Читать книгу Quin and Morgan Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - John Moss - Страница 13

They talked very little on the way back from Waldron. Miranda needed to assimilate her imagined account with the facts. Morgan was uneasy about how her assumptions made her seem vulnerable. There were still the circumstances of a suicide-murder to be resolved. He feared for her if she turned out to be at the centre.

Cutting down from the 401, Miranda asked if he wanted to be dropped off at his place in the Annex. He told her yes if it wasn’t out of her way.

“I’ve never understood why people say that, Morgan. Since I’m going to check in on Jill before I go home, it’s considerably out of my way.”

“Margot Kidder.”

“What?”

“Lois Lane — that’s who would play you in the movie. When she was quite a bit younger.”

“What movie?”

“Don’t you cast yourself in movies?”

“Yes. But I cast myself. I’d play me. Isn’t that the point?”

“Sandra Bullock?”

“You just want to wear tights.”

“Tights?”

“Lois Lane, Superman, changing in phone booths. Maybe Kate Nelligan.”

“If you couldn’t be you?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t it sometimes feel like you’re watching yourself in a film, like someone else is calling the shots?”

“It’s called dissociation, Morgan. Or Calvinism. And who would be you? Gene Hackman, right? All men want to be Denzel Washington or Gene Hackman, no?”

“You might as well be someone you like.”

“Aren’t you already?” As soon as she spoke, she realized she was offside. As comfortable as he was with himself, that wasn’t who he wanted to be. No one really wanted to be himself, or herself, she thought.

She wheeled up in front of his house. There were still a few kids hanging out, playing hopscotch, two girls and a boy skipping rope. In the heart of the city and down-at-heels trendy, the Annex tried its best to be a neighbourhood. “Here we are, Morgan. Home is the hunter.”

“You want to come in?”

“Not on your life. No, I’ve got to check in on Jill. She’s too calm.”

“It’s her Eleanor Drummond side.”

“She’s pure Molly Bray.”

“I hope so for her sake.”

“Would you help me put the top up?”

He got out and undid the snaps on the tonneau cover, folded it, and tucked it behind the seats. The car looked black in this light. In the sunlight it was racing green. He hauled the top out of its well, and Miranda reached up and pulled it over and down, clinching it into place.

“Thanks, Morgan,” she said through the window. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

He surprised them both by getting back in the car.

“What is it?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Are you?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

He gazed at her in the ambient light of the city, in the glow of the instrument panel. Dark illuminated circles in the burled walnut exuded a faint violet that caught in the highlights of her eyes.

She reached over and touched his hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Miranda, the girl, Molly Bray, whatever she did, and you’re only guessing, she didn’t learn anything from you. And neither did Griffin.”

She looked startled, as if Morgan had exposed something she hadn’t yet confronted herself.

“Whatever happened between you and Griffin, you in no way, no way, empowered him to try it again.”

Miranda realized pattern formation was a way of taking the blame on herself, using her own sense of guilt to obscure Griffin’s depravity, which she felt was somehow her fault.

Morgan observed her watching him, the violet highlights in her eyes cryptic, as if she were waiting to hear him out before passing judgment, which could go several ways. She could be angry or hurt, or possibly relieved, or resentful for being exposed.

“Listen,” he said, “you had similar needs. That doesn’t mean you were the same.”

At first she thought he meant her and Griffin.

“You talked about the absence of parents catching up on her. Miranda, your father left you just when you hit puberty.”

“He died, for goodness’ sake.”

“At fourteen you held him responsible. No amount of love or anger could bring him back, no amount of crying or wishing changed anything. I know from how little you talk about it how much it hurt you, his leaving. Your mother and sister had each other. Your father left you alone.”

The violet in her eyes glistened.

“By the pond …” He hesitated.

“You didn’t know you were being watched until that summer when you were seventeen. You didn’t know if anyone was there for sure, but the possibility excited you. What was Celia’s reaction? She got married. Donny was her way of proving she was normal. Griffin scared her into doing what she was going to do, anyway.

