Blood Wine

by John Moss

  When they got to her door, he took the key and opened it, reaching inside to switch on the hall lights. The bulb was out. They walked through into the living room, where he flicked on the overhead.

  “Okay,” he said. “You get to bed, you must be exhausted. It’s been a long day. How’s your leg? You all right?”

  “Morgan, relax. My leg’s fine.” She stood back and looked at him. She shook her head in mock exasperation.

  “You’re going to walk home like that!” she said. “Have you any idea what you look like? Come in and we’ll see if we can’t get you fixed up. You’ll get arrested for vagrancy.”

  Hobbling into the bedroom, she came out a few minutes later and tossed a pair of khaki slacks at him.

  “They were Philip’s. They’ll fit.”

  She disappeared again and came back with a sweatshirt.

  “It’s mine, it’s extra large. It’ll be just right for you. Sorry, I don’t have any underwear your size. How about socks.”

  She dropped back into the bedroom and returned with a pair of thick work socks. She also had a pair of old-fashioned blue knickers in her hands.

  “Better than nothing,” she said.

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “It’s up to you. They’re clean. I wouldn’t tell.”

  He hefted the khakis in his hands, looked at the knickers, and shrugged.

  “Why don’t you change in the bathroom? Have a shower while you’re at it. I can wait. I’m too wired to sleep.”

  While Morgan showered, she stood in the bathroom doorway, watching him openly, then made her way to the toilet and perched on it to talk to him.

  “This is action central,” she shouted.

  “What?” he responded, trying to locate her position from the sound of her voice.

  “My shower, this is where the action is.”

  “You want to join me?”

  She leaned forward from the toilet and gazed around through the streaming glass.

  “Very tempting, Morgan.” She paused as if considering the possibility, then added, “But not tonight. There have been enough disappointments for one day.”

  He turned off the shower. She got up and handed him a towel over the stall door as she walked out into the bedroom.

  “Can you hear me?” he called.

  “Yes, you don’t have to shout.”

  He walked into the bedroom, clutching his towel and the small bundle of clothes.

  “It’s all yours,” he said. “I’ll change in here.”

  She looked at him and smiled. It would be easier for her in the bedroom but she did not want to deflate his gesture of gallantry. She went into the bathroom but left the door open so they could talk while he dressed. She undressed.

  “I’m sorry about the old lady,” she said. “Mrs. Peter Oughtred. Do you think she had a first name?”

  “Yeah, it’ll go on her gravestone. Along with her maiden name.”

  “Isn’t that an awful phrase.”

  “What?”

  “Maiden name. After seventy years of being Mrs. Peter Oughtred, she’ll revert to Jane Smith, or whatever. I don’t think she had a clue what was going on there at the Bonnydoon Winery. What do you think he called her?”

  “Who?”

  “Peter.”

  “Mrs. You know, I bet he called her the Missus.” He paused. “Can you hear me?”

  “I can’t for a minute, Morgan. Pour us a couple of drinks. There’s Scotch in the kitchen.” She turned on the shower. He walked to the bathroom door, stood admiring her through the wet glass for a moment, leaned in, and flipped on the heater-light and fan, which emitted a rumbling glow, pulled the door shut, and wandered out into the kitchen, socks in hand, leaving the silky blue knickers crumpled on the end of the bed. He changed his mind, went back in and retrieved the panties, folded them neatly, and stuffed them in his back pocket. Let her think he’d worn them!

  When she came out, hair in a towel, wrapped in the terrycloth robe that Elke had been wearing less than twenty-four hours before, Morgan was in the kitchen, sitting back in an old Boston rocker that Miranda’s grandmother had passed on to her when she was a child, with his feet up on the seat of another chair. She picked up her Scotch and sat down near him on the floor, stretching her wounded leg in front of her.

  Morgan started to get up.

  “No,” she said. “I’m better here for a bit.” She leaned back against the wall.

  “So, what do you think of our Elke?” she asked.

