Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  And now Leo.

  Alvy lifted his head. A keening noise arose from the back of his throat. Merritt glanced at him. “What’s the matter with the dog?”

  “I don’t know,” Stevie said, pulled back into the room. Senses a tautness in the air, she thought, patting her knee. “Come here, sweetheart.”

  Merritt dropped the package on the table and folded her arms across her chest. “So, anyway, why didn’t you tell Michael?”

  Stevie felt spent. “He was going off to the Curtis.”

  “He would have married you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Such a good boy.”

  “Good natured. Why are you always so spiteful about him, Merritt? When does the sibling rivalry end? He’s done—did—a lot of good with who he was and what he had.”

  “He was another control freak, but just in a different way.” Merritt thrust her chin out. “All men are control freaks.”

  Stevie chose to ignore this. “And besides, there were things I wanted to do in life. I was nineteen years old. I didn’t want to be saddled with a child.”

  “Then why didn’t you have an abortion?”

  Stevie was silent. She looked at Merritt, who seemed to be studying her intently. Why, indeed? She had asked herself that many times in the aftermath. She could barely face the truth: that a philosophical position against abortion, which Michael had gleaned from his philosophy class, then promulgated in bed one spring morning, had decided her. That she had clung to her decision with a ferocity born of youthful zeal.

  “Funny thing is,” Stevie continued, avoiding Merritt’s scrutiny, “Michael said he had something he wanted to tell me when he phoned me on Monday.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But when Leo’s brother-in-law mentioned Washington tags on his luggage, I thought maybe he had gone down there. Maybe he knew. Maybe someone had told him—”

  “Well, it wasn’t me.”

  Stevie lifted her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell Michael? God knows, you’ve had enough arguments over the years. You could have thrown this at him so easily.”

  “What?” Merritt snapped. “And let him know he had a direct heir?”

  “An heir? A direct heir? I thought you were trying to get away from this Rossiter royal family business.”

  Merritt shifted her weight and reached down for her purse. “A daughter, then. I meant a daughter. Jesus!”

  13

  Nadir

  Liz dropped the cigarette end into the Styrofoam cup and considered the dying hiss as the ember hit the coffee dregs.

  Sort of like my life, she thought.

  Her eyes returned to the computer screen and the ten inches of meaningless drivel she’d cranked out. A puff piece about the upcoming—excuse me, forthcoming (god forbid she should violate one of Martin’s word edicts)—opening of Galleries Portáge. The Zit’s huzzahs for downtown redevelopment seemed to grow in reverse proportion to its plotting to flee the downtown in favour of some ugly industrial park. The piece was about a shop in the mall that sold Inuit art—a last-minute contribution to a Friday advertorial supplement. It was the kind of crap underpaid freelancers usually did. Guy assigned it to her instead. She was being punished.

  This is what I get for telling Guy to drop dead.

  She glanced across the room toward Guy’s desk. His chair was empty.

  Perhaps he’s dropped dead on the way back from lunch. What’s the likelihood?

  Lousy.

  She looked toward the bank of windows on the south side. A natural reaction to seek the light, she thought. But someone had shut the blinds when Louis St. Laurent was prime minister and last dusted them when John F. Kennedy was winging his way to Dallas. Light existed only as a thin ghostly presence between the slats. She closed her eyes. Even that ethereal glow made her head ache a little.

  Surprise! That’s what happens if you drink too much.

  And if you sleep on an overstuffed couch.

  In the car on their way home, after the police had questioned them, after strained goodbyes were said, Spencer had been oblivious to the obvious topic of conversation. Someone they both knew—at least a little—had been murdered not a hundred yards away. Michael might even have been murdered while they were stuffing their faces with Bunny’s cold tenderloin of beef, for heaven’s sake. But, no, Spencer lit into her about her lack of enthusiasm for his political plans, for his wanting to serve.

