Murder in Focus (16 page)

“Thanks,” said Sanders. “You've been a real help. Almost as much help as last time,” and pushed them out the door. As soon as their car pulled out of the parking lot, he bounded down the stairs and into Harriet's car. He found a map in her glove compartment, checked where he was going, and headed out for the Queensway and Stittsville.

The long spring evening was just beginning as Sanders pulled south off the expressway, grateful to get the low sun out of his eyes. A medium blue car pulled off after him; he slowed down perceptibly to get it off his tail. Instead of using the deserted road to pass, it too slowed down. He looked again. A fairly new Ford Escort, front license plates blurred with mud and rust. He picked up speed suddenly, found some traffic to put between them, and pulled far ahead before settling back down to the speed limit. The blue Ford appeared to be gone. He must be catching the prevailing local paranoia. He couldn't even let a perfectly ordinary car exit from the Queensway without being consumed by suspicion. He glanced at his watch. He'd be in Stittsville around seven-thirty.

At 7:30, Andy Cassidy put away the pile of surveillance reports he had been double checking. The casual complaints of bad and insufficient data that Ian MacMillan had passed on from Henri Deschenes—the ones he had dismissed so lightly on Monday evening—had rankled. Still, everything in front of him seemed normal; he shook his head and looked at his watch. The cleaning crew should be gone by now and he could get back to his fruitless search of Steve Collins's files. He walked down the familiar corridors to Steve's office in the gray half-light that found its way in from the long May evening. Steve's door was shut, his lights out. Cassidy pulled out the key he still carried with him and opened the office door.

Silhouetted against the darkening eastern sky, Betty's motionless form was perched on a table pushed against the window. She turned her head slowly in his direction in that unsettling way she had. “Don't turn the light on,” she said.

“What's happening?” asked Andy. He had at least learned not to ask what she was doing there. It seemed to him that each time he'd asked that question, he'd lost the exchange.

She slipped down from the table and pointed over to the corner beside Steve's desk, where Andy had stacked boxes of files as he sorted them. It was empty. He looked around him. The whole office was empty. He ran over to the desk and began flinging open drawers. They were unlocked and rattled hollowly as he yanked at them. There wasn't even a pencil left behind. “What in hell happened to all Steve's things? Did you take them?”

Betty shook her head and moved closer. Now, even in the dusk, he could see scarlet patches in her cheeks and fury in her eyes. She raised a finger to her mouth and motioned him out of the room. He followed her down the hall toward her own cubbyhole of an office. “There,” she said, as soon as she had closed the door. “Now we can talk.”

“What happened?” he repeated.

“It was the RCMP,” said Betty. “They arrived with authorization to seize his stuff. Because he was killed on their turf. Packed up everything and took it away, even his keys. You should have kept them.”

“Who?”

“Ian MacMillan and a couple of constables,” she said. “It was all legal, I think. Not that I had anything to do with it. I just wandered by to see what was going on. No one pays much attention to me.”

“Bloody hell,” muttered Cassidy. “Not that there was much there, as far as I could tell, anyway.”

The scarlet patches in Betty's cheeks deepened and spread to her throat and forehead. “I just remembered this afternoon,” she said, picking up a paper clip and beginning to untwist it viciously, “that Steve had left a few files in my small cabinet in here. He claimed he ran out of space in his own file drawers,” she turned the paper clip into a triangle, “and could never find anything once the department had locked it away. I wrote you a letter about it this afternoon, but after those guys were in here, I decided I'd better wait and give it to you in person.”

“Why didn't you come down to my office?” he asked, amazed.

“I wouldn't want to do that,” she said. “It looks funny. Here,” and she threw a letter at him before turning and fleeing. He closed the door behind her and bolted it before picking up the envelope. It was dated that day, and neatly typed:

Dear Andy,

I'm sure Steve would have wanted me to give you what he'd found. I don't know what's there, but he seemed to feel his case was complete. You'll find the key to the small black filing cabinet taped to the underside of the top section of the copier. Check the “clear paper path” instructions and open the section marked “B” and you'll find it. He was very concerned about that material—and I think you'll see why once you look at it. If it is what I think it is.

