Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  Sort of.

  6

  In a Yellow Wood

  “Can I use your phone?”

  “May. May you use my phone.”

  What a twit. “Okay, may I use your phone?”

  “Your reason?”

  To run up bills to Beijing. “To phone the story in,” Leo said to Martin. They were standing at the foot of the Kingdons’ driveway. Nearby, small knots of people had gathered on the street, police cars, ambulances, and such being the usual draw. The only real diversion, however, was a uniformed officer struggling in the breeze with a spool of yellow plastic tape designed to seal off the scene of the crime.

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “But I—”

  “Is this your shift, Mr. Fabian?”

  “No. But—”

  “Then leave it.”

  “But—”

  “Three buts and you’re out. Now I must see to my guests.”

  Martin turned and waddled back up the drive. Leo stared after him. A little earlier, when he had burst onto the darkened Kingdon lawn through yet another lilac hedge, he was grateful to see the house lit up. He had been composing a lede in his mind, and was eager to get to a phone. Noting Martin’s penguin silhouette at the bottom of the drive, he had breezed past the assemblage at the top with a casual “evenin’ folks,” surprised to see Liz Elliot (who laughed) and Guy Clark (who scowled), and headed straight for the Citizen’s managing editor. Small talk ensued. “Hello, Mr. Fabian, what are you doing here? Came to pick up a friend. She found Michael’s body. Really, and who’s that? Stevie Lord. Oh, yes, I know the family. Dr. Lord, the plastic surgeon…on the board…” Etc. Etc. Martin, who, except for the incident in May, had pretty much ignored him during the six years he had served at the Zit, suddenly seemed interested in his life and associations. Go figure. His white shirt front, bisected by a dark tie, glowed blue under the mercury street lamp. He looked like someone had plugged him in, which, Leo thought, might also account for his peculiar animation. Finally, Leo slipped his request in edgewise.

  No go.

  Furious, Leo stamped over to Stevie who was waiting beside the Land Rover, hugging herself, his jacket draped over her shoulders.

  “That asshole won’t let me phone the story in,” he exploded. “I’m going to look for a phone booth.”

  “Phone the story in?” Stevie echoed. Her voice was deadpan, her eyes two bullets.

  Christ. “Sorry.” He backtracked quickly. “Are you cold?”

  Stevie opened the door to the passenger side. Alvy promptly thrust his head into her thigh. She stroked his sleek fur absently. “Please just take me home.”

  Leo walked around to the other side of the vehicle. Rain was starting to spit. He heard someone shout his name and peered through the knot of rubberneckers to see Roger Mellish, the Citizen’s food editor, and his lady friend—whose name slipped his mind—arm in arm, tottering up the street. Their heads were almost pressed together—well, as much as could be, given the difference in their heights—and as they approached, he could hear them, amidst giggles, doing a lazy chorus of “Found a Peanut.”

  “I haven’t heard that song since I was seven,” he said to them.

  “Nor I,” Roger replied, beaming, a little out of breath. “I have some memory of mother singing it to me during the Blitz. Do you know Nan?”

  “Yes, we met at Michael’s barbecue in the spring. Hello.”

  “Hello,” Nan trilled. Leo thought she looked a little blotto. She was dressed in one of those shawl things middle-aged women seemed to like on cool evenings. “What’s the next line, dear?” She gazed up at Roger. “Oh, I know. ‘Called the doctor, called the doctor, called the doctor—’”

  “Oh, Nan, stop it.” Roger appeared flushed with pleasure, making his fleshy face with his white forelock look like a ripe strawberry with a lick of cream. The expression in his eyes as he surveyed the scene, however, was more grave. “What’s happened here?” he asked, tugging at the collar of his turtleneck.

  “Did you know,” Nan interrupted thickly, “that Roger found a peanut?” She giggled.

  “Nan, shush.”

  “Well, you did, darling.”

