(2012) Cross-Border Murder (21 page)

That made me smile. Both of us new that Phil would not be so easily sidelined. “I’ll remind him when I see him next.” I said.

In Georgeville, I headed first for Gooden’s cottage. I wanted to be sure it was empty before I began to question any of his neighbors. This time there was no car and no youthful presence. I got out of my car, planning to take a closer look, when an elderly neighbor emerged from the side of the cottage next door pushing a wheelbarrow full of gardening tools. I thought of my own back lawn and garden. I had become so preoccupied since Gina arrived on my doorstep, that I could not even remember what state my garden was in. The neighbor eyed me with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. I wondered if I looked like a real estate agent, or perhaps a potential buyer. I walked casually over towards him. He was short, stout, older than I was, but still muscular. He had a thin crown of gray hair which sat like a halo on the top of his weathered face. His eyes, without the glasses which hung loosely from a cord around his neck, blinked as I approached.

I felt I needed a pretext for asking questions about Gooden’s movements the previous Sunday. His marital problems came to mind, and at the same time an image of his young and devoted, protective secretary. I did not mind if Gooden’s neighbor presumed that I was some kind of divorce investigator seeking evidence for an alimony settlement. I counted on his knowing that Gooden and his wife were separating and, although it was possibly wishful thinking on my part, that he might be more sympathetic to Mrs. Gooden than to the blunt and abrasive academic.

“I was wondering,” I asked, trying to act with the directness of a Phil Ryan, “whether Professor Gooden was here last weekend with a young woman.”

The neighbor stared at me and blinked twice. Calmly, he put his glasses on which made his eyes look larger and flintier. He could have challenged my right to ask such a question, but I got the impression that responding to anyone with a deliberate rudeness was foreign to his character.

“No. I believe he was alone.” He said in a tone that was just barely civil.

I nodded, looking disappointed.

“But you’re not certain.” I pressed.

He stared at me. “No. But then I don’t spy on what my neighbors are doing.” I had been put on notice.

“But you did see him here that weekend.”

He shrugged. “He was over there, Sunday morning, washing his car when I returned from church service.”

“Around what time was that?”

“Around eleven.” I wondered if Gooden could have been washing away evidence of where he had been earlier that morning. I experienced an adrenaline rush.

“Do you know what time he left on Sunday?”

“No. As I’ve said, I don’t pay much heed to the comings and goings of my neighbors.”

“Do you know what he’s asking for the cottage?” I threw in to confuse him, and also to satisfy my sudden curiosity.

“Nope. None of my business.” I doubted that. I could see his short, plump wife standing behind the closed front door, wondering whether to emerge to satisfy her curiosity about what I wanted. I began to feel uncomfortable. I decided not to press my luck. I thanked him. Once in my car I gave them both a weak smile and headed back towards the center of the village. There I pondered my next step. This was not the kind of work I enjoyed. I never had. In all my years in journalism I had never got used to having to ask anyone potentially rude questions. But I was here now, and I had to complete a task which I felt could not be avoided. I decided to ask questions first at the two gas stations I had noticed on the outskirts of the village nearest to the return route to Montreal. If I was unsuccessful there, then I would try the two or three stores in the village itself that were likely to be open on Sundays before giving up and returning to Montreal.

At the first garage, I ran into an incontrovertible piece of information. I had decided to fill up as a matter of courtesy. The garage owner was a grizzled man of about my own age. We chatted about the weather and the depressing fact that the government had once again raised the taxes on gasoline. As casually as possible, I asked him if Gooden was one of his customers.

He nodded. “Drives a white Honda.”

I nodded. “Did he by any chance stop by for gas this past Sunday?”

“Yep.” I could see his eyes narrow.

“Was it early in the day?”

“No. Around five o’clock.”

He seemed to be encouraged by my look of consternation.

I was going to ask him if he was sure when he added: “Came by just as I was closing. I remember because it was my brother-in-law’s birthday and I’d promised my wife I would close early. If it’d been some stranger I would have told him I was closed. But Mr. Gooden is a regular.” He replaced the gas nozzle back into its socket with a firm clang of metal which somehow made it clear that any further questions about Mr. Gooden would not be welcome.

