Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  He took a deep breath. “I got a call from a friend of mine asking me to come and get her here,” he shouted back.

  The officer leaned back into the window and replaced the radio receiver, Leo moved toward the cruiser and repeated himself with less amplification: “I was asked to pick someone up here.”

  “Oh. It’s you. You sure got here fast enough.”

  “Look, I’m only a reporter from nine to five.” Like I live this job. “The meter’s off right now. What’s happened?”

  “Dead body.”

  Stevie!

  “A woman?”

  “A male.”

  A wave of relief crashed over him. Not Stevie. Well, of course not Stevie, you idiot. Who would have done the phoning?

  “Who, then?”

  The officer shrugged. She looked like she was twenty-two, creaseless skin and pink ears under an almost punkish haircut, and pale blue eyes that regarded him coolly. “Did you say someone called you? From here?”

  “I think so. Stevie Lord. Slim, dark, dark-haired.”

  “She’s in the yard.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Of course you can’t. And you should either have that dog on a leash or put him back in your vehicle.”

  Leo turned. Police officers and brick walls share a common feature: they can’t be argued with.

  “Detective Nickel should be here shortly,” she added.

  Leo thought he detected a hint of malicious glee in her voice. “Happy day,” he responded. Speaking of brick walls. He had been arguing with said detective, his brother-in-law, wouldn’t you know it, about Free Trade with the Yanks on Sunday at his mother’s. Frank: for; Leo: against.

  He opened the passenger side door and Alvy jumped in. Leo moved around the back to the driver’s side, then hesitated. The officer was again leaning into the cruiser. Where was the other cop? Like Noah’s menagerie, they usually travelled two by two. He looked at the Rossiter property. The gate was purely decorative, the remnant of a day when the grounds were fenced. Lilac bushes now defined its border. They didn’t look completely impenetrable.

  He ducked down behind the Land Rover, poked his head around the fender to note the officer’s whereabouts—still yapping on the radio—then scuttled like Groucho across the patch of grass and pressed himself into the shrubbery. He paused. The wind was rising, leaves were rustling with a nice cinematic pitch. Leo squeezed his large frame into the lattice of branches, grateful for the leather jacket, and held his arm up to protect his face. Gingerly, he sidled through the yellowing foliage, endured the stabbing along his thighs, and after a moment, popped out on the other side. He peered into the gloom and strained his ears. No police life-forms in evidence. A glow of light to the west side of the house drew him across the front lawn. He hugged the corner of the house and peeked around the side. There, collapsed on an outdoor chaise, the inclined planes of her cheekbones and strong nose accentuated by a shaft of light pouring onto the grass from the open kitchen door, was Stevie. She appeared to be hugging herself, fallen into sleep. He moved quickly.

  “Stevie,” Leo whispered, crouching behind the chaise. “Are you okay?”

  Her head turned toward him, her dark eyes searched his face as if pondering the profundity of his question. “No,” she replied, finally, firmly. “No, I’m not.”

  He didn’t know what to say next, dreaded what the answer might be. He wanted to embrace her—she seemed so small and subdued—but the only way to hold her would be to more or less climb on top of her. On his knees, the damp starting to work through his jeans, he felt a sudden and strange and madly inappropriate impulse to ask her to marry him. He was in the classic position. And she was unexpectedly vulnerable—for once.

  “You must be cold,” he said instead.

  “Freezing.”

  “Take my jacket.”

  He slipped off the leather and tucked it around Stevie. She pulled its collar up to her chin, sighed a little sigh, and closed her eyes. Leo’s mind returned to the scene: the darkened trees, the light blazing from the kitchen, the curious air of expectation. Two and two were rapidly making four.

  “Is it Michael?”

  He watched her eyelids shut tighter.

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s young. What? Thirty-three? He’s my age—”

  “Leo, he’s been murdered.”

  And then she amended it. She opened her eyes and stared into Leo’s. “It looks as though Michael’s been murdered.”

