Murder in Focus

by Medora Sale

  When he mounted his bike and moved off, he was dressed completely, from cap to boots, in the greenish uniform of the combined Canadian Military Forces.

  He didn’t stop again until he was about a mile from the target zone, where a pair of military vehicles formed an efficient roadblock. He left his bike by the side of the road and walked up to the bored-looking corporal in charge. “Hi,” he said, unbuttoning the pocket of his tunic and taking out a set of papers. “Here you go,” he added casually.

  The corporal took the proffered documents and looked at them closely. “Right you are,” he answered, apparently impressed by the signature in front of him. “Murphy, back that truck up.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” asked Rennsler. “I was dragged back from leave an hour ago for some fucking colonel and told to get my ass out here with dispatches.”

  “Christ, didn’t that happen to all of us?” said the corporal, yawning, as the driver backed one of the vehicles just enough to let the motorcycle through. “I haven’t the faintest bloody idea what’s going on. I just stand here out in the middle of nowhere and stop traffic. No relief, nothing. Fucking officers,” he muttered, and stepped out of the way.

  Rennsler carried on until he was out of sight of the roadblock party before stopping across from a farmer’s field and wheeling the bike down into the ditch. He removed his attaché case and a pair of leather-and-metal objects hooked on to the edge of the carrier, laid the bike on the ground behind a small bush, and covered it with the tarp. He turned his attention next to the attaché case. First he removed another set of papers and buttoned them into his pocket; then he took out, one by one, the components of a Steyr AUG assault rifle, lightweight, reliable, and deadly, whose six parts had fit neatly into his elegant and workmanlike case. He assembled them with loving care and hoisted the rifle once, checking the scope. He smiled with pleasure. Even in the dimmer light of the woods, it would give him twice the range he needed for the assignment. He clipped his own webbed carrying strap to the assembled outfit and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He hooked the metal-and-leather apparatus over his belt, glanced down at the casually concealed bike, and suddenly remembered something. He flung back a corner of the tarp, reached into a bag under the seat, and took out his thermos of coffee. He flicked things into place again, crossed the road, and headed into the woods to wait until 2:00 p.m.

  Chapter 10

  “This is it,” called out the bus driver as he pulled in to the curb.

  “Thanks,” said Harriet, and swung herself down onto the rear steps with one hand on the pole, landing with a thump as she did. Sanders followed her at a more decorous pace. The bus was filled with an early afternoon crowd of young mothers and retirees, and he could feel their curious eyes burning into the back of his neck as he hurried off the bus. “Come on,” said Harriet. “It’s just across the street.”

  Sanders laid a hand on her arm. “Wait,” he said, and pointed. There, in front of Ace Colour Labs, was a pale blue Ford Escort, illegally parked.

  “Looks familiar,” said Harriet, and started briskly across the street. “Shall we go over and talk to him? Ask him what the hell he thinks he’s been doing?”

  “For chrissake, Harriet,” said Sanders, exasperated, “hang on a minute.” He grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her back. “If we just blend into the scenery over here we can get a good look at whoever it is. Why frighten him off? Or whatever.”

  “You’re so goddamn cautious,” she complained. “Don’t you ever prefer the direct approach to life’s little problems? But if you insist, I will defer to the superior knowledge that experience—I assume—has given you.” She backed away from the curb and into the doorway of a wholesale office supply company. “I do, however, have a camera here with me,” she patted the pocket of her jacket, “and I intend to get a shot of whoever it is. For posterity, or the police, whichever comes first.”

  The door to the processing plant was set at right angles to the front face of the building, up some four steps from street level. As they stood and chatted, apparently considering the merits of a set of brightly coloured file cabinets, the lab door was flung wide open. Harriet raised her tiny camera in one hand, waiting for the profile to start down the steps and show full face. As he was turning, however, a huge truck belonging to one of the largest breweries in the province pulled in front of them and screeched to a halt. Sanders looked up the street in despair. A block away a red light glowered malevolently; a line of traffic had materialized out of nowhere to form an impenetrable barrier in front of them. That beer truck wasn’t going to be able to budge until the light changed and the intersection cleared again.

