Grave Doubts

by John Moss

  “I’ll meet you at Starbucks in an hour.”

  They both knew which Starbucks — the one over from police headquarters on the corner of College and Yonge.

  “So, you’ve been away?” she said when she saw him.

  He rose, kissed her on both cheeks, and slumped back into his chair. He had a large cappuccino waiting for her, with the saucer on top to keep it warm. His eyes were bloodshot and his hands swollen, but he looked content, like the cat, having swallowed the canary, who endured indigestion as a reasonable price for the pleasure.

  “Tell me.”

  “Well,” he said, “I got on an Air Canada flight at Pearson, heading for Easter Island. When I transferred to Varig Air in Brazil, I was travelling to Isla de Pascua. In Santiago, I boarded Lan Chile for Rapa Nui. And I landed on Te pito o te henua. All the same place. It was a magical journey. Did you ever read Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, where he gets on a modern train in the Metropolis, and transfers to an older train on his way to Mariposa as he travels back into another world defined by nostalgia and wit? I have just emerged from another dimension, defined by enchantment and mystery.”

  “You sound slightly demented. What on earth took you… there?” Miranda gazed across the table at her partner, who was dishevelled, buoyant with enthusiasm. He was precious in her life, she wanted to tell him. She wanted to hug him and keep him invulnerable. “You are an idiot, Morgan. No one knew where you were.”

  “On Rapa Nui. That’s what they call themselves, and their language, and the island. Te pito o te henua means navel of the world. It’s not really a name; for a thousand years they didn’t know there was anyone else on the planet. It’s a geographical declaration.”

  “I wrote an essay on Thor Heyerdahl as an anthropological entrepreneur when I was in university.”

  “How very cynical. You were ahead of your time.”

  “Yeah, actually I wrote it in high school. ‘Kon Tiki: Boys at Sea.’ ‘Aku Aku: Boys Still at Sea.’ ‘Indiana Jones: An Autobiography.’ Whatever. Got an ‘A.’ Or should have.”

  “You ever notice how people ask about your travels so they can talk about themselves?”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

  They sipped their coffees, each looking over the rims at the other. Miranda smiled, inhaled coffee, and, as she choked, slammed down her cup on the table. Morgan grimaced in sympathy. Her eyes watered, she tried to speak, she waved her hand to reassure witnesses that she was not about to expire. Everyone but Morgan looked away.

  “Well then,” he said. “Given this opportunity to say a few words, let me fill in possible gaps in your memory of Heyerdahl. Rapa Nui is about three thousand kilometres off South America, another three thousand from Tahiti. There are almost nine hundred moai — that’s what the statues are called — and about three times that many people.

  “Nine hundred,” she mouthed in astonishment.

  “Yeah, from three feet to sixty feet tall, not all completed. Every one is unique, like a signature — you know, the same and yet each version is different. They were created over an eight-hundred-year period.”

  “Sixty feet?”

  “That one’s still in the quarry at Rano Raraku. I spent a lot of time out there.”

  He talked on and on, and Miranda was spellbound. Eventually, it was Morgan who exclaimed, “It’s time we get back to work.”

  “I was working while you were away, you know. The world didn’t hold its breath in your absence. Things happened.”

  “What?”

  “Not much. Do you want a ride home? Maybe you should run up and let the superintendent know you’re back.”

  “Is he still living there?”

  “Just about. I think he’s taken a room on St. George. It’s a negotiating strategy. She threw him out, you know. The rumour is he was not having an affair.”

  “No!”

  “Apparently she got tired of buying the toilet paper and pepper.”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s my theory: if you don’t keep track of the toilet paper and pepper, you’re not sharing responsibilities, you’re just helping out.”

  “I manage to run out of both on a regular basis.”

  “Exactly. And she was so busy being a lawyer, a wife, a housekeeper, and society matron, and a mother, neither of them noticed he was mostly just being a cop.”

  “You know all this, because…?”

  “A friend of a friend has an informant who works out at her gym.”

