by David Waters
When she returned with the coffee, I asked her to give me her impressions of the members of the close-knit group to which she had belonged at Winston University, starting with the Symanskys.
She nodded. We both knew that this was something that we had to do, and that it would not be easy. She stared at her unlit fireplace. “What I remember most about them is their charm. They seemed to be a perfect couple. They had the kind of social polish and ease that most other people envy. And yet I never got close to them. There are some people you meet that you feel you want to keep in touch with, even if it’s only through a yearly exchange of Christmas cards. I never felt that kind of feeling about the Symanskys. They kind of floated in and out of my life leaving behind only this impression of polish and charm. Like a politician who remembers your name, gives you a smile and a peck on the cheek and then is gone. Odd, isn’t it, but when Gina told me they had spied on some of us, it didn’t come as all that much of a surprise. I guess I must have sensed that their charm was only skin deep. No, that’s not quite right. Their charm was natural enough. Maybe it had started out as a kind of facade and had become a real part of them. There’s a professional actor I know,” she said. She turned her doe-like eyes on me and seemed to be sizing me up. She couldn’t be wondering whether my charm was a facade. I didn’t have any, or at least not the kind that is worth noting. She looked away. “The minute my friend leaves his front door he’s on stage. He’s witty, charming, delightful, a consummate companion. But there never seems to be an unguarded moment. I’ve always suspected that when he returns home, and closes the front door, and lets his hair down, a totally different person emerges.” She allowed herself a flirtatious smile. “I suppose one would have to go to bed with him to find out.”
For a few moments we sat their in silence. Given the fact that we would soon have to discuss her assessment of Dean Gooden, it could have been an awkward moment. But it wasn’t. I grinned.
“What if you discovered that there wasn’t another person. That being on stage was all there was to him?”
I saw a hint of panic in her eyes.
“I would find that very frightening.”
“Could that be true of Stella and Steve Symansky? In a way they were always performing too, weren’t they?”
She nodded, but then she said, “somehow it doesn’t strike me as accurate in their case.” She gave me a puzzled look. “Gina gave me the impression that you felt there was a justifiable aspect to their spying at Winston.”
I was about to acknowledge the statement, but I stopped myself. “Justifiable is not the right word.” I said. “Steve Symansky proffered his Eastern European family backgrounds as a rationale. It probably had some validity. I think I may have been taken in a bit. Gina was right about one thing. All that we were really allowed to see while we were there was an orchestrated performance.”
“Somehow I, too, just can’t see the words justifiable and spying being linked, as if they could possibly belong together. It’s a frightening thought.” She stared at the fireplace as if she was looking at a world where fire or warmth had gone out.
“I agree,” I said. I told her about a documentary I had seen about East Germany after the reunification. The files of the secret police had been made open to public inspection. There had been line-ups outside the building. Apparently about one out of every fifty East Germans had been recruited by the STAZI to spy on their neighbors. “People who consulted their files were often devastated by what they found their neighbors had reported on them. So much of it was trivial and insignificant. Reams of what we used to call venial sins. Some were humiliated by the obvious trivialities of their lives that had been meticulously recorded in the secret archives by well paid officials.”
She gave me a searching look. “I wonder what the secret files in Washington have recorded about me.”
“Nothing as far as I know.” I explained that my Washington contact had not found her name in the computers, and that Steve Symansky had gone out of his way to assure me that he had reported nothing of significance on either her or her husband. “Do you think,” I asked her, “that either of the Symanskys might have killed Professor Monaghan?”
“And then Naomi?”
“Yes. But let’s get back to Professor Monaghan first. Assuming, for example, that one of them was caught going through his office.”
She nodded but then shook her head. “God only knows there might be a certain justice if they turned out to be the guilty ones, but it doesn’t strike me as being in character.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Their charm. They were both verbally skilled. I think their first instinct would be to talk their way out of even the most difficult of situations. Particularly, if one assumes that they had the time to prepare themselves for it in advance. I don’t think either of them would have broken into his office without having thought out a plausible excuse in case someone discovered them there. Including Monaghan. I don’t see them panicking and suddenly striking out to hit someone over the head.”
“Unless, of course, Monaghan threatened to expose one of them.”
“It’s a possibility I suppose.” But she did not look convinced.
“If not the Symanskys, whom do you see as the most likely candidate? I assume you’ve given it some thought over the years.”
She became very hesitant. “The most likely candidate?”
“Yes.”
“Of that inner circle that Gina has zeroed in on?”
I nodded.
She gave me a self-indulgent smile. “Part of me would like to think that it was some immature, underprivileged student who blew up at Monaghan for giving him a failing grade. It would make it easier for me, for all of us, to forgive. Even to forget the whole thing.”
“Naomi’s death changes all that,” I remarked, “it tends to narrow the suspects down to those Gina and I saw or,” I added as an afterthought, “someone they may have spoken to.”
“And that amounts,” Mary said thoughtfully, “to Harold Hendricks, Stella and Steve Symansky, and some officials at Winston.”
