Do or Die

by Barbara Fradkin

  “When was that?”

  “It started about a month ago. Jonathan and I had a big fight over it, and he said I had to trust him. But I’m not a fool. I can’t compete with a woman like that.”

  “Do you know who she was?”

  Her mouth quivered. “Raquel Haddad.”

  Haddad, he thought. Lebanese name. “Jet black wavy hair, olive skin?”

  She glanced up in surprise. “You’ve seen her?”

  He shrugged, non-committal. “Who is she?”

  She lowered her eyes and twisted the kleenex around her finger like a noose. “An undergraduate troller. She hung around our floor, looking for prey. She started with another guy but quickly moved on to more promising prospects. At first Jonathan denied she was even in the picture. Then he said she was just a research assistant. Yeah, right.”

  “You didn’t believe him?” “She was all over him.” The noose tightened, then she released it with a small gasp. “I…I don’t mean he lied.” She pressed her hand to her forehead and took deep breaths, striving for composure. “It was just his way of letting me down easy. Jonathan hates to hurt anybody. But sometimes being wishy-washy hurts more than an honest yes.”

  “How did he seem recently? Anything different? Was he troubled?”

  “He felt bad about me, I could tell. He avoided me at the university. He’d leave the room if I came in or pretend he was engrossed in a book. Jonathan was never very extroverted, but he seemed quieter than before.”

  “Sad?”

  She put the shredded kleenex aside and smoothed her bathrobe, in control again. “You know—” She raised her eyes thoughtfully “—sometimes he did look a little sad. I thought maybe she was giving him a rocky ride. She looked a little too…hot-blooded for his temperament.”

  “Did you notice anything different between him and his friends or classmates?”

  “He didn’t hang out with them as much as before. He seemed buried in his work. They made snide little comments like ‘Blair thinks he’s going to find a way to make cats talk’.”

  “That sounds jealous. Were others jealous of him?” “Jonathan had no airs. He was handsome and brilliant, but he was also modest and unassuming. I think some guys were even jealous of that. They’d like him to be an arrogant creep, so they could put him down without feeling guilty.”

  “Are you saying jealousy was a major problem?”

  “Jealousy is always a problem in the academic world, Detective. That’s one of the first things my father warned me about.” She smiled wryly. “But then, my father would say jealousy makes a good incentive.”

  Or a good motive for murder, he thought to himself, but did not say it. He wanted to keep her soft and pliable. “Any particular person more jealous than the rest?”

  Suddenly, she unfolded herself from the sofa and drew herself up to her full height, careful to arrange her dressing gown. “I’m sorry, do you want a cold drink? I didn’t realize this would take so long. I should fix myself up a bit.”

  Gone was the moment for pliability. She glided into the kitchen, head high and back straight. Unlike the living room, the kitchen was spare but spotless, every pot neatly stacked on the shelf. She plucked some items from the fridge, tossed them into the blender, and disappeared, giving Green a chance to snoop. He could tell a lot about a person by the way they arranged their kitchen. In his own home, three half-empty boxes of Cheerios and a lidless ketchup bottle were likely to fall on your head when you opened a cupboard door, but there was no such danger here. There certainly wasn’t much money either, but the neat, organized inhabitant was making the most of it. The kitchen table doubled as a desk, and a painted bookshelf held cans and boxes neatly arranged by type. The food was simple and utilitarian—no spices or exotic grains.

  Green revised his initial impression of Jonathan’s ex-girlfriend. The mess in the living room was superficial, created in a day of shock and grief. Marianne Blair was right; Vanessa Weeks was very much her own woman, practical, organized and used to being in control. True to this insight, she returned a minute later dressed in shorts and a pink T-shirt over a lean, muscular body. Her hair was combed back into a pony tail and her face was freshly scrubbed. He could see now that she was pretty in a wholesome way. She flipped off the blender.