  Sanders swore loudly above the noise of the truck and started around it to the left. Harriet began to run to the right to get past the obstruction, her camera still ready in her right hand. He executed a shift in direction that would have looked impressive on a basketball court and pounded after her.

  “Did you see him?” he asked, panting, as he caught up to her.

  Harriet was staring at the disappearing rear bumper of the Ford Escort. She shook her head. “Not very well. I got an impression of tall and skinny. And pale. And fast as hell. It didn’t take us that long to get around the truck.” Her voice trailed off in disappointment. “I got a grab shot of him, but I’m not sure he’ll even be in the negative. I was still running when I took it.”

  The traffic in front of them gradually began to move out of the way. In less than a minute the street was relatively deserted again. “What the hell,” said Sanders. “Let’s go see if your pictures are still there.”

  “They wouldn’t give them to anyone else,” said Harriet. She tried to inject confidence into her voice.

  “Really?” said Sanders.

  “Yes, really,” said Harriet. Annoyed, she charged up the stairs two at a time ahead of him and stormed into the reception area. “Work ready for Parallax Productions yet?” she demanded as she walked through the door. “You were copying a slide and making a print of it for me.”

  “Yes, it is, Miss Jeffries,” said the tiny, dark-haired girl behind the counter. “Came up half an hour ago.” She reached into a space under the counter and extracted a brown envelope.

  “Terrific,” said Harriet, picking up the envelope. “Now you don’t have to bother calling me.” She peered inside to make sure there was something in there and then waved it triumphantly at John.

  “Funny thing, though, Miss Jeffries,” said the girl, frowning. “Someone was just in, said he was a friend of yours and wanted to pick up the negatives we’d been developing—that’s exactly what he said. But I didn’t know. When he didn’t use your company name, and didn’t know what kind of work we’d been doing and all that, I didn’t think I should let him have them. Anyway, Suzie tried to call you,” she nodded back at the office area, “but you weren’t in. Of course. You were on your way here, weren’t you?” She laughed. “I hope I did the right thing. I mean, you usually pick up your own work, not like some people.”

  “You certainly did,” said Harriet. “I never asked anyone to pick up any work for me. Must have been one of my clients trying to get out of paying for a print. Did he say anything else? Like who he was?”

  The girl leaned forward with her elbows on the counter and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “it was really strange. I said that we didn’t have any work for Harriet Jeffries—and that’s true, because our work was for Parallax Productions—and so he asked me for the name of another lab that might do colour processing and stuff like that for professional photographers.”

  “What did you say?” asked Sanders.

  The girl giggled. “I sent him over to Powell’s Colour Labs. Right on the other side of town. I guess it was mean, but he wasn’t very nice. The sort of customer that treats you like you’re part of the furniture. You know—the part that needs to be replaced.”

  “What did he look like?�
� asked Sanders.

  “Big guy. Real big. Like you,” she said, looking up at him.

  The door opened and a young man in jeans hurried in with an envelope, which he dropped on the counter. “As big as that?” asked Sanders.

  The girl nodded energetically, picked up the package, and glanced at it. “Tomorrow morning?” she yelled at his retreating back.

  “Fine,” floated in to them from the closing door.

  “Yeah,” she said. “About the same size as Keith, I guess. Sure. With sort of light hair, I think, maybe blond or kind of red, like, and, uh, blue eyes. They might have been brown or hazel, but I think blue. And kind of ordinary looking. Nothing special about him. Actually, I didn’t take to him much, to say the least, so I guess I wasn’t looking very closely.”

  “Thanks, Liz,” said Harriet, and turned to walk out. “That’s terrific,” she said as soon as they were outside. “Friend Keith, whoever he is, is at least four inches shorter than you are.”

