Cut Off His Tale: A Hollis Grant Mystery

by Boswell Joan

  “Marcus was a spokesperson for the City Church, the homosexual Christian congregation. Before Christmas, they applied for permission to conduct their services at St. Mark’s. Decisions like that are made at a congregational meeting. I wasn’t there, but I heard it was horrible, and their application was rejected.”

  “Did you know Mr. Toberman?”

  “We’ve been friends for years, ever since we took a course together at the University of Ottawa.” Hollis paused. Was this the time to mention Marcus’s visit to the manse a week or ten days after the meeting and the shouting match he’d had with Paul? Marcus had enough problems without Madam Inquisitor having a go at him. She’d talk to Marcus herself. If she had even the tiniest suspicion he might be involved, she’d tell Simpson.

  “How did Toberman take the congregation’s decision?”

  “I don’t know; I wasn’t there.”

  The next underlined name on her list was Tessa Uiska. “She’s the wife of Kas Yantha, the doctor who was with me in the medical tent. Tessa’s a doctor and a good friend of mine.”

  Simpson raised her hand. “Hang on. How did they both get along with Paul?”

  “They didn’t. They had very little to do with him.”

  “How can that be when you say she’s a friend?”

  “It’s not complicated. Three years ago, after our wedding, I arranged for the four of us to have dinner together. As I said, Tessa and I have been friends since we were undergraduates, and when Kas and I met, we hit it off right away. I thought it would be natural to have the four of us together. But, at our one and only dinner, Paul made it clear we wouldn’t be a foursome. He wasn’t unpleasant, but he discouraged any suggestion of future socializing.”

  “Would they connect with him in any other context?”

  “Not socially, but Paul wasn’t shy about using anybody who had information he required. Because he was familiar with Kas’s expertise on deviant behaviour, he was paying him to vet his manuscript.”

  “That was a first draft of the manuscript for the new book.”

  “No, Paul respected my editorial abilities, and I’d gone through it. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to see it until it was nearly perfect.”

  “I’ll be talking to you about the book later. Please continue.”

  “Roger Workman is the husband of Elsie, the woman downstairs. Roger and Paul got along fine.”

  Three more names and they reached the end. Simpson laid the booklet on the table.

  Hollis sat back, wondering what else Simpson would ask.

  “Would you describe your husband’s personality?”

  Where to start? Could she even say he had a single personality? The more she found out, the more she wondered if he had had multiple personalities. Hollis twisted in her chair, tucked her feet under her, clutched her coffee cup and peered into its depths. When she’d seen him lying on the road, she’d felt terrible, but now anger had replaced pity. Her eyes filled with tears of rage.

  Simpson dug in her bag and handed Hollis a small package of Kleenex.

  Hollis put the cup on the table, pulled a tissue from the pack and blew her nose.

  “Let me ask you specific questions. How long had you been married?”

  “Three years.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “I’m a social historian. I teach at a community college.”

  “I’m not sure I know what a social historian does, and I certainly don’t know how that explains how you met.”

  “I’m getting there,” Hollis said. There was a note of annoyance in her voice. This women was so pushy. She could at least listen without interrupting. “A social historian collects and writes the history of common people, their customs and way of life. When male historians predominated, they wrote of politics and wars, but there’s much more to history. I guess you could say I’m one of the experts. I’ve published three books and many articles.” Hollis heard the enthusiasm in her voice. This was one of her favourite topics.

  “I repeat, what does this have to do with meeting your husband?”

  “In July and August I do field work in my specialty—folklore and music. Helen Creighton pioneered the work more than fifty years ago when she traveled the Maritimes making notes and later, when portable recording machines appeared on the market, recording songs, superstitions and folk tales. Three summers ago, I followed her trail around the Maritimes. With her information as a base, I drove the back roads talking to old people and recording their generation’s memories. I also took millions of reference slides for my paintings.”

  Simpson’s legs were crossed, and one cowboy boot jerked faster and faster.

  Time to speed up. “Later in August, after I’d worked for six weeks in Lunenburg County, I drove to Halifax to catch an art exhibit of Linda Climo’s animal paintings.”

  Simpson’s toe tapped more quickly.

  “I spent the weekend with an old school friend who’s married to a United Church minister. Paul was teaching a course at the Pine Hill Divinity School, and my friends invited him to dinner. The next day, we went sailing on the Arm . . . the rest is history.” And it’s not the sort of history I want to write about, Hollis thought, and realized her teeth were clenched, her shoulders lifted, her whole body expressed her rage.

  The tapping toe slowed. “But it didn’t end happily ever after?”

  “No.” Should she confess Paul had accused her of presenting a false image, of hoodwinking him into marrying a fictitious woman? Tell her she’d acted impulsively her entire life and married Paul almost as a lark. “Maybe we were too old, too set in our ways. Paul was difficult, complicated.” Could she say he was a deceitful, lying son of a bitch? Maybe if she was a suspect, that wouldn’t be wise.

  “Ms Grant, telling me unpleasant truths about your husband does not make you disloyal or show lack of respect for the dead. Familiarizing myself with the good and bad aspects of his character will provide me with clues to uncover the motive for his murder.” Simpson’s sharp tone warned Hollis to get on with her story.

