Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  “He didn’t say. His name was, I wrote it down but I remember it, Terrace Rattigan.”

  “Terrace or Terrence?”

  He pulled a neatly folded piece of paper from his pants pocket. “Yes, Terrence. We’re supposed to keep notes to help us get the names right. It’s always better for the aggrieved if we call them by name.”

  “The grieving,” said Morgan.

  “Eddie, did this Mr. Rattigan leave a card? How am I to reach him? Did he say why? Police business or personal?” Miranda turned back to Morgan. “I’m still on sabbatical. It must have been personal. Eddie, was he attractive?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he was. I don’t know, maybe not, I didn’t notice. He said to tell you he is not staying at The Four Seasons.”

  “He’s not staying at the Four Seasons? He said that?”

  “Ma’am, he said you’d figure it out. He didn’t say what he wanted, but he was an important person. You could tell. I see a lot of important people in my line of business. He said you met on the Ireland Queen.”

  “In your line of business?” Miranda couldn’t help admiring his spunk. “Important people die in the end, Eddie, the same as the rest of us. And work on your note-taking. It’s the Island Queen, not Ireland.”

  “I think Eddie was referring to his present line of work,” said Morgan as he edged around the young man, grimacing at Miranda in a bid to have her follow. “I’m sure Terrace Rattigan will track her down, Eddie. He sounds like a determined sort of fellow. Semi-determined, since he didn’t get past you. Good man. G’night.”

  “Good evening, Detectives,” said Eddie Block, with a hint of a bow, or perhaps it was a tentative genuflection, it was difficult to tell in the fading light, but there was no question about the slight quiver of deference in his voice as he called after them, before turning back to the ferry to resume his sea-faring duties. “I was pleased to be of service.”

  * * *

  Morgan tapped the refrigerator for a beer and the remains of a day-old submarine sandwich. They had decided not to have dinner together. Miranda’s system was struggling to sort out the difference between being awake and asleep and Morgan was feeling cranky. They walked up to Union Station and caught the subway, Morgan going west and Miranda going east, which was an illusion since the lines arced north and ran parallel only a few blocks apart.

  She had talked about her mysterious visitor with an offhand lack of interest that surprised him. He figured it was either because she had no idea who he was or the exact opposite, that she knew exactly who he was and chose not to disclose his identity. Morgan watched television for awhile and went to bed early. At three a.m. he woke up. Precisely at three. It unnerved him how that happened. He wore an old Bulova that had been his father’s retirement gift. The gold was worn through on the back, but it kept perfect time. The movement inside was absolutely silent. Yet somehow, it woke him to the exact second measured by the sweep second hand at the top of the hour. Not every hour, just hours deemed important by the watch, or by his mind as it blindly monitored his progression through time.

  If he set his alarm, sometimes he would wake up five minutes before it went off. Not four minutes before or six but five. It seemed the timepieces in his life showed an uncanny prescience.

  He stared at where the ceiling would be if he had been able to see it in the diffuse light coming in from the street through his broken blinds. He might have been dreaming about sex. He had that same uneasy feeling, although no images came to mind. He tried to focus on his case, which seemed after their afternoon with Rove McMan to be simultaneously coming together and in even more of a shambles. He wondered if Miranda was awake. He decided not to call her. It was three in the morning, after all.

  When he woke up again a few minutes later, he had been unmistakably dreaming about sex. He lay very still, waiting for the ache to go away, but each time he relaxed the perfect naked body of Gloria Simmons presented itself as a vision, while at the same time she seemed to be snuggling her warmth close against him within the narrow confines of a down-filled sleeping bag.

  To distract himself he focused on Ibiza, when he had been in his early twenties, and indulged in recollections of his greatest humiliation. He was trying to take his mind off the natural blonde beauty of Gloria Simmons in what he hoped would be an inversion of the Cialis effect. Two English girls had taken him home for the night. He was working in a bar on the harbourfront. The girls had been smoking pot and drinking beer. When the taverna closed, they asked if he wanted to see their room, which was like a small outbuilding on the flat rooftop of a larger building. When they got to the room, the girls did their minimal ablutions and took off their clothes and motioned for him to do the same and crawl into bed between them. The three of them lay side by side, naked under a sheet. He was totally ready. After a while one of the girls fell asleep and then the other girl fell asleep. He stayed awake all night, baffled by what he might have done or should have done or could have done and didn’t do. In the morning, the three of them got up at the same time, used the toilet affair on the roof outside their door, and went back to the harbour area for breakfast.

