Winner's Loss

by Mel Bradshaw

  One glance at the pastel I’d taken from Moretti’s shop sufficed to show that Nora could see these two men through eyes very different from mine. She had depicted both of them, along with her husband Herman, as princes. I could choose to believe that one or both of the depictions were charitable flattery. Still, I didn’t know if I could rule out the possibility that she had actually felt some magnetism coming from one or the other of the two men — and that she had responded to it.

  My next destination was the Department of Public Works and Highways. Lou Sweet, I discovered, did not now and had never owned a car. Carl Moretti owned a 1912 Overland Model 59 Roadster, the colour listed as white. Well, you couldn’t get lighter than that. I just didn’t see how he could have driven it over to the church with one leg. Had he added some ingenious hand control to work the right pedal? Had Nora driven it for him? Neither alternative struck me as very likely. And yet the tightfisted Carl Moretti had spent money year after year keeping his registration up to date.

  I dropped in on him on my way to Christ Church Grange Park. As usual, Moretti was sorting through the items in his shop, treasures that never appeared better displayed or organized when he left them to move on to the next bin.

  “That car has been sitting on blocks since I enlisted,” he said in answer to my inquiry. As when I’d had to deal with him two days earlier, he sounded aggrieved at having to speak to a fellow member of the human race, but there was a shoulders-squared air of pride about him as well. “I pay rent on a garage just to keep it there, and I pay the registration — you bet. In case you were wondering, it’s not for sale, at any price.”

  I made him hang a closed sign on his shop and take me round to see the machine. It was as he’d described it, up on blocks, no tires on the rims, and no hand controls. He clearly kept it polished, though. The roadster’s whiteness gleamed angelically in the dingy shed. When I left Moretti, I took away the impression that this chariot was the monument to his dashing and whole-bodied youth.

  My arrival at the Christ Church rectory followed Myrtle Hutchinson’s by no more than a minute. She was still standing in the vestibule, her fall coat unbuttoned, her cloche hat in her hand, when she opened the door to my knock. The sight of me elicited a little hiccup of surprise. She clapped her free hand to the pleated front of her white blouse.

  “Are you telepathic, detective? I was just about to phone your office.”

  “You remembered the colour of the car you saw.”

  “Well, yes.” She gave me a quick smile, recovering her poise. “Come in and shut the door. Eric is sensitive to drafts.”

  I came in and shut the door. “What colour was it?”

  “Come through to the drawing room, won’t you?”

  I came through. The drawing room was for its spacious dimensions sparsely furnished. Fresh upholstery fabric in a variety of floral patterns livened up three battered armchairs and a sofa. A harmonium, a couple of Windsor chairs, and stacking tables — scattered from their nest — filled in as much of the remaining floor area as they were capable of. The walls were decorated at wide intervals with photographs of clergymen and their wives and framed reproductions of well-bred, old-country landscapes.

  Myrtle hospitably gestured me into the most comfortable-looking of the armchairs. “I’ll order tea for you if you like. Forgive me if I don’t join you. I’ve had at least a cup at every house I visited this afternoon.”

  “None for me either, thanks. And, just for the record, I don’t read minds.”

  “Then I’ll need to keep talking about tea. Excuse me a moment.”

  Myrtle went to speak to someone in the kitchen. When she returned, she pulled the door to, then sat on the sofa and leaned towards me. “I was just in the home of a young Varsity man, victim of a terrible accident. He dove into a pool where the water was too shallow, broke his neck, and is now without the use of both legs and both arms. His widowed mother is a great believer in the health-giving properties of green tea, and — although I think she realizes quadriplegia is beyond even this beverage’s power to cure — she has grown fond of the flavour and serves guests nothing else.”

  “The car was tea green.”

  “I believe it was, detective. The colour of weak green tea.”

  “The whole outside, or were the fenders — say — a different colour?”

