(2012) Cross-Border Murder

by David Waters

  “My father,” Gina persisted, “believed that someone you all knew continued to fan assumptions about his guilt even after he was released. Does anything along those lines occur to you?”

  Steve Symansky gave a puzzled negative shake of his head. Stella frowned, and then shook her head as well. But Gina had noticed the slight hesitation.

  “Nothing at all?” She asked Stella.

  “No. Not really. Nothing that would justify what your father believed.”

  “But something did occur to you.”

  Stella hesitated. “Only one incident. And it was really very minor.” Gina waited. Finally Stella gave in. “It was at a party, I don’t remember whose, and Harold Hendricks, have you met him?”

  We both nodded. “We’ve also touched base with Naomi Monaghan, or Bronson, as she is called now.” I added. It was not the kind of thing I had planned to mention.

  “Is she still in Montreal?” Stella asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, at any rate, on that particular occasion, Harold had drunk too much as usual, and he said, if my memory is correct,” she was staring thoughtfully at some point in the Persian rug, “something to the effect that given the way Monaghan had treated his wife, he had probably deserved to have his head bashed in by someone who truly loved her.” Her face reddened. “Looking back, I realize that it is possible that he was referring to your father. But at the time I didn’t think so. You see we all knew that Hendricks was pathetically infatuated with Naomi. I only saw it as a pitiful form of macho grandstanding on his part.” She thought for a moment. “I’m still inclined to put that interpretation on it.” She smiled apologetically.

  I felt a need for some fresh air. The Symanskys were not my kind of people. I glanced at Gina. She nodded. “We should be going,” I said, nodding politely to each of them in turn, “if anything else occurs to you, I’d appreciate your giving me a call.”

  “Yes, of course.” Stella Symansky said.

  While Stella held Gina in conversation in the doorway, Steve Symansky followed me out to the car. I had the feeling there was something he wanted to say to me. He stared down the street at the campus. “If, as part of your story about Monaghan’s death, you feel you have to include my work for the CIA while I was at Winston, I’d appreciate a few hours advance notice before it appears in the paper.” I noted his careful use of the conditional. He must have known his CIA connection while in Montreal was a story in itself for almost any Canadian journalist. Still, it was an interesting opening gambit. Not a special plea to be kept out of the papers but something close to it. I responded with a gambit of my own.

  “I want to try to restore Montini’s reputation, and to do that I need to find out who murdered Monaghan. And to do that I need the co-operation of those who were part of his circle then. But I’m not on a hobby horse about anything else that happened that many years ago,” I said. I saw hope briefly touch his features. “So unless what you did is a crucial factor in why Monaghan was murdered, I’m not interested in having it upstage the restoration of Montini’s reputation.” I managed to make my intentions sound more noble than they were.

  He nodded as if he understood. He wanted very much to put a positive spin on what I had said. “I appreciate any consideration you give me. I still have important work I want to do at Boulder College. Call me if you think I can be of any additional help.”

  “So what did you think?” I asked once we were back in the car.

  “A nice piece of theater. Well-planned. We all played our roles beautifully.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I was slightly disappointed with her reaction but I was curious abut how she had reached it. “What makes you think that?”

  She threw me a catty glance. “When he was proposing to be candid about some of his spy work at Winston, I was watching Stella closely. Her protests were fake. They had planned that little duet in advance. I wouldn’t even be surprised if his modest revelations had prior approval in Washington.”

  I grinned. “That strikes me as a bit much.”

  “Not really. There’s a certain logic to it.”

  “Oh?” I pressed her, “what logic?”

  “They know you’ve initiated inquiries in Washington, and possibly in Ottawa. They figured what you don’t know now, you’re likely to find out later. Just the fact that you made arrangements to interview Symansky at length suggests that you’re on to something. Spin doctors call the technique damage control. Better to appear frank about it now and gamble on a very limited exposure in some Montreal newspaper, rather than have inquiries continue to be made in Washington. Everyone knows,” she said, “how voracious the media in Washington can be about almost any kind of CIA scandal. Surely you’re aware of that.”