And thank you for doing this. I hope you catch the bastard who got him—no matter who he is.

With apologies,
Betty

The door leading from Betty's cubbyhole to the room containing the photocopy machine was locked. Cassidy looked around. Getting in couldn't be that difficult or she would have left him even more instructions on how to do it. He looked at the containers of paper clips and staples on her desk, and then flipped through the papers in her In tray. Nothing. He drew open the shallow top drawer and there it was. A key with a large and grubby tag marked “Photocopy Room.” Not so difficult. He opened the door, turned on the light, and picked up the sheet of instructions. Sure enough. “To clear paper path,” it said, with an arrow indicating the knob that had to be turned. The entire top of the machine slowly heaved itself up, and there in the corner, attached to the top, was a frizzled piece of electrical tape, which, when peeled away, proved to be hiding a small key. “Good girl,” he muttered, and headed back to the small black filing cabinet. He looked at the array of material inside it, pulled out three folders, and settled down at Betty's desk to digest their contents.

Sanders looked at the big white clapboard house and thought for a moment. The most effective way to get somewhere with the landlady was probably to charge in, in his own person, waving his ID, and snow her with credentials. He reached into his pocket, fished out the fake leather case, and slipped it into his left hand, ready to be flashed open as soon as the landlady appeared. There was no doorbell that he could see. He picked up the large black knocker and let it fall. The sound reverberated on the other side of the door. There was no answering noise. He waited. Nothing. He shook his head impatiently, raised his hand to fling the heavy knocker against the door again, and was stopped by the faint sound of footsteps. A few seconds more and the door fell away in front of him.

He looked at the landlady and felt as if he had slipped into a time warp. She appeared to be a haggard thirty, or perhaps a youthful forty-five, perfectly preserved from the sixties. Her long brown hair was streaked with gray and worn in a single braid pulled forward over her left shoulder and falling over her chest. Her feet were bare and dirty, her legs encased in worn jeans, and her Indian embroidered shirt covered with strand after strand of beads. Not someone likely to support the maintainers of law and order? He hastily slipped his ID back into his pocket. “Hi,” he said, leaning awkwardly against the door frame. “I'm a pal of Don's—Don Bartholomew. I read about, uh, what happened . . . in the paper. I didn't know what I should do. So, I came here. I'm John. John Sanders.”

“What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously.

“Well, I'm not quite sure,” he said, straightening up a little and running his hand over his hair. “I've never had this happen to me before—” He remembered his role and slouched again.

“Had what happen?” She broke in impatiently. “Look, if you've got something to say, say it. Otherwise I have things to do. Like there are flies on the back porch I haven't counted yet.”

“Well,” said Sanders, “I dunno. I left some, uh, stuff in Don's room, and I wondered if—”

“Stuff? You mean grass, dope?” she asked, with a grin. “Because if you did, pal, you're outta luck. Jesus, the place's been crawling with cops since Monday. One came to tell me what happened and he looked up in his room and then two more turned up a little later to search his room and then there was a third one. And he went up there, too. All in plain clothes, of course, but I can spot those bastards a mile away. Always could. I made them come up with identification all right. Anyway, they've walked off with everything but the bedposts from his room.”

“Shit,” said Sanders. “They took everything? But it wasn't anything like that. It was something I'd written. Did the fucking cops take all that away, too?”

“You're damned right they did,” said the landlady. “Every piece of paper. Pigs, that's what they are. We were right back in the old days. They're still pigs.” She leaned against the other side of the door frame and picked up the end of her braid, assessing him. Finally she seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. “They got everything but his notebooks.”

“You mean . . .” Sanders paused before he could put a foot wrong.

“Yeah. The notes for his novel. And his journal. All great writers keep journals. Did you know that? Don told me. Anyway, I've got all that stuff. He didn't trust the other guys in the house.”

“Maybe my stuff is in there, too,” said Sanders, leaning closer to her. “When did he let you have it?”

