Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  Sebastiano shook off the hand in a fury. “No!” he cried. “She is not my sister. She is my wife!”

  The others looked around in confusion. “He said she was his sister,” Thom insisted forlornly.

  “Sir?” Saylor said. “Are you telling us this woman was married to you?”

  Sebastiano nodded, head in his hands. “In Brazil, yes. She is my wife for two years!”

  Thirteen

  Circumstantial Evidence

  The drizzle that had begun the eve of the wedding returned by afternoon and seemed to follow them home. The two-plus hours it took to return to Toronto was endured mostly in silence. Dan dropped Bill off at his townhouse and cabbed it back to Leslieville. He was at his desk Monday morning. Donny had called three times before Dan got there to say he’d heard about the drowning on the news. The event had been made to sound even more lurid and colourful when magnified by the immigration angle and the novelty of a gay wedding. Dan spoke with him briefly then pleaded work commitments.

  It wasn’t till the following day that he heard anything further. Just before noon he looked up to see his office assistant standing in his doorway.

  “Hello, Sally.”

  “They’re calling it suspicious,” she said, waving a file in front of her. “I thought you’d want to see it immediately.”

  Sally normally had no compunction about barging in unannounced; today, she hovered in the doorway decked out in an orange blouse and burgundy skirt. She seemed dressed for some occasion Dan wouldn’t be privy to: a U2 concert or the arrival of the Dalai Lama. Or possibly a protest at the American Embassy, though that would have required different colours, say, just the right shade of black on black — somewhere between polished charcoal and Death — with militant-looking armbands.

  Dan knew little about her personal life. She was one of the restless MTV tribe that crowded shopping malls and dance clubs, sporting their quirky fashions, celebrity obsessions, and shortened attention spans, and who took time to record their innermost thoughts at Speakers’ Corners and graduated from mid-size universities with vague degrees, hoping for careers in anything arts-related before settling for something less spectacular but more lucrative.

  “Come in, Sally.”

  She took a tentative step forward and stopped, looking around as though she’d never been there before. “Thank god somebody’s got a design sense,” she said, noting the reproductions of abstract art on the walls. “Everybody else’s office is just ...”

  Dan waved her forward abruptly. Startled, she nearly dropped the file.

  “Everybody else’s office is just what?” he said, smiling to show he wasn’t being unfriendly.

  Her eyes went around the room again, comparing what Dan’s office was with what the others weren’t. “It’s like they’re colourless or something. Nothing but beige and grey.” She shook her head over the incomprehensibility of it all.

  “Thank you. You’re the only other one who’s noticed.”

  Sally nodded. “That’s because you and I come from the same planet,” she said conspiratorially.

  Dan leaned forward. “And to what do you attribute all this colourlessness? Our alien nature?”

  Sally cocked her head. “I think it comes from being Canadian,” she said. “We’re raised to be bland and agreeable. Even the immigrants who come here eventually fade into some sort of creeping beigeness. There’s something wrong with that.”

  Dan nodded at the file in her hand. “You said they were calling it suspicious?”

  Sally nodded vigorously as she handed it over. “Big bump on her head. They think someone bashed her and dumped her overboard. You saw the body. What do you think?”

  Dan looked down at the report, thumbed open the cover. “I noticed the bump,” he said. She waited. Dan looked up. “I’ll need some time to look this over,” he said, smiling patiently again.

  “Oh right — of course! It’s all yours.” She turned to leave then stopped and turned back. “One other thing. You probably already knew this too. She was pregnant.”

  Dan looked up in surprise.

  Sally smiled. “Well, you do now.”

  The pregnancy wasn’t the only item of interest in the report. Daniella’s blood-alcohol level showed she hadn’t been drinking. Not a drop. Dan recalled the martini glass he’d watched her empty and how pale she’d looked. And, later, how she stumbled as though she’d been drunk. But she hadn’t. Obviously she’d known she was pregnant.

