Читать книгу Bush Poodles Are Murder - Lou Allin - Страница 7

Mel.” Miriam slumped into a cushioned chair so deep that her legs stuck out like a rag doll’s, shaking hands covering her face.

“Was it a heart attack? Have you tried . . .” Wondering if she recalled any CPR other than the dog variety where one blew into the nose, Belle leaned forward when she heard Miriam gasp. Her friend had risen to turn on a tole lamp. Blood trickled from the man’s ear, pooling into a grotesque halo. Instinctively, Belle knelt and reached for his throat, the skin slightly scratchy with a final five o’clock shadow. He seemed neither warm nor cold, but at ambient temperature.

“I see.” Or did she? Fell and hit his head? Curious as she was, from that angle it was hard to judge the overall impression of the man. He wore an indigo blue silk dressing gown and shiny black leather slippers. A tiny moustache marked one side of his slack face, the thinning, unnaturally dark brown hair mussed by the fall. At his throat, a small gold chain winked. One well-manicured hand with buffed nails held a fire iron. And unless she was wrong, he couldn’t have been more than five-foot-two. A little powerhouse with a Napoleon complex? While Miriam hyperventilated in hoarse breaths, Belle rose and walked around the circular sofa arrangement. Near the wall of windows lay a large, awkward object. She stooped and reached out a tentative hand.

“Don’t touch it! I did, and now what will—”

“What are you talking about?” Belle pulled the silken cord of an ornate cut-glass chandelier, and a light halo fell around her feet. “My God. He was hit with a piece of Inuit sculpture?” Carved from green soapstone, easily measurable from her wood-buyer’s eye, this sixteen-inch walrus, from demure flippers to its flat-faced, whiskered muzzle, reclined on its side. A few years ago, a disturbed man had slipped past the Mounties into 66 Sussex Drive, made his way to the second floor bedrooms and threatened the Prime Minister, who had grabbed a similar piece to defend himself. His wife, calm as a psychiatric nurse, had talked the man into surrendering a penknife.

Noting the bloody smears on the artifact, she backed away and stood next to Miriam as the silence expanded. The metronomic ticking echoing down the hall reminded her of a childhood song: “And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.”

“Let’s just leave. Someone else can find him. Elena, his cleaning lady tomorrow morning. No one needs to know. We can wipe off the—”

Belle shook her head, attempting to quell a rising panic about her friend’s behaviour. Miriam had been gutsy enough to bark down a mugger in Toronto who had tried to steal her purse on the way back to her hotel after a performance of Mamma Mia. Why was she acting so illogically? Possibly because her beloved was cooling under the laws of forensic science, and she had already incriminated herself. How long had he been dead before Miriam arrived?

“Then you may be eliminating the murderer’s prints, too. And Melibee may have told someone about the dinner, jotted the date in a planner. Steve’s mentioned details like that more than once. If you tell the truth, why would anyone suspect you? What’s the motive?” Her eyes glazing over, without even a blink, Miriam clutched a tufted pillow like a lifesaver, growing oddly quiet.

Belle used her cellphone to dial Steve’s number, speaking briefly about the discovery. Then, like a sensible Scot, she went to the kitchen and located a box of Earl Grey tea. Brewing up a pot in a china version of an English cottage, aromatic bergamot steam puffing from the chimney, she ladled pure buckwheat honey into their cups, stirring slowly. Melibee had a tempting pantry, bearnaise sauce, asparagus soup, canned truffles and goose liver pâté. What might his fridge hold? Then she chastened herself for letting a magpie mind run on in the stark face of tragedy. He was a victim, after all, deserving of respect. As far as she knew.

Miriam sat mute, removed to another world, while Belle, whose attempts at conversation fell like leaden shots, browsed through Architectural Digest, Harper’s, and Antique Journal, American magazines too rich for her blood. She moved into a small den, where paintings clustered one wall, mostly nudes in a variety of styles. Rousseau’s recliner in “The Dream,” Cezanne’s crouching “A Modern Olympia,” even a disturbing Klimt’s “Danaë,” a huge thigh dominating the picture. She backed away from a crotch close-up entitled “Origin of the World” by Corbet but had to admire the wit and technique. Some of the waif-like anorexic Picassos, a hole in one torso, were amusing, and the Degas ballerinas confirmed a taste for much younger women.

Twenty-five minutes later, buzzed up from below, Steve remarked to Belle at the door: “I actually finished my dinner this time.”

With a shrug, she pointed down the hall. As they entered the living room, he turned on more lights, pulled out a notebook and parked at one end of the sofa, frowning at the tea display. “I know this isn’t easy, Miriam, but you were first on the scene. Here’s the routine. While I take notes, go over everything you noticed, then start again, and I’ll ask questions. Slow as you want.”