  “We’ve been at the Wajan.” Roger sighed. “It’s the new Thai restaurant around the corner. I seem to have had a mild reaction to something—the peanuts in the satay probably.” Roger turned to look at the police officer roping off the area. “At any rate, what is going on here? Car accident?”

  Leo shook his head. “It’s Michael Rossiter. He’s dead.”

  Roger’s eyes widened. “Good god!” Nan, who had been crooning under her breath, “Died anyway, died anyway, died anyway last night,” shuddered visibly. The words perished on her lips. “What happened?” she gasped, staring at him.

  “Well, I hate to say it.” And he did. “It looks like murder.” He gave them an edited version of the evening’s events.

  “Who found him?” Nan asked.

  “Stevie Lord. A friend of mine. She’s in the car.”

  “Oh, my god, I know Stevie.” She peered through the Land Rover’s windshield. “Oh, the poor girl. Excuse me.”

  They watched her circle the front of the vehicle. “What does Nan do?” Leo asked, suddenly bereft of conversation.

  “She teaches interior design at the university.”

  “Oh, then that’s how she would know Stevie.”

  “And you say she found Michael?”

  “She’s been taking some photography-dark room sort of lessons with him.”

  “Oh, so she was the appointment.” Roger sneezed suddenly. “I do beg your pardon.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave his nose a cursory wipe. “I’d phoned Michael from work earlier in the day saying I’d drop by this evening to pick up my reading glasses. Bunny and I were over yesterday looking at the last of the photos he did for Taste of Winnipeg. He said there’d likely be someone else over.

  “I was sort of hoping he might be able to add the Wajan to the book,” he added as an afterthought. “It’s really rather good.” He gave his head a shake. “Anyway, that’s neither here nor there now. Goodness, this is quite…” He seemed to grope for a word. “…shocking.”

  “I really should get Stevie out of here.”

  “Nan, dear,” Roger called, “let’s go. Leo would like to get Stevie home.” He glanced over at the police cruiser. He regarded Leo speculatively. “I guess this is your story.”

  “You would think. But Martin’s being a real asshole,” Leo gestured toward the Kingdon home and tugged at the Land Rover’s door handle. “He won’t even let me use his phone.”

  “He’s an odd little man, isn’t he? But maybe it has something to do with Michael being Bunny’s nephew.”

  “Maybe,” Leo allowed, sliding into the driver’s seat. He actually hadn’t thought of that and felt like a heel. He closed the door on the throb and glare of police lights. A couple of raindrops splattered on the windscreen, forming small craters in the thin film of dust before disintegrating and racing down the glass.

  “Rain at last,” he remarked, suddenly awkward.

  Stevie stared ahead. “I left my camera bag in there,” she said hollowly.

  “I’ll see if they’ll let me have it.”

  “Doesn’t matter now.”

  “Sorry about the phone-it-in thing.”

  “It’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s your job, I mean.”

  The journalistic cannibalism? “I suppose.”

  There was a silence. Leo groped around in his mind for conversation to suit the situation, but since he’d never been in such a situation, his mind was mush.

  “Have you ever thought about not being a reporter?” Her voice was a tiny thing in the dark.

  “Not?” Leo leapt on this. “Well, I’ve thought about playing forward for the Maple Leafs, but somehow I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.” It was Axel Werner’s doing that he’d ended up in journalism. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in
history, he’d been contemplating a career in fuck-all when Axel, who on a whim and with illegally gleaned money had bought the Dauphin Courier, invited him to join the staff. Of two. Him and Axel. Neither of them knowing squat about journalism, but learning quickly.

  “Why?” Leo flicked the switch for the windshield wipers. “Have you ever thought of not being a designer?”

  “It occurs to me. I think I ended up in interior design because my brother took architecture—”

  “I thought he was a doctor.”

  “No, Rob’s the doctor. Will is the architect. He would built these interesting models…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Does this conversation have something to do with Nan Whatsername?”

  “Hughes. Yes. I think I might meet with her toward the end of the week.”

