Cut to the Quick

by Joan Boswell

  Manon, Etienne and Tomas nodded.

  “Two spoonfuls of sugar for everyone,” Hollis directed.

  Several moments of silence broken by clinking spoons and Etienne’s muffled sobs

  Manon encircled Etienne with an arm as they drank their tea. Clearly her priority was her son.

  Hollis wasn’t family. Should she leave? At least make herself scarce while they digested the news. She shifted and rose.

  “Hollis, don’t go. We need you. You’ve experienced this. What happens now?” Manon said.

  Hollis sank back. “Police officers will come and talk to everyone. They’ll go through Ivan’s things searching for evidence.”

  Tomas lifted his head. “Dad, if the police haven’t told Mom, you have to do it. I could, but it should be you. And you should go now, right now, before there’s anything on radio or TV .”

  Curt, who’d refilled his glass, took a long swallow. “You’re right. I told the officers at Sunnybrook that I would.” He grimaced. “False courage. Lena will blame me.” His lips set in a straight line. “Maybe she should blame ambulance dispatch.

  Why in God’s name did they take him to Sunnybrook? Downtown hospitals have trauma units. Anyway, no matter what the police say, Lena will blame me.”

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang. Nadine answered and brought two police officers into the kitchen.

  Impossible.

  Hollis recognized Rhona Simpson, the Ottawa detective who’d been in charge of her husband’s murder case. Rhona looked equally surprised.

  Hollis recovered first. “Detective Simpson, you’ve transferred to Toronto?”

  Rhona introduced Zee Zee and added, “I investigated Ms Grant’s husband’s murder a year ago. It was my last Ottawa case.” She nodded to Hollis. “The world grows smaller and smaller.” She directed her next remark to Curt. “You’re Ivan Hartman’s father.”

  “I am.” Curt introduced everyone else.

  “Sorry to intrude on your grief. If you can manage it, we’d like to ask questions. Time is important,” Zee Zee said.

  “Perhaps we should move to the living room,” Manon said. Propelling Etienne ahead of her, she led the way.

  Zee Zee took notes while Rhona conducted the interview. “I understand your son didn’t live with you all the time? Any idea where he was going?” Rhona asked Curt.

  “None. Not to work. He works...” Curt’s eyes widened. He swallowed as if a large foreign object were stuck in his throat, “Worked, at the Buy Right Superstore on St. Clair. If he was going south on Parliament Street, he wasn’t going there.”

  “He also worked for Catering Plus. I have their phone number but not their address,” Manon said.

  “Did he have alcohol or drug problems?”

  “Of course not,” Curt said. His gaze and Manon’s flicked to Tomas and away again.

  Zee Zee made a note.

  “Was he worried about anything? Depressed?”

  “Are you implying he cut his own brakes?” Curt bristled.

  Rhona held up her hand. “I’m not implying anything— these are routine questions. Did he belong to a gang?”

  “Not Hell’s Angels, if that’s what you’re suggesting. No, not a member of any gang.”

  “Any trouble with the police?”

  Curt shook his head.

  “We found a current student card from George Brown College in his wallet. Which campus was he at, and what was he studying?”

  “George Brown,” Curt repeated. He frowned. “I didn’t know he was studying anything.” He addressed Manon and Tomas. “Do you know?”

  They shook their heads.

  “I do,” Etienne said.

  He had everyone’s attention.

  Etienne managed a smile, although his eyes were swollen and his nose was running. “He was taking cooking. He was going to be a chef. He had a big white hat and everything.”

  “We might have guessed,” Manon said. “But why didn’t he tell us? Why is Etienne the only one who knows this?”

  Rhona addressed Etienne. “George Brown has several locations around Toronto. Do you know which campus he was at?”

  Etienne thought for a moment. “You know the big castle on the hill? He told me that every time he passed it, he thought of me. He promised to take me there in my summer holidays.”

  “Good work. The Casa Loma campus.” She turned to Curt. “Was Ivan’s bike the same as the other two parked outside?”

  Curt nodded. “Different years.”

