Murder in Focus

by Medora Sale

  The Mary Jo Motel didn’t extend to the glamour of having its own coffee shop, and so at eight the next morning, Sanders was sitting in a dark booth in the nearest restaurant that claimed to serve breakfast, observing a sleepy-eyed Harriet. “I hope you’re not expecting me to be bright and witty,” she said, running her tongue lightly over her upper lip. “I feel as if someone just wrung me out and dropped me down here to mildew.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Sanders, surprised.

  “I was afraid that you were looking at me like someone who expects conversation at breakfast. Can’t you read a paper or something?”

  “If I had one, I could,” he said equably. “I hadn’t realized you were dedicated to breakfast in silence.”

  “Not always,” she moaned. “But this morning . . .” He pushed himself over to the end of the bench seat and stood up. “Where are you going?” she asked. There was an accusatory tone in her voice.

  “I’ll be right back. I’m going to buy us a paper.”

  “On your way out would you tell the waitress I’m going to expire if she doesn’t bring the coffee right away? Please?”

  “Will do.” By the time he returned, an empty orange juice glass and half-filled cup of coffee sat in front of her place. He dropped the paper on the table between them and slipped back into the booth. “Which section?” he asked. “And then not another word until you’ve finished eating.”

  “Look,” she said, paying no attention to him or the paper, “I’ve been thinking, and I want to know what you thought you were doing last night.” Suddenly her pale cheeks coloured and she grinned. “I mean before that. I know you’re the professional, but what in hell were we supposed to get out of just sitting in that car and watching a dead house? And I don’t see why you didn’t want me to go in and look around. A party doesn’t exist—short of a reception for the queen given by the governor-general—that I can’t crash.” She sat back and looked smug.

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk over breakfast.”

  “That’s before I have coffee. And don’t change the topic.”

  “I’m sure you could have got in there,” said Sanders. “It’s no trick for a single woman who looks like you to find space at a party. But what in hell were you supposed to do once you got in?” he asked with sudden irritation. “Go around asking everyone who stole your pictures? Ask the host what his connection was with someone who might have stolen your pictures? ‘Excuse me, sir, but I was wondering if you had happened to invite any of the unsavory thieves and murderers that I’m looking for?’ Be sensible, Harriet, darling,” he said, picking up her hand and trapping it in both of his. “All I wanted to know was who was at that thing, and we got there too late for that. Obviously everyone interesting left just before we got there. Strelitsch must have been the last guest to go. I can find out who lives there today. I don’t have to do it in the middle of the night.”

  “Ah, here comes breakfast,” said Harriet. She looked reflectively at him. “Maybe I’ll drop around there this afternoon with a camera or two and ask him if I can photograph his house. Some people are pleased at the idea, but even if they don’t want to be photographed, they usually don’t mind chatting. Do you suppose Strelitsch is his girlfriend?”

  “Do you think all this could wait until we find out who the owner is?”

  “Certainly not,” said Harriet, turning to her bacon and eggs. “And miss,” she called to the waitress’s retreating back, “could you bring us another order of brown toast? Thank you.”

  Harriet pushed her empty plate away after a silent meal. “Now, the paper. Which section? No, don’t answer. You must be a sports fan,” she said, grabbing off the first section and pushing the rest toward him. “Men like you are all sports fans, aren’t they?” She gave him a wide-eyed look and then winked.

  Sanders, who hadn’t looked at the sports pages for some years, accepted defeat with good grace. He picked up the paper, held out his coffee cup for a refill, and settled down to what he had. The choice was dismal: a pair of depressing articles graced the first page—one on violence in professional hockey, the other on cocaine use among baseball players. He rejected both, turned the page, and settled down to read a long article on the upcoming local high school track-and-field meet instead.

  Just as he was getting to the last long list of prospects for the regional finals, he was interrupted by a slap as Harriet dropped her paper down. “John, look at this,” she said. She had turned the paper half around and was pointing at a column headed FIRE IN STITTSVILLE CLAIMS LOCAL VICTIM. “Isn’t that where you were last night? A boardinghouse in Stittsville?”

  Sanders pulled the paper over in front of him and read the brief article. “Not very informative, is it?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Harriet. “I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.”

  “‘. . . tragic fire in a rooming house . . .’” muttered Sanders in her direction. “‘Rescue workers made several unsuccessful attempts to enter the burning building. . . . No other bodies were found . . . house completely destroyed in the blaze, which raged for five hours. . . . After a preliminary investigation, Fire Chief Reginald K. Johnson estimated the damage . . . at $150,000. Cause unknown . . . neighbors expressed a belief to reporters that the owner of the house had been concerned about a faulty wood stove. The identity of the victim is being withheld pending notification of the next of kin.’”

  “Is that the person you went to see?” asked Harriet.

  “How in hell do I know?” Sanders snapped. He thought of poor, silly Miranda nibbling on the end of her long braid of hair, and a terrible weight descended onto his shoulders. “There must be more than one boarding house in the town, it’s not that small. And this article is worthless. It doesn’t even give the sex of the owner. Jesus, what kind of garbage is this—‘neighbors expressed a belief’!” Do they always write like this?” He pushed the paper back to her just as Harriet began to slide over to the edge of the bench she was sitting on. “And where are you going?” he demanded.

