Depth of Field

by Michael Blair

  “I will,” I said.

  “Jeanie Stone came by,” she said.

  “She said she might.”

  “This is a horrible thing to say, but when I first met her, I thought she was a lesbian. She isn’t, though.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “Did you make a pass at her?”

  “I’m not a lesbian,” she said seriously.

  “I know you’re not a lesbian, Bobbi. I was trying to make a joke.”

  “Oh.” She smiled unevenly. “Of course you were. Sorry. My brain still isn’t working properly, I guess.”

  “If it ever did.”

  “Haw.”

  “Has your father been by to see you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “My mother called, though.”

  “Oh, crap, I forgot all about your mother. I’m sorry. I should have called her.” Bobbi’s parents had been divorced for years. A year or two before, her mother, who once upon a time had been a nurse in that very hospital, had moved to Nanaimo with her second husband. Or was it her third?

  “It’s all right. Greg called her. Don’t worry about it. She likes him better than you, anyway. Or did, at least.”

  “I know your father doesn’t like me, but I thought your mother did. What did I do wrong?”

  “Mom got it into her head that we should be married. I told her you didn’t want to marry me and I certainly didn’t want to marry you, but that didn’t seem to make any difference to her. And now that Greg’s decided to go and raise horses with Isabel, he’s in her bad books, too.”

  “Well, at least I have company. What did you mean you ‘certainly’ didn’t want to marry me? Some women might even consider me a good catch.”

  “It’d help if I was in love with you, or you with me, wouldn’t it?”

  “Mm, I guess.”

  “You’re good company, though. Most of the time.”

  “Thanks,” I said, reminded of my conversation with Anna Waverley.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “C’mon. I know you. Something’s wrong. What is it? Oh, shit. You’ve broken up with Reeny, haven’t you? You have that look. I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and shrugged it off. “Have you remembered anything about the attack?”

  She shook her head. “No, not really. I get little flashes of things, a boat, being in the water, a face hovering over me, probably the guy who gave me CPR. I don’t remember anything about being beaten up.”

  “Any idea of when they’re going to let you out of here?”

  “Couple of days, Dr. Sandra said. God, doesn’t she have the most fabulous eyes?”

  “She does indeed,” I agreed.

  “The rest of her ain’t bad, either,” Greg Matthias said from the door, Dr. Sandra at his side, a huge smile on her face. He beckoned to me. “Tom, can I speak with you for a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said and went out into the hall with him.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m all right. Spooked, though. I have the strangest feeling that the world is a very different place than it was yesterday, I just can’t pin down how it’s changed, even though I know how it’s changed.”

  “Understandable. I want you to tell me everything you remember about last night, from the time you got Anna Waverley’s message till the police arrived.”

  “Again? Now? Here?”

  “Let’s go get a coffee.”

  I agreed. He told Bobbi we’d see her in a little while, then we went down to the coffee shop, picked up two coffees, and found a quiet corner. When I was finished telling my story for the seventh time, he said, “The door was unlocked?”

  “Yes,” I replied. I hesitated, then said, “She didn’t kill herself, did she?”

  “No,” he said. “The ME saw right off it wasn’t suicide. There were ligature marks on her throat inconsistent with hanging, and her hyoid bone was fractured, indicating that she’d been manually strangled before the noose was put around her neck and she was strung up to make it look like suicide. And there were marks on the overhead beam where it was scored by the extension cord as she was hauled up.”

  That was more than I really needed to know, but he wasn’t done.

  “She had a moderately high level of alcohol in her blood, but a lot more in her stomach. Ante-mortem bruising indicates she may have been forced to ingest it before she was killed.”

  I closed my eyes and saw the empty wine bottle on the dining table, and the two wine glasses next to it, which I hadn’t remembered until that moment.

  “There was no sign of forced entry, so she probably knew her killer. Or killers. Let them in, anyway. The lengths he — or they — went to to make it look like suicide were pointless, really, given the state of the art of forensic science these days. But,” he added, with a shrug, “in the real world most killers are stupid and think cops are even stupider.”

  “If this is the real world,” I said, “you’re welcome to it.” Then something quite unpleasant occurred to me. “I’m not a suspect, am I?”

  “No. The TOD — time of death — was between eight and nine. You’ve got a good alibi. Me. You didn’t leave the hospital till after nine and a neighbour puts your arrival at Anna Waverley’s house at ten-thirty.”

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “I can’t really discuss it with you, Tom. I’ve already told you more than I should. You’re not a very popular guy around Major Crimes right now. Kovacs wants you charged with interfering with an ongoing investigation. He’ll calm down eventually, but I’d stay out of his way for a while. He’s still handling Bobbi’s case. I’ve caught Anna Waverley’s only because we’re a bit short-handed at the moment. If we can show a reasonably conclusive connection between Bobbi’s attack and Anna Waverley’s murder, I’m out of it, though.”

  “The connection seems pretty conclusive to me.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good bet, but so far there’s nothing but coincidence to connect them. Except for you, of course.”

  My guts twisted into an icy knot. “Do you think Anna Waverley was killed because I went to see her?”