  “She’s very attractive in an ethereal sort of way.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Morgan!”

  “Oh. Well, I think there’s a lot we don’t know. I think there’s a lot she still doesn’t know.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You can remember what happened to you, right? It was fuzzy before you were doped, but it came back. Drugs and trauma obscured things for a time —”

  “And you think she’s been through more than me, and that’s why she’s drawing a blank.”

  “She recalled everything up to Bonnydoon. It’s not amnesia. She phoned New York from the station. She got a bit confused, she called her ex-boyfriend. Then she sorted it out. She called her boss at Beverley Auctions, she’s their wine expert, that’s big bucks. Her boss told her to stay at The Four Seasons on the company tab. What am I missing?”

  “Her childhood in Sweden, her early experience with sex watching Ingmar Bergman films, no, I think you’ve covered it all.”

  “Until the disconnect, between hearing the ring-man executed in the wine shed and turning up on your doorstep with his hand in her purse.”

  “And a gun.”

  “A smoking gun.”

  “So, there’s got to be a major traumatic experience in there, you figure, more than being abducted across an international boundary and bearing witness to murder?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think,” said Morgan.

  “And she ends up at The Four Seasons on an expense account. Tomorrow she’ll shop.”

  “Envious? Yeah, but Spivak told her not to leave town, not without us, so she’s gotta have supplies.”

  “From Yorkville, Hazelton Lanes, already.”

  “So she’s trapped in the most fashionable part of the city. She hasn’t much choice.”

  “Trapped? The thing about The Four Seasons, Morgan —”

  “It’s very expensive.”

  “Elegant.”

  “In an expensive sort of way.”

  “What else is there?”

  “You ever stay there?”

  “With Philip? No. We had dinner. Met for lunch once. But for … private times … we came back here.”

  “Always?”

  “Yeah. Don’t look so shocked.”

  “I’m not shocked. Disappointed, maybe.”

  “Jealous.”

  “No, I’m a grown-up. Disappointed for you that it couldn’t have been better.”

  “Is that genuine sympathy, Morgan? Or condescension?”

  “Yes,” he said, with careful equivocation.

  There was a long pause. They were friends. Neither felt rancour for breaching bounds of propriety. As partners used to being together in soul-draining crises, their rules of intimacy were elastic. There was no urgency, as there might be between lovers, to resolve the differences between them.

  “Morgan, know what I think?” Miranda eventually said.

  “What?”

  “I think you should knock that back and go home.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re meeting her for breakfast. Maybe she’ll put it on her tab. We need a treat.”

  “Okay,” he said, getting up from the old rocker and, after a futile flick of the light switch, walking down the dark hall. “See you tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”

  “Too early. She won’t be up.”

  “Nine thirty.”

  He stepped out into the illuminated gloom of the corridor, drawing her door shut behind him.

&nb
sp; 7

  The Four Seasons

  Morgan walked through the cool of the night along side streets over to the Annex neighbourhood. The residual June heat gathered a thin layer of glistening moisture on the sidewalk and on the meagre rectangles of grass in front of houses standing shoulder to shoulder along the way. Only Yonge Street was alive at this late hour, and he hurried across it as if the gaudy lights and the night people threatened contagion.

  He stopped in front of his house and surveyed the scene. The street was lined on both sides with huge silver maples. Some homes were single-family, but most were multiples, converted either to apartments or condominiums.

  Condominia?

  His own place was part of a rambling nineteenth- century agglomeration of stonework and brick with turrets and gables and gingerbread trim, a modest mansion that had been reconfigured as a jigsaw cube of modular dwellings with two-storey windows knocked through the brick and cantilevered exterior stairs of cement slab and wood. The overall effect was absolute hybrid, what he described as Victorian postmodern, and curiously pleasing.

  He had bought it after he and his wife separated, before the divorce.

  He stood at the door, his hand on the latch, staring into its gleaming midnight-blue depths.

