Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

* * *

  In the dark and brutal instant it took for Miranda to assimilate the unknowns, her mind swarmed with facts, as it often did when she needed to dissociate from raw feeling. President Salvador Allende was an elected Marxist. Augusto Pinochet was the general who overthrew him. Pinochet brought relative prosperity, he established a totalitarian reign of terror, it lasted two decades, the disparu numbered over four thousand. The coup took place on September 11; another September 11. Allende shot himself in his office, within walking distance of this room. It was an act either of desperation or martyrdom. The fascist Pinochet was now out of power, but he was alive. He presently lived within walking distance of this room.

  The two figures looming at the foot of her bed smoked in silence, cigarettes illuminating their distorted features with each inhalation in a macabre gleam. They did not know she was awake. Or perhaps they did. She kept her breathing even. They said nothing.

  Miranda mentally reached for her Glock semi-automatic, which was secure in her gun locker at Police Headquarters in Toronto.

  She wanted to laugh at the absurdity, she wanted to scream, she wanted to absorb every detail: muted light pushing against her curtains from the quiet street outside, the smells of a tropical city at dawn, of American tobacco, and the sound of her own breathing. She wanted to be calm, fully present at her own execution. She tried to suppress fear; fear breeds futility. She suppressed rage; rage would make her more vulnerable. She wanted to cry. She could do nothing, feel everything. She waited.

  A cigarette arced onto the carpet, was ground into the fibres in a small conflagration of sparks. A hand touched her foot through the sheet. Gently, like a lover, trying not to startle. She flinched involuntarily and drew herself up against the headboard, with the sheet wrapped around her. Contact had been established. In a moment, pressing their advantage, they would turn on a bedside light so that they could see her better than she could see them.

  “Hola,” said a man’s voice, surprisingly high-pitched and cheerful.

  Miranda said nothing.

  The bedside light flicked on.

  “You are Mrs. Miranda Quin?” He spoke English.

  She said nothing.

  “We regret this intrusion, Miranda Quin, we must do what is necessary.” In spite of his soothing voice, this sounded ominous.

  “You are naked beneath your cover, is it true?”

  Miranda’s sense of her own vulnerability ratcheted up by several degrees.

  “We must ask you to get dressed. We will watch.”

  She pulled the sheet closer, then realized this might seem enticing and fluffed it away so the contours of her body disappeared in oblique planes of shadow and light.

  “We must watch, Mrs. Quin. You are a policeman, yes? You might have the gun. You might be well trained in the martial arts, you might be hazardous. Possibly you would run away.”

  “Naked?”

  “Please. You get dressed in your clothes.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Nowhere, Mrs. Quin. We wish to talk.”

  “Can’t you talk to me like this?”

  “No, Mrs. Quin. You are naked.”

  His courtesy puzzled her, given that they had broken into her room in the dead of night. The man who spoke English handed her the clothes she had left in a neat pile on a chair for dressing in the early morning. He waited until she had squirmed into her panties and then he withdrew the sheet. Awkwardly, she continued to dress, wavering for balance on the soft bed as her weight shifted, feeling unutterably vulnerable.

  Their thinking: it would be easier to explain away a fully clothed corpse than a naked one. They must be police of some sort. Gangsters or revolutionaries would simply kill her, dressed or not. There seemed no threat of rape, which upset her because it implied something more complex, even more sinister.

  * * *

  Morgan had finished out his day watching bad television. Usually he read, but he was feeling uneasy. His eyes were sore from researching Harrington D’Arcy. He wondered how Miranda was doing in Santiago. She was staying at the same Best Western where he had spent the night a year ago. The beds were excessively soft, but it was a clean, well-lit place. When he turned in, he thought of her asleep, and when he awoke in the morning, it felt as if they had spent the night together, but she had left early.

