The Eye of the Beholder

by Janice Macdonald

  “So, how are you keeping connected with the folks down there?”

  “Define connected. We have a conference call with Iain, Roberto, and that chief of theirs every Thursday morning, but oftentimes we lose the connection and I don’t think the materials we sent down to them by post have even arrived yet.”

  “What is it with the bureaucracy of Mexico and the Central American countries? Everything else is state of the art, everyone there speaks two or three languages, and most of them have lived in Europe or elsewhere on this continent, the Wi-fi is strong, the mix of veneration of history and push to modernity is beautifully balanced, and yet you cannot feel secure about something actually arriving by post from just one country over?”

  Steve laughed and nodded.

  “It’s driving Iain crazy. He wants to send things via some sort of Dropbox method, but Roberto’s boss doesn’t believe it to be secure enough for transmission. Meanwhile, who knows where the mailbag containing the files we sent them has got to?”

  “The other thing I was wondering was, did you get confirmation from her friends or relations as to whether those items actually belonged to Kristin? The bag, and the hat and the bathing suit and flip flops? Or was she dressed by the murderer?”

  “That, I can tell you right now, because I recall how weird I thought it was. According to her roommates on the trip, Kristin did have a red bathing suit, and they thought the sandals were hers, but they had never seen either the bag or the hat she was found with. She apparently wore a pink Edmonton Oilers ball cap when she was with them, and we even found a photo of them all on the pirate ship with her wearing the pink-billed cap.”

  “Wow, that’s very interesting. I’m not sure why, but I think that may be important.”

  Steve smiled.

  “Well, what is important to me is aiming us both toward the bedroom.”

  “You wanting to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, is that it?”

  “We’re married now, so any hour is a decent hour, I would think.”

  “Oh, Mr. Browning!”

  It was my turn to smile.

  26

  Steve was gone to work by the time I woke up on Saturday, but, true to his word, he had emailed me a list of the contents of the bag found with Kristin Perry when she died. I was determined not to equate it with her, now that I knew that her roommates didn’t recognize it as hers.

  There had been the Frida Kahlo book, the same one I’d picked up at the local bookstore, where there had been a stack of five or six copies. There was a small zippered bag containing some pesos, her hotel key, her Alberta driver’s licence, her UPass, and both a debit and a credit card. There was a small tube of sunscreen, with all the directions in Spanish. And there were three art postcards listed: one of Frida and Diego on their wedding day; one of a fried egg on a piece of toast; and one of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I knew that the wedding portrait was in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I wasn’t sure about the egg. Was that an Andy Warhol? And one of Munch’s four paintings had been stolen a few years back, but was apparently back in Norway, wailing away.

  I looked the list up and down once more. It seemed obvious to me that this was a deliberate set of items, not what Kristin might actually have had in her own bag, and just transferred.

  Her passport had been locked in the hotel safe along with those of her roommates, so it wasn’t surprising that it wasn’t in the bag. Also, the very few cards weren’t a surprise. Kristin had probably left a wallet back home filled with store membership discount cards, old sales receipts, and Canadian Tire money, bringing only her essentials. Perhaps the girls had ridden the LRT to the airport shuttle bus on their way to the airport and were planning to return the same way, hence her bringing her UPass.

  Whoever had killed her wasn’t looking to empty her bank accounts or run up her charge card, or they’d have taken them. Of course, they had targeted an art student. Perhaps they were aware that the monetary pickings would likely be slim. Or they were aware of how easily law enforcement could track their movements if they were to use the cards.

  There had been no fingerprints found on any of the items in the bag, which also spoke to the idea of it being staged. Steve had included the file of notes I presumed Iain had made of the bag.

  He had checked with Vallarta police to determine that the bag was available at two stores in The Flea Market, and one stall in the market on the island in the river. It was older stock, but sold well enough, and no one could recall anyone unusual buying one.

  It could have been a man or a woman, and no one would have noticed. It wouldn’t have seemed odd for a man to be buying a purse in a tourist destination; vendors were probably used to people purchasing items as gifts to take home as much as for personal souvenirs.

  The book had already been traced to the same bookstore where I’d purchased my copy. Again, no one had any recollection of who had bought it. They were more focused on noting patrons who were bringing in secondhand books for a discount on others, than on recording every new purchase.

  The art cards were noted, and while I was pleased to see I had been correct in guessing the provenance of the Kahlo and the Munch, I’d been wrong about the fried egg. It wasn’t Warhol, and Iain hadn’t been able to determine who it was. He had “Etsy?” written in his notes.

  The idea that Iain McCorquodale had been aware of Etsy, the online craft emporium, amused me. It also brought me back to that student focused art gallery Steve and I had visited on our 124th Street art amble. Etsy might be the sort of place students were selling their work, even while in school. I wondered what the protocols were for students to be selling art while in school, and whether anyone bothered with that sort of distinction anymore. If a housewife with crafty ideas could whomp up some cutesy craft and decide it was worth selling on Etsy, why shouldn’t some aesthetically minded student find some way to augment their student loans?

