by Richard King
We were quiet as we thought about Allan’s last point. I had to admit that it was a good one. At that time we had no hard evidence that he had done anything except act like a fool and that was not against the law.
“I don’t fully believe you,” Gaston told him. “But I don’t have enough to hold you so I’m going to let you go for the moment. Do not get in the way of the investigation again. Go about your business and be sure to keep out of my way. If I find you poking around again I promise you that I’ll arrest you for something — tampering with evidence, interfering with an investigation — something. You may only have to spend a day or two in jail but believe me when I tell you that it won’t be an experience you’ll enjoy. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah,” Allan answered sullenly. Allan did not seem to appreciate the break he was getting. I was hoping that Gaston would arrest him and throw his arrogant, sullen ass in jail.
“Now give me the keys and clear out of here,” Gaston told him, “and don’t let me catch you interfering in this investigation again.”
Without a word Allan slid the keys to Gaston, got up and left the apartment. I followed him into the living room to make sure he left and did not make a detour into the bedroom to hide until we left.
Gaston followed me into the living room and said, “Well, that was unpleasant, wasn’t it? You don’t really get to see people at their best during a murder investigation.”
My stomach growled reminding me how hungry I was. “Lunch,” I reminded Gaston.
“Right. But let’s go somewhere decent for a change.”
We left the apartment, taking our garbage with us, and headed off to find a good restaurant. Good thinking has to be supported by fine cuisine.
chapter seventeen
The closest good restaurant was a place called Cellini on McGill College Avenue. It was a cavernous, split-level affair situated under one of the high-rise office towers that had taken over that street. The place was filled with what looked to be lawyers and stockbrokers, all wearing their business blues. I felt decidedly underdressed as I wasn’t wearing a tie or a jacket.
After we ordered, spaghetti alia putanesca for me and fettucine with pesto for Gaston and a bottle of the house red to help put the events of the morning into a warm glow, Gaston pulled his notebook out of his pocket and began to flip through it. Not to be outdone I opened my file folder and pulled out my notes and began reviewing them.
“OK, my friend, let’s see who we have as suspects. Arlene Ford remains on our list even though she went a long way to convince me of her innocence this morning. Allan Gutmacher is a candidate, as well. He’s a loose cannon. He may have believed that the professor was interested in his girlfriend. If he barged into Hilliard’s office to protect her honour or something he may have got into a fight and killed him. Michaels is definitely on our list. I don’t know about opportunity but it certainly seems that he had a motive. We also have Professor Miller-More, the former love interest. She seemed the most genuinely upset of the people we interviewed but, who knows, maybe he left her and she was angry. I don’t see more than that as a motive for her yet but we may as well keep her on the list of suspects until she is definitively disqualified. Finally, there is her husband. Hilliard was a rival for his wife’s affection at one time.”
“But we haven’t interviewed him. We haven’t even met the man. How is he a suspect?”
“It’s because we haven’t met with him. Remember, his wife left a message on his voice mail and he was to call me. So far he hasn’t called. If you had a message to call the police what would you do?”
“Me? I’d be terrified. I’d call them as soon as I could; unless I had something to hide — then I might put it off for as long as possible. I get it,” I exclaimed, finally realizing why Gaston had Fred More on his suspect list. “What makes him interesting to us is that he hasn’t called.”
“Exactly. I think we’ll drop in on Mr. More as soon as we finish our lunch. Is there anyone else on our list?”
“I think we can safely exclude the cleaning woman, Mrs. Smith, and even Sarah Bloch. Neither of them appears to have had a motive. Regardless of what her boyfriend thinks I think Sarah handled herself intelligently and she appears to have been more or almost honest with us. Certainly as regards her relationship with Hilliard. I’d love to know what she and Allan talked about when they found each other in the history department. Maybe she thought he killed Hilliard and she was protecting him by not telling us exactly what happened that morning. Who knows? There may be others, random love interests and/or their boyfriends. But at the moment we have five solid suspects: Arlene Ford, Allan Gutmacher, Ron Michaels, Jane Miller-More, and Fred More. The evidence does not point directly to any one of them.”
“And so our next move will be … what?”
“For now, just to keep an open mind should be enough. The secret to solving crimes is to keep plugging away, gathering the facts to ensure that we see and understand all the possibilities, and jumping to no conclusions.”
There seemed little more to say about the case for the moment, and Gaston sat back and relaxed. We finished our meal, and had just been served coffee. “The last time I was in this restaurant I was with my father,” he remarked, looking around at the elegant, comfortable room. “This place is one of his favourite haunts. He is the senior partner at Lemieux, Clark, Beaubien and Stein. You can see that the legal profession is very well represented here. And he looks the part: a very judicial-looking, elderly gentleman, very formal in his behaviour, even with me … or especially with me. He has always considered that relations between a father and son should be very formal.”
I said nothing, thinking that I now understood from whom Gaston had inherited his cool demeanor.
“We see each other rarely,” Gaston continued. “There has been a certain coldness between us for years over my choice of profession. My sister” — I was instantly on the alert at this mention of the beautiful Gisèle— “thinks that the rift is much more serious than it is and is always trying to bring us back together, and she manoeuvred us into having lunch together here a few weeks ago. We ran out of conversation after each of us had asked about the other’s health and well-being and ended up in an embarrassing silence.”
