(2012) Cross-Border Murder (13 page)

We went into the kitchen. “Coffee?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t have a diet coke, would you?”

“Yep. As a matter of fact I do.” I went to the fridge and got out two diet cokes. I waited until she had taken at least two bites of the pizza and a substantial sip of coke. The fact that she was eating I took as a good sign. I still did not feel like feeding the sourness in my stomach.

Instead I said, “Let me put a number of premises to you which may lead to a reason for what happened at the motel. Premise number one, for some reason the murderer decided that he had to get rid of Naomi. Possibly she did know something damaging, and the murderer knew that, although why anyone would wait until now to take action is beyond me. But let’s put that aside for the moment.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Gina interjected. There’s a way in which the time gap makes sense.”

“Okay, out with it,” I said

“Once my father was arrested, the murderer had to wait. To tackle Naomi then would have shifted the investigation away from my father. And by the time my father was released, and Naomi had yet to say anything, the murderer might have felt temporarily safe. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. As time went by the strategy paid off. But when we decided to track her down and talk to her maybe the murderer panicked.”

“Agreed. Premise number two,” I said, “The murderer somehow discovers that Naomi has gone to her cottage alone. How he came to know that escapes me. Maybe accidentally, maybe not. But let’s assume he did. It may give us a break when we check alibis and movements.”

So far I was doing okay, because Gina, curious, simply nodded.

“Premise number three. The murderer hopes that any tie-in between Naomi’s death and that of her husband will not get made.”

Gina frowned, “I find that hard to believe.”

“I don’t,” I said, “and it might have worked. It might still work.”

Her shoulders sagged slightly. “Okay, I’m listening.”

First there’s the location of the cottage. It’s not only isolated but it’s in a different jurisdiction from the one which investigated Monaghan’s murder. Hence he kills her in a way to maximize the likelihood that a cop like Captain Leclair will conclude that her murder was the unfortunate byproduct of a break-in.”

I took a sip of my coke which seemed to burn its way down to the pit of my stomach. “Which brings me to premise number three.”

“Actually,” Gina said, her eyes twinkling sadly with fatigue, “it’s premise number four.”

I smiled hesitantly in return. “Okay. Premise number four. The murderer doesn’t know we’ve been at the cottage. He presumes we haven’t yet spoken to Naomi since my first meeting with her, and assumes it could be days before we find out her death. He decides to try and scare you off. Not kill you. That would only re-open the case. But a warning shot. One the police could interpret as being intended for someone else. Someone like Linda. But one which might frighten you enough to send you back home to the States to rethink how much you really want to pursue all of this. After all he has nothing to lose by trying.”

Gina frowned. “Maybe.” She did not seemed convinced. “But there’s a key weakness in your argument isn’t there?” I waited. “There’s still you. Why would he think that you would not find out about Naomi and pursue the investigation?”

I just shrugged. She stared at me. It slowly dawned on her just where my argument was leading.

I sighed, “the murderer probably assumes correctly that I’m someone who has been pushed out into early retirement. And assumes further that I’m really only doing this because you’ve persuaded me to. If you pull out and go home. What do I do? He can assume that the paper is not likely to pressure me to continue my investigation. And unless I came up with something solid as evidence almost immediately, the paper, the police, and even I would quickly lose interest. Everything would eventually peter out, settle back into the kind of no-man’s land it was before you came on the scene. At any rate he has little to lose by firing off a random warning shot under the circumstances.” She was staring at her hands in her lap. I was hoping to see her eyes and gauge her reaction. Her next question caught me by surprise.

“And you, did you too assume that I would just turn tail and run home to mother?” Her eyes had grown hard with anger. “Is that what you want me to do?”

“No.” I let a sheepish grin spread across my face. “And I didn’t assume that you would turn tail and run home to mother. But then I probably know you better than the murderer does. Or maybe he simply doesn’t have much experience with young women like you.” I meant it as a compliment, but I think she took it as just another pathetic example of gender miscalculation.

“God, I’m exhausted,” she said, “so where do we go from here?”