  “Serve, my ass,” she had snapped. The booze buzz had begun to wear off. “Why even bother? The Liberals haven’t won an election in this province in thirty years, and never will again. Or do you think the prime minister, if we ever have another Liberal prime minister in this country—”

  “Of course we will—”

  “—will call you on the phone one day and offer you a senatorship for your great sacrifice to the party in this political wilderness? You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Being in Ottawa, sitting in the House of Parasites, manipulating things…”

  And she’d ranted on that way, in a way she hadn’t for years, reducing Spencer to chilly silence. When they pulled into their driveway, he got out of the car, slammed the door, and thrashed his way into the house. Liz had remained in the car, growing colder as the metal sucked up the interior heat, and colder still as she realized what she had done: she had never before given full voice to her antipathy to his ambitions. This was beyond snipping and snarking.

  She had got out of the car eventually. She could tell from the progression of lights in the upstairs windows of their overvalued Oak Street home that Spencer had made his way to bed. She went into the house and lay down on the couch in the living room in the dark listening to the splatter of rain on the window. Like a chilly premonition, quite suddenly she felt the full weight of her unhappiness. She thought she deserved a good self-indulgent cry. Hell, her fifteen-year marriage was moribund. And Paul —

  Liz opened her eyes. The near-empty noontime newsroom and all its grime and chaos rushed in. Ugh. She closed them again. In the middle of dessert, Martin had offered to investigate the commotion next door. “It’s Michael,” he had announced, returning a few moments later. As they looked at him expectantly, he added in a strangled voice. “He’s dead. It appears he may have been…murdered.”

  There had been only a moment before the message hit home, but in that moment Liz had looked across the table at Paul and seen in his face not the shock she was feeling, but a kind of relief and—was she mistaken?—wonder? satisfaction? The look vanished as soon as it appeared and the dark tufted brows knitted into very proper concern, but Liz had found herself as troubled by the apparition of unconcern as she had been by the fact of murder. She had thought about it as she’d lain dry-eyed on the couch. It had been the last thing she had thought about as she’d drifted into sleep, dressed in her clothes, hugging a pillow for warmth. She had been only barely conscious of Spencer making morning noises before leaving for work. He hadn’t woken her, and when she did finally stir, she felt stiff and uncomfortable—more tired than when she had fallen asleep. She was also late and had grabbed the handiest skirt and blouse, then spent precious time trying to brush out an absurd-looking wing of hair that her awkward sleep had fashioned.

  She had tried again in the women’s toilet to fix her hair after her scene with Guy. Perhaps she had appeared composed as she faced his invective—nicotine always helped—but she hadn’t felt it. He had obviously been pissed about something when he shouted her name across the newsroom (it turned out to be an incorrect attribution in a story, which was really the night desk’s fault), so she had tried to mollify him by humouring him. After all, hadn’t he—she dimly recalled this—been practically palsy-walsy near the end of dinner last night? Something about changes or promotions in the newsroom? Perhaps she shouldn’t have kidded him for being a seventh wheel at the party. Or suggesting, ha ha, that—okay, maybe it was a little tasteless—that he’d just dropped by the Kingdons for a nosh after giving old Michael the
heave-ho.

  He really was humourless. Why did she even bother? Why are women always appeasing difficult men?

  Guy had fixed her with a gaze of such cold intensity, she was, for an instant, taken aback. But then he went all theatrical, snapping pencils in two like some crazy person in a bad film, and she just thought: screw you. Even the spread-that-lie-around-and-I’ll-get-you threat was cornball. But then he dropped his voice and hissed at her that he knew with delicious certainty that she was fucking Richter and wouldn’t that intelligence just make life all messy for a couple of ambitious men in the community. And she had felt this shock bloom like little flowerlets along her nervous system. Not so much that he knew. But that he had known all along. And that he was waiting like a spider to spring it on her. She had managed a response: Drop dead. Hardly clever. But—ah, my friends and oh, my foes—the nicotine helped.