  “Joe Difalco,” she replied as if the conversation hadn’t been interrupted. “Joe hates his guts, and it’s pure, simple jealousy. Joe thinks he’s God’s gift to women, but he’s just a swaggering Latin pig. He’s supposed to be Professor Halton’s golden boy, but people went to Jonathan when they needed brains. Joe grew up in a sixteen-room mansion in Cedarhill, and his daddy owns five cars, including a Lamborghini, but Jonathan gets invited to 24 Sussex Drive. Joe thinks the world is at his feet because his parents always told him it was, but it was really at Jonathan’s feet.”

  “You don’t like this guy much, do you?”

  To her credit, she managed a laugh. “When you hold Joe and Jonathan up together, there’s no comparison. If someone had to die…” Her voice trailed off as she busied herself setting out glasses. He tried to imagine mentally how yogurt, carrots, club soda and wheat germ would taste.

  “Did you ever hear Joe threaten Jonathan or act as if he wanted to harm him?”

  “No. Joe’s strategy was to pretend Jonathan didn’t exist. Joe is a doctoral student in the final stages of his dissertation. He’s one of Halton’s most senior students. Jonathan’s a lowly Masters student. Final year, so higher than me, who’s just beginning, but I’m not sure Professor Halton would even have noticed him if his mother wasn’t made of money. Jonathan presented a threat, but more for his potential than his present status.”

  “Does Joe have a temper? Ever seen him angry?”

  “I’m sure he does. He can be very intense. Wound up like a spring, impatient, restless.” She poured a yellow sludge into each glass. “It suggests inadequate cortical control of the limbic system.”

  He skirted the editorializing deftly as he took his glass from her. “What does this guy look like?”

  “Good-looking, I suppose, if you like the Mediterranean look. Dark, curly hair, big brown eyes. Compact but muscular. I’d say he does weights.”

  “Mustache?”

  She shuddered. “No, at least not that.”

  “Do you think he is capable of murder?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They returned to the living room and, as casually as he could, he set his drink on the floor by his side, out of sight. Over the next half hour, he probed her knowledge of the routine details of Jonathan Blair’s life. Blair enjoyed cycling, boating and skiing, but in recent months had done little but his research.

  “Did he enjoy a good read?” Green asked casually. “The classics, for example?”

  Her brow furrowed in confusion.

  “He was in the literature section.”

  “Oh.” Her brow cleared. “He read constantly, yes, and he did enjoy mysteries as an escape.”

  Mysteries were hardly Shakespeare, Green observed privately, but he left the topic to probe her views closer to the case, unearthing little of interest. She could think of no one else with the remotest reason for wanting him dead and no situation that might put him in danger.

  “He studied the brains of cats, for heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed. “Most of his days were spent in the animal room, the EEG lab, or at his computer. He didn’t even help to teach a course. So there isn’t even the motive of a student driven berserk by a poor mark.”

  “What did he do with the cats?”

  “You don’t really want to know.” She eyed him balefully. “He drilled holes in their heads and inserted probes to stimulate electrical activity in the hippocampal region. Which is part of the limbic system and crucial for new memory.” Seeing his blank look, she waved an impatient hand. “He trains his cats on different listening tasks and measures brain responses.”

  Green winced. “I get the picture. What about the anti-vivisectionists? That’s a pretty fan
atical bunch. Did he receive any threats or complaints from them?”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s clutching at straws, I’d say. He never mentioned complaints.”

  “Well, I am clutching at straws,” he replied, allowing a plaintive edge in his voice. Appeal to her maternal side; he’d often found that worked with women. “I don’t have any real motives for murder here, and everyone I talk to describes him as Mr. Perfect.”

  “Well, if I were you, I’d check into the dark-haired bitch he’s had on his arm for the past two months. Raquel’s Arabic, and you know how protective those guys can be about their women.”

  As a Jew, Green had a finely tuned radar for prejudice and was no longer surprised when it cropped up in the most unexpected places. In some ways, the subtle bigotry of the educated white elite was more deadly than the crude ignorance of the streets. Vanessa Weeks probably didn’t even think of her remark as racist, merely factual. But prejudice aside, in this case she had a point, he realized, particularly when he considered the murder weapon MacPhail had described. An eight-inch, smooth-bladed knife. If folklore was to be believed, the weapon of choice among Arab desert tribes.

