by Medora Sale
The door opened before she put her key in the lock, and she jumped back, startled. “You sure take a helluva lot of gear with you when you go to lunch, don’t you?” said Sanders.
“I haven’t been to lunch,” she said coldly. “I’ve been to Orillia.”
“Orillia! What in hell were you doing there?” he asked. “And you could have told me you were going. I’ve been killing myself trying to find you.”
“Do you mind if we hold this conversation inside?” she asked, making a futile attempt to push by him.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, and reached down to pick up her overnight bag and camera case. She followed with knapsack, tripod, lens case, and cooler.
“Get me a beer,” she said, relenting slightly, and headed into the bathroom, “and then I’ll tell you all about it. It’s very mean and petty. Not the kind of thing you’d want to tell someone whose opinion of you means anything.”
“Well, there you have it,” said Harriet, settling herself a few minutes later into a corner of the couch with a glass of beer and some crackers. “I took off because I couldn’t stand giving any more help and comfort to someone who really needs it. I told you it was mean and petty.”
“But why you?” asked Sanders. “That’s what I can’t understand. I would have thought you’d be the last person in the world she’d go to for help or advice.”
“What in hell do you mean by that?” asked Harriet, affronted. “Oh, I see. You mean, because of you. Us. Well, I don’t think she actually realizes that I . . . that we . . . are whatever we are,” she finished lamely. “I don’t believe I ever mentioned it. After all, she’s only really interested in her own problems at the moment. She never asked me about mine. And if you think about it, the only time she’s seen us together we didn’t exactly fly into each other’s arms, you know.”
“Typical,” muttered Sanders, ignoring the last comment. “Selfish, spoiled brat. So you decided to take off.”
Harriet nodded. “It was very last minute. I just bolted without telling anyone.”
“And without closing your door,” said Sanders. He had walked around behind the couch and was staring out at the deck as he spoke. “I hate to keep preaching at you, but for chrissake, Harriet,” he said, and turned back to the room, “you do take awful chances.”
Harriet stopped herself in the middle of a slow stretch. “What do you mean? I checked that door as I was leaving. I always do. It was locked.” She dug her back into a pillow propped against the armrest of the couch and drew her knees up to her chest, resting her chin on them and looking sideways over at Sanders. “And you can’t resist preaching. It’s part of the very fabric of your soul.” She tossed that off with a fleeting grin. “Anyway, did you really find it open?”
He nodded.
“Damn. I wondered how you managed to get in, but it didn’t seem tactful to ask.” She frowned, rescued her drink from the floor, and took a sip. “Must have been the landlord,” she said at last. “He comes in every once in a while, and he’s careless as hell. If you look around, you’ll probably find a greasy tap he tried to fix, or something like that. And he’ll turn up tonight to tell me all about it. He’s not a great plumber, but he’s a great explainer. He’s the reason I have a chain for the door.” She pulled her legs up closer to her. “And would you stop looming around all over the place? Come and sit down.”
Sanders looked down at his long legs as if he’d never noticed them before. “Looming?” he said, and walked over to the couch. He threw himself down on it, head back, legs straight out in front, and yawned. “Has he done this before?”
“Mmm,” said Harriet. “But he’s stopped trying it while I’m home. In my bleakest moments I have an awful feeling he creeps around looking for love letters or pawing through my underwear or something like that. But he’s probably just checking that my housekeeping is up to standard. I must speak to him about the door, though. That really is too much.” She bent forward and stretched an arm along the back of the couch. “Anyway, what’s wrong with you? Feeling sick?”
Her hair swung forward and brushed against his hand in thousands of searing fiery sparks. He held himself very still. “No,” he said at last.
She pulled her head back. “I see. Then I suppose that look on your face means you’re angry,” she snapped. “Furious because I went off to work without asking permission, is that it? And I’m not supposed to do that. Would you call and ask me if you could go off and poke around looking for an ax murderer?” The words crackled with anger.
“It’s not that . . .” he started.
“Well, then, what in hell is it?”
“It was the—” He stopped, unable to say it, acutely conscious that Harriet’s body had stiffened with resentment beside him. “It was the—” Suddenly he started to laugh, deep wrenching gasps of laughter.
“What in the name of God—” Harriet started to speak and stopped again, looking at him in amazement.
He took a deep breath and tried again. “It was the answering machine,” he said finally.
“The answering machine,” said Harriet, completely mystified.
“That goddamn message on your answering machine,” he said, still laughing. “You have to change it. It’s too damn cute, and there’s nothing worse than cute when you’re in a rage. And I was in a rage.” She stared at him, and he began to laugh again. “Oh, Harriet,” he said, reaching for her and pulling her forward onto her knees beside him. “I am so goddamn glad to see you again.” He put a hand through her hair, drew her close, kissed her, and then cradled her face in his shoulder. “How in hell do we get into these ridiculous arguments?”
“They’re always your fault, you know,” she murmured, and twisted herself gently sideways until she was in his lap.
His hands slipped under her shirt and ran over the soft skin of her breasts, her shoulders, and down her back; she pressed herself up against him with an urgency that twisted his gut and dizzied him. He pulled back and looked at her, touching a finger to her lips as they parted in the beginnings of a question. “Shh,” he said. “Is the chain on the door?”
