by Nick Craine
“They weren’t supposed to wash the walls with it.” Chellis stretched open Uncle Bob’s pocket and pointed to it. With some effort, the cop managed to get the bar in, making the transaction seem like some comically inept drug deal. “Isn’t it demeaning, officer? Answering petty nuisance complaints like this? I can’t believe you even bothered. I mean, a bar of soap?”
“Slow day. What we need in this town is a good murder. Claymore has all the luck.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Chellis patted his pocket.
“Great. Make it a double while you’re at it.” He gave a nod and turned to go. The finger pads of his gloves were missing.
When Chellis returned to the kitchen, he was disappointed to find no new labour-saving devices in place. The leaky tap wasn’t even fixed. Drip, drip, drip, enough to drive a guy crazy. Although Elaine herself, leaning up against the counter and lost in dreamy speculation about Gorilla glue, or some such improvement for her soap, was more than enough to do that.
“Take off your pants,” he ordered.
“Why, what’s wrong with them?” She glanced down at her perfectly pleated slacks. Evidently, the husband also ironed.
“Nothing. I require glandular relief.”
She actually laughed. “Your male prerogative?”
“You got it, sister.”
“Touch me and I’ll scream.”
He didn’t, but she screamed anyway. A surprised shriek when she discovered that she was stuck fast to the counter, as he had feared. His house had turned into human flypaper.
He rubbed his hands together. “Now I’ve got you where I want you.”
Incredibly, she laughed again. “All right, you villain, I’ll go with you. But you have to buy me breakfast first.”
“Breakfast? You talking about those square, buttered, wheaten objects?”
“That’s right. Remember, you always bite off the bottom corners first so that they look like a pair of briefs.”
“A guy has to have some fun.”
“Sad fun, Chel. You do it because you’re sexually repressed.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
13
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
IN AN ATTEMPT to protect his vehicle from verbal abuse, Chellis flicked on the radio, catching some castrato in mid-opera, possibly even mid-operation, wailing away. He flicked it off, ending the torture for all concerned.
“What’s that rattling noise?” asked Elaine.
“What rattling noise?”
“Your car, what’s causing it?”
“You mean that mellifluous clunk clunk clunk sound? That’s how it works. If it didn’t do that it wouldn’t move, you see, that’s the beauty of it. There’s this clever whirligig thingy under the hood.”
“I didn’t know you’d taken a course in powder-puff mechanics.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“We’ll be lucky to make it to her place. So much for being unnoticed. Might as well roar down the driveway leaning on the horn.”
“Horn doesn’t work.”
Elaine groaned and gave over to staring out the window. They drove past a gardening store with a mob of cement and plaster lawn ornaments on display: nymphs, coyly clad in diaphanous hard wear, gnomes (the usual suspects), giant fish, triceratops, Aslans, pigs, big Bambis, and life-size courtiers of a vaguely Renaissance persuasion. There was such a crowd of them that they gave an impression of a population explosion, the fantastical insensate breeding like rabbits.
Or rather, like humans. “Did you know that there are over six billion people in the world and at least one billion of them are writing novels?” Chellis said.
“I got that impression.” Elaine plucked the cherub’s head off the dashboard, placed where Chellis could keep an eye on it. She weighed it in her hand, ran a finger over its gritty, pocked face. “Where did you say you got this?”
“Secret admirer. Came special delivery.” Talk about getting an impression.
Elaine slid the head back onto the dash. “What are you expecting to find at her place, anyway?”
“Dunno. Her corpse?”
“Chelly, don’t say that.” Elaine shivered. “Wasn’t there some book of hers where a writer character – ?”
“Gets it in the neck? Yup. I don’t think she much cares for other writers. Can’t remember which one. Death Notices? Dead Lines? Hit List? They all begin to blur together after awhile.”
“Some sort of blackmail plot, wasn’t it? Lazar becomes involved in the investigation and then gets fingered for the crime.”
“The fool.”
“Let’s turn around.”
“Can’t. Car only goes in one direction.”
“Be serious, will you.”
“Always am, deep down. Tell me again what Vaughan said. What he heard when he was at the vet’s getting Noir deballed.”
“Fixed.”
“In my line of work we call that a euphemism.”
“Work? Right.”
“Let’s not go there, okay?”
“Let’s not go where we’re going.”
“Ah, but we’re almost there. So tell me.”
“I already did.”
“You might have left something out. Old investigative technique, eh.”
Elaine sighed so theatrically that her exhaled breath lifted the bangs from her forehead. “The receptionist . . . Ewan? I think that’s his name. He’s been trying to get in touch with Mrs. Havlock, but no luck. Her precious doggies have been terrorizing the place. That’s it. End of report.”
“The little devils, good for them. Sounds like they’re back on the job. But where’s Mummy?”
“Chel, if you think there’s something funny going on call the police.”
“No thanks, I’m practically going steady with those guys as it is. And don’t tell darling Vaughan that. What if there’s nothing going on? I’d look like a doofus. She might be caught up in an inspirational whirlwind, writing her brains out, temporarily lost to the daily round.”
“I doubt it.”