  “Please don’t use either bike. We’ll test them and the pad for prints. We’ll have more questions later. What about Ivan’s room—we’d like to check it out.”

  “My room is there too. We share the third floor,” Tomas said.

  “Please come up and remove whatever you’ll need for a few days. We’ll secure the site until we finish our investigation. After we’ve spoken to Ivan’s mother, we’ll be back to make a thorough room check and ask follow-up questions,” Rhona said.

  “I told the police at the hospital I’d tell Ivan’s mother, my ex-wife, Lena Kalma. If you’re finished with the questions, I’ll go and get it over with,” Curt said.

  “We’ll give you time before we call on her. Please tell her not to touch anything in his room until we’ve checked it out.”

  Curt headed towards the front door. “Papa, they said that you aren’t supposed to ride your bike. Even if you could, I don’t think you should,” Etienne said.

  “What?”

  “You have a bike like Ivan’s—I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “My God, out of the mouths of babes.” Manon’s hand rose and briefly covered her lips. Her eyes wide she said, “It’s true. Maybe whoever did this terrible thing didn’t intend to kill Ivan. Maybe it’s a serial killer, and he plans to kill all of us.” She looked like she’d like to ratchet each word back into her mouth.

  Rhona sighed. Too much television. Serial killers were rare, although to watch crime shows you’d think one lurked around every corner. The killer might have got the wrong victim, but there’d be time to talk about that later. “Serial killings are rare. This certainly doesn’t look like one. I think you can put the thought right out of your mind,” Rhona said reassuringly.

  * * *

  “They didn’t know much about him, did they?” Zee Zee said while Rhona navigated across the city. “I wonder if it’s because they’re Anglo-Saxon?”

  “Would your family be different?”

  “I’ll say. Family and clan are important for us. Are they too important? A good question. Family is one reason Somalia is such a mess. Everyone belongs to a clan and defines himself that way.” She sighed. “Clans are forever at war with each other. It’s feudal, never ending and may never improve. Are strong family attachments bad? Is Anglo Saxon reserve and refusal to get involved in other’s lives a good thing? Are there definitive answers? I don’t think so.”

  “Did feuding force you to leave?”

  A long silence. Rhona glanced at Zee Zee.

  “Sorry. It’s a painful subject. My father was an Ethiopian Christian physician. The rebels killed him and my brothers because of their beliefs. My mother and I escaped and lived in a refugee camp for two years. Finally one of my mother’s brothers sponsored us to emigrate here. We do have tightly knit families. For example, our single women, no matter how old they are, do not live alone. I’m thirty-five, but because I’m unmarried, I live with my mother. I can tell you she knows a thousand times more about me and everyone in our extended family than Ivan Hartman’s family knew about him. There’s no way I’d be studying at George Brown without her knowing all about it. And my mother isn’t particularly inquisitive—it’s the way we are.”

  “I’m sorry to hear what happened to you. It’s hard to imagine.” She meant the murder, not the extended family. Rhona’s own clan played a large part in her life.

  “Even harder to live,” Zee Zee said. “Maybe Ivan’s mother will have more to tell us?”

&n
bsp; She clearly wanted to change the subject. And who wouldn’t? They agreed it was Zee Zee’s turn to interview.

  Rhona drove south then west to the far reaches of Queen Street. In her first months in the city, she’d read dozens of books about Toronto and memorized the gazetteer. She sometimes amused herself by thinking about passing the cabbies’ test if police work didn’t pan out. She not only knew streets but also had familiarized herself with the characteristics of neighbourhoods.

  Lena lived in South Parkdale, a run-down district with few trendy bars and boutiques. Investors and home buyers considered it an iffy neighbourhood for two reasons. First, because of its proximity to 999 Queen Street, the mental hospital. Secondly, because the conversion of many large homes into warehousing rooming houses for the mentally ill and downand-out had populated the streets with frightening people.

  Lena Kalma lived in a former store on Queen Street. Two display windows flanked a glass-fronted door from which she’d removed all hardware. She’d painted almost everything vermillion, wood and glass alike. The exception—each window and the door had a shoebox-sized unpainted glass rectangle located at the average person’s eye level. Underneath she’d stencilled the word “LOOK” in white.

