by John Moss
Spivak moved around beside Morgan and acknowledged the coroner with a wet cough.
“You want to get that looked at, Detective. You’d do better spitting than swallowing.”
“You too,” he leered.
No one acknowledged the joke. Sometimes, thought Morgan, there’s no double in double entendre.
“I’m not yours till I’m dead,” said Spivak, with the righteous sneer of the self-afflicted.
“I can hardly wait.”
Spivak relished being an unpleasant cliché. He had long since forgotten what he was really like. At least Ravenscroft is ironic, thought Morgan. The stereotype she animates is intentional.
“What’re you doing here?” said Morgan.
“It’s my case.”
Morgan said nothing. It had not occurred to him the case was not theirs.
“You have a problem with that?” asked Spivak. “Check it with Rufalo.”
Morgan shrugged. “Who are you working with?”
“Him,” he said, nodding in the direction of a gaunt young man Morgan had never seen before.
Spivak’s last partner was killed in a car accident; a woman, a rookie, a high-speed chase. A lot of bad publicity, no liability. She was driving.
“He looks like a funeral director,” said Morgan.
“He’s in the right place,” said Ellen Ravenscroft. “I think he’s kind of distinguished.”
“Maybe where you come from,” said Spivak with a sneer.
Spivak is the perpetual immigrant, thought Morgan. Born in Toronto, grew up speaking English, his parents spoke none. By identifying others as outsiders he proclaims his own credentials as a native son.
“Yorkshire,” she said, paused, and added, “love.” Her tone made the word seem its opposite. “Now to business,” she continued. “We have a killer who was taking no chances. This fellow has been shot through the head, gutted, and for all we know asphyxiated and poisoned as well.”
“Check it all out,” said Spivak cheerfully, ingesting a massive wheeze.
“What do you make of this?” his funereal partner called from the bathroom doorway. Spivak and Morgan walked over to him while Ravenscroft rejoined the pathology team by the bed.
Morgan was startled when he entered the bathroom. The walls were smeared with swathes of blood that appeared to have been applied with deliberation, to deliver an indecipherable message.
“My goodness,” he said.
Morgan’s habitual avoidance of obscenity and profanity was known through the department and sometimes ridiculed, but never to his face.
“My goodness!” Spivak repeated.
Morgan looked at him. Spivak’s eyes flicked downwards in a brief acknowledgement of something unspoken between them. He was a crude man and hard as nails, but Morgan was alpha, something to do with quietude, with his intelligence. Men like Spivak invested stillness with menace and were grudgingly deferential.
“What’s it saying to us, Morgan?” asked Spivak.
Morgan reached over and flicked off the overhead light. The room fell silent. He turned on the heater-light and the low rumble of the fan spread around them in the red gloom, the blood scrawlings on the wall disappearing, merging with the shadows. He turned on the overhead and the bloody scrawl returned.
“She wouldn’t have seen it,” he said.
“Unless she did it herself.”
Morgan glared at the burly, unkempt man — Morgan was unkempt, Spivak was scruffy.
“It’s her bed, her boyfriend, her gun. She’s on suspension.”
“What?”
“It’s automatic. And Rufalo says you’re out of it, too. This is Igor, he’s a mortician from Jamaica.”
“Don’t you be saying to he such a terrible thing, I never been to Jamaica, man,” Spivak’s new partner said in an exaggerated West Indian dialect. Then he turned to address Morgan. “Eeyore, not Igor,” he said, and shook hands, speaking with a crisp Toronto inflection. “We’re working on racial sensitivity,” he continued. “So far, Spivak can’t make the entry requirements for the program. I have heard a lot about you and your partner, mostly good things. My mother didn’t realize Eeyore was an ass. Nice to meet you.”
He seemed a nice enough kid. Morgan walked back into the living room, where Miranda was sitting on the sofa, small and alone amidst the commotion.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“Did you see the stuff scrawled on the bathroom walls?”
She looked at him quizzically, cocking her head like a wounded animal.
“Hieroglyphs of some sort. Written in blood.”
“Philip’s ...” she murmured, her voice trailing off.
A woman from the CSI unit kneeled in front of them.
“Detective Quin, I’m going to need some bits and pieces.”
Miranda held out her hands one at a time, and the woman pared residual matter from under her nails into a small plastic envelope.
“Did you wash?” she asked.
“Yeah, I had a shower. I flushed the toilet.” Miranda seemed almost embarrassed.
“That’s okay. I need to check what I can.”
“There’ll be powder under my nails,” said Miranda. “I was on the range yesterday.”
“With the murder weapon?”
“Pardon?”
“The murder weapon,” the woman repeated, nodding in the direction of the bedroom.
“I guess so. I don’t know.” It seemed inconceivable he could have been killed with her own gun. And inevitable that he was.
“And we’re going to need a vaginal scraping.”
“He was my lover, for God’s sake.”
“Did you have sex last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll need to find out.”
“Yeah, okay. Where?”
“As soon as we can. We’ll take you over to Women’s.”
Morgan felt for her, but it was standard procedure.