  Their names were Mandy and Christine. He could remember the exact shape of their breasts in the lamplight, the exact warm, clean smell of their bodies. When he met them for drinks back in London, they seemed exotically ordinary, and he realized they didn’t have much interest in him, either. Years later, he had a somewhat sordid tryst with two women from headquarters, a one-time thing, but that, he thought, was another story.

  As he had anticipated, his ruminations led to self-judgment which extinguished his yearnings. The aching had subsided. The whole threesome thing, he thought — he supposed every man had been through similar experiences — suggested an inability to sustain a relationship. He thought of Lucy, his ex-wife, he thought of Miranda, he thought of Beverley Weekes on Rapa Nui, a swarm of memories in jagged fragments raced through his mind.

  Suddenly, he knew who Miranda’s friend was and where he was staying. When they had walked over to the subway from the Harbourfront, she had expressed irritation at the man’s cryptic behavior. “There were a surprising number of eligible men on board,” she had said. “I dined and danced for a week, Morgan. How am I supposed to remember them all. Terrence Rattigan? No, maybe Terry. There might have been a Terry. Who pays attention to names on a cruise ship? Everyone is buddy or mate or, you know, those instant nicknames travellers use so they don’t have to remember real names. Politicians do the same thing. Your funeral friend said he’s attractive.”

  “Only because you asked,” Morgan had said.

  Squirming around in his bed to make himself comfortable, Morgan drifted on the edge of sleep. Amidst the flurry of women’s faces and body parts that he seemed to have amputated in a frenzy of objectification, a theatre front in London loomed in his mind. Columns, portico, billboards. The Haymarket Theatre. He had met Christine and Mandy for drinks in a pub opposite the Haymarket Theatre in London, just down from Piccadilly Circus. That’s where he’d seen the revival of a play about the later life of Lawrence of Arabia, after Lawrence changed his name and joined the R.A.F. The play and T.E. Lawrence were both called Ross. The author was Terrence Rattigan. Of course, the name had seemed familiar. And Rattigan-Ross was staying at the Haymarket Hotel, a boutique hotel off Bloor Street frequented by lesser celebrities. Not the Four Seasons. Terrence Rattigan had challenged Miranda to figure it out. This Terrence Rattigan, not that one. The Haymarket, hay, market, one season, when hay was brought in after stooking to dry on the fields of Sussex and Kent. And who else but Ross would define Miranda in terms of her ability to solve puzzles?

  She had told Morgan quite a lot about T.E. Ross. The man seemed to thrive on maintaining a precarious balance between the treacheries of sedition and incidental grace, with only his charm and good looks to help distinguish between them. Morgan suspected he also travelled under the name of Peter O’Toole, the actor who had brought Lawrence and Ross so memorably to the screen. Or
his real name was Peter O’Toole and that was his incentive for plundering Lawrence for his nominal disguises.

  Morgan got up and walked into the bathroom. It was only a little past three, too early to shave. He dressed in yesterday’s clothes, which were still draped over the chair by his dresser, put on a windbreaker, anticipating the chill of a late August morning, and headed out at a brisk pace for the Haymarket Hotel.

  There was only one man on duty behind the desk and no concierge in sight. Morgan asked for Terrence Rattigan’s room number.

  “It’s 3:48 in the a.m,” said the man, looking at Morgan like he had materialized on the spot. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I know the time. What room is he in?”

  “You’ll have to come back.” The man was about Morgan’s age, clean shaven, but red-eyed. Probably wary he’d screwed up too many jobs in the past, he wanted to avoid trouble. “Sorry,” he added.

  Morgan flashed his police ID. “Homicide,” he said.

