by Richard King
“Tabarnoosh,” Gaston muttered.
“Yeah,” I responded. “This guy sure was neat. It’s like a showroom.” I half expected the furniture to be lined up in alphabetical order.
I wandered over to the bookshelves to look at the books. You can tell a lot about people by the kind of books they buy. I’ve learned that people talk about the books they read about in the New York Review of Books or the Sunday Times but the books they actually buy and read are often a different story. Hilliard was probably one of those people who read what they said they read. The shelves were full of books on history. What amazed me was that the books were organized by topic and period and alphabetized by author or editor. Amazing. More than that, the books were lined up so that the spines were all even and appeared to have been dusted regularly. I wanted to run my finger along the tops of the books to check for dust but I thought that it would be tacky, what with the owner of the books being freshly dead and all. It didn’t seem fair to come into a murder victim’s house looking for clues to the crime and end up judging him as a housekeeper.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We arrange for some privacy,” Gaston whispered to me. He turned to the concierge and said, “Thank you very much for bringing us to Professor Hilliard’s apartment. We’ll let you know when we leave so that you can lock up. I’m going to seal the place when I leave so only the police will be permitted to enter. If anyone else wants access to the apartment you’ll have to get my permission. If you notice anyone, anyone at all who does not belong here, trying to get in to the building or this flat call me immediately. Here’s my card.” Gaston pulled a business card from his blazer pocket and handed it to Grant.
Mr. Grant looked at the card and looked at Gaston. He didn’t want to leave but he didn’t want to challenge the police either. So he did kind of a nervous little dance at the doorway. He half turned as if to leave and then he turned back to face us as if he was going to say something. He said nothing and backed up a step, stopped, turned to leave, stopped and turned to face us again. He probably would have kept this up until he got dizzy and fell over if Gaston hadn’t realized what was happening. Putting on his most reassuring professional manner, he spoke kindly and slowly: “Mr. Grant, I know you’ve had a shock, but we’ll take care of things now. We’ll stop by your apartment as we leave so you can lock up.” He put his arm around the man’s shoulder and gently turned him towards the vestibule and the elevator.
The concierge took one last look over his shoulder and stepped into the elevator. Gaston bumped the apartment door closed with his shoulder and looked around the living room again.
“Well, nothing seems to be out of place.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“So apparently our mysterious visitor has not been here yet. To be on the safe side we’d better wear these. So we don’t disturb any fingerprints or some other evidence.” He produced a couple of pairs of surgical gloves from an inside jacket pocket and we both put them on. From the wrists down we looked like a couple of surgeons in search of a patient.
“No computer anywhere,” I said, scanning the place.
“Evidently,” Gaston answered. “But that’s not all we’re looking for. We’re also looking for clues of a more general nature. Anything that will help us to understand our victim and help us to figure out who killed him.”
“Maybe it was the president of the Messy People’s Society,” I joked.
Ever the diplomat, Gaston ignored me. “It certainly doesn’t look as if anything has been moved in a while which means that the killer hasn’t been here or knew that the thing he —”
“Or she,” I piped in.
“— was looking for isn’t in this room. Or the murder had nothing to do with anything Hilliard had and only to do with Hilliard himself.”
A wide range of possibilities, I thought to myself.
“Before we start let’s check out the rest of the place to see if I’m right.”
It took me a moment to see where the rest of the place was. The wall opposite the entrance from the vestibule was cut with an high, arched opening that led to a hallway. The wall of the hall was also painted eggshell white so it almost blended into the living room wall. There was a large painting floating somewhere in my field of vision and it was only after I oriented my sense of perspective to the space that I perceived that it was hanging in the hall beyond the living room. The painting had a white background, the colour of baby’s-breath flowers, with very pale faded-red and bleached yellow brushstrokes to create an abstract drawing. It kind of reminded me of a dying computer screen saver. I knew that there had to be a bathroom and kitchen somewhere but I couldn’t see where.
I followed Gaston and saw that there were doors, two to the left and two to the right of the back wall, concealed behind the short alcove walls.
One of the doors was on the back wall itself and the other one was adjacent to it. We went through the second door on left and found ourselves in Hilliard’s study.
I swear this guy had more books in his house than I had in my bookstore. Three of the four walls of the study were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves except where there were doors for closets. The fourth wall was mostly filled with a window. An easy chair and hassock stood in the corner with a lamp behind and a small table beside the chair. A comfortable place to read. The room was dominated by a large oak desk in its centre.
This room was all done in brown tones. The desk was deep brown oak, the reading chair and ottoman were café-au-lait brown, the wall-to-wall carpet was earth brown, so as not to show the dirt I guess, although I couldn’t imagine any dirt actually getting into this place. There was an old, comfortable-looking, cracked brown leather chair behind the desk. The desktop was clear save for a desk blotter, a telephone, and a banker’s lamp in the upper left hand corner. No computer. I could imagine working very comfortably in this room. I was tempted to move in.
