Fit to Die

by Joan Boswell

  We spent most of the twenty-two minutes talking Scrabble. I discoursed on the delights of playing against a computer, but Mrs. D. wouldn’t take the hint; she wanted a Scrabble date. She preferred afternoons, and I being a self-(i.e. rarely) employed librarian, could have said yes. But I like afternoons for the web, since it’s slow in the evenings, so I lied about wanting to be home should a client call. We decided on Tuesday because it’s a lousy TV night.

  Mrs. D. proved an excellent opponent—better, in some ways, than my computer version, whose sound and graphics lacked the charm of her wit and hospitality. Despite the heavy old furniture, her apartment was bright and airy—a nice change from my Goodwill-eclectic pit. At first I went easy on her, but when she played mangabey and flitch back to back, the kid gloves came off.

  That last Tuesday, she was distracted. Didn’t bat an eye when I put enquirer on a triple word. During the four months we’d played, we’d rarely gotten personal, so I didn’t ask what was wrong. She gave me the envelope as I was leaving, and I said “sure” without comment. Then, on Thursday, I met the super in the garbage room and he told me she’d died. “Damn!” I said, somehow resentful she hadn’t consulted me. Then, “Who’s going to look after her bird?”

  He shrugged. “She was your friend,” he accused.

  Acquaintance, I corrected silently. But she had a couple of my books, as well as a key to my flat, as I had to hers, in case one of us locked herself out. “One of her relatives might take him. If she has any,” I said to a face neither hopeful nor helpful. “If he doesn’t starve to death first.”

  “Well…” He went back to emptying the blue box. He wasn’t going to do anything for a tenant who couldn’t tip.

  I returned to my flat thinking I’d better retrieve my books before they got packed with whatever her next of kin would be taking. I could feed the bird at the same time.

  • • •

  The super hadn’t told me about the police tape. I debated crawling under it, but that wouldn’t tell me why it was there. So I called Bernie, the only cop I knew and the man who was likely handling the case, and for a change didn’t have to leave a message.

  “It’s just a formality,” he explained. “I’m sure it was natural causes.”

  The paper boy had found her that morning. When she hadn’t responded to his knock as usual, he’d tried the knob. Bernie’s scenario was that Mrs. D. had fallen, as old ladies are wont to do, and hit her head on the cast-iron radiator.

  “C’mon,” I said. “There’s nothing by the radiator she could trip over.”

  “At that age, you don’t need anything. A dizzy spell, your knee buckles. She wore orthopedic shoes.”

  “So? She was healthy as a horse. She used to take the stairs for exercise.”

  “Yeah, but at that age. We see it all the time, Annie. Old people. Weak bones.”

  “So you’re going to save money on an autopsy by chalking her up to statistical probability?”

  “No, we’re waiting on the autopsy. She isn’t high priority.”

  Alone people never are, I thought.

  “Actually, you might be able to help,” Bernie said. “You ever been in her apartment?”

  “Plenty of times.”

  “Good. Her door was probably unlocked all night. Get the superintendent to let you in and see if anyone took advantage.”

  “Me? Didn’t she have one of those ‘in case of emergency phone so-and-so’ numbers?”

  “You tell me. Apparently she’s got a son someplace, but we haven’t tracked him down yet.”

  “She never mentioned him.” An estranged son wouldn’t know if anything was missing anyway. Was I really the only person close enough to her to know? I told him I already had a key and asked if it was okay to touch stuff.

  “We don’t put tape up for decoration,” Bernie said. But despite the possibility of theft, he was in no hurry to send in the forensic team. “She was old, Annie,” he reminded me.

  “What are you saying, Bernie? That she was senile? Because she wasn’t. She beat me at Scrabble all the time.”

  “She was eighty-two.”

  That surprised me. “So what?”

  “You sound like you’d rather she was murdered.”

  I just didn’t want her dismissed. “She wasn’t a dotty old lady,” I said.

