Murder in Focus

by Medora Sale

  At 7:30, Andy Cassidy put away the pile of surveillance reports he had been double checking. The casual complaints of bad and insufficient data that Ian MacMillan had passed on from Henri Deschenes—the ones he had dismissed so lightly on Monday evening—had rankled. Still, everything in front of him seemed normal; he shook his head and looked at his watch. The cleaning crew should be gone by now and he could get back to his fruitless search of Steve Collins’s files. He walked down the familiar corridors to Steve’s office in the gray half-light that found its way in from the long May evening. Steve’s door was shut, his lights out. Cassidy pulled out the key he still carried with him and opened the office door.

  Silhouetted against the darkening eastern sky, Betty’s motionless form was perched on a table pushed against the window. She turned her head slowly in his direction in that unsettling way she had. “Don’t turn the light on,” she said.

  “What’s happening?” asked Andy. He had at least learned not to ask what she was doing there. It seemed to him that each time he’d asked that question, he’d lost the exchange.

  She slipped down from the table and pointed over to the corner beside Steve’s desk, where Andy had stacked boxes of files as he sorted them. It was empty. He looked around him. The whole office was empty. He ran over to the desk and began flinging open drawers. They were unlocked and rattled hollowly as he yanked at them. There wasn’t even a pencil left behind. “What in hell happened to all Steve’s things? Did you take them?”

  Betty shook her head and moved closer. Now, even in the dusk, he could see scarlet patches in her cheeks and fury in her eyes. She raised a finger to her mouth and motioned him out of the room. He followed her down the hall toward her own cubbyhole of an office. “There,” she said, as soon as she had closed the door. “Now we can talk.”

  “What happened?” he repeated.

  “It was the RCMP,” said Betty. “They arrived with authorization to seize his stuff. Because he was killed on their turf. Packed up everything and took it away, even his keys. You should have kept them.”

  “Who?”

  “Ian MacMillan and a couple of constables,” she said. “It was all legal, I think. Not that I had anything to do with it. I just wandered by to see what was going on. No one pays much attention to me.”

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Cassidy. “Not that there was much there, as far as I could tell, anyway.”

  The scarlet patches in Betty’s cheeks deepened and spread to her throat and forehead. “I just remembered this afternoon,” she said, picking up a paper clip and beginning to untwist it viciously, “that Steve had left a few files in my small cabinet in here. He claimed he ran out of space in his own file drawers,” she turned the paper clip into a triangle, “and could never find anything once the department had locked it away. I wrote you a letter about it this afternoon, but after those guys were in here, I decided I’d better wait and give it to you in person.”

  “Why didn’t you come down to my office?” he asked, amazed.

  “I wouldn’t want to do that,” she said. “It looks funny. Here,” and she threw a letter at him before turning and fleeing. He closed the door behind her and bolted it before picking up the envelope. It was dated that day, and neatly typed:

  Dear Andy,

  I’m sure Steve would have wanted me to give you what he’d found. I don’t know what’s there, but he seemed to feel his case was complete. You’ll find the key to the small black filing cabinet taped to the underside of the top section of the copier. Check the “clear paper path” instructions and open the section marked “B” and you’ll find it. He was very concerned about that material—and I think you’ll see why once you look at it. If it is what I think it is.

  And thank you for doing this. I hope you catch the bastard who got him—no matter who he is.

  With apologies,

  Betty

  The door leading from Betty’s cubbyhole to the room containing the photocopy machine was locked. Cassidy looked around. Getting in couldn’t be that difficult or she would have left him even more instructions on how to do it. He looked at the containers of paper clips and staples on her desk, and then flipped through the papers in her In tray. Nothing. He drew open the shallow top drawer and there it was. A key with a large and grubby tag marked “Photocopy Room.” Not so difficult. He opened the door, turned on the light, and picked up the sheet of instructions. Sure enough. “To clear paper path,” it said, with an arrow indicating the knob that had to be turned. The entire top of the machine slowly heaved itself up, and there in the corner, attached to the top, was a frizzled piece of electrical tape, which, when peeled away, proved to be hiding a small key. “Good girl,” he muttered, and headed back to the small black filing cabinet. He looked at the array of material inside it, pulled out three folders, and settled down at Betty’s desk to digest their contents.

