Scammed

by Ron Chudley

  Only when it was all done, and the sun well risen on a bright day, did he allow himself to think of rest. A shambling scarecrow of pain and fatigue, he clawed his clothes off and staggered into the shower. The hot water hit him with a delicious shock. His head cleared—and he remembered the gun.

  “Oh, Holy Christ!”

  Dripping and stark naked, he stumbled through the house. God, how could he have overlooked the most important thing of all? It was lying in the studio, where he had so carefully removed it from its owner’s dead hand. The fact that there was no one to see it didn’t matter. What terrified Greg was that he could have forgotten it in the first place, almost as if some part of him had wanted it to be found.

  With icy clarity, he recalled exactly where the monstrous little thing was. Throwing open the studio door, he almost screamed when it wasn’t there. Fortunately, the shock was only momentary; his mental picture had been turned around, and when he looked in the correct place—there was the gun.

  He rushed across the studio, so overwhelmed with relief that only after it had happened did he realize he’d actually done that dumbest of things: staring at the gun clutched in his still-dripping hand, all he could do was groan weakly.

  But it was too late and—final surprise of the day—he found he didn’t care. So his fingerprints were on stupid thing. Okay, before he disposed of it, he’d just have to wipe them off. Meanwhile, he was wet and freezing. He went inside, finished his shower, dried off and without bothering to put on anything, locked every door in the house and went to bed.

  He didn’t clean off the gun right away. Instead, he stuck it under his pillow.

  • • •

  He awoke at what he was astonished to discover was twilight, from a heavy and dreamless sleep. He felt thoroughly rested, but when he moved, every single inch of him hurt. Rising painfully, he suddenly remembered the gun, stowed under his pillow like a treasured keep-sake. I must have been crazy last night, he thought, fishing it out. Stripping the case off the pillow, he used that to wipe the weapon from end to end, then dropped it into the case and wrapped it into a compact bundle. Carrying it with him, he padded to the kitchen. Before anything else, coffee.

  His bare foot almost immediately trod on something sharp. There were bits of shattered crockery all over the floor: of course, the mug the intruder had used, which Greg had smashed in revulsion and had not had the energy to clean up later. Stepping around the wreckage, he had a vivid memory of the man taking what would be his last drink—then stopped himself in mid-thought. There would be none of that. Not now. Not ever. He would put the whole incident out of his mind, lock it in some dark corner and throw away the key, and that process had to start right now.

  While coffee was brewing, he swept up the mess. He then had another shower, which took away much of the pain, and made breakfast. He still hadn’t put on any clothes, which, although a little chilly, felt good, cleansing. His parents had often in earlier years gone about the place nude, something with which Greg had never felt comfortable. Now, for the first time in his life, it didn’t seem so strange at all. Out of left field came the thought, Maybe I’m more like the old man than I knew.

  Though Walter Lothian’s orneriness had been responsible for much of what had happened in the last weeks, his guts and feistiness had never been in dispute. If, apart from a shared taste for whisky and a newly discovered pleasure in being naked, Greg could find in himself some of the old man’s rugged individuality, that would be no small compensation. When memories arose of this fearful time, bringing with them disgust or, God forbid, more guilt, what he had to do, he realized, was view the whole thing through the prism of his father’s confidence and self-assurance. Then he would get over it. This was a startling idea that was also a considerable relief.

  But what he needed right now was to take leave of the Cowichan Valley. Pack up and return to Victoria. There he could get back to his sane, sensible and, above all, quiet life, while things settled down, in the world and in his own sadly pummelled heart.

  As for the gun, the best place for that was somewhere far away from the scene, preferably at the bottom of the ocean.

  TWENTY-ONE

  After his strange and fearful existence of late, getting back to work was almost like a vacation. Each day, with its peaceful routine, was such a balm to his battered psyche that in a remarkably short time, he was feeling much like his old self. Not that everything was exactly the same. In the office, people treated him differently, seeming to notice him more, stopping to chat when a passing nod would once have been sufficient. At first Greg put this down to sympathy, his parental loss being common knowledge, but it was more than that. He was puzzled, until George Allrod, who noticed everything, provided a clue.

  “Morning, Greg,” he said one day. “Glad to see you’ve come out of your shell.” Which, perhaps, said it all. For whatever reasons—the deaths of his parents, the frightening aftermath or the simple fact of having survived—the part of Greg that had always avoided interaction with his peers was no longer dominant. The difference was not glaringly obvious, but people evidently sensed it. Quite simply, he was better liked. Once he’d become used to this, Greg found it enjoyable.

  The probate of the will was completed in good time, and Greg resumed going to the house by the river on weekends, getting it ready for sale. He didn’t sleep there. That would have been too much. And his hours were spent in brisk activity, studiously avoiding all thoughts of recent history. He replaced the broken window and finished the clearing, cleaning and sorting of everything, including the contents of the studio, which he sent to his father’s gallery in Vancouver. A huge exhibition and sale of the late artist’s works was envisaged for the near future.