The woman forced her mouth around one word at a time. “I came. About seven. He was there. Like that.” She pointed to the body, squeezed her eyes shut and refused to continue, though he prompted her several times.

“Shock,” Belle mouthed. “That’s why I made—”

A muscle on his temple twitched, and his voice mixed patience with frustration. “If it were anyone else, I’d ask you to come to the station right now, Miriam. But under the circumstances, it can wait until Monday.” He took sets of their fingerprints with a small kit, providing Handiwipes for cleanup. Oblivious to the movements, Miriam was less responsive than a zombie, her hands falling limply after Belle cleaned each finger.

Minutes later, clatter filled the hall, voices, boots sucked off. White coats and paper overalls of the crime scene analysts. The roll of a gurney. Miriam remained silent, her eyes vacant. Then she began to rock back and forth.

“That’s the coroner come to certify the death. Take her home before she . . .” Steve said, cocking a thumb at the body. “When this settles down, we’ll need to know all about Mr. Elphinstone.”

Forcing Miriam into her coat was like dressing a large, pliable child, but luckily the boots had zippers. Belle was surprised at the fox jacket, not that Miriam was anti-fur, but it seemed rich for her bank account. Recent investment profits perhaps. Casting a last look at Melibee, her friend began weeping uncontrollably. Belle found the Neon’s keys in her purse on a hall table and drove her home, steadying her as they moved across the icy lot to the lobby of her two-bedroom apartment near Junction Creek in New Sudbury.

“Do you want me to call Rosanne?” Belle asked as she opened the door.

Miriam hung up her coat with a devastated look, smoothing the fur like stroking a sleeping baby. Then she answered in a toneless voice, “I’ll be fine. I’m sorry I—just go home, please.”

Like the lone character on stage as the curtain fell, Belle called for a taxi and stared out the window until it arrived fifteen minutes later. Vague sounds issued from the bathroom, taps, clinks, drawers, so she assumed that Miriam had settled in. After collecting her van at the condo, Belle wondered if she shouldn’t have insisted that her friend stay with her for the weekend. Big trouble lay ahead. Melibee hadn’t clunked himself with a ten-pound carving and dropped it fifteen feet away. Who could have wanted the man dead? She was beginning to have suspicions about those all-too-lucrative stock opportunities.

On Monday morning, with Miriam silent, either a good or very bad sign, Belle pushed into a dark office with no signature aroma of freshly perked coffee to meet her frozen nose. Miriam rarely missed a day. Feverish with the flu, she’d had to be beaten from the door more than once. Fingers on the faltering pulse of Palmer Realty, the woman was an absolute necessity. After shucking off her coat, Belle made the coffee with studied nonchalance, which dissipated after the third cup as she began watching the clock. After such an ordeal, had Miriam slept in?

Finally, she succumbed to worry and called, listening to twenty unanswered rings. Then the door opened, and Steve walked in, a deadly serious look in his dark eyes, a memory of his Ojibwa heritage and Scottish grandfather in Western Ontario. “Sit down. I have some bad news,” he said as her blood pressure hit Zone Red.

Protocol over, he explained the events of the weekend, official activity behind closed doors. “I’m on my way to Miriam’s for another interview. As a favour, I’m asking you to come—”

“Are you going to arrest her? That fast? Can’t you see that she couldn’t harm a blackfly if her life depended on it?” Her flailing arm spilled the coffee across the desk, soaking a sheaf of papers. Blindly, she blotted them with a pile of tissues.

“Stop panicking. Of course we don’t make arrests that quickly. Why waste the time of the courts until a case is locked and loaded? But even you must admit that things aren’t looking good. That statue was identified as the murder weapon, and the only prints are hers.”

An orderly world shuddered and broke apart like the off-kilter merry-go-round in Strangers on a Train. Until that moment, Belle hadn’t imagined the possibilities of Miriam killing anyone, but beneath the sensible, sang-froid exterior lay passionate depths. Miriam had an abiding contempt for child molesters, had watched her former husband slug the family uncle when he’d tried to continue his historic abuse with Rosanne. Even so, what could have caused her anger? The merry trio had been off to dinner. “That’s absurd! She was in love with him.” At Steve’s calculating look, she stopped short. Giving him information was one thing, providing ammunition that might hurt Miriam was another. Passion was one of the world’s paramount murder motives. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” according to Oscar.

