by Medora Sale
Less than an hour later Sanders walked into the room where he had spent so much time the night before getting so little out of a stony-faced Paul Wilcox. The intervening time had not served to wipe the stubborn glare from his eyes or the taut control from his jaw. Sanders smiled pleasantly at him and sat down. “I’m not going to bore you any more about that little matter of the tenders, Mr. Wilcox. We’ll leave our people in Fraud to deal with that. It’s not in my line of competence anyway. But I do have something here that I’d like to discuss with you.” And from his pocket he withdrew a small bundle of letters and spread them on the table in front of him. “They’re not all here, of course. I thought we could just go over some of the more interesting ones.” Wilcox stared incredulously at the paper laid out in front of him. His face whitened and then turned gray with shock; the smooth tight muscles under his cheeks and jaw spread and sagged, making his stern profile puffy and aged.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “She told me she’d burned them—all of them. She promised.” His face fell forward into his hands and he began to cry, with deep racking sobs of exhaustion and despair.
“Paul McInnes Wilcox,” said Sanders, his voice almost lost in the tumultuous hysterical weeping of the man he addressed, “I charge you with the murder of Jane Annette Conway.”
Eleanor walked into the Indonesian restaurant and looked around. There he was, sitting over by the wall, his back to her, reading a paperback. “Hi,” she said nervously, and sat down. “How do you like it?” She gave her head a funny little shake. “He said it was the best he could do without shaving my head. I don’t think he believed my story.” She grinned. “He seemed to think I had a very kinky boyfriend.”
Sanders looked at her critically. Her inch-long hair curled tightly all over her head. “I like it,” he said. “It looks good on you. Which is a damned good thing, because I’d be in real trouble if it didn’t.”
“You said you talked to the guys who did it?”
“Oh no. The guys who did it are back in Detroit or Montreal or wherever by now, I imagine. They were probably here to look after something else, and came in useful picking you up. I got a message from the guy who ordered it done.”
“Who is he?”
“How should I know?” Sanders laughed. “If I knew who he was, I’d be a hell of a lot more famous, or at least richer, than I am.” He stopped to order two bottles of German beer. “No. His communications are anonymous.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. Just that he was getting out of my life again—actually, our life. He’s lost interest in Wilcox and friends. That’s one more thing we don’t have to worry about right now.”
“Oh, sure,” complained Eleanor. “You weren’t lying on that cold hard floor for hours. And you don’t look like a French collaborator after the war right now, either.”
“Come on,” said Sanders. “Where’s your adventurous spirit? Besides, it’s cute and fluffy-looking. And anyway, when I saw that envelope full of hair, I was expecting much worse.”
“Where is my hair, anyway?”
“Tucked away safely. It’s evidence.”
“Sure. A trophy, you mean.”
“That too. Let’s order. Can you work your way through a Rijstaffel?”
Eleanor finally put down her knife and fork with a contented sigh, and then looked at the scraps remaining on the dishes arranged on the hot plate in front of them. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t eat another green bean right now. Although I could choke down another beer if one were put in front of me.” She pushed her plate to one side and leaned comfortably on the table. “You know, I find it hard to believe that Grant Keswick would kill a woman in cold blood like that. People really surprise you sometimes.”
“He didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Kill Jane Conway in cold blood—or even in hot blood, as far as that goes. His vices don’t seem to run to murder.”
“Then why do you have him locked up for it?” Eleanor shook her head impatiently. “And if he didn’t do it, then who did?”
“Well, actually, at the moment he’s locked up for trafficking, but he’ll probably be out on bail by tomorrow. And once we got into Jane Conway’s safety deposit box, it wasn’t too difficult to work out. Paul Wilcox had been her lover for some time, and he’s one of those guys who have a compulsion to commit themselves to paper when they’re in love. Surprising how many people are like that. Anyway, we have a small bundle of tender little notes that she carefully kept together. He tells his ‘darling Jane’ several times that his life would be perfect if only they could get married, but that he knows she understands that his career would be ruined if he tried to divorce his wife—who isn’t an understanding sort of woman, apparently. In one he explains to her that she will definitely have to get rid of the baby, and if she doesn’t feel like having it done here, he’ll pay for a fancy clinic somewhere else. Obviously nothing was too good for her.”
“Except marriage.”