  “Ah,” he said. He forgot to tell her about Rongorongo for sale in the marketplace. He would; she’d ask. A written language no one could read; she was executor of her assailant’s estate and he had owned an incised tablet the size of a paddle blade filled with indecipherable glyphs. It was worth a small fortune, certainly more than her vintage Jaguar. Maybe she wouldn’t ask; maybe she would assume Morgan would tell her anything new he might have learned, if he had learned anything new. They both knew he couldn’t resist.

  Without asking, Morgan ambled over to the counter and ordered two more cappuccinos. Miranda followed him with her eyes, sure other women were doing the same. There was something about the way he moved — a shambling self-assurance — the way his clothes looked worn in and not worn out, the crooked smile, the way he combined intensity with nonchalance.

  She looked around the Starbucks interior. There were five other women; several of them, oddly enough, were looking at her. She was glad he was home.

  After they checked in with Alex Rufalo, she drove him home. When he emerged from the bathroom, clean-shaven, hair combed, wrapped in a towel, he appeared almost normal. By the time he descended from the loft after dressing, he already seemed slightly unkempt; his hair looked windblown, although God knows there wasn’t much air moving through his apartment, and his clothes, while clean, were already rumpled. All signs of exhaustion had left his face; he looked refreshed and relaxed. He sat on the blue sofa since she was comfortably ensconced in his favourite armchair

  “I suppose you hung out with the police down there.”

  “Carabineros. Isla de Pascua Carabineros. I met a guy called Te Ave Teao, trained in Chile but born and raised on the island. There’s no crime in Rapa Nui — nothing serious. Mostly, I kept to myself. What’s happening with our major case? I’m assuming it’s still our major case.”

  “Can’t tie the victims to each other or connect either of them to the house. A lot of dead ends, so to speak. I think we’re dealing with murder for amusement — the arbitrary indulgence of an inspired psychopath.”

  She was aware she was echoing a conversation she had had with Rachel. This made her wonder how much her intimacy with the young woman had been to compensate for Morgan’s absence. Perhaps that explains why we never became lovers, she thought.

  “There’s no use looking for motive, then,” Morgan was saying. “Method we know. Opportunity was at the killer’s convenience. So we focus on what?”

  “The entertainment factor. I know it’s grotesque, but maybe our only hope is to interpret the crime as a creative event. Morgan, we have to shift from motive to intent. The ring and the cross are no longer clues to what happened; the hidden crypt is no longer evidentiary; the colonial clothes, the mummification, the eternal embrace, these aren’t factors that will help us to explain the murder itself. Everything is turned around. Don’t you see?”

  “Not yet, but I’m trying.”

  “Clues and evidence won’t lead to the killer directly, since they were arranged with pathological intention to achieve an aesthetic effect.”

  “All art is pathological.”

  “Now that is profound.”

  “But true. The artist plays life against death without a twinge of conscience. Suffering, brutality, sadness — they’re just the raw materials.”

  “Joy, triumph, ecstasy — they’re raw materials, too. ‘Inferno’ is only one part of the Divine Comedy, Morgan. That’s why it’s divine!”

  “What about Freud?”


  “What about Freud?” she retorted — but she already knew where he was going. It was good to have Morgan back in the game.

  “There’s a disjunct between the signifiers and the signified —”

  “You’re switching discourses, Morgan!”

  “No, I’m piggybacking Freud on Saussure. We’re trying to make a story out of signs that make no sense — we should forget the story and look for the author embedded in the mystery itself.”

  “Yes,” she said. Morgan’s back.

  “There’s a subtle distinction, but incredibly important. We can’t explain the psychopath’s madness by interpretation, but we can find him there, hidden among symbols and artifice, expressing his madness. It could be Freud: about issues of love and sexuality. It could be Aristotle: about hubris and achieving catharsis. It could be Beckett —”

  “That’s what I said, Beckett.”

  “A story about nothing but itself.”

  “So we all become characters in search of an author. Holy Pirandello, Batman! It’s a challenge. When you’re inside the play, he gets to be God.”

  “You said what about Beckett, to who?”

