Murder on the Run

by Medora Sale

  “I dunno,” said Dubinsky, looking blank. “I’m out of practice arresting MPPs. Why don’t you go get him and I’ll pick up Keswick. He’s more my type.”

  “Coward,” said Sanders. “Let’s send Collins and Wilson out to get Keswick—he’s easy. All he’s likely to do is paste them, and they can handle that.” He twirled his pen in his fingers for a moment, watching the effect with admiring eyes. “Jesus.” He let the pen drop. “There’s no way we can get Wilcox without clearing it upstairs, though. Here, give us that stuff—and send Collins and Wilson off while I’m gone.” He picked up the file folder, slipped the prints into it, and headed off upstairs.

  “So that’s it,” said Sanders to the smoothly elegant man on the other side of the desk. “I don’t know whether one of them killed her, or why. As far as we can tell now her death may be completely unrelated, but these prints show a connection between Wilcox and Jane Conway, and between Wilcox and Jimmy Fielding. And Fielding certainly has links with organized crime. I don’t know where Keswick comes into this, but he does come into it. Anyway, he’s being picked up right now. He should be able to fill in a few gaps.”

  His interlocutor folded his fingers together and rested his chin lightly on them. He seemed to focus on the middle distance as he contemplated. He was paid to be smooth, and clever, and to juggle all the possible strands and inter-connections and pitfalls of any action taken by government, the attorney general’s office, or the police. “I had better talk to the A.G.,” he said finally. “This is too hot for me to stick my neck out alone on.”

  Sanders nodded. “What I need is to get into his office in the Parliament Buildings. We’ve got to have evidence, and it might be there.”

  “That’s tricky,” he said in a distant voice. “You, of course, have no shadow of a right to do that. But then, he knows that as well, and is likely to have left anything of a—uh—sensitive nature there for just that reason. If we go through regulation channels, we are likely to lose the element of surprise, I imagine. It’s complicated.”

  Sanders nodded again. “Maybe we should bring the chief in on this in case questions are asked. He’s going to be mad as hell when he finds out.”

  “Good God, no! The fewer people who know about this, the better.” He reached for his telephone and spent the next few minutes in muttered conversation. Finally he hung up and spoke to Sanders. “At six o’clock tonight,” he said, looking somewhere past Sanders’ left ear, “everyone in whom you are interested will be at a small reception. It will last at least until seven. This will get you past the small east door”—he handed Sanders a card marked “Press/Special Occasion”—“and the regular patrolling of the halls doesn’t start until after the House rises. It is sitting right now, so there are lots of people around and a certain amount of confusion.” He stood up. “You’re on your own in this. Don’t get caught. You’d find it unpleasant, and we’d find it counter-productive.”

  It was four o’clock by the time Sanders got back to the office. “We’re on,” he said. “How are you at B and E, Dubinsky?”

  “How complicated?” Dubinsky leaned back and yawned. Dinner looked to be a long way off tonight.

  “Not very—an office door, some desk drawers, a few filing cabinets, maybe a small safe. Probably wouldn’t be a difficult one, you know. Just one of those home-security types.”

  “Not a chance,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m okay on doors, not too happy about filing cabinets, but no safes. That’s not my line.” He looked pensive for a moment. “I know a couple of guys who could do a safe without too much trouble—but I never acquired the skill. And I don’t want to.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A pal of mine from the RCMP is pretty good with small safes.”

  “Would he do it?”

  “Naw. It really wouldn’t be worth his while. I mean, they’d crucify him if he got caught.” He shook his head. “And it’s not even his bust. Eddy might, though. Eddy owes me. He’s pretty good—doors, safes, anything at all. We went to school together.”

  “Do you think you could get hold of him—soon? Before six?”

  “I could try. Might take a few minutes, though. He travels around a bit.” Dubinsky reached for the phone, and began dialing a number culled from his elephantine memory. Sanders wandered tactfully out of earshot. After twenty minutes of telephone calls and earnest quiet conversations Dubinsky finally put his hand over the receiver, and said, “Eddy wants to know how he’s supposed to get in there.” Sanders picked up the press pass. On it was neatly written the date and the number two, circled in red. No matter how sleepy the guy on the door was, he’d be able to count to two. “I told him about the reception. He asked would it be okay if he comes as a waiter. Then he can blend in if all hell breaks loose.”