Again Gaston paused, and I wondered if now was the moment to ask whether Giséle was married or in love.
“Then suddenly,” Gaston went on, “he asked me a surprising question: if I still ‘worked for the police’. I thought it was a strange way of asking the question, as if the police were a competing law firm rather than a public institution. I was also surprised that he thought I might have changed careers without his knowing. But it was just his way of letting me know what he thinks of my job. Since I’m not a lawyer, not even a notary, I have not chosen a career worthy of the name Lemieux.”
“He sounds formidable. The forbidding patriarch. Perhaps a bit —” I searched for a diplomatic term — “rigid.” I visualized myself approaching the austere figure my imagination had conjured up and asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The very thought was terrifying.
“Perhaps a little rigid, yes. My father,” Gaston said, laughing, “would consider your profession to be a very bohemian one. Possibly not quite as bad as the police department, but still unacceptable.”
Not son-in-law material then. I heaved an inward sigh.
Gaston called for our bill and we prepared to leave the restaurant. I was beginning to see why Gaston had befriended me. As the scion of an haut-bourgeois Quebec family, he was out of place on the police force, though he loved the work. He saw in me a contemporary who was not of his world but with whom he could share some of his interests. Someone whose life conspicuously lacked the kind of social pressures and demands his family background had exerted on him. I could see why his colleagues on the force thought he was a stuck-up snob. I could also see that he was nothing of the kind.
As we walked to the campus in silence I thought about the last time, the previous Frid
ay, I had a meal with my parents and how different it was from Gaston’s experience.
My parents like to have my brother, my sister, me, and all of my nephews and nieces come over for dinner on Friday nights — a sort of shabbas for the assimilated. I try to leave work by six o’clock on Fridays so as not to be too late. My parents live on Randall Avenue, in a duplex that they bought in the fifties when prices were cheap and this part of NDG was considered practically in the country.
Last Friday was no different from any other Friday. I was, as usual, the last to arrive. My parents, my brother Ben, his wife Sandra, my sister Naomi, and her husband Max were all in the overfurnished living room sipping on soft drinks. The children were in the basement watching TV. I went downstairs to see them. Playing with them on Friday nights made me long for a family of my own. However, by Saturday morning the longing had passed, so I remained single and childless.
Shabbas in my family is a long way from a religious event. My father, a cab driver, comes from a working-class background and is a proud, lifelong socialist. He considers religion a way to keep the masses in their place and so there is no religious practice in his house; I know my mother, an elementary schoolteacher, would like to be a little more observant but only goes so far as to light the candles at sundown. But they have never given up their religion’s vocabulary of reverence for the family. Friday night is shabbas and the night the whole family should be together for a home-cooked meal. My siblings and I rarely miss one of these family get-togethers. We are too important to each other to go more than a week without some kind of physical contact.
“Sammy, come and sit with us. I’ll get you a coke,” my mother called when I came up from the basement. My brother and sister and I hugged and my father tousled my hair as if I were still a child. “So what’s new in the literary world?” he asked. “Ben and Naomi were just bringing us up to date on the financial world. I tell you, I could have made a fortune if I had a fortune to invest.”
Ben is an accountant and Naomi is a stockbroker. They are both very successful. My father, given his socialist beliefs, doesn’t quite understand how they can devote their lives to the pursuit of profit — surplus labour value to him — with such pleasure, but he is proud of their success. (Ben and Naomi are investing money for my parents so that they will have a comfortable old age — I contribute too but not as much as they do, given my bookseller’s income — and be able to retire to Florida. So it’s quite possible that my father did make a fortune that day thanks to my older siblings.) As the baby of the family I am the most indulged, spoiled, some might say, but not so much that youthful sibling rivalries carried into our adult relationships.
Dinner, in fact any meal with my family, is a noisy adults-only affair. The kids are happier eating in the basement rec room — away from their boisterous, embarrassing elders. There’s always lots of food, a more or less traditional meal of matzoh ball soup, chicken, kugel and that awful sweet wine. The meal, shorn of religious content, is full of jokes, familial teasing, and banter. There are also times when we have political debates that are real table-banging events. Anyone who doesn’t know us but overheard the arguments would probably think that we’re getting ready to kill one another. It’s easy to beat my father in an argument based on logic, impossible to win based on volume. My mother, the one with the more common sense, tends to stay out of these fights until we run ourselves down and then she usually ends discussion with a sharp, insightful remark. That doesn’t exactly stop us but it does get us to change the topic or the tone of our discussions.
I love these evenings with my family. I wondered, as Gaston and I walked to McGill, a murder very much on our minds, how he would react if he ever attended one of our family meals. Would he be shocked by the differences between my family and his? Or would he be jealous?