  He’d just finished the report when the phone buzzed. The display identified the call as coming from the Prince Edward Country OPP. Dan picked up.

  “Hi, Dan, Pete Saylor here.”

  “Pete! How are you?” Dan pictured the neatly dressed officer from Picton, wondering to what he owed the call.

  “Have you got a minute?” Saylor asked.

  “For you, I do — shoot.”

  “I guess you’ve heard we’re calling it a suspicious death.”

  “I just finished the report.”

  “So what do you think?” Saylor asked, launching in without preamble. “You were there. Would anybody want her dead for any obvious reason?”

  Dan hesitated. He’d already considered the question and come up with a few plausible if conjectured answers. “I haven’t really had time to think this through,” he said.

  What he was really thinking was that small-town cops were known for taking things out of context and hanging on like pit bulls when they smelled blood. Bored by years of putting out grass fires, dragging drunks out of bars, and handing out tickets to careless cottagers for polluting rivers and lakes, they exaggerated harmless circumstantial evidence into something much larger when the chance came to seize on a moment of glory. More than one man’s reputation had been destroyed because somebody had had what at the time seemed like a good idea, but which later proved false, the victims of small town zealotry. David Milgaard, Steven Truscott, Guy Paul Morin — those were just a few names that came easily to mind. There had been others, men and women whose names weren’t as familiar, who had spent time in jail for other people’s crimes. And there were probably many more besides who never had the opportunity to have their names cleared.

  “Completely off the record,” Saylor said. “Just between you and me.”

  Dan tried to imagine Saylor in the larger picture: more than competent at his job, boxed in by life but devoted to a wife and kids living just outside the town limits, possibly in a grand version of a log home, something unique and half-hidden by a copse of trees off a busy highway. He’d watch sports, follow Hockey Night In Canada assiduously, but maintain an avid interest in the news, curl up with his honey over reruns of Sex and the City or possibly even Will and Grace for a lark after the kids had gone to bed when there was nothing better on. Sophisticated and good-natured, but under-challenged. The thought of cracking a case like this, if case it turned out to be, would have a strong appeal for him, something that would continue to glitter and twist in the back of his mind long after his shift was over.

  “Pete, I really have to think about it before I open my mouth and get some poor innocent schmuck in trouble.”

  “All right. I thought you might say that.” Pete laughed lightly. “Want to hear my theories?”

  “Can’t hurt,” Dan said.

  “Good man. I need to try them out on somebody — in confidence, of course.”

  “Understood.”

  “First there’s the gay aspect. It was a gay wedding.” He shifted gears here. “By the way — are you gay? It’s cool if you are, my younger brother’s gay.”

  Dan frowned and wondered if it was true, but he let it pass. “Yes, I am,” he said. “And I was an invited guest.”

  “Hey, no hang-ups here. We’re a new breed of cop,” Saylor said breezily. “So anyway, there’s that aspect. And we already know the dead girl was his wife, not his sister, as he’d claimed.”

  “Actually, they’d both claimed that. I think they fooled everyone.”

  “R
ight. Well, we had a few eyewitnesses who testified that the girl and her husband seemed to be arguing after the wedding, maybe half an hour before she disappeared. Apparently she hadn’t wanted him to go through with it, though my sense is he was bucking for citizenship….”

  “I know all this,” Dan interrupted, trying not to sound impatient.

  “Right. So it’s possible he killed her to stop her from ruining his plans,” Saylor said.

  “I see what you’re getting at. That’s very interesting.” Except, Dan thought, I was fucking her husband around the same time you have him tossing her overboard.

  Saylor sounded pleased. “The other possibility is that the guy he married — Thom Killingworth — quite the name, huh? Anyway, it’s possible he didn’t want her messing things up for them, so he killed her.”

  Which is also a reasonable guess, Dan thought, except that Thom was busy fucking my boyfriend when it happened. On the other hand, he couldn’t confirm that Thom and Bill were still together when Daniella disappeared. Bill had arrived at the ballroom a minute or two after Thom. They could have gone their separate ways earlier, while Dan was tupping the Brazilian bull.