  “Christ!” Leo stifled his mouth with his hand. He clung to the word “looks.” It only looked like murder. Perhaps it was just an accident. He searched for confirmation in Stevie’s eyes but she had shut them again. Leo thought wildly about intruders intercepted, a struggle, an accidental…an accidental what? Even though he had reported on murders and their aftermath, he had always felt detached. Murder wasn’t something that happened to people you knew. It was something that happened to people in—how ironic—newspapers: sad, stupid, squalid affairs, usually; remote events that took place after drinking hours were over, in crumbling apartments, by people too crazed to realize what they had done.

  The rising wind sent leaves twisting in the night air, briefly flashing gold in the kitchen light as they descended to the dark lawn. Leo glanced about. Where was that other cop? The house seemed as undisturbed and genteel as any Crescentwood home on a September evening. The indifferent sky above glowed indigo as the last feeble ray of autumn light withdrew into the night. A siren sounded faintly in the distance. Leo thought about Michael.

  He wouldn’t have met Stevie but for Michael. And he wouldn’t have met Michael but for the schemes of Guy Clark, the Go! editor, under whose aegis Leo had briefly toiled through the thawing of Winnipeg’s long winter. Once Leo had been a political reporter at the Legislature, a plum assignment. But he had involved himself, conspicuously, in trying to organize the editorial staff into a union. Management, unamused, responded with the sort of arbitrary measure the union had hoped to challenge, banishing him to the hinterland of the Go! section, the redoubt of much that was silly. Leo, who had won a National Newspaper Award in his first year for a series of articles on police corruption, had been reduced to rewriting wire service copy about Hollywood stars, answering questions in the Answers column about removal of warts, and producing featurettes on local eccentrics and their hobbies—pap, in other words. It dulled his skills and made him near furious with boredom. There were opportunities to write larger features in Go!—which was the only plus side—but Clark spurned every idea he put forward. He thought instead about his salary and swallowed his pride. One day in May, Clark commanded his presence and said, “I want a feature on angels.”

  Hell, Leo had thought, not some New Age shit. But he expressed his reservations more judiciously.

  “I mean, Leo, the rich people in this town.” Clark waved a sheet of paper in Leo’s face. “The ones who write fat cheques on a regular basis to keep some of these fucking tax-supported arts groups from going down the toilet. I want to know how much they give, who they give it to, why they do it, and so on.”

  It wasn’t the worst story idea Clark had ever doled out, but glancing at some of the names on the list Leo doubted his ability to execute a story. Christine Farquhar, Emerald Cuthbertson, Bill Noseworthy, St. Clair MacCharles, Stella Affleck: each he vaguely recognized as old Anglo money and old Anglo money valued discretion more than it valued the Georgian silver passed down from their great-grandmothers. Liz Elliott sympathized: The angels story idea had been hurtling around Go! like a grenade without a pin, but everyone else had ducked. Lots of luck, she said, waving her cigarette: They won’t talk.

  And they didn’t. Very politely, usually through some functionary, everyone on the list declined Leo’s invitation for an interview.

  Except Michael Rossiter. Even though there had been a long pause over the phone in which Leo presumed his hopes were to be dashed once more, he did agree to meet for a conversation. There had been a sort of pity
ing tone in Michael’s voice that made him bristle, and when he said he would talk only for background, not for attribution—the faint-hearted appeal of politicians and civil servants—Leo bristled some more. But, growing frustrated with the hopeless story, he reluctantly agreed to the terms. Attribution? Background? Yup. Michael was, of course, one of those Rossiters, the family that had once owned the Zit, as the Citizen was unpopularly known. The brother of Merritt Parrish, fashion reporter for less than a year, who swanned into the newsroom whenever the notion crossed her mind, which didn’t seem to be very often.

  Better than nothing, Liz had shrugged. Michael was a photographer, played violin, and sat on the board of the WSO. He was a decent enough source, she said, of off-the-record information. But he would talk only if he thought he was doing some good, she had warned. He was Mr. Integrity.