“Me too. It’s more the sort of thing you would do. C’mon, let’s change the subject. Heard from your folks lately?”
“Postcard. Alcatraz.”
“Cool. Must be nice to have parents.”
“No it’s not.”
“Maybe not your parents.”
“You romanticize family too much.”
“I’m a romantic guy.” Chellis began to sing, “You saaay tomato . . . and I say tomato.”
“It’s towmawtow.”
“Tomato.”
“Stop it.”
“You say psychopath . . . and I saaay sociopath . . . let’s call the whole thing . . . oops, we’re here!”
“No we’re not.”
“Can’t you agree on anything?”
“Well we’re not.”
“Shortcut.” Chellis had pulled off the highway onto a side road and was delighting in the sound of gravel crunching under the tires, pinging away into the ditch. It gave him an illusion of speed and power and . . . what else was it that men were supposed to want? Respect, that was it. Never fear, that would be arriving soon. “Don’t you love these country roads?” he said. “They’re like a labyrinth.”
“Wrong. They’re set out in a grid pattern.”
“Go ahead, wreck my metaphor. If we meet the Minotaur, you’ll have to recant.”
“It was a simile.”
“Same thing. And pedantic is my territory, don’t you be poaching.”
Chellis turned onto an even smaller road, no more than a rutted track that vanished into a wooded area. The car bounced up and down, long grass brushing against the underside. Another delightful sound, interrupted shortly by an abrupt scraping noise. As the engine sputtered and died, he said, “That was convenient. Upon this rock I shall park my car.”
“Brilliant.”
Respect, yes, finally. “Time for walkies, anyway. Her place is beyond those trees there.”
�
�You’re sure of that? Something tells me you don’t have a clue.”
“Laney, you forfeited your woman’s intuition years ago, remember? Whereas I am in touch with my inner navigator. Besides which, I checked with an ordinance map before picking you up. Believe you me, I know every trembling leaf and quivering blade of grass in the immediate environment.”
“And every rock.”
“Getting better acquainted by the moment. Let’s shake a leg.”
When they emerged from the woods quite some time later, Chellis’s self-respect was still attached by a filament at least.
“Do you always carry one of those GPS things in your purse?” he asked testily.
“Only when I’m with you.” Elaine gazed up at Havlock House, rear view. “So now what, we sneak in through the servant’s quarters?”
He methodically began to pick a scattershot sampling of beggars’ ticks off the sleeve of his denim shirt, thereby removing all evidence of the sexual attack he’d endured while ambling through the flora. Vegetation apparently couldn’t resist him. He’d been leafily embraced and tumbled, poked, pollinated, and almost grafted – wed to a massive oak that had practically leapt in front of him. “It’s a wonder I don’t burst into bloom on the spot,” he said. Then added, “First we peek through the windows.”
“And second?”
“We leave.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. There was an extremely low percentage of kidding in that comment. About .005% would be my estimate.”
“Why, why, do I let myself get talked into these things?”
“Self-reflection is good, Laney, and about time, I’d say. If you’d indulged more often, it might have saved you from some serious miscalculation in your love life. But as regards Mrs. Havlock’s, I only want to see if anything seems suspicious. Whereas, what? You want to break the door down?”
“We could try knocking, if that hadn’t occurred to you. She might be in there having a fit because a couple of prowlers are skulking around in her backyard.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s see.”
“Elaine, no.” But would the woman listen to him? Never. Too bullheaded – she could be the Minotaur’s wife. Hands on hips, he watched her charge like Mrs. Minotaur across Athena’s precisely trimmed lawn, past burgeoning perennial beds and robustly flowering bushes. Someone here was keeping appearances up. He took in the verdant scene, spotted a Flowering Judas. It was easily identifiable, seeing as a poor cousin to this one had staked a claim in his own postage stamp of a yard, planted by Rennie in a one-day gardening blitz, thereafter to be neglected forever. What remained of it were a few malnourished and balding twigs determinedly eking out an existence in a depleted patch of soil like an old-timer in a nursing home. He walked over to this more privileged plant, which for some reason reminded him of Wayne Gretzky. A bunny magnet, maybe that was it. Truly, it was a mystery how the mind works, his anyway. Despite all the cranial distress he’d endured, he did recall that this was the setting Mrs. H had used for her non-compliant corpse, her turgid bit of starter material for the new book.
While Elaine was politely but firmly tap-tap-tapping on the back door, successfully rendering pointless their cloak-and-dagger work thus far, he crouched down to take a closer look at the ground beneath the bush. Disturbed. It was and he was. Someone could have easily been stretched out here, given the flattened grass, the uprooted spurge, the button nestled so conveniently in a tuffet of moss and winking at him like a wayward metallic eye. He picked it up, fingered it, a small two-holer, fallen off a cuff perhaps. Male or female apparel, hard to say. His boss might have taken a turn under the bush herself as an imaginative stimulant. Who knows, she may have conducted her own research for some realistic detail he hadn’t been asked to provide: the exact feel of the bone-chilling damp beneath her back, the intoxicating freshness of the foliage, the upended world view from the underside of the Judas. Some authors did go to extreme measures for authenticity, for the real dirt. Some even travelled extreme distances on ambience safaris, hunting for local detail, local wine, and other interesting commodities, spending tormented, but essential days away from the desk, all the better for pumping padding into novels as fat as the average North American. Research, research, it had its allure. It was his personal theory that the Sirens had tried to distract Odysseus with particulars, not song. They had called out to him the ancient and seductive equivalent of baseball stats, the endless trivia generated by divine superstars, the infinitesimal constituents of the hitherto unknown.
