by Anne Emery
“When was it that she died?”
“It was May, 1981.”
“You didn’t contest the will, I take it.”
“Of course not! Good heavens! We’re not family members, and we certainly didn’t think it was any of our business to question Tilly’s intentions.”
“No, no, I understand. You said something about the death notice; you don’t happen to have a copy, do you? I mean, do you keep files relating to your volunteers?”
“Oh, yes, we keep records of their hours, little mementoes, honours they’ve received for their work, that sort of thing. We still have Tilly’s. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Would you like to see it?”
“Can’t hurt.”
She disappeared into the office again and I heard the sound of papers, followed by the whirr of a photocopier. “There you go, Monty. Though I can’t imagine how it will help you with Corey’s case.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, folding it carefully and slipping it into my jacket pocket. “I won’t take up any more of your time, Connie. Thanks.”
So. The will that went missing from Dice Campbell’s files had been changed in the year before Matilda’s death in May 1981. Who got the money?
I could not say who got the money, but my files told me that the first zoning applications relating to the Bromley Point project were filed within three months of Mrs. Lonergan’s death. And if Dice got the money, and put it into the project, it was worth a lot more now that it had been when he got his hands on it. Of course, it was the widow Mavis who would reap what Dice had sown when he went to work on poor old Tilly Lonergan. He could not, of course, have done anything so obvious, and open to challenge, as have the woman bequeath money to him directly. He could not have witnessed the will if he was a beneficiary. But I had little doubt that with a bit of digging I would discover someone or something — a corporate entity perhaps — with an obscure connection to Dice Campbell, and a sudden influx of cash in 1981.
†
“Is Ed still in?” I had scooted over to Johnson’s office on Hollis Street late that afternoon.
The receptionist stole a glance at one of the secretaries who was standing nearby. “Well, he’s in, but —”
“But what?” The look again.
“He’s not feeling well.”
“So I’ll take him up to the Grafton Street Clinic; I think he needs plenty of fluids.” I walked ahead to Johnson’s office and knocked on his door.
“Get lost!”
I opened the door and went in. “Going to knock off soon? I thought we could have a steak at the Midtown or — Jesus! Are you all right?”
“No. Yes. I had a hard night. And morning. I crashed here at six a.m. or something. Fuck.” He was pale and shaky, head propped up on one hand while the other arm dangled down the side of his desk.
“You coming for a steak or not?”
“No, no! Maybe. It might be just what I need. A hair of the dog, you know how it goes.”
When we were seated in the tavern I asked him again if he was all right. “Have you been hitting the bottle harder than usual? Is there anything wrong?”
“Everything I touch turns to shit.”
“Like what?”
He waved a hand and picked up his beer with the other. “The Bar Society complaint. Clients pissing me off. Shit like that. I should just hang it up. Find something else to do with my life. Drink all day and sponge off Donna.”
“Listen. I want to ask you about Dice Campbell.”
“Why do you keep asking me about Campbell? You seem to think I was a Siamese twin with the guy, or something. I only saw him at a few —”
“You knew him. I didn’t.”
“What about him?”
“Do you know if he ever set up any kind of corporation?”
“Why?”
“Never mind why. Just, did he?”
“No idea. How does this tie in with Leaman?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, what the hell —”
“I think there was a connection between the two of them, and anything I can find out about Campbell may help me find the link.”
“My advice to you is: stop rooting around in all this old crap. Stick to the point, which is that Leaman killed himself and Scott, and you’re going for the payoff. Forget Campbell.”
I shrugged. Johnson eventually returned to the subject of the client who had filed a complaint against him; he muttered darkly about that, and the other aggravations of running a legal practice, for the rest of the night.
