“Okay,” said Scobie. “So what ‘gravy’ was he talking about then?”
“Honestly, Sarge, I don’t know. He liked a little mystery, Maurice did. But there sure was somethin’ in the air that was going to bring in more money than he gets shovelling coal for the CPR.”
“An inheritance?”
Lulu’s face scrunched. “Doubt it. His family was from Lowertown. Not a pot to piss in between ’em. I figured maybe he noticed something in the pawn shop that was worth a lot more than the listed price. He had an eye for high-end goods. When the claim was up on it, Maurice was going to buy it, then resell it and make a killin’. At least, that’s what I thought.”
Lulu’s lips trembled and she dabbed her eyes, smearing her mascara so widely she looked like a raccoon. A very sad raccoon.
“Was this windfall going to happen soon?” asked Scobie.
“Oh, yeah. Sounded like it was coming up right away.”
“A local event? Going to happen in Ottawa?”
“Far as I know. He didn’t mention goin’ nowheres out o’ town.”
Frances was scribbling on her writing pad, then dashed out and knocked on the door to the interview room. Scobie opened it with a scowl and she passed him a note. When he sat down again across from Lulu, he took a new tack.
“Miss Torrance, some of the materials recovered from Mr. Courchene’s back shed have, shall we say, strategic significance to the war effort. Frankly, I don’t care who stole it. I don’t care how it got into Cat’s shed. I’m not interested in collaring any juvenile delinquents. But it would help us fight the Germans if I knew the joints that the stuff came from.
“Now, I’m willing to pretend that I never heard about these neighbour kids if you could find out the places they hit. That’s all I want. Piece of paper with a few addresses. No names. No questions asked.
“I’m sure you’d like to clear Mr. Courchene’s name. Get me those addresses and I’ll release a statement to the papers stating categorically that Mr. Courchene was brought in by mistake and was completely innocent. Deal? Could you manage that?”
Lulu sat, dazed and hesitant.
“Miss Torrance. I know this is a very difficult time for you. But it’s a difficult time in the war, too. To be helpful, you need to act quickly.” He opened the door for her, and she drifted sadly down the hall, bearing unmarried widowhood like a cross.
When they all returned to Scobie’s office, he lit a cigarette and raised an interrogative eyebrow.
“My call,” said Inspector Hollingsworth, “is that Lulu is on the up and up. Not faking her grief. Doesn’t know any more than she’s telling.”
“I agree,” said Frances. “A woman doesn’t kill her groom six weeks before the big date. She didn’t trip up. Her story was straight and clean.” Frances nodded a kudo to Scobie. “You were gentle with her. I think it’ll pay dividends.”
Scobie’s phone rang and he answered. “Yep. Yep. Nope. Thoughts? Anything else?” The conversation was over in one minute flat.
“Doc Thompson at the morgue. Cat drowned, so he entered the water alive. Contusions on the back of the head could have come from a blunt instrument or the rocks at the foot of the Chaudière Falls.”
“Anything else?”
“His wallet was in his back pocket. Twenty bucks. Not a robbery. Three fingertips on his right hand were scraped raw and he had some wool thread under his fingernails. High-quality cashmere.”
“Cat wouldn’t own a cashmere coat. How about Lulu?”
“Unlikely. You saw the rags she was wearing. Not the cashmere type. But I’ll ask.”
“Any point in arresting these kids on Lulu’s say-so?” asked the inspector. “Haul them in and scare the be-jesus out of them?”
“I’d rather wait to see if Lulu’s persuasive art can get the addresses we’re after.”
“Did you search his house?”
“That’s next. Want a dekko?”
“If we were Boy Scouts,” said Frances, “we’d be getting a badge for this by now.”
Cat Courchene lived in a clapboard row house on Clarence, a back lane over from York Street. The place was small, but surprisingly neat for a bachelor’s lodgings. It was sparsely but functionally furnished. The phone sat on the kitchen table by the back window. There was a full ashtray and a notepad beside it. Scobie squinted at the notepad and turned it to better catch the light. Then he tipped the ashtray onto it and rubbed the ashes gently with his index finger across the notepad. A faint impression left from the ripped-off top page emerged. It looked like “CE 11:30 Eddy Brd.”
