Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (24 page)

Passing a pharmacy on his way back to the car, he saw a window display advertising gifts for Father’s Day the next week. Some Father’s Day, he thought grimly. My wife and son in Toronto and my father near his deathbed, full of reproach. It was then that he thought of how to explain the lie. Blown up and beautifully framed, the picture would make a perfect Father’s Day gift. To a man mired in memories, it would be more touching than a hundred sweaters or dressing gowns. The problem was that if Sharon had indeed gone back to Toronto, he would have to steal yet another picture to make the gift.

Back in the office, there was still no message from her. Had she really left without a single word to him? Anger flared briefly. How dare she have so little faith! And so little appreciation of the pressures he was under? She’d seen him smeared in the press before, and she knew better than to believe a word they said! Surely when she calmed down in a few hours, even a day or two, she’d remember that. Reassured, he decided not to call anyone else, at least not just yet. If she still wasn’t back tomorrow, he’d begin the search in earnest. But she’d be back. She’d stuck by him before, kicking and screaming but still there, through worse than this.

Having forced his worry into the back of his mind, he turned back to the phone messages that had collected. More than half were from the press, and he tossed them into the waste basket. Fat chance I’ll call you bastards, he thought grimly. All you want is a juicy pound of flesh for the headlines. Carrie’s murder and my tie had done nicely today, but what about tomorrow? In the absence of anything else, perhaps a nice little story about my collapsing marriage. Or my inability to protect witnesses and my failure to charge the suspect staring me in the face.

Contrary to popular opinion, nothing was staring him in
the face but reams and reams of information. To tease out the answer, to make sense of all the conflicting tides, could take days. The crux of the puzzle lay in the motive. Everyone else was betting on the Haddads. Sex and revenge were feelings the public—and his fellow cops—could understand far more easily than the panic of professional humiliation and lost dreams. On the surface too, the evidence clearly favoured Eddie Haddad— the knife, the bloody shirt, the lies about his whereabouts.

Sullivan, Jules and Marianne Blair were right. Most policemen would have arrested Eddie on the spot. So why was he holding back? On a mere hunch, based on the panic in Eddie’s voice and the earnest look in his eyes? Or was he, as Sullivan the pragmatist often accused him, winging out into the wild blue yonder, seduced by the complex psychic web of Halton’s group? There was a mystery there, as fascinating and sinister as any he’d encountered, but perhaps it was irrelevant. Perhaps Blair’s murder was a mere lucky coincidence for the student who had perpetrated the fraud. Green hated coincidences, the enemy of deduction, but sometimes they were true. Sometimes the obvious suspect was the right one.

But just then a shadow blocked his doorway, and he looked up to see Brian Sullivan leaning against the frame. He tossed a file down on Green’s desk.

“Well, buddy, if you were looking for an easy answer to our problems, you can forget it.”

“There’s not one fingerprint in Carrie’s whole apartment!” Green echoed incredulously.

Sullivan shook his head. His hair stood in straw tufts, and his eyes were red from rubbing. “Nothing useful, and no fibres or tissue we can pin down either. This killer’s no fool. He
anticipated all the angles.” Sullivan sighed. “And that’s not all the bad news, buddy. The black hair we got from the shirt? It doesn’t match any of the Haddads. Not even Eddie’s.”

Despite the forensic dead ends, Green felt a surge of triumph. His intuition had been right! Better than all the computer scans, the forensic minutiae and the balancing of probabilities that formed the core of everyday detective work.

“It doesn’t really mean anything,” Sullivan muttered, dropping into the chair opposite. “I mean, it weakens the case against Eddie, but it doesn’t kill it. One black hair…it could have been there for months.”

“The shirt was washed.”

“Spot washed, forensics says. Mike, it’s staring you in the face. The kid is as guilty as hell.”

Green wavered. He remembered the neat little bullet hole in the centre of Carrie’s forehead and felt a hard fist form in his chest. He rose. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe—”

The phone shrilled at his elbow, making them jump. Green pounced on it, hoping it was Sharon, but instead the gravel voice of the desk sergeant came through.

“There’s a Mr. Pierre Haddad down here, Inspector. He insists on seeing you.”

