Negative Image

by Vicki Delany

  Amy’s brother Mike had been at the Bishop when Smith had dropped in, and upset at what she had to tell him about his sister’s shopping habits. “She’s working at that place that takes care of dogs during the day. Dog day care they call it, for God’s sake. What’s wrong with leaving your mutt with a bowl of water and kibble when you’re at work? Some people have more money than they know what to do with. I can give them a couple of suggestions. No matter, it’s a good job for Amy. They like her there, say the dogs get on well with her. Now she wants to get a dog for Robbie.” He made a face. “That’s all I need.”

  “What does she do with Robbie when she’s working?” Smith sipped at the glass of ice water the bartender had poured her. She and Mike had pulled stools up to the bar. The Bishop and Nun was almost empty. A couple of guys were setting up instruments on the postage stamp-sized stage, and the light was very poor. A cheap bar could be a depressing place early in the evening.

  “She works three days a week, for four hours at a time. The women’s support center helps her out. She pays a small amount out of her salary and they supplement it so Robbie can go to a lady’s house. The plan isn’t to have Amy supporting herself, that’s never going to happen, but to give her a feeling of independence. Her boss is already asking if she can work more hours, but I think it’s enough for a start. She’s so proud of earning money.” He sighed. “I guess I forgot to tell her that you have to have the money in your pocket to pay for what you want, not just the promise of it coming in at the end of the week.”

  A loud crash and the room turned blue with swearing. One of the musicians had knocked over the drums and the other started berating him.

  “Hard lesson to teach someone,” Smith said, turning back to Mike, “when she must see people all the time holding up plastic cards and then walking out with stuff.”

  “We’ve got a cousin couch surfing with us at the moment. Maybe I can get her to take Amy shopping, show her how to figure out if she has enough money to pay for things she needs.”

  “That would be a good start.”

  “Sometimes I wish I was so innocent. Amy has no guile at all, and never wishes anyone anything but good.”

  “A nice world to live in,” Smith agreed.

  They arranged that Monday morning Mike would take Amy back to Rosemary’s to pay what she owed. He would try to explain about the intricacies of commercial transactions. In the meantime Smith would speak to her mom. Perhaps the support center could offer some classes on basic finance.

  The last car passed and she darted across the street to join Winters and Kevin Farzaneh.

  “Hi,” she said, “What’s up?”

  “I can’t decide where to eat in this town,” Farzaneh said. “Too many choices. I need someone local to show me around. Say dinner tomorrow, or lunch, even breakfast?”

  It was nice to be asked. She gave him a big smile, before saying, “I don’t date cops.”

  “What she means by that,” Winters said with a laugh, “is that she doesn’t date you. Thanks for the tip.”

  “All part of the job. Speaking of which…Oh, never mind, but I’ll be back.”

  He walked away, after giving Smith a most charming grin. She wondered if he practiced it in front of the mirror every morning.

  “What’s up?” she asked again.

  “I’ve had word that a known gang member with a criminal record is in town. I’m going to drop by his hotel, let him know I’m watching him. I thought it might be nice to have a uniform beside me. Are you free?”

  “For now. Not too much happening.”

  “If you get a call, take it, but come with me in the meantime. What? Do you have a problem with that, Smith?”

  “No, not at all.” She’d hesitated, considering telling him about Madison’s insinuations regarding their relationship. Suppose she’d only imagined what the Mountie had been hinting at. She’d look like a fool, or worse that she was projecting. She fell into step beside the sergeant.

  “Do you have a guest staying here by the name of Langois?” Winters asked the front desk clerk, showing his badge. Not really necessary, as she certainly remembered him, and Smith stood beside him in full uniform.

  “Yes,” she said, without checking her computer.

  “Room number?”

  “310”

  They took the stairs.

  Without words, Smith stood on one side of the door to 310 and Winters on the other. He reached out a hand and knocked.

  “Yes?”

  “Police.”

