The Price of Love and Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  “An accident? You’re talking about—”

  She put her finger to his lips. “No, darling, don’t say it. Don’t say the word.”

  But whether he said it or not, she knew, as she knew he did, what the word was, and it sent a delightful shiver up her spine. The word was murder. Murder was what they were talking about. After a while, Ray said, “I might know someone. I did an unusual job once, impersonated a police officer in Montreal, a favor for someone who knew someone whose son was in trouble. You don’t need to know who he is, but he’s connected. He was very pleased with the way things worked out and he said if ever I needed anything…”

  “Well, there you are, then,” said Laura, sitting up. “Do you know how to find this man? Do you think he could arrange something?”

  Ray took her left nipple between his thumb and forefinger and squeezed. “I think so,” he said. “But it won’t be easy. I’d have to go to Montreal. Make contact. Right at the moment, though, something a bit more urgent has come up.”

  Laura saw what he meant. She slid down and took him in her mouth.

  Time moved on, as it does. The days cooled, but Ray and Laura’s passion didn’t. Just after Thanksgiving, the weather forecasters predicted a big drop in temperature and encouraged Torontonians to wrap up warm.

  Laura and Ray didn’t need any warm wrapping. The rose-patterned duvet lay on the floor at the bottom of the bed, and they were bathed in sweat, panting, as Laura straddled Ray and worked them both to a shuddering climax. Instead of rolling off him when they had finished, this time Laura stayed on top and leaned forward, her hard nipples brushing his chest. They hadn’t seen each other for a week because Ray had finally met his contact in Montreal.

  “Did you talk to that man you know?” she asked after she had caught her breath.

  Ray linked his hands behind his head. “Yes,” he said.

  “Does he know what…I mean, what we want him to do?”

  “He knows.”

  “To take his time and wait for absolutely the right opportunity?”

  “He won’t do it himself. The man he’ll put on it is a professional, honey. He knows.”

  “And will he do it when the right time comes? It must seem like an accident.”

  “He’ll do it. Don’t worry.”

  “You know,” Laura said, “you can stay all night if you want. Lloyd’s away in Vancouver. Probably looking for property.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He won’t be back till Thursday. We could just stay in bed the whole week.” Laura shivered.

  “Cold, honey?”

  “A little. Winter’s coming. Can’t you feel it?”

  Ray smiled. “I can definitely feel something,” he said.

  Laura gave him a playful tap on the chest, then gasped as he thrust himself inside her again. So much energy. This time he didn’t let her stay in control. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her over on her back, in the good old missionary position, and pounded away so hard Laura thought the bed was going to break. This time, as Laura reached the edges of her orgasm, she thought that if she died at this moment, in this state of bliss, she would be happy forever. Then the furnace came on, the house exploded, and Laura got her wish.

  “Two Dogs Perish in Beaches Gas Explosion,” Lloyd Francis read in the Toronto Star the following morning. “House-Owners Also Die in Tragic Accident.” Well, they got that wrong on two counts, thought Lloyd. He was sitting over a cappuccino in his shirtsleeves at an outdoor café on Robson Street, in Vancouver. While the cold snap had descended on the east with a vengeance, the west coast was enjoying record temperatures for the time of year. And no rain.

  Lloyd happened to know that only one of the house’s owners had died in the explosion, and that it hadn’t been an accident. Far from it. Lloyd had planned the whole thing very carefully from the moment he had found out that his wife was enjoying a grand passion with an out-of-work actor. That hadn’t been difficult to do. For a start, she had begun washing the bedsheets and pillowcases almost every day, though she usually left the laundry to Phaedra. Despite her caution, he had once seen blood on one of the sheets. Laura had also been unusually reluctant to have sex with him, and on the few occasions he had persuaded her to comply, it had been obvious to him that her thoughts were elsewhere and that, in the crude vernacular, he had been getting sloppy seconds.