  “The sooner the killer is caught . . .” The sound of the closing door in the supposedly empty church echoed in her mind. She’d give this woman all the help she could. “Paul liked power. He was narcissistic and viewed people around him only as they reflected him. His religion came from the Old Testament. He judged sinners harshly.” And he certainly had firsthand knowledge of a variety of sins.

  “Probably not an uncommon trait among the clergy.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Before she revealed the worst of Paul, she’d at least give him credit for what he had done. “On the other side of the ledger, he did measurable amounts of good. He didn’t support an issue or cause unless he was prepared to give a hundred and ten per cent of his energy. Two examples: his enthusiasm and work for refugee resettlement and his commitment to raising the profile of the Christian homosexual community.”

  “I understand he wrote about the gay community and its treatment by society in his most recent book. Are you familiar with the manuscript?”

  “Yes. As I said, I edited the most recent draft before he passed the manuscript to Kas.”

  “Tell me about your husband’s . . .” The detective paused and didn’t quite look Hollis in the eye as she finished the sentence, “extramarital affairs.”

  No quarter from this woman. No sympathy for the newly widowed. However, other than her, who would be more likely to kill Paul than a cuckolded husband? “I think it’s time for me to be frank. Paul was not a good man. Last night Marguerite Day told me,” she paused and looked down at her hands, wishing she didn’t have to share this information. “Paul had sex with one of the women he was counselling.” She raised her eyes and met the detective’s steady gaze. “That is so despicable, but it gets worse—the woman killed herself.”

  “I can understand how painful it must have been to hear that. And what about his affairs?”

  “Sally Staynor was the current one.”

  “Did you
know her?”

  “No. Marguerite said you were in church yesterday when Sally, who was with her son Dan, had hysterics. Poor Dan.” Hollis fiddled with a strand of wool hanging from the bottom of her sweater and thought how awful his mom’s scene must have been for him. “But you want to hear about Sally. She and Paul worked together on St. Mark’s most recent project—resettling a Salvadorian family.”

  Simpson picked up the marathon program and flipped through it. “Would the JJ Staynor, Oneida Drive, Ottawa, be her husband?”

  “How did I miss his name?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  Hollis thought Simpson’s tone implied that Hollis had done it deliberately but she could be wrong.

  “Do you know him?” Simpson asked.

  “Only that he owns The Annex Chop Shop.”

  “What about other women?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. You’ll have to ask Barbara Webb or someone else.” She met Simpson’s gaze, “I’m sure if there was one, there were many, many more. I’m having a hard time adjusting to what I’ve heard and facing the fact that I didn’t know my husband at all.”

  Simpson raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “Barbara Webb said Reverend Robertson took his private papers to the manse. Where are they, and what volume of paper are we talking about?”

  Did she have to admit her ignorance? “I’m not sure.” She hazarded a guess. “Two, maybe three filing cabinets.”

  “How many drawers in each one?”

  Time to own up. “Actually, I haven’t any idea. This is going to sound bizarre, but Paul keeps his clothes and personal papers and belongings in a locked bedroom, and I’ve never been inside. I could have—his keys are in his downstairs study—but we’d made a deal, and I respected his wishes.”

  Simpson eyebrows rose, and she peered over her tortoiseshell glasses. “You can show me or give me the key. I’ll arrange to have the papers moved to the police station. Two more questions. Did your husband leave a large estate, and who benefits from his death?”

  Ah-ha. The key questions: was there enough money to motivate murder and who would inherit? Her hands trembled again. Simpson would think she was guilty. She crossed her arms and tucked the offending hands out of sight. “His mother left him a sizable amount when she died more than twenty years ago. The invested income allowed him independence from the church. Since we were in the process of divorcing, I imagine if I was the beneficiary, I no longer am.” Time to clarify her position. “I’m aware money is a motive for murder, but I earn a good salary and someday . . .” She unfolded her arms, reached forward and superstitiously touched the wooden table, “someday, I’ll come into a sizeable amount from my mother, who’s a very successful chartered accountant.”

  “Try to find the will—it may be important.”

  Important to her too—Ms Simpson had not moved her to the bottom of the list, and she didn’t like her current status. She’d do her own digging.

  From Rhona’s point of view, Hollis remained a suspect, and she intended to follow up on the information Hollis had provided. But it was time to attend Paul Robertson’s autopsy at the Municipal Hospital.

  After she’d parked, she hurried to the rotunda and followed the main concourse thronged with patients and staff before she turning into the basement corridor leading to the morgue. No sign directed those unfamiliar with the building. Whether patients or professionals, no one wanted a reminder the hospital dealt with death as well as life.

  In the autopsy room, the pathologist, a bustling woman in her mid fifties, nodded a greeting. Dr. Victoria Axeworthy loved the scientific precision made possible after death. Apparently she’d returned to medical school to qualify as a pathologist after three years spent in general practice had soured her on the imprecision of the human species. Hang nails identified as life threatening crises and far advanced invasive cancers as small discomforts had taught her humans could not define their own condition. As a pathologist, she catalogued the evidence presented by the mute, uncomplaining corpse, analyzed it and identified the cause of death and a thousand other relevant and irrelevant facts.

