Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  9

  Norma Cheverel’s luxury flat was every bit as elegant and expensively furnished as Banks had expected. Some of the paintings on her walls were originals, and her furniture was all hand-crafted, by the look of it. She even had an oak table from Robert Thompson’s workshop in Kilburn. Banks recognized the trademark: a mouse carved on one of the legs.

  When Banks and Susan turned up at seven thirty that evening, Norma had just finished stacking her dinner dishes in the machine. She had changed from her work outfit and wore black leggings, showing off her shapely legs, and a green woolen sweater that barely covered her hips. She sat down and crossed her legs, cigarette poised over the ashtray beside her.

  “Well,” she said. “Do I need my solicitor yet?”

  “I think you do,” said Banks. “But I’d like you to answer a few questions first.”

  “I’m not saying a word without my solicitor present.”

  “Very well,” said Banks. “That’s your right. Let me do the talking, then.”

  She sniffed and flicked a half inch of ash into the ashtray beside her. Her crossed leg was swinging up and down as if some demented doctor were tapping the reflex.

  “I might as well tell you first of all that we’ve got Michael Bannister’s testimony,” Banks began.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do. It was you who took those photographs at the banquet and in the hotel room afterward. It was you who spent the night with Michael Bannister, not Kim Fosse.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not. You told him later that if anyone asked he’d better say it was Kim Fosse he slept with or you’d tell his wife what he’d done. You knew Lucy had a weak heart, and that he thought such a shock might kill her.”

  Norma had turned a shade paler. Banks scratched the small scar beside his right eye. Often, when it itched, it was telling him he was on the right track. “As it turns out,” he went on, “Lucy Bannister was well aware that her husband occasionally slept with other women. It was just something they didn’t talk about. He thought he was protecting her feelings; she thought she was protecting his. I suggested they talk about it.”

  “Bastard,” Norma Cheverel hissed. Banks didn’t know whether she meant him or Michael Bannister.

  “You seduced Michael Bannister and you planted incriminating photographs on Kim Fosse’s living room table after you’d killed her in the hope that we would think her husband had done it in a jealous rage, a rage that you also helped set us up to believe. We’ve checked the processing services, too. I’m sure you chose Fotomat because it’s busy, quick, and impersonal, but the man behind the counter remembers you picking up a film on Wednesday, not Kim Fosse. Beauty has its drawbacks, Norma.”

  Norma got up, tossed back her hair, and went to pour herself a drink. She didn’t offer Banks or Susan anything. “You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “And a hell of an imagination. You should work for television.”

  “You knew that David Fosse walked the dog every evening, come rain or shine, between six forty-five and seven thirty. It was easy for you to drive over to the house, park your car a little distance away, get the unsuspecting Kim to let you in, and then, still wearing gloves, hit her with the trophy and plant the photos. After that, all you had to do was convince us of her infidelity and her husband’s violent jealousy. There was even a scrap of truth in it. Except you didn’t bargain for Lucy Bannister, did you?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Norma said. “What about the film that was in the camera? You can’t prove any of this.”

  “I don’t believe I mentioned that there was a film in the camera,” said Banks. “I’m sure it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but that film couldn’t possibly have been taken by Kim’s camera either, or Michael Bannister wouldn’t have had red eyes.”

  “This is just circumstantial.”

  “Possibly. But it all adds up. Believe me, Norma, we’ve got a case and we’ve got a good chance of making it stick. The first film wasn’t enough, was it? We might have suspected it was planted. But with a second film in the camera, one showing the same scene, the same person, then there was less chance we’d look closely at the photographic evidence. How did it happen? I imagine Kim had perhaps had a bit too much to drink that night and you put her to bed. When you did, you also took her room key. At some point during the night, when you’d finished with Michael Bannister, you rewound your second film manually in the dark until there was only a small strip sticking out of the cassette, then you went to Kim Fosse’s room and you put it in her camera, taking out whatever film she had taken herself and dumping it.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m that clever, am I? I suppose you found my fingerprints on this film?”

