by Vicki Delany
“Gosh, yes.”
“Tell me about this park. The Commemorative Peace Garden?”
“I don’t know why everyone’s making such a fuss over it. A bunch of folks want to turn some guy’s land into a public garden with a fountain in the middle. Seems like an okay idea to me.”
“But it’s more than a park, isn’t it? I’ve been told that it’s to honor draft dodgers. Do you have any feelings about that?”
“Nope.” She pressed a button and the radio blared to life, the music hard and ugly.
“If you don’t mind, Meredith, could you turn that down?”
“Sorry.” She twisted a dial.
“In the 1960s and ’70s some Americans, soft and spoiled, too cowardly to serve their country in Vietnam, ran to Canada. It was a disgrace that Canada let them in and even more of a disgrace when the American government forgave them once the war was over.”
“Vietnam,” she said. “My mom went there on a tour last year. She said it was nice.”
“When their country called upon them to do their duty, they ran like rats from the light. And now this so-called peace garden is going to honor their cowardice. That can’t be allowed to happen, Meredith. I’m here to ensure that the people of the United States know the real story of this garden.”
“I thought you were here because of Mr. Montgomery being murdered?”
“Just between us, Meredith, I suspect his death has something to do with the park. He wanted to put a stop to it, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And now he’s dead. Murdered. Doesn’t that make you wonder?”
She took her eyes off the road. “Seems like a bit of a stretch to me.”
“How many murders were there in Trafalgar last year, Meredith?” he asked, although the answer had been in Irene’s briefing notes.
“None.”
“Wow, that’s impressive. A good journalist looks for anything out of the ordinary. Always think outside the box, Meredith, that’s my advice to you.”
“You think someone who supports the garden killed Mr. Montgomery?”
“I don’t think anything, Meredith. I’m here to investigate, that’s all. We’ll let the truth speak for itself. What the hell is that?”
On the side of the hill someone had spelled out a word in stones painted white: Marywuana.
Meredith shrugged. “It appeared about a week ago. No one knows who did it or what it’s supposed to mean. Some people think it’s code, and some think the writer can’t spell.”
“I’m guessing it’s supposed to say marijuana.”
“Probably.”
“The police haven’t removed it? You can see that sign for miles.”
“The police don’t much care who smokes up now and again. As long as no one’s selling to kids, or there are hard drugs involved.”
“What the hell. Am I in Oz?”
“Australia? Of course not, this is Canada.” She slowed down as her lane took them off the highway and into town. Small businesses lined the street; the sidewalks overflowed with pedestrians and colorful flower boxes. Trafalgar looked like any one of a hundred, a thousand, small towns Rich had been to in his long career. Except for the surrounding mountains and the misspelled advertisement for marijuana.
They passed a building built of aging red stone. 1888 was carved above the door, and the modern sign over that said Trafalgar Daily Gazette. Meredith turned left, left again, and pulled into a parking space. “Here we are,” she said, redundantly.
□□□
Dr. Louis Tyler looked nothing like a lothario. He was very short, with a round belly that made him resemble one of Santa’s elves. Long strands of grey hair were draped from left to right, a failed attempt to cover his bald spot. Winters knew diners in Vancouver that could have made use of the grease from his hair. But the dentist’s eyes twinkled with good humor and he greeted Smith with warmth.
“Molly, my dear, here in your official capacity, I see. In that case, I won’t embarrass you by mentioning that it’s been more than six months since your last visit. You want to keep that gorgeous smile, now don’t you?” The dentist looked at Winters. “Is that smile not a testament to the quality of my work, sir?”
Smith’s face turned as red as the silk roses on the receptionist’s desk.
There was one patient in the office, a freckle-faced young woman with straight brown hair, parted in the middle, a long colorful skirt, red eyes, and a clump of tissues held to her right cheek. She glared at the interlopers.