  Victoria ordered her surroundings and set everything she needed at hand. From experience, Rhona remembered Victoria talked in the third person as she dissected, removed, siphoned and bottled.

  The examination began as Victoria dictated a description of the body: “A male Caucasian of middle years in good, no, make that, very good physical health. Not overweight, but well developed.” She continued from visual inspection and notation through the opening of the body and ended with a minute examination of vital organs. Throughout the examination, she noted her observations with precision and care. She said, “The healthy pink tissue of the lungs indicates the subject probably never smoked and worked in a relatively pollution free environment.” After she had removed and examined a section of lung, she observed: “A long knife entered the body, followed an upward trajectory, and collapsed the right lung before it punctured the heart and caused death. Such a wound was not self-inflicted.”

  Rhona risked a question. “Would it have taken great strength?”

  The pathologist’s hands didn’t stop as she answered. “No, a reasonable amount, but more important, whoever did this probably had a good knowledge of anatomy.” Her voice took on a resonating timbre, as if she were addressing a class at the medical school. “Theoretically, many people possess the skill to kill this way, but there’s a tremendous gap between knowing how and actually doing it. From the angle of the thrust, I’d say he was a right-handed person.”

  Dr. Axeworthy continued the autopsy. The whole performance, and it was an admirable exhibition of skill and confidence, gave Rhona no other useful information.

  “Thank you, Dr. Axeworthy. The body may be released. I’ll tell his wife,”

  On her drive to police headquarters Rhona chain smoked two cigarettes before she parked in the underground garage, locked the car and walked through the ranks of private vehicles, unmarked cars, police cars and paddy wagons to the station’s caged entrance. Police vans drove into the cage where the police, surveyed by video cameras, removed the prisoners to the holding cells under the station.

  She continued past the cells and stopped at the vending machines lining the lower hall for a coffee, double-double, and an O’Henry bar. In her office, she threaded her way through four regulation beige filing cabinets, an old wooden table crowded with computer paraphernalia and a second tall spindly table with a slide projector directed at a pulldown screen. She set her coffee down on a Formica topped desk and sorted through the contents of her “in” basket.

  An envelope of marathon pictures attracted her attention. The lack of fingerprints on the handle of the knife had suggested the perp had worn gloves. Not knowing if runners commonly wore them, she’d requested file pictures of marathons. A quick skim of the clippings confirmed her suspicion that gloves and lightweight jackets, particularly in Ottawa in May, were not unusual. Early on, she’d given a constable the task of scrutinizing each waste basket along the route, looking for discarded gloves. If the searchers retrieved them, DNA traces would help convict the murderer.

  In the afternoon, she’d interview Staynor. No doubt a butcher could slice and chop with the best of them. For lunch, she sorted through the Glebe possibilities, dismissed one flashy Chinese and two upscale Italian restaurants as too expensive and settled on Turkish Delight, a cheap café located next to Marshalls, a smoke and magazine store. Because she liked to read while she ate, she stopped first at Marshalls—famous not only for the quantity and variety of magazines but also for the number of winning lottery tickets it sold—and bought the daily paper.

  Front-page coverage of the murder dwelt on Robertson’s support of radical causes and on the murder weapon, a black handled boning knife. She turned from the front page to the death notices and read that donations to City church, the AIDS hospice, and St. Mark’s refugee fund were requested in lieu of flowers. Had the Christian gay community apprec
iated Robertson’s flamboyant campaign on their behalf?

  When she’d finished the last buttery flake of phyllo dough soaked in honey, she licked her lips and shivered with pleasure. Warm and well-fed, she was prepared to absorb and assess the truths, half-truths and lies people would tell her.

  Six

  Her interview with Simpson left Hollis angry, jittery and ready for action. She punched in Marcus’s number.

  “Hi, it’s Hollis. Are you busy? I’d like to come over and talk.”

  “I haven’t laid eyes on you for ages. And, suddenly, it’s imperative for you to visit this very minute? You haven’t even been in my new apartment.”

  Immersed in her own problems, she hadn’t considered how her request might sound. Before she could apologize, he spoke again in a different tone.

  “I’m sorry. You must be really upset. I can’t imagine why you want to see me, but you’re welcome. I’ll make coffee.”

  On the drive to his new apartment, she thought about their friendship and its beginning years before, when they’d met as two outsiders in an introductory photography course in the fine arts department at the university.

  Marcus, enthralled with photography and a prizewinner in several competitions, had not believed he could make a living doing what he loved and enrolled in a practical university program—physical education. Allowed an arts option in his second year, he chose the course to refine his skills.

  Although painting obsessed Hollis, and she had a diploma from the Ontario College of Art and Design, she, like Marcus, had chosen a safer route, undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in history. Because she often used reference photos and slides, she took the photography course to improve her skill.

  Isolated from the main stream of younger students, each of them delightedly identified a kindred spirit. Initially, they shared coffee and bagels, later, wine and cheap meals. The term progressed and their friendship deepened as they discovered how much they had in common. They remained connected after the course ended.