  Naturally, they did.

  She’d affixed boxes to the other side of the unpainted glass rectangles. A colour diorama filled the first one. Somehow, inside the small space, she’d created an illusion of great depth. Far in the distance, an ambiguous tiny figure, arms uplifted, screamed in terror or ecstasy. The second box contained a foreground unisex face pressing against the glass. A viewer could read its enigmatic expression as horror or jubilation. The third box’s black interior held the white floating word “oh”. Nothing made immediate sense but challenged a viewer to provide her own explanation.

  Rhona stepped back. “As if this neighbourhood’s residents don’t have enough problems. Now they have peepholes in blood red windows to make them question their sanity.” She grinned at her partner. “If I had to, I’d make a wild guess that an artist lives here.”

  Since the centre door lacked a doorknob, they moved to the bright red door next to the storefront. Zee Zee lifted her hand to press the bell. Before she touched it, the door opened a crack and a tall woman peered at them.

  “I’ve been waiting,” she said, hovering behind the partially open door. She wore a white coverall and head scarf. A surgical mask dangled on her chest. Her red-rimmed eyes stared at them balefully.

  After Rhona and Zee Zee identified themselves, Zee Zee said, “You’re Lena Kalma?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, widening the opening and allowing them inside. Stairs climbed from the small hall.

  “Follow me,” she ordered and passed through a doorway into the storefront’s front room. Here the opaque paint on windows and door allowed no natural light inside. Overhead fluorescents illuminated chaos. Tiers of stacked containers teetered and threatened to topple. Rusty buckets, feather boas, old clothes from a dozen ethnic groups—an eclectic mix—swung from ceiling racks. A stew of smells defied cataloguing—old leather, dust, sweat and stale air. Lena tacked through the room and wove down the hall through the labyrinth of cartons. One or two stacks climbed upward and scraped the ceiling.

  “Wouldn’t the fire department be unhappy?” Zee Zee murmured. “Isn’t this house a four alarm waiting to happen?”

  Low wattage wall sconces lit their way. Finally they emerged into a large room. Dazzling late afternoon June light flooded through floor to ceiling windows. Although not as crowded as the front room or the hall, a host of unrelated objects hung on the white walls. Magenta, ochre, indigo, fluorescent orange—Rhona’s eyes flitted from object to object. Possibly the room contained something made from every natural and unnatural colour. It pulsed with energy. Hundreds of photos littered three tables ranged along one side. Lena indicated that they should sit on one of the four straight chairs lined up as if they’d entered a doctor’s waiting room.

  Rhona chose the one burdened with the smallest pile. She carefully lifted off a tricorn hat, three art books and a Mexican serape before she lowered herself to the lime green and orangestriped chair. Zee Zee gingerly removed a nest of fifties style Pyrex mixing bowls topped with an actual bird’s nest before she sat down. While the detectives cleared space for themselves, Lena tipped miscellaneous items from a short antique wooden bench and pulled it over to face them. Before she sat down, she pointed to the tables.

  “I can’t stand doing nothing. I feel so helpless.” She frowned, “I’d like to run out and kill Ivan’s murderer.” She sniffed. “Don’t worry. Since I can’t do that, I’m going back through all my photos and making a photo collage of Ivan’s life.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss and apologize for intruding on your grief, but we need to talk to you about Ivan. Tell us about his life, his friends, his enemies, that kind of thing,” Zee Zee said.

  “Enemies.” Lena thrust her head forward. “He didn’t have enemies. You have to piss people off to have enemies. Ivan specialized in niceness. He should have told his father to go to hell. Should have lived with me. I loved him. His father didn’t.” Her voice shook, and her lower lip trembled.

  “He did live here sometimes, didn’t he?”

  Lena bit her lip to regain control. “Not recently.”

  “When did he leave?”