I handed him my credit card. I usually pay cash but I figured the credit card receipt would provide me with the name of the garage and possibly of its owner. As I drove away, I realized that my feelings were getting in the way of my work. Normally, I should have been pleased with the progress I had made. But I wasn’t. I didn’t like Gooden. Finding any evidence which contributed to his elimination as a suspect was not what I had hoped for.

But he could not have been at that particular garage filling up around five o’clock, and also in Montreal taking a potshot at Gina outside the motel. That is, if the garage owner’s memory could be believed. To be on the safe side, I returned to the village and asked questions in both the grocery and hardware store. But all I ran into were shoulder shrugs, and the kind of veiled hostility that small towns reserve for prying strangers. The most I got was an acknowledgment that they knew who Gooden was.

The sky was still a lucid blue when I made the turn onto the autoroute which led back to Montreal. It was the kind of sky which made one want to believe that truth and beauty and goodness go together. Bollocks and fairy tales, I told myself. I needed a sky with gray clouds to keep me focused on what life was really like.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 

Hendricks was parked in his car across the street when I arrived home. When he saw me, he got out and ambled towards me on his short legs. We met on the path leading to the small gallery at the front of my house. His large head seemed to be tucked at an angry angle into the set of his broad shoulders. I invited him inside. He gestured instead towards the two folded chairs leaning against the wrought-iron railing.

“I’d prefer to sit out here, if you don’t mind.”

I shrugged. “Help yourself. I’ll be back out in a minute.”

I went in to check my answering machine. There were no messages. I returned with a bottle of Scotch, soda water and two glasses. I suggested he pour his own drink. After a moment’s hesitation, he filled his glass half-full. He studied the label on the bottle before he put it down in the space between our chairs. He added just a dash of soda.

“St. Leger,” he muttered condescendingly, “here they mistakenly give it a French pronunciation. Back home, it’s pronounced St. Ledger, like the well-known horse race after which it was named. He took a sip of the Scotch and came right to the point.

“I believe you owe me both an apology and an explanation.”

“For what?”

“For entering my cottage in Essex Junction without an invitation.”

“The door was open,” I said, “I’ll admit I did step inside and holler to see if anyone was there.”

“And if my lodger had not been there? What would you have done?” His voice had become testy and challenging. “Taken a leisurely look around? Go through my desk? Check out my bedroom?” I could feel his anger. “So what were you doing in Essex Junction in the first place? What were you after?” I caught a whiff of the Scotch he had imbibed before coming here. His left eyelid twitched a couple of times before I could answer.

““I wanted to check the mileage between your cottage and Naomi’s.” I said without apology.

He stared at me slack-jawed. “Check the mileage?”

“Yes. See how long it would take you to go from one to the other. If it’s any consolation I did the same for the Symanskys.”

He shook his head in disbelief. His eyes dropped down and stared at his drink.

“Within the past week,” I said simply, “someone killed Naomi Bronson and took a pot-shot at Gina. Probably the same person who killed Monaghan years ago. At the moment, everyone who knew where Naomi’s cottage was located is a potential suspect.” His hand holding the Scotch gave a minor spasmodic jerk.

“I did not kill either Monaghan or Naomi.” He said with tight-lipped vehemence. For a few minutes we sat in an uneasy silence. Across the street a group of young children were playing with a dog. The presence of young children was a new phenomenon. For almost a decade all my neighbors had been elderly, their children had grown to adulthood. But recently a few had sold their homes and moved into apartments or condominiums. And so now there were children on the street again to delight or torment the rest of us with the rituals of growing up. Hendricks poured himself another drink and pushed the bottle back in my direction. I added a little Scotch to my soda water.

“I noticed some hunting rifles in your cottage,” I said. I avoided mentioning that a rifle seemed to be missing from his display cabinet. I wondered if his lodger had relayed that part of our conversation. If he had, Hendricks gave no indication of it.

He nodded. His eyes clouded over and he paused to take a sip of his drink. “I used to hunt when I was younger.” His left eye twitched again. “But one day I almost shot another hunter. I decided that someone who drinks as much as I do shouldn’t hunt.”

“But you kept the guns.”

He nodded.

He looked longingly towards his car. The dog across the street was joined by another. It was odd to see two dogs without their owners and without leashes. The children had stopped their game. One of their number had been called in to supper. The rest stood around wondering what to do next.