“If I could have a couple of minutes of your time, Dr. Tyler,” Winters said. “On a police matter.” He smiled at the young woman, obviously in dental distress. “We won’t be long, Miss.”
Tyler escorted them to the back. “You see how much we need subsidized dental care. That woman should have been to see me months ago. But she couldn’t afford it and now she’s in for a substantially larger bill. Don’t you agree, Mr. uh, what did you say your name was?”
“I’m Sergeant Winters, and you know Constable Smith.”
“Please sit down. Let me ask Rachel to bring in another chair, I won’t be a moment.” He headed for the door.
“That’s not necessary, Doctor. I’ll stand,” Smith said, pulling out her notebook. “This isn’t a social visit.”
“I suppose not.” Tyler settled himself behind his desk. His office was small, tucked behind the examination rooms. The practice was decorated in soothing shades of peach and pale green; soft music came from hidden speakers. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
“Have you read the paper this morning, Doctor? Or listened to the news on a Kootenay radio station?”
“Never do. Nothing but shootings and stabbings and wars and famine. I’m from Manhattan originally. I fled the urban jungle and moved my bride and my practice more than twenty years ago. My family tells me that New York has improved a great deal since then, but I don’t know whether or not to believe them. My mother is always trying to entice me back. More her grandchildren than me, I suspect.”
Winters stepped into the flow of words. “You’re unaware there was a death in town last night?”
The cheerful expression drained from his face. “Someone I know? It must be, because you’re here. My daughters and my wife, I saw them at breakfast not an hour ago. Don’t tell me….”
“Your family’s fine, as far as we know,” Smith said from her place against the wall.
The dentist blinked. “Then who?”
“You’re friends with Mrs. Eleanor Montgomery?”
“Ellie? Not Ellie?”
“Mrs. Montgomery is in perfect health. Can you tell me what your relationship is with her?”
A curtain closed over Dr. Tyler’s face. “We’re friends.”
“Good friends?”
“How do you define good, Sergeant? I meet a lot of people due to my practice and my participation in community affairs. I have good friends in New York I haven’t seen in years, but there are people in Trafalgar who I dine with on a regular basis without even knowing if they have children.”
“Stop prevaricating, man.” The fellow couldn’t say one word if a hundred would do. “I asked you a straightforward question. Answer it.”
Tyler looked at a framed picture on his desk. Winters couldn’t see what it contained, but he could guess. The happy Tyler family, no doubt. “Mrs. Montgomery told me that you and she were having an extramarital affair. Would you dispute that?”
Color drained from Tyler’s face. Winters could almost feel the heat of Smith’s interest hitting him in the back.
“Ellie can be blunt at times, Sergeant. She has scant interest in common social conventions.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“Perhaps you could wait outside, Molly?”
“Constable Smith isn’t going anywhere, Dr. Tyler, at least not until we’re finished here. Did you have dinner last night at the Montgomery home?”
“Yes.”
“What time did you leave?”
“You’re sure of the time?”
“Ellie likes to keep a regular schedule.”
“What time did you arrive at their home?”
“Four. I close the practice early on Thursdays and Fridays.”
“That was a long dinner.”
Tyler looked up. “Why are you asking me all this, Sergeant?”
“Reginald Montgomery died last night. Shortly before nine o’clock. It takes, what, five minutes to drive from the Montgomery home into town?”
Tyler leapt to his feet with such force that his chair fell to the floor behind him. The long strands of his comb-over flapped to one side of his head. “Are you accusing me of killing him?”
“Should I be?”
“This is ridiculous. Get out of my office, now. I’m calling my lawyer.” He snatched up the phone.
Winters remained seated. “It is, of course, your privilege to call counsel. Although I’m asking you a simple question. What were you doing at the Montgomery home between four and eight forty-five, Doctor?”
