Sleep of the Innocent

by Medora Sale

  “Robert,” he said uncomfortably.

  “But people don’t call you that,” she said. “Robert’s much too formal for someone who looks like you. And Bob is too casual. I bet they called you Robin at home. I shall call you Robin—unless you object violently.”

  He stared at her in amazement. “And how about you?” he countered with a flash of anger. “Why do you do this to yourself?” He picked up a lock of her hair. “And wear those clothes?”

  “Oh, that’s nothing. Just part of my professional disguise, that’s all. People expect it. Here comes the lasagna. I hope it’s good.”

  He pulled up in front of a reasonable-looking motel a few blocks farther on. “I guess that’ll do,” she said. “I can look after myself from here. Thanks for the ride. And dinner.”

  “I’m coming in with you,” he said, abruptly remembering that he was supposed to be keeping an eye on her. “Just to make sure they’ve got a room. Besides, what about money? If you really did lose your purse—”

  “You still think I’m lying, don’t you?” She laughed. “I did lose my purse, but I borrowed some money. Remember? I’ve got plenty.” She patted an area in the vicinity of the hipbone.

  “Plenty? I figured she lent you a ten.”

  “Oh, no. Her friend was pretty generous, I reckon, and she’s easygoing about money. She must have thought there was more where that came from. Poor thing.”

  “Okay,” he said in a voice heavy with doubt. “I’m coming in anyway, though. Just in case. But I’ll stay in the background.”

  “Oh, good,” she said dryly. “I wouldn’t want you to sully my reputation. Let’s go.”

  He concealed himself tactfully behind a rack of postcards on the other side of the lobby while she checked in. “Right,” said the man behind the desk, as a key hit the desk with a muted clang. “Room one-sixteen. Right along the corridor over there. You sure you don’t want something on the top floor? It’s quieter.” Lucas strolled over to the desk.

  She picked up her key and shook her head. “I like to be near the ground,” she said. “We all have our little oddities. Oh, hello, Robin. Thank you. It was a lousy start to a friendship, but dinner was great.”

  He tried to think of something to say, nodded, and left.

  Lucas walked into his apartment, dropping his parka on a chair. It was a long drive from Finch to Adelaide Street. And on one beer and a glass of wine he felt as if he’d been up all night boozing. Sleep, said his tired brain. He started for the loft that served as his bedroom, shedding clothes as he went; by the time he was up the short flight of stairs, he was down to his shorts. The ringing of the telephone came as a hideous jolt. “Shit,” he muttered, and picked up the receiver.

  “Lucas. It’s Baldwin. Where in the hell have you been?”

  “Stashing the witness in a motel and getting myself something to eat. Sir.” Odd that he had instinctively reversed the order. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” he roared. “Marty Fielding’s on my back. Wants to know what’s being done, who killed his client, everything.” In the ensuing pause, Lucas could see him pacing fretfully back and forth. “Everyone else in the city wants to know, too. What did you get from the girl?”

  “Nothing much,” said Lucas, yawning. “Calls herself a singer, but she’s probably a hooker with a pretty mean-tempered pimp. Lots of bruises. I think she was in the apartment when Neilson got killed—didn’t kill him but can identify the person who did. She’s scared.”

  “What makes you think she was there?”

  “I just don’t believe in this mysterious girl, Krystal, who lends her an apartment on fifteen minutes’ worth of friendship. And she was wearing the perfume the bed stank of, and her fingerprints were all over. It stands to reason. Neilson brought her in for the day—or whatever—and when he was killed, she was under the bed or behind the couch or something like that. And besides, she doesn’t have a coat. No one goes out without a coat on a day like this. I’ll bet there was a woman’s coat in the apartment. Was there? You got a list there of the stuff they found?”

  “What kind of coat?”

  “How the hell should I know? Probably black and not very big.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Lucas sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall. Come on, Baldy. Get a move on.

  “Yeah. A black leather coat, size eight, woman’s, made by—”

  “She was there. And so scared, she forgot her coat.”