  Lucy was on his mind. That had been years ago, when he was still in his twenties. Twenty-four. She had come here, once, just after he moved in. He was painting the door, the last of a dozen coats, trying for the patina of depth that layers of paint can give wood, like the doors of Dublin. She tried to seduce him. It was her idea of how to negotiate a reconciliation.

  He had married the wrong woman. His marriage to Lucy could be measured in months.

  The condo was a white elephant, which from Morgan’s point of view was a good thing. The architect-builders were happy to arrange for a private mortgage with a minuscule down payment, on the promise of his salary with the police force. The Cabbagetown of his childhood was a world away, just down a few blocks, the other side of Yonge Street.

  Miranda had trouble getting to sleep. The mattress was new. The morning he spent cleaning up, Morgan had arranged to have the old one hauled away and this one delivered. She had already slept on the new mattress once, but in a deep, dreamless slumber. She knew she must have been dreaming, but she had not remembered anything on awakening except a sort of bleak vacuum enticing her back into sleep.

  That was the previous night. Now she was sure she could feel the trough in the centre of the bed, as if Philip were lying there, still, drawing her to him.

  She missed Philip in a strange way. The unknowable qualities about him were part of his attraction. It had never occurred to her the mystique was anything more than a protective vestment to keep his daughters in Oakville from harm, to avoid hurting his wife, to protect Miranda.

  Their last hours together remained a blur, even though she had reconstructed an account of everything leading up to the Dom Pérignon. She tried to remember their first meeting. In the courthouse corridor. She was coming out of the washroom. He was rushing headlong down the corridor. They collided.

  She could see it all in her mind’s eye, not cinematically but in a busy mosaic of images and sounds, a flurry of words and conflicting emotions.

  “Damnit, you moron,” she had said, while simultaneously trying to ascertain if it was a judge, deserving an instant apology.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, helping her to maintain balance. “Did I hurt you? I was clumsy.”

  “No,” she snapped, but looking at his sheepish smile she continued. “Possibly, yes — are you a lawyer?”

  “Yes, I am. I was distracted. Are you really?”

  “Hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “My name is Philip Carter.”

  Miranda realized, as it all came back, how playful it had been, their initial conversation. Then why was he rushing? Where was he going in such a hurry that he could switch so abruptly to a debonair mode. He didn’t explain and it never occurred to her to ask. They went out for dinner that night. She talked mostly about the case she had been attending.

  He had seemed surprised she was a detective. Perhaps too surprised. People in that building were usually officers of the court, one way or another, or they were at the court’s mercy.

  When she explained she was a witness for the defense, he seemed amused.

  “Hostile, I assume?”

  “No, not really.” It registered in the back of her mind that he was using terms more familiar to American courtroom dramas. She wondered how far she should go with this. “You’re not working for the prosecution, are you?”

  “Me! Do I look like it?” No, he did not. His suit was far too expensive.

  “I’m a friendly witness,” she said, smiling. “I don’t like being this guy’s friend, but that’s how things worked out.”

  “This guy, he’s a bad guy then.”

  “Vittorio Ciccone.” She enunciated, stressing the consonants as if it were an English name.

  He repeated it with an Italian inflection. “He is a bad guy,” he added, “a very bad guy. A capital case.”

  “Murder, yes, first degree.”

  “And you work Homicide?”

  “Yes. And I know, it’s strange, but I’ve been called by the defense. What are you working on?”

  “Nothing so interesting. Do you know Ciccone?”

  “We’ve met several times.”

  “Really. They don’t get much bigger than him. What makes you think he’s innocent?”

  “Not guilty! There’s a big difference. Nobody would accuse Vittorio Ciccone of innocence, not even Vittorio Ciccone.”

  “Should you be talking about this?”

  “No, I should not,” she said, reassured by his sense of legal propriety.

  “Okay,” he said. “Tell me about Miranda Quin?”