  “I know,” said Sanders gloomily. “It’s because she’s so small. Everyone over five foot six is a giant as far as she’s concerned. Nice girl, but a lousy witness.”

  “At least she didn’t give away my slide,” said Harriet.

  Once they were safely settled on the bus again, Harriet opened up the brown envelope and gently eased an eight-by-ten colour print out of it. “Impressive, isn’t it?” she said, handing it over to him. “They do very nice work there. A good, reliable lab. Pleasant, too.”

  Sanders stared at the print in disbelief. The small area in front of the west wing of the building had been blown up to fill the entire print surface, and the faces of the two men stared at him with the sharpness and clarity of a studio portrait. Scarface’s dark eyes smoldered under their heavy brows; the blond was looking straight at the camera with a half-smile on his face, his hand raised as if in an attempt to cover it. He appeared to be waving mockingly at them. “How did you manage this?” he asked finally.

  She grinned, a smug and self-satisfied grin. “I told you I was good. And the lab’s no slouch, either. You ask for a hand-done print, you get quality. Of course, this is no four-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent special. They charge for this kind of work.”

  “How much?” asked Sanders curiously.

  “They haven’t billed me yet,” said Harriet, “but it’s Cibachrome. I expect it’ll probably be around forty dollars or so. Worth it, though, isn’t it? That’s for the print, of course. The copy of the slide will be on top of that. I don’t suppose the police—”

  “Probably not,” said Sanders. “Unless they’re forced to.”

  “In that case,” said Harriet. “It’s back to looking for my pictures. I don’t care how many cops are after you, we have to find those pictures or I can’t afford all this charity.”

  “I think we’d better find someplace safe to stash these first,” said Sanders. He slipped the print back into the envelope and handed it to Harriet.

  “Damn!” she said, and stared down at the print in her hand as if the thought that she might lose this one had returned her to that state of awkward misery he had found her in. He shifted uneasily in the cramped space offered by the bus seat and tried to think of something reassuring to say. “I’ve got it!” she said. “Couldn’t be better. Off we get. Quick.”

  Sanders scrambled off the bus after her, back onto Wellington Avenue, close to the spot where they first met. “Now what?” he murmured plaintively.

  “In here,” she said, dragging him into a stationery store. She scooted past the cards and into the writing paper section, scanned the various-size pads lined up in front of her, and picked up two of the cheapest ones. She checked them hastily for size against the envelope in her hand and nodded. “So far, so good,” she muttered to Sanders, who had been stalking wordlessly after her. She dropped them on the counter, plucked a five-dollar bill from her pocket, and dropped it with them. “Don’t bother to wrap them, please,” she said hastily, as the woman behind the cash register took out a bag. “I’ll use them here.”

  “Huh?” said the cashier, halting in mid-swoop. She was frozen in baffled immobility, holding the bag in her left hand and with her right reaching for the pads.

  Harriet smiled brightly, ripped the stiff back cover off each pad, slipped one into the envelope behind the print, and then, with great care, worked the other in on top of the print. She picked up the pen sitting beside the cash register with another smile, this one apologetic, and began writing on the outside of the envelope. She pulled her notebook out from one of her top pockets, extracted two stamps from somewhere inside it, and pasted them down on the envelope. “Keep the paper, if you like,” she called to the startled clerk, and flew out of the store. Sanders caught up with her as she was dropping the photographs into the nearest mailbox.

  “You haven’t sent them to yourself, have you?” he asked. “Because if you have, that is the oldest and stupidest dodge going. They’ll just wait and grab them as they’re going to your apartment in the mail.”

  “I’m not that dim-witted,” said Harriet, looking too pleased with herself to be offended. She walked for some time in silence and then stopped and looked around her. “I sent them to my editor,” she said softly. “In Toronto. She’ll look at them, wonder what in hell they are, and then figure that sometime soon someone will explain why they were sent to her. In the interim, she’ll put them on that huge shelf where she keeps piles and piles of manuscripts she hasn’t finished working on yet. It must be the safest place in the world to hide something. I can’t imagine anyone, no matter how clever he is, figuring that one out for a while.”