“Fucking, Sergeant. Fucking. I was far too busy to murder anyone. My wife spends most of her time worrying about whether or not she’ll ever have grandchildren, and Ellie is an open-minded, fun-loving woman.” He slammed the phone down. Spittle flew from the corners of his mouth. His face had turned bright red, and a vein pulsed in the middle of his forehead. “We fucked before and after dinner. Although in my wife’s favor I will admit that Ellie’s cooking is barely palatable. Perhaps I should have dinner at home and then go round for dessert with Ellie, eh? I’ve considered it. I’ve started taking Viagra. It does wonders for an older man’s stamina. You might want to try it, Sergeant Winters. Now unless you intend to arrest me, I have a patient waiting.”
“What did you do after leaving the Montgomery home?” Winters asked, with no change in his tone of voice. Tyler clearly had anger-management problems, but so did a lot of people. Not all of them killers.
Tyler fell back into his chair, the bluster leaving him as quickly as air escaping from a balloon pricked by a needle. “I went home, Sergeant. To my wife.”
“I’ll need to confirm that with her, Doctor.”
“You won’t…you won’t tell her where I was, will you? She thinks that I go to Dental Association meetings some nights. She…well, my wife is a highly strung woman. My marriage is important to me.”
But not important enough to withstand the benefits of Viagra. Winters got to his feet. Hard to believe anyone could be more highly strung than the doctor himself. “Your activities prior to eight forty-five may not be relevant. If they’re not,” he leaned heavily on the word if, “we can probably avoid involving Mrs. Tyler in that discussion. Thank you, Doctor. We’ll see ourselves out.”
The receptionist and the patient watched with round eyes and drooping jaws as Smith and Winters strolled though the waiting room.
They took the stairs in silence. They both reached for sunglasses as they stepped out into the street.
“I think,” Smith said, “it’s time to find a new dentist.”
□□□
“I’d like to plunge head first into the story and start interviewing people around town.” Rich said to Meredith. “People who knew Montgomery. Was he married?”
“Yes.”
“A grieving widow makes a great story. Set up an interview, ASAP. Then we’ll tackle the peace garden angle. I’d like to meet these traitors who abandoned America when she called them. I’m counting on you to take me to them, Meredith.”
“I’m not sure,” she said, studying her long pink fingernails. “People don’t like outsiders interfering.”
“We’re not interfering. We’re just telling their story. I can assure you that I want to hear what everyone has to say. Always Impartial, that’s the motto of CNC, right, Meredith?”
“I don’t want to take sides.”
“Nor do I. Always Impartial. I can tell from the story in the morning’s paper that you’re a good reporter, top notch. You’ve got your ear to the ground. I need your help on this Meredith, do I have it?”
Indecision moved behind her lovely dark eyes.
He didn’t give her time to make up her mind. “We’ll make a super team. Now tell me, who’s the best person to talk to about this Commemorative Peace Garden?”
“Lucky Smith probably.”
“Can you set up an interview with him?”
“Lucky’s a woman.”
“Even better. Give Lucky a call. I guarantee she’ll be pleased to tell her side of the story to the audience of CNC. Early this evening would be good. My cameraman’ll be here by then. Tell her that I’ll have a photographer, women love that.”
“I can talk to her, sure, but there might be a problem.”
“Come on, Meredith, you’re a journalist. Explain to this Lucky woman how important it is that America understands what she’s trying to achieve here.”
“It’s not that, Rich. It’s just that Lucky’s daughter, Molly, found the body.”
“How horrible for her. She needs an outlet for her stress. We’ll interview her along with the mother. Play up the shock of discovering the deceased to add a human interest angle.”
“That’s not it. Molly’s a cop. I thought she was just a beat cop, but she’s assisting the sergeant in charge of the investigation. I went to high school with Molly. I’m pretty sure she’ll tell her mom not to talk to anyone.”
If Rich Ashcroft believed in God, he would have fallen to his knees in the parking lot behind Trafalgar Daily Gazette and raised his hands in thanks.
