Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  Talking with a stranger, however inane the conversation, has a certain therapeutic effect. And the conversation, as she continued to a third vodka and a fourth, did become more inane, at least as much of it as she could remember now, sitting in bed wondering if she should call room service for an antacid but opting instead for a cigarette. Somehow they had slipped from the practical side of his business into a boozy Freudian subtext of keys and locks. The implications of the jokes—locksmiths had a million of them—and the stories—another million—were clear and soon there were the brief but meaningful silences and the lowered voices. She had noted two things earlier, before her head had begun to swim: one was that he was drinking less than she; the other was that the room was full of men, locksmiths presumably, and that some of them appeared to be inordinately interested in the activity at the bar. The mirror told her so. This all seemed quite hilarious at the time. Years had passed since she had been in a pickup situation and she found herself enjoying it and, in an ironic way, enjoying the apparent belief that he was scoring. Finally, foolish in his security, he excused himself to go to the men’s room. When he was out of sight, she picked her purse casually off the bar and made for the elevator as steadily as she could.

  Before he got off his stool he had asked her name. “Anna,” she had replied in a smoky voice she had developed for the part. “What’s yours?” She couldn’t remember now what it was. Bob or Rob or Ron or Don—some generic male name. She felt a little sorry for him now. It wasn’t until she had rolled into bed that she realized she had stuck him with the bar tab.

  She wondered if she should go down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. She really didn’t want to run into him having a late breakfast—she picked her watch off the side table—or a late lunch, rather. The thought of food was off-putting in any case. Her hangover wasn’t severe, just sufficiently unpleasant to deny her an appetite for eggs Benedict, say, or even French toast. The more urgent need was for something to drink. She phoned room service, ordered orange juice and tea, and then flopped back into the pillow, turned on the bed lamp and picked up her book. She read a few lines, failed to absorb their meaning, and put the book down.

  She wasn’t sure if this impromptu retreat was accomplishing what she’d hoped it might. She had been barely aware of her intentions when she left Paul Richter’s apartment Friday evening. She just knew she had to get away somewhere and the idea of escaping into a hotel grew as she drove home. She threw a few things into a bag, returned to the car and then, about to drive away, got out and went back into the house to leave a note for Spencer. “I’ve gone to a hotel for a few days,” she scribbled hurriedly. “I need time to think.” She underlined the last word twice and then added as an afterthought: “You’ll have to take your mother to the mall opening. I won’t be there.” Typically, even in the middle of this crisis, she was arranging the social niceties of his life. In her mind, the afterthought sounded withering and dismissive, but, in fact, Spencer had to be reminded to pay attention to his mother as he had to be reminded to pay attention to anything not directly relevant to his precious career. He would probably interpret it as a simple directive, she thought. He needed someone on his arm at the gala and he would have been pissed off to have to go alone, a man in his position. She was even introducing a public relations advantage he probably wouldn’t have thought of otherwise: the sight of the aspiring political candidate taking his dear, sweet mother to an important social event while his wife—what excuse would he give?—was “feeling a little under the weather.”

  For some reason this note, written in haste, played on her mind. Why had she even mentioned a hotel? Was some part of her mind hoping that he would try to contact her? There were a hundred hotels in the city but surely he would have the sense to know she wouldn’t take a room in some flophouse out on the highway. But at the registration desk of the Winnipeg Inn, she had obscured the trail by giving neither her name nor her maiden name to the clerk, but her mother’s maiden name, and paid in cash.

  She looked around her room, at the indifferent furniture, the monstrously huge television set, at the Group of Seven reproductions on the wall opposite, the bedspread with its broad orange stripes, vibrant even in the semi-darkness—all of it so banal compared to the home she had once so carefully decorated. Had she taken an irrevocable step coming here? “A few days” she had written on the note; in other words, the weekend. But the weekend would be over in a few hours. Would she be home then? Or would she stay on and go to work from the hotel? She had to return home at some point, if just for the sake of a change of clothes. Should she start looking for an apartment? Go and stay with a friend? Stay put?

