Cold Comfort

by Scott Mackay

  Lombardo nodded, commiserating. “I know you do, Barry,” said Lombardo. “I’ll do what I can.” Lombardo glanced out the window where the sky was clear and crisp. He scratched his head, his eyes again narrowing, a faint grin coming to his face. Lombardo, ever at ease, a man of grace and charm, now seemed awkward about something. “I did some checking into Heckler and Koch ownership province-wide,” he said. Lombardo hesitated, reluctant. “You’re not going to believe this, but Alvin Matchett owns a Heckler and Koch.”

  Gilbert stared at his partner, all expression leaving his face. “So?” he said.

  Lombardo stared back; Gilbert could nearly hear the air crackle with crossed signals. “I know, Barry, but…” He glanced apprehensively toward the front of the office, where Carol Reid walked by with a few packages of Xerox paper. Then he turned around, put his hands on the edge of Gilbert’s desk, leaned forward, and lowered his voice. “We have to at least look at it. I know he was your partner, and I know you’re great friends, but—”

  “Come on, Joe, you’re not actually suggesting Alvin had anything to do with Cheryl’s murder.”

  “No,” said Joe, the single syllable dropping from his mouth like a brick. “Not at all. I know Alvin. I know he’s a good cop. But we got to put it in the paperwork. He’s a registered Heckler and Koch owner. And he has a connection to Cheryl. We ask to take a look at his gun, we have ballistics fire it a few times, and we’ll file the report under J.” Lombardo stood up. “When Marsh looks at the file, he’ll know we’ve tried everything. If Alvin’s the way you say he is, he’ll give you his gun without a blink.”

  At eleven o’clock that same morning, Gilbert, accompanied by a blood technician, and with an escort of two uniforms, pulled up in front of Charles Latham’s opulent home in Rosedale. Against the brilliant blue but bitterly cold sky, surrounded by snow-covered spruces and pines, Latham’s house, despite its architectural dissonances, looked picturesque. Gilbert got out of his Lumina and walked back to the patrol car. The uniformed driver rolled down his window. Sometimes he longed for patrol. Arrests and collars were always so straight-forward on patrol. There was never any labyrinth, maze, or dead-end.

  “Keeping warm?” asked Gilbert.

  The officer nodded. “You want us out for this one?” he asked.

  Gilbert shook his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe just park in the driveway so he knows you’re here.” Gilbert looked at the box of Country Style donuts sitting between the two officers. “And save one of those for me.”

  The driver smiled. “Will do.”

  The officer rolled up his window and drove into the driveway.

  Gilbert walked back to his own car. The evidence technician, Monica Chavez, got out of the car with the blood-taking kit.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  They walked up the front walk. Gilbert rang the doorbell. A moment later, Sally answered.

  She looked first at Gilbert, then at Monica. Her shoulders tensed, not much, but enough for someone like Gilbert to look twice.

  “Detective Gilbert,” she said, now forcing a smile. “Is Mr. Latham expecting you?”

  From inside the house he heard the sound of the dishwasher humming. “No,” said Gilbert, pinning an apologetic grin to his face. “No, but if you wouldn’t mind getting him.”

  She peered past his shoulder where she saw the patrol car and the two uniforms sitting in the driveway. The smile disappeared from her face.

  “He’s very busy,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s a good idea to bother him about Cheryl right now.”

  “This shouldn’t take long,” he said. “If you’ll just have him come downstairs we’ll get it over with as quickly as possible.”

  Sally looked at Monica then back to Gilbert. She opened the door further, her face both anxious and puzzled. Yet the small knit in her brow indicated she was annoyed as well. “Come in,” she said. “If you could just wait in the hall.” No coffee or Chelsea bun this time. She was glum. Her sunny Filipino features had hardened. “I’ll see if he’s available.”

  Gilbert took a deep breath. “Sally, things will go quicker if you tell him he hasn’t got a choice.”

  This stopped her. She gave him one last look, not a particularly hostile one, but as if she finally understood he meant business. She nodded then disappeared up the stairs.