Gaston walked into the room and opened the closet door. We found a couple of file cabinets in the closet and banker’s boxes on an upper shelf. Gaston pulled open a file cabinet drawer and found files, all neatly arranged in hanging folders identified with small tags in plastic holders. We looked at the first one and it said History 541.1/Notes (Teaching) followed by History 541.1/Notes (Reading) followed by History 541.1/Exams (Mid-Term) and so on. This was one organized guy.
“We’ll check out the other rooms to get a sense of the layout of the place and then we’ll search with a bit more focus,” Gaston said as he walked out of the room with me at his heels. “In particular, please keep your eyes open for a telephone jack for his computer. Like the one you found in his office. I want to know if he used his computer in the same way at home as he did at work.”
We walked into the kitchen-dining room area. There was no wall separating the two rooms so there was easy access between them.
One of the walls in the dining room was exposed brick and the colour scheme followed the brick tones. The carpet was russet and the table was a square and reddish brown. There were four matching chairs at the table, one on each side. To the left of the door there was a credenza made of the same wood as the table and chairs, obviously a set. There was nothing on the lacquered tabletop except my reflection. Fingerprints would have been obvious on its gleaming surface but there were none. There was light streaming in from a large window in the wall across from the table.
The kitchen was a standard white kitchen with grey counter tops. It was serviceable, with a stove, fridge, dishwasher and cabinets but none of the accoutrements a person interested in cooking would have had, no interesting spices or kitchen gadgets in sight. Only a cof-feemaker, toaster and microwave. Everything else was behind closed cabinet doors.
There was a wall phone in the kitchen but so far as I could see no additional jack for a modem. I didn’t think Hilliard would hook his computer up in the kitchen anyway but I was told to be on the lookout for an extra phone jack and I was.
We went down th
e hall to the final two doors. One led to a small guest bathroom and the other to a large corner bedroom. In keeping with his one colour per room approach Hilliard had chosen beige for his bedroom. The carpet was the colour of wet sand and the walls a bit lighter, the colour of dry sand. There were windows on two walls. The duvet on the queen-size bed was the colour of bronze and the drapes matched it. There was a brass lamp on each of the night tables and one of the tables was piled with books and magazines. The other was bare except for the lamp and a phone. Again, no evidence of an extra phone jack. The light in the room was golden because the sun was setting now.
I wasn’t surprised to find that Hilliard’s clothes were neatly arranged in his closet. Groups of suits and sports jackets and blazers neatly hung on wooden hangers and arranged by colour. Sports shirts were on plastic hangers and dress shirts folded in their dry cleaner plastic packages and stored on shelves.
Hilliard’s bathroom was large and had all kinds of special stuff. A whirlpool tub, a shower with shower heads on two walls and various levels, a hot lamp in the ceiling, two sinks, two magnifying shaving mirrors and a long set of mirrors over the sink that concealed an equally long medicine cabinet. One end of it contained lots of soaps, a shaving brush, shaving cream in a wooden container and a razor, colognes and some over-the-counter medicines. The other end, over the second sink, was empty. Most people’s medicine cabinets are overflowing with junk. Hilliard’s was neat and only two-thirds full. From the selection of pharmaceuticals and grooming products I got the impression that Hilliard was more concerned about how he looked than how he felt.
Gaston seemed lost in thought as he wandered back into the living room. Turning to me, he asked, “Well, my friend, what do you make of all this?”
Seizing this chance to impress him with my observational skills, I jumped in. “It may be unfair to the recently departed but it looks like this guy had a single-minded, compartmentalized approach to life. One colour per room. Everything organized and in order. Nothing out of place. The only place I noticed anything personal was in his bathroom. He had a lot of, well, what can you call them, beauty products for men. Most guys have one aftershave, one toothpaste, and so on. Hilliard had several of each. Plus different kinds of soaps and cleansers. It looks to me like our victim was as self-centred, tight-assed, and monochromatic as his apartment. But I’ll bet that the bedroom got a lot of use.”
“What makes you think that?” Gaston asked.
“He lived alone yet the bathroom was designed for two,” I explained. “Two sinks, two shaving or make-up mirrors and a whirlpool bath built for two. And empty space in the medicine cabinet for guests. Believe me, this guy liked to control things and make them go his way. But you know, there is one thing out of place.”
“What would that be?”
“The smell,” I sniffed the air. “There is a very slight but distinct trace of perfume.” The scent was somehow familiar to me, but I couldn’t think what, or who, I associated it with.
“You are right. But there are no perfume bottles.”
“Which means that the perfume, and its owner, were here recently. But here’s no sign she ever lived here. Her presence cleaned out of his life just like whatever was her end of the bathroom cabinet.”
“You’re probably right that his personality was, what did you call him? — Monochromatic and self-centred? Having a sense of what he was like will help us interpret the evidence. I would guess that the reason for his death had something to do with his lifestyle, that’s for sure.” He wandered over to the sofa and sat down, still focused on his thoughts. I sat down on one of the chairs and my mind wandered as I waited for him speak again. I wondered whether his sister Gisèle was as brilliant a lawyer as he was a police detective.