“Eddy Brd? Eddy Bridge? Meet ‘CE’ at 11:30 at the Eddy Bridge?” suggested the inspector.
“Well, that narrows things down,” said Scobie. “Only one Eddy Bridge, but there could be a thousand ‘CE’s in Ottawa.”
-23-
Puzzled
All night Frances’s mind fussed in a labyrinth of dead ends. A restless sleep? No rest, no sleep. A restless awake would be more accurate. Finally, she dressed in the dark and trudged through the squeaky snow to the Bank to put coffee on for the Rascals. The empty office, uncharged by clattering typewriters or ringing phones, was often conducive to reflection.
The door to the outer office was open. In the kitchen off the boardroom the coffee percolated, and a plate of fresh muffins sat on the counter. She poured a cup, picked up a muffin and found Brendan in the MBO, working on a jigsaw puzzle.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he replied to her inquiring eyebrow.
“Me neither,” said Frances. “Coffee’s ready. Your muffins?”
“Helped my mother make three dozen for the church bazaar. Arthritis troubles her too much to stir dough. Earned a commission.”
“Very democratic of you to share.”
“Is ‘democratic’ the right adjective?”
“As opposed to?”
“Aren’t socialism and communism the philosophies of communal sharing? What do democracies share beyond the right to elect the wrong government?”
“Too deep for me after no sleep and before coffee.”
“The famed problem-slayer Frances McFadden has been troubled out of a good night’s sleep? You’re supposed to be on holiday, off duty from the problem desk. Drain your brain. Go to mindless movies. Candy for your eyes.”
“At six o’clock in the morning?”
Brendan’s jigsaw puzzle pictured two large man-o’-wars in battle on the high seas. Frances picked up the cover of the box. “A thousand pieces! Where do you even start?”
“Over the years, I have refined the Brendan McGuire Systemic Approach to Decoding Puzzles. Even with a thousand pieces, every piece placed reduces the search field for the next piece. Rule number one: Start with simple. Edge pieces all have one flat side, so it’s a cinch to orient them.”
“But even with the edge done, you still have ninety percent of the pieces left. And all this blue sea and sky.”
“Rule number two: Divide and conquer. Scanning a thousand pieces — examining too many irrelevant clues — wastes time. I move the sky and sea pieces off to the side for later. Narrowing the range quickens the search. In this puzzle, about half the pieces depict man-made items — the ships, the sails, the cannons firing, the flags waving. After I’ve framed the puzzle edge, I cull out all those pieces and build the ships.”
“Okay, but you’ve got two ships under sail.” She picked up a piece of mast. “How do you decide which it belongs to?” “Rule number three: Seek visual clues. The British ship is in the foreground, so is in sharper focus than the French man-o’-war.” He took the piece from her. “Impressionist blur — belongs to the French ship.”
“And how about all the blue in the background?” Frances picked up another piece. “Could be either ocean or sky.”
“Rule number four: Check for context. Although both sky and sea are bluish, they are different shades of blue. I divide them into subsets. And within the subsets, there are whitecaps, sun and shadow on the water, and cloud patterns
in the sky. More subsets. Each division simplifies your search. The sun reflects off the water and makes patterns on the undulating waves. The waves run in neat parallel rows, darker in the shadow of the ships, brighter out in the clear sun.” He examined the piece she held. “Light reflection, dark shadow — water, close to the British ship.”
“Still, these sky pieces are nearly identical.”
“Ah, my dear Watson, ‘nearly identical’ is not identical. In a closed puzzle, every piece has just one home. Rule number five: Precise detail dictates the one true fit.”
“What’s a ‘closed’ puzzle?”
“A puzzle for which there is a single predetermined answer. Every jigsaw puzzle, every crossword puzzle has been created with a defined solution by the puzzle master. Puzzle masters are often playful and will throw ambiguous clues or near-perfect-but-false-fits at you. That’s the challenge.”