  They sipped their liqueurs, hers a Drambuie and his something more exotic, she didn’t catch what. She did not want to talk about herself. She did not want to talk about him, in case he was married.

  After a comfortable silence, she said, “He really is one of the bad guys, he’s going down for murder….”

  “Unless you convince the jury otherwise.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s up to his lawyers. But yes, I could make the difference.”

  “And then he walks?”

  “He walks. For the time being. Sooner or later we’ll get him.”

  ‘“We? You’ve switched from ‘they’ to ‘we.’”

  “Lawyers are ‘they.’ ‘We’ are police.”

  “And never the twain shall meet — except in this case, you and I, we met in spite of ourselves.”

  “We did, didn’t we,” she observed. “It happens. My superintendent is married to a lawyer.”

  “Rufalo?”

  “Yeah, Alex Rufalo. You know him?”

  “By reputation. Is he a good man?”

  “Yeah, he leaves us alone.”

  “Us?”

  “Me and my partner.…”

  “Who is?”

  “David Morgan.” She was surprised he had not heard of Morgan, or that he had not heard of Morgan and herself as a team. They tried to keep out of the papers, but they were well known in the department, big as it was, and among lawyers and judges. That’s why she was a valuable asset for the Ciccone defense.

  “You’re not criminal?” she asked with an disingenuous smile.

  “No,” he responded with a sly grin. “Corporate. Mostly a desk jockey. Ogilthorpe et al on King Street.

  “Gotcha,” she said. “That explains the Armani.”

  “Hugo Boss,” he said.

  “Gotcha,” she said again, only a little disappointed.

  As they walked home, choosing Church Street over Yonge to avoid the confusion, where everyone at this time of night seemed dressed for a private masquerade, they did not have much to talk about; they did not yet have a history.

  “I’ve read about Vittorio Ciccone,” he v
entured.

  “Yeah. Drugs. Big time. No record. My partner and I, a couple of years ago, arrested one of his associates for murder. We couldn’t connect Ciccone to the crime, not directly, but it was a hit. He arranged it, and the killer, well, honour among thieves, he’s doing hard time and Ciccone wasn’t charged.”

  “Then what were you doing in the witness box?”

  “You could say I’m a character witness.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Semi.” She caught the look in his eyes as a car drove by. He seemed genuinely interested.

  “He lives in Rosedale,” she said and prepared to launch into a safe narrative that would incriminate no one, nor compromise herself. Much as she warmed to this somewhat inscrutable man, she was wary of entrapment. She did not entirely trust anyone associated with the courts, especially lawyers, even corporate lawyers.

  “A couple of years ago,” she continued, “a kid was killed on his street. A neighbour’s little girl. She was apparently kidnapped. We hoped she was being held for ransom. We found her body in the ravine. She’d been brutally assaulted.”

  “Sexually?”

  “And beaten. Some of the bruises were old. My partner and I, it was our case. We suspected the stepfather but we couldn’t get near him, nothing would stick. Then one day the stepfather walked into Headquarters and gave himself up. Full confession. His name was Ferguson. It was Vittorio Ciccone, he got through to the guy. Didn’t torture him, didn’t blackmail him, didn’t express the community sentiments by exterminating him. Simply knocked on his door in Rosedale, told him it was time to turn himself in. Vittorio Ciccone has that kind of power —”

  “Arouses that kind of fear.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t touch the man, didn’t lay a finger on him.”

  “And you’re going to tell that in court, and the defense thinks that will get him off for murder?”

  “No. It will establish my credentials in relation to their client.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then,” she said, “at the appropriate time, I will say that I saw him the night of the murder.”

  “Where?”

  “At home. His place, not mine.”

  Philip Carter looked at her cryptically. She could not tell what he was thinking.

  “Last fall,” she continued. “I was out for a walk. Rosedale is a beautiful place for long walks alone through autumn leaves on red brick sidewalks, especially in the evening. He was pulling into his drive and caught me in the headlights. He recognized me from the little girl’s murder.”