(2012) Cross-Border Murder (23 page)

I could hear him relaying this information to Racine. “So do I go ahead?” He asked.

I felt an adrenaline rush. “Yeah. Definitely.” Again I heard him relay the decision to Racine.

“He’s gone to call them. We’ll head back to my motel. The agency has no license to function outside of Canada, so they’ll just be temporary visitors like the rest of us. That means they’ll have to be particularly careful not to attract attention to themselves. Still, they should be able to do the job for a day or two. Meanwhile, I’ll check to see of there’s an outfit down here we can use. Get Paul off the hook as soon as possible.”

After we hung up, I went back to bed for a second time. In the darkness of my room, I felt drained. Empty. Despondent. I was no psychoanalyst, but I suspected I knew why. I was out of the loop. Whatever was going to happen in the next eight hours would happen without me. It was now Phil’s game. I felt alienated, without real use or meaning. What I was feeling was similar to what I had felt two weeks after retirement; when it had finally dawned on me that the newspaper would manage just fine without me; that even the memory of my involvement with it would dwindle in time to a dying fall: and then tumble off the edge of memory into oblivion. I suspected that I was beginning to mourn the inevitability of my own death. How long did I have before I would be erased from the memory bank of humankind? How many of us, I thought, begin the process of mourning our own death years before we actually die? The process of mourning our own demise, I speculated sadly, probably begins once we know that we have gone past the peak of usefulness.

As I lay there, I told myself, well you’re still alive you bugger, so stop feeling sorry for yourself. Besides, this time, you’re only out of the loop temporarily. Tomorrow you will be involved again in whatever happens. But that presentiment of death I had felt in the darkness of my room lingered. I remembered my conversation with Phil Ryan when I had first phoned him. He had asked me to make sense of the fact that he had been put out to early pasture, particularly, since he had so identified with the job that he had probably lost his wife as a consequence. It was a form of dying. How does one explain any death? Even the death of a career? Or the death of a marriage? It was something I wanted to think about. Something I knew I would want to discuss with him eventually.

A gray light was seeping around the window shade when a nightmare brought me suddenly fully awake. In my nightmare one of the children I had seen earlier in the day was bashing one of the other children with a rock. I was trying to race across the street to halt the carnage. But my legs were leaden, and my feet stuck to a coating of tar on the road.

The images of the nightmare faded. I went to a front window. In the early overcast dawn, the street was just a street. Only a few birds scuttled silently around on the nearby lawns. My role in the nightmare was too obvious to need interpretation. But why did my dream use the children across the street rather than adults?

I went downstairs and put on the coffee. Last night I had been troubled by the problem of motive. Adult motive. Was my sub-conscious mind trying to tell me that the motive for violence, any violence, even murder, was fundamentally childish? It could well be. Or even more, that the real cause of violence might lie in childhood or even beyond? Is the inevitability of a murderer’s actions writ large, like certain other diseases, in one’s genetic code? In that case, looking for any motive, remotely adequate to the act, was pointless.

It was the stuff of Greek tragedies where human life was fated to act out the spinning motives of the gods. Christianity, certainly, had rejected that view. A degree of freedom in determining one’s fate was primordial to it. But the postmodern world was increasingly placing its faith in the sciences, and in particular, in one of its offspring, genetic engineering. Would they ultimately find both Cain and Abel in the genetic code? Would they eventually learn how to isolate the gene of violence, and successfully modify it? In my fevered imagination, I saw a grinning, gnarled figure of death, scythe in hand, mutter mockingly: genetic slaves, so where’s the dignity of the son of man and the son of God now?