  “To whom! To Rachel Naismith, my new best friend.”

  “You are a fickle woman.”

  Morgan got up from the sofa and moved around the room. Lack of sleep made him restless but he felt exhilarated to be working again.

  “We have a cold-blooded killer with talent,” he said. “Do we have a pattern? If this is his masterwork, did he serve an apprenticeship? With whom? More to the point, on whom? If this is the first display of his deviant aptitude, I have the distinct and uneasy feeling it will not be his last.”

  “That’s just what I’m afraid of, Morgan. Success spawning success. There’s no precedent — nothing like it at all in the States, or here. Nothing with comparable flair, or the same intellectual self-consciousness.”

  “You tried the Ontario Provincial Police?”

  “Nothing. They ran it through ViCLAS —”

  “ViCLAS?”

  “Violent Crime Linking Analysis System.”

  “I knew that.”

  “The Orillia OPP are cutting edge. Nothing.”

  “Did you try Interpol?”

  “Of course. I was thorough. And imaginative — I was open to variations on the theme. But nothing, nada, rien.”

  “So we wait. It’s grotesque, but that’s all we can do. Have you talked to Pope again? Or the anthropologists? How in the hell were they fooled, if Pope saw right off that the scene was a fake?”

  “Forewarned is forearmed. He knew after you called what to expect. Poor Birbalsingh and Hubbard — they walked in cold. They had no reason to be skeptical. The condition of the bodies, their dress, the sealed crypt, it all seemed consistent. It was an archeological site”

  “Their findings to be entered in the annals of science.”

  “Does science have annals? Yeah, Morgan, I went back to talk to them both. Professor Birbalsingh was amused more than anything. And intrigued. He said when we catch the killer he’d like to talk to him. It might help in his forensic research with authentic antiquities. Dr. Hubbard was less sanguine. I asked her if she could put a trace on the clothing. She already had, and came up with nothing. It would be virtually impossible to track down unless it had been stolen from a collection, she said. More likely it was bought in one of those strange little shops in London that cater to every imaginable taste. I couldn’t argue. I’ve never been to London.”

  “Is it worth getting Scotland Yard to check around?”

  “I’ve already asked. The chap on the phone was absolutely charming, asked me to fax the paperwork and they’d get right on it, and wanted to know if I dated.”

  “If you’re dated?”

  “No, Morgan. He was flirting. It was quite flattering.”

  “Desperate measures, given the Atlantic —”

  “He said I should look him up if I ever got over. Constable Stenabaugh. He sounded quite handsome.”

  “You are a desperate and fickle woman.”

  “Rachel and I went out to see Alexander Pope.”

  She knew that would surprise him, that they went together.

  “He is a lovely man,” she continued. “And he has a breathtaking home. Pre-Victorian, I don’t know what you’d call it — Georgian Colonial, neo-American Federal. You’ve got to see it; you’d love the furnishings. Some of the paint must be ten layers thick, some of the pieces he’s made himself, right down to faking the paint. We stayed for a sauna. He’s a fascinating man. Beautiful body — he must be fifty.”

  He looked at her quizzically. In his brief absence she had made new friends. He would not have anticipated the relationship with Officer Naismith. Miranda was generally slow in warming to women. Her explanation was a paraphrase from the old comic strip Pogo: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” Pope was less unexpected. What Morgan had taken as the man’s pleasantly austere asexuality, he now realized, from the tenor of Miranda’s voice, was mistaken by women for smouldering passion refined through an aura of eccentric gentility.

  Strange, he thought. We can’t both be right.

  “Did you ask him for a list of people who might have the skills to close in the alcove?”

  “Yeah. He laughed. He told me there’s nobody, apart from himself. And, he assured me, he was working in Arlington, Texas, through the fall and winter. It checked out. He’s got a major reconstruction project down there, where they’re anxious to pay for their past — unlike post-colonials who try to obscure it. He was on the job every day, seven days a week, for a full five months.”

  “And they died during that time?”

