Читать книгу Cordi O'Callaghan Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 15

When I got to work first thing the next morning I geared myself up and phoned Shannon Johnson, Diamond’s girlfriend, but all I got was a chirpy voice saying she and Diamond were out and to leave a message. Jeez, Diamond had been dead for at least three weeks by my reckoning and she hadn’t changed the message? Creepy. I left my name and number and explained the reason for my call and suggested a meeting after work.

I called a list of entomologists Martha had come up with and shamelessly pumped them for information about their courses: what they had found worked and what didn’t. It was discouraging. Most of them had enrollment way down and grant money in the air, except the ones working for agriculture, and they had gobs of money.

I spent the rest of my day doing research in the library and missed the call from Shannon, but Martha confirmed that the date was on — or at least that’s what she thought she’d gleaned from the garbled conversation.

I left work early, shopped along Elgin Street, and bought a good sturdy rope hammock that I’d been dying to get. The kind with the wide wooden spreaders. Then I walked down Elgin to McLeod and Shannon’s apartment. It was an old apartment building on the corner across from the Victoria Museum — a five-storey red brick affair with a wide central staircase going up to the second floor. I walked up the flight of stairs and found apartment 2. There was a little card identifying the occupants as Diamond and Johnson.

I knocked on the door and waited a long time before it opened and a tall blond-haired woman in a fashionable two-piece suit stared out at me. I wondered why Patrick had called her small until I remembered how tall he was. Anyone under six feet must have seemed small to him. Shannon stood a good three inches taller than I did. Her green eyes were puffy and red and her tiny features were the colour of sorrow — ash grey. There was a slight resemblance to Lianna, but this woman had more warmth. She kept wringing her fingers and looking behind her. I introduced myself, but Shannon ignored my hand and didn’t invite me in. She just stood there and stared at me and then said in a curiously emotionless voice, “I don’t understand why you think I can help you, why you think a bunch of stolen disks have anything to do with Jake.”

Her voice was soggy, her green eyes flat and dull, as she waited for some cue from me.

“I don’t know that it does, but Jake’s the only lead I have to go on.”

Shannon stood in the doorway fiddling nervously with the doorknob until I had the strongest desire to grab her hand and pull it away from the damn knob.

I repeated what I had said on the phone, all about my disks and Diamond. When I finished there was an uncomfortable silence as Shannon struggled with some inner battle and gripped the doorknob like a lifeline. She kept shooting looks at me and as quickly looked away, making up her mind a dozen times and changing it until I finally said, “Look, maybe now isn’t the best time.”

At that Shannon made up her mind.

“No, no I think it’s okay. I suppose you’d better come in.” She pulled open the door and let me in, then quickly closed and bolted the door behind her.

I followed her down a short, indigo blue hallway into a very large room. It had lovely high ceilings and large windows overlooking the museum, and the windowsills were wide enough to sit on, except that they were full of plants. The windows were open and a gentle breeze was blowing the pale peach curtains inward. There were boxes of books, some computer disks and file folders in the centre of the room, and papers spread over every surface. The back of a red velvet sofa had been slashed and the stuffing was all over the floor. Three pictures leaned against the wall, one of a lynx and two of Diamond and Shannon, with the glass shattered and the photos ripped.

“Oh, it’s kind of a mess,” she said, which I thought was rather an understatement. “Someone broke in and trashed the place sometime this morning. The police only just left.”

It was quite a mess. Diamond certainly seemed to have left a lot of paperwork behind him that interested someone. First his office ransacked and now his home. I wondered if he and his wife still kept a house together and if it had been searched too.

“I came home for lunch and found stuff flung everywhere. It’s horrible. It’s taken all afternoon to clean it up and figure out what’s missing. Just a bunch of vandals the police say. Why do people do these things?” I didn’t like the sound of her voice, a tight, bare-knuckled type of voice, on the verge of control and the abyss beyond.

“Look, maybe I’d better come back another day. It’s not a good time for you.”

She answered so quickly and with such vehemence that it made me start because it seemed so out of character. “It’s the perfect time. You can help me clean up while we talk.” She looked at me and softened her voice. “I sure could use the help.” She handed me a plastic bag and indicated a pile of papers in the corner. I picked my way through the mess and began stuffing papers into the bag.

“What did they steal?” I asked.

“Nothing important as far as I can see,” she said. “All our valuable stuff is here: the stereo, VCR, computer …”

I had sidled my way over to the computer, and the distinctive smell, though weak, made my skin crawl. The computer was covered with the same stuff that had wiped my own computer clean.

I looked around and saw her staring at me. “You didn’t keep any important records on this computer, did you?”

“We used to, but the computer had total system failure once and Jake never trusted it again. He used it only for small stuff anyway. He’d bring home his current work on those disks and feed them in. He never left any of his work on the computer, just games and things like that.”

“Any of your work?”

“Me? No. I don’t know anything about computers. I like a pen and paper better. I never used it.” I wondered if she knew what the formaldehyde had done to the computer — surely she could smell it — but I didn’t have the heart to bring it up. She’d find out soon enough, if it was important. “Do you know what was he working on? His grad student said he was excited about something. Any idea what it was?”

