Cold Comfort

by Scott Mackay

  Gilbert left the kitchen.

  He entered the bedroom. The bed had been pushed to one side, the blankets disturbed, as if they’d been pulled away, then put roughly back into place. The mattress rested askew on the box spring; somebody must have looked under it. The rug had been rolled up. He opened the dresser drawers; the women’s underthings, the sweaters, the sweatpants, the socks—all looked gone through. Cheryl’s wallet sat on top of the dresser along with two framed photographs. He opened the wallet. Two-hundred-and-sixty dollars, a driver’s license, two major credit cards. Not a robbery. A thief would have gone for the easy cash and credit cards. He looked at the photographs. One was a graduation photograph of Cheryl, she must have been twenty-one, a fleshier rounder face, wearing a mortar board and graduation gown, her blonde hair longer, straighter, brighter. The other showed a younger Cheryl, fifteen years old, standing beside an old woman—was it her mother?—and a girl of maybe twelve. They posed in front of a wood shack in the middle of winter. The young girl held up a two-foot pickerel. Ice fishing? Who was this girl? A sister? She bore no resemblance to Cheryl. Cheryl had a certain snap; this girl was dull, had a small ferret-like face and bad teeth.

  He lifted the telephone on the bedside table, pulled out his notebook, and dialed Bell Canada’s last-number service, *69. The computerized voice gave Gilbert the last number Cheryl had called; he scribbled it in his notebook. Then he dialed the operator and had her connect him to the name-that-number service. He quoted the number. He didn’t have to write down the name when the service operator gave him the answer; it was already there under his potential suspects list: Charles Latham, Cheryl’s ex-husband.

  He put the receiver down and went into the bathroom. The door was cracked, the wood trim around the jamb broken, the tile floor powdered with plaster dust. The medicine cabinet mirror was broken, with several of the lower shards leaning out from the frame. A struggle? The door forced, the mirror broken. He tried to discern footprints in the plaster dust, but the dust was much too disturbed. He looked at the hall floor. By rights, there should have been plaster dust tracked out there. But the hardwood floor was spotless. Someone had cleaned up afterward. The wastepaper basket lay on its side. It was full of unused toilet paper. Taken from the roll and simply dumped in the basket in a long curving ribbon. He lifted the wastepaper basket. Something heavy shifted within the folds of toilet paper. Moving the tissue carefully aside, he saw the handset from a General Electric cordless phone. The handset didn’t look damaged in any way. So why would it be in the wastepaper basket underneath all that toilet paper? He pressed the engage button; he got a dial tone. It was working. He put the phone back in the basket, lowered the basket to the floor, and made a note.

  And he noticed more blood. Two drops, about an inch apart, in an oblong pattern that suggested the splatters came from the direction of the sink. He knelt and closed the shutoff valves; Forensic would have to check the catch-pipe. He stood up and tapped the end of his pen against his notebook. Was Cheryl Latham murdered here, in this apartment? He didn’t think so. In such a quiet building, in such a quiet neighborhood, the shot would have been heard.

  He reviewed the security tape from the Glenarden down at College Street with Percy Waxman just after seven that night.

  Because it had been such a cold night, people entering the Glenarden on the night of the murder had been thoroughly bundled. Four wore parkas with deep hoods; Waxman was unable to identify them. Three others, all men, wore balaclavas. Waxman couldn’t identify these either.

  “Can I go now?” asked Waxman.

  Gilbert looked at the man.

  “I don’t want anyone going into her apartment under any circumstances,” said Gilbert.

  “Do we have to have the crime-scene tape across the door?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “How long will it be there. It looks like hell.”

  “As long as it takes,” said Gilbert.

  He let Waxman go. As long as it takes. But this wasn’t a dunker. This wasn’t a grounder, something he could easily throw to home plate. This was a pop fly. This was out of the ballpark. This was a whodunit and a mystery. Even worse, this was a heavy, a powder keg, and, under the circumstances of the flagging clearance rates, with budget cuts on the way, couldn’t have come at a worse time. His stomach growled. He should really go home to Regina. These sixteen-hour days were starting to get to him. But he had to make Joe Lombardo look good on this one. Because he had a feeling Marsh had zeroed in on Joe. He had to show Marsh just what a good detective Joe could be. He wanted to save Joe’s job on this one. Because he really suspected Joe’s job was in danger. And that was too bad because if anyone was meant to be a homicide detective, Joe Lombardo was; the facts he unearthed behind the scenes were often stupendous.