  The postcards bothered me. They were so easy to lay out as some sort of pictorial sentence or comic strip. If only one used the right order.

  Egg on toast, The Scream, Frida and Diego’s wedding. Perhaps that was a commentary on special occasions. They all start like a regular day with breakfast, then tension and nerves, even the happy ones.

  The Scream, the egg on toast, the Wedding. There is tension and fear, then a toast, as a metaphorical toast to celebrate, and then a wedding, the happily ever after ending.

  Frida and Diego. Munch’s Scream. A fried egg on toast. Frida meets Diego, or in this case, Kristin meets her murderer. There was a scream because she was frightened and killed. And then there was a fried egg. What could that mean at the end of that scenario? The killer ate breakfast? It happened in a diner?

  I flicked from the fried egg postcard picture, to my photo of the scene of the crime.

  The fried egg was the last word. It looked just like the sunhat on top of Kristin’s face. And underneath that egg, Kristin Perry was toast.

  27

  I took a photo of the layout of the postcards and added my photo of Kristin on the beach, and emailed it to Steve, with my thoughts. He called almost immediately, sounding excited.

  “This is the first thing that makes sense to all of us. It adds a strong plus to the column that says this is a murderer who is definitely dabbling in the fine arts.”

  “Have there been any others prior to this, do you think?”

  “Other murders?”

  “Yes. This seems very tidily done, with nothing out of place. But surely there were messier versions, sketches leading up to the big work of art? Even the great masters all did their practice sketches.”

  “It could be anything, couldn’t it? A bit of graffiti, some refuse set out in a particular way. We might even have overlooked signs at other murder scenes, though there aren’t that many that pop up without a clear line on who was involved and why. It’s a thought though, and I’ll take it to
the group. Thanks, Randy. Every new nugget helps.”

  I smiled into the phone.

  “Glad to bring you a nugget.”

  “I’ll be home by seven.”

  “See you then. I’ll make a casserole.”

  “Make that six forty-five.”

  I tidied up my books and notepad, and bustled into the kitchen to find ingredients for my casserole. That was the great beauty of casseroles; one only had to find three to five interesting things to pop together, and then set them in the oven for an hour, and poof, you had a meal that indicated you had put thought and energy into it. I checked the fridge crisper for salad fixings and then went off to the bedroom to have a shower.

  With my hair damp, but feeling a lot fresher in clean jeans and an embroidered blouse we’d bought on our honeymoon, I set the table out on the balcony. It was a beautiful clear evening, and the sun wouldn’t set for another three hours or so, making it basking weather up on our concrete aerie. The heat was absorbed by the grey wall, but seemed to warm the whole area. I had set a couple of rag rugs out on the tiled floor of the balcony, making it cozy underfoot. I set the heavy silverware on top of the napkins, to assure they wouldn’t fly away in a sudden breeze, and went back into the kitchen for the salt, pepper, and hot sauce Steve insisted on putting on everything, another find from our honeymoon.

  With the salad under a mesh cover, and a trivet ready to accept the casserole dish, I was finished setting the table, and I stood gazing out on the river valley and beyond to the north side of the river. The lights in the baseball park were on, indicating a game was about to take place. We would be able to see the action, but not hear the crowd from this distance. A trolley went over the top of the High Level Bridge, and at the same time, an LRT train went the other direction on its own bridge just beyond. The white bow of the new Walterdale Bridge gleamed at the river’s edge, closer to us than the huge black bridge that spanned the entire river valley. I saw people kayaking down the river. I heard joggers below me along Saskatchewan Drive. It was like one of those Richard Scarry double-pages in a children’s book of everyone on the move.

  Maybe I was turning into a visual arts person, seeing everything in framed images. That is what I had read somewhere; that an artist wasn’t someone who could draw or paint exquisitely. An artist was someone who knew where to draw the frame around something to make the rest of us really see it.

  That thought brought me back to Kristin on the beach. What had we been meant to really see?

  “Hey honey, I’m home!”

  I turned toward the interior of the apartment. It was impossible to see in from out in the sunlight, which I took comfort from, even though at our height, very few people would be able to peer in. I stepped back into the living room to see Steve dumping his keys and service belt into his drawer in the kitchen island.

  When he saw me, he smiled the same smile I had seen when we took our vows and my heart did a flip in my chest. I was still having a hard time believing this was real life now.

  “You look as great as the kitchen smells.”

  I moved in for a kiss.

  “My theory is that any food smell you come home to, meaning you didn’t have to cook it, is the best food smell ever.”

  Steve laughed.

  “There is something to that, I’ll admit. Does it work if you set things up and then go for a walk?”

  “That only works for pot roast.”

  Steve laughed again, and I shooed him off to wash up for supper. I popped on oven mitts and pulled the bubbling casserole out of the oven. It was a bit of a wriggle to get the screen open with a hot dish in my hands, but apparently that is why elbows were invented. By the time Steve reappeared, I was pouring wine into our Mexican glass goblets. Steve sat down and dished himself some salad while I got on an oven mitt once more to take the lid off the casserole. I served us both, and then popped the lid back on, more to keep bugs away than to keep it warm. Steve had told me bugs rarely made it up past the fourth floor of a building, but I was taking no chances. There was enough protein in that dish already.