“No.” She hesitated. “But Patrick’s right. He was kind of excited about something, but when I asked, all he would say was that it was important and he wanted to surprise me.”

I idly started looking at the labels on the disks — all games of one kind or another, no data, no personal stuff.

“Was anything stolen, anything at all?”

“Yes. About two months before Jake died he brought back a little box filled with some mammal teeth and fur, said it had something to do with his lynx studies. You know about his lynx studies?” I nodded. “He sometimes brought stuff like that home, not often but sometimes, and only the really good specimens. He kept them in a box in his desk over there. Most of what he collected he gave to Patrick to catalogue, but sometimes, if a tooth was particularly good, he’d bring it back for himself.”

Her hand went to her neck and I saw she was wearing a necklace with a single tooth, embedded in silver, dangling from a silver chain.

She saw my eyes glance at her necklace and dropped her hand and smiled.

“This tooth is … was … his Florida Panthers’ tooth, he said.”

I raised my eyebrows in question.

“He liked to collect the teeth of all the sports teams named after cats, professional and amateur — Ottawa Lynx, Florida Panthers, Cincinnati Bengals, Bobcaygeon Bobcats, Dumoine Pumas — you name it, he collected them and turned them into necklaces.”

I remembered Lianna’s necklace and the much smaller tooth she wore. I wondered what cat that had been and what team it had represented. What a strange man. Most men give rings or earrings, but Diamond obviously handed out the canine teeth of felines to his women. Talk about being hooked on his profession.

“He gave me this just before he went into the bush. He had one just like it. They came from Florida and New Brunswick.”

His and hers necklaces, I thought with a shiver. Yuck.

“Anyway his collection is gone — he was very proud of it. Seems like a dumb thing to steal but there was a lot of silver too. The police figure that’s why it was taken, for the silver he used to make the necklaces.”

She stood there fiddling with her necklace for a long time.

“They say you found him.” Her voice cracked, and she sat down suddenly amid a pile of file folders and the stuffing from the sofa, which poofed up around her like dandelion fluff.

“Why’d it have to happen to him?” Her voice sailed too high and shattered, and I found myself looking around the messy room for a Kleenex and going to the kitchen for a glass of water. Shannon struggled to hold back the tears and gulped the water I brought to her.

“Sorry, I can’t help it. I still can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe it happened. Jake was the best woodsman I ever knew. He kept a flare gun by his head every night before turning in just in case he needed it for bears or other wild animals. The cops didn’t mention that he’d fired the flare. It just doesn’t fit. He’d have had time to fire the flare. No one could surprise Jake. He had eyes in the back of his head. He would have fired the flare.”

“But it was a rogue bear, a crazy bear, Shannon,” I said with a conviction I wasn’t sure was justified. “A rogue bear is unpredictable. It could have been stalking him. Perhaps he just didn’t wake up in time,” I said, trying to remember if there had been a flare gun listed in the police report.

“Jake would wake up if a grasshopper tried to sneak by him; he was that light a sleeper. Honest to God. An owl couldn’t sneak by that man. There’s no way he could have been surprised by a stupid bear. Even a rogue bear or whatever it is you call it. He would have had some warning, some feeling that there was something bloody wrong. I’ve seen him wake in the tent and listen for fifteen minutes until a bear, silent and stealthy, walked into our camp one night. He knew. Don’t ask me how the hell he did, but he knew and he was ready for it with the flare gun. He didn’t have to hear it first. He could sense it with some sort of sixth sense. He would have put up a fight.”

“But suppose he’d taken a sleeping pill or something like that? Maybe a shot of scotch even. It could make him groggy. It would be harder to wake up, make him sleepier.” I was remembering the coroner’s report. The guy was certainly under enough stress with the logging to have resorted to something that would let him sleep.

“A sleeping pill? Jake? A sleeping pill? Christ, you obviously don’t” — she suppressed a sob, swallowing it — “didn’t know Jake. He never took any pills at all, no medication, not even vitamins. He was not just a planet environmentalist, he was a body environmentalist too. And who would ever take a sleeping pill in the bush anyway? No. He’d have woken in time to do something, even if he’d had a drink or two. I’m sure of it. Besides, he had Paulie.”

“Polly?”

“His cat. Never went anywhere without little Paulie. Beautiful black velvet cat with liquid gold eyes. Loyal little devil. It belonged to Jake’s nephew but got run over by a car. The parents wanted to put it down but the nephew appealed to his Uncle Jake. The vet had to amputate one leg but the cat adapted remarkably well and Jake began to admire it for its tenacity. In the end he kept it. She stuck to Jake like a burr. She went with him every time they went into the bush. Nothing got by Paulie. Nothing. She’d have wakened him even if he were in a coma.” She looked up and saw the expression on my face.

“You know something,” she said eagerly. “What?”

“There was a black three-legged cat around the day we found Diamond.”

“That was Paulie!” she said excitedly. “Where is she? Have you got her? Is she okay?”

I shook my head. “It disappeared and we never saw it again.”

The eagerness in her face faded and she murmured something about posting a reward.

