No Pain, No Gaine

by Edwina Franklin

  Sandy’s breath caught in her throat. Dio, what if…! Riding a wave of excitement that swept every other feeling out of its path, she rushed to the telephone and punched in Ted Gaine’s home number.

  He picked up the receiver on the second ring, sounding a little out of breath as he said, “Hello.”

  “Sergeant, it’s—”

  “Alessandra! Is something wrong?”

  She shook her head emphatically, then realized he couldn’t see her and blurted, “No! Listen to me, Sergeant. What if he doesn’t choose his disguises randomly? What if he deliberately poses as his victims?”

  “We shouldn’t be discussing this over the phone.”

  “But I just did. I just had a phone call from a witness.” And as Gaine listened intently at the other end of the line, Sandy described her conversation with Dooley.

  “You’re going to have to come in,” he said when she was done. “We’ll need a formal statement for the Parmentier case file.”

  She swallowed hard. “Wait a minute—you mean you’re putting this on the record?”

  “If we’re ever going to convince the Department that this guy exists, I’m afraid we have to. Come in tomorrow morning.”

  She sighed, thinking of the article she still had to write, and the fit her editor would throw if she spent the morning anywhere but at her desk. “I can’t. Tomorrow’s my deadline.”

  “Tuesday morning, then,” he said after a beat. “Nine o’clock. Don’t be late,” he added sternly. “And make sure you get that window repaired.”

  Chapter Five

  Monday, June 11

  Sandy arrived at the Police Digest offices shortly before nine o’clock the next morning and found a meeting taking place around her desk. Instantly her heart sank. Dio, what now?

  “She just came in,” said Paul’s voice from the center of the huddle. “DiGianni, get over here!” And the several staff members he’d been conferring with immediately dispersed, revealing a strange man sitting in Sandy’s chair.

  He was fair and slight and wore a tie with his short-sleeved white shirt. He stared at her through thick glasses as she approached, obviously sizing her up, as well. “Are you the user of this terminal?” he demanded.

  Frowning, Sandy halted a yard from her desk and drew herself erect. But she smothered her indignation when she saw Paul clamp his teeth firmly around his cigar and raise both bushy eyebrows in silent ultimatum.

  “Mr. Blass works for the company that maintains and repairs our computer system,” he told her.

  Blass? Why did that name sound familiar? Sandy wondered.

  “I’ve had to replace the keyboard,” Blass explained in a now-see-what-you’ve-done voice that set her teeth on edge. “This is a brand-new keyboard, Ms. DiGianni. I’ve already tested it and it works fine. As long as you don’t spill anything on it, it shouldn’t give you any trouble.”

  As long as she didn’t spill anything?

  Paul was still watching her. Reminding herself that this Blass fellow was simply doing his job—never mind that he’d just leaped to an insulting and completely erroneous conclusion—Sandy managed a tight little smile. Her hands, meanwhile, had clenched into fists at her sides. She could feel her fingernails gouging her palms.

  Suddenly Paul was shaking Mr. Blass’s hand and thanking him for coming by first thing on a Monday morning.

  “Paul…!”

  “My office, DiGianni,” he growled. And Sandy snapped her mouth closed and followed him into his cubicle.

  “Why do I get the feeling I’m being blamed for what happened to that keyboard?” she demanded.

  “Shut the door,” he sighed, and sank down on his chair. When they had privacy, Paul continued in a voice almost as stern as the repairman’s, “Your keyboard had a dozen shorts in it, kid. Blass says they were caused by liquid spilling over the keys and down onto the circuitry. Logic says you must have knocked over a cup of coffee—”

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  “Some kind of drink, then, by accident while you were working.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “It wasn’t me, Paul.”

  Gazing steadily into her face, he took the cigar out of his mouth and rolled it slowly between his thumb and forefinger. “Nobody else uses your terminal,” he pointed out. “Nobody else even sits at your desk. And I’ve seen you on occasion sipping club soda from a tin while working through your lunch break. Maybe this was one of those fluky accidents. Maybe you weren’t even aware it happened. But in any case, I don’t want it happening again. Is that clear?”