“Can you do it here?” Miranda asked.
“I can’t, but the M.E. could.”
“A coroner’s pelvic — see if she’s up for it.”
The woman went to find Ravenscroft. Morgan leaned over the sofa from behind, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.
“We’ll have to go down to Headquarters,” he said. “Spivak and Eeyore, they’ll want to talk.”
“How long?”
“What? Downtown —”
“No. How long’s he been dead?” she asked.
“Five or six hours.”
“Is it bad?”
“He’s dead.”
“Gruesome?”
“Yeah, very.”
“Disembowelled?”
“Eviscerated —”
“God!”
“Yeah.”
“While I slept. Oh, Jesus.”
“You were unconscious, you’ll need to be tested. Someone slipped you something. Given the outcome, I’m guessing it wasn’t Philip.”
Morgan’s cellphone buzzed. He flinched at the intrusiveness. The CSI woman and Ellen Ravenscroft approached Miranda and led her into the bathroom.
When Miranda walked past Philip, exposed on the bed with his guts looping out of his abdomen, she did not flinch. She had seen worse. The bathroom, she found more distressing. Blood on the walls, taunting with unrevealed meaning. The horror, she thought, the horror, and nothing else came to her mind.
“You sure you want me to do this?” asked Ellen.
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” said Miranda.
“Fully licensed, fifteen years this side of the pond, may the House of Windsor and my own dead mother forgive me.”
“So, help yourself,” said Miranda, sitting on the edge of the tub.
“You’ll have to drop your knickers, love.”
With an annoying air of solicitude the CSI woman helped Miranda back onto her feet. She closed her eyes tight, and then opened them slowly. Curiously, she felt little grief. Rage, fea
r, a sense of violation, of profound loss — it was not about Philip, it was the gaping hole his absence left inside her.
Although Miranda preferred skirts, anticipating the police she had put on slacks, feeling less vulnerable that way. The CSI woman held out a bath towel, and averting her eyes she wrapped it around Miranda, who stepped out of her slacks and underwear.
“You want me to assume the position?” Miranda asked, dubiously eyeing the bathmat on the floor. Instead, she sat down again on the edge of the tub.
“Okay, spread ’em,” said the M.E. “Let’s see what’s been happening in there.”
As Miranda leaned back to brace herself, Ellen Ravenscroft hunkered between her knees with a penlight in her mouth. Miranda flinched involuntarily as the M.E. reached in with a swab.
“You had a shower, right? But no douche?”
“No. Damnit. I don’t remember. Get the hell out of there.”
“Just a minute, love. Okay. I’d say you had a right good night of it. Well, until, you know —”
“That’s gratifying. Are we finished?”
Miranda closed her legs, stood up, and retrieved her clothes. The M.E. fell backwards on her bottom.
“Yes,” said Ellen as she unceremoniously struggled to her feet while the other two women watched. “We’re done.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Miranda asked as she slipped back into her clothes.
“With dead people? Seems forever. I actually trained as an OB/GYN. God only knows why. Staring into the gaping maws of womanhood day in, day out, it palls after a while. So I made a lateral move to the morgue.”
“You’d rather work with the dead?”
“Wouldn’t we all, dear. Look at the three of us.” Her glance included the CSI technician. “Women in our prime, the three witches of Caldor, whatever, guiding the departed into the underworld —”
“Is there anything else?” asked the CSI woman, edging toward the door, but instead of leaving she leaned against it as if she were afraid an intruder might overhear them.
Ravenscroft leaned close to Miranda and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Sorry about this, love.”
“Me too,” said Miranda.
“I’ll need a blood sample and a urine specimen, then we’re finished. You threw up, didn’t you, but we’re hoping for traces of a knock-out drug, maybe GHB or something more potent.”
“Hoping for?”
“Your alibi, love.”
The M.E. took blood and without a fanfare of modesty Miranda produced urine.
“Is that everything?” she asked, turning the vivid yellow vial over to Ellen.
“You’re dehydrated, dear girl. Have lots to drink, you’ll feel better.”
Miranda reached for the wall switch and turned on the heat-light with its rumbling fan, then switched off the main light, drenching the room in livid red. The exterior window had been painted over decades ago. The fires of Hell could not be more ominous, she thought. The three women whose life work was death stood perfectly still. She extinguished the red and they were again left in absolute darkness, except for the comical slit of illumination defining the bottom edge of the door.
She was more comfortable in the dark. Philip’s blood on the walls, it was the neatness that bothered her. There was no blood on the floor, and there had been no blood on the floor of her bedroom. The grotesque message scrawled with deliberate precision was intentionally obscure, she was certain of that — the meaning was in the way it was done.
“Thanks,” she said.
The other two women stepped back as she pulled open the bathroom door. Morgan was standing sentinel on the other side, facing away and framed by the busy glare in her bedroom. The body was covered with a clean sheet, like a rumpled bed.
2
The Message
Morgan and Miranda stood in the living room with Spivak and Eeyore Stritch. Morgan looked angry. Spivak seemed puzzled. He stared at Miranda with genuine concern, which was somewhat concealed behind his habitual scowl. His young partner seemed anxious.
