Law and Disorder (9 page)

We might even need lightweight blankets.”

“Blankets?” I said. “It’s a million degrees lately. We’re in the middle of a heat wave. Oh, never mind. Get whatever they’ll need.”

“A mirror, I imagine, as well.”

“There’s one in the bathroom.”

“Not everyone’s like you, Camilla. Some people care what they look like. I think Ashley and Brittany definitely fall into that category.”

“Fine. Just take care of it quickly.”

“Bedspreads,” he said.

“All right.”

“Pillow shams too, I suppose.”

I narrowed my eyes. Was he yanking my chain? No. He appeared to be completely serious.

“I just wish I could paint the room,” he said, looking around. “It’s the one space I never got to decorate because all those boxes were blocking the walls. If you ask me, it’s a bit dreary.”

Dreary was good, in my opinion. “Too bad there’s no time. You’ll be run off your feet getting all this stuff.”

“It’s really beyond the call of duty, Camilla,” Alvin said. But I noticed his eyes were shining. A shopping spree was right up his alley. I could always distance myself from the results.

“Do you need money?”

He held his head high. “I have savings. I’ll pay whatever it is. You can reimburse me.”

I was proud of myself for not mentioning that the only reason he had savings was because he hadn’t been paying rent. Of course, we both knew I’d never asked him to pay any rent, and he had in fact offered. We were both living free when you thought about it.

Alvin left humming. “I need to get a bit more equipment for my cooking projects too. Just leave it all to me.”

Well, I certainly intended to. I went back to staring at my sheet of paper. I had the feeling I was forgetting someone important.

“I have sources,” P. J. said, lowering his voice in case any of the Saturday evening crowd of noisy people in D’Arcy McGee’s pub might care what he had to say. Wishful thinking on his part. “This will blow the top of your head off.”

I said, “Don’t dramatize. And at the same time, please resist the urge to bullshit. Just tell me what you learned about Rollie.”

“You are no fun, Tiger. Do you realize that? I can’t believe we’re having breakfast and dinner together on the same day.”

“I am even less than no fun.”

P. J. lifted his Alexander Keith’s India Pale Ale and sipped, all the time looking at me so I’d know how unfun I was.

I have never minded being a drag. I picked up my hamburger and dug in. First of all, you get hungry after a walk from the Glebe to Sparks Street. And secondly, you never want to let P. J. know you’re eager to hear what he’s holding back on. I finished a bite and carefully checked out the sweet potato fries to see which little beauty I might start with.

The fry paused on the way to my mouth when P. J. remarked, “It wasn’t an easy way to go. Shot and then drowned.” I could sense his barely contained excitement.

“Shot and drowned? No, I don’t imagine it was.”

“My source said he was shot first.”

“I had heard that he’d been shot and dropped in the water. I didn’t realize he really had drowned. My own source left that out.” This was a bit too close to that old joke for me. Damn Mombourquette for not mentioning it. Of course, he may not have known.

P. J. said, “It gets worse. Turns out he was shot in the knees. It would have disabled him, but not killed him.”

“In the knees?” What the hell? Mombourquette sure hadn’t mentioned that. I’d assumed Rollie had received the fatal shot in one of the usual places: head or heart. My dinner had lost its appeal. I pushed my plate away.

P. J. had ordered the fish and chips, and apparently his appetite was unaffected by the details of Rollie Thorsten’s fate.

After a while, I said, “Are you saying Rollie would have been conscious when he went into the water?”

P. J. chewed slowly for a while before saying, “That’s what my source thinks. You know I can’t reveal my—”

I snapped. “I’m not asking for the name of your sources, although anyone with half a brain could figure out it’s that girl in the path lab. The one who has the hots for you.”

“Really? How did you…?”

“Let me see. She works in the pathology department. She drools when she sees you. Tough one.”

“Anyway, calling her ‘that girl’ isn’t too politically correct, Tiger. Especially from such a knee-jerk left winger as yourself.”

“There’s nothing wrong with girls, P. J. Try to remember that for future reference. Now, just to finish up. Maybe Rollie was knocked out first and then shot and drowned.”

P. J. shook his carrot top vigorously. “I think my source would have mentioned that.”

I felt a buzzing around my ears. “So, then he knew what was going to happen to him.”

“He must have.”

“And he wouldn’t have been able to move his legs properly when he went into the water.”

“Yeah.” P. J. actually put down his fork this time.

I said, “Someone really wanted Rollie to go out the hard way.”

“That’s it.”

“They wanted him to know what would happen and probably why it was going to happen.”

“Could have been up to three minutes, my source figured until he lost consciousness and drowned. That would be pretty rough.”

“I can’t even imagine who would do that to another person. Even Rollie. He was just sleazy and opportunistic, not evil. I think that Brugel is behind this. He’s the only person I can think of who is capable of it. And he stood to gain from Rollie’s death.”

“He’s locked up solid in the RDC.”

“And you think he couldn’t make something like this happen?”

“I hear you,” P. J. said, although I noticed he’d picked up his fork again.

