Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  Rossiter Scion Dead at 33

  Local Artist Found Dead

  Life Ends in Fatal…

  Fatal what? Stabbing, shooting, garrotting, poisoning? What had Stevie witnessed? He couldn’t ask her.

  A few streets away, the siren was rising to painful decibels. Just over the hedge, a set of brakes shrieked. Leo tensed. He had been at scenes of death before, but at a remove, on the other side of the yellow tape, fed on whatever thin gruel the cop shop’s flack du jour cared to dole out. Now, he was here first, in advance of detectives and the whole scene-of-crime crowd, in advance of the rival Examiner and the other media (who took their cues from Citizen headlines anyway). Maybe this was a feature-writing opportunity. He’d have details they’d never have. And wouldn’t Frank just crap himself when he read it in the paper and wonder how he got it?

  Just a quick look, then out. No notebook, but memory would suffice.

  He shouldn’t really even be in the yard. Further penetrating a crime scene was courting trouble big time, but he remembered reading somewhere that Italians possessed an ancient habit of disobedience. And was he not Italian on his father’s side?

  Besides, on his English mother’s side, there was this expression: In for a penny, in for a pound.

  He whispered to Stevie: “You didn’t see me.”

  Then he dashed up the back stairs of Michael’s house.

  5

  Qwerty

  Leo glanced at the body, then quickly glanced away. It was worse than he’d imagined. His own reaction surprised him. He darted down the hall to the bathroom.

  “Leo!” A voice roared from somewhere toward the kitchen and shot up Leo’s spine as he hugged the toilet. He wished he’d had something less colourful than pizza for dinner. He also wondered how Frank had arrived with such speed.

  Coming into the house had been a stupid idea. He’d only wanted a quick peek. In and out. He didn’t expect to be trapped by his brother-in-law.

  “Leo!” The voice was closer this time. “I know you’re in here. Come out so I can kick your ass.”

  Leo rose unsteadily, pulled a Kleenex from a box, and wiped at his mouth. He peered at a photograph near the sink that he hadn’t noticed on his first visit in the spring. Lit by a nightlight, it was of some guy wearing a lampshade on his head and shaking hands with Howard Pawley outside the premier’s office in the Legislature. “The Life of the Party,” it was called. Well, at least Michael wasn’t completely serious about everything. He stepped into the hall and gave Frank a shit-eating grin.

  “I guess that cop figured I’d come in here.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on. I can’t believe Stevie ratted me out.”

  “Stevie?”

  “The woman on the chaise.”

  “It was the jacket covering her, you fuckwit. It’s the only one I know with an Italian flag on it.” Frank sniffed the air, then grimaced. “Don’t you watch Hill Street? This is a crime scene.”

  “Hey! I haven’t touched a thing.”

  “You’ve touched the toilet, you pussy.” Frank stood with his hands on his hips, his jacket open. His paunch nearly covered his belt. “Get another Kleenex, wrap it around your finger, and then flush the toilet about five hundred times.”

  “How’d you get here so fast? I thought you only dropped by after forensics had done its job.”

  “They’re busy. Some guy eviscerated his wife in the North End.”

  “Wow, two murders in one night. Winnipeg is the murder capital of Canada. I wonder how they’ll play it on the front page—”

  “Christ, I don’t need this crap.” Frank gripped his forehead. “I was in the middle of a perfectly good Blue Jays game. Now go flush the fucking toilet.”

  Leo obeyed.

  “I can’t believe you violated a crime scene.” Frank was looking through the half-opened sliding doors. “I should arrest you.”

  “What would my sister say?”

  “‘Arrest him.’ Anyway, I’ve got to get you out of here somehow. And there’d better not be a word about this in the paper.”

  “Let me stay. I know Michael. Knew him. Deputize me.”

  “This isn’t a John Wayne movie.”

  “And I know Stevie who knew Michael—”

  “Wait a minute. Aren’t you here being an asshole for the Citizen?”

  “No, Stevie called me. She found the body.”

  “You mean that woman outside is the Stevie? The one you’ve been dating or whatever?”

