Murder at the Mendel

by Gail Bowen

  I was just cleaning up when the phone rang. It was Sally. Her gun was missing.

  “What gun?” I said. “For God’s sake, what kind of person owns a gun?”

  “A person like me who works alone at night in a house that sometimes has a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of art lying around. God damn it, Jo, don’t yell at me. Stu bought the gun for me the first year we were married, and it was a good idea. That studio of mine is right on the river bank. Anyone could break in. And someone has. Remember I told you I had two break-ins over Christmas? Well, both times whoever was there left things behind: more used sanitary napkins, a bag of kitty litter, also used, and some stuff that’s too disgusting to talk about. But the point is, because they were leaving things, I never checked to see if things were missing. The paintings were okay, and that’s about all that’s of interest there.”

  “Except your gun,” I said.

  “Yes, except my gun,” she repeated. “And according to the police, it appears to have been the same kind as the one that did the job on Clea and poor old Righteous Protester.”

  “How do they know?”

  “The same way they knew to look for a gun at my house in the first place. From the registration. God, Jo, it looks like I’ve really managed to get myself up shit creek.”

  The realization seemed to hit us both at the same time, but I was the one who put it into words.

  “Sally, I think we’re going to have to stop talking about what you’ve managed to do to yourself. Too many things are going wrong for you. The police show up at the gallery as soon as you discover Clea’s body; your gun, apparently the same kind as the one that committed the murders, suddenly disappears. I think there’s somebody else involved here.”

  Her voice on the other end of the line was small and sad. “Yeah, I think you’re right, Jo. And you know what else? I think whoever wants me up shit creek is doing everything they can to make sure I don’t have a paddle.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  When I read the paper’s lead story the morning of Clea’s funeral I could feel my throat closing. The police had started to give the media details about their investigation, and there weren’t many arrows pointing away from Sally and me. There was one item of hard news: Kyle, the museum guard, told the police that minutes before they arrived, the burglar alarm had gone off in the delivery area at the back of the gallery. When he went out to investigate, he saw a figure running down the hill toward the river bank. The snow was so heavy that he couldn’t give the police a description, couldn’t in fact tell for certain whether the runner had been male or female. Kyle had given chase but when he heard the siren from the police car, he returned to the gallery. The only thing that seemed to be missing from the gallery was the film from the video camera suspended over the bridal bed.

  A mystery runner and an empty camera: it wasn’t much.

  The human interest angle was more fertile ground. From the beginning, the local paper couldn’t seem to get enough of Clea and Sally. The morning after the murder, the obituary column had carried the details of Clea’s funeral: services were to be conducted at the University Women’s Centre by a woman named Vivian Ludlow from the radical feminist community. She taught a course called Human Justice, and I knew her slightly from the university. Interment was at a cemetery on the east side of the city. While men were welcome at the interment, they would not be permitted to attend the funeral service.

  The paper managed to repeat the details of the funeral arrangements in most of the stories about Clea’s life and death. Those few lines always gave a titillating but not libellous spin to their stories. Clea’s association with Sally at womanswork; the arson that destroyed their gallery; the public outcry against the bisexual imagery of Erotobiography: all were suddenly set against a dark feminist world, a world where men were not welcome. It was hot stuff.

  The Righteous Protester wasn’t hot stuff. Even on the day of his funeral, he only rated a column and a half on page three. His name was Reg Helms, and as I read his obituary, I was struck again with how sad and stunted his life had been: a childless marriage to a woman who had died the year before of cancer, no friends to speak of, and a dead-end clerical job with a company called Peter’s Pumpkin Seeds. Reg Helms was a great writer of letters to the newspaper; and every talkshow host in town recognized his voice. His preoccupation was our disintegrating society, and it was a theme he played with variations. Sometimes it was Quebec that was destroying the country, sometimes ethnic groups or Aboriginal peoples, but the subject that really warmed his heart was sexual permissiveness. Sally’s show had been a holy mission for him. He had been fifty-four years old when he died.

  The facts of Reg Helms’s life had become as familiar to me as my own, but today there was something different. There was a final paragraph that laid out the medical details of his death. Helms had died of a bullet in the carotid artery.

  The pathologist said death had come swiftly; nonetheless, there had been a second shot. Police theorized that when Reg Helms had raised his hand to his shattered throat, his murderer had fired again. The second bullet had struck Helms’s watch. He had died at 6:21 on Tuesday, January first. His watch had recorded hour, minute, day and date. Cosmic timekeeping.

  As soon as I saw the numbers, I felt a rush of excitement. Sally’s phone call had come at ten to seven, and she had told me she’d just arrived at the gallery. I’d left home immediately. Under ordinary circumstances, I could have been at the gallery in ten minutes, but the blizzard and the walk across the lawn outside the gallery had slowed me. It would have been after seven when I found Reg Helms’s body. At 6:21 I’d been at home with my kids cleaning up after dinner, getting ready to watch the end of the Rose Bowl game. I had an alibi. And if there was justice, Sally would have one, too.

  She answered the phone on the first ring. When I told her about the story in the paper, she was restrained.

