“That would be great. It means I can head back home to sort myself out and make my class in plenty of time. Thanks. By the way,” I was trying for casual conversation mode, “how did Guy die?”
“I can’t discuss anything at the moment, Randy, you know that.”
Steve walked me out to the front lobby, where two grimy-looking young men were looking sullenly at the desk sergeant. “I can get an officer to drop you off at home, if you like.”
“Don’t worry. There will be a bus along pretty quick, and I can transfer at Southgate to the 9. I’ll be home within the hour.” I hated the smell of police cars, and it did nothing for one’s reputation to be brought home in one.
Steve knew what I was thinking. “Unmarked car, no vomit. I promise.” He pulled out his cellphone and hit a contact number. “Carl? Are you near the station? … Yeah, I would appreciate it if you could give someone a ride home? … No, it’s Randy. She was in giving a statement…. Right, well, Keller will just have to deal with it…. Right, thanks.” He signed off and smiled.
“Carl is three blocks away in a green sedan, and would be happy to drop you off home. I don’t want you having to risk cancelling a class because of me.” He leaned forward and kissed the tip of my nose. “I have to get back to work. Take care of yourself, and say hi to Leo for me. Thanks for coming in.”
“Are you going to be questioning Denise?”
“Yes, she’s coming in at 11; she had a 9 a.m. class to get around.”
“Good, she’ll have more of the ins and outs of the hotel particulars.”
“Right.”
“Will we be able to continue with the reunion, you think?”
“I hope so. As far as I can tell, that will be our best pool of persons of interest.”
“Oh, I see. Well, unless there is someone else here whom Guy robbed. Let me see what I can find about his other publications for you.”
“Not a bad idea. Thanks.”
“I am sorry I forgot to tell you about the phone call. I just didn’t want to dredge up anything in front of Leo, and then it slipped my mind.”
Just then a dark green sedan pulled up, and a man waved to Steve and me. Steve waved back and I hurried out to meet my driver.
Carl was a man of few words, but pleasant enough. We mostly listened to the police scanner as he cruised down 51st Avenue and turned onto 111th Street. He took the curve to 109th Street with the arrogant ease of someone who normally drives with lights on the roof of his car, and I figured Officer Carl hadn’t been out of uniform long. I suggested he could let me off in front of Remedy, across the street, and he complied. I popped into the store to get a couple of Kashmiri chais to take home to Leo.
Leo met my offering with delight. “What a wonderful drink! Are you ready for teaching?”
I shook my head as I sipped the pistachio chai goodness. Leo continued, unabated.
“No? I’ll give you ten minutes to change into your lecture drag, and then you have to tell me everything. In fact, how would it be if I came with you to MacEwan? You only have the one class today, right? We could pop over to Audreys Books after, and go for lunch downtown.”
I agreed to his plan, shut the bedroom door in his face, and quickly changed into a pair of black trousers, a black-and-white chiffon top and a black jersey-knit blazer. I pulled my classier black walkers out of the closet, and shoved my running shoes back under the bed. A dash of mascara, silver and lava drop earrings, and a clip to hold back my hair, and I was ready.
“Woohoo, Professor Craig! How many chili peppers do you get on the rating sites?”
“None, I hope. I try not to go on those places. It makes me feel too self-conscious to think about people discussing me and the manner in which I teach. I barely feel comfortable turning my back on them to write on the whiteboard as it is.”
“Oh, I know. I feel like sneaking on and rating myself from time to time, with lines like ‘Professor Durochers’ sartorial splendour adds a cachet of piquancy to the study of the subject’ and see what they’d make of that.”
“I can see people booking into your classes in droves for that sort of promise.”
“Of course you can. But we can’t all teach the Jazz Age by living it, now can we?”
By this time, we were off the bus and walking cross-country through the downtown streets, in order to miss the traffic and construction connected to the new arena. Leo was properly in awe of the changes wrought in the last couple of decades, which made it fun to stroll along. He was especially delighted with MacEwan University.