“And Dean Peter Gooden.” I said. My discomfort must have shown.
“You know. Don’t you,” she said.
I nodded. A slight blush tinged her cheeks and faded almost as rapidly.
“How did the you find out?”
“Gina has always known. She heard you and your husband discussing it.”
“And she told you?”
“No.”
She sighed. “I’m glad.”
I nodded.
“Then who told you? I can’t imagine that it was something that Gooden would have wanted to share with you.”
“I trapped Harold Hendricks into telling me.”
“Hendricks!”
“He was passing the parking lot and saw the two of you in Gooden’s car in what I gathered was some kind of compromising position.”
She smiled at my attempt at a circumlocution, but there was sadness in her eyes. “It was all so pathetic.” She looked wistfully past me. That slight trace of a blush came and went from her cheeks again. “I didn’t even like the man.”
“Gooden tried to give me the impression that he wasn’t really a part of the group back then.”
She frowned. “I certainly don’t remember it that way. I certainly had the impression he was one of Monaghan’s prize students. And he was at most of the parties. Maybe he didn’t share all of their political convictions. And he was considerably younger.”
“What was he like? Gooden.”
She sighed. I could see that she wanted to move on to something more important to her. But she answered my question. “He was bright and ambitious. But not to my knowledge very emotionally sensitive, except when it suited his purpose. And then you could feel that it was an act. But then I’m sure my view’s now a prejudiced one.”
I took a last sip of my coffee. “Gina seems to have been convinced that her father believed someone in the group had betrayed him
.”
“I know.” She shifted on the couch and tucked her legs beneath her. “But there was nothing solid to back it up. We discussed it often. It was only an instinct on his part. I think it was something he wanted to believe. You see, if he had been able to prove that, it might have made up for some of the suffering. As the years passed, and things went from bad to worse, it was a belief which seemed to become anchored in his deepest needs.”
“But he never tried to do anything about it?” I said, “I mean he never hired a private detective or anything like that. Never called anyone?”
“We never had the money to do anything, except talk among ourselves. If we had had the money, who knows?”
I nodded. “Getting back to the list of possible suspects,” I said.
“Yes, well,” she said, “if you’re going to be objective about it, there’s me, of course, isn’t there?”
I had the feeling that this was something that had been on her mind most of the evening. “Yes, I suppose so. In theory at least.” I gave her a mock smile to indicate that this was something I was not prepared to take seriously. “After all, you were a part of the group, and you were in the photograph!”
“And my husband did have an affair with the victim’s wife. First Monaghan and then Naomi, a jealous wife’s perfect revenge. The thought, of course, must have occurred to you.” She seemed to be watching my eyes very carefully.
“Yes. But only briefly. And not in any serious way.”
“After all,” she continued, her tone more serious than I had expected. “You have to admit I had a motive. I was angry at my husband’s affair with Naomi. Right? I could have arranged to see Michael Monaghan privately to discuss what I considered a mutual problem. He could have laughed at my predicament. We Irish are known for getting into a rage when we feel slighted. I could easily have struck at him with that paperweight.”
I don’t know why but I felt somehow that I was being tested. “But Monaghan,” I observed, “would surely not have agreed to meet with you just before he scheduled a meeting with your husband.”
“You didn’t know Michael Monaghan!” She remarked. “It would have amused him no end to agree to see us back-to-back, one after the other.”
I could not help feeling that we were playing some game, and that she was determined to play it through to the end.
“And what about Naomi?” I said. “Motive after all these years. Hardly. And opportunity none.”
“Well, it’s only a four hour drive from here to Naomi’s cottage. Slightly less than two thirds the way to Montreal. I could have left early Sunday morning undetected and been back before mid-afternoon.”
“And your motive?”
“Afraid that she would tell Gina that she thought I was the one who had killed her husband.”
“And why would she do that?”
“We never got along. Frank was giving her up in order to try and patch up our marriage. Who knows?”
“And what about the pot-shot fired at your daughter.”
“I would certainly plead innocent to that.” Her mouth smiled, but I saw pain in her eyes. “But then it was not Gina that was hit.”
“True, but you could not have done it and got back here in time to answer Gina’s phone call here on Sunday night.”
I could see her doing some mental arithmetic. “It would have been close. I would have had to have broken most of the speed laws, and most of it in the dark.”
“And your motive?”
“The same one that you gave her. To persuade both of you to halt the investigation.”
“So why did you wait to intervene? Why let her come to Montreal in the first place.”
She thought about that for a moment. “As you may know, I did try to dissuade her from going. Perhaps I didn’t think she would make any headway.”
“And what made you think she had? Did she phone you and report on our progress or lack of it?”