  Sandy swallowed a huge lump of outrage. Evidently Paul had made up his mind and wouldn’t be swayed by the facts. Or a display of emotion, she realized. She took a calming breath before replying stiffly, “Perfectly clear, Paul.”

  “You’ve got a 5:00 p.m. deadline,” he muttered, stuffing the cigar back into his mouth. “So get to work.”

  Sandy nodded once, curtly, and returned to her desk, muttering darkly to herself in Italian.

  Blass was gone, and all the other staffers were concentrating on their own screens and keyboards, pretending they’d been deaf and blind to the scene at her desk. Sandy sat down and positioned her fingers on the keys, then removed them again. The keyboard was at the wrong angle—the little retractable legs hadn’t been pulled down to tilt it forward for typing.

  She lifted the keyboard to adjust the legs. There was a white envelope taped to its underside.

  Cautiously, Sandy glanced around at her fellow staffers. Everyone was busily working at his own terminal, seemingly oblivious to her discovery. She tugged the envelope free and turned it over in her fingers. The name DiGianni had been printed on it in large, precisely formed block letters. And it was sealed.

  Part of her wanted to believe that this was nothing more than an extra copy of the operator’s manual, left as a preventive measure by a repairman who didn’t want to make too many repeat calls. But her name was on the envelope, and it had been deliberately concealed so that only she would find it—and considering everything else that had been happening to her lately, Sandy had begun to doubt whether anything as innocuous as a tech manual would ever come her way again.

  Trying to be inconspicuous, she tore the envelope open. It contained a single sheet of paper, a green-tinted page ruled off in columns that looked as though it had been torn out of some kind of accounting ledger. The block lettering at the top of the page spelled out the name Unity Sportswear, and in the space marked Supplier she saw only a handwritten nine-digit number. There were dates down the left hand side, and in one of the columns a list of large dollar figures corresponding to the dates—seven entries in all, ending with the previous August fourteenth.

  Sandy shifted uneasily in her chair and let her gaze sweep Editorial once more. Unity Sportswear. Her memory was tingling, as it had done when Paul had introduced Mr. Blass… Of course! Suddenly she knew where she had seen both names: in Bert’s file, last night. Unity Sportswear was one of the companies owned by Lou Parmentier and Nick Vermeyer. And Blass had to be Roger Blass, listed in one of the subfiles as a source.

  Clearly, Blass had left this envelope for her to find. Sandy paused to consider the implications of that. One of Bert’s sources had sought her out with information. Either Blass knew she’d found Bert’s file, or he was hoping she had.

  She replaced the page inside the envelope and slid it into her purse. She would need time to review this message, to figure out its significance. Meanwhile, a few more nagging questions had taken root in her mind. How many other people knew she had that file? How had they found out? Was one of them Mr. Vanish?

  “I understand you had quite a weekend, partner,” observed Joe Wegner as he dropped into the chair behind his desk. “Aidman told me about the break-and-enter at DiGianni’s place—said you were a pillar of support for the devastated victim. That was great timing,
I’ve got to tell you. So did it work?”

  Ted kept his head down and continued flipping the pages of the bound report in front of him. He didn’t really feel like discussing his unprofessional lapses of the past few days in his and Joe’s workspace, which sat cheek by jowl with all the other detectives’ cramped cubicles, separated from them only by a shoulder-high partition.

  “Did you scam her source out of her?” Joe persisted, undeterred by Ted’s silence.

  “Nope.” Ted slammed the report shut and dropped it noisily into a desk drawer.

  “Did you get her to say anything at all?”

  “Last night she informed me that Mr. Vanish killed Parmentier. I told her to come in and give us a formal statement to that effect.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence before Joe burst into laughter. “You’re kidding.”

  Ted shook his head.

