by Lou Allin
“He’d invested quite well. Mutual funds. All that stuff’s at home, though. I don’t know anything about the exact figures. Frankly, I never paid attention.”
Belle nodded. “Stocks fell into the toilet after 9/11, but values are soaring now.” Mutt waved aside the financial complexities. Was he that naïve? Still, not everyone cared for money as much as she did.
“So how bad was the interview?”
He seemed charged with anger and humiliation as he recalled being taken to a windowless cupboard of a room at Police Headquarters at Tom Davies Square, running long fingers through his thick hair, a pulse pounding in his temple. “I can’t believe they grilled me on where I’d been that day. And listen to my crime jargon. It might be funny if it weren’t so personal.”
“Routine.” Belle thought about the logistics of the trip north and spread her hands. “But you were driving 69 all the way, right?” Had he stopped off at Bump Lake? She felt guilty for her suspicions.
“I had no idea about how to get to where he was working. Why would I have cared until now? But the police say the road goes by the Burwash turn, and how can I prove I didn’t know?”
“I see. The point is that you could have reached him without much difficulty . . . if the time frame was right.” She noticed four hummingbirds duelling at the feeder. They were aggressive little creatures, territorial and war-like. Mutt must have filled it. That a murderer could mix hummingbird nectar seemed like a grotesque joke. “They sound like they’re bluffing.”
“It was beyond belief. They asked me some very intimate questions about our relationship. Whether anyone else was involved. Who was living in our house. A Cecilian nun from Zaire who’s taking courses in microbiology at Brock. Even the HIV/AIDS question lifted its ugly head.”
“How awful. Why is that relevant?” Trying not to be obvious, she scrutinized Mutt. With the modern drug cocktails, no one resembled the archetypal skeletal victim any more, but another crease had etched his forehead.
He squared his broad shoulders. “You can bet they wouldn’t have handled it this way in T.O. Bunch of rednecks.” He saw her grimace. “Sorry. I don’t mean you or any of the others I’ve met up here. Ramleau made my blood boil.”
“He’s off the case soon.” She told him what Steve had said.
“And this guy Steve’s a friend of yours? That’s a break.”
Too many ideas were arriving without notice. Belle didn’t know how to interpret that comment. Did he expect special treatment? She finished the bottle of beer, touched the cool glass to her cheek. Were the police right? Did Mutt have the opportunity?
Belle pointed at a road map he had spread out. “Show me where he was working. I know a bit about the region from my real estate travels.”
Mutt indicated Bump Lake, several miles west of the former Burwash facility grid, deep in a swampy area with a maze of dirt roads and old logging trails tapering into savage, uncharted wilderness. “Here’s where they found his canoe floating loose and his . . . body. His truck was parked a mile back at the turnaround.”
“So he must have portaged.” No wonder Gary had become so fit. Muscling even a light canoe was a task she couldn’t handle alone for more than a few hundred feet.
Suddenly he gave his head a pound with the butt of his hand. “Damn. I forgot about the canoe. Gary joked that it was his woman, sleek and fast. It’s a Prospector Chestnut.”
Belle knew that brand well. Old Town had been making them since 1910. “I have a Grumman. No mystique, but it can take a collision with a jagged rock. Anyway, we can use the truck and pick it up.” She paused. “Unless the police have it.” If it had been left in the open when the death had been thought accidental, how likely would it be that fingerprints or other forensic evidence like blood would remain? She kept quiet.
“Those Keystone Kops again. But then I guess you don’t get much crime up here, not like down south.”
“We kill people with roads. Sudbury has two of the worst twenty in Ontario.”
He looked at his watch with sudden embarrassment. “Sorry, but I’m expecting a call. I’ve been in contact with a few of his fellow professors at Brock. They’re excited about getting the notes and promised to answer any questions. If I can get this project tidied up, then at least I . . .” He looked out over the lake, where a merganser skidded across the glassy surface, its mate probably in the shoreline rocks and weeds guarding their nest. “Remember that baby elk? I dreamed about it last night. We should start there.”
The inadvertent “we” had made her a partner. She noticed a pile of periodicals on the table. One anomaly caught her eye. The Environmental Pollution Journal. It seemed well-thumbed and had strips of paper marking pages. “Pollution? I thought he was a zoologist.”
