by Rick Blechta
It would have been a simple matter to go into the house and turn on the porch light, but I didn’t think of that in my distracted state. Instead I went to the car, and with shaking hands, fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment. I already had it on when I came back up my steps.
It wasn’t Olivia, but her friend Maggie – and it looked like she’d been strangled.
The effect of seeing someone lying dead on my porch,her swollen throat a mass of ugly bruising and her tongue fat and purply-red in her open mouth, was made infinitely worse by the harsh, concentrated beam of the flashlight. Maggie’s eyes were open, and her expression was incongruously one of surprise, as if she hadn’t believed her life was about to end.
Standing up slowly, I clicked off the light and leaned back against the porch railing, telling myself to keep breathing deeply. The first thing that went through my shaky mental faculties was, What have I gotten myself into? as I entered the house to call the police.
The two constables who arrived took one look at the body, said something into a walkie-talkie and escorted me to their cruiser, where they sat me in the back. It was only when the door shut that I noticed there were no door handles or window cranks. I’d never before had a twinge of claustrophobia, but I sure felt it then.
I was asked some preliminary questions while we waited for reinforcements, with me leaning close to the plastic divider so I could hear them clearly. My head was still swimming, and I’d started shaking, a delayed reaction to the shock, I suppose.
Three more cars pulled up in short order. Lights bouncing off the neighbouring houses and loud voices talking soon had the first of the curious neighbours on their porches and front walks, staring at the drama taking place on my property.
Yellow crime scene tape was unrolled from the tree at the corner of my property all the way across to the driveway, where there was another big tree, then up to the corner of the house. Towards Broadview, a fourth cruiser parked across the road, sealing it off.
Left alone in my backseat prison, I could only watch helplessly.
Eventually someone in a business suit, obviously more senior, came to the window and peered in. He was a big man, but some of that had gone to fat, and he looked to be not far from retirement. One of the original constables was with him, and I heard him say, “This is the guy who called it in. That’s his house.”
“I don’t plan on freezing my ass out here talking to him. Take him into the house and get him something to drink. He looks like he needs it. I’ll be in to speak with him in a while.”
As we walked towards the house, I asked, “Could we go in by the back door? I don’t...you know...”
The constable grunted. “That’s what I had in mind, buddy,” as we continued up the driveway.
To my embarrassment, his hand was on my upper arm when I noticed the street’s nosy parker, who lived on the other side of me, step out her front door. I kept my face forward, pretending I didn’t see her. The old battleaxe had made it clear long ago that she didn’t think much of me or my choice of vocation. This certainly wasn’t going to help matters.
Once inside the kitchen, the constable asked me if there was any booze, but I don’t have any in the house any more, so he made a pot of coffee. I just sat at the kitchen table dumbly, not even bothering to remove my coat. Through the storm door, I could see people moving around on the porch and the occasional flashes of photos being taken.
We were silently sipping from our steaming mugs when the man who’d freed me from the police cruiser came in the back door.
“Constable, the media has arrived. I want you out front making sure none of them gets past our line. Got that?”
The constable took a big sip of the coffee as he rose and winced as it burned its way down. “I’ll get to that right away, sir.”
The big man stuck out a meaty paw.“I’m Detective Sergeant Palmer,” he said as I got partway out of my seat to shake. “Mind if I join you in a mug of that coffee? It’s going to be a long night.” He went over to the kitchen door and looked out at the foyer, then shut the door.“You don’t mind if we search your house, do you?”
That gave me a twinge, but I couldn’t think of a reason to deny the request. A lawyer probably could have given me a dozen. All I wanted at that point was to appear cooperative and above suspicion. I did decide, though, that a prudent course of action would be to not offer any information not directly asked for. I still stupidly had the hope that I might keep Olivia out of this mess.
After filling a mug from the orderly row I kept on the counter, the cop sat down heavily in the seat across from me. “Bet you wish you’d never come home tonight.”
I couldn’t decide whether the comment was meant to be friendly.
***
An hour later, I knew it had been a mistake to come home. If I’d had even an inkling of what waited for me on the porch, I probably would have never come home.
Palmer’s questions, while not overtly hostile, were relentless. Quite rightly, he focussed on where I’d been all day, who had seen me, what I’d been doing. I answered everything as fairly and completely as I could, even though there were things I didn’t want him to know. I don’t think he believed me when I told him I only knew Maggie’s first name and that she lived somewhere in the west end. I didn’t know where, and I didn’t know what she did for a living.
“I’ve only met her a few times. Actually, she was a friend of the vocalist for the jazz group I play with.”
Palmer looked up at that. “And where can I find the vocalist?”
I winced inwardly, realizing I’d just given something up. “I really don’t know. She left in the middle of our gig two nights ago, and we haven’t heard from her since.”
The detective was in the middle of writing when one of the underlings came in and spoke softly into his ear. Palmer whispered something back, and the underling nodded and left.
The detective looked at me for a good twenty seconds, probably to ratchet up my anxiety. It did the trick. “You say you hardly knew the woman on the porch, that she was a friend of your group’s singer.”
