by Medora Sale
“Jesus, Grant, if you could work with Jane, you could work with anybody. The two of you fought like drunken Finns.”
“No ethnic slurs, if you don’t mind. I’m an ethnic myself. And Jane and I had a certain common set of interests beside business that kept things going, you might say.” He smiled.
“Yeah. Bed. Anyway, can you give me the name of your contact?”
“No, ma’am. He wouldn’t like that very much. But I’ll give him your name and home telephone number. He’ll call you if he’s interested. If you don’t hear from him, there’s not much I can do.” Grant shrugged.
“Great.” Marny dropped a couple of bills down on the table between them and left, just as a rum and Coke was set down in front of her empty chair.
Eleanor sat in the spring twilight at her desk. She stared out the window of the elegantly redone red-brick Victorian house that was home to Webb and MacLeod, Real Estate, trying to avoid the clutter that had accumulated in the past few days. It had not been a terrific time to be non compos mentis, apparently. Several people, obviously desperate for housing, had been trying to get in touch with her over the weekend. She felt a pang or two—one of guilt and one of regret for probable commissions lost—and sorted out her messages. In the midst of this dreary contemplation of opportunities missed, her phone buzzed. At the same time, Frances, on her way out the door, stuck her head in the office and said, “Phone. It’s a man. A friend, I think.” Frances spent her days trying to marry off all the unattached agents in the firm.
“Hello. Eleanor Scott speaking,” she said cautiously, more afraid it might be one of those people she was supposed to have called back several days ago.
“Hello to you, too. Are you busy?” Without waiting for a reply, he went on. “If you’re not, I’m going up to see Amanda once more and then out to eat. Want to come?”
“Yes, I am,” she said firmly. “I have to make a living.” She paused a second. “On the other hand, I would like to see how she’s doing.” She crumbled completely. “Well, okay. I’ll meet you up there.” Her face brightened as she swept everything off her desk and slammed the drawer shut.
Amanda was sitting up in bed, much encumbered still with plaster, but looking very lively and tackling an enormous bunch of grapes with one hand. She waved the grapes at them in a gesture of welcome. “Hi. Mom has gone to take my father to the airport; he has to get back. But she’s staying until I’m out of here. So I’m all alone. Except for my friend out there. Do you know that he won’t let me eat anything except stuff my parents and Aunt Kate bring me? It’s awful.” She gestured at them to sit down. “And I suppose it’s all your fault, too,” she said, looking accusingly at Sanders. “Leslie brought me a box of chocolates, and I couldn’t have them.”
“Better safe than sorry,” he said, unrepentant. “But if you’re not too annoyed, I have a favour to ask.” She grinned. “Would you look at these pictures and see if you recognize Jimmy in any of them? I know you say you didn’t get a good look at him, but we think we know who he is; it would help if you could confirm it for us.”
“Sure,” she said, eating another grape and putting down the bunch. “But I really didn’t see him, you know.” She wiped her good hand on the sheet and spread the pictures out on the bed in front of her. She looked intently. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “Is that ever funny. I don’t recognize Jimmy, but look at this one! It’s the man in the gray Honda!” And she picked up the picture of James Feldman, also known as Jimmy Fielding.
“Did everyone know about the man in the gray Honda but me?” asked Sanders over a plate of goulash in the closest Hungarian eatery. “That might have made things hang together a bit, you know.” He glared at her.
“Don’t harangue,” she said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. Heather probably knows more than I do.”
“Terrific,” he said, irritated. “And I wonder what the significance of ‘all the kids’ is in the statement ‘all the kids knew about it.’ The whole school?”
“I wouldn’t think so. Just her friends and anyone they told it to. Shouldn’t take more than a month to figure it out,” she said with a laugh. His glare checked her mirth. “Sorry, but you couldn’t imagine the speed at which news travels in a girls’ school. I doubt if you’d ever figure out who knew one piece of information at one particular time. But I’m sure that Roz will do anything she can to help you. Of course, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Unless you want to go around and try to see all Amanda’s best friends and see what they say.”
