Murder at the Mendel

by Gail Bowen

  “The colours are lovely,” I said dismissively.

  Gary Ariano said, “Go closer. Get a good look.”

  Up close, the mural glowed with apocalyptic light. Dark storm clouds in the corner menaced the perfect blue of the sky; under the crowds that circled the field where Jesus stood, the earth was cracking open, and arms shaking their fists at God thrust themselves through wounds in the earth.

  “That just about reflects my world view at the moment,” I said.

  “I knew you’d like it,” said Gary Ariano dryly, as we turned and walked out of the chapel and back into the world.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Sally’s funeral was set for Monday afternoon, the first day of the university’s February break. The administration had introduced the break a quarter of a century before because the university had the highest suicide rate in the country. The students still called it Dead Week. The period between Friday night when I walked home through the darkness from my meeting with Father Gary Ariano to the morning of the funeral was a blur for me: arranging for musicians, choosing the proper spray of flowers for the coffin, the right arrangements for the tall copper vases the college chapel provided, talking to Mieka about food for the reception afterwards –busywork, but anything beat thinking about Sally.

  And anything was better than thinking about Izaak Levin. I couldn’t get my mind around the fact that the brilliant man Sally and I had dreamed over that hot, starry summer was a killer. Looking at my reflection in the hall mirror, I saw the same woman I always saw, but I felt like Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive. In desperation, I grabbed my gym bag and went to Maggie’s. The aerobics class was in the same gym Sally and I had been in before Christmas, and she was everywhere in that room for me, face set in concentration, body slick with sweat, invulnerable. Halfway through the workout, I couldn’t take the memories any more, and I ran to the dressing room and wept.

  I talked to Nina many times that weekend but I saw her only once, when Mieka and I went Saturday morning to take Taylor shopping for an outfit she could wear to the services on Monday.

  We pulled up in front of the Lachlans’ at nine o’clock. Stuart met us at the door. He looked, as the Irish say, like a man who has spent the night asleep in his own grave, but he helped Taylor on with her coat and walked us out to the road.

  When he saw Mieka waiting in her car, Stu looked at me. “Haven’t you replaced your car yet, Joanne?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, “there doesn’t seem to have been any time.”

  Stu fumbled in his pocket and produced a set of keys. “Here,” he said, pointing to the two silvery Mercedes in his driveway. “Take one of them. I’m not going anywhere, and even Nina can’t drive them both at once. Jo, she told me you’re handling everything for us. Keep the car as long as you want. Keep it forever.”

  Taylor had already climbed into the front seat of Stuart’s car, so I went to tell Mieka I didn’t need a ride after all. When I slid into the driver’s seat, I smiled at Taylor.

  “Okay, miss, let’s go look at some dresses.” It wasn’t until I pulled into a parking place at the mall that it hit me. For the first time since the accident, I had driven a car again.

  I was still driving the Mercedes when I pulled up in front of St. Thomas More Chapel an hour before Sally’s funeral. I’d come early because I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.

  As I walked into the hushed coolness of the chapel it seemed as if everything was as it should be. A screen was in place to the side of the altar. Hugh Rankin-Carter was giving the eulogy, and he wanted to show some of Sally’s work as he talked about her life. The college’s copper urns had been replaced by two of Nina’s most beautiful lacquerware water jars, and they were filled with orchids. The mass cards with the reproduction of Perfect Circles, Sally’s painting of us that last summer at the lake, were piled neatly on a table by the door. “Je n’ai rien négligé.” Me and Nicolas Poussin.

  During the funeral, my children and I sat under the mural of the prairie Jesus performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He was wearing a white robe, and His arm was raised in benediction. I tried to keep my eyes on that sign of blessing, but I kept seeing other things: Taylor, looking like a Parisian schoolgirl in her black double-breasted coat and beret, pulling back from her father and grandmother as they walked up the centre aisle. Stuart stumbling and Nina reaching to steady him as they took their places in the front pew. Hugh Rankin-Carter at the lectern, unrecognizable for a moment in a dark business suit, his face broken by anguish. Hilda McCourt, back ramrod straight, saying good-bye to another free spirit. And in front of the altar, inescapable, the plain pine box that held all that was left of Sally’s grace and laughter and beauty.

