Aloha, Candy Hearts (25 page)

“Yes, yes, the children. And she would be where, exactly?”

Mabel rotated her roundish body to take in the room. There were a few people here and there, but generally not much was happening. Finally she hopped up a bit and proclaimed, “Oh there she is! See her? Just coming in from the foyer.”

“Thank you, Mabel,” Sereena said as she began pulling me away. “And thank you for all your hard work here today.”

The woman beamed. “It’s for the children.”

Like repeating a toast, we left with a half-hearted chorus of:

“For the children.”

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Anthony Bidulka

Sherry Fisher was standing at the entrance to the ballroom, a much younger woman by her side. They were speaking to one another in that awkward, stilted way you do when you’re trying to look engaged but really hoping someone will come up and talk to you because that’s why you’re standing there in the first place and you have nothing left to say to the person next to you.

Excellent.

The mayor ’s wife was a plain woman camouflaged by expensive decoration, like beautiful linen and sparkling flatware adorn-ing a chrome and formica table. Her clothing, haircut, and acrylic nails were certainly expensive, but they couldn’t hide the harsh, tough features that lay beneath. Maybe that’s why the affair with Durhuaghe had ended when she was nineteen. Perhaps the rose’s youthful bloom had already begun to show its fading petals. Her body was fit, but poorly proportioned, with too-wide shoulders over a hipless torso and shapeless legs. Her nose was bulbed at its tip, and her eyes heavy-lidded and set too close together. Her teeth, although whitened and straightened, were horsey, and her skin was leathery in a way that made me think biker chick rather than high society lady.

Her eyes flashed as we approached, giving each of us a quick appraisal before the requisite smile. “Sereena,” she greeted my date. “Mabel told me you were coming. How nice to see you.” I got the feeling she wasn’t sure if it was.

“I’d like you to meet Russell Quant,” Sereena said.

I stepped up and took the woman’s hand. It was big and her grip firm. She gave me a look as if perhaps she knew me but wasn’t sure.

“And let me introduce my daughter, Carleen.” This was the woman standing next to her. Upon closer inspection, the daughter was older than I’d thought, likely bearing down on thirty. But she’d been fortunate to inherit few of her mother ’s coarse features, obviously favouring her father ’s end of the gene pool. “My husband and I are very proud of Carleen. She’s just opened her own hair salon here in town. It’s called Cutz.”

“How clever,” Sereena purred.

“Congratulations,” I said shaking the pleasant looking young DD6AA2AB8

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woman’s hand. “How’s business so far?”

“Pretty good,” she answered brightly. “I really like cutting hair.”

“Sereena,” I said, turning to my friend. “Weren’t you just saying the other day you were looking for someone new to cut your hair?”

Sereena gave me a heated look. Her hair was never “cut.” It was styled, coiffed, designed, but never cut. She flew to Montreal monthly to meet with her long-term hair care professional, Pierre LaFlueg. In between, a Pierre LaFlueg trained associate who worked in Saskatoon, catered to her needs.

Sereena quickly figured out my ploy, and she and her hair took one for the team. “Yeeeeeeees. I suppose we could discuss your credentials, darling,” she said, threading her arm through the young woman’s and leading her away for a tête-à-tête.

“So, Mr. Quant, what is it you do?” Sherry asked, straightening the upturned collar of her bronze-metallic hued dress, which inci-dentally (or not?) matched her hair colour.

I didn’t think the mayor ’s wife was particularly interested in my answer, but I imagine she was thrilled to have someone at her fundraiser who wasn’t related, a childhood friend, or a member of her husband’s staff.

“I’m a private investigator, Mrs. Fisher.”

Her eyes grew flat as if she’d just heard some unhappy news.

“I see,” she said, looking over my shoulder.

“I find out things people want to keep hidden,” I added for good measure.

Her mouse brown eyes fell on me with a decided thud. “I see.”

She fumbled a bit as she pulled a cellphone out of her purse.

“Usually things that happened a long time ago, maybe when they were very young.”

