(2012) Cross-Border Murder (17 page)

But before he could hang up I asked: “Why did Monaghan give low grades to students like you?”

The silence which followed told me I hat touched a raw nerve.

Finally, he murmured, “I’m afraid only Michael Monaghan could really answer that. Good day, Mr. Webster.”

I stared at the phone. I felt like I had blown a second interview with the surprisingly smug Dean of Engineering.

But I decided I wasn’t quite through. I called again. Leg work indeed! When his secretary came on the line, I was as sweet and smooth as maple syrup. “I was just talking to Dean Gooden.” I explained, stating what must have been obvious to her. “We were talking about his cottage. He mentioned its location, but the name of the town has suddenly eluded me. I’d prefer not to disturb him again. Would you perhaps know it?”

She seemed unsure of what to do. Finally she said, “I think it’s Georgeville.”

“Ah, yes, of course, that’s it. Glad I didn’t have to disturb him again.”

I put down the receiver. Georgeville. How very interesting. The location did not come as a complete surprise. Academics all seemed to favor the countryside south-east of Montreal. Either near the American border or across it. Some of course preferred locations to the west across the border in Ontario. Usually for tax reasons. Very few opted for the Laurentians north of Montreal. Georgeville was a small town on the other side of lake Memphramagog from Naomi’s cottage. I estimated not much more than a thirty minute drive around the northern tip of the lake. Interesting indeed.

Gooden was right. It was time to do some leg work. A chat with the local Georgeville merchants, a visit with some of his neighbors. Find out what kind of car he drove. That kind of thing. The same applied to Hendricks and the Symanskys. My stay in Portland was going to be shorter than I had intended.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
 

After supper, Mary suggested that we go for a walk before darkness fell. Gina declined. She had spoken little during supper. At some point during the meal I had become puzzled by what I felt were Gina’s increasingly introspective silences. We left Gina behind to clean up the dishes.

“It’ll take us about fifteen minutes,” Mary said, “to reach the tip of the cape and a view of the harbor.”

What was a brisk walk for her was little more than a leisurely stroll for me.

“Do your friends call you Tom or Thomas?”

“Both.”

“And which do you prefer?”

“I used to prefer Tom. But increasingly I prefer Thomas.”

The landscape changed as we walked. Trees gave way to the wild rose bushes that one finds near the sea.

“There’s something my mind has been fumbling with,” I said, “perhaps you can help me with it.”

“What’s that?” She asked. The tip of Cape Elizabeth came into view.

“Ever since Gina knocked at my door, we’ve been focusing on the people in the photo. Subsequent events appear to have warranted that. But initially casting a wider net would have been more reasonable. At first, I had the impression it was because of something her father had told her. But it was you that gave her the photo.” I said, “for some reason you must have nudged her in that direction too. Why? Last night, you mentioned only your husband’s belief that someone in the group had betrayed him. Are there any other reasons?”

Mary gave the question careful thought. Finally she nodded. “Nothing conclusive, but I remembered some of the discussions I had with my husband and his lawyer not too long after Frank was arrested. It had to do with the significance of the weapon. The weapon, as you may know, was a heavy cone of an artillery shell. Not just your average paperweight! And it was kept on a shelf above a filing cabinet in a corner of the office, slightly behind and to the right of Monaghan’s desk. It was not something that would have been in easy reach of just any student who came to confront Monaghan about a disappointing mark, no matter how enraged the student might have been. At the very least, it implied someone close enough to Monaghan to be able to wander around the office while talking or arguing with him.”

“Or someone with access to a key, and who may have been going through the files near the shell cone when Monaghan appeared.”

“Yes. So when Gina insisted upon pursuing the matter with some of the money her father left her, I got out that photo. Why I had kept it I don’t know. But I had. Maybe, for me, it symbolized a brief nostalgic period before everything at Winston came down in ruins. It’s odd,” she added, “but when I looked at the photo before giving it to Gina, I felt something sinister looking back at me.”

