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THREE

What do you call an honest lawyer? -A statistical improbability

Saturday morning, I was annoyed bright and early by more knocking at the door. I whipped it open expecting to see Bunny there with yet another nutty bit of information.

A small, crisp woman with expensive blonde highlights gripped my hand and shook it. I was so startled that I hardly noticed that she’d actually stepped right into the house. Maybe I was taken aback because her teeth seemed to twinkle, and her skin glowed like she was some kind of magic lantern.

“Jacki Jewell,” she said with a wide smile that left stars in my eyes. “You must be Camilla. It’s wonderful to finally meet you.”

I said, “I’m not sure I…” Oh, hang on. I knew the name Jacki Jewell. That toothy grin was plastered all over For Sale signs in The Glebe, Sandy Hill and New Edinburgh. But what the hell was she doing in my front hall?

Closing the door behind her, I discovered. “Your sister sent me,” she said.

Of course. I should have known.

I said. “Which one?” Each of them is capable of meddling in my life in ways I never imagine until the meddling is in full swing and then it’s often hard to find a defensive position.

“Edwina,” she said cheerfully.

“Oh, well. She’s out of town. They’re all on a three-week Mediterranean cruise along with my father. Not back until the first of July.”

I didn’t bother to add that I’d been reveling in a spell of peace and quiet without their daily badgering about my failure to measure up on so many fronts: quality of housekeeping, career path, marital status and driving skills being the main ones. Of course, I’d been dashing back and forth to Nepean to check on their houses every few days, but that was a small price to pay for peace and quiet.

Her expression stayed positive, but I sensed a bit of strain at the corners of her lipsticky smile.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “But…”

“So whatever it is, I want you to know it wasn’t my idea.” I smiled grimly, expecting she’d take the hint.

“That’s fine,” she said, sticking to her guns. “Doesn’t matter at all. There’s no finders’ fee for my services. I hear you’re interested in selling this house.”

“Well, I guess I’ve been thinking about it. A bit. I haven’t really decided yet because…” I trailed off.

Of course, I’d been thinking about selling the house. That was putting it mildly. I’d inherited the property, car and a pile of financial assets. The house was pretty and convenient, but I had good reasons to feel guilty living in it. The neighbours were less than lovable and Alvin’s decorating didn’t help. To add to it, the house had been fully furnished, and now my own belongings and whatever had survived from my office were squeezed in too.

“Well, good, that’s why I’m here.”

“Doesn’t work for me. I’m not ready yet. I have stacks of material from my previous office, and it’s taken quite a while to get that sorted out. In fact, I’m working on that this weekend.”

She reached out and patted my shoulder, something I’ve never really tolerated well. I barely resisted the urge to swat her hand, partly because I’ve been working on being a nicer person, but mainly because I didn’t want a barrage of long-distance calls from my collective sisters admonishing me for my bad manners. Jacki Jewell must have read my mind because she withdrew her hand and kept it out of swatting distance.

She didn’t lose her glow though, nor did her linen wilt. I had to hand it to her. “I can help with that. It’s a specialty really. You’ll be so glad when it’s over.”

“Thanks for your interest, but as I just clearly said, I’m not ready yet and—”

She opened her mouth.

I held up my hand. “And I don’t do well under pressure.”

Alvin’s voice piped up behind me, speaking directly to Jacki Jewell. “It’s so true. You’d want to watch out for that.”

“Of course,” Jacki Jewell’s smile lit up again, “you won’t get any pressure from me. That’s why I have such satisfied clients.” I think she believed that.

Alvin approached her, admiration on his face, his hand outstretched to shake hers. “Alvin Ferguson.”

Gussie the dog took that opportunity to fart softly on the sofa.

I said, “In the interests of saving time, let me state categorically that I’m not ready to sell the house.”

Alvin piped up, “But Camilla, just the other day you said—”

“Naturally,” Jacki Jewell said, “you have to act when you’re ready and not a moment before. If I could just look around a bit, that would help.”

“Help what?”

“Exactly. At some point you will want to sell, and I can give you a few tiny bits of advice that will make that process easier, even if,” she paused here for full effect, “you go with another broker.”

And I will, I promised myself.

“What kind of advice?” Alvin said.

She turned her blinding smile on him. “Staging a home can make the difference between a quick sale and the price you want and a protracted and miserable selling period.”

“Staging,” Alvin breathed. “I’ve heard about that. You mean someone would come in here and make things look like a model home? That would be great, wouldn’t it, Camilla? People do that for a living. I think I’d be good at that, myself. I’m an artist. I did these.” He pointed proudly to the nearest Tuscan murals.