  Not that Laura hadn’t been careful and cleaned herself up well. Lord only knew, she had probably stood under the shower for hours. But he could still tell. There was another man’s smell about her. And then, of course, he had simply lain in wait one day when she thought he was at the studio and seen them returning together from the beach. After that, it hadn’t been hard to find out where the man, Ray Lanagan, lived, and what he did, or didn’t do. Lloyd was quite pleased with his detective abilities. Maybe he was in the wrong profession. He had shown himself to be pretty good at murder, too, and he was certain that no one would be able to prove that the explosion in which his wife and her lover had died had been anything but a tragic accident. Things like that happened every year in Toronto when the heat came on. A slow leak, building over time, a furnace not serviced for years, a stray spark or a naked flame, and BANG!

  Lloyd sipped his cappuccino and took a bite of his croissant.

  “You seem preoccupied, darling,” said Anne-Marie, looking lovely in a low-cut white top and a short denim skirt opposite him, her dark hair framing the delicate oval face, those tantalizing ruby lips. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Lloyd. “Nothing at all. But I think I might have to fly back to Toronto today. Just for a short while.”

  Anne-Marie’s face dropped. She was so expressive, showing joy or disappointment, pleasure or pain, without guile. This time it was clearly disappointment. “Oh, must you?”

  “I’m afraid I must,” he said, taking her hand and caressing it. “I have some important business to take care of. But I promise you I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “And we’ll live in that house we saw near Spanish Beach?”

  “I’ll put in an offer before I leave,” Lloyd said. “It’ll have to be in your name, though.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I know. Tax reasons.”

  “Exactly. Good girl.” It was only a little white lie, Lloyd told himself. But it wouldn’t look good if he bought a new house in a faraway city the day after his wife died in a tragic explosion. This called for careful planning and pacing. Anne-Marie would understand. Marital separations were complicated and difficult, as complex as the tax laws, and all that really mattered was that she knew he loved her. After the funeral, of course, he might feel the need to “get away for a while,” and then perhaps Toronto would remind him too much of Laura, so it would be understandable if he moved the business somewhere else, say Vancouver. After a decent period of mourning, it would also be quite acceptable to “meet someone,” Anne-Marie, for example, and start anew, which was exactly what Lloyd Francis had in mind.

  Detective Bobby Aiken didn’t like the look of the report that had landed on his desk, didn’t like the look of it at all. He worked out of police headquarters at 40 College Street, downtown, and under normal circumstances, he would never have heard of Laura Francis and Ray Lanagan. The Beaches was 55 Division’s territory. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and one of Aiken’s jobs was to have a close look at borderline cases, where everything looked kosher but someone thought it wasn’t. This time it was a young, ambitious beat cop who desperately wanted to work Homicide. There was just something about it, he’d said, something that didn’t ring true, and the more Bobby Aiken looked at the files, the more he knew what the kid was talking about.

  The forensics were clean, of course. The fire department and the Centre for Forensic Sciences had done sterling work there, as usual. These gas explosions were unfortunately commonplace in some of the older houses, where the owners might not have had their furnaces serviced or replaced for a long time, as had happened at the house on Si
lver Birch. An accident waiting to happen.

  But police work, thank God, wasn’t only a matter of forensics. There were other considerations here. Three of them.

  Again, Aiken went through the files and jotted down his thoughts. Outside on College Street it was raining, and if he looked out of his window, all he could see were the tops of umbrellas. A streetcar rumbled by, sparks flashing from the overhead wire. Cars splashed up water from the gutters.

  First of all, Aiken noted, the victims hadn’t been husband and wife, as the investigators and media had first thought. The husband, Lloyd Francis, had flown back from a business trip to Vancouver—giving himself a nice alibi, by the way—as soon as he had heard the news the following day, and he was doubly distraught to find out that not only was his wife dead, but that she had died in bed with another man.

