Cat Got Your Tongue

by Louise Clark

  He told himself that was why he was planning the evening, but he knew there was more to it. They'd committed to each other in the middle of Spring Break, but now, mere days later, the school vacation was almost over and so was their relationship. He couldn't accept that; he had to do something.

  He was about to go over to Christy's house to lay out his plan and invite her to join him when his phone rang. He considered not accepting the call, but it was from his editor at the publishing house that was putting out his book on Frank Jamieson's murder. It was late Friday afternoon. At this time of day, on the last day of the workweek, a telephone call would be to share some spectacularly good news, or to stave off imminent disaster. He decided he'd better take it.

  Unfortunately, the editor wasn't calling to celebrate. Legal had issues with certain parts of the manuscript. The book was due to be sent to the printer on Wednesday and they needed those sections revised by Saturday afternoon so editorial could review the new text on Sunday, legal could okay it on Monday and production could make sure the changes were included in the final document on Tuesday. Quinn put his personal plans on hold and got to work.

  The rest of the afternoon and all of his evening was a marathon of review, revision, and negotiation with his editor. He heard his father going out around seven. When Roy returned much later, he was deep in a confrontational call with his editor, arguing about changes the publisher wanted and which he didn't agree with. He crashed about two and was up again at six.

  Now the changes were finally done, everyone was satisfied, and he had the rest of the weekend to himself. He could still take Christy out for that romantic dinner and night out. The arrangements were made; all he had to do was ask her.

  When he made his plan for the evening, was he thinking of Christy's needs or his own? He wanted her to be focused on him, not on her dead husband. But was that what was best for her? He considered that moodily as he saved and closed files, methodically tidying up his on-screen workplace.

  It was certainly best for him. By taking her out to dinner and then to a hotel he'd have her all to himself, which was exactly what he wanted. They could talk about each other, their feelings, the future they could have together. It would be like a recommitment to their relationship.

  He brooded about that as he went up to his room to make himself presentable. It wasn't a good sign when a dating couple needed time and an artificially romantic environment to remember why they were dating in the first place.

  Worrying, he thought, was a sign of fatigue, that was all. He shook himself out of the mood while he cleaned up. Once he had Christy's agreement and they'd organized timing, he'd have a quick nap. That would help his frame of mind.

  He went down to his front door and then out and over to hers. As he rang the bell, he could hear shrieks of laughter echoing dimly from somewhere in the house. Those were followed by the thump of feet rushing up stairs moments before the door was wrenched open. Noelle, with Mary Petrofsky peering over her shoulder, grinned at him. "Mom! It's Quinn!" She opened the door wider to let him in.

  He stepped into the small landing. He had the ominous feeling that his timing was off.

  Noelle slammed the door shut and said, "Mom's upstairs."

  Mary Petrofsky's less assertive voice said, "With my mom." She stopped, then added, "They're having tea."

  "Using the Jamieson tea service," Noelle announced. "Aunt Ellen's there too."

  He could just imagine the scene.

  "They're having scones—"

  "Yum," said Mary.

  "And clotted cream!" Noelle said.

  "And sandwiches. Little ones," Mary added, nodding.

  "It's a proper tea!" Noelle's announcement was echoed by the sound of female laughter coming from the living room. Quinn didn't recognize the voice, so it wasn't Christy or Ellen. Must be Rebecca Petrofsky.

  Not only was his timing off, but it was disastrously off. It was now two o'clock in the afternoon. He'd made the dinner reservation for seven, and thought they could check into the hotel about five. Those two hours would give them time to enjoy each other, then change before going out.

  Part of the whole romantic evening plan was the way he would ask Christy to come out with him. He'd take her for a walk in the woods where they had spent so many intimate hours together. There he would invite her to go with him for the evening out.

  No way she was going to go for a walk in the woods with him right now. In fact, it was unlikely he'd even have a chance to talk to her before five o'clock.

