Beautiful Lie the Dead

by Barbara Fradkin

  Determined to divert Hatfield from his favourite political soap box, Green plunged ahead. “Tell me what you do know about the Longstreet case.”

  “I know it wasn’t suicide.”

  Green’s eyebrows shot up. “What did the autopsy find?”

  “Asphyxiation due to strangulation. That much was released before the hammer came down. But get this.” Hatfield leaned in close, breathing Scotch. “He was naked as a jaybird.”

  The penny dropped. “Ah. And the cops knew this?”

  “Of course they did! So did the coroner. But they killed it to avoid the scandal. It wasn’t that common back then, or at least as openly talked about, but obviously sex was involved. But whether the guy was doing himself, or had an over-enthusiastic partner who miscalculated, the cops never said.”

  “But surely the cops would have at least investigated whether there was another person in the room. There was no DNA back then, but they would have looked for fingerprints, a second wine glass, hairs on the sheets...”

  “Everything was wiped clean.”

  “Everything?” Green leaned forward. “You mean door knobs, toilet seats…?”

  “And the dishes in the drainboard. All washed, all whistle clean, according to the investigating cop.”

  Green sat back in disbelief. “Didn’t that strike anyone as suspicious? If you were about to engage in a little game of autoerotic asphyxiation, you don’t wipe all the dishes and surfaces clean. You don’t expect to die!”

  Hatfield laughed. “You’d think. I asked the cop that, in fact. Some fresh off the farm kid who’d just landed his first case. Not even a detective. The force hadn’t even called in the big guns, and when the coroner ruled it suicide, they just left this kid with this stinking political mess in his lap.”

  Green sidestepped the political reference. He knew the force wouldn’t have left the young officer to his own devices. Someone higher up had pulled the strings. “So what you’re saying is there was no investigation. What about witnesses? The landlord, the neighbours?”

  Hatfield shrugged. “Suddenly blind and deaf, even after I offered a substantial sum. Never heard a thing. Professor Longstreet was a quiet, considerate neighbour who wasn’t there very often, and when he was, he was as helpful and hard-working as you could possibly want. Even offered to help one woman with her restraining order and another with some minor traffic charge. All-round saint.”

  Green’s cannelloni arrived, smothered in thick sauce and fragrant with basil and garlic. He sank his fork into the cheesy mixture and prepared to take a bite. “Okay, but you know something, I can tell. Something the Star wouldn’t let you print.”

  Hatfield chuckled. “I had something, but it vanished between my fingers the minute Cyril Longstreet’s minions paid a visit to the apartment building with a chequebook in hand. The tenant in the apartment underneath was a med student working eighteen hours a day at the Montreal General and off-hours as a bartender to pay for her studies. She was upset at all the noise— the parties, the singalongs, the gung-ho student meetings to plan their next protest that always ended with some bed-banging deep into the night. She told me Longstreet had sex every night he spent there, got so she hated to see him arrive because she needed her sleep.”

  Green’s pulse quickened. “So there was almost certainly a lover present when he hanged himself. Any idea who?”

  “Some pretty young thing. The med student, who was anything but, was not very specific.”

  “Always the same girl?”

  “Well, there were lots to choose from back in those days before all the politically correct sexual harassment crap. And it would be in keeping with the type of sleaze who screws co-eds while his wife is home with a two month-old baby.”

  “Co-eds? It was one of his students?”

  “That’s just a guess, but it was his pattern. Elena herself had been his student, and thirteen years his junior.”

  “Did the Montreal Police know this?”

  “I told that baby-faced cop, but I doubt he followed up. Too much work. He might even have to investigate. Nobody wanted this case to be anything. They all just wanted it to go away.” Hatfield grinned and drained his glass, rolling the last of the Scotch around on his tongue. “It’s kind of poetic justice in a way, that now it’s come back to bite everyone in the ass.”