“My goodness, it’s all grown up!”
“It’s rebranded itself at least four times since you were here last. At one point it tried to go all lowercase, but people were mispronouncing it and thinking ‘ma-ce-wan’ was a Cree word of some sort.”
I left Leo browsing in the bookstore, with a promise to meet me at the clock in the library at 11:15. That would give him enough time to stroll about and see the whole campus, and me enough time to deal with students after the lecture, pick up mail in the office and do my due diligence in watering the plants by my desk.
It was odd to be standing there discussing the concept of place in the Alice Walker story “Use.” Many of my lecture points were drawn directly from my own research into Margaret Ahlers’ sense of place in her work. Yet, in twenty years of off-and-on lecturing, this was probably the first time I’d made that connection. The past was hopping up and hitting me in the face all over the place these days. That is what you have to thank reunions for, connecting dots you’ve not aligned.
Does it make people happier to find tidy patterns in their lives? Is it more satisfying to know there is an underlying reason for why you veer left here, or choose that item on the menu there, or long to wear your hair in a pixie cut even though you know it would never suit your bone structure? It seems to me that life as a glorious jumble of a mystery is a far easier path to navigate.
A good discussion took place between students who were firmly aligned on either side of the argument in the story: whether to use the quilts that had been handed down through the family, or treat them as artifacts and hang them on the wall as art. One particularly discerning student noted that Walker was having her cake and eating it too by writing the story about the incident. “By writing about the quilts, even though she gives them to the daughter who will use them as blankets, she is preserving them as art.” I nodded and smiled. Being able to read passionately with a foot in criticism is a fine art, and to see it in first-year students always gives me hope.
I tidied things away, cleared the whiteboard and exchanged pleasantries with the Anthropology sessional coming in to take the room as I left. Soon, I was waiting behind the huge glass-and-polished-chrome clock for Leo to show up. He was three minutes behind time, but that’s what you get for meeting at a clock. We decided to head up the road we could see from the window, which was now being called Capitol Boulevard.
“Why don’t I treat you to lunch here at the Parlour? I love Italian food.”
“That sounds great. I have heard good things about it, but I’ve not been here.”
We pushed the door open and the yeasty smell of bread and the scent of garlic and oregano made both our stomachs grumble. Soon we were seated in a cozy table, with hot bread and cappuccinos, waiting for spaghetti dishes I couldn’t pronounce.
“So tell me everything about this morning. What have you heard and what do you know?”
“All I know is that Guy was killed and Steve wanted a statement from me because he knew I had just discovered that Guy had stolen some of my research for this latest book he wrote on Margaret Ahlers.”
“The nerve! So you are a suspect?”
“I would be what they refer to as a ‘person of interest,’ Leo. I am off the hook because it turns out that Steve was with us during the time they think Guy was killed.”
“So I am off the hook, too.”
“Yeah, I suppose you are. Though, come to think of it, I wonder where everyon
e else from our reunion class was during that time.”
Leo’s eyes danced. “This is going to be the yummiest reunion. It’s as if we all went to grad school with Jessica Fletcher!”
I laughed. “Yes, it got so I wondered why anyone ever asked her to a party. Someone always died when she’d showed up. You’d think they’d start putting two and two together.”
“You are my personal Nancy Drew, Randy. The only two police investigations I’ve ever been connected to have had you right in the middle of them.”
“I swear I am not in the middle of this one, Leo.” I laughed, a bit shrilly, and took another piece of bread, buttering it defiantly with more butter than I should.
But deep down, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t sitting right at the epicentre.
40.
By the time Leo and I got back to my place, Denise had been in to give her statement and had come straight over after the fact.
She and Leo spent half an hour hugging and catching up before we all sat down and dealt with the issue at hand, the death of Guy Larmour.
“Had he called you when he got in?” Denise asked. I shook my head.