She began to chew off the lipstick on her upper lip. “I see.”

“Do you still have contact with Simon Durhuaghe, Mrs.

Fisher?”

There was an icy silence, followed by some pretty erratic eye movement, then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr.

Quant.” She began to punch numbers on her phone.

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Anthony Bidulka

Wow, what a believable response. “Do you know Walter Angel?”

Her brow creased and I could feel the waft of heat shimmering off her reddened cheeks. “I’d like you to leave right this minute.

How dare you come to my fundraiser and start accusing me of things.”

“I haven’t accused you of anything.” Yet. “I just wanted to know if you’ve been in recent contact with either of these men.”

“Yes, Allan,” she spoke tersely into the phone. “I want you to come to the ballroom right now.” Pause. “By the front doors.”

Pause. “I need you to escort out a gentleman who shouldn’t be here.”

But I’d paid for a ticket. At least she called me a gentleman.

“That’s fine, Mrs. Fisher,” I said calmly. “I appreciate the escort, but I think I can make my own way out. Perhaps there’s a better time for us to talk?”

She narrowed her eyes and her thin-lipped mouth grew mean.

She whispered, “Fuck off.”

See? I knew it. Biker chick.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my office, basking in the glory of being the only person I knew to have ever been thrown out of a lunchtime fundraiser for “the children.” PWC was quiet as a tomb.

Ever since Errall’s bombshell announcement that we were out on our butts in three months’ time, an uneasy pall had fallen over the building’s residents. Even the welcoming smile of Lily, our preter-naturally cheerful receptionist was at half wattage. The doors to all the offices were resolutely shut as if none of us wanted to talk to the others. Fine by me. I had some thinking to do.

As I settled into the Muskoka chair on my balcony with a cup of coffee, I chewed over the idea that there was a very good chance my kindly murder victim, Walter Angel, wasn’t such a nice old guy after all.

It was more than likely that, as one of the main archivists when Simon Durhuaghe donated his papers to the University of Saskatchewan, Angel would have known about the damning jour-DD6AA2AB8

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nal and personal letters from Sherry Klingskill-now-Fisher.

Obviously Durhuaghe didn’t know, or didn’t remember, that this controversial material was part of what he’d absent-mindedly handed over.

He was one of the kings of CanLit, and certainly one of Saskatchewan’s most famous sons-done-good, so the university had been bound to go after the Durhuaghe collection. The man himself probably didn’t care one way or another. I could hear him saying, “Sure, take the stuff, and good riddance.” He was probably thrilled to get rid of the piles of boxes cluttering his basement, and the tax receipt was probably welcome, too.

I could easily imagine that as the first to cull the material, Helen Crawford would have been the one to come across the evidence of Durhuaghe’s dalliance with a young girl and his betrayal of his wife. She might have shared her shocking discovery with her colleague, Walter Angel. Then what? Did she begin blackmailing Durhuaghe? Is that why she hid the stuff? Is that why she created the treasure map? Maybe she wanted to be able to tell Durhuaghe that if anything ever happened to her, the documents were hidden someplace he’d never find. The only one who could find them would be the holder of the treasure map. Who had that been? A friend? Family member? Another colleague? Or had she simply hidden the map in a safety deposit box only to be opened upon her death?

Maybe Walter Angel’s coming into possession of the map—for some reason as yet unknown to me—was a simple passing of the baton from one co-conspirator to another? Which made him com-plicit in the scheme. Perhaps he was getting a cut of the blackmail monies all along.

But why would Angel only be getting a copy of the map now?

Why not ten years ago when the journal was first discovered and hidden? In any case, Walter had to have known the import of the treasure map. He’d flown all the way to Victoria to retrieve it. If indeed this was all about blackmail, it seemed certain Walter Angel was somehow involved in the whole scheme. And someone else knew it too. They had killed him for it.

Was it Durhuaghe himself? Trying to put an end to the hemor-DD6AA2AB8

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rhage of money he was paying out to keep a lid on his indiscre-tions?