“You went back there on your own. Why? It wasn’t about sex. For the first time since your father died your behaviour, Miranda, determined the quality of existence of someone else, an adult, a male. It was no more sexual at first than a teenage girl’s love for her father. Intimacy, without any threat of encroachment. You went back again and again. It gave you the sense you could make anything happen.

“Lying there butt-naked, bare-assed in the grass, you were celebrating being Miranda. You were cavorting, disporting, with fate. Robert Griffin was essential to the scene. That he was Robert Griffin was irrelevant, or maybe not. Maybe if you knew he was the mill owner, it was even better. It gave you more power. He was a grown-up, a man, at your mercy, and you were merciless. You were merciless that August challenging death.

“But you were also afraid you were being manipulated by your unseen observer, that it was his desire making you return to play out what must have seemed a charade in a foreign language, afraid that it was your desire to please him. You were merciless, Miranda, merciless in judging yourself, your brand-new sexuality.

“Through the next year you found your kissy-face boyfriend who didn’t like sex. Perfect. Daniel Webster kept you safe among words, gave you a context to let your confusion run free.

“And you got older, fall, winter, spring, and nothing was resolved. When you returned the next summer, it was a very deliberate act. You were eighteen, a young woman, you walked by the mill, you knew he would see you, you went back to prove once and for all you were responsible for your own fate. It wasn’t sexual that day. It was all about contesting the limits of power, maybe defining the limits of being.

“And he followed you. He was supposed to be your necessary witness. It wasn’t meant to be a trial by fire, nor law, but he became judge and executioner. He intruded in the negotiations with yourself. He violated your relationship with your father, what was left of him in your heart. And he brutalized your capacity for being open to love. He raped you, Miranda, and left you bleeding inside, with a great wound, a gap in your life that only began healing in the last few days since the predator died.”

“David.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“G’night, Miranda.”

“G’night, David. See you tomorrow. It’s buck-naked, Morgan, not butt-naked. And I wasn’t.”

“Good night, Miranda.”

“Good night.”

As he unlocked his front door, Morgan was startled by his reflection hovering within the depths of paint in the evening light, and then reassured. He had given the door fourteen coats of midnight blue, sanding lightly between each coat until the depthless patina gleamed like a Georgian doorway in Dublin. He had done that a dozen years ago, and still approached it like a welcoming friend, whatever his mood, whatever time of day or night he came home.

His house was red brick, a neighbourhood sort of home that had been bought by a contractor and turned into an agglomeration of condos that related to each other like disparate planes in an M.C. Escher drawing. His own place was partly on the second floor but extended via an open-concept stairwell with a wrought-iron staircase up to a third-floor loft. That was his garret bedroom. His kitchen, toward the back of the building, dropped half a storey to accommodate the entryway into another apartment from cantilevered steps up the side of the building over the driveway. He prided himself on not knowing just what fitted where or how many people actually shared the house with him. Not that it mattered. The building was well constructed, the renovations were sound, and his place was sepulchral, unless the shared furnace was running, which sent a hush through the air.

Morgan walked across the living room without turning on the lights. The two-storey window that dominated the front wall, between the foyer and the far-side wall of exposed brick, let in enough city light that he could see his way through the intricacies of modular spaces envisioned by the builder fifteen years ago as urban chic. Two banks of vertical blinds had been installed, but since Morgan first moved in while reconstruction was still going on, neither set had worked. The upper bank stayed permanently closed, which was fine, giving him privacy in his garret loft and a modicum of darkness for sleeping. The lower bank was irreparably open. His neighbours could look in if they wished, just as he could see them, but by urban convention they lived their lives as if neither could observe the other, as if their pre-dawn and evening activities were privy to themselves alone.

He picked up the remote in the darkness and flicked on the television, then without waiting to see what was on went into the bathroom, which doubled as a laundry facility. Shucking his clothes into a basket, he plucked pajamas from a hook on the back of the door, sniffed them, and without showering put them on, splashing a bit of cold water on his face before going out into the hall. He turned abruptly back into the bathroom, clicked on the light, and brushed his teeth. Then he flossed. He always flossed. Even though he hadn’t had dinner yet, he flossed to subdue the bacterial detritus of the day.