  "Who is it, Noelle?" Christy asked, breaking into his thoughts as she appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked beautiful in a pair of dark slacks she'd topped with a sapphire blue sweater that did great things for her coloring and hugged her figure in all the right places. Her expression, though, was worried, but relieved at the same time. Quinn knew why. She was worried that Joan Shively, the social services worker who had made checking on Noelle's well-being her life cause, might take it into her head to do a random house visit. It was unlikely since it was Saturday and even Shively had a life, but Christy was always wary.

  He hoped the relief was pleasure at seeing him. "Hi," he said.

  She smiled and came down the stairs. "Hi, Quinn. What's up?"

  Though she smiled at him, Quinn thought he saw some restraint there. He decided that it was best to ignore it. "It's a nice afternoon. I dropped by to see if you'd like to go for a walk."

  Christy glanced up and over her shoulder. "Quinn, that's sweet..."

  "My mom's here," Mary Petrofsky said.

  "She is," Christy said. She came further down the stairs. "Noelle, why don't you and Mary go back to the playroom? I've got this."

  Noelle looked from Mary to her mom to Quinn, then nodded. "Come on, Mary. I'll race you!" They dove back down the stairs to whatever game they were playing in the basement family room.

  Christy paused on the stairs so she was eye-to-eye with him. "I'm sorry, Quinn. It was lovely of you to think of me, but..." She shrugged. "I can't."

  "What about later?" he asked in a low voice.

  "Mary is doing a sleep over and the Petrofskys are going out to a romantic dinner." Her lips twitched. "And having a romantic night as well, I expect."

  He saw his own romantic evening slipping away while the Petrofskys had theirs. He wasn't going to let it go without a fight. Tonight might be out, but he could change reservations. "The Petrofskys obviously had the same I idea I did."

  She looked confused.

  "I came over to invite you to dinner."

  Her face lit up. "That's sweet, Quinn." Her expression turned rueful. "But..."

  "Yeah," he said. "Bad timing." He reached up to stroke a stray lock of hair away from her eyes, forcing her to look up into his. "What about tomorrow evening?"

  Her gaze searched his for a moment, then she looked down and away. "Last day of Spring Break," she said. "I need to be here for Noelle." She lowered her voice. "Since Frank left, it's been hard. She's upset, but she's hiding it. I don't want to..." She hesitated. Her voice shook a little when she resumed, but her words were firm. "I can't go out tomorrow. It's a family thing. I need to be with her." She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. "You understand, don't you?"

  Down in Pasadena they'd pretended they were a family: Christy, Quinn, and Noelle. Now they had returned to Burnaby they were back to the way they'd been before they went away together. Christy had a daughter and they were both Jamiesons. Whether Frank was still in Stormy didn't matter at this point. Christy had asked him if he understood, and he thought he did. She wasn't ready to commit to anything deeper than a sexual liaison.

  So he had to decide—was that all he wanted from her? Was it enough?

  He didn't know. He didn't think so.

  Still, as he looked into her eyes he knew he couldn't end it this way, with Ellen and Rebecca in the living room, the kids downstairs and the cat somewhere in the house, probably spying on them.

  "I understand," he said. He stepped away. "
I'll let you get back to your tea party."

  "Thanks," she said, but she made no move to climb up the stairs.

  He nodded and let himself out, the image of her cool composed Jamieson princess expression burned in his mind's eye.

  He was already canceling his reservations as he headed down her front walk.

  * * *

  "I'm going to tackle Brody Toupin today," Quinn said. He was eating breakfast with his father. The bacon and eggs Roy had fixed were congealing on his plate.

  Roy set his own plate on the table and sat down. He looked pointedly at Quinn's uneaten food. "Something playing havoc with your appetite?"

  Quinn cut a piece of bacon and ate it. "No." He looked at his plate, not his father.

  Roy dipped toast into the soft yoke of his fried egg. "True love never runs smooth," he said, before crunching the bread.

  "Oh, for God's sake!" Quinn said. He pushed back his chair and picked up his plate. "I'll be back later."

  "See you," his father said affably.

  Brody Toupin lived in Kitsilano, not far from Jericho Beach on the shore of English Bay. In the forty-five minutes it took Quinn to drive from Burnaby, he fumed about know-it-all fathers, women who couldn't move on, and idiots like him who put up with them. By the time he arrived at Toupin's address his mood was bleak and his outlook grim.

