by John Moss
Miranda had studied semiotics in university. She wondered if this accounted for the poignancy she felt for a language indecipherably encoded. She tried to imagine not being able to read your own writing.
Morgan continued. “The islanders, they call themselves Rapanui, the island is Rapa Nui, two words, they used to have joke tournaments. Koro ’ei.” He savoured the words. “Jest fests, the losers laughed, and had to throw a feast, a weird form of potlatch —”
“Morgan —”
“I think there are fewer than twenty authentic Rongorongo tablets around, pretty well all in museums. He paid half a million.”
“Well, Mr. Griffin!”
It pleased them to have arrived at the victim’s identity without resorting to actual research. They watched him drift by as if he might reveal more of himself if they waited.
“No shoes. He wandered out from the house in socks,” said Morgan, dispelling any doubt that this was the dead man’s home. “Where did Yosserian go? I thought they were hauling him out of there.”
“Mr. Griffin seems a little soft around the edges,” said Miranda, who didn’t work out but was trim. “Not in very good condition.”
“He’s dead,” said Morgan, who occasionally worked out but mostly skipped meals.
“I doubt if he even played golf. Too pallid to belong to a yacht club. Clothes not sufficiently stylish to suggest peer influence. I’d say he’s a loner. But don’t you think it’s peculiar, a high-priced lawyer, and I’ve never heard of him?”
“Cops and the law don’t always connect. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck.”
“You’d think he’d have some sort of a public presence, Morgan. Look at the house.”
“I’m not sure he had much of a presence at all. He looks exceptionally ordinary.”
“As you say, he’s floating in a fish pond. Let’s get him out before the family comes home.” Miranda turned to see that Yosserian was standing by with another officer, apparently not wanting to disturb their forensic deliberations. She caught his eye, and they moved forward.
“There’s no family coming home,” said Morgan. “They’d be here already. It’s too late in the season for Muskoka, everyone’s down from the cottage by now. The yard’s too orderly. No bikes, no barbecue. The big Showa wants food, he’s nibbled those fingers before. Look at that. The Ochiba — look at him nuzzling. They’re closer than family. These fish are Griffin’s familiars.”
“Familiars.” Miranda often repeated Morgan’s key words, sometimes to mock him but sometimes intrigued. “That’s creepy. With scales.”
“They don’t all have scales. Some of them are Doitsu.”
Miranda was equivocating about whether or not to give him the satisfaction of asking for an explanation when a stunning young woman emerged from the shadows of the walkway along the side of the house. She moved toward them with an air of belonging.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” said Morgan.
“She’s not family.”
The woman stood to one side and gazed at Robert Griffin as he was hauled over the pool edge and spread out on a groundsheet. While the officers manoeuvred the bag, she seemed to focus on the rasping of the zipper and the squishing liquid sounds as the body settled into its plastic receptacle. Then she spoke with deliberate calm. “You’re quite right, Detective. I’m not family.”
“Really,” Miranda said, realizing her disparaging comment had been overheard. The striking young woman was one of those people defined by style. Someone you had trouble imagining with a home life or childhood memories. A prosperous self-reliant urban adult of purposefully indeterminate age.
Somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-two.
She had the subdued flare of a woman who read Vogue to check for mistakes, Miranda thought. She probably subscribed to Architectural Digest, never travelled by bus, and arrived early at the dentist’s so she could read Cosmopolitan.
Miranda brushed imaginary creases from her skirt and straightened her shoulders inside her jacket. She glanced at Morgan. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.
“I take it you knew the deceased,” Miranda declared too formally as she gazed into the woman’s eyes, searching for personality.
“Yes, I did,” said the woman. Then, as if she were ordering a martini, she added, “I was his mistress. I still am, I suppose.” The woman smiled. “Wives become widows. There’s no past tense for a mistress.”