In the kitchen he whipped up a quick spinach salad from pre-washed leaves and took it with two bagels and a beer back into the living room, where he settled in front of the television. Reaching over, he turned on a table lamp. Morgan always found it depressing to walk past houses at night and see only the light of a television flickering against the ceiling and walls like some sort of primordial campfire. He watched television with the lights on, though he often listened to music in the dark.

When Harry Meets Sally was playing, or was it When Harry Met Sally? He couldn’t remember, but he recognized the scene immediately. Meg Ryan was just beginning her tumultuous orgasm in the restaurant. Billy Crystal was bemused. Meg was awesomely sexy. Billy was quizzical, unmanned. Meg was frightening, ecstatic. Morgan set his bagels down on the side table.

The most amazing thing about the scene was how erotic it was. There was no other scene to compare, not since Marlene Dietrich snapped her legs apart at the Blue Angel. Sharon Stone was primal, but predatory. And yet Meg Ryan was faking. The whole point was that she was faking. The turn on wasn’t the unrestrained and voluptuous display of sex, but the fact that she was in such awesome control.

Morgan sank back into the sofa, clutching his beer in one hand and reaching for a bagel with the other. The salad sat on the table untouched.

He was restless. He turned off the television and climbed to his bedroom as if he were looking for something, sat down on the edge of the bed, then got up and went back down the spiral staircase. Settling on the sofa, he clicked on the TV again and switched to CNN, with the volume so low that he couldn’t make out what was being said but could follow parallel stories in the subscript scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

The bastard had never lost track of her, he thought. That was the part that made his skin crawl. He lived as a reclusive lawyer, he played in his mills, he amassed his fabulous collection of koi. He did what he did with Molly Bray, and with how many other young girls, as well. But all the time he shadowed Miranda.

Perhaps Griffin enrolled in Sandhu’s semiology course because he was enthralled with language, and wonder of wonders, Miranda was there, too. An older student wouldn’t stand out. They weren’t interested in job potential. They took high-interest seminars with high motivation. He might already have sat behind her in lecture theatres, taking anthropology and human geography courses. Maybe he was in the cafeterias, in the library, watching her on dates. Morgan felt enraged as he thought about Griffin haunting Miranda’s life, and frightened, to know that she had been oblivious.

That was a big leap, though, from university to the present. She did a tour with the RCMP, and she and he had been hanging together in homicide for over a decade. Had Griffin been watching both of them? It wouldn’t be hard from a distance. They had even been in the news every once in a while.

Why, Morgan thought, why name her executor? Griffin lived in her shadow for years, but when he knew someone was going to kill him he came out of the shadows, he touched her, he understood it would bring back the past.

Miranda knew about Molly Bray now. Had Eleanor Drummond known about her?

He switched back to Harry and Sally and turned up the sound. They were getting together at a New Year’s party. Billy Crystal wouldn’t play him. The comedian was charming, but there was nothing ambivalent about him. The best actors projected menace or suffering, even at their lightest moments. Meg Ryan, no, Miranda wasn’t sad and perky. America’s fallen sweetheart. Falling, perpetually falling. Miranda was Miranda. That was what he liked about her.

Morgan wondered about Ellen Ravenscroft. Maybe he should give her a call. He knew he wouldn’t. Miranda would know if he did. He didn’t feel he had to be faithful to Miranda. They lived separate lives, or went through the motions of conducting themselves as if they lived separate lives. It was just that she would know.

He found it easier, at this age, if he tried not to think about sex. During the day, he noticed himself monitoring skirt lengths and panty lines and the contours of sweaters, the peep line of blouses, but he sublimated his visceral responses until evenings, and often by then, now, in his early forties, they dissipated into vague yearnings for company. Not that he wasn’t up for it when the necessity arose. It wasn’t that he was becoming asexual.