Frances’s tired eyes looked unconvinced.
“Think of it as code-breaking. Every puzzle needs to be decoded. Colour and shape are your coding clues. The puzzle creator will try to trip you up. Certain pieces are almost identical in colour, almost identical in shape — a false trail. Colour and shape need to merge for the perfect fit. Also, the picture on the jigsaw box is seldom the exact colour as the actual puzzle. You need to make allowances.”
“What draws you to jigsaws and crossword puzzles?”
“Keeps my pea-brain active.”
“Working at the Bank of Canada doesn’t keep your mind active?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I like working here,” said Brendan. “Who wouldn’t be happy to be involved in fighting the war without carrying a gun? But really, miss, you make all the tough decisions. Solve all the puzzles for us.” He smiled. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“An unarticulated ‘but’ hovers behind your words, Brendan.”
“Well, working here doesn’t engage all the mind of a recreational problem-solver. Crosswords and jigsaw puzzles make up the difference.”
“Have you ever come across puzzles that you couldn’t solve?”
Brendan thought. “One time my little cousin Phoebe was visiting and knocked over a pile of puzzle boxes she was warned not to touch. She shoved the pieces back quickly to avoid being caught, but in her haste she mixed the puzzles up. Then I had sky pieces that didn’t fit in one puzzle, and not enough pieces in the other.”
“I think that’s my problem with this espionage case,” said Frances. “Either pieces are missing or pieces don’t fit. If I get you another coffee, can you help me break the code?”
“What about the Official Secrets Act?”
“I think that military guy was just trying to scare me, but I’ll keep things general just in case.”
Frances brought back coffee and sketched as much as she dared of the narrative to Brendan. He was quiet until she finished. “Phoebe Syndrome. You have pieces of more than one puzzle, and, you don’t have all the pieces to either.”
“That doesn’t help much.”
“Why do you assume that one person was responsible for all three deaths? The poisons are likely linked — same poison — like two edge pieces, but is the drowning?”
“These are all suspicious deaths in a short period of time.”
“Agreed. They may be linked, just keep an open mind about them. Then, you’ve got all these loose ends that don’t seem to link into anything. You need to group them somehow.”
“How?”
“See what fits together and what’s extraneous. How did the forger of the Bank flimsies know about Montague Norman’s dog?”
“He must know Norman or know someone who knows Norman.”
“Right. That will limit your search. Whose cashmere coat threads were stuck under Cat Courchene’s fingernails?”
“Not many people can afford cashmere. The threads must have come from someone well off. True. The search narrows again, although Cashmere Coat may, or may not, know about Montague Norman’s dog. I need more context clues.”
“You’ve got initials in two places. ‘CE’ on the notepad in the Cat’s kitchen, and ‘JRCE’ on the coat in the Ping Pong Club cloakroom.”
“So . . . ?”
“Not identical, but they overlap. Could they refer to the same person? The same subset?
“There’s some Cuban connection at play. Orinoco’s older brother? Batista’s men if Orinoco’s funding dissidents? Or, if he’s cash-poor supporting his sister and stopped sending money to the dissidents, might they have turned on him?”
“So Cuba’s a subset broken into three further subsets?” asked Frances.
“Now you’re getting it. The city of Montreal keeps cropping up. The ‘poison hemlock’ gangster operates there. Gonzalez’s last known contact with Orinoco was from there. Have you considered whether Orinoco passed on his meeting at the Cuban consulate to deal with problems in Montreal, or to avoid problems in Ottawa?”
“True. Señorita Gonzalez was clearly frightened when she had to deal with Señor Rodriguez and Mr. Mofongo. They might have scared Orinoco from coming back here.”
“Finally, this ‘supposedly dead’ guy will need operating funds. Have you checked with the banks about all those accounts in different names? Can you put a stop-payment on them, or have anyone trying to draw cash from them reported to the police?”
A stunned silence.
“Brendan, you’re a genius. Why didn’t I think of any of this?”