  Lena straightened and contemplated them like a predator considering tasty prey. “If you can imagine, he accused me, his mother, of prying. He said he wasn’t going to live where his personal life wasn’t private.” She crossed her arms on her chest. “Private!” Her voice skidded up the scale to high C. “I am his mother.”

  “Did he move out because of something specific?”

  “That’s none of your business. It has nothing to do with his murder.”

  “We decide information’s relevancy. Please tell us.”

  “He said I read his emails.”

  “Did you?”

  Her eyes didn’t quite meet theirs. “I might have happened to touch some key or other and seen it.”

  Zee Zee said nothing. The silence stretched and expanded.

  Finally, Lena said, “I wanted to find out why he spent so much time in his room.”

  “And, what did you discover?”

  “He didn’t save many emails,” she said defensively.

  Rhona didn’t buy this. More likely Lena had erased ones she didn’t like, and that’s how Ivan had found out what she was doing.

  “We’ll have a look at his computer.”

  “Good luck. He took it. Maybe it’s at his father’s house.”

  They hadn’t seen a computer or a laptop in his apartment. They’d have to follow up on this lead. “Show us his room, but first tell us about his problems with his father?”

  “His father was the be-all and end-all for Ivan. He craved Curt’s love and approval.”

  “Did he tell you he was going to George Brown College?”

  “I knew nothing, and I was his mother. He told me nothing, shut me out of his life. I only wanted the best for him. Why do sons do that? Tomas doesn’t tell me anything either.” Lena jerked to her feet, sending the bench crashing. She didn’t pick it up. Instead, she motioned to them to follow her. “Come upstairs. I guarantee that his room will tell you nothing.” She pointed at them. “Nothing. I keep using that word. My son was a mystery—a big zero—a nothing.” She strode from the room.

  They followed her upstairs and along a hall to the only door that sported an unlocked padlock dangling from a latch.

  “Is the lock new?”

  “He installed it a week before he left.” She straightened. “Of course I had to intervene. In case of fire, I insisted on having a key.”

  Which rather defeated the purpose. No wonder he’d moved out.

  The room resembled a monk’s cell.

  “Please don’t come in here or allow anyone else to do so until we’ve checked everything out.” Rhona said.

  “Help yourself. If
you find anything that tells you about my son, it will surprise me.” Lena nodded dismissively. “Poor Ivan. Whoever killed him deserves to suffer pain like he did. Can you imagine his panic, his horror when he realized his brakes wouldn’t work? We don’t execute killers any more— maybe we should. Or maybe we should mete out justice ourselves.” Her eyes narrowed. “I’m capable of doing that. I would enjoy watching his killer suffer like my poor boy did. You’d better find him before I do, or don’t hold me responsible for what I’ll do.”

  Four

  After they’d spoken to Lena, Rhona and Zee Zee returned to the Hartmans’ to interview each family member individually. They began with Curt. He escorted them to the family room, casually furnished in yellow and cream. A bowl of red apples on the glass and brass coffee table added a splash of colour. Inside, he positioned himself beside a wing chair upholstered in mustard yellow corduroy and waved them to the sofa.

  Rhona knew better. She was too short. The sofa would suck her down like quicksand or leave her perched uncertainly, unable to lean back because of the seat’s depth. A leather desk chair on casters provided an alternative. She rolled it to face Curt. Zee Zee, close to six feet tall and in no danger of being mired in the sofa, relaxed against the cushions and prepared to make notes.

  “Have you identified any of Ivan’s enemies?” Rhona said.

  “No. Or friends either. He was a lone wolf.” He shrugged. “Not a true wolf—that implies strength and fierceness. He had neither—he was a loner.” He extended his legs and examined his shoes before he said, “I like my house shipshape. Like it to run well. No upsets. On an even keel.” He smiled faintly. “I’m a sailor. Nautical terms explain things. Until now, Ivan never rocked the boat.”

  Sounded like navy or army boot camp. The house revolved around Curt and his needs, and he resented the rough water stirred up by his son’s murder. Talk about egocentric.

  “We’re covering all bases. Because you had similar motorcycles, you or your son Tomas may have been the intended victim. Can you name anyone with a motive to kill you?”