“No,” he said. “That’s probably a waste of time. I think I’ll concentrate on Mr. Fielding himself, and see what he can come up with in the way of an explanation.”
Chapter 13
Sanders walked into the familiar room and headed toward his desk with the profound conviction that he had never left it. The sight of Dubinsky, yawning and bleary-eyed, only served to heighten the illusion. It had been after three when they had finally decided that they were going to get nothing from Jimmy Fielding. For six hours he had sat and smiled and referred all questions to his lawyer. A sleepy nurse on night duty had thought that maybe Fielding’s mug shot represented the face she had seen in the hall outside room 526; but, then again, she hadn’t noticed him that clearly. Sanders’ jaw still felt stiff from suppressing his anger. He yearned to get the man alone for a few hours, to see if he could shake that complacent grin off his face, to evoke just a flash of fear in those bland eyes. Dammit. If they hadn’t been in such a hurry to hustle him downtown so they could get a positive I.D. on him from the Griffiths girl, he could have—but no. Whoever it was that Jimmy worked for would be a hell of a lot more terrifying to him than John Sanders, detective inspector, could ever be since Sanders was unlikely to carve him up and feed his guts to the gulls, no matter how tempting the idea might be. “Hi, Ed,” he yawned. “How’s it going? Any word on Parsons?”
“Not yet,” said Dubinsky. “McInnis is on. He’ll call if she comes to.”
“I think I’ll drop over to the hospital and keep an eye on things. We’d better take a copy of that sketch—if it’s ready—in case she can identify the bastard. And maybe we can get something new out of the Griffiths girl while we’re waiting.” He flipped half-heartedly through the mail on his desk, opened some, dropped the rest into a drawer, and then turned the leaf of his desk calendar. He peered at the cryptic scribblings on it. “What do you know,” he said. “This is the day Conway’s lawyer gets back from Mexico. Call him, eh, Dubinsky, and tell him we’ll be over this morning. Don’t give him a choice. I have something to pick up first. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
Dubinsky fell into stride beside Sanders along Dundas Street. The weather, which had spoiled Easter with wind and cold, was tormenting office workers by being warm and sunny now that the long weekend was over. “I couldn’t get him,” he said finally, as they headed the few blocks over to the hospital. “He’s not getting back to the office until tomorrow, she says. And she hasn’t the slightest idea where he is.” Dubinsky grunted in disgust. “Which she seems to think is pretty funny. If I was that guy I’d get another secretary.”
Sanders noted the empty chair outside room 526 and scowled. He flung open the door, half expecting to find Amanda’s mangled corpse inside. But she was sitting tranquilly up in bed, watching a game show, with a young police constable in the chair beside her. “Working hard?” said Sanders, and jerked his head in the direction of the door. The young man fled. Sanders pulled a brown paper bag out of his pocket and dumped it on Amanda’s bed. She picked it up doubtfully and glanced inside, then pulled out three large Swiss chocolate bars—a hazelnut, a nougat, and a praline. “I hope you like those kinds,” he said. “I’m sorry about the food.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “I love them. But you really didn’t have to. Did you come all the way over here just to bring me chocolate? I’d feel awful if you did.” She was trying to open each one as she talked and to sample all
three flavours, not an easy task for one hand.
“Well, no. I had other reasons.” He forced his fatigue-numbed facial muscles into a smile. “We’d like you to try to remember everything you can about Jimmy.” Amanda nodded. “First off, how often was he there?”
Her slightly freckled nose wrinkled in concentration as she considered the question. “I suppose once or twice a week, after school, usually. He’d just be sitting there in his car. We used to stand around on Leslie’s front porch talking, sometimes for a long time, and he’d be there all the time.”
“Can you remember when he first started showing up?”
“We first noticed him about five or six weeks ago, but he could have been around before that. You don’t really pay any attention to cars just parked there, you know. In fact, we probably never would have noticed him except that one day Mrs. Conway walked by the car and he called out something to her. She stopped and looked at him for a second, and then went right on. That was when we decided that he was following her, and we started making up these crazy stories about who he was and what he was doing. As a joke, you know.” She laughed. “Our best one was the oil sheik—he was a filthy rich oil sheik, dying of passion for her, and was waiting there to abduct her and carry her off to the Persian Gulf where she had to teach his other wives physics.” By this time she was giggling wildly, and Sanders and Dubinsky were staring blankly at her. She took a deep breath. “That was because one day a police car came by while he was there, and he took off right away—so, obviously he had something to hide, you see.”
