None So Deadly

by David A. Poulsen

She’d had a cheery, agreeable voice on the intercom, and a cheery, agreeable woman in her mid- to late thirties came to the door, pulled it the rest of the way open, and smiled at me. She was wearing jeans and an I Hawaii T-shirt. She had short brown hair and large, expressive eyes. Attractive. Behind her a boy I would have put at about twelve or thirteen was watching me. Protective. The look on his face much less friendly.

  “Hi, I’m Carly, come in.”

  “Adam Cullen.” I stepped into the apartment, offered a hand; she shook it and I followed her to the living room.

  “I’ve got some coffee on. Would you like a cup?”

  “Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

  “Chance, why don’t you talk to Mr. Cullen while I get the coffee. You want a juice?”

  Chance shook his head and sat in a recliner near the window, leaving a patterned chesterfield for me. I sat and looked at the kid for a moment, wondering if Terry Maughan was his dad and if he looked like him. I wasn’t sure I saw any resemblance between Chance and Carly Maughan, but that may have had something to do with the smile that seemed a permanent feature with her, a distant memory for him.

  He was, however, wearing a faded Blue Jays shirt, providing me with an opening.

  “You like baseball, Chance?”

  “Not really.” He saw me looking at his shirt. “I took it out of the lost and found at school.”

  “Good work,” I said. “It’s a great look.”

  He apparently missed my sarcasm or didn’t feel the need to respond, opting instead to stare at my shoes. I was pretty sure it wasn’t that my footwear fascinated him so much as that I didn’t.

  “Actually, your name is a famous one in baseball,” I told him. “A big part of history. Tinker to Evers to Chance. Double play combination for the Chicago Cubs in the early 1900s. Chance was the first baseman. There was a very cool poem about them. I wrote a paper about it when I was in university.”

  I reached for my phone to look it up. Chance nodded but he was clearly underwhelmed by my dullness. I had lost him at actually. I left the phone where it was.

  Carly Maughan mercifully re-entered the living room, two coffee mugs in hand. I stood, took one, and sat back down. She surveyed the seating arrangements, started to sit on the couch with me, then changed her mind.

  “Chance, maybe you should leave Mr. Cullen and me to talk. Maybe you can find something to do in your room.”

  I’m pretty sure Nero Wolfe could have gotten to his feet in less time than it took Chance. He slumped off down the hallway and a few seconds later we heard the door close.

  “He’s fourteen,” Carly said as she settled in the chair Chance had vacated. I wasn’t sure if she offered her son’s age as general information or as an excuse. I decided that if this was a preview of what we could expect from Kyla when she hit fourteen, I’d hurl myself from a tall building the night before her birthday.

  I pulled out a notebook and pen, partly to add credence to my cover and partly to jot down anything she gave me that might be useful in finding her former husband.

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me, Carly.”

  “You said you were writing a story about Terry.”

  “Yes, I understand you two haven’t been together for a while.”

  “A little over four years. Four wonderful years.”

  “Terry was … difficult, was he?”

  “No, he was not difficult. He was impossible, at least to live with.”

  “Abusive?”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t say abusive. It was … it was as if everything I ever said or did just bored him to death. Other than when we had sex. And I’m not sure that after a while, even that …” She shrugged.

  “What did Terry do for a living?”

  “It would be faster to tell you what he didn’t do. Let’s see, he was a Transit System bus driver — that was a good job, benefits and everything. He lasted maybe two years. He was a plumber’s helper, worked for a short time in the oil patch, sold shoes in a store in Southcentre Mall, and he got into every get-rich-quick online scheme, make that scam, there was. We were always broke. My parents bailed us out on mortgage payments and other bills until I just couldn’t ask them anymore, and that really pissed Terry off. That’s when we split. In fairness, I will say the thing Terry wanted most was to be a cop like his dad. And he tried, twice. Failed the written test both times.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “Someone I spoke to said Terry did some sort of door-to-door sales.”

  “That’s true. I mean, it wasn’t like encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners or anything like that. It was a little more twenty-first century — there’d often be some technology element to it; he liked that, but it was always the same: it didn’t quite work out and it was always someone else’s fault. Sad, really.”

  “Have you seen Terry recently?”

  “I haven’t, and that’s kind of different. He hasn’t seen Chance or even called him in a really long time. We used to see him every now and then, at least for birthdays and stuff, but not at all for quite a while now.”

  “How long is a while, Carly?”

  She thought for a moment. “I’d say a year, maybe year and a half. Oh,” she jumped up, “let me top up your coffee.”

  “Just half a cup,” I said.

  She picked up my mug and disappeared into the kitchen. Without Chance to talk baseball with, I decided to look around the living room. There were pictures, lots with Chance as the subject, some with him actually smiling. There were a few of Carly, some with her and her son together, but none with a man in them.

  Carly came back about then and handed me my coffee. I thanked her and sat back down. “So, what do you do, Carly?”

  “Receptionist in an accounting office. Four days a week. Today’s my day off and it’s cool because this is a half day at school for Chance. We get some time together.”

