Spiked

by Randall Denley

  “Right,” I said, nodding sympathetically. “How long have you two lived together?”

  “Almost a year now.”

  “So you must have gotten to know Mae pretty well.”

  Lily sipped her tea, then said, “Not really. Mae was always busy with school or work, you know? It seemed like she was hardly ever here.”

  “Not much of a social life?”

  “She wasn’t a party type of person or anything like that,” Lily said. Then she hesitated, about to add something, but stopped herself.

  “But?” I prompted.

  “She always went out Tuesday and Thursday nights. And she didn’t come back until the next morning. I assume she had a boyfriend, maybe a married guy? I never met him, anyway. You won’t use that in your article, right?”

  “No, of course not.” Interesting, though. Where did Mae Wang sleep those other two nights of the week? Not wanting to seem too interested in the mysterious boyfriend, I said, “So, did Mae have any hobbies or interests? Sports, maybe?”

  “No, she really wasn’t that type of girl. More of a bookworm, really.”

  “How about politics? I understand there are a lot of strong feelings among expatriates about the situation in China.”

  “Well, she worked for the embassy. I guess that tells you something. I never heard her talk about any of that stuff from home, though.”

  “Home. That reminds me. Maybe you can clarify something. Was Mae born here or in China? It’s one of those basic biographical facts we like to include in a piece like this.”

  “She always said she was from Vancouver. To tell you the truth, I never asked.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me? I was born in Scarborough. Not very exotic.”

  “Better than Mississauga,” I said, smiling. “Now what about school? I know Mae was a graduate student in the language school at Carleton, but she was already fluent in Mandarin. Why was she at Carleton?”

  “She wanted to teach. She talked about that quite a bit. Did you talk to Horsley?”

  “I did. This afternoon in fact. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve seen him at embassy events. Horny Horsley, Mae called him. He was always coming on to her. It was gross.”

  “I’ll say. The guy must not own a mirror. Mae would have had to be crazy to hook up with him.”

  Lily laughed, the first time she had done so. She was beginning to trust me. It was time for one more request. “Do you think I could see her room? It can help a writer get a bit of a feel for the person.”

  “Sure,” Lily said, rising from the low chair just as gracefully as she had descended. As I got up, I felt a twinge of the feared back pain. I really should get that looked at.

  Lily led me down the short hall and opened the door to Mae’s room. Unlike the shared bathroom, it was neat, almost monastic. The bed had a white cover, perfectly smooth, with two fluffy pillows in shams. There was a single dark wood dresser, but not a personal picture or memento on its glass-covered top. A book case stood by the closet, loaded with books, mostly Chinese. The closet door itself was closed. I would have liked to see inside, but that would be asking too much. In all, it was as impersonal as a hotel room.

  “Not much to see,” Lily said. “She was the neat one. I’m the slob.”

  “I’m just the same. Who’s got time for housecleaning?”

  Back in the living room, I put away my notebook and said, “What about you Lily? You said at the start that this was very hard on you. I can only imagine.”

  Actually, having lost almost every member of my family to violent death, I could more than imagine, but it wasn’t the time or the place to talk about that.

  When Lily shrugged again, I said, “When I met you at the door, you seemed afraid.”

  “Well, it did kind of spook me. It’s just hard to believe that Mae would kill herself, especially in such an awful way. I can’t imagine jumping off a building. At least she didn’t do it here.”

  ‘Thank God for that.”

  “You’ve talked to the police, right?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Is there any chance this is something other than a suicide? I mean, Mae seemed unhappy sometimes, maybe more than sometimes, but I don’t see her killing herself. She had a lot going for her. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Lily’s intuition was almost certainly correct, but there was no use worrying her any more than she already was. Whatever trouble had found Mae, Lily didn’t seem to be part of it.

  “No, it doesn’t make sense, but it usually doesn’t when someone kills themselves. We all have an inner life that other people don’t know about. Sometimes, that life is worse than anyone imagines. It doesn’t sound like Mae was the sort who was eager to share her problems. I’ve covered a lot of these kinds of situations. You can’t always make sense of them.”

  “All right,” Lily said. “Talking to you has made me feel a little bit better. Do you have a card in case I remember anything else important?”

  “Of course,” I said, handing her one. “If there is anything at all you think I should know about, or if you just want to talk, give me a call.”

  Lily put the card on a little black table by the door, nodding her thanks.

  As I went back down the steps toward my car, I hoped I was right in my assumption that Lily wasn’t part of whatever was going on and wasn’t in any danger. For just a minute, I second-guessed my decision not to level with Lily about how Mae had really died, but the knowledge would probably just worry the poor girl for nothing. She already had enough to handle after losing her roommate. All young people thought they were invincible. I knew only too well that they were not.

  ELEVEN

  Back in the car, I called Reilly’s cell. It rang five times before he picked up. “You back among the living?” I asked.

  “Barely. You making progress?”

  “Some. Up for a beer?”

  “Always.”

  “Meet me at the Black Thorn on Clarence. You know it?”

  “I’ve made a thorough study of every pub in town. Get a table on the patio, if you can.”