Elaine?
Chellis quickly looked toward the house and caught sight of the back door closing. She was not on this side of it. Christ.
He rushed over in case immediate heroics were required, and entered the house as quietly as possible only to hear Elaine’s hardheeled loafers clack-clacking across the hardwood, while she simultaneously called out Mrs. Havlock’s name. Called into an unresponsive churchy silence.
“Not here,” she announced from the far end of the hall.
“Geez Laney, it’s too bad you left your megaphone at home.”
She ignored him, a practice with which he was all too familiar, and ducked into a room on her right. “God!” he heard her gasp.
“What? What is it?”
An icy stiletto of fear slid in under his ribs.
When he caught up with her, though, he found that the crime scene was missing a few essential elements. The dining room, yet not a single speck of gore was being served up. Nor had the gold, tasselled holdbacks on the heavy silk curtains obviously garroted anyone of late. The reproduction artwork was criminally bland, but blameless as far as he could see. “Okay, I give up.” Not only was the room missing a dead body, but there wasn’t even any dust. No one had decomposed here in at least the last hundred years.
Elaine was staring at one of the walls and shaking her head. “How could she? That colour? It’s hideous.”
So. The worst kind of misdemeanour: bad taste. Or taste that was not Elaine’s. The walls were painted a sanguinary red, which admittedly was intense. Chellis felt as if he were standing inside a corpuscle. The dining wound.
“You’re out of touch, sweetheart,” he said. “Don’t you read House & Home? This is the latest from the Serial Killer palette. Ripper Red, Slasher Scarlet – ”
“Do you have to say that?”
“Yes. Perversity is psychologically nourishing, a healthy habit. Consider how many proto-cancer cells withered the moment I formulated my witticism. And did you know, by the way, that the decks of warships used to be painted exactly this colour so that subsequent carnage wouldn’t unnerve the sailors?”
“Useless information.”
“You think? There could be blood splattered all over these walls and we wouldn’t be able to tell unless we looked more closely.”
Elaine turned on her hard heel and marched out of the room.
He followed her out, then continued to trail behind her as she pushed open half-closed doors and vetted several tidy, unrevealing rooms. In the kitchen, she was momentarily distracted by a postmodern pepper mill the size of a fire hydrant, while Chellis checked the fridge and found a sorry, wilted head of lettuce, but no other decapitations. The house secrets, if there were any, were all stashed well out of sight.
“I wonder who cleans this place,” Elaine mused, wandering back down the hall.
“Who cleans your place? And please don’t say – ”
“Vaughan.”
“He does not. Give me a break.”
“Nothing but the truth. He doesn’t believe in making other people do the grunt work. He feels that everyone should be responsible for cleaning up after themselves. Besides, he enjoys hands-on labour, doing simple things.”
“’Tis a gift to be simple,” observed Chellis, smirking into the stairwell. “We’d better check upstairs, too.”
“Fine. You go.”
“You’re not coming?”
“No.”
/> “Why not?”
“Because I’m out of here. This has been a colossal waste of time.”
“Come on, Laney. Why are you being so . . . so . . . passive-aggressive?”
“That wasn’t being passive-aggressive. It was being sensible. Which is better than being passive-passive.”
“You’re not implying that I’m that, I trust?”
“No. I’m saying you’re that.”
“Oo-la-la, quelle chienne,” he muttered to himself.
This earned him a sharp, phlegm-clearing elbow in the vicinity of his left lung. “Say that again and there will be a body on the floor.”
He clutched his chest, and coughed. “Now you’re being aggressive-aggressive. I can’t take you anywhere.” Although the thought of taking her was pretty thrilling. Better not mention it, though, and shorten his life even more.
“Is this her office?” With the toe of her shoe, Elaine nudged open the door of a sanctuary that Chellis had on occasion been allowed to visit. “Wow, how can she work in such a mess, papers and stuff everywhere? The rest of the house is so orderly, too. I’d never be able to concentrate, but some people need this sort of ferment, I guess.”
Glancing over her shoulder and taking in the room’s staggering disarray, he said softly in Elaine’s ear, “Bingo.”
14
Manual Labour
CHELLIS WAS STARING at his hands, surprised, as though they had turned up unexpectedly after having been missing for several weeks. Or years, for they had changed had they not since his last close inspection? Their complexion had acquired more character, which is to say, more freckles, the odd brownish splotch, extra knucklecrinkles, a wart (!), more prominent veins, deeper lines in the palms. His hands were aging in advance of him, possibly in their efforts to hold the future at bay, reaching out protectively, blocking further harm like flesh shields.