It was drizzling when we left the Midtown; I slipped on the rain-slicked pavement and grabbed Johnson for support. We looked like a pair of Vaudeville drunks. My companion thundered at a passing cab, and it pulled over. Ed passed out beside me, and I had to shake him when we got to his condo. Staging had been set up along one wall of his building, and I wondered idly what it would be like to be part of a condominium when costly repairs were required Well, at least this building was being maintained, unlike the crumbling condos that my clients had slapped together. Who had sent me a warning about that? No, nobody. Drunken reasoning. I was losing brain cells at a rapid rate. That was the Colosseum postcard I was thinking about. I had thought somebody was making a point about ruins, but really it was a tip-off about Campbell and the Colosseum. “Ask,” the person had written. Well, I had done a lot of asking since then . . . Wait a minute! “Ask and it shall be given!” The same writing, done with a calligraphy pen. Warren Tulk’s bookshop. It was Tulk who had sent the postcard. I realized Ed was mumbling something as he struggled from the car; he was telling me to pay the fare. I paid when I got home; the cabbie had to shake me awake when we pulled up to the house.
I hadn’t got anywhere with Johnson about whether Dice Campbell may have set up a corporation as a dodge for the acquisition of Mrs. Lonergan’s money. And I didn’t even remember my interest in the subject till eleven o’clock Saturday morning, then immediately pushed it from my mind.
I spent a dreary day doing long-neglected chores around the house, accompanied by loud rock music on the stereo, which I hoped would be more effective than booze in drowning out thoughts of Maura and her baby. Nevertheless, I picked up the phone and made arrangements to take Tom and Normie to Lawrencetown Beach for a few hours of body-surfing on Sunday. Even in the middle of August, the water temperature at Lawrencetown was only 13 degrees Celsius but, as always, we eschewed the wetsuits favoured by the surfers there and had a grand old time in the waves. Of course, with our body temperatures so low afterwards, we were the only ones in the entire city driving home with our windows up and the heater on. Small price to pay.
†
First thing Monday morning I called Dice Campbell’s friend, Wade Evans.
“Hey, Monty.”
“Another question about Dice. Do you know whether he ever set up a corporation of any kind?”
“Yes, but I don’t think he did anything with it. Just got it registered and let it sit there.”
“What was the company name, do you know?”
“Yeah, something unusual. Spirit Safe Limited.”
Spirit Safe. What was the company going to do? Sell safes? Spirits? Did it matter? I took it upon myself to do some corporate research. By the end of the day I had the paperwork showing that Spirit Safe Limited was established in 1978 with Darren Dice Campbell as president and Mavis as vice. Nothing was done with the company, but it was reactivated in 1981. I called Ed Johnson’s number; maybe the name Spirit Safe would trigger his memory.
“Ed.”
“What?”
“I found out the name of Campbell’s company.” Silence. “Ed?”
“What?”
“It was Spirit Safe.”
“So?”
“What was the company set up for?”
“Who cares? Go bark up another tree, for Christ’s sake!”
“Do-you-know-what-the-company-was —”
“I think Dicey wanted to open a bar.
Scotch bar. Never got it done. That obviously has nothing to do with your case, so forget about it. I’m tired of all this old shit. And I’m late for court.” Click.
It took me a while after that to get through to the woman identified in Matilda Lonergan’s obituary, namely, Matilda’s late husband’s brother’s niece by marriage. Martha Fielding lived in Arizona. It was a steamy hot August day in Halifax, so I prompted her to tell me the temperature where she was — 101 degrees Fahrenheit — which cooled me off a bit. I explained why I was calling. Sure enough, she had been the recipient of the contents of Matilda’s house, or at least the few residual items that had not been willed to other people. I asked if she had the will. I did not mention the fact that the solicitor’s copy had disappeared from Campbell’s files not long after I discovered it. She went to check.
“There are two wills here!” Martha announced when she came back. “Aren’t you supposed to destroy the old one when you make a new one?”
“The new one supersedes the old. Could you go through the later one — you can skip the teacups and butter knives — and tell me if there is a bequest to something called Spirit Safe Limited?”
“Yes, she left them eight hundred eighty thousand dollars.”
“What are the names of the witnesses on the last page?”
“Tracy MacKay and Irene Fowler.”
Tracy had been Dice Campbell’s secretary. Irene may have been a woman working in the same building, called in to be one of the two required witnesses.
“Now, could you look at the earlier will? What was the date of the first one?”
“August 14, 1977.”
“Who did she leave the eight hundred thousand to at that time?”