  “It was in the living room closet. She couldn’t have got the door open without moving the body. So, don’t lose track of her, eh? Where did you put her?”

  “The Blue Star Motel. No one’s likely to find her there. Good night, Inspector. I’ve had it.” And he dropped down the phone and climbed under the bedclothes in the same motion, sinking almost instantly into oblivion.

  Chapter 3

  Lucas walked into the noise and activity around his desk with his eyes clamped half-shut and his mouth dry and foul-tasting. He wasn’t sure how much sleep he had finally managed the night before, but it hadn’t been enough. Not nearly enough. He put down his coffee, carefully removed the lid, and with equal care set his almost-cold Danish beside it. So far this morning he had successfully avoided speech. Even the woman at the bakery where he picked up his breakfast had said, as she always did, “Black? And you want your Danish warmed up?” and he had nodded. Gratefully. And so, when Kelleher said, “Morning, Robert,” all he got in return was a croak.

  He took a mouthful of coffee. That was better. “Anything new?” he said in a voice passably like his own.

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “Nothing?” he asked incredulously. “What’s everyone been doing?”

  “Tripping over each other’s feet. Whatever you do, duck when the phone rings. Ten to one it’ll be Baldwin screaming at you to do the exact opposite of what you were supposed to do five minutes ago. If you follow me. I’ve only been here an hour, and he’s phoned at least four times, screwing everything up. Eric’s not here—he’ll be in later. He went off to get some sleep. Been chasing around most of the night, I think, trying to avoid Baldy. He has this big list of people he’s not supposed to question, and he’s looking pretty grim.”

  “That’s going to look great when it hits the papers, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Kelleher, with a certain amount of relish. “Won’t it? Tempting thought. I want to be here when Sanders hears about it, too. Not that Baldwin’s his favourite person anyway.”

  “Where in hell is Inspector Sanders?” asked Lucas forlornly. “If he doesn’t come back, I’ll never get away from Baldy.”

  “Somewhere in the States with his girlfriend,” said Kelleher. “Having a hell of a lot more fun than we are and screwing up everyone’s schedule. I wish to hell people didn’t just take off on holidays anytime they felt like it,” he added, in a low-voiced mutter. “Leaving other people stuck with assholes like Baldwin to deal with. Anyway, relax. It’s safe around here for a while. Baldy’s coming in late, thank God. Did you know him when he spent all his time bending paper clips and worrying about politics? I never realized what a pain in the ass he could be when he started taking his job seriously.” He paused to pick up his coffee. “So help me God, I’ll never complain about someone not working again. I swear. By the bones of my sainted Aunt Mary.”

  Lucas grunted and pulled the telephone closer to him.

  “Room one-sixteen,” he said, when he reached the desk at the Blue Star Motel. During the ensuing pause, he started in on the Danish. It was cheese. He varied the kind from day to day, depending on his mood. Cheese meant exhausted. And grim.

  “Who do you want to talk to?” The voice on the other end was a suspicious voice. A cautious voice.

  “Jennifer Wilson.”

  You could almost hear the head shake. “Miss Wilson left last night.”

&
nbsp; “Last night? She only checked in last night.” There was an icy pause. “Damn,” muttered Lucas. And then something else occurred to him. That little bitch had gone sneaking off with—“You didn’t find a blue sweater in the room, did you?” he asked. “Men’s, large, hand-knit?”

  “Who is this?” Now the voice was heavy with suspicion.

  “I’m a police officer,” he started in his usual bored sing-song, “and I’ve been—”

  “We made a damage report on the room to the officer who came by this morning,” he said coldly. “There wasn’t any sweater.”

  “Damage? What damage?” The world had gone mad on him this morning.

  “The damage caused by the people who broke into the room,” he said carefully, as if he suspected that Lucas was not very bright.

  “What in hell are you talking about? Someone broke into her room? Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? Was she hurt?”