  The grind of the lobby door’s security lock jolted her from her reverie. Leo bolted into the newsroom, yanked his notepad out of his jacket pocket, then, alternating hands with the pad, tugged off the jacket, which he then dumped on his desk. After a glance at city desk, manned by a decisive-as-wood assistant city editor with a Beatles haircut twenty years out of date, he headed for the library with an air of preoccupation.

  Probably been at the cop shop, she thought, watching his back disappear. He was wearing, she would swear, the same checked shirt he wore when he joined the newsroom six years before. There were tablecloths in Italian restaurants of the same material. Or did he have a wardrobe of them? However gruesome Ishbel was—everyone but Leo knew she was sleeping with him to advantage her career—she at least managed to art-direct his wardrobe a little. You could always tell when Leo was between relationships. He would revert to the kinds of clothes a practical parent would buy an indifferent eight-year-old.

  What a sweet cluck.

  She settled her eyes back on her screen.

  So clearly the relationship with this Stevie person, whom she had yet to meet, couldn’t be very strong. Wasn’t she an interior designer?

  Liz deleted a line about Cape Dorset prints and recast it. Still crap. Her hand wandered to her purse. She groped for the cardboard of the cigarette pack.

  No. I’ve got to ration them out. I will ration them out.

  I wonder if Leo has any news about Michael’s death.

  Okay, if I have one now, then I can’t have another one until, let’s see, 2:30.

  Or maybe he knows something about the violin.

  Christ, another thing to feel shitty about. She lit the cigarette and gratefully drew the smoke into her lungs. What if Michael had been murdered for the sake of this violin? What if it had been her story that had been the catalyst? Michael would have made the Guarneri an anonymous gift to the symphony if she hadn’t pursued Belle Shulman’s tip, if she hadn’t virtually pounced on Michael with her precious inside knowledge. Was the missing violin really the Guarneri del Gesu? She had assumed all along when she was interviewing Michael on the phone and when she was writing the story that he had had it with him in his possession. If you bought a fur coat at Eaton’s wouldn’t you bring it home with you? He even graciously supplied the Zit with a picture. But now she wondered: Can you buy an art object worth a million dollars in one country and just carry it home on a plane to another? Were there export papers? Import duties? Paperwork? Bureaucracy? Does a bonded courier deliver it later? Why hadn’t she asked Michael? Hell, it had been only a nice little human-interest story at the time. Who would have thought it could become so fraught? That such details would matter?

  She stubbed her half-smoked cigarette against the side of the cup, saved her half-finished story, and headed for the library. Leo would know.

  She found him bent over in one of the tight aisles. One of the little metal sarcophagi drawers that held the clipping files was pulled from its bottom mooring and tipped toward the floor. She contemplated his backside for a half-second. But something drove such assessments from her head.

  “Leo?”

  “Oh, god.”

  Liz took a sharp breath. “What is it?”

  Book 3

  Thursday, September 29

  14

  The Darkroom

  Thirty days hath September.

  Which meant, Stevie realized, glancing at the kitchen calendar on the way to the basement, that in two days’ time another month’s rent for her Toronto apartment would be sucked out of her bank account.

  Shall I go? Or shall I stay?

  Return to opulent Toronto, scene of unhappy marriage? Or linger in Winnipeg, a thousand glorious miles away from Sangster? Toronto, where good designers could find a market? Or Winnipeg, where designers were a strange luxury? Careerwise, remaining in Winnipeg was ten steps backward. It was a city you got out of, you fled, only to sentimentalize later with ex-Winnipeggers at some party in the Annex where the pièce de resistance was a Jeanne’s cake or Gunn’s bagels or Old Dutch potato chips. Which you consumed while recalling the blizzard of 1966.

