Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  “Hey!” Axel shouted.

  “You have a contribution to make?”

  Axel retreated. Frank shifted his gaze back to Merritt, who was twisting an emerald ring on her hand.

  “Okay, I did see someone.”

  “Who?”

  Merritt bit her lips.

  “Who?” Frank repeated more insistently.

  Merritt released a heavy sigh. “Axel.”

  Axel’s head swivelled. He stared at Merritt, his face flushed, pulsating with anger. “It’s a lie!”

  “I saw you, Axel.” She pouted. “You came running out of the south gate. Sorry.”

  Axel opened his mouth to protest, but Frank cut him off. “You were seen running east down Wellington around 7:30. I think we’re talking vicinity—”

  “Oh, come on. I often run down Wellington Crescent. And, besides, I hardly know Michael. Why would I—”

  “Yours was the last number he called. His phone’s got one of those last-number-dialled buttons. I got your answering machine.”

  Axel blustered. “Well, he didn’t leave me a message. I don’t why he would have been calling me.”

  “And yet you were at his house Tuesday evening.”

  “I wasn’t at his house.”

  “You were in his yard.”

  Stevie could see Axel’s jaw muscles working overtime.

  “All right,” he spat. “I’ve been looking for investors. I’m trying to restart my magazine. I thought Michael would be a likely backer.”

  “Thought? So you were unsuccessful.”

  “I’d written to him. I tried a formal appeal with business plan and all that.”

  “You didn’t tell me any of this,” Merritt interjected hotly.

  Axel ignored her. “Anyway, he left me a message at home Tuesday. I guess because the phone’s out at WL. He said he couldn’t. Something about making some changes in his life, whatever that means.”

  “Were you disappointed? Angry?”

  “Disappointed,” Axel replied evenly. “But angry? Not angry enough to kill someone, if that’s what you’re trying to get at.”

  “Then what brought you to Rossiter’s house? Someone construct a jogger’s path through his yard?”

  “I thought I’d take another shot at it. Make a personal appeal. It was a whim.”

  “Oh, a whim.”

  “Look,” Axel responded with new anger. “Merritt wasn’t home when I came by. Michael’s house isn’t that far away, running. I took a chance he might be in.”

  “And was he? In?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t try to find out.”

  “Why not?”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “I thought that was a woman’s prerogative.”

  Axel gave Frank a level gaze. “I changed my mind because of something I saw.”

  “And what was that?”

  Axel flicked a glance at Leo. “I don’t know if I should say,” he drawled. “I wouldn’t want to be bumped off in chapter twenty-nine.”

  Book 5

  Saturday, October 1

  27

  Fish

  Leo knew better than to question his luck—at least when it first presented itself. He’d slept late, crawled downstairs to make some coffee, fetched the Citizen and the Globe and Mail from the front step, let Alvarez out and in, then crawled back upstairs to bed. “Police seek new clues in Rossiter slaying,” was the headline over his page three story.

  Well, they will be, once they read this story, he’d thought with a certain glee, imagining Frank opening his paper and blurting some sort of expletive-deleted expression in front of Maria and the girls. After all, when he’d gone into the Zit late the previous afternoon to file an update on the Rossiter investigation, he was the only one who knew the Guarneri was safe and sound in the hands of bona fide violinist and friend of the deceased, Caitlin Clark. He half-expected Frank to phone as he breezed through the rest of the Zit then ploughed through the Globe. But the air was cool in the bedroom—largely because the plastic covering over the hole in the roof intended to be a skylight had leaks—and the dog was warm, and so he’d found himself falling back into slumberland. He’d awoken some time later from a dream to the sound of someone shouting his name below—Stevie, he’d recognized through a fog.

  “Up here,” he’d croaked.

  “Are you alone?”

  Am I alone? Jesus! “Yes. Just me.”

  Just me.

  A dog.

  And—he glanced under the covers—a bone.

  Stevie had burst into the room, her dark hair in voluptuous disarray, carrying the fragrance of an autumn morning. Her face bore an expression Leo had not seen before and could not fathom as she began unbuttoning her coat.

