by Mel Bradshaw
It did cross my mind that Deane might be trying to get me out of town for a few hours. While I was considering his offer, a middle-aged woman in black entered the study with a tray. She unloaded coffee pot, cups, cream, and sugar onto the library table and loaded our supper dishes in their place before exiting as quietly as she came.
“How do you take yours, Sir Joseph?” I asked.
“Black.”
I poured two cups of black coffee and handed Deane one.
“Guaranteed poison-free,” he said with a grin before taking his first sip. “I’ll have a car with a full tank of gas parked in the driveway tomorrow morning from seven o’clock on. You’ve only to ring the front doorbell and someone will hand you the key. What do you say? On second thought, don’t say anything. Sleep on it. If you don’t come by, no harm done.”
Chapter 10
I didn’t wait at Deane’s hovel for his sister to get back from the play. He wanted to make some more phone calls before “those idlers in New York” went to bed, and I had to catch Dalton Linacre in his lab before eleven. I figured I had just time to nip by City Hall and collect Ned’s report first.
I expected I’d have time to read it on the Bay streetcar, but Ned — ever the dutiful schoolboy — couldn’t seem to stop himself from writing complete sentences. As a detective he’d never have enough pockets for all his notebooks unless he mastered point form.
Albert Pan or Pun was born in Canton, China in 1875. He emigrated to Canada in 1904 upon payment of a head tax of $500. Pan owns a fish store on Baldwin Street in Kensington Market. He builds bamboo scaffolds as a sideline, mainly for construction projects in Chinatown. His chief difficulty in both businesses is finding suitable help as immigration from China is no longer permitted at any price. He began work for Nora Britton last spring. At her insistence, he took Lou Sweet as his assistant. He trained Sweet as best he could. Sweet was neither a quick study nor a hard worker. Nonetheless, Pan assured me that the scaffold as completed meets the highest standards of convenience and safety. His one reservation was the low rail along the outer edge of the top deck, but that height had been requested and insisted upon by Nora Britton herself. There was nothing he could do. He otherwise got on well with the artist, who on occasion treated him to a bowl of ice cream at the shop across from the church. He was paid for the scaffold in full and on time. He understood that Sweet had a less friendly attitude to Nora Britton, but Pan asked no questions and discouraged conversation on the subject. Sweet did tell Pan that he was not married, but needed the work because he had “family responsibilities.”
I located Lou Sweet’s dwelling on Elizabeth Street in the Ward. There I found a woman named Rose Mertens and her two children: Theo, aged six, and Louise, aged three. When I identified myself as a policeman, Rose claimed to be Lou’s wife. I explained that I was investigating Nora Britton’s death and had no interest in the morality of her living arrangements. I had to say this more than once. Gradually I coaxed her to admit that what Lou Sweet had told Pan is correct. She and Lou are not married. She says she is the widow of Hugo Mertens, Theo’s father. To support his family, Hugo took mill work up north with Chapleau Forest Industries. He got caught in a debarking machine and died there five years ago. Rose is receiving a pension under the Workman’s Compensation Act, but that payment will be cut off if she remarries.
A year after Hugo’s death, Rose began cohabiting with Lou. Their daughter Louise was born the next year. To protect her pension, Rose risked being fined or jailed as a common prostitute for living with a man not her spouse. Naturally, Rose and Lou wished to avoid any kind of publicity that might call attention to their living arrangements. Then, two years ago, the risk became even greater when the Workman’s Compensation Act was amended to discontinue benefits to widows living common law. Fearing the impoverishment of the couple and the children, Lou was furious at Nora Britton for using Rose and Lou and their house as models. His vanity was also hurt by the use of Rose and their house to represent the slums. His chief concern, however, was economic. Rose appears not to have shared his worries regarding Nora Britton. She believes police and government officials never pay attention to paintings.