Mattress, thought Morgan, but said nothing. She was an interesting anomaly, not because she was the mistress of a flaccid man with a comb-over but because she obviously didn’t need to be. She was addressing Miranda. He turned away. There was a jousting so subtle neither woman seemed aware of it, and it didn’t include him.
“Griffin didn’t like mistress,” the woman said. “I rather like it myself. Lover is just too depressing.”
“Was he depressed?” Miranda asked with a hint of aggression.
“Why, because he killed himself? He wasn’t a man to die from excessive emotion.” She paused. “From business perhaps. He never talked about business.”
She made it sound like suicide could have been a tactical ploy.
“It’s unexpected, if that’s what you mean,” she continued. “But not surprising. Robert was a very secretive man, but he could be quite impulsive.”
The woman studied the black plastic bag, tracing the zipper line as if it were a wound. Her features softened, then she glanced up directly into Miranda’s eyes, her dispassionate aplomb instantly restored. For a moment Miranda felt an unnerving bond between them.
“With some people, you know, you can’t really tell,” said the woman.
“What?” Morgan asked. “If they’re dead?”
“Whether they’re depressed,” she said. “I suppose he might have been.” She smiled as if forgiving herself for a minor oversight.
Miranda looked at her quizzically. The woman didn’t seem concerned about a display of grief. Perhaps that would come later. Perhaps, more ominously, she had dealt with it already. Or sadly, thought Miranda, she felt nothing at all.
“Do you have access to the house?” Miranda asked.
“Do you mean, have I keys? Yes, of course.”
“Then perhaps we could look inside,” said Morgan.
“Of course,” said the woman. Touching Miranda on the arm, she casually amended her assessment of the victim’s mental stability. “He sometimes took Valium.”
“Sometimes?” said Miranda. “It’s not an occasional drug.”
“He said he had trouble sleeping.”
“And did he?”
“We didn’t sleep together, Detective. I’m not his widow.” She seemed vaguely amused by her own witticism. “My name is Eleanor Drummond.” She held her hand out to Miranda, then Morgan.
The woman was gracious without warmth, as if they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she a lapsed Catholic. Some people offered their names as an invitation, but with her it seemed more like a shield or a disguise.
They introduced themselves in turn, both fully aware Robert Griffin’s mistress had taken the initiative.
Together the three of them walked beneath the trellised portico to a set of large French doors, which Eleanor Drummond unlocked. “Did you need permission to enter?”
They stepped into a room busy with artifacts.
“No,” said Miranda.
“But if it was suicide?”
“This was murder,” said Morgan.
Eleanor Drummond’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but she said nothing.
The room was large and cluttered, with massive doors leading away on either side and into the interior depths of the house. It seemed cramped; it was the room of a man who needed to see what he thought, piled on shelves. Morgan felt vaguely embarrassed, the way he did gazing at an open cadaver.
Windows flanked the French doors along the outer wall. There was a fireplace, there were shelves against the other walls packed with hardcover books, with the occasional oversize volume stored horizontall
y on top of the rows. Books with pictures of koi lay open on the sofa and floor in cross-referencing piles. There was a small pile of books beside a wingback chair that faced out with a view of the garden. A slender Waterford vase sat poised on one of the bookshelves with three wilted long-stemmed roses. The walls were adorned with antique guns, animal heads and old maps, aboriginal masks and photographs of blurred shadows, likenesses of nightmares. There was a bar to one side littered with koi paraphernalia, water-testing potions, gauges for testing salinity, ammonia, oxygen quotients.
“Odd that it was locked,” said Morgan.
“Maybe he went out another door and walked around,” suggested Miranda.
“In his socks?”
A pair of dress shoes sat neatly on the floor, facing away from the sofa. The shoes had been removed by a man at rest, not parked there on his way outside.
“He usually used the wingback,” said Eleanor Drummond as if they were piecing together the same puzzle.
Morgan motioned for her to sit, then took a seat opposite. Miranda drifted away and, despite the forensic specialists coming in through the French doors, the woman focused on Morgan as if there was no one else in the room.