Dubinsky looked up sharply from his notebook. “Looks like a drop, doesn’t it?”
Sanders nodded. “More convincing than the thought that little Jimmy was dying of love for her.” He shook his head. “Who’s he connected with, Dubinsky? You know him from way back, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “That’s hard. He always seemed to be a loner. But he’s been mixed up in a lot of mob-connected stuff.”
“Then we’ll have to work at it from the other end,” said Sanders, turning abruptly back to the girl. “Who knew that you knew who was in the gray Honda?”
Amanda stopped to consider for a moment. “Well,” she said, “Heather did. And she could have told her mother, I suppose.” He glared at her. “And Leslie. She saw it too, lots of times, although she didn’t walk by it, the way Heather and I did, so she couldn’t see in and recognize the guy. But aside from them, we talked about it at lunch one day.”
“When?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. One of the days after Conway was killed. I suppose Monday or Tuesday. It wasn’t right after, I know that. Probably Monday or Tuesday.”
“Who was there?”
“That’s harder. Leslie must have been there—”
“Leslie who, Miss Griffiths?”
“Sorry. Leslie Smith. And Jennifer—she always eats lunch with us. Jennifer Delisle. And I think Sarah Wilcox was there, too.” She shook her head again. “Jessica Martin might have been in the room, too. She usually eats lunch with us.”
“Do you know if any of those girls told anyone else?”
Amanda tried to shrug her shoulder and failed. “Probably. I never asked them not to tell anyone. But you’d have to talk to them.”
Sanders snapped his notebook shut and stood up. “Thanks. Would you like that miserable specimen out there to come in and keep you company?” She nodded. “Okay. I’ll send him in. Don’t feed him all your chocolate.”
It only took them four minutes to travel between the lively Amanda and the surgical waiting room. McInnes was sitting there patiently, among the anxious parents and spouses, flipping through a magazine. “Any word?” asked Sanders.
“No, sir, not yet,” he said, getting to his feet. “I brought a tape recorder—they said we could try it in the recovery room, in case she comes to.” There seemed no response to this, and a gloomy silence fell over the room again.
It was at least twenty minutes before they were beckoned to the door by a tired and irritable-looking man. “Sorry,” he said. “We did what we could, but there never was much of a chance, you know. It was a miracle she hung on as long as she did.”
“You mean she’s dead?” said Dubinsky, startled.
“That’s right,” replied the surgeon. “And I trust you’ll find who did it to her before I have to treat any more like this.” His voice was cold and angry.
Thirty minutes later four very apprehensive girls were ushered into a small seminar room at Kingsmede Hall. They relaxed visibly at the sight of a pair of plain-clothes policemen. A group summons out of class like this usually got you Miss Johnson and a whole lot of trouble; this looked like twenty minutes’ relief from sweating through some dreary novel. They giggled themselves into four chairs and prepared to waste time. All four reluctantly denied knowing anything useful, however. Jessica Martin had to deny knowledge of any Honda or anyone in it. She had been sick last week and couldn’t possibly have been at lunch that day.
“I remember that conversation, though,” interposed Leslie. “We were trying to figure out if the guy was her husband or her boyfriend—only seriously, this time. But I don’t think I ever told anyone about it. Honest.” She looked at him with innocent brown eyes. He sighed and wished he were better at distinguishing truth from falsehood in adolescent females.
“Wasn’t it Amanda who said that a friend of her aunt knew someone in the police who said that the murder was done by the rapist?” asked Jennifer. “So the man in the gray Honda wasn’t important and it didn’t matter who he was. I told my dad, but he didn’t believe me.”