“Look,” I said, trying to bring the subject back to Diamond, “even a seasoned woodsman can get careless sometimes, and that’s all it would take if a rogue bear was around. He was careless enough to leave a chocolate bar in the tent. He could have misplaced his flare gun too, or lost it along the portage.”

Shannon’s head jerked up and she stared at me, open-mouthed. “Are you crazy? No way. He found out he was allergic to chocolate, months ago. Migraine headaches. But he didn’t like to tell anybody. He thought he had to be macho and all that. He hated to think he had any weaknesses. But even if he was sneaking it on the sly, he’d never leave food in the tent. He made me empty my pockets of candy wrappers and burn them before we got into the tent, he was that meticulous. Drove me crazy. He knew what bears could do and he never did anything to entice them. He never kept food in the tent, even toothpaste, and he always strung up the food pack well out of reach of animals. And I can’t imagine him ever losing that flare gun. He’s had it more than twenty years and it’s saved his neck a dozen times or more.”

“Suppose he did lose the flare gun? Would he have resorted to using his tranquilizer gun in an emergency?”

She nodded. “Yeah, sure, if he had time to load it and all, but it’s not something you can do quickly, and besides, he didn’t have his trank gun with him this last trip.”

I looked at her in surprise.

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s in my car. He forgot it there when I drove him to work the day he went into the bush. I didn’t notice it until last week.”

I tried to swallow the implications of this new revelation. If Jake hadn’t taken out the tranquilizer gun, then whose dart had hit him?

“Could he have picked up another one at his office?”

“It wouldn’t have occurred to him. He’d already packed it, you see, but he needed something from the pack and we were in such a hurry and he asked me if I could find it, and, well, I guess in my haste the tranquilizer gun case got left behind.”

So where did the dart come from that was found in Jake’s body, I wondered. Someone must have been with him when he died, but who? Shannon got up and dumped a green garbage bag full of stuff by the sofa and then handed me another bag.

“I know it’s crazy,” she said. “He was killed by a bear, but somehow I still can’t believe that.” She was looking like she was going to crumple again, so I quickly changed the subject.

“Were there any disks stolen?”

“You mean like yours? I don’t know. As I said he didn’t keep any disks here except … Yeah, hang on a moment. This might help you.” She got up, picked up her purse, and rummaged in it until she finally surfaced with a disk.

“He gave me this just before he went into the bush. Asked me to take it to a printer and print out the injunction stuff on it for him and keep it in my purse until he got back. He was afraid the loggers might get hold of it and learn his game plans, I guess. He’d have done anything to stop the logging up there. He loved that place. And how he envied those guys on the west coast — you know, the ones who saved the forest because of a rare owl that lived there? He and his family used to camp up in Dumoine when he was a kid. Anyway, I printed out the injunction stuff for him — it’s still at work. You’re welcome to the disk, though. It’s no good to me anymore.”

She handed me the disk. I placed it in my inside jacket pocket and then stood up to go. Shannon accompanied me to the door, grabbing onto the doorknob once again.

I turned on the threshold and said, “Jake Diamond’s wife came to see me last week.”

Shannon tensed every muscle and clenched her fists around the knob, but she said nothing.

“She wanted to know about a black diary of hers that she says Diamond mistakenly took. She thought maybe I’d seen it when I first found Diamond as it hadn’t shown up in the police report and wasn’t among his effects. Do you know anything about it and why she’d think he had it?”

Shannon ground her teeth and went pale and trembly. The doorknob rattled in her hand.

“You’d think she’d be happy with the insurance policy she had on his life. A million bucks is nothing to sneer at. I know it made Diamond horribly nervous. People kill for less than that. She wants everything of Diamond’s right down to his camera and all the beautiful pictures he took of his lynx and bobcats. His stuff’s not worth much, God knows, but it means a lot to me to have those things, and I know she just wants them to shut me out. Diamond said he would leave all his things to me. He wrote another will in his black diary, and we got two acquaintances to witness it. He wanted me to have those pictures, to have all his things, not that bitch. She really told you that black book was hers?”

“The black book isn’t hers?” I asked innocently.

“No, of course it isn’t. I don’t know or really care what she told you. The truth is that he wrote another will.”

“Isn’t that a little odd, not going through a lawyer?”

“Not really. Jake said it’s perfectly legal as long as it’s witnessed and it’s handwritten. It all happened because the night before he was due to go into the bush he read an article in the paper about separated couples, and what to do to make sure you don’t get screwed financially. Well, it said the first thing to do is to change your will because if you die all your stuff goes to the wife, not to me. So he scribbled it all down in his black book and we got it witnessed by his friends. He was going to put it in the safe deposit box but he didn’t. I checked. It isn’t there.”

“And you have no idea where it is?”

“It must have gone into the bush with him. I haven’t seen it, but my brother, he’s a lawyer, he told Lianna’s lawyer about it. Her lawyer then confirmed its existence with the witnesses, and told me that unless I can find the will, the will favouring Lianna stands.”

Suddenly her green eyes widened and she looked right through me. “Holy God. The bloody bitch. Do you think that’s why my place was ransacked?”