“Yes.”
“The singer who’s not around.”
I nodded.
“But you are trying to help.”
I nodded again but didn’t appreciate the sarcastic edge to his voice.
“Have you reported this singer as missing?”
“She’s not exactly missing.” I told him briefly what had happened at the club on Tuesday night. “Yesterday, I hired a private investigator to find out what the hell’s going on.”
Palmer barely refrained from rolling his eyes. “Who?”
“Shannon O’Brien.”
His face looked more friendly. “Get her on the phone.”
“Isn’t it a bit early?”
“Trust me, she’ll want to know.”
“You know her?”
“Since she was a hotshot young constable. Her dad was head of homicide when I got promoted.”
The nearest phone was in the off-limits front hall, so I used my cell. I got an answering service and explained that I really needed to speak to my investigator, no matter what the time was.
“Is this something that can wait until business hours?”
“No, it can’t!” I barked. “Something really terrible has happened. I must speak to her right away.”
The woman at the answering service calmly said she’d relay my message but didn’t sound enthusiastic about it.
Two burly cops came into the room, took the last of the coffee after seeing our mugs, and went into a corner to huddle with Palmer. I could only catch words here and there as people began noisily going in and out the front door.
My cell’s “Take Five” ringtone started playing, and I snatched it up.
She sounded put out. “Mr.Curran, it’s Shannon O’Brien. The answering service said you needed to speak with me immediately. What’s up?”
“When I got home from the club a few hours ago, I found a b
ody on my porch.” It felt very odd to speak of such violence so matter of factly.
“Whose body? Olivia’s?”
“Olivia’s friend, Maggie. I haven’t seen her since—”
Palmer stepped over and held out his hand.“Give me that. Shannon, it’s Guy Palmer... Yeah, it’s good to hear your voice, too... Well, the world’s a small place. Look, to cut to the chase, your boy came home tonight and found a stiff on his front porch. Strangled... Well, you and I both know these things can get out of hand pretty quickly. What can you tell me?... You will?... Okay, I’ll be here waiting. I don’t have to tell you the drill... Yes, I’ll let them know.”
He handed back the phone, and she sounded more friendly. “Mr. Curran —”
“Look, call me Andrew, or Andy.”
“Andy – and you call me Shannon, okay? I will get there as soon as I can, less than an hour if the traffic gods are kind. Just sit tight. Everything is going to be all right.”
I was beginning to feel a little rough around the edges. “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t find someone murdered on your front porch.”
“You’re right. But I will be there to help. Get some food in your stomach. You’ll feel better.”
“I don’t feel like eating.”
“Do it anyway.”
I hung up as another plainclothes cop knocked on the back door. “Got a minute, Guy?”
Palmer and one of the cops went out the back door. The third stayed behind to keep an eye on me. Palmer came back in after a brief discussion. It was easy to see from his red face that he was furious.
“Still want to stick to your story about the dead woman?” he asked.
“I’ve told you what I know.”
“Have you?”
“To the best of my ability, yes.”
“Then how come the old lady next door told us she’s seen her here several times, and on one occasion you had a very loud argument, right out on that porch where she’s lying now?”
Looked as if my private investigator was mistaken about everything being all right.
Chapter 6
Hell and damn! Shannon thought as she sped through the light traffic of the early morning at a rate considerably over the legal limit.
This job had certainly gone south in a hurry. When she’d gone to bed the previous evening, she’d told her musician boyfriend, Michael, that the case would no doubt turn out to be a simple one of a woman on the lam from some charge in the States who had stupidly stuck her head up into the public light and consequently got hauled back to face the music.
“I’ll have this whole thing cleared up within a week,” she’d told him confidently.
Why couldn’t life ever be easy?
She wished she’d taken Michael up on his offer to spend the night at his downtown loft instead of being the good mom and staying home with her two teenage kids. She’d have had a far shorter drive to get to Curran’s house. Of course, Michael had also offered to come out to her place in Caledon. Problem was, she still felt uncomfortable sleeping with Michael in her own house, even if they were doing just that: sleeping. She had to set some kind of example for her seventeen-yearold daughter especially, even though the whole thing was a complete sham. Rachel certainly knew what her mom was doing when she spent the night with her boyfriend.
As she drove, Shannon wondered if something she or her latest recruit had done could have caused the death of this woman. She felt confident that talking to some people at the airport wouldn’t have caused any alarm bells to be sounded, but there was no telling what Jackie Goode might have stirred up the previous day.
Swinging south onto the Don Valley Parkway, she had to remind herself not to formulate conclusions without sufficient information. Her experience with the Toronto Police and in her own business had certainly drilled that into her head: get the facts and be thorough. Sloppiness could get you killed.
Now someone was dead.
The constable on duty at the end of Curran’s street hadn’t been informed of her arrival, typical of Guy Palmer. Her dad had said in an unguarded moment years ago that Palmer was a competent enough detective,but he had a “terminal case of the sloppies”.He worried about the time he wouldn’t be around to pick up his underling’s shortcomings. When police detectives made mistakes, innocent people could go to prison – or worse.