  “No, every part of the body. When I looked into my cup, the white porcelain inside appeared just the palest shade of green, and that was the colour of the roadster Nora’s lover was driving. If it had been lettuce green, I’d have been able to tell you right away, but I simply had no word for a shade of green this light. When I tried to remember, I thought the car must have been white or grey, but somehow I knew it wasn’t.”

  I was excited, but not jumping over the moon. If Myrtle was talking straight, it wasn’t Joe Deane’s Chrysler she’d seen. On the other hand, I didn’t know anyone with a tea green roadster. I wasn’t betting any company sold cars that colour; possibly it was a custom paint job. Or had Myrtle made this car and its driver up?

  “Have you any other clue as to who this lover might be?” I asked.

  “Not a one, I’m afraid.”

  “The make of car? The man’s height? A glimpse of anything he might have been wearing — a hat, for instance?”

  “No hat. Nora was standing on the running board and leaning into the car. Her hands were on the sides of the man’s head, covering his ears, and her head hid the rest of his features. I might have caught a glimpse of the shoulder of his suit jacket — charcoal grey or black.”

  “A wisp of hair?”

  “Possibly, but I couldn’t tell you what colour.”

  “Think it over,” I suggested. “There are fewer choices than for car colours. Do you think he might have belonged to Christ Church?”

  “I don’t know, detective.” Myrtle shrugged. “And I refuse to throw around wild guesses that might hurt innocent parties.”

  “All right. Have you ever been to Nora Britton’s studio?”

  “No. I was at Carl Moretti’s shop once picking out costume jewellery for a pageant. But that was before Nora moved in upstairs.”

  “Did you or Mr. Hutchinson visit Nora on the evening of Sunday, October 9?”

  Myrtle’s long blonde eyebrows went up in surprise. “No, neither one of us. Normally I wouldn’t presume to answer for Eric, but Sunday evenings you can count on the two of us being fully occupied around the church, with lots of witnesses to tell you where we are.”

  “Were you aware of anyone’s having gone to Nora’s studio that evening? Perhaps you overheard the chance remark of a parishioner.”

  “No. I presume you think the poison was delivered to Nora that evening.”

  “How old is your husband?”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “How is his health?”

  “Good. I think he smokes too much, but he’s more vigorous than most men ten years younger. Why do you ask?”

  “Mrs. Hutchinson, the police have questioned plenty of folks since you and I first talked, and you are the only one to report that Nora Britton had a lover.”

  “I can’t help that. Do you suspect I was hallucinating?”

  “I do not.”

  “Then you suspect I’m lying. And why would I do that? Not to gratuitously blacken the reputation of a friend. Oh.”

  Myrtle dropped her eyes. Her hands, which had been folded in her lap, now were clenched. When she looked up at me at last, her cheeks were flushed.

  “You suspect I was lying to protect Eric. Would you believe me, detective, if I told you I would know if Eric were unfaithful?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I believe you would.” I had for this belief not only my estimate of Myrtle’s perceptiveness, but also Effie’s assurance that Nora would never have slept with a married man without his wife’s permission. “Was Mr. Hutchinson Nora Britton’s lover?”

  “No, he was not. Will you have to speak to Eric about this?”

  “I’ve
no plans to at present,” I said.

  I was about to thank Myrtle for her time, but decided instead to just sit quietly across from her for the minutes it took her to collect herself. Eventually, she took a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose, then gave me a smile that started small and sad, growing slowly into the full, impersonal rectory smile expected from the priest’s wife as she saw off departing visitors.

  Chapter 16

  Outside the rectory, I asked the first passerby where I’d find the nearest service station. It was a four-minute walk. The owner was able to direct me to an automotive paint shop, which gave me a folder displaying samples of available fast-drying pyroxylin colours. The closest shade to what Myrtle had described was called Whisper Green. When I started asking questions about it, the smooth-talking sharp-dresser behind the counter went to the shop area and brought out a man in goggles and paint-stained khaki overalls whom he called Sam.