  Bernie paused to grind his teeth or something, then said, “Take a look around, don’t touch anything. And don’t break the tape,” he warned before hanging up.

  Bernie and I had met during the investigation of my nephew Ivor’s murder, which got me more involved with family affairs than I’d been in decades. We aren’t friends, but he finds my thought patterns useful on occasion. He says my brain’s wired differently, so I make connections he wouldn’t. I once told him it’s an occupational hazard of subject indexers, but only once. I don’t want him calling the National Library when he needs a consultant.

  I hadn’t told Bernie about the envelope; it must have Freudian-slipped my mind. I hadn’t even opened it, as if that act would make her death more real, even though—or because—I was pretty sure this is what she’d mean by “in case.”

  Because Mrs. D.’s newest piece of furniture dated from around 1952, her flat looked like a scene from a PBS Mystery! My eyes zoomed in on the chalk outline under the window opposite her front door, travelled to the big bloodstain by the head, then panned up to the red smear on the radiator. There was nothing in the area she could have tripped over or stumbled against—unless you count sixty-inch shears a hazardous product.

  The place definitely looked different, and it wasn’t just poor Bijou huddled silent in his cage like a street person in a doorway. The middle cushion of the sofa had a dent in it, something I’d only ever seen after having sat there myself. The doily on the back of the wing chair was off kilter, and the cut-glass ashtray wasn’t quite centred on the coffee table. I bet myself that, because of cutbacks, Bernie wouldn’t dust for fingerprints unless he had good reason to.

  Hands in the back pockets of my jeans to avoid inadvertently touching anything, I went up to the birdcage and said, “Hi, Bijou.” He looked at me with a baleful black eye. “Guess you miss your mom, huh?” He responded with a slow blink. The cage was uncharacteristically messy, as was the area of carpet it stood on—chaff and gravel and feathers all over the place. Something like my apartment, although not so cramped and literally shittier. The food and water containers were the kind with long tubes that you filled from the top, and my conscience eased when I saw they were far from empty.

  I scanned the room from this angle. Bijou’s cage stood about three feet behind the wing chair, and three feet in front of and to the side of the window over the radiator. I tested the distance. Mrs. D. might have stumbled on her way to talk to the bird, but she couldn’t have hit the radiator. In the light coming from the window, I could see smears in the ashtray, as if it hadn’t been properly wiped. Maybe Mrs. D. made an extra effort when she expected company, but that didn’t sound like her. She’d struck me as the kind of person who ironed nightgowns.

  Bijou hopped off his perch for a snack, and I noticed his water cup had things in it I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, identify. On the assumption the cops would skip dusting the birdcage, I removed the container to clean it, but in the kitchen, the gleaming sink and counter tops needed protection. On TV the cops always use a handkerchief; I figured the kitchen towel would do.

  There was no kitchen towel.

  In the bathroom, there was no bathroom towel.

  Who steals towels?

  • • •

  “Not everybody ties them through the fridge door handle,” Bernie told me when I called him. I hadn’t realized he’d taken in so much of my flat the couple of times he’d been here.

  “She had one with roses on it that was strictly decorative,” I told him back. “Even that’s gone.” I’d confirmed that after I returned to Mrs. D.’s apartment, having cleaned and filled Bijou’s water container at my place.

&
nbsp; Bernie mulled that over a moment. “Nothing else missing?”

  “Hard to say, since I couldn’t touch the doors and drawers. But she must have had a visitor.” I told him what I’d spotted. “Unless your people sat on the sofa or used the ashtray.”

  “Or she did.” He sounded insulted.

  “You didn’t know Mrs. DesRochers.”

  Bernie sighed like he would have to pay for the manpower personally and told me the forensic guys would be finished by the evening at the latest.

  With nothing else to do, I got on the web and looked up the care and feeding of budgies, and picked up a couple of Scrabble words in the process: cere and lutino. Then I looked up Scrabble and found a site where I could play by e-mail; but it cost money, and I wasn’t all that sure a remote human would prove a better substitute for Mrs. D. than my computer game.