  “There was something she needed to tell you, you said. Urgently. She was killed shortly after leaving the message on your phone. Odds are that whoever killed her didn’t want her talking to you again, perhaps afraid of what she might tell you about Bobbi’s attack.”

  “If that’s what she wanted to talk to me about,” I said. A cold feeling came over me. “Uh, do you think my phone or my house may be bugged? Or hers?” It was easy enough to do, with gear you could by at almost any electronics store or off the Internet.

  “I doubt it,” Matthias said. “It’s more likely that she mentioned your visit to someone. But we’ll check, if you like.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’re probably right about her talking to someone else. I’ll let you know.”

  “When you were at her house the other night, did she say anything that implied she knew who attacked Bobbi or who else may have been on the Wonderlust the night of the attack?”

  “No.”

  “She drank almost two bottles of wine. How drunk did she get?”

  “Hard to say. She became fairly talkative, but she didn’t slur her words or lose track of the conversation. I’m not sure two bottles of wine was necessarily a lot for her.”

  “Are you saying she was an alcoholic?”

  “No, but it’s a definite possibility.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “Not much. A glass and a half, maybe.”

  “How certain are you that she had a lover at the time of her death?”

  “Reasonably certain. Sixty, seventy percent.”

  “Any idea who he might be? Whoever he is, he’s at the top of our list right now.”

  “Sorry. She didn’t mention a name or tell me anything about him.”

  “We’ll need to fingerprint you to eliminate your prints from the scene.”
>
  “No problem. Just tell me where to go.”

  He did, asking me to go there as soon as I could, and I promised I would, then we went back upstairs and visited with Bobbi for a while longer. He left before I did. I left when Bobbi started to yawn. She still tired easily, she said. I drove back to Granville Island, but I didn’t go to the studio, going home instead. I wasn’t in the mood to face Mary-Alice’s nagging or Wayne’s good-natured eagerness. I wished my friend and neighbour Daniel Wu were around, as I could have used someone to talk to, but he was in Montana or Manitoba or someplace for most of the month, overseeing the final stages of the construction of a public library he’d designed. I was supposed to be looking after his plants while he was gone. I’d been neglecting them lately, so I got his keys and let myself into his house, directly across the dock from mine. Maggie Urquhart was also away, on a book-signing tour — Maggie was a retired professor of anthropology who wrote bestselling books about modern urban mythology and spirituality that had made her more than moderately wealthy — and I was supposed to be neglecting her plants, too, so when I’d done with Daniel’s, I took care of Maggie’s. It was a good thing she’d boarded Harvey, her Harlequin Great Dane, or he’d have starved to death, among other things. Then it was lunchtime. I made a toasted tomato-and-cheddar-cheese sandwich, ate half of it, then wrapped the rest in Saran and left it in the fridge to be thrown out at a later date.

  When I got to the studio at a few minutes past two, Mary-Alice said, “Where have you been?” as if she were married to me and not my little sister and junior partner.

  “Visiting Bobbi,” I said, stretching the truth.

  “I tried to reach you. Bobbi said you left before lunch.”

  “I must’ve fallen into a time warp,” I said, eliciting a scowl. “Why were you trying to reach me?”

  “Walter Moffat’s office called.”

  “Is that right? What did they want?”

  “He’s changed his mind —”

  “And this is news? He’s a politician. They change their minds as often as I change my socks. Maybe oftener. What exactly has he changed it about?”

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s going to join the Green Party.”

  She sighed. “He’s changed his mind about the exhibition catalogue. He’d like to meet with you to discuss it.”

  “Okay. When?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “I take it he isn’t interested in coming to us.”

  “No, of course not. Should I call his secretary and make an appointment?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Try to be a little more enthusiastic. What’s going on with you, anyway?”

  It was wishful thinking to hope that Anna Waverley’s murder, with all the gory details, possibly including my involvement, wouldn’t be all over the news before too long, so I took a breath and told Mary-Alice how I had found Anna Waverley’s body. I kept it short and simple, but by the time I was finished my voice was ragged and I wanted to run away and hide somewhere.

  “God,” Mary-Alice said when I’d done. “You do manage to get yourself into some fine messes, don’t you?”

  “Not exactly by choice,” I said.

  “What were you thinking? Or perhaps I should ask, ‘What were you thinking with?’”

  My patience ran out. “Goddamn it, Mary-Alice,” I snapped. “Stop treating me like I’ve just run down the next door neighbour’s dog with my bike. I’m not a little boy and you’re not my mother, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You don’t have to shout at me,” she retorted hotly.

  “I’m not shouting,” I shouted back.

  “You are too!”

  Wayne stood up from the computer to which the digital studio camera was attached. “Anyone want a coffee?” he asked, but almost ran out the door without waiting for an answer.

  “How well does David know the Waverleys?” I asked Mary-Alice.

  “What?” she asked. I repeated the question, to which she replied, “What makes you think he knows them at all?”

  “He told me at the party that he’d met them both. He’s also purchased art from Samuel Waverley’s gallery.”

  “So what? I buy fish at Fisherman’s Wharf. That doesn’t mean I know the fishermen. Anyway, even if he did know them, what could it possibly have to do with her murder?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said. “I was just thinking he might be able to tell me something about her, who her friends were or if she had a lover and who he might be.”

