Murder on the Run

by Medora Sale

  Eleanor pulled up in the driveway of 24 Forest Crescent and sat for a moment in the car. The spring house-buying season was in full swing, and the day had been hectic—meetings in the morning and three showings in the afternoon. Fortunately, a five o’clock appointment had canceled out, or she could have been in the office until nine. She wondered if John had called. After all, it had been his idea that she go to that crashingly boring party with Grant, and two days later, she still hadn’t heard from him. Of course, she’d been presiding over an open house all Sunday afternoon, but he knew how to leave a message at the office. Damn! Sitting here stewing did no good at all.

  She opened the front door cautiously and looked around to see who was about. Mrs. Flaherty was crashing around with her pots in the kitchen, a reassuring sound, and the blare of the television from the morning room told her where her daughter probably was. She strode through and discovered her mother and Heather deep in a WKRP in Cincinnati rerun.

  “Oh, hi, Mummy,” said Heather. “I thought you weren’t going to be in tonight.” She reached up her forehead for a kiss.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, sweetheart, but my evening appointment canceled out—three houses I don’t have to go through tonight. I think they’ve finally realized that they have no intention of moving.” This remark was addressed to her mother, who also presented herself for a kiss. “So here I am. Anyone call?”

  “Not that I know of, dear. But you’d better check the front hall.”

  “Yes, of course I will. How was school?”

  “Fine,” said Heather as she always did. Eleanor often wondered what it would take of triumph or disaster to make her come up with a more elaborate description. “And I need five dollars and a permission slip signed today because we’re going to the zoo tomorrow and I’m the only person who hasn’t got her money in yet. Mrs. Brett is really mad.”

  “Oh, good Lord, Heather, why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Her daughter shrugged and smiled maddeningly at her.

  “Are you going to be in for dinner?” Eleanor’s mother asked. “I should tell Mrs. Flaherty if you are.”

  “I don’t know. I think I might be going out again.” Now why did I say that? she wondered. “Anyway, I’m going up to change. I’ll see you in a minute. Heather, get out of your uniform. And have you done your homework yet?” Without waiting for replies or excuses, she fled from the scene, feeling slightly more as if her maternal conscience had been eased.

  The phone started ringing as she opened the door to the third-floor apartment. She dashed up the stairs and grabbed it in a slide that would have done a first baseman proud. Her hello was so breathless as to be incoherent, but it elicited the right sort of response.

  “Hello. Sorry I didn’t call before, but things have been going crazy around here.” Sanders’ tone became tentative. “I know it’s early, but how about dinner? Everything I was working on has suddenly collapsed. I might as well knock off.”

  Eleanor hesitated, searching for the right reaction. “Why not?” she answered casually. “We all have to eat. Shall I meet you somewhere? Or are you going to swoop up here in a police car and convince my neighbours I’ve been arrested?”

  “I think I’d better come and get you. You don’t drive very well as the evening progresses, I seem to remember. And I have a responsibility about these things,” he answered coolly. “Is 6:30 too early?”

  “No—I’m starving already. Should I get dressed up?”

  “I thought we’d go to the Pallas—if you like—and that’s hardly dinner-jacket country.”

  That was a low blow. The Pallas had tender associations from her first encounters with him; his comment jolted her out of her cool breeziness. “That sounds—lovely,” she said. “I’ll meet you downstairs at 6:30.”

  She showered and dressed in a casual pair of pants and a large shirt. It wasn’t quite the track suit she usually wandered around in when she wasn’t in working dress, but at least it was comfortable enough to enable her to deal with John Sanders. She certainly didn’t want to be struggling along all evening in a tight skirt and hobbling high heels. She bade farewell once again to her daughter, thinking she could have tried to look a little crushed that her mummy was going out, and went out to wait for John in the late April sun. She shivered in the chill wind. Life seemed a little too perfect this evening; something was bound to go wrong. She waved over the shaggy hedge of bridal wreath at Kate Abbott, who was just coming home, and slowly walked down the long drive to the street.

