by Medora Sale
“True,” said Cassidy. “But then I have made two visits to the Caribbean, to islands where the banking laws would protect an illicit account from search and seizure. Lots of opportunity to stash away lots of profits.”
“Which I have not,” said Deschenes. “Although presumably I could have buried it all in my backyard until such time as it would be safe to dig it up again. It simply takes a little more patience.” Deschenes went back to the beginning and began to run quickly through the file again. He looked up at last and shook his head. “There’s nothing here, Andy. You must realize that. There’s nothing here you couldn’t find out by walking down the corridor and asking anyone you passed. Nothing you could build a case on. Certainly nothing that anyone would kill someone for.” He slipped the material into an empty file folder. “Why did you bring it to me?” he asked at last. “Instead of someone at CSIS.”
“I’m not sure,” Cassidy replied slowly. “Because I assumed that the whole inquiry must have been instituted under you originally. Five years ago he was working for you. Didn’t you give Steve his instructions?”
Deschenes shook his head. “Not on this one. If anything, he gave me my instructions. He didn’t like what he thought was going on—not at all. And he wasn’t going to allow it to happen.”
“And so I figured you could decode the last page,” Cassidy said simply. “Since I thought he had started the inquiry for you.”
Deschenes shook his head and tapped the file with his forefinger. “He’s using a simple book code here, as I suppose you’ve worked out already.” Cassidy nodded gloomily. “And you were hoping that I had the key, weren’t you? Because if Betty Ferris is telling the truth, Steve thought he had the goods on someone. But the material in clear is a matter of public record. If he had evidence enough to convict, it’s on the last page.”
“Maybe we can work around it, find out how many of that old Montreal-area detachment are in town right now—or were here on Monday,” said Cassidy, shrugging aside the problem.
“I think you’d be better off finding out whether he left the key to the code around someplace else.”
“Maybe it was in his diary,” said Cassidy. “You guys have that along with all the rest of his stuff?”
“Not that I know of,” said Deschenes. “Do we have all his things?”
Cassidy nodded. “If there was anything else, it might be in the place he was staying at, wherever that was,” said Cassidy. “A boardinghouse near the secure site, I think. I have the address somewhere.”
“The place he was staying at? Do you mean out in Stittsville?” Deschenes formed a pyramid of his fingers and rested his chin on it as he looked at Cassidy. “When did you get up this morning?” he asked suddenly.
“About half an hour ago,” said Cassidy. “I was up late last night trying to work out that code. Why?”
“Do you think we’re the right people to be looking for all this?” he said, dismissing Cassidy’s question with an abrupt gesture.
“Who else would do it?” said Cassidy, startled.
“I’m not sure. An independent commission of inquiry of some sort, I suppose. After all, it’s the RCMP and CSIS we’re inquiring into. That’s usually considered conflict of interest.” Deschenes paused again, looking very tired, and for the first time that morning Cassidy remembered that he had been ill, very ill. “Don’t look so worried, Andy. We’ll give it a try. Perhaps you could go back to his files and see if you missed anything last night.”
A knock sounded on the door. A heavy knock, like a harbinger of doom, or the hand of someone who has to knock on a lot of doors. Cassidy jumped. “Who in hell is that?” he asked.
“Ian MacMillan, I suppose,” said Deschenes. “I asked him to drop by. If you want to leave before he charges in, may I suggest that you can always get out through the washroom. It still connects to the outer hall. I expect Higgs will be up as soon as that group of his takes a break.” Cassidy uttered a squeak of protest and fled through the door that Deschenes was pointing toward.
MacMillan walked in, nodded briefly, and settled himself into a comfortable chair, crossing one long leg over the other knee. Before opening his mouth, he pulled out his notebook and flipped rapidly to a spot in the middle, slipped the book back into his pocket, and said, “Good morning. I trust I’m not late. Charlie not here yet?” Before the point could be scored, however, Sylvia flung open the door and ushered in Charlie Higgs. Deschenes looked at the two of them and frowned.
“Too many people are asking questions,” he said abruptly. “I need to know exactly what you’ve got, beyond the worthless junk that has turned up in your reports.”
“Questions?” MacMillan sat up slightly, as if astonished by the effrontery of people asking what they were doing.
“Yes. Steve Collins’s death is getting harder and harder to keep in hand. The house he was living in out in Stittsville was torched last night and the landlady killed. There were people in and out, according to the neighbors. Constantly. Before the fire. The day before that. People who looked to them like police. Any of you go out there?” he snapped.
Higgs shook his head. “Are they sure it was arson?”
“That’s what they say. Arson aside, was any one of us out there looking for what he might have turned up?”
“More likely to be his mates from CSIS,” said MacMillan.
“Or whoever took him out,” added Higgs gloomily. “You’d think someone would have had the sense to keep an eye on the house, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m sure they did,” said Deschenes, relaxing for a moment. “This is probably a pro forma inquiry.”
“Any word on that picture?” asked MacMillan, yawning.
Higgs shook his head. “Bastard didn’t turn up today. He’s probably taken off back to Toronto with it as a souvenir.”