  2

  Easter Island Cryptic

  To Miranda’s surprise, she was still alive. The city stirred outside her window and she was not a corpse, she had not been molested, she had not been tortured. So far, she had been treated with a kind of deferential civility calculated to invoke terror. The acrid smell of burned synthetic fabric made her nauseous. The smoking man who did the talking frightened her more than the man who was silent, even though his voice was amiable. He had absolute power in a room swarming with ghosts of the disparu, because in the dead hours of early morning he was responsible to no one. He smiled politely as she arranged herself against the headboard, drawing her knees up to her body.

  “You are ready now to talk?” he said.

  “About what?”

  “This is not a social visit, Mrs. Quin. You know why we are here.”

  “It’s Ms. Quin.”

  “Yes. That is good. You will tell us, please, where is that man?”

  His high-pitched voice was smooth and she thought of drowning in oil, suffocating.

  “No,” she said. She had no idea who they were talking about, but it seemed a good idea to answer in the negative.

  He moved close to the side of the bed. The other man moved close on the other side. She felt squeezed, twisted inside, like meat in a grinder.

  “Mr. Harrington D’Arcy. You know Mr. D’Arcy?”

  “I’ve never heard of him.” The name sounded vaguely familiar. “Are you with the police? I assume you are armed.”

  “It is not necessary, Miss Quin.”

  The implication was that the two men could kill her with their bare hands, although his tone was conciliatory. The feeling of drowning in warm oil.

  “Strange,” she said. “In Canada, we need warrants.”

  “There are police you do not know, Miss Quin, even in your country, they do not need warrants. Public police, you serve the law. Carabinaros, we serve the state. We do as we do.” He paused, savouring the idea, and as he repeated the words they took on an aura of menace she felt to the bone. “We do as we do.”

  “Really,” she said. “I have never heard of Harrington D’Arcy.”

  The man leaned forward so that the circle of light from her bedside lamp washed over his distorted features, making him look for a moment like he was wearing a death mask. He picked up a book and leaned back into the shadows.

  “You are reader of Mr. Thor Heyerdahl, yes?”

  She shrugged noncommittally, suddenly realizing they must be after the handsome Englishman, annoyed that it had only now occurred to her.

  “This is not your book.”

  “Yes,” she said. “No, it was a gift.”

  “From Mr. Harrington D’Arcy?”

  “From my partner.”

  “Sexual?”

  “What! No, professional. What business is it of yours?”

  He smiled.

  “Mr. Harrington D’Arcy gave you this book. On the airplane from Toronto to São Paulo.”

  Nothing makes you so vulnerable as knowing you have been watched unobserved.

  He reached into a leather satchel the size of a human head. She had not noticed it before, as it was resting on the floor by his feet. She flinched at the macabre possibilities. He withdrew a book and handed it to her. She let it slip through her fingers onto the bed. She half-expected it to leave a bloodstain.

  “He left this book behind. It has your name inscribed in it. Open, you will see, it is your name.”

  She reached down and tentatively folded back the cover. On the flyleaf were the words “Miranda Quin.” They were written in ballpoint, in an elegant script that was unnervingly familiar.


  “Yes,” she said. “That’s my book, and this, the one in your hands, that’s his, the man’s. I didn’t know his name. I’ve never seen him before, I haven’t seen him since the plane from Toronto. I know nothing about him.” She remembered wondering if he was a spy. She almost forgot finding his note, where he virtually declared his covert and endangered status.

  The Englishman had asked for help. She was police. These men were menacing and possibly murderous. Miranda stood up, forcing the smoking man to back deeper into the shadows. She decided to take the position that she was no longer afraid. The man turned and flipped on the overhead light, and in the brightly illuminated room, Miranda felt a rising sense of control.

  “I do not know the man,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “No,” said the man.

  “I have to pee.”

  “No pissing.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” said Miranda. “There will be pissing, one way or another. You can watch, if you want, but I am now going to pee.”

  She moved past him into the bathroom.

  “No,” he said. “I do not watch lady piss.”

