(2012) Cross-Border Murder
Cross-Border
Murder
David Waters
iUniverse, Inc.
Bloomington
Cross-Border Murder
Copyright
© 2012 by David Waters.
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-4759-2849-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4759-2851-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4759-2850-1 (ebk)
iUniverse rev. date: 06/06/2012
Contents
In 1995 my life changed in dramatic ways. I was a semi-retired journalist and in a grumpy mood at the time. The night before I had listened to the Expos baseball game and they had played miserably. The year before they might have won the World Series had the season not been cut short by a strike. Still, it is not everyday that someone appears at your door demanding that you redeem a serious mistake you made early in your working life. What follows is how I reacted—with consequences both good and bad. My life has never been the same again.
I answered the doorbell on the third ring. The young woman and I locked eyes through the plain glass of the front door. After a moment’s hesitation I opened the door half-way. Her jeans were faded. A backpack was slung over a green sweater.
“Mr. Webster?” She said.
“Yes.”
There was a long pause. I did not invite her in.
“My name is Gina Montini.” She said it as if her name should mean something to me. It didn’t. I thought I saw the assertiveness in her eyes weaken.
“Are you Mr. Webster the reporter?” She asked.
“Was.” The single word sounded curt and so I added: “I’m semi-retired.”
I saw her eyes glaze over. It was a phenomenon I was getting used to. People who want to use one professionally, quickly lose interest when one has retired. Of course, what she saw could hardly have impressed her as I stood in the doorway in a faded dressing gown, somewhat slack-jawed, stiff, almost lifeless like a photograph of someone from another era caught in a tawdry moment of time. But then I saw determination return to the set of her lips.
“May I come in?”
I wanted to say no, but I still had a reporter’s curiosity and after a moment I moved aside. She eased past me and made her way into the living room.
Facing someone in my present condition was the last thing I wanted. I had not yet showered or shaved. Early retirement was not wearing well. I had yet to start any of the projects I had been planning to do. Two weeks of walking the neighborhood around my house in Montreal had revealed enough of the local environment to last me a lifetime.
“You wrote about my father’s arrest sixteen years ago. He was a professor at Winston University,” she said as she plunked herself down on the couch. She removed some faded newspaper clippings from her backpack and held them towards me. I glanced at them just long enough to jog my memory. I handed them back. Montini, I remembered now, had been charged with the murder of a fellow professor. But for some reason which I could not remember the case against him had been dropped.
“He was innocent,” she put a special emphasis on the verb. “Your reporting assumed that he was guilty even after he was released.”
I raised a dubious, condescending eyebrow. I had always thought of myself as an old-fashioned objective newsman: an exception in a trade where objectivity no longer paid the necessary dividends. Commitment, anger, a cause were what seemed to drive the new breed. But I had always prided myself on being a born spectator. I expected to leave the planet that way. I was not an admirer of how civilization was evolving, but giving it a course correction was not within the orbit of my arrogance.
She held out the clippings again. I ignored the gesture. If I had written that guilt lingered after her father had been released, I would have been quoting someone else, not passing a personal judgment. Besides, if I had wanted to scrutinize what I had written about her father I had copies in my filing cabinets upstairs in the den.
“When they let him go, you wrote that he was still under police suspicion.”
I did not want to offend her feelings, but what I wrote had been accurate. “He was,” I said simply. “The police were satisfied that he was guilty,” I added. That much I remembered. But something bothered me now. It was a fleeting memory of the suddenness with which the investigation had been dropped and the case closed. I had been on holidays. Had the paper followed up on that? I couldn’t remember.
“Where’s your father now?” I asked.
“He’s dead. In a grave. In a small town in Oregon.” Her lips pursed slightly in anger.
I tried to look appropriately sympathetic.
“He should have lived longer,” she said, “but his liver failed. He had become an alcoholic.”
“I’m sorry.” I muttered. And in a way I was. It was the kind of horrid death I could understand. It was a character defect of my profession. In recent years I had attended my share of premature funerals.
She stared at me. “Did you know that he was hounded out of Winston University?”
“No.” But then I had never followed up on the story. I had been moved on to something else.
“Well he was.” There was a touch of sarcasm in her voice as she added, “as you noted in your article, suspicion lingered. We had to return to the States. But his past at Winston University somehow seemed to surface at every place he worked. He acquired a defeated look and drank more. People assumed it was a guilty conscience.” Her gaze shifted to her knees.