She gave me a sad smile. “No, she didn’t phone me, and I was damned annoyed.” Her fingers reached up and stroked her upper lip. “I was worried for her. She had phoned early in the week to tell me what motel she was staying at, and then nothing. I called the motel twice. But she didn’t call back. I began to think that maybe you, or someone else, had placed some doubts about me in her mind. I don’t mind telling you that I was not only worried but angry.” She gave me a searching look, as if she was trying to understand how my mind worked. I decided it was time to end whatever game it was that we had been playing. I began to wonder whether she thought I had come here because I suspected her.
“Look,” I said, “I know that you weren’t involved in this in any way. I would like you to believe that.”
She shifted her position on the couch. “Why?”
“Because Gina’s too bright. She would have known if you had been implicated in any way.”
“What if she went to Montreal because she just wanted to be sure about that?”
I shook my head. “She’s too straightforward. She would have told me by now. Besides, she would have confronted you first. At some point we have to trust, you know, even if at times it seems like a gamble.”
“I know.” She seemed to relax for the first time. “Thank you.” She said softly.
I began to relax again too. “So why did we go through this long exercise?” I asked.
“I had to be sure.”
“About what?”
“About you. That Gina was in good hands. That she could trust you. That I could trust you.” A glint of warmth, even of amusement, returned to her eyes. “I suspect you’re a better man, Thomas Webster,” she said, “than Gina indicated to me after she first met you.”
That made me smile. I wondered whether Gina had yet changed her mind.
As if on cue, Gina appeared at the top of the stairs.
“It’s way past midnight! What are the two of you still talking about?”
Mary Montini looked at her wristwatch. “So it is. It’s way past my bedtime.” She rose. She smiled at her daughter. “We’ve been discussing whether I should be considered a suspect in any of this.” I marveled at the way she had brought her deepest fear right out into the open for Gina to confront.
Gina’s mouth dropped open. “You’ve got to be kidding!” Gina came part way down the stairs.
“Of course we are, dear!” Her mother replied with a smile as if to say, aren’t we the foolish ones.
Gina gave me a baleful look, shook her head in mock disgust at the peculiar behavior of her elders, and went back upstairs.
CHAPTER TEN
Mary Montini had gone to work by the time I came downstairs for breakfast. I had forgotten, in our discussion the previous evening, to get her assessment of Harold Hendricks. At breakfast, Gina’s behavior towards me was minimally civil.
“Okay,” I said finally, “so what have I done?”
“Wasting time discussing my mother as a suspect is not very bright. In fact it’s insulting.”
“It was your mother that brought it up.”
“She was only testing you. Any one with a drop of Irish blood would have known that.”
But I was not Irish. In fact I was a mongrel with no defining national or tribal roots. Merely an individual living on a very troubled planet. “I know that. But your mother was not insulted, so why are you?”
“Because the fact that the two of you discussed it last night at some length meant that back in Montreal you had once considered it as a possibility. Yet you never mentioned it to me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Then I added in a lighter vein. “See these pouches under my sad eyes. They’re there because all my life I’ve been like a bloodhound sniffing suspiciously at everything that comes into view. When you rang my doorbell, that’s what you got, a slow but plodding, and not terribly bright bloodhound.”
After she had finished her coffee, she went back upstairs to continue going through the files Joe Gibbs had given me. I put a call through to Phil Ryan. He had already been in
touch with Captain Leclair and somebody by the name of Ricci who was investigating the shooting at the motel.
“In the deep grass behind the bowling alley they found a shell casing which matched the bullet which passed through the outer part of the victim’s thigh and landed up against the wall of the Motel. It seems to have come from a .22 caliber hunting rifle. Definitely an amateur. A good thing in a way because it weakens their assumption that some dispute at the club where the victim worked was behind it. I tried to persuade Ricci that the most likely scenario involved a connection with both Monaghan’s murder and that of Ms. Bronson. If that was the case, he said, why didn’t you or Gina mention it when they questioned you.”
“I was tired. Gina seemed badly shaken. I just wanted to get home.”
“I can understand that. I think we should pester the people you spoke to so far, see what they have in the way of alibis. It’s going to take days for Ricci to get untracked, and Leclair is bogged down in jurisdictional paperwork. Why don’t you give me the Symanskys’ telephone number. I would like to question them. Get a feel for what they’re like. Besides, I think they will respond better to a call from a cop. I’ll tell them I was in charge of the Monaghan file and not mention that I’ve retired. See how it works.”
“Okay,” I said. In fact I felt a little relieved. The Symanskys were not the kind of people I felt comfortable questioning on the phone. “I can give Hendricks and Gooden a call from here.” I gave him the Symanskys’ telephone number. “They live in Burlington.” I said. “I haven’t checked a map yet, but I doubt that it would take more than forty minutes to get from Burlington to Naomi’s cottage.”
“Oh, by the way, Leclair checked about the cottage. It was registered in Naomi’s maiden name. She bought in 1968 long before her husband was murdered.”
I explained what Mary Montini had told me, including the presence of a high powered telescope with a telephoto mount. “Naomi,” I explained, “was a dedicated photographer.”
“Yeah. According to Leclair she made part of her living that way. She also worked on film documentary projects for French television.”