  Gilbert rolled back the tape to some marked off counter numbers, then pressed play.

  There she was, Cheryl Latham, coming home from work at 6:15 last night. Fast-forward. There she was leaving, at 7:02, wearing running shoes, exercise tights, and a green parka. Fast-forward. Here she was, coming back again at 9:16. And that was it. According to the security tape, she didn’t leave the building after 9:16. Yet she was found this morning at Dominion Malting, frozen solid, like one of those ancient victims at Pompeii so many centuries ago. With the front stairs and fire escape the only way in or out, just how the hell did she wind up down at the pier?

  Four

  At the morgue the next morning, an hour after Cheryl Latham’s autopsy, Gilbert entered Dr. Blackstein’s office with two coffees to talk things over. He sat in one of two chairs in front of Blackstein’s desk. Blackstein sat behind his desk glancing over the business-size sheets of the preliminary report. Outside his window a few pigeons huddled on his sill, trying to keep warm. Today was just as cold as yesterday, and the weatherman wasn’t predicting milder temperatures until the weekend.

  Dr. Blackstein lifted a small zip-lock glassine bag. “Here’s your slug,” he said. “I’ve made a notation in the evidence log. It’s yours now. It looks like a .45 to me, but you can have your ballistics check it out.”

  Gilbert took the bag and had a close look at the bullet. “That’s not so good, is it?” he said. “A soft-nose. It mushroomed more than usual. Ballistics aren’t going to have much to work with.”

  Dr. Blackstein shook his head. “Not so soft. You saw the area of cavitation around the wound downstairs?” Gilbert nodded. “I’ve thought about it now. It was much shallower than usual. And the hydrostatic shock was much smaller as well.” Dr. Blackstein shrugged. “And that can mean only one thing. She was already frozen when your perp shot her. She was already dead. You’ve got a screwball, Barry,” he said.

  Gilbert stared at the bullet. “Overkill?” he suggested.

  “I don’t know,” said Blackstein. “It’s not like the usual overkill we see. With real overkill, your perp would have emptied his clip. You saw how we dug around. We found only the one slug.”

  Why would anyone shoot a person who was already dead?

  “So she froze to death,” he said.

  “The change in blood gases confirms it.”

  “So maybe she wasn’t murdered. Maybe she just froze to death.”

  “You’ve still got manslaughter,” said Dr. Blackstein.

  “If not second-degree.”

  Dr. Blackstein rested his hands on top of the preliminary report. “Like I said, I think we have a screwball. Your perp didn’t actively kill her. He let the elements do it for him.”

  Gilbert nodded. “That’s murder,” he said. “Whether we can prove it…” He took a sip of his coffee and nodded at the preliminary report. “What else did you put down?”

  “Pretty well everything I said downstairs while you were watching us,” said Blackstein. He glanced at the report, summarizing. “A single contusion to the right side of the head. Glass slivers recovered from her hair. She was wearing contact lenses. She wears a bridge; her front teeth are false. There’s an old scar on he
r lower lip. It looks like she had her teeth bashed out at some time in her life. Lungs and heart were fine. Her stomach contents consisted of coffee and half digested jelly donut. Also some salad. The bullet penetrated the upper intestine.” Blackstein flipped to the last page of the provisional autopsy report, where there was a crude drawing of a woman’s body. “Right here,” said Blackstein, tapping an X in the drawing’s abdomen. “There’s an upward trajectory of maybe thirty degrees.”

  Gilbert inspected the drawing.

  “What are these little stroke marks all over the arms, the ribs, and the head.”

  Blackstein peered over his glasses. His phone rang but he let his voice mail get it.