A screech of brakes broke in on my reading. I looked out the streetcar window in time to see a long, black Studebaker Big Six touring car shiver to a stop behind the exit doors, just then opening to let someone off at Gerrard Street. The fabric top was down, and I had a clear view of the back and side of the driver’s head. It was familiar. Black hair brushed straight back on top, shaved at the sides. A certain tilt to the head. I jumped up and rushed forward through the streetcar till I could see his straight nose. It was the boxer who’d never had it broken — Jack Wellington — the rising star I’d watched sell out to professional gamblers just two nights ago. I wasn’t in time to get out and jump on his running board; I didn’t in any case want to miss my chance to get Linacre’s report. But you can bet I stuck my head out the window far enough to read by lamplight the six-digit number on the licence plate. I hadn’t lost my appetite for a personal word with the bum.
When I transferred to the westbound Carlton car at College Street, I finished reading Ned’s report. The final portion was an account of a visit to the police lockup. Lou had under questioning confirmed Rose’s explanation of his beef against Nora.
After hearing Lou’s account of the Stillwater holdup, Ned had also visited the cell Iva had been brought to following treatment for her gunshot wound. She expressed fears about the jail or prison farm sentence she was facing, but even more about the difficulty of supporting herself when she got out. She’d been able to type sixty words per minute, which had got her a pretty steady succession of office jobs. But the doctors hadn’t promised her right hand would ever recover enough for secretarial work, even if she could find an employer willing to hire an ex-convict. Acting Detective Cruickshank’s inclusion of these details in his report on the Nora Britton case did credit to his warm heart if not to his sense of relevancy.
Professor Linacre had hung up his worn lab coat by the time I pushed open the door to his lair in the basement of the Mining Building. I’d never seen him looking so tired. Perhaps he’d have been just as glad if I hadn’t turned up before he got away, but he gave me a decent percentage of his normal grin and sank with good grace back into his desk chair.
“Okay,” he said.
It was the first unnecessary word I could remember hearing from him. He lit a vicious-smelling cigarette and sucked in a lungful of smoke. When he’d got all the stimulus he could from it, he blew it towards the ceiling. Up till now, we’d had much speculation about the role of poison in the death of Nora Britton, but no evidence. The man I trusted to supply that evidence was about to speak.
“As for the lunch you brought me, I found no trace of toxic material in the coffee, the hermit cookies, or the chicken salad sandwich.”
“Chicken?” I said. “I thought it was fish.”
“You smelled something fishy and assumed it was the sandwich. It was the knapsack, which was covered in the same stuff your colleague brought me scrapings of. Vomit, as you suspected. But what fish it was or why it made her sick, I can’t tell.”
“Let me be sure I’ve got this straight, professor. The vomit contained no trace of any poison known to forensic science?”
“None.”
“Can we say then that the deceased must have eaten the fish, whatever kind it was, at an earlier meal and that she suffered a delayed reaction to it?”
“That’s possible. It’s also possible the fish matter was introduced into the other cookie.”
“That’s too deep for me, professor.” I hesitated to say one of us couldn’t count. “What other cookie?”
“Reflect that you couldn’t bring me all the items the deceased ate, only the three items she left a part of. I found crumbs of a second variety of cookie, and crumbs were all I found so it must have been delicious. I could just make out that it contained chocolate, but there wasn’t enough residue
for any sort of toxicological analysis. If the fish matter was introduced into this cookie, it may be that the chocolate flavour would have been strong enough to mask it.”
“So where do we go from here? I’d like to be in a position by Monday morning to tell the inspector that this is definitely a murder.”
“Find out if the woman ate fish earlier in the day. If not, she must have eaten it in the chocolate cookies. Fish matter isn’t a normal ingredient in baked goods, so its inclusion can hardly have been innocent. Meanwhile, I’ll get an ichthyologist to tell us which species are poisonous to humans, and then you coppers find out where in this town those fish can be bought, begged, or stolen.” Linacre gave his scalp a rub, completely tousling his already slightly disorganized hair. “I’d also like to get a fish expert to analyze this muck on the knapsack, but that won’t be done by Monday — or, if we have to send it away to someplace like Princeton or Harvard, by the Monday after that.”