  “To find out,” she said innocently. “If it’s the same person, that is. Not if they always write that way.”

  “How in hell are you going to do that?”

  “You’re going to give me her name, I’m going to try telephoning her and asking her if she has a room to rent, and if I do get through to her, then we know it was some other house that burned down, don’t we? After all, if the house is totally demolished, the phone won’t be working anymore, will it?”

  “Not bad,” said Sanders. “Especially for first thing in the morning.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said with exaggerated modesty. “You got any change?”

  Several minutes elapsed before Harriet slipped back into the booth again. “Well?” asked Sanders. “What did you find out? Or are we booked into a room in Stittsville for the next week?”

  Harriet shook her head. “I didn’t exactly find anything out,” she said. “But there’s something funny going on.”

  “What happened?” asked Sanders. His voice was sharp. “Tell me exactly.”

  “Well, I got the number from the long-distance operator and dialed it. By the way, here’s your money back. No one seemed to want it.” She dropped a pile of coins on the table between them. “The phone was answered on the first ring by a man, which surprised me. I was expecting to get either the beautiful Miranda or the usual wait and then a little message about the number being out of service or something like that. Anyway, as I was saying, a man answered, and I asked for Mrs. Miranda Cruikshank, and he asked me who I was, and I said that all I wanted to do was talk to her, and he said could he tell her who was calling, and I asked him why he wanted to know. Then I decided that we could go on doing that forever, and meantime no one interrupted and asked me for money, and so I said that all I wanted was to ask if she had any rooms available and since when did you need a credit check to do th
at. I figured that if I really had been after a room I’d be getting mad by now. And he said that he wasn’t sure and could I hang on while he found out? Anyway, still no one wanted my money, so I was getting suspicious—or, by now, very suspicious—and I hung up. They were tracing the call, weren’t they? The line was clicking a bit.”

  “That doesn’t mean much, but yes, probably. It sounds as if he was stalling.”

  “Does that mean we’re going to be surrounded by hordes of gun-toting policemen any second now?”

  Sanders shook his head. “Probably not. You weren’t on the phone that long. On the other hand, there’s no point in tempting fate and hanging around here. It can be very time-consuming to be suspected of torching a little old landlady.”

  “You think it was arson?”

  He frowned. “They think so. Why the fuss if it wasn’t? Of course, we’re still not positive it was my landlady who went up in smoke, are we?”

  “Aren’t we?” said Harriet quietly.

  Sanders shook his head, but whether in agreement or disagreement she couldn’t tell. “Dammit. Why burn down that house?” he asked. “And if it was deliberate, why burn the landlady with it? As far as I could tell, she was insignificant, knew nothing. A bit crazy, maybe, but completely harmless.” The memory of that blue Ford in his rearview mirror returned. Had he seen it outside Stittsville? Or had it followed him there and stayed behind to get rid of Miranda and her house?

  “She knew about those papers under the Christmas cake,” said Harriet. “And she can’t have been killed just because you found out about them, can she?” she added. “How many people besides you do you suppose she showed them to? Or were you the only one whose charm she succumbed to?”

  “You’re a cruel woman, Harriet Jeffries,” he said. “But absolutely right. If she showed them to me in all confidence, she probably showed them to a few other people in all confidence. After all, I just landed on her doorstep out of nowhere, didn’t I?” He slipped out of the booth, grabbed his coat, and began to put it on. “Come on, lady. We’d better get the hell out of here.”

  They darted across the road through the morning rush hour traffic and landed, panting, in front of their new motel. “I’m going out to Stittsville again,” said Sanders. “I have to find out what happened. Do you think you can stay out of trouble until I get back?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, don’t go off by yourself and try to break into the house on Echo Drive, for instance. Or stalk possible murderers. Stay in the motel room until I get back.” Harriet grimaced. “Or at least leave a note with the manager telling me where I can find you. Under this name.” He scribbled “Mr. E. Dubinsky” on a piece of paper torn from his address book.

  “Who’s that?” asked Harriet, with a puzzled shake of the head.

  “Me, as far as they know. Actually it’s my partner’s name. I’m more likely to respond to it than I am to McTavish or Jones.”

  “On the other hand, it’s pretty distinctive and obviously connected with you.” Harriet frowned at the paper.

  “Only by my colleagues, you fool,” said Sanders, laughing. “And they’re not the ones we’re trying to sidestep. Are they?”

  “I guess not,” said Harriet. Her voice was creased with doubt.

  Andy Cassidy closed the door to Deschenes’s office and pulled a bundle of papers from his inside jacket pocket. “How secure is this room?” he asked.

  “No more now than it ever was,” said Henri Deschenes. “Why? Did you want to go somewhere secure?”