  The door opened.

  The man who stood there was dressed in the trousers of a nice gray suit with a well-pressed white shirt neatly tucked in and an expensive pink tie properly knotted around his neck. He looked like any prosperous businessman, except for the size of his neck and the bulge of muscle underneath the shirt. His hair was buzzed down to the scalp and the remains of old acne scars pitted his face like a topographical map. His nose looked as if it had been broken more times than probably even he could remember, and his small black eyes reflected no light. Those eyes made Smith think of the rat she’d found impaled on her door. He smelled, very heavily, of tobacco.

  His gaze, not quite a sneer but close, crossed Smith, dismissing her instantly, and focused on Winters. “What do you want?” He had a heavy French accent.

  “Mr. François Langois?” Winters asked.

  “Oui.”

  “May we come in?”

  “Non.”

  “Do you want us to discuss business in the hallway?”

  “I ‘ave no business with you.”

  “I’m sure it’s not a problem, François,” a man said from inside the room. “Let the gentlemen in. We only wish to be of assistance.”

  Langois opened the door and stepped back.

  Josie Steiner and her lawyer were sitting at a circular table by the window. Glasses and food dishes and papers were piled high on the table. A bottle of wine nestled in an ice bucket.

  Oh boy, Smith thought, this is awkward. Wasn’t Sergeant Winters forbidden from any involvement in the Steiner murder?

  Josie opened her mouth. The lawyer waved her to be quiet. “If it isn’t Sergeant Winters,” he said, “As I recall you’ve been removed from this investigation for personal reasons. I suggest you leave or I will be forced to make a complaint.”

  “Unfortunately,” Winters said, not sounding at all concerned, “this is a small town with a small police service. We all have to multi-task, isn’t that correct, Constable Smith?”

  “What? Uh, yeah, that’s right, sir.”

  “I’m here on another matter. If you’d be more comfortable, perhaps you and Mrs. Steiner should leave.”

  The lawyer jerked his head toward Josie. Without a word, she got up, taking her wine glass with her. She grabbed the neck of the bottle and pulled it out of the ice, crossed the room, and opened a door. She closed the door behind her, but the scent of her perfume lingered.

  “I’m here to have a chat with Mr. Langois,” Winters said. “A private chat.”

  “’e stays,” Langois said. He picked up his beer and took a hearty slug.

  “I had a look at your record,” Winters said. “It doesn’t look good.”

  “Mr. Langois has paid his debt to society,” Iverson said. “He can come and go as he pleases. Which, come to think of it, is more than can be said for you right now, Sergeant.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m wondering what you’re doing in our fair town. Perhaps I can offer you some tips on the best sights to see. Skiing’s over for the year, do you hike?”

  “What?” Langois said, confused. He put his beer on the table and threw a questioning look at the lawyer.

  Iverson peered over the top of his glasses. “François is here as a friend of the family to support Mrs. Steiner in her grief. Mrs. Steiner’s father,” his eyes lingered on the sergeant, “is unable to get away at this time. As much as he would like to.”

  Smith looked back and forth between the three men. A lot more
was being said in this room than words, and it was in a language she didn’t understand.

  “Thoughtful of you,” Winters said to Langois. “A word to the wise—we will be watching you.”

  He turned and walked away. Smith pulled the door shut behind her.

  At the bottom of the staircase, Winters stopped and waited for Smith to catch up.

  “That might have been a mistake, Molly,” he said. “Iverson isn’t playing in the minor leagues, and he will do whatever he can to protect his client. I don’t see Mrs. Steiner killing her husband, she’s been brought up to keep her hands clean, but I doubt Iverson understands that.”

  What Winters could possibly know about Josie Steiner’s upbringing, Smith couldn’t imagine. She didn’t ask; he wasn’t soliciting her opinion.

  He stopped talking while a woman clattered down the stairs. She gave them a sideways glance and hurried away.

