by Anna Porter
“How is the lovely Brenda? Taking it like a soldier, is she? And the child...what’s her name? Beverly? Alexandra? You know...the little princess?”
“Meredith?”
“Ach yes, Meredit.” She pronounced it that way, with a hard t. By making it sound like an uneasy combination of “mare” and “edit,” she took a lot out of the name.
“They were fine,” Judith said.
“Did you happen to mention my communication to Brenda?”
“No. I did tell Philip Masters, though. He seemed surprised. I wonder what—”
“Philip was not surprised,” Eva Zimmerman stated unequivocally. “Philip is the last person who would have been surprised. Anyway, almost the last. When you’re so close to the devil you’re bound to feel the heat. So what did he say?”
“Mrs. Zimmerman.” Judith thought she should bring the conversation around so she was asking the questions, not the other way around. “About the telegram. Why did you send it to me?”
“Who else was I going to send it to? You’re working on the story, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am, but that doesn’t explain... What I mean is...” She was beginning to feel like Alice conversing with the Red Queen. “Why did you send a telegram saying that Mr. Zimmerman was murdered?”
“Why? Because he was. That’s why. And I thought someone should do something about it. Don’t you think that’s reasonable?”
“Actually...well, yes. But I don’t understand why you think he was murdered.” It was at times like these she wished she’d kept a tape recorder. Giles would never believe this conversation, even if Finance International were the kind of magazine to delve into such personal matters as murder.
“Because he told me so. Himself. Paul was expecting to be killed. Perhaps not so soon, but he knew it was coming. He had been anticipating it for years. A matter of destiny—as he saw it, of course. With Paul everything was a question of destiny. We have a way of bringing these things down on ourselves if we expect them, and the waiting becomes a kind of race. For time, you know. Very likely a key to his success—he never knew when he’d be cut off. Personally, I would recommend suicide in such cases—a greatly preferable method. So admirably controllable. But that wasn’t his way.” When she paused, Judith could hear her breathing—a hard, rasping sound, as though she was having trouble drawing air into her lungs. “Perhaps you’d like to come and visit?” she asked.
“In Paris?”
“Well, that’s where I am.”
Sixteen
CONSTABLES STEWART and Giannini had interviewed altogether 48 people on Spadina Road between St. Clair and Eglinton and had gathered a list of suspicious-looking characters a mile long who had been seen in the vicinity of Madame Cielo’s over the past two or three weeks. The list abounded in such surprises as a black woman with four white poodles who was driven to and from her house in a stretch limo, two people with eye patches and bowler hats, a green man with a guitar case, a six-foot peroxide blond woman, a dwarf, and a punk rocker with orange hair, spiked black wristbands, and her own blue hearse. David Parr concluded that Spadina Road must have more than its fair share of creative people. The problem was how to weed out the imaginary characters from the real ones. In a red brick rooming house, there was a young school-teacher who admitted to having consulted Madame from time to time. Madame’s fee varied with the nature of the business. For a simple forecast, she charged her standard $50. For consultation regarding loved ones, her fee escalated to $100. Once, the schoolteacher had asked her if she could cast a spell that would re-establish her relationship with a boyfriend. This particular procedure was tagged at $300 for step one, and heaven knows what happened at step two. As the first stage had involved spraying her friend’s brand new Volvo with her own urine while mumbling some extremely embarrassing words, the school-teacher couldn’t bring herself to the second stage.
“So did it work?” Parr asked Giannini after he had listened to the report.
“What do you mean, did it work?”
“The urine. Did it work?”
“I didn’t ask,” Giannini confessed.
“Kid was afraid she was going to say yes,” Stewart said. He was two years older and ten pounds heavier than Giannini and never let him forget it.
“You figure she actually tried it?” Giannini asked.
Stewart shook his head. “Takes all kinds,” he said. “But I reckon we’ve got the motive, all we need is the suspect.”
“You do?” Giannini asked.