I didn’t.

When I arrived home, Alvin was in full swing, standing on a shiny new ladder in the third bedroom. Two boxes containing blow-up beds and several overstuffed plastic shopping bags were parked in the hallway. I managed to navigate my way into the room.

“Oh,” I said. “I see you found time to paint after all. I thought we said that we weren’t—”

“It needed brightening,” he said.

“Well, it’s certainly bright now. You know, I never would have considered Chinese red myself.”

He shrugged and wiped a bit of paint from his nose. “They are here for the dragon boat races, Camilla.”

“Hard to argue with that,” I said.

“Too bad it’s going to take four coats to cover this boring sand colour on the walls. I’ll be here all night.”

“My sympathies,” I murmured as I shut the door.

I fell asleep mentally working my way through Rollie’s better-known cases and the people he’d come up against. My list was by the side of the bed in case more names came to mind. At three in the morning, my eyes popped open, something that happened all too often. Gussie grunted reproachfully and Mrs. Parnell’s cat stretched and turned her back to me to make a point. The point being that the night is for sleeping, not for gasping, twisting and sitting up in bed for the second night in a row. But sleep had been chased from my head by a face.

Annalisa Fillmore’s face.

Of course.

It would be hard to imagine anyone who could have hated Rollie Thorsten more than Annalisa Fillmore. Why had it taken me so long to remember her? Annalisa’s black eyes had flashed in my dream, but even after I snapped awake, I could still see her. The lingering image was that of a tall, svelte figure in a Sunny Choi suit speaking passionately into a microphone and decrying the state of sentencing in Canada. My sister Edwina once mentioned that Annalisa Fillmore only wore Stuart Weitzman shoes which set her back three hundred dollars plus. Her handbags would be worth more than my last car. I remembered Annalisa’s face contorted with rage as she confronted Rollie on the courthouse steps. Rollie, dropping his customary unconcern for his fellow humans, had actually jumped back like a startled hamster. Some people had laughed at his panic. But I wondered at the time if Rollie hadn’t hurtled out of her reach, would Annalisa Fillmore have pushed him down the wide courthouse stairs?

Even so, it was a serious mental leap from rage after a court case to shooting someone and pushing them from a boat into the middle of the Rideau to drown.

At four, I was still awake.

At five thirty, Gussie and I were back from our walk. I gave Alvin a break, but by six, I figured what the hell, P. J. might as well get up and confront the day too.

“What time is it?”

“Doesn’t matter. We need to talk about Annalisa Fillmore.”

“Who the bleep is Annalisa Fillmore, and why can’t she wait until… My god, does my clock say six oh three?”

“Try and follow the script, P. J. Annalisa Fillmore is the founder of Mothers for Fair Sentencing. You see her at conferences. You hear her issuing juicy sound bites on the news after trials.”

“Okay. And I care about this at six oh three because?”

“Because Annalisa Fillmore’s fifteen-year-old daughter was killed by her joyriding boyfriend. The boyfriend got off with a non-custodial sentence. Although I think maybe he had to write an essay on road safety too.”

“Sheesh.”

“Exactly. It was before they enacted the street racing laws. Annalisa must have had an impact on those too. She lobbied like a house on fire. The kid wouldn’t get away with it now, and trust me, he was a grubby little creep and as guilty as sin.”

“Don’t the courts decide that?”

“The court did decide that, but he didn’t have a record, his parents were every bit as wealthy, well-connected and respectable as Annalisa Fillmore herself, and the boy’s lawyer talked a good story. Brilliant even.”

“Now it’s six oh four, and I’m thinking this interesting information could have waited until eight thirty, nine o’clock, no problem.”

“So guess who the boyfriend’s lawyer was.”

It sounded like P. J. was yawning. After a while, he said, “I can’t guess my own name at this time of day.”

“Give it a shot.”

“Oh. You mean—really?”

“You got it. Our boy Rollie. She hated him. White-hot lava hated.”

“I don’t know if lava is white, but allow me to remark that you hated him too. Everyone who knew him probably detested him.”

“Oh sure, no argument here. I’m actually on my own list of suspects. But we both know that I didn’t kill him. I’m pretty sure you didn’t either, although you will do almost anything for an exclusive. But this woman’s emotions went way beyond our minor loathing. I worked with her from time to time on Justice for Victims matters, and she was deadly serious.”

“You said you worked with her, so did you get along all right?”

“I believe in the rights of the accused to a fair and unbiased trial, no matter what I think of that particular individual or the crime. That seemed to be an issue for her, and we had words more than once.”

“You had words with someone, Tiger? That’s hard to believe.”

“Hilarious, P. J. Did I mention she owned a boat? Some kind of yachtlike thing that you can actually sleep on. She was out on that boat the night her daughter died. I don’t think she’d have trouble getting her manicured mitts on a gun either. She’s loaded. Trust me. No one hated Rollie more than Annalisa did. I think she would have been capable of this. I think she would have thought it was funny. You awake now? Get cracking. You want that story? Let me tell you about a weird situation.”