  “I don’t believe so. I think Miss, uh, Wilson—if that’s her name—had already left by the time they entered.”

  “Let me speak to the clerk on duty last night.”

  “He’s asleep,” said the voice. It sounded shocked.

  “Then wake him up. No—I’ll be out there as soon as I can. I’ll see him then. Just leave everything as it was.”

  There was a significant pause. “I’m sorry, sir. But the constable said we could repair the damage. The workmen are already in the room.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” muttered Lucas. “Never mind. I’ll be out sometime this morning.”

  He dropped the phone back down and cursed the girl, the motel, the phone, everything. “Something wrong?” asked Kelleher, amused.

  “I’ve lost the witness,” said Lucas. “I stashed her in a motel last night, showing touching faith in her word that she was going to stay there for a few days, and she took off in the middle of the night.” He omitted the complication, the strange people who came to visit her and apparently destroyed her room, because explaining them was going to be beyond him at the moment.

  “Baldy’s going to be pleased, isn’t he?”

  Inspector Baldwin was not pleased. His face became unnaturally still, then reddened slightly, and then paled to white again. There was silence—ominous silence—for at least a minute.

  “Let me see if I understand this,” said Baldwin at last. “First of all, you find someone outside the murdered man’s apartment who has come out of it very recently, but you decide, even though this is a very sensitive investigation, that she is not important enough to hold. You drop her off in an out-of-the-way motel of her choice—”

  “Not exactly, sir,” said Lucas. “She chose the direction; I found the motel.”

  “Some motel in her part of town, then. You still think she’s relatively unimportant. And then you decide when you’re talking to me that she must be an eyewitness to Carl Neilson’s murder, and on that comforting thought you go to bed. Leaving her to skip out in the middle of the night with a couple of accomplices. What made you think she hadn’t killed the man? Do we have a better suspect?”

  “Her hands were clean. She hadn’t fired a gun. And we got her right after the phone call went in. For God’s sake, the guy was still bleeding when the constable got there,” said Lucas defensively.

  “Gloves? Rubber gloves?” snapped Baldwin.

  “There weren’t any,” said Eric Patterson, who had walked into the office without knocking—or any other ceremony—as was his habit. “We’ve combed through the entire apartment. And there’s no place to stash them between the apartment and where the cadet grabbed her. And before you ask—no one’s opened the windows since they were last painted, a year ago, but just in case, we searched every inch of land under them anyway.”

  “Did you search her?”

  Patterson looked at Lucas, who shook his head uneasily. “I didn’t. But she wasn’t wearing very much, and it was pretty tight.”

  “So,” said Baldwin. “She could have slipped a pair of surgeon’s gloves in her underwear.”

  “There’s something else,” said Patterson, yawning. “She might have hidden the gloves, but we didn’t find a weapon, either. Harder to miss. Did she look strange to you, Robert? Like she had a Beretta in her bra?”

  “Listen, she couldn’t have hidden a hairpin in the outfit she was wearing.”

  “Or a Colt in—”

  “Watch it, Eric,” said Baldwin. “Well, if you’re right, and she didn’t shoot him, then she must know something about the person who did. I want her found. Soon. Today. How far can she have gotten since the middle of last night?” Lucas looked at Patterson and shrugged his shoulders. The answer, of course, was that she could be landing in Paris right now. “And as soon as you get any sort of lead on her, I want to know. I’m under great pressure to find out who killed Neilson. Fielding has already called a couple of times this morning. We need results, and fast.”

  “I sure as hell screwed that up,” said Lucas gloomily as they walked back down the corridor.

  “Don’t worry about it. She’s probably not that hard to find. You want me to get onto it?”

  “Don’t bother. How many people can it take to find one girl? What I can’t figure out is what’s gotten into Baldwin. You’d think Marty Fielding was the goddamn mayor. Or the prime minister.”

  “Jesus—where have you been for the last year?” said Patterson.

  “Out of it, obviously. Who’s Fielding? Besides being a rich lawyer. I know that.”