  “You’re not,” said Joe incredulously. “Well, I hope she has this on damned good authority, because Nielsen’s going to want both our badges when he reads about this imaginary killer in our report.”

  “Alessandra’s pretty sure he exists, Joe.”

  Wegner studied his face for a moment. “So it’s Alessandra now? Why do I get the feeling that your waters have become slightly muddied, partner?”

  “They’re not muddied,” Ted assured him. “She thinks she can prove this guy is real, and I believe her.”

  Joe shook his head indulgently. “You should hear yourself.” He laughed. “Listen, if all the cops in North America have been trying for ten years to nail him down, without success, what makes you think your girlfriend can do it?”

  “First of all, she isn’t my girlfriend,” Ted corrected him mildly. “Second, what she told me last night was that she’d been contacted by an eyewitness to the Parmentier murder.”

  Joe’s smile froze on his face and then slowly melted into a frown. “What? An eyewitness? Coming forward after all this time?”

  “He knew the killer was Mr. Vanish and he was scared. Now he thinks Vanish intends to silence him and he’s twice as scared—so he’s talking.”

  Wegner’s expression became skeptical. “Yeah, to a reporter.”

  “Who’s talking directly to us. This guy saw the car being parked on Howard Road, Joe. He saw the shots being fired and the killer walking away, and he saw it by the natural light of the setting sun. I told you there were things about this case that didn’t add up, and that was one of them.”

  “But all those witnesses we interviewed, who saw Parmentier at the victory party just before midnight…?”

  “…could have been celebrating with a master of disguise. Who were they, anyway? Envelope stuffers, canvassers, campaign workers giddy with their success. They were probably half-sloshed on champagne before he even showed up.”

  Joe heaved a martyred sigh. “So we’re back to that? What about the Vermeyers? Neither of them can drink because of their various medications, and they both gave us sworn statements to the effect that Lou Parmentier was alive and partying at their home until 11:55 p.m. the night of the murder. Parmentier was a close personal friend, as well as a business associate of theirs, Ted. The campaign workers might have been fooled, but nobody could have slipped a ringer past the Vermeyers.”

  “All right,” said Ted, changing tack, “what about the other car, the Mercedes?”

  “Parmentier’s car?” Joe frowned. “It was found abandoned in the parking lot of an all-night convenience store.”

  “And the only prints on it were Parmentier’s.”

  “That’s right. So he must have left the party, remembered he had to pick up some milk or something on the way home and stopped off at the store, and that was when the killer must have kidnapped him,” Joe recited impatiently. “Get to the point.”

  “How did the killer know he was going to stop at the store?”

  “Maybe he followed him from the party.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a little chancy? Consider—this wasn’t an impulse killing. Whoever murdered Parmentier planned ahead and pulled off a slick, professional job. He picked the ideal spot to abandon the rental car. No witnesses—he thought. He left no fingerprints anywhere, not even latent prints on the car rental contract. Forensics has now put that car through every test known to man and come up blank. The murder weapon has apparently disappeared into thin air. Why would someone that careful about details adlib an important step like the kidnapping of the victim? It makes no sense—unless Parmentier was kidnapped and killed long before that car pulled into the parking lot.”

  Joe slowly shook his head. “The Vermeyers would have spotted an impostor a mile away,” he said flatly. “Parmentier was alive until midnight.”

  “There’s a witness who saw him die before dark.”

  “Only according to your Alessandra.”

  “Would you quit calling her that? She isn’t my anything,” Ted snapped, his annoyance increasing as a rush of heat suffused his neck and began to rise into his cheeks.

  And that was something else she had in common with Carol, he thought as Joe raised both hands in a gesture of surrender and retreated, chuckling, a little farther behind his desk.

  First she’d had that call from Dooley, and now Blass had left her a sheet torn out of a Unity Sportswear accounts payable ledger, showing a transfer of $25,000 to a nine-digit account on the day Lou Parmentier was killed.