  “Do you know of any cars that come straight from the factory in this colour?” I wanted to know.

  Sam, in his forties by the look of him, pulled off one leather glove and scratched his sandy moustache. He spoke with an Irish lilt, his there and the coming out dare and da.

  “Any there are would be coming from General Motors. They’re boasting how much choice they offer, compared to the competition.”

  I assumed he meant Ford, still wedded to black. “Have you ever repainted a car in Whisper Green or anything like it?”

  “See any traces on my boiler suit?” With a soft chuckle, Sam turned slowly around to allow for a thorough inspection. “That colour hasn’t been out a year,” he added. “It’s never been used in this shop to my knowledge.”

  “Has anyone bought the paint to take away?”

  I turned from Sam to the counterman, who consulted his files and told me no.

  Before leaving, I asked the two men how many car-paint competitors they could name and carried away the beginnings of a list. Before visiting any of these shops, however, I went back to the rectory to check the colour of the sample against Myrtle’s memory. When she’d recovered from her surprise at finding me back on her doorstep so soon after I’d left, she said, “Yes, that’s it — or maybe that with five per cent more white mixed in.”

  The shade was distinctive enough that all the paint shops I was able to visit in the hours before closing time were able to answer my question with certainty. Unfortunately, the answer in every case was no — they hadn’t used Whisper Green or anything like it on any vehicles of any sort. They hadn’t sold any either. I also managed to reach a General Motors dealership. They told me none of their products were in what I was starting to think of as “my colour.”

  I returned to the office tired and hungry close to eight o’clock. The official investigation into the murder of Nora Britton was twelve hours old. I hoped the rest of the team had progress to report.

  The only one of my three musketeers I found in the detective room was Rudy Crate. He was jolly and full of the fine time he’d had at Choo-Choo Mansion. Mary-Maud had served him brownies. He’d discussed with Sir Joseph the relative virtues of Constable and A.Y. Jackson as landscape painters. He’d chatted with Frieda — that is, Lady Deane — about the depiction of François Villon in The Vagabond King and the perpetual appeal of the artist/criminal. He’d discovered nothing we could use, but it didn’t matter now that Myrtle had made it clear that the light-coloured roadster she claimed to have seen was green, not cream like Sir Joe’s.

  I couldn’t think of anything further for Rudy to do at that moment and told him he could go home. He said he might as well stay a bit longer. Professor Linacre or some ichthyologist might still phone about the fish poison. While I thought this a curious display of keenness after the way he’d spent his afternoon, I told him to suit himself.

  I asked around the detective room to see if anyone had anything I could nibble on while waiting to hear from Harry and Ned. No one did. I sat at my desk and drew up a list of suspects with Herman’s name at the head. The Deane household was now in the clear. Under Herman I wrote Ernestine — but how could she, without arousing suspicion, have delivered the poisoned cookies? Nora might not resent her, but I’d had no indication that she regarded Ernestine as a friend. Finally I added Myrtle with a question mark and the possibly fictitious man in the green car.

  Twenty minutes later I was still scratching my head when Ned called from the pay phone in the lobby of his apartment building. He’d already been home and eaten some of his mother’s good meatloaf before speaking to me. I told him he’d done right and asked him not to tell me anything more about the meal unless he wanted my drool in his ear.

  Ned reported that the first fish shop he’d tried informed him that, however much of a delicacy poisonous pufferfish or fugu might be in the Orient, it was not sold in Toronto. Skeptical, he sought a second opinion, a third, and so on till he’d canvassed twenty retailers — starting with Albert Pan in Kensington Market and ending with Ye Olde Fish Shoppe in Forest Hill Village. Those listed in the directory he phoned; those without phones he visited. Ned was pressing in his inquiries. He feared that fishmongers might have one story for government agents and another for gourmets. If — as seemed reasonable — customs officials made difficulties about allowing the importation of food that might kill, smuggling or deliberate mislabelling might still make that food available for a premium under-the-counter.

