Cold Comfort

by Scott Mackay

  “You live in the same house with Webb, and a woman as smart as Cheryl is bound to see things. Or maybe Dorothy knew and Dorothy told her. I was a little nervous about it at first, I told Tom maybe we ought to do something about Cheryl, I wasn’t sure if we could trust her, but Tom told me not to worry. Cheryl never mentioned it. Like she didn’t want to know about it. Like it was our business, and she couldn’t care less. So I started to relax. They were cash bribes, small bills, we really had nothing to worry about. Tom bought Cheryl things, a car, a horse, some jewelry, and she seemed happy about it. Things were going well. I took my cut. After Dennison, I felt I was owed.” He shook his head and a flicker of emotion appeared on his face. “You know what that did to me, Barry?”

  “I think I do, Alvin.”

  Matchett shook his head slowly, meditatively. “All I ever wanted was to be a cop. I should have fought harder. But I didn’t want to turn it into…” He shrugged. “You know.” He looked at the blank wall, turning his head quickly. “I didn’t want to bring dishonor to the force. Christ, we were both so young. So I went, and it was like walking into purgatory. It was easy to justify a lot of things after that. Taking kickbacks, figuring things out for Tom, working the tenders like a card shark. I was good, I knew what to do, I knew how to ride the risks, it was my way of getting even.”

  Gilbert grinned; grinned the way he used to grin sometimes when he and Matchett were in patrol. “So you couldn’t have cared less about the money?” he said.

  Gilbert expected Matchett to crack a smile but his face remained impassive. “I liked the money,” he said. “I liked it a lot. It made me feel free. It made me feel as if I was getting what I deserved.” He shook his head. “All you dicks, slaving away for fifty grand a year, I thought that was so funny. I still do. I was rolling in it. Tom was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Do you think so?”

  Matchett’s face settled. Was that remorse he saw in his old partner’s eyes? “No,” he said. He lifted his cigarette and took a long pull. “No, maybe not. He can be such a sanctimonious son-of-a-bitch. But I won’t get into that.”

  The bitterness in Matchett’s voice settled like a grey fog. They were silent for nearly a minute. Then Gilbert grew conscious of the silent and unseen rolling of the videotape.

  “So when did Cheryl come into it?”

  Matchett blew a smokering, stuck his finger through it—an old habit from patrol—and gave Gilbert a vague nod, as if he were growing fatigued by the whole discussion.

  “Officially, she was hired in June. But she came to us in March. She was prepared. She had every angle covered. And she was diplomatic. She could have given us an ultimatum; she knew about the kickbacks. But she took the time to persuade us. The whole thing was her idea right from the start. In June, neither Tom nor I knew anything about Larry or Donna, nothing about the blackmail. Her scheme was simple. Embezzle election funds by purportedly hiring the services of her ex-husband’s numbered corporation. She worked for him part-time. She had a lot of banking privileges. She arranged a subsidiary account for Scuba-Tex in Freeport. That was going to be convenient for Tom because he had a place down there, and it was offshore enough, at least for our purposes.”

