Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  “Well—?”

  Axel turned a page, as if he were studying the text. “I think,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “that I might know…who killed Michael.”

  Leo’s pen stopped in mid-serif. “Nice bombshell, Axel. Can I ask who?”

  “You can try.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “What is this? The journalistic equivalent of a cocktease?”

  “It’s complicated.” Axel reached back and stroked his ponytail.

  “Then tell the police.”

  “I might.”

  “You might? You want someone to get away with murder?”

  “I told you, it’s complicated!”

  “You know, Axel, if this was some murder mystery novel, you’d be bumped off in short order. There’s always some smartass who knows something, makes a big secret of it, then is found strangled or stabbed in chapter twenty-nine.” Leo doodled in his notebook. “Does whoever you think did it know that you know?”

  Axel frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “Male or female?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “A known aficionado of pricey violins?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Is this why you called me at 8:31 in the morning?”

  “Maybe.”

  Leo noted Stevie and her parents move up the aisle. She didn’t see him. He tapped his pen impatiently against his thigh. “Does this have something to do with Merritt?” he asked.

  “Merritt who?”

  “Merritt Parrish, née Rossiter, only sister of the deceased and the woman you’re currently fraternizing with horizontally.”

  Leo could feel Axel stiffen beside him. “How do you know that?” he whispered hotly.

  “You thought you could keep it secret?”

  “Shit!” Axel closed the Bible with a snap. “Who else knows?”

  “Stevie, for one.”

  “And—?”

  Leo shrugged noncommittally. “What’s with the secretiveness anyway?”

  “I’m married.”

  Leo hooted. “Like that’s stopped you before.”

  “Okay, it’s partly Merritt.”

  “Really?”

  “She wants it that way.”

  “You’re telling me—” Leo began, then lowered his voice as a frail elderly couple shuffled into the pew in front of them. “—you’re telling me that Merritt doesn’t want her brother’s killer found?”

  “I told you—it’s complicated.”

  “I’m beginning to believe you.” Not, Leo thought grimly.

  Axel growled under his breath. “She’s really hot, Leo.”

  “And really rich?”

  Axel’s fist landed on Leo’s shoulder, harder this time. Fortunately the suit padding cushioned the blow. “Fuck you, Fabian.”

  A grey head swivelled and a rheumy eye regarded them balefully.

  “We’re in church, you asshole,” Leo said under his breath, kicking him in the shin. “Watch your goddamn language.”

  They had sat the rest of the service in silence. Leo’s attention wandered, as it usually did anytime whenever he was in a church, which was rare. Mostly he wondered why Axel had chosen to tantalize him with knowing who Michael’s killer might—might—be. Only the homily focused his mind. Father Day had not been oblique about the snatching of a life in its prime and he had waxed vehement on the subject of restitution. Pretty illiberal for a late-twentieth-century Christian, Leo reflected, scribbling away on back of his program, but, hell, it made good copy.

  The gathering graveside afterwards was brief but intensely grim. People, Leo included, seemed unhappily surprised to be standing in virtual mud, unable to hear the priest, and shivering in the damp air. Stepping through the door into Merritt’s house, however, he began to feel his spirits lighten. Part of it was the promise of spirits, he considered, slipping off his coat, noting the mayor in the living room sipping a scotch and ogling Merritt’s now-entirely-appropriate funereal decor.

  Couldn’t be a better time to have a black rug, he thought, handing the coat to some flunky, looking behind at his own trail of muck merging into the trails of others. He turned into the living room. A fair crowd, and a choice one. Drop the big Kahuna on this address and the minority government would be more minor still, he thought, watching the mayor begin a smiley schmooze of the finance minister. Clearly, this was going to be a working funeral for more than just Leo. He patted his chest, feeling the bulge of his notebook. There was one person in particular he wanted to talk to.

  “Guy Clark as city editor?” he said to Martin Kingdon, who waddled past him. What he’d read on the microfilm that morning still played in his head. “Your memo surprised the hell out of some of us.”

  “He’ll do a fine job,” Kingdon hissed over his shoulder and disappeared into a knot of men, all of them six inches taller.

  The hell he will. Leo grabbed a drink off a tray. He noted Axel pointedly ignoring him, pretending to look at an art deco sculpture on the mantle, as if he’d never seen it before in his life. He went in search of Stevie and espied her in the dining room, talking with a hefty woman who was unfamiliar to him. Stevie was dressed in a black sheath, which just seemed to set off her dark hair and dark eyes. Her hair was up. She looked like one of the women in Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video. I’m a sick man, he thought: I’m getting horny at a funeral.

  She turned and smiled at him, which made it worse. “This is Sharon Bean,” she said by way of introduction. “We went to school together. Sharon owns a cleaning company.”

  “A cleaning company of one, actually.”

  “Sharon was Michael’s cleaner,” Stevie added.

  “Oh?” Leo turned his attention from Stevie’s charming profile to look at Sharon. She looked like she might do windows, too, and carry her own ladder.

  “I was last there on Tuesday.” Sharon lowered her eyes. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Have you—?” Leo began, but Stevie interrupted him. “I’ll just leave you two,” she said. “There’s someone I should talk to.”