“Nope. I checked my phone for ring-throughs, too, because sometimes I miss calls because I’ve turned the sound off. But there was nothing. Leo and I connected, we met Steve for dinner, and then Steve was called away to the hotel.”
“From what I understand, Guy was shot at close range in his hotel room. There was a pillow used as a silencer, but people in the room below heard something, and that was how he was discovered so soon.”
“Who did you hear that from?” Steve had been so close-mouthed with me, and here was Denise knowing everything about the case.
“Myrna Danyluk was being interviewed after me. She came in on the same flight from Toronto as Guy, and they’d been talking in the airport. She was going to offer to share a cab with him, but he disappeared, so she took the shuttle to the hotel. Apparently, she spotted him in the lobby of the hotel later, checking in and talking to someone. She couldn’t really say if they were together or had just connected.”
“How many people from our group are here already?”
“Well, if you count those of us who still live here, there should have been fifteen already on the ground yesterday, with another twenty-five or so who came in this morning. A few stragglers will be here later on this evening, in time for the events on Friday, and the rest will be here by Saturday morning.”
“And Steve is interviewing all fifteen?”
Denise shrugged. “I’m not sure. Leo, have you been called in?”
Leo shook his head sorrowfully. Denise laughed. “You wouldn’t like it so much if you were. There is something so unnerving about being questioned by the police, even when you are squeaky-clean innocent.” She turned her attention back to me and her earlier train of thought. “I know he is interviewing everyone at the hotel. He probably isn’t going to be interviewing the list of professors emeriti who live here still and are invited. You and I were in the mix because of the organizing, I think.”
“And the fact that Guy plagiarized my thesis.”
Denise nodded. “Right. Although as motives go, that is rather mild, right? I mean, who kills to avenge being plagiarized?”
Leo chimed in. “Oh, but to the police, we’re probably all rife with petty jealousies and harbouring vast grudges against each other. Those of us with tenure will be targets of malignancy to those who haven’t landed a fulltime job. Sorry, Randy, present company excepted.” He went on, gesturing grandly. “Those of us who have books out will be the envy of those who are under the gun to publish or perish. It stands to reason that anyone who has stolen intellectual property amid a crowd of intellectuals would be a likely target for all sorts of people.”
“Well, then, thank goodness you are my alibi, Leo.”
“Mutual, I’m sure, darling.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere, though,” Denise said. “We have a party tomorrow night, where walking among us there may be a murderer. How’s that for a reunion highlight?”
“Oh sweetheart, it just doesn’t get better than that!” Leo gushed. Startled, Denise laughed, and we joined in, the stress of the day fuelling our mild hysteria.
“I think this calls for a pot of tea.” Leo got up to fuss with the kettle and tea pot, leaving Denise and me to go over the plans to decorate and haul the drinks up from her car around 3 p.m. the next day. The alumni and professors were supposed to arrive around 5:30, but we were pretty sure some would be early, since the last tour of the campus ended at 5.
“Dr. Spanner has called me twice about the event just this last week, and wanted to know who all was coming for the reunion, and what the plans were,” Denise said, sounding rather awed. The former chair of the department had been retired for several years, but she cast a long shadow still, especially when it came to anything about the writer-in-residence program which had been her baby till Denise took it over.
“So I take it she is turning up for the mixer?”
“I guess so! Wacky, eh? I heard she had declined to attend some fancy centennial celebration of the department a few years back, but she’s decided to turn up to our little party.”
“Maybe one of her pets from her supervising days is one of the folks coming back?”
Denise nodded. “That’s probably it. Anyhow, I am considering it a feather in our caps that so many of the professors emeriti have accepted the invitation. We must have been a good crop, all in all. Now I just hope it goes smoothly.”