“I’ll check on the way to the bedroom,” she answered, her voice growing hoarse and faint.
Veronika stood on the broad pavement where the Royal Ontario Museum rose like a vaguely Romanesque fortress and looked around for Harriet. All around her there was a sense of things closing down. The last orange school bus was pulling away from the curb, and the sellers of hot chestnuts and popcorn and small toys on sticks were rearranging their wares, preparing to pack up for the day. She hesitated. Harriet was probably waiting for her inside; there was little point in standing out here. She moved cautiously in her slippery new shoes up the wide stone steps and into the vast lobby.
She looked around. A couple of security guards were chatting near the admissions booth; two women with a scholarly air strolled past her up the main staircase. No Harriet. She paid her admission fee and wandered into the museum shop to pass the time. Stationing herself in the midst of a collection of terra-cotta reproductions—horses, amphorae, odd-looking beasts and birds—she began to examine each one, methodically checking the descriptions, reading the prices, from time to time looking up through the glass walls in the direction of the admissions booth.
Harriet lay sprawled on her stomach, her head perched comfortably on Sanders’s shoulder, one leg tossed over his. “If you’re not careful,” she said, “I could go to sleep like this.”
He lifted her hair out of her eyes and tossed it back, then patted her affectionately on the hip. “I should be at work,” he said. “I have no reason at all for being here. It’s not even my lunch hour.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“Not even that,” he said, running his index finger down her backbone for the pleasure of feeling her writhe sleepily against his naked side. “And they can bloody well get on without me.”
Th
e telephone rang. “So that isn’t for you?” asked Harriet.
He reached over for it. “Leave it,” she said, touching his arm. “The machine is still on. We don’t have to answer it.”
“The hell it is,” he said. “Your machine answers on the third ring. I should know. I’ve listened to it often enough for the past two days.”
“Hell,” said Harriet, struggling up to a sitting position. “You’re right.” She reached over and snatched up the receiver, trailing the cold cord over Sanders’s chest. She listened for the space of five seconds and snarled, “No.” She handed him the receiver and curled up beside him.
“Who was that? Or is it confidential?” he asked, and winced at the hurt vibrating ever so slightly in his words.
“Very confidential,” said Harriet, allowing her voice to drop five tones. “I have this lover,” she said. “A girl named Sheila. When she calls, she asks me if I need a new furnace, and if I say no, then— Hey!”
Sanders had grabbed his pillow and was waving it menacingly over her head. “You can be the most irritating, supercilious—”
“My, my, Officer. Such big words.” She threw herself up against him and wrapped her arms and legs around him. “I’m cold,” she complained. “You have allowed the temperature of the room to drop.”
“And at least Sheila—”
“—would have brought a new furnace over. Anyway, there must be hot water. I’d better take a shower,” added Harriet. “Or you’ll never get back to work. Come and soap my back.”
Don Walker slouched in his chair in the interrogation room and maintained a stubborn silence. He had looked up briefly when his lawyer entered the room; but Charlie Mitchell’s arrival did nothing to loosen his tongue. It just made him look desperately in Mitchell’s direction before refusing to answer. Charlie, meanwhile, ignored his client; he yawned and listened to the questions posed first by Volchek and then, fifteen or twenty minutes later, by Dubinsky, who had also wandered into the room.
Finally, Mitchell raised a hand to stop the questioning, yawned again, and spoke in bored tones: “Could I have a few minutes with my client? I don’t think he’s quite grasped the situation.”
“Sure,” said Dubinsky. “Be our guest. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”
It was more a lecture than a conference. Charlie Mitchell’s sibilant hiss poured into his client’s ear without interruption for ten minutes. From time to time, Walker would nod in miserable agreement and then hunch farther down in his chair. By the time Charlie was finished, Walker seemed to have lost at least half his substance and to be in danger of collapsing into himself, melting into a gray puddle on the chair.
“My client,” said Charlie at last, “has one or two things to say that could be of interest to you. But he would like to know first if the Crown is willing to take his helpfulness into consideration when it comes to the laying of charges or the drafting of a sentencing report.”
“Just a minute,” said Volchek, and disappeared. The men left in the room sat or stood and stared everywhere but at each other until he finally returned. “Crown wants to know are we talking a straight ‘guilty’ plea on all counts?”
“Could be,” said Mitchell, calmly ignoring his client’s whisper of protest.
“You’ve got it. Degree of mitigation depends on degree of helpfulness.”
“What does that mean?” asked Walker suspiciously.
“The more you talk, the less you get,” said his lawyer. “So let’s get going. With luck you can talk it down to two years less a day. Otherwise . . .”
“Uh, yeah,” said Walker. “So, what do you guys want to know?”
“Let’s start with the robberies,” prompted Volchek. “And we can go on from there.”
Don rearranged his rodent-like features into an expression of injured innocence and produced his formal disavowal of responsibility. “Yeah, well, I just followed along, like. It wasn’t my idea.”