  “How many women do you know named ‘Stevie’?”

  “Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “I guess you don’t watch Murder She Wrote either? Don’t you know that the person who ‘finds’”—Frank’s fingers squiggled the air—“the body is sometimes the killer?”

  “I think you watch too much television.”

  “Why aren’t I seeing the back of you?”

  “Come on, Frank. Give me a few minutes. Let me watch you do your stuff. Get into your head. Background. Detail. You know, for an investigative feature. Or features. This could be a series. Day by day of your investigation.” “Death of an Angel,” he thought, picking up on the title of that crappy movie. It fit, given Michael’s philanthropic bent. “Besides, it’s too late about contaminating the crime scene. You’re contaminating it, too.”

  “They have my follicles on file.”

  “Oh, you’ve got some left?” Leo glanced at Frank’s shiny pate.

  “All right, I’m taking you out of here myself.” He took a step forward.

  Leo stepped back. “I’m bigger than you. And younger.”

  “I work out.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that thing around your waist?”

  “It’s a little middle-aged spread. What’s your excuse? You’re looking pretty doughy, Fabian.”

  Leo looked down at his body. He had become a little sedentary. “I’m still bigger than you.”

  Frank sighed. “Fine. If I’m stuck, I can always use the evidence to arrest you on suspicion of murder.”

  “Fair enough.” Leo joined his brother-in-law. “Though you’d have to come up with a motive.”

  “Let’s see. This guy,” he gestured through the door, “was a friend of Stevie’s. A male friend of Stevie’s. How about…a jealous rage?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I believe I’ve hit a sore spot.” Frank reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a latex glove.

  “Don’t tell me you carry those things when you’re off-duty?”

  “I moonlight as a proctologist.” Frank pushed his hand into the glove and reached around for a switch on the inside wall. “Okay, let’s get a little light on the subject.”

  Leo joined him for a second look. The sharp and sickly colour was worse than monochrome. His stomach lurched. There was nothing make-believe about the sticky clotting blood puddled on the mint green carpet. And there was no mistaking the identity. Michael’s lifeless white face was turned left in partial profile, his sandy hair matted with drying blood, his arms in a navy T-shirt splayed helplessly at his side. Leo’s hand went to his mouth.

  “Don’t even think about hurling here,” Frank growled, squatting to take a closer examination while Leo hovered over his shoulder. The source of the blood appeared to be under the right temple, although most of the right side of the head remained invisible, stuck to the matted carpet. Above, at the edge of the desk, Leo noted a darkened smear, as if Michael’s head had hit the desk before falling to the carpet.

  Frank carefully lifted the blond hair on the back of the scalp with the blunt edge of a penknife. Leo winced. The top and left side of the skull appeared to be depressed; there was almost a trough running from the crown down toward the ear with a series of darkened fissures radiating along its length.

  “Very little external bleeding from this area, though,” Frank mused, pocketing the knife and rising. “Something else must account for this blood. Autopsy will tell.” He surveyed th
e room. “You’ve been here before. Be useful. Anything missing? Anything out of place? Anything look like a murder weapon?”

  Leo followed his brother-in-law’s eyes, grateful to look away. “Actually, I’ve only been here once.”

  “Oh, great. And you said you knew this guy.”

  “Well, I looked around.”

  “You snooped.”

  “I was at a party here in the spring. I was curious. Call it journalistic prerogative.”

  “I call it shitty manners.”

  Leo took a deep breath and surveyed the contents of the room. It was messy. He wasn’t sure if it was very lived-in—unlike the other rooms he’d walked through, which were as tidy as his mother’s—or if someone had messed it up. The centrepiece was the walnut desk, a great heavy Victorian piece that accommodated a computer, which was still on and humming away. Along each side, forming a U-shape with the desk at the base, was a table scattered with various books and papers, a printer, and a hinged plastic box for the computer disks, which was open. Among the paraphernalia strewn on the desk and tables were an art deco alarm clock, a fan, an ancient Olivetti manual typewriter, a telephone answering machine, a tape recorder, a small electronic Casio piano keyboard, clusters of pens and pencils set in souvenir mugs, a pencil sharpener in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, a plastic radio from the 1940s, a pair of glasses, a daytimer, and several plants. Bookshelves ranged over two walls while the third wall, opposite the door, was curtained. Between the desk and glass doors was a couch, a reading lamp, and a coffee table surmounted by a five-inch television.