“Scientific disciplines often overlap. One time he did a study about metal levels in fecal pellets of moose. Around the ore smelters in Sudbury, I think.”
Once Sudbury’s core had been a wasteland the size of New York City, timber gone, vegetation scoured from roasting beds at the turn of the century and acid rain to finish the job. Soil had run from its hills, leaving black rock. Then in the Eighties, a government-industry-civilian re-greening initiative had brought rye grass and small pines back, leading to a United Nations reclamation award at the Earth Summit in Brazil.
“So question one, where is the baby?” Suddenly she had an eerie thought. Zoologists were quirky enough to keep carcasses in the freezer. Maureen had a power-chugging monster in the basement. “You didn’t look downstairs—”
He tapped her hand. “My first thought. It’s empty and unplugged. But I got a clue from a zoologist at Shield University. He said that Nickel City College has a dissecting room in their new tech complex. Paul Straten’s the contact name. Apparently he’s one of Ontario’s top elk researchers.”
“I gather you haven’t reached him yet.”
Mutt folded the map carefully. “We’re still playing phone tag.”
That night Belle ate a frozen pizza for a change. With a whole-wheat crust, low-fat mozzarella, and topped with spinach, it sounded better than it tasted. A call to Rainbow revealed that her father indeed had been ferried to the St. Joseph Health Centre Emergency Room. Ann suggested that Belle call to check his progress before driving in.
“He’s being seen by the doctor now,” the nurse said when Belle finally got through. “We’re full-up, but we’re going to keep him overnight, even if it’s on a gurney. Best thing is to call back in the morning.”
“Can you get him a sandwich?”
The woman laughed. “He’s already had three. Plus coffee, a doughnut and snacks from someone in the waiting room. He’s not allergic to peanuts, is he?”
SEVEN
Preoccupied by her father, Belle hadn’t slept well and was out of the starting blocks at five with no more than coffee and juice. As dawn broke, she was passing the airport, watching the plume of the Superstack in the distance, the world’s largest free-standing chimney, which supposedly scrubbed the air ninety-five per cent clean of sulphur dioxides.
Slowing down after the Falconbridge Road railroad overpass, before she turned right into Tim’s for another java, she glanced at the large billboard warning about “The Silent Killer” and urging people with gas installations to install carbon-monoxide alarms. Hers was in the TV room. Recently when the window had been open and the van had been running outside, the unit had started beeping like gangbusters. Most houses had smoke alarms, but how many older homes added this precaution?
At the hospital at seven a.m., she talked to the heavy-set nurse in the Emergency Room, bleary-eyed after a long shift and blowing her nose. Belle stepped back from the germfest. “Yes, he was seen by Dr. Cowl, a very sharp resident. Spotted it right off. Pemphigoid, an auto-immune disease of the elderly.”
Not mere blisters, then. Belle put her hand on her chest, felt her heart play timpani. Her blood sugar needed a top-up. “Can they help him?” When she got to the office, she’d check the Internet for t
reatment options.
The nurse smiled in reassurance. “Not to worry. A regimen of steroids, Prednisone probably, will clear him up fast. He’s a sweetie. Talked on and on about how he’d seen every film ever made.”
Belle laughed. In nearly fifty years of working, so he had. “Then he’ll be going right back to the home?” Routines were so important to him.
“High doses of Prednisone can cause anxiety and other disorienting symptoms, especially in seniors. They’ll keep him here to assess his initial reactions for at least a week. And now I’m sorry, but I—”
“Thanks for your patience.” Belle looked around at the many cubicles separated by white curtains. “May I see him?”
“They took him out half an hour ago for some blood work. I’ll tell him you came by.”
At the office, Belle noticed by the trademark shepherd snore that Baron was making himself comfortable in the back room. He was quiet and well-behaved, despite his manly assets. Was Yoyo hoping to breed him? That was easier for the owner of a male. One-stop shopping, and a share of the pups. Still, he had a few conformation flaws.
Yoyo had settled in. The hustling temp had not only helped unload the Adams place, but like a veteran in the trenches, she had cold-called forty people that week, a chore Belle likened to successive root canals, and lined up four eager to sell. Her outfits had toned down. Today featured a tasteful linen dress (high hemline and Lucite platform heels aside), and she’d nearly memorized the stylebook Belle had loaned her.