Miranda usually found books comforting. At first she had thought the room was a sanctuary, but as she wandered around she found it unsettling. What she had initially taken to be evidence of personality was actually its absence.
The shelved books were arranged by subject matter. She arranged her own books by colour and size. There was a cluster of postcards tacked to a bulletin board. On the obverse side they were blank. Sometimes the most telling story was no story at all. The opulent vulgarity of the Waterford vase attracted her eye. It was Victorian and still had a Birks label affixed to the base. There was no radio, no outlet for music. There were no paintings, only a pair of diplomas, a couple of studio graduation portraits. On a shelf an unlikely sequence of ornamental porcelain ducks was arranged next to some antique etchings in whale ivory.
“Scrimshaw,” said Morgan, glancing in the direction of her gaze.
She nodded. Looking down at the colourful runner beneath her feet, the coarse wool blunt with age, she wondered if it was good. Morgan would know. Must be antique, she thought. Not much resilience. And no underpad.
Close by the fireplace was a ceramic bin, out of which an array of walking sticks protruded at odd angles. She noticed a flat wooden blade leaning against the bin which, on closer examination, appeared to have hieroglyphs etched into its surface. My God, she thought, gently tracing her fingers along the rows of figures running its length, this was half a million dollars. She held it aslant to the light, trying to capture the inscrutable shadows.
It saddened Miranda to realize that Easter Islanders couldn’t possibly afford to repatriate their heritage. How could they compete with museums or with a wealthy collector from Rosedale who was too feckless to put it on display?
Did Rongorongo have any meaning if its meaning was lost?
Morgan watched her scrutinizing the hieroglyphs. Her auburn hair and slightly aquiline nose, lips poised in concentration rather than pursed, hazel eyes squinting to make out the writing, as if by peering more carefully she could understand what it said, all made her appear like an actor playing the role of detective: detached but absorbed, quietly confident, attractive but not distracting, hints of a strong personality bringing the scene into focus.
He returned his attention to the dead man’s mistress. She was both subtle and flash. Maybe Griffin preferred the word lover to make them seem equal; she preferred mistress to affirm the divide.
Morgan fidgeted while they talked. He watched more than listened. Eleanor Drummond seemed not to know she was being interrogated, and yet revealed virtually nothing.
Miranda tried several doors before finding a staircase that was surprisingly steep and narrow, leading up to the main part of the house. She ascended the stairs and rambled from room to room, turning on lights as she went.
“Personally, I think it was suicide,” Eleanor Drummond repeated to Morgan as if the possibility had just crossed her mind.
“Everything suggests he wasn’t anticipating the end,” Morgan said. “Books laid out to be read, shoes by the sofa — it all gives the impression of a man who had no intention of dying.”
“Perhaps that’s what he wanted us to think.”
“And why would he want us to think that?”
“So you’d think it was murder.”
“Which I do.”
“Drowning in a pond doesn’t seem like murder, Detective.”
“Dead men don’t drown. He probably died in this room.”
She looked away, out to the garden. She shared the habit of all beautiful people, inviting him to assess her without seeming to stare.
There was no way she would have been able to manoeuvre a man to the pond, dead or alive, without leaving skid marks on the grass and bruises on the body from hefting him over the retaining wall. Morgan was certain there would be no bruises. Griffin’s clothes weren’t twisted on his limbs, his body seemed inordinately relaxed. The fish weren’t spooked.
She didn’t strike him as a person who would work with an accomplice. Eleanor Drummond might have the capacity for murder, he thought, but judging from her disinclination to express appropriate emotion, probably not the desire.
Morgan thought of the koi. They weaved the shadows, wefts of colour sliding through warps of dark clear water. He lapsed into wordlessness, his mind occupied with images.
Awkwardly, the woman withdrew a cigarette, then glanced around. Seeing no ashtrays, she slipped it back into the package and set the pack down on the coffee table. She settled back on the green sofa as composed but on edge as if she were in an oncologist’s waiting room.