I leaned back farther in my chair. I grinned, “you go home to mother.”

“What!” Her eyes popped open. If she had been a cat, gouges of my skin would have been lying on top of the cold pizza. But I was serious.

“It makes sense right now for us to do what the murderer expects us to do. We give him a few days to grow arrogant. We gather more information. Take the time we need to sort things out. Then we come back and set the fox right back into the chicken coop when the murderer least expects it.”

“Sounds like you’re simply trying to get rid of me.” She said uneasily.

“Nope, because I’m coming with you.” She gave me a puzzled frown. “For one thing I want to get a feel of what happened back then from your mother. I’m hoping that you’ll call her tonight and persuade her to let us drive down to see her tomorrow. Anything that needs doing here we can leave to Phil Ryan.”

Gina sat there sizing up what I had suggested. Finally she shrugged, “okay, maybe it makes some sense.” I think she agreed that we needed a chance to talk things out, think things through. “But it’s a long drive.”

“So, we’ll share the driving. After you’ve spoken to her, I’ll call Phil Ryan. Bring him up to date. See if he’s found out anything interesting from the old police file. Persuade him to get in touch with this Captain Leclair. Meanwhile, let’s move your things into the spare bedroom.”

Gina just nodded.

I helped carry her things upstairs. I suggested she use the telephone in the den to phone her mother. While she was doing that, I went downstairs, quickly ate a slice of pizza, cleaned up, poured myself a mug of coffee and went back upstairs.

“It’s okay,” Gina said emerging from the den.

“How did she react?”

“Worried about me.”

I nodded.

“She was a bit ambivalent about your coming.”

I nodded again.

“But she will fix up the spare room. I said we’d arrive around supper time.”

“Good.”

Gina nodded. “I’m tired. I think I’ll pack it in. Maybe I could use one of those tranquillizers now.”

I went to the medicine cabinet and brought back two small orange pills.

“What are they?”

“Rivotril. A mild dosage.”

“Rivotril? What’s it prescribed for?”

“Anxiety.”

She stared at me. I had no intention of explaining why I had them. “They’ll help you sleep. I suspect that half the world suffers from some form of anxiety,” and then I added, “and so it should.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” I muttered. “If I had an answer to that I’d be able to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. Probably because we come into the world howling. And most of us leave it frightened and whimpering. And in between we walk a confusing tightrope somewhere between happiness and despair. That’s surely reason enough.”

She moved towards the bedroom. She smiled, “being dysfunctional is a state of mind. None of us really have to live that way. See you in the morning.”

I nodded.

She shut the door slowly behind her.

I took my coffee to my desk and dialed Ryan’s number. When he answered, I explained about what happened at the cottage near Mansonville, about the shooting incident outside the motel, about our interview with the Symanskys, and our subsequent speculations. He listened attentively. There was a long pause before he responded. “I’ve gone through the old file again and made a list of all the things I should have done back then. Perhaps we could get together tomorrow and go over it.”

I explained the decision to return to Gina’s home and visit her mother.

“Makes sense. You said you picked up a fair amount of background information from the guy who’s in charge of PR at the university.”

“I could probably make a copy of it all and drop it off on our way out of town.”

“You have a copier?”

“Yeah. Haven’t used it much. Probably the first time I’ll get my money’s worth out of it.”

“By the way, I know Leclair.”

“The cop investigating Bronson’s death?”

“We once took a course together.”

“It’s a small world. If you’re talking to Leclair, ask him if the Monaghans owned the cottage before Monaghan was murdered.” I explained the cottage’s proximity to the location of Bull’s gunnery range and my earlier theory that Monaghan might have been spying on Bull.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll also try to contact whoever is in charge of the shooting at the motel. Did you get any sense of where the shot might have come from?”

“No. It could have come from any number of locations.”

“True.” He knew the area. The motel was situated on an artery dotted with motels, fast food restaurants, used car lots, and a couple of rather well known strip joints. Behind it was a wooded escarpment and across the road an abandoned bowling alley.

“So how’s Gina taking all of this?” He asked.