“Oh,” she said glancing around and losing a bit of her bright colour, “did you? My.”

My, indeed.

“Let me get you some lemonade, Ms Jewell,” Alvin said, fluttering from the room like a lovesick moth. “I’d like to hear more about this.”

As he disappeared from view, she leaned toward me and said, “First, I’d recommend getting rid of the murals. Contemporary buyers want neutrals, harmony and simplicity.”

“Do they? Well contemporary buyers are just going to have to suck it up if they want this house. The murals stay.”

“Oh, certainly, just as long as you realize that it will limit the number of people who come through.”

“It will limit it to none, because if you recall, less than a minute ago, I said that I was not ready to sell.”

“Well, of course, you did. And I agree, but we’re just blue-sky thinking about the future. Anything I could do to help make the transition easier for you and...”

“Alvin,” I said.

Gussie yawned. The little calico cat got up and stretched.

“Your dog is quite, um…”

“Flatulent? Yes indeed, although I should point out that he’s not actually my dog although he is lying on my sofa. He belongs to Alvin’s brother, but for complicated reasons he’s been here for a while.”

“He seems to get along with your cat,” she said, a tiny frown line appearing between her eyebrows.

“Again, odd as it may seem, that is not my cat. She belongs to a friend, Mrs. Violet Parnell, who is actually in the Perley Rideau Hospital recovering from a broken hip.”

“Do I hear tweeting?”

“Lester and Pierre. Peach-faced lovebirds. Also visiting.”

“That’s a relief. Pets make it much harder to sell a place. So if these cute creatures could move on, things would go much more smoothly.”

Gussie had been in residence for more than four years, and Mrs. Parnell’s cat, for various reasons, had always more or less stayed at my place. The birds were just hanging around until Mrs. P. was discharged from hospital.

“Move on? That won’t be happening.”

“Well, fine, of course, it is your home. Keep in mind that a lot of buyers are afraid of dogs and others are allergic to cats. Birds make people nervous, but I’m sure we can work around that.”

Was she deranged? “I don’t actually have to work around anything, because I’ve decided I’ll be happy in this house forever.”

“Certainly, take your time and think it over. Do you mind if I look upstairs?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do mind. I’m not selling this house, and you can tell my sisters that from me. Now I’m extremely busy today, and you’ll just have to excuse me.”

“Absolutely,” she said, not moving.

I opened the front door, letting in a blast of hot humid air. I smiled and said, “Goodbye, Ms Jewell.”

To do her credit, she turned that right on its head. She glanced at her watch and raised her eyebrows. “I really have to go, but I’ll just leave this information package for you. I’m here to help. I can certainly facilitate your paper purge.”

“You don’t seem to understand—my files are highly confidential.”

“Confidentiality is one of our specialties. I’ll call you.”

As she minced toward her black Mercedes SUV, I lifted my middle finger. “Call this,” I muttered.

Alvin scowled at me. “She seemed very professional. Knows what she’s talking about. I bet she can sell anything.”

“Well, she’s not selling this house, Alvin. And I think we’ve seen the last of her.”

I took advantage of having the front door open to snatch the mail, which must have been still sitting there from the day before, the office assistant once again asleep at the wheel. The mail contained the usual slim bundle of pizza delivery ads, fitness centre come-ons and bills, which were no longer a big problem for me.

This time there was also a single white unstamped, unaddressed number ten envelope. Sealed. I opened it.

Alvin always hovers when I get the mail. He likes to be in charge of all that exiting stuff. “I must have forgotten to bring the mail in yesterday. I’ve been busy with my cooking project. There are thousands of recipes for oatcakes.” He frowned as I stared at the note.

I lowered my voice. “It says Rollie Thorsten.”

“I honestly thought it was your brother-in-law, Stan, sending those jokes.”

It would be just like Stan to try to creep me out by sending unfunny yet unsettling jokes in plain envelopes. This was the man who’d inserted whoopee cushions, fake dog turds and ice cubes with insects into every MacPhee family gathering that I could remember. I thought back to the stick-on cigarette burns on my sister’s custom upholstery, the piles of plastic vomit under the coffee table. And those were just the highlights. This envelope business was all very Stanlike. But Stan was on the Mediterranean cruise with my sisters and the other two brothers-in-law and my father.

Maybe he had an accomplice. But Stan was as cheap as he was cheerful. His money went on Buicks and joke novelties. I couldn’t see him paying anyone to do this. To the best of my knowledge, he had no cronies outside the family. My sister Edwina kept him on a short leash.

