Hard Winter Rain

by Michael Blair

  Matthias looked up at his partner. Her strong, solemn face was expressionless.

  “He said Sara Mackie died in the line of duty a few weeks later.”

  Shoe was constantly surprised that even after all these years the memory of it still hurt. “She was killed when a drunk driver rammed her squad car at eighty miles an hour,” he said. “I suppose you could call that ‘in the line of duty.’”

  “Is that why you quit?” Matthias asked.

  Shoe nodded. “Between being responsible for ending Ron Mackie’s career and Sara’s death, I lost my enthusiasm for law enforcement.” And, for a time, just about everything else, he recalled. Two days before Sara had died, he’d asked her to marry him. She’d said yes.

  Matthias finished his coffee before Shoe had drunk a third of his and dropped the empty cup into a waste bin beside the bench. “Trumbull told us something else.” Shoe waited. “He told us that unless you’d changed a lot in ways that most people don’t usually change, there’s no way in hell you’d be involved in your friend’s death.” Shoe waited some more. Matthias shrugged. “Anyway, I put my money on the wife. Nine times out of ten, it turns out to be the wife.”

  “You’d lose this one,” Shoe said.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Matthias looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “The guy that whacked O’Neill was a pro. Or at least a talented amateur. Left the murder weapon behind but bugger-all else. We didn’t find so much as a nose hair we could tie to him. We’ve got reports of someone answering his description boarding the SkyTrain, but then nothing. Probably removed his disguise on the train then ditched it. Cool. Not the kind of psycho dimwit wives usually hire to off their husbands. They usually leave a trail like a slug leaves slime.”

  “What about the weapon?” Shoe asked.

  “An old .38 Smith & Wesson service revolver, probably a souvenir from World War Two. The serial number was intact, but it won’t do us any good; the gun’s too old. There were no prints on either the gun or the shell casings. The MO is similar to another shooting a few years ago in Surrey, but otherwise we got squat. The victim back then was an informant who ratted out the wrong dealer, but there’s no evidence O’Neill was connected in any way to drugs. Anyway, most drug-related killings in this city these days involve Indo-Canadians. Still...” He shrugged again.

  “What about other suspects? Sean Rémillard, Patrick’s cousin, could there be anything there?”

  “I doubt it. Rémillard is what you might call colourful, but so far no one’s been able to come up with a plausible motive. Or even an implausible one.”

  “What do you mean, ‘colourful’?”

  “After passing the bar on his third try,” Matthias said, “he chased ambulances for a while before discovering politics. He was an independent city councillor for a few years, a real hair in the ass of both Harcourt and Campbell’s administrations. Since losing his seat in ’93, he’s worked as a Liberal party mouthpiece and fundraiser. Now I guess he’s decided to make a run for the brass in a federal by-election. Some say he’s being groomed to be prime minister someday. The theory being, I suppose, that a perfectly bilingual French Canadian from B.C. could restore the Liberal’s fortunes in the West and reunite the country.” Matthias made a face. “He’s tight with a big cheese in the party, um, I forget his name...”

  “Allan Privett,” Shoe supplied.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Rémillard’s married to his daughter.”

  “What’s she like?” Shoe asked.

  Matthias looked up at his partner.

  “It’s hard to say,” Worth supplied. “She’s a bit on the cool side—”

  “Cool?” Matthias snorted. “She’s cold as a frozen mackerel.”

  Worth scowled at him. “Are you going to let me finish?”

  “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Thank you,” Worth said. “She’s of high average intelligence, I’d say, and well educated. She’s an only child and a bit spoiled. Attractive enough, but ...” She hesitated.

  “She’s built more like a brick than a brick shit-house,” Matthias interjected.

  Worth sighed. “She could use some time in a gym,” she agreed. “Good clothes, though,” she added as an afterthought, which brought a grin to her partner’s face.