  I didn’t disagree with her. But I was inclined to discount her assessment. She was thinking like an American. The truth is that the Washington media rarely reports anything that happens in Canada unless it impacts on their world in a major way. A minor revelation about something that happened that long ago would not even make the back pages. And anyone with power in Washington would know that. I tended to agree with Symansky when he told his wife that Washington had no interest in what he might reveal. “Did you detect any false notes in what he said?”

  “Their alibis for instance struck me as a bit too pat. Why would they remember exactly where they were the night Monaghan was murdered unless they felt they needed to have alibis? Or unless they were asked to account for their movements by Ryan and his team. Were they?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “So they probably had reasons to fear that they might get dragged into some subsequent investigation, if and when it ever got serious. I also noticed another oddity.”

  I frowned. She was noticing quite a few things I seemed to have missed. “And what was that?”

  “Her alibi wasn’t as solid as his. That could be just an accident of course. But maybe she was the one who always did the snooping for them in Monaghan’s office.”

  “Are you suggesting that maybe Monaghan caught her at it, and that she killed Monaghan in a moment of panic?”

  She wasn’t quite prepared to go that far. “I don’t know. But I would never underestimate her toughness. She’s more black and white than he is. Less slippery too as a result. It’s significant that they chose to let him do all the talking. They even seemed to get upset when I made her enter the conversation.”

  Once again I didn’t disagree with her. But neither was I convinced. It would explain, of course, why he was able to deny ever having broken into Monaghan’s office. The categorical nature of his denial had struck me as a bit glib. Even more puzzling was the impression he left that all he had done was keep an occasional eye on Monaghan, and from a distance at that. He or his wife would surely have attempted to do better than that. A key to an office is not hard to get. They would probably have been familiar with Monaghan’s agenda and appointment book. Furthermore, given what Hendricks had hinted to me, I doubt if Monaghan was the only one doing work for Bull. He probably employed assistants at the University or worked in tandem with other associates in the broader engineering community. That was something the Symanskys probably would have known. But Symansky had been careful to reveal none of that. He had proved to be a prudent man. Or maybe, just maybe, he had really been a very minor cog. Once again I was aware that I was out of my depths, beyond the range of my previous experience.

  I must admit I was also puzzled by their decision to leave Stella’s former role out of any admission of the double life they had lived at Winston. As if throughout it all she had never been more than the dutiful wife with a modest academic career on the side. They had to have assumed that I might know otherwise, or find it out in the course of my investigations. I asked Gina what she thought about that.

  “That did puzzle me a bit. Perhaps they were not sure about how much you knew at this stage,” she sighed, “they were careful. They did not deny her FBI background. Maybe they were wait
ing for us to show our hand. Maybe they wanted to protect her because as a woman she would pay a bigger price if it all became public.”

  Here we go again I thought. I wondered what twist of feminist logic and theory I was about to uncover. I decided to bite, to step into yet anther world I clearly did not fully understand. “But surely he’s the one with the most to lose,” I said as provocatively as I could, “a presidency of a college, a good salary, a prominent role in the community.”

  “Maybe. But think about it. In today’s America, he would be easily forgiven, even in academic circles. Particularly in small town academia. After all, he had only done his public duty as he saw it at a difficult time in America’s history. Men are inclined to accept that kind of thing more easily.”

  “I see,” I said, “but she, being a woman, would not be so easily forgiven?” I could not keep a slightly mocking, skepticism out of my tone of voice.

  Gina indulged me with an exasperated smile. I think she was actually looking forward to this part of our discussion. “Men are bred,” she said, “to regard the world outside the family as a kind of game, albeit a potentially dangerous, competitive game. They know they have to pretend to get along with some pretty dubious characters much of the time in order to play it. And partly because of that very few of them ever have more than a few really close friends. I mean the kind they would reveal their most intimate problems too. Friends that they would willingly trust without giving it a moment’s thought.”

