OTHER CULLEN AND COBB MYSTERIES
Serpents Rising
Dead Air
In memory of my dad,
Lawrence Allen (Larry) Poulsen,
who shared with me the joy of reading
In memory of Wayne Lucas,
who shared with me the joy of friendship
And always … for Barb
Table of Contents
Cover
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Acknowledgements
Mystery and Crime Fiction from Dundurn Press
Copyright
Cover
Title Page
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Acknowledgements
Prologue
February 28, 1965
The cigarette smoke stung her eyes. She threw the cigarette down, regretted it right away — hated to do that to a Lucky Strike, damn good smokes — and looked around.
Looking for Joni. Joni Anderson, who said she’d be there for the last set before taking the stage herself. But Joni wasn’t there. Not yet. Or at least not here in the alley, smoking, laughing, tuning her guitar in one of those crazy, brilliant, completely open-string, Joni-esque ways that few could follow, let alone play.
She rubbed her eyes, trying to drive the sting away, and squinted at the back of the building. Not old, not new, just one more building in a row of structures that offered no more or less than this one.
The Depression. She’d always felt it was a weird name for a folk club. First of all, people often mistakenly thought the name referred to the mood, not the social and economic shock that had devastated so many of the world’s economies in the 1930s. This Depression was that Depression; it had nothing to do with the state of mind. The old newspaper clippings that dotted the walls, virtually the only decorations to be found in the place, provided the proof as to which Depression was being referred to.
Instead of Joni, the only other people in the alley were her two band guys: Jerry Farkash, who’d been with her from the beginning twenty-one months ago, and Duke whatever-the-fuck his name was, surely to God the worst bass player to ever stride on stage with an Airline electric around his neck.
She glanced at her watch. 10:50. She’d begin her last set at 11:00. Joni would take the stage just after 11:30, play for an hour and a half with barely a break, and everyone would love her. Like they did every night.
She really wanted Joni to catch her last set. Especially the new song, the one she’d co-written with the shitty bass player. The guy could write lyrics. That was the only reason she’d kept him around this long. But even with his ability as a lyricist, she knew he’d have to go. He was killing them on stage.
And the guy was weird. What kind of name was Duke? And his last name was just as crazy. Prego, that was it. Prego. You’re welcome in Italian, for Christ’s sake. Not his real name, obviously. Who calls himself Duke You’re Welcome? The guy had to go, and before her Vancouver date at The Bunkhouse. She’d pay him something for the lyrics and then send him on his way. She’d rather play The Bunkhouse without a bass player than have Duke fucking Prego on that stage.
She looked at her watch again. Just time for one more Lucky Strike. She turned away from the biting wind to light it and didn’t see the car come up the alley. She heard it, though, and once her cigarette was lit, she turned to see if it was Joni. Maybe she’d caught a ride with some guy, or —
As she turned, she heard the screeching of brakes. The car doors were flung open. Then pop, pop, pop — not loud like you’d expect gunshots to be, but they were gunshots. She realized that when first Jerry, then Duke went down clutching his chest, groaning, then gasping like he was trying to get air. Then two men — one of them holding a gun — were racing toward her.
She tried to run, but it all happened so fast. There was one fleeting moment of recognition. A scream … a curse. Then the first man, not breaking stride, hit her with his fist, and it was all over.
One
There was something Holmesian about it.
Cobb and I were sitting in his office, drinking Keurig Starbucks, me looking out the window at 1st Street West below us and watching a beautiful twenty-something blonde cross the street and head toward Cobb’s building.
My memory told me that was how several Holmes stories began — except, of course, it was Holmes’s apartment on Baker Street that he and Watson were in and Holmes was either playing the violin or reading the newspaper. Cobb had spent the last hour invoicing clients and telling me in general terms the nature of their cases. To my knowledge, Cobb did not play the violin.
There was, however, a bit of a similarity between Watson and me. Although Holmes’s companion was a doctor and I had spent most of my adult life as a crime writer, first for the Calgary Herald and then as a freelancer for the last several years, the fact was that, like Watson, I was something of a chronicler of the cases Cobb and I had worked on together. I was, at that time, working on a couple of articles I hoped to shop to magazines — articles that recounted the details of our recent investigation into the violent deaths of a number of right-wing media luminaries. That was the reason my computer sat at the ready on a small table in one corner of Cobb’s second-floor space on the corner of 12th Avenue and 1st Street West in the Beltline, an elder statesman among Calgary neighbourhoods.
