Winner's Loss

by Mel Bradshaw

  “Where would Jordan Stillwater come in?”

  “He has time on his hands now that he’s retired. Sometimes he fills it with visits to parishioners’ homes. It’s possible he delivered some of those food parcels to the church when Miss Britton was there.”

  “But surely any admirer would have avoided entrusting food for Nora Britton to a man who had talked of killing her.”

  “Not everyone would have heard that talk.”

  “And if they had?”

  “And if they had they mightn’t have set any store by it whatever. People were used to hearing Jordan spout any sort of foolishness.”

  “But you did set store by it, or I wouldn’t be here. Why was your attitude to the man different?”

  “I knew he’d been in trouble with the law. You can look that up. Now I really should —”

  “Just a few more questions, Mr. Hutchinson,” I said pleasantly. “I know you want to help Miss Britton. You can talk while I walk you back to the rectory. The floor here looks clean: did Nora Britton spill any blood on it?”

  “There was none, thank God.” The rector shivered. “As I’ve said, I was upset enough as it was. I think the sight of that poor girl’s blood would have broken me completely. Ah, my voice is shaking. I’m sorry, detective.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. I believed his distress was real. “I see there are two doors to this sanctuary besides the one we used. You say Miss Britton couldn’t have been pushed to her death because all the doors were locked Tuesday morning. Does that mean that even with your keys you couldn’t get in?”

  “Strangely, yes.” The rector’s voice strengthened. I’d given him a subject on which to hold forth. “The west door we came in and the south door both lead directly outside, and both were fitted with inside bolts when the church was built, or at least before the beginning of my tenure.”

  “Simple barrel lock bolts with no key and no way of opening from outside?”

  “Exactly. The north door, by contrast, the door leading to the vestry, had no such fastening until Nora Britton started working here.”

  “Did she ask to have one installed?”

  “She did not. She must have known I never would have allowed a lock with the potential to exclude me from my own church.”

  “So she bought and installed one herself?”

  “Apparently so, because on Tuesday morning the caretaker had to break open the door to the church from the vestry. This was not difficult because the barrel bolt that had been added was smaller than those on the other doors.”

  “And in your comings and goings before Tuesday you never noticed the new bolt?”

  “I’m embarrassed to admit I did not. If I had, I’d have had it removed.”

  “Any idea why she might have felt the need for such a lock?”

  “None,” said the rector. “I gave her a key to the church so she could work here whenever she pleased, whether I was around or not. I can only assume she had an unusually strong aversion to being disturbed or even observed while she painted.”

  I had a look at the door in question. The bolt was indeed better suited to a kitchen cupboard than to a door this size. The hasp was dangling by one screw from the door frame; the wood in which the other screw had been embedded had been torn away. I concluded that if anyone had pushed Nora Britton to her death, that person would have had to be concealed somewhere in the sanctuary when the rector and the caretaker broke in: the murderer could not have fled leaving all three doors bolted from inside, however insecurely.

  I accompanied Hutchinson through the vestry and out into the cool, clear day. My thoughts turned again to food — and drink. I decided to let the rector get to his meeting.

  “Just curious: what does CETS stand for?”

  “Church of England Temperance Society. Are you an abstainer, Mr. Shenstone?”

  “During interviews,” I assured him. Little as I wanted to prolong this one, it occurred to me to ask if Hutchinson had ever met Herman Koch.

  “No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering if he was jealous of his wife’s success, the success that should have been his. He won the contest, then lost the commission. That could make a guy sore. Doubly so when he lost it to a wife that wouldn’t take his German name.”

  “Oh no,” said Hutchinson. “The only reason she kept the name Britton was that she already had an artistic reputation when she married. She and Herman Koch were very close and loving.”

  I was walking back east towards City Hall when a middle-aged man in a white jacket popped out of one of the shops opposite the church.