“Four, five days ago,” she said. “One of the other guys had been snooping in his room. What did you give him?”

“It's an outline, an outline for a story I was writing. My only copy, too, which was pretty stupid of me. I guess you wouldn't think to look at me that I wrote stories,” he added modestly, “but then Don didn't exactly look like he did, either. Poor bastard.”

She was still holding the end of her braid in one hand, twisting the tip around her second and third fingers. “What the hell,” she said at last. “Come on in. I'm Miranda, Miranda Cruikshank. Let me see if I can find your stuff.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Cruikshank,” he murmured. “I really appreciate this.”

“Miranda,” she said. “You gotta call me Miranda,” and took him by the hand to pull him into the house.

“Nice house you got here, Mrs., uh, Miranda,” said Sanders. They were sitting in an enormous kitchen at a round wooden table. The scene was a parody of nineteenth-century rural nostalgia. Behind him a wood stove burned, enveloping the kitchen in stifling heat. On the painted pine boards in front of the stove, Mrs. Cruikshank had thrown a large and grubby braided rag rug. A fat golden retriever lay sleeping on a chintz-covered couch near the source of heat; in front of him, on the other side of the kitchen, was a stained, wooden drainboard with a shallow porcelain sink in it. The dog opened an eye, considered Sanders, thumped her tail on the cushion, and slept again.

Miranda looked around her critically, as if she hadn't noticed her surroundings in ten years. “Thanks,” she said. “Not bad, I guess. I came up here with Wayne—my boyfriend—in seventy-one. Me and the baby. It seemed like a nice place, you know, to get away from the materialism and hypocrisy of the city and that sort of crap.” She turned and stared out the window into the deepening shadows. “Except that a small town's got just as much hypocrisy. And materialism. Funny, isn't it? Anyway, the bastard took off one day and disappeared to somewhere. Vancouver, I think. He's probably living in the suburbs and working in a brokerage office or something like that now. And wearing suits and ties. So here I am. Amanda—that's the baby—she's gone to Toronto to get away from—what does she call it?—the stifling atmosphere of a dying small-town culture. So now I've got nobody and I live alone. What the hell, I'm used to the place. In fact, I kind of like it now and so I take in boarders. It's a living. Sort of. Keeps me from getting too lonely, if you know what I mean.” She eyed him hungrily. “You'll have a beer? Come on,” she added, coaxing, before he had a chance to accept or reject it.

“Sure,” he said easily, and leaned back in his chair as if he had all the time in the world.

“There.” She set a bottle in front of each place and opened both of them. Apparently there was something in her moral code that forbade the use of glasses. She turned to a set of cupboards, opened a bottom door, and pulled out a potato chip bag, unopened. She set it on the table between them. “Organic,” she said. “They're wild. I'm thinking of opening a
real
health food store somewhere around here.” Sanders's eye suddenly fell on the dirt ground into the floor, the work surfaces and piled up in the corners, and he shuddered at the thought of this woman running a food store. “Don't you think you could make a fortune out of it?” She ripped open the bag. “Have some chips.”

Sanders gave another desperate look around. “You wouldn't have any idea where Don might have—”

“Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry,” she said. “Your story. Well, if it's here, I know where it'll be.” She got up with a rattle of beads and threw open a door at the back of the room. It led into a gloomy passageway. “The pantry,” she said, her voice muffled. “I put it in here with the chili sauce and peach jam from last year. Figured nobody'd look there for that kind of stuff, would they?” Sanders shook his head. That would probably be the first place he'd look, but never mind. Maybe nobody had. She returned waving a large, rusty cookie tin. “Here it is.”

She opened the tin with care and revealed a round shape wrapped in aluminum foil. “Last year's Christmas cake,” she said, taking it out and putting it on the table. Under it was a round of cardboard, covered with waxed paper. “That's nothing,” she added, and lifted it out, too. Underneath that, on a piece of greasy paper towel, lay a notebook, black, soft-covered, and slightly dog-eared. “Do you think it might be in here?” she asked.