  “What about family?” Dan blurted out before he could stop himself. He was thinking of Ted Killingworth. How far could you trust a junkie? But maybe Ted was exactly the sort of person who got caught in the crossfire of these things, innocent yet unable to clear his name.

  “I’ve definitely thought of that one,” Saylor said. “Did you ever wonder what the parents thought about their son marrying another man?”

  “I wonder about things like that all the time,” Dan said. “And wish I didn’t have to.”

  “Point taken.”

  “But in Thom’s case his mother paid for the wedding, so presumably she approved of it. I heard the father’s been missing for twenty years, so it’s not likely he had anything to do with it unless you assume he returned in time to murder the woman everyone presumed was his son’s sister-in-law.”

  Dan heard Saylor chewing that one over. Maybe he was one of these cops who hated to be shown up. “Actually,” Saylor said. “I meant the other guy’s family. The Brazilian side.”

  “Oh. Well, I think it’s fair to say they would have disapproved of the event, had they known the real story, which I now doubt they did. Still, doesn’t it seem more likely that they would try to kill the boy rather than his wife?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Saylor said. “What if I told you I think the girl was targeted by accident and that it was really her husband that was supposed to die?”

  This gave Dan pause. “What makes you say that?” he said slowly.

  “Think about it. She looked like him. She was dressed exactly like him. With heels on, she would even have been about his height.…”

  “….and in the dark, she would look even more like him,” Dan finished.

  “Which is why everyone thought it was the boy who went overboard.” There was a satisfied tone in Saylor’s voice. “So you agree with me?”

  Dan hesitated. “It’s more than possible,” he said. “I mean, when you piece it together.”

  “I thought you’d agree,” Saylor crowed.

  Dan’s mind was racing again. “The only problem,” he said, “is that almost none of Sebastiano’s family attended the wedding.”

  “Almost?”

  “There was an old aunt,” Dan said. “She hardly looked strong enough to harm anyone, let alone toss someone overboard. But…” Dan mulled this over, “…why would it have to be someone in Sebastiano’s family?”

  “Exactly!” Saylor paused triumphantly. “Did you know the best man was rumoured to be having an affair with the groom?”

  “I’d heard something to that effect,” Dan said, thinking now would be the time to throw Saylor off track. “But I’ve got a better one for you.” He heard Saylor breathing heavily as he waited. “Did you know about the will?”

  “What will?”

  Dan felt the cop being drawn in. “Apparently there was a provision in the grandfather’s will that left money to the first brother who married.”

  Saylor whistled. “Interesting! So where does that leave us?”

  Dan tapped a pencil. He looked at the clock on his phone display. The morning was ticking by and he’d barely made any headway with the files in front of him.

  “Pete, that leaves me stuck in my dingy office and you out enjoying the beauties of Prince Edward County.”

  “Touché.”

  “I better go. I’ll check in with you, brother.”

  He’d barely hung up when the phone rang again. It was Trevor, calling to say in that appealing voice of his that he was in town to catch a plane back to B.C. that evening. Was there even a remote chance Dan would have time for lunch?

  Of course I would, Dan thought. For a guy like that, work could wait.

  An hour later, they sat across from one another upstairs at Spring Rolls, dishes scattered over the table. Trevor was dressed in greens and tans, his wavy hair echoing the shell pattern on his shirt. Dan filled him in on the revelations surrounding Daniella’s death. Trevor was surprised to hear about the pregnancy and was more than a little shocked to learn the length the pair had gone in perpetrating the deception. Daniella’s jealousy had nearly blown it the evening before the wedding, Dan noted, when she’d claimed to have it in her power to stop the ceremony if she chose.

  “Too bad she didn’t — she might still be alive,” Trevor observed.

