Law and Disorder (6 page)

Maybe he had an accomplice. But Stan was as cheap as he was cheerful. His money went on Buicks and joke novelties. I couldn’t see him paying anyone to do this. To the best of my knowledge, he had no cronies outside the family. My sister Edwina kept him on a short leash.

“Trust me, Stan isn’t killing people, Alvin. He didn’t even stay mad at me when I wrecked his Buick. Remember?”

“Who could be doing it?”

“I don’t know, Alvin. Some pathetic soul with an axe to grind. I still don’t believe it really has anything to do with me.”

“If you say so,” Alvin said.

He likes to have the last word.

“How crazy is that?” I said to the light of my life, Ray Deveau, doing my best to fill up the thirteen hundred minute block of telephone time we manage to talk every month. It’s a necessary part of our long distance relationship. “Not that there’s anything funny about the joke business.”

“Maybe, just a…”

“Okay, but you live in Cape Breton. Here in Ottawa, we’re more serious. All that Parliamentary protocol and everything.”

“Not while you have Alvin with you, you’re not serious.”

“That’s true. Remind me to send him back to Sydney, and the Ferguson family dog too.”

“Returning to the jokes,” Ray said quickly. “So you’re saying you got these same notes too, and Alvin threw them away?”

“He showed them to me because they were lawyer jokes and he wanted to annoy me. But he didn’t say where they came from and he didn’t say anything at all about the names. I don’t think he noticed them. They just went straight into the recycle bin unless, of course, Gussie ate them. Alvin figured I wouldn’t be insulted by them, and that’s no fun, and he couldn’t figure out why anyone would send them, so, toss! No discussion.”

“And Bobby did the same thing?”

“Bunny. Well, no. He doesn’t get mail, I guess, just flyers, and he would look at anything with his name on it suspiciously. You know, the ‘how did someone find my address?’ kind of suspicion. He thought getting these things in a plain envelope was weird.”

I couldn’t see Ray over the phone and he couldn’t see me. This was a good thing because it meant I could lie around in old T-shirts and baggy shorts and keep my hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail. I didn’t have to have a pedicure every month, as my sisters advised. It was the one good thing about having a significant other one thousand, six hundred and forty-one kilometres away. He could imagine me any way he wanted and vice versa.

Sometimes we were right about each other. At that exact moment, I knew he was scrunching up his face.

“And this ‘Bunny’ doesn’t have them.”

“His wife is crazy clean. They’re gone.”

“You sure they’re gone? You should get the local boys to go over and search his house.”

“Are you kidding? I can’t do that to Bunny. Okay, he’s been a burglar most of his adult life and probably when he was a child too, now that I think of it. But he can’t have the cops traipsing all over his house. What if they found something incriminating?”

After a significant pause, Ray finally spoke again. “You know something? I have to put the cat out now. How about I bang my head on the sidewalk a few times while I’m outside?”

“See that’s the problem, Ray. You’re a cop. It colours the way you look at the world. I’m a lawyer. Bunny was my legal aid client for years. I’m attached to him. I can’t traumatize him. Also, you don’t have a cat.”

A strange noise drifted over the line.

“Are you laughing? Ray? Cut that out. Oh, gotta go. It looks like Leonard Mombourquette’s calling on the other line. I’ve been leaving messages for him all night. It’ll be about the dead lawyer.”

“Call me back right away. We have to work out the details about the girls.”

“The girls?”

“Brittany and Ashley. Don’t turn everything into a game, Camilla.”

Details about the girls? The very mention of Ray’s teenage daughters was enough to make me edgy. Possibly because they both hate me.

“Sure thing.” I didn’t want Mombourquette to hang up.

“Don’t forget.”

“Yup.”

I picked up Mombourquette’s call. “What’s happening, Leonard?” I’d been trying to reach him at home and on his cell and later at my friend Elaine Ekstein’s place because he still hadn’t called me back.

“If I tell you, will you stop calling?” he said. I thought I could hear Elaine squawking in the background.

I said, “Any luck?”

“It looks like your man Rollie was shot with a small calibre weapon. No ballistics results yet. This is not public knowledge, so if you tell anyone else, I’m coming after you.”

“A small calibre weapon. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. I don’t actually know anybody with a gun.”

“Oh, come on. You were a legal aid lawyer long enough. Everyone you dealt with had a gun. Hey, now your boyfriend even has one.”

“Don’t creep me out. I have trouble with the cop thing. So was there anything else?”

“It’s not enough that the guy was shot and tossed off a boat? You wanted him garroted too?”

“Was he garroted?”

“No. We actually don’t get a lot of garroting around here. But two out of three ain’t bad.”

“Aren’t you playful tonight, Leonard? Was he bound?”

“What, you think there’s a sexual component to this?”

“Ew. With Rollie Thorsten? That just makes my skin crawl. So if he was found in the middle of the Rideau, he must have been taken there on a boat. I was just wondering who he might get close to who might have a boat and might also have a gun. My point is just that it would be easy to narrow that down. Guys with guns and boats.”

“Try to be a bit more politically correct, Camilla. Maybe women with guns and boats. Now, you want to tell me how come you asked about the fact that he was shot?”

“Do I have to?”

“Let’s see. I’m Major Crimes, there’s a killing with information known only to the killer, the police and the staff at the morgue. Hmm. So, in short, yes, you have to tell me.”

“Fine, but you won’t like it.”

“Try me.”

“I got a lawyer joke in the mail.”