  “She knew Rémillard and O’Neill when they were kids growing up in Quebec,” Matthias said. “She had some emotional problems when she was fifteen or so, just after she moved out here with her family in ’76. She’s a do-gooder now, sick kids, the environment, women’s rights.” Worth scowled again, but Matthias ignored her. “The perfect wife for a politician,” he concluded.

  “When I talked to Patrick on Friday,” Shoe said, “he told me there were a couple of business opportunities he was looking into. Anything there?”

  “We got the number of an outfit in Nanaimo named LogiGraphics from his cellphone log. He called them just before he was killed to postpone a meeting. We had the Nanaimo cops talk to them. Bunch of computer nerds, they said, live like moles. They were pretty upset about O’Neill’s death. He was considering buying in and helping them go public to raise development capital.”

  Shoe weighed his loyalties for a few beats, then said, “What about Victoria O’Neill’s friend, Kit Parsons?”

  Matthias looked at Worth, whose eyebrow lifted again. He turned back to Shoe.

  “Have you met her?” Matthias asked.

  “Once, the day of Patrick’s murder. She was at Victoria’s house.”

  “What’s your take on her?”

  “She’s very protective of Victoria.” This time it was Worth who snorted. “How’s her alibi?” Shoe asked.

  “She was in her studio with a client from two to four p.m.,” Matthias said. “He confirms it.” He sighed heavily. “She’s got motive, I guess, and attitude to spare, but unless we can connect her to the shooter somehow, we’ve got nothing. You’ve been poking around. Have you come up with anything we might be interested in? Anyone he work with look good for it?”

  Shoe shook his head. “Not so far.” He hesitated, knowing it probably wouldn’t do any good to ask, but he asked anyway. “Did Patrick have his palmtop computer with him when he was killed? Or his laptop?”

  “We’ve got his Palm,” Matthias said, “but he didn’t have a laptop with him. We didn’t find it in his car or at his home, either. Any idea where it might be?”

  “The Palm was his own,” Shoe said, “but the laptop belonged to the company. We haven’t been able to locate it.”

  “If it turns up, maybe you could let us know.”

  “I’ll do that. Do you think I could get a copy of his appointment file from the Palm?”

  “I’m not sure we could give it to you if we wanted to,” Matthias said. “O’Neill’s Palm is password protected and we haven’t been able to unlock it. According to our techs, the only way to bypass the password is to do a hard reset, which erases everything. They’re working on it. You wouldn’t happen to know his password, would you?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  Matthias was silent for a moment, then said, “Look, I could tell you not to nose around, although I get the impression that it wouldn’t do any good. But if you get in the way, or if we think you’re obstructing our investigation in any way, we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks. A metric tonne at that. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Shoe said. “I surely do.”

  Matthias stood up. Worth tossed her empty coffee cup at the waste bin, missing by a good foot. Matthias sighed, retrieved the cup, and dropped it into the bin.

  At a few minutes past three, Shoe was standing on the sidewalk in front of the dry cleaning store on Cordova. Barbara Reese came out of the store at 3:15. She was looking down, fastening her coat, long umbrella hooked over her right wrist, and so did not see him until he said, “Hello.”

  Her head popped up and for a brief moment there was a spark of fear in her eyes. It faded as she smiled tentatively. “Oh, it’s you.” Then her expression grew tr
oubled. “You were lying the other day, weren’t you? You are with the police.”

  “No,” Shoe said. “I’m not a cop. I was once, a long time ago, but not now.”

  “But this isn’t a coincidence, is it? Your being here? Are you—” She frowned, searching for the word. “Are you stalking me?”

  “I apologize if it seems that way,” Shoe said. “As I told you, I knew your husband. After he died I tried to get in touch with you, to see if there was anything you needed, but by the time I learned where you lived, you had moved. You didn’t leave a forwarding address and your mother and your in-laws would tell me only that you’d left Vancouver.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone where I was going,” Barbara said. “I didn’t really know myself. We moved around a lot for a while—Edmonton, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Winnipeg—before we finally settled in Calgary.”