  And, in fact, at an Italian restaurant on Corydon where they met, Michael had not been at all pliable when it came to specifics about his philanthropic gestures—the nubbly, gossipy details that Guy Clark was demanding. He’d been more curious about Clark, pointing out, amused, that he—Clark—had failed to include on the list his aunt, the managing editor’s wife, Marilyn Kingdon (Bunny to all), who was known to give generously to the arts—allegedly, that is. Of course, he couldn’t really say; it was up to Aunt Bunny to talk, if she wanted. “Giving” wasn’t necessarily about money, he’d added at one point. Time could be given as well. He was, for example, doing the food photography for a fundraising cookbook the Friends of the Symphony was producing for the Christmas market. That he could talk about; the publicity would aid sales. But flacking for some little project wasn’t Leo’s aim.

  “Is it fair for society’s well-being, whether it’s the arts or health care or recreation, to depend on the whims of the rich?” Leo had asked on one point, frustrated, trying to provoke Michael. “Isn’t charity a way for the status quo to sustain itself and salve its conscience at the same time?”

  “It’s all very unfair.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Look, I agree people need justice, not charity, but sometimes acts of charity are all you can do.” Michael had shrugged and stared into his coffee cup. “Wealth can be a prison of sorts.”

  Oh, fuck you sideways, Leo had wanted to say, but instead simply stared at the bent head, at the thick blonde hair swept back from the high forehead. It wasn’t enough that Michael was rich and talented. He was good-looking, too.

  “I know you don’t believe me.” Michael continued to study his coffee.

  “I don’t. But can I quote you?”

  Michael looked up and laughed. “No.”

  “C’mon, man,” Leo had said at last, “throw me a bone. I’ve got to go back to the Zit with something.”

  A guilty grin had spread over Michael’s face. “Sorry, I guess I’ve been wasting your time.”

  “Well—”

  “You’ll have to turn it into a think piece.”

  “That’s occurred to me.”

  “I know a professor at the University of Winnipeg who—”

  “Donald Keating, in sociology? Doing a book on charity? I’ve already got a call in to him.”

  Michael fingered the rim of his coffee cup. “I could give you an epigraph—you know, an italicized quote before the body of the text. How about that? To make some amends.”

  “A bit precious for a newspaper.”

  “Ah, but not for the Go! section.”

  It was Leo’s turn to laugh. “All right, what is it?”

  “Well, it’s sort of the root of my philosophy in this area.” His expression grew serious. “It’s what I believe. And I think the others on your list would probably agree, even if they haven’t thought about it.”

  “What is it? Leo asked again.

  “Matthew six, verses one through three.”

  “The Bible?”

  “Look it up when you get back to the paper.”

  Leo had. In the Citizen library he’d found—remarkably—a red-covered copy of the New English Bible. He blew the dust off the top and turned the onion-skin pages to the Gospel of Matthew.

  Be careful not to make a show of your religion before men; if you do, no reward awaits you in your Father’s house in heaven. Thus, when you do some act of charity, do not announce it with a flourish of trumpets, as the hypocrites do in synagogue and in the streets to win admiration from men. I tell you this: they have their reward already. No, when you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

  He stared glumly at the text. The left hand/right hand bit might do for an epigraph as Michael suggested, but otherwise it read more like a first-century editorial. He supposed he could set up some poor sap in a corporation’s philanthropy department to argue for the “flourish of trumpets”—after all, corporations gave to get—then record his reaction when quoted back to the contrary no less an authority than Jesus Christ. But it wasn’t a story. There was little to do but give Clark the bad news. He would pitch it as a think piece, quiz the usual tame academics, toss in some StatsCan statistics, and whisk the whole hummingbird’s egg into a giant soufflé.