“I was still having the worst time with this ‘me’ or ‘I’ stuff with prepositions, until I figured out that if it sounded wrong, it was right,” she said with a comical smile. “Between you and me. Duh.”
Belle laughed until her stomach hurt. “And vice versa. Now why didn’t I think of that?”
Yoyo applied herself religiously to the keyboard, tapping up a symphony that rivalled Miriam’s in speed. When she finished, she reached over her shoulder to rip off another “Word a Day” page from her calendar. “Fossil,” she read, pausing with some surprise. “Hey, do you know that word can refer to a living person? Weird.”
“Not really,” said Belle.
Around ten, Mutt called, his voice more perturbed than worried. “There’s been a break-in here.” He gave some details, but with a client coming in the door, Belle didn’t have time for the whole story.
“I’ll stop by on my way home. Meanwhile, call the police and the insurance company. I think Maureen uses Royal on Paris Street.” As the go-between profiting from the rent, she felt a responsibility to expedite the matter. Not that she was totally surprised, because occasionally a tiny crime wave hit the road, usually teenaged snowmobilers breaking into camps just to raise hell, or in summer, the disappearance of prime movers like boat motors, shotguns, and small electronics. One real danger was vandalism. Maureen had some lovely antiques and very expensive small-paned windows for a country look. As for Mutt, she didn’t imagine he had brought much in the car, except for clothes, books, a computer and a printer.
Late that afternoon, Belle was at his door. “Knock, Knock,” she said, as he put down a journal and got out of a recliner.
The beamed, open-concept great room had a kitchen and dining area at one end, the massive fieldstone fireplace from the original cottage reaching two stories at the other. Building a house around a chimney had been a tour-de-force, but Maureen had installed an insert for safety. Nothing seemed out of place at first glance. Maureen’s father’s handmade snowshoes were crossed on the wall, along with two rusty leghold traps purely for decoration. The large wine cooler in the corner was burbling as if it stood at the bottom of the ocean. “Are the other rooms okay? When do you think it happened?”
“Hold on. I’ll explain.” He sighed. “I went into town last night to see a film at that Silver City. Didn’t get back until midnight. To be frank, I just unlocked the door, went upstairs, had a brandy, and got in bed. Slept in. I didn’t notice the broken window until this morning.”
The house had an open, wraparound porch, which made for easy access for intruders. Belle walked over to examine the pane he’d blocked with a piece of cardboard and duct tape. “You can get a glazier out for that. Bestway Glass on Notre Dame is good. But was anything taken?”
“I didn’t pay much attention to what was in the house. Obviously, the big television’s still here, that old stereo. My laptop was in the car. Gary’s camera is gone, along with his new laptop.”
She blew out a breath. “Those are typical targets. The Hock Shop will be the first call for the police.”
“One other funny thing.” He paused, scratching his head for answers. “Seems like the den was their real focus. They opened a portable file cabinet of Gary’s. Rooted around in his papers. Do you think that they were after cash? Looking for a safe?”
“What else? Anyone can tell that there’s money in this house. It’s no fish shack.” She’d never forgotten her one and only burglary, when she’d rented an apartment. A gold coin worth five hundred dollars U.S., a birthday present from her mother, was in her underwear drawer, the first place any respectable robber checked. Lucky for claims, the empty case was left behind. “I’ll ask Maureen about valuable property, and we’ll check off the items. Have the police come out?”
He shrugged and batted at one shoulder of a blue cashmere pullover, where a mosquito had landed, sneaking in with Belle. “An hour ago. They told me that unless they get a tip, these kinds of robberies are hard to solve. If it’s a ring of juvenile delinquents, sometimes they get lucky if the kids brag at school.”
“Not likely. Kids don’t roam in gangs here, hauling skateboards or doing wheelies on their bikes. That’s typical of suburban areas with malls.”
“Now I see why you have a dog for a burglar alarm. Maybe I can rent the one next door.” He cocked his thumb towards the adjoining property, then had a second thought. “Say, you don’t think that guy would—”
Belle shook her head. “Bill Strang’s a loner, but he has a healthy respect for the law. Used to be a security guard at Memorial Hospital.”