“Just a second. Here it is. She left eight hundred thirty thousand to something called Primrose House Foundation.”
As expected. The very archetype of the sleazy lawyer, preying upon a well-heeled, and well-intentioned, elderly widow. I could picture Dice at her bedside, speaking of the charitable organization he had founded, Spirit Safe. Its purpose was undoubtedly noble: providing shelter for runaway children to keep them safe, or to keep their spirits alive. How did he get away with it? What role, if any, did Mavis play in the scheme?
“Thanks, Martha. I wonder if you could make copies of both wills and send them to me in Halifax. I’ll be happy to reimburse you for your expenses.”
“No need of that. But I’m leaving for a short vacation. If I don’t get them in the mail before then, I certainly will when I come back.”
“Thanks again. Oh, before you go, are there any other beneficiaries named?”
“Let me look here. Yes. She left fifty thousand dollars to someone by the name of Corey Leaman.”
I absorbed the news in silence.
“Monty?”
“Yes, sorry. Which will is he in?” As if I didn’t know.
“The old one, but not the new one.”
I gave her my address and rang off.
What did I have? A wealthy and generous woman who seemed not to have spent any money on herself, but who saved and planned to leave it where it could do the most good for the cause dearest to her heart: troubled young people without resources of their own. Including Corey Leaman. She had made out a bequest in 1977 to Primrose House, in a multi-page will that listed every trinket and bauble she owned. The amount suggested that she envisioned either a magnificent new building or, more likely, a modest house and a fund for future expenses. John Trevelyan had been her lawyer at the time. When Trevelyan had become too busy — or too high and mighty — to drive out to Sackville and listen to a sick old lady dither about her Royal Doultons, he had made the fatal mistake of palming her off on a young lawyer on the lookout for any work he could get. Fatal for whom? Leaman? Dice Campbell? Could Leaman have found out that Dice had cut him out, pushed Dice off the balcony of his office, then stolen his gun? I could easily see fifty thousand dollars as a motive for murder. I had any number of clients who risked long years in prison for a few bucks and a pack of smokes. And Dice Campbell considered fifty thousand a princely enough sum to take the risk of cutting Leaman out and adding it to the sum bequeathed to his own company, Spirit Safe.
Did Mavis know about this, or at least suspect it? If she was in on the plan to divert Mrs. Lonergan’s money to the family business, did she also know there had originally been a bequest to someone named Leaman? If she suspected that Dice was killed by Leaman, had she delayed her revenge on Leaman until now? Had she bided her time all these years to divert suspicion away from the will scam? I had no trouble at all thinking of Mavis as a woman with complicated motives. I had recently convinced myself she had a motive to kill Dice herself.
I fished around in my desk drawer and found the paperwork I had obtained showing the details of Dice Campbell’s company. Ed Johnson said Dice intended to open a Spirit Safe bar but never got around to it. I formed a mental picture of Mavis tarted up as a bar wench. The corporate documents said the company was incorporated in 1978, with Dice and Mavis as its officers and directors. It was allowed to lapse, and then was reactivated right around the time Dice altered Matilda Lonergan’s will. Yes, here it was again in 1981 with the directors’ names — I looked at the paper, blinked, and looked again. No. It couldn’t be.
“I have to go to the Law Courts!” I announced to the receptionist, as I flew from the office.
I ran down the hill to Lower Water Street, turned left and kept running till I reached the Supreme Court building. I took the stairs to the third floor. I knew which courtroom he was in; if he had to face the judge’s wrath for holding up the proceedings, so be it. That would be the least of his problems.
“You look like you’ve seen a spook, Collins. What’s your problem?”
I found myself unwilling to blurt out the only thing that was on my mind. I had to catch my breath and decide how to handle this. “Are you here for the Bromley Point chambers hearing?”
“Yeah, me and half the bar of Nova Scotia. The rest of them are inside, but it’s going to take a while before I get my turn.” He peered at me. “You look a little jumpy. There’s a cure for that, but it ain’t pretty.”
“What’s the cure?” I said, barely listening as I surveyed the area to see who else was around.
“Detox, Collins. How about the Baird Centre?”
“I don’t need to be detoxified, Johnson. But you do. Your hand is shaking.”