  “Anyway, if things don’t go well, I wanted you to know, Molly, that you’re a good police officer. You’ve got a future ahead of you, if you want it.”

  What the hell?

  She was so dumbfounded that he was out the door to the lobby before she recovered and ran after him. “John, I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket and she checked the display. The station. She answered, following Winters through the lobby and onto the street.

  “Thanks, Ingrid.” She put the phone away. Winters waited for her.

  “Fellow by the name of Frank Spencer, who lives on Station Street, called to speak to me. I questioned him the other night about the B&E across the street. He said he remembered something. It’s still quiet so I’m going to try to get someone to cover the street, grab a car and pay him a visit. Do you want to come?”

  He studied her for a long moment. His eyes were heavy and he looked very old. “No, Molly, you take it. I think it’s time I had a talk with my wife.”

  He walked away. A streetlamp lit him in a circle of yellow light, just for a moment, before the darkening night swallowed him up.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  It was time to talk to his wife. It was long past time to talk to his wife. When he realized Iverson and Steiner were in Langois’ room, Winters had had a momentary stab of panic. He could be suspended for interfering in the Steiner case after being ordered not to. Then, without conscious thought, he came to the decision he’d been wrestling with. Eliza mattered more than the job. If she were charged, even if Madison kept badgering her, he’d quit. Walk away from his career, and do everything possible to clear her.

  She was sitting in the living room, in her favorite chair, holding a book to her chest, her legs curled up underneath her, her feet bare. Her hair was lifeless and her eyes puffy and red. She must have heard him arrive, his car in the driveway, his key in the lock, his footsteps on the hallway floor, but she made no move to stand up. She looked at him, and didn’t say a word. A pile of tissues was scattered across the table at her elbow, beside her reading glasses. Outside, dusk was deepening, turning to night, but she hadn’t turned on the reading light and her face was in shadow.

  She turned back to her book and said, “Forget something?” in a tone meant to convey disinterest.

  “Forgot to say I love you.”

  She turned a page. “Do you?”

  He stood in front of her chair. “Of course I do. I always have. I always will.” He took the book out of her hands and dropped it to the floor. “Come to the kitchen. Let’s have some tea and talk.”

  “Do you mean talk, John, as in an exchange of mutually beneficial information, or just an attempt to bully me into confessing to something I didn’t do. Like your Mountie friend?”

  He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. “This is a mess, for sure, but we won’t sort anything out if I don’t let you tell me what’s going on.”

  The laugh lines around her mouth and eyes had set into dark trenches. She’d aged about twenty years in less than a week. Her hair was dirty and uncombed, and her T-shirt had a coffee stain on it. “To show you I’m serious,” he said, “I’ll even make the tea.”

  She didn’t laugh, but let herself be led by the hand into the kitchen. She sat at the table while he filled the kettle and plugged it in. A single-serving yogurt container, half-full, was in the sink, beside a piece of toast with a couple of small bites taken out of it. It was unlikely she’d had much more to eat than that for days.

  He could feel her eyes on him as he busied himself making up a tray with tea pot, cups, milk, but she said nothing.

  Finally the kettle boiled. He poured hot water into the pot, and put the tray on the table. He placed a cup in front of her. At last he sat down.

  “Tell me,” he said, “about Steiner.” He poured tea.

  She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and twisted it around her fingers. At first he was afraid she wasn’t going to speak to him. He’d hardly blame her if she didn’t. He sipped at his tea as his heart thudded in his chest. He didn’t know if he could live without her.

  ***

  She’d been at a party with Rudy that night twenty-seven years ago. As usual, there had been lots of booze and lots of cocaine. She didn’t usually drink because she couldn’t afford to waste any of her miniscule daily allotment of calories, but drugs didn’t make you fat. She hadn’t been in the mood to party—a boring function for some magazine editor’s birthday—and wasn’t even in the mood for snorting coke, even though the party organizers had bought the best. She’d had a meeting with her agent that afternoon. The agent told Eliza, straight out, that she needed to be more friendly to the executive at the advertising agency which was handling a major campaign for a high-end European designer moving into Canada.