I couldn’t think of a way to improve on Linacre’s plan of action, so I thanked him and was about to about to say good night when it occurred to me to ask whether he was taking the Carlton car westbound. He said he was. We rode together as far as Roncesvalles, where I got off and headed south. He was too exhausted to have much in the way of conversation, but he did confide that since separating from his wife he had been living in a room in the High Park area. His marriage broke up because he was never home.
I mulled that over on my way down to Queen Street West, where my own bed-sit waited emptily for me. It would seem empty only until I’d had a nightcap and dropped into dreamless sleep on my unmade bed. In my mid-thirties and never married, I still believed I’d done well in choosing to put everything into the job.
Except that this night my sleep wasn’t dreamless. And in my dreams female companionship didn’t stand as something distinct from the job. Nora Britton was both.
And large as life — which was not large at all. Rather petite and clean-edged, demure and sensuous, coolly focused and warmly tender.
Contrary to popular songs, what happens in dreams — my dreams at least — is rarely what you want. The embraces I shared with Nora, all the physical lovemaking, was an elaboration I indulged in as I was waking up. I’m not saying these fairy tales were healthy. I’d have done better to think about how I was going to get together with Ruth, a woman of flesh and blood with all of life before her. Hell, if I wanted a woman of mystery, why not Ruth? Intrigued as I was, I knew almost nothing about her, less than I now knew about Nora.
Soon, I promised myself: I’d see Ruth soon. I just had to answer to few more questions about Nora first.
I did, after all, remember something from sleep, from that place where wishful thinking doesn’t write the script. What I remember Nora conveying, with words or looks, was that she wanted the truth of her death to come out — wanted that more than she wanted her killer tried and hanged. As a cop, I didn’t see how she could have one without the other.
I pondered over eggs and toast whether I’d better stay in Toronto today and try to find out whether Nora had eaten fish six days ago. The trouble was I couldn’t think who in town would know or could give me a decent lead. On the other hand, she might have mentioned the name of a favourite restaurant to her parents or her sister. I was ready for a break with routine. Might as well take Sir Joe up on his offer of a car and head north.
The streetcars ran less frequently on Sundays, so I had many minutes to settle on what description of automobile I hoped to see in Deane’s driveway. I didn’t want a limousine, in which one man would look ridiculous unless in chauffeur’s livery. An inconspicuous sedan with lots of pep would suit me fine, although I’d never turn down a Bugatti racer.
While no Grand Prix champion, the flivver I spotted when I stepped out of Gloucester Street onto Jarvis was a heart-quickening Chrysler Imperial roadster. I bounded up Deane’s front steps two at a time. The manservant that opened the big oak door to my knock delivered the key to me with looks of envy and regret. He made it clear I should consider myself a lucky man.
“It’s only a year old, sir,” he said, “and guaranteed to run all day at eighty miles per hour with no murmur of complaint.”
“Does Sir Joseph drive this car himself?” I asked.
“Always. Only in his absence does his driver ever lay hands on it.”
It was not lost on me that Joe Deane’s personal car was cream-coloured. It also fell into place that the second last day on which Deane claimed to have seen Nora, October 5, was the same Wednesday on which Myrtle Hutchinson, the rector’s wife, reported having seen Nora kiss a man in a light-coloured roadster.
Chapter 11
There was no trick to finding Aurora: it was straight north up Yonge Street. Little traffic was circulating. From the hill down into Hogg’s Hollow on, I dodged around the lumbering trolley cars of the radial railway and stopped paying attention to speed limits.
I’d left the Chrysler’s top down, as I’d found it. The air temperature, although higher than normal for mid-October, hovered in the low fifties, so the breeze whistling around the windshield into my face had a bracing sting to it. New pavement smoothed my ride all the way up to Richmond Hill and then again beyond that dusty village past stubble fields. Some proceeds of the recent harvest seemed to have been invested in repainting the trim on the Victorian brick farmhouses; a shaft of sun broke through the clouds and gleamed off the white front doors. I nudged the speedometer needle up another ten miles per hour and let the wind howl.