A big genetic fix might bring a reign of peace, but I did not want it. There was no dignity without a degree of freedom and choice. And that meant the horror of human adult evil. I had come back full circle to the problem of motive; preferably adult motive: preferably one which could be understood.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 

Ryan phoned around ten o’clock. Racine’s people were in place. He was on his way back to Montreal. When he asked me what my plans were for the day, I told him that I would be putting my notes in order, and making courtesy phone calls to both Joe Gibbs and the newspaper. In fact, I planned to spend much of the day cleaning the house. As a confirmed bachelor I tended to keep my place neat and orderly, but I had my flaws. I would put off vacuuming until the growing number of fuzz balls made it unavoidable. And laundry tended to pile up until there were no more clean towels or bed sheets. In other words I was facing hours of work before the house would be fit to accommodate Mary and Gina who would be arriving later that afternoon. I threw on a large wash of sheets and towels, then I tackled the kitchen, cleaning out the fridge, washing the floor, putting on the dishwasher and making a minimal grocery list. While I remembered it, I phoned “Wings and Things”, and placed an order for a large bucket of wings, medium hot, to be delivered around six o’clock.

I had just hung up when the phone rang. It was Mel Vogel’s secretary. Now that she had me on the line, she put me through to him.

“Tom, Haylocke has just filed a story out of Washington with a note that says it’s meant to be a sidebar to your story. Unfortunately I’m in the dark, what’s happening? When are you going to be filing?”

“I don’t know. We’re on the verge of tracking down someone who has murdered twice. I’m not going to write until I have more solid evidence.”

“Haylocke’s story seems to me to be valid on its own. All it needs is a phone call to the Symanskys to get a confirmation or a denial. I mean the fact that a Canadian university harbored CIA informers is front page news. Could you check with the Symanskys so we can run the story?”

I explained that I had already spent an afternoon interviewing them, and that I had told Symansky that I didn’t necessarily plan to use that information unless it proved truly pertinent to the story I was working on.

“Tom, did I hear you right? You’re supposed to check with me before doing anything like that!”

“Mel, I’m not one of your employees anymore. Remember?”

“Christ, that’s not the issue, Tom! The issue here,” he said in the authoritarian tone he often used when he felt exasperated, “is the public interest!”

“Is it? Whose public interest? What public interest?”

“Jesus,” Mel said in a quieter tone, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You’ve only been gone one month. Are you trying to tell me that CIA agents on a Montreal campus is not an issue that’s in the public interest?”

I thought that over. “I guess I am. You’d be surprised, Mel, how one views journalism and the public interest as an outsider. If there were agents there now, yes. Front page story. But the Symanskys left the country a decade ago. It’s now an old story. It should have been written back then when it would truly have been in the public interest. Anyway,” I said, “it wasn’t a commitment on behalf of the paper I made to the Symanskys. It was only a statement of intentions. My intentions.” I could sense his frustration. He had his hands on a very readable story. Whether it was really in the public interest was not what was motivating him. I knew him too well. I sighed to myself. In for a penny in for a pound. I went on to explain the deal I had made with Joe Gibbs. That seemed to stun him into a prolonged silence. Then he said, “but you didn’t agree to anything in the paper’s name, is that right?”

“Right.”

“So there’s nothing to prevent me from running Haylocke’s piece?” His tone made it clear that it was not really a question he was asking. It was a sarcastic jab. He was simply reasserting his power to decide.

“I have no intention of making any commitments on behalf of the paper. You’re paying Haylocke, not me. What conditions I put on my writing is another matter.”

“And I don’t have to authorize payment to you if I don’t like the conditions you’ve placed on anything that you submit.”

“I can live with that.” I said simply.

Perhaps he sensed that he had gone too far. When he spoke next his tone had softened. “If I decide to run Haylocke’s piece, will it interfere with what you’re working on?”

I gave the question some thought. Some of my journalistic instinct was returning. Running the article might in fact flush out some additional information which I was missing about the period surrounding Monaghan’s murder. Furthermore, Haylocke’s information raised questions which merited further attention. Who in Canada knew about the Symanskys’ secret life? Was Winston the only campus with CIA informants at the time? And what about now? There were always valid pretexts for the CIA to have hidden operatives in a country like Canada. I mentioned some of these things to Mel, and I reminded him that McGill in the past had at least one major project partially funded by the CIA. I explained Monaghan’s connection with Dr. Gerald Bull’s project, a project initially funded by McGill and directly or indirectly by the American defense establishment. Still my primary concern about his use of the Haylocke piece, I explained to him with a sigh, was that it might only serve to distract attention away from my re-examination of Monaghan’s murder and my investigation into the more recent murder of his former wife.