  “Not bad,” said Sanders with a nod of genuine admiration, and raised an arm to hail a taxi.

  “Where are we going?”

  Sanders opened the door, nudged Harriet in, and jumped in after her. “Echo Drive,” he said. “Somewhere in the five hundreds. I’ll let you know where to stop.”

  The driver yawned and set the meter ticking.

  “I thought you didn’t want to go back there,” said Harriet. There was a hostile edge to her voice now.

  “I never said that, did I?” asked Sanders in surprise.

  “No, it just seemed to me that you were avoiding it,” she said irritably. “And me and my immediate problems. I mean, I’ve been trying to get in that house and find out what was going on, and you’ve been wandering off to hell and gone all over the place. Anywhere but there.”

  Sanders leaned back and looked at her, tempted to pick up the gauntlet. A sentence that pointed out her general selfishness and unreasonableness leaped into his mind, but framing it seemed too exhausting and futile an effort. “One thing at a time, sweetheart,” he replied instead, and lapsed into silence. “That’s it, just up ahead,” he called out suddenly. The cab braked and slowed down.

  “But we’ve gone way past it already,” complained Harriet in a whisper.

  “You need the exercise,” he murmured back. The cabdriver yawned again, muttered an indistinct figure, and reached out for his money; as soon as Sanders told him to keep the change, he seemed to fall into one of those trances that are common to his profession. Sanders glanced to see if he was preparing to leave, and when it appeared that he wasn’t in a hurry, grasped Harriet around the waist and propelled her toward the rear of the car. “Now,” he whispered, “I want you to cross the street and walk up to any one of those houses, knock on the door, and when someone answers, ask for Charlie—no—Chuck MacTavish. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “And when I’m told there is no such person?”

  “Smile and apologize. If the cab is gone, just leave. If he’s still there, string it out as long as possible.”

  “And what will you be doing?”

  “Standing around looking awkward and embarrassed. I’m very good at it,” he added bitterly, “Years of experience.”

  The cab finally took its depa
rture while Harriet was explaining with great care what Chuck looked like to the tired-looking woman in the doorway. In the background a tiny baby wailed in misery. At last Sanders tapped her on the shoulder. “Look, I’m awfully sorry to have kept you out here so long,” she said. “You’ve been so helpful. Thanks a lot. And the baby must be—”

  “The baby’s always crying,” the woman replied dispiritedly. “But I’d better go have a look at her anyway. Sorry I couldn’t have been more help.”

  “Now you’ve made me feel like an absolute bitch,” said Harriet as she stormed down the steps. “That poor creature in there is obviously crazed with exhaustion and I kept her at the door trying to locate a nonexistent person living at a nonexistent address. What in hell are you up to?”

  “Think of it as a change from listening to a baby cry. Now all we have to do is drift quietly back to the house and see what’s going on. It looked pretty quiet as we went past it in the cab.”

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” asked Harriet, trying to drift as convincingly as she could.

  “Ring the doorbell. If no one answers, we’ll go around to the back and break in.” Sanders began to drift more briskly.

  “I don’t believe this,” said Harriet. “And you an officer of the law.”

  “When people are after you for murder,” said Sanders. “I’ve noticed your outlook changes. The thought of a little B and E somehow doesn’t seem so important.”

  “Anyway, what makes you think they’ll be out?” she said skeptically. “You seem to be assuming that we’ll have the place to ourselves,” she added.

  “Because it’s three-thirty, and if something or other is going to happen at five, then they’re probably running around doing whatever it is. If they are home, then we’ve probably screwed up completely and this place has nothing to do with anything—your pictures, Bartholomew’s notes. Nothing.”