“You’re about to have company,” I said, not looking away from the street or the young woman, who had clearly favoured denim when she had made the day’s fashion decisions. I was confident of the correctness of my assertion because at the moment, Cobb was the lone tenant of the building, all the others having been temporarily evacuated while renovations were taking place. I’d asked him how it was that a private detective was not inconvenienced with having to vacate his office when other firms with more office space and several actual employees had been. Cobb had smiled as he told me that, as soon as the building manager had mentioned Cobb would have to leave the building for a couple of weeks, Cobb made as if to begin the packing process, pulled several firearms from his closet, and set them on his desk. The manager, apparently not certain whether the weapons were part of the move or had been taken from the closet for some other purpose, decided that Cobb’s office looked “okay as it is” and backed out the door with considerable dispatch.
“Male or female?” Cobb asked, without looking up from his own computer.
“Decidedly female,” I told him.
“And you know she’s coming here because …?”
“Because (a) there’s bugger all else on this side of the street, (b) she keeps looking up here as she gets closer, and (c) she’s now entering the front door of the building.”
“Ah … that last one’s a dead giveaway.”
He closed up his computer in an apparent attempt to look more detective-like for the new arrival and had just completed that task when the knock came at the door. I turned from the window, crossed the office, my slippery city shoes (as Ian Tyson called them) drumming on the aged hardwood, and opened the door. My closer look at the young woman confirmed what I had been fairly certain of from my window view of her. Though the September wind had done her mid-back-length blond hair no favours, she was striking. Young — twenty-ish, I guessed — and … striking.
“Is this the office of Michael Cobb, private detective?” she said
in a voice that was breathy but firm. My first impression of her was that she was no-nonsense.
“It is,” I said, and stepped back to allow her to move into the office.
She stepped inside, and Cobb stood up to greet her. There was a momentary look of confusion on the young woman’s face as she looked from me to Cobb and back at me.
I gestured in Cobb’s direction to allay further confusion.
“I’m Mike Cobb,” he said, “and this is my associate, Adam Cullen. Please have a seat.” Cobb indicated a brown leather chair that, until I’d stretched my legs by moving to the window, had been my spot. I took a new position on a hard-backed, hard-seated, cloth-covered thing that offered a comfort level equal to that of a church pew.
When she was settled into her chair, Cobb looked at the young woman. “What is it you think I can help you with, Ms. …?”
“Brill. Monica Brill.”
“Would you care for a cup of coffee, Ms. Brill?”
She shook her head, sat forward in the chair, and looked at Cobb with eyes that confirmed my earlier assessment. She was all business.
“I’m interested in hiring a private detective, but I need someone who does more than spy on wayward spouses in divorce cases.” She wasn’t smiling.
Cobb was. “I won’t lie, Ms. Brill, I did a few of those back in the day, but haven’t for a long time. I’m an ex-cop, worked robbery for a few years, homicide for a few more.”
She nodded, then looked over at me, eyebrows lifted. “That’s what my research indicated. Your partner does the divorce work now?”
“Neither of us does, actually,” Cobb said, as she turned back to him. “Mr. Cullen is, as I mentioned, my associate. We occasionally work together. Mr. Cullen is particularly good at conducting research. I tend to be more at ease … in the field.”
“Will you be working together on this case?”
“That depends on the nature of the investigation you want me to carry out. Maybe you should tell me how I can help you.”
She nodded, pursed her lips, and said, “Maybe I’ll take that coffee, after all.”
“On it,” I said, heading for the Keurig machine. Adam Cullen, researcher and gofer. “How do you take your coffee?”
She smiled. “One sugar, please. No milk.” She turned again back to Cobb. “I’d like you to find my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother is missing?”
“She is. That is, she has been for some time.”
“How long has your grandmother been gone?” Cobb asked.
“Fifty-one years.”
“Make that two coffees,” Cobb said to me.
There was silence in the room for a few minutes, but for the gurgling of the coffee machine. I glanced over my shoulder at the two of them. Cobb was studying the young woman, a quizzical, slightly surprised, but not thunderstruck look on his face. I had never seen Mike Cobb look thunderstruck.
Finally, he spoke. “And are you certain your grandmother is still alive?”
“I’m not certain of that.” Monica Brill shook her head. “That would be part of your assignment. I want you to find out if she’s still alive after all this time … and if she’s not, I want to know what happened to her.”
“Maybe you should start at the beginning, Ms. Brill.”
I started toward her with the coffee, but before I could make the delivery she stood up and walked to the window, standing in almost the same place I had left moments before to answer the door. “You might want to take a look,” she said.
Cobb and I looked at each other, then followed her to the window, Cobb moving up alongside her, me standing just behind her, looking over her shoulder.
She pointed. “See the Italian restaurant there?”
She was pointing at Parm, a place Cobb and I had been to a few times. Decent food, better-than-decent pizza, and extremely handy — directly across the street and maybe fifty steps from the front door of Cobb’s building.
“Parm,” I said, to confirm that we were all looking at the same place.
She nodded. “Do you know what it used to be?”
