Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  “Book?” Leo’s eyes strayed to a story on The Fury, the city’s doomed soccer team.

  “A Taste of Winnipeg.”

  “Oh, right. That thing.” Leo looked up to see a flash of annoyance in Roger’s face. He had a large head but small features, which always made Leo think of creases made by a balloon artist. “Sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “I didn’t mean to sound dismissive.”

  Roger pushed a hand through an abundant head of hair. His white forelock, an eccentric feature, flopped back. “I didn’t think you were,” he drawled. “I was just thinking about the delays.”

  “Eve fussing.” Leo laughed, referring to Axel’s wife, a graphic designer. Axel had actually had to fire his wife as art director of Winnipeg Life after the first issue came out. She was good, but she was slow.

  “Bunny says she’s left town.”

  “Not again.”

  “And then there was Michael spending the summer in Europe.”

  “Which—what?—delayed some of the photography?”

  “Somewhat.” Roger selected a letter at random and began tearing at it with his thumb. “Though he’d pretty well caught up. Been working like a Trojan the last few weeks. There’s still a couple of restaurants left, though. Bunny will probably have to hire someone.”

  “I suppose Michael had been doing the food photography gratis.”

  “Of course.” Roger pulled a sheet of flower-embossed notepaper from the envelope. “Except for Eve, it’s pretty much all volunteer labour,” he continued, his eyes running over the script that Leo could see from his vantage was spidery in the extreme. “Which is part of the problem. Volunteers aren’t always as dependable. Bunny had scheduled a sort of gang edit of some of the page proofs last Saturday afternoon and a number of people never showed. Oh lord,” he sighed, replacing the letter in its envelope, “another old dear burning to see her family recipe for fudge in print.”

  “Her chances?”

  “Slim, indeed.” He glanced up then said under his breath, “I think Ray’s slithering in this direction.” Roger scooped up his pile of correspondence. “I’ll leave you to him.”

  Leo debated whether to pick up the phone to return Axel’s call and annoy Ray by keeping him waiting, but there was a humourless gleam in his eye that made him hesitate. Really, slither wasn’t the right word. Alcock approached not like a snake, but like a rooster. He was Napoleonic in height, Anglo-Saxon in ancestry, and bare-knuckles in temperament. Leo’s take on this was Hobbesian: he was nasty, British, and short.

  “You’re now on general assignment,” Alcock barked, interposing himself between Leo and Julie Olsen, who quickly adjusted her chair. A sour odour wafted from him.

  “What?” Leo recoiled slightly. “Why?”

  “Because I say so.”

  “Sieg Heil.”

  The mapwork of tiny veins that played along Ray’s nose and cheeks glowed. “Watch it, Fabian. You haven’t got anyone to protect you this time.”

  Leo stared at him. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Ray’s eyes narrowed. “Michael Rossiter is dead.”

  “I know. I was there.”

  “So I understand.”

  Leo folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, once more from the top: What are you talking about?”

  Ray turned to Julie. “Sweetheart, would you get me a coffee from downstairs?” Something from his pocket was pressed into her hand. Leo leaned forward to see Julie’s angry frown. “There’s a good girl.”

  Ray swivelled back, oblivious. Julie rose. She was a head taller than Ray and cartoon steam was coming out of her ears.

  “And I’ll need the change from that loonie, too, darlin’,” he added without looking at her as she stomped off. “Thanks, luv.”

  Leo imagined a periwig instead of the comb-over. Alcock: a figure of the Enlightenment. Nope. Never. For his very first assignment at the Citizen, Alcock had fixed him with a humourless stare and told him to phone Buckingham Palace and ask what they thought about a Jew being appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba. Leo had countered by suggesting Ray insert something large and uncomfortable up his ass. As ever, the relationship between a reporter and an editor was antipathy, suspicion, and mutual lack of respect.

  “I’m saying, Fabian, that you no longer have a guardian angel.”

  “I wasn’t aware I ever had one. Have you found Christ now that Harry Mack owns this paper?”