  “Well?”

  “It’s not like I took an inventory when I was here.”

  “Big help you are.”

  “All the usual stealable stuff is still here—TV, stereo, computer. But he’s got a lot of expensive camera equipment upstairs. Maybe—”

  “All in good time.”

  Frank grunted and began opening the desk drawers with his gloved hand. Leo could see a stack of writing paper, a box of envelopes, and an expensive-looking fountain pen in the centre drawer. Two of the three drawers on the right side of the desk held the usual office hardware, various computer instruction manuals and a stack of other manuals plus warranties for varied gadgets. Organized bugger. The last drawer was empty. Of the three drawers on the left side, two were full of sheet music in folders marked by the composer’s name; the remaining drawer held only a few empty manila files. Frank shrugged and glanced over at the computer.

  “Looks like an old model.”

  “Early, mid-eighties,” Leo agreed, watching the cursor on the screen pulse and glow.

  “I haven’t figured out why people even need home computers. Your nieces are nagging me for one.”

  “Shell out, Frank. They can probably use it for school.”

  “That’s their argument. But what would this guy be using one for?”

  “An inventory of his ties, perhaps?”

  “Screen’s blank.”

  “And nothing in either disk drive.” Leo glanced at the empty slots. “No hard drive on this baby.”

  Frank surveyed the room. “This guy must have had a few bucks. You’d think he could afford a more updated computer. What did he do for a living?”

  “I don’t think he had to make a living. His family once owned the Citizen, if that means anything to you.”

  Frank grunted.

  Leo stepped toward the desk and glanced at the open disk container. There were two plastic dividers. On one a neatly typed label read “programs.” It contained three disks. The other read “correspondence.” It was empty.

  Bet he wrote his letters with a fountain pen with perfect handwriting.

  The open daytimer caught his eye. It was week-at-a-glance, only Thursday, September 29 on the right-hand page followed Wednesday, September 21 on the left.

  “Frank,” Leo gestured to the desktop.

  Frank grunted again. “Page missing.”

  “No flies on you.”

  Leo next ran his eyes over the contents of the bookshelf. Among board games, video cassettes, stereo equipment, a microscope, and various souvenir bric-a-brac was a collection of contemporary Canadian fiction, a number of biographies of musicians, a few books of twentieth-century history, a couple of genealogical texts, several large format compilations of famous photographers, a smattering of travel literature, and a shelf of what looked to be Catholic literature, lives of saints, church history and the like. Eclectic, he thought. And, here at least, neat. Spines all aligned. Still, it was no different than his own eccentricities: his place was a chaos, but his record collection was alphabetized and perfectly aligned.

  Frank was examining the typewriter. “It’s just like that one at your mother’s. Remember when Alison and Jennifer were little?”

  When Leo’s nieces were four and six, they discovered an ancient typewriter in his mother’s attic and for a winter, whenever the Nickels were over for dinner, they would rush upstairs and bash away at the thing.

  “I think they mostly liked the sound of the bells.” Leo looked at the Olivetti, a model from the early years of the twentieth century, square and black with small circular key pads. It looked as prim, efficient and full of moral rectitude as a spinster secretary in a 1910 law office. “I’ll bet it’s some family heirloom,” he added. “Ol’ grandpappy Rossiter probably wrote blistering anti-labour editorials on it during the Winnipeg General Strike.”

  Frank scratched his hairless head. “So, what about family? Wife? Kids?”

  “None that I know of. He has a younger sister—Merritt Parrish. She writes fashion for the paper. And there’s an aunt and uncle who live next door.”

  “Parents?”

  “Dead.”

  “Right, I think there was some sort of accident years ago.” Leo stopped suddenly and listened. He turned his head sharply.

  “What?” Frank asked.

  “Someone’s coming.”

  “Shit.”