“Surprisingly well, I think. She’s resilient. But then she’s still very young.”

He sighed, “oh, to be young again.”

“Forget it,” I said, “we’ve had our youth. Life is not a merry-go-round. There’s no second go at it.”

“Yeah, don’t I know it.” And on that odd note, we said goodnight and hung up. I swallowed what was left of my cold coffee and took my drained spirit off to bed.

But before I fell asleep, I thought about Gina’s mother. There was something I had never told Gina. When I had first looked at the photo enlargement she had given me, I had told myself not to discount anyone as a possible suspect, and that had included Gina’s mother. After all, I had told myself, she also had had a motive to confront Monaghan about his wife and her husband’s behavior. It was only a slim possibility, but she and Monaghan might have agreed to meet and had an angry argument which had led to an accidental homicide. Out of guilt, or so I had told myself on that first day that I had met Gina, Frank Montini might have accepted to take the fall for his distraught wife.

In retrospect, those early thoughts now appeared silly. Events had changed the slate of potential suspects. And I was grateful for that, because now I could meet Mrs. Montini on a different level. Still, too little was known about the role Gina’s mother had played in the tragedy at Winston so many years ago. But at that moment I was too tired to formulate the questions I would have to put to her.

CHAPTER NINE
 

We were on the road again, had been for more than five hours. We had finally passed what Gina had called the salt line: a point where she could sense the smell of the ocean. What I noticed was a change in the texture of the ground. The black loam of the mountains had given way to a lighter mix of sand and earth. We were still, by my estimation, about forty highway miles from the sea.

Over breakfast, I had given Gina a digest of my conversation with Ryan. I had also xeroxed all the data I had gathered from Joe Gibbs, and had dropped it off at Ryan’s home as promised. Near the border, I had given Gina the files. She glance sporadically through them but without enthusiasm. Given the events of the last few days, the data seemed strangely remote from the heart of our investigation.

We had stopped for a late lunch in South Paris and as we munched on a salad, Gina began to tell me about her mother and her mother’s extended family. I had assumed that both Gina’s parents had been of Italian extraction. But instead I discovered that Gina’s mother had been one of six children born to Irish immigrants in Boston. Her maiden name had been Shanahan. And her baptismal name had not been Maria, as I had presumed, but Mary. When Gina and her parents had returned to the States, they had first moved to Boston to be close to her mother’s family.

“But it made my father very uncomfortable,” Gina said.

“The Irish can be pretty clannish,” I noted.

Gina smiled, “the problem was they all wanted to see my father as part of the clan. They all wanted to be helpful. But my father didn’t like the trade-off. For him, the trade-off was their right to be nosy, to poke and gossip about every aspect of our life, past, present, and future. That’s why we ended up in Portland. It’s a two and a half hour drive to Boston. Close enough to keep in contact, but far enough to keep it sporadic.”

“What about your father’s family?”

“Well, they also live in Boston. My father’s parents died about ten years ago, but his two brothers and a sister still live there. My father was the youngest child and he was born here in the United States, while the others were born in Italy. They still cling to the old ways, a tradition with which my father felt little affinity. He was also the only one to get a university education, so he and his family were not as close as my mother’s.”

“Your mother was university educated too, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Did she specialize in history like your father?”

“No. She did her degree in social work.”

“Ah!”

Gina threw me a curious glance. “Why ah!? What made you say that?”

“Because you don’t hear of people going into social work anymore. But it was quite common in the sixties.”

“True. I wonder what brought about the change?”

“The jobs are no longer there.” I suggested. Deficit cutting is in, social spending is out. Has been for more than a decade. When I was your age, there was a consensus that something could be done to improve the lot of the poor and underprivileged. And the money seemed to be there. So were the jobs. We thought we needed more social workers. Today, we’re downsizing. Social workers are out. We’re going back to soup kitchens and Christmas baskets. Psychologists not social workers are now the growing fad. They’re rarely funded by public money, so they treat the middle class and charge a substantial fee. Does your mother do social work in Portland?”