  “So she more or less used Latham’s corporation as a front for funneling funds to the Bahamas. And Latham didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Latham has his head in the clouds. The guy’s a first-class dip-shit. The corporation was really a leftover from one of his father’s holdings. He had no interest in it whatsoever. He was more than happy to let Cheryl have the reins. He just wanted to spend all his time at his drafting table or in his garden. If you go into the accounts, which I’m sure you will, you’ll see all these checks drawn from the campaign account in Cheryl’s handwriting, all made out to Ontario Corporation 601847, all signed by Tom. You trail it to the corporation account, you’ll find a bundle of checks payable to Scuba-Tex, Freeport, which on the surface makes perfect sense, because on paper it’s the sister franchise to Scuba-Tex, Toronto, and nothing could be more kosher than 601847 paying funds into the Scuba-Tex account. At the front end, the campaign account has receipts from 601847, so that the amounts we embezzled all look like legitimate expenses. It was a great scheme. I told you Cheryl was smart. She structured the Freeport account so we all had signing privileges. None of us could withdraw more than five thousand at a time. The bank gave notification whenever money was withdrawn. That more or less protected us from each other. She had all the fail-safes in place. And she was a dynamo as a fund-raiser. But then she said she wanted fifty thousand. She was acting strange. We knew something was going on. Tom asked me to work something out. She was scared. It didn’t take me long. I think she wanted to tell someone. By this time we were…you know…and Jane was getting to be a pain, sniffing around…and I think Cheryl really wanted to tell someone, about Paul Varley, about the blackmail, and because we were…you know, intimate, I think she thought I could protect her. So she told me about the twenty-five grand each to Larry and Donna, and I got nervous because she was all mixed up. Ever since Paul Varley, she hasn’t really seen things straight, was so loaded up with guilt…” For the first time Matchett looked Gilbert right in the eyes. “Honest, Barry, she was pathetic. I felt really sorry for her. I thought if I could straighten her out…running from that dead man in the snow for twenty-five years, and I don’t know why she felt guilty because he beat her black and blue. But that’s Cheryl. Tortured by her conscience. Thinking if she could just order her life well enough, her problems would go away. So I gave her a good shake. I mean I really shook her. I wanted her to pay attention. I shook her so hard she had bruises on her arms. And I told her that if she thought Donna and Larry would stop at the twenty-five apiece she was crazy. This was chronic. I could see that. You remember that blackmail thing we had on patrol, the guy in the bakery, and that woman, that real low-life—it was like that. Donna and Larry, real low-lifes. They weren’t going to stop. A couple of leeches like that? Forget it.”

  Matchett took a final drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out.

  “So you offered them three thousand each and gave them a warning,” said Gilbert.

  Matchett stared at Gilbert hard, taken off guard by this remark. But then he smiled, admiring his old partner’s trade-craft.

  “I see you’ve done your homework.”

  “You gave them a warning, and Larry took the warning, but Donna didn’t, Donna decided she was going to try again, and that’s when you killed Donna.”

  Matchett lifted a finger warningly. “You know, Good-haven’s going to come through that door in three seconds flat if you keep this up. I’m holding up my end of it, Barry. I mention Donna in passing. I’ll just say this: we weren’t going to stand for any impediments. I wasn’t going to stand for any impediments. I misjudged. I thought I fixed the problem. I thought with Donna and Larry…I thought Cheryl would bury old ghosts, but she didn’t. She got scared. She collected documents. She hid them. She thought those documents would protect her. When I told Tom…he was just too busy to know about it, he was introducing the cutback legislation in the House the next day, he just said deal with it, like it was my problem, like he didn’t have his hands in the pie. Fuck him. I think he thought I was some kind of janitor. It was my job to clean up. He didn’t care how I did it. And Jane was pissing me off. She was snooping. I found her on two different occasions going through the accounts. So that was something else I had to deal with. I had Cheryl in a powder-keg condition, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, threatening me with sensitive bank statements. I had Jane Ireland digging deeper and deeper, just hoping for a chance to crucify me. And it was like Tom Webb didn’t even know me anymore, setting me up to take the fall if Cheryl finally caved. I didn’t like going over to Cheryl’s, she got that bird a week before Christmas, and she would joke about it in her nervous little way, called it her guard-bird, but I really hated the thing.”

  He leaned back in his chair and folded h
is hands on top of his head. Gilbert waited.

  “I really thought of it as a game after a while,” said Matchett. “Risk management, that’s what we call it at work, and I enjoyed the game because it was going to pit me against the same people who had ruined my life, the police. And it also gave me the opportunity to show them—to show you—in a backhanded way, that I was still a good cop, that I could play the evidence game, the investigative game, just as well as you could. My risks were Cheryl, Tom, and Jane. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could have that quarter million free and clear. All I had to do was neutralize my risks.”

  “You’ve got manslaughter on Cheryl,” said Gilbert. “You might as well tell me. I know you want to.”