  Sanders looked at the big white clapboard house and thought for a moment. The most effective way to get somewhere with the landlady was probably to charge in, in his own person, waving his ID, and snow her with credentials. He reached into his pocket, fished out the fake leather case, and slipped it into his left hand, ready to be flashed open as soon as the landlady appeared. There was no doorbell that he could see. He picked up the large black knocker and let it fall. The sound reverberated on the other side of the door. There was no answering noise. He waited. Nothing. He shook his head impatiently, raised his hand to fling the heavy knocker against the door again, and was stopped by the faint sound of footsteps. A few seconds more and the door fell away in front of him.

  He looked at the landlady and felt as if he had slipped into a time warp. She appeared to be a haggard thirty, or perhaps a youthful forty-five, perfectly preserved from the sixties. Her long brown hair was streaked with gray and worn in a single braid pulled forward over her left shoulder and falling over her chest. Her feet were bare and dirty, her legs encased in worn jeans, and her Indian embroidered shirt covered with strand after strand of beads. Not someone likely to support the maintainers of law and order? He hastily slipped his ID back into his pocket. “Hi,” he said, leaning awkwardly against the door frame. “I’m a pal of Don’s—Don Bartholomew. I read about, uh, what happened . . . in the paper. I didn’t know what I should do. So, I came here. I’m John. John Sanders.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Well, I’m not quite sure,” he said, straightening up a little and running his hand over his hair. “I’ve never had this happen to me before—” He remembered his role and slouched again.

  “Had what happen?” She broke in impatiently. “Look, if you’ve got something to say, say it. Otherwise I have things to do. Like there are flies on the back porch I haven’t counted yet.”

  “Well,” said Sanders, “I dunno. I left some, uh, stuff in Don’s room, and I wondered if—”

  “Stuff? You mean grass, dope?” she asked, with a grin. “Because if you did, pal, you’re outta luck. Jesus, the place’s been crawling with cops since Monday. One came to tell me what happened and he looked up in his room and then two more turned up a little later to search his room and then there was a third one. And he went up there, too. All in plain clothes, of course, but I can spot those bastards a mile away. Always could. I made them come up with identification all right. Anyway, they’ve walked off with everything but the bedposts from his room.”

  “Shit,” said Sanders. “They took everything? But it wasn’t anything like that. It was something I’d written. Did the fucking cops take all that away, too?”

  “You’re damned right they did,” said the landlady. “Every piece of paper. Pigs, that’s what they are. We were right back in the old days. They’re still pigs.” She leaned against the other side of the door frame and picked up the end of her braid, assessing him. Finally she seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. “They got everything but his notebooks.”

&nb
sp; “You mean . . .” Sanders paused before he could put a foot wrong.

  “Yeah. The notes for his novel. And his journal. All great writers keep journals. Did you know that? Don told me. Anyway, I’ve got all that stuff. He didn’t trust the other guys in the house.”

  “Maybe my stuff is in there, too,” said Sanders, leaning closer to her. “When did he let you have it?”

  “Four, five days ago,” she said. “One of the other guys had been snooping in his room. What did you give him?”

  “It’s an outline, an outline for a story I was writing. My only copy, too, which was pretty stupid of me. I guess you wouldn’t think to look at me that I wrote stories,” he added modestly, “but then Don didn’t exactly look like he did, either. Poor bastard.”

  She was still holding the end of her braid in one hand, twisting the tip around her second and third fingers. “What the hell,” she said at last. “Come on in. I’m Miranda, Miranda Cruikshank. Let me see if I can find your stuff.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Cruikshank,” he murmured. “I really appreciate this.”

  “Miranda,” she said. “You gotta call me Miranda,” and took him by the hand to pull him into the house.