  I was willing to concede the point. Whether it applied to a younger generation of males, I wouldn’t know. But it was not far off the mark in terms of my generation and, by implication, of Steve Symansky’s. Where that was leading us I did not know.

  “At the worst,” Gina added, “he could still teach and work on his book. But women,” Gina paused to make sure she chose the right words, “have a need to share their problems, usually by default, with other women. It involves real emotional risks. A way of bonding. It provides them with some of the essential support they need in a world that they know is hostile and abusive. And so, if it ever comes out that Stella was trained as a professional spy by a male world, and worse, trained to be calculating about whom she befriended so that she could spy on them, and that this had been going on for decades.” She shook her head with the wonder of it all. “Well, it means instant ostracism, and not just by her close friends in Burlington. There won’t be a woman within her social class in all of New England who won’t take her distance from Stella. The back-biting will eat her alive. If rumors could follow my father across the border, imagine what they would do to Stella!”

  I felt sure Gina had exaggerated. The real world was never quite that gender different. But still I saw her point.

  Some of her observations had come to me as a surprise. Some of my own subsequent thoughts also troubled me. I thought I had conducted a thorough and relatively knowledgeable interview. But I realized now that I had only scratched the surface. I was about to apologize for not having probed harder when Gina let me off the hook.

  “On balance,” she said approvingly, “it was smart not to push them too hard today. It would have put them on their guard. And they might have revealed even less. Now that they’ve opened up, it will be easier to get even more out of them later if we need to.” Something about the thought seemed to amuse her. “They’re probably indulging in a late afternoon sherry,” she remarked. and comforting each other on how well they handled the whole thing. I bet she’s telling him about the special pleading she did on his behalf while we were standing in the doorway chatting.”

  “Oh, what did she say?”

  “Oh, she talked about how important his role at Boulder College was to him. How much he hoped to achieve there if he was re-appointed when his term came up later this year. How damaging any report out of context might be to what he still had to offer the academic community here. God, she even dragged in my mother.”

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, she mentioned how much she had liked her, and how she intended to get in touch with her soon.”

  I told her about Symansky’s more conditional approach.

  “It figures.” She laughed. She seemed to be enjoying the progress we seemed to be making. “Maybe we can use the fix they know they’re in as a kind of lever later.” I had the feeling she was already beginning to plan our next meeting. She gave me a knowing grin. “I bet you practically promised to leave him out of your reporting unless it was absolutely necessary!”

  I tried to look offended. But I only smiled. “Not quite. But sort of.”

  “I think you’re growing soft in your old age,” she said. “Or have you always been like that?”

  “Nope,” I said testily, “I think it’s a very recent change on my part.” I don’t know whether it was the reference to my age or my behavior that upset me most.

  She said, “maybe I will have to play tough cop, to your soft cop approach!”

  “No.” I said firmly. “That could be truly dangerous. Maybe we should leave that role up to Phil Ryan.”

  Later that night, back in my increasingly disorderly den, there was a message on my answering machine. To my surprise I found that it was from Naomi Bronson. She suggested that Gina visit her anytime on the weekend at her cottage in the Eastern Townships. Otherwise she would try to set up at meeting in Montreal later in the week. She left instructions on how to get to the cottage and a telephone number. I called Gina and informed her. We decided it would be smart to set out around noon tomorrow. She would call Naomi in the morning.