  * * *

  The aroma of coffee wafted into her dreams and wrapped itself languidly around her naked body. Tickled her nostrils, brushed lips across her forehead.

  Lips?

  Sue Peters opened her eyes to see the morning sun carving slats of shadow on the wall opposite. Above her, Gibbsie bent his sleep-tousled head, a smile on his face and a cup of coffee in his hand. His other hand roamed her belly, tentative and tender. What a hardship to wake up to on a Sunday morning. Fighting the stiffness of her damaged body, she pushed herself partially upright against the pillows and took the coffee. Strong, black, fabulous. He fetched his own coffee and slipped in beside her.

  “I love waking up beside you in the morning,” he said.

  “Mmm...” she said, wary. “You make a mean coffee.”

  He reddened and his Adam’s apple bobbed. A bad sign. “I’ve been thinking, we’d save money so much faster living together.”

  “Money maybe, but not sanity. I told you, I’d drive you nuts in less than a month.”

  He leaned over to kiss the little ridge of scar below her breast.

  Once she’d been ashamed to let him see her, let alone explore every inch of her.

  “You could never drive me crazy, ever,” he murmured. “Except by saying no. You know you’re going to marry me someday.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And you know it’s not going to happen until I can keep up my end one hundred per cent.”

  “You can! You said you’d marry me when you could walk down the aisle without a cane, and you can!”

  “Sometimes. But I’m just as likely to pitch sideways into the pews.”

  He didn’t answer right away, and she figured he was thinking the same thing she was, that she might never be one hundred percent. After all, it was nearly three years since the assault. Then he touched her hand. “Don’t you dream about it sometimes?”

  She nodded, took a sip of coffee and silently swore at her shaking hand.

  “Then let’s do it! Just go for it. Grab it. Holy jumpin’, Sue, you of all people understand that we never know what’s around the corner. Look at poor Brandon Longstreet—one minute he thinks he’s got his dream in the palm of his hand, and the next minute it’s ripped from his hand.”

  “Meredith’s choice, Gibbsie. Obviously not such a perfect dream after all.”

  “We don’t know that. We only know this Lise Gravelle spooked her and made her take off.”

  “But not even telling Brandon where she is? You got to admit, Bob, that’s a pretty good kick in the teeth.”

  “Oh, Sue, that’s not the point!” He shoved himself up in bed.

  “The point is, b-bad stuff happens. We can’t control that, but we can control what we do. I love you just the way you are. I don’t want to wait months or years to be with you—”

  He was winding himself up into a rant she’d heard before, but this time she was barely listening. An awful thought had occurred to her, and she wondered why they’d both missed what had been staring them in the face for days.

  She clutched his arm. “Bob, why do you suppose she hasn’t contacted Brandon?”

  He sputtered mid-rant. “What?”

  “Think about it. If they loved each other, if they trusted each other, why wouldn’t she send him a sign?”

  “Because...she’s freaked out?”

  She whipped her head back and forth. “That might work for a few hours, but not days. She’s supposedly an intelligent, levelheaded woman, not some hysterical bimbo.”

  “Then because she’s mad at him? I don’t know! Sue, it’s Sunday morning. I haven’t even finished my coffee yet, I’m in bed with the woman I lov
e, talking about marriage—”

  “This is important, Bob!”

  “So’s our marriage!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, I never said I wouldn’t marry you—”

  “This spring?”

  “What?”

  He grinned. Still red but no longer sputtering. “This spring. When the tulips are in bloom and the fruit trees are budding.”

  “Can we discuss this case?”

  “We can have an outdoor wedding, maybe in the arboretum, on the little footbridge.”

  She stared at him. He wasn’t grinning any more. His cheeks were flushed and his dark eyes sparkled. He was serious.

  “Yes or no,” he said. “And I’m not taking no.”

  A strange heat raced through her whole body from her toes all the way to her scalp, setting her skin on fire. A laugh bubbled up in her. Relief. Joy. Who the hell knew?

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I guess it is.”