  “To talk about jobs?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then you are staying in Winnipeg?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They drove along in silence for a few moments. The rain was starting to tap the roof of the Land Rover. One of those sad autumn rains that nourish nothing.

  “Did Michael ever not want to be a photographer?” he asked tentatively. He flicked her a glance, but her head was turned to the dark landscape.

  “Actually, music was his first love. He went off to the Curtis Institute to study violin. I think he would have loved to have had a solo career—”

  “Pretty difficult to establish.”

  “—but then there was all this business stuff here after his parents died. And settling Merritt. My parents became her guardian for a few years until she was eighteen.”

  “Why not Martin and Bunny?”

  Stevie shrugged. “One of those sibling relationships that soured. Or so my mother says. Lillian had the better looks, made the better marriage—well, on the surface—and was somehow just more…good. She was a Catholic convert in marriage and really took to it, apparently. Her husband’s drinking made her a famous martyr in certain circles.” Stevie’s voice softened. “She and my mother were fast friends. Lillian was really lovely. Almost like a TV mom of those days.”

  Leo cast her a worried glance, then had to swerve for a cat that darted across the Crescent. “Anyway,” he said, aiming away from Rossiter memory lane, “what would you be if you had to do it all over again?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be Mrs. David Sangster, for one. And I’m not, by the way. My divorce papers came through today.”

  “Congrats…I guess.”

  “Congrats are fine. Anyway, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “You could do something related.”

  “Such as?”

  “I dunno. Look at Roger. He was a chef. He trained at the Ritz or some big hotel in London. And worked in CP hotels around Canada. He moved into food writing.”

  “Why?”

  “Got tired of standing.”

  They sped down the Crescent.

  “Stop at Merritt’s, would you?” Stevie said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t want her finding out from some stranger.”

  Leo suspected some stranger had already been in touch, and he could guess who. He turned into the drive. Every window glowed. Imagine one person tramping around this huge house. The heating bills. The electric bills.

  “What am I doing? Dropping you off? Do you want me to come in with you?”

  Stevie turned to look at him. A stray beam of light from one of the street lamps illuminated her eyes. They looked bruised. Leo wanted to touch them and make the dark circles go away.

  “What do you want to do?”

  He looked at her and shrugged. “Be with you.”

  She considered him a moment, the way she did from time to time, wordlessly.

  “Okay.” She reached for the handle. “Have you been here before?”

  “Me? Are you kidding? I’m way out of her league. I’ve never been able to figure out why she bothers working for the Zit. She must be loaded.”

  “You think that, do you?”

  “Well, look at this house.”

  She gave him a wan smile. “I think you’ll find that appearances can be deceiving.”

  7

  Four Lies

  Yes, she had already heard. Yes, she had had a phone call. They were almost the first words out of Merritt’s mouth when she opened the door, though Stevie knew in an instant when Merritt’s pale face appeared in the frame of glass that her news was not new. Something about the studied expressionlessness. The green eyes with their hard glitter. What stabbed Stevie’s heart, though, was how much Merritt’s eyes—not their colour, but their shape, the depth of them—reminded her of Michael’s.

  “But how do you know?” Merritt addressed Stevie as she stepped into the front hall, then glanced at Leo who came up behind. “Oh, for Christ’s sake! I’m not giving you a quote.”

  “He’s with me.” Stevie turned to Leo to assure herself that he wasn’t going to turn into a large coiled notepad before their very eyes. But he was distracted by the hallway’s centrepiece, a large Plexiglas cube, balanced miraculously on one point, containing an artful jumble of women’s shoes.

  Stevie watched Merritt turn sharply into the living room. No offer to take her coat, Leo’s jacket as the case was. She slipped it off and draped it over the newel post. Leo pointed at the cube, wearing an expression of cartoon puzzlement.

  “It’s a statement,” she whispered.

  “Of what?” he whispered back.