  He excused himself and slipped into the hall to call the station. He reached Sullivan at his own phone.

  “Any breaks yet?” “The guys are collecting a lot of stuff, Mike, but we don’t have a clear-cut motive or an obvious suspect yet. No sign of our mystery student in the plaid shirt. Paquette has come up empty on the fingerprint analysis so far. MacPhail says the body has no defensive wounds on it, so Blair didn’t try to block the blow. Looks like he was taken by surprise. “

  “That suggests somebody smooth and quick with a knife.”

  “Ruthless, too. The guy couldn’t afford to hesitate.”

  “Did MacPhail speculate on how much strength it would take? Could it have been a woman?”

  “It was a hell of a sharp knife. Double edge and pointed tip. A woman could slip it in without trouble.”

  “Have the guys got anything on the dark-haired girlfriend yet? Her name’s Raquel Haddad.”

  “Yup. Jackson’s already heading out to her home as we speak.”

  * * *

  The University of Ottawa was scattered through the aging downtown district of Sandy Hill, once the elegant home of the lumber barons, entrepreneurs and founding politicians of the fledgling town. Some of the stately mansions of a hundred years ago were now embassies, but many had been subdivided into cheap tenements filled with immigrants and the transient poor. Green dodged swaddled Somali women pushing strollers as well as the usual throngs of scruffy students as he raced to the university administration building to track down Raquel Haddad before Jackson did. He was fuming. Jackson was supposed to contact him, not blunder off after sensitive witnesses on his own.

  Green was glad he knew every pothole and stop sign in the neighbourhood, for he had been born in a dilapidated little house a mere mile away in Lowertown, on the working class side of Rideau Street. After his first brief, but expensive foray into marriage and home-ownership, which had scared him off both for years, he had moved back to the inner city to a rundown brick low-rise in Sandy Hill. He had always referred to it, rather proudly, as “the dump”. With each promotion and pay raise, he kept intending to move into larger, sleeker, more modern quarters but always found himself reluctant to part with it. It was in the heart of his daily life, a short drive from the police station, Nate’s Delicatessen and his father, who now lived in a seniors’ apartment just off Rideau Street.

  Green’s apartment was cramped and drafty; it had no balcony, only one bedroom, creaky floors, balky plumbing and a shower that never stopped dripping. There was no room large enough for the spectacular, four-speaker sound system he wanted to buy so that he could blast the great rock classics from the four corners of the room. His mother had come from a musical family in Warsaw, before they all perished in Treblinka, and while he was growing up, she had supplemented his father’s assistant shipper’s salary by giving piano lessons. The children had been excruciating, but his mother’s fingers could make the dullest Bach étude come alive. His taste ran to a more raucous sound than hers, but even now, fifteen years after her death, music still brought her back to him.

  But musical yearnings aside, a single man could live in the “dump” quite nicely, as long as he wasn’t picky. Three, however, was a definite crowd. When Sharon had given up her modern high-rise apartment to move in with him, both had understood the accommodations would be temporary. She had grown up in a sprawling suburban bungalow, and she did not share his attachment to noise, car fumes and crumbling corner stores. She had been a good sport, but the arrival of the baby, which had ousted his favourite green lazee-boy from the living room corner to accommodate the crib, had given the matter a new urgency.

  Under the guidance of Mary, Brian Sullivan’s wife, they had looked at half a dozen houses in the price range they could afford, which wasn’t high, because in addition to child support for a daughter he barely knew, Green paid almost all his father’s expenses at the seniors’ home. But the houses Mary had found had been soulless chunks of vinyl and particle board; none had felt like homes to him.