  Saturday, on a long aimless walk across the Provencher bridge and around St. Boniface, she had started to compose in her mind a list of pros and cons, her mind going back and forth like a cerebral tennis match. She didn’t love Spencer, or at least she was no longer in love with him—that was the main consideration. One too-large River Heights home was about all they shared these days, and only inertia seemed to be keeping them together. On the other hand, maybe there was some hope. Perhaps if they had a child. She was thirty-seven, Spencer forty-one. It wasn’t too late, tick, tick, tick. They should have had one earlier. They had planned to have one earlier. But then no child arrived, and neither of them seemed to have the courage to explore the reasons why. Spencer’s climb up the corporate ladder became more urgent, his political involvements more intense, his workload more tyrannical. She left her pretty but dull job editing a literary journal at the University of Manitoba for a greater engagement with life at the Citizen. At home apathy took root.

  On the other hand—could one have three hands?—it was probably too late. Spencer was absorbed in his career and if she wasn’t exactly absorbed in hers, enough remained to keep it interesting. At least she wasn’t beholden, as her mother’s generation had been, to a husband for the sake of bed and board. Her job at the Citizen paid decently. There was some opportunity for advancement. And now that Guy Clark was moving to city desk, one of life’s more hellish aspects was removed. Perhaps she should seek the Go! editorship after all.

  Shit, why had Guy Clark popped into her head? In a way, it was he who had precipitated this crisis. How did he know anything about her private life? She was sure she had been careful. But that didn’t matter now. The question was whether he would really divulge what he knew, or just continue to torture her with it. And why did she care anyway? This wasn’t the nineteenth century, for god’s sake. Society wasn’t going to excoriate her and drive her to such despair that she would throw herself under a train!

  But if Spencer did find out, the marriage really would be in trouble. His pride wouldn’t tolerate being—that funny word—a cuckold. Why was there no equivalent word for a woman betrayed by her husband? And why had she allowed herself to entertain the word betrayal? It was a cutting, accusing word and it frightened her a little. Yes, it was a betrayal, at least of those vows taken so long ago and in a frame of mind that never anticipated it would be tested. But somehow the marriage had become one of such indifference, that the real betrayal was more their betrayal, hers and Spencer’s, of the pledge to love and honour.

  She reached for the ashtray and extinguished her cigarette. Her mouth felt thick and furry. There were water glasses in the bathroom, but even the thought of cool water splashing in the sink couldn’t tempt her from bed. Besides, she thought, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself draining glass after glass and that would only leave her with a stomach cramped and bloated. No, room service would arrive any moment. Then she would be forced to rise. She felt a sudden ache for sweet sugary orange juice and hot sweet tea.

  She reached for another cigarette but then, disgusted for the thousandth time with her addiction, tossed the packet across the bed. It had occurred to her in this weekend of reflection, in her search for some kind of key to the meaning of life—well, her life anyway—that she was addicted to unhappiness. She sought it out, savoured it, wallowed in it, a
nd then, when it looked as though she could finally achieve the equanimity she envied in those around her, she would snatch at something that would bring her down. The affair with Paul hadn’t been the first, though it had been the longest and the only one with someone who lived in the city. Once, some years back, not long after she had started work at the Citizen, she had gone to interview a cellist, a guest artist with the symphony, in his hotel room. He was French, very attractive. Eventually he suggested they complete the interview in bed. After that, they kept up for months a passionate and hopeless telephone affair, he in some hotel room or concert hall somewhere in North America or Europe, she from the Citizen surreptitiously using billing numbers from the paper’s other departments. Finally, the relationship, such as it was, petered out from its own impossibility, and from a high, Liz had sunk into depression. Spencer, as usual, had been oblivious to her mood. Sometimes she wished he had found out and then there would have been the crisis she both dreaded and anticipated. A couple of times she had taken the chance of using the home phone and when Spencer queried her about these long distance calls to St. Louis or Houston she had wanted to scream, “I was talking to my lover, you idiot!” But instead she excused them as calls related to arts stories she had been working on.