  No, Lloyd had said, he had no idea who the man was, but it hadn’t taken a Sherlock Holmes to discover that his name was Ray Lanagan, and that he was a sometime actor and sometime petty crook, with a record of minor fraud and con jobs. Lanagan had been clean for the past three years, relying mostly on TV commercials and bit parts in series like Da Vinci’s Inquest, before the CBC canned it, and The Murdoch Mysteries. But Aiken knew that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t been up to something. He just hadn’t got caught. Well, he had definitely been up to one thing—screwing Lloyd Francis’s wife—and the penalty for that had been far more severe than for any other offense he had ever committed. He might have been after the broad’s money, too, Aiken speculated, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to get that now.

  The second thing that bothered Aiken was the insurance and the money angle in general. Not only were the house and Laura Francis’s life insured for hefty sums, but there was the postproduction company, which was just starting to turn a good profit, and Laura’s inheritance, which was still a considerable sum, tied up in stocks and bonds and other investments. Whoever got his hands on all of that would be very rich indeed.

  And then there was Lloyd Francis himself. The young beat cop who rang the alarm bell had thought there was something odd about him when he had accompanied Lloyd to the ruins of the house. Nothing obvious, nothing he could put his finger on, of course, but just that indefinable policeman’s itch, the feeling you get when it doesn’t all add up, like when the sound track doesn’t synchronize with the picture in a movie. Aiken hadn’t talked to Lloyd Francis yet, but he was beginning to think it was about time.

  Because finally there was the one clear and indisputable fact that linked everything else, like the magnet that makes a pattern out of iron filings: Lloyd Francis had spent five years working as a heating and air-conditioning serviceman from just after he left school until his early twenties. And if you knew that much about gas furnaces, Aiken surmised, then you didn’t have to bloody well be there when one blew up. You could be in Vancouver, for example.

  Lloyd felt a little shaken after the policeman’s visit, but he still believed he’d held his own. One thing was clear, and that was that they had done a lot of checking, not only into his background, but also into the dead man’s, Ray Lanagan. What on earth had Laura seen in such a loser? The man had petty criminal stamped all over him.

  But what had worried Lloyd most of all was the knowledge that the man, Aiken, seemed to have about his own past, especially his heating and air-conditioning work. Not only did the police know he had done that for five years, but they seemed to know every job he had been on, every problem he had solved, the brand name of every furnace he had ever serviced. It was all rather overwhelming. Lloyd hadn’t lied about it, hadn’t tried to deny any of it—that would have been a sure way of sharpening their suspicions even more—but the truth painted the picture of a man easily capable of rigging the type of furnace in the Silver Birch house until it blew up on the first cold snap of the year.

  Luckily, Lloyd knew they had absolutely no forensic evidence. If there had been any, which he doubted, it would have been obliterated by the fire. All he had to do was stick to his story, and they would never be able to prove a thing. Suspicion was all very well, but it wasn’t sufficient grounds for a murder charge.

  After the funeral, he had lain low in a sublet condominium at Victoria Park and Danforth, opposite Shopper’s World. At night the streets were noisy and a little edgy, Lloyd felt, the kind of area where you might easily get mugged if you weren’t careful. More than once he had had the disconcerting feeling that he was being followed, but he told himself not to be paranoid. He wouldn’t be here for long. After a suitable period of mourning he would go to Vancouver and decide he couldn’t face returning to the city where his poor wife met such a terrible death. He still had a few colleagues who would regret his decision to leave, perhaps, but there wasn’t really anybody left in Toronto to care that much about Lloyd Francis and what happened to him. At the moment, they all thought he was a bit depressed, “getting over his loss.” Soon he would be free to “meet” Anne-Marie and start a new life. The money should be all his by then, too, once the lawyers and accountants had finished with it. Never again would he have to listen to his wife reminding him where his wealth and success came from.

