Blood Wine (3 page)

“Me too,” said Miranda.

“I'll need a blood sample and a urine specimen, then we're finished. You threw up, didn't you, but we're hoping for traces of a knock-out drug, maybe GHB or something more potent.”

“Hoping for?”

“Your alibi, love.”

The M.E. took blood and without a fanfare of modesty Miranda produced urine.

“Is that everything?” she asked, turning the vivid yellow vial over to Ellen.

“You're dehydrated, dear girl. Have lots to drink, you'll feel better.”

Miranda reached for the wall switch and turned on the heat-light with its rumbling fan, then switched off the main light, drenching the room in livid red. The exterior window had been painted over decades ago. The fires of Hell could not be more ominous, she thought. The three women whose life work was death stood perfectly still. She extinguished the red and they were again left in absolute darkness, except for the comical slit of illumination defining the bottom edge of the door.

She was more comfortable in the dark. Philip's blood on the walls, it was the neatness that bothered her. There was no blood on the floor, and there had been no blood on the floor of her bedroom. The grotesque message scrawled with deliberate precision was intentionally obscure, she was certain of that — the meaning was in the way it was done.

“Thanks,” she said.

The other two women stepped back as she pulled open the bathroom door. Morgan was standing sentinel on the other side, facing away and framed by the busy glare in her bedroom. The body was covered with a clean sheet, like a rumpled bed.

The Message

M
organ
and Miranda stood in the living room with Spivak and Eeyore Stritch. Morgan looked angry. Spivak seemed puzzled. He stared at Miranda with genuine concern, which was somewhat concealed behind his habitual scowl. His young partner seemed anxious.

“We've got a problem, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Your friend, they can't find him.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, cocking her head toward the bedroom. “You can't get more found than that.”

“Yeah, you can,” said Spivak.

“
Someone's
in there,” Morgan said.

For a desperate moment she thought it was all a mistake, that it was someone else dead in her bed.

“His name is not Philip Carter. There was no Philip Carter at Ogilthorpe and Blackbourne, they've never heard of him.”

“Morgan, what are you talking about?”

“There's no home in Oakville. No teenage daughters, no wife.”

For another weird moment, Miranda felt relieved; she would not have to bear the guilt for a widow's grief or fatherless children.

“Your friend, he doesn't seem to exist.”

“Is that an existential proclamation?”

“Listen to me. Philip Carter, his driver's licen
c
e, his health insurance card, credit cards, they're fakes.”

“No,” she snapped. “His address —”

“A Vietnamese variety store in Oakville. They met him once, he paid them, they forwarded his mail to a mailbox in Toronto.”

“But you know him, Morgan. For God's sake, Philip is Philip.”

“We never met.”

She was incredulous. Morgan was so inextricably a part of her life.

“Never?”

“You never talked about him.”

“Really!”

“Okay,” said Spivak. “Enough true confessions.” He motioned Eeyore to come closer then turned to Miranda. “Where'd you meet this guy?”

“In court.”

“Lawyer, criminal, judge?”

“I met him coming out of a washroom.”

“Janitor?”

“Lawyer.”

“Women's or men's?”

“Me, I was coming out of the women's. He was in the corridor. I walked straight into him.”

“In the courthouse?”

“Yes.”

“You were there for the Vittorio Ciccone trial?”

“I'm a witness.”

“Yeah, everyone knows you're a witness.”

“It's complicated.”

“Yeah, everything connected with Ciccone is complicated. Finding a dead guy in your bed, is that a Vittorio Ciccone complication?”

“Philip is a corporate lawyer. Was.”

“Drug lords need corporate lawyers, especially phantom corporate lawyers.”

“No, Philip didn't know him.”

“It's as dangerous to be
for
Ciccone as
against
him.”

“I'm neither.”

“You're the link between a dead guy and a guy who kills people. You ever see him practi
s
e law?”

“No. How do you watch a corporate lawyer practi
s
e law?”

Spivak smiled, and the effort made him break into a rough, rising cough. “So tell me about the wife and kids?”

“He was married.” She refused to say he was “unhappily” married. “He had two teenage daughters.”

“You've seen pictures?” Spivak asked.

“He wanted to keep that part of his life separate.”

“From?”

“From the part he shared with me.”

“Generous man. You've known him for two months?”