  “Excuse me, mister. Have you just been talking to the Reverend? Simon Leavitt’s the name. He won’t see me. He had his good wife tell me he wasn’t home, but I don’t believe it. Do you think I’d find him in now?”

  I said I believed the rector was meeting with foes of the demon rum.

  “There’s always some excuse. I know he’s upset about the artist that died in his church this week. That was terrible — such a fine woman too. Still, I’ve been trying to get his attention for over a year.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Yes, of course. She came into my place a lot last August.” Simon Leavitt pointed to an ice cream parlour in the row of shops. “September too, on warm days. Fresh fruit sundae, that was her cup of tea. And I have to say we make them just as good as Eaton’s. Are you a friend of hers?”

  It was strange how this question made me feel, as if she were still capable of having friends. I wanted to say, Not yet.

  “Did you ever see her with anyone,” I asked, “or did she always come in alone?”

  “I don’t remember things like that, but she was a sweet woman. That’s how you should think of her. Are you her husband?”

  “Would you remember more if I told you I was a detective sergeant?” I showed him my badge.

  A look of unwilling submission settled on Leavitt’s face. “She came alone sometimes, sometimes with a man. Once or twice with a Chinaman.”

  “Catch any names?”

  “None, I swear.”

  I figured Simon Leavitt or his family — back in Europe perhaps — had had reason to distrust the police. I could always come back to him later if I wanted to pursue the question of Nora Britton’s associates. At the moment, I suspected he thought talking to me could do him no good.

  I was wrong, though. He wasn’t quite as despairing as all that.

  “Say, mister detective, do you think you could do something about the Children’s Downtown Clinic that Christ Church is running? They hand out free milk, and the nurses are helpful as anything when little Hymie or little Hudel has a cough or a rash, but it’s all to get Jewish families to convert to the Church of England. Can you stop that?”

  “I can’t think of any law that’s being broken.”

  “We never try to get anyone to give up their religion and convert to ours, let alone use the infirmities of children to do it.” Leavitt shook his head at the lack of scruple. “Do you think Reverend Hutchinson would speak to our rabbi?”

  “Religion is clean out of my line, and I’ve only ever had one talk with the rector. You have good questions, Mr. Leavitt, but you also have the rotten luck to be putting them to the wrong person. Now let me ask you one: do you know where I could find Jack Wellington?”

  “The Jewish kid that lost the fight last night because of a no-good referee? You don’t see him down here anymore. Once a person owns three or more suits, he buys a house in Forest Hill to hang them in.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I’ll come back for a sundae some time.”

  Hungry as I was, the first order of business was a sardine salad on brown as assembled by my favourite sandwich shop. Settled on a stool at the counter of Uneeda Lunch on Queen Street, with the first two big bites inside me, I reviewed my morning. Plainly, Christ Church Grange Park was far from one happy and harmonious family. Threatening language that in isolation sounded like banana oil
took on a darker colour given the whole history of the mural project.

  Overall, I was inclined to believe Eric Hutchinson’s version of that history. Quite possibly he had pushed Nora Britton to finish her painting by Armistice Day harder than he now wanted to admit. If anything depended on his truthfulness, however, I could easily seek confirmation from other sources for most of what he’d told me. He plainly didn’t suffer from excessive modesty, but I couldn’t see that he’d shaped his answers to make himself look wiser than he was. He hadn’t pretended to any knowledge of art. What did he think of the merits of the first and second mural designs? I’d heard no whisper of that. In contrast, he’d practically bellowed his attraction to the artist behind the second. Being sweet on her in a fatherly way perhaps made him perceive threats where there were none. Still, I saw no reason why we shouldn’t have the body of the deceased checked for poison.

  Chapter 4

  As soon as I set foot back in the detective office, I was told Inspector Sanderson was waiting for my report. I stormed into his glass-walled office, and before he could get out his first question, I said I wanted to see an autopsy report on Nora Britton.

  Sanderson lit one of his filthy pipes and to make matters worse told me to shut the door. I didn’t quite.