  It was eerie how all this new information had begun falling into her lap, even eerier that it related to the Parmentier case. Maybe she’d found Bert’s ghost along with his file, Sandy mused as she picked up her cup and took it and the ledger page into the living room.

  Evening sunlight poured through her front windows like molten gold and the air was just beginning to cool. She eased herself onto one of the love seats with a sigh, feeling the freshening breeze and the warmth of the tea unwind her at last. Even for a Monday, the afternoon had been rough. She’d made her deadline with moments to spare, and then had been summoned to an editorial meeting about the remaining articles in her series, during which Paul had chewed his cigar to ribbons and rubbed his bald spot to a dazzling shine before finally letting her keep both the articles and the byline.

  Sandy sipped slowly and scanned the piece of paper Blass had left under her keyboard that morning. The nine digits designating the supplier could be some kind of retrieval code—it was difficult to believe that a company the size of Unity Sportswear wouldn’t have computerized bookkeeping. This page probably came from the manual records used for data entry.

  Perhaps the numbers referred to a bank account. Roger Blass could probably tell her, since according to Bert’s information, Blass had supervised the accounting department of Duds ’n’ Dudes, Parmentier and Vermeyer’s retail fashion outlet, until the previous December, when he’d suddenly quit to become a service representative for Global Data. Interesting career move, thought Sandy, and added one more to the list of questions she intended to ask him.

  She let her eyes wander down the left side of the page, noting that there had been seven transfers of money in all, made over a period of three years. Somebody had to have authorized these payments. What if it had been Parmentier himself, paying off a blackmailer, or buying political support?

  Dio, what if she was holding in her hands the very reason for his murder?

  Setting down her teacup, Sandy hurried back into the kitchen, where her pens and clipboard still lay on the table. She would have to copy down all the information on this sheet and give the original to Ted Gaine first thing tomorrow morning, for the Parmentier investigation. The detectives would have to talk to Roger Blass—

  No, wait, she thought suddenly. If Blass had wanted to talk to the police about what he knew, he would have given them the page instead of her. Sandy would have to make the contact herself, preferably as soon as possible.

  Fighting to keep her hand
s steady, she leafed through the printout of the Sources subfile and found his name above an address on Glen Manor Road. No phone number. Sandy ran back to the living room and pulled the thick Toronto directory out of its slot in the telephone table, hurriedly finding the page and running her finger down the column of names. No number was listed.

  She would have to travel to his home to talk to him. But Glen Manor Road was in the Beaches area of the city, and there had been assaults lately on lone women after dark in the Beaches. Perhaps it would be wiser to wait until Ted Gaine could accompany her there. He wouldn’t object to that, as long as it was part of the Mr. Vanish investigation.

  She would be seeing Gaine tomorrow morning. She could ask him then, make the date for that evening. No, date was the wrong word, especially for time spent with Sergeant Gaine, she thought with a sigh, replacing the phone book in its slot. Conference, maybe, or field excursion, but regrettably not a date.

  As she straightened, she noticed Gaine’s card still sitting by her telephone. He’d insisted on patching her bedroom window that night, with a square cut from a corrugated cardboard carton and about half a roll of duct tape. He’d pressed his card into her hand, felt it still trembling and refused to leave unless she promised to call him, at any hour, if there was any further trouble or if she was frightened…and he’d held her, at precisely the moment she needed to feel strong arms around her, tightening his embrace, letting her know she was safe and secure as long as he was with her.

  Sandy smiled softly as she lost herself in the memory of that embrace, refusing to think about what it might mean, afraid it might mean something else altogether. As long as Ted Gaine was with her tomorrow night, she told herself, she had nothing to worry about. Not a thing.

  The handgun came apart like a child’s toy, but he was only interested in one component—the barrel. That was where the rifling was, the grooves that spun the fired bullet to give it flight stability. Each barrel had slightly different rifling. Each put slightly different markings on a slug, making it possible for a ballistics expert to match a bullet with the gun that had fired it—provided it wasn’t a .38 Webley with a switched barrel.