“We’ve got a problem, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Your friend, they can’t find him.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, cocking her head toward the bedroom. “You can’t get more found than that.”
“Yeah, you can,” said Spivak.
“Someone’s in there,” Morgan said.
For a desperate moment she thought it was all a mistake, that it was someone else dead in her bed.
“His name is not Philip Carter. There was no Philip Carter at Ogilthorpe and Blackbourne, they’ve never heard of him.”
“Morgan, what are you talking about?”
“There’s no home in Oakville. No teenage daughters, no wife.”
For another weird moment, Miranda felt relieved; she would not have to bear the guilt for a widow’s grief or fatherless children.
“Your friend, he doesn’t seem to exist.”
“Is that an existential proclamation?”
“Listen to me. Philip Carter, his driver’s licence, his health insurance card, credit cards, they’re fakes.”
“No,” she snapped. “His address —”
“A Vietnamese variety store in Oakville. They met him once, he paid them, they forwarded his mail to a mailbox in Toronto.”
“But you know him, Morgan. For God’s sake, Philip is Philip.”
“We never met.”
She was incredulous. Morgan was so inextricably a part of her life.
“Never?”
“You never talked about him.”
“Really!”
“Okay,” said Spivak. “Enough true confessions.” He motioned Eeyore to come closer then turned to Miranda. “Where’d you meet this guy?”
“In court.”
“Lawyer, criminal, judge?”
“I met him coming out of a washroom.”
“Janitor?”
“Lawyer.”
“Women’s or men’s?”
“Me, I was coming out of the women’s. He was in the corridor. I walked straight into him.”
“In the courthouse?”
“Yes.”
“You were there for the Vittorio Ciccone trial?”
“I’m a witness.”
“Yeah, everyone knows you’re a witness.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, everything connected with Ciccone is complicated. Finding a dead guy in your bed, is that a Vittorio Ciccone complication?”
“Philip is a corporate lawyer. Was.”
“Drug lords need corporate lawyers, especially phantom corporate lawyers.”
“No, Philip didn’t know him.”
“It’s as dangerous to be for Ciccone as against him.”
“I’m neither.”
“You’re the link between a dead guy and a guy who kills people. You ever see him practise law?”
“No. How do you watch a corporate lawyer practise law?”
Spivak smiled, and the effort made him break into a rough, rising cough. “So tell me about the wife and kids?”
“He was married.” She refused to say he was “unhappily” married. “He had two teenage daughters.”
“You’ve seen pictures?” Spivak asked.
“He wanted to keep that part of his life separate.”
“From?”
“From the part he shared with me.”
“Generous man. You’ve known him for two months?”
“Nearly.”
“Not very well.”
“Who knows anyone very well?”
“Did you kill him?”
She felt rage choke in her throat and thought she was going to vomit again.
“Lookit,” said Spivak. “Why would a stranger use your gun to kill another stranger, mutilate the corpse with your knife — M.E. says he was gutted post mortem — and then scrawl with his guts on your walls, and oh, yes, with you sleeping through everything, not a mark on you?”
Silence.
�
��And one more thing,” said Spivak. “There’s gunpowder under your nails.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Gawd no. I’m not even taking you down for questioning. But don’t leave town, as they say. You’re the prime until something better turns up. Sorry about the boyfriend.”
Miranda had known Spivak for years. He wasn’t a bad cop and he wouldn’t get in the way while she and Morgan conducted their own shadow investigation. The kid seemed agreeable, maybe a little odd.
It was midday and they were alone. Morgan found a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the kitchen cupboard. A recent vintage, but with a fulsome aroma. He did not recognize the label; this surprised him. He poured them each a long drink, using crystal stemware he had never seen before.
Leaning side by side against the counter, they toasted in a grim salutation to the surrounding emptiness.
After a while, they toasted again.
“Here’s to old what’s-his-name,” said Miranda.
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “To Philip.”
“He brought this for a special occasion,” she said. She was cupping the tulip-shaped bowl of the glass in her hand. Morgan reached over, took the glass from her, then returned it so she could properly grasp only the stem.
She offered a wan smile of acquiescence. She could feel the warmth of her lover’s body, his hands, his breath.
The wine was the colour of arterial blood before it congeals. She sipped but it tasted raw, although Morgan was enjoying it.
“The prints on my gun, my prints should be all over it.”
Yeah, he thought.
“Ellen Ravenscroft, Morgan, she’d jump your bones if she could.”
“Or yours.”
“Nonsense, she’s straight. She’d eat you alive.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, gazing into the crimson depths of his glass.
“I thought I was falling in love,” she said. “God, I’ve been stupid.”
“Me too, sometimes. I married my biggest mistake.”
“At least you didn’t kill her off.”
“Divorce; a form of manslaughter.”
“How old am I?”
“Thirty-eight. Why?”
“Thirty-seven and change.”
He said nothing.
“You’d think I’d learn, Morgan.”