  “The prints were smudged, as you no doubt knew they would be, and you wiped the photographs and camera. When you’d loaded the film, you advanced it in the dark with the flash turned off and the lens cap on. That way the double exposure wouldn’t affect the already exposed film at all because no light was getting to it. When you’d wound it on so that the next exposure was set at number eight, you returned it to Kim Fosse’s room.”

  “I’m glad you think I’m so brilliant, Inspector, but I—”

  “I don’t think you’re brilliant at all,” Banks said. “You’re as stupid as anyone else who thinks she can get away with the perfect crime.”

  In a flash, Norma Cheverel picked up the ashtray and threw it at Banks. He dodged sideways and it whizzed past his ear and smashed into the front of the cocktail cabinet.

  Banks stood up. “Time to call that solicitor, Norma.”

  But Norma Cheverel wasn’t listening. She was banging her fists on her knees and chanting “Bastard! Bastard!” over and over again.

  Some Land in Florida

  The morning they found Santa Claus floating facedown in the pool, I had a hangover of gargantuan proportions. By midday I was starting to feel more human. By late afternoon, on my third Michelob at Chloe’s, I was almost glad to be alive again. Almost. I was also coming to believe that Santa’s death hadn’t been quite the accident it appeared.

  “Happy Hour” at Chloe’s—a dim, horseshoe-shaped bar adjoining a restaurant—lasts from eleven a.m. to seven p.m., and by late afternoon the desperation usually starts to show through the cracks: the men tell the same joke for the third or fourth time; the women laugh just a little too loudly.

  The afternoon after Santa’s death I found myself sitting opposite his small coterie. They were an odd group, the three of them who formed the central core. There was a gray-haired man, about sixty, who always looked ill to me, despite his brick-red complexion; a size-fourteen woman in her midforties who wore size-ten clothes; and a pretty blonde, no older than about twenty-five. Maybe I’m being sexist or ageist or whatever, but I could only wonder why she was hanging around with such a bunch of losers. Christ, didn’t she know that if she played her cards right she could have me?

  OK, so I’m no oil painting. But despite a bit of a beer gut, I’m reasonably well preserved for a man of my age and drinking habits. I’ve still got a fine head of hair, even if it is gray. And I may be a bit grizzled and rough-edged, but I’ve been told I’m not without a certain cuddly quality.

  Anyway, in my humble opinion, Santa—in reality Bud Schiller, a retired real estate agent from Kingston, Ontario—was a total asshole. Most people only needed to spend a couple of minutes in his company before heading for the hills. But not these three. Oh no. They laughed at all his jokes; they hung on his every word. Of course, Schiller bought most of the drinks, but I thought his company was a hell of a price to pay for the occasional free beer.

  “So, who do you think did it, then, Jack?”

  Al French had slipped onto the empty stool beside me. Al was a cross between a loner and a social butterfly: he seemed to know everyone, but like a butterfly he never lit in any one place for long. He said he was a writer from Rochester, but I’ve never seen any of his books i
n the shops. If you ask him to be more specific, he just gets evasive.

  Al tipped back his bottle and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He was a skinny little guy with a long nose, slicked-back hair, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Today he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “Bullshit. And you know it.” Al put his bottle down and whispered in my ear. He sounded as if he’d had a few already. “When a jerk like Bud Schiller dies, there has to be something more behind it than mere accident. Come on, buddy, you’re supposed to be the private eye.”

  “True. But I’m on vacation.”

  “A real gumshoe never rests until he discovers the truth and sees that justice is done.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Where d’you read that, Al? An old Black Mask magazine?”

  Al looked hurt. “I didn’t read it anywhere. I wrote it.”

  “You write private-eye stories?”

  “We were talking about Bud Schiller’s murder.”

  See what I mean? Evasive. And persistent. I ordered another round of Michelob and offered Al a cigar.

  “Cuban?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Al shrugged and took the cigar. “What they gonna do, huh? Arrest me for smoking?”