  He reached out and pulled the bathroom door shut as she began to slip the waistband of her slacks down over her hips. She sat down amid shadows cast from the dim light that seeped under the door. The door then opened a crack and a hand reached in, scraped along the wall, and switched on the overhead before rapidly withdrawing. Superstitious, she thought. Afraid I’ll disappear in the dark.

  She really did have to pee and it gave her time to think. As she rearranged her clothes, she decided the best strategy was to be volatile. Not grace under pressure, but explosive. She banged her forehead a couple of times with the heels of her hands, re-channelling the adrenaline from roiling to rush, and, swinging open the door, she strode out into the bleak light of the room.

  They were gone.

  She held her breath, then gasped, shivering, walked over to the window and looked out on the street. A few people were trudging to work; it was too early for traffic. Behind her, the carpet smelled like smouldering brimstone. She turned and surveyed the room. She coughed and it echoed. They had left both copies of the Heyerdahl book discarded on the bed. The note from the Englishman lay open on the bedside table.

  Whoever he was, the man who signed himself T.E., was not Harrington D’Arcy. Miranda had seen Harrington D’Arcy once. She had been leaving Alex Rufalo’s place after a staff party. Rufalo’s wife, Caroline, was a high-powered lawyer, a colleague of D’Arcy’s who was dropping her off before the last guests had departed. Curiosity compelled Miranda to peer into the shadows of the limousine when the car door swung open. D’Arcy was sitting back against black leather, washed in the pale light seeping through the tinted glass. Her endangered Englishman with the flashing eyes and irritating self-assurance looked nothing at all like Harrington D’Arcy. She admired his wit and panache for having chosen the name as a nom de guerre. The real D’Arcy was exceptionally wealthy, very influential, but competely unknown beyond a rarified world defined by his own corporate interests.

  * * *

  In the morning, Morgan went directly to the morgue after a brief stop at The Columbian Connection on the edge of the Annex, a new place that made him think of a Starbucks made over by Tim Hortons, a place of such compromised authenticity he found it unnerving. He doubted he would become a regular patron.

  Coffee and bagel in hand, he flagged a taxi. The driver had no idea where the city morgue was located. Morgan was surprised. He did not often take cabs, but he trusted that the cabbies would be familiar with notable locations.

  Morgan preferred to walk or take public transit — the subway, never buses. Together, they usually took Miranda’s XK 150, her consolation for a sordid episode in the recent past, something to remind her she was a survivor. She was a better driver; he liked her car, but not driving.

  Although it was early, Ellen Ravenscroft was already at work. Morgan apologized for not bringing her a coffee. He offered her part of his unfinished bagel, but she declined. He nodded in the direction of the shrouded cadaver. “What’s the verdict? Was it murder?”

  “You tell me, love. Did someone want her dead?”

  “Wanting a person dead doesn’t make it murder. Possibly a gruesome coincidence. Of course, there is no such thing as coincidence,” he said, mouthing a cliché he didn’t believe.

  They approached the stainless-steel table isolated in a pool of light. Ellen pulled back a plasticized sheet, revealing Maria D’Arcy’s face. It was empty, now, the personality vanished. Death was not unkind, only indifferent.

  “You don’t want to see the rest of her, not until I’ve done some tidying up.”

  “No,” Morgan agreed, leaning down so close to the dead woman, in another context he might have been her prince, come to kiss her awake.

  “What are you looking for, love?”

  “Perfume.”

  “Very expensive. With all she’s been through, it lingers, doesn’t it?”

  “No. That’s the point,” said Morgan. “It doesn’t. Yesterday morning, it was distinct, the smell of sunlight and pebbles. But there’s nothing, now.”

  Ellen Ravenscroft leaned over so that their heads almost collided. “You’re right,” said the medical examiner. She stood upright and tilted her head back, with nostrils flared, gazing slowly around the room. “How very strange. There’s still a bit lingering in the air.”

  “Did you wash her down?”