  Stevie shrugged. She followed Merritt, sensing rather than seeing Leo stop short at the entrance to take in what she, too, had found startling on her first visit back in the spring. She hadn’t been in the Rossiter home in more than a decade; for most of that time, too, before Merritt returned from New York, it had sat empty. Merritt had redecorated, no doubt with Michael’s money. The living room and the dining room beyond were completely and utterly black: black as coal, black as night, black as death. The walls were painted with a matte finish that seemed to swallow the light radiating from a couple of art deco lamps on low black lacquer tables. The ceiling, its outline barely detectable, was black. Or, rather, it seemed a void, abetting a feeling that the corners of the room were blurring. The fireplace, mantel, and wall above opposite the entrance were covered in mirror, and Stevie could see Leo reflected in full surprise. She was reminded of her own startled self in Michael’s mirror less than two hours earlier and, feeling a shimmer of panic pass through her, promptly settled onto one of a pair of black leather couches.

  Opposite her, across a coffee table cluttered with art deco bric-a-brac, Merritt primped at the ends of her curls, which were damp, giving her head little intermittent shakes as though she were trying to catch an imaginary breeze. Her red hair blazed like an aura of flame. Her green silk bathrobe glowed like a field of emeralds. Hardly subtle, but certainly dramatic. Stevie was reminded of a lesson from first-year ID layout assignments: Photos framed by black card were always more forceful than white.

  “How did you find out so fast?” Merritt rephrased her earlier question, drawing her legs up.

  “I found him, Merritt.”

  “You found him? Dead? Oh.” She glanced away, then up at Leo, who seemed to be drinking Merritt in like a man who had been without refreshment for some time.

  “Have a seat, Leo.” Merritt flicked a lacquered nail to a spot next to Stevie. “So, was it…horrible?”

  Stevie’s hackles rose, as they so often did with Merritt. As a teenager, she had babysat Merritt on a few occasions and had been so tested at every stage—TV time, bath time, bed time—that she vowed never to babysit anyone else ever again. “Yes, Merritt, it was horrible,” she replied, keeping the sarcasm under control. “It was very very horrible.”

  “Michael was murdered,” Leo interjected, seating himself.

  “Well, I know that.” Merritt glared at him and folded her arms across her chest. “Who’d want to murder Mr. Goody Two-Shoes anyway?”

  Stevie imagi
ned this a circumstance where she might reach across the coffee table and slap Merritt with a resounding crack—she could hear it in her mind—but she was both too numb to make the effort and too aware that Merritt had built a brittle carapace around her to keep her own demons at bay.

  Leo, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be finding Merritt’s question rhetorical. “Well,” he began, but Stevie cut him off sharply: “I’m sure the police will have some answers soon.”

  A silence descended. Merritt regarded her nails with a frown. Leo squirmed. Unbidden, the sight of Michael’s dead body flew into Stevie’s mind. Her stomach churned. Quickly she said the first thing that came into her mind: “Do you want help making arrangements?”

  “Arrangements?” Merritt looked up.

  “The funeral.”

  “Oh, that.” She grimaced. “There’s lots of time.”

  “Not really.”

  “We’ve got a few days.”

  “Maybe your Aunt Bunny should handle it.”

  “No way. I’ll do it.”

  “Anyway,” Leo interjected, “the police might want to keep—” Stevie knew what he was going to say before he said it. Autopsy. Mutilation. I’m going to be sick.

  “I need to use the bathroom.” Stevie leapt off the couch.

  “Are you okay?” Leo frowned.

  “Would you mind using the en suite upstairs?” Merritt called after her. “And get me some Valium? It should be in the cabinet.”

  Valium? Oh, there’s a cure. As Stevie rushed up the stairs, an unexpected image came to her head of herself, aged fourteen, being groped by some teenage Lothario on the big bed in the Rossiter Sr. bedroom while a party given by Michael in his parents’ absence rose to a noisy crescendo below. Merritt, all of ten, had crept in and begun swatting at them with her Barbie doll. That had ended that.