  “Sure. Anything. He can come as a duck if he wants.”

  At six o’clock Dubinsky, Sanders, and a small man in a dinner jacket pulled into the University of Toronto parking lot across the street from Queen’s Park. By the time they were out of the car, Eddy had disappeared. “Jesus,” said Sanders, impressed. “Where did he go?”

  “Don’t ask,” said Dubinsky. “I never met a guy who could vanish the way he does.” They walked boldly over to the east entrance with the arrogance of reporters with a perfect right to be there. As they were showing the bored O.P.P. constable their press pass, a small figure nipped by them, squeaking, “Extra catering staff. Which way?” The constable pointed to the left, and Eddy disappeared again. Sanders shook his head in admiration.

  They walked confidently through the high-ceilinged corridors to the area in which important members of the current government had their offices—they hoped. Those few people who passed by them paid no attention to them at all; they turned a corner, and there they were, in front of the office of Paul Wilcox, MPP. “How does he rate such a classy corridor?” whispered Dubinsky. “The rest of these guys all seem to be Cabinet ministers.”

  “Yeah. And potential Cabinet ministers. Our boy is—was—on his way up. Now where’s Eddy?” And then they heard a soft shuffle of fast-moving feet, and Eddy appeared behind them, a tray under his arm.

  “Camouflage,” he said. “Is this the door?” Without waiting for a reply, he loosened his jacket and extracted from a series of pockets inside the front a couple of odd-looking tools. “Simple locks,” he said, fiddled, held his breath, slipped the second tool between the door and the frame, and opened the door. “Get in and close it,” he said, flipping on the light. “Before someone comes along. Jeez, you guys are slow.” They were in a small, well-furnished reception room, with a desk, filing cabinets, and a couple of comfortable chairs, coffee table, and expensive magazines. There was another door behind the desk, also locked. Eddy approached it, looked, murmured “piece of cake,” and slipped open the bolt in a few seconds. In this room, also small, but pleasant, were a window letting in soft evening light; a bare desk, dark, reddish, and opulent; a couch, chair, and a large plant; and, in the wood paneling of the wall, something that was unmistakably a safe of ancient vintage.

  Eddy walked over to it, sized it up, and opened his jacket again. He selected a couple of instruments, laid them down on the floor, and then crouched in front of the safe. Meanwhile Dubinsky took a flat tool from his pocket and set to work on the desk drawer. It took him a while, and a few breathy curses, to get that lock snapped back and the first drawer opened. Sanders began to flip rapidly through its contents, while Dubinsky, working on top of him, scrambled through the second one. Finally Eddy spoke. “Do you think you guys could crash around the outer office for a while? I can’t hear anything—I’ll never get this bitch open with all that noise. Besides, you make me nervous.” Abashed, they fled.

  “Might as well try the filing cabinet,” said Sanders. “Can you manage that lock?”

  “Only if someone has a paper clip,” said Dubinsky in scorn. “I hope they don’t keep important
stuff in here. Security is terrible.”

  “I don’t suppose they do,” said Sanders. “Come on, let’s go.”

  The metallic screech of the top drawer of the filing cabinet opening covered the quiet click of a key in the door. Sanders was already flipping through the contents when his hand stopped at the sound of Wilcox’s pleasantly cultured voice.

  “Well, well, gentlemen, isn’t this a surprise! From the press, I assume? I assure you that whatever you might find in there would be very dull from your point of view.” He walked over to the secretary’s desk. “But I don’t think that the police will find someone breaking into my office boring. Not at all.”

  Sanders straightened up and looked at Wilcox with casual amusement on his face. “Ah,” he said, “but we are the police. And we don’t mind being bored, not at all. We’re used to it.”