  There had been a few others. But each liaison, for different reasons, had been as precarious and futile as that first one. Finally, there was Paul. She felt her stomach flutter as her mind fixed suddenly on the last time they had made love. It had been on a Wednesday, ten days earlier. They had met, as usual, at his apartment and, as usual, after work. She could always excuse early evening absences to Spencer by saying she had to work late on a story, not that he was often home himself at dinner time. Paul was there to greet her. Orchestra rehearsals always ended promptly at three-thirty, and if he had no other business, he would be at the apartment preparing something light to eat, opening a bottle of wine, or readying some other surprise. These cinq-à-sept idylls in the antique iron bed of the condo’s tiny bedroom were oases of happiness for her. Paul was a lover imaginative and attentive beyond any she had ever had, certainly beyond Spencer, whose puppy-like enthusiasm of their early marriage had dwindled over the years into something perfunctory and distracted, as though having sex with her was either convenient or obligatory. She never thought of Paul as old, though he was, as the saying went, old enough to be her father. But her widowed father, retired to British Columbia and a life of sedentary gloom, had flesh that never questioned the law of gravity. Paul battled it. His work was a swimmer’s regimen, propelled arms onstage, proscribed diet off, his leisure time a discipline of exercise, most of it taken outdoors. But the outcome, the lean strong physique, was not the attraction. It was, rather, the interior man, the one behind the cultivated mask of pride that had drawn her to him. She felt sometimes like a pupil, he the teacher with accumulated wisdom and the weight of years lightly borne. Cocooned in his arms that Wednesday, she had suddenly realized that not only had she fallen in love with him, but that for the first time she was experiencing love itself, in its purest, most indestructible form. She had started to laugh and cry at the same time and, silently, he had held her more tightly until like a baby she had fallen into sleep.

  A terrible groan reached her ears and she realized with a start that the sound had come from her own throat. Of course, she had doomed herself once again to misery. Between that evening and the evening at the Kingdons’ she had lived in the giddy expectation of upheaval; that he would announce that he had left his wife and would she share his life? And yes, she would. But at the Kingdons’ he had been unapproachable. Even for the few moments when his wife and her husband had been out of the room, he had behaved as though they were mere acquaintances. She knew now why. The explanation had arrived with Michael Rossiter’s package.

  A soft rap sounded on the door and she was shaken from her thoughts. She dragged herself from the bed, put on her bathrobe, and opened the door to a gangly pimpled youth in a uniform bearing a tray with the orange juice and tea.

  “On the table by the window will be fine,” she said to him.

  He did as she asked and then without permission proceeded to open the drapes. The sunlight blasted Liz’s eyes and her head pounded.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she muttered, drawing the back of her hand against her eyes.

  “Sorry,” he drawled, then added officiously: “It’s after twelve o’clock. Reception wants to know if you’re staying another day. Twelve is normally check-out time.”

  Liz felt suddenly like slapping him and took it as a mark of how far she was hurtling from her own youth that she now found people this young to be almost unbearable.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “I will be staying another day. Would you tell reception? Thank you so much.”

  She held the door wide so he couldn’t mistake her desire to be rid of him immediately.

  “You’re welcome,” he responded airily.

  She slammed the door and her head throbbed once again. The orange juice was fresh-squeezed but it was thick with unstrained pulp and warm as blood. She felt vaguely nauseated drinking it, and its benefit was illusory anyway. Her thirst was not slaked. Only the sugar in the juice contributed to a lessening of fatigue.

