles. She wore orthopedic shoes.”

“So? She was healthy as a horse. She used to take the stairs for exercise.”

“Yeah, but at that age. We see it all the time, Annie. Old people. Weak bones.”

“So you’re going to save money on an autopsy by chalking her up to statistical probability?”

“No, we’re waiting on the autopsy. She isn’t high priority.”

Alone people never are, I thought.

“Actually, you might be able to help,” Bernie said. “You ever been in her apartment?”

“Plenty of times.”

“Good. Her door was probably unlocked all night. Get the superintendent to let you in and see if anyone took advantage.”

“Me? Didn’t she have one of those ‘in case of emergency phone so-and-so’ numbers?”

“You tell me. Apparently she’s got a son someplace, but we haven’t tracked him down yet.”

“She never mentioned him.” An estranged son wouldn’t know if anything was missing anyway. Was I really the only person close enough to her to know? I told him I already had a key and asked if it was okay to touch stuff.

“We don’t put tape up for decoration,” Bernie said. But despite the possibility of theft, he was in no hurry to send in the forensic team. “She was old, Annie,” he reminded me.

“What are you saying, Bernie? That she was senile? Because she wasn’t. She beat me at Scrabble all the time.”

“She was eighty-two.”

That surprised me. “So what?”

“You sound like you’d rather she was murdered.”

I just didn’t want her dismissed. “She wasn’t a dotty old lady,” I said.

Bernie paused to grind his teeth or something, then said, “Take a look around, don’t touch anything. And don’t break the tape,” he warned before hanging up.

Bernie and I had met during the investigation of my nephew Ivor’s murder, which got me more involved with family affairs than I’d been in decades. We aren’t friends, but he finds my thought patterns useful on occasion. He says my brain’s wired differently, so I make connections he wouldn’t. I once told him it’s an occupational hazard of subject indexers, but only once. I don’t want him calling the National Library when he needs a consultant.

I hadn’t told Bernie about the envelope; it must have Freudian-slipped my mind. I hadn’t even opened it, as if that act would make her death more real, even though—or because—I was pretty sure this is what she’d mean by “in case.”

Because Mrs. D.’s newest piece of furniture dated from around 1952, her flat looked like a scene from a PBS Mystery! My eyes zoomed in on the chalk outline under the window opposite her front door, travelled to the big bloodstain by the head, then panned up to the red smear on the radiator. There was nothing in the area she could have tripped over or stumbled against—unless you count sixty-inch shears a hazardous product.

The place definitely looked different, and it wasn’t just poor Bijou huddled silent in his cage like a street person in a doorway. The middle cushion of the sofa had a dent in it, something I’d only ever seen after having sat there myself. The doily on the back of the wing chair was off kilter, and the cut-glass ashtray wasn’t quite centred on the coffee table. I bet myself that, because of cutbacks, Bernie wouldn’t dust for fingerprints unless he had good reason to.

Hands in the back pockets of my jeans to avoid inadvertently touching anything, I went up to the birdcage and said, “Hi, Bijou.” He looked at me with a baleful black eye. “Guess you miss your mom, huh?” He responded with a slow blink. The cage was uncharacteristically messy, as was the area of carpet it stood on—chaff and gravel and feathers all over the place. Something like my apartment, although not so cramped and literally shittier. The food and water containers were the kind with long tubes that you filled from the top, and my conscience eased when I saw they were far from empty.

I scanned the room from this angle. Bijou’s cage stood about three feet behind the wing chair, and three feet in front of and to the side of the window over the radiator. I tested the distance. Mrs. D. might have stumbled on her way to talk to the bird, but she couldn’t have hit the radiator. In the light coming from the window, I could see smears in the ashtray, as if it hadn’t been properly wiped. Maybe Mrs. D. made an extra effort when she expected company, but that didn’t sound like her. She’d struck me as the kind of person who ironed nightgowns.

Bijou hopped off his perch for a snack, and I noticed his water cup had things in it I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, identify. On the assumption the cops would skip dusting the birdcage, I removed the container to clean it, but in the kitchen, the gleaming sink and counter tops needed protection. On TV the cops always use a handkerchief; I figured the kitchen towel would do.