  • • •

  When you’re self-unemployed, time management consists of choosing between what you ought to do and what you want to do. That Friday, I still hadn’t checked to see if anything besides the towels were missing and, because budgies.org said to change the water every day, what I wanted to do was assuage my guilt. So I trekked back up to Mrs. D.’s.

  About the only thing not covered in fingerprint dust was Bijou; Mrs. D. would have been horrified. It made the apartment eerily different, like a familiar place in a dream. I concentrated on the cage, the only thing seemingly unchanged by the invasion. Poor tyke looked lonely. My mother used to leave the radio on for the cat, so I hunted around for a radio.

  I’d never been in Mrs. D.’s bedroom and halted at the door with a creepy feeling that my nose would end up where she wouldn’t have wanted it poked. But, really, I was doing her a favour looking after Bijou like this. I told myself that twice before I went in.

  A television and VCR sat atop a satinwood dresser that faced the candlewick-covered bed. She’d put masking tape over the VCR’s display panel. I lifted it off. 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00. I stuck the tape back down and thought she’d carried independence a tad too far by not asking me to help her set it.

  No radio here. The kitchen? I was crossing the living room to get there when I heard the snick of a key in the lock.

  The man who walked in looked even more startled than I must have. Another expression flicked across his face, too quickly for me to make out, and then he smiled like a shoe salesman. “I’ll assume you have a right to be here,” he said, the way shoe salesmen say “Can I help you?”

  He was tall and good-looking in an overly careful way. His navy blue trench coat, beige slacks and oxblood loafers were all top-of-the-line Wal-Mart. As I studied his pale face, trying to decide if his hair were natural or Grecian Formula, I recognized the eyes and forehead. “You must be Mrs. DesRochers’ son,” I said.

  He looked annoyed that I’d guessed his secret but nodded affirmation. “And you?”

  “Just a neighbour. I’m looking after Bijou until someone claims him.”

  I made purposeful, kootchey-coo sounds to the bird, trying to say “Aren’t you a little late to finally visit your mother?” with my body language.

  He got some kind of message, because he stood there awkwardly while I pointedly ran my finger through the featureless patina of fingerprint dust on the coffee table, tsking for the shame of how this well-preserved furniture had suffered at the hands of heartless cops. He lit a cigarette without offering me one, took a deep drag, then came up with an explanation for his presence. “I’ve, ah, come to collect some papers.”

  Lucky I wasn’t facing him full on, because an image of that lavender envelope popped behind my eyes, making them blink. “Be my guest,” I said to him sideways.

  He pulled open some drawers but without much conviction. I knew he wanted me to leave, which is why I took my time. Finally, he ran out of patience. “She must have thrown them out,” he announced, slamming the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

  “What, in particular, were you looking for?” I asked sweetly. “Maybe she mentioned it to me.”

  “Oh, just some papers. Legal stuff…”

  Not a man who thought fast on his feet. How hard would it be to rattle him? “Your mother never spoke about you, you know.”

  He knew. “We didn’t get along,” he said as if that explained everything. “She ever talk to you about where she kept important stuff?”

  “Bijou was pretty important to her,” I said, hoping to lay a little guilt on him. “Will you be taking him with you?”

  “I got no place to keep a bird. Why don’t you just flush him?”

  Did the Humane Society have a Most Wanted list? “You know the police are looking for you?”

  A moment’s panic in his eyes, then, “Why?”

  “To tell you your mother’s dead, I guess.”

  “Oh. Ah, they already told me that.”

  “Good,” I nodded. Why hadn’t Bernie mentioned it? “I guess you got the key from them?”

  “Yeah.”

  I had no idea where Mrs. D. normally kept her house keys. Nor did I know why I was so sure this man wasn’t honest. I think it was his grooming. I’ve never trusted guys who look like catalogue models.

  “Well,” he said, hands in his trench coat pockets, “I guess I’ll have to see about getting this stuff cleared out.”