I had the feeling a kneecap was about to break through the thin fabric of the faded jeans. “For five years we drifted. My mother and I followed along. But then one day he just walked away. We were in Portland, Maine. He sent us a postcard a week later from somewhere out west. But he never came back. I never saw him again. Except at the funeral.”
I was surprised by the affection which had crept into her voice. She had obviously loved him despite his desertion.
“We didn’t try to follow him. My mother hoped he would work things out on his own, and then come back. Or ask us to join him. At first there was an occasional exchange of letters. Then nothing. She prayed a lot. When he died he was a janitor in a small town in Oregon.” I frowned. My self-inflicted state of despondency seemed suddenly indulgent in the noon day sun which filtered in through a wide crack in the window curtains. We stared at each other.
She took a deep breath. “I want, I need your help to right a wrong: to bring the truth to light. He was not the murderer. I’m sure of that. And I would like the record set straight.”
I thought that over. What she wanted was more than a rewrite of an old article, saying that, contrary to earlier reports, her father had not been under suspicion when he had been released. Besides the rewrite would not be accurate. I still had this memory of the police being angry when the case was dropped. They believed he was guilty. Could he have been innocent? What she needed was a re-opening of the case. One which would follow a cold trail to a guilty party. None of this was within my range.
“Look, I’m no detective,” I told her, hoping to end matters there.
“I know.”
“I’m a semi-retired newsman,” I added lamely. “And investigative journalism was never my specialty.”
She nodded as if she was acknowledging a small flaw in her plan. “I stopped by the newspaper and read through most of what you’ve written.” That rankled me. It shouldn’t have. What she had read was part of the public record. But the public record of a journalist is rarely scrutinized. Like policemen, we get very touchy whenever someone from outside wants to look at our past record.
We stared at each other. She had to be pretty desperate if she had come to me for help. I had the feeling the same thought had passed through her mind. I found myself in a quandary. I wanted to say no, but I was never very good at knowing how to do so gracefully. There was something both forlorn and tough about her as she sat there waiting for me to decide. Besides she was pretty. She had the same olive skin as her father, and the same black hair, except that it hung down in ringlets where it rested on her shoulders.
“Could you come back later?” I said with a touch of asperity. “It’ll give me time to get cleaned up and do some thinking.” She nodded gratefully. We settled on five o’clock. I watched her walk down the street.
This is ridiculous I thought. Why am I even tempted to become involved? I’m just an observer wanting to watch life pass by as I settle into old age. Was it because I sensed in her a persistence which would not give up easily? And what if she was right? What if instead of just being an observer I had contributed even in a small way to the suffering of her father and his family? Did I owe her even a modicum of assistance? And what if she found someone else to help her unravel a truth that I and others had ignored way back then? If there was a story to be set straight surely I was the one who should do it. Even if it was beyond my competence, I could at least open some doors for her. Besides what else did I have to occupy my time? I wandered upstairs, checked my files and reread what I had written back in 1979. It was not a pleasant task. I had to admit that her criticism of my reporting had some validity. I had given unnamed police sources far more play than our system of justice called for. Shortly after two, I showered and shaved and made myself a late brunch.
After a second cup of coffee, I called the office and spoke to Mel Vogel, the managing editor. I explained the story I was thinking about working on. Without the paper’s support my involvement would be useless. I expected him to say no, even though I had an early retirement pay-off deal which required that I write a minimal number of stories in the coming year. But he said to go ahead. He would pay any expenses if I submitted them in advance. I grimaced as I realized that step by step I was beginning to incriminate myself in her quest. I finished my coffee and thought about what to do next. I tried to reach the police captain who had been in charge of the case. We had become as friendly as policemen and reporters got back in those days when I had worked the police beat. Which is not that close, but at least we were on a first name basis. The officer who answered his phone at police headquarters told me Phil Ryan had now retired. That surprised me. I had retired a short time back at fifty-five. Ryan had been at least five years younger than me. Despite his name, Phil Ryan was not Irish. His great grandfather had been, but his matrimonial line was pure French-Canadian. His language at home was French. But like so many of his generation he had spent many years in the English school system, and I suspect his English, grammatically as well as colloquially was as good if not better than his French. I checked my old Rolodex and found a home number. I hoped he had not moved since the last time I had phoned him at home. I reached him on the second ring. His voice had the slow drawl of the underemployed. It brightened somewhat as I explained the reason for my call.