  “The police?” Wilcox paused a moment. “Then no doubt you have a warrant of some sort. May I see it?” He looked steadily at them. “Or are you on some sort of fishing expedition here? And just what kind of police are you?” His voice acquired a nasty edge. “Either you produce identification or God help me you’ll never get out of here in one piece. And shut that filing cabinet. There’s nothing in there anyway.”

  Dubinsky automatically drew out his warrant card: “Metro Police—Sergeant”—before Sanders could kick him hard enough to shut him up.

  “Isn’t that nice?” purred Wilcox. “You gentlemen have made a grave mistake, Sergeant. You have no jurisdiction in this building. You need permission just to set foot in the hallway.” He reached for the telephone on the desk. “I hope you two weren’t set on a career in the department, because you won’t have one.” Then he snarled, “You picked the wrong man to harass this time. I’m not some insignificant backbencher who’s afraid of cops. The police commissioner can deal with this. I’ll be seeing him on Thursday, and that’s about as long as you’ll be on the force.”

  Dubinsky looked appalled. An expression of detached amusement settled itself on Sanders’ face. As Wilcox picked up the receiver and began to dial, the door to the inner office opened gently. “There wasn’t much in there—is this what you guys were looking for?” asked Eddy, and held up a small green notebook and a black leather briefcase in front of Paul Wilcox’s horrified eyes. A sound came out of his throat, part scream and part sob, and he flung himself out the door, slamming it in their faces.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” said Sanders. “It worked.”

  “Aren’t we going after him?” asked Dubinsky.

  “Naw. Didn’t you hear the gentleman? We don’t have any jurisdiction in this building. If he’s in the House, no one can get him for now, and if he headed out the door, someone else can pick him up.” He dialed a number. After some rapid instructions, he looked around and said, “Hey. Where’s Eddy?” The office was deserted.

  “Long gone,” said Dubinsky. “He’s probably picking up his pay as an extra waiter by now—and helping himself to dinner and someone’s diamonds at the same time.” He picked up the notebook and briefcase. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This place makes me nervous.”

  Chapter 16

  Sanders swept aside all the accumulated memos, reports, coffee cups, and general debris on his desk with his elbow and carefully set down the notebook and the slim black leather briefcase. Gently, he sprung open its two silver fastenings and raised the top. Inside lay a modest pile of photocopied legal-size documents. Dubinsky peered over his shoulder as he lifted out the first one. It was on letterhead of the Pag-Jan Construction Company, and was headed “Tender no. 107593, Ontario Central Detention Centre.” Sanders’ eyes glittered as he leafed through the pages of figures and handed it to Dubinsky. He picked up the next one. Satisfaction twitched at the corners of his mouth—Beck Construction, same project. The next was from Jamieson Construction; below that, from Del-Fram Construction. Seven in all, from some of the largest and most solidly based firms in the area. “If you owned a construction company, Dubinsky, wouldn’t you be happy if someone gave you all this material? I wonder when the deadline for tendering is. In two days, I’ll bet; just enough time for someone to adjust a few of his figures after looking at these.” Sanders put them all carefully back in the briefcase. “This will have to go to Fraud. My God.” He sounded awestruck. “That detention center is a huge project. No wonder he was a little disturbed to see us with the briefcase. Let’s have a look at the book.”

  His train of thought was interrupted by Collins bursting through the door, his normally stolid features pink with excitement. “We got him,” he announced. “There’s enough coke in that apartment to make trafficking stick tighter than. . . .” Comparisons failed him.

  “Where is he?”

  “Downstairs, with Wilson, keeping his mouth shut.” Sanders started for the door. “But that’s not all we found,” said Collins following after him. “I found a”—he pulled his notebook out—“pair of women’s lounging pyjamas, silk, purple in colour, size five. Could have belonged to the Conway woman.” He looked like a bird dog with a fat pheasant in his mouth. “They’d been worn, too. Smelled of perfume and were kind of wrinkled a bit.”

  Grant Keswick was sitting on a straight-backed chair looking coldly angry when the two men were let in to the interview room. He gave no sign of recognition or acknowledgement, but said in clear and clipped tones, “I would like to speak to my lawyer. Until then, I have nothing to say.”