  I sat at my desk for a few minutes longer staring out the window. But low level clouds and mist made the night darker. The yellow lights on the next street were only flickering pinpricks. The result turned my window into a distorting mirror, reflecting the light on my desk, parts of my own face, and some of the objects behind me in a manner that made them seem more of a magician’s illusion than solid creations of time and space. I tried to avoid thinking about the accumulating and discordant bits of evidence that seemed to circle in the night like ghostly buzzards around the murder of Professor Monaghan. There seemed to be a dirty world out there I really didn’t want to know about, a world of confusion which tired the mind and the spirit, a world where the father of lies lurked and laughed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By noon the next day, Gina and I were back on the road. We had spent part of the morning trying the number Naomi Bronson had left on my answering machine, but to no avail. Something had disrupted phone service, not unusual in such a rural area. Finally we had decided to undertake the drive anyway. Beneath an almost translucent blue sky, a mild Spring day made mockery of the feelings I had experienced the night before. Reality was anything but a world of smoke and mirrors and dark thoughts. A smell of loam rose from the surrounding countryside with a warm certainty about its purpose. Fecundity was everywhere. And it functioned without self-doubts or insecurity or, indeed, morality.

  An hour and a half later we passed through the town of Mansonville and veered left towards Owl’s Head mountain. The road was paved all the way to the ski resort, but a half-mile farther, the pavement gave way to gravel and dirt. According to Naomi Bronson’s instructions, her cottage would be on the left about three miles from the entrance to the ski hill. There would be a gate with a sign and her name on it. I slowed down, in part because the road was still rutted and ravaged from the spring run-off, but also because I did not want to come upon her place too abruptly. As I came to a crest beside an old, abandoned graveyard, I stopped the car.

  Stretched before me was a remarkable valley. It was probably fifteen miles across and twenty miles in depth. At the southern end I could see Jay Peak, one of the largest skiing areas in northern New England, and one of the earliest ones to employ a large cable car to take skiers and sightseers to the top of the mountain.

  “Do you see that far corner diametrically opposite to us?”

  Gina scanned that sector. “What about it?”

  �
��That’s Highwater, a small town on the border where both countries maintain full custom services. Over these hills to our left is Lake Memphramagog whose southern tip is in the United States at a town called Newport. During prohibition, a lot of liquor was smuggled across the border over small mining and lumber roads between Newport and Highwater. But that’s not the reason I’m drawing your attention to this valley.” She waited impatiently for me to go on. I think she was in a hurry to get on with her meeting with Naomi. “Bull’s gunnery range was near Highwater. It ran parallel and very close to that border down there. In fact, if my memory serves me right, a portion of the land he used as a potential supply depot actually straddled the border.”

  Gina stared down the valley in obvious fascination.

  I took my observations a step farther. “If Naomi Bronson’s cottage is properly situated up in the hills to our left, and if they had the cottage when Monaghan was alive, then with an average telescope, Monaghan could probably have spied on Bull’s operations.”

  “But why would he want to do that?” Gina asked puzzled.

  “Maybe he was jealous of what Bull was accomplishing. Maybe he wanted to leapfrog some of Bull’s research. Some countries would have paid handsomely for that kind of new ballistic information.”

  “I think it’s time I found out,” Gina muttered frowning, “what Naomi has to say to me. Maybe I’ll even ask her whether Monaghan was ever able to spy on Bull’s compound down there.”

  I started the car down the slope. We should be able to spot the cottage once we were over the next crest. I was right. What I did not expect were the number and nature of the vehicles parked near it. There was a Honda hatchback, an ambulance with its lights blinking and two police cars. I slowed down to a crawl as I approached. A young provincial police officer tried to wave me on. But I stopped instead. I rolled down my window and explained in French that we had come here to see Ms. Bronson at her request. He frowned. He shouted in French to a fellow officer who ambled over. They consulted and then told us to get out of the car. They motioned us towards one of the police cars. Once there, the youngest one kept an eye on us while the more senior trudged up the hill towards the cottage which sat impressively on a ledge about three hundred yards up the hill from the road. A few minutes later, what I took to be an officer in civvies came down the path towards us. He was followed by the woman I had met just a few nights ago at Naomi Bronson’s tenement. As she recognized me I could see her whisper something to him.