  Leo’s mind raced over the layout of the house as he remembered it from his exploration during his search for the toilet during the Victoria Day party. “Michael’s bedroom’s in the back corner. I’ll go out through the window. But you’ll—” He gestured to Frank’s gloved hand. “—have to lift the sash. I mean, I wouldn’t want to leave fingerprints.”

  “Then get moving.”

  In the bedroom, a reading lamp next to the bed was switched on, casting a warm glow across the navy duvet cover and over the hardwood floor. The rest of the room fell into shadow. Leo squinted, seeking the best-placed window. As he had noted in May, the room had once been two. A broad arch through an adjoining wall had knitted the two rooms together in an L-shape, while retaining a sense of separate functions. One part, the larger, was the bedroom proper with its own door to the bathroom. The smaller portion contained only a chair, a music stand, and a low table with a Tiffany-style lamp—or, hell, maybe it was a real Tiffany lamp. He moved toward the farthest window, felt his foot hit something, then found himself falling through the air.

  “Ow, fuck,” he said as the floor rose to meet him.

  “Christ,” Frank hissed. “Would you stop with the noise?”

  “What is it?” Leo picked himself up. There was just enough light for his adjusted eyes to discern a stumpy eccentric shape on the floor. “A violin case.”

  “Stupid place to leave it.”

  “It looks empty.”

  “No flies on you, either.”

  “Michael bought a really valuable violin, Frank. Didn’t you read about it in Saturday’s paper? Worth a million bucks.”

  “No shit.” They stared at the object on the floor. The case was indeed empty. In the low light, the red velvet lining appeared dark as blood. “Maybe he left the violin somewhere else in the house.”

  “Sure, Frank, like on the back of the toilet or the top of the microwave.” A headline flashed in Leo’s brainpan:

  Violin theft points to murder

  “And how do you know that this is t
he violin anyway?” Frank insisted. “What kind of idiot keeps a million-buck fiddle lying around the house?”

  “Hell if I know, Frank. But maybe it’s—y’know—a clue. Michael’s lying dead down the hall. He owns a valuable violin. And, whaddaya know, here’s a violin case, and no violin.”

  “Or maybe it’s a diversion. And maybe it means bugger all. In any case, I want you out of here.”

  Frank moved to the window and pulled at the sash, which slid up easily. “Shit, there’s a screen.”

  “What did you expect, Frank? This is Winnipeg, land of mosquitoes.”

  His brother-in-law fumbled with the plastic tabs that released the screen from its frame.

  “Jesus Christ, Frank, what the hell are you doing?” A voice boomed behind both their backs.

  “Would you cool it, Gerry? Keep your voice down.” Frank slid the screen into the room. Leo turned. Frank’s partner was as tall and morose-looking as Ichabod Crane. He surveyed Leo sourly.

  “Frank, what is he doing here?”

  “He’s just leaving.”

  Leo scrambled onto the ledge and peered into the night. “I guess if I sneak across to the Kingdons’—”

  “Take the long way around. If some uniform finds you, you’re in deep shit. You already have a record, remember?”

  “It was a youthful indiscretion, Frank. Besides it was Axel’s fault.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’ve heard about some of your behaviour at shift parties. I’ll tell my sister.”

  “Remember I said I was going to kick your ass? Well, here goes.”

  Leo felt a shod foot firmly planted on his backside. Before he knew it, he was through the air and spiked on a bush in a rustle of dead leaves.

  “And don’t make such a damn racket,” Frank whispered as he reaffixed the screen.

  “Frank, are you out of your mind?” Leo could hear Gerry’s voice raised in protest.

  “Gerry, listen, there wasn’t much I could—”

  The window slammed shut. Leo spent a minute taking in the cool air. From his perch he looked over the trees where a slender moon was hanging low in the northern sky, threatened by slowly massing clouds. As he carefully and as noiselessly as possible disentangled himself and slithered to earth, he felt a tiny pain ripple through his lower back, the legacy of an old soccer injury and ever after a harbinger of rain. He had felt few such twinges over the dry, hot summer. He almost welcomed one now.