  We had taken two cars to the chapel. Taylor was going to our house with my kids right after the funeral. She said she didn’t want to see them put Sally under the snow. I didn’t, either, but I was an adult; I didn’t have any options.

  As I drove to the cemetery, I was glad to be alone. Nina had asked me to ride with them, but at the funeral Stuart had broken down completely, and I knew if I had to spend any time with him, I’d go over the edge, too.

  Prospect Cemetery was on the river south of the city. The road into it was narrow, overgrown with bushes. In the summer the bushes became a dense and primitive place where city kids would drink beer and make love. But as I looked at that windswept hill, bleak as a moor, it was impossible to believe in a world of pleasure and hot coupling.

  There were only a handful of us at the graveside: Father Ariano, Nina, Stuart, Hugh Rankin-Carter, Hilda McCourt and me. I didn’t react when they lowered Sally’s casket into the ground. I think by then I had entered a place in my mind that was beyond reaction.

  Nina had invited me to come back to their house for a drink. As I pulled onto Spadina Crescent, I wondered if I should have been so quick to say I’d come. I didn’t remember the drive from the cemetery at all, and when I looked at the art gallery I felt a stab of panic. It seemed unfamiliar, changed from the place I knew. Disoriented and frightened, I tried to grasp what was different, and then suddenly I knew.

  The banners were gone. They had taken down the yellow banners that had celebrated Sally’s name against the winter sky since the week before Christmas. In one of her books, Virginia Woolf says something about how we experience the death of someone we love not at their funeral but when we come upon a pair of their old shoes. I hadn’t come upon Sally’s old shoes in the portico of the gallery, but for emotional impact, the missing banners were close enough. I pulled into the parking lot, put my head on the steering wheel and wept.

  On the dashboard in front of me was the mass card from Sally’s funeral. Hugh Rankin-Carter had chosen the epigraph. It was from Jacques Lipchitz, the great sculptor. “All my life as an artist I have asked myself: what pushes me continually to make art. The answer is simple. Art is our unique way of fighting death and achieving immortality. And in this continuity of art, of creation and denial of death, we find God.”

  Tuesday morning was Izaak Levin’s memorial service. I wore the same black wool suit I had worn the day before to Sally’s funeral. Dead Week.

  Izaak’s service was at a small performance studio in the old fine arts building. Whoever had chosen the venue had made a wise choice. Not many people came to say good-bye to a man who was alleged to have killed four people. That morning as I had rummaged through my dresser for a pair of black panty hose, I had come up with a dozen reasons I shouldn’t go.

  A dozen reasons not to, and just one that compelled me to go, but it overrode all the rest. I was there for Sally. I had a sense that she wanted me there, and so I was there.

  Someone had taken pains with Izaak Levin’s memorial service. There was a good jazz quartet playing fifties progressive jazz: “Round Midnight,” “Joyspring” and some tunes I recognized from the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Between numbers, three men who looked like contemporaries of Izaak’s read from his art c
riticism.

  There was no coffin. Izaak Levin had been cremated as soon as the coroner released his body.

  I didn’t know any of the people in that room, but one woman held my attention, mostly, I think, because she seemed like such an unlikely mourner. She was a small, square woman in her sixties, nicely but not fashionably dressed in a royal blue crepe dress. Her jet-black hair was upswept, and her face still had traces of plump prettiness. When the service was over, she shook hands with the musicians and the men who had read. Then she turned and walked toward me.

  As she held out her hand, she smiled.

  “I’m Ellie Levin, Izaak’s sister, and I wanted to thank you for coming.”

  “I’m Joanne Kilbourn,” I said. “I knew your brother many years ago in Toronto and I was a friend of Sally Love’s.”

  She flinched but she looked at me steadily. “I was a friend of Sally’s, too. I didn’t see her often enough, but I loved to be with her. She always made me laugh. She made Izaak laugh, too. He used to say she’d lead him to an early grave, but he worshipped her.”