There was no kitchen towel.

In the bathroom, there was no bathroom towel.

Who steals towels?

“Not everybody ties them through the fridge door handle,” Bernie told me when I called him. I hadn’t realized he’d taken in so much of my flat the couple of times he’d been here.

“She had one with roses on it that was strictly decorative,” I told him back. “Even that’s gone.” I’d confirmed that after I returned to Mrs. D.’s apartment, having cleaned and filled Bijou’s water container at my place.

Bernie mulled that over a moment. “Nothing else missing?”

“Hard to say, since I couldn’t touch the doors and drawers. But she must have had a visitor.” I told him what I’d spotted. “Unless your people sat on the sofa or used the ashtray.”

“Or she did.” He sounded insulted.

“You didn’t know Mrs. DesRochers.”

Bernie sighed like he would have to pay for the manpower personally and told me the forensic guys would be finished by the evening at the latest.

With nothing else to do, I got on the web and looked up the care and feeding of budgies, and picked up a couple of Scrabble words in the process: cere and lutino. Then I looked up Scrabble and found a site where I could play by e-mail; but it cost money, and I wasn’t all that sure a remote human would prove a better substitute for Mrs. D. than my computer game.

When you’re self-unemployed, time management consists of choosing between what you ought to do and what you want to do. That Friday, I still hadn’t checked to see if anything besides the towels were missing and, because budgies.org said to change the water every day, what I wanted to do was assuage my guilt. So I trekked back up to Mrs. D.’s.

About the only thing not covered in fingerprint dust was Bijou; Mrs. D. would have been horrified. It made the apartment eerily different, like a familiar place in a dream. I concentrated on the cage, the only thing seemingly unchanged by the invasion. Poor tyke looked lonely. My mother used to leave the radio on for the cat, so I hunted around for a radio.

I’d never been in Mrs. D.’s bedroom and halted at the door with a creepy feeling that my nose would end up where she wouldn’t have wanted it poked. But, really, I was doing her a favour looking after Bijou like this. I told myself that twice before I went in.

A television and VCR sat atop a satinwood dresser that faced the candlewick-covered bed. She’d put masking tape over the VCR’s display panel. I lifted it off. 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00. I stuck the tape back down and thought she’d carried independence a tad too far by not asking me to help her set it.

No radio here. The kitchen? I was crossing the living room to get there when I heard the snick of a key in the lock.

The man who walked in looked even more startled than I must have. Another expression flicked across his face, too quickly for me to make out, and then he smiled like a shoe salesman. “I’ll assume you have a right to be here,” he said, the way shoe salesmen say “Can I help you?”

He was tall and good-looking in an overly careful way. His navy blue trench coat, beige slacks and oxblood loafers were all top-of-the-line Wal-Mart. As I studied his pale face, trying to decide if his hair were natural or Grecian Formula, I recognized the eyes and forehead. “You must be Mrs. DesRochers’ son,” I said.

He looked annoyed that I’d guessed his secret but nodded affirmation. “And you?”

“Just a neighbour. I’m looking after Bijou until someone claims him.”

I made purposeful, kootchey-coo sounds to the bird, trying to say “Aren’t you a little late to finally visit your mother?” with my body language.

He got some kind of message, because he stood there awkwardly while I pointedly ran my finger through the featureless patina of fingerprint dust on the coffee table, tsking for the shame of how this well-preserved furniture had suffered at the hands of heartless cops. He lit a cigarette without offering me one, took a deep drag, then came up with an explanation for his presence. “I’ve, ah, come to collect some papers.”

Lucky I wasn’t facing him full on, because an image of that lavender envelope popped behind my eyes, making them blink. “Be my guest,” I said to him sideways.

He pulled open some drawers but without much conviction. I knew he wanted me to leave, which is why I took my time. Finally, he ran out of patience. “She must have thrown them out,” he announced, slamming the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

“What, in particular, were you looking for?” I asked sweetly. “Maybe she mentioned it to me.”