“Either that or CSIS got it from him before we did. From what I can figure out, things are still pretty wild over there,” said MacMillan. “My source tells me . . . well, let’s say, he wouldn’t be surprised if reports weren’t getting through to us.”
“What I can’t understand,” said Higgs doggedly, “is why we’re not getting anything on what’s going on with the Austrian delegation.”
“Why don’t you ask them? Talk to their security man. Or better still, I will,” said Deschenes. “I’m curious about him.”
MacMillan pulled himself to his feet. “Do you need me for this?” he asked. “I have a helluva lot to check on this morning, with the goddamn meetings starting this afternoon. Surely you and Charlie can deal with the Austrians, can’t you? Especially since his little class of new security experts is going away at lunchtime.” He picked up his coat and raised one hand in salute as he walked out of the office.
“I’d like to know what’s going on,” said Higgs. “The violinist seems to be moving closer and closer to the prime minister, as far as I can tell—”
“But aren’t the Austrians keeping an eye on her?”
“You’re damned right they are.”
“Who’s the businessman who gave the party?”
“Her boyfriend, maybe. But she might just have picked up with him to give her a door to the prime minister. I don’t know. It’s pretty difficult when you don’t understand what’s going on and no one’s telling you anything and—”
“And they expect us to stop anything from happening. Maybe we’ll send someone out to interview that businessman and have a chat with Austrian Security as well.”
Sanders walked briskly to the parking garage where he had stashed his car. He had no desire to land in front of Miranda Cruikshank’s house driving the same car he had been in last night. As he moved from street to street, and from sidewalk to garage, he kept glancing into windows and down alleyways. That vulnerable spot between his shoulder blades twitched, and he found himself watching for a light blue, new Ford Escort. He was going to start dream
ing about that damned car.
Traffic was light once he got out of the city center, and all going in the opposite direction. He parked about two blocks away from Mrs. Cruikshank’s house and began walking slowly toward it. The sun was bright, the sky a thin, clear, washed-out blue—the same colour as that car, he thought, and shivered with guilt and apprehension—and the wind as cold as the nose on an Arctic fox. He turned up his coat collar and tried to look like someone drawn out for a stroll by the sunshine and his curiosity. It was difficult.
As he rounded the corner a gust of wind brought the smell. It was the stench of wet coal tar and old wood, of death and destruction. He hated that smell. He loathed being anywhere near a case where fire was involved, and was damned glad that most of them were handled with expertise and dispatch by the fire marshal. He moved ahead very slowly, sizing things up, and stopped before he got to any official bodies who might be posted to watch for late-arriving voyeurs.
There was a black gap, a rotten hole, in the long line of white clapboard houses that made up this section of the street. Whatever timbers had been left standing by the fire had been thrown down by the force of the hoses or the efforts of the firefighters to break apart the last, dangerous remnants of what was once a building. The house next door was streaked with black smoke; charring along the front corner post testified to the violence of the blaze at its worst.
A bored-looking man in the uniform of a fire department investigator was standing in the front yard and looking at the mess that opened up at his feet. Sanders opened the small gate in the picket fence and walked carefully up the concrete path he had been on the night before. The investigator barely flickered an eye in Sanders’s direction before speaking. “Sorry, sir, can’t come in here. The site is dangerous and under investigation.” He sounded as bored as he looked.
Sanders extracted his identification and waved it in front of the man. “Sanders, John Sanders. I’ve been poking around on a case that seemed to involve the owner of this house in a marginal sort of way. Naturally, I was interested when I heard she had gone up with her house.” The man looked impassive, but slightly less hostile. “Rooming house, wasn’t it?”
“Mmm,” said the man in front of him.
“Boarders, smoking in bed, I suppose,” said Sanders. “These wooden houses are real firetraps.”
“Not this one,” replied the investigator with considerably more animation. “She was a bit odd, that woman, but she had a healthy respect for fire. House was fitted out with alarms and sprinklers everywhere. If it had been a slow-starting fire, trucks would have been there in plenty of time. Arson, this was. Someone waited until she was alone in the house, they did. Went up like a bonfire.”
“Where were all the boarders?”
“Only two of them now, they say. Funny thing is, the third one, died just this week. An accident at work or something. They were off at the pub boozing. Didn’t turn up until it was pretty much all over.”
“Do you think I could poke around a bit?” said Sanders casually. “We’re looking for a piece of missing evidence. I was told it was in this house.”
The investigator laughed. “Unless it was made of asbestos you’re not going to find it now. Anyway, not a chance I can let anyone onto the site to look around. We’re having enough trouble with people interfering with our investigation as it is. That’s where my boss is, trying to get rid of a few nuisances right now.”
“What do you mean, ‘interfering with your investigation’?” asked Sanders.
The investigator shrugged. “Anyway,” he went on, “there’s nothing much left here to look for. It seems we’re trying to find the person she was drinking with last night just before the fire started.” He glanced at Sanders, fixing his look on him for a second or two, and then turned away to gaze back at the ruins of the house. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they won’t mind if you just look around a bit. Hang on a minute and I’ll see if I can get permission to let you onto the site. Don’t fall in the cellar while you’re waiting or I’ll be in deep trouble.” He chuckled and headed off to an official-looking car parked in front of the neighbor’s house.