He poured himself a cup of black coffee, warming his hands on Miriam’s “Are We Having Fun Yet?” mug. “Not a very discriminating choice for our mutual friend. Elphinstone is linked with phony investment schemes in Vancouver and Calgary going back twenty years. He slithered out of the major charges, but spent a year in Club Fed on the coast. Guess he didn’t like the ocean view or the tennis courts because we haven’t any recent records.”

“Invest . . . but she was doing fine. Last time we talked . . .” she said. Suddenly cold at possibilities, she recalled her friend’s unguarded trust and infatuation. Or was she trivializing Miriam’s feelings, smug in her solitary, risk-free world of tramping forest paths with Freya? Suddenly she felt mean-spirited.

Steve’s eyes narrowed with interest. “So she did invest with him. How much?” But Belle merely shook her head. “Apparently he was quite the ladies’ man, a lucrative avenue. Cozied up with wealthy widows,” he added, giving her a sidelong glance. “A bit older than you, I’d say.”

The drive across town in the unmarked Crown Vic took only minutes. Except for the manager chipping ice from the sidewalk with a wicked pick, all was quiet at Miriam’s six-suite apartment building. Her Neon sat out back, blanketed with the weekend’s snowfall, which made Belle increasingly uneasy. As they got out of the vehicle, she said, “I hope she’s OK. She hasn’t answered the phone. Why did I leave her like a sick dog licking her wounds?”

After climbing the stairs, they stood before the door to 3B and knocked to a hollow response. With a shrug, Steve tried the knob, which turned easily. Belle held her breath, knowing that townies never left homes unlocked. The door opened into the living room, a scene of chaos. Newspapers were scattered on the floor amid islands of tissues and crumpled mail. Vinyl records had been sailed against the wall, some broken, others scratched or bent. Miriam’s tastes appeared to run to Johnnie Mathis and late Sinatra. Belle placed a battered LP onto the table. “The Twelfth of Never” was the featured song.

Then with a nod from Steve, she went down the hall. In the bathroom, towels smeared with make-up littered the floor, along with tatters of the lovely apricot dress, as if Miriam had rent her garments in classical fashion. Signs of illness appeared on the toilet bowl rim. An empty pill bottle had rolled into a corner, a tap dripped. Suddenly Belle was reminded of the shower scene in Psycho. Shivering, she opened a connecting door into Rosanne’s old room, posters of Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in pectoral poses. Pink was the dominant colour scheme, the quilt a pastiche of teddy bears.

A small groan led her to the larger bedroom, where Miriam lay face down, her head half-covered with a pillow. “Are you asleep?” Belle asked foolishly, touching her naked, freckled shoulder like a timid lover. There was no response, just a sour reek of gin, that telltale juniper from the innocent woods. Gently, Belle turned her friend onto her back. The curly grey hair lay in damp mats, and Miriam’s skin, creased from pressure, looked sallow as beeswax. When her lids fluttered open for a second, her eyes were dull coins, as if she were in another painless country. Belle spoke her name twice, three times, getting no response.

“Is she here or not? What’s taking you so long?” Steve appeared in the doorway, suddenly alert. “Christ, a suicide attempt? Better let me handle this.”

As he shoved her out of the way, Belle moved to the other side of the bed, her foot connecting with something which clinked against the frame. “Call a doctor, Steve, or we’ll have another corpse on our hands.”

Sniffing pointedly, he examined Miriam’s eyes and listened to her breathing. Then he took her pulse. “She’s just smashed. When she comes to, I’ll have to take her downtown. You can’t avoid an interview by staying drunk.” As he muttered legal technicalities, a small tear dripped from Miriam’s reddened eye.

Belle moved into the bathroom to collect a cold compress, fill a glass with water, tidy the towels, anything to keep moving. How could Steve insist on cruel protocols in the face of such a pitiful spectacle? With a shudder, she picked up the empty medicine bottle, removed her distance glasses and squinted at the label. Voltaren, an anti-inflammatory. So Miriam had arthritis, though unlike Belle, the hypochondriac, she never complained. Nobody overdosed on that, nor on the Tylenol, yet unopened. The medicine cabinet was empty of other prescription drugs.

As she soaked and rung a towel, she could hear Steve bark instructions on the phone in the living room. Returning to Miriam, offering soothing words, mindless but helpful to herself, she laid the cold cloth onto the pale forehead. When she tried to offer a drink, water dribbled from the slack mouth. “It’ll be OK. Relax for now. We’ll get a doctor.”

Any more relaxed and Miriam’s heart would stop. Where was Steve? Did he intend to handcuff the helpless woman and frogmarch her to jail? And what awaited her in the humiliation of custody? Even in the new police building, conditions couldn’t be comfortable. A smelly holding tank of drunks and prostitutes? Drug addicts? A detox facility? And if she were jailed, for how long? What horrors would Miriam endure before the bloated justice system moved her case forward?