Since moving into his postmodern Victorian condo, Morgan hadn’t had many visitors. His former wife, Lucy, had come over once, drunk, and had tried to seduce him. That was when the paint on the door was still tacky, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since. The Bobbsey Twins had once paid a memorable call. That was an episode that overloaded his stock of erotic recollections to the point of short-circuiting the system. It was the best of adventures, but also the worst. He savoured it sometimes in the depths of the night, and he cringed at how absurdly distressing the whole affair had been.

It wasn’t an affair.

He sat back, staring into the radiant play of colour emanating from the tube, and remembered.

One was blond with big hair and a strapping physique. The other was slender, with a pixie-punk hairdo of indeterminate hue, mostly mahogany mauve, and suction-cup lips. They were known around police headquarters as the Bobbsey Twins.

He looked over at the front door, relieved to know they wouldn’t suddenly appear. At the same time he felt a certain dissolute urgency, hoping they would coalesce out of the images of their indiscretion into another encounter.

There had been a loud rapping on the door. It was evening, the beginning of July, the first real weekend of summer in the city, and the town was alive with festivities marking the First and the Fourth. One holiday marked a revolution, the other was the legislated celebration of an end to tedious negotiations. There were enough Americans living in Toronto, and enough would-be Americans, that parties often extended from one date to the other, especially if they contained a weekend between. It was raining outside, but he had heard street parties only a block or two over in the more bohemian parts of the Annex. Then there was a knock, like a drum roll, on his dark blue door.

That was three, maybe four years ago. Three. He was forty. He opened the door, and a drenching wind hurled weather into the foyer, along with two very young, very wet women.

“Close the door, for goodness’ sake,” he said.

“Hello, Morgan. May we borrow your dryer?”

“My dryer?” He scrutinized them, trying to place them in a recognizable context.

“You know us. I’m Nancy.”

“I’m Anne,” said the other, while rainwater streamed from her mauve hair over her pouting full lips. “No last names.” She grinned, and her lips quivered. “We’re on reception. You’ve seen us at headquarters on College Street, the big new modern building —”

“I know where it is. I work there, too.”

“We know that,” said Nancy with the drowned blond hair. “That’s why we’re here.” She looked satisfied, as if she had explained everything that needed explaining.

“You work together?” Morgan blurted out. God knows, he had seen them often enough. He knew they did.

“Mostly,” said Anne, smiling hugely. Then she exchanged a knowing look with Nancy. “Sometimes we do. It just depends how things turn out. Can we borrow your dryer?” she asked, enunciating the word dryer very clearly as if he might not understand.

“I don’t use a dryer,” said Morgan.

“Your clothes dryer,” said Nancy.

“You’ve been partying,” said Morgan, stating the obvious.

By now his visitors were in the middle of the living room and he had circled around as if to prevent them from going any farther. As they danced about, trying to generate warmth, pools of water sprayed out beneath them.

“Turn your back,” said Anne with a sly curl to her swollen lips. “You mustn’t watch.”

She began to pull her soaking T-shirt over her head. Morgan turned away and stared at the exposed brick wall. He heard wet clothes puddling in piles on the floor. He had no idea what the protocol was, given the circumstances. Suddenly, he realized the lights were on full, and whirled to face them. “For pity sake, the neighbours!”

He didn’t know where to look. They were both stark naked. The neighbours across the street must be having a hard time about now, pretending they couldn’t see everything. He lunged for the overhead light switch, but when he snapped it off all that happened was the glare in the window was reduced. His table lamps still managed to cast full illumination on the entire scene. If he turned them off, too, it would signal to the entire neighbourhood that an orgy was in progress. He moved into the shadows by the spiral staircase. Maybe the neighbours would think he wasn’t home.

“What kind of music you got?” Nancy asked.

She was shaking out her hair in front of the window into the pile of dripping clothes she held in front of her. Anne was ambling around, inspecting the artwork, casual, as if she were at a gallery, wearing a little black dress and over-high pumps. Nancy dropped her clothes onto the hardwood floor beside Anne’s, avoiding the thick Gabbeh rug that so far had only been subjected to a few random droplets. She approached the stereo as if it were a potential dance partner, cocking a hip slightly off centre and coming to rest a little too close to Morgan. “Can I put on something?”