  Now it was my turn to flinch, but I reached out and touched her hand. “I know he worshipped her,” I said. I grasped for something else to say. “Miss Levin, I’m truly sorry his life ended so unhappily.”

  She covered my hand with her own. “So, do you think he did what they said?”

  The question took me by surprise, and so did my answer.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. They have all that evidence against him, but I just don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t believe it because it’s not true,” she said flatly. “He was my brother for sixty-five years. I knew his limits. He was no killer. He was a gambler, and like a lot of smart people he wasn’t smart about money. You would have been a fool to cosign a loan with him, but killing? Never. Izaak Levin was no killer.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. In the background, I could hear the sounds of the musicians packing up: instrument cases shutting, plans being made for lunch. I wondered if they knew how lucky they were to be part of the normal world.

  For a moment Ellie Levin seemed to be lost in her thoughts. Finally she said, “He was in a lot of trouble when he died.”

  “Money trouble?” I asked.

  “Worse,” she said. “In-over-your-head trouble. It started with money. Before Christmas it was money. He called me Christmas Eve and told me he was seriously in need of cash.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “Do I look crazy? I’m not a wealthy woman, Joanne. All I have is my home and some bonds our parents left me. I’ve always been firm with Izaak about money. I had to be. I was saving for our old age. I always figured somehow we’d end up together at the end of our lives, and I wanted things to be nice.”

  For a moment, I thought she was going to break, but she took a deep breath and went on.

  “I talked to him two more times before … before the end. It was after New Year’s Day, but I don’t remember the days. Who remembers days when it’s just ordinary life going on? Anyway, the first time, Izaak was on top of the world. ‘No more money worries. I’ll be your banker from now on, Ellie.’ That’s what he said. Of course, I tried to get him to tell me the particulars, but he just laughed.

  “He wasn’t laughing the last time he called. He sounded screwed up tight and frightened. This time when he wouldn’t tell me what was going on, I didn’t take no for an answer. I kept at him. I badgered him until finally he hung up on me. But I didn’t give up even then. I phoned him back. He sounded so tired it broke my heart, but I was scared, too. I pleaded with him. I told him I’d keep calling him until he confided in me. Finally, he said, ‘You always were persistent. But you know, sometimes it’s safer not to know. I found out something I wasn’t supposed to know, and now I’m out past Jackson’s Point, Ellie. I’m way past Jackson’s Point.’ ” She looked at me, waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “It was a place we weren’t supposed to swim past when we were kids. Every summer there were stories about kids who swam past Jackson’s Point and got caught in the weeds and were never seen again. Anyway, for Izaak and me, Jackson’s Point became a way of saying we were in over our heads.” Suddenly her eyes were filled with tears. “So I should have listened, right? Miss Practical saving for the future while the weeds are pulling my brother under.”

  “Have you told the police this?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “they were very patient. They heard me out and they asked me if I thought Izaak was involved in blackmail. When I said that’s exactly what I was afraid of, they pounced. All the more proof of his guilt, they said. If Izaak knew he was going to be exposed, he might have killed Sally so she’d never know what he’d done.” She looked directly at me, and there was a flash in her eyes that was very like her brother’s. When she spoke again, her tone was like his, too: sardonic, mocking. “So,” she said, “does that make sense to you? To kill someone you love so they won’t think less of you?”

  Her question was still in my ears as I walked across the snowy lawn in front of the fine arts building. There were other questions, too. If there was blackmail, who had been the target? Stuart Lachlan? If Stuart was the one, what was he being blackmailed about? How was Clea Poole involved? She and Izaak had little use for one another. Sally had told me that, but they both loved Sally. Had they discovered something condemning about Stuart Lachlan and decided … Decided what? And the one question that suddenly loomed over everything. If Izaak hadn’t committed the murders who had? Who had killed Sally Love?

  As I turned onto the street where I’d parked, my head was pounding. I was tired. I couldn’t seem to work out any of the permutations and combinations, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to go home and stand under the shower until all the horrors were washed away.

  But the horrors were just beginning.

  There was a traffic ticket on the window of the Mercedes. Except when I got closer I saw that it wasn’t a traffic ticket.