Or was it Sherry Fisher? Desperate to keep her reputation as first lady of Saskatoon untarnished. A cruel media might decide to paint her as a wanton Lolita rather than the teenage victim of a much older sexual predator. Or was it both of them? Were the famous writer and the mayor ’s wife in cahoots? I thought back to the afternoon. She’d reached for her phone to contact her goons long before she had reason to really feel threatened by me. Had she been expecting me? Had Durhuaghe warned her?

And then one more possibility slid uncomfortably into my mind, like a slimy, sneaky, invading snake. An icy shiver shook my skin, from the tip of my toes to the base of my skull.

Had I stumbled upon a murder plotted by the mayor of Saskatoon?

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The rehearsal dinner is a longstanding tradition, held the evening before a wedding. Sereena Smith is anything but traditional, but she’d agreed to host the affair, as long as she controlled the content. She’d decided the Friday night event should be an homage to history’s great lovers—of which Anthony and Jared were two—

and that the meal, served in her yet-again newly redecorated home, would be a medieval feast. This meant costumes, eating meat without utensils, serving wenches, and mead, plenty of mead. The only part of the idea I wasn’t keen on was the costumes.

Where do you get them? They never fit right. And there was always someone wearing the same getup as you, and looking much better in it.

Fortunately, Sereena knew this about me. So when I pulled into my garage at the end of the day, there was a plastic wardrobe bag hanging on the door that led from the garage into the backyard.

Unfortunately, once inside and wiggling my way into the costume, I realized something my neighbour obviously didn’t know DD6AA2AB84

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about me: I am not big on showing off my genitalia in public.

When at first I squeezed into the ballet tights for the Rudolf Nureyev costume she’d chosen for me, I assumed she’d either gotten the size wrong, or else my gym routine needed a major adjust-ment. But the tunic, which ended just above my hips, fit perfectly.

As did the waist sash and slippers.

I studied myself in the bedroom’s full-length mirror and winced. Even Barbra let out a sympathetic whimper. Brutus simply looked away, too embarrassed to say anything. I stared at the nether region just south of my midsection. Actually I was rather impressed with the seemingly gargantuan lump. What miracle material was this thing made of, I wondered? Could I have a new pair of wonderpants made of it?

I turned to the side and checked out my profile. Oh my. No way. Appropriate for a porn video or professional ice skating perhaps, but for a party? Uh-uh.

As I scurried to my walk-in closet to look for a spare Scarlett O’Hara costume I was sure I had in there somewhere, the doorbell rang. Wrapping a towel around my manifest man bump, I followed the dogs down the hall and into the foyer. When I opened the door, there stood two white haired men, one wearing a traditional Indian kurta.

“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked Anthony and Jared.

“Ismail Merchant and James Ivory,” Anthony answered.

“You know,” Jared said when I gave him a confused look.

“They made A Room with a View, Howards End, Maurice. All those great movies. A lot of others too. They were together for forty-four years. It was either this or Raymond Burr and Robert Benevides.”

“Raymond Burr?” I said, almost losing my towel. “Ironside was gay?”

“I liked him better as Perry Mason, but yeah. And he was Canadian, too.”

I was a poorly informed gay man. “Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me Doogie Howser is gay.”

Jared cringed. “I need to get you a subscription to Out.”

“Sereena asked us to collect you,” Anthony said with a wicked smile on his handsome face. “And she instructed us that if what DD6AA2AB8

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you were wearing was anything less than-skin tight, we’re to call immediately for reinforcements.”

I threw down the towel. “Look at this!” I yowled. “I cannot be seen in public like this.”

Jared grinned as lasciviously as his altered-but-oh-so-sweet face would allow. “I think I may be marrying the wrong guy,” he growled as he eyed up my bottom half.

“That’s it! I’m not going. Mary Poppins just made a pass at me.” I turned and made tracks for the bedroom.

“I’m James Ivory!” Jared insisted, yanking me back by my waistcoat collar.