  And then she began unbuttoning her blouse. Leo emitted some sort of gurgling noise—he couldn’t remember what it was now—and jabbed his foot urgently under the covers at Alvarez’s stomach. The dog turned his majestic golden head toward him, regarded him with surprise and sadness, then hopped off the bed.

  “I think,” Stevie said, flinging the last of her things onto a chair, “you know what to do.”

  Afterward, Leo spent maybe twenty-five seconds questioning his luck. Delayed grief fuck? He’d heard of those. Charity fuck? Sports fuck? Comfort fuck? Love-you-mean-it fuck? Marry-me fuck?

  Oh, what the fuck.

  She’d been at Johns Mayhew, the lawyers, with Merritt, he drew from her after they’d dozed a little and reawakened.

  “And?” he murmured.

  She was turned away from him. He held her, running his hand over the flesh of her stomach, marvelling at its softness.

  “The Winnipeg Foundation gets most of it. Earmarked for arts programs.”

  “One way to make sure your left hand doesn’t know what your right is doing, I suppose.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. What else?”

  “Well, there’s me.” Leo felt as much as heard her sigh. “I got all the camera and darkroom equipment.”

  “And this is…good?”

  Stevie was silent a while. “I’m not really that interested in photography, Leo,” she said at last. “Besides, I have my brother’s things.” She turned toward him. Leo felt her breath along his neck and her next words seemed to hum along his skin: “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I think you know.”

  Leo kissed her forehead. He was in a mood to forgive Pol Pot that unpleasantness in Cambodia. “You’re worth waiting for.”

  She leaned her head back on the pillow to look at him. She smiled shyly. Leo felt himself begin to blush. “Anyway,” he said quickly before the conversation turned into an awkward mushfest, “who else got what?”

  “For some reason, Caitlin Clark and that brother of hers that you dislike each got about a third of a million.”

  “What! Guy got that much money? Uh-oh.”

  Leo thought back to Frank’s interview with Axel the evening prior. What had kept Axel from going into Michael’s house Tuesday was the sight of Guy Clark coming out.

  Frank had leapt on this like it was a hot dinner in a cold climate. “What time?”

  “A few minutes after 7:00. I looked at my watch before going into the yard. There was still light.”

  “You talked?”

  “No.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I was in shadow, under a tree. He was standing on the back step and the light was on.”

  “What was he doing?”

  Axel had shrugged. “Nothing. He just stood there a few moments, not moving. Then he walked down the steps and disappeared around the house. I think he was heading over to the Kingdons’.”

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “A briefcase.”

  “So then why didn’t you continue with your plans to visit Rossiter?”

  Axel had shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t know, really. There was something weird about Guy, ab
out the expression on his face. Maybe it was the porch light exaggerating it, but it seemed macabre. I just wanted to get away.”

  “Do you have any reason to dislike Guy Clark?” Frank had asked abruptly.

  Axel had been unprepared. His face flushed. “No,” he exploded as Frank regarded him stonily. “You think I’m making this up?”

  Frank had shrugged, then asked coolly: “So what’s the expression that creeped you out?”

  Axel’s eyes had sought the back corners of the black room. “Rapture,” he replied after a moment. “I think I’d describe it as rapture.”

  Recalling the conversation afterwards, Leo had thought Axel had been doing the dance of the bullshit artist that comes from too much feature writing. Rapture, my ass. But now, with Stevie’s revelation, it didn’t seem so preposterous.

  “But I don’t understand,” Stevie said, drawing him back from his reverie, “why the Clarks would be beneficiaries at all, and neither does Merritt. And the lawyer was no help. Caitlin knew Michael from the Curtis but—”

  Leo explained. The accident. The other victims.

  Stevie listened with growing disbelief. “Restitution?”

  “Atoning for the sins of the father.” Or some such Biblical guff, he thought. “Caitlin might find the gesture inappropriate.”

  “And Guy?”

  “Oh, he’ll eat it up. But could he have known he was in Michael’s will?”

  “There was no will,” Stevie said.

