by Medora Sale
“Where did those two come from?” asked Sanders. “I didn’t see them standing there.”
“They came along between the time I was setting up and when I actually took the shot. See how far over they are? The camera was pointed in that direction,” she said, indicating the center of the building, “and yet it picked up those two guys. That Olympus twenty-four-millimeter shift is a beautiful lens. See how straight those lines are? You know, they probably didn’t even realize that they were in the picture. I mean, if they saw us. Remember where we were standing? They would assume that anyone set up like that was taking a shot of the door.”
“Does that matter?” asked Sanders, curious now. “I mean, do you have to get someone’s permission to take a picture of him? Of course, they’re so small you wouldn’t be able to recognize them anyway.”
“What do you mean? There’s enough detail in that slide to blow it up to four by six feet and turn it into a mural. Here, let me show you.” She handed him a small object like a jeweler’s glass. “Look at it through the magnifier. You’ll see.”
Sanders clutched the magnifier to his eye and obediently looked at the slide. The two men, dressed in dark suits and clutching newspapers under their arms, were looking in the direction of the camera, as if they were trying to decide what to do about it. He looked at the hollowed cheekbones and wide mouth of the one on the right with a sense that he should know the man. But then, he was probably a politician and had his picture plastered over the papers two or three times a week. “You’re right,” he said. “You can see their faces.”
“Most of the book is going to be done in black and white, of course,” she said. “But I wanted one really spectacular wide-angle shot in colour for the dust jacket. Or the editor does, I should say. What do you think? Splashy enough? Yet filled with Canadian restraint?”
“I’m impressed,” he said. “Maybe you really are a photographer. In spite of the lab.”
“Thanks,” she said casually, and switched off the light box, leaving the slides where they were. “Come into the living room and sit down. Can I get you a beer? Of course. Just a minute.” She led him into a large room with high ceilings and long windows and pointed him at an armchair. “There,” she said, “sit.” She handed him a newspaper. “Amuse yourself while I get the beer.”
Sanders looked idly down at the copy of the Ottawa Citizen lying in his lap. The news of the world seemed far away and insignificant right now. The headline told him that the latest provincial budget was going to hit smokers again, which meant nothing to him. He didn’t smoke. Then, unfolding the paper so that the entire front page would be visible, he stared. There, beside a feature story on safety in the workplace, was a picture of someone he knew, someone he had seen recently. And that someone, whose name was apparently Don Bartholomew, was now dead. Murdered. Don. And he saw it all again in his mind in the bright colours of exhaustion. The drunken construction worker, the mynah bird, the man who took him away.
The man who took him away. High cheekbones, sunken cheeks, that mouth, those mean, son-of-a-bitch eyes. And the scar. “Hey,” he said to Harriet as she brought in a couple of bottles of Henninger beer. “Do you have a better magnifier? Can you make those slides bigger?”
“The detail is there,” she said. “I don’t have a stronger magnifier, but I can throw the slide into the enlarger and we’ll make it as big as you want. Which slide did you want to see?” She looked mildly curious, but not sufficiently so to ask why.
“The one with the two men in front of the court. I think I’ve seen one of them before.”
“I’ll get it.” She was heading through the kitchen with the slide before he got to his feet. “Come through here,” she called, pointing to a door he hadn’t noticed before that led out of the kitchen beside the back entrance. “It was the scullery,” she said. “It’s small, but it makes a pretty workable darkroom.” She reached up and clicked on a light, and then took the plastic cover off an enlarger. “This ought to give you what you want. It’s a secondhand Beseler I picked up here in Ottawa. It’s a sweetheart. Almost as good as my new one at home,” she added. “These lenses are just about as sharp as the one I took the picture with. If it’s in the slide, we should be able to see it.” She slipped the slide into the film carrier and turned on the light. The picture appeared, pale and distorted, on the easel below. She loosened a nut on the top of the enlarger and pushed the entire head gently back until it clicked solidly into place, now in a horizontal position. The picture gleamed on the freshly painted wall. “Okay. Flip off that light, will you? And I’ll get this into focus.”
He leaned over her in the dark, distracted by the scent of her hair and her skin, but trying to concentrate on the image in front of them. Slowly the lines sharpened and straightened, the shadows gathered into themselves, and the highlights leaped up between them. And there, over on the left, was the man with the deep-set eyes, the hollowed cheeks, and those thick and sensuous lips. He was staring right at Sanders, daring him to take that picture. Beside him stood a fair-haired, tanned man, whose eyes were directed at his companion. “Which one is it?” asked Harriet.
“The dark one,” said Sanders.
“Who is he? Besides a mean-looking son of a bitch.”
“A murderer, I think,” said Sanders.
“I was wrong about one thing,” said Harriet finally, after they had looked in silence at the image for a long, long time.
“What’s that?”
“About them not knowing they were in the picture. That one’s looking straight at the lens and he doesn’t seem very happy.” She fell silent again. “What do we do now?”
“Well,” said Sanders, “I suppose we can take this slide in to the locals. The Ottawa police’ll be able to deal with it. After all—”
“The hell we do! This is my slide, John Sanders, and it’s not going to spend the next three years kicking around some courthouse waiting for trials and appeals and God knows what and then finally come back to me in tatters years after the book is published.”