  “Ellen Ravenscroft wrote the report. She was sure they died in the depths of winter. Fairly sure.”

  “How could she tell?”

  “Micro-organisms; decomposition tables; schedules and charts of this and that. They have their methods. Once she knew what she was looking for, it was easy.”

  “Ain’t that always the way!”

  “We ran chemical analyses on the plaster ingredients and paint. It was like an alchemical inversion, Morgan: old ingredients newly mixed to look old.”

  “What about sexual assault?”

  “Tissues were too far gone —”

  “This isn’t about sex, anyway. Not this one.”

  “Wrong, Morgan. I think it is. Not the act of, maybe, but it has to be about sex. You wait and see. You don’t mount cadavers in a headless embrace without Freud in attendance.”

  He smiled enigmatically.

  “I thought you were in the Cayman Islands.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I wasn’t.”

  Miranda left for headquarters. Morgan planned to walk over to the university and talk with Hubbard and Birbalsingh. He took possession of his wingback again, settled down, and stared into the middle distance.

  We wait, he thought. There are cold cases to deal with, and investigative legwork to be done for other teams, but we wait. There is no way to anticipate the killer’s next move. Will we even recognize it?

  Of course, or he’s failed!

  It’s bound to be different. Perhaps not a theatrical tableau, but if it doesn’t evoke the original, his genius is wasted.

  To have his bodies remain undiscovered, that would have been failure. So, the sick diorama must have been set up after demolition was approved by the city. But if we’re right, spurred on by his success the killer will reach for a cumulative effect. Then he’ll have, and we’ll have, a pattern.

  That’s small consolation for the deaths in the offing.

  Outside, Morgan surveyed the street. He lived in the heart of the Annex, surrounded by looming Victorian houses and well-kept between-the-wars homes with verandahs. It was well past the middle of April, buds were forming on the huge silver maples along the street, and the occasional willow showed the beginnings of green. Tiny lawns had been raked of winter debris and the pavement was swept clean of the gritty detritus that had accumulate
d through winter in ridges by the curb. A few crocuses and hyacinths poked upwards in flowerbeds, above tulips and daffodils that were secretly breaking out of their chrysalises in the cold earth below. Cars gleamed; in the winter there was no point in keeping them washed. Windows on houses were sparkling clean. Robins squabbled in the air and squirrels raced under cars, over lawns, leapt among branches in desperate games of hide-and-go-seek.

  As he walked down to Harbord Street, he conjured with images of Rapa Nui, playing them through his mind against the backdrop of his neighbourhood in the Annex. Cabbagetown had changed. Suburbia was foreign territory. High-rise condos sapped the soul. But in the Annex, Morgan felt comfortable. The smell of barbeques in summer, the grating of snow shovels in winter, the excitement of spring, the slow apprehension of autumn, cars in all seasons parked bumper to bumper — these defined the dimensions of home. At any one point in the year, he was aware of it all.

  Sometimes, among the most striking moai buried to the shoulder in ravines below the quarry, great statues leaning forward, gazing over the grasslands of the island toward the Pacific, he felt a vague longing for the more familiar world against which his experience on Rapa Nui was shaped and measured. It was this merging of worlds within that made his adventure exciting and poignant. Travel is about being someplace and being away from someplace at the same time.

  The moai that reached the coast were set on platforms called ahu, and they would have been given eyes of obsidian on polished coral and faced with their backs to the sea.

  In his mind he could still see stone and wood tablets in the marketplace, meticulously etched with the island’s Rongorongo script by carvers who could not understand the writings of their ancestors, yet honoured the indecipherable glyphs by their scrupulous reproductions. He could see rich Polynesian complexions and luxuriant long hair, and a few mirroring variations of himself, slathered in sunscreen, shielded under the wonderfully familiar floppiness of an old Tilley hat. He could see the clean streets of Hanga Roa, the bustling village on the southwestern shore where virtually all of the island’s population live, and on the streets the occasional car and the horses and dogs and people vying for casual pre-eminence. All this mixed in a mental mélange with his perceptions of Toronto in the promising spring.