  “The X-ray came back,” he said. “These are multiple distant fractures. She had a lot of accidents as a kid. If you can find some relatives, maybe you should check these out. Three times she broke her right arm. Twice her left. Seven broken ribs at various times in life. A fractured skull. And there’s scar tissue all over her spleen. Accidents like that… well, statistically, it’s way out of line. A kid shouldn’t have that many accidents.” The doctor squinted and shook his head. “What can I tell you, Barry? I think she was beaten as a child. We have the missing teeth, and all this other stuff.” Blackstein took a sip of coffee and looked out the window. The pigeons on the sill jumped into the air and took off in the direction of Yonge Street. He shook his head again. “Someone beat the crap out of that woman when she was a kid.”

  Gilbert met Sonia Bailey, Cheryl Latham’s Glenarden neighbor, on her lunch hour at Cultures, a buffet-style restaurant downtown. She was a tall, exceedingly attractive mulatto from Antigua who worked as an executive secretary at Canada Life in the historic old building south of the Royal Canadian Military Institute. She ordered vegetarian chili with tofu. Gilbert had the meat lasagna. The place was full of office and hospital workers grabbing a quick lunch. Because it was so cold outside, the large windows had steamed over; someone had drawn a face in the misty coating.

  Sonia Bailey was subdued; she’d learned of the murder just this morning. She had an open and honest nut-brown face with dark searching eyes. She leaned forward, wanting only to help.

  “How long did you know Cheryl?” asked Gilbert.

  She glanced up at the low-slung halogen lamps. “A year,” she said. “Maybe a bit more.” She spoke with a musical West Indian accent.

  “Did you know her well?” asked Gilbert.

  She considered this. “I knew her better than I know any of the other tenants. She was my neighbor. We talked when we met in the hall. We did our laundry together. We had dinner together twice, and coffee down at Starbucks a few times. I’m not sure I got to know her that well. She seemed a private person.”

  Out on University Avenue two pumper trucks from the local firehouse roared by; in this cold weather, the buildup of static electricity in Mount Sinai Hospital was constantly setting the alarms off.

  “Did she ever talk about Charles?” asked Gilbert.

  “Her husband?” she said, arching her delicate brows. “Once.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “That she was separated, that she was filing for divorce.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded. “That’s it.”

  “Did you ever meet Charles?”

  “No.”

  A man sat down at the next table with a bowl of vegetable chowder and two slices of sourdough bread; he opened a small laptop computer and called up some graphs to the screen.

  “Did you ever see her with anyone else? Did you ever hear anyone else in her apartment with her?”

  “No. She never had visitors. At least not when I was there.” Sonia twisted her lips to one side, as if she were recalling something. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I saw her once with a Chinese woman. I guess she must have been a friend. She was helping Cheryl up the stairs with a new armchair.”

  “And how long ago was this?”

  Sonia shrugged. “Six months. Maybe seven.”

  “Do you know the woman’s name?”

  “No. I passed them in the stairwell. I was in a hurry. We just said hello.”

  “What did this Chinese woman look like?”

  “She was pretty. Slim. About five-seven. She had her bangs trimmed straight above her eyebrows.”

  “How old?”

  “Early thirties.”

  Gilbert glanced at the man’s laptop screen; the man was moving things around with the trackball and drag key. Laptop for lunch. Gilbert knew the feeling. He sawed into his meat lasagna and chewed. A Chinese woman. A thin lead, but it would have to be checked out.

  “Did she ever talk about her family?” he asked. “Did she ever mention her stepfather?”

  “Tom Webb?” Sonia took a sip of her carrot juice and glanced at her watch. “No, never.”

  “Did she ever mention her real father? Her biological father?”

  “No.”

  “Or any siblings?”

  “I think she has a sister. But she lives up north. Somewhere around Sudbury.”

  “Is that where Cheryl’s from?” Gilbert thought of the photograph on Cheryl’s dresser; the woman and the girl and the ice-fishing shack.

  “I don’t know. She never said where she came from.”

  Easy enough getting answers from Sonia Bailey. But the answers seemed to have little value.

  “Have you noticed anything odd about Cheryl’s behavior in the last little while?” he asked.

  Sonia lifted her hand and waved to somebody she knew, a balding man with a beard wearing a Hudson Bay tricolor parka, just coming in from the cold.

  “Not really,” she said. But then her brow furrowed. “Unless…”

  Gilbert waited. “Unless what?”

  Sonia’s eyes seemed to focus on some undefinable point. But then she looked at Gilbert full in the face. “I found her crying in the laundry room once. In fact, not too long ago. Maybe about two weeks ago. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, only that she was remembering something sad. That’s out of character for Cheryl. She’s always so happy. She’s always humming. She never gets down about anything. I thought she must have been sick. I told her she should see a doctor but she said no, she would be all right, she just needed a little time to sort things out.” Sonia Bailey dipped her spoon into her chili. “She never told me what she meant by that. I just left her alone. I thought that was best.”

  Back at headquarters, Joe Lombardo had the ballistics results from the recovered slug.

  “The lands and grooves were in good shape, despite the slug’s condition,” he said. Lombardo pointed to the flowering cactus on Gilbert’s window ledge. “Is that new?” he asked.

  Gilbert gazed at the bright vermilion bloom on top of the prickly tuber.

  “Valerie gave me that.”

  Lombardo nodded, but it was a cagey nod, a nod that jockeyed for position. “Valerie,” he said. “The girl from Denmark. The exchange student.”

  “She’s from Germany.”

  “How can I find out about that? I’ve got the extra room at my place. I’d love to have an exchange student stay with me for a while.”

  Gilbert stared at Lombardo skeptically. “I bet you would.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “The only reason she’s here is because Jennifer spent six weeks in Germany last summer.”

  “So I have to have my own daughter first?”

  “You’d have to talk to Regina. She arranged it all.”

  Lombardo grinned. “But I don’t think Regina wants any more children. And isn’t she already married?”

  Gilbert made a face. “Some day I’m going to have to reform you.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  “You won’t recognize yourself once I get through with you.”

  “If I end up anything like you, I won’t want to recognize myself.”

  Gilbert now grinned back. “You’d like being me,” he said. “You’d be able to have exchange student
s stay with you.”

  Lombardo laughed.

  “Now what do you got on this bullet?” asked Gilbert.

  Lombardo looked down at the ballistics report. “A Heckler and Koch .45 semiautomatic with a copper sheath.”

  “That narrows it.”

  “And I’ve got Laird’s list. He’s got thirteen cars. He also cautions that the Michelin XGT is a popular replacement tire.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know.”

  Gilbert tapped his desk a few times. “Did you dig around in marriage records at all?” he asked.

  Lombardo nodded. “Cheryl’s been married only the once. To Charles Latham.”

  “No, I’m talking about her mother. Doris.”

  “It’s actually Dorothy,” said Lombardo. “I had to make a few calls.” Lombardo slid his hands into the pockets of his stylish pleated pants. “She died three years ago from breast cancer. Tom Webb was actually her third husband, Cheryl’s second stepdad. Before Tom Webb, she was married to a man named Paul Varley, no details, only that he died some time in the early 1970s. Before that, Dorothy was married to a mid-level mining executive, Craig Shaw, who worked for Lac Minerals in Sudbury. He was killed while on a tour of one of their newly sunk shafts in Povungnituk, Quebec. Cheryl must have been seven at the time.”

  “So Cheryl’s from Sudbury?”

  “They actually lived in Laurentian Hills. That’s a well-to-do suburb just outside Sudbury. Tom Webb’s riding is up there, Sudbury West. I guess Dorothy met Webb up there.”

  Gilbert stared at the paperweight of bullet slugs McEndoo had fashioned for him down in the machine shop.

  “Any siblings?”

  “Not from that first marriage,” said Lombardo. “Cheryl was an only child. But Paul Varley had three kids, two boys and a girl. Nothing much on her step siblings yet, just their birth records. Larry and Dean are the boys. Donna’s the girl.”

  “Webb should have told me this.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe Dorothy never told him.”

  Gilbert raised his eyebrows. That might be a possibility.