  She had been a rising star at Yabu Pushelberg when she met David Sangster. She was a project director for Liquid, a new nightclub on Richmond, and he was one of the investors. At an early meeting they had clashed over the concept of water cascading over a glass ceiling and down the walls—his notion, which her training told her was nothing but an invitation to the gremlins of expense and technical difficulty. She saw liquid as metaphor, not as substance. He got his way. He was intense. She was smitten. They were married in three months, married for three years. She was right about the waterfall. The overruns were horrendous; the opening delayed; the maintenance considerable; but by then his preoccupation had moved elsewhere. She had seen the end in the beginning; if only she had done so in her marriage. Her star kept rising at YP. Holt Renfrew’s cosmetics floor, the 400-seat Asian-fusion restaurant Hanoi Jane’s, “E,” a boutique hotel in Yorkville. For a few years she was happily preoccupied with her design career. She felt practically pampered working in such a creative shop. And the money was fabulous. Then, slowly, the economy started to drag, affecting YP and her work, but—worse—David’s work, his wheeling and dealing. Almost overnight, she was the one bringing in more money. He grew as resentful as a little boy whose sister brought home higher marks from school.

  Shall I go? Or shall I stay?

  I miss the work. But do I miss Toronto?

  Stevie groped for the stool, then sat down to wait for her eyes to become accustomed to the dark. The first few times she’d used the old basement darkroom in the spring she’d found tiny pinholes that leaked light like stars pricking an inky sky. She’s also found secreted a cache of moldy 1970s Playboys, which made her wonder just how interested in photography her brother had really been. She’d thrown out the magazines and patched the holes and become cheerfully distracted from life’s vicissitudes by the art of photography. At least as long as Michael was teaching it.

  Now Michael was gone.

  Why even bother to develop the film?

  Something to do, she supposed. She had had a strangely long and deep sleep, dreamless it seemed, and unrefreshing, leaving a fogginess clinging to her that was utterly immune to coffee, very resistant to a jog in the park, and quite oblivious to her mother, whose conversation at the breakfast table had finally trickled to a stop in the face of granite indifference.

  Reaction to shock?

  Dully, she had picked up the Citizen. She had avoided Wednesday’s paper. Her nerves had been too raw to face the truth in black and white. But this morning she felt herself wrapped in a thousand woolly scarves, so muffled as to deaden anything that might disturb in Thursday’s paper.

  The story was on page one, below the fold. The headline read: “Police seek fiddle.” The story was perfunctory. There was no byline.

  “And the obituary is in,” her mother had remarked from her end of the table. “Third section, page twenty-seven.”

  Stevie folded the paper to the narrow column and read silently:

  Michael Thomas Conr
oy Rossiter

  Michael Rossiter passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Tuesday, September 27, 1988.

  Born in Winnipeg April 10, 1955, Michael was a gifted artist, volunteer and philanthropist who made many contributions to the city’s cultural life.

  A graduate of St. Paul’s High School, he completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Manitoba school of music. In 1976, after taking first place at the Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition, he continued his studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he graduated with a Master’s Degree in violin performance. A planned solo career was never realized, however, due to matters arising from the tragic death of his parents, Thomas and Lillian Rossiter, in 1977. After returning to Winnipeg in 1981, he performed with Music Inter Alia, the Winnipeg Chamber Music Society, and Aurora Musicale while at the same time turning his talents increasingly to photography. A founding member of the Floating Gallery, his photographs have been exhibited widely at commercial and public galleries including Toronto’s Jane Corkin Gallery, San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. In 1986, his photography for Saturday Night won a National Magazine Award. Originator of the popular M/R photography workshops, he was at one time or another a member of the board of several Winnipeg arts organizations, notably the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

  He is…

  Stevie closed her eyes. She felt her heart constrict and a sob rise in her throat. The surface of a life reduced to a few column inches in a newspaper. The essence absent. One of a dozen obituaries that day, each life given roughly equal weight. All the same in death. She hated the democracy of it. Michael had more, did more, was more.

  She took a cleansing breath and willed herself to open her eyes. The text swam. She blinked, then blinked again. The words clarified.

  “‘He is survived by his sister, Merritt Parrish of Winnipeg,’” she read aloud, virtually her first words of the morning. She glanced over the edge of the paper, wiped along her lids, and noted her mother studying her.