  This was home, he thought, as his car wove in and out between parked cars and potholes on the back streets of Sandy Hill. He covered the six blocks to the administration building with his accelerator foot to the floor. For once he appreciated the spritely little blue Corolla Sharon had insisted he buy last winter. At the time he’d considered it an alien yuppie affectation, but his rusty yellow Pony had been twelve years old by the time Tony was born, and Sharon had refused to allow the baby anywhere near it.

  His first impulse had been to buy a Suzuki Swift, which was one step above a moped and the cheapest, most anti-inspectorish vehicle he could find, or, as a concession to his incipient midlife crisis, a used Mustang convertible. But Sharon was pushing for a mini-van. The Corolla was her bottom line, and given that choice, Green considered himself lucky. He’d parted with his Pony reluctantly because, like his apartment, it had sentimental value, but as the Corolla leaped in response to the gas, he realized how loathe he’d been to admit that everything, including himself, was growing old.

  His old Pony would have been smoking by the time he pulled into the parking lot of the University of Ottawa administration building. He parked the Corolla in a spot marked “Dean of Arts”, slapped a police sticker in his window and headed for the records department. The mention of murder and Professor Myles Halton sent the chief records clerk scurrying for the confidential file on Raquel Haddad.

  Raquel was twenty-two, born in Beirut to a Lebanese physician, but she was listed as living with her uncle Pierre Haddad, a Canadian citizen with a local Loretta Street Address. Green jotted it down, then scanned the rest of her file. She appeared to be in the fourth year of an Honours Biology program with a heavy emphasis on physiology, anatomy and biochemistry. Something Vanessa Weeks had said came to mind. Jonathan had told her Raquel was only a research assistant. Did senior Honours students help Masters students with their research?

  A visit to the eminent Dr. Myles Halton was certainly in order, but first he had to check out Pierre Haddad. The Loretta Street address proved to be a corner convenience store on the fringe of Little Italy. The front door sagged and the “L” and “Y” on the sign “Loretta Confectionery” had peeled off. Another victim of big box stores, Green thought as he pushed the door open with a screech of rusty hinges and entered a room full of dark, half-empty shelves. No wonder business was bad. Mr. Haddad needed some pointers in presentation.

  In response to the screech, a curtain parted at the back of the store and a man emerged. Early forties, swarthy and prematurely gone to fat. He rolled down the aisle to the cash.

  “Pierre Haddad?”

  The man scowled, drawing his heavy black brows over his eyes. Green produced his badge and kept his voice soothing. Experience had taught him that people from violence-plagued countries were easily alarmed. “I’
m Inspector Green of the Ottawa Police. As you probably know, a student at the University of Ottawa named Jonathan Blair was murdered last night. I’m told that Raquel Haddad was one of his research assistants. We are asking everyone who knew him if they know anything that might help us. Raquel listed you as next of kin, and this as her address. I wonder if I could speak to her.”

  Haddad had betrayed nothing during the entire speech, no doubt a habit learned on the streets of Beirut. But once Green had finished, he arranged an expression of dismay on his face.

  “Murdered! No, I did not know that. How terrible.”

  A foolish error, Green thought; he had passed the newspapers stacked for sale by the door. The news was blazoned across the front in large bold print.

  Green let the lie pass. “Yes, it’s terrible, and we need all the help we can get. She’s your niece, I understand? Living here with you?”

  “She is the daughter of my brother in Beirut. But we don’t live here. This is my business.”

  “Did she ever talk about someone named Jonathan Blair?”

  He shook his head, then smiled and became effusive. “My brother sent her over here to be safer with me, but Canadian girls, they have much more freedom than Lebanese girls. She doesn’t like to talk to me about her school. I try to take care of her—keep an eye, you know, but not too much. I know she studies science, but I don’t know who are her friends.”

  Green knew it was ludicrous to think Haddad knew little of his niece’s university life. Mediterranean families brought their traditional values and their protectiveness with them, and it took several generations to wash out. Raquel might have refused to tell him anything, but he would have found out anyway.

  But it was not yet time to get tough. “Can you give me the address where I can find her?”