  When Greg told his sister the kind of sum this was expected to raise, she was as stunned as he had been. They were aware that their father had once been quite famous, but in later years, his style had fallen out of fashion, hence the many unsold works. But death altered everything: the supply of Lothians now being finite, apparently every collector in the country was interested. The amount predicted from the sale was many times that lost in the scam; a mere portion of it would have provided the best possible treatment for Mary. The bitter irony of that didn’t bear thinking about.

  On a Tuesday morning, nearly two months after the end of the financial year, the second day of summer, Greg received a phone call at work.

  “Mr. Lothian, this is D. S. Tremblay of the Victoria Police. I have some news.”

  “Oh?”

  “It relates to the theft of your ID.”

  “Really?”

  “Do you think you could spare a few minutes to come in to the station?”

  Greg’s heart had speeded up as soon as the caller identified himself. His mouth was a little dry as he said, “Er . . . sure. When would be a good time?”

  They settled on 3:00 PM that afternoon. In the interim, Greg continued his regular routine, but the calm that had begun to settle on his soul was disturbed. News about his ID could only mean that at least some of it had been recovered. Did that mean that the body of the thief had been found and identified? If so, the police would no doubt contact everyone whose property had been discovered in his possession. So this contact was probably just routine. Nonetheless, as Greg waited for the intervening hours to pass, he couldn’t help feeling nervous.

  He got to the police headquarters on Caledonia Avenue long before the appointed hour and filled in time walking about, so that being early wouldn’t make him look too eager. But when he did arrive at Tremblay’s office, the red-haired detective’s friendly greeting immediately put him at ease.

  “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Lothian. Take a seat. I hope you didn’t have too much trouble getting away from the office?”

  “No, we’re not too busy at the moment, thanks.”

  “Fine, fine!”

  They chatted for some moments. Tremblay offered coffee, which Greg declined. He couldn’t help noticing several pieces of what appeared t
o be his ID laid out on the desk. Noting his glance, the detective nodded. “Yes, that’s your stuff, all right. Does it seem to be all there?”

  What wasn’t there, obviously, was the old driver’s licence. That he had burned. “I guess so,” he said, adding, since not to mention it would seem odd, “oh, except the driver’s licence. I don’t see that.”

  Tremblay shrugged. “Can’t win ’em all. Lucky to get this lot, I reckon. You do identify these items as yours?”

  “Of course. Er—how did you find it? You caught the thief, I gather?”

  The sergeant patted his brush cut. “Yes and no. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Hold on.” Deliberately, Tremblay rose and closed his office door. As he returned, he indicated a picture on his desk: a woman and two young boys. “My family,” he said, as if in answer to a query. “You have family, Mr. Lothian?”

  “You mean a wife and children? No.”

  The sergeant tapped his forehead apologetically. “Oh, yeah—you mentioned that, I believe, when you told me the sad story about your parents.”

  “You remember that?”

  Tremblay gave him a look of mild reproach. “Sure! Just because we couldn’t do anything at the time doesn’t mean we weren’t concerned. Anyway, that’s kind of why I called you.”

  “You have information on who stole from my parents?”

  “Not exactly. It’s complicated.” Tremblay reached for a scratch pad and began to doodle. “The reason I asked you here involves a bit more than the fraud committed on your folks, or the theft of your own ID. You see, Mr. Lothian, my guys and the Mounties are conducting a joint investigation into an organized-crime ring operating in the capital region. Obviously, I can’t divulge details, except to tell you that your ID was among a bunch of stolen articles we recovered just recently. To tell the truth, it turned up by accident, when we had the unexpected opportunity to search the premises of one of the gang. And that happened because the guy turned up dead.”

  Greg sat very still. “Oh. But I don’t see . . .”

  “What this has to do with you? Nothing directly. I wouldn’t be telling you, except for an odd coincidence.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The guy I mentioned was found floating near the mouth of the Cowichan River. You know that river, right?”

  “Of course. I grew up there. My parents’ house is on the river and that, as I told you, was where my mother . . .”

  “Yeah, sure! Of course, you know it all too well, eh? Sorry to have to bring it up, but—well—here’s where the coincidence comes in.”

  Greg strove not to show his growing apprehension. “What kind of coincidence?”

  “You see, this dead guy in the river—shot in the head, I guess it can’t hurt to tell you that—was found in a place where he couldn’t in fact have been dumped. He must have floated down from upstream. We had no idea where he’d been put in until we got an unexpected break. The Duncan RCMP received a complaint about a car that had been abandoned. When they ran the plates, they found it was stolen. So they took some prints, just in case, and what do you know, they were on file. The thief was none other than our dead perp from the river. So, in finding the car, we knew the general area of where he’d probably got himself wasted. Now—here’s where we get to the coincidence—do you know where that car was parked?”

  Not trusting himself to speak, Greg just shook his head.

  “Can you believe it, on Riverbottom Road—not a hundred yards from your folks’ front gate.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Of course, we didn’t know the significance right away. It was only later, when we started to go though the guy’s stuff and found your ID, that I remembered your story and the Cowichan River connection. So, being a naturally curious guy, I looked up your folks’ address and, bingo, it was almost exactly where the guy’s car was. Now that’s a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  Greg nodded numbly. “Incredible.”