□□□
“Kootenay Boundary Regional Hospital in Trail. The autopsy’s scheduled for noon. We should just make it, which will put us in Dr. Lee’s good books. She hates being left waiting.” Winters leaned against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”
Communities in this part of the province were small, with long stretches of undeveloped land between them. Trail was about an hour from Trafalgar but less than half-an-hour from the border with Washington State. Smith had driven down this road many times. Lucky, Samwise, and Moonlight visited family in the States. They never visited Andy’s side of the family, and he didn’t often come with them. When Smith was fourteen, her parental grandfather, whom she had never met, died. After that her grandmother traveled to Trafalgar every second Christmas, and sometimes Andy’s sisters and their families came with her. No one ever spoke about the old man, and his years of bitterness at the son who’d abandoned not only his country but the legacy of generations of a proud military family.
The sky was blue, and the temperature indicator in the van already read twenty-nine degrees Celsius. She switched on the car’s air conditioning. American tourists sometimes ran into difficulties with the change in the temperature scale as they crossed the border, thinking that twenty-nine degrees meant scarves and mittens, rather than the shorts and sunscreen required by the equivalent of eighty-five Fahrenheit.
Houses and property sporadically broke through the heavy pine forest stretching back from the road. She passed everything from tumble-down shacks to luxury mansions, sometimes less than a hundred yards apart. At the lights for the turnoff to Castlegar, a young woman, hair wrapped in a red scarf, heavy pack at her feet, stood on the other side of the intersection, her thumb out. She raised her eyebrows as the light turned green and the unmarked police van, the only car on the road, accelerated. There weren’t many places you saw hitchhikers these days, and certainly not women. Other than the Kootenays, that is.
It was five minutes to noon when they arrived at the hospital. Smith found a parking spot close to the entrance and switched off the engine. When she turned to wake up Winters, he was looking at her. There was no trace of sleep in his dark eyes or the muscles of his face.
“Here we are. Trail.”
“So I see. Thank you, Molly.”
Smith cursed herself for an idiot. Did she always have to point ou
t the obvious? Of course they were in Trail. Winters must have been here hundreds of times.
They walked across the parking lot, heat rising from the asphalt. One of the advantages of being a woman is summer clothes—cropped pants, light cotton T-shirts, naked arms, barely there sandals, acceptable even at work. But now that she was a cop, Smith’s feet sweated in boots and thick socks, her pants clung to her legs, and her gunbelt dragged her down. She’d made the mistake of wearing a new bra, and beneath the Kevlar vest the underwire dug into tender skin. Winters, by contrast, was dressed comfortably in brown pants and a perfectly ironed cream shirt, open at the neck. The shirt wasn’t tucked in, and Smith knew that it concealed his gun and handcuffs.
The hospital was quiet on a pleasant Friday morning. Her boots were loud on the freshly polished floors.
“Have you attended an autopsy before, Molly?” Sergeant Winters asked, pushing through the door marked No Entry.
“No.” A flock of small birds searched for a place to nest in her stomach.
Dr. Lee was waiting for them. Her unbound hair fell in a sleek black waterfall. The too-large white lab coat covered her dress, and she held a Styrofoam coffee cup in her right hand.
“We’re ready to begin.” Lee turned, and her stiletto heels tapped like a marching band down the bright white corridor. She tossed her cup into a wastepaper basket without giving it a glance.
Smith swallowed.
“There’s no disgrace in being sick or feeling faint. Leave if you have to,” Winters said. He pulled a small tube out of his pocket and rubbed it above his upper lip. He held it out. “Menthol. Kills some of the smell. This body isn’t old, so it shouldn’t be too bad, but it’s never pleasant. Take it.”
Smith took it. She smiled at Sergeant Winters. Deep calming breaths, she said to herself, applying the balm. Take deep calming breaths. This couldn’t be any worse than the guy who flew off his motorcycle and hit the side of the mountain head first going a hundred kilometers an hour. After having a lot to drink and telling his buddies that only pussies wore helmets.
They followed Lee through the swinging doors.