The half of my mind not focused on the drive was batting around the question of whether Joe Deane and Nora Britton had been lovers. Apart from the light-coloured roadster and the coincidence of dates, the evidence was a matter of impressions. Deane had shown me that he would rather spend an evening talking about Nora with a stranger, even if the talk shed little light on how she died, than pass an evening with his wife at the theatre. Deane and Nora had a common interest in painting. Lady Deane’s interest in operetta was not shared by her husband. Then there was Nora’s nude self-portrait. Had Lady Deane seen it? Even if Deane and Nora had never been to bed together, their friendship, it seemed to me, might inspire jealousy in a neglected wife. The last thing I needed was more murder suspects, but if the inspector let me pursue this case, I was resigned to interviewing Deane’s wife and anyone that took her interests to heart. That might include her sister-in-law, who had been responsible for the food packages Nora took away from Deane’s house.
My plan was to catch the Britton family as they left Trinity Church, but the car ran away with me. In short order, Aurora cemetery loomed up on my right. I wondered if Nora’s ashes would ever find their way there. Then, also to my right, rose the war memorial — a facsimile lighthouse without any artistic rendering of warriors to stir up controversy. A mile further on, I reached the centre of the community with three-quarters of an hour in hand.
I didn’t have the Brittons’ home address, but by asking around soon found their place on Temperance Street. It was a well-kept, two-storey brick house on a wide grassy lot, with a side yard as well as front and back. A property slightly grander than its neighbours. The house faced west, away from the sun at this hour. There appeared to be a lamp on in the front room, so I thought I’d knock and see if one or more of the family had stayed home from the eleven o’clock service.
Before I made it halfway up the front walk, the door was opened by a youngish fair-haired woman in a white middy blouse and a dark skirt so long it swept the floor. Her right hand rested on the door frame. When I got closer, two more things about her struck me: first, the placement of her hand was not casual but for support and, second, she had been crying. Her brown eyes were wet and red, and the handkerchief she clutched in her left hand looked well used.
“Mr. Shenstone?” she said. “I’m Effie, Nora’s sister.”
“A pleasure, Miss Britton. Did Sir Joseph tell you to expect me?”
“I’d just put down the phone when I saw your car — his car, he
tells me. Please come in.”
She hopped back into a square hall, at the same time grabbing a worn wooden crutch she had leaned against the wall. If she had a right leg beneath her long, black skirt, plainly it was of no use to her. She turned and led the way to the right into a large living room in the front of the house.
She invited me to sit on a chesterfield with its back to the front window, while she took a wing chair opposite. Beside her stood a table holding the telephone, a lamp, and an open book lying face down. She blew her nose into her handkerchief before putting it away, then looked at me and nodded. Ready.
“What did Sir Joseph tell you about me?” I asked.
“That you’re a police detective looking into Nora’s death and that it may not have been accidental after all.” Her voice was brisk and reasonably steady.
“I take it that possibility is not new to you, Miss Britton.”
She shook her head. “Nora wasn’t clumsy. I never thought she tripped.”
I wouldn’t have said that Effie Britton bore any family resemblance to Nora, but I had to remind myself that I’d only seen one photo of the artist. All the other images I took as portraying her were ones she’d painted herself, possibly with a quart or two of self-flattery. Effie’s mouth was wider, her face longer, her hair shorter — boyishly short in fact. Her build was more masculine too: she had broad shoulders and large hands. The one thing I saw in the younger sister that I’d seen in the elder was energy.
I came to the point; I judged she would want it and could take it. “Can you think of anyone that might have wanted to kill her?”
“That I can’t.” Effie swallowed and went on. “No, Nora was the finest person that ever walked this earth. I hero-worshipped her. She was kind to everyone, kind to a fault. And so very talented. And beautiful, with a beautifully free spirit as well. And, although there’s an eight-year difference in our ages, once we were both grown-up she never made me feel like a younger sister. She treated me as a friend and an equal. She had firstrate artistic training in New York, but she admired me for having a university degree.”