  “But—”

  “It wasn’t a will as such.” Stevie drew away from him. “The lawyer called it an inter vivos trust,” she explained, turning on her back, looking up at the plastic on the ceiling that was flapping gently in the wind. “In effect, Michael was preparing to give away all his money. While he was alive.”

  Leo blinked twice. “But that’s nuts.” He thought warmly of his own tiny savings, his lovely RRSPs, his sweet little CSBs, that endearing stock portfolio he had started with a broker he knew. Who could part from such things?

  “He was going to keep some of it, surely.”

  “Even the house was to be sold, and the money folded in.”

  “And then what? Beg on the streets?”

  Stevie turned to look at him. “I have no goddamn idea,” she replied with some vehemence.

  “But didn’t he tell the lawyer?”

  Stevie shook her head. “Apparently his intent was to tell everyone his plans at a later point.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Yes. I don’t know why, really. When we were first dating, I once asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up—”

  “Concert violinist, I thought.”

  “He said ‘shepherd.’”

  Leo snorted.

  “It wasn’t funny at the time. It just told me he wasn’t thinking about us—about me and him. He had some sort of extravagant vision of himself, alone, overseeing a bunch of stupid sheep—humanity at large, I suppose. I’m starting to sympathize with Merritt. His managing her life.”

  “But to the good, surely.” Odd to be defending Michael, but—what the heck—Michael’s intercession had saved his job. “I mean, at least in Merritt’s case. Doing a turn at the Zit has probably been good for her.”

  The glance Stevie shot him suggested otherwise. “I doubt she’ll be there much longer.”

  “Ah! I was beginning to wonder if Merritt got cut out.”

  “She’s in. But the money’s not free and clear. Michael set up a trust. She’ll have a generous income, but someone else will be managing it. The lawyer at Johns Mayhew is the trustee. In fact, she doesn’t get the first payment until she rejoins a drug rehab program. Back to Hazelden, or wherever.” A smile flitted across Stevie’s face. “She threw a fit over that one.”

  “She’s not that bad, is she?”

  Stevie’s smile turned to a frown. “She’s on the slippery slope. Didn’t she seem sort of stoned to you at the reception yesterday?”

  Leo felt an urge to reach out and trace her face with his finger. “And that’s it?”

  She glanced at him. “No. The trust includes one other person.”

  Let it be me, he thought fleetingly.

  “A child.”

  Leo nearly swallowed his own tongue. “Your child? He knew?”

  “No.”

  “Then what child?”

  “His child.”

  “Another child? But—”

  “He has a son who lives with his mother in Holland. Or West Germany. I’m not sure which. He’s about ten.”

  “Did you know about this other kid?”

  “Michael didn’t even know.”

  “Oh, not again. Michael sure spread himself around. Talk about—what’s the word?—fecund.” He shifted to avoid a blow to the gut.

  “The boy sought him out. That’s why Michael suddenly went to Europe and stayed there so long.”

  “So who’s the mother?”

  “Someone Michael was with at the Curtis. That’s all I know.” Stevie smiled at him glumly, then looked away. “Are you going to fix that hole in your ceiling?”

  “Eventually,” he replied, drawing closer to her, suddenly indifferent to ceilings and wills. “I think you’ve had a kind of shock this morning.”

  Much later, after Stevie had left for home, Leo padded downstairs and began to root through the refrigerator. Unbreakfasted, ravenous, he had offered to make something for them to eat in bed, but she had wanted only coffee, having inhaled its aroma when she’d first come into the house.

  “The lawyer gave us water,” she’d said, leaning over the far edge of the bed.

  “How do you take your coffee? I forget. Sorry.”

  “Oh!” she had exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “I’m just looking at your story.” Her voice was muffled. She lifted the paper where Leo had left it folded at page three. “So Caitlin Clark had the Guarneri the whole time. Well, that puts a different spin on things.”

  “Your coffee?”

  She had smiled at him. “I like my herrings red and I like my coffee black.”

  “There’s still a missing violin, though,” he’d cautioned, exiting the bedroom.

