by Richard King
“Not tonight. Too busy with her homework.”
“OK, then. Where do you want to go?”
We agreed on Philinos, a family-owned Greek restaurant on Park Avenue. The food is great, the atmosphere warm and friendly, and the staff all family members. One of the great things about the place was that they didn’t mind if two people shared one order — and the portions were large enough that Jen and I could easily do that and both have plenty to eat. Over beers, while we waited for our brochettes and salad, Jen again asked me about Susan. Although Jen was never judgemental about my girlfriends I don’t think she entirely approved of Susan. We had got past our sexual feelings about each other, more or less, but we didn’t accomplish this at the same time — nor was the solution permanent. There were times when I felt a strong attraction to Jen and I was almost certain she sometimes felt the same way about me. The problem was, we had never felt the same way about each other at the same time, and we had taken to referring to our ill-timed crushes on each other as a big joke. I certainly didn’t want to ruin our friendship, not to mention an excellent business partnership, by getting serious about the “joke.” Besides, what if I was wrong?
We sat out on the small terrace of Philinos enjoying an after dinner Cointreau talking about nothing in particular, books we had read, movies we’d seen, and industry gossip. The night was warm, and the moon sailed above the city street full and bright. We were sitting side by side and Jenny leaned her head on my shoulder and sighed. I put my arm around her and sighed back. My feelings for her at that moment were totally fraternal. In spite of her boyfriend of the moment I’m not sure that her feelings toward me at that moment were equally platonic. We left the restaurant arm in arm. She lived a couple of blocks east and north of me on Jeanne-Mance so I walked her to her door. After a chaste hug and kiss good night I walked back to my place to an early night of dreamless and much-needed sleep.
chapter twelve
I woke up early feeling refreshed and energetic and I treated myself to a run on the mountain as the sun came up over Montreal. There is no better start to the day than a run up Mont Royal in the early morning. My preferred route takes me up the east side of the mountain and affords me a glorious view of the Montreal skyline as I pant up to Beaver Lake. If I’m feeling really energetic I push on to the top of the mountain to the cross that dominates the city below. The only sounds are the rustle of the wind in the trees, the rhythmic thump of running shoes on the hard-packed earth of the path, and huffing and puffing — mine and that of the other runners. It was great preparation for my next detecting assignment: a return visit to the history department at McGill University.
Lemieux’s message to me was clear: I was to use the informality of my unofficial status and as much charm as I could muster to get Arlene to take me into her confidence. I wasn’t all that optimistic that I — or anyone — had enough charm for that, but I was prepared to give it a try.
I thought it would be a good idea to bring a small bribe and so I stopped in at the Café Paillon on my way to pick up a couple of cappuccinos to take with me. Something more tangible might have worked better but a well-made cappuccino has helped me to smooth relations with members of the opposite sex on more than one occasion.
I retraced my steps along Sherbrooke Street to the McGill campus and into the Elwitt Building to the history department. Before I opened the door to the department I put on my best smile and a warm look in my green eyes. I don’t know why I bothered.
“You’re early,” Arlene Ford snapped at me as I walked through the door. “No one is here yet. Especially not the cop.”
Without losing the smile or the friendly look in my eyes I got my shoulder under the rock and started pushing it up the hill. “Yes, I am a bit early. I’m sorry. I hope I’m not disturbing you. I brought you a cappuccino.” I carefully opened the bag and placed a cardboard cup of cappuccino on her desk.
Arlene Ford looked at it as if it was something a low-flying bird had dropped on her desk. “Thank you,” she said coolly but made no move to touch it. “You can wait over there,” she said, pointing to a chair.
I sat down. There are people in the world, I reflected, that you like the moment you lay eyes on them. People who are immediately attractive in some way. Jennifer is such a person and Gaston’s sister is another. Susan, too, despite her prickliness. I sighed inwardly, thinking of Susan. I can think of many more. And then there are people who instantly repel rather than attract you on first meeting, and then things go downhill. When it’s mutual — as it certainly was with Arlene Ford and me — there’s no way you’re ever going to hit it off. I suppose the fact that I suspected her of murder didn’t add to my appeal. But if I was going to get anything out of her, it wouldn’t be with charm. I’d have to scare her. This would be a new endeavour for me. I don’t think I’ve ever scared anyone in my life.
I sipped at my coffee and tried staring at her for a while. I was really just trying to figure out a good opening line, but my unblinking attention did the trick all by itself.
“What are you staring at?” she snarled.
I jumped right in with the first thing that popped into my head. “I’m trying to figure out how someone as smart as you are thinks they can get away with the stunt you pulled yesterday.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about?” I repeated softly with, I hoped, just a touch of sarcasm. “You were terrified over what you thought we found in Hilliard’s condo. But then you realized that whatever it was that you thought you left there was actually in the bottom of your bag. You did your best to talk your way out of it. But it didn’t work.”
“It didn’t work?” Her throat was so constricted with fear that she could barely squeak out the question.