Raquel’s uncle was tight-lipped and grim as Green ushered him into an interview room near his office, and when he spoke, it was obvious he had rehearsed the speech carefully.

“Inspector Green, you notice I have brought no lawyer with me. That is because I want to cooperate with the police. My sons and I have done nothing wrong, and we trust that the Canadian justice system will not betray us. I know that the knife and shirt from the murder were found in my garage. I know that my son Edward has lied about being home with us that night. We have talked about it and I believe his
explanation. I also believe that you are an honourable man and did not put the knife there. So I appeal to you, as an honourable man, to listen to our side of the story. There can be only one explanation. The Haddad family has been framed.”

Although he had just been thinking the same thing, Green tried to look sceptical. He arched an eyebrow. “Framed? Why would someone do that?”

Haddad looked at him as if he thought him a complete fool. “Obviously, so you would blame us instead of him.”

“I mean, why you?”

“Perhaps someone saw the boys arguing with Jonathan Blair earlier and took advantage of the situation.”

“A pretty long shot, Mr. Haddad. They’d have to know who your sons were, who Raquel was and her connection to Jonathan, and they’d have to want Blair dead. Not many people fit that bill.”

“Probably only one, Inspector. The murderer.”

Green continued to play devil’s advocate, using Haddad to explore the theory. “It leaves a lot to chance, and it implies Blair’s murder was a spur of the moment thing. When the killer sees a chance to blame your sons, he goes off to the library and sticks a knife in Blair’s gut. That’s another thing— the knife. He had to get himself a Bedouin knife.”

Haddad waved a hand in dismissal. “Those things are everywhere.”

“But he’d have to buy it. The fight with Blair was at six-thirty. Many stores are closed at that hour on Tuesday, and even so, it probably would take him more time to hunt one up.” Green shook his head. Detective Gibbs had not yet been able to find where the knife had been bought, and Green knew that if it took Gibbs this long, it would take the killer even longer. “This was much longer in the planning, I’m afraid.”

“Then it was planned to blame my son Eddie,” retorted Haddad.

Green analyzed the implications. “For that, the killer would have to know an awful lot about your family.”

“Raquel could have told anybody about us. That is how the killer could know everything. Even that we did not want her to see Jonathan Blair.”

Green took the reasoning one step further. For this frame to work, it was equally important that the family know about her affair with Jonathan. The killer needed the Haddads to make a fuss and to make public their hostility towards Blair. Yet the Haddads said she never talked to them about her friends.

“Tell me,” he asked as casually as he could. “How did you find out Raquel was seeing him? Did she tell you?”

Haddad took a deep breath. The faint pink of shame tinged his cheeks. “Jonathan wasn’t the only one. There were others before. When Raquel came to this country, she seemed to go wild. She is so beautiful. The men, everywhere, they chase her. She liked it. She saw how the Canadian women do what they want, go out with boys, choose whoever they want, and she wanted that too. Even before I knew about Jonathan, I decided to send Raquel back to Beirut when her courses were over. But then I found out they were going to move in together.”

Green hid his surprise. Certainly Jonathan’s mother knew nothing of such plans. In fact Jonathan had told his father only days before his death that he was coming back to Vancouver, perhaps for good.

“What makes you think that?” he demanded.

“I found a note from Jonathan to Raquel. It was a—a…” Haddad flushed. “A love letter. Disgusting. Jonathan talked about getting an apartment next week. That made up my mind for sure.”

Green frowned. “Where did you find this note?”

“Last Sunday night my boy Paulie found the note on the front walk. She must have dropped it on her way in. When I read it, I said that’s enough.”

And that’s when the phone calls to Lebanon began, Green thought to himself. “Did you ask Raquel about the note?”

Haddad nodded ruefully. “Tuesday afternoon, at the university. That was the argument you know about. I asked her about the note and I told her about Lebanon.”

“What did she say about the note?”

“She said it’s not true. There is no note. Jonathan and her are not…together. But Raquel always lied to me. Hid things from me.”

Green’s antennae began to quiver. “Do you still have the note?”

Haddad reached into his pocket and extracted a folded sheet of paper. He held it a moment in trembling hands before reluctantly handing it over.

