Hard Winter Rain

by Michael Blair

  “One moment, please, Mr. Tilley,” Shoe said.

  Tilley turned. “What is it?”

  “Did Mr. Hammond tell you he asked me to look into Patrick’s death?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Tilley replied as though his mouth hurt. “However, any investigation into O’Neill’s murder should be the responsibility of my department.”

  “You can take that up with Mr. Hammond,” Shoe said. “In the meantime, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  The planes and angles of Tilley’s face hardened.

  “Where were you between three and four on Monday afternoon?”

  “As I told the police, I was in my office.”

  “When Hammond Industries took over the building maintenance and security company you worked for,” Shoe said, “Patrick didn’t want to keep you on, did he?”

  “That’s right,” Tilley replied. “He didn’t. But,” he added with a tight smile, “I harboured no ill will toward him. Besides, I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “You are indeed,” Shoe said. “Thank you.”

  Tilley turned on his heel and stalked out of the reception area, back stiff and fists clenched at his sides. Shoe watched him until he disappeared down the hall toward his office, then turned to Muriel.

  “Do you have any plans for lunch?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Have lunch with me? My treat.”

  “In that case, of course.”

  “Good,” Shoe said. “It’s a date, then.”

  “Ooh, I haven’t had one of those in a while,” she said.

  Patrick’s office was down the same hall as Del Tilley’s. Shoe found Patrick’s former assistant, Sandra St. Johns, sitting at Patrick’s desk, tapping at the keys of a laptop computer, her large round glasses perched on the end of her nose.

  “Can I help you?” she said, slipping her glasses off and placing them on the desk, which was littered with open file folders and documents.

  Sandra was twenty-seven, slim, and coltish, with long sandy hair, brown eyes, and slightly boyish features. Shoe hadn’t exchanged more than a couple dozen words with her at any given time in the year and a half she had been Patrick’s assistant. Patrick had praised her competency more than once. Naturally, because she and Patrick had spent a lot of time together, there had been rumours of an affair. An equal number of rumours, however, likely initiated by men who’d crashed and burned after hitting on her, had her pegged as a lesbian. Shoe was inclined to discount both.

  “Have you taken over Patrick’s office?” he asked.

  “Uh, no,” she said. “I’m just trying to bring myself up to speed on some of the things he was working on.” She stood. “If I keep busy...” she said, but her voice trailed off and she left the thought uncompleted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was there something you wanted? I’ll get out of your way if you like.” She leaned over the desk and started to close and stack file folders.

  “No, please,” Shoe said. “You don’t have to leave. I’m just looking for Patrick’s appointment book. Is it somewhere in that pile, or did he take it with him when he left?”

  “Patrick kept his appointments in his Palm,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “This is a Palm,” she said, picking up a brushed metal device about the size of a personal cassette player, but slimmer. It had a small screen with a row of tiny buttons below it. “A palmtop computer,” she explained. “I suppose he had it with him when he—when he left.”

  “He didn’t have a real appointment book,” Shoe said.

  “This is a real appointment book,” she replied with a tolerant smile. “And address book, notepad, to-do list, calculator. You can even...” She paused.

  “What?” Shoe asked.

  “Do you know where Patrick’s laptop is?”

  Shoe looked at the laptop on Patrick’s desk.

  “This one’s mine,” she explained. She held up her Palm device. “You can synchronize the information on these things with other computers. That means—”

  “I think I understand,” Shoe said, hoping he did.

  “But if he took his Palm with him, wouldn’t he have also taken his laptop?”

  She shook her head. “The company supplies the laptops.”

  “You didn’t find his in his office?” he said.

  “No.”

  Shoe wondered if it would do any good to get in touch with Sergeant Matthias to see if Patrick had his Palm or his laptop with him when he was killed and, if so, to ask for a printout of the appointment book data. Probably not. The police wouldn’t be keen on sharing information with a potential suspect.

  “What’s this about?” Sandra asked.

  “I’m conducting an internal investigation into Patrick’s death,” Shoe said.

  “I see,” she said.

  “You spent a lot of time with him. Is there anything you can think of that might give us an idea why he was killed?”

  She shook her head. “Not a thing,” she said. “I wish there were. We may have spent a lot of time together, but we weren’t really friends. Our relationship was strictly business. I know very little about his personal life.”

  “Did you know Patrick was planning to leave the company?”

  “No, but it didn’t come as any great surprise. He was pretty angry about Mr. Hammond’s refusal to go public.”

  “He told me he was looking into a couple of business opportunities,” Shoe said. “Do you know anything about them?”

  “No,” she said.

  “In the weeks before he left,” Shoe said, “did you notice anything unusual about his mood or behaviour?”

  “He did seem distracted,” she replied. “A little preoccupied. But, in retrospect, that makes sense, if he was planning to resign.”

  “What were you and he working on?”

  “We’d just begun negotiations for the acquisition of the micro-brewery in Port Moody. That’s what I’m working on now. Your report was very helpful, by the way. We had also just wrapped up the sale of a marina property in Delta to a condominium developer. Nothing very exciting.”