  The Silver Birch explosion had not only destroyed Lloyd’s house and wife, it had also destroyed his car, a silver Toyota SUV, and he wasn’t going to bother replacing it until he moved to Vancouver, where he’d probably buy a nice little red sports car. He still popped into the studios occasionally, mostly to see how things were going, and luckily his temporary accommodation was close to the Victoria Park subway. He soon found he didn’t mind taking the TTC to work and back. In fact, he rather enjoyed it. They played classical music at the station to keep away the hooligans. If he got a seat on the train, he would read a book, and if he didn’t, he would drift off into thoughts of his sweet Anne-Marie.

  And so life went on, waiting, waiting, for the time when he could decently and without arousing suspicion, make his move. The policeman didn’t return, obviously realizing that he had absolutely no chance of making a case against Lloyd without a confession, which he knew he wouldn’t get. It was late November now, arguably one of the grimmest months in Toronto, but at least the snow hadn’t come yet, just one dreary cold gray day after another.

  On one such day Lloyd stood on the crowded eastbound platform at the St. George subway station wondering if he dare make his move as early as next week. At least, he thought, he could “go away for a while,” maybe even until after Christmas. Surely that would be acceptable by now? People would understand that he couldn’t bear to spend his first Christmas without Laura in Toronto.

  He had just decided that he would do it when he saw the train come tearing into the station. In his excitement at the thought of seeing Anne-Marie again so soon, a sort of unconscious sense of urgency had carried him a little closer to the edge of the platform than he should have been, and the crowds jostled behind him. He felt something hard jab into the small of his back, and the next thing he knew, his legs buckled and he pitched forward. He couldn’t stop himself. He toppled in front of the oncoming train before the driver could do a thing. His last thought was of Anne-Marie waving good-bye to him at Vancouver International Airport, then the subway train smashed into him and its wheels shredded him to pieces.

  Someone in the crowd screamed and people started running back toward the exits. The frail-looking old man with the walking stick who had been standing directly behind Lloyd turned to walk away calmly through the chaos, but before he could get very far, two scruffy-looking young men emerged from the throng and one took him by each arm. “No, you don’t,” one of them said. “This way.” And they led him up to the street.

  Detective Bobby Aiken played with the worry beads one of his colleagues had brought him back from a trip to Istanbul. Not that he was worried about anything. It was just a habit, and he found it very calming. It had, in fact, been a very good day.

  Not because of Lloyd Francis. Aiken didn’t really care one way or another about Francis’s death. In his ey
es, Francis had been a cold-blooded murderer, and he had got no less than he deserved. No, the thing that pleased Aiken was that the undercover detectives he had detailed to keep an eye on Francis had picked up Mickey the Croaker disguised as an old man at the St. George subway station, having seen him push Francis with the sharp end of his walking stick.

  Organized Crime had been after Mickey for many years now but had never managed to get anything on him. They knew that he usually worked for one of the big crime families in Montreal, and the way things were looking, he was just about ready to cut a deal: amnesty and the witness relocation plan for everything he knew about the Montreal operation, from the hits he had made to where the bodies were buried. Organized Crime were creaming their jeans over their good luck. It would mean a promotion for Bobby Aiken.

  The only thing that puzzled Aiken was why? What had Lloyd Francis done to upset the mob? There was something missing, and it irked him that he might never uncover it now the main players were dead. Mickey the Croaker knew nothing, of course. He had simply been obeying orders, and killing Lloyd Francis meant nothing more to him than swatting a fly. Francis’s murder was more than likely connected with the postproduction company, Aiken decided. It was well known that the mob had its fingers in the movie business, often for the purpose of money laundering. A bit of digging around might uncover something more specific, but Aiken didn’t have the time. Besides, what did it matter now? Even if he didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together, things had worked out the right way. Lanagan and Francis were dead and Mickey the Croaker was about to sing. It was a shame about the wife, Laura. She had been a good-looking woman, from what Aiken had been able to tell from the family photographs, and it was a pity she had died so young. But those were the breaks. If she hadn’t being playing the beast with two backs with Lanagan in her own bed, for Christ’s sake, then she might still be alive today.