Cut Off His Tale: A Hollis Grant Mystery (21 page)

“How awful.”

“Too right. Stan went bananas. He threatened divorce, threatened to take the kids, threatened to kill Paul. It was ugly. Really, really ugly.”

“Didn't I see Stan's name in the marathon program?”

“He finished in four and a half hours.”

“Did the police talk to him about Paul?”

Denise tilted her head to one side and regarded Hollis with a quizzical half-smile. “Saying he'd kill Paul and doing it are two different things. He's verbally abusive, but he's never done anything physical.” She hunched her shoulders. “He volunteered to talk to a detective interviewing runners after the marathon. I don't know what he said, but I can't imagine he talked about the affair. Even to himself, he can barely admit it happened.”

Hollis poured herself another cup.

“He admired Paul's sermons. I think he told the detective about them. I'm sure he didn't say anything about me. I don't think he'd confess to anyone. How am I going to tell him about the will? My God, he'll have a fit.”

The two women sat silently.

“But never mind me. What about you? It must have been a terrible shock for you when you read Paul's will. And really hard for you to phone. I'm so grateful that you came to tell me.” Denise said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“It has been pretty grim. Thanks for the offer, but there's nothing you or anyone else can do. Paul was a malicious, conniving bastard, pure and simple. I only wish I could promise to keep it a secret and arrange for you to pick up the cheque at the lawyer's office.” Hollis shook her head. “But I can't—wills are probated—made a matter of public record. Because of Paul's notoriety and his murder, it'll only be a
matter of time before the will is read, maybe even reported in the paper. And such bizarre bequests will attract attention.”

Denise covered her face with her hands. “My God, what a price to pay. My kids will disown me.” She dropped her hands, rose and walked around the table where she bent, circled Hollis's shoulders with her arms and hugged her. “Thank you for warning me.”

Driving home, Hollis wondered about Stan Eakins and his temper.

Chequebooks in her bag, Rhona drove to the Gloucester branch of the Bank of Commerce, where the eager young manager, exuding fumes of Obsession, shepherded her through the thick steel doorway, the door ajar to facilitate business, and into the vault. He scanned the entries in the dog-eared log safety deposit box users signed each time they opened their boxes.

“You're right.” The manager lifted his eyes from the log. “Paul Robertson's name is here. Now for the acid test—will this key work?”

The bank's master key unlocked the first lock, and Rhona's key unlocked the second. When the chunky little door swung open, the manager slid the long steel container out of its slot and handed it to Rhona before he conducted her out of the vault and into one of three private cell-like rooms where owners emptied or added to the contents of their boxes.

Rhona raised the grey metal lid and peered inside—it was empty. Emerging from the cubicle she handed the box, the chequebook and a search warrant to the manager. “I'd like a print-out of recent activity for this box and for the account
that goes with these cheque books.”

The manager trotted off. Simpson chose one of the thinly upholstered chairs in the waiting area and considered the pamphlets shilling the bank's various services. She'd read through the info on mortgages and sat back to wonder if she and Zack might buy a place if she moved to Toronto when the manager reappeared. Simpson dropped the brochure on the pale wood table and stood up. Being short was bad enough—she hated to have anyone speak to her when she was sitting down.

“I took a quick glance, and it doesn't appear the box has been opened this year. The chequing account is in Paul Robertson's name, and there's been a great deal of activity over the last three years—regular deposits and corresponding withdrawals. The balance never increased above the initial four hundred dollars he deposited to open it—in fact, it's decreased to cover administrative charges.”

“Would you go over the listings for the past three years as well as the log of the safety deposit box? List every date when Paul Robertson used the box and fax the list to me along with a printout of the activity in the chequing account for the last year.” She handed her card to the manager. The manager promised to assign someone to work on it right away.

Driving downtown, Rhona filled the car with a fug of smoke. Paul Robertson had deviated far from his usual haunts to open this secret account—he must have had a reason. Perhaps he parked cash in the