  The restaurant was as warm, the food as comforting as she remembered. Eleanor took a sip of her Retsina and smiled. Then she complained, “You haven’t asked me about all my earth-shattering discoveries of Saturday night. What’s the use of having an informant if she doesn’t inform?”

  “Sorry about that,” he said, in his most offhand way. “Did you find out anything earth-shattering? I spent quite a bit of time with Mr. Keswick myself over the weekend, and he didn’t strike me at the time as a very useful source of information. And we seem to be chasing another rabbit right now.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Her old boyfriend from home. As soon as the story broke in the newspapers, he ran. And we haven’t found a trace of him—he’s not at home, at her uncle’s farm, at any of his friends’, or on the highways in between. The O.P.P. have been looking for his car all day. If he’d been driving around, they’d probably have spotted him. I wasn’t around on Sunday when the report came in, and none of those bleeding idiots thought he was that important, so they left him for me this morning.” He glared at Eleanor as if she had been personally responsible for letting him get away and then laughed and poured some more Retsina in her glass. “So what did you find out about Mr. Keswick? Am I grinding my molars over the wrong man?”

  “Not very much, actually. He was deep in conversation with some politician for a long time, but before I could creep over and hear what they were talking about, Stephen—remember Susan’s creepy boyfriend, Stephen?—jumped me and it took me forever to get rid of him.”

  “Did you catch the politician’s name?”

  “Paul Wilcox. I didn’t recognize him, although the name sounds familiar. Grant said that they were discussing Arts Council grants.”

  “Could be. He’s an up-and-coming type in government these days. Every time you look around he’s on some commission or other.” He reached for her hand. “Thank you. You did your best and they probably weren’t discussing anything important. Do you remember the last time we did this?” Eleanor nodded, making an indeterminate noise in her throat. “I went back to your place and got hit on the head.”

  “I remember that,” said Eleanor, grinning in spite of herself.

  “Perhaps we should go back to my place then,” he said lightly. “And just to prove how honourable my intentions were, you’ll discover that I made no attempt to clean up this morning. At that point I had no plans to try to lure you back there.”

  “And just when did your plans become dishonourable?”

  “I think when I saw you walk through the garden in the sunshine. I always seem to connect you with gardens. They suit you.” He looked at her for a moment longer. “Why don’t we forget dessert and coffee. I’ll make you coffee at my place. It’s one of my secret domestic skills.”

  Eleanor stood by the window in the darkened apartment and looked over the magnificence of the city by night, and the thick blackness of the lake in the distance. “This is spectacular, John. How did you find it?”

  “Luck, really. I got the tag-end of someone’s lease. The place does have certain disadvantages. Because of its location, I have to share it with the upper-income-bracket pimp-and-hooker population. That sort of makes me feel at home—like my days on Vice. All those familiar faces.” He moved over behind her and put his hands very lightly on her shoulders. “Eleanor, do come here,” he said softly. She turned quickly and found herself clinging tightly to hi
m, astonished at the ease with which her emotions could betray her. She had intended—if she had had any intentions—to keep this evening light and chatty, giving herself time to sort out her annoyance at having been dumped unceremoniously last year and then picked up again like an old half-read novel. Now, between the trembling of her knees and the uncertainty in her voice she couldn’t have formed a coherent sentence to save her life. And she was clutching him with the intensity and determination not to let go you might find in a large, hungry dog with a very juicy bone. They sank in a tangle on the somewhat crowded couch.

  “You know,” John remarked some time later, looking down at her tousled head and remnants of clothing, “there is a bed. Over there in the bedroom. It has a view of the lake, too. Come on.” He heaved himself off the couch, removed his arm from the one sleeve of his shirt that he still had on, and dragged her to her feet and into the apartment’s other tiny room.