  “Nice house you got here, Mrs., uh, Miranda,” said Sanders. They were sitting in an enormous kitchen at a round wooden table. The scene was a parody of nineteenth-century rural nostalgia. Behind him a wood stove burned, enveloping the kitchen in stifling heat. On the painted pine boards in front of the stove, Mrs. Cruikshank had thrown a large and grubby braided rag rug. A fat golden retriever lay sleeping on a chintz-covered couch near the source of heat; in front of him, on the other side of the kitchen, was a stained, wooden drainboard with a shallow porcelain sink in it. The dog opened an eye, considered Sanders, thumped her tail on the cushion, and slept again.

  Miranda looked around her critically, as if she hadn’t noticed her surroundings in ten years. “Thanks,” she said. “Not bad, I guess. I came up here with Wayne—my boyfriend—in seventy-one. Me and the baby. It seemed like a nice place, you know, to get away from the materialism and hypocrisy of the city and that sort of crap.” She turned and stared out the window into the deepening shadows. “Except that a small town’s got just as much hypocrisy. And materialism. Funny, isn’t it? Anyway, the bastard took off one day and disappeared to somewhere. Vancouver, I think. He’s probably living in the suburbs and working in a brokerage office or something like that now. And wearing suits and ties. So here I am. Amanda—that’s the baby—she’s gone to Toronto to get away from—what does she call it?—the stifling atmosphere of a dying small-town culture. So now I’ve got nobody and I live alone. What the hell, I’m used to the place. In fact, I kind of like it now and so I take in boarders. It’s a living. Sort of. Keeps me from getting too lonely, if you know what I mean.” She eyed him hungrily. “You’ll have a beer? Come on,” she added, coaxing, before he had a chance to accept or reject it.

  “Sure,” he said easily, and leaned back in his chair as if he had all the time in the world.

  “There.” She set a bottle in front of each place and opened both of them. Apparently there was something in her moral code that forbade the use of glasses. She turned to a set of cupboards, opened a bottom door, and pulled out a potato chip bag, unopened. She set it on the table between them. “Organic,” she said. “They’re wild. I’m thinking of opening a real health food store somewhere around here.” Sanders’s eye suddenly fell on the dirt ground into the floor, the work surfaces and piled up in the corners, and he shuddered at the thought of this woman running a food store. “Don’t you think you could make a fortune out of it?” She ripped open the bag. “Have some chips.”

  Sanders gave another desperate look around. “You wouldn’t have any idea where Don might have—”

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said. “Your story. Well, if it’s here, I know where it’ll be.” She got up with a rattle of beads and threw open a door at the back of the room. It led into a gloomy passageway. “The pantry,” she said, her voice muffled. “I put it in here with the chili sauce and peach jam from last year. Figured nobody’d look there for that kind of stuff, would they?” Sanders shook his head. That would probably be the first place he’d look, but never mind. Maybe nobody had. She returned waving a large, rusty cookie tin. “Here it is.”

  She opened the tin with care and revealed a round shape wrapped in aluminum foil. “Last year’s Christmas cake,” she said, taking it out and putting it on the table. Under it was a round of cardboard, covered with waxed paper. “That’s nothing,” she added, and lifted it out, too. Underneath that, on a piece of greasy paper towel, lay a notebook, black, soft-covered, and slightly dog-eared. “Do you think it might be in here?” she asked.

  Sanders reached into the cookie tin and picked up the notebook. The first page was headed “Dawn in Vienna” and was filled with apparently random jottings. “That’s the name of his novel,” said Miranda Cruikshank, pointing at the heading. “Neat, eh?” She sat back with a look of satisfaction. “And those are his notes for the first chapter. He showed me. I couldn’t figure them out at all, but of course they made perfect sense to him.” Her eyes filled with tears for a moment. “Such a damn stupid thing to happen to such a nice guy.”

  Sanders scanned the first three or four pages as casually as he could. He had to resist the temptation to whip out his pen and start copying, but Miranda, although she seemed more than willing to accept anyone at his own valuation, might get suspicious if he started taking notes on his old pal’s writing notebook. “I’ll bet this would’ve been a great novel,” he said, injecting as much folksy sentimentality into his voice as he could dredge up. “I guess this must be his cast of characters, eh?—all these initials. Probably trying to think up names. It’s hard to come up with good names, you know.” Miranda Cruikshank nodded wisely. She had obviously had this sort of conversation before. “I wonder what he meant by that? Did he ever tell you?” He yawned and pointed at the bottom of the fifth page of the notebook, where Bartholomew had written “1700 Joe + 1” and drawn a box around it.