  “The coroner didn’t think any autopsy necessary,” he said. “Clearly an accidental fall. Asked what I could expect when a woman was allowed to swan around up on a scaffold. Blithering fool.”

  “Has he released the remains to the family, sir?”

  “If he has, he’ll have to get them back. I’ve told his chief we need a post-mortem on this lady. And if she’s already been buried, he’ll have to issue a warrant to disinter. So you believe Mr. Hutchinson?”

  “I believe there was nasty talk about the deceased, but that’s a long way from murder. The church sanctuary was locked from the inside at the time of death, and no one else was found inside when the rector and the caretaker broke in. So it’s unlikely she was pushed off that scaffold. If the autopsy results rule out poison, I don’t see any reason to investigate further.”

  Inspector Sanderson pinched his lower lip and looked at me from under his black eyebrows. I was afraid I was now going to be reassigned while we waited for those results. None of the cases Sanderson was likely to put me on held the promise of useful work. At one end of the class spectrum, an Atlantic-hopping baroness claimed to have had jewellery stolen from her suite at the King Edward Hotel, an investigation much better suited to Detective Sergeant Rudy Crate with his authentically plummy English drawl. At the other end, our department had for the past week been watching a suspected bawdy house on Chestnut Street, an assignment already boring Detective Sergeants Nichol and Lazenby to twitching distraction.

  “While we’re waiting, though,” I said, “I could just check up on the source of the poison threats, a man the rector thinks has some sort of police record.”

  “All right, Paul. That shouldn’t take long. Then see if Rudy needs a hand.”

  I shut the inspector in with his pipe smoke on the way out.

  “You may like the smell of rotting fish,” said the detective at the desk next to mine, “but for the sake of the rest of us do you think you could find somewhere else to store your picnic?”

  Parsons was pointing at Nora Britton’s knapsack, which I’d left on the floor by my chair. In the stuffy detective office, the stink was pretty bad.

  I hoisted it up onto my desk and undid the metal catches. Inside I found a Thermos half full of what smelled like coffee and two wax paper packages. One contained a sandwich, with a couple of bites taken out of it. The contents were some sort of grey paste. Perhaps tuna salad. In the other I found three hermit cookies and enough crumbs to suggest Nora Britton had eaten the fourth. If the autopsy showed the painter had been poisoned, we’d want coffee, sandwich, and cookies all tested. I considered sending them immediately to the province’s one-man crime lab, Professor Dalton Linacre at the University of Toronto. But he was cruelly overworked by police departments around Ontario and had as well responsibilities to the chemistry department he headed. We detectives had been warned not to make him do tests on spec. To oblige my neighbour, I took the repacked knapsack down to the evidence lockers.

  Back upstairs the department files smelled of nothing worse than dust. I quickly found that Jordan Stillwater’s record of contacts with the police didn’t amount to much — charges dating back to the Prohibition years just ended. It seemed that as a pharmacist Stillwater had sold some customers alcohol without the requisite doctor’s prescription or had sold more than prescribed. That period had made criminals of a lot of us; if I personally had never got my rye from a drugstore, it was only because it would have spoiled the taste for me to think of it as medicine.

  While I was at it, I checked police records to see if Jordan’s grandson had ever come to the attention of the law, and here I found something more serious. In 1924 the ex-sailor had participated in a brawl at a dance and had been fined for the crime of common assault. Then in 1926 he was suspected of beating up a Chinese restaurant owner who was employing a Caucasian girl in his kitchen. Archie admitted removing the woman from the premises. He had evidently removed her with some force as she was subsequently treated for a broken arm. No charges were laid in either case because of the two victims’ refusal to testify. The investigating officer was of the opinion that the woman’s silence was due to the influence of her parents, who were appalled to find out where she’d been working and overjoyed to have her out.