  “We? Did you marry again?”

  “Uh, no. I meant my kids and me.”

  “I’d like to talk to you,” Shoe said. “But I don’t want to make you late for work. Perhaps I could take you to dinner sometime.” Sunday, he knew, was the only evening she had free.

  “You offered me a ride the other day,” she said. He nodded. “You can drive me home, if you like.”

  “Home?”

  “I was let go from the bar last night.” “I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes, I’d be pleased to drive you home. My car’s this way.”

  They walked to his car, parked around the corner.

  “I guess you’re not a cop after all,” she said when she saw the Mercedes. “Cops don’t drive cars like this.” Shoe opened the passenger door for her, held her arm as she got in. In the car she gave him directions, although he knew where she lived. When they were underway, she said, “How did you know my husband?”

  “We worked together,” Shoe said. It wasn’t the truth, but it would do for now.

  “He never stayed in any one job for very long,” Barbara said. “How well did you know him?”

  “Not well,” Shoe said.

  “But you must have gone to a lot of trouble to find me. For someone you didn’t know very well. Why?”

  “I wanted to repay a debt I owed him,” Shoe said.

  “What kind of debt?” she asked suspiciously. “Not money? Usually he owed other people money.”

  “No, it wasn’t money,” Shoe said.

  She was silent for a few minutes, looking out the side window. After a couple of blocks she turned to him and said, “How did you find me? I didn’t come back to Vancouver till six months ago to look after my mother. She died on Labour Day.”

  “Yes, I know,” Shoe said. “I was looking through some back issues of the Vancouver Sun a few weeks ago when I saw her funeral announcement. It was two months old, but I went to the funeral home and told the director I was an old friend of the family who had missed the funeral. He gave me the phone number of the dry cleaning store.”

  “I can’t afford a phone,” she said. “My mother didn’t have insurance and I still owe the funeral home three thousand dollars. I don’t know how I’m going to pay them now that I’ve lost the job at the bar. I barely make enough at the dry cleaning store to cover my rent.” Her eyes sharpened. “So, if you want to repay your debt to my husband by offering me a job...” Her voice trailed off.

  “I can see if there’s anything available where I work,” Shoe said.

  “You look like you work in an office,” she said. “I used to work in an office a long time ago, but they all use computers now. I wouldn’t know a computer from a dishrag. All I know is waiting on tables and clerking in stores.”

  “My employer owns several retail stores.”

  She leaned forward and pointed through the wind-shield. “That’s where I live,” she said.

  Shoe double-parked in front of a rundown five-storey building on the fringes of the area of Vancouver known as the Downtown East Side, into which the city had corralled most of its homeless population, along with its pushers, addicts, pimps, and whores. The ground floor of the building was occupied by an Asian grocery. The entrance to the apartments on the upper floors was a narrow doorway beside the grocery. Taking a notepad from the glovebox, Shoe wrote down his home and office phone numbers, tore out the page, and handed it to her.

  “Call me on Friday,” Shoe said. “I’m sure I can find something for you in one of my employer’s companies.”

  She took the slip of paper, looked at it, then at him. Her dark eyebrows were knit with uncertainty.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “You seem like a nice person,” she said. “And I suppose I could use all the help I can get right now.” Her right hand was on the door release. He waited for her to continue. She looked at the slip of paper in her left hand, then held it out to him. “But whatever you think you owed my husband, you don’t owe me anything.”

  A police car moved up behind and the cop at the wheel blipped the siren a couple of times, probably figuring Shoe was a john out slumming. Barbara opened the door and started to get out of the car.

  “Please,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner. I’ll explain.”

  She shook her head. The siren blipped again.

