Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  “Except for the mysterious source of money, and that’s a big except, we’re looking at the nephew first. Claims he was in Detroit for the weekend looking for used CDs.”

  “So he told me. Makes sense. She mentioned his plans.” Belle’s fingers drummed a paradiddle as she thought about Zack’s immediate and long term needs. “Did you find the will?”

  “Tucked in the desk neat as pie along with a property deed, bankbooks, income tax statements and utility bills. And you were right. Small pensions were her only income. Let’s see.” He paused and the sound of shuffling papers echoed over the line. “She banked at the Toronto Dominion in Garson. Few hundred in a chequing account. Three thousand in term deposits. RRSPs of around eighty thousand. Pin money, really. No action on any withdrawals. Her own life insurance ended with the husband’s death. C’est tout. People have been murdered for less, though.”

  “But how did she pay? Could there be records someplace else? Maybe n bank in Manitoba or somewhere she used to live?”

  “Not under the married name. And we checked Blixen, too. Computers make it easy to hunt cross-country. Wasn’t some old hoard mouldering under the mattress, either. The bills were nice crisp purple thousands, according to the salesman, some polyester sleaze. A neat stack barely half an inch. How often does someone count out cash like that?”

  “Think she robbed a bank?”

  “Not around here, and besides, she’d make an unlikely candidate with her age, not to mention her sex.” For a moment Belle conjured up the image of Ruth Gordon brandishing a yam in her babushka to shake down the tellers. “So our FOURTH question is, why the cash?” he asked before he rang off.

  Exactly, Belle thought, finishing the eggs and washing up. Why not a safe, conventional cheque? Anni was not the high-rolling type. And a van? That was no old lady vehicle, more the choice of a young parent or someone running errands. For the Canadian Blood Services perhaps? Would someone there have any answers? One of these days she should donate.

  Meanwhile, she had to take her father his lunch at the nursing home. It was “Tuesday, Tuesday,” the cadences of the sing-song game he had invented when she and Mama Cass had been babies. He was eighty-four years old. Not long ago he had been living in his own house in Florida, adjusting to her mother’s death, finding a stylishly-coiffured, much younger Italian girlfriend named Mary at a Life Goes On meeting. Then came cumulative TIA’s, tiny punches to the brain, lurking Alzheimer’s, plain old senility. Who cared about the official diagnosis? He grew too tottery and confused to stay by himself. With his zaftig girlfriend waving a tearful good-bye, Belle rushed him back to Canada before his diminishing abilities flashed a red light to Immigration, which frowned on incoming drains to the health care system.

  For a fraction of the U.S. costs, he had a private room at Rainbow Country, a small competitor of the anonymous pretty-faced high rises where the upper middle class preferred to warehouse their parents. The facility was a bit tattered around the edges, but clean as a new penny, and with matchless personal care. The nurses and attendants chronicled every sneeze and sniffle, each bite of food, pill and missing sock.

  After a blow-by at the office, she pulled into Granny’s Kitchen, the friendly family restaurant where they had enjoyed a weekly meal when he could still walk. “Hi, Maria. The usual. Shrimp, french fries and cole slaw. Hold the seafood sauce. And pie and ice cream. Cherry if possible. Cheeseburger and milk for me.” Belle passed a few words with one of the regulars, a man about thirty-five whose shambling manner made him appear drunk. The sad truth was that Fred had lingered in a coma for a year after a devastating industrial accident. Intensive physical therapy and a large injection of courage had restored enough coordination to get him on his feet and enrolled in a few marketing courses.

  “Did you register for the summer sessions at Nickel City College, Fred?” Belle enjoyed hearing about his progress.

  “A big runaround. Workman’s Comp won’t authorize the program. They say I’d have to drive to work in marketing up here, be mobile, you know? And I’m driving, for sure. But it’s like they don’t believe I have any right to.” His laboured speech was difficult to understand, so she watched his lips carefully. He looked as if he needed a shave, or perhaps he was giving up. With a fumbly bow, he presented her with his Sudbury Star as he left. “The old dog just might have another trick left.”