“Do I have to come over there and question you?”

“It’s true. You know that old one, ‘How do you keep a lawyer from drowning? Shoot him before he hits the water.’”

“You got this joke, and that caused you to think that someone might have shot Rollie Thorsten?”

“I was hoping these jokes were irrelevant.”

“These jokes?”

“I’ve had a few of them. Anyway, it turns out the next day a name comes in an envelope. Alvin has been just throwing the names away or Gussie’s been eating them. He didn’t make the connection between the names and the jokes. But this is the third time it’s happened. After we get each joke, someone connected with the legal community dies.”

“Huh? So somebody’s killing lawyers and sending jokes? Or sending jokes and then killing lawyers?”

“Yeah. Don’t get upset.”

“Are you kidding? I love the idea. Hey, listen to this, Elaine.” A squeal in the background drifted over the line. “Elaine does too.”

The dial tone seemed to mock me as well.

I could tell I’d have a bit of work convincing Mombourquette that, just this once, I wasn’t pulling his leg.

“Camilla?”

“Oh sorry, Ray, I got distracted. I had to walk Gussie, and you know how he sniffs every tree. I meant to call you back and I would have.”

“Yeah well, it’s one o’clock here now, and tomorrow’s a working day, so I thought I’d speed up the process.”

I chose not to remind Ray that I’d been worrying about how to keep the cops from going through Bunny’s house once they found out he was involved, which they would. That would tick him off more. Of course, I knew that I couldn’t hold them off and that bothered me. Nearly a million people in the Ottawa area, and somehow someone had picked Bunny and me to share the sick joke with. And why was that anyway?

“Camilla? Are you there?”

“What? Sure I am. I was just waiting for you.”

“Okay then, here goes. It’s about the girls.”

“Oh, right,” I said with feigned enthusiasm. “Ashley and Brittany.”

“Yes,” he said. Did I detect a little tone there?

They were the second reason I liked talking on the phone with him, rather than living with him. We each had our baggage. My dead husband, Paul, and Ray’s memories of his late wife. In time we’d be able to have a great relationship. The presence of two teenage girls who viewed me as taking over their mother’s place currently presented a bit of a hurdle. Even if they were both attending university in Halifax, a five-hour drive from dear old Dad.

“What about them?”

“You know they’ve been keen on Dragon Boat races since we had those events here in Sydney the last couple of summers.”

“Right, and that’s terrific. Happy to contribute,” I said. This was going to be easy. Sponsoring the little beasts while they rowed for a good cause. Why not?

“You sound enthusiastic,” he said, that teasing note creeping into his voice. I loved that voice, made my knees weak.

“I am,” I said, “in a weak-kneed way, I am.”

“Well, that’s great. They’ll be arriving in Ottawa this week.”

“Did you say Ottawa?”

“I’m glad you’re not too weak-kneed to be listening.”

“They’re coming to Ottawa?”

“Quit teasing. You know how much I appreciate this.”

“Remind me why again?”

“The Ottawa Dragon Boat Race Festival is next week. I thought it had all been arranged, Camilla. We discussed it, and I talked to Alvin about it too the other day, and he said it was great. Don’t you remember?”

In fact, I didn’t. “It’s just late, like you said, and I’m groggy. That’s terrific. The Dragon Boat Races are a lot of fun. Are you coming with the girls? Because that would be really excellent.”

“I have a work commitment that I can’t get out of. Believe me, I’ve tried, but it’s a course, and I’m locked into it. No choice.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll be sorry to miss out on the race and, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t mind seeing you either.”

I said, “It’s wonderful. They’re coming with a team, right?”

Ray was quiet for a second. Words like wonderful do not come naturally to me, especially in connection to visitors, aside from Ray, himself. Maybe I had overdone it again.

“Right,” he said at last. “But there’ll only be the two of them and they’ll be busy. They’re a real pair of water rats. They love this racing thing. And they don’t mind sharing a room. Think how much worse it could be.”

Despite the time of night and my state of mind, I managed not to say that I couldn’t think of how it could be any worse.

FOUR

What is a lawyer’s ideal weight?
-Five pounds, including the urn.

M
orning comes early in the middle of June. When the first light of dawn scratched at my eyeballs somewhere around four thirty, I sat up in bed and started making notes.

48 By the time I climbed out of my bed, I had a plan. A long shower and my favourite green apple shampoo helped me to feel alive at least. I shook my hair dry and slipped into a pair of light cotton capris and a sleeveless top to set out with Gussie through the sleeping neighbourhood. I banged on Alvin’s closed bedroom door as we stumbled by. Spare him the sympathy. He had it coming.

Twenty minutes later, Alvin gazed blearily at me across the kitchen. He squinted and turned back to sip his Cape Breton-style morning tea. “It’s too early for you to be so grouchy, Camilla. And it’s not fair of you to wake me up.”

“Time to come clean, Alvin.”

He glanced at me warily.

I pulled up the second stainless steel and leather chair. “I had a long talk with Ray last night. By any chance is there some small detail you might have forgotten to mention?”

Alvin had taken on the look of a mouse in his mousehole while the cat sat outside tapping its claws on the floor. In this relationship, I so rarely get to be the cat.

“Like what?” he said, sipping the bracing black tea.

We both knew perfectly well that there were many many things Alvin could have forgotten to mention out of self-preservation, playfulness, or other Alvinesque reasons.

“Oh say, like Ashley and Brittany? Ray’s daughters.”

“What about them?” he said.