“Trust me, Stan isn’t killing people, Alvin. He didn’t even stay mad at me when I wrecked his Buick. Remember?”

“Who could be doing it?”

“I don’t know, Alvin. Some pathetic soul with an axe to grind. I still don’t believe it really has anything to do with me.”

“If you say so,” Alvin said.

He likes to have the last word.

“How crazy is that?” I said to the light of my life, Ray Deveau, doing my best to fill up the thirteen hundred minute block of telephone time we manage to talk every month. It’s a necessary part of our long distance relationship. “Not that there’s anything funny about the joke business.”

“Maybe, just a…”

“Okay, but you live in Cape Breton. Here in Ottawa, we’re more serious. All that Parliamentary protocol and everything.”

“Not while you have Alvin with you, you’re not serious.”

“That’s true. Remind me to send him back to Sydney, and the Ferguson family dog too.”

“Returning to the jokes,” Ray said quickly. “So you’re saying you got these same notes too, and Alvin threw them away?”

“He showed them to me because they were lawyer jokes and he wanted to annoy me. But he didn’t say where they came from and he didn’t say anything at all about the names. I don’t think he noticed them. They just went straight into the recycle bin unless, of course, Gussie ate them. Alvin figured I wouldn’t be insulted by them, and that’s no fun, and he couldn’t figure out why anyone would send them, so, toss! No discussion.”

“And Bobby did the same thing?”

“Bunny. Well, no. He doesn’t get mail, I guess, just flyers, and he would look at anything with his name on it suspiciously. You know, the ‘how did someone find my address?’ kind of suspicion. He thought getting these things in a plain envelope was weird.”

I couldn’t see Ray over the phone and he couldn’t see me. This was a good thing because it meant I could lie around in old T-shirts and baggy shorts and keep my hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail. I didn’t have to have a pedicure every month, as my sisters advised. It was the one good thing about having a significant other one thousand, six hundred and forty-one kilometres away. He could imagine me any way he wanted and vice versa.

Sometimes we were right about each other. At that exact moment, I knew he was scrunching up his face.

“And this ‘Bunny’ doesn’t have them.”

“His wife is crazy clean. They’re gone.”

“You sure they’re gone? You should get the local boys to go over and search his house.”

“Are you kidding? I can’t do that to Bunny. Okay, he’s been a burglar most of his adult life and probably when he was a child too, now that I think of it. But he can’t have the cops traipsing all over his house. What if they found something incriminating?”

After a significant pause, Ray finally spoke again. “You know something? I have to put the cat out now. How about I bang my head on the sidewalk a few times while I’m outside?”

“See that’s the problem, Ray. You’re a cop. It colours the way you look at the world. I’m a lawyer. Bunny was my legal aid client for years. I’m attached to him. I can’t traumatize him. Also, you don’t have a cat.”

A strange noise drifted over the line.

“Are you laughing? Ray? Cut that out. Oh, gotta go. It looks like Leonard Mombourquette’s calling on the other line. I’ve been leaving messages for him all night. It’ll be about the dead lawyer.”

“Call me back right away. We have to work out the details about the girls.”

“The girls?”

“Brittany and Ashley. Don’t turn everything into a game, Camilla.”

Details about the girls? The very mention of Ray’s teenage daughters was enough to make me edgy. Possibly because they both hate me.

“Sure thing.” I didn’t want Mombourquette to hang up.

“Don’t forget.”

“Yup.”

I picked up Mombourquette’s call. “What’s happening, Leonard?” I’d been trying to reach him at home and on his cell and later at my friend Elaine Ekstein’s place because he still hadn’t called me back.

“If I tell you, will you stop calling?” he said. I thought I could hear Elaine squawking in the background.

I said, “Any luck?”

“It looks like your man Rollie was shot with a small calibre weapon. No ballistics results yet. This is not public knowledge, so if you tell anyone else, I’m coming after you.”

“A small calibre weapon. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. I don’t actually know anybody with a gun.”

“Oh, come on. You were a legal aid lawyer long enough. Everyone you dealt with had a gun. Hey, now your boyfriend even has one.”

“Don’t creep me out. I have trouble with the cop thing. So was there anything else?”

“It’s not enough that the guy was shot and tossed off a boat? You wanted him garroted too?”

“Was he garroted?”

“No. We actually don’t get a lot of garroting around here. But two out of three ain’t bad.”

“Aren’t you playful tonight, Leonard? Was he bound?”

“What, you think there’s a sexual component to this?”

“Ew. With Rollie Thorsten? That just makes my skin crawl. So if he was found in the middle of the Rideau, he must have been taken there on a boat. I was just wondering who he might get close to who might have a boat and might also have a gun. My point is just that it would be easy to narrow that down. Guys with guns and boats.”