  Belle opened the paper. It was hard to understand why he wasn’t bitter. Maybe he was merely glad to enjoy what pleasures remained, a good meal, restoring his Camaro. On the front page were details about another residential school lawsuit, this time in Fort Albany, an isolated Cree community on Hudson Bay. Leaving an ugly trail back to the Fifties, the priests, nuns and lay workers had been charged with fondling, rapes and illegal abortions. How had the community remained silent? Easy. Parents who complained were told that their government cheques wouldn’t be cashed, nor would the company store provide credit. Thank God the last of these “schools” had closed in the early Eighties.

  “No charge today,” Maria said, appearing like a benevolent dervish and setting the bags on the table. “This is my final shift, so I want to thank my best customer.”

  Belle looked up in mild confusion. “Going on vacation?”

  “I have needed one for some years. An eighty-hour week, you know, running this place. My son Tony helps in the kitchen, but he wants to study to be a chef in Montreal, and I am not so young anymore.” She shook her wattles like a weary ox, as wide as she was tall. “So I have sold the restaurant.”

  Belle took her tiny, talented hand and offered good wishes. For her father’s sake, she hoped that the new owner would keep the same menu. Routines were important to old folks.

  At Rainbow Country, she passed a few lawn chairs on the small porch, saluting the coughing brigade who had abandoned the free tar and nicotine of the dreary smoking room. Under nursing home rules, smokers were allowed one cigarette an hour, receiving lights from the staff. Abby, a grizzled veteran nearly blind behind mirrored sunglasses, recognized Belle’s voice. “Got to grab some fresh air with our smokes,” she said with a wheeze and rummaged in the bag attached to her walker.

  Belle opened the pack and lit one for her, then went inside to collect a bib, towel and silverware from the supply cabinets. Along the hall, she noted the subtle, depressing changes, the pixie with two canes now a blanketed shape in bed, the empty blue chair where the cadaverous man who chuckled over Janet Evanovich’s Deep Six once rocked. Father’s television was blasting out an exercise program, a Jane Fonda clone in spandex hip-hopping to unearthly perfection.

  She shrank a bit as always to see him in his “gerry” chair, designed to guard against a fall, but a cruel jailer. Broken hips were a nightmare ending with blank spaces on the name board by the nurses’ station. She remembered the day she had bought it. He’d been found on the floor twice, too proud to call for help. In the Model Sick Room at a local pharmacy, she’d sat down to test the comfort, and the officious clerk had leaped forward to lock the lap table into place. The sudden confinement in a padded cell on wheels had nearly forced a scream from Belle’s tightened lips. Holding her breath, she ‘d unlocked the clasp with paralytic fingers and scrawled a check for nearly a thousand dollars while tears dried on her face.

  “Hi, handsome. It’s Tuesday, Tuesday, and I’ve brought your shrimp.” She unpacked the boxes and arranged his bib.

  “I thought you weren’t coming.” He recited the same line with a calculated pout, even after her scrupulous visits through blizzards and ice storms. The rare times she left town for more than a few days, she arranged for an aide to deliver the lunch.

  His thick white hair was fresh cut and brushed, baby blue eyes large and clear, glasses long abandoned in a drawer. For some reason he no longer used them, even to read, or perhaps he had forgotten that he wore glasses. A Maple Leafs’ shirt and machine washable work pants completed the easy-care outfit. Despite the extra effort, the staff was religious in making sure everyone was
up and dressed by nine so that they didn’t sit around in nightclothes.

  Filling a glass with water from his tiny bathroom, she bumped an elbow against a cumbersome Hoyer lift straddling the toilet like an enormous mantis. Then she set up his lunch, sat back and let him enjoy the food without conversation. Not only was his speech unintelligible with his mouth full, but he needed concentration to coordinate chews and swallows. A minced or puréed diet might soon be required, the dietician had noted. Belle had tried to keep his bridges battened down, but getting him to the dentist was a navigational minefield, and it didn’t take much to wrench a back, helping him in and out of the van. Saner to operate without teeth at all. Bridges and dentures often went missing anyway with the cob-webbed female wanderers who collected small items on their “clean-up” rounds.

  The cheeseburger, milk and his Maclean’s magazine kept her attention, though she cocked an eyebrow at the fanatical exercise woman flogging a Nordic Track. How senseless to buy costly steppers and treadmills to compensate for sedentary lives instead of choosing a relaxing walk. Belle’s quiet paths were the best reason for living in the wilderness instead of in a city where five-year-olds took classes in street smarts. Then she thought glumly of Anni and put away the rest of the cheeseburger. To be banished from the world outside to a little room like this would not have been her choice, but to leave so soon, upon the whisper of a breath?