“But they couldn’t have done them without you, could they, Don?” said Volchek in a silky tone. “You were the one who knew how to get through the security systems.”
“Uh, yeah, maybe. See, when you’re installing a system, it really costs to make it break-in proof. Like in a house, I mean. With all kinds of windows in stupid places and crap like that. So when someone says to me that no one’s gonna try to get in through that little window over the garage, say, it’s too small, and it’s going to cost a lot more to take the wiring over there, I say okay, and we don’t do it, and then we use that window to get in. We’re all pretty skinny guys. Then maybe we turn off the system and break a window somewhere else so it looks like they forgot to turn the alarm on. You’d be surprised how many people forget to turn on their alarms, anyway.” Don was beginning to expand as he worked his way into his narrative. “Rich, stupid assholes.”
“What about the house on Rosefall Road?”
“Oh, them,” he said dismissively. “They had the whole house done. A fucking cat couldn’t have got in there. They had a lot of valuable stuff, I guess. I told those guys not to try that house,” he added with an air of righteousness. “And I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I wasn’t in on all the jobs, you know. I might’ve told them how to get in and stuff like that, but I wasn’t there.” Little beads of sweat were beginning to form on his temples and across his hairline.
“So who ran things if it wasn’t you?” asked Volchek.
“It sure as hell wasn’t me,” said Walker with too much emphasis. “It was the buru.”
“The what?” said Dubinsky, who was taking rapid notes as Walker spoke.
“The buru. It means the boss. In their language. They all called him that.”
“How do you spell that?” asked Dubinsky. “Buru.” Walker shrugged his shoulders. Spelling wasn’t part of his bargain with the Crown. “And what language are we talking about anyway?”
“Oh . . . Basque,” said Walker. “They all spoke Basque.”
“What’s that?” asked Dubinsky, looking around.
The various police officers in the room looked at each other. “‘It’s kind of like Spanish, I think,” said Volchek, finally, with more goodwill than accuracy.
“Yeah, kind of,” said Walker. “That’s where they’re from. Spain. Anyway, the buru—he’s this kid, really smart kid. Reads all the time. Philosophy and stuff like that. He figured out what to do. And when. And he knew the guy who fenced it all for us.”
“And who’s that, Walker?” asked Volchek softly. “Where did you get rid of it all? We were wondering about that. And we were wondering just where we could find it, too. It’s gonna make things a lot easier on you when we find all the goods.”
A line of sweat trickled down the side of Walker’s face. “I don’t know what happened to it.” Real anguish shook his voice. “We took it to the buru, and he stored it at this house he had until he could get to the fence. And I never knew where the house was, so there’s no use asking me,” he added vehemently. “I was only inside it once, when we had to pick up a vanload of stuff, and Carlos and me, we were riding in the back of the van and never saw where we were going. And it was dark out. But it was a really big, new-looking house, like in Thornhill or Aurora. Places like that. You could hear all these animals around and stuff. It was in the country, sort of. That’s all I know about it.” More sweat gathered on his forehead. “Then he got rid of it in New York, or at least in the States somewhere. I think New York. But listen, I never even saw the guy.”
“And does the buru, the boss, have a name?”
“Not that I know,” said Walker. “No one ever said his name.”
“How about an address?”
Walker shrugged.
“So,” said Dubinsky, “who shot Constable Underhill? You, Walker?”
“Listen, I never killed no one.” His hand jerked spasmodically, and he grasped it tightly with
the other one. “Especially not a cop. You gotta be crazy to do that. I wasn’t even there that night. I was working. I told you, I never liked that house. I wouldn’t have gone if I could. You guys already asked me about that weeks ago. And you checked it out. You go look at your records.” His voice began to rise in pitch, and he paused to pull himself back in control. “I was working. Carlos would’ve done that. He’s crazy. Real crazy. I dunno, I think he saw too many Rambo movies or something. He can’t keep his hands off of a gun. But I dunno who did it, because when they were talking about it, it was in goddamn Basque, and I never knew what they were saying. But it must have been Carlos. It can’t have been Manu. Jesus, he’s so scared, if he saw a gun, he’d piss himself.” Walker paused uneasily for a moment as he remembered Manu’s knife, but he shoved the humiliating picture back into the deepest recesses of his brain. “It must have been Carlos.”
“And Mrs. Wilkinson?”
“I wasn’t there neither. You guys checked me out on that one, too. I was clean. I was in on a game that went on all night.”
“So where did you get her ring, Walker? Someone mail it to you?”
There was a panic-stricken pause. “Manu took it,” he blurted finally. “And asked me to raise money on it. He thought he’d make people too suspicious. With him having an accent, you know.”
“So tell us about this, uh, Manny. Is that his name?” said Dubinsky.
“Yeah. Something like that. He’s a Basque. Real patriotic,” he added, remembering the knife once more. “He’s kinda tall, skinny, not real dark, but he’s got this long black hair. And a mustache. One of those little ones. And he’s twitchy as hell.”
“And Carlos? What does he look like?”
“I dunno. Nothing special. He’s shorter than Manu. And he’s got black hair. And a tan. I guess he’s about thirty, maybe.” Walker was beginning to sweat profusely.
