Stain of the Berry (9 page)

More clicking. "I'm sorry sir, I only have an R. Banyon listed. The number you're looking for may be unlisted."

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BOOKS/Anthony Bidulka - Russell Quant Mystery/Anthony B...

Was that a hint? I've always wondered if phone operators really know unlisted numbers but just won't give them out. "Is the R. Banyon on Chestnut Avenue?"

"Yes sir. May I direct your call?"

"No. Thank you, Brenda. You've been very helpful."

"You're welcome."

I disconnected the call and set the phone back on the table while I mulled over an idea in my head. I absentmindedly pulled a half-soggy Wei Wonton from my dinner plate and popped it into my mouth.

Chewing helps me think.

Moxie is not a common name, so I was willing to bet that the Moxie Banyon in Tanya's address book was the Moxie in the picture I found in her apartment who was the same woman Newton Furberry saw entering the apartment with her own key, and more than likely the "M" in Tanya's Daytimer. She was also my best...my only current hope of finding out more about Tanya's personal life. Since her phone number was disconnected, there was a chance Moxie had left Moose Jaw, but there was also a chance she'd simply gotten an unlisted number or was resident at the R. Banyon address..."R" being a husband or other relative's initial. I mentally considered my Tuesday schedule. Yep, empty. Tomorrow's forecast was for another day of clear blue skies and temps in the mid-thirties. I hadn't had the RX7 out on the road for quite a while. Don't they say highway driving is good for a car-cleans out the carburetor or some such macho nonsense? Although Moose Jaw is a good two-and-a-half hour drive from Saskatoon, I've found in my line of business, that whenever I snoop in person, the results come out much better. It was decided.

Time for a road trip.

I was definitely getting a bad case of convertible-hair and touch of windburn as I followed Highway 2

dotted with potash mine signs toward Moose Jaw. There is nothing quite as exhilarating as driving fast on a hot summer day with tunes blaring, the top down and your shirt off. When I reached the outskirts of town, I pulled into an Esso station for gas, time in front of a bathroom mirror, and directions. By 11:00 I was rolling up in front of a decent looking little house on Chestnut Avenue. It appeared to be freshly painted in earthy colours and was surrounded by a honeycomb wire fence heavy with newly blossomed sweet peas in purple, lavender, maroon, pink and white, and thick stalks of hollyhocks reaching for the sky. The front gate, centered with the house's front door, was beneath a homemade wooden arbour that I guessed would've collapsed were it not for the support of the wiry tendrils of a sturdy grapevine that crawled up each side. Beyond the gate was a crumbling cement sidewalk that led to the house's entrance and separated the tidy front lawn into two halves. Each side was identical except for another arbour on the left side of the house which likely led to a backyard; on the right was an above-ground kiddie swimming pool.

I stopped at the gate and observed a woman kneeling next to the pool, smiling at a child, a girl of about four or five I thought, frolicking in the pool wearing bright pink bathing suit bottoms. The woman turned when she sensed my presence and looked at me. I was right. It was Moxie Banyon. Or at least it was the same woman as the one in the photograph from Tanya's apartment.

"Can I help you?" she asked, sounding friendly, but not getting up to greet me. She gave me the smile, the one that looked so easy in the picture.

"Good day for it," I said, nodding at the pool. "Are you Moxie Banyon?"

The woman's face fell. Uh-oh.

"Who are you?" she asked, less friendly now, and trying to keep a close eye on me and the little girl at the same time.

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"My name is Russell Quant. I'm a private detective from Saskatoon. I drove up here today to ask you a few questions. It shouldn't take long."

"I'm afraid you've come a long way for nothing, Mr. Quant."

I regarded her dark features, shiny hair glistening in the sun, summer skin several shades browner than in the picture, melted milk-chocolate eyes. "Can you tell me why?"

Moxie stood up and held out her hands to the girl. "Maya, come on, it's time to get out of the pool."

"Nooooooooo, Mama," the youngster whined. "It's too hot to go inside. You said we could swim."

