by Richard King
“I’ve sealed the apartment,” Gaston told him. “For the moment only the police can enter it. But I have one more question. Did Professor Hilliard have a housekeeper?”
“Sure, he had a housekeeper. You don’t think a busy man like him had the time to clean his house, do you?”
“Do you know her name? Did she have a key? Do you know when she was here last?”
“Not so fast,” Grant pleaded. “Her name’s Betty. Her last name is one of those English names that is so hard to pronounce. Smitt or something like that.”
“Do you mean Smith?” I asked.
“Oui, that’s right. Smitt.”
“How did she get into Hilliard’s condo?” Gaston asked.
“She had a key of course. But sometimes she forgot it and I let her in.”
“And when was she last here?” Gaston patiently repeated his last question.
“Thursday. She came every Thursday.”
“Do you know where she lived?” Gaston asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe in Westmount.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant she really lived in Westmount or if he thought all the English lived in Westmount and therefore that is where someone named Betty Smith would live.
“How do you know she lived in Westmount?” Gaston asked.
“She told me,” Grant said with an exasperated tone. “How else do you think I would know? We talked about how long it took her to get here and she said she was lucky she only had to come from Westmount and it was only one bus.”
“I don’t suppose you know her address, do you?”
“No, just Westmount.”
“I’ll have to find her then,” Gaston said.
“Someone named Smith who lives in Westmount. That shouldn’t be to hard. I’m glad I only have to read Shakespeare.”
“We’ll find her,” Gaston said with a smile. “Do you want a lift? I’m finished here.”
It was just after eight. I accepted his offer and told him he could drop me on the corner of Hutchison and Fairmount in Outremont. There was someone I had to meet. A date, I guess you’d have to call it.
chapter nine
One of the advantages of running a bookstore more or less in the middle of a college campus is the constant stream of beautiful young women that pours through the door. It’s also one of the disadvantages. They get younger every year, of course. Teachers notice that too, I’m told. They also get sillier and sillier. And some of them get silly at the sight of an eligible male in his thirties. I don’t know what they see in me, but they seem to find an old geezer like me more attractive than young men their own age; it makes me retrospectively resentful, remembering how their exact counterparts snubbed me when I was twenty. On the other hand, I’m only human. And male. It’s sometimes very hard work resisting their blandishments. Jennifer finds the whole spectacle highly amusing. She calls me the “freshies’ choice.”
Susan was a bit different, though. Definitely not a freshie. The words terse and tough were invented for her. She was also terrifically attractive, with long, straight black hair and brown eyes so dark they were almost black too, and the kind of perfect Italian skin that comes from the genetic imprinting of hundreds of generations living by the Mediterranean for thousands of years. She looked as if she just got back from a tropical vacation.
She showed up in the store a few weeks ago, zeroed in on me, and handed over a reading list. “I have to read some fiction. Can you help me find these?”
She said “fiction” with the feeling that most people reserve for the words “root canal.”
“What’s wrong with reading novels?” I asked. “I do it all the time. It’s fun.”
“Yeah, maybe. I put off an English course till my last semester and now I have to do it to graduate. It’s not for fun.”
Obviously, her major was not English. I helped her find her novels. Her scorn for them as made-up stories was very clear.
Her no-nonsense attitude was a bit scary, but I tried to defend literature. “Maybe you won’t find them all that awful. Anyway, I’ve read a lot of novels, and these ones aren’t bad.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“Really. It would be a shame to blow graduation because of a couple of novels. And after you graduate, in what? Economics? Nuclear physics?”
“Biochemistry.”
“Once you’re a graduate biochemist you’ll never have to read fiction again.”
“We’ll see,” she said. I realized she thought I was hitting on her, and she was making it clear that she could see right through my approach. It was at that point that I actually began to feel like hitting on her.
“Where do I pay for these?”
I pointed her toward the cash counter was she stalked off to pay for her books.
After she paid she took a few minutes stowing the books away in her large, serious-looking briefcase. As her back was turned I took the liberty of admiring the athletic curve of her long legs in black stockings and miniskirt. Only to be caught in the act as she abruptly turned and looked at me with narrowed eyes. For a moment I thought she was going to smack me like an outraged 1950s movie heroine. Instead, taking her time, she came up close and without cracking a smile, she said, “Isn’t this the point where you ask me out for a coffee or something to eat?”
For a few seconds I literally couldn’t speak. Then, I’m sorry to say, I laughed. I thought she was putting on her tough-girl act either to scare me away or for some kind of joke. I was horrified when her face changed and she suddenly looked as if she was going to cry. A minute before you might have taken her for a wised-up twenty-five-year-old. Now she looked about sixteen, and mortified.
“Well, thanks a lot,” she said in a choked voice, and rushed out of the store.
Of course I ran after her.
Over the next few weeks we became — I think the only word for it would be entangled.