“But you were afraid for Gina and so you still tried to dissuade her from coming to Montreal.” She nodded. We had come to a spit of land where the ocean stretched before us. We stopped to absorb the view. The sun, now low in the sky, was behind us. Its rays cast a pink sheen upon the now gentle medicinal swells of the sea. The cargo boats lined up in the channel a mile or two from the port had acquired a glowing patina which gave them, for the moment, an aura of magic. Yet another illusion, I thought. But this time not caused by smoke and lies, but by the evening light of the sun. In truth, I knew those ships were probably little more than rusting monsters of modern mechanical engineering. I watched as some of the small boats that had been fishing in the channel packed it in and headed back to port leaving a wake of glistening foam behind them.

She said, “sometimes it’s best to let the past sleep. It’s true that a murderer had not been caught and punished. And we had suffered. Frank was dead. But the evil and the venom had stopped there.”

“As far as one could tell,” I remarked.

“Yes as far as we could tell,” she acknowledged.

A few hundred yards from us the tide slapped quietly at the large, seaweed covered rocks piled along the coast.

“There’s a myth in Irish folklore,” Mary said, “that Saint Patrick chased all the snakes out of Ireland. Have you ever been to Ireland?” She asked.

“No.”

“A part of Ireland is as lush and green as all the songs say it is. But there is another part that is almost uninhabitable, strewn with nothing but rocks, and stubble and peat.” Strange, but to my untrained ear, and in that half-light, her voice seemed to acquire a soft tribal lilt. “There’s another Irish myth,” she continued, “that says that the snakes did not leave Ireland at all, but were only banished to that part which, particularly at night, looks almost like a dead lunar landscape. So which myth is true? Who knows? Probably neither. But everyone agrees that it’s a foolish man who goes poking under all those rocks just to see if there are really snakes there just to satisfy an itch to uncover the truth.”

“And Gina was setting out to poke under rocks.”

“And now Naomi is dead, and an innocent friend of Gina’s has been shot. This morning Gina was having second thoughts. She had needed to get at the truth because of how she felt about her father.”

“And you didn’t?”

“Frank was dead. I had never doubted his innocence.”

“We’ve been making progress,” I said defensively, “we may yet see justice done.”

Mary nodded. “If justice is what you want. Gina only wanted to vindicate her father by unraveling the truth of what really happened. Justice always seems to cost a lot,” she said, “and not just money. We never seem to quite get the kind of justice we want, and it seems to soil us in the process.”

“It would be a mistake to stop now,” I suggested.

“Oh, I know,” she said wistfully, “besides, the police are involved again, and maybe they can use our help. We don’t need someone else falsely accused! We should probably all go back to Montreal soon. There’s not much which can be accomplish here.”

“We?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m concerned about Gina. I want to be beside her the rest of the way. We’ll both feel safer.” She added simply.

I took a last look at Portland harbor. I thought of sailors out on a dangerous ocean. They must have imagined such a harbor as a safe haven, as home. And yet, I thought, the ports, themselves, are places fraught with danger and violence. Winston University must have once seemed like a safe haven to Mary and Frank Montini. Perhaps even more so to Gina. Was any place really safe? Really a home? “There’s plenty of room at my place,” I said, “no need for either you or Gina to stay at a motel.”

“Good.” A decision had been reached. An ironic smile dimpled her cheeks. “Of course,” she added, “we’re assuming that Gina has not decided to abandon her quest and stay home!”

The thought made me smile. “I would doubt it.” The idea that Gina might quit now was alien to my understanding of the woman who had so insinuated herself into my life. We turned from the harbor and began the walk back. For a few minutes we were content to walk in silence. Then I remembered something I had meant to discuss.

“Last night,” I said, “I never got your assessment of Harold Hendricks.”

“I know. Poor dear Harold!”

I gave her a startled look. “Hardly the way I would describe him.”

She hesitated. When she spoke there was a slight edge of anger in her voice. “But then you never saw,” she said, “the way he would grovel at the feet of Naomi for whatever crumbs of affection she would occasionally toss his way.”

I remembered that Stella had mentioned his infatuation with Naomi. “God, when will life stop surprising me. I find it hard to see Hendricks as a grovelling romantic courtier!”