“Oh, I should be in there, no question. The place gives me the willies, though. Makes people shoot themselves in the head. I’m glad to see you finally filed that lawsuit. You want to get the ball rolling before the young widows both find rich husbands, and there goes your dependency claim.”
“I didn’t file anything.”
“Somebody did. I heard about it downstairs.”
“There’s not going to be a lawsuit, Ed.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Let’s cut the crap, Monty. We both know why you’re here.”
“Do we?”
“But you’re going to be disappointed. The old man didn’t show. I think he’s out of the country.”
“The old man?”
“There’s a warrant out for his arrest. Story of his life.”
I decided to play for time. “Why would I want to see the old man?”
He laughed, and it was not a joyful sound. “So you could hear the story first-hand, right? He’s shameless enough to tell it. I’d rather die than tell it — in some moods, I’d rather kill than tell it — and he’d spill it like it happened every day.”
“I don’t —”
“Sure you do. It’s right there on the docket. R. v. Negus. Theft over. Judge alone.” Ed wrenched open his briefcase and rummaged through his papers.
My mind latched on to the name Negus. Vincent “Vegas” Negus. Right. Vernon, the homeless guy, had remembered the name.
“There.” Ed waved the Crown sheet in front of my face. “Satisfied? You saw the docket, like you saw the docket
on arraignment day that time over in provincial court. You saw my old man’s name on it. Which I have no doubt you uncovered in your relentless investigations into that fucking Colosseum. The ruin that stands for all time! Nobody knew I was related to that bottom-feeder because at the earliest opportunity I changed my name from Negus to Johnson, my mother’s name. Then, after one of his many stints in the bin with the rest of the trash, the old man blew into town and got wind of the orgy going on at Dice Campbell’s back in ‘85. And he was in there. Hoping to sit at the table and gamble for human flesh. When did you piece it all together, Collins?”
“I —”
“When that old bum freaked out at the sound of my voice at the choir concert, right? Or at least that came back to you when the rest of it . . . ah, fuck it.”
“But if it was your father at the Colosseum, how would your voice —”
“My voice probably still resounds in their heads, at least the ones who are alive. ‘Do a dance for us, boys. Give us a song. Then maybe we’ll let you go.’”
“What do you mean about singing? I don’t follow.”
“I’d heard about this party that had been going on all weekend, and was out of control. I knew my father was there, and my only fear — I didn’t care if they brought in wild animals to tear him apart — my only fear was that he’d let slip in front of everyone that I was his son. I couldn’t have that. So I pulled a ball cap over my head, took a pair of Donna’s old eyeglasses, and tried to make myself look like someone else. I got myself in there — never mind how — and tried to drag old Vinny out. He was at the bottom of the heap as usual. A gladiator, fodder for the amusement of his betters, and he was beating up on some smaller guy. Maybe it was that guy, Vernon. I grabbed the old man and tried to get him out. He started to fight me off. He said: ‘Well, if it isn’t the little crooner.’ About my singing in the band. But he didn’t say I was his son. The Romans cheered and laughed and made wagers on the outcome of the fight between me and him. I knocked the old man’s head against a table, and he slumped to the floor. But the guy at the door wouldn’t let me take him out. The guy had Dicey’s gun. Dicey was in his office with the door closed, with some girl. The rest of them all started to stomp their feet and demanded a song: ‘You’re a crooner, eh? Sing us a tune! Sing us a tune!’ On and on. I didn’t want to make it any worse and I didn’t want to stay and let them find out who I was, so I — fuck!” Ed’s voice broke, and he slashed at his eyes with the back of his hand. “You knew this, you fucker. You must have had a good laugh picturing the scene. Me singing for the likes of Ken Fanshaw and his hangers-on! I was born in a lousy stinking flophouse and we were starving half my childhood. We had old Negus beating the shit out of us, but I made it out of there and got my law degree. And there I was, back at the bottom of the pile with the rest of the poor white trash. I sang a few bars of ‘The Gambler,’ and tried to pretend I thought it was a big joke. That tramp, Vern, must have been the guy in the fight, and he heard my voice.