  What convinced Ned in the end that no shop sold fugu flesh, legally or otherwise, was the food-preservation argument. While experiments with rapid freezing promised a brighter tomorrow, today’s freezer technology was still not good enough to bring dead fish across the Pacific to Toronto in peak condition. Simply put, any fugu you could have put on your dinner table would have been too mushy to be worth the price you’d have had to pay to get it there.

  So it was that Ned came to believe that the creature that interested him was more likely to be found in a menagerie than a food store. He contacted the Riverdale and High Park zoos. Neither had the fish; neither knew where one could be found. He visited the Walker House Aquarium attached to the Walker House Hotel at Front and York Streets. Aquarium director James Palmer had in his collection exotic goldfish, fighting fish from Siam, and a pair of piranha, but no pufferfish. He was just suggesting Ned direct his inquiries to the New York Aquarium in Lower Manhattan when an associate recalled that the owner of a private zoo had shown up last winter with a selling price for various fierce or poisonous fish, including a two-year-old female fugu. The Walker House specialized in smaller and more colourful fish, and since the curious but less decorative fugu could grow to three feet in length, the offer had been declined. The fugu and other exotic fish had subsequently been advertised for sale in the daily papers. The seller called himself Wild Bill Templeton, and kept his creatures on an acreage outside Whitby, a town forty miles east of Toronto. Ned told me he could do no more until he got authorization from Inspector Sanderson for a long-distance call.

  I undertook to speak to the inspector on Tuesday morning.

  I’d just rung off when Harry got in.

  “You should be at home changing diapers or building a playpen,” I told him. “It’s late.”

  Harry shrugged off his fall coat and grinned. “Think the old man will give me a day off after I solve this case?”

  I perched myself on the edge of Harry’s desk while he slouched in his chair. “Are you close?” I asked.

  “No further than from here to Timbuktu. First, Ernestine. The chili-chocolate mix was family lore. She later looked for it in cookbooks. Not there.”

  “So who did she tell?”

  “Maybe a few people, in idle chat. She doesn’t remember who, except — she’s unshakable on this — she never told Herman. Not that it was a big secret, but it never came up. He didn’t cook and didn’t care what he ate. She just started thinking about chili and chocolate again when Nora suggested a happy family reunion.”

  “Anything new from Elizabeth Street?


  I told Harry we now had a better idea of what shade of car we were looking for, but he had no new roadster sightings to report. In the afternoon, he’d talked to a number of Nora’s neighbours, both ones he’d missed in the morning and ones he’d spoken to before he had Herman’s picture to show. The bright boy that sold cigarettes thought he’d seen the party in the picture over two weeks earlier, which squared with Herman’s claim to have visited Nora’s studio on October 1.

  “The problem with spotting Nora’s visitors,” said Harry, “is that she shared a street door. Any friend or lover of hers might get lost among the antique fiends and bric-a-brac addicts that dropped money at Carl Moretti’s shop.”

  “What about after shop hours when Moretti locked up and went home?”

  “Well now, there I learned something interesting and pretty well useless.”

  “Spill, Harry.”

  “There’s a fella on the street that calls himself Grummy and dresses like a bookie, though he won’t admit to having any occupation. This afternoon he told me he regularly cuts down the lane behind Moretti’s and has on occasion after dark seen a rope ladder hanging from the second-floor window.”

  “Do you buy it?”

  “I didn’t until I met two more residents that claimed to have seen the same thing. So someone could have visited Nora without showing his face on the street.”

  “Or her face,” I added, although I had trouble seeing Myrtle as this someone. She’d told me she wouldn’t have ventured up the painter’s scaffold, a stable structure compared to a swinging rope ladder. “There was no ladder in the studio Saturday morning,” I told Harry. “But by then it could have been removed by Nora, her night visitor, or Lou Sweet, the oaf that broke in.”