“Oh, just some papers. Legal stuff…”

Not a man who thought fast on his feet. How hard would it be to rattle him? “Your mother never spoke about you, you know.”

He knew. “We didn’t get along,” he said as if that explained everything. “She ever talk to you about where she kept important stuff?”

“Bijou was pretty important to her,” I said, hoping to lay a little guilt on him. “Will you be taking him with you?”

“I got no place to keep a bird. Why don’t you just flush him?”

Did the Humane Society have a Most Wanted list? “You know the police are looking for you?”

A moment’s panic in his eyes, then, “Why?”

“To tell you your mother’s dead, I guess.”

“Oh. Ah, they already told me that.”

“Good,” I nodded. Why hadn’t Bernie mentioned it? “I guess you got the key from them?”

“Yeah.”

I had no idea where Mrs. D. normally kept her house keys. Nor did I know why I was so sure this man wasn’t honest. I think it was his grooming. I’ve never trusted guys who look like catalogue models.

“Well,” he said, hands in his trench coat pockets, “I guess I’ll have to see about getting this stuff cleared out.”

By way of answer, I held up my fingerprint-dust schmutzed hands and then headed for the bathroom to wash them. Maybe this sleaze was his mother’s rightful heir, but I hated the idea of his having charge of things she cherished.

When I got back to the living room, he was gone.

“He’s a slimeball,” I told Bernie next morning after he confirmed the guy had gotten the keys from the cops just before he’d walked in on me. Police HQ is only a ten-minute stroll away.

“What did he do to you?” he asked, sounding worried.

I gave him a blow-by-blow account of my meeting with the slimeball, and in return Bernie told me his first name was François, commonly known as Frank, and he had done time for pimping and drug dealing, which explained why Mrs. D. never talked about him. He lived in Hamilton and had been home when the cops called about his mother.

“It doesn’t take long to get from Ottawa to Hamilton,” I said. “He could have killed her and driven all night to get back.”

“We don’t know that she was killed.”

“What about the autopsy?”

“She had a bruise on her upper left arm.”

“There you go,” I said. “Someone hit her.”

“Old people bruise easy, she could have bumped into something.”

“How was her brain, Bernie?”

The preliminary autopsy confirmed that Mrs. D. wasn’t a stumbling, senile wreck. Bernie gave me the details with gruesome minuteness. He didn’t usually keep me that informed, so I figured it was his way of saying I was right. As a quid pro quo, I told him about the envelope.

He mumbled something that could have been merde. “What’s in it?”

The lavender sheet lay face up on the sofa cushion beside me, the single, fountain pen-written paragraph framed by the date and the signature. “It’s dated Tuesday, and she leaves fifty-three thousand, one hundred and thirty-three dollars and seventy-two cents to Guide Dogs for the Blind.” She used to cut the stamps off envelopes for them, too. “And a thousand to me, and the contents of her apartment to the Salvation Army.”

Bernie didn’t say anything for a moment, then: “You know where she’d come up with a figure like that?”

“Her bank account?”

“She was getting the Old Age supplement.”

That didn’t mean anything. I knew people working three jobs who collected EI.

“I wouldn’t count on spending any of that thousand,” Bernie warned me.

“It’s handwritten, a valid will.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“She wasn’t senile,” I said, real slow.

“Okay. By the way, did she have a cleaning lady?”

“She never said anything about one.”

He had a hard time believing a woman of Mrs. D.’s age could keep an apartment that clean. “She must have spent all her time polishing.”

All those evenly coated surfaces came back to me. “Are you saying there were fewer fingerprints than you’d expected?”

That’s just what he was saying, and we argued some more about Mrs. D.’s ability to look after herself and her home.

“Her place was always immaculate,” I said, as if her standards were normal. “I mean, she wasn’t anal about it, but she didn’t have a heck of a lot else to do.”

“Gee, I didn’t know you were so busy,” Bernie wisecracked. I definitely had to keep that man out of my kitchen.

“If he knew about the money, he could have killed her so he could inherit it,” I said.

“She could’ve just fallen, Annie.”