  Her father wiped his mouth with a tiny burp after the last french fry had vanished. “What’s up? You’re pretty quiet.”

  She had no qualms about telling him about the murder. He loved excitement. When he had worked as a booker for Odeon Theatres in Toronto, a gas explosion had levelled a building across from his office. The disaster had been his number one story for fifty years. “Hold your horses. First the coffee.” She cleared away the debris and opened the pie box, fetching from the kitchen a mug bearing a picture of him with his arm around his lovely girlfriend. “My neighbour was murdered.”

  A gleam lit his eyes, and his voice strengthened. “Murdered? In Canada? I don’t believe it.”

  “Neither do I, but trust me.” She paused for the dramatic effect he enjoyed. “I found the body.”

  His pitch jumped an octave as he ate up the details as fast as his dessert. “No kidding? Tell me everything.” And so she did.

  “Her name was Jacobs? Was she a Hebe, then? Pretty rare birds in this neck of the woods.”

  Belle frowned. “Father, really. That’s not politically correct these days, a word like that.”

  “What does politics have to do with it? The whole fillum business was Jewish when I worked there. That’s what they called each other, Hebes.”

  She sighed, wondering how to span the decades, explain the evolution of manners into diction. “It’s one thing for an ethnic group to use those names, but for an outsider, it’s quite rude.”

  “So I’m a Scot. Like Arnold Palmer. Is that rude? The Pope’s a Pole. Is that rude?”

  “Well, I only . . .”

  He stared her down, stubborn in his innocence. “And besides, I nearly married Eva Rosenblum. Except her parents lined her up with a rich doctor, a fancy one, a gyro . . . gyro . . .”

  “Gynaecologist. Lucky Eva, or maybe not. Anyway, Jacobs was the married name. Anni was Danish.”

  He beamed. “A Dane. See?”

  Old dogs and new tricks. Maybe he had a point. As she left, he stabbed an index finger on his lap table. “Appearances can be deceiving, girl. Look underneath. Use your peepers.” He drifted off for a moment. “Remember what you said to that clown at the Christmas parade who asked where you got those eyes so blue?”

  “Right, Father. ‘Out of the sky as I came through.’ Except that my eyes aren’t that blue anymore. And speaking of precocious brats . . .” She kissed him and returned to the van. Such observations might be the ravings of an old man seduced by films, but sometimes, like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, he grasped an idea that sliced the fog. Would she have to play Edna May Oliver and chase the donkeys from the yard? “Peepers.” What was there to look at? Were any of the puzzles valuable? Had Anni been having work done at the house where calculating eyes might have tucked away information? Word got around in the casual labour market.

  SIX

  After asking Hélène and Ed DesRosiers for dinner that night, a feast starring her no-fail chicken casserole, Belle set out for her favourite real estate activity: reconnaissance, checking out a property. She chose twill pants and a turtleneck along with Reeboks designed for a hike in the bush. On a sunny morning, the drive fifty miles north to Onaping Lake was a pleasant diversion, despite the blackflies organizing a Jonestown massacre on the windshield. She passed time working on her country song, imagining Nashville fame through an instant hit. “Come on up to Mama’s table,” the refrain went, and as she flinched at the endless timber trucks roaring back from remote towns, the next verse wrote itself:

  I’ve been on the road since Christmas

  Driving trucks across the land.

  I’ve raced across the Pecos

  And crossed the Rio Grande.

  I’ve spent some long and lonely nights

  Looking at a motel wall,

  But down that endless highway

  I could hear my mama call.

  At a small marina she rented a five-horse motorboat, ripping the cord to goose the old Evinrude into action. The lake was a good size with a reputation for excellent bass fishing. Luckily the wind was down, the silken surface reflecting pillowy clouds. She plastered on industrial strength bug dope loaded with Deet. The expensive aerosol used by tourists lasted about as long as a non-filter cigarette and had the same transitory effect on the pests.