  “Fielding is the membership secretary of the Yacht Club. No, it’s not even The Yacht Club. Baldwin doesn’t aspire—yet—to The Yacht Club. It’s the Sandy Cove Yacht Club. You know. Number two. We try harder.”

  “I see. And Baldwin wants to join—”

  “Right. And so he doesn’t want Fielding annoyed at him.”

  “He’s crazy. He should keep his boat at a marina. It’s cheaper and less aggravating.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t have a boat. If he gets in the Yacht Club, he’s going to buy a boat and learn how to sail.” Eric chuckled. “I wonder if Marianne gets seasick,” he added softly.

  “Marianne?”

  “His wife. Last year it was horses, remember? He took riding lessons, the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Only Marianne kept breaking out in some sort of rash, and they discovered she was allergic to horses. So he had to find something else.”

  Patterson’s gossipy, malicious voice went on and on while Lucas tried to imagine Baldwin on a boat. He was a big man, used to getting his own way through sheer size and forcefulness. Lucas imagined him standing by the mast, roaring at the wind to blow from the right quarter and stop all this messing about. And then—wonderful thought—being swept overboard. Boats. His thoughts drifted away from Baldwin. Lucas’s father belonged to The Yacht Club, all ties, blazers, white flannels, and quarts of gin. Those sails, at least twice a summer, in his father’s Nonesuch, with his stepmother lying about chattering and oozing sex all over the place. His father, to give him credit, still regarded sailing from the point of view of the serious racer he once had been and preferred to stay quiet and sober on the water; if Tricia hadn’t been along, Lucas might have enjoyed himself. But there was no point in going sailing with someone who talked incessantly. On a boat, in the middle of the lake, was the only place around where you could get away from the interminable sound of voices and phones ringing and bloody internal combustion engines. He shrugged. Patterson’s monologue seemed to have exhausted itself. He went back to finish his cold coffee and Danish before setting off for the motel.

  The March sun poured down on the ferry dock as the M/V Uncatena edged gently away from Vineyard Haven. Inspector John Sanders, Metropolitan Toronto Police Department, Homicide, and Harriet Jeffries, freelance architectural photographer, were up on deck, leaning companionably against the rail, stari
ng down into the water. They were almost alone. Most of the people crossing were islanders, year-round residents of Martha’s Vineyard, and for them the off-island trip was routine enough to make them consider hot coffee and a warm, comfortable seat inside more important than looking at late-winter scenery.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Harriet, yawning and pulling her coat more tightly around her.

  “The parking lot?” asked John, pointing to the broad expanse of asphalt where cars lined up to get on the ferry.

  “No, you benighted idiot—the island. Now. In March. With lots of cold wind and no tourists. Except for us, of course.” She turned to look at him. “Do you suppose that the locals saw us and groaned—here comes the tourist season all over again?”

  “Maybe they took us for a sign of spring—like robins.” He wrapped his arm tightly around her shoulders. “After all, the sun started to shine just as we pulled into the harbour on Wednesday. We’ve given them three whole days of good weather.”

  “I still can’t believe that we actually got here,” said Harriet. “That you were willing to walk out and leave them all behind. How much vacation time did you say you had accumulated?”

  John ignored the question. “Me? When did you last take a holiday?”

  “I never take holidays,” said Harriet smugly. “I merely change my working locale temporarily when I get sick of Toronto architecture.” She giggled huskily. “And alter my working hours somewhat.”

  “To between eleven and eleven-thirty on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.”

  “Something like that.” Harriet leaned forward over the rail and looked past her companion in the direction of the open water. “You know, you could be right. About our bringing good weather. Look at that.”

  The ferry was gliding tranquilly into a wall of fog. Somewhere close to their ears, a crew member loosed a melancholy, ear-splitting blast of the horn as the world disappeared behind a blanket of gray. Harriet jumped and then shivered in the cold dampness. “What a magnificent atmosphere,” she said. “All we need is a ghost ship to come drifting past.”