  “I would like you,” said Eleanor, stretching luxuriously on the unmade bed a few minutes later, “to admire my belly muscles. They have cost me a great deal of sweat and agony—and I feel I deserve some sort of reward for the effort.”

  “Impressive,” he murmured, as he lit a candle. “Now, can I get you some coffee—or beer, maybe, or there may be wine, and since Dubinsky was here, there’s something left in a bottle of rye. And take off that shirt. You look much better without it; besides, partially dressed women are beginning to make me nervous.”

  “Sure.” Eleanor shrugged herself out of her shirt. “And I’ll have a beer, I think. We’ll leave Dubinsky the rest of his rye.” Sanders retreated to the tiny kitchen and returned with bottles, glasses, and opener. “Speaking of Dubinsky, which we really weren’t, I suppose, what makes you so un-Dubinsky-like?”

  “In what way? It is not given to all of us to have a build like a sumo wrestler, you know. But it’s a very comforting trait to have in a partner. He doesn’t even have to do anything. They just look at him and melt into the scenery.”

  “I don’t mean your size, you idiot. I mean, Dubinsky would never talk about people having builds like sumo wrestlers, would he?”

  “Aah. You are referring to the thin veneer of civilization that a couple of years of English and Philosophy at University College gave me, are you? That flippant manner and brilliant use of language, you mean?”

  “How did you get from there to here, then? It seems a long way from English to murder.”

  “But not from philosophy to crime. Well, to make a short story too long, I was a perfectly ordinary boy from the east end with a flair, I suppose, for school. I won a scholarship to the U of T and went into a nice arty program, where I did all right for a while”—he turned casually away to pick up his beer again—“until I got deflected.”

  “Deflected?”

  “After first year I got a job as a security guard back on my home turf and ran into Marie, who was pretty enticing in those days—she’s still not bad, you know—and between her distracting me all through second year, and then during study week finding cause why we should get married, I didn’t even bother writing my exams. And that was the end of my experiment with culture and civilization. The police force was recruiting at that particular time, which was more than you could say for a lot of other places, and it seemed like a fairly secure and interesting way to make a living, so I joined. I’m not really that different from Dubinsky, you know. The polish slips off pretty easily.” He rolled over and ran his hand along her belly, and then took her beer glass from her and carefully set it on the floor.

  “What time is it?” asked Eleanor. “I have to get home before it’s time to get Heather off to school. I am not one of your carefree singles.”

  Sanders reached over for his watch. “Would you believe that it’s only 9:30? That’s what happens when you leave for dinner before the sun sets.”

  “Mmmm,” said Eleanor, giving herself up to the moment, “set the alarm for two o’clock.”

  “Why not five?” he murmured. “I’ll cook you breakfast.”

  Chapter 8

  It was the final five minutes of Amanda’s second last class of the day, English. The sun pouring into the classroom seemed to have infected teacher and students with a spirit of lazy contentment. It had been a long, cold winter. The discussion of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock was dwindling into nothing; even the title was no longer capable of producing giggles. In that soporific atmosphere, the secretary’s head poking around the corner hardly caused a ripple. Miss Whitney lazily took the proffered piece of paper, read it, and called to Amanda.

  “It’s a phone message. It’s almost time for the bell, so why don’t you go now and call? Take your books.” Startled at the unusual summons, Amanda hastily gathered her knapsack and poetry text and stumbled out of the classroom down to the pay phone in the common room.

  She looked carefully at the words on the slip for the first time. “Please call your Aunt Kate as soon as possible.” Where was Aunt Kate? The number on the message was not familiar. Amanda fished out her quarter and dialed the number. A pleasant masculine voice answered with the words, “Harris and Robinson. May I help you?”

  “May I speak to Dr. Abbott, please?” asked Amanda.

  “And who may I say is calling, please?”

  “It’s her niece, Amanda,” she replied, confused.