  “Wait,” he said, watching her give Sharon a little hug, and wishing it were him. “Will I see you—?”

  “Come for dinner.”

  Leo groaned. “Hell, I have to go back to the Zit.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed. “Well, anyway…”

  “Talk later?”

  “I’m going to be here for a while. To keep an eye on Merritt.”

  “I know someone else in the room who can do that.”

  “Ah,” Stevie smiled knowingly and disappeared behind someone’s back.

  “So you’re the famous Leo Fabian,” Sharon said.

  “You read my stuff?”

  “Hell, no. Stevie’s mother has dropped your name. I clean for the Lords, too.”

  Leo felt his face begin to heat up. He didn’t realize he was conversation fodder for cleaner and client. “And are reports favourable?”

  “Discretion is the watchword of the cleaning business,” she laughed.

  “And here I thought it was bleach.” He took a sip, studying her over the rim of his glass. “I was about to ask you a minute ago—have you talked to the police?”

  “No, why? Should I?”

  “When were you at Michael’s?”

  “In the afternoon. Between about 2:00 and 5:00.”

  “You might have been the last one to see him alive, you know.” He paused. “Well, second-last.”

  “Third-last, actually. When I was leaving that man—” She gestured toward the living room and craned her neck. “—well, he was here a minute ago. Michael’s uncle, Mr. Kingdon. He was coming up the path.”

  “When was this?”

  “A little after 5:00.”

  More than an hour before time of death, Leo thought. He frowned.

  “Something the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing.” But Leo’s brain roiled with questions. “Back door or fr
ont door?” he asked.

  “If you mean which way Mr. Kingdon was going, then back door. I left by the back door and passed him by the side of the house.”

  “And you left the door unlocked?”

  “Michael was home.”

  “The whole time?”

  “He wasn’t when I got there. I let myself in with my key. He arrived about twenty minutes later.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I should be telling you this.”

  “That discretion thing? He is dead, you know.” Leo was blunt.

  “More that reporter thing.”

  “Call it background. You know the concept?”

  Sharon flashed a set of even teeth. “I have a master’s degree in social work.”

  “Shoot me now,” Leo said, flushing.

  “Maybe later. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “If you think cleaning ladies spend all their time snooping, you’d be wrong.”

  “But you must notice things. The violin, for instance—”

  “I’ve dusted a black case in that dressing room off Michael’s bedroom once a week for the past three years. It’s never moved. I’ve never seen it open. Michael never mentioned it to me. If that Guarneri I’ve been reading about has been in that house in the last few weeks, then I didn’t see it.”

  Leo admired her efficient reply and thought she would be hard to live with. “Were you in that room he uses as an office?”

  “I clean everywhere but his upstairs studio.”

  “Did you note a daybook, a diary?”

  “Yes, it sits on his desk.”

  “And—?”

  “Was it open? Yes. Did I read it? No.”

  “Your eyes didn’t sort of pass over any jottings?”

  She shook her head. “Leo, one of the reasons I dumped social work was because I didn’t want to know about people’s private lives.”

  Leo sighed. “Computer disks?” he asked feebly. “Were there any on the desk?”

  Sharon glanced up at the ceiling in thought. “There were some in a smoked glass—well, smoked plastic—box. I remember because they were multicoloured, and I could see them through the glass when I was dusting.”

  “Well, that’s something. Having a computer with no hard drive and no disks was odd.” He stepped out of the way to let someone pass. The place was becoming very crowded. “Hope the fire chief’s not at this reception,” he remarked. “I wonder why she didn’t have it in the church hall or something.”

  “I think Merritt likes to show off her decor.”

  Leo raised in eyebrow.

  “I clean for Merritt, too.”

  He laughed. “Does your card say ‘By Appointment to the River Heights Bourgeoisie’?”

  “I sometimes slum in the West End.”

  “I don’t need a cleaning lady.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “That’s not very discreet.”

  “You’re not my client.”

  “True.” Leo downed the last of his Scotch. He could feel the liquor moving through his veins. It was pure pleasure. “So,” he said, tapping his fingers against the glass, “was there anything remarkable about your Tuesday at Michael’s?”

  “Not really,” she replied, shrugging.

  “Was he in the house the whole time you were?”

  “In his studio upstairs for part of it, and then he went out to mail something. He was gone about forty minutes or so.”

  “Has Canada Post removed another neighbourhood mailbox?”

  “I think he walked down to the post office on Corydon.”

  Leo glanced over Sharon’s shoulder. An elderly man with a flushed, wrinkled face above a clerical collar was holding a glass of amber liquid in each hand.

  “Don’t let your right hand know what your left is doing, Father,” he called.

  The priest held up both glasses and toasted Leo. “I think Our Lord might make an exception in his case,” he said, beaming, then turned back to his own conversation.

  “Father Saunders,” Sharon lowered her voice. “I thought he might take the service. The new priest doesn’t have his warmth.”

  “You know him?”

  “I go to St. Giles too. Father Saunders retired in the spring.”

  “Too?”

  “Michael was a regular.”