  Reluctantly, Dan confessed what he’d done after discovering Bill and Thom were having an affair. Trevor listened, his face neutral. Dan searched for judgment in his expression, but found none.

  Finally, Trevor said, “Boy, you play for keeps, don’t you?”

  Dan looked down, his hands splayed across the table. “If I said it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, would that make it any more understandable?”

  “I’m not saying I don’t understand. A lot of guys would probably want to have done what you did, but I doubt many of them would have the balls to go ahead and let the consequences be damned.”

  “I’m just hoping to hell what Thom said about getting himself and Sebastiano tested was true.”

  “I’ve no doubt it was. I know Thom — he doesn’t fool around when it comes to things like that. He’s obsessive, especially with new boyfriends. I know he’d be right there with Sebastiano when the test results came back. He’d want to make sure he was getting a disease-free playground. That’s why he went to the trouble of getting the tests done.”

  Dan fingered his water glass. “That’s what I figured. Still, it was stupid. I took no satisfaction from it.”

  Trevor looked at him slyly. “None?”

  Dan felt himself blushing. “Okay, yeah — it was hot. But now all I can think about is how stupid I was.”

  “Revenge is sweet.” Trevor’s expression turned serious. “I gather my cousin will have other things to worry about if they’re looking at Daniella’s death as a possible murder. I know it’s none of my business, but do they actually think he might have killed her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Calling it suspicious is still a step away from declaring it foul play. They may think he had a motive to kill her, but that’s different.”

  Trevor looked out the window and down at the traffic doing a soft-shoe shuffle along Yonge Street. “It seems unbelievable we were attending a wedding a few days ago and now it’s a murder investigation.”

  The room was nearly empty. They were among the last diners. Their waiter sat at another table tabulating his receipts. For once he didn’t seem in a hurry to have them leave.

  “I know this is also none of my business … but what are you going to do about Bill?”

  Dan’s eyes darted away then back. “What would you do?”

  “I’d probably make plans to break up with him and then not have the guts to go through with it.” Trevor looked sidelong at Dan. “On the other hand, if I were you, I’d ditch the bastard and ac
cept my offer for a visit to the Left Coast.”

  Dan laughed softly.

  “I’m serious. If you need a place to get away, some place safe to visit. No strings.” He shrugged. “Though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find you sexy as hell. I’m sorry if that seems to be an inappropriate comment right now, for any number of reasons.”

  “No apology necessary,” Dan said. “And ditto for you.”

  Trevor put a hand on Dan’s wrist and rubbed his thumb against the skin next to his watchband. He sat back. “Time to go, I’m afraid.”

  Outside, traffic crawled through the intersection. Pedestrians brushed impatiently past Dan and Trevor as they stood outside a dollar store with a boarded-up front window and a sign: We Moving! To the north, the Brass Rail, Green Mango, and the Shoe Company vied for signage. A few doors away, another Starbucks, ubiquitous as mosquitoes. Urban life unfurled in one long, unending street named for its promise of eternal youth.

  An Asian man went by with an anxious face. Korean, Dan thought. Or possibly Vietnamese. Probably sent here by his parents after a lifetime of saving to get him to the land of dreams, where he now worked two jobs to send money home and pay them back for the rest of his life for having given him what they would never have. He lingered on the steps of the Brass Rail, torn between duty and the posters of girls with their biologically impossible breasts inviting him in. A ferret-faced man approached and spoke a few soft words, the salesman’s surreptitious pitch. The Asian man’s eyes flickered nervously over at the strip club, then back to the man. Go for the girls, buddy, Dan thought.

  Two doors up, a bleached-blonde dressed in suburban shopping mall jeans two sizes too small lingered in front of a shoe display. She had Tweetie Bird tattooed on her left shoulder, a bruise under her right eye. Whose sad little dolly are you? Dan wondered, mapping the clues that might help him or one of his colleagues decide where to begin looking when the expected phone call didn’t come, the key didn’t turn in the lock.