“I’ll come over right from class,” I offered, but Denise reminded me I was supposed to be dressed up for the event. “Okay, I’ll stop here, get into my glad rags and get there by 3. I can wait out by the loading dock doors for you. Leo?” I called into the kitchen. “When were you planning on getting to the Humanities building tomorrow?”
Leo appeared with mugs dangling from his fingers and my teapot in his other hand. “I can be there any time you want. I have the football game this evening, a tour and a lecture tomorrow morning, and was thinking of hanging around the tent in the quad after that to see if I recognized anyone else. I can be wherever you want me whenever.”
“And you don’t have to come back here to change?”
“No, I was thinking of dressing a bit more splashy tomorrow and just going with it all day. By the way, has Dr. Leahy confirmed he was attending? He was my advisor.”
Denise pulled her list back out of her briefcase.
“We have Babchuk, Cormoran, Daniel, Davies, Leahy, Markham, McGivern, Samson, Spanner, Tretheran, Wilkie, and Zyp. So yes, your advisor will be there. Does he know you will be?”
“No, we only exchange Christmas cards anymore, but I don’t suppose seeing me at a reunion will give him a heart attack.”
Denise slid the list back into her bag and dusted off her hands, as if she’d been doing heavy manual labour. “So, the three of us at the loading dock doors tomorrow at 3, and we should manage to get everything up there in two loads.” Denise looked pleased. I figured she had been more worried than she’d let on about Guy’s death throwing a wrench into all the plans that were underway for the reunion.
Though I still couldn’t believe it, Leo trotted off to catch the LRT to snag a good seat for the football game. He was armed with directions to the Saville Field, which was adjacent to the South Campus LRT stop. In his days on campus, that would have been the middle of the University Farm, where a herd of placid Holsteins used to graze. He promised to retrace his steps after the game and be home around 10.
“If not, I will call, don’t worry.” He waved happily and marched off up the road toward campus. I went back to the apartment, where Denise was pouring herself another cup of tea and once again sorting through her lists.
She smiled with a tired wrinkle on either side of her mouth. “If they don’t call us back to the police station umpteen times, I think everything will go off without a hitch.” The stress of the term’s beginning coupled with pulling this
off was making her look weary, the look we wore at the end of term, not the beginning. Once more, I questioned the wisdom of organizing this reunion.
Denise waved it off.
“This is just fretting about the police. What if it turns out Steve can’t be part of things because he has to work the case?”
That had occurred to me. It would be awful to be waving around a sparkly left hand without a fiancé to point to. People might think I was making it all up. Denise wasn’t through with her prognostications, though.
“Or they may decide to pin it all on you, even though you seem to have an airtight alibi. Maybe they will decide you and Leo did it together, and are alibi-ing each other.”
I looked at her in horror. The last thing I wanted was to get dragged into another murder case. It was bad enough dealing with the whole secret of Margaret Ahlers, without having to fight for one’s own freedom. I wondered if it would be a good idea to spill the beans about Ahlers to Denise, right then and there, but I took another look at her pile of lists and decided to spare her, at least for now.
Once Alumni Weekend was over, I would sit her down and tell her everything. When she had less on her plate—that would be the best time. After all, I’d kept it a secret twenty years; four more days wouldn’t matter.
41.
Steve came over an hour or so after Denise had left. I had gone through the opening paragraphs I’d taken in from my students, bleeding green ink all over them in the hopes of stirring them into stronger arguments and stances. “Death to the wishy-washy first-year essay” was my motto this year. My satchel was sitting near the door, ready for my lectures on Monday. I had arranged for my Friday classes to see a movie of “The Lamp at Noon,” a Sinclair Ross short story we were tackling. I could use the downtime while the film was playing to gather my thoughts and prepare myself for the onslaught of humanity.
Put me in front of a class, or an amphitheatre, and if I know my topic, I will speak with pleasure and little in the way of nerves. Set me, however, in a dinner party situation where I know very few people and I will remain quiet and shy till I’ve either had a good conversation with one new person or two glasses of wine.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 23