  “It doesn’t matter that much,” Cassidy said briskly. “I just like to know. Here it is, and you’ll find it interesting, I think. Before you look at it, though, I should tell you where I come in—in case you haven’t heard.” He looked over interrogatively in Deschenes’s direction and got nothing but the same steady, courteous gaze he had been greeted with. “We’re doing our own investigation at CSIS into any connection between Steve’s death and the business at the secure site, of course—”

  “What have you found out?” asked Deschenes.

  Cassidy shook his head. “None of the workmen could have killed him. They’re all clean and accounted for as far as we can tell. We’re working on the assumption that he finally connected with the person he was looking for, the one Carpenter reported was nosing around, asking the workmen questions. Except that we can’t make the descriptions fit with the guy in the bar who rented the car. The one who gave him a ride. Steve must have just drifted along with him to find out what he was up to. You remember how he worked, a great believer in giving people enough rope to hang themselves with.”

  “Entrapment,” said Deschenes mildly.

  “If you prefer,” said Cassidy. “It works. Anyway, whoever he is, if that bastard took Steve Collins by surprise he must be one hell of an operator. So the answer to your question is nothing, I suppose. Nothing new, anyway. There’s a fairly large contingent working on it because that’s where the results are most likely to come in. And they do seem to have picked up a couple of interesting threads. But I was asked to nose around and see if there was anything else potentially explosive in his files, or if he was mixed up personally in anything else, and all that I can come up with is something he called Royal Twist. He had the craziest names for things, didn’t he?”

  “And that is?”

  “It has to do with a lost heroin shipment and the murder of a dealer named Maurice Charbonneau. Steve was looking for someone connected in any way with drug enforcement near Montreal in the old days who seemed to have a bit too much money. This is the letter Betty Ferris wrote me about the material.” He handed the slightly crumpled paper across the desk.

  Deschenes read it and cleared his throat. “Interesting.”

  “We’re all in it—anyone who was posted in the Montreal area five to ten years ago. I can’t say I care much for what he says about me. In fact, I considered burning that page,” Cassidy said with a self-conscious laugh, “but then I decided that on the whole it might be better to leave the material intact.”

  “Especially since Betty has probably read it all, you mean?”

  “I mean,” he answered, and grinned.

  “Well, now,” said Deschenes, picking up the first page. “What have we here? It starts with Superintendent H. Deschenes, as is only right and proper. I shall read out the salient facts and you can comment on errors and discrepancies, so don’t fall asleep. It notes that I am forty-six, which is correct enough, and married to Marie-Claire, and have a house in Sandy Hill that is no longer mortgaged—God be praised—and that as far as he can tell, except for the purchase of a new car two years ago, have not indulged in any unusual pattern of expenditures.”

  ‘He seemed to think that you were as honest as cops go,” said Cassidy.

  “We’ll see. Next is Charlie Higgs. Forty-four and a widower. Poor Charlie. He’s taken that very hard, you know. He’s gotten bitter. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. He, too, has a house without a mortgage, and a cottage, two children, the boy a police cadet, the girl at Carleton. But we knew that, of course. He paid off his mortgage suddenly two years ago—”

  “That was after Helen died, wasn’t it? He must have used the insurance money.”

  “That’s right. This list is garbage so far, Andy. How many years did Steve work on it? Never mind. Frank Carpenter, thirty-eight, married to Carmen, three kids—hellions, those kids are, and old enough to turn up in court one of these days—house, again no mortgage, cottage, new car, and holidays in Florida for the last three years. Sounds menacing until you look at the figures for bank accounts and credit cards.”

  “It still seemed to me to be a bit excessive.”

  “Maybe. But it’s hardly yachts and weekends at Monte Carlo, Andy. Ah, here we go. Andrew Cassidy, thirty-five, single, no assets except for a registered pension with a trust company. New car, expensive va
cations three out of the last four years, including trip to Ireland last summer. And a lot of comments about your private life as it relates to your expenditures. You know, Andy, you make the rest of us look like a dull lot. Who are these next people?”

  “Drug Squad, Montreal. I’m not sure there’s anything there, but look them over. There are some interesting people, but only one who merits investigation.” He reached across the desk and pointed at one name on the list in front of Deschenes. “That’s the only interesting one.”

  “I know him,” said the superintendent. “Not a wonderful sort, but I think we have a pretty complete file on him already. Of course, we’ll open it again.” He turned to the last page, looked at it, and then went back to the first page again and ran his finger down the list of names on all the pages in front of him. “Where’s Ian?”

  “Ian MacMillan? He’s on one of the sheets I didn’t bring. I discounted him, I guess, because he wasn’t anywhere near drugs at the time.”

  “But he was with us in Montreal.”

  “Sure, but he was on immigration, wasn’t he? Doesn’t matter. I’ll bring it over tomorrow. There wasn’t anything much. He seemed to be living pretty well for a while, but you know it was all his wife’s property. And when they split up, he was left with his salary, that was all.” Cassidy gave Deschenes a puzzled look. “What did you make of the last page?”

  “Ah, that. We’ll consider it later. Let me look at the figures again. Find yourself a magazine, Andy.” Twenty minutes later, Deschenes pushed the pile of papers away. “I’m gratified to discover how rich the men I work with day by day seem to have become. You and I appear to be the poorest.”