Hendricks sighed. “You know, at first, I found the crusade you and Gina had embarked upon amusing. Later, I found myself hoping that both of you would tire of it and forget it. Now Naomi’s murder has probably made all that impossible, hasn’t it?”

I nodded. “When we first talked, you admitted that you all treated Montini somewhat shabbily, particularly after he was released. But I still don’t quite understand why. After all you had been friends, more or less.”

“You put your finger on it when we first spoke,” he muttered, “but perhaps you don’t remember. If not Montini then whom?”

He seemed to drift off into a world of his own. “One of the surprising things that occurred once Montini was released was that we all began to avoid each other. You see we were all afraid. If not Montini then whom?” he repeated, “someone close? Some sinister force we did not understand? Something, or someone that might pose a danger to the rest of us because of what we knew, or even what we did not realize that we knew? And so when we met, we all threw out the most far-fetched theories, almost deliberately, it was the CIA, it was the South Africans, it was anyone but someone at Winston University. Or, as someone was bound to remark, jokingly, at some point, maybe after all it was really Montini! Why did we behave that way? Because it was a way of letting others know that we knew nothing of significance whatsoever. And that consequently we posed no danger to anyone, certainly not to whoever it was who had killed Monaghan. It was sad really.” And his eyes, as he looked briefly at me, seemed to reflect his thoughts. “For years we had seen ourselves as courageous radicals. Overnight, fear and a mystery had turned us into cowards.”

I frowned, staring past him. It was a new wrinkle that I had not considered. All along I had assumed that one way of identifying Monaghan’s murderer was to discover who had continued to feed the rumors of Montini’s guilt after his release. It had never occurred to me that more than one of them would have done so. But had they? The Symanskys had denied it.

When we had first talked, he had hinted that Monaghan’s work for Dr. Gerald Bull was a lead that I should follow. But he had gone no farther than that. In fact when I had pressed him, he had retreated. I leaned forward and said, softly, like a school principal urging a student to unburden himself of what he knew. “I’m sure someone must have had some suspicions about the real murderer’s possible identity, even if they chose out of fear not to feed the gossip mill. So whom did you come to believe was the killer?”

He sat up and shook his head. His eyes dulled over. “Sorry. But until some real evidence emerges, I intend to keep my suspicions to myself.”

“But why?”

“Because it would be foolish to do otherwise at this stage. I’ve already said too much.” He sipped his drink. He gave me a cautious look, but behind it I could sense a palpable fear. His behavior puzzled and confused me. If he was not the murderer what was he afraid of? I could not resist one last stab at rubbing his nose in what he had admitted to be his own form of cowardice. “For an engineer who used to be a macho hunter, you’re pretty tepid in you desire to hunt down a real villain: one that has killed again, as recently as last Sunday. That is if it’s not you.”

He gave a self-pitying smile “It’s not me. I’ve told you that already. And I’m certainly not a macho hunter.” He stared down at his almost empty glass. “Not much of an engineer any more either for that matter. Used to be. Or at least used to think of myself that way. I don’t even do any research any more. I just get paid to teach about some of the basics.” He finished his drink. But he did not put his glass down. He just sat there as if he did not know what to do next. His mind seemed to drift off, almost as if he had forgotten the purpose of his visit. From some remote region of his mind, he asked, “Have you seen the movie WATERLAND?”

“No.”

He stared at the children across the street. “It’s about life in the fens and marshlands in a part of England that is very close to sea level. The caprice of nature inundates it at will. The challenge,” he said gruffly, “is to constantly reclaim the land from the raw forces of nature. So engineers build dykes, sluice gates, divert rivers, construct whatever is necessary to try to defeat the inevitability of nature. Engineers know that life is a kind of constant war against nature. Fens and marshes are prime engineering territory.” He gave a wistful smile. “It’s ironic, because building the engines to defeat nature also involves engineers in the building of engines to defeat people.” He sighed, “it’s a culture that produces a certain mind set. Many engineers become fascinated with weapons. And the bigger the weapons, the more fascinated and ego-driven some engineers become.” I felt he was trying to tell me something by indirection. He looked at me, trying to gauge my reaction.