  “It’s great for you, Jo. Really, I’m happy and relieved that you’re off the hook. It was awful knowing I’d involved you in all this. But it’s no out for me. I don’t know what time I got to the gallery. I don’t even wear a watch. If you say I called you at ten to seven, then I must have gotten to the Mendel at about a quarter to. I called you as soon as I saw Clea.”

  “But, Sal, don’t you see, I can tell the police that. I can swear to it.”

  “It’s not enough. My best friend swearing that I told her I’d just arrived at the scene of a crime and found a body –it’s just too thin, Jo. The cops would blow that alibi out of the water in about eleven seconds. I need more than that. I’ve been sitting here figuring out times. Let’s say I got to the Mendel at 6:45. The roads were bad so it took me about ten minutes to drive there. That puts me out in front of my house at 6:35. And I must have been out there five minutes or so having my altercation with the guy in the ski mask.” She laughed. “That probably happened around 6:30, so he’d be the one to give me the alibi. Do you think I can count on him?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” I said.

  “No,” Sally said, “stranger things than that have not happened. Face it, Jo. Nothing’s changed. I’m still up the creek.”

  As I went upstairs to dress for the funeral, the relief I’d felt earlier was gone. Sally was right. Nothing had changed. She was still up the creek. And she still didn’t have a paddle.

  When Sally came in to have a cup of coffee before we went to the funeral, the paper was lying on the kitchen table. She picked it up and started reading aloud. There were signed messages of condolence from a local women’s art co-operative and the Daughters of Bilitis. There was also a full-page ad from one of the fundamentalist churches containing a number of first-person accounts from men who described themselves as victims of pornography. All of them described exemplary boyhoods that ended abruptly when they were exposed to pornographic pictures and began to masturbate their way down the slippery slope to damnation.

  When she had read the final confession, Sally sl
apped the paper down on the table.

  “God, these guys are amazing. The old monkey-see-monkey-do theory of art and sex. Didn’t the mums who taught these good boys ever tell them to keep their hands above the sheets?”

  Angus, sitting opposite her, tried to look suave, as if he had conversations about masturbation at the breakfast table every day.

  Sally seemed to dawdle over her coffee. I was the one who finally stood up and said it was time to go.

  “My first all-girl funeral,” Sally said to Angus as she zipped up her parka. He gave her a look that made me realize he was growing up.

  It was a brilliant January morning, so cold there were sun dogs in the sky. We didn’t talk much as we walked the few blocks to the campus. Classes started the next day, so there were students around with winter tans and new knapsacks and bags from the bookstore. On the signpost outside the University Women’s Centre was an old poster with a picture of Paul McCartney and the word HELP in block letters above his head. Someone had drawn a balloon around it and given Paul some additional dialogue. “HELP – I’m old and boring,” Paul said.

  “No one can accuse Clea of that one any more,” said Sally, and there was an edge to her voice that I should have picked up on, but didn’t. In retrospect, it would have been better if Sally had not gone to the funeral. From the minute we walked up the steps to the women’s centre, she was edgy and combative, and there was nothing inside that building to chill her out.

  The women’s centre was hot, and it had that egg-salad smell that seems to linger in all public buildings that serve short-order food. It was a pretty barren place: some posters on reproductive choice and date rape on the walls, and chairs arranged in semicircles with an aisle up the middle. By the time we arrived, almost all the chairs were full. Even so, the sister Sally sat next to ostentatiously got up and moved to the back of the room, and there was a nasty hissing sound from the people in the row behind us.

  “Cows,” Sally said under her breath. “So fucking self-righteous, so fucking precious about the place for women’s art, but not one of them had the decency to ask if they could use my work on their little card here. Look at this.” She tapped the front of the memorial card with one of her long, blunt fingers. It was a reproduction of a painting Sally had done in the early seventies: an adolescent girl sat legs apart, naked in front of the mirror over her dressing table. Her look, as she sat absorbed in the mystery of her body, was both radiant and fearful. The girl was Clea Poole.

  “Not that I mind,” Sally was saying, “but these women are always whining about being used by the power structure, you’d think one of them might understand the laws of copyright.”

  I started to say something, but at that moment, two women began to sing a cappella and the casket was brought in. It was covered in a quilt with a clitoral pattern, peach and ivory. All the pallbearers were women, and it stirred something in me to see them, strong and handsome, carrying a sister. When the singing ended, there was silence, then a thin woman in designer blue jeans and a white silk blouse came out of the front row, laid a hand on the casket and began to speak.

  The thing you noticed first about Vivian Ludlow was her hair. She was younger than me, perhaps forty, but her hair was white, and she wore it shoulder length and extravagantly curled. It was very attractive. She was very attractive: good skin, no makeup, a full-lipped, sensitive mouth. She made no effort to raise her voice, yet she commanded that room.

  “Like all of you here today, Clea Poole lived a life of risk and confrontation and inherent subversiveness,” she began. “To be a woman is to live every day with the knowledge that the personal is political. It is to risk everything and to gain everything. It is to know the radically transgressive power of gender, but it is also to experience the moment of incarnation as self becomes flesh.”

  Beside me, Sally’s voice was low with disgust. “They think they invented it, you know. Clea made me go to a meeting once, and at the end the speaker jumped on the table and invited us all to have a peek at her uterus.”

