After the Horses

by Jeffrey Round

  “Nice flowers,” Dan said, hoping to put her at ease.

  “Yes, thank you. From son.”

  She was far warier this time. Her dark eyes followed him, reading every gesture. Words could be made to say anything, all stories were half fiction, anyway, but a person’s movements did not lie.

  “You said the house was very clean when you arrived.”

  “Yes,” she said hesitantly.

  “As though no one had been there for some time?”

  “Yes.”

  Because in all likelihood no one had been there, Dan thought. No one living, at any rate. He saw the dawning, the realization in her eyes. She’d seen something.

  “He is —”

  “He is what, Irma?”

  “He is still there!”

  Curiosity turned to fear. Her eyes darted around the room, like a trapped bird looking for a window.

  “Who?”

  A hand rose to cover her mouth.

  “Jesus!”

  She uttered the name with quiet vehemence. For a second, Dan thought she was cursing. Or worse, losing her mind. She’d be hopeless as a witness. Who did you see? the prosecutor would ask. Jesus! she would respond, staring out at the court like a madwoman. He needed to bring her back to sanity for a few more minutes, until he’d finished questioning her.

  “Mr. Malevski doesn’t take away,” she said.

  “Take away what?”

  “Every week I leave pamphlet, every week he put in garbage. Wicked man. But this is same pamphlet I leave on table one week before. Why he doesn’t throw out?”

  Dan shook his head. “You’re saying you left a religious pamphlet and Mr. Malevski didn’t move it or pick it up from the previous week?”

  She nodded fearfully. “Yes!”

  “So when you got there, the house was the same as it had been when you cleaned the week before?”

  “Yes! Except kitchen. I wipe …”

  Someone had to clean up that mess.

  “You wiped up the blood?” he asked.

  A sob escaped her. She nodded.

  “Tell me what you found when you arrived.”

  She sat silently for a moment, collecting herself. “House is very clean, except kitchen. But greenhouse is not normal.”

  Dan turned to her. “The greenhouse?”

  “Flowers are dead. I wacuum. So many on floor.”

  Dan nodded, thinking of Hank’s peace offering. “They all died, didn’t they?”

  “Maybe one, two is okay …”

  Dan thought of what he’d learned on the Internet. There was such an amazing variety of orchids. They were like immigrants, of every race and colour, brought from shore to shore by travellers, traders, and buyers. Ziggy had told him how much some of them cost. Dan hadn’t believed it until he read it online. One particular plant had sold for two hundred thousand dollars. Most of them lost their flowers when exposed to cold, but others — a handful — actually thrived, one or two varieties out of thousands. Yuri had owned several such orchids.

  “Was it cold when you arrived? In the house?”

  He already knew the answer.

  “Yes, is freezing. Like refrigerator.”

  Sensitive to temperature, humidity and light, the orchids had suffered with the lowering of the thermostat. But not all.

  He thought back: Lionel left for Mexico on the third, but Charles had stayed behind, joining him two days later. What had Lionel said of Charles? That he was afraid of him. That Charles had experience making money disappear into foreign accounts. He thought of the sleeping pills Charles insisted Lionel take to relax. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place: Dan suddenly knew who Santiago’s other boyfriend was. Charles had known, too.

  Irma waited until Dan asked everything he needed to know. There wasn’t much time left. On his way out, a photograph caught his eye. Irma, looking much the same as she did right now, only smiling and with a handsome young man at her side, his arm thrown over her shoulder.

  “Son?” he asked.

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “A good-looking boy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Family is important,” Dan said.

  She smiled.

  Thirty

  The Unravelling

  Dan knew he had to move fast. At least one life was at stake. There was no sense going back to the Lockie House. The code had been changed and he thought he knew by whom. It wasn’t necessary to break in to confirm anything. Even if his theory proved correct, as he was sure it would, there were limits to what the police would accept. He’d simply have to prove to Inspector Johnston what he knew to be true.