  She didn’t want to be friendly to any of them anymore, and she didn’t want to keep taking the drugs that made it easier.

  She’d been bad-tempered at the party, had a fight with Rudy over nothing much at all, and gone home. Alone, sober, and wondering why, now that she’d achieved, at twenty-one years of age, all she’d dreamed, she was so unhappy.

  If she were to make excuses, explanations, the first would be easy. She’d been so young. Her mother, a housewife from Saskatoon, tried to guide the sixteen-year-old girl around the world of high fashion, so out of her depth it was laughable. Eliza’s first agent might as well have been a pimp. She was, truth be told, a pimp. “Make men like you,” had been her advice to the shy, awkward girl from Saskatchewan. And Eliza had somehow known what she had to do to make men like her. As she crawled up the slime-soaked ladder that was the modeling world, even once she’d been in sight of the top, she still made them like her. Although, most of the time, she didn’t like herself very much. She’d discovered she had a good head for money, and began taking courses in finance, which she absolutely loved. She kept that a secret from Rudy and her agent, knowing, probably subconsciously, they both needed to keep her dependent.

  She arrived home from the party to find the lock on her front door smashed, and called the police. The officer they sent was young, new. His name was John Winters. She showed him around the apartment, knowing he’d be impressed by the furniture, the art, the view. Her ass. She turned to see that his head was down as he wrote in his notebook. “Did you get all that?” she said.

  “I think so.” He finished writing and only then looked at her. “You should call an emergency locksmith, ma’am. I’ll wait until someone comes, if you like.”

  She loved him, the handsome, passionate, dedicated, sexy policeman, who pushed all her erotic buttons and taught her that sex could be something more than the most boring part of a job interview. She loved him so much she stopped screwing for work. And, to her surprise, she kept getting work. She no longer needed the coke and hadn’t taken a hit since. She’d pretty much forgotten about that part of her life.

  When she did think of it, it frightened her to realize how different it could have all turned out. If she’d been stoned, as she usually was
after a miserable industry party, she would have either not called the police about the break-in or waited until the morning. And someone else would have come.

  She shook her head, chasing the memories away, and looked across the table at her husband. He looked so stricken, she wanted to reach out and kiss his face. Kiss it all over, and keep kissing until all the unhappiness had gone away.

  Instead she said, “You knew I was engaged when we met. The night I met you I realized that even if I never saw you again, I didn’t have to settle for the likes of Rudy Steiner. I’ve seen him around over the years, at functions and parties. We said hi and moved on. It seemed every time I ran into him, he was with another wife. They were getting progressively younger, at least in relation to him. I heard he’d married five times. I never doubted for a single minute I’d merely have been wife number one.”

  “Guy was a fool,” John said with a growl.

  She almost smiled. “He cornered me at a gallery opening not long before we moved here, maybe just over a year ago.” John hadn’t been with her. Even if he hadn’t been busy—and that was the height of the infamous Blakeley case that had almost broken him—John avoided fashion parties and gallery openings almost as much as the press clamoring to know when he’d be making an arrest. “His breath was bad and he needed a bath, and he was with a woman who looked to be about fifteen. He’d been pretty high. He told me the biggest mistake he made in his life was letting me get away. I could have told him he hadn’t let me do anything, but what was the point.” Rudy had taken the breaking of their engagement badly, and had bad-mouthed Eliza for a long time after. “And that was that.” She looked out the window. Rain slashed against the glass, and all was black and wet.

  “Drink your tea,” John said.

  She picked up the cup and took a sip. He’d added sugar while she wasn’t looking, but she drank it nevertheless.

  “Obviously,” he said, “that wasn’t that.”

  “No. He called me two weeks ago. Said he was going to be in Trafalgar for a few days, on assignment, and would like to get together.”