  He dived for her, spilling the dregs of her cold coffee over the blanket. “Finally!” he managed before burying himself in a kiss.

  It was a full hour before he turned to her with a puzzled look.

  They were both showered and dressed, and the remains of eggs and toast sat on her tiny breakfast table.

  “Were you saying something about Meredith Kennedy before I...?”

  “Before you dragged me off topic?” She smiled. The brilliance of her insight had dimmed now, but it was still a damn good idea. “I was. I was saying there are only two reasons I can think of why she hasn’t sent word to Brandon in all this time, especially if she knows how frantic everyone is.”

  “Well, obviously if she’s dead...”

  She nodded slowly. “That’s one.”

  “I know you have your doubts about that, since her credit card was used and Lise Gravelle turned up dead, but it’s hard to see why else—”

  “The other reason is if she’s the one who killed her.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Don’t you think we should tell the sergeant?” Bob asked. He was driving the way he always did, eyes straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. The roads were dry as bleached bone now but still narrowed by icy snowbanks on either side. As the crow flies, it was a short hop from Sue’s apartment to the station, but the one-way streets turned the trip into a labyrinth.

  The sun, just days from its winter solstice, was barely making it over the rooftops and its pale glare was blinding. No warmth to it, though; the car thermometer read minus fifteen and the exhaust from cars and chimneys billowed white in the bitter air.

  Sue suppressed a shiver as she figured out an answer. “We will,” she said, “but Inspector Green assigned us some background checks, so I think we should do those before we tell anyone our theory.” She could see the little smile on his lips, and she knew he didn’t want to report in to Marie Claire Levesque any more than she did. This was their case and the inspector had made the requests to them personally, so she was damned if Levesque was going to get all the glory for their work.

  Luckily, when they arrived at the station, the sergeant wasn’t even there. Murder cases didn’t take days off—how many times had Sue seen the inspector work all week without a break—but Levesque was probably off tobogganing with her daughter.

  Let’s not go there, she chided herself, pulling herself back to the task at hand. Marriage, kids, the impossible Mommy dance—that was getting ahead of herself. It was bad enough she was now staring at a spring wedding!

  She stopped at her desk next to Bob’s, and they hung up their coats and fired up their computers in perfect unison. He looked at her and laughed. On the way over, they had divided up the computer searches, with Bob ferreting out the links and her following along behind to jot down any relevant findings. No one navigated the web like Bob, and if there was information to be found linking Lise Gravelle to Elena Longstreet or the Kennedys, he would find it.

  At the end of three hours, they’d found precious little, although Bob claimed that in itself was significant. From what he could find, Lise had never crossed paths with Elena, either as a client, witness or adversary. They did not belong to the same associations, support the same charities or frequent the same online sites. In fact, although Elena showed up on the web all over the place, Lise’s cyber footprint was very small. Almost invisible. The woman barely existed. There were a couple of payments to the Parti Quebecois, some charitable donations to Médecins sans Frontières and Plan, nothing more.

  By comparison, Elena was a cyber star, showing up on the boards of several charities and law associations, frequently featured in the social columns and lifestyle pages of both Toronto and Ottawa newspapers. Interviews with local radio and television stations were archived on sites. The woman was a passionate defender of the Charter of Rights, which may have been Prime Minister Trudeau’s proudest achievement and a defence attorney’s best friend, but an obstructive pain in the ass to law enforcement efforts across the country.

  Still, as she listened to the videos and read the articles, Sue couldn’t help admiring the woman. She’d fought for respect and equality among the white-haired, middle-aged men who controlled positions of power in the legal profession. She’d quit a prominent law firm in Toronto when she found herself bashing her head against its glass ceiling, and she’d come to Ottawa to establish her own firm. Hired her own juniors, taken on the white-haired bastards in court, and won more times than not.

  All the time raising a kid entirely on her own.