  He pulled out his phone as he turned his car around. Johnston was with him now. She agreed he had a point. A big point. And he was closer to Radio City than she was.

  “I can get there first,” he said.

  “Be careful!”

  Charles and Lionel were just crossing the lobby, bags in hand, when Dan arrived.

  Fury rose on Charles’s face. “I told you to leave us alone!”

  “Please, Charles!” Lionel grabbed his husband’s arm to quiet him. “Dan? What’s this all about?”

  Dan gave him a rueful look. “It’s about …” He shook his head. “It’s about orchids.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s about orchids.”

  “What are you talking about?” Charles demanded.

  Lionel quieted him again and said softly, “I don’t understand.”

  Dan took a breath. “To understand, you have to work backwards. A man is killed in his own home and the door is double locked. Makes you wonder why. Why go to the bother of locking a door when you know someone’s going to find the body eventually? The easy answer is, to give the killer plenty of getaway time. Sure, why not? It’s the likeliest reason, but in this case it wasn’t the real reason because nobody was trying to get away. Then I thought maybe it was a sign of veneration. Of love, even. It fit Ziggy’s story. Maybe Santiago’s, too. He and Yuri had been together long enough. In any case, either of them could have done it. It might have been an accident and the killer later sealed up the place like some kind of shrine. But that wasn’t it, either.”

  “How do you know?” Charles asked.

  “Because this murder was meticulously planned. The only thing that didn’t fit was the timing.”

  Dan saw the first cruiser pull up outside the building. Inspector Johnston got out and drew her gun. A second cruiser nosed into place behind it. Two more officers leapt out and followed.

  Dan kept talking. “So I asked myself, what if the death didn’t occur when it was supposed to? What if it occurred earlier than we were led to believe? Once I asked that question, things started falling into place. Except in that case, why would someone break into the dead man’s house to use his cell phone?”

  Lionel shook his head, a crease puckering his brow.

  “You would only do it if you wanted to make it look like the cell’s owner was still alive. Someone used Yuri Malevski’s phone to make a call to Mexico and to text an entry code to a house cleaner.”

  Lionel shook his head. “You mean it wasn’t Yuri who called me?”

  Dan shook his head. “No. It was someone else.”

  “But who?” Lionel asked. “It was Yuri’s voice on the message.”

  “Or a recording of Yuri’s voice.”

  “Oh.”

  Dan nodded. “Who else was around to use Yuri’s phone? You and Charles were in Mexico. The cleaning lady was just a cleaning lady who’d been set up to further the plot along, so I didn’t think it was her. A transsexual named Jan used to frequent the house, but no one had seen Jan for some time, so once again it was unlikely. There was even a weird neighbour with a grudge, plus a supposedly crooked cop thrown into the scenario to confuse things. And, unbeknownst to nearly everybody, a strange boy named Ziggy lived under the eaves in Yuri’s house. He confessed to me he’d extracted the entry code texted to the cleaning lady from Yuri’
s cellphone. A very sweet lady in possession of some extremely valuable orchids, by the way.”

  Dan saw Inspector Johnston standing at the back of the lobby listening to him.

  “At first I wasn’t so sure about Ziggy, but I quickly realized he was more of a neurotic than a psychotic. Killer? Nah, I don’t think so. So who else was there?”

  Dan let the question hang in the air. He turned his gaze on Charles. “You left late to meet Lionel in Mexico, didn’t you?”

  Charles suddenly looked bewildered, dropping the lawyer’s bravado.

  “I had a case to close. I made arrangements to meet with Lionel two days later. It was a Saturday. The airline will have a record. I told you this already.”

  “True,” Dan said. “I don’t doubt what you say. But somebody made a call and sent a text. Then the phone disappeared. I don’t think that was part of the plan. It showed up this morning in a pawn shop with the fingerprints of the suicide victim who jumped from Overlea Bridge, by the way. Though it’s beginning to look as though that wasn’t really a suicide after all,” Dan said.