  Ray perched on the edge of his desk. His voice dropped. “Who the hell do you think pulled your nuts out of the fire last spring?”

  “Ray, if you look hard, you’ll see a question mark hovering over my head.”

  “Clark wanted your head on a platter after you punched him.” They both glanced across the newsroom at Guy, his angry face framed in the dull haze of the room’s only window. He was making a great show of ripping page after page of the Go! section, rolling them into balls, and stuffing them into an adjacent garbage can.

  “Probably found a typo,” Leo commented. “Anyway…?”

  “Anyway, Michael interceded.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Ray cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well, I didn’t!” Leo shook his head as if to reorder his brain cells. “I didn’t ask him. I hardly knew the guy, for god’s sake. And besides, what sort of influence would he have anyway? This rag doesn’t belong to the Rossiters anymore.”

  “Bunny Kingdon is his mother’s sister. Martin is his uncle.”

  “I know. But does this mean he micro-manages the horseshit that goes on in this place?”

  Ray grunted. “How do you think little Miss Merritt got her job here?”

  “Okay, using your influence to get your sister a job. No biggie. Besides, she worked in New York, in fashion. I mean, Jesus, you just have to look at her.”

  Ray grinned his canine grin, a blaze of white teeth in a blood-infused face. “But she can’t put a sentence together, Fabian. The boys on the rim tear their hair out when they get her copy. Fashion isn’t their strong suit.”

  Leo glanced toward the semi-circular desk at the front of the room. Uninterested in clothes as he was, he couldn’t envision a more unfashionable collection of men and women.

  “Still…” Leo was nonplussed. “How do you know this anyway?”

  “I was in Martin’s outer office when Clark was having his shitfit. He has what we call in Blighty a carrying voice.”

  “But how do you know about Michael’s role?”

  “Let’s just say his name came up.” He patted his comb-over. “All in the family, I guess. Michael using his influence with his uncle.”

  Leo was about to pick up on this, but Clark suddenly broke through the newsroom drone by shrieking Liz’s name. Leo watched her square her shoulders and take her time lighting a fresh cigarette before rising and making her way through the sea of battered desks.

  “See what I mean by a carrying voice?” Alcock pulled a penknife from his pocket and began digging dirt from his nails. “Anyway, as I was saying, you’re off the police beat and on general assignment.”

  “Finally, after four months back on this dumb beat, there’s a good story, and you take me off it.”

  “Not my idea.”

  “Whose then?”

  “Martin, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “Fuck this. I’m going to have a word with him.” Leo started to rise.

  Alcock pushed him back into the chair. “Give it up. He’s at St. George’s playing golf with Harry Mack.”

  “Christian nutbar freakazoids play golf?”

  “They’re playing Christian nutbar freakazoid golf, I guess. Martin has some serious arse-kissing to do if he’s going to get the publisher’s chair he’s been drooling over since Tom Rossiter popped his clogs way back when.”

  “Then I’ll go to St. George’s.”

  “The sign at the entrance says ‘No Blacks, No Jews, No Riffraff.’ I th
ink you qualify under the final category.” Alcock blew some dirt off the penknife onto the floor. “Look, how about you do the follow-up on the North End murder?”

  “Psychopath eviscerates wife? Is there much more to say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You could always do the old bit with the neighbours saying, ‘but he seemed so normal.’”

  Leo flipped to page one. “‘I always thought he was disturbed,’ said Lenore Rebrinsky, his next-door-neighbour. ‘He liked to weed his garden naked.’” He looked at the city editor. “Don’t you read your own paper?”

  Alcock shrugged. “I’m throwing you a bone, Fabian. Take it.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Are you defying me?”

  “Trying my best.”

  Alcock tapped the penknife against the desktop. “Christ, what does it matter? Look, keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll sort it out with Martin. Pretend I misheard. But you won’t have a byline in the meantime.”

  “I don’t care. It’s not like I haven’t seen my name in print before.”

  “Well, you’ve got about twenty minutes to get to the cop shop for the news conference.”