“Nearly.”

“Not very well.”

“Who knows anyone very well?”

“Did you kill him?”

She felt rage choke in her throat and thought she was going to vomit again.

“Lookit,” said Spivak. “Why would a stranger use your gun to kill another stranger, mutilate the corpse with your knife — M.E. says he was gutted post mortem — and then scrawl with his guts on your walls, and oh, yes, with you sleeping through everything, not a mark on you?”

Silence.

“And one more thing,” said Spivak. “There's gunpowder under your nails.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Gawd no. I'm not even taking you down for questioning. But don't leave town, as they say. You're the prime until something better turns up. Sorry about the boyfriend.”

Miranda had known Spivak for years. He wasn't a bad cop and he wouldn't get in the way while she and Morgan conducted their own shadow investigation. The kid seemed agreeable, maybe a little odd.

It was midday and they were alone. Morgan found a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the kitchen cupboard. A recent vintage, but with a fulsome aroma. He did not recognize the label; this surprised him. He poured them each a long drink, using crystal stemware he had never seen before.

Leaning side by side against the counter, they toasted in a grim salutation to the surrounding emptiness.

After a while, they toasted again.

“Here's to old what's-his-name,” said Miranda.

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “To Philip.”

“He brought this for a special occasion,” she said. She was cupping the tulip-shaped bowl of the glass in her hand. Morgan reached over, took the glass from her, then returned it so she could properly grasp only the stem.

She offered a wan smile of acquiescence. She could feel the warmth of her lover's body, his hands, his breath.

The wine was the colour of arterial blood before it congeals. She sipped but it tasted raw, although Morgan was enjoying it.

“The prints on my gun, my prints should be all over it.”

Yeah
, he thought.

“Ellen Ravenscroft, Morgan, she'd jump your bones if she could.”

“Or yours.”

“Nonsense, she's straight. She'd eat you alive.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged, gazing into the crimson depths of his glass.

“I thought I was falling in love,” she said. “God, I've been stupid.”

“Me too, sometimes. I married my biggest mistake.”

“At least you didn't kill her off.”

“Divorce; a form of manslaughter.”

“How old am I?”

“Thirty-eight. Why?”

“Thirty-seven and change.”

He said nothing.

“You'd think I'd learn, Morgan.”

“Yeah.”

“This place is a mess.”

There was a stillness about her that he could feel like a shimmering at his temples. Her hazel eyes seemed resolute, her auburn hair was mussed as if she had just made love. Her lean body torqued sensually from the hips as she surveyed her apartment.

“I don't want the ghoul brigade,” she said. “I'll do it myself.”

A loosely knit group of volunteers who had lost loved ones to murder or suicide would confront their own nightmares by turning up after the investigators were finished, if summoned, to scrub blood off floors, scrape viscera from walls, clean furniture and rugs, do whatever had to be done. Miranda did not want to deal with the goodness of strangers.

There were professional crime scene cleaners. She had worked with them. They were good, but this was private.

“Morgan.”

“Yeah?

“How come I'm alive?”

I don't know
, he thought.

“Jesus,” she said, “it's about me, isn't it? Philip was collateral damage. Oh Jesus Christ Lord God Almighty. This was a message to me.” She smiled. “Swear and a prayer,” she explained.

She looked at Morgan, a recovering Presbyterian and avowed anti-theist. It made him uneasy when she swore. He mouthed some wine and swallowed.

“Amen,” she said.

“It's not always about you.”

“Sometimes it is,” she said, then repeated: “Amen.”

The next three days went by in a blur. The minutes and hours, daylight and darkness, were undifferentiated in Miranda's mind. Morgan had taken her to his place in the Annex. Corking the Châteauneuf-du-Pape with a downward blow of his fist, he had grasped the bottle by the neck, scooped up some clothes in a bag, escorted her to the car, and driven even more carefully than usual. He was acutely aware that she disliked his driving. She always took the wheel when they were together, but this was an exception.

While she stayed with him, he slept on the sofa. Incredibly, his random collection of her clothing included changes of underwear and enough variety. But she was uncomfortable being alone in someone else's bed. She stayed for two nights and then went home because she was lonely.

Now she was gazing across the room at him in Starbucks, just down College Street from Police Headquarters. His back was to her; he was picking up a couple of cappuccinos. He turned and shambled over. She smiled. He was trying to look after her.