We walked to the campus in silence.
chapter eighteen
We stopped at the main entrance to the campus and asked where Dean More’s office was. We were directed to an administration building in the most out-of-the-way corner of the university campus. It was a nondescript box of about nine stories, the only structure in sight that was in any way modern. The bottom three floors were brick and the rest black siding. The building directory told us that More’s office was on the top floor. We took the one working elevator. Just inside a glass door inscribed with Dean of Graduate Studies, we found a secretary whose desk name plate identified her as Donna Nichols. She was typing away on a computer at a speed to be envied and didn’t notice us for a moment. She had coal-black hair cut short, in a kind of 1920s bob. What I could see of her face in profile was pretty, with regular features and a smooth complexion, but she wore too much make-up. She was wearing a denim shirt with an appliqué flower design across the back and a red kerchief around her neck. As I had her in profile I could see the beginnings of a black lacy bra at the opening of her shirt. A discreet clearing of Gaston’s throat finally got her attention and she turned to us and asked officiously, “May I help you?”
“We’d like to see Dean More,” Gaston responded.
“Certainly. Today is out of the question, in fact the rest of the week is booked. Perhaps next week sometime?” she said, referring to a large agenda.
“I beg your pardon,” Gaston said with exaggerated politeness. “I didn’t mention who I am. Gaston Lemieux, detective, of the Montreal police department. This is my colleague Mr. Wiseman.” He showed her his badge and identification. “Perhaps Dean More could find room in his busy schedule. Would you be good enough to tell that we’d like to see him now? If it’s not inconvenient. I’m afraid this is a matter that can’t wait.”
Ms. Nichols got up, and looking at him warily, said, “I’ll tell him you’re here.” She walked into Dean More’s office after the most perfunctory of knocks.
After a couple of minutes she was back, holding the door open for us. “Dean More will see you now,” she recited as if reading from a cue card.
Fred More rose from his chair and came out from behind his desk to greet us. He was a tall man, over six feet, with the build of an athlete. His shoulders were broad and his waist was trim. He had straight dark brown hair and a matching wispy moustache. He looked more like a football coach than an academic. We introduced ourselves and shook hands all around. His grip was, of course, vice-like; I tried to hide the wince of pain I felt. At least he was dressed like a dean, in a tan and brown Harris tweed jacket, dark brown slacks, and loafers. His yellow oxford cotton shirt was a button-down, with a monogram at the cuff. He wore a striped tie and looked collegial as hell and I half expected him to start smoking a pipe. He didn’t.
“I expected you to call me,” Gaston explained. “Your wife left a message on your voice mail giving you my phone numbers.”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to call. But as you see, I’m extremely busy and haven’t had time to call.” I couldn’t see that he was busy at all. His office was neat and tidy and looked more like a showroom for office furniture than a place where actual work got done. His desk was clear except for a cup of sharpened pencils and pens and a yellow legal pad. On the credenza behind his desk was a telephone, some pictures of himself and Jane in various rustic and vacation settings and the omnipresent computer. A regular desktop computer with screen and key board. This one was beige.
“But I’m sure you’re very concerned about the murder of one of your faculty members,” said Gaston neutrally.
“Oh, yes, terribly concerned.” He sounded terribly unconcerned as he motioned for us to take chairs. We did so. He returned to his power position, seated at his vast, shiny desk. I began to see why he hadn’t returned Gaston’s call; he probably never returned anybody’s call. He was smooth, self-centred and oblivious. “I’ve ordered a full-scale inquiry into our security measures,” he was saying, sounding extremely pleased with his own efficiency. “I’ve asked all department chairs to review their procedures. I’ve solicited quotes for combination security locks on all doors that open onto public area a
nd hallways. And I’ve sent out a number of memos outlining steps to be taken in the event that a suspicious person or persons are seen wandering about the buildings. I expect to be able to bring some specific proposals to the deans’ meeting at the beginning of next month. I have been very concerned. I don’t ever want anything like this to happen again.”
He had been busy. All those memos and reports in four days. The man must be a memo-writing machine.
“Now, what can I do to help your investigation? Of course I’ll do whatever I can.” He said this with an earnest look as if he’d been eager to help all along, but had not been asked.
“Did you know Professor Hilliard well?” Gaston asked, taking out a notebook.
“In a professional way, yes. We were never close, but we had a cordial relationship. When I was in the history department I saw a bit more of him than I have recently. Of course you know that my wife was engaged to him at one time. But that was in the past. Her feelings about him changed, though she continued to regard him as a friend. As did I. Their previous acquaintance didn’t affect our ability to treat each other with respect, genuine respect. He was also an admirable scholar. A fine historian.”
So that was how he wanted to play it. Oh so civilized. But then he’d ended up with the girl, hadn’t he? So he could afford to be smug.
“We heard that her decision to break off her relationship with him and marry you was rather sudden.”
“Sudden? no, I wouldn’t say it was that. We both knew Jane as our star undergraduate, top of her class, on the honour roll from her first year to her last and she won the history prize and a scholarship to the University of Toronto to do graduate work. So I’ve known her at least as long as Harold did. When she wanted to return here to teach I was delighted. And although we normally prefer not to hire our undergraduates or graduates for their first jobs, in Jane’s case I was able to convince the history department to make an exception. I was chairman of the department at that time so my recommendation carried quite a bit of weight.”