Gaston snapped me out of my daydream. “This place is neater and more organized than any home I’ve ever seen. His office was total chaos. So either the murderer came over here and tidied everything up, or he or she messed up the office looking for something. I think it’s the latter. There hasn’t been time for this kind of tidying up, but wrecking a place can happen very fast. That means that the murderer got what he wanted at Hilliard’s office and so didn’t have to search his home. We are pretty sure he took the computer; he may have taken other things too. I’m also sure that he hasn’t been here, partly because he would have been in hurry and would have made a mess like in the office, and partly because I’ve had this place under surveillance from the moment I got the victim’s address. It’s unlikely he could have got in here and out again without being seen.”
“So what you’re saying is that we’re no further ahead than we were before we came here.”
“In a way, yes. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing here to help us. Let’s look around and see if we can find something useful. Let’s assume that the murder is in some way connected with Hilliard’s work or with someone he knew at work. I’ll bet that when he worked at home he worked in the study.”
This seemed kind of obvious. I wanted to help but I had no idea where to start. Going through all the books looking for a note or something would take hours. I couldn’t look for fingerprints. I didn’t know what to do.
Gaston must have got an idea because he stood up and went into the study. I followed and watched as he circled the room until he found the connection for the phone on the desk. “That’s what I’m looking for. There are two jacks here and the phone is plugged into one of them. So the other one is probably for the computer.” He pulled out one of the drawers of the cabinets in the closet and started carefully flipping through the files.
“That’s true,” I said. “Now all we have to do is find the computer.” I was a little disappointed in myself for not finding the phone jack. So far I hadn’t been much of a help.
I sat down at his desk and opened one of the drawers. I was hoping to find an envelope marked “To be opened in the event of my death” but all I found were pencils and pens, a note pad and that kind of thing and the three pennies I think you’ll find in every single desk drawer in the world. I opened another drawer and found a stack of manuscripts of books and articles he had written.
I can’t explain why I did what I did next. Perhaps it’s because I’m a snoopy, suspicious person. Perhaps it’s because I’m a slob and I tend to hide things in order to make my desk appear neat. If I had a big clean desk blotter like Hilliard’s I would probably conceal stray notes or papers under it. I lifted it up and there, stuck to the desk, was a yellow Post-it note with some writing on it.
“I think I found something!” I was excited.
“Don’t touch it,” he said, getting there just in time to stop me peeling it off the desk. I pulled my hand away as if the note were radioactive.
We looked at the note. It wasn’t clear what the scratchings on it referred to.
“Ham, roman numeral three, and a one,” I read. “Or Ham, I, I, I and the digit one.”
“Is it a shopping list? Three somethings of ham and one of something else?”
“I don’t think so. A shopping list is usually done in regular, you know, arabic numbers and usually contains more than one item. Anyway, why would he hide a shopping list? It’s a reference to something he wants to remember. Bible and play references are usually written that way. Like Genesis chapter 4, verse 21 or Macbeth act II, scene 1.”
Then we both got it at the same moment. “Hamlet! Not Macbeth, Hamlet!” we exclaimed together.
I was extremely proud of myself for finding an important clue. “Hamlet, act three, scene one. That’s great! But what does it mean?” I had no idea. I was hoping that Gaston, more experienced than me at these things, would recognize its significace.
But he was as puzzled as I was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have to admit I never read Hamlet. I’ve seen it performed in French. I don’t remember act three scene one particularly. Do you?”
I hadn’t read Hamlet since college and couldn’t remember the last time I saw the play. It was embarrassing. One thing
Gaston ought to have been able to count on from me was my knowledge of all things English and literary. “There must be a copy of Shakespeare around here somewhere,” I said hopefully. “We can check it out and see what the significance of the note is.”
“We can’t take anything off the shelves until the lab detail has checked the place out for fingerprints and such. But you must have a copy at home or in your store. Read it and let me know what significance Hamlet has to a murder —”
“Murder in Shakespeare?” I interrupted, giggling. “You must be kidding.”
Gaston wasn’t amused. “Let me know by tomorrow.”
Homework, I thought to myself. I imagined detective work as being more exciting than a freshman English homework assignment. But I knew Gaston was serious and I decided to read Hamlet, at least act 3, that very night.
“Let’s go,” said Gaston. “I don’t think there’s anything more for us to do here. We’ll have to let the CSU team go over it now.”
We left the apartment, and while I called for the elevator he took out a yellow sticker the size of a loonie that said POLICE! ACCÈS INTERDIT, and pasted it over the keyhole of the lock, then pulled the door shut.
As the elevator descended he said, “I want to see the concierge before we leave. I have one more question to ask him.”
The concierge was waiting for us when we got off the elevator and it was clear from the way he was leaning against the wall that he’d been waiting there since he left us.