  The Black Thorn was my go-to pub in the ByWard Market. It had an easy-going, lived-in look, the kind that didn’t immediately say interior decorator. The two-storey Victorian that housed it sat just below the fortress-like American embassy, which formed the western edge of the market. The Parliament Buildings loomed above it, casting the patio in early evening shadows by the time I arrived.

  The area behind the Black Thorn was framed by even older stone buildings on Sussex, creating a private courtyard in the midst of the noise and chaos of the market, Ottawa’s main area for nightlife, such as it was. Fifty years ago, people had come here to buy cucumbers. Now, they came to get pickled.

  Reilly entered through the patio’s back entrance, wearing jeans and a navy golf shirt hanging outside his pants. He probably imagined he was blending in with the crowd, but he might as well have had the police logo on his shirt. You could make Reilly as a cop the minute he entered a room and I was sure that the tails-out shirt was meant to disguise the fact that he had a holster clipped to his belt. At least he looked a little better than the last time I had seen him, now freshly-shaven and his grey hair dark and still wet from the shower.

  Reilly sat heavily on the chair across from me, caught the server’s eye and pointed at the pint I had been sipping, raising his finger to indicate another.

  “So, how’s your investigation going?” he asked.

  “I think that’s supposed to be my line.”

  “I’ve only got one thing. You go first.”

  “OK. I’ve found out a bit more about Mae Wang.”

  I detailed the basic stuff I had learned from Horsley and Lily Liu, then said, “There are two things I think are important. First, the roommate tells me that she learned about Mae’s death when the RCMP came to her door. She didn’t report Mae missing and she said nothing about any contact in the RCMP. I didn’t push her on it, but ther
e’s no reason for her to lie about that, and the other things she told me rang true.”

  Reilly shook his head. “Lying pricks. It doesn’t surprise me. I was pretty certain this superintendent I was dealing with was bullshitting me from the get go. Good thing he’s a cop because he’d never have made it as a criminal. Lousy liar.”

  “So that means the RCMP knew who Mae Wang was and decided to get into this on their own. Any theories?”

  “Could have come from a lot of directions,” Reilly said. “CSIS, CSEC, maybe their own intel people. They all pay a lot of attention to the Chinese Embassy and the people associated with it.”

  “I know what CSIS is, but what’s CSEC?”

  “Communications Security Establishment Canada. They’re out in the east end. These guys eavesdrop on electronic communications, hack into computers, Christ knows what. They monitor everything that comes in or goes out of the embassy. They’re not spies like the guys at CSIS, but it’s the same line. The CSIS guys themselves watch the people who work there or visit the embassy. The RCMP boys who provide ‘security’ outside the embassy gates note everybody coming and going, too. Mae Wang must have been on their radar.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t explain why they were so quick to know about her murder.”

  “Had to be under surveillance.”

  “Because of her work as an interpreter?” I asked, not hiding my scepticism.

  “If that’s what she was.”

  “You know different?”

  “Not yet, but I had a buddy with the Vancouver police check into the idea that Mae had family in that city. This guy has a pretty good feel for the Chinese community there, but he came up empty. Mae Wang, Carleton student and embassy interpreter, doesn’t exist. Not by that name. Mae, or whoever she really was, simply made up her background. There are people in China who make a damned good living creating fake identities for people who want to come here. Usually, they’re rich gangsters who want to launder their money.”

  What Reilly was saying confirmed my own thinking, but that didn’t make it helpful. “As much as I like the woman of mystery angle, I’d like it a lot better if we could prove that her identity was fake.”

  “There are people who probably can. If the Mounties or their spook friends were paying attention to Mae Wang, there’s a decent chance they know her real identity. She was either a Chinese spy, or they suspected she was.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. The embassy here is full of spies. Really, that’s the only reason they bother to have one. They keep an eye on the local Chinese community, but the real work is stealing military and industrial secrets.”

  “But Mae didn’t have any diplomatic status. She was just an interpreter.”

  “There has to be more to it than that,” Reilly said.

  “You think the Chinese killed Mae?”

  “No. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to pull that stunt at the morgue to get her body back. She’d just have disappeared and no one would be any the wiser.”

  “It’s a great story, if true, but even in a column, I need something more than speculation. If the Mounties aren’t telling you what’s going on, they aren’t going to tell me.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t find out. It pisses me off when a fellow cop lies to my face. I’m sure it’s the usual national security bullshit, but they use that to cover up a multitude of sins. I’d like to find out who Mae was, even if it’s just to twist their noses.”

  “I’m for that, but how are you going to do it?”

  “I know some people. Let me see what I can find out.

  “You said there were two interesting things. What else have you got?”

  “The roommate tells me that Mae Wang slept somewhere else two nights a week, Tuesday and Thursday.”

  Reilly smiled. “I’ll bet she wasn’t doing much sleeping. Could she have been working for an escort service? That could take this in a whole different direction.”

  I hadn’t considered that. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not basing that on anything but gut instinct, but Mae seemed pretty busy with school and her work. Would she have been working as an interpreter if she could have made easier money doing something else? I don’t think the roommate would have told me about Mae’s twonight-a-week thing, either, if she was in the life.”