  He and Monica sat on the upholstered bench.

  “Nice place,” said Monica.

  “He’s an architect.”

  “I didn’t know architects made so much money.”

  Gilbert thought of his own salary. “I guess some do.”

  Latham made no fuss when he came downstairs. He glanced briefly over the warrant, then simply unbuttoned his sleeve and rolled it up.

  “I’m sorry about this, Charles,” said Gilbert, as Monica tied the rubber tourniquet around Latham’s bicep and had him make a fist.

  Latham looked even paler than usual. “Was there much blood?” he asked.

  Gilbert stared at Latham. Was this an act? Come on, Charles. Show me something. Let me see you. What exactly were you searching for when you tossed your wife’s apartment on the night of the eighteenth? Did you borrow Danny’s car?

  “Enough to give us a scientifically reliable sample,” said Gilbert.

  Monica slid the needle into Latham’s arm.

  Later that afternoon, Gilbert drove to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Nestled among the heavily wooded parklands and ravines surrounding the old McLean Estate, just north of the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, the CNIB was a sprawling network of ivy-covered buildings, dormitories, and wings. It was here that books were turned into Braille, Seeing Eye dogs taught to guide, and the blind habituated to a life among the sighted.

  Gilbert parked his car and hurried through the gate to the main building. Much of the CNIB was staffed by the blind, and it was odd for Gilbert to see so many of them in one place, stepping briskly along the halls, keeping to the right, their white canes gingerly held out before them, navigating their way through the corridors, up and down stairs, in and out of offices and meeting rooms as if they were completely sighted. He felt strange, like he was invisible; no one could see him; if one of them got too close he simply stepped out of the way. He finally found his way to the cafeteria.

  Shirley Chan waited for him at a table by the window eating Chinese noodles out of a Tupperware container, not with chopsticks but with a fork, and sipping a Diet Coke. He worked his way around the tables, careful not to step on the tails of the many guide-dogs. They had never met, but he knew who she was from the funeral surveillance, and from Sonia Bailey’s description. He stopped in front of her table and leaned forward.

  “Ms. Chan?” he said.

  She was thirty-five, with black bangs cut straight across her eyebrows, an attractive woman, wearing red lipstick, a jade necklace, and a silk blouse with small yellow dragons.

  “Detective Gilbert,” she said.

  He pulled out his shield and nodded. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,” he said.

  “Anything I can do to help,” she said. She wasn’t native Chinese, had to be at least second-or-third generation, spoke with a plain Canadian accent. “We’re all still stunned around here,” she said. “Cheryl was liked by everybody.”

  Gilbert opened his briefcase and took out his notebook. “I’m sorry about Cheryl, Ms. Chan.”

  “Call me Shirley.”

  “I understand you were good friends with her.”

  Shirley glanced out the window where the bare branches of a maple tree scraped against the pane. “I was her friend,” she said. “But she had a certain reserve. I don’t know if I ever got through that reserve.”

  Gilbert flipped to a fresh page of his notebook. “And she was at work on the seventeenth? You saw her here on that Monday?”

  Shirley nodded. “She was here.”

  “And did she seem different to you at all?”

  Sh
irley took a deep breath. “I’m not sure how to answer that. Not different from the way she’d been behaving lately.”

  Gilbert’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “How do you mean?”

  Shirley absently stirred her noodles with her fork.

  “I don’t know, maybe she was just overworked. She worked so hard. She lived for work. At one point last year she was holding two jobs.”

  “She was?”

  “Her stepfather hired her as a fund-raising consultant. A six-month contract.”

  “Because of the election,” said Gilbert.

  “She’s a bit of an expert. She knows how to raise money.” Shirley ate a mouthful of noodles, chewed meditatively, stared out the window. “She must have been working sixteen-hour days. Maybe it was just because she was so tired…since Christmas…I don’t know. She hasn’t been as chipper. She had an affair. With someone from her stepfather’s staff. It didn’t turn out well. And she had family problems. Not that she would ever tell anyone about them. She was a private…” Shirley Chan put her fork down and stared at Gilbert. “You know what I mean? You could spend a whole day with Cheryl and not be any wiser. She had this guard, this suit of armor she put on. To tell you the truth, I found it exasperating at times.”