  “But would anyone kill someone for the sake of an ordinary violin?” she had shouted after him.

  Good question, he thought now, staring blankly at the refrigerator’s contents. Maybe somewhere in the city there’s one hopping mad thief with a murder on his conscience. He lifted the lid of a plastic tub and sniffed tentatively at its contents. Or, more likely, the violin theft was always a diversion. He dumped the spaghetti into a casserole and put it in the microwave. Cui bono? Merritt. Caitlin. Guy. Maybe Axel, the hound. Some psychopath at the Winnipeg Foundation? He watched the casserole, spot-lit, spin slowly on the glass tray. But Michael hadn’t made a will. He’d set up a trust. No death was needed to transfer the wealth. If the beneficiaries had only waited a while…

  Of course, who knew about Michael’s arrangements with his lawyer, anyway? And why, in the name of Daddy Warbucks, was someone as young, intelligent, educated, and accomplished as Michael Rossiter giving away all his money? The very stuff the world sought with such greedy passion. He pulled the casserole from the oven and gave the contents a desultory stir. Massive nervous breakdown? Awesome blackmail scheme? He took a deep breath. Is this wonderful spaghetti sauce or what?

  Stomach growling, he returned the casserole to the oven for a few final spins. Maybe Michael decided, in some crisis of conscience, to make a break with the world by breaking with the kind of life he was leading. Non-violently, that is. The French Foreign Legion. Does it still exist? A desert island? Are there any left on his crowded planet? Leo recalled his interview in the spring with Michael for Guy’s aborted feature about Winnipeg’s angels. Michael had done a money-doesn’t-buy-happiness riff on him. “Wealth can be a prison of sorts.” Oh yeah? Send me to that slammer, he’d thought then as he did now, a blizzard of useless Lotto 6/49 tickets swirling in his head. Michael ha
d referred to the Gospels. Matthew 6:1-3. He recalled the first line: “Be careful not to make a show of your religion before men.”

  The microwave dinged. Leo ignored it. He felt a quickening of his pulse. He glanced up at the clock above the sink. It was not quite three o’clock. He found the phonebook in the hall. It was the first Saturday in October, one of the last remaining Saturdays in the year with the promise of snowless weather and what’s his name, the priest, would probably have weddings stacked like aircraft over O’Hare. But it was worth a shot. As he dialled St. Giles, he felt a surge of excitement. It seemed like such an obvious route of enquiry he didn’t know why he hadn’t explored it earlier. Perhaps because the church was something he had happily eliminated from his life before he was twelve years old, he had forgotten what a power it could be in the lives of others, even contemporaries who he assumed shared his own skepticism.

  He was surprised when Father Day himself picked up the phone. There was no staff on Saturdays, he said, sounding distinctly distracted. Leo would be quick. He explained his concern. Father Day said he knew little. He was too new to St. Giles. But he had heard from Father Saunders—Leo recalled the retired priest from Merritt’s reception—that Michael had sought spiritual advice for a period of time. Yes, possibly re-examining his life. Yes, “crisis of conscience” might be a suitable description. But Leo would have to ask Father Saunders. The sessions had ended some time ago, and while Michael had continued to come to St. Giles for Mass, he and Father Day had not had any illuminating conversations. However, he understood that Michael had taken his quest—Leo thought he detected a slight edge of cynicism behind the word—elsewhere. He suggested Leo pursue his enquiries there and gave him a name and an address. Directory assistance would have the phone number. Then he rang off. He was sorry, he said wearily. A wedding party was awaiting his presence.

  Leo had quickly written down the details, but then he stared at it for a while, sinking slowly into a kitchen chair. The implication was so startling, so peculiar, that he couldn’t take it in at first. But however strange and unexpected it was, it made sense of recent events in Michael’s life; perhaps, too, he thought, it would make sense of his death. With growing excitement, he phoned directory assistance, got the phone number, and was gratified to be connected once again with the correct person. He had been expecting a dour tone and great circumspection but instead the man on the phone seemed to burble with goodwill. Come and visit us, he insisted. So Leo made an appointment for the very next day, in the early afternoon.