My Darling,

I can’t stay away from you! I grow hard just writing this note. I want you, I need you, and I’m sick of sneaking around and grabbing stolen hours with you. To hell with your uncle. To hell with my mother and the stuffed shirts we work with. We’re going to do it! I’ll tell my mother I’m taking a trip, we’ll get that place and we can stay in bed for the rest of our lives! I can’t believe I’ll be able to fuck you whenever I want you. Which is always! Only one more week! Hold on, baby. I am, hard as it is (just the way you like it). I love you madly!

Jonathan

Sullivan reread the note, then held it up to study it from a distance. They were sitting in Green’s office, having thanked Pierre Haddad for his help and promising to get back to him. The plastic evidence bag crackled in Sullivan’s hands. Inside was an eight-by-eleven sheet of standard white computer paper.

“Pretty impersonal way to send a love note,” Green muttered. “Looks more like an office memo.”

“People who do everything by computer operate like that. I get lots of memos just printed by computer. Nobody bothers with writing anymore. At least the guy signed it.”

“Right…” Green rested his head in his hand. “But you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty damn convenient. Hardly anything we can match it to, to check if Blair really wrote it…and this business of it ‘accidentally’ dropping on Pierre’s front walk. Give me a break.”

“You’re saying it’s a plant?”

Green swivelled to face Sullivan. “Let me ask you this. What would be your reaction if you found a note like this from Lizzie’s boyfriend?”

Sullivan grinned. “Lizzie’s only sixteen. I’d kill the guy.”

“But if—”

“What every father’s would be, Mike. Furious. Just like the Haddads. I’d probably try to send her to my sister in Alberta.”

“So this note would be almost sure to provoke a reaction?”

“Absolutely. He pushes all the buttons—crude sex, defiance of parents…just wait till you have a daughter, Mike. You’ll want to protect her from the likes of us till she’s thirty-five!”

I have a daughter, Green thought with a sudden pang. A daughter and a son, but perhaps I’ll never get to know either. He forced the idea out of his mind with an effort. “This killer is clever, Brian. Look at the frame!”

“If it is a frame,” Sullivan reminded him. “The only thing
we have to substantiate that theory is one black hair. And that could belong to Eddie Haddad’s girlfriend, for all we know.”

“But it doesn’t. It belongs to the killer.”

“As they say, tell that to the judge.”

Green swivelled his chair back to his desk and stood up. “Let’s get this down to Paquette and see what forensics can find. Then we’ll take it over to the documents guy at the RCMP lab and see if it’s really Blair’s signature. Maybe then we’ll have more than one black hair.”

Green had hoped to get the note analyzed quickly, but just as he and Sullivan were crossing the main lobby towards the Ident Unit, Deputy Chief Lynch emerged from the elevator. Clutched in his fist was a newspaper. Oh fuck, Green thought to himself.

“Green! Get over here!”

Green sent Sullivan on ahead to Paquette’s lab and steeled himself to face Lynch, who propelled him into an empty waiting room and slammed the door behind them.

“I don’t need this shit!” Lynch flung the tabloid down on a chair. “I put myself on the line for you. I promised the bigshots you could deliver, and what do you give me? This!” He stabbed the front page with his finger.

“It’s not worth wasting our energy on, sir,” Green replied, although he knew it sounded lame.

“Wasting our energy?” Lynch echoed. “That’s all you can say? The press calls us all a bunch of whores and incompetents, with you topping the list—”

“The press tries to sell papers. They do whatever it takes, you know that, sir. If they don’t have facts, they make them up. I can’t control what they print.”

“You could if you’d answer their calls!” Lynch shot back. “Or answered Media Relations’ calls. Or mine! If you told
anybody what the fuck you were doing, then maybe it wouldn’t look like nothing.”

“What do you want me to do? Answer calls or solve the case?”

The Deputy Chief shoved a finger in his face. “Listen, sonny, this is not Adam Jules you’re talking to. I don’t give a fuck about your homicide record. It doesn’t do me bugger all good if you’re sitting on your ass letting this Arab bastard run around loose. Pick him up before I assign the case to someone else.”

Green could feel the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Gritting his teeth he counted slowly to five. “He’s not guilty, sir,” he said when he dared.