  “It must’ve been important,” said Miranda. She looked over at Sanders and picked up her braid again. She had done that while wondering whether to let him in the house and it made him nervous. “For him to do that to it.”

  “Naw,” said Sanders lazily, hoping to head her off. “Just doodling, I’ll bet.” He began to flip idly through the pages. “I guess my stuff isn’t—” A piece of letter-size paper, folded in four, dropped out of the notebook onto the table. “Maybe this is it,” he said, unfolding it and trying to hold it away from Miranda’s prying eyes.

  It was headed up “R.T./Hardy, F.F.T.M.C.” and consisted of a meaningless series of numbers, some circled, arranged in what looked like paragraph form, filling the better part of the page. At the foot of the page Bartholomew had written, in what by now was familiar handwriting, “Party, May 18th, 720 Echo Drive.”

  “Is that yours?” asked Miranda, reaching out her hand for it.

  Sanders shook his head and folded the piece of paper up again. He opened the notebook once more as if to replace it, palmed the sheet, and slipped it into his pocket. He went on staring at the fifth page, which, in spite of a jumble of initials, seemed to make some sense, and willed it into his memory. For a fleeting instant he had considered palming the entire book, but decided that even a trusting creature like Miranda would think its disappearance peculiar. Finally he looked up and answered her. “What’s that?” he said, as if being dragged back from a reverie that had taken him thousands of miles away. “Mine?” He shook his head slowly. “No, this is all Don’s stuff. Tragic, isn’t it?” he added. “A great talent like that.” Miranda Cruikshank nodded in solemn agreement. “I guess he must have mailed my outline back to me. And well, you know what that means. It could be weeks before it turns up.”

  “Probably,” said the landlady. “After all, someone like Don
wouldn’t have lost anything you gave him. I mean, he was so, well, fussy about everything. Used to drive me crazy sometimes. Not like these other slobs I have living here.”

  “Unless he’d been drinking a bit,” said Sanders, curious to see what her reaction would be.

  “Drinking? Don? You gotta be kidding,” she said. “You had to practically tie him down to get him to have a beer. Did he used to drink when you knew him?”

  Sanders nodded. “A bit,” he said cautiously.

  “Must have gotten himself into trouble over it,” she said. There was satisfaction in her voice. “I thought so. I mean, otherwise why be so careful about the stuff? And he never came in drunk like the rest of the guys. Never.”

  “Do those other guys who live here, your other boarders,” he said, “do they work at that same construction job he was on?”

  “Nope,” she said. “The other guys he works with, they’re staying at the hotel. He told me he had enough of them during the day, without having to live with them, too.”

  “That sounds like Don,” said Sanders, standing up. He was beginning to tire of the deception, easy though it was. “Look, thanks a lot for the beer and the chips. And thanks for looking for my stuff. Don must have appreciated living in a place like this.” At that he began to worry that he had gone too far, but Miranda Cruikshank smiled and held out her hand.

  “Peace, brother,” she said, solemnly.

  “Uh, peace,” gurgled Sanders, and fled.

  Sanders climbed into Harriet’s car as fast as he could get the key in the lock and headed through town for the nearest open garage to fill up her fast-depleting gas tank. As he pulled up in front of a lighted regular-unleaded pump and killed the engine, he thought that he caught a glimpse of a medium-blue Ford Escort through the corner of his eye. Ridiculous, he murmured to himself. He was being swallowed up in some locally induced paranoia. He stretched, tried to look unconcerned, and then pulled out his notebook and began to jot down absolutely everything he could remember from those five or six pages. The more he wrote down, the uneasier he felt. On one of those pages hadn’t Bartholomew mentioned a light blue Ford, license number 1 something something B something F—or E? Or had he made that up, remembering from that hot kitchen some fact that didn’t exist, that had jumped backward into the book from his unconscious memory of the car that had just whipped by him. Then other words from those pages floated into his memory and began to tease and worry at him.