  “You say she had an affair,” said Gilbert. “With who?”

  A few of the sighted employees walked by with trays of food, glancing curiously at their table. When it came to murder, everyone was curious.

  “A man named Alvin Matchett,” she said.

  Gilbert felt his face turning red. “Alvin Matchett,” he repeated.

  “Yes.” She took a sip of her Diet Coke through her white plastic straw. “A very nice guy. She should have worked harder. I don’t know what happened. First Charles, then Alvin, she can’t seem to stick it through.”

  “You met Alvin Matchett?” he said.

  “Twice,” she said. “She couldn’t have chosen a sweeter guy. A real gentleman. I think she regretted the way things turned out.”

  “She was upset about it?”

  “I think so. But she didn’t talk about it. She lost some weight. And she looked awful. I told her, go see a doctor. But she doesn’t like doctors. She doesn’t like people poking and prodding her.”

  He looked out the window, where three grackles settled on the branch of the maple tree. Why didn’t Matchett mention this? Then again, why should he? It was over and done with. Still, he would have to ask Alvin about it.

  “And do you know Charles?” asked Gilbert.

  She raised her eyebrows. “A bit,” she said.

  “And what do you think?”

  Her face settled. “I find him moody,” she said. “He loses his temper easily. I once saw him smash a four-hundred-dollar vase because he didn’t like where Cheryl put it.”

  Gilbert contemplated Shirley Chan. Something not right about Latham, that’s for sure, and Shirley was confirming it.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath, now reluctant. “He was always snooping,” she said. “At least that’s the impression I got. Whenever he came to the office here, he would pull open filing cabinets and look through them, really inappropriate, right in front of everybody, stuff that was none of his business. We didn’t know what to say. I mean, what do you say to a man like that, a man who has absolutely zero social grace?”

  Gilbert’s eyes narrowed. “Did he do this often?” he asked.

  “Often enough.” A wary crease came to her brow. “But I can’t help thinking…” She looked down at her noodles. Then she looked up at Gilbert, her eyes now inquisitive. “You knew about the burglary, didn’t you?”

  As if, because he was a detective, he knew about every one of the hundreds of burglaries committed every month in Metro.

  “What burglary?” he said, frowning a bit.

  “Our office was burgled the night Cheryl was murdered.”

  He assimilated this information calmly, evaluating it as perhaps a major piece of evidence. Cheryl’s murder had a contralateral crime; the murder of her stepsister, Donna Varley. Now there seemed to be a contralateral crime to the tossing of Cheryl’s apartment. He would phone Richter in Burglary and get the details.

  “And was anything taken?”

  “No,” she said, and she now looked perplexed. “Nothing at all.”

  Nine

  Alvin Matchett wouldn’t meet Gilbert at police headquarters. Though the changeover in staff had been considerable in the last fifteen years, there were still many officers and detectives who remembered Matchett, and who couldn’t forget the Dennison shooting. Likewise, Matchett didn’t want Gilbert to come to the Parliament Buildings, especially with Ronald Roffey sniffing around. So they met in Queen’s Park, just north of the legislature. Temperatures had climbed, the winds had died, and the sun shone benevolently as they strolled the path toward the War Memorial.

  Gilbert was apologetic but insistent; Matchett was grave but cooperative.

  “It ended four months ago,” said Matchett. “It was stupid. I didn’t know what I was thinking. The whole thing was a mistake.”

  “And Jane didn’t like it,” said Gilbert.

  “She and I were…up until last June. But then I just got… I got tired of it all. The fitness thing, the vitamins, and the food, it was just too much for me. I’m getting old. Jane’s forty-two, she still thinks she can fight it, but she’s going to learn sooner or later.”