  He took a deep breath, grew solemn, lifted his lighter between his thumb and middle finger and turned it end on end a few times on the table. “I knew you would see the tire tracks in the snow. My first problem was a car. My own car was out of the question. A stolen car? No, too many risks. A rented car. Maybe. But that left a paper trail. Then I thought, get Jane to bring the car. In fact, build a line of evidence that leads to Jane. The Sorels, the bullet, the hair. I thought if I could arrange it so Jane took the fall, she would be out of the way. At the very least, it would buy some time.”

  “So you had Webb leave a message on her voice mail asking her to bring a car from the pool?”

  A grin came to Matchett’s face. “Before we had voice mail, we had answering machines. When we got voice mail, we got rid of all our answering machines. There were a lot of old message tapes around. I checked them all. I found an old message, Webb asking Jane to bring a car to Mount Joseph. I guess this was from when Dorothy was dying. Jane went out for coffee and I rigged the message onto her voice mail.” Matchett’s grin broadened. “I was really pleased when I came up with this idea. It gave me an additional decoy, Webb’s voice on Jane’s voice mail, a way to at least implicate him as an accomplice in Cheryl’s murder. He was setting me up, and I wanted to provide myself with some protection. He didn’t know anything about the car, but let’s remember, he told me to do something about Cheryl. So in that sense he really is an accomplice. He wanted her out of the way, but he wanted plausible deniability as well. I knew how the game was played. It gave me a great sense of satisfaction to manipulate all this false evidence so intricately. The ultimate purpose was of course to throw you off completely, but there was part of me that wanted to show you how good I was. I wanted my handiwork admired.”

  “So you got in the car and you drove to the Glenarden.”

  Matchett frowned. “You’re missing the point, Barry. It was all very carefully planned. I knew about the security monitor in the lobby of the Glenarden. I had to wait for a cold day, a day when I could legitimately be bundled up, so that when you scrutinized the tape, as I knew you would, you would just see a man in a parka with his head in his hood, and his face covered with a balaclava. Typical winter gear for such a cold day. I just didn’t pick any day.” He took a deep breath and brought his hands down from his head and put them back on the table. “Then there was the problem of how to get her down to the car without a lot of noise. She let me in. I said I just wanted to talk to her. She was still in her exercise stuff. I went up there and fixed some drinks. I told her we might have some legal difficulties. Before I knew it, she was on the phone to Latham, asking about a lawyer. I cut the call short. I said I was hungry, so she went into the kitchen to get some food, and while she was in the kitchen, I put the Kedamine into her drink. Strong stuff. She had about two sips, and she started to feel woozy, and I think she guessed what was going on. She panicked. She got up and backed away from me and that’s when she let that damn bird out of the cage. You have to admire her. I went crazy. I was so completely distracted by that parrot being loose in the room she was able get to the bathroom with the portable phone. I got control of myself and just let the bird fly. I ran to the bathroom, grabbed her by the hair, and smashed her head against the mirror. I think she dropped the phone, I can’t remember, all I heard was that bird squawking out in the living room. Cheryl looked at me for a second or two, then she just slumped. I pulled her out into the hall. I thought all her neighbors must have heard the commotion.”

  Matchett looked pale, and a film of perspiration had appeared on his head.

  “I just tried to kill all my nerve endings at that point,” he said. “I still had a lot to do, I had to search her apartment, then go up to her work and search there. So I went back out into the living room and I saw the parrot perched on the curtain rod. It didn’t fly away from me. It just stared at me, turning its head this way and that, trying to figure out what I was going to do. Even when I was just a few feet away, it just stared at me. I guess they’re used to humans. I grabbed it and I choked it. It took a few minutes, but I finally killed it. Then I just stood there and got a grip on myself. I cleaned up the glasses and put them away. I generally tidied up. Then I walked back into the hall and saw that Cheryl had moved herself back into the bathroom.”

  “She was in there covering the phone with toilet paper,” said Gilbert. “She was already trying to leave clues.”