“I think they’re actually looked after a little better than that,” he said mildly. “And I understand what you’re saying, but this picture may be their best chance of finding out who he is. You can’t just ignore that, Harriet.” He was trying to sound as calm and reasonable as he could. “Can you?”
“Oh, I can, without any difficulty. The problem is, will you let me?” She frowned. “There are the other slides—let’s have a look at them.”
“The other slides?”
“Sure. Whenever I’m taking slides for anything important I always bracket my shots—do a couple more at a slightly different exposure. Actually I often do at least two at each exposure. It’s cheaper to expose another few inches of film than to have copies made. You get better results, too. But not when there’s someone dancing around breathing down my neck, trying to get me to hurry,” she said pointedly.
“I don’t see how you manage to get an exact copy if you take two pictures at different times.”
“I do buildings, remember? They don’t have any trouble holding a pose. Just a minute.” She left him in the darkroom, staring over at the pair of men on the Supreme Court lawn, trying to figure out exactly what he should do now. “Here it is,” she said, and switched slides.
The shot was flatter, the colours less brilliant. “That was the one where we’d lost the sun again,” she said, frowning at it. “The filtration is wrong. And the men have gone, so it’s no good to you. Let’s try the second shot.” The same deep colour and rich contrasts jumped up at them again. “That’s good,” she said. “But dammit, look at those bastards. I told you they’d seen me.” Where in the first slide there had been two people staring into the camera, now there was a pair of slightly fuzzy backs. “They’re getting the hell out of there.”
“Can’t you use one of the others for your cover and give the police the one with their faces show
ing?” asked Sanders.
“Are you kidding? The other two are disasters. I couldn’t give them to a printer.” She turned off the enlarger, flicked on the light, and stood in the middle of the room, chewing her lip. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We can zip back to the lab now and get copies made of the good slide, and we’ll take them to the police tomorrow.” She picked up the three slides carefully. “I don’t suppose they’ll pay me to have it copied. It costs.”
“They’re going to want the original, you know.”
“Well, they’re not getting it. There probably isn’t anyone there who could tell the difference anyway. The printer gets the original, the police get what they think is the original. Okay? That far I go, and no farther.”
The way out to the lab seemed even farther this time, and the scenery no more gripping than it had been the first time around. Sanders sat impatiently in the car waiting for Harriet to emerge. Just as he had decided that she had walked out the back or been kidnapped, the door opened and she came bouncing out, looking completely unrepentant.
“What took you so long?” he asked, his voice developing that nasty edge he used on his partner.
“It’s all your fault,” she said blithely. “I knew you wanted the slide in a hurry, and so I told them it was a rush, absolutely urgent job. But they have an old client who’s coming in tonight with another huge rush job and they wouldn’t budge for us.”
He noted the “us” and filed it silently away. “So how long is it going to take? Two weeks?”
“Oh, no. I was trying for tomorrow noon. But it looks like Friday morning, realistically. He made some vague promises about tomorrow at six if they could, but these vague promises never pan out. Is that impossibly long?”
“If that’s the best they can do, then it can’t be, can it?” He smiled. “I don’t know why I’m worrying. It’s not my goddamn case.”
“Right. Now where to? Aren’t you getting hungry after all that?”
“A police station.”
“A what? What’s the matter with you? Feeling like eating in a familiar environment?”
He gave her a look of long-suffering patience. “I have to let someone know that I saw the man they’re looking for both in the coffee shop with the victim and in front of the Supreme Court. At which point he no longer had a scar. I’ll tell them there are pictures, too, but they’re in being developed.”
“Now you’re making me sound like Mummy with her sixty-nine-dollar camera special. I don’t like it.” She leaned back against the car door, looking mulish.
“What do you want me to say? That I know this photographer with a magnificent picture of the man you’re looking for and one of his pals, only she won’t give it to us? You don’t want that, really.”
“Why? Do the Ottawa police go in for torture?” She sat up straight again. “Oh, forget it.” With a vicious grating of the starter, she got the engine going. “Any particular police station you want to go to?”
“I think there’s one off Rideau Street. That’ll do nicely. It doesn’t matter a pinch who gets the report at this point. The Ottawa police aren’t handling the case, anyway. They’ll send it on and maybe someday someone will ask to see me. Or they may have caught him already, in which case they won’t need me or you or the picture. Okay? The station, then dinner.”
Harriet sat in the car this time, and watched Sanders striding up to the front door of the police station. She opened up the glove compartment and took out a book—she always kept one ready in case she drove out to a location and had to wait. For a client, for the sun, for people to get out of the way. She was always having to wait. Thirty pages later he opened the car door and slid in. She closed the book with a snap and tossed it back into the glove compartment.
“What took so long? And are they coming out to arrest me?”
“Why do people always make jokes about getting arrested when they meet police officers?” asked Sanders irritably. “It really isn’t very funny.”