“Yeah. Streetwise old woman went around collecting large dollops of cash from a bunch of simple marks. She pushed them to do stupid things in exchange for celestial favors and milked them for all they were worth. There’s plenty of lonely, gullible people around. Well, one of them, after trying the urine trick, or God knows what else, having run out of savings along the way, got royally fed up and bumped her off. Can’t say I blame the poor sot.” Stewart sat well back in his chair and looked expectantly at Parr. “What do you think, sir?”
“Well, then,” David said. “All you chaps have to do is bring in that poor sot and we can close the file. Case has had a bit of attention in the press, the Chief wants us to clear it up fast. We’re due for a couple of breaks.”
Parr certainly thought he was due for a break. Two unsolved murders and Judith insisting he look into a third was not conducive to feeling happy with himself.
In the morning he had talked the Bermuda police department into checking out Zimmerman’s XJ-S, but it had already been cleaned and the glass replaced, and on walking around it they saw nothing suspicious. He could hardly expect the Bermuda police to take much more interest on the basis of unsubstantiated suspicions from Toronto. The Zimmermans were not the sort of people whose cars one tore apart without strong evidence. Perhaps Levine could persuade them to cooperate if he tried in person.
David had Michael Ward checked through the files and, sure enough, he had a mature police record that started when he was twelve. Petty stuff, mostly, till he’d shot and wounded a gas station attendant in 1975 and gone away for a ten-year jaunt. He’d been paroled into the custody of the John Howard Society and they’d found him the job at Zimmerman’s. There had been no complaints about him since. Checked in with his parole officer regular as clockwork.
David’s luck changed with Deidre Thomas’s call at 3. She had found a letter addressed to Paul Zimmerman from Harvey Singer.
“What does it say?” David asked.
“I’ll meet you at the Royal York, Black Knight Bar, at 5,” Deidre suggested, “and you can see for yourself. Or don’t officers of the law ever have drinks with regular members of society?” She sounded coy, which didn’t suit her age range.
“Drinks are fine,” David said, “but can’t wait till 5. How about I pick you up in ten minutes in front of the building and we go for a coffee break at Telfer’s?”
She didn’t hesitate for a moment.
She waited for him at the curb, in ankle-length silver raccoon. She wore high-heeled gray suede boots and a soft peach scarf that wound around her head. When she got into the car she let the folds of the coat fall back to reveal the long shapely legs David had admired the day before.
“You’re not married, are you, Officer Parr?” she asked him over the rim of her whiskey sour. “I was reading somewhere that policemen have one of the highest divorce rates in America. Guess that would be true here as well, wouldn’t it? Tough being married to a policeman, worrying every night if he’s safe. Waiting. Not knowing.” She shivered deliciously.
“Statistics don’t lie,” David said, opening the long white envelope she had given him.
The paper was rather unusual in that it was bordered in black. The sort of paper they use for funeral notices. It was addressed in fine, slanting longhand, well-spaced words, to Paul Zimmerman, Esq., Chairman, Monarch Enterprises. It was dated December 21, 1986, and that matched the New York postmark on the envelope to which it had been stapled.
There was no �
��Dear Mr. Zimmerman” or “Dear Paul,” or any other form of salutation. The letter simply said: “This picture will bring back some memories for you, as it did for me. I hope your nights are long.”
It was signed “Singer.”
There was a photograph in the envelope, an old black-and-white with serrated edges, showing two boys around ten years old, standing close together, each with an arm around the other’s shoulder. One was a good hand’s-width taller than the other, so the short one had to reach a bit to stretch his arm up. You could just see the ends of his fingers over the taller one’s bony shoulder blade. They were wearing baggy swimming trunks. Both had thin, boyish legs they had spread apart in bravado, showing off for the camera. Above the waist, the smaller boy was a little chubby, which he had gone to some pains to hide by wearing an oversize singlet. The other pushed out his narrow chest, the ribs forming an arch over the hollow of his stomach. They both had short haircuts, one blond, the other dark. The smaller boy wore glasses, and his outer arm was propped against his hip. The taller boy had made a fist with his outside arm and was flexing the nonexistent muscles. Both were grimacing into the sun.