  The clerk stiffened. “You guys carry Glocks?”

  “Yes we do,” said Morgan, glaring. He was wondering whether his handgun was in his gun locker at headquarters or at home in his underwear drawer. “I’m here unofficially.” He said this in a Clint Eastwood whisper. He read the man’s nametag. “Jeffrey, I need your co-operation. A key card. I’d like to surprise Mr. Rattigan.” Morgan suspected the clerk had previously had run-ins with the police. He was trying to turn his life around. Morgan had little use for bully cops, but he felt a gut-driven urgency to connect with T.E. Ross before Miranda did.

  Once outside Rattigan’s room, Morgan slipped the card into the lock and gently pressed down on the handle. He entered silently and stepped into the darkness, closing the door quietly behind him. By the light of the clock radio, he shuffled his way to the bedside. He leaned forward and immediately realized the absence of warmth emanating from the bed signified trouble. He straightened; too late.

  “Checkmate, Mr. Morgan.” Morgan flinched at the pressure of cold steel against his right temple. He guessed a .44 Magnum semi-automatic. This guy wouldn’t use a revolver. “I’m assuming I paid the desk clerk more that you did, Detective. I was expecting your partner. She told me about you. Do sit down. Oh, you can’t see. Well here’s what I want you to do. Very slowly, unbuckle your belt.” The barrel of the Magnum bit into Morgan’s flesh. “Good, now drop your pants. To the ankles. There. I do apologize for the awkwardness. I assure you my interest is not libidinous in the least. Now, turn, slowly, sit down on the bed. Sit back. It’s very soft. And quite low. There now, comfortably off balance, feeling rather silly? Let me turn on the light.”

  Morgan felt like a fool. It was an old trick. He’d read about it in spy novels. He felt even more foolish when light flared from the bedside lamp and he could see his captor’s hands even though his face was still shrouded in darkness. Ross was pointing toward him with a travel-sized canister of shaving cream. Morgan had been rendered powerless, not by Remington, but by Gillette.

  “You are Mr. Morgan, I presume? Otherwise, I will have to kill you and deposit your body piecemeal in the mail chute.”

  “Was this really necessary?” said Morgan as he struggled awkwardly to his feet and drew up his pants.

  “Probably not,” said Ross, moving toward the door and turning on the overhead. “It’s all part of the game. And if you had been someone else — but I knew you were not. I could smell the absence of a sidearm. Do you realize guns emit odours, even when they haven’t been fired in a very long time? Of course, by the time I figured you were unarmed, you were disarmed. Nice to meet you.”

  Ross thrust his hand forward as if he were at a class reunion. Morgan took the proffered hand and gripped it for a moment as he contemplated his advantage, then shook it firmly. So much of what he had heard about Ross suggested a professional: cool, very clever, sophisticated, elusive, ruthless, a man unencumbered by passion or moral integrity. Ross in Toronto struck Morgan as more amusing, even charming, and more dangerous than he had expected. A gifted amateur, treacherous and unpredictable.

  “We have a lot to talk about, Detective Morgan. Let me call room service for coffee. The kitchen opens at four. We’re already well into the day.”

  * * *

  Miranda had gone directly home after she left Morgan at Union Station. She had not managed to pick up groceries since she had returned so she opened a tin of Spam and sliced off a piece which she slathered with strawberry jam, washing it down with a room-temperature can of Canada Dry. When she was a girl her favourite dinner, and her father’s favourite, as well, was Spam fried in butter with tinned pineapple slices and a sprinkling of brown sugar and cinnamon. Years after he died she realized this concoction wasn’t her father’s favourite at all. It was something they had invented together when her mother and sister were out. She still kept Spam in her kitchen as comfort food.

  Despite the exhaustion, after her dinner she turned on her computer and explored for a couple of hours, made a few phone calls and, satisfied, collapsed on her bed and was asleep in minutes.

  She awakened in the middle of the night at virtually the same time as Morgan. Her system insisted she was feeling sluggish after an excessively long afternoon nap, Tahiti-time. She stared into the depths of the shadows moving across her bedroom ceiling as her curtains played with the ambient light of the city that was filtering through.