  I nodded, sipped the coffee. I noticed she hadn’t mentioned the beauty products. “I don’t want to keep you too long, but I wondered if you knew where I might find Terry. I’d really like to talk to him, interview him for the story.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t. I know he was living in a furnished suite for a while but then I heard he came into some money. After his dad died, Terry’s mom remarried and I think the new guy had quite a lot of money. So maybe Terry got a nice inheritance or something.”

  “Which I take it he didn’t offer to share.”

  She shook her head again. “I didn’t care about it for me,” she said, and I believed her. “But it would have been nice for Chance if we had a little extra every once in a while.”

  “Terry ever talk about his school days?”

  “School days?”

  “Yeah, you know, people he chummed around with, teachers he liked, teachers he didn’t like, just the stuff people talk about when they think back to school.”

  “Well, I guess he might have said something from time to time, but I can’t honestly remember any of it, so I don’t know if it was all that interesting. I guess I didn’t really pay attention.”

  “I heard he sometimes helped his dad with presentations in schools — you know, the kind where they talk about the police with the kids. Terry ever mention that?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I remember him saying something about ‘all that time I spent with my dad talking about how great cops are should get me into the force.’ But it never did.”

  “So you can’t give me any idea where I might look for him.”

  “I can give you the address of the place he was renting, but I phoned a couple of months ago and he’s been gone from there for quite a while.”

  I nodded and stood up. “Thanks, I’ll take that address anyway, and the last phone number you have for him, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, I’ll get those for you.”

  “Oh, one last thing. Do you happen to have a picture of Terry I could borrow?”

  Her face came as close to a frown as
it looked like it was possible for it to get. It took a few seconds for her to make up her mind.

  “I guess so. I’ll be right back.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen and I moved to the door to wait for her. Chance came out of his room and over to where I was standing.

  “It was good to meet you, Chance,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: Tinker to Evers to Chance,” he said, then grinned at me.

  The last two lines of the poem. Good ol’ Google. Someday I’m going to learn not to judge people on first meeting them. Chance Maughan had just taught me that lesson, again.

  We were in the middle of a high-five when his mom emerged from the kitchen with a piece of paper and a small photo. “Did I miss something?”

  “I was just saying so long to a pretty cool kid.”

  The smile returned to her face in a big way and she handed me the paper and the photograph. “I don’t need the photo back.”

  “How about I just take a picture of it — that way you don’t need to part with it.” I pulled out my phone. “I keep forgetting about the technology.”

  Chance gave me a little wave and I grinned at him as he headed back to his room. When the door had closed, Carly said, “That doesn’t happen very often.”

  “I’m glad it happened today,” I said.

  “I guess he thinks you’re a nice guy. I do, too.”

  “Thanks, and right back at both of you.”

  I took a couple of pictures of the photo, put my phone away, and turned for the door.

  “If you ever wanted to have another cup of coffee sometime … I’d … uh … be up for that.”

  I turned back to her. There was some pink in her cheeks as she made the offer.

  “Thanks … I …” I hoped the smile on my face told her that couldn’t happen. The smile on hers told me she understood.

  “I really appreciate your help,” I told her.

  She smiled again. “You’re welcome, Adam.”

  When the door closed behind me, I sent a wish to wherever wishes are supposed to go that she’d meet a great guy one day and the three of them would have a nice life together.

  On the street in front of the building, I looked at my picture of the photo. I probably wouldn’t have needed it. Chance was his dad minus twenty-five or thirty years. I climbed into the Accord and GPS’d the address she’d given me. The place where Maughan had rented a suite was only a couple of blocks from the house he and his family had lived in when Terry was in junior high at Kilkenny School, and only a couple more from the school itself.

  I decided to drive by the place, see if anyone there might offer up something on where the elusive Terry Maughan could be found. I made a drive-through pickup at a Starbucks on the way and relied on Stan Rogers’s Northwest Passage — the album, not the single — to provide the accompaniment for the drive.

  More and more I felt that Terry Maughan might be connected somehow to what happened in 1991, but how direct or tenuous that connection was, I had no idea. Was he a teenage murderer? Was he an accomplice? Was he the guilt-ridden family member who’d found out what his father had done and had had to live with that knowledge ever since? All of those and probably a couple more scenarios I hadn’t thought of seemed possible.

  And could that mean he was also connected to Kennedy’s murder? And where the hell was he? Why the disappearance that roughly coincided with the time the first shadows began to appear on Kennedy’s surveillance tapes of the alley behind where Faith’s body had been found? Or was the whole thing wishful thinking — a couple of coincidences and some circumstantial evidence that added up to nothing?

  The GPS directions took me right by the school, and a couple of turns led me to the address Carly Maughan had provided. Big house, I would have guessed seventies vintage. I tried to visualize where the suite Maughan had rented was situated in the house, and realized I had no idea. I got out of the car and headed for the front door, rang the bell, waited, rang it again.

  After a lengthy wait, I finally heard movement on the other side of the door. It was opened by an unshaven guy in jeans and an undershirt, his body language and facial expression screaming pissed off.

  “You have trouble with readin’, Mac?”