“You mean pre-Parm, or fifty-one years ago?” Cobb’s eyes were still focused on the restaurant.
“In the sixties there was a coffee house located in the basement of that building. It was called The Depression.”
I nodded. “I’d forgotten that,” I said. “I’ve read about the place. It was Calgary’s first coffee house. Did fairly well for a time, I think. A few big-name performers appeared there early in their careers. Neil Young, the Irish Rovers, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell —”
“Except her name wasn’t Mitchell. Not then.”
She turned away from the window. Cobb and I followed suit. Monica Brill settled back in her chair; I set her coffee on the desk in front of her, passed Cobb his coffee, and returned to my spot on the concrete slab disguised as a chair.
“Anderson,” I said. “She was Joni Anderson back then.”
“Very good, Mr. Cullen.” Monica Brill nodded and glanced approvingly at me, making me feel like I had just passed some test.
She sipped coffee, set the cup back down, and took a breath. “On February 28, 1965, my grandmother was playing The Depression. She was on the same bill as Joni Anderson. My grandmother stepped out into the alley behind the building between sets to have a cigarette. She was never seen again.”
“Right,” I said, “I remember reading about it. A couple of guys were shot, and a third person — your grandmother, I take it — disappeared. The police were never able to solve either the shootings or the disappearance.”
“That’s right. No one has solved the case … up to now.”
“I assume you have a reason you’d like this looked into after all this time,” Cobb said.
“Our family has lived without knowing what happened to my grandmother that night. I don’t want to live like that anymore. Even if the news is really bad, as it very well could be … I want to know.”
Cobb rubbed one hand over the other, then changed hands and repeated the gesture. He was thinking.
“Ms. Brill, you want to engage my services to conduct a search for your grandmother, who disappeared a half century ago. I’m not in the habit of taking people’s money under false pretenses. And that’s what I’d be doing if I were to accept this case. Almost all of the people your grandmother knew back then, and those who knew her, will be either dead or in a home, some with limited ability to be of help. If we can even find them. I have quite a high regard for my ability to do my job. But this case offers so little likelihood of being solvable that, I say again, I feel like I’d just be taking your money.”
Monica Brill didn’t answer. She reached down into the satchel she had set at her feet and pulled out a file folder. It was fairly thick.
“This is what I’ve been able to do on my own,” she said, setting the folder on Cobb’s desk. “In this folder are press clippings, a photocopy of the police report from the original investigation, photographs of my grandmother performing, and a map of the street as it was back then. I put that together myself. I might have one or two of the businesses wrong, but I think for the most part it’s quite accurate. The two detectives who first worked the case were Lex Carrington and Norris Wardlow. Mr. Wardlow died in 2003, but Mr. Carrington is still alive and is a resident of Cottonwood Village Retirement Centre in Claresholm, which is about an hour south of Calgary. I tried to get in to see him, but the people in charge wouldn’t allow it, so I don’t know if he remembers the case or is even mentally competent. That’s as far as I went with my own investigation. I decided it was time for a professional to take over.”
I could see Cobb was impressed. He opened the folder, flipped through some of the material in it, read a couple of the clippings, and finally looked up at the young woman sitting opposite him, who showed no sign of impatience.
&
nbsp; “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Cobb told her. “We’ll work this for a week — make some calls, see if there’s any chance that there might actually be some leads out there, something we can take hold of and follow up on. If after that time I feel there’s any point to continuing the investigation, we’ll talk again. If, however, I think I’d be wasting my time and your money continuing, then I’m out.”
Monica Brill nodded. “That’s fair.”
“Now, is there anything you’re not telling me?”
“What do you mean?”
Cobb leaned forward on the desk.
“Often with cases that have been unsolved for this long, when someone wants the investigation restarted, it’s because something has suddenly turned up — a long-lost note, a letter from the missing person, a mysterious phone call, something like that. Is there anything along those lines that might be the reason, or at least part of the reason, you’ve come to see me?”
Monica Brill hesitated. It was her turn to think. “I guess … I guess there is something that’s kind of, well, puzzling.”
Cobb looked at her but didn’t say anything.
“Five weeks ago, I received a CD.”
“A CD.”
Monica nodded. “I wasn’t going to say anything, because I was afraid you’d think I was a crackpot and not take the case.”
“How did it come to you?”
“It was left in my car.”
“In your car,” Cobb repeated.
“My car had been locked. I’m sure of that because I remember locking it with my remote, and an older couple who were nearby glared at me when it beeped.”
“So, someone broke into your locked car and left a CD.”
“Yes.”
“And where was this?”
“At the grocery store. A Safeway just a few blocks from where I live. I didn’t notice it right away. I loaded my groceries in the trunk, and when I went to get in the driver’s seat, the CD was lying there. I almost didn’t see it.”
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