“But not from a brain seizure or anything?”

“No.” Bernie knew he’d upset me and gracefully changed the subject by asking me to drop off the will.

I looked at the lavender paper again. She’d signed it Léonie DesRochers (Mrs.). Until I’d opened it, I hadn’t even known her first name. Léonie, the acute accent a bold stroke, almost a tick. She’d probably been born Francophone. I admired her Scrabble prowess even more. “He’s a slimeball,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Yeah. Annie, if you see him again, just walk away. And call me.” He gave me his home phone number. I felt like I’d been promoted.

Bernie’s shot at my housekeeping skills hadn’t bothered me, much. But I got to thinking about myself at Mrs. D.’s age. Would I end up one of those crones with six cats? (Highly improbable.) Blue hair? (Almost impossible.) In an apartment crammed with odd bits of my life? (Very likely.) So maybe I should clean up. Right. As soon as I did more important things, like…

Bernie’s not lazy; why wouldn’t he link the bruise on her arm to the crack on her head? Why wasn’t he working from the assumption she’d been shoved against that radiator? On the other hand, why was I so sure that Mrs. D.’s death hadn’t been old age catching up with her?

No, I didn’t “rather she was murdered.” Maybe I was just looking for something to occupy my idle brain; maybe I resented Bernie’s insinuation that old people die so easily; maybe I didn’t want to think about myself dying all alone like that. Finally, I decided the reason didn’t matter as much as proving that somebody had murdered her.

Crime see Suspect see Motive. Okay, a slimeball’s a pretty good suspect, and money’s a pretty good motive. If Mrs. D.’s $54,133.72 was real, and Frank knew about it.

Presumably Mrs. D. knew about it, so why were her kitchen cabinets full of yellow-label cans? Would she have been saving it all to give to Guide Dogs for the Blind? How could we have talked so much without her telling me more about herself?

There’d been a Mr. DesRochers, but all I knew of him was that he’d been in the War. And she knew Pitman shorthand, which she’d offered to teach me. I’d never had the heart to tell her voice-recognition systems were doing to stenography what hypertext had already done to book indexing.

At that dead end, I went back to thinking about why Frank had killed his mother. I even said it out loud that way: Why did Frank DesRochers kill his mother? It’s a different question from: Why did Frank DesRochers kill Mrs. D.? It got me figuring another way.

The first thing I figured was: he didn’t do it on purpose. Even if he was a slimeball pimp-drug pusher, he didn’t strike me as the type who would cold-bloodedly kill his mother. Besides, he didn’t have the brains to plan a trip to the video store. And the way she fell made it seem likely she was pushed. He was there, they got into a fight, and he pushed her. Then he didn’t ransack the place looking for whatever he wanted, because Mom’s dead, and he’s in a hurry to scram. But he did do a cursory search, because he knew he wouldn’t find anything when he opened drawers while I was there.

It was an easy scene to envisage: They shout, he shoves, she falls. He runs to check her, finds she’s dead. Maybe gets some blood on him. Uses the towels to clean his hands, wipe up fingerprints, which means he had a reason to worry about leaving fingerprints. And he searches the place. Search see Hidden see Secrets. Mrs. D. had a lot of them, including her own son. And the envelope. Which she gave to me to keep secret from Frank? So he wasn’t looking for the envelope, because how could he look for something he didn’t know existed? So what the hell was he looking for?

Looking for…searching for…searching…the web. But you can’t search the web for answers when you don’t even know the questions. Okay, try another tack. Play devil’s advocate. Pull a Bernie.

Could Mrs. D. have simply lost her balance and fallen? Did that really happen to old people? I got onto Google.com, and worked out the most efficient way to enter the search criteria. Old, people, and falling were just too vague. Okay, losing your balance. Losing balance? Balance was the most specific word, which should always come first when you’re using a search engine. I typed in “balance lost.” What I got was:

Results 1-10 of about 298,000 for balance lost. Search took 0.91 seconds.