  She glared at me. “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you implying that David was her lover?”

  “What? No. For god’s sake, Mary-Alice. All I asked was how well he knew her or her husband.”

  “Sorry,” she said, deflating. “It’s just that — well, never mind.”

  I knew better than to ask, so I didn’t. Mary-Alice’s marriage was a little like Dr. Schrödinger’s boxed cat: as long as you didn’t look inside the box, a state of quantum uncertainty existed, but as soon you checked to see if the cat was dead or alive, the uncertainty collapsed and the cat died — or not. I didn’t want to be the one to collapse Mary-Alice’s marital uncertainty.

  More than once Mary-Alice had told me that she’d suspected David of having an affair. My typical response had been to dismiss it, write it off as her imagination getting the better of her. But while Mary-Alice was prickly and a little insecure, she was, as Anna Waverley had put it, far from stupid. Me, I’m not so sure of. Until Mary-Alice had brought it up, the possibility that her husband had been Anna Waverley’s lover had been the farthest thing from my mind. However, the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory postulates that we are never more than six people away from anyone in the world — you know someone who knows someone and so on a maximum of four more times until you get to someone who knows me — so the possibility that David Paul and Anna Waverley had been lovers may not have been so farfetched at all. Until the day that faux Anna Waverley had walked into my office, I’d never heard the name Anna Waverley, but I’d been only one degree — David Paul — away from knowing her. Unhappily for her …

  Mary-Alice must have smelled something burning. “What is it?” she asked, peering intently at me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Are you going to make that appointment with Walter Moffat?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Something else occurred to me then: if I’d been only one degree of separation away from Anna Waverley, it seemed likely that I wasn’t many more degrees of separation away from the faux Anna Waverley.

  chapter sixteen

  The ex-Honourable Walter P. Moffat did not live in the riding he’d once represented, although he did, as I later learned, maintain a pied-à-terre in the West End, which his former riding encompassed. His principal residence was a big, ramshackle old stone house that squatted on a rocky promontory jutting out into Howe Sound a few kilometres north of the ferry terminals at Horseshoe Bay. A brass plaque affixed to a moss-encrusted stone pillar at the entrance to the grounds identified the house as the headquarters of the Josiah E. Bridgwater Foundation, established in 1927 for an unspecified purpose. The Liberty jounced along the winding potholed drive between overgrown cedar hedges, wild gardens, haphazardly mowed lawns, and unkempt woods. Whatever the purpose of the foundation, it didn’t waste money on groundskeeping.

  I parked at the end of a row of eight other cars parked facing the dripping woods along the edge of a weedy gravel apron in front of the house. There were six Japanese compacts of varying makes, models and vintages, one battered, rusting Chevy pickup, and a relatively recent Dodge Caravan with the name of the foundation in discreet lettering on the front doors. The other vehicles likely belonged to house staff or foundation employees; I couldn’t imagine the ex-Honourable Walter P. Moffat being caught dead in any of them. His car was probably tucked safely away in the three-car garage of the coach house next to the crumbling
mansion.

  There was another plaque bearing the name of the foundation under a doorbell button beside the massive oak doors. I pressed the button, but didn’t hear a chime and had no idea if the bell worked at all. The general condition of the house wasn’t reassuring. As I wondered if I should knock, one of the doors swung open on creaking hinges.

  Half expecting an ancient foot-dragging hunchback to appear, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lovely dark-eyed woman with thick, wavy hair the colour of dark-roasted coffee beans and a complexion like coffee with a touch of cream, who said, “Mr. McCall, come in, please,” in a voice that was as smooth and warm and sweet as melted milk chocolate. Mellifluous didn’t begin to describe it.

  “Thank you,” I said, as she stood back then closed the door behind me. She was barely five feet tall, wearing snug-fitting jeans and a dark wool V-neck sweater. I pegged her age at twenty-five, more or less.

  “This way, please, Mr. McCall,” she cooed sweetly, and started up the broad, curved staircase. I followed, trying without much success not to stare at the beguiling twitch of her sumptuous rump. It was right there, not quite in my face, but at eye level. What was I to do? At the top of the stairs she stopped, turned, and said, “This way, please, Mr. McCall,” gesturing down the long upstairs hall. She fell in beside me, the top of her head an inch below the level of my shoulder. She smelled delicately of vanilla. The edible woman, if you’ll pardon the allusion.

  The walls of the long hall were dark wood panelling above wainscotting, the kind of place where one expects to see rows of ornately framed oil paintings of ancestors, red-coated gentry riding to hounds, rolling farmland dotted with cows and sheep, or ancient churches and dilapidated castles. However, there was not a single painting on the walls, no marble statuary lurking in shadowed corners, no vases with or without wilting flowers in the niches, no decoration of any kind save heavy drapery over the high mullioned windows. The Josiah E. Bridgwater Foundation, I surmised, did not support the arts.

  My guide stopped at a door at the end of the hall and knocked gently. The door was opened immediately by Mrs. Elise Bridgwater Moffat.