“Not even close. It was obvious that all that stuff about the Mont Blanc pen set was just a ruse. You’d have been much better off crying and telling us all about how you used to go to Hilliard’s apartment to work on his manuscripts, and he tried to come on to you sexually and you barely got out with your virtue intact and in the struggle some intimate possession of yours got left behind. See, that would have been convincing — because you could have told that story and maintained the confessional mood you had established.” I couldn’t believe that I was teaching her how to lie. “We probably would have believed you. We might even have been sympathetic.”
Arlene Ford looked at me through squinty eyes for a moment and then suddenly got up and ran into the conference room. I was so taken aback by this that I didn’t know what to do. It took me a minute to notice that she left the door open and I took this as an invitation to join her.
She was in the far corner of the conference room. She had flung herself down at the table with her head on her arms. The top of her dyed blonde head moved up and down as she sobbed and gasped for air. I took a minute to get the Kleenex and all-important coffee from her desk and, closing the door behind me, I went over and sat down beside her. In the most fatherly voice I could manage I asked, “Is there anything I can do?”
“It’s true,” she moaned between sobs.
“What’s true?” I asked.
“What you said.” She lifted her head and took the Kleenex I was holding out to her. “I went over to his place to do some extra work and he came on to me. Just like you said.”
It sounded like she was beginning to hyperventilate and I was getting more worried about her. “I resisted and finally he promised to leave me alone. I told him I would stop proofing his manuscripts if he didn’t leave me alone,” she continued, still crying. “But he didn’t mean it. I was fooled because he would never bother me here. Oh no, at the office it was all Ms. Ford this and Ms. Ford that. He never even called me Arlene, never mind the things he used to call me at his place. So I believed him and kept going back and I went back one too many times. He just about raped me. He was tearing at my clothes. I played along hoping to distract him so I could escape. And I did. But I had my clothes off and all I coul
d throw on was my jeans and a shirt. And I took off leaving my other stuff behind. I was too scared to hang around.”
I said nothing. It wasn’t true, of course. If she’d actually left her underwear it was pretty unlikely she’d forget she had eventually got it back. I also doubted she would have forgotten it and left it in her bag for — I wondered when she would claim it had happened.
“When was this?” I asked sympathetically.
“About three weeks ago. I never went back and I did my best to avoid him around here. Although around here Dr. Hilliard was Dr. Jekyll. You’d never know what he was like off campus.”
And with that she put her head back down on her arms and cried some more.
Time to switch tactics.
“I’m impressed,” I said. I got up and took a step away, then turned and examined her coldly. “That was quite a performance. If you had done that when we were at the café it would have been really convincing. But not now.”
Arlene sat bolt upright. Apparently I had thrown the stop-crying switch. She glared at me with pure narrow-eyed hatred. I had never experienced the venomous stare of a murderer before but at that moment I was convinced that I had found the killer.
Without taking her eyes off me she stood up and slapped me hard across the face.
At that moment, Lemieux appeared. “What’s going on?” he asked, surprised.
“Arrest that woman,” I said angrily, gently stroking my burning cheek. “That woman” packed quite a wallop.
“For what?” He asked. “Slapping a bookseller? That’s hardly a serious crime.”
“No,” I growled. “For murder. For killing Professor Hilliard.”
“Has she confessed?”
“Not in so many words,” I answered.
“Then do you have any evidence?”
“Not really,” I said sheepishly.
Turning to Arlene, Lemieux asked, “Did you murder Professor Hilliard, madam?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she responded angrily and stalked out of the room. Following Arlene Ford from room to room could become a time-consuming endeavour. I was half out of my chair but Lemieux held out his arm in the universal signal for stop. “Sit down, my friend.”
He walked over to the door, closed it and sat down. “Tell me what happened to earn you such emotion.”
“She’s a liar. Everything she told us was a fabrication. We can’t just let her walk out of here.”
“I’m sure she’s just going into the next room to cool off. I’m not concerned about: her at this moment. I want to hear your story.”
I recounted what had led up to the slap. When I had finished, Gaston just looked off into space and stroked his moustache. By now I knew not to interrupt him when he was thinking; not that he would have heard me anyway.
Finally his eyes came back into focus and he said to me in a bemused tone, “Well, well, Sam you seem to be getting the hang of police work. Pretty soon you’ll be considering a career change.” Then he turned serious again. “We still don’t know what she left in that apartment but her theatrics have given us more confirmation that it was something important and probably incriminating. She’s still on our list of suspects. Let’s see if anyone else makes it onto that list.”
Lemieux went into the reception area to see which of the people he wanted to see had arrived. I liked his attitude. He had asked Arlene to have three people available and he never doubted that they would be there.
I could hear Arlene introducing him to someone and sure enough he returned a moment later with a pretty blonde woman — a natural blonde — about the same age as Susan but with less fire in her eyes. She was dressed in the uniform of the nineties student: Gap jeans, a Roots sweatshirt, uncomfortable-looking black boots and an Eastpak backpack which she let slide to the floor as she sat. She was pretty, I suppose, in a conventional sort of way, and she carried herself with assurance. She showed no nervousness at being questioned in a murder investigation.