“Miss, you’re an exhausted banker needing a holiday. And this stuff is completely unrelated to your area of expertise. Where were Hollingsworth or Scobie or Evans on these ideas? They’re supposed to be the pros. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer if you ask me.”
“I think they’re all overworked dealing with a dozen other emergencies. This little fake memo problem is just a blip in their busy day.”
Chatter announced that Claire and Bridget and Maddie had arrived in the outer office. Brendan went out to offer muffins to all. A phone rang and Maddie spoke for a few seconds before stepping into the MBO. “Governor Towers is on line two from Florida. Want a word?”
Frances did. “Good morning, Governor, how’s the weather at Hobe Sound?”
“Delightful! We can pick fresh oranges and grapefruit right off the trees for breakfast. How are things up north?”
“Mr. Meldrum has the Bank spinning like a top. You’d be proud. He presided over a hugely successful Victory Bond launch last Thursday.”
“Excellent. Any other issues? The prime minister behaving himself?”
“I have him completely under control, just the way we like him. I do have one question. Didn’t you once work in Cuba?”
“I did. Back in the early 1920s. For the Royal Bank.”
“Did you ever run into the Orinoco family there?”
“Not that I recall. That was twenty years ago. The Royal Bank’s current man in Havana, Chris Watts, is up here in Hobe Sound right now. He just stopped in to pick me up for a round of golf. Want to talk with him?”
“If you don’t mind.”
A strong voice with youthful but seasoned vigour picked up the receiver and Frances introduced herself. “Mr. Watts, does the name ‘Orinoco’ mean anything to you?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve met Señor Orinoco at the Havana Club. Kind of a harmless guy with a tobacco plantation. His business is suffering due to the Depression. There are rumours about some friction in his personal life. Wife in seclusion. Daughter in disgrace. Why do you ask?”
“One of the Orinoco twins just died in a ski accident in the Gatineau Hills.”
“Sad, although from what I’ve heard, the older brother Manuel won’t be moved to grief.”
“One final question,” said Frances. “How indulgent is the Batista government of opposition?”
Mr. Watts laughed. “About as indulgent as the Nazis are of us. There are many mysterious disappearances in Havana. Expatriate Cubans suspected of collaboration with government opponents are closely monitored. An ‘expediter team
’ is rumoured to deal with these issues on foreign shores. A Señor Rodriguez and a Mr. Mofongo. Mofongo is an American — well, Puerto Rican — who used to work in an adventure park in Florida, wrestling alligators. Ever wrestled an alligator, Miss McFadden?”
“No,” said Frances. “It wasn’t a prerequisite to getting hired at the Bank of Canada.”
Mr. Watts laughed again. “Well, ’gators are incredibly strong and exceedingly wily. You need to be Superman or insane to try it. Mofongo did two shows a day until a Batista henchman caught his act and hired him to be a ‘roving problem solver,’ so to speak.
“This is all hearsay. I’ve seen him lumbering around Havana a couple of times, although I’ve never heard him speak. He might be a mute. He has a massive upper body and looks to me like he could handle half a dozen alligators at once.”
-24-
Montreal
What cinched the trip to Montreal was Carlos Orinoco’s white Triumph sedan. Scobie’s APB on the stolen car brought a call from the Montreal police. A large hole in the ice off the end of the Redpath wharf in the harbour had been reported. A diver went down and called for a crane with a winch. Up came a white Triumph with an Ontario licence plate registered to Carlos Orinoco of Ottawa. The car contained two bodies, late-middle-aged males, one bald, one with grey hair. Scobie called Hollingsworth and the inspector called Frances. “In addition to the car, Scobie’s also got a positive ID from the Montreal police on the fingerprints of the second poison victim with the head trauma. Montreal small-time hood named Gib Seguin.”
“A lot of loose ends straggle out of Montreal,” said Frances. “Maybe you should go down and nose around.”
“Alone? To the sin city of North America? A guy could get into trouble down there, unless of course, he had a bank clerk to ride shotgun.”
“You’re as bad as Scotty Meldrum. He can’t go anywhere without a sidekick. Needs an audience for his wry humour.”
Carbon Copy Page 16