The picture was taken on the grass in front of a small white house with double glass doors and climbing roses. There were some gardenias to the left and the rear end of what looked like a baby carriage.
“I was married once,” Deidre confided. “Didn’t work out particularly well. It was okay in the beginning, of course, but didn’t last the stretch. Not many do these days, I suppose.” She mused. “I’ve been living alone for a few years now. Paul made it easy for me. No regrets. Successfully single, as they say. Only problem is Saturday nights. Damned if I know why, but they’re the hardest. I think we were all conditioned to believe that if we were good little girls and kept our legs crossed, didn’t argue with the boys, and prettied up our faces, we’d be whooping it up Saturday nights. Doesn’t work, though, does it?” She was fingering her whiskey sour, not drinking much of it. “Wish I’d never heard of calories, don’t you?”
“How did you mean Paul made it easy for you?” David asked.
Deidre shrugged. “Doesn’t much matter now,” she said. “He just did.” She looked very sad, suddenly.
“Where did you find this?” David asked, putting the photograph back into the envelope.
“In one of our ‘bring forward’ files,” she said. “We were very organized. Reason I remembered the name was that Paul asked me to look up Singer in the New York telephone book. You see, there’s no address on the envelope.” She rolled her eyes at the memory. “There were dozens of them. I copied the pages for him.”
“That would have been late last December?” David asked. “After he got this letter?”
“Probably,” Deidre said, thoughtfully. “Hard to isolate the time. All I remember is going round to the central library. We don’t have a New York telephone book at the office.”
“The 21st is near Christmas,” David prompted.
“So?” Deidre said. “Wouldn’t stand out much for me. Haven’t paid attention to Christmas for years. Best way I know to get through the whole damn holiday period is to try and ignore it. It’s such a rotten letdown once you grow up, don’t you think?”
David nodded pensively.
“One time I went to an ashram in New Jersey. I read about it in Time magazine. Now don’t laugh. I thought it might really help me with life, you know.”
David didn’t laugh.
“What do you do Saturday nights?” Deidre asked.
“Not a helluva lot,” David confessed. “But my mother never made a big issue of it, so I don’t worry about it. What else is there in that file?” he asked.
“Not much. Birthdates. Lists of birthday presents he bought Meredith and Brenda, so he wouldn’t buy the same things again. And there were copies of letters to Arthur—that’s his son in New York. Letters from organizations he regularly gave money to. That sort of stuff.”
“Nothing else from Singer?”
“No. Why? Was this guy somebody famous?” she asked.
“No,” said David. “He wasn’t anybody special. He just died a few days before your boss did, and I’ve been thinking there might be a connection.”
“But Paul died of a heart attack.”
“Singer was murdered. In Toronto last Thursday night.” David pocketed the envelope and its contents. “I’ll drive you back now,” he said.
He had been wrong when he thought that talk of murder might alarm Deidre Thomas. She became positively ebullient. “My,” she said, “my, my, my,” swiveling her head, bouncing her brown curls. “I’ve never been involved in a murder investigation before. Do you have any suspects?”
“Not yet,” David admitted, “but I’m working on it. I’d like to borrow that file for a day, if I may.”
“You don’t think Paul had something to do with it himself?” She narrowed her eyes and hunkered down around her glass. David wondered if she was trying to look like Humphrey Bogart. She had looked a whole lot better before.
“I doubt it. I have to get back to work now,” he said, “but, if you like, we could go to a movie one Saturday night.”
“Tomorrow?” she asked eagerly.
“Why not?”
She pulled the raccoon over her shoulder and headed out the door. “I’ll bring the file,” she said.
David figured he would have to see Mrs. Singer one more time. He was not looking forward to it.