Susan was one semester away from graduating with a degree in chemistry. She was an American from Rochester in upstate New York, who decided to move to Montreal and McGill University because she figured Montreal was about as far from Rochester as you could get in terms of urban culture and still be in North America where she could go to university in English. I was half correct about her Mediterranean background. Her mother was Greek and her father was from Ithaca, New York.
Her interest in science, it turned out, was genetic. Her mother was a chemist who came to the United States from Greece to work in the Kodak labs in Rochester, which was where she met her future husband, Susan’s father, who was also a chemist at Kodak. Her family was kind of a living Kodak moment.
After Gaston dropped me off I ran to Susan’s apartment, late, and she was irritated. Did I mention that all the women I’m drawn to have hot tempers?
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? Do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than wait around? You’re lucky I had lab notes to rework or I’d have been long gone, buster! Haven’t you ever heard of the phone? It’s a new invention. You find them on every street corner these days.”
I loved it when she talked like Katharine Hepburn, but she was right, I do have a problem with punctuality. When I get involved with something I tend to forget that people are waiting for me — usually Jennifer, but now Susan too.
There’s no question Susan was a lot of fun to be with. Part of the fun was that she was not terribly interested in the things that interested me. I would talk about a book I had read or about something that I had seen on the news and she would not know what I was talking about. But she had an incisive scientific mind and she didn’t accept the things I said just because I said them. She questioned my assumptions and I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of talking to her, though in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn’t a basis for a real relationship. I didn’t particularly like having to explain why I read what I read, why I liked the movies and plays I liked. The trouble was, the more doubts I had, the more assumptions she seemed to be making about the permanence of our r
elationship. I knew I would have to disentangle myself, but I wasn’t sure how.
Susan wasn’t interested in things abstract, the humanities or the arts. On our second date I had made the mistake of taking her to see a Goya exhibit at the museum. She gave me an anatomy lesson at each painting. She explained that the figures were completely out of shape, much too elongated. When I told her that Goya had astigmatism and he painted what he saw, Susan argued that what he saw was not the way things were in the real world and why didn’t he get eyeglasses or find another line of work, something where poor eyesight wouldn’t be a problem. I knew from this experience never to see a Picasso exhibit with her.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I have a good excuse this time. I’m involved in a murder.”
“For your sake I hope you were the victim.”
“No, really. I’m involved in a murder investigation,” I repeated, pointedly not laughing at her joke.
“That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard! You were delayed because you had to commit a murder? Please! You can do better than that.”
“I didn’t commit murder. I’m working with the police to solve one. Let’s go get something to eat and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“This better be good,”she said as she slipped on her jacket and stepped out into the hallway. But she was beginning to believe me. I could tell. And she was beginning to be curious.
There is a café/bakery on every street corner in Montreal. And the corner of Hutchison and Fairmount, about half a block south of Susan’s apartment, was no exception except that the Opera Café was a cut above the others in the neighbourhood. I don’t know why they called it the Opera Café. They played jazz, mostly blues, on the café sound system and there was nothing even remotely operatic about it. But the coffee, sandwiches, and salads were great and there was always a plat du jour if we wanted something more substantial.
I ordered grilled chicken breasts and Susan had her usual salad. Cappuccino, which I would need to keep me awake to read Shakespeare, followed the food. During the meal I told Susan about my day. She started off pretty skeptical but soon got involved in the mystery. “Do you think you’ll find the computer?” she asked.
“We know he had it when he left his condo to go to work and his office was a mess so we have to assume that something was taken and we can’t find the computer so it seems likely that that’s what was taken.”
“Most people put their computers right on their desks. Especially if they carry them around. What I mean is: if the professor carried his computer around with him he didn’t hide it. So why would someone mess up the office for something that was right there in plain sight?”
I don’t know if Gaston had thought of that; he sure didn’t mention it if he had, and I know that I was so wrapped up in the chaos of the murder scene I hadn’t considered the obvious. Since the computer was missing we just assumed that the office was trashed in the course of the robbery. But we also knew that Hilliard had not put up much of a fight so the office was not destroyed in a struggle. We didn’t put two and two together to realize that the murder, the theft of the computer, and the trashing of the office could have been related sequential events. We assumed the three actions to be part of one continuous event.
Susan had a way of cutting through the illogical clutter of a situation and exposing its central core. She was a lot better at dealing with real-world problems than abstract ones.
“God!” I exclaimed, almost shouting. “We missed the obvious. Hilliard was killed, the computer was taken, but the murderer must have been looking for something else. Obviously something related to the murder and the computer but we don’t know what that was and we don’t know if the murderer found it.”
“Or it, whatever it is, had nothing to do with the computer, ”she said and smiled the smile of people who easily cut to the kernel of a problem but don’t have to actually solve it.
“Then there’s all this business about Shakespeare,” I said.
“Shakespeare.” She mught have been saying “dog turds,” if you went by the childish distaste in her voice.
I ignored her tone and told her about the note hidden under the desk blotter. “I’m not sure what it means. Lemieux wants me to read the play tonight, or at least scene one in act three, to see if there is anything there that helps us.”