It had taken Sanders a half-second to recognize that look and the fake casual friendliness that followed it. Before the investigator could reach for his radio, Sanders was striding around the corner toward his own car, blessing the prescience that had prompted him to leave it out of sight of the house.
He headed south, one eye on the rearview mirror, away from Ottawa, until he was sure that no one was interested in his movements. He pulled into a gravel side road and waited for five minutes. Nothing. A tractor pulling a wagon moved slowly by, a red sports car whipped past too fast to notice him; otherwise the highway was deserted. He flipped on the radio in time for the twelve o’clock news. The international situation got a minute—as much as it deserved, no doubt—and the current prime minister got another minute. The leader of the opposition was granted a mere forty-five seconds. Nicely calculated, that, thought Sanders, who was staring at his watch and looking at the road at more or less the same time. Then a minute for local news before the weather. There was still nothing along that road that could be looking for him. He put the car in gear and almost as quickly slammed his foot on the brake again. “Foul play,” the boyish voice of the announcer was saying, “has not been ruled out. Police are currently looking for her drinking companion of the night before, believed to be a man representing himself as a police officer from the Toronto area. Anyone knowing the whereabouts—” Sanders turned off the radio with a vicious click that almost dislodged the knob from its stem. Dammit, he swore softly to himself. This was going to take a little bit of thought.
He backed up until he was parked on the other side of a small hill from the highway, no longer visible to anyone but a field of cows on his right. He pulled out his notes from the night before and began to study them with some concentration.
If he remembered correctly, and he thought he did, those pages had had a very familiar air. The last item on the page that he had been studying had been something about “ferret to O. r/v file #3 . . .” and some more numbers that he could almost see. “Advance payment given—amount not stated, but above $10,000?—on take-out target unspecified but specialized. 1700 Joe +1.” It was a style of note taking—not his own, but familiar. And it belonged to a professional. Not a snitch, but a sober, conscientious undercover officer with a gift for playing the stupid drunk, who had left something in semi-clear because he was uncertain of getting through to his usual contact. The notes seemed to say that he had turned up a professional hit man after a big target for big bucks under one of the rocks he had turned over. And the hit was to be at 1700 hours on Joe + 1—Friday. Today? Next week? And Don Bartholomew had once worked—some time in the past—with Inspector Charlie Higgs, because Higgs had laughed with real affection for a moment over the memory of that strange phrase. And the next expression on his face had been sorrow, Sanders was positive about that.
As he thought, he penciled in notes against the paper in front of him until the thin point on his pencil broke. He sighed and reached into his pocket to see if he had another one stuffed in it. His fingers curled around a piece of stiff paper instead. He pulled it out. The bottom half of the bill from the restaurant in Brockville, and on it the telephone number that Scarface had been calling—maybe.
He took out his map and looked for the nearest town that might have a restaurant and yet not be too close to the beaten track. In fifteen minutes he was inside a suitably grubby one. He ordered a cheeseburger and headed back to the telephone.
When he got his partner on the line at last, Dubinsky sounded irritable. Sanders fed a pile of quarters into the machine and started talking, fast. “Look, Ed, I want you to check reverse listings for Ottawa and tell me what this number is.” He read it carefully into the receiver. “Call me back as soon as you’ve got it. It’s important.”
“I
don’t have to check anywhere, John. That number is sitting on my desk right here in front of me. It’s the number I’m supposed to call if I find out where you are, so be a pal and don’t tell me, eh?”
“So, whose number is it, for chrissake?”
“It’s the goddamn RCMP, that’s who it is. And what in hell is going on? The whole world is looking for you. Did you really put a bullet through the head of some woman out in Stittsville? And shoot her dog, too? I told them you might have killed the woman, but not the dog, so if the same weapon got both of them they could forget it.”
Sanders didn’t laugh. “Which branch?”
“Security. Operations. And no, I don’t have a name, just a department. Sorry. Look, sweetheart, I’m busy. But keep in touch if you can and let me know what’s happening.”
Since this was the first time his partner had ever called him sweetheart, Sanders deduced that someone had wandered, too close and too curious, in the direction of Dubinsky’s telephone. More troubling than that, however, was the other question this telephone call had raised. What had Scarface been doing calling the RCMP before heading off—presumably—to kill Don Bartholomew? Bartholomew, who had once worked for the RCMP. Unless, of course, someone else at the coffee shop had called that number often enough for the mynah bird to get attached to the melody.
He fished in his pocket for more change. The number at the Mary Jo Motel rang twice before he got a hesitant answer. “It’s me,” he said. “Anything going on there I should know about?”
“Some,” said Harriet. “I don’t know how critical it is, though. I’ve been rooting around about the Echo Drive house. It’s owned by a Mrs. Muriel Smythe, according to the old city directory. I called, got switched to another number, and got some female iceberg on the other end who said that Mrs. Smythe was unable to take telephone calls. I tried to find out where she lived—I mean, if she lived in the house—and the iceberg hung up on me.”