"And we will," Moxie told her daughter. "We'll swim some more later. I promise. But right now I need to talk to this man and I can't watch you at the same time."

"I wanna stay outside."

"Okay. Just not in the pool, okay, Maya?"

Maya, a miniature version of her mother, slogged through the water as if it were wet cement and allowed herself to be hauled out and into a waiting towel. Moxie wrapped the towel around the girl and told her to see if she could find the ladybug they'd apparently spied earlier that same morning.

"She's a good girl," I said. And I could tell that Moxie was an exceedingly good mother too. "Thank you for talking to me. I'll try not to take too much of your time."

Moxie straightened herself and faced me with one hand on a rounded hip. "Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Water or something?" she offered, indicating for me to take a seat in one of three lawn chairs set up near the pool.

I gazed uncertainly at the chair. It was one of those with the criss-crossing strands of some sort of plasticized material, the kind I've fallen through on more than one occasion. But I gave it a go and it seemed willing to hold my weight. "No, thank you. I'm fine, Moxie."

"I'm not Moxie," she told me, lowering herself into the chair across from mine and watching my reaction.

"Oh, my, I...I...I'm sorry," I sputtered. "I jut assumed...I just...you are a friend of Tanya Culinare though?"

"No. I'm not. Why do you ask that?"

I pulled out the photo that showed this woman next to Tanya and handed it to her. I wondered how she was going to get out of this one. I instinctually liked Moxie, so I disliked having to put her in this uncomfortable situation, but she did just lie to me.

Moxie stared at the picture with intense interest, almost longingly. "Where did you get this?"

"In Tanya's apartment." I waited for a few seconds and when it seemed she wasn't about to come clean, I asked, "Do you remember when this was taken?"

After another second she broke her concentration from the picture and gazed up at me. "I don't. This isn't me. As I told you, Mr. Quant, I'm not Moxie."

Crazy lady? Forgetful? Trying to mislead me? What?

"I'm Missy, Moxie's twin sister."

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Okay. Was not expecting that. Missy glanced over at her wandering daughter and asked her how she was doing. I used the time for the brief exchange between mother and daughter to rethink my line of questioning.

"I'm sorry," I said again. "I didn't know. Can you tell me where I might find Moxie?"

"You're probably wondering why I didn't tell you that first off," Missy said, eyeing me with care.

Wellllllllll, yep, uh-huh.

"I wanted to know who you were first, and what you wanted with Moxie."

I nodded. The protective sister. "Of course. I can provide you with identification if you'd like, before I meet Moxie."

"There's no need, Mr. Quant. You see, Moxie is dead."

Not wanting to discuss the matter further in front of her young daughter, Missy asked if I would come back later that evening after Maya was asleep and her husband was home. Was it simple coincidence that two young women who knew each other-at least well enough to be in a picture together-were now dead? I couldn't be certain but I sensed there was important information to be had in Moose Jaw, so I accepted the invitation and headed downtown to find a hotel room.

I was a child the last time I'd spent any time in Moose Jaw, visiting some relative I don't remember, so the quirky little city with its North and South Hill, urban forest, meandering stream, European-inspired public park, creative architecture and banquet of playful, building-size murals was a pleasant rediscovery.

I'd heard rumours of a fantastically successful hotel-spa-casino complex that had sprung up several years earlier, spurring this sleepy community back to the vigour it once enjoyed as the prairie headquarters for the Canadian Pacific Railway and home to a renowned training centre for wartime fliers. After securing a room at the Temple Gardens Mineral Spa & Hotel and some Meing Com and Geal Kob at Nit's, a Thai restaurant I'd heard good things about, I had time to kill and decided to participate in the activity Moose Jaw is best known for: corruption.