“What didn’t he believe? That Amanda’s aunt—”
Jennifer broke out in fits of giggles. “No,” she said, gasping for breath. “That Amanda had seen someone outside the house—Conway’s house.” She giggled again. “He said that girls our age have very fertile imaginations and we probably couldn’t tell the difference between a gray Honda and a beige Pinto.”
“I told my dad, and he thought it was clever of Amanda to notice something like that,” said Sarah, blushing furiously. “But I never told anyone else. I mean, except my mom and little brother, too.”
Sanders looked intently at the four faces in front of him. “Thank you,” he said morosely, “you’ve been a big help,” and watched them swarm from the room.
“So,” said Sanders, “there we have it. Not one of them, if you can believe them, told anyone except members of their own families. I wish I knew if they were telling the truth, or if they think they’ll get into trouble by saying they told other friends. They all sounded as if they were lying through their teeth. If I got a performance like that out of a suspect, I’d be on the phone to the Crown, working up charges.”
“I think,” said Dubinsky, “that they giggle and blush even when they’re telling the truth.”
“They also do it when they’re lying,” growled Sanders. “But let’s assume we heard the truth. Then we’d better find out something about their parents, wouldn’t you say?” He strode off in search of the principal.
Roz was standing in the hall watching uniformed bodies hurtle by her on their way to class. Sanders raced to grab her before she disappeared again. “Do you have information on those girls’ parents? Like what they do and where they work? We’re trying to establish a link between Amanda and the men who attacked her.” Roz looked at him doubtfully for a moment, and walked back into Annabel’s office.
“Pull the admission files for those four girls, please, and bring them into the seminar room. Thanks.” She turned to him. “I hope that’s what you need,” she said, then she smiled dismissively and left.
In a matter of minutes, Annabel dropped four file folders on the table in front of them. “That’s confidential information, you know,” she said tartly. “Ordinarily we don’t let anyone look at it. If there’s anything you don’t understand, ask me.” With a
mildly poisonous look, she swept out.
“Okay,” muttered Sanders. “Eliminate the Martin girl, since she wasn’t at school—although I suppose we should check that.” He placed her folder to one side. “Right. Smith. Mr. Geoffrey Smith.” He scribbled down both addresses, home and business. “He’s an architect; they live on MacNiece Street, a few houses away from the victim’s apartment building.” He picked up the next folder. “Delisle. Dr. Martin Delisle. A plastic surgeon. I wonder if he makes millions doing face lifts.” He continued scribbling. “And last, Wilcox. Mr. Paul Wilcox. Well, look at that—Wilcox the MPP. They have everything at this place, don’t they?” He looked up. “Which one of these guys had any connection with Jimmy, do you suppose?”
Dubinsky shrugged. “Could have been any of them. I’d put my money on the politician, though. A man with Jimmy’s connections could be very useful to someone like that.”
“How about the architect? I’d be willing to bet Jimmy’s network extends to construction and building contracts, wouldn’t you?” He piled all the files neatly once again. “Or, of course, it could have been anyone of them telling somebody else, or it could have been someone connected with one of the other girls who passed it on after she heard it through the grapevine.” He yawned again. “Let’s go back to Mrs. Conway’s old friends and try out the trafficking scenario. I like it—it seems to fit some of them very nicely.”
It was one o’clock in the afternoon when he stumbled out of his sweat-soaked bed and into the bathroom. The face that peered back at him from the mirror belonged to someone else. It was flabby and covered with stubble; the right cheek was hideously disfigured with claw marks. He shuddered in disgust. He had fallen asleep in his underwear; now he reached over and pulled on a pair of wrinkled cords and a sweatshirt, picked up his dirty socks and dragged them on. He grabbed a pile of quarters from the change on the dresser and stumbled down the winding stairs, yanking on boots as he passed the door. His destination was the row of newspaper boxes at the corner. He blinked as his eyes hit daylight. For four days now he had been sitting inside the house with curtains drawn, sleeping erratically and infrequently, sending out for pizza on the few occasions that he noticed hunger. He was living besieged, surrounded by enemies, enemies so powerful and clever that they could manipulate the news. They were lulling him into a false sense of security in order to set traps for him.