She smiled, “Oh, he tried to be! But I think he was sexually very insecure.”

I tried to remember what he looked like in the photo. About five foot six. With short legs, a large head, long arms and large hands. “Physically he was hardly a centerfold.” I admitted.

The look she threw me reminded me of Gina. It was tinged with exasperation, suggesting somehow that there are things that some men will never understand. “There are a lot of men, even less prepossessing than him, who have been very successful with women. Some of the most successful seducers, I’m told, have been small men with remarkably strong egos and faces that would make their mothers weep! But I don’t think Harold had ever come to terms with the physical attributes he had been born with. Odd in a way. Because he had intelligence and a sense of irony, qualities which could have been very attractive.”

“So how did Naomi treat him?”

“Badly. I’m afraid. She used him like a puppy dog. Fetch me this and fetch me that. And then she would turn away from him to talk to someone more interesting or more flamboyant. Harold, I’m afraid, was useless to her in terms of getting back at her husband.”

“The Monaghans must have been a strange couple.”

“Yes.”

“What did they have in common?”

“I don’t know. Both had smugly rejected their family backgrounds. Naomi came from a wealthy conservative family. She felt intellectually superior to them. I don’t know. She may even have married Monaghan to snub them because he came from a poor borough of New York city. He saw himself as an under-appreciated genius.”

“Was he?”

“Not really. At least I don’t think so. I think he had been a bit of a scientific prodigy as a student. But I think time had modified that.”

“So one day they woke up to realize that all they shared in common was a mutual arrogance that was going nowhere.”

“I think Naomi was aware of that. He may have been too self-centered to realize it.”

“Could Hendricks have killed Monaghan if Naomi had nudged him into doing it?”

“Why would she want to do that?”

“I don’t know. I could see her saying at some point, half-jokingly, will someone please rid me of this arrogant bastard. Enough perhaps to encourage someone like Hendricks to take it literally.”

Mary shook her head. We were now only a hundred yards from her house. The moon had risen. Not a full moon, but almost. We chose not to go in right away, but stood in the shadow of a willow tree. She tilted her head and gave me a wry look. “It sounds to me as silly as the kind of argument the prosecution planned to use against my husband. They believed my husband went to see Monaghan to ask him to step aside, and that Monaghan was murdered as a result of an argument that ensued. I knew otherwise, of course, but how could I prove it? Frank and I had discussed the affair before he went to see Monaghan in his office. He had already told Naomi that it was over.”

“So why did he go to see Monaghan?”

She looked surprised. “Because Monaghan had called him that morning and had asked him to come over that evening. We assumed Monaghan had been told about the affair. That was the reason my husband went to see him. To try to limit the potential fallout for all of us. It was a silly idea. Or was it? How different things would have been if he had stayed home instead. Of course he should have called security when he found that Monaghan was dead. But he knew that nothing could be done for Monaghan at that point, and so he got out of there as fast as he could. He was never very good at handling traumatic crisis situations. But my husband was not a violent man. And I can’t see Hendricks as one either.”

“Hendricks had his office right next to Monaghan’s. What if Monaghan told him about your husband’s purpose in coming to see him.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because,” I speculated, “Monaghan was an arrogant, mean man. Naomi confirmed that Monaghan knew about her affair all along. He would have known how hurt Hendricks would feel, not only from knowing that your husband had had an affair with Naomi, but from the fact that your husband had decided to dump her. If, in addition, Monaghan decided to taunt Hendricks about his lap-dog love for Naomi, Hendricks might simply have exploded. With one sudden stroke he eliminates both his rivals. Monaghan dead. Your husband in jail for life. He would have had the last laugh on both of them, and who knows maybe even got Naomi in the bargain.”

She shook her head. “And so why would he kill Naomi fifteen years later?”

“Maybe Hendricks had dropped a hint to her at the time about what he had done.” I was thinking about what Stella Symansky had said. “And maybe she had just laughed at him and ignored him. Maybe that was what she was intending to tell Gina. She might even have told Hendricks when he called her what she was planning to say to Gina.”