  “Not the parts you’re sniffing.” The ME pulled the sheet back all the way. Her normally animated features congealed into a mask of stunned disbelief. “Apparently someone has given her a right good clean-up.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “It’s ridiculous. An embarrassing, offensive, outrageous, ridiculous comical absurdity. Oh God, I’ll have to get to the bottom of this. When I left her last night she was scented with money, the way the good Lord intended. And I was the first in, this morning. The universe is not unfolding as it should, David, no one breaks into a morgue.”

  Morgan was aware she had used his first name. The only person to use his first name had been his wife of brief duration — and occasionally Miranda, but only in exceptional circumstances. “Someone apparently did,” he said. “Unlikely as it seems. Security’s light.”

  “That’s an explanation, not an excuse.” Ellen Ravenscroft drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Damn it! Damn it, I was pretty much done with the autopsy part, moving on to analysis. So, God damn it, I don’t think anything’s been compromised except my dignity. And hers, of course.” She took in another deep breath and exhaled with a warming smile, searching for equilibrium in morbid good humour. “Bloody ghouls, if you ask me. Necrophiles. Hapless vampires — the blood’s already been drained. Necromancers, social pariahs, royal creeps. Generally the dead don’t make very good company, you know. Well, they do, sometimes. But they don’t issue invitations.”

  “Invited or not, she had visitors. So why is she here?”

  “She’s dead. Oh, you mean why is she dead?” Ellen Ravenscroft grimaced. “From causes yet to be determined. I’d say what killed her was generalized hypoxia brought on by acute respiratory distress. She died from asphyxiation. Exactly what caused the asphyxia, I just don’t know.”

  “She could have been smothered. I don’t see any strangulation marks.”

  “There aren’t any. It might be self-induced hypocapnia.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Death by hyperventilation, which could be a possible response to the symptoms of hypothermia. A side effect from exposure.”

  “In the middle of summer.”

  “It’s August, Morgan. The nights are cold.”

  “Cool.”

  “It doesn’t have to be freezing for hypothermia. And she had a fair bit of alcohol in her system. French champagne, I believe. And not much on in the way of clothes.”

  “Can you check out the champagne for me?”

&nb
sp; “Yes, of course. And before you say it, I know French champagne is redundant. If it’s real champagne, it’s French, n’est ce pas?”

  “Could someone else have done it?”

  “Exposed her, yes — misadventure, or at the worst, manslaughter. Asphyxiated her, yes, but damned if I know how. I’ll keep trying. No evidence of a man lurking about down there in the nether region. Maybe a bit of messing about, but gently, perhaps on her own. I’ll let you know. I’d say the bikini top was put on by a man post-mortem — he cupped her breasts in it, before struggling to secure the clasp. Left a few abrasions. A woman would have done it up at her waist, then slid it around.”

  “Her husband did it.”

  “That’s quite a revelation! He’s confessed, has he?”

  “To covering her breasts, not to murder. Bared breasts may be commonplace these days, but not at the RTYC.”

  “You think it’s about owning her boobies, Morgan?” She looked down at the body and smiled capriciously. “He doesn’t own them anymore.”

  “Yeah, he does. He’ll be along to collect the remains. Don’t let her go?”

  “What?”

  “Her body, don’t let her go.”

  “Of course not. Her remains remain.”

  “Good. Now all we have to figure out is why her husband wants a murder investigation, what nefarious crimes is he trying to obscure through misdirection? And what’s with the perfume?”

  She looked up at him. “Listen to you,” she said. “Morgan, you need me. Without your partner, you’ve got no one to talk to.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Off you go, then, love. I’ve got work to do.” She did her best in the circumstances to shrug coquettishly, then turned back to peruse the exposed corpse. “I’ll call if the lady reveals anything more.”

  Morgan edged back into the shadows that circled the autopsy tables, casting each in a separate cone of light. “Yeah,” he said in a casual voice as he turned and sauntered out the door, irritated that she might be right. About Miranda.

  She would be in the air over the Pacific by now, landing about the same time as he reached headquarters if he walked slowly and didn’t stop along the way.