  It was an envelope, square, creamy, good quality. I opened it. Inside on a square of matching paper a message was printed in careful block letters: I SAW YOU KILL SALLY LOVE.

  My first thought was that the note was some kind of bizarre sendoff for Izaak. But Izaak was dead. Twenty minutes earlier, the small mahogany box that held his earthly remains had been sitting on a table in the fine arts building. He was beyond messages. And the envelope hadn’t been delivered to the funeral. It had been stuck on the windshield of my car.

  Except it wasn’t my car. The silvery Mercedes with the characteristic ARTS licence plate didn’t belong to me. It belonged to Stuart Lachlan. The accusation of murder hadn’t been directed at me; it was directed at Stuart Lachlan. I got into the car. My hands were shaking so badly I had trouble getting the key in the ignition.

  I started to drive to Spadina Crescent. Then I thought about the nature of my evidence: an anonymous letter, a sister’s belief that someone other than her brother was a killer. Why was I so ready to believe Stuart Lachlan was capable of murder? We had never been close, but I had liked him well enough. I’d been a guest in his home. I was his dead wife’s oldest friend.

  Things had gone very wrong for Stuart in the past months. There was no denying that, but Stu was a civilized man, and civilized people don’t commit murder when things go wrong. As I turned onto my street, I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t jeopardized my relationship with Stu and Taylor by levelling hysterical accusations at him. I’d always considered my two best qualities loyalty and common sense and I didn’t seem to be exhibiting either. What I needed was rest and a chance to put things like an anonymous accusation into perspective.

  Angus was running out the front door when I got home. “I left you a note. James asked me to sleep over. His parents are taking us to the Globetrotters and his mom says it’ll be late so if it’s okay with you I’ll stay there. I know it’s a school night, but I thought maybe for the Globetrotters, you
could bend your rules.”

  I was glad to see him excited about something again. “For the Globetrotters, I’ll bend,” I said. “Have you got money?”

  “Their treat,” he said happily. “Thanks, Mum. I’ll get my stuff after school.”

  “If I don’t connect with you then, have a good time.”

  “Right,” he said as he kissed the air near my face and ran out the door. He was back in a second.

  “You’ll be all right alone, won’t you?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “It’s all over, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s all over.”

  “It’s all over,” I repeated, as I stepped under the shower. But in my bones I knew that it wasn’t over, and I was filled with apprehension.

  It was when I was zipping my blue jeans that I remembered the package Sally Love had left at my house the night we came back from skiing at Greenwater. “My insurance policy,” she’d called it. “If you lose it, I’m dead. And don’t get curious.”

  Well, I hadn’t lost it, but suddenly I was curious. The myth of Pandora’s box didn’t scare me. I couldn’t imagine loosing any more evils on mankind than the horrors we’d already seen. I pulled on the sweater Nina had given me for Christmas. The pattern was an elaborate and brilliant patchwork of colours. Nina said it had taken her most of the month of November to finish it. Just putting it on made me feel close to her.

  The package wrapped in brown paper was right where I had left it, in my sewing basket. I tore the wrapping off and found a videotape.

  “Surprises,” I said as I walked down the hall to our family room. Young Frankenstein was in the VCR. Angus and I had watched it together the night before. I pushed eject, then I put in Sally’s tape, sat back in the rocking chair and watched.

  For the first seconds I thought that somehow I’d erased the tape. The screen was filled with grey static, but then I saw a long shot of Stuart Lachlan’s house. There was no sound, and the quality of the video wasn’t very good. There was a close-up of Taylor’s family of snow people, the father, the mother and the little snow girl with her sign – “Merry Christmas from Taylor.” Home movies. The camera lingered a little on the snow people and then it moved down the flagstone walk past the stand of pine trees at the corner of the house and around to the backyard. Somehow the movement seemed purposeful, as if the person behind the camera had a plan in mind. There was a quick establishing shot of the backyard and then we were looking through a window. I recognized the room immediately. There was a wall of books and family pictures, a cabinet filled with Royal Doulton figurines and, over the mantel of the fireplace, a portrait of Sally and Taylor. The room was Stuart Lachlan’s study at the back of the house.