  Archie sounded like a nasty piece of work. I’ll admit I couldn’t see this brawler as a poisoner, even though he might have had access to restricted substances through his pharmacist grandfather. No, from what I’d read and seen, men that used poison to murder tended to be schemers rather than scrappers, scholarly types — often doctors like Cream or Crippen. I wondered if there might be another way Archie could have killed Nora Britton and left her body inside a church locked from the inside. It seemed impossible — unless he’d been hiding inside the church Tuesday morning when the rector broke in and managed to escape unnoticed. I hoped a post-mortem on Nora Britton could be performed this afternoon. I might pursue the Archie Stillwater angle if no trace of poison was found.

  I looked up from my desk to see Inspector Sanderson striding towards me. From the furrows in his high forehead I surmised I wasn’t going to be seeing an autopsy report any time soon.

  “Paul, I’ve just been on the phone to the coroner. He says Nora Britton’s remains were released to the next of kin Wednesday morning. He’s in the process of issuing a warrant to get them back, but it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve no faith in his sense of urgency. You’d better get in touch with Herman Koch and warn him not to have his wife buried in the meantime. He doesn’t appear to have a phone, so you’ll have to go round.”

  Constable Nanos’s report was still on my desk. I scanned it for the address of the deceased. “Would that be Elizabeth Street?” I asked.

  “No, Strachan Avenue south of King. As near as I can make out, it’s between the Mercer Reformatory and the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, on the site of the old Central Prison. His residence and studio appear to be in the former prison chapel. I haven’t been able to discover an actual street number, but you’ll find it.”

  “By taxi, sir?”

  “Streetcar,” said the impatient but thrifty inspector.

  Friday was payday, so I was able to pick up my slim packet of banknotes on the way out to buy a paper and catch the King car.

  The long ride out gave me an opportunity to see how the Daily Dispatch had reported last night’s fight. There was no article, just a record of the result with no suggestion that either Wellington or Hardcastle was bent. That didn’t mean Lariviere had some hold over the publisher, but you had to wonder. Meanwhile, Ruth’s big breakthrough onto the front page would have to wait. I hoped I’d live long enough to see it.

  It was past four o’clock by the time I found the prison chapel,
the weather still clear, sunny, and just about cool enough for mid-October. Isolated in the middle of an assortment of newer sheds and factories, the soot-stained red brick structure looked about fifty years old. The plain hipped roof carried no spire or cross. Only the tall, round-topped windows on the second of two storeys suggested a hall suited to a gathering of worshippers. The rectangular footprint of the building was broken here and there by the stumps of projecting walls, walls that would have connected the chapel to the now-demolished remainder of the Central Prison.

  I walked all the way round the building and found three doors. My knocking at two of these went unanswered. The third was opened by a woman with curling, dark hair, held off her face by a man’s cloth cap of indeterminate colour. Her face was lined, her arms muscular. She looked me over while resting her hands in the pockets of a clay-spattered, blue-checked house dress. She told me that Herman Koch’s door was on the opposite side of the building. I told her Mr. Koch didn’t appear to be home.

  “Was it about having your portrait painted?” she asked in a deep, husky voice.

  “Do I look as if I could afford it?” I admit I was entertained by the thought.

  “I don’t judge people by their clothes,” said the woman. “But if you don’t have the cash for a three-quarter length in oils, you might still consider a charcoal head for a hundred dollars.”

  “Or a terra cotta bust?”

  She wiped the back of her right hand across her upper lip. “Even if you were serious, I haven’t the time. Are you a bill collector?”

  “Does Mr. Koch get many visits from them?”

  The woman shrugged, her lips pressed tight. Time I came clean.

  “Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone,” I said. “Mr. Koch is not in any trouble with the police, but it’s urgent I see him.”

  “Ernestine Lopez. Herman likes to paint by natural light, so if he isn’t home now he soon will be. He’s only got an hour and a half till sundown. If you want to wait in my studio, you can. The partition wall between his space and mine isn’t up to much. We’ll hear when he comes in.”