  “Mmm, this is amazing.” Steve was the most appreciative person to cook for. We had bonded early over food, which to my way of thinking was a good thing, even though it boded that we’d end up both being at least twenty pounds over our standard approved weight in life.

  Once we had settled into our meal, and were proceeding to clear our plates at a leisurely pace, our conversation turned to the Kristin Perry murder.

  I was eager to know what other people on his task team had said about my rebus pictorial message idea.

  “Roberto thinks it is a genius idea. Iain said it made sense, but he couldn’t figure out why she had to look like an egg on toast at the end. And Garry, our art expert because he owns two Sylvain Voyers, thinks that may be the best lead we have so far. He’s now searching back through crime scenes over the last three years that had any pictorial aspects to them, to see if there is any linkage that can be done.”

  “Why three years?”

  “The thought was that it would capture anyone who was in fourth year of a BA or BFA now, or anywhere in between. We needed to start somewhere, with a small enough catchment to allow for a prediction.”

  “I love it when you talk analytically.”

  “Remind me to median your base line later. But first, seconds!”

  Steve dished out more casserole for himself. I declined another portion, but made a note that there would be leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

  When he had cleared his plate a second time, Steve stood to clear the whole table. I wiped the table clean with our napkins and then took them both to the washer, along with the wine bottle which went into the recycle bin in the same utility room. I dished the leftovers into a container while Steve filled the sink with sudsy water, foregoing the dishwasher.

  We bustled about the kitchen together, quietly and harmoniously, and then settled in to the living room with tea and the television. We were catching up on a magnificent series starring Liev Schreiber called Ray Donovan, which explored the relative morality of a family of transplanted Boston Irishmen out to Los Angeles. Steve considered it to be on a par with The Sopranos for cinematic exploration of the humanity of criminality.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be watching Law and Order or something else with cops as the heroes?”

  “Why would I want to watch a fictionalized depiction of what I do every day, except to laugh at the magical timelines? No, I think it is important for me to understand the humanity of it all, because we paint things so black and white every day. We need to remember there are infinite shades between.”

  “Do you notice we’re talking about morality and philosophy with art terms? Did we always do that, or is it dealing with the Kristin Perry murder that has us speaking with visual arts metaphors?”

  “And looking for metaphors everywhere we look?”

  “How do you reconcile that on a day-to-day basis? As you move more and more into a case, does everything begin to look as if it belongs?”

  “I think that’s why most Superintendents run their crews with a three case load format. You juggle three different puzzles, keeping you fresh to possibilities and not tied into one rabbit hole that makes everything look like a clue. Sometimes I think those huge task teams dealing with a particular crime or killer get very blinkered.”

  “Are there a lot of task teams?”

  “Once again, magical thinking TV, mostly. If you can afford the space, you devote a wall to a case, but there are several going on in the same area. Actually, that’s not as much of a traffic jam as it sounds. And sometimes it leads to interconnections you wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.”

  “As in, the murderer you’re looking for on this wall may be the same person who is murdering people on that other wall, in a whole different manner? Aren’t murderers supposed to stick to a pattern?”


  “Normally, they do. But sometimes they venture out, or connect with other malfeasants, or simply stumble over an easy opportunity to do something slightly different. After all, why stab someone if you can push him out a window?”

  By this time, we had slid past the last possible time to begin a new episode without consciously admitting we’d be haggard the following day, so Steve turned off the various devices with their corresponding remotes, and I gathered up the teapot and mugs and rinsed the tidied things away in the dishwasher.

  “So you’re telling me that someone as obviously message-driven as our murderer in Mexico is going to just happily defenestrate someone if the opportunity arises? I’m not sure I buy that at all. I think this guy cares more about the message than the medium, and by medium I mean victim.”

  “I think you’re right, and it’s the conclusion most of us have come to, although Iain is still pursuing Kristin Perry’s background to see if there was anywhere it intersects with someone who took umbrage with her to the point of following her on vacation and doing her in.”

  “So, we’re looking for victims with art connections, or with symbolic patterns at any rate.”

  “Right.”

  “In the last three years.”

  “Yep.”

  “And how many unsolved murders have there been in the past three years in Edmonton?”

  Steve smiled wryly as he pulled the coverlet back on our bed.

  “Well, if you factor out the body recovered from the river that hasn’t been claimed since 2004, and several bodies not discovered until at least a month after they had died, making it very hard to sign off on whether they died of natural causes, there are three.”

  “Ooh, no wonder they call us the Murder Capital of Canada.”

  “I know, right? A little localized gang flare-up every now and then, and the news media goes wild. Honestly, Edmonton on the whole is a pretty safe city, if you don’t count getting knocked over by a cyclist on the sidewalk.”