  In spite of everything, I started to laugh. No one else was laughing. At the front, Vivian Ludlow was asking Clea’s friends not to turn their eyes from the broken woman she was at the last because to do that was to devalue the purpose of Clea’s life. Every eye in the place was on us now, and Sally was gazing back defiantly. Around us little brush fires of hostility were breaking out. At the front, Vivian Ludlow had moved to a safer topic, Clea’s delight in Christmas, and I felt myself relax.

  “Remember,” Vivian Ludlow said softly, “how every year as the holidays began, Clea would make each of her friends a gingerbread house, small, perfectly crafted with love, an exquisite work by woman for woman, a reminder throughout that family time that we are family, too.”

  There was sobbing in the room. Beside me, Sally said in disgust, “And all she ever asked in return was that you crawl into the little gingerbread house with her and live happily ever after.”

  “Sal, for God’s sake, shut up,” I whispered. “You’re going to get us lynched.”

  She glared at me, but she lapsed into silence until the pallbearers brought the casket down the aisle. On the way out, the other mourners gave us a wide berth, and as we left the women’s centre and stepped into the brilliant January sunshine, I thought we were home free.

  I was wrong. There was an old bus parked across the street from the centre, and as Sally and I stood on the steps, people began pouring out of it. They knew what they were doing. As they hit the street, a woman gave each of them a sign, and they crossed toward us. The messages on the signs were Biblical, but the selections showed a distinct bias toward Old Testament retribution; verses about sin and punishment and death seemed to be the favourites.

  “The revenge of the Righteous Protester,” Sally said mildly, and she waved to them. They didn’t wave back. Councillor Hank Mewhort was leading them. He was still wearing his “Silver Broom: Saskatoon ‘90” ski jacket, but the old green Hilltops tuque had been replaced by a tweed cap with ear flaps. The hat was an improvement, but the face under it was still smug and mean. He started to say something to Sally, but suddenly his jaw dropped and he fell silent. I turned to see what had stopped him.

  Behind us, the doors of the women’s centre had opened and the pallbearers were bringing out the casket. When I saw them, I knew why Hank Mewhort had frozen in his tracks. The pallbearers had changed their clothing. During the service, they had been wearing street clothes; now they were all in black – combat boots, skintight pants, leather jackets – and they were wearing gorilla masks, big toothy ones, the kind you pull right over your head.

  Beside me, Sally snorted. “Just what this party needed, the Guerrilla Girls.”

  “What?” I said. The world was getting too complex for me.

  “It’s a political thing some women who make art in New York started. I guess these dopey souls think they’re the road company. It’s supposed to be a protest against tokenism and chauvinism and sexism and paternalism – all the isms. It’s ridiculous, but of course Clea thought it was swell.”

  As the Guerrilla Girls loaded the casket into the hearse, Councillor Mewhort’s friends stood dumbstruck. They looked as if they had seen the beast with seven horns and ten heads from Revelation. When the hearse pulled away, the Guerrilla Girls raised their leather-jacketed arms in a solemn salute.

  Beside me Sally said, “Makes you proud to be a woman, doesn’t it?”

  One of the Guerrilla Girls heard her and she gave Sally the finger. Sally went over to her and ripped the mask from her face.

  “I should have guessed you wouldn’t miss out on this one, Anya,” she said. “Look, why don’t you do the art world a favour. Find some nice guy, settle down and forget about painting.”

  One of the other Guerrilla Girls reached toward Sally and shoved her.

  “Cat fight,” yelled Councillor Mewhort from the sidewalk. A Guerrilla Girl ran down the stairs and grabbed him by the collar. Then the fight was on. I didn’t wait to
see who won. It’s hard to care about who wins a fight between moralists who want people to be struck down and feminists who wear animal heads to celebrate womanhood. Hank Mewhort had fallen to the sidewalk, and there were three Guerrilla Girls on top of him. Sally was trying to pull them away when I came up behind her, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her toward College Drive. I thought I heard a man’s voice yell thanks at our retreating backs.

  “Why were you trying to save him?” I asked.

  “Three against one,” said Sally. “Even if you’re an asshole, those aren’t fair odds.”

  I gave her shoulder a squeeze. Then without another word, we walked home.

  The story has an addendum. That night after I’d driven home half of Angus’s basketball team, I dug out my lecture notes for the next day and opened a bottle of Tuborg. Angus was having a shower, and Peter and Christy were downstairs studying. I went into the living room, put on an old recording of Dennis Brain playing the Mozart horn concertos and started to look over my introductory lecture. I had crossed out a couple of references that were no longer current and added a few that were when I heard someone at the front door. I looked out the window and saw Sally’s Porsche at the curb.

  It was a bitter night, and when I opened the door Sally walked past me into the house. She was carrying a packing case.

  “Here,” she said, leaning it against the wall, “this is for you. I’m sorry about this morning. I’m not much good when I feel cornered.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  She grinned. “Right. Anyway, open your present.” I started to wrestle with the box.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. She bent over the box, and with a few strong, sure movements, she had it open and was holding the painting that had been inside.