  “But you’ll call me? About the job?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

  Barbara got out of the car and closed the door. As Shoe put the car in motion, he glanced into the rear-view mirror. She stood on the sidewalk, in her long dark coat and red beret, umbrella hooked over her arm, watching as he drove away. As she receded into the distance, he saw her put the slip of paper into her coat pocket.

  chapter five

  Thursday, December 16

  Charles Merigold’s secretary’s name was Gillian Whistle. She regarded Shoe with cool grey eyes as he approached her desk. Her face, framed by wings of dark blond hair, was triangular, smooth brow a trifle too wide perhaps, chin a trifle too pointed, but the overall effect was pleasant. Shoe put her age at somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.

  “Is Mr. Merigold in?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied. She blinked and Shoe imagined he could feel the breeze from her long dark lashes. She picked up her phone and pressed a button. “Mr. Schumacher would like to see you, sir.” She listened, said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up. “You can go right in,” she said, smiling at him with perfectly even and brilliantly white teeth.

  “Thank you,” Shoe said. He went into Merigold’s office.

  “You want to speak to me about Patrick O’Neill, I presume,” Charles Merigold said. He gestured toward a chair facing his desk.

  “That’s right,” Shoe said as he sat down.

  Charles Merigold’s desk was not as big as Bill Hammond’s, but it was big enough to put some distance between the two men. Shoe wasn’t quite sure what to make of Hammond Industry’s Managing Director. Merigold was pompous and vain, perhaps even a bit prissy, but he was competent and intelligent and had a reputation as a savage competitor on the squash court. While he was somewhat formal and standoffish, Shoe had always found him to be polite and respectful toward everyone in the office. Patrick hadn’t got along with him at all, though.

  “Basically, Charles’s job is to piss on everyone’s shoes,” Patrick had said. “And he enjoys his job. Which is probably why no one likes him.”

  “You worked regularly with Patrick,” Shoe said. Merigold nodded. “In the last few weeks, was there anything out of the ordinary about his behaviour or demeanour that you noticed?”

  “No,” Merigold replied. “Nothing.”

  “He didn’t seem worried, distracted, preoccupied?”

  “No,” Merigold said again. “But he wasn’t the most demonstrative of men, was he? Kept himself to himself, as it were.”

  “You and he had an argument last month. What was it about?”

  “You must be aware that Patrick and I did not always see eye to eye on matters of business,” Merigold said. “As a result, our working r
elationship could get somewhat intense at times. We had occasionally heated discussions. They could be quite animated, but to call them arguments is to imply animosity. Perhaps Patrick did not like me—I’m told I’m not a likeable person—but I can assure you, neither he nor I allowed personal issues to interfere with our work. Patrick’s job was to grow the company’s assets. Mine is to protect those assets. We were both simply doing our jobs.”

  “What was this particular heated discussion about?”

  “I don’t recall the specifics,” Merigold said. “But from time to time we did not agree that a property he was considering for acquisition would make a worthwhile addition to Hammond Industries’ assets. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Patrick could be, shall we say, somewhat cavalier with the company’s money and often let his enthusiasm for a project get in the way of his good sense. I’m sure the exchange to which you are referring was no different.”

  “Were there irregularities in any of his business transactions?”

  “Certainly not,” Merigold said. “Patrick may have been adventurous, but he did not abuse his position for personal gain. I may not have approved of some of his acquisitions,” Merigold said, “but there was nothing irregular about any of them.” Merigold paused, then said, “I thought he was your friend.”

  “He was,” Shoe said. “But the police are working on the hypothesis that he was killed by a professional. Revenge is a strong motive for murder. If someone felt cheated in a business deal, he might have hired a hit man to even the score.”

  “That may be so,” Merigold said. “Patrick was a shrewd businessman, and some of the people with whom he came into contact may have undoubtedly felt that he’d got the better of them. But to the best of my knowledge there was nothing improper about any of his business dealings.”

  “He recently shut down a gasket manufacturing plant in Surrey,” Shoe said. “Is it possible someone who worked there was upset about losing his job?”

  “Possible,” Merigold conceded, “but unlikely. Patrick gave them all rather more generous severance packages than I would have. Or Sandra St. Johns, for that matter.”