  “Come off it, Keswick. You lawyer isn’t going to be able to talk away four or five thousand bucks worth of coke. Not very bright of you to leave it lying around like that. Besides, that’s not what we want to talk to you about, is it? Whose purple silk whatevers are those? Size five. Not many women around that small.”

  “Maybe not in your circles, pal, but there are in mine. I know a lot of very classy-looking ladies.” He smirked in an irritating way, and Sanders stifled a flash of anger as he recollected that Keswick probably considered Eleanor to be one of them. His voice became silky and confidential.

  “You have quite a temper, don’t you, Keswick? Probably you’d think nothing at all of bashing someone’s head in if you discovered she’d been sleeping around. You don’t look like someone who’d appreciate that sort of thing from your women. Those silk things were Jane Conway’s, weren’t they? Someone will be able to identify them, you know. She had friends.”

  “So what you if they were? We used to see a lot of each other, back before we split up. Last October. That’s a long time ago.” Keswick laughed casually, but the sweat stood out on his forehead and darkened his shirt in patches; his clothes seemed tight, barely able to contain his stocky frame.

  “Then why in hell did you get so mad at her the night before she was killed if you were all through with her? And why hang onto stuff of hers all that time? You don’t strike me as the sentimental type, Keswick. What did you do when she told you she was pregnant? Was she trying to make trouble for you? That must have upset you.” He drawled out the words.

  Keswick froze into silence. “Pregnant?” he said cautiously. “What in hell are you talking about?” Then he pulled his indignation around him again. “I have friends who might have something to say about evidence being planted in my apartment, and about harassment of people in the arts, constant harassment.” He attempted to drape his arm carelessly along the back of the chair. “You can’t hang this on me, Sanders.”

  “If you’re talking about your pal Wilcox—we’ve got him too. There are at least fifty men out there looking for him. I wouldn’t count on his support right now. He has enough troubles of his own.”

  Keswick abandoned his efforts to appear casual. “I’m not saying a word until I see my lawyer.” His mouth closed in a thin line, then he spat out, suddenly and spitefully, “and if you’re looking for someone to hang Jane’s murder on, try her husband. He had a reason.”

  Sanders shook his head gently. “I don’t think we need
go that far, Mr. Keswick. Her husband was working in a lab with ten other people while you were smashing Jane’s skull in. You should learn to control that temper of yours.” He smiled and turned to the other men in the room. “For now, you can book Mr. Keswick for trafficking, Wilson. But be sure you let him call his lawyer.”

  “Do you think we can get him for the Conway woman?” asked Dubinsky as they walked briskly back to their own corner of the building.

  “I don’t know,” said Sanders, looking gloomily at the squalor they had left behind them. “Probably not. I’m not even sure he did it.” He shook his head and reached for the briefcase, still sitting in the middle of his desk. “Has anyone checked Wilcox’s house?” he said suddenly. “We’re going to look pretty goddamn stupid if he’s at home, all quiet and cosy.”

  Dubinsky reached for the phone, and carried on a hasty muttered conversation. “Not yet. They’ve established that he’s left Queen’s Park—they think, although they’re a little worried he’s found himself a hole there somewhere. They’ve got Avenue Road pretty well covered, with all the adjacent streets, and there’s someone out at the airport by now—and the bus depot and Union Station, just in case. I said we’d send Collins over to his law office and that we’d check out his house.”

  “Did you put someone else on the sightings and reports coming in on the van?” asked Sanders suddenly.

  “Yeah,” said Dubinsky. “McNeil. It’s going to need more than one guy, though.”

  Glenn Morrison twitched back the floor-length curtains in his living room and looked carefully out at the sky. The everlasting spring twilight had finally given way to dark, or at least as much dark as one was likely to get in a fifty-mile radius of the city. Now he would be safe. There was no one to ask him where he was going. The brand on his face would disappear in the darkness. The only problem was that they were always on their guard at night. He sat and thought, drew up plans, rejected them; considered, reconsidered. It was the only way. One last successful raid and he would stop for now.