  I looked where a fat, flabby finger was pointing. A faded sign read “No soliciting.” “Actually, I didn’t see the sign, Mac, but we’re okay, I’m not soliciting, not selling anything.”

  “I work nights and you interrupted my sleep, so if you ain’t selling, what the fuck you want?”

  What the fuck I wanted was to kick this man in the chimichangas, but I opted for restraint and a smile. “I’m looking for a former tenant of yours, Terry Maughan.”

  “Well, if he’s a former tenant, then that pretty well means he ain’t here, wouldn’t you think that’s what it would mean?”

  The chimichangas, through no fault of their own, inched closer to a date with destiny.

  “He leave a forwarding address?”

  “No, what he left was a month and a half of unpaid rent. Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  I decided to change my approach. “Calgary Herald,” I said. “Just working up a feature on illegal suites. If you wouldn’t mind staying right about where you are, I’m just going to step back a little and get a shot of you at the front door. Yeah, that’ll be perfect.”

  I started to back up, moving my hands like I was lining up a photo. “This will look great,” I said.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, just a minute,” the guy said. “We don’t need any pictures here or any stories. You know what — there’s a nice lady rents that suite now, single mom, has a daughter at university; she comes home on weekends sometimes. You don’t wanna see somebody like that out on the street, do ya?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “That’s why this is a totally sympathetic story. No fake news here, brother. I see you as a hard-working guy, works nights, has a little thing on the side that he rents out to people who are just as nice as he is. See how great that will be on page eight?”

  I continued to set up my photo, checking the light, the angle. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to the gentleman that the taking of a picture required a camera, which I was lacking. I stepped back up on the landing, pulled out my notebook and pen.

  “Can I get the correct spelling of your name?”

  “No names, no photos, okay? Come on, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said. “The last thing the Herald would want is to cause anybody any stress. So tell me about Terry Maughan.”

  “What do you wanna know?”

  “I’m assuming that when you rent a suite to someone, you ask a few questions. What did he do for a living?”

  “He ran some kind of home-based business, some online thing. That’s what he said. I try not to interfere with other people’s business.”

  I’m pretty sure there was a message for me in there somewhere. I ignored it.

  “Maughan have many visitors?”

  “No, hardly any. A couple of women, so at least he wasn’t a fag. I’d have thrown his ass outta here if that was the deal.”

  “Yeah, good for you. Did he go out much?”

  He nodded his head. “A lot at night. Not every night but I’d say quite a lot. The suite is set up so people can come and go without my knowing — you know, give ’em their privacy — but he had a fairly loud vehicle. So I knew when he was leaving.”

  “How about when he came home? Did he stay out all night?”

  “I told you, I work nights, so I wasn’t here most of the time when he got home. A couple of times on my days off, I noticed that he got back maybe two or three in the morning.”

  “The loud vehicle — what did he drive?”

  “SUV.”

  “Remember the make?”

  “Nope.”

  “Big, little, midsize?”

  He shrugged. “I’d say maybe somewhere in the middle.”

  “Older, newer?”

  �
�Somewhere in the middle.”

  “What about during the day?”

  “I told you, I was usually sleeping. Like I oughta be doing right now. But sometimes he was gone during the day, too. I know that from my days off. I figured he was doing whatever his business was all about.” A big yawn, exaggerated for effect.

  The longer I stood on that porch, the more I felt that my body was being infested by poisonous insects. I’d had enough.

  “Well, thanks, Mr. …?”

  “Uh … Smith.” He winked at me.

  “Right.” I winked back and turned to walk up the sidewalk toward the street. Just before I got to the Accord, I wheeled around, pulled out my phone, and held it up as if I was taking a picture.

  He opened the door and yelled, “Hey, we agreed no pictures. What the fuck ya doin’?”

  I pretended to click, then waved as I dropped into the driver’s seat. “So long, Smitty.”

  I resisted the desire to race home for a shower, opting instead for soup and a sandwich at the Avenue Deli in Marda Loop. The sandwich was Montreal smoked meat, and it provided the needed antidote to the noxious aura of the man I had just talked to.

  As I ate I flipped through my notebook, pages of jottings and recapped conversations, focusing on the notes I had made following my visit to Kilkenny School. I recalled walking the route Faith and her friend Jasmine had probably walked on their way home that terrible day in 1991. I thought about the Maughans — the cop and the son.

  Terry Maughan had returned to the old neighbourhood, at least for a while, when he was renting from Mr. Personality. It was within blocks of Kilkenny School and the former Maughan home, and not far from the site of the Faith Unruh murder. Significant? Maybe. Except he wasn’t there now.

  I finished my food and called Jill. I figured she might be on a break at the Inn. She was, and picked up, her voice radiating the joy the job gave her every day.

  “Hey, girl I love. How’s your day?”

  “Busy but good. Lots of drop offs at the food bank and a couple of new people wanting to stay at the Inn. Just processing them right now.”

  “Okay, won’t keep you. Just needed to hear your voice.”

  “I love that you called. Don’t forget Kyla and I have a baseball meeting tonight.”