Blueberries May Restore Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age/S

…Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age By Judy…

www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/1999/990910b.htm

U-M freshman not drunk, may have lost balance

…freshman not drunk, may have lost balance Detroit Free Press…

www.freerepublic.com/forum/a362c2f0e24de.htm

C&EN 6/29/98: FINANCIAL ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheet

…ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheets CAPITAL…

pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980629/anal.html

Lost your bank balance?

news sensation The Ketamine look, the Fashion world has been shocked this week…

www.nwnet.co.uk/n-23/xavier.htm

Bank balances and fashion. And Bernie thinks I think weird. The next page had more bank balance references, and $54,133.72 did sound like a bank account. Finally I hit one with the phrase “Unclaimed bank balance.” So far, all the pages had been American. Was there anything like that in Canada?

I typed in “unclaimed bank balance account canada” and got it on the very first citation:

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

…an unclaimed balance back from the Bank of Canada? …

ucbswww.bank-banque-canada.ca/faq_english.htm

The Unclaimed Bank Accounts page was straightforward. All you had to do was type in the name, and it returned:

Unclaimed Balance

Information Name: DESROCHERS, LEONIE

Payee: Address: MONTREAL (QUE) Savings Account: 8135402	Transferred to Bank of Canada: $54,133.72
Last Transaction Date: 1973/8/17	Transfer Date: 1983/12/31
Status: Unclaimed	Outstanding Balance: $54,133.72

Originating Bank: NATIONAL TRUST, 1535, RUE STE-CATHERINE, MONTREAL, QC, H3N 040

To my way of thinking, the only way a woman who taped over the flashing 12:00 of her VCR would know about a web page for unclaimed bank balances was if someone told her. And my guess was, that someone was Frank. So when he’d walked in on me, what he’d been after was evidence that he’d told her—the Bank of Canada’s phone number, or claim forms—something showing that she’d begun procedures to claim her money. Because he had killed her, and the way to avoid another jail sentence was to remove any evidence of the obvious motive.

And he was going to come back—real soon, if he hadn’t already—to do a more thorough search, which meant somebody should be watching the place.

“I found the money,” I told Bernie over Mrs. D.’s phone.

He put me on hold while he told someone to check it out. I used the time to finish wiping fingerprint dust off the coffee table. I’d been cleaning for an hour; it was something to do while waiting for him to call me back.

“What if he does know about it?” Bernie finally said. “He can’t inherit it anyway.”

“But he doesn’t know that,” I argued. “That’s what he’s been looking for: her will. He tells her about the money, asks for it, she says no and he kills her.”

“But Annie, if she found out about it from him, when’d she have time to write the will?”

I look forward to the day Bernie can follow my thinking without my having to lay it before him step by step. “He sees her some time before Tuesday night, because Tuesday night’s when she gave me the envelope. He’d found out about the money and asks her for it. She says, ‘I’ll think about it,’ or something. She writes the will, gives it to me. He comes back Wednesday night, she says no, he gets mad--” I heard a key in the front door. “He’s here,” I whispered, hanging up and grabbing one of Mrs. D.’s novels to look like I was reading.

“Hello,” I beamed when Frank walked in.

“You move in or something?”

“Just keeping Bijou company.” The phone started ringing. “Somebody has to look after him.”

His eyes narrowed, darting from me to the phone and back again. “I told you, I got no place to put a bird.”

“Pity,” I said, shriller than you should say a word like that, but the phone was pretty loud, “your mother really loved him.”

We stared at each other a moment, waiting for the next ring, but it didn’t come. “Look,” he said, “I got stuff to do here.”

“I understand,” I said, standing up. His face took on a self-satisfied look, like a teacher who’d just ordered a rotten kid to do something, and the kid obeys. He even stepped aside to clear my path to the door, so he had to turn around to follow me when I headed for the kitchen.

He found me rinsing the dustcloth. “Leave it,” he said. “You can go now.”

“Thanks, but I’d like to finish cleaning up.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I do. I have to do it because I cared about your mother, and she cared about her things.”

“Well, they’re my things now, so you can go.” “Are you sure?”