  “I mean, our guy leaves his car near where someone must have topped him. And that place is connected to one of his victims: yourself. So you see, I have to ask: do you have any information at all that could make this any less of a coincidence than it seems?”

  Ever since the revelation about the car, Greg’s mind had been churning. How could he have been so stupid? Christ, he had even seen the dead man’s keys while searching him. But not until this moment had he given thought to the now painfully obvious question: how had he got himself there? Now, he mustn’t let that mistake sink him entirely. The best thing, he decided, was to stick as close to the truth as possible. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Perhaps this guy . . . by the way, does he have a name?”

  “Eric Molinara. No harm you knowing that, I guess.”

  “Perhaps this Molinara went there with the idea of robbing my parents’ house.”

  The sergeant’s eyebrows lifted. “Was it robbed?”

  “No. Otherwise I’d have reported it. What you may not know is that my dad is—was—a pretty famous artist. Because of that, and the way my mum passed so quickly after he did, there was a lot about it in the papers. Maybe this Molinara guy read it, figured the old man was rich, and that the house would be empty and worth robbing.”

  “And was it?”

  “I told you, no.”

  “I mean, worth robbing?”

  Greg gave what he hoped was a realistic chuckle. “Goodness, no. My folks were very old-fashioned. They didn’t have any of the electronic stuff that I understand thieves usually go for. Not even a TV set. And as I told you, they’d already been scammed out of most of their money. They certainly didn’t keep any in the house.”

  “But you said your dad was famous.”

  “Yes, so someone might have thought he was worth robbing. But, believe me, Sergeant, if the guy had got into the house, all he’d have found was a bunch of paintings my dad couldn’t sell.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because his work is out of fashion. In Canada, being famous and being rich can be two very different things. The irony is that now that my dad’s dead, his work is quite valuable again. But no ordinary thief could know that, and it wouldn’t do him any good anyway.”

  “I see what you mean. So—you’ve no idea why Eric Molinara’s car was found where it was?”

  “None at all.”

  “Fair enough. And you didn’t notice anything strange at any time? Like—say—odd characters hanging about?”

  “No. But you need to understand, I was hardly ever there. Even now that I’m clearing the place out for sale, I can only make it on weekends.”

  The sergeant nodded, opened a desk drawer and took out a photo, which he slid across the desk. “Ever see this guy?”

  Greg willed his hand to remain steady as he picked up the photograph. It was a mug shot of his intruder, a few years younger, posed stone-faced for the police camera, but undeniably the man with whom he’d had the fatal meeting. “This is Molinara?”

  “Yeah—minus his extra head ventilation. Well?”

  “Never laid eyes on him. Sorry.”

  “You sure?”

  Greg risked a dry smile. “Doesn’t look like someone you’d easily forget. Yes, I’m sure.”

  Tremblay shrugged. “That’s it, then. It was a long shot, but you have to follow every lead, even if they go nowhere. In my business, we like to say there’s no such thing as a coincidence, but that’s bullshit. God knows why Molinara got whacked, or who put him in the river, but it clearly had nothing to do with you. Hell, maybe the clown shot himself. That’s what the Mounties think, though God alone knows why he’d do it in a river. Probably we’ll never know. Anyway, thanks for coming in.”

  “That’s okay. Sorry I couldn’t be more help.” Trying to hide his relief, Greg stood up. “Is that all, Sergeant?”

  “Yeah,” Tremblay said. “Oh, there’s just one other thing I should tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  �
�Apart from the usual spiel about getting in touch if you think of anything else, it’s this: the guys Molinara ran with are not small time. He probably didn’t steal your ID but got it from whoever did. Frankly, turning over private houses wasn’t his style—not unless there was something very valuable involved—so I’d be surprised if your place was his real target.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s possible that something bigger than we suspected may be going on in your area. Mob guys could be involved, bikers, who knows. To me, Molinara’s death has the smell of a hit.”

  “Really!”

  “Yeah. So here’s what I’m saying. If you do get the feeling of something strange, out of the ordinary, up there in the Cowichan Valley, get in touch with me right away. Would you do that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. And don’t forget what I said—there could be some very dangerous guys, so whatever you do, don’t try to be a hero.”

  “Don’t worry,” Greg said fervently. “I’m an accountant. Heroes we definitely are not.”

  Tremblay’s laugh was warm. “Good thing. We need you guys to save us from the taxman, eh? Okay, Mr. Lothian, thanks again.”

  When he reached his car, Greg realized that the smile that had been on his face when he left Tremblay’s office was still fixed there. He got in, only then seeing the parking ticket on the windshield. It didn’t faze him. In fact, he didn’t even bother to retrieve it, but left it flapping in the breeze as he drove off. When, a couple of blocks later, it flew away, he was still smiling.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Montisarian Gallery on Granville Street in Vancouver was modest in its outside appearance: dark glass and burnished bronze façade, name in discreet gold script, beautifully carved but modestly proportioned entrance. Only the presence of a single, glowingly lit painting by the Group of Seven’s Arthur Lismer in the front window indicated to the initiated the exclusive nature of the works displayed and transactions conducted therein.