“Anything,” he said. “Please.”

He was flustered as much by the casual familiarity as by their lack of clothes.

“You like Eskimo art?” asked Anne, picking up an intricately carved miniature tableau of whalebone and ivory.

“Inuit art,” he said. “In Canada they’re Inuit.” Pedantry was a way of retrieving composure. “It means ‘the people.’ Inuit is plural. Inuk is one. Inuuk is two. The ivory is from the tusk of a narwhal. The bone is very delicate. It’s very old, from a petrified vertebra.”

Anne smiled indulgently, and her lips quivered. “Can we use the dryer? Sorry about the mess.”

She scooped up the drenched clothes and followed him into the bathroom. He opened the dryer, but she held out the end of a wad of clothes and stepped backward into the shower.

“Grab tight and we’ll wring them out,” Anne told him.

Water poured down the front of Morgan’s slacks.

“Sorry,” Anne said, her full lips swelling into another smile. She stuffed the clothes into the dryer, and he turned it on. Then she took a towel from the neat pile on the shelf over the dryer.

For a moment Morgan thought modesty had finally set in, and he offered another towel for her friend. Anne declined, saying ominously that one would be enough, and walked into the living room where Nancy was dancing with herself to music that was almost inaudible.

Kneeling on the warm dry wool of the Gabbeh, Anne stretched out to draw the puddles of water on the floor together in large, sweeping motions. Morgan couldn’t help staring, first at Anne, wondrously slender and smooth as she reached and twisted while she dabbed at the floor, with her bottom cocked upward like a beacon, then at Nancy, moving in a dream world of her own to music he could barely hear, her fulsome young body shaping the air as she moved like a Henry Moore carved out of voluptuous flesh. Giving in, Morgan sat on the bottom step of his wrought-iron staircase, absorbing it all, eyes sliding back and forth from one to the other. Anne walked over to the window, stood fully framed for a moment, gazing out at the street, then bent down once again, bottom in the air, and mopped up the remaining water.

“I’ll just throw this in with the clothes,” she said when she was finished.

He looked at the towel, dripping and mottled with residual dirt from the floor, which he tried to keep clean. He was a good housekeeper.

When she came back, she said, “Lovely and warm in here. It’s been a bugger all day, really hot. We needed the rain. Trouble is, we got soaked to the skin, absolutely drenched. It’s been a movable party. We dropped into HQ and picked up your address. We’ve noticed you, Morgan. Happy Canada Day.” She leaned over and gave him a big hug. “Shove over,” she said, sitting on the step beside him. “Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?”

“Clothes.”

“So what do you do when we’re not here?”

“Um …”

“You want to smoke dope?”

“No,” said Morgan. Then, almost in apology, he added, “I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not.” Anne smiled with her great lips less than a head’s breadth away. “Do we make you nervous?”

“No,” said Morgan. He didn’t want either to protest too much or appear nonchalant.

“I’ve got some dope,” she said, and walked over to her bag in the foyer. As she strode away from him, Morgan could see incised on her bottom, like an erotic abstract, the pattern of the wrought-iron step. He relaxed a little. It made her seem vulnerable. She turned and walked toward him. Full-frontal exposure — he felt imponderably vulnerable.

“Come sit with me on the floor,” she said.

She sat cross-legged on the thick Gabbeh, and when he approached, she turned him gently like a marionette so that he settled with his back to her and she drew him down to lie against her lap.

“Comfy?” she asked.

He looked up at her lips. Her breasts came to firm points just above his temple. He couldn’t bring them into focus at the same time, and his eyes, bleary from trying to adjust, shifted back to her lips. “Every man’s fantasy,” he said aloud. But he felt sick. She was twenty. She had the body of a girl.