  “My father was lapsed RC,” Leo said, wondering why that had sprung into his head. “My mother’s lapsed Anglican. I think I’m lapsed agnostic.”

  “I think I might become lapsed if we have too much more of depressing Father Day.”

  Leo didn’t respond. He suddenly thought of something that Sharon could do for him—and it wasn’t mop his floors.

  He explained.

  She regarded him skeptically. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem right. And it might not be good for Stevie.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  Sharon was silent a moment, then she regarded him slyly. “I do have an opening for anyone who wants a cleaning lady.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “I’m a businesswoman. Here, I’ll give you my card.” Sharon opened her purse. “And I’m not being opportunistic,” she added, rifling through its contents. “Stevie’s told me about the state of your place—”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “—and Michael was letting me go soon anyway—and, I might add, it had nothing to do with my work.”

  “Why then?”

  She handed him a card. Bean Cleans, the embossed type declared in aggressive red. “Heaven only knows,” she said. “The man was a mystery.”

  Caitlin Clark was easy to pick out of a crowd. As Leo recalled from Michael’s party in the spring, she bore an uncanny resemblance to her brother, which should have been a fate worse than psoriasis, but, thanks to some genie of the genes, wasn’t. Guy’s chin was weak. Hers was heart-shaped. His hair was a thatch of dull straw. Hers was a cap of honey gold. She was the same height as Guy, which made her becomingly tall for a woman, but forced him into the unforgiving category of short men. When he was lost in thought, Guy thrust his lips forward like a petulant child. When Caitlin was lost in thought—as she appeared to be when Leo touched her sleeve—her lips pressed together in a little moue, which made her look darned kissable, if you could forget who she was related to.

  She had been in a conversational knot with three other people, one of whom, a reedy fellow with volumes of kempt hair down to his waist, he recognized vaguely from Michael’s barbecue as an orchestra member. She had seemed happy enough to be drawn away when Leo introduced himself.

  “You’re the one who punched my brother,” she remarked in Leo’s ear as he wedged into the crowd to look for a quiet spot.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think it’s something he doesn’t deserve from time to time.”

  Startled, Leo turned to look at her. There was a flush along her fine cheekbones.

  “He knew where I was, and he didn’t bother to call me,” she continued.

  She had flown to San Francisco the week before, he learned as they made their way through the kitchen to a back sun porch—to see old friends, play at a couple of recitals, and audition for the San Francisco Symphony. She only learned of Michael’s death from a copy of the Citizen the flight attendant had handed to her on the flight from Vancouver that morning. She’d barely had enough time to change and get to the church.

  “So I’m still in shock,” she said, stepping down onto the stone floor. The room was chilly, the furniture wrought iron, and every cushion black. It was about as uninviting a room as any could be on a damp fall day, which was probably why everyone else was shunning it. Leo pulled out a chair for Caitlin and noted her flinch as the back of her thighs hit cold vinyl. Her black suit had a short skirt.

  “It was lousy of Guy not to let you know earlier,” he responded, taking a chair opposite, glad of wool trousers.

  “I’ll give him hell later.”
<
br />   “I’d like to see that.”

  She smiled wanly. Leo started to say something, then noticed her eyes. Deep blue, with a touch of mischief. He blanked, then started over. “He’s just been made city editor—”

  “What a surprise.”

  Leo started. “You’re not? Surprised, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “He’s only twenty-eight.”

  Caitlin shrugged, then tapped his hand with her finger. “Anyway,” she said, “what did you want to talk to me about?”

  Leo, recovering from the erotic jolt of her touch, blurted: “Your parents.”

  “They’re dead.”

  “I know.”

  Caitlin’s eyebrows rose. “Why are you interested in my parents?”

  Damned good question, he thought, looking into her lovely but puzzled face. “Symmetry?” he replied, feeling slightly ridiculous. “Your parents. Michael’s parents. Killed in the same car accident. Guy and Merritt. You and Michael—”

  “There never was a me and Michael.” Caitlin cut him off. “We were just good friends.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Are you suggesting I’m next?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Symmetry—your word. Michael’s gone. So, by your logic, I’m next?”

  Leo stared at her. “God, no.” He told her about his morning’s work scrolling through Zit microfilms. The Rossiters, he’d learned, had taken Michael to Winnipeg Airport to catch a Toronto flight with a connection to Philadelphia. Sometime later they left, but their car jumped the meridian curb on the airport approach and hit an oncoming car, driven by none other than Caitlin’s father. The Rossiters and Caitlin’s mother, who was in the back seat of the Clark car, were killed instantly. Caitlin’s father, who had been driving, died two days later of massive injuries. And Caitlin, who had been in the passenger seat, en route to catch a later Toronto-bound flight, escaped—thanks in part to a seat belt—with minor injuries. The accident was attributed to icy conditions and mechanical failure in the Rossiter vehicle and later affirmed by investigation.

  The play the Zit gave the Rossiters hadn’t surprised him. After all, Tom Rossiter had been the publisher of the paper. And the relative indifference shown the Clarks hadn’t surprised him either. They were nobodies by comparison. But a certain irregularity among the facts and figures sent his bullshit detector into high alert.