  By way of answer, I held up my fingerprint-dust schmutzed hands and then headed for the bathroom to wash them. Maybe this sleaze was his mother’s rightful heir, but I hated the idea of his having charge of things she cherished.

  When I got back to the living room, he was gone.

  • • •

  “He’s a slimeball,” I told Bernie next morning after he confirmed the guy had gotten the keys from the cops just before he’d walked in on me. Police HQ is only a ten-minute stroll away.

  “What did he do to you?” he asked, sounding worried.

  I gave him a blow-by-blow account of my meeting with the slimeball, and in return Bernie told me his first name was François, commonly known as Frank, and he had done time for pimping and drug dealing, which explained why Mrs. D. never talked about him. He lived in Hamilton and had been home when the cops called about his mother.

  “It doesn’t take long to get from Ottawa to Hamilton,” I said. “He could have killed her and driven all night to get back.”

  “We don’t know that she was killed.”

  “What about the autopsy?”

  “She had a bruise on her upper left arm.”

  “There you go,” I said. “Someone hit her.”

  “Old people bruise easy, she could have bumped into something.”

  “How was her brain, Bernie?”

  The preliminary autopsy confirmed that Mrs. D. wasn’t a stumbling, senile wreck. Bernie gave me the details with gruesome minuteness. He didn’t usually keep me that informed, so I figured it was his way of saying I was right. As a quid pro quo, I told him about the envelope.

  He mumbled something that could have been merde. “What’s in it?”

  The lavender sheet lay face up on the sofa cushion beside me, the single, fountain pen-written paragraph framed by the date and the signature. “It’s dated Tuesday, and she leaves fifty-three thousand, one hundred and thirty-three dollars and seventy-two cents to Guide Dogs for the Blind.” She used to cut the stamps off envelopes for them, too. “And a thousand to me, and the contents of her apartment to the Salvation Army.”

  Bernie didn’t say anything for a moment, then: “You know where she’d come up with a figure like that?”

  “Her bank account?”

  “She was getting the Old Age supplement.”

  That didn’t mean anything. I knew people working three jobs who collected EI.

  “I wouldn’t count on spending any of that thousand,” Bernie warned me.

  “It’s handwritten, a valid will.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “She wasn’t senile,” I said, real slow.

  “Okay. By the way, did she have a cleaning lady?”<
br />
  “She never said anything about one.”

  He had a hard time believing a woman of Mrs. D.’s age could keep an apartment that clean. “She must have spent all her time polishing.”

  All those evenly coated surfaces came back to me. “Are you saying there were fewer fingerprints than you’d expected?”

  That’s just what he was saying, and we argued some more about Mrs. D.’s ability to look after herself and her home.

  “Her place was always immaculate,” I said, as if her standards were normal. “I mean, she wasn’t anal about it, but she didn’t have a heck of a lot else to do.”

  “Gee, I didn’t know you were so busy,” Bernie wisecracked. I definitely had to keep that man out of my kitchen.

  “If he knew about the money, he could have killed her so he could inherit it,” I said.

  “She could’ve just fallen, Annie.”

  “But not from a brain seizure or anything?”

  “No.” Bernie knew he’d upset me and gracefully changed the subject by asking me to drop off the will.

  I looked at the lavender paper again. She’d signed it Léonie DesRochers (Mrs.). Until I’d opened it, I hadn’t even known her first name. Léonie, the acute accent a bold stroke, almost a tick. She’d probably been born Francophone. I admired her Scrabble prowess even more. “He’s a slimeball,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “Yeah. Annie, if you see him again, just walk away. And call me.” He gave me his home phone number. I felt like I’d been promoted.

  • • •

  Bernie’s shot at my housekeeping skills hadn’t bothered me, much. But I got to thinking about myself at Mrs. D.’s age. Would I end up one of those crones with six cats? (Highly improbable.) Blue hair? (Almost impossible.) In an apartment crammed with odd bits of my life? (Very likely.) So maybe I should clean up. Right. As soon as I did more important things, like…