  “I knew it wasn’t,” Lionel said, turning to Charles. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Dan continued. “But the question remains: why make a call and send a text? Why? To frame someone for the murder and cover up for the missing money that had been siphoned from the bar. Someone wanted to make it look as though Yuri was still alive, when in fact he’d been dead since the third of February.” He turned his gaze on Charles. “Probably not long after your argument with him.”

  “I didn’t kill Yuri!”

  Dan watched him. “I believe you now, but for a while I thought you had. Still, there was that call and the text from Yuri’s phone. They had to have been made by someone else, since Yuri was no longer alive.”

  Everyone stared at Dan.

  “But how do you know?” Charles ventured.

  “The orchids.”

  “What orchids? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, I couldn’t figure it out. Here’s a man who is supposedly crazy about orchids with a greenhouse full of dead plants. He’d paid a lot of money for those plants. They should have had flowers on them. They should have been alive. But most of them were already dead when a cleaner arrived and vacuumed the petals off the floor. That was a Thursday. Yuri’s body was discovered two days later, on Saturday. The coroner’s report said he’d been dead for two or three days at most, but in fact he was dead well before that. The house was nearly freezing for a week. The thermostat had been turned down to keep the body from decomposing. That’s why the doors were double-locked, to keep anyone with the code from entering and turning it back up until a few days before your return from Mexico by a cleaning woman who always cleaned house on Thursday.”

  “Then who made the call and sent the text?” Lionel asked.

  “Your lover.”

  Lionel looked to his husband. “But Charles was with me by the time I got the call. Besides, he changed his plans for business reasons at the last minute. His boss insisted. It wasn’t anything he planned.”

  “Yes,” Charles broke in. “I changed them for business.”

  “Nevertheless, Charles came later. He met you two days into your vacation in Mexico, as you both pointed out. It would have given him ample time to do the deed before turning down the thermostat and heading off to Mexico. As I say, he might have done it, but Charles didn’t have the code to Yuri’s house. In fact, he told me himself he never had the code.”

  “Then how could he have made the call or sent a text?” Lionel asked. “You just said —!”

  “I didn’t say your husband made them. I said your lover did. The same person I saw standing on the stoop when I arrived at Malevski’s house this morning. I thought I saw a delivery man trying to get into the house with an old code, but in fact he had just changed it after removing some very expensive orchids from the greenhouse. It was Santiago.”

  Lionel shook his head. “But Santiago’s dead!”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Then who —?”

  “A boy who had already threatened suicide. Ziggy was pale as a ghost, even under all that make-up. Didn’t you notice the discrepancies on the body you identified as Santiago’s?”

  Lionel looked bewildered. “His face was damaged badly. I … I told you, he didn’t look right. He was all swollen up!”

  “Yes, and Ziggy told me Charles said he looked like Santiago’s younger brother. True, they looked a bit alike, but they were essentially different in obvious ways. Santiago has olive skin where Ziggy’s is pale. Santiago was hairy, while Ziggy was smooth.” Dan held Lionel’s gaze. “Ziggy told me he got the new code from Yuri’s phone. He would have had to pick it up to read it. Then later he sold it to a pawn shop, along with a few other items. That was a problem. They weren’t Santiago’s fingerprints on the phone, they were Ziggy’s. As his lover, you would have known you were identifying the wrong corpse. I saw Santiago’s picture about an hour ago, in fact, so I have a pretty good idea where the police will find him. He seems to have found an adopted mother. She keeps his picture beside the orchids he gave her for safekeeping.”

  Charles set his suitcase on the floor and looked at Lionel. The anger had been replaced by fear and uncertainty.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Lionel looked away. “Why were you running around with that stupid little boy in girl’s clothes? And all those other scum you picked up, thinking I would never find out? You made me sign that prenuptial agreement, virtually locking me into marriage. Is that your idea of fair — tying me down and making me risk all my savings if I left you?”