“People do it, I assume, because they’re nervous. I have never made a joke about you arresting anybody, especially me, so far in our brief acquaintance. What I said was referring to the very real possibility that they might take umbrage at what I have done with that slide.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I take it back. And they probably won’t, because they don’t seem to care very much. They took down my name and particulars, as we say, and then passed them on to the relevant authority. That’s what took so long. Passing it on to the regional police. Because they, in turn, felt some compulsion to pass it on to the RCMP, and that took forever. Do you think you can wait another hour or two for dinner?”
“Wait? Can you give me a reason why I should?” Before he had a chance to answer, she shook her head gloomily. “I hope you realize what you’re asking me to do. I don’t survive very well without food.”
“Because my presence is requested back at the god damn RCMP building. Whatever we saw seems to have excited the bloody Mounties no end.” He stretched and then turned and gave her a gloomy look. “I should have just waited and told them tomorrow morning.”
“Leave me out of it if you can, please. I’d rather not spend the evening being grilled by a couple of horsemen. I’ll drive you out there and hide in the car.”
Harriet dropped Sanders off outside the grounds to avoid having to pass through any inspections, formal or informal, and offered to wait.
He shook his head. “I’d rather walk,” he said.
“Walk? From here? You’re crazy. This is the middle of the goddamn suburbs. Nobody walks around here. You’ll get hit by a car.”
He looked mulishly at her. “I’ll go up the path by the river,” he said. “I’m restless and it’s a nice evening. Why shouldn’t I walk? You go ahead and eat somewhere. I’ll join you later.”
“You want to walk by the river, be my guest. Only I will be downstream sitting in the car next to a little park—it’s about a half, maybe three-quarters of a mile away—and you can ride with me from there.”
He felt a surge of annoyance and immediately felt petty and foolish. “Sorry. Okay. The little park. But I have no idea how long I’ll be.”
“I brought a book,” she said as she slipped the car into gear and drove off. A worried frown creased her brow as she pulled over again at River Road and made for a parking spot as near the river as she could get. But the pale blue Ford Escort that had been in her rearview mirror since they left the point, no matter how hard she tried to shake it, apparently hadn’t wanted to look at scenery. Maybe it hadn’t been that same one, after all. How many blue Fords are there in a good-size city, anyway? she thought. Thousands, probably. And so the chances of one being behind her at any particular time were excellent, weren’t they? She got slowly out of the car and looked around; she reached into the backseat and unwrapped a brown towel tucked in a corner. Out of it she took the tiny camera she always kept handy, and headed down to the river to indulge in some shots of the water. As she walked back to the car, it occurred to her that perhaps the blue Ford was following John, and was still kicking around outside RCMP headquarters. She hoped so. It was going to have a devil of a time following him along that bicycle path without attracting some unwanted attention. She smiled in relief and got back in the car, pulled her book out of the glove compartment, and opened it to page thirty.
Sanders sat in the waiting room and began building himself up to a full-size fury. He had redescribed the scene in the bar until his mind was soggy from the repetition. He had gone over the photography session again and again, each time with extreme caution, a fact that was evidently not lost on Superintendent Deschenes. And now he had been parked out here like a piece of inconvenient and outmoded furniture and told to wait. And that was what he had been doing for the past hour. He jumped to his feet and was headed for Deschenes’s secretary’s office just as she poked her head wearily in th
e door. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long, Inspector,” she murmured. “The superintendent would appreciate another word with you if you don’t mind.”
“What the hell do you think—” he started, looked at the smudges of fatigue under her eyes, and stopped. “Sure,” he said, and followed her into the office.
Inspector Higgs was sitting there when Sanders came in. Higgs was studying a pile of material sitting on the edge of Deschenes’s desk. “Sorry for that delay, Inspector Sanders,” said Deschenes. “But, as you can no doubt appreciate, we had to check on a few things before letting you out of our grasp. Do sit down.”
Sanders took the other chair, which was directly across from the superintendent’s desk blotter. On the blotter sat a pile of computer printouts, topped by a picture that he recognized instantly. Trusting bastards. They must have been on to Toronto all this time, pulling his personnel files and identification photos. He hoped they were pleased with the result. On the whole, he thought they were not. No doubt they had been hoping for an imposter, who would give them a nice, juicy, and easy lead into something. He grinned. “I never thought it did me justice,” he said, nodding at the mug shot.
“These things seldom do,” said Deschenes. “However, it is unmistakably you. And that was all that we really had to ascertain. Now it only remains for me to repeat my apologies.” There was a noise at the half-closed door and another man walked in, someone brutally big and sandy-haired. “Hello, Ian. This is Inspector Sanders, Toronto. Ian MacMillan. To repeat my apologies, as I was saying, and to let you go.”
“Why so much interest in a construction worker?” asked Sanders abruptly.
“Well, we’re not really that interested,” said Deschenes. “He may have been involved in an organization we’ve been looking at. He himself isn’t really that significant, I think. Wouldn’t you say, Charlie?” And without waiting for Higgs to answer he went on. “Regional police weren’t really quite accurate in implying that this was our case. We made a simple inquiry and they jumped to some complicated conclusions. You know how it is.” He smiled and got to his feet. “You say you’ll be able to get that picture later in the week. Do you know exactly how much later? It might, after all, be rather useful.”