  Brody Toupin's residence was a small mid-sixties infill house that had been sandwiched into a tiny lot between two much larger houses. The building took up most of the property. There was enough space left to provide a driveway and a pocket-sized lawn.

  From the outside, the building didn't look like much, but in Vancouver's high octane housing market Quinn guessed it would sell for well over a million dollars. He knew from his research on Toupin that he was the owner of the property and he reflected sourly that the music business must be doing well by him.

  Toupin answered the bell on his first ring, as if he had been hovering nearby waiting for Quinn to arrive. He said hello, then peered over Quinn's shoulder, frowning.

  "Looking for something?" Quinn asked.

  Toupin scanned Quinn up and down, then said, "You don't have a camera and you didn't bring a photographer."

  Still standing on the front step, Quinn said, "No." He left it at that. He had a feeling he knew where Toupin was going with the question, but he wanted the man to say the words. Then he'd be able to act.

  "You're not going to supply pictures to whatever rag you're selling the article to, are you? Will they accept it without images?"

  Quinn was still standing at the front door. He reflected that Brody Toupin couldn't be all that bright. He expected Quinn to write a favorable article about him, but he'd begun the meeting with a confrontational statement and hadn't even bothered to invite him in. "The paper will supply a shot from their morgue," Quinn said. He sent Toupin a cool look and added, "I don't write the kind of fluff that requires more photos than content. People read my articles because they're interested in what I have to say and the opinions I offer, not because they want to ogle a pretty face or drool over a muscular body."

  Since Brody Toupin possessed both of those qualities, he stiffened. "I'm not some pinup for teenyboppers."

  "No, you're backup for one of the hottest bands on the planet." Quinn indicated the house with a nod of his head. "From your address and the value of property around here, I'd say you don't have a lot to complain about."

  Toupin's brows snapped together and his expression hardened. "I was supposed to get headline status. Vince promised me that when he convinced me to participate in the SledgeHammer tour. Then the bastard screwed me, told me I wasn't good enough. That's bullshit."

  "There are plenty of people who would envy you the success you've already got," Quinn said crisply. Brody Toupin was rubbing him the wrong way. Between the two of them and their equally negative moods, it was unlikely that he was going to get much of an interview from the man, even if Toupin agreed to one.

  "I dumped the band I was with to go on that tour," Brody said. Anger reverberated in his tone. "We were doing okay. Not great, but we were making sales and getting airplay. In Canada, at least. Vince told me he'd push me into the stratosphere and I bought it." Now he sounded more disgusted at himself, than angry at Vince. "That band. The one I dumped? They had a US number one a month ago. They haven't made it yet, but they're on the way." Bitterness crept into his voice. "And I'm stuck here without a band. Without a label. Without even an opportunity to work back up on a big-time band because SledgeHammer is on hiatus."

  "And you blame that on Vince?" Quinn said.

  "Of course I blame it on Vince! Who else would I blame it on?"

  Yourself, Quinn thought. Your bad decisions. Your greed. "I guess you were pretty mad at him."

  Vince held up his hand. "Oh, no. I see where you're going. Don't try to pin Vince's death on me!"

  Quinn shrugged. He was snarly enough to want to push this guy to the limit. Sure, he should be objective, but he was human and Brody Toupin struck him as the kind of guy who would never be satisfied. "Someone killed Vince. Why not you?"

  Toupin allowed his mouth to gape open in astonishment. "Why would I?" At Quinn's raised brow, he said, "Look, Vince was my manager. Sure, I was pissed at the mess he'd made, but I couldn't afford to dump him until I found a new one. Now I don't have Vince behind me, I'm not going to get the kind of gigs I did when he represented me. Yeah, I was furious at him for lying to me, but killing him would be like cutting my own throat. I wouldn't do it."

  "People do stuff for stupid reasons. Ever heard of revenge?"