  She poured a cup of tea and took it to the window. Her eyes adjusted to the light and she looked southeast over the city past the Red River, glinting in the sun, toward the streets she had walked the day before. Then, as now, she had tried to push from her thoughts the other Paul, the Paul whose awful secret had poisoned her heart. She would try to invoke the man of ten days ago who could charm her thoroughly, who had resurrected feelings long dormant, even the man who could amuse her at a dinner party by slaying the egregious Guy Clark with a cutting word or two. But the other Paul Richter, the doppelgänger twin within, could not be denied. He had battered his way into her consciousness. And each time, she had shivered, as she shivered now in the heat of the sun pouring through her window. What she had read in that file, and what he did not deny Friday at his apartment, had terminated their affair as surely as the schemes of a clinging wife. His hands, his beautiful, slim, strong, sensitive hands, which brought order from the orchestra’s chaos, which brought ecstasy from her willing body, had once beat the life from a man. His eyes, which had looked into hers with tenderness, had once fixed on another’s death-panicked eyes until they became staring and lifeless. And there was more, much more.

  Her teacup rattled in its saucer. She had started to shake, a sob clutched her throat. This is why I’m here. The thought tore at her. This is why I’m in this hotel. It isn’t because of Spencer. Brooding on their marriage had the comfort of the known quantity. Separation, divorce, perhaps reconciliation—she could deal with these things. But not murder gone unpunished. And not committed by someone she loved.

  She didn’t know what to do. When Paul asked her coldly Friday what she intended to do with the information, she had lied. She had said she didn’t know, that for the meantime she had locked the file in her desk drawer. She had felt suddenly frightened of telling him the truth, that the file was in another’s possession, and it wasn’t until a few moments later that she realized why. She had been slow, stupidly slow, in making the connection, but when she did, she felt the full force of it. Heart pounding, she had had to clutch the side of the piano in Paul’s studio to steady herself. The last person in possession of this information had been murdered. And yet, as this thought seized her mind, she wondered at its possibility. It wasn’t that her lover was capable of murder. She knew he was. It was the timing. The timing was wrong. But she asked anyway, as nervelessly as she could, chilled by the possible answer. She had to know, to hear not just his words, but to read his face, his gestures.

  “Did you,” she asked, staring at him, her breath slowed to a whisper, “kill Michael Rossiter?”

  His response had been brutal in its simplicity. Silently, he had walked to the door and shown her out, his expression forbidding. But the door did not slam b
ehind her as she expected it to. He must have lingered for a moment watching her back as she walked down the hall toward the elevator. Only then, as she rounded the corner did she hear the soft shush of the door slowly brushing the thick carpet and the barely audible click of the lock. There was a delicacy in it that she chose to interpret as regret, or sadness. And she wondered then, as she wondered now, looking out across the river, if she had done the right thing by placing the damning information in Guy’s custody. By doing so, she had virtually guaranteed Paul’s ruin.

  But as she had several times in the last hours when she permitted herself to dwell on this, she could feel herself soften. After all, she rationalized, the murder had taken place long ago. Perhaps under the circumstances it had been, if not excusable, then at least understandable. Perhaps the years had punished him sufficiently. Surely there had been times when he had been racked by guilt. And wouldn’t the revelation disrupt too many lives? There would be too much past raked over the coals. All she need do was dress, get over to the paper, and retrieve the file. It had been so late in the afternoon when she placed it amid the other papers on Guy’s desk. It was likely he never picked it up, or, if he had, paid no attention to it, or not understood it. He was such an idiot. There would be only a skeleton staff early Sunday afternoon at the Citizen. No one questioned you if you looked through another’s desk. Few had working locks. It was just presumed you were looking for a pen or one of the elusive dictionaries.

  But then, once she had it in hand, what would she do with it? Destroy it? Destroying the evidence would not destroy the truth. She imagined that truth with a spectral power to intrude upon her life, to come swooping down at awkward moments with all its attendant guilt and horror, the way the magnified sins of childhood could suddenly violate one’s hard-earned adult serenity. Could she live with that? She didn’t know, had no idea. She wondered if she was living in a moral vacuum. How could she doubt that what she had done was correct? She could only admonish herself for lack of courage in following the story herself. But between the mind and heart lay a minefield of doubt.