He stood there for at least half a minute before he finally gave me one piss-poor imitation of a skeptical laugh, and said, “She leave a will or something?”

“As a matter of fact, she did.” I brushed by him as I strolled back to the living room.

“No, she didn’t,” he insisted, following so hot on my heels that he almost bumped into me when I stopped.

“Is that what you’ve been looking for?” I asked, turning to face him. “Because you won’t find it here.”

“Where then.” More of an order than a question.

“Safe and sound.” I started to head for the wing chair, but he snatched my arm.

“Is this what happened on Wednesday? Did she refuse to give you the money, and you got angry and grabbed her?” He looked worried but didn’t let go. “And then maybe she said something to you, and you got even madder, and pushed her too hard? Is that what happened?”

“You’re crazy.” But he let go of me.

My arm hurt like hell, but I refused to rub it as I moved away from him. “You pushed her too hard and she fell, that’s all. An accident.” If there was any justice, manslaughter.

“I wasn’t even here.”

“They found your fingerprints. You didn’t wipe them all away.” I could practically see the smoke coming out his ears as his mental machinery ground. “How could your fingerprints get into this apartment when you haven’t seen your mother in twenty years?”

His lips started to twitch, and he blinked in what I mistook for confusion. Then he lunged.

He moved about as fast as he thought. Aiming for my neck, he caught my shoulder, knocking me onto the sofa while he continued on momentum, right into Bijou’s cage. They both hit the floor at the same time, and I caught a glimpse of him, wet and chaffy, wiping birdseed and gravel from his eyes as I ran for the door.

Which whacked me right on the side of the head.

I wish I could have seen it, Bernie kicking the door in, gun in two hands yelling “Freeze!” like you see on TV. But I was out cold.

It took three days for the headache to clear. Bernie called on the first to ask how I was. I don’t remember what I answered, but it took him two more days to call back.

“You wouldn’t think he had the brains to find something like that,” he said in reference to the Bank of Canada web page.

Six-year-old kids can find web pages, but like my thought processes, I considered it wiser not to disabuse Bernie. Instead I asked if Frank’s confession had been hard to come by.

“No,” he replied, sounding relieved I was willing to chat. “He believed your lie about the fingerprints. We never told him different.”

Frank DesRochers had called his mother several times from Hamilton, after years of no communication. Then he’d driven to Ottawa to persuade her to claim the money and give it to him—it went pretty much as I’d predicted. After he’d killed her, he’d returned to Hamilton so he could be home to receive the sad news of his mother’s death.

“He said he wanted to start his own business.” Bernie’s tone told me how much he believed him. “Probably drugs, but he needed a stake. Fifty-four thousand would have done it.”

I was thinking how fifty-four thousand isn’t enough money to turn somebody’s life around, let alone end it, when Bernie added, “What I don’t understand is, how could you forget about that much money?”

“It probably wasn’t that much when she originally banked it.” I’d already done some calculating. “Don’t forget, it was earning interest in the good old days of double-digit inflation. It doesn’t take long at eighteen per cent. And she may have assumed it was still sitting there.”

We discussed how well Bijou was settling into his new home; to my undying gratitude, one of Bernie’s subordinates had taken him. Then he asked, “How’re you feeling?”

“A lot better. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”

He made a pfff noise. “You scared the shit out of me, not answering. It was stupid, confronting him like that. Especially when you think a guy’s a killer.”

“You mean my not answering the phone persuaded you he was a killer?”

“You always answer by the second ring,” he said defensively.

“Anyway, he’s not a murderer—not technically, just a manslaughterer.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed. What made you so sure she didn’t just fall, anyway?”

I’d never been sure, I’d just disliked Bernie’s version of her death. “She was my friend,” I said, because it was an easy answer.

Bernie said he understood.

Author’s note: All the web pages in this work of fiction are real. Because the web changes by the minute, your search on Google may return different results.

MELANIE FOGEL is the editor of the Ellis Award-winning Storyteller, Canada’s Short Story Magazine. Her own writing has appeared in publications as diverse as The Canadian Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff and the Ottawa Citizen. She is also the author of two how-to books for writers.