“What more recent murder?” He asked, confused, but suddenly alert.

“Professor Monaghan’s former wife.”

“When did that happen?”

“Last weekend.”

“How come I’m not aware of it?”

“Because after his death she reverted to her maiden name, Naomi Bronson. Besides, she was killed at her cottage in the eastern townships. Hence, her death probably only made the local news in Sherbrooke.”

There was a moment’s silence. He was obviously appalled that I had not brought Ms. Bronson’s murder to the paper’s attention. Before he could say anything, I added, “and the police so far have not been willing to conclude that there’s a connection between the two murders.”

“But you’re convinced there’s one.”

“Yes.”

Mel was silent for awhile. I could sense that he was beginning to see a much bigger story in the making than the one about the CIA informants on campus in the seventies.

“Okay,” he said finally, “for the moment I’ll hold the Haylocke piece. And I’ll even lay low on the Bronson murder. At least until I hear from you. But, for Christ’s sake, Tom, keep in touch! Keep me informed! I want to be sure we have some exclusive coverage of all this before I see some of it on the television news. Are we in agreement there?”

“Certainly,” I said. And at the time I meant it.

When he had hung up, I decided to phone Joe Gibbs. But before I did that I transferred the wash to the drier. Then I called him. I felt I owed Joe Gibbs some advance notice about the possible appearance in the paper of the Haylocke piece. After all Mel could well change his mind. Besides I needed some information from Joe. He listened as I explained what had been filed to the paper from the Washington stringer.

He sighed, “fortunately,” he said, “there are no key administrators left here from that period. Can’t say I like it, but if your paper runs something, they’ll have to take a long look at what was happening at McGill as well. It’s still the story you may end up writing that worries me. Anything new there?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Can you brief me?”

I hesitated. The less anyone at Winston knew at this stage the better. “Yeah. But only if you keep it strictly between us.”

This time it was Joe who hesitated.

“Okay. Shoot. Brief me.”

I explained about Hendricks. About the ammo he had bought. About the rifle which seemed to be missing from his gun display cabinet. About his infatuation with Naomi around the time her husband was murdered.”

“Shit!” He said. There was a long pause and then he added, “still, it’s all very circumstantial as proof of any wrongdoing, isn’t it?”

I agreed. “So far. Yes. Certainly not enough for me to write anything yet. But if the police get their hands on a rifle of his which matches the bullet found at the motel all of that will change.” I did not mention our suspicion that Hendricks might have transported the rifle back to his cottage yesterday.

“Agreed. But until that happens, both of us better keep a lid on this.”

“True. Which is why I want to make sure no one at Winston alerts Hendricks or any one else to what we know at this stage.” I explained that Hendricks was at his cottage in Vermont. “My question is, how long could he stay there before his responsibilities required that he return to the university?”

He gave a harsh laugh. “Who knows. But since classes are over and most of the exams have already been written, he could probably stay until early September without breaching his contract. You’d be surprised how many of our professors do just that. Particularly those who have established residences across the border in Ontario where taxes are less onerous. Between the end of April and the beginning of September, you rarely see them here. They have exam papers, research material, books from the library, you name it, shipped to them by Federal Express. Departmental meetings either grind to a halt or are attended only by the local die-hards.”

“You’ll try to find out about Hendricks for me?” I asked.

“I’ll try,” he responded, “but given what you’ve told me I’ll have to be very discreet. I presume you don’t want me to just ask Gooden?”

“Definitely not!”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do. I hope you’re wrong about Hendricks. Strange, but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for him. Probably because he always seemed to be aware of his own shortcomings and was consequently less puffed-up than the newer breed of professors. I’ll call if I find out anything.”