When the crime scene was declared open, he had gone back to her apartment and cleaned up, even scrubbed the scrawled blood from her bathroom walls.

She had been suspended with pay. He was posted to a cold case that he could work on his own, and which gave him the time to shadow Spivak and Stritch, since that was what the superintendent knew he was going to do, anyway.

“How are you making out?” he asked.

“Same as last time you saw me, eight hours ago.”

“Ten. I've got an update.…”

“On?”

“You, mostly.”

“Shoot.”

“Your prints were on the gun — which was definitely the murder weapon.”

“As expected.”

“And no one else's. That's okay, though,” he assured her. “Your gun should have been smeared with layers of your prints. But there was only one neat cluster. At least two rounds were fired. And there were powder traces under your nails.”

“We know that. I was at the range —”

“No, you weren't at the range that day. It was a couple of days before.”

“Really? You checked?” She paused, trying to sort out memory from reconstruction. “Two days before? My head's more messed up than I thought — there was only one bullet wound.…”

“Even Spivak agrees the prints were too neat.”

“So where's the other slug?”

“Good question.”

“But two rounds were fired?”

“Only one bullet was missing from the clip, but forensics are sure at least two were fired. Whoever did this was meticulous, replacing the bullet.”

“What else?”

Morgan looked into her eyes and raised his cappuccino in a gentle salute.

“The kitchen knife, it was yours, it had your prints on it — of course — but no blood on the handle, only the blade.”

“Suggesting what?”

“Well, there's more. Ellen Ravenscroft called.”

“And?”

“She says the gut wounds don't match up with the knife. It has a serrated edge. At this point it seems a red herring.”

“And? You're looking solemner and solemner. Spit it out, Morgan.”

“Well, you and Philip had sex.”

“Often.”

“That night, I mean. I wasn't asking a question.”

“And?”

“You had sex with someone else as well.”

“What?”

“Seems that way.”

“Then someone had sex
with me
, goddamn it. Who?”

He shrugged, almost apologetically.

“Oh my God, Morgan. Can they tell a sequence?”

“You mean who was first? No.”

“It had to be Philip,” she said. “Then he was killed. Then his killer … while Philip was in the same bed.” Miranda gagged but stifled the rush in her throat to retch.

“We'll get the bastard.”

Even with her gut clenched and her head reeling, Miranda acknowledged to herself that Morgan had sworn. A mild expletive, but for him an indication of formidable anger. She was glad he was on her side. Controlled rage was a powerful ally.

She reached across the table and placed a hand over his. “Morgan. Since I was drugged — they've established that, right. It was a GHB cocktail. Used for date rape — does that mean Philip had sex with me while I was unconscious as well as the other guy?”

“Miranda —”

“It's okay. And it seems less likely that his killer would … oh Jesus, it's sickening … get off in me with a bloody corpse on the bed. No, it had to be Philip offering to share me, then he took a turn on his own, then he died.”

Her eyes were glazed and her voice was tremulous, but her jaw was set firm and she looked Morgan straight in the eye as she talked. He wanted to come around and hold her, but Starbucks was a public place and intimacy was not what she needed. She needed to feel his rage as the strength of affection. She did not need pity but love.

“Miranda?”

“Yes?”

“Once we're through this —”

“There's no getting through this, there's only, you know, living with it.”

He wanted to ask her to marry him. He didn't really want to ask her to marry him. He wanted to declare he would always look after her. He knew he could not always look after her. He wanted to tear her pain out by the roots. Without hurting her. He wanted to feel better about himself for having let this happen to his partner.

“Morgan, what is it?”

She was his friend. The best thing he could do was get on with the case.

“Nothing's turned up about the man formerly known as Philip Carter,” he said. “We've checked with the Mounties, with the FBI, INTERPOL. Nobody's heard of him, there's no match for his prints. Total blank. One of over seven billion people on the planet.”

“Yeah,” said Miranda. “Not any more.”

“You okay with that?”

She almost laughed. “Well, no,” she said. “Not okay! On the other hand, maybe I am. If he wasn't dead, I'd want to kill him.”

Morgan felt restless. He wanted to be doing things, not because he gave a damn about Miranda's dead lover, whoever he was, but for Miranda herself, to get her life back so they could be partners again.