  Matchett shrugged. “I guess so. And I guess I missed the phone. I was more concerned about just getting her out of there. If someone suddenly showed up at the door…” Matchett lifted his pack of DuMauriers and stared at the cancer warning. “I had to get her out. So I rolled her up in the carpet. I took her to the laundry room and pushed her out the window. Then I climbed out the window myself. I wanted to avoid the lobby monitor. I took her out of the carpet and put her into the trunk. I had no idea she was going to freeze to death. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I brought the carpet upstairs. It was late. There was no one in the halls. I put the carpet back down and began my search. I knew I should have gotten rid of the parrot but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. And what was I going to do with it anyway? I could leave it there, that was a clue, or I could take it away, that was a clue as well; either way, it was evidence, so I decided to leave it. I couldn’t find the documents. I didn’t even think of going near the cage. The cage was just a blank spot in the room. So I left the apartment and I went up to the CNIB. How long does it take a person to freeze to death in that kind of weather? By that time, she’d been in the trunk an hour. I checked her office, no documents. I got mad. I knew then I had to kill her. In fact I knew I was going to have to kill her…well, a day or two after she found out Donna had been murdered.”

  “So really we’re talking premeditated murder,” said Gilbert.

  Matchett glanced over his shoulder at the one-way glass. “I don’t think Goodhaven likes to hear things like that.”

  “You’ve got your deal, the manslaughter charge, what difference does it make?”

  “As long as we understand each other.”

  “Just go ahead,” said Gilbert. “You’re starting to get on my nerves.”

  Matchett pulled a cigarette from his pack and lit up. “There’s not much more to say. Choice of gun. Why would I use my own gun? Why not buy a gun from any of the peddlers on Church, on Jarvis, unregistered, untraced, thrown away after the murder? Again, because I needed something solid for Jane. I really enjoyed that, pretending I was trying to protect Jane when you kept asking about the key. I really had you going.”

  “Alvin, I never bought it. It smelled fixed right from the start to me.”

  The smile faded from Matchett’s face and he looked disgruntled. “Yeah…well…at least Marsh fucked up. I never liked him. Even way back when.”

  “Marsh is a good cop.”

  “Marsh is an asshole.”

  “Let’s stick to the subject,” said Gilbert. “You drove her down to Cherry Beach, a nice deserted spot…”

  Matchett nodded, his eyes narrowing, took a long contemplative drag on his cigarette then let the smoke drift out in two thin columns from his nose. “What we used to call a dump job,” he said. He looked at Gilbert. “Remember? A dump job. The hardest thing in
the world to solve because the victim has no relation to their surroundings, there’s nowhere for the detective to start. I open the trunk and she’s not moving. She’s not breathing. And her skin’s gone this grey color. I touch her wrist. Cold. I think to myself, holy fuck, she’s frozen. So I lift her out, and I’m so startled by the way she feels that I lose my grip and she falls in the snow. She’s kind of stiff, not inordinately so, but I knew she had to be dead. I lift her up again and I carry her out to the beach and drop her there. And I was just going to leave. But then I thought about Laraby. I knew she was dead but what if…what if I drive away and she somehow miraculously gets up the way Laraby did, and walks to the nearest police station and reports me. Plus I had to leave a bullet for Jane’s sake. So I shot her. And I was going to drive away, but then I saw a car coming down Cherry Street, and I didn’t want to be caught red-handed, so I loaded her back into the trunk, and headed back. Then the car pulls a U-turn at the bridge. I think to myself, I don’t want this body in the trunk. I’ve got to get it out. So I take the next turn off, the Dominion Malting pier, and I dump her there. Finished. Done. The perfect crime. All I had to do was wait for Tom and Jane to fall like dominoes.”

  Matchett gave him a self-deprecating shrug. And Gilbert had to admit to himself, there was a certain ingenuity about the whole thing. But just as an investigator often lost control of his investigation, it seemed a perpetrator nearly always lost control of his crime. Matchett looked at him, and Gilbert didn’t know what he was expecting, but he was certainly expecting something.