  “That wasn’t the purpose …” Charles started to say. “I was protecting us. I was just doing what lawyers do.”

  “Protecting us?” Lionel spat at him. “And I was just doing what accountants do, balancing the accounts and tidying up your dirty little affairs all over the city. Santiago is twice the man you are.”

  From the corner of his eye, Dan saw Inspector Lydia Johnston move quietly toward Lionel.

  Epilogue

  Home

  Dan was just edging up to the curb when his phone rang.

  “Hey, Dad!”

  Ked’s voice nearly leapt out of the phone at him.

  “Hey! What’s up?”

  “I won!” He waited a beat. “The science contest! I won with my sling psychrometer!”

  Dan laughed. “That’s amazing!”

  “Old world technology,” Ked said. “It’s still the best.”

  “So are you going to give up your cellphone and revert to tin cans tied together with strings?”

  “That’s too old world for me. It probably even predates you.” There was a pause. “This will really help with scholarships.”

  “Great! I guess that’ll make it easier for you to move away from Toronto when you go to school.”

  “I guess.” There was a longer pause. “You really want me to move away?”

  “I want you to see what the rest of the world looks like. You have to leave home to do that. But it doesn’t mean you can’t come home again whenever you want.” He paused to consider. “How does Elizabeth feel about this?”

  “She thinks I should go, too.”

  “Then there’s your answer.” Dan put the car in park and turned off the ignition. “I’m truly thrilled for your win, but I just arrived somewhere and I need to do something. Can we talk about this later? Maybe over a little celebration?”

  “Sure.” Hesitance crept into Ked’s voice. “I’m busy tonight, though. Elizabeth and I are going out. Sorry.”

  “No worries. We’ll arrange something.”

  Dan got out of his car and stood looking up at the house that had relinquished nearly all of its secrets to him. For a moment, he wondered about the future owners, then decided he’d let them discover the secret panel on their own.

  He punched in the four numbers of the entry code, gratified to see red turn to green once again. Still welcome, afte
r all. He was beginning to feel like part of the family. Maybe that was Yuri Malevski’s influence, creating a place where everyone could be at home.

  Most of the plants had been removed from the greenhouse. The few that remained were dead or too large to be moved easily. He hoped whoever took them knew their worth. Or maybe not. Why not just let them be plants, with no special price tag attached to them? Let them be appreciated for their beauty, he thought.

  Dan bounded up the stairs to the third floor and pushed on the panel. It swung open. He looked around the tiny space. The diary was gone — police evidence. The fingerprints on it had confirmed what he’d already known, that it was Ziggy who was pushed from Overlea Bridge.

  He nudged the curtains aside and looked out on Yuri Malevski’s lush garden. Who knew, but the fruit trees and flowers might have dated to the time of its construction, back when it was just becoming known as the Lockie House. It was a pleasant thought, all that stretching back into antiquity.

  It was a cozy hiding spot. Dan could have benefited from something like this as a boy escaping his father’s drunken aggression. He lay on the futon and stared at the beams overhead. Three words were scribbled in chalk on the wood: Ziggy was here! He felt a lump in his throat.

  Just then, his cell buzzed. It was Donny.

  “Are you still angry with me?” Donny asked.

  “Angry with you? Why?”

  “For introducing you to them and getting you mixed up in that sordid tale.”

  “Not your fault. You couldn’t have known. And no, I’m not angry with you.”

  “Thank god. Prabin told me I was imagining it, but I’ve had nothing but sleepless nights ever since.”

  “In fact,” Dan said, “if I’d listened to you in the first place, I might have been further ahead. You made the whole thing sound like a bad TV drama, and in fact that was what it was. I need to learn to think in clichés if I’m going to be more successful. It really was all about the protection money, but not because of the police. It was Lionel and his Cuban boyfriend scheming to steal from Yuri and have a life of luxury.”