  “Probably not,” Reilly conceded, nodding. “Tuesday and Thursday suggests someone who is maybe here during the week for business or has a wife and family he needs to spend the weekends with. I’m thinking the boinking must have taken place at your building. We’ve got a pretty heavy surveillance camera presence on Elgin. Let me see what I can find out.”

  I took a long pull on my Keith’s White and said, “You thinking the boyfriend was worried she would blow the whistle on him?”

  “Maybe. If so, he’s a boyfriend with a lot to lose. Of course, our investigation was at a very preliminary stage when the plug got pulled. All we had determined was that Mae Wang didn’t rent an apartment in the building. She could have been visiting anyone there.”

  The idea that there could be a killer in my building was creepy, even creepier if he found out that I was asking questions about Mae Wang’s death.

  “I can give you one lead on the boyfriend. I interviewed a guy called Ron Horsley, Carleton professor. The guy clearly had the hots for Mae, something that was confirmed by the roommate. He’s got to be 60, though. I can’t see the two of them together.”

  Reilly laughed. “Yeah, who’d want to screw an old bugger like that?”

  “You haven’t seen Horsley.”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  “So what’s next?” I asked.

  “Normally, I’d get some uniforms, canvass the building, show Mae Wang’s photo, see if anyone recognized her. I’ve got no resources on this, though. Maybe this joint task force will get around to doing the basics, eventually. More likely, they will sit on their hands because no one is going to speak up for this girl. No family, no one who gives a shit.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. I’m not going to knock on my neighbors’ doors asking if any of them committed murder lately.”

  “Leave it with me.” Reilly drained his pint and said, “I’ve got to get going. I do have actual cases I’m responsible for. Let’s stay in touch on this, shall we? Someone is trying to get away with murder here, but the coverup from guys who are supposed to be on our side is almost as bad. When you get into this diplomatic shit, none of the normal rules apply. I have a hard time with that.”

  “Me too,” I said. The Mae Wang story was proving to be more layered and complex than I had at first imagined, and I was still skimming along the surface. If Reilly was right, what lay beneath was dynamite, but it was frustratingly difficult to establish anything as a fact.

  “Look, Kris, be careful with this,” Reilly said. “Whoever is behind this killing is obviously dangerous and you might have already put yourself on their radar by asking around.”

  I nodded. I had been interviewing hardened criminals and gang members for years, and I used to think I was invincible. I had found out the hard way how easy it was for powerful people to take someone like me off the board.

  I thanked Reilly for his help and watched him make his way through the maze of tables on the patio and back into the pub itself. He hadn’t asked me a single question about Suzy Morin. Either he had accepted that I really had no information or he was finally starting to move on. Hopefully not in my direction.

  TWELVE

  “Tea?” Colin asked.

  I would really have preferred coffee. Saturday morning at 9:30 was time for a caffeine jolt, not for fiddling with tea. Colin was already fussing with the teapot and his beloved Earl Grey, though.

  “Sure, tea would be great.”

  When I had called earlier in the morning to update him on the Mae Wang developments, I had been thinking that it was something that could be done on the phone, but Colin had insisted I come around to his apartment. Given our history, I wa
s wary of that. When a man is in love with you, and you’re not sure if you are in love with him, managing expectations is important.

  I glanced around the condo, searching hopefully for evidence of recent female habitation; a lipstick-stained glass, a lingering whiff of perfume, maybe even a discarded thong. Any of those would be a welcome sign that I had been replaced.

  I searched in vain. The place was pristine as usual, the white leather furniture and black granite kitchen countertop setting the simple theme chosen by the developer’s designer. I was a bit surprised to see that Colin had started to personalize things since I had moved out. When we were together the place was basically a hotel room, but Colin had added a bank of four televisions to the living room wall, tuned to the news networks of CBC, CTV, CNN and Fox. He had acquired a massive oak desk, shoved up against the main window to take advantage of the fifteenth floor view. The desk top was neat and I suspected he didn’t do much actual work there. Arrayed across the desk was part of Colin’s collection of celebrity pictures, showing him with Tony Blair, Jean Chretien, Stephen Harper and Benjamin Netanyahu. In a slightly larger frame and placed in front of the rest was a shot of a much younger Colin wearing a flak jacket and helmet during his war correspondent days. I knew that he had always been miles from the action, but his time in the Falklands was the high point of Colin’s career, in his own view. He never tired of talking about it, unaware that others tired of listening.

  I was sure the rest of Colin’s vast collection of trophy pictures was still in the bedroom. I’d always found that a bit creepy. Who wanted to have sex in front of a picture of her boyfriend with the Queen?

  It was definitely a male lair, without a trace of a woman’s presence. Before me, Colin was noted for consuming women the way other men consumed potato chips. I wasn’t sure whether our relationship had saved him or ruined him.

  He finished with his tea preparation. Pot pre-heated, tea steeped exactly five minutes, just a touch of milk.

  “Black for me,” I said.

  “Yes, I recall,” he said, smiling.