  That week had already been a bad week, the least of which had been the futility of Clark’s assignment. Tuesday, Ishbel had decided her career was much more vital than being with him, and, after two years together, without warning had left abruptly for Vancouver, kissing him carelessly, saying she would send for her things. He had been devastated. Wednesday, the spring rains had revealed a serious leak in his roof where he intended to install a skylight. And Alvarez, who had had an eye infection and had been fitted at the neck by the veterinarian Wednesday evening with what looked like a lampshade, was being as miserable as it was possible for a kindly retriever to be.

  Thursday at 10:00, two days before the Victoria Day long weekend, he’d sat down across from Clark at the latter’s desk in the front of the newsroom. He was late because he’d forgotten to set the alarm, normally the efficient Ishbel’s chore. He was soaking because the Land Rover series IIA, which he’d spent years restoring, wouldn’t start and he’d dashed from the house to the bus without an umbrella or even an old newspaper to cover his head. He felt sour. Pushing back his wet hair, he made his pitch to Clark, who flew into a tantrum. Leo had witnessed Clark’s childish outbursts before; they were not infrequent. He had been on the receiving end of one or two himself, the last a few weeks earlier when Clark had blindly refused to release him from work to give blood to the Red Cross, which had called, as it occasionally did, for his A negative blood.

  Later, after it was all over, Leo couldn’t remember being enraged—losing it, as the saying went. A spurt of anger, perhaps, but perhaps he was fooling himself that it had been only a spurt. All he could remember was numbly watching Clark’s cakehole flapping, the stream of words spinning into a kind of black noise. All he wanted, all he wanted in the world, was for the fucker to just shut the fuck up. Somehow—he couldn’t remember willing it, but he could remember the sharp pain of bone against bone—his fist collided with Clark’s mouth. Blood splattered onto the dummy copy of the day’s Go! section spread out between them. There was a moment of ominous silence. Then Clark, howling, his hand over this mouth, tore out of his chair toward the men’s toilet on the other side of the room. Feeling drained, Leo rose, and while thirty pairs of eyes watched in utter silence, retrieved his wet jacket from the dilapidated coat tree near the cartoonist’s office at the back, and exited the newsroom for what he was sure would be the last time. He walked home, four miles in the pouring rain. He went straight to the liquor cabinet, poured himself a Scotch with his good hand, plunked down on the Morris chair he and Ishbel had restored together, and had a conversation with Alvy who, picking up his mood, plopped his lampshaded head on Leo’s knee and stared at him morosely. His career was over; his mortgage payment was due (and without Ishbel’s contribution); and he was probably facing
an assault charge.

  Three hours later, a bouquet of blood-red roses arrived with a card. “Our hero,” the card read. “Love, the Go!-Go’s.” He knew Liz had to have been behind the gesture. She was the most fearless when confronting Guy. The other reporters in the Go! section—Ian Pears, Doug Whiteway, Alison Fussell, Karen Watkin, and Diane Fischer—were too committed to self-preservation. But, like flowers after a death in the family, they were little consolation.

  The next day, two things of significance happened. Martin Kingdon phoned. Miracle of miracles, Leo wasn’t fired. He would have a two-week suspension without pay. (Okay. Not too eager now, Leo.) He would be reassigned to city desk where he would take up the police beat, his starting point with the Citizen six years ago. (Busted to private, but okay.) And—this was completely non-negotiable—he would be required to apologize to Guy in front of the entire editorial staff. The gall surged in his throat. He hesitated, then saw the heavens open and his paycheques wing into the clouds. (Yeah, all right. If I have to.) You have to, Mr. Fabian, Martin assured him.

  Then Michael Rossiter, of all people, telephoned. He had heard the news (how fast it had spread!), offered his sympathies, and invited him to his barbecue Monday. Where he’d met Stevie.

  And now, four months later, Stevie was lying a kiss away on a chaise in Michael’s yard. And Michael was dead.

  Leo’s mind returned to the scene. Michael certainly wasn’t poor. Perhaps he had interrupted a robbery in progress, though the house, despite its Crescentwood location, didn’t evince great wealth. He had an urgent desire to press Stevie for further details. He couldn’t help it: Murder was music to the journalistic ear. Headlines danced in his head: