Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  Janet had, in her mind, many sins to atone for, and, like a prison lifer, she quickly learned that obedience was all that was required to survive and prayer was all that necessary for her salvation; prayer, and the pleasuring of God’s representative on earth, Wayne Browning.

  It has been three days since Janet’s disappearance, but this time the police have pulled out all the stops. Forcible abduction from a house in the ritzier end of town is less easy to ignore than a crazy woman who wanders away from a commune, even if she is witness to a fellow officer’s death. In any case, with Daphne and Trina both putting the bite on him, Inspector Mike Phillips wants her found. The press have been pulled in and Craddock is getting worried.

  “I gotta get her outta here,” the private eye tells Creston once he’s scanned the headlines in the Vancouver dailies, but he assumed that he would eventually take Janet back to Browning’s commune and now has no plan since Beautiful is out of the question. According to the Vancouver Sun an entire police division is camped out near the community.

  “You should have made better arrangements,” fumes Creston, although he’s convinced in the back of his mind that Janet poses no real threat. “Is she still mentally disturbed?” he asks.

  “A real fruitcake,” says Craddock. “No one would believe a word she says.”

  Creston wavers. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I can’t keep her forever,” protests Craddock.

  “I’m aware of that,” shouts Creston, slamming down the phone.

  David Bliss is someone else whose ordeal is far from over. The writing is progressing, but after an initial burst in which he managed to keep Yolanda in the back of his mind for a couple of days, he’s come unglued again.

  “Why did she do it, Sam?” he wants to know, calling his daughter for support.

  “Just keep writing your script, Dad.”

  “You’re humouring me.”

  “Someone has to. But like I said, if she doesn’t come back you’ll have a mega-bestseller on your hands.”

  “Really.”

  “Of course. Everyone loves a great romance, and yours rivals Romeo and Juliet. You could be the next Shakespeare.”

  “Now you are joking. Anyway, I wonder if it isn’t more like Taming of the Shrew, with me as the shrew.”

  “Stop worrying. I can just imagine you on the radio,” she says, primping up her voice to sound like a BBC announcer. “So — just how far would you go to get back the love of your life? A few soppy poems, a couple of dozen roses perhaps. Well, that might be enough for some women, but on today’s show we have a lovestruck man who wrote, and got published, an entire novel. Please welcome… Yeah!”

  “I’d rather be with Yolanda, thank you,” Bliss moans dryly.

  “Then do it properly. Have faith.”

  Trina’s son, Rob, wakes Daphne when he barges into the basement suite at seven in the morning looking for his skates.

  “Mum,” he protests, when he tracks her down in the kitchen. “This place is like a friggin’ hotel when you’re here.”

  “I know,” says Trina, mixing banana pancakes. “And I’m thinking of letting out your room as well.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It’s only Daphne from England,” she explains. “You remember her?”

  “Is she the old lady you nearly killed last year?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Yeah right. I remember, anyone can get lost in the Cascade Mountains in a bathtub.”

  Daphne pops her head around the door looking for a cup of tea. “Good morning.”

  “Hi, Daphne,” chorus the family.

  “According to Amelia Drinkwater the kids were murdered,” Daphne succinctly sums up over the breakfast table as soon as Trina’s husband and children have left. “Doc Symmonds is covering for someone, the police files have been dumped, and Janet is round the bend. I’m not sure what we’re trying to prove.”

  “Think about it,” says Trina excitedly. “What if we cracked three forty-year-old murder cases?”

  “And what if we discover that Janet really did kill all her kids?”

  “She didn’t. She’s too religious,” suggests Trina.

  “Oh, come on,” protests Daphne. “Half the murders in the world are committed by religious zealots.”

  Trina is stumped for a second. “All right, let’s say she did; then we can switch sides, put on blinders, and prove she didn’t. Lawyers do that all the time.”

  “Don’t let Samantha Bliss hear you say that,” laughs Daphne.

  “Anyway, I’d like to do something about that freak up at that Beautiful joint. Those women are all like zombies,” Trina continues, putting on a monotone. “‘Yes, our Lord Saviour,’ ‘No, our Lord Saviour,’ ‘Three bags full…’”

  “Maybe Janet will be able to help if we find her.”

  “I doubt it. She believes she’s a reincarnated angel.”

  David Bliss is still lost in a deep hole, and Daisy seizes an opportunity to slip in to fill the void.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to you,” insists Bliss when she shows up at his apartment with a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and a couple of dozen oysters.

  “But, Daavid. She might never come back to you,” says the Frenchwoman as she tries to muscle her way into the kitchen.

  “That’s true,” he admits, blocking her. “Then I’ll just have to be on my own for the rest of my life.”

  “Zhat is crazy.”

  “No, Daisy. That’s love,” he says, knowing that the masked prisoner faced a similar quandary; despite the lovesick man’s outrageously romantic gesture he risked permanent incarceration if he failed in his mission. “I feel terrible about letting you down,” he carries on as he gently turns her around. “But the truth is that I’ve always been in love with Yolanda.”

  “Not always,” protests Daisy, but Bliss shakes his head and edges her back out.

  “Always, Daisy. And she said the same about me. She told me that the moment she saw me she realized my image had always been in her mind. That she had spent her life looking for me.”

  “And now she leaves,” scoffs Daisy. “She’ll come back Daisy… she’ll come back,” he assures her as he slowly closes the door.

  But will she? he questions, as Daisy wipes a tear and turns away, and then he walks through to the balcony and looks across the town to the promontory where the Château Roger hides its shame amid the giant eucalyptus trees.

  And if she does, will it take eleven years? he asks himself, knowing that, despite the masked man’s grandiose gesture of offering the magnificent building as the prize to his dream woman, she apparently rebuffed him.

  And if Yolanda rebuffs you? he asks, but he stops the dark thoughts with the realization that his novel offers an opportunity to salve more than one sore. If Samantha’s scripting thing really works, he reasons,and I do write Yolanda back into my life, then why not get revenge on Chief Superintendent bloody Edwards while I’m at it. He’s the gerrymandering villain who claimed she was dead and trashed my dreams.

  “So,” he questions aloud, seeking a character to imbue with Edwards’ malevolent traits. “If the Man in the Iron Mask was the good guy, who was the rogue of his day?”

  Louis Quatorze, Duke of Normandy and King of France — Louis le Grand as he insisted on being known — springs readily to Bliss’s mind, and he hunts through his stack of research papers for information.

  “Gambling was the main entertainment at the court of Louis XIV,” he reads from a piece culled from a biography of the sovereign. “It was well known that the king was not only good at the table, but that he was a quick-witted intriguer who could adjust the odds in his favour,” the paper explains, and Bliss hits on a way to incorporate his nemesis in his scripting.

  If his own situation was orchestrated by the machinations of Edwards, he reasons as he flips his notepad onto a clean page, why shouldn’t the masked prisoner have been goaded into his romantic ploy by his Machiavellian master?“Sacrifice is
what all women desire,” the sovereign opined to the young Ferdinand, a handsome Hungarian prince who sought his advice in the art of seduction, he scribbles quickly as King Louis’ devious plot takes shape. “In everything women enjoy abundance. From the size of one’s house to the dimensions of one’s organ. The only way to win favour is to spend extravagantly on the table, on clothes, carriages, houses. But it is never sufficient for the fair maidens to use their wiles and their loins to take your heart, usurp your power, and spend your money — they want sacrifice. ‘Why wouldst thou not fight a dual for me? Risk thine life for me in battle? Joust until dawn for me?’”

  “But I am neither a dueller nor jouster, not of any repute,” protested the love-sick man. “Though I am esteemed for my grace in the minuet and gavotte.”

  “Few women would consider the sacrifice of a pair of dancing shoes to be sufficiently noble to win their affection,” suggested the king, an expert in heart matters. “And you are but a poor fool if you cannot conspire to lay your neck upon the block without risking your head.”

  “Very clever,” muses Bliss, seeing the deviousness in the king’s design to inveigle the heartsick young man into building a great château on the very edge of his kingdom — a château that, if the scheming ruler gets his way, will end up belonging to him.

  No wonder Louis was detested by associates and enemies alike, admits Bliss with a certain chief superintendent in mind, although the French king was shrewd enough to outlive most of them. But was he happy?

  Who is happy?

  I was.

  Don’t start that again. Keep writing — write her back into your life. It’s not over till it’s over.

  You mean it’s not over until she marries Klaus.

  No. I mean it’s not over until you die.

  But now, with his story progressing, death is definitely not an option. Absolute victory is now Bliss’s only aspiration, so he calls Samantha with the good news and discovers that Daphne is in Canada with Trina.

  “Oh God,” he moans. “Not another hare-brained charity fundraising scheme?”

  “Not this time — no crazy marathons, just something to do with murdered babies.”

  “Those two will get into serious trouble one of these days.”

  “Right,” says Trina flopping a large notepad and her PI manual onto the table in front of Daphne. “Strategy session.”

  “First we have to find Janet,” suggests Daphne.

  “And then?”

  But beyond that neither of them has any notion.

  “OK,” says Trina a few moments later as she writes “Find Janet Thurgood” across the top of the first page. “Let’s work on that first. We’ll figure out the rest as we go along.”

  “Find Janet,” echoes Daphne, and she peers out of the window across the haze covered city of Vancouver towards the surrounding mountains as if seeking clues.

  “Newspaper,” cries Trina and excitedly grabs the day’s copy of the Vancouver Sun. “I flushed out a friend’s husband once with a photo on the front page.”

  “Really?” gushes Daphne.

  “Actually, I was a bit naughty,” admits Trina with a girlish giggle. “I bared my titties on the Lions Gate Bridge and stopped the traffic.”

  “Oh, Trina!”

  “I know… but it worked. Anyway don’t go all la-di-dah on me Ms. Daphne Lovelace, OBE,” she carries on, giving the elderly woman a cheeky nudge. “I’ve heard stories about you.”

  Daphne’s inner smile gives nothing away, although in the back of her mind she sees flashes of times long ago when, as a wartime agent, the exposure of her breasts in public would have seemed childishly innocent. “We could try the papers…” she begins, but her tone suggests that there are alternatives, “but why don’t we put ourselves in the minds of her kidnappers first?”

  “Kidnapper,” corrects Trina. “According to Clive Sampson, there was only one.”

  “If only he’d got a look at him,” muses Daphne, then she leaps up with an idea. “Come on. Grab your hat,” she says. “We’ve got some legwork to do.”

  “Legwork?”

  “Yes. If we’re supposed to be detectives, let’s act like real detectives.”

  Trina glances at the clock. “The bars don’t open till eleven,” she says mischievously. “Though we could get a coffee and donut.”

  The winter hours of the bar L’Escale in St-Juan-sur-Mer are as laissez-faire as Angeline, the waitress. During the ten tourist-filled weeks of summer the dusky-skinned local dashes back and forth across the racetrack of a road to her customers seeking shade under giant parasols on the promenade overlooking the harbour. Balancing heavily laden trays, she plays chicken with fast-footed stallions at the wheels of gaudy chick-magnets, and generally causes enough fender-benders to keep the local repair shop owner happy all year.

  But the heat of summer is now only a memory, and David Bliss is the only remnant as Angeline brings him yet another glass of red wine.

  “So how is zhis book about l’homme au masque de fer?” she asks as she peers over his shoulder.

  Bliss looks at the blank page — the same page he’s been looking at for six hours — and shakes his head. Then he picks up the glass and studies the red liquid seeking inspiration.

  Come on, he tells himself. You can do it. Remember what Sam said. Have faith. Write it properly and she’ll come back.

  “Do you believe in love, Angeline?” he questions, looking into the dark Latino eyes of the pretty waitress.

  She shrugs. “Bof! Mais oui… Of course, monsieur. But I am half Italian and half French. I have no choice but to believe.”