  The name Terry Rattigan bounced through her mind aimlessly. He said they had met on the Island Queen. Maybe he was the guy she had spent a day with on Bora Bora, sourcing the best buy for Tahitian pearls. She had already been given carte blanche for a necklace at the Pearl Market in Papeete, although she wouldn’t allow herself to be compromised by accepting something like that on Ross’s account. It was one thing to exploit his hospitality on the ship — she figured he owed her — but jewellery was something else.

  The man she was remembering as Terry had shared free taxis with her for the short hops from pearl shop to pearl shop, offered as a courtesy. Most of the shops on Bora Bora were actually within walking distance in the village of Vaitape, but some were ensconced in the lobbys of luxury resorts. They’d had fun, checking out strings of pearls in the $10,000 range, deciding that that was their fantasy limit, and finally buying a grey luminescent pendant for him, $300, and smoky-blue earrings for her, also $300. They had lunched extravagantly at the Intercontinental on Matira Point and dined at the famous Bloody Mary’s in the evening, but saw no celebrities. She recalled every detail. But they didn’t use names. They had felt too close during the entire day to ask, then back on the ship at night, they had been shy with each other and next morning they sat at different tables for breakfast before disembarking with a handshake in Papeete.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted him to find her. Rapa Nui had been one world, Toronto was another, but her Polynesian sojourn between them connected to neither. Here she was a homicide detective on leave, on the island she had been an aspiring novelist snared in espionage and armed insurrection. On the ship, she had been someone else. Thoughts of Terry Rattigan slipped out of her mind.

  She reconstructed conversations of the previous afternoon. With Maria Pilar, then Rove McMan. She had forgotten the interlude with Ellen Ravenscroft at the morgue. In retrospect, one figure dominated through the entire day like a shadow brooding over their visit to the seigneurial cottage and then on board the Tangata Manu. Miranda had never met Gloriasimmons, but she felt she knew her in some ways better than Morgan did, and Gloriasimmons was a dangerous woman to know.

  She suddenly decided it was time to meet her potential nemesis. She got up and walked into the bathroom where she had a quick shower and meticulously applied minimal makeup before dressing in the best summer suit in her wardrobe. She adjusted her holster harness under her jacket so that it wouldn’t bulge, picked up her cellphone and called a cab, then dropped it into her purse.

  Entering Police Headquarters through the main entrance, she signed in at the night desk and took the elevator u
p to her office. The desks in Homicide were empty, except for a couple of people in the shadows at the side of the room where one guy was writing up a report and another was hunched over, asleep. But Superintendent Rufalo’s light was on and she could see him through the glass, busy with paperwork. She waved. He did a double take, then came out to greet her.

  “Morgan didn’t tell you I’m back?” she said.

  “Morgan who?” said Rufalo. “I never see Morgan. Without you around, he’s counter-social.”

  “With me around he’s counter-social. Did you just make that word up?”

  “What are you doing here? Did you finish your novel?”

  “Life overtook fiction. I couldn’t make notes fast enough to keep up. I’m here for my Glock.”

  “You’re on leave.” He recognized the determined look on her face. “Okay, you’re back on duty.”

  “Thanks, Alex.” She unlocked her desk and dug out a key, then walked to the gun locker, and, removing her scaled-down Glock semi-automatic, she tucked it into its holster. “One thing? Did the book you gave Morgan to pass on to me, did that come from Maria D’Arcy?”

  “Yes,” he said. “From her mother.”

  She could tell by the look on his face that he was struggling to resist asking why she seemed to be confirming something she already knew. He felt vaguely complicit in the murder Morgan was investigating. Miranda knew this, just as she knew the answer to her query. She also knew how to keep him from asking too many questions about what she was doing there in the small hours of the morning.

  He shrugged, walked back into his office, and closed the door.

  Miranda realized he didn’t want to be questioned about why he was there, either. During marital difficulties he was known to seek occasional refuge in the comfort of the one place in the world where he was sure of himself. He closed the interior blinds and opened the exterior blinds to anticipate the earliest traces of morning light.