  “And before that?”

  “Let’s see,” she said, brow furrowing. “We spent a couple of months restructuring the Handyman hardware chain. Oh, yes, and we closed down an old rubber gasket manufacturing plant in Surrey. It was one of the first companies Mr. Hammond acquired when he was starting out.”

  “Was anyone particularly angry or upset at losing his job?”

  “No,” she replied. “We actually hired staff for the hardware chain. As for the gasket plant, everyone there seemed relieved that we’d finally put the place out of its misery. It hadn’t had an order in months.”

  “Could you give me their names anyway?” Shoe asked.

  “Sure.” She sat down, put on her glasses, and pulled her laptop closer. She spoke as she tapped at the keys and stroked the touchpad. “There were only six people left,” she said. “The manager, who was in his eighties, almost doddering. An office manager/bookkeeper in her sixties who’d been there since the mid-fifties and pretty much ran everything. A secretary/receptionist, also in her sixties. Two lathe operators at least as old. And this guy in shipping and receiving who didn’t have any teeth and kept looking down the front of my blouse.” She tapped the return key. “Not that there’s anything to see,” she said, peering down at her chest. She stood up. “Okay, it’s printing now. You can pick it up in the photocopy room next to your office.” Removing her glasses, she rubbed the furrow between her brows with the tip of her index finger. “There was one thing that was kind of unusual,” she said.

  “Unusual how?” Shoe asked.

  “Patrick seemed to hit it off with the office manager/bookkeeper, Ramona Ross. He took her to lunch a couple of times, rather long lunches, which wasn’t like Patrick at all, and one day she was pretty tipsy when they came back. Happy tipsy, though. And I think he spoke to her a couple of times after the plant closed.” She looked thoughtful
for a moment longer, then said, “Other than that, it’s been business as usual. Oh, he had an argument with Charles Merigold last month.” She shrugged. “But then he and Charles were always arguing about one thing or another. This one was a little louder than usual, though.”

  “Do you know what it was about?”

  “No.”

  “Patrick travelled quite a lot,” Shoe said. “Did you often go with him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But not always.”

  “Do you recall anything out of the ordinary happening on any of your trips with him?”

  “No. Nothing. He usually left me on my own for a while whenever we were in Montreal, but he had family there, so there’s nothing unusual about that.”

  “Were your trips always strictly business?”

  “What does that mean?” she said. A pink tinge coloured her throat, whether from anger or embarrassment, Shoe wasn’t certain.

  “There were rumours that you and he were having an affair.”

  “Of course there were,” she snapped. “There are also rumours that you’re an intelligent man.” The flush deepened and spread to her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m a little sensitive about that.”

  “There was nothing to them, then?”

  She smiled thinly. “No, nothing,” she said, but she didn’t make eye contact with him as she said it. She stood up and closed her laptop, a little roughly, Shoe thought. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  “Stay put,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

  “How’s your investigation going?” Muriel asked.

  The restaurant on the ground floor was crowded and noisy, and Shoe had trouble hearing Muriel’s soft voice over the clatter and buzz of the lunch-hour trade in pasta primavera and investment strategies.

  “Hard to tell,” he said. “But I’ve only just got started.” He summarized what he’d learned from Sandra St. Johns, which didn’t take long. “Were they having an affair?” he asked when he’d finished.

  “According to the water-cooler crowd they were,” Muriel replied. “But then, according to the water-cooler crowd, so are we.” She smiled. “We both know how much truth there is to that, don’t we?”

  Shoe felt himself colour. “So you don’t think they were?”

  “I don’t really know,” Muriel replied. “I’d be disappointed in Patrick if they were. But people often fail to live up to our expectations, don’t they?”

  “Only if your expectations are high,” Shoe said.

  She said, “Hmm,” and picked at her salad in silence for a moment, then laid down her fork. “I was angry with him, you know. Do you know when he told me he was leaving? At five o’clock on Friday. He came by my desk, handed me his keys and his parking pass, and told me he wouldn’t be needing them anymore.” Her eyes misted. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t he tell anyone he was leaving? I thought we were his friends.”

  “He wasn’t moving to Mars,” Shoe said. “It wasn’t like we were never going to see him again.”

  “But we aren’t ever going to see him again, are we?”

  “No,” Shoe said. He was gripped by a sudden, pervading sense of loss. Patrick was gone and in his place there was a cold void. There would be no more rambling conversations over slow games of chess. No more weekend sails on English Bay in a rented C&C (Patrick had sold the Hunter two years before). No more summer lunchtime walks along the Stanley Park Seawall admiring the tanned and muscular rollerblade girls. He washed down the tightness in his throat with a sip of water.

  “Do you think he was in some kind of trouble?” Muriel asked.

  “If he was, he hid it well.”

  “Too well,” she said.

  They talked about nothing of consequence for a few minutes—Muriel’s townhouse in New Westminster, Shoe’s ramshackle house and the work he was doing on it, January Jack Pine and his makeshift houseboat—and then lapsed into a comfortable silence until the server had cleared the table. Neither wanted coffee.