Miranda reappeared, stepping through the massive doorway back into Griffin’s retreat. She had been uneasy, almost anxious, in the rest of the house. It felt unnaturally empty, as if the ancestral ghosts haunting its spaces and furnishings hadn’t yet embraced their newest arrival. In the den, perhaps because the dead man’s predilections appeared on display, the ghosts seemed more accommodating.
“Would you excuse me?” said Morgan abruptly, addressing Eleanor Drummond while gesturing to his partner for help. “Detective Quin will have some questions. I’m needed outside …” His voice trailed off as he closed the French doors behind him. He took a deep breath of the evening air, annoyed with himself for having offered an explanation to account for his exit.
Activity in the garden had faded with the evening light. He walked over to where the body bag lay on the ground sheet, with a solitary attendant standing vigil. Morgan nodded.
“Waiting for the Black Mariah,” explained the corpse’s companion. “The ME ran out of gas. It didn’t seem I should leave the guy here on his own.”
Morgan was taken by the man’s innate courtesy. “It’s okay. See what you can do inside.” As the officer was about to disappear under the shadows of the portico, Morgan changed his mind. “Yosserian, go on out front. Show the medical examiner where to come when he gets here. Where did you get the body wrap?”
“Left over from the multiple last week in Cabbage-town.”
“You’re not supposed to be driving around with those.”
“Yeah,” said Yosserian.
Morgan knelt beside the remains of Robert Griffin and unzipped the bag to the shoulders, peeling the synthetic material back in dark folds. The pallor of death, highlighted by the lights from the house, gave the visible remains an appearance of antique marble, like the toppled bust of a Roman senator. Morgan stood and contemplated the nature of human flesh. He thought of the bust of Homer in a poem he imagined he had forgotten.
Strange, this had happened and nothing had changed. A man was mysteriously dead and it made no difference. Usually by now Morgan’s mind was teeming with intimations, possibilities, connections. But here was a death for which no crowd gathered.
The medical examiner came around through the walkway
, led by Yosserian, the body’s self-appointed keeper. “Is that you, Morgan?” she asked, trying to penetrate the gloom.
“You ran out of gas?” said Morgan. He moved close enough so that Ellen Ravenscroft could see it was him, then shrugged agreeably and turned away.
She squatted by the body. “All right then, love, I’ve got work to do.”
Morgan gazed into the closest pool, the fish now indistinct wraiths deep below the surface. The low green pond down by the ravine appeared brackish in the dying light. He walked over to it. It smelled fresh. Why no water flowers, no grasses around the shoreline?
He tried to block out the banal chatter between Yosserian and the ME. They were arguing about the body bag. He listened to the water and thought he could hear the hush of its limpid surface as it settled against the earth. His mind seemed both empty and filled until in the distance he heard a siren and returned to himself in the garden.
When a diver appeared by the lower pond, Morgan watched for a while. Her light, as she submerged, transformed from a shimmering cone to a glowing green cor-sage, then a vague flicker, until it extinguished in the opaque depths, only to reappear again here and there as she groped her way to the edges. It made him queasy, watching her hand reach up through the murk to signal her assistant the direction of her quest.
“She won’t see anything in there,” said the assistant, standing tall as if the higher perspective would let him see deeper. “This kind of thing is by touch alone.”
Morgan felt claustrophobic. He nodded and retreated to the upper pool. The diver had already checked this one thoroughly, moving gently among the fish, and come up with nothing.
By the time Miranda joined him, Ellen Ravenscroft had left with the body, the diver was gone, and the night sky was flushed with the lights of the city. The water in front of them was black, like anthracite sheared from its motherlode. Morgan remained motionless, staring into the impenetrable depths. Miranda moved close enough that they could feel the body heat between them, but they didn’t touch. They were comfortable with silence.
Eventually, she said, “It’s strange, that huge house, it’s creepy. Except for the den the place could have been decorated by committee.”