  “So you and Jane—”

  “For nearly two years. I actually lived with her for a while. You should see the biceps on her. She can bench-press two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. She’s got…and her pecs… anyway, we split up, and Jane took it hard, but I felt…I don’t know, I felt great. No more fighting free radicals by mega-dosing with antioxidants.”

  Up ahead, an old man in a grey overcoat and fingerless gloves, his nose as red as a strawberry and as large as a tomato, fed bread crumbs to pigeons from a plastic bag. Students from the nearby Faculties of Music and Law strolled the park, enjoying the unexpected thaw.

  “So when did you start seeing Cheryl?” asked Gilbert. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but you know how it is.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Gilbert recognized the refrain from the Dennison hearings.

  “She came on staff about the end of May,” said Matchett. “I thought when Tom hired her he was doing her a favor, you know, family and everything. But she was qualified. She was a good fund-raiser, not only helped Tom’s campaign but the whole Tory campaign. That’s where we really got to know each other. Working the money thing for her stepfather. It was like our personal crusade.”

  Out on Queen’s Park Crescent, a delivery truck backfired. The pigeons the old man was feeding leaped into the air and swept over Gilbert and Matchett. Matchett jerked to one side and ducked, raising both hands above his head. Gilbert stared at his old partner. Matchett looked up at the pigeons with phobic aversion.

  “You’ve got a thing about birds?” asked Gilbert.

  Matchett lowered his arms, watching the pigeons apprehensively as they circled back to the old man and the bread crumbs.

  “I hate them,” he said. “I always have.”

  “Then I’ll take back the budgie I got you for your birthday.”

  “Good,” said Matchett. “Get me a cat instead.”

  “I thought you were allergic to cats.”

  “I am,” he said. “But they make great bird killers.”

  Gilbert laughed.

  They strolled to the other side of the park in silence, both of them in their own thoughts. An old Chinese couple practiced Tai Chi under a tree in the snow. When Gilbert and Matchett reached the War Memorial, Gilbert pointed across the street.

  “That’s my car over there,” he said. “In the Law School parking lot. You’re sure you have enough time for this? I can come back after work if you want?”

  Matchett watched the traffic, waiting for a break. “You just want the gun, right?”
/>
  Gilbert nodded. “That’s all.”

  “Then we should have plenty of time.”

  The Avenue Road bus rumbled by. They hurried across in the wake of the bus and entered the Law School parking lot. A young man stepped gingerly through the ice-covered lot carrying a double bass, coming from the Faculty of Music directly behind the Law School. Gilbert and Matchett got in Gilbert’s Lumina.

  “What’s the best way?” asked Gilbert.

  “Back down to Wellesley and across. Then right on Parliament to Winchester.”

  Gilbert started the car.

  As they drove eastbound on Wellesley, they resumed their discussion.

  “Anyway, Jane was jealous,” said Matchett. “She wouldn’t cooperate. This was her response to the whole thing, her way of getting back. Not that she was much involved with the election. She was too busy running Tom’s office, handling the day-to-day stuff. But when we needed help, she was a real pain. Say we needed a car at a certain location at a certain time. Before Cheryl, she’d go to the carpool herself and deliver it personally. Not later on. Sometimes we’d be lucky to get a car at all. Or if we had a pile of stuff to fax, she’d always get it out late and she’d pin the blame on Cheryl. I don’t know why. As if making my life inconvenient was going to change things. I still have clothes over at Jane’s place. I’ve been trying to arrange a time to go over and get them. No dice. I think I’m just going to have to wait until she cools down.”

  They caught the red light at Church Street, in the heart of the gay section; several slim young men with short hair and mustaches strode by; Gilbert couldn’t help wondering, why short hair and mustaches all the time?

  “You don’t think…” He faltered. “I mean she was jealous, but she was jealous in a normal way. She didn’t flip out.”

  Matchett looked at him with a mocking grin. “You know, with you around, everybody in this city is going to be a suspect sooner or later. Jane may have her idiosyncrasies, but she’s not whacka-whacka.”