At vigil by the bed, feeling more confident since Miriam had begun to snore, for twenty more minutes she waited for Steve. Gone to collect the manacles? Then she heard a door open, voices were exchanged, and in walked a silvery blonde angel with a single thick braid down her back. Evelyn Easton, an emergency room surgeon, a treasured combination of skill and savvy. Steve met Belle’s surprised look with a grin. “Ev’s granddaughter’s a friend of Heather’s. Luckily cops can pull strings.”

Not one for unnecessary words, Evelyn nodded to Belle, whom she’d met professionally, opened a medical bag, and motioned them out with an imperious wave of her hand. At six feet, she was an imposing woman, a natural athlete, whose reflexes, even at fifty, served her well.

In the living room, Steve sat on the overstuffed sofa and took notes while Belle paced around, unable to concentrate. One wall featured a gallery of family pictures, Miriam as a frizzy-topped baby, Rosanne in childish poses, then serious at graduation. Black-and-whites featured a pleasant older couple with a post-war Plymouth coupe, perhaps Miriam’s late parents. In a prominent spot in a silver frame, someone with a familiar moustache smiled. Melibee, larger than life. Belle read the signature: “To my beloved from Mel. Together forever, forever we two.”

Absolutes always disappointed, she thought with a grimace. Weren’t those the words to a banal disco song which reverberated in the brain long after it had mercifully departed the airwaves? Instead, Melibee would be reunited with the dead wife Miriam had mentioned, if there were an afterlife. She turned to the window to watch the snowflakes cover the city grime and grit with a white innocence.

From the frantic moments upon arrival, time had slowed to a crawl. Belle passed from the pictures to the quilts on the walls. Miriam’s award-winning hobby demonstrated patience, skill and a genius for colour. She remembered with fondness the thoughtful gift of a Whig Rose masterpiece that adorned her waterbed in the fleeting summer months when she could abandon the giant down duvet. One quilt presented a variation on the famous log cabin design, rectangles piled on rectangles, another the prickly maze of the pineapple pattern. The third held an odd blue and black modern piecework. She turned her head to follow the dizzying curves. While Steve continued to write, giving an occasional grunt, she browsed the crowded bookcase, a library of information on the artful craft. Thumbing through, she found a sister to the off-kilter design, then closed the book with an ironic sigh. “The Drunkard’s Path” the design was called.

Finally, Dr. Easton joined them, her soft grey eyes reassuring, as she placed a cellphone into a capacious pocket of her dark blue padded cotton jumpsuit. “I’ve given her a mild stimulant,” she said, “and ordered an ambulance. It’s wiser than transporting her in a squad car. She’s on her feet now, and it’s important to preserve her dignity.”

“But the liquor. It wasn’t like her. A glass of wine’s all I ever saw . . .” Belle said, her voice trailing off as if she were defending a wayward family member.

Easton closed her black bag with a confident snap, then reached for her coat. “People have turned to worse in a crisis. I’ll ride along with her to the San. There’s a top psychiatrist who’ll admit her. She’s not to be questioned in this condition, not under any circumstances, much less in the intimidating atmosphere of a police station. Will that be a problem, Steve?” Her hands-on-hips gunslinger stance signalled her intentions.

Steve backed off, shaking his head. “Your word is good enough for me, Doctor.”

Belle moved forward as she searched Evelyn’s calm, professional face for solace, her lips tightened against trembling. “What can I do?”

The blonde icon touched a talented finger to perfect, unrouged lips. How many times had those hands knitted back souls from the feet of God? “Call her relatives. Pack a bag with light, indoor clothes, anything else she might like. Personal items like sweaters, books and pictures can be comforting. I noticed a folded quilt in the bedroom. Drop everything off at the main desk.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t expect a Victorian bedlam. We have progressed since Dickens. Certainly, she’ll have a private room in the beginning.”

As Miriam emerged minutes later, arm in arm with the doctor, then enveloped quietly by two young male attendants in heavy parkas, one line came to Belle’s mind: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Vivian Leigh as Blanche DuBois escorted from a marriage she couldn’t comprehend, primitive urges oceans below her effete capacity, the feral look in Kim Stanley’s eyes, scenes snipped from the original to censor the steamy sexuality that threatened Eisenhower’s snug little families with their smug little secrets. But that was the end of the movie. This was only a prologue. And didn’t Karl Malden have a moustache? His pious rejection had given fragile Blanche the cruelest blow.