He could feel her pubic hair against the back of his scalp as she moved about, preparing to light up. He nestled into her, and she seemed to open and press back with her thighs. He felt unnervingly intimate and distant, lying so close but facing away. He watched Nancy, who was still dancing gently, now close to the stereo.

They both watched Nancy. Then Anne placed the crudely rolled joint in his mouth, and he drew in deeply and held. Morgan hadn’t smoked since Ibiza, and there he had mostly observed others doing it. He didn’t like the taste very much, or the sensation of ingesting effluent into his lungs. It made him feel queasy. She was careful not to drop burning embers onto his face.

After a while, she said, “Take those off. You don’t want to burn holes in your clothes.”

He flinched, panicked again. She was twenty; he was a forty-year-old detective. He felt like a pervert. Nancy must have heard them, because she came over and knelt beside him. She undid his belt, zipped his fly down, and with knowing hands reached under him and shrugged his slacks down past his buttocks. He was barefoot, so it was easy to tug them away and slip off his underwear. Then she leaned over him so that her pendulous breasts brushed against his face as she reached between his back and Anne’s thighs and grasped his jersey, which she hauled up and over his head in a single smooth motion. She stood and looked down, surveying her handiwork. Her breasts were perched high on her rib cage. She was young and they were resilient, with lives of their own.

Damn, they were kids, he thought. But he settled against Anne and savoured his torment like a drowning man clutching a treasure of gold as he plummeted into the depths to a gruesome demise.

Nancy returned to her dancing. Morgan glanced up at Anne, seeing her in parts, her breasts, her collarbone, her slender neck, her full lips, nose, eyes gleaming their separate highlights, tendrils of damp hair, all suspended above him like the discontinuous sections of an Alexander Calder mobile. Her lips were succulent, possibly for her as well — she seemed to suck against them in a kind of perpetually rearranging pout as if she were savouring the taste of her own body. Morgan looked down at himself, surprised to see an erection.

He was aroused through his entire being, ready to burst into an annihilating orgasm that would leave him in a pool of fluids on the floor. Morgan hadn’t focused on his penis until then, and now it seemed an absurd appendage, isolated and vulnerable. He half twisted against Anne’s lap to see if he had caught her interest down there. She adjusted her weight and pressed her pubic bone against his skull, and he settled back.

Nancy must have tuned her subliminal sensitivities in his direction. She danced over lazily and dropped slowly to his side, examined him without touching, then rose on tiptoe like a dancer and spread her legs over him, languorously descending, holding herself open and tilting him back as she settled firmly with her bottom against his pelvis. Nancy stayed squatting over him like that without moving except for the slight quivering strain of her thighs. She gazed at him eye to eye, and at Anne, smiling fondly, conspiratorially, then back at Morgan, staring deep into his eyes until the incomprehensible stillness that closed around him began to send waves through his entire body and he shuddered, the two young women like sculpture enfolding him in their cunning stillness. In a slow explosion of pure sensation, he exploded inside her, inside both of them, inside himself.

No one moved. They swayed, Nancy’s thighs quivered, Anne’s lips were moist in the lamplight. Almost on cue, as Morgan struggled between apprehension approaching dread and the pleasures of utter depletion, the dryer bell sounded. Nancy rose over him, draining across his torso, smiling down, standing for a moment, then moved away. Anne smiled with her voluptuous lips and said with affection, “Come on, old man, it’s over.” She slid gently out from under him, stood, and moved away.

He lay back on the Gabbeh, examining the ceiling of the loft, able to recognize details in the patina of paint on the drywall. He wasn’t stoned; he had never been stoned. But he was spent. He felt physically and emotionally and morally spent.

Anne squatted beside him, fully dressed, and kissed him squarely on the lips, sharing her succulence for a long moment, then stood while Nancy, also dressed, leaned over and covered him with his jersey, across his depleted private parts. She knelt by his head and gave him a soft kiss, hardly touching his lips.

“Happy Canada Day,” she said.

At the door Anne called back in a low voice, “Happy Fourth of July.”

The door swung open and clicked shut, his beautiful door. Morgan lay on the Gabbeh for a long time, contemplating.