By the time Shannon was escorted up the driveway and around to Curran’s back door, her mood had blackened considerably.
She found her client sitting at his kitchen table, head down. He looked awful, but she hadn’t expected anything else. From all accounts he was a good guy, well thought of by his peers. Murder has a way of hitting people between the eyes with a force they cannot imagine. The better the person, the worse the shock. What she now needed most were some private words with him, but she couldn’t think of how she might swing that.
Palmer was on top of her before she was barely in the door, all “hail fellow, well met” as he pulled her into a bear hug against his foulsmelling overcoat.
“Shannon, you look fantastic. How you doing?”
She slid out of his grip and stepped back almost to the door, fighting to keep her expression blank. Palmer stank of cigarettes, coffee and garlic, a lethal combination.
Regardless of the fact that her dad had been a storied homicide detective, Shannon knew most cops distrusted private investigators. Having Palmer on her side could prove invaluable, so she needed to keep everything nice and friendly.
The police detective would be hoping his old boss’s daughter might already have information that he could utilize to make his investigation easier. Any time Palmer could find something to save him effort was a valuable thing in his eyes. If she managed things right, she might very well manipulate this situation to her advantage.
Patting Andy on the shoulder, she said, “Sit tight. I’m going to talk with Detective Palmer out on the back deck. I want to get up to speed on where we stand. Is that okay?”
The drummer didn’t even look up. “Sure. Fine with me.”
“What you got?” Palmer asked as soon as the door shut behind them.
“Curran showed up in my office two days ago, said he wanted to find his band’s vocalist, that she’d been escorted out of the club where they play by two heavies. She went without any fuss.”
“And you checked up on his story?”
Shannon nodded, fighting the urge to silence Palmer with a loud, “Well, duh.”
“Let me show you what I got to deal with.”
He led Shannon down the driveway and onto the porch. Two techs were hard at work around the body, but Palmer asked them to step back.
She’d been on site after a few murders in her time, but never a manual strangulation. Though she knew from books what it was all about, seeing one up close and personal was pretty intense. There had been enough time for the victim to realize she was going to die.
Shannon turned away, walked down the steps and surveyed the growing crowd at the crime scene tape, all of them eager to know what was going on. They might not be so eager if they knew what the reality actually looked like.
Palmer was next to her. “I know you don’t let the dust settle on you. Tell me everything you’ve found out.”
She gave him a concise rundown of what she and her new recruit had found out, which didn’t amount to all that much, except that Curran’s version of what had happened at the club seemed to be accurate. For the moment, she held back what she’d found out at the airport the previous day.
“Know anything about the stiff on his front porch?” Palmer asked.
“If it’s not this missing singer, then no. What did Curran tell you?”
“Well, he made out at first as if he didn’t really know the woman. Then we find out from a neighbour that the victim had been over here a number of times, and on one occasion, the two of them had a verbal donnybrook right on the selfsame porch.
“According to him, he left for work at his normal time, about eight. When he
came home, shortly before three a.m., he found the body on the porch and calls it in. We’ve listened to his voice mail to see if she’d called or something before she came here, but other than two hang ups after he left for work, there’s nothing. Could have been her, I suppose.”
“What does the ME say about time of death?”
“Best first guess is sometime after eight. Your boy’s not in the clear.” Palmer lit a cigarette and looked into the brightening eastern sky for several moments.“Tell me, do you think Curran’s clever enough to have bumped someone off then faked the whole discovery thing? ‘Cause that’s the way I’m leaning at this point.”
This quick decision was part and parcel of the way Palmer worked. He could, of course, be correct, but Shannon’s gut told her no, although she’d also gotten a phone report from Goode about her visit the previous afternoon. Jackie’d felt Curran had been on edge. Perhaps it had been the fact that Goode was poking around, perhaps something more sinister.
“What’s the dead woman’s name?”
“No ID on her. Curran told us it was Maggie. He says he doesn’t know any more than that. Of course we’re checking it out, but that could take awhile.”
Shannon thought for a moment longer. “Think I could have a talk with him – alone?”
“I don’t know if I can oblige, Shannon, department protocol and all that. You know how they are downtown these days.”
She winked conspiratorially at him. “Since when has that ever stopped people like us? I promise to share anything I get. He might be willing to talk more openly with me. Could be a good shortcut.”
“Well, I got stuff around front that needs doing. I suppose I could work it where you’ll stand in for one of my boys, short of manpower and all that, you know? It is about time I sent them out to canvass the neighbourhood. But you got to share anything you get. Don’t jerk me around on this, Shannon.”
They returned to the kitchen, where Palmer gave his men jobs to carry out in order to clear the room. In a matter of moments, Shannon was alone at the kitchen table with her client, a fresh pot of coffee and,comically,a box of fresh doughnuts she’d taken the time to pick up. The friendly dig hadn’t been lost on Palmer – but he’d also helped himself to a glazed one.