“May I present my colleague, Miss Bloch, this is Sam Wiseman. He is assisting me in the investigation.”
I rose and nodded a courteous bow to Miss Bloch. I was too far away to shake her hand.
“I know you,” she said. “You work in the bookstore.” She sat down and laced the fingers of her hands together on the table in front of her. Gaston sat on the same side of the conference table, and I took chair at the end. I had them both in profile. Sitting like that she made me think of the star pupil in a grade eight class waiting for the teacher to begin, not wanting to miss a word. I straightened up to look as attentive as she did.
Lermieux began in a very formal way. “Thank you for coming to meet with me, us I mean, Miss Bloch. I appreciate it. As you know there has been a murder and we must talk to all those who may have information concerning the murder.”
“I don’t know anything about the murder.” Sarah looked alarmed.
“We shall see,” intoned Lemieux. “What was your relationship to Dr. Hilliard?”
“He was my thesis adviser. And I was his teaching assistant.”
“What I meant was, how did you get along with Professor Hilliard? Were you close?”
“I wouldn’t say close. We had a formal relationship. I always called him Professor and he tended to call me Ms. Bloch in public. I respected him as a thesis adviser and my teacher. No more than that.”
“I see,” Lemieux said. “Did you work closely with him?”
“During my first year here, no. More during my second year and a lot more over the summer as I was preparing for my exams and trying to work out a thesis topic.”
“So you spent a lot of time with him this last summer?”
“Yes. My field is the Revolution of 1848 in France and there is already so much written on that period that I needed help finding a topic that would be suitable for a doctoral dissertation. I had a lot of ideas but Professor Hilliard thought that they were too broad or lacked focus. He helped me find a topic that was narrow enough to be manageable and broad enough to be a PhD thesis.”
“And you found such a topic?”
“Yes. I’ll be working on the role of Parisian merchants during the revolution.”
“And you spent a lot of time with Dr. Hilliard to work on this topic?”
“Why do you ask me that? What’s it got to do with anything?” Sarah was beginning to lose her cool and become a bit exasperated with Lemieux’s questions.
“I’ve been hearing rumours that Dr. Hilliard was not always so correct in his relationships with his students. I was wondering if you had any experiences with him. Did he ever try to initiate a more personal relationship with you?”
Gaston was so roundabout in the way he led up to and asked the question that I almost didn’t realize where he was going. There were pads and pencils on the table and I reached for one of each to be ready to take notes should anyone say anything noteworthy.
Sarah looked at Gaston and repeated, “Personal? Do you mean did he try to cross the line between student and teacher? Is that what you mean?” Sarah acted as if this was the craziest idea she had ever heard. “If he wasn’t dead, it would be almost funny. Where on earth did you hear this so-called rumour?”
Gaston tilted his head toward the wall that divided the conference room from the secretary’s office. Sarah understood what he meant and said, “Well, you have to consider the source, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“There have been lots of rumours about Professor H. since Jane broke up with him. I’m sure that some of them have been based on truth. But the only person I know of who actually had an extracurricular, shall we say, connection with him is your source.” This time Sarah tilted her head toward the wall between the room we were in and the secretary’s office.
I didn’t get these two. Why didn’t someone just say Arlene Ford? Why all this circumspection? Did they expect her to be listening through the wall? Then again, maybe she was.
“And how can you be so certain?” asked Gaston.<
br />
“They were pretty discreet. But there were times when I’d see her stand a little too close to him when going over something, making body contact, if you know what I mean.”
“Really?” I blurted. “The cold and angry —” I was about to say Arlene’s name but in keeping with recently established practice I finished the sentence by inclining my head toward the wall.
“Yes. Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes she would leave her hand on his after she handed him something. There were small gestures. Maybe they thought nobody would notice, but I did. After the first few I saw how many of them there were. Once when I had to drop something off at his house I smelled her perfume.”
Of course. I remembered that perfume, too. It had nagged at me like a song, the title of which I could not remember, running through my head. I knew I recognized the scent put for some reason I did not connect it with Arlene. I guess the perfume gave off a different scent on the air of Hilliard’s condo than it did on the person of Arlene Ford.
“So you saw her there?”
“No, that’s the point. She was obviously there but not in the living room or the study which was where I was with Professor Hilliard. We spent about fifteen minutes together going over some marking I had done and then I took home another set of papers to grade.”
“When was this?”
“Last spring. At the end of the semester. I was doing the final grading. And if she wasn’t in the living room or the study that only left one other room.”
“I guess you don’t mean the kitchen,” I said.
“I don’t mean the kitchen, believe me.”
I was certain, now that Sarah jogged my memory, that Ms. Ford had been in Hilliard’s apartment just before our visit. I wondered why Gaston hadn’t noticed the perfume. I almost laughed out loud at the thought that he was the professional detective but I had the nose of a bloodhound.
“Did the professor seem different in some way that night?” Gaston inquired. “Did he give any indication that he had a visitor?”