  “Oh, yes. Is that Miss Griffiths? Dr. Abbott is in a brief meeting right now. Would you like to hold? She shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.” Ten minutes sounded like an eternity to Amanda, who could at that moment hear the bell ringing for Latin. “Wait a moment, I think she may have left a message for you.” There was a pause. “Here it is. Could you please meet her at 3:30 at the corner of Mount Pleasant and Elm, the southeast corner? She is picking up your parents at the airport.”

  Still clutching her magic piece of paper, Amanda pelted into Latin class, no later than several of her slower-moving classmates. Breathlessly she waved the slip in front of Mrs. Cowper’s face and explained her predicament. Her parents were coming in; her aunt wanted her to drive out with her to the airport to meet them; and could she leave class five minutes early?

  Mrs. Cowper reacted predictably. “Of course, Amanda! How nice that your parents are coming in. Keep your eye on the clock and slip out when you need to. Leave yourself enough time to get to your locker. Have a lovely time tonight!”

  It was a couple of minutes before the final bell when she stationed herself on the prescribed corner, looking intently down the hill for Aunt Kate’s car to appear. She scarcely noticed the yellow police car pull up in front of her and stop, lights flashing. The handsome young constable who was driving got out and walked over to her. She looked up in surprise. “Excuse me, miss, but are you Amanda Griffiths?” She nodded, beginning to feel a sickening sense that something was very wrong. “I was asked to pick you up and take you out to the airport—something about an accident—” As his voice trailed off, he smiled and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “Is it my parents?” she asked. “Has someone been”—she couldn’t say the word that was on her mind—“hurt?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” he answered gently. “But if you’ll come with us we’ll soon have it straightened out.” He propelled her toward the car and opened the back door. There was a man in plain clothes sitting on the passenger side, looking straight ahead. She climbed in, and only realized after the door slammed shut that there were no handles on the inside. That and the mesh between the front and back seat gave her an uncomfortable caged feeling.

  Instead of heading north in the direction of the airport, however, the car turned right off Mount Pleasant into north Rosedale; it cruised along Summerhill, into a park, past the sign that said “Official Vehicles Only,” and down a steep hill. Amanda opened her mouth but could not phrase a question that seemed adequate to the occasion. Besides, terror had taken away her voice, and she was grappling to maintai
n an outward appearance of calm. The car stopped, and the driver got out. He opened the door and bent over to peer in. She shrank back automatically. He turned away from her; when he turned back to her he had a handkerchief in his hand, with a sickly, sweet, chemical smell to it. As she opened her mouth to scream he clapped it over her face, soaking wet and cold. She struggled for an instant.

  Eleanor sat with her mother, lazily drinking tea and letting her thoughts float idly where they would. Her mother was chewing over a problem having to do with the planting of some perennials at the bottom of the garden and the apparently related question of whether the tenant who was renting the coach house over the garage for a handsome sum should be allowed to buy a puppy. A standard poodle was what he had in mind, and the various strengths and weaknesses of the breed—as understood by Jane Scott—were being canvassed minutely. “You see, dear, poodles dig. I know they do, because they’re just like terriers, and it’s impossible to keep a garden if you have a terrier. So what do you think I should do?”

  Eleanor paused and looked at her mother. She hadn’t been listening carefully enough to know which problem had actually been tossed in her lap, and besides, it seemed obvious to her that her mother would plant what she liked and that Susan, who owned the house, coach house and all, would not object to anything her new tenant wanted to do of such an innocent nature. “Well,” she temporized, and was saved by the sight of Kate Abbott waving through the living-room window and striding around to the side door. “Kate,” she hailed, “come and have some tea.”

  “Well, I don’t really think I should,” she said. “I just came over to see if Amanda was here. She wasn’t home when I got in, and it occurred to me that she might have wandered over.”

  “She’s not here,” said Eleanor. “But we can ask Heather. She might know where she was going after school.” She called upstairs and was finally greeted by an answering shout and the appearance of her daughter. “When did you last see Amanda, dear?” asked Kate. “And did she say anything about where she was going?”