  In all this blitz of media coverage, however, there wasn’t a single connection to the poor little invisible woman who worked as a hospital clerk in Montreal. Bob had even less luck with the Kennedys. Norah had virtually no presence on the web, only cropping up as the secretary of her local church women’s group and a few years ago on an amateur curling team. Reg had written some letters to the Citizen editor complaining about high city taxes, police inaction on low-level crimes such as vandalism, and the decline in parental supervision due to single-parent families. But besides being a complainer and a hard-nosed, law-and-order type, Reg Kennedy kept out of the spotlight. He was in their police system as witness to a few disturbances and impaired driving cases, but being a bartender, that was to be expected.

  In his perusal of public records, however, Bob did discover one interesting fact. Both Reg and Norah had grown up in Montreal and had moved to Ottawa only after their marriage.

  “Plus Elena Longstreet left Montreal in 1981. That’s all pre-internet, so if the connection between them all dates back to Montreal, it will be on paper records only,” he added in frustration.

  “We need to find out what part of Montreal they grew up in, what schools they attended, what children’s camps, college activities...” Sue raised her eyebrow skeptically. “You think the Kennedys went to college?”

  He shook his head. “Probably not, but the Quebec CEGEPs are like junior colleges, and I’ll bet back then there weren’t very many of them, so English kids from all over Montreal might have been thrown together. You have to go to CEGEP for two years before university, so even Elena would have attended. One way to find out. They’ll have records.” He reached for the phone.

  “But Lise Gravelle is French.”

  He hesitated in mid-dial before shaking his head. “Still worth a shot. We’re going to have to use the phone to get at this earlier background anyway.”

  He looked adorable, bent over his computer clicking through links as he dialled with his other hand. She pulled herself to her feet stiffly and went over to drape her arms around his neck. She nibbled his ear. “It’s Sunday, Gibbsie. Nobody’s going to be there.”

  He flushed deep red, jotted down a number and hung up.

  “Damn.”

  “We could just ask them, you know. Drive over to the Kennedys and ask them where they lived in Montreal, where they went to school, if they ever met Lise Gravelle.”

  He turned into her arms. “The inspector just asked us to do background. Maybe he doesn’t
want to tip them off just yet.”

  “Tip them off about what?”

  “About Lise Gravelle. That we suspect a connection.”

  She stood up and snatched her jacket off her chair back. “For Pete’s sake, Gibbsie, we won’t give away any state secrets! It’s a routine inquiry, all part of trying to track down where their daughter might have gone.”

  She knew he’d cave. He could never say no to her. As he drove them to the Kennedy home, she leafed through her notes and papers in Meredith’s case, trying to see if they’d overlooked some small detail she could use as a wedge. Her pulse jumped when she found one.

  Norah and Reg Kennedy had just come home from church and were still in their finery—Reg looking like an undertaker in a navy wool pullover and white dress shirt, and Norah in a black knit dress that stuck to her in all the wrong places. The week of worrying had worn them out. Their skin was grey and their eyes had sunk into their skulls as if in retreat from the world. They flinched at the sight of the two detectives. The house smelled of a thousand foods—chocolate, basil, cabbage and vinegar. Sue suspected the parade of friends and helpers had continued all week, but the living room was so clean you could eat off the floor. Funny how some people cope.

  Figuring to put their fears to rest, Sue spoke as soon as she sat down. “No news, I’m afraid. We’re just doing some routine follow-up to see if there’s anything we missed.”

  Without her having to ask, Gibbs took out his notebook and let her lead. “Have you thought any more about who Meredith might have visited in Montreal?”

  Norah shook her head. “She knows people there through her work, so maybe it was one of them.”

  “You’re both from Montreal, right?”

  A flicker crossed Norah’s face. The briefest hesitation. “Yes, but we moved here years ago.”

  “Where did you live there?”

  “Beaconsfield. It’s...” Norah gestured in vague dismissal. “It’s a suburb on the lakeshore. West Island.”

  “Do you remember the address?”