“What makes you think the note is a clue?”
“The fact that it was so carefully hidden and so neatly written seems significant. We can’t be sure it has anything to do with the murder. In fact I’m pretty sure it has nothing directly to do with the crime. How could Hilliard know to hide that note in case, some day, he happened to be murdered, in which case the cops would find it and understand it and arrest the murderer? If he knew he was going to be murdered, why not just hide the name of the murderer under his desk blotter? Or better yet, do something to prevent the murder in the first place and avoid the messiness of an untimely death. No, I think the reference to Hamlet has some significance for Hilliard alive, which when we understand it may help us figure out why he was murdered. And I think that Lemieux thinks so too.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I explained to Susan was prophetic. Gaston and I struggled to understand the significance of the reference to Hamlet to the crime. Neither of us realized for quite some time that the significance of act 3, scene 1 of Hamlet was right on the surface, there for anyone to see the moment they abandoned their traditional way of looking at things.
While we were finishing our cappuccinos Susan snuggled up to me and said, “You know, Sherlock, in a way it was a good thing that you were late. It gave me a chance to finish my lab notes so I can devote the rest of the evening to you.”
I was strongly reminded of what I liked about Susan. But something about the way she said “Shakespeare” had sent a chill through me. And suddenly a vision of Gisèle’s face floated in the air somewhere, just out of reach. I was certain that Gisèle loved and appreciated Shakespeare.
“I can’t,” I said a little too bluntly. I felt badly that I was brushing her off so I softened my tone and continued, “I have to read Hamlet. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it. It’s a really long play and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through it in one night. But I’ve got to try or I’ll be bounced off the case.”
“Oh, well,” Susan sighed. “If you prefer murder to me, I guess …” She let the sentence trail off and sighed again.
I didn’t prefer murder to Susan, but I was beginning to fear that she was taking me a little too seriously. The odd reference to her sister’s wedding, and how happy it had made her mother, made me suddenly determined to go home and solve a crime rather than get into an extended evening that, no matter what delights it might offer, could also lead to a conversation about our relationship.
I paid and we left the restaurant. I walked Susan home and then headed to my place.
chapter ten
I stretched the fifteen-minute walk home into thirty minutes. Not because I wanted to think but because I wanted not to think. To stretch the walk from Susan’s apartment to mine meant taking the scenic route through lower Outremont. Upper Outremont is the enclave to the Québecois ruling class just as upper Westmount is the home of the English-Canadian ruling class. (I always suspected that Outremont was named by the denizens of Westmount as the name literally means “beyond the mountain,” not a appellation a group would apply to itself.) Lower Outremont, although mostly populated by Québecois, is more polyglot than the section on the mountain.
I never get tired of exploring Montreal neighbourhoods. No matter how many times I walk the same streets they never lose their charm and mystery, especially the area north of chic Laurier Avenue and south of dowdy St-Viateur. It’s a neighbourhood of large, solid brick and stone single-family homes and the uniquely Montreal triplexes. The residents are a mix of the francophone Québecois bourgeoisie and a large Hasidic community. The Hasidim, dressed in their traditional black clothing, and the Québecois in
their fashionable black styles manage to coexist, mostly without conflict if not in actual harmony. Maybe it’s because both groups have a certain sense of separateness that this happy coexistence is possible. Who knows? As I pass the the houses I try to imagine what life must be like within. Sometimes through an unshaded window I see a well-stocked library and I imagine I’m looking into the study of an intellectual, a professor at the Université de Montréal perhaps. Other times I see a dining room heavily furnished with a table, chairs and china cabinet all of polished dark wood and I imagine the happy shabbas that must be celebrated around that table.
It was a beautiful, clear, cool autumn night and I consumed a peaceful half an hour wandering the streets of lower Outremont before I cut back to Park Avenue and home.
I wanted to clear my head so that I could read Hamlet without imagining a clue to Hilliard’s murder on every page. I knew that looking at the play that way would lead to sloppy thinking. The note had been left before the murder and I had to guess what significance the act and scene referred to in the Post-it might have had to a living breathing history professor. Of course Hamlet is so littered with murder — murder for revenge, murder for ambition and lust, or through mistaken identity, suicide, assassination and murder by treachery — that it would be hard not to think of homicide, poison, and swords, while reading it.
I was refreshed by the time I got home. I felt that I could take on all of Shakespeare’s tragedies and I began to look for a copy of Hamlet. My house is the exact opposite of Hilliard’s. His books were so well organized they were practically card-catalogued; my books, and I have thousands of them, are shelved randomly. I had to remember where things were in order to find them. Not always an easy task. I had a paperback copy of Hamlet somewhere but couldn’t find it. At last I resorted to a fat Collected Works; it was big and easier to locate than a slim volume. I took it to the sofa in my living room, got comfortable and began to read. I skimmed the first two acts and concentrated on the third and read bits from the rest of the play. I had to read it slowly and more than once before I got into the rhythm and beauty of the Elizabethan English.