  I laughed. “Seriously, Al, the cop I talked to said it was an accident. She asked me if I’d seen or heard anything unusual, then she left.”

  “Had you?”

  “No.”

  I wasn’t going to tell Al, but I’d spent the evening sitting out in the lanai smoking a cigar, reading Robertson Davies, and working my way through a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I could hear the sing-along in the distance, and I remember thinking there was something absurd about a bunch of adults singing “Jingle Bells” and “White Christmas” under the palms, especially with an asshole like Bud Schiller dressed as Santa leading them along. About nine thirty, when the sing-along ended, the print in my book was too blurred to read anymore, and by ten o’clock or thereabouts, like most people in the Whispering Palms Condominium Estate, I was sawing logs.

  “He’d been drinking,” I went on. “Mary Pasquale, the girl in the office, she told me he was three sheets to the wind. He must have been carrying his piano away after the party when he tripped near the edge of the pool and pitched in, headfirst.”

  Al just raised his eyebrows.

  He had a point. Even as I repeated the official line, something nagged at the back of my mind. As an ex-cop turned PI, I’ve seen enough weird crime scenes in my time, like the guy they found dead on the subway tracks and couldn’t find his head. But in this case, I had to ask myself two questions: First, wouldn’t Schiller have dropped the piano as he flung his arms out to protect himself from the fall?

  And second, perhaps more to the point, why on God’s earth was Santa’s electric piano still plugged in?

  “I’ve noticed you talking to Schiller’s cronies,” I said to Al quietly, so they wouldn’t overhear. “Do you know any of them well enough to think one of them killed him?”

  Al shook his head. “Not really. Just casting the nets, you know. Ed Brennan, the red-faced one, he’s into the ponies. We went to the dog track at Naples once. But he’s a sore loser. Too desperate. And I played golf with Schiller a couple of times a few years back. He cheats. Did you know that?”

  I didn’t rate cheating at golf as high on my list of motives for murder, but you never knew. “What about the girl?”

  Al raised his eyebrows. “Aha! Cherchez la femme, is it? Her name’s Karen Lee. Kindergarten teacher, I think.”

  “I wish my kindergarten teacher had looked like that.”

  “You’d’ve been too young to appreciate it. Besides, if you’ve got any thoughts in that direction, Jack, forget them. I warn you, she’s strictly an ice queen.”

  I looked at Karen Lee. She was running her finger around the rim of a tall, frosted glass—abstractedly, rather than in any deliberately erotic way, but it still looked sexy as hell. She sure didn’t look like an ice queen to me.

  “How long has Schiller been coming here?” I asked.

  “Longer than me, and I’ve been a regular for, what, nine, ten years now.”

  “How did they all hook up with each other?”

  “I don’t know, except they’re all from Canada. Every year Schiller would manage to gather a few luckless characters around him, but, like me, they didn’t usually come back for more. Ed was the first one who did, about four years ago. The blonde was next, year after, I think, then Mama Cass showed up just last year.”

  “What’s her real name?”

  “Ginny Fraser. Three-time loser from Smiths Falls, far as I can gather. Single mother. Welfare.”

  “How can she afford to come here?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “What does Ed do?”

  “Retired. Used to be a school caretaker in Waterloo.”

  Kindergarten teacher; welfare case; retired caretaker. Not exactly high-paying jobs. And all Canadian. Still, that didn’t mean much. Half of Canada rents condos in Florida in the winter—and Canada’s a big country. I looked at them again, trying to read their faces for signs of guilt. Nothing. Karen was still running her finger around her glass rim. Ed was attempting to tell a joke, the kind, he said loudly, that he “just knew old Bud would have appreciated.” Only Ginny was laughing, chins wobbling, tears in her eyes.

  I finished my beer, said good-bye to Al, and left. When I got back to the condo that evening with a bottle of Chilean wine and a pound of jumbo shrimp for the barbecue, I tried to put Al’s suggestion of murder out of my mind.

  But it wouldn’t go away.