“Exactly. But you can tell from her correspondence with her lawyer that she was hell-bent on divorce because she was planning on marrying again. It looks as if she kept those pictures and letters to blackmail Wilcox into marrying her.” He gazed deeply into the newly arrived beer for a moment. “It was obviously a mistake on her part.”
“It’s a damn good thing for Grant that she kept those letters and that you found them. My God, imagine if they still hanged them here!”
“I was never entirely happy about Keswick as anything but a pusher. I just couldn’t come up with a mental picture of him actually doing it. I mean, here’s a girl, in top physical condition—granted that she’s pregnant, of course—who runs miles every week and gets killed in daylight on a public running path, potentially in full view of anyone coming along. How does an actor who boozes and God-knows-what-else catch her?”
“Easy. He waits for her and grabs her. He’s maybe in lousy shape, but he’s very strong.” Eleanor shivered. She remembered that rock-hard arm steering her across the floor at the party.
“Uh uh. How does he know where she runs, when she’s coming along, and that someone else isn’t going to be running by at just the moment she appears? It was sitting at the back of my mind, ever since I decided the rapist didn’t get her, that it had to be someone she went running with. And her husband had one hell of an unshakable alibi. And then Mrs. Wilcox talks about her husband coming in at breakfast time all sweaty from his run—although how she knew is beyond me, since she hasn’t been up before ten in years. When I woke up the next morning it clicked. Keswick’s apartment doesn’t even have a pair of sneakers or sweaty shorts in it—but Wilcox’s laundry smells like a locker room after a soccer game. He admitted it; I don’t know if he’ll keep on admitting it once he discusses it all with his lawyer, but I don’t think he’s the type that stands up well when he feels guilty.”
“What’s going to happen to the others? The ones who kidnapped Amanda?”
“Not all that much—it’s going to be almost impossible to make kidnapping stick under the circumstances, and all her injuries were caused by her falling over the edge of the ravine when she ran away. Gruber’s going on fast and furious about drug dealing to get himself out of the soup, so that’s what the Crown is going for. I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the expression on her face, “but really you don’t want to put Amanda through a court case as well. They’ll get a few years.”
“And what’s going to happen to the guy that killed all those girls? After all those months of being terrified of him, it seems impossible that he’s actually been caught. Where is he?”
“In the hospital. He’s suffering from a concussion and a few broken bones, I guess, but he’s babbling away about his mission, and failed tactics, and that sort of thing. He seems to think he’s in some sort of commando unit. He’ll never even see a courtroom. He’s really out of it.” Sanders pi
cked up his glass. He had been profoundly shaken by those honest blue eyes and his earnest explanations. “They’ll put him away somewhere until he pulls out of it or is just too old to do any more damage.”
“Horrible,” said Eleanor. “Was he married?”
“Yes. And his wife is pregnant.” Sanders shook his head dubiously. “She doesn’t seem very unhappy, though, according to Dubinsky. Once she realized she would never have to see him again, that is. She has a good job, and she’s clever. Ed liked her. He figures maybe she already has someone else in mind—but he has a very suspicious mind. She said when we were through with the van we could give it back to the dealer or drive it off a cliff—as long as she never had to look at it again. She sounds like a gutsy sort of girl. But he said he never wants to look at anything as disgusting as that van again.”
“So all these people get off practically scot-free—with deals and pleas of insanity. I don’t like it.”
“Not really. Morrison will be locked away for years, and who are the others? A two-bit hood, a coked-up actor, and a stupid little cop. We got Wilcox, and I’ve got ten days off coming to me. Life looks pretty good really.” He stood up and pulled out her chair. “Come on, let’s start my vacation right now,” he said, dropping a kiss on her short, tangled curls.
About the Author
Medora Sale is the author of the acclaimed John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries mystery series, set in contemporary Toronto, and under the name Caroline Roe, of The Isaac Chronicles, a series of historical mysteries. Born in Windsor, Ontario, Sale’s interest in criminal justice was roused by her father, a lawyer and engineer involved in weaponry and criminal justice, who served as an official in the court system. Sale is a graduate of the Centre for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto, is a past president of Sisters in Crime and Crime Writers of Canada, and won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel for Murder on the Run, the first title in the John Sanders/Harriet Jeffries mystery series.
Copyright
Murder on the Run © 1986 Medora Sale
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EPub Edition March 2015 ISBN: 9781443443746
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published by Paperjacks in 1986. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in this ePub edition in 2015.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are use fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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