During the era of Prohibition, Moose Jaw had a direct pipeline to Chicago via the Soo Line that runs southeast through Minneapolis. The booze trade primed the town and it blossomed like a flowering stinkweed. With it came hoodlums and gamblers, graft and prostitution, and the construction of a warren of underground caves and tunnels through which flowed illicit booze and shady characters including, so the legend went, Al Capone himself. As I passed by River Street, the area once ripe with seedy flophouses, rambunctious gin joints and smoky gambling dens, I was oddly disappointed by the current sanitized version, yet something about the place still reeked of mischief and my mind was a barren field ready for seeding by the time I reached the Tunnels of Moose Jaw tour office. I spent the afternoon, along with several other tourists, immersed in the colourful version of history, well preserved, beneath the seemingly innocent prairie city streets of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

It was as if Moxie Banyon's twin sister, Missy, had decided to throw me a party. As I pulled up to the house on Chestnut Avenue that night, the lights inside were burning bright and several other cars were parked nearby. The door was answered by a brown-haired man of medium height with a pleasant face and wrestler's body. He reached out for a shake and introduced himself as Shane Ollenberger, Missy's husband.

"We're in the back," he said, stepping aside to allow me into the house. "Can I get you a beer?"

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"Ah, no thanks, I'm okay. But Shane, I'm curious. The way I tracked down your wife was by a phone number listed to an R. Banyon?"

The man guffawed. "You're gonna bring that up, are ya?" he said good-naturedly. "R. Banyon is Robert, Missy's grandpa. This used to be his house and our phone number was his phone number. After we moved in to take care of him, we never bothered to change it, even after he passed on. Nothing like a bit of procrastination, eh?"

I smiled and nodded. "But Moxie, your wife's sister, had a phone number registered to this address?"

"Oh yeah. When she moved back to town and in here with us, she wanted her own phone line. So the bills wouldn't get all mixed up, y'know." His mouth turned downwards as he added, "Disconnected now."

I followed Shane down a narrow hallway that dissected the modest house in two equal halves and led to the back door. He let me out onto a small, unstained wooden deck which, based on the woodsy scent of fresh sawdust, I guessed was newly constructed. Besides Shane, there were four other people on the deck, sitting in a semi-circle of lawn chairs similar to the one I'd used earlier in the front yard and facing out toward a neat square of grass. The only face I recognized was Missy's.

"Have a seat, man," Shane said, indicating an empty spot in the middle of the others.

I wiggled into the chair, feeling a little on display and nodded a hello to Missy on my right. "Thanks for seeing me."

"When I told Mom and Dad that you were asking about Moxie, they wanted to come over to hear what you had to say."

I smiled at the couple seated to my left, both in their late fifties and, except for hints of grey in their hair, they were dark-featured like their daughters. They told me their names were John and Marion.

"And this is my brother," Missy said, motioning toward a younger man, surprisingly blond as Madonna, who sat a little off from the others and to the right of his sister. "Cameron."

"Hello Cameron," I said.

He answered back with an unfriendly glare.

"Thank you for coming out to talk with me," I said to the group in general. "I hope I haven't interrupted anything you had planned for tonight."

"Shane," Marion Banyon spoke up, "didn't you offer Mr. Quant something to drink? It's so hot tonight."

"He did," I quickly assured her. "I'm fine, thank you."

She looked doubtful "Okay then, if you're sure. Just ask if you want something though."

I smiled at her hospitality. "Thank you, I will. As I explained earlier to Missy, the reason I came to Moose Jaw looking for Moxie is that I'm a private detective looking into the death of a woman named Tanya Culinare. Tanya had in her possession a picture of herself with Moxie, and I..."

Missy nodded. "Well, of course she would. They were close friends. Well, much more than that, really, but that was over before Moxie came home. It's just so sad about Tanya-she was a nice girl. Kept to herself mostly, but very nice I thought. Didn't you, Shane?" She turned to ask her husband who'd now lowered his bulk into a chair next to her. "Didn't you think she was nice? I can't believe she's dead too.

Was it really suicide or...I suppose that's what you're looking into, is it, Mr. Quant?"

"Errrr....did you say they were more than friends?"

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"Moxie and Tanya dated for a few months...not long...ah..." she turned to Shane again. "What would you say, about four, five months, last year was it?"

He nodded as he thought. "Yeah," he agreed. "I think they broke up around March, was it? That's right.