  “Under the circumstances this may seem trivial,” Muriel said as they waited for the check, “but what are your plans for the holidays?”

  Last year Shoe had spent the holidays with his family in Toronto, for the first time in years. Generally, though, he didn’t celebrate Christmas, spending his time off catching up on his reading or just puttering about. As a rule, he turned down invitations to Christmas dinner; however, the year before last he had had Christmas dinner with Patrick and Victoria, Muriel and her not-yet-former fiancé, and another couple. After dinner Patrick had distributed song sheets and insisted on singing carols.

  “The usual, I suppose,” he told Muriel. “How about you?”

  “This will be my parents’ first Christmas since my grandfather died,” she said. “They’ve booked a tour to Las Vegas to gamble away my inheritance, so I’ll be on my own. Maybe we could spend some time together.”

  “I could use some help painting my house,” Shoe said.

  “Gosh, what a treat,” she said with a smile.

  No matter how hard she tried—and for Patrick’s sake she had tried—Victoria found it impossible to like Sean Rémillard. Sean was Patrick’s first cousin, the only child of Patrick’s mother’s younger sister. Patrick and Sean had pretty much grown up together after the death of Sean’s father in a car accident. While Victoria was sure the voters would love him, for her liking his smile was too wide, his hair was too carefully arranged, and his easy French-Irish charm was too contrived. He did, however, appear to be genuinely distraught over Patrick’s death.

  “Jesus, Victoria,” he said as he embraced her. “I can’t believe this. Stuff like this just isn’t supposed to happen. God, I’m so sorry. You must be devastated.”

  “Thank you, Sean,” she said as he released her. With a grunt, he dropped limply onto the sofa.

  Charlotte took Victoria’s hand and held it as she kissed her coolly on the cheek. Charlotte Privett Rémillard was not a hugger. “My father sends his condolences,” she said softly. She let go of Victoria’s hand and patted her hair, although not a single silvery-blond strand was out of place.

  “Thank you,” Victoria said again.

  Charlotte lowered herself onto the sofa beside her husband, carefully adjusting the skirt of her Versace suit, perfectly cut to make the best of her slightly too thick figure. She sat with her back straight, shoulders square, and plump knees together.

  “Can I get either of you anything?” Victoria asked. “A drink? Coffee?”

  “What?” Sean said. “No. No, thanks.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Nothing, thank you,” she said, adjusting the overlap of her suit jacket, as if she were concerned about the amount of cleavage showing, which was none at all.

  She flinched as Sean lunged to his feet and went to the big window overlooking English Bay a thousand feet below. He stood with his back to Victoria and Charlotte for a few seconds, shoulders slumped, before he turned and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Have the police released Patrick’s body yet?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Victoria said. “Probably by Friday, though.”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “The coroner’s office is busy this time of year, apparently,” she said. “And evidently short-staffed due to a flu bug that’s going around.”

  Sean nodded. “Have you spoken to his mother?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “She wanted him buried in Montreal, of course.”

  “Actually, no,” Victoria said. “He’s to be buried here. This is his home.”

  “Of course,” Sean said. He looked at Charlotte, then back to Victoria. “Money is a bit tight these days,” he said. “What with campaign expenses and all.” He glanced at Charlotte again. “But I’ll find a way to pay her way out for the funeral,” he said. Charlotte’s heart-shaped face remained expressionless, except for a bit of tightness around her small, cupid’s-bow mouth. “His brothers, too.”

  “Do
n’t worry about it,” Victoria said. “It’s been taken care of.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Sean said.

  “Patrick’s former employer has agreed to cover the cost,” she replied.

  “The least we can do is spring for the hotel.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  The interchange lagged.

  “How’s the campaign going?” Victoria asked.

  “What? Oh, fine. Ah, maybe I’ll have that drink now after all. Scotch-rocks?”

  “Certainly. Charlotte?”

  “Nothing for me,” Charlotte replied.

  Victoria went into the kitchen to make Sean’s drink, leaving him standing at the living room window, staring out over the rooftops toward the grey expanse of English Bay, and Charlotte watching him, a little cow-eyed, Victoria thought, from the sofa. He was still standing there when Victoria returned with a Scotch on the rocks for him and a glass of white wine for herself.

  He took the drink from her. “I remember when Pat first brought me up here and told me he was going to build a house here one day. It was just a few weeks after we’d arrived in Vancouver. I didn’t think the old Volvo we’d driven from Montreal would make it, but it did. Damned near killed ourselves going back down, though, when the brakes gave out.

  Good thing for us it had a standard transmission or we’d’ve ended up in the bay.” He looked at the drink in his hand. “Damn,” he said thickly and gulped at it. Ice rattled against his teeth.

  Sean no longer seemed quite so slick and superficial. His smile was crooked, his hair was mussed, and his salon tan had turned waxy. Victoria placed a hand on his arm.

  “I’m so sorry, Sean.”

  “There’s only me left,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “There used to be three of us,” Sean said. “Mary and Patrick and me. Mary drowned, you know?”