  Toupin's eyes narrowed. "I didn't kill Vince. Like I told the West Van cop, I was in the can when the cat started to howl. No way I could have gone outside, killed Vince and slipped back into the house without anyone seeing me. I'm in the clear." He stepped back from the door. "I think we're done here."

  "Works for me," Quinn said. The door slammed behind him as he walked back to the street where his car was parked. Although Brody Toupin's defense sounded reasonable, his alibi for the time of the murder was thin. There was only his word that he'd been using the bathroom when Vince was killed. They would have to check his whereabouts with others before they wrote him off as a suspect.

  Buoyed up by that thought, Quinn got into his car and headed back to Burnaby.

  Chapter 28

  "Why is that man here?" Charlotte Sawatzky asked. She was wearing a flowered spring dress, a little early for the season, but appropriate for the meeting this morning. Her eyes were narrowed ominously; she didn't look happy.

  Ellen peered around the room. A utilitarian meeting room in the basement of the Library building on West Georgia, the room had been set boardroom style for the two dozen people invited to become the inaugural members of the East Side Beautification Committee. As they waited for the full contingent to arrive, people milled about, chatting, helping themselves to coffee and semi-stale pastries, and generally scoping out who they would be working with. "What man?" she asked.

  As the genders were pretty much evenly represented, the question made sense. She recognized a few of the faces. The head of the city's Parks and Rec department, the owner of a well-known chain of garden stores, and the dean of English Bay University's downtown campus, to name only a few of the worthy citizens who had answered the call.

  "That one. The agitator," Charlotte said, pointing. She didn't bother to be discreet.

  "Oh," said Ellen, after a quick glance. "You mean Sydney Haynes."

  "Yes!"

  Ellen contemplated her friend, unsure why she would be so hostile toward the man. True, Sydney Haynes tended to be a single focus kind of person. He'd talk about nothing but his charity, droning on and on until his auditor wanted nothing more than to escape. Ellen thought he probably gained quite a few donations with that particular tactic. But to call him an agitator seemed a bit much. Still, Charlotte Sawatzky wasn't the type to make a fuss where none was needed. "I've only met him twice. Both times ended in unpleasant ci
rcumstances, but I don't think he caused the unpleasantness."

  "I have not met him at all," Charlotte said, her tone dismissive. She sniffed and her chin tilted up. "I only know of his doings."

  Ellen raised her brows and waited, but Charlotte didn't say anything further. She had apparently decided she should hold her tongue on the subject of Sydney Haynes.

  After a moment, Ellen said, "How are your son and daughter-in-law coping?"

  Charlotte seemed to deflate. "Badly," she said. "The police have botched the investigation completely. There are no new leads and not enough evidence to charge the brother of that dreadful musician."

  Charlotte was talking about Hammer and Kyle Gowdy. Once, before she'd moved in with Christy and Noelle, Ellen knew she would have identified Graham Gowdy exactly as Charlotte just had. Now that she'd been to a SledgeHammer concert and partied with the band and the assorted characters who surrounded them, she had to squash irritation at Charlotte's comment. She realized, with some surprise, that she'd enjoyed the experience and liked the people. The thought threw her off stride and she missed what Charlotte said next. She became aware she'd been wool gathering when Jeff Darling, the city councilor who was representing the mayor, called the meeting to order.

  They settled onto sturdy metal and fabric covered chairs around tables set up in a large square. Jeff talked enthusiastically about the changing requirements of the city and the need to create a plan to revitalize decaying areas on the East Side. Ellen listened attentively and made notes in a small leather bound book she drew from her purse. Charlotte, seated beside her, glared at Sydney Haynes.

  Jeff identified the need for more green spaces, suggested flower boxes be erected at regular intervals along major streets, and then closed his opening remarks with the cheerful request for input from all present. "But first," he said, as he prepared to sit down, "let's introduce ourselves."

  They went clockwise around the table. The EBU dean spoke first, in a self-depreciating way that did nothing to minimize the list of his accomplishments. He was followed by Portia Quance, a woman who owned a very high-end boutique hotel. Portia simply looked around the table with raised brows and said her name, expecting everyone present to know what it represented.