  Do I have a choice? Bliss wonders as Angeline needlessly dusts off a nearby table, and he watches her for a few minutes questioning why he could not fall in love with her. What’s so special, so different about Yolanda? “Magic,” he tells himself and springs his mind back to the moment their eyes first met, when his brain fell out as he attempted to brief her and her fellow officers about the disappearance of an English computer agent aboard a ship bound for Holland. It was a moment of total, overwhelming magic, he decides, and finally picks up his pen knowing that his legendary character must have felt the same in order to have been so smitten.

  “I was instantly captivated by your opal eyes,” he begins, giving a voice to the lovelorn Prince Ferdinand while using the pretty dark waitress as a model. “ I dissolved at the soft tenor of your melodious voice. I recognized the sincerity and honesty in your smile. I felt the wisdom and intelligence emanating from your mind. I quivered at the perfect form of your body.

  “Your flowing nigrescent hair, your delicate fingers, and your slender legs, completed a portrait of such perfection that a heavenly lyre player strummed my heart and the voice of a sweet trumpet sang in the air.

  “Rippling wavelets on the Mediterranean shore continued the perfect rhythm of the universe, while, for me, time stopped. Then the lyre player took over — plucking my heart until my whole being vibrated, and the sound of my rushing blood pulsated in my ears.”

  Daphne and Trina’s quest may have not have the same significance, or passion, as Bliss’s search for the truth behind the fabled masked man and his own destiny, but it has, nevertheless, borne fruit.

  “I can’t believe the police didn’t find this,” muses Daphne as she pores over the handful of evidence that she and her friend found in the street not far from Clive Sampson’s house.

  “I can,” sneers Trina. “That lot couldn’t find a johnny in a condom factory. All they do is hound innocent motorists like me.”

  “It was fairly obvious that he didn’t just turn up and burst in,” says Daphne, agreeing by implication. “He would’ve been shadowing the place for hours… maybe even days. He’d need to know the odds. Who was at home?”

  “He had to suss the place out,” suggests Trina. “For all he knew the fuzz might have had the place under surveillance.”

  “Oh, that’s very English,” says Daphne.

  “I’ve been watch
ing Inspector Morse,” admits Trina. “Your cops always seem a lot cleverer than ours.”

  “You’ve gotta be good if you are not carrying,” drawls Daphne in a New York twang, and she catches the look of surprise on Trina’s face.

  “NYPD Blue,” says the older woman, laughing, then she goes back to the items scattered across Trina’s dining table and lists them. “Twenty-four cigarette ends — all the same brand, smoked to the filter — from three separate locations in sight of Clive Sampson’s house; one receipt — Pizza-Pizza, $15.27 — the day before Janet was snatched; a Creston chocolate wrapper; and several lumps of spearmint gum.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Trina flicking through her private investigator’s manual for the section on tracing people. “How did he know where to find her? She didn’t register a phone, a TV, or a car; she didn’t buy anything; she had no mail; she didn’t tell anyone — she didn’t even know where she was.”

  “What about Clive, your patient? Would he have told anyone?”

  “You are kidding. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He wouldn’t have done anything to risk losing her.”

  “Oh! What love will do to a man,” mutters Daphne wistfully.

  “So — hang on,” says Trina. “The only people who knew she was with me were Mike Phillips and that creepy sergeant who’s always trying to nail me.”

  “Maybe they followed you when you smuggled her out.”

  “Hold on a minute,” says Trina as her face lights up, than she grabs her baseball cap and makes for the door. “Won’t be long.”

  Three minutes later she’s back, smiling, and with her baseball cap reversed. “Look,” she says, popping open a closed fist like a magician to reveal half a dozen cigarette butts that match those on the table. “He must’ve been watching me; must’ve followed me to Clive’s place.”

  “So how did he know she was here?” Daphne wants to know.

  Trina spits, “I bet that little snot Brougham grassed on me.”

  “Grassed?” queries Daphne with a smile.

  “More Inspector Morse,” admits Trina while picking up the phone to call Mike Phillips.