Mutt’s mouth gave a suspicious twitch as he flipped back his hair from his eyes. “Then he’d be wise to the ways of break-ins, wouldn’t he?”
“Let’s be logical. For nuisance purposes, he would have trashed the place, not just mucked around in the den.”
Mutt folded his arms and leaned back on the sofa. “Guess so. I’m used to city life, with five locks on each door.”
“Anything new on Gary’s research? How are the missing camera and laptop going to affect your work?”
“I checked his files before the theft. Everything was backed up on disks, and they were upstairs. The Nikon had nothing saved in the memory when I first looked at it. But the good news is that I’m meeting with Paul Straten at the college tomorrow morning. Do you want to see that white elk baby? Gary took it in a week ago.”
“So it wasn’t lost after all. Oh, my God. What kind of shape is it in?” Her stomach had been rumbling for its dinner infusion. Now, any appetite was flying off as quickly as the shrieking seagull that flashed by the shoreline in search of a minnow.
Mutt chuckled, his eyes crinkling like foil at the edges. “Frozen. Eleven tomorrow at the college good for you?”
As she was leaving, she noticed a stunning framed etching on the wall. “Irish elk,” the brass caption at the bottom read. “Was this Gary’s?”
Mutt swallowed and looked out the window. “I gave it to him. Took a trip to Dublin last year. I found the engraving in a shop. Circa 1810.”
“Beautiful creature. Extinct?”
“Went out of production eleven thousand years ago. Gary said they weren’t elk, but giant deer. Seven feet at the shoulder and twelve-foot antlers, according to fossil reconstructions.”
“I wonder why their antlers got so big.”
Mutt laughed from the belly. A sound of resilience. “Sex, of course. True then, true now. Females chose to mate with the best displays, and final
ly their necks couldn’t sustain the weight, or the horns got entangled in trees and killed them.”
Belle rubbed her neck. “Fashion’s a killer, starting with hooker heels.”
She was unable to reach Maureen at the main number for the clinic in Kismayu that night but left a message on the answering machine telling her about the break-in. The house was safely occupied, and that’s what counted.
The next day, finishing some paperwork, she left the office at ten thirty, passing the latest mall expansion revitalizing the city. After over a decade, the higher unemployment rate was dropping toward the national number. Chapters, Staples, Costco, and up the hill, the gigantic Home Depot and the Sears HomeStore. Joining them were more American chain restaurants: Kelsey’s, Montana Bar and Grillhouse. She preferred lunching with the rain-snow-or-hail sausage vendor set up at Canadian Tire. The complimentary sauerkraut was a meal in itself.
Turning onto Barrydowne, she passed LaSalle Blvd., then made a right into the Nickel City College complex. For decades, it had offered practical training in business, health and social sciences, and technology. Passing a few pay lots and the ever-growing Special Needs Centre, with its metal sculptures of clients in wheelchairs, she parked at a string of meters, moved to one showing half an hour, and dropped in a loonie, calculating to the minute.
At the foyer doors, she saw students puffing happily in front of the No Smoking sign. Her nostrils flared at an herbal mix, and one eyebrow rose as she got a wink from a young man dressed in black semi-Goth apparel. A music student? Still, a bit early for the wacky tobaccy, as her older neighbours Ed and Hélène called it. Inside the main lobby, she met Mutt, sipping a coffee and offering one to her. Behind him, up the stairs to a mezzanine, a long line waited. “This place has more wings than an octopus has tentacles,” he said. “I’ve been roaming around. Found the coffee right away, though. Regular okay?”
She’d ignore the sugar to spare his feelings. “Perfect. Lead on, Macmutt.” She bent back the plastic tab for a slug as they began walking down the hall. A few girls in short shorts had admiring glances for Gary’s partner. She preferred that word to lover, consort, even husband or wife. A clean, Western-movie sound, someone you could count on. Like Randolph Scott. Then she remembered a Vanity Fair article that had run a picture of Hollywood’s two most virile men setting up house together in the Forties. Thirty years later, a maître de had claimed that Cary Grant and Scott had met for supper in a famous restaurant and had sat together in a darkened banquette, holding hands like an old married couple.