  The problem was what, if anything, was I going to do about it? Back home, I’m a licensed private investigator, but down here I’m not even a citizen.

  Still, that evening out on the lanai, after the wine and the shrimps, I decided to keep my bourbon intake down. A good night’s sleep and no hangover would be the best bet for whatever tomorrow might bring.

  * * *

  The grass pricked my feet as I walked toward the pool the next morning for my prebreakfast swim. Already the temperature was in the low seventies and the sky was robin’s-egg blue.

  I stood for a moment on the bridge and looked down into the murky water for the huge turtles and catfish. Evenings, just before dark, I’d got in the habit of feeding them chunks of bread. But there was nobody around this morning.

  A couple of hundred yards away, over the swath of dry grass, the squat, brown condo units were strung out in a circle around the central island, connected to the mainland by a wooden bridge over the narrow moat. The pool, the office, and the tennis courts were all on the island. And that was Whispering Palms. Someone had bought some land in Florida and got very rich.

  An old man, fuzz of white body hair against leathery skin, was lying out on a lounge chair catching the early rays. The scent of coconut sunscreen mingled with the whiff of chlorine. The pool was still marked off by yellow police tape.

  I noticed that the office door was ajar, and when I popped my head inside, I saw Mary sitting at her desk, staring into space. I like Mary. She’s about twenty-five, an athletic sort of girl with a swimmer’s upper body and a runner’s thighs. She has a shiny black ponytail and one of those open, friendly faces, the kind you trust on sight.

  “Oh, Mr. Erwin. You startled me. You weren’t wanting to use the pool, were you?”

  “I was. But I see it’s still off-limits.”

  A frown wrinkled Mary’s smooth, tanned brow. “Well, I mean, it’s not on account of the cops or anything,” she said. “It’s just . . . well, I didn’t think the residents would like it, you know, swimming in a dead man’s water.” She turned her nose up. “So I’ve called maintenance and they’re gonna clean it out and refill it all fresh. Should be ready by this afternoon. Sorry.”

  “No, you’re right. It’s a good idea,” I said.

  Most people probably would be put of
f by swimming in the same water where an electrocuted Santa Claus had floated around all night alone in the dark, but it didn’t bother me much. I had seen death close up more times than I cared to remember. Besides, people swam in the ocean all the time and thousands have died there over the centuries.

  “Mary,” I asked, “do you happen to know who the last people to see Mr. Schiller alive were?”

  “His friends. Mr. Brennan, Miss Lee, and Miss Fraser. They said he was fine when they left.”

  Of course. The ubiquitous trio.

  Mary shook her head. “Never could understand what Miss Lee saw in that group, pretty girl like her.”

  So I was vindicated for thinking exactly the same thing yesterday. And if a young woman like Mary could think it, too, it couldn’t be either ageist or sexist, could it?

  “Mind if I ask you something?” Mary said with a frown.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Mr. Schiller was a Canadian citizen, right?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Well, I was worried, you know, like his relatives might come down and make some sort of lawsuit. What do you think?”

  Aha, the great American paranoia raises its ugly head: lawsuits. “I’m no legal expert,” I said.

  “You hear about things like that all the time, don’t you? I mean, they could sue for millions. I could be liable. It would ruin me.” She laughed. “Even if they sued for hundreds it would bankrupt me. I could lose my job. I need this job, Mr. Erwin. I need the money to go back to school.”

  I smiled as reassuringly as I could and told her I didn’t think that would happen. We didn’t even know if Schiller had any next of kin, for a start. And she couldn’t be responsible for his behavior when he was drunk.

  “But the cops said he must have tripped over that crack in the tiles.”

  “What crack?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  We went outside. The old guy in the lounge chair was still working on his skin cancer. Near the side of the pool, Mary pointed out the crack. It didn’t look like much to me. I put my foot in front of it and slid forward slowly. My big toe slipped right over the crack and the rest of my foot followed. I could hardly even feel the rough edge of the tile. “It’s hardly enough to trip over,” I said to Mary.