  As Leo looked up at the clock, something flew past his head, hit the wall, and clattered to the floor by Alcock’s feet. Looking down, Leo noted a ballpoint pen, one of the promotional items from last fall’s failed outreach to the youth market. “Pop A Zit,” it said. At his desk, Guy Clark was snapping pencil after pencil, the tiny cracking noises rising above the newsroom hum like footfalls in a dry forest. His narrow face, a purple streak under a lock of dirty-blonde hair, leaned across a desk covered with a heavily blue-pencilled copy of the morning edition. He appeared to be hissing something at Liz, who sat in front of his desk, coolly smoking a cigarette, watching him remove each pencil from a CBC Information Radio souvenir coffee mug. The hiss grew louder as the newsroom fell to a hush, people straining to catch the essence of this latest fit.

  “You spread a lie like that around and, believe me, I’ll get you.” Guy’s words grew to a shriek.

  Liz opened her mouth as if to respond, but instead a series of perfectly executed smoke rings poured forth and floated into Guy’s face. She then rose and opened her mouth again, but the words, not smoke, poured forth. Unfortunately, they were drowned by the sound of one Guy coughing.

  10

  Connect the Dots

  The plump woman patted the back of her head to judge the state of her French roll (intact), readjusted the bifocals on the bridge of her nose, then dropped her fingers to caress the keys of her Selectrix. Father Day kept leaving brochures for computers on her desk and extolling the virtues of peecees and apples or some such names, but she had dug in her heels. Computers crashed, she had heard. Typewriters did not. She would not be dictated to by some machine with a mind of its own. She was rehearsing the very speech when the two young women slipped into the outer office. The red-haired one was clearly Michael Rossiter’s sister. Something about the eyes, their animation as much as their shape. But who was the other, with the dark angry eyes and the serious brow? Of course, Father Day hadn’t bothered to introduce them. Oh, how she missed Father Saunders, who had retired in the spring. Such a gentleman. But these young priests…!

  She had asked twice if Stevie would like a cup of coffee, but had received no response. She had tried penetrating the brain of the visitor with the same laser gaze she sometimes applied to the back of Father Day’s head, but that didn’t work either. Undoubtedly the magazine she had on her lap was just all too absorbing.

  But Stevie wasn’t remotely interested in Winnipeg Life. She had plucked it from a pile without thinking, the way she would in a dentist’s or doctor’s office, and had begun turning the pages. But the words and pictures blurred.

  She had expected she would join Merritt in Father Day’s office. She had found herself almost craving it—the ritual of kind words delivered by an understanding cleric. Weren’t they supposed to have a handle on the big issues? But the priest had come briskly through the door at the secretary’s summons, his face under the clerical collar raw and red as if windburned, his eyes inscrutable behind round glasses that turned to silver disks as they caught the morning light streaming through the church office window. The phrasing of his condolences was as economical as his movements, and after introductions in which he’d ascertained Stevie’s status as a non-relative, he’d ushered Merritt back through the door to his office, and closed the door. But Stevie had had a moment to see his eyes behind the lenses as his face turned sharply from one to the other. They were small and shrewd and she had felt somehow in that moment she had been unfairly judged. It only made her feel more like a fish out of water. Candle wax, floor polish, the crucifix on the wall behind the secretary’s head complete with writhing corpus. She had turned to sit in one of the chairs, found it unforgivably hard, and sorted through a pile of religious magazines until she found something secular and readable. But it was five months old, with an unpromising cover story about downtown redevelopment—Can Galleries Portáge Save Downtown?—and soon her mind flew to the events of the morning.

  When she’d awoken, she’d found her mother perched on the edge of her bed. Which was odd.

  “Mom?” She’d rubbed her eyes in the semidarkness.

  “Oh, my poor Stevie!”

  Then she’d remembered. The fog of sleep dissolved. “Oh!” A tiny cry lodged in her throat. She sat up. Her mother enveloped her in a hug. A memory of damp leather blunted the fragrance of her mother’s Opium. She pushed Leo from her mind.