Seventeen
WHEN DAVID ARRIVED at Judith’s, she was packing. It was a process that worked by elimination, rather than thoughtful choice. She had laid most of her clothes out on the bed, lined up blouses on one side, skirts and pants on the other, pantyhose and underwear in one corner, jackets and dresses in the other. In the middle she had built a nice little arrangement of toothpaste, toothbrush, and creams and lotions, and a black felt hat. Boots and shoes were stacked on the night table with the phone.
“You’re planning to spend the year?” David inquired from the doorway.
Judith held up a lilac blouse, gray skirt, and brown pants. “What do you think?” she asked, holding them against herself.
“At the Meurice, I’d go for the skirt,” David said. “But then, I’ve never been invited to the Meurice, never mind stayed there. It’s a place for black mink, long lamé dresses, and strings of real beads. Royalty stays there, not policemen from Toronto.”
“You sound a bit jealous,” Judith said, placing the skirt and blouse in the battered blue suitcase at the foot of the bed. She threw the pants on the floor.
“I am,” David admitted. “I’m going to have a rotten time in New York with Mrs. Singer while you’re at the Meurice with a weird old dame who sounds half interesting.”
While Judith continued to stuff clothes into the suitcase, David sat at her typewriter and told her about Mrs. Singer, sending Levine off to Bermuda to check out the Jag the local cops wouldn’t touch, the police report on the Zimmermans’ garage boy, and his meeting with Deidre Thomas.
“That’s the Chloé?” she asked, sniffing the air.
“The what?”
“The perfume you’ve brought with you. Twenty-eight dollars for a small bottle, plus tax. Done some close questioning, have you?”
David ignored the innuendo. Chances were Judith knew him better than he knew himself. “She’s a fairly sophisticated lady, with some income on the side. Zimmerman bequeathed her a tidy sum, enough that she doesn’t need to worry about the next job now he’s dead. She’s attractive and tough, and I think she was rather more to him than a private secretary. She might know quite a lot about him.”
“She’s not the only one,” Judith said, wrapping her boots in a dry-cleaner bag. “I had the impression that old Mr. Zimmerman may have been a ladies’ man of some repute. No one’s exactly talking about it, but there are hints. His wife suggested he had been a connoisseur of women, and I have an idea he was in mid-affair with one of his directors’ wives when he died.”
�
��A man of formidable libido,” said David, with the kind of good-natured smirk men put on their faces when they hear of the sexual exploits of other men—grudging admiration and fellow pride.
“And of few close friends, I suspect, though so far only Philip Masters has been willing to come right out and say so. Except for Eva, that is, and the consensus is she’s mad.”
David showed her the note and the photograph. “This is what Deidre found in his files,” he said. “Is one of these Zimmerman?”
“Very likely the tall one,” Judith exclaimed. “An amazing similarity to Arthur Zimmerman. But people change a lot into their teens. God knows, my kids have. Wouldn’t recognize the two charming little angels from the galloping behemoths I live with.” She had started to pull some of the clothes out again for a second look. “You think the other’s Singer?”
David did. He also thought there was something enormously endearing about Judith bending over the well-trodden suitcase, her bright auburn hair on either side of her face, like puppy’s ears, her shrunken hand-knitted sweater riding high up her back to reveal the foamy flesh where her hip began. There was the edge of a strange sensation in the back of his throat that he almost recognized as tears, and it struck him again that, no matter how he struggled to disguise the fact, he loved her.
Judith threw two jackets and a dress onto the middle of the bed over the hat, creams, and lotions, and stood back for a critical appraisal. The sweater resumed its uncertain perch, the hair swung back, and David took her in his arms and kissed her. She laughed softly because she’d been expecting him to come to her: she’d been aware of his eyes turning soft as he watched her.
They made love over the dress and jackets and simplified Judith’s packing by eliminating a certain element of choice, particularly in the way of hats. It was a warm, tender, reassuring kind of love that was difficult to surface from—the kind Judith found most insidious because it left her doughy, unprepared for the world. David’s strong, feisty body surrounded her, made her feel much too safe, protected from the harshness of everyday life. It would be difficult to snap back into the plans for the Paris trip.