  The seller’s crude map guided her to the site, where she pulled up onto a long sandy beach, an attractive feature. The rest was rocky but level. With several acres backing into the hills of maple and poplar, a small woodlot might be maintained. Lots of privacy, too, only five or six other cottages in view. Using a fist-sized boulder and a couple of nails, she pounded a realty sign onto a prominent birch, then tramped the property to determine if a field bed could be located the requisite fifty feet from the lake. Building would cost more, but the land was a bargain for someone who prized seclusion and didn’t mind the limitations of water access.

  She sat awhile on the shore, checking her watch with a reluctance to restart the roar of the motor. A clump of tiger lilies caught her attention, naturally prolific and tenacious, Dylan Thomas’s “force that through the green fuse”. Anni loved lilies. Now she was pushing them up. Belle felt frustration at the slow investigation. Perhaps Steve had searched the house thoroughly, but what about visiting the Canadian Blood Services? And that Geo. If only cars could talk. Yet perhaps it could whisper a few ideas . . . if it weren’t a recycled blob of metal by now.

  An hour later, she drove by Crosstown Motors. Would Anni’s old vehicle still be in the yard? The wretched little soul had more likely been passed to one of the lower-end used car lots which sold affordable transportation to folk on minimum wage. A salesman oozed out the door and eyed her aging but serviceable vehicle, perfect for a trade. “Interested in another van?” he asked, lighting a stogie. “We have a great selection of new Ventures and Trans Sports set to wipe up the competition.”

  “Just looking,” she said indifferently, measuring him from the corner of her eye to Steve’s description of Mr. Polyester. The scant hairs feathering his pink scalp were woven for maximum coverage, but the effect was more pathetic than artful.

  “Most powerful standard engine, 3.4 litre V-6,” he said, stroking the driver’s seat of a handsome cobalt blue model the colour of Lake Wapiti before a thunderstorm. “Twenty-six storage compartments, hidden front wipers, three choices of seat styles. And priced to sell. You can cruise home, tax and all charges, for less than you’d dream, especially if our manager Mel is in a good mood. Free air this month, too.”

  “CD player, of course.”

  He waved his hand in an expansi
ve gesture. “Whatever you want, Madame. Plus dual stereo systems. One up front and one in back for the kiddies. Relax with Sinatra while they blast their ears with head-banger music.”

  Bristling about being pushed into his decade, Belle eased into the cushy quad chair and leafed through a brochure on the dash, the new car smell calling her like a lover. “Up to ten cup holders?”

  She climbed out, accepting the card he presented with a hopeful smile. “A friend of mine bought one of these sweethearts recently. Traded in her old Geo. Poor thing was on its last legs,” she said.

  Her girlish snicker didn’t earn a blink. He puffed and pondered, thumbing a monster ash from his cigar which narrowly missed her foot. “Gotcha, the rust bucket. I remember now. Muffler fell off in the lot. Gone for scrap to Rock City over on the Kingsway. Funny old gal, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, just as she left, I told her again what a plum she had chosen, selection reinforcement, you know. She muttered something under her breath, sounded like an ill wind bringing good.” He winked knowingly and fixed red oyster eyes on Belle. “Bible maybe. She looked a strict one. Preacher’s wife. Librarian.”

  A cryptic observation for Anni, Belle thought. What could she have meant? She headed for Rock City, hoping that the car had been saved from the crusher.

  As children, she and her friends had loved to sneak around junkyards, searching for fresh wrecks, broken glass a gory delight. “Blood! Ten points!” they screamed at any dark stain, the fate of the unlucky riders beyond the comprehension of chocolate-bar minds. The gawky attendant at the metallurgical cemetery turned a page in a Spiderman comic and sent her to the rear of the yard in search of a right front seat to match the one her bad little child had peed on.

  Next to a pyramid of tires, the old Geo sat like an abandoned pet. Belle started with the trunk, then moved to the glove box and seats. Nothing, not a gum wrapper, parking ticket stub, or roll-up-the-rim-and-win coffee cup. Even the jack was cleaned and oiled. Anni had been too fastidious to have laid a trail to her murderer. Then folded up in the visor, the edge of an envelope caught her eye. No inscription, nothing inside, just a fine cream paper alien to a society which had traded ink and stationery for prosaic e-mail. Into her pocket it went as she headed for the gate, calling over her shoulder, “Wrong colour.”