  “I can’t believe this has happened, my poor—”

  And so it had gone. Hugging. Weeping. Counselling. This was Kathleen Lord, who had earned her therapy chops in California, no less. Her father had heard the news on CBC. He’d alerted his wife. They decided to let Stevie sleep. (They? Stevie imagined her father had tied her mother to her chair to keep her from barging in.) Her father left for the hospital and Kathleen, honouring her promise, had beetled over to Merritt’s instead. Hugging. Counselling. No weeping. (“She has it bottled up.”) Organizing—funeral, reception. Luckily Father Day phoned, so that was the church figured out. She was going to drive Merritt to St. Giles’ in an hour.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Stevie interjected.

  “You should rest.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake.” Stevie swung her legs over the bed and was immediately smacked with a bout of dizziness.

  “I told you.”

  Stevie rose tentatively and reached for her robe at the foot of the bed. Pushing her arm through the sleeve kindled the memory of another garment whose sleeve she had recently occupied. Another memory of the previous evening. She contemplated her mother, who was busy smoothing the duvet.

  “Mom—”

  “Mmm?”

  “Have you talked with Aunt Paul lately? Or had a letter?”

  “Why are you asking that?” Kathleen stopped in her tidying.

  “Can you just the answer the question?”

  “I haven’t talked to her since last month. Her birthday. Didn’t I tell you? Pauline and George have decided to sell the house in Ten Hills and get something smaller somewhere else in Baltimore—a condo.”

  “I guess I forgot.”

  Kathleen’s suspicious regard worked on her like an itch. “Okay,” she sighed. “Michael was apparently in Washington earlier this month.”

  “And so you think—?”

  “Well, I don’t know, do I?” Her tone was sharper than she’d intended. “And I guess I won’t find out.”

  “If you had told him in the first place—”

  “Ma, I am not having this conversation again.”

  “You started it.”

  “These are the words of a mother and therapist?”

  Kathleen shook her head gently. Her eyes softened. “Sweetheart, Michael’s gone and that’s an end to it.”

  “Which ‘it’?”

  “All the many ‘its.’” Kathleen pulled the duvet over the pillows.
“By the way, there was a call from a Les Strickland for you. Doesn’t he have something to do with Leo?”

  “His obsessive-compulsive next-door neighbour. Probably wants me to walk Leo’s dog.”

  Stevie had bristled a little. Alvy was a sweet dog, and, okay, so she wasn’t working. But Les just presumed. And Leo had led him—somehow—to presume.

  And on a day like today. She turned from her unread magazine and glanced out the church office window. Autumn leaves, crisp air. Canine enthusiasm. She relaxed: Walking Alvy might be a tonic.

  The woman at the desk, alert to the movements of those waiting for Father Day, lifted her hands from the keyboard and again asked whether Stevie would like a cup of coffee. Stevie declined but she’d given the woman an opening.

  “Isn’t it awful? We were so shocked when we heard. Such a nice man.” The persistent emphases hammered at Stevie.

  “Are you a relative?” the woman continued.

  Stevie stared at her. If I were a relative, wouldn’t I be in there? “No,” she mustered. “Just a friend.”

  “Oh, dear. Your poor thing.” Cluck, cluck, cluck. “Were you a good friend?”

  Stevie frowned. The intonation was offensive, but the woman couldn’t seem to help speaking in italics.

  “We grew up together. His house was just down the street.”

  “Oh, I see.” The woman patted her bun, which looked like a small furry animal in repose. “Then you must know what an…” she paused “… interesting photographer he was.”

  “Well, actually—”

  “My husband and I went to see his show last winter at the—now I can’t remember the name—?”

  “Floating Gallery, probably.”

  “In every picture, someone was wearing a lampshade on his head—”

  “Oh, the Life of the Party series.”

  “—and shaking hands, and meeting politicians and well-known locals. There was even one with the bishop. It was very—” She seemed to grope for a word. “—interesting.”

  “You’re an art photography fan?” Stevie stifled a yawn. Winnipeg Life had renewed appeal.

  “Oh, dear, no. He left me an invitation to the opening. He used to come here a lot before Father Saunders retired.”