“Try to be a bit more politically correct, Camilla. Maybe women with guns and boats. Now, you want to tell me how come you asked about the fact that he was shot?”

“Do I have to?”

“Let’s see. I’m Major Crimes, there’s a killing with information known only to the killer, the police and the staff at the morgue. Hmm. So, in short, yes, you have to tell me.”

“Fine, but you won’t like it.”

“Try me.”

“I got a lawyer joke in the mail.”

“Do I have to come over there and question you?”

“It’s true. You know that old one, ‘How do you keep a lawyer from drowning? Shoot him before he hits the water.’”

“You got this joke, and that caused you to think that someone might have shot Rollie Thorsten?”

“I was hoping these jokes were irrelevant.”

“These jokes?”

“I’ve had a few of them. Anyway, it turns out the next day a name comes in an envelope. Alvin has been just throwing the names away or Gussie’s been eating them. He didn’t make the connection between the names and the jokes. But this is the third time it’s happened. After we get each joke, someone connected with the legal community dies.”

“Huh? So somebody’s killing lawyers and sending jokes? Or sending jokes and then killing lawyers?”

“Yeah. Don’t get upset.”

“Are you kidding? I love the idea. Hey, listen to this, Elaine.” A squeal in the background drifted over the line. “Elaine does too.”

The dial tone seemed to mock me as well.

I could tell I’d have a bit of work convincing Mombourquette that, just this once, I wasn’t pulling his leg.

“Camilla?”

“Oh sorry, Ray, I got distracted. I had to walk Gussie, and you know how he sniffs every tree. I meant to call you back and I would have.”

“Yeah well, it’s one o’clock here now, and tomorrow’s a working day, so I thought I’d speed up the process.”

I chose not to remind Ray that I’d been worrying about how to keep the cops from going through Bunny’s house once they found out he was involved, which they would. That would tick him off more. Of course, I knew that I couldn’t hold them off and that bothered me. Nearly a million people in the Ottawa area, and somehow someone had picked Bunny and me to share the sick joke with. And why was that anyway?

“Camilla? Are you there?”

“What? Sure I am. I was just waiting for you.”

“Okay then, here goes. It’s about the girls.”

“Oh, right,” I said with feigned enthusiasm. “Ashley and Brittany.”

“Yes,” he said. Did I detect a little tone there?

They were the second reason I liked talking on the phone with him, rather than living with him. We each had our baggage. My dead husband, Paul, and Ray’s memories of his late wife. In time we’d be able to have a great relationship. The presence of two teenage girls who viewed me as taking over their mother’s place currently presented a bit of a hurdle. Even if they were both attending university in Halifax, a five-hour drive from dear old Dad.

“What about them?”

“You know they’ve been keen on Dragon Boat races since we had those events here in Sydney the last couple of summers.”

“Right, and that’s terrific. Happy to contribute,” I said. This was going to be easy. Sponsoring the little beasts while they rowed for a good cause. Why not?

“You sound enthusiastic,” he said, that teasing note creeping into his voice. I loved that voice, made my knees weak.

“I am,” I said, “in a weak-kneed way, I am.”

“Well, that’s great. They’ll be arriving in Ottawa this week.”

“Did you say Ottawa?”

“I’m glad you’re not too weak-kneed to be listening.”

“They’re coming to Ottawa?”

“Quit teasing. You know how much I appreciate this.”

“Remind me why again?”

“The Ottawa Dragon Boat Race Festival is next week. I thought it had all been arranged, Camilla. We discussed it, and I talked to Alvin about it too the other day, and he said it was great. Don’t you remember?”

In fact, I didn’t. “It’s just late, like you said, and I’m groggy. That’s terrific. The Dragon Boat Races are a lot of fun. Are you coming with the girls? Because that would be really excellent.”

“I have a work commitment that I can’t get out of. Believe me, I’ve tried, but it’s a course, and I’m locked into it. No choice.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll be sorry to miss out on the race and, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t mind seeing you either.”

I said, “It’s wonderful. They’re coming with a team, right?”

Ray was quiet for a second. Words like wonderful do not come naturally to me, especially in connection to visitors, aside from Ray, himself. Maybe I had overdone it again.

“Right,” he said at last. “But there’ll only be the two of them and they’ll be busy. They’re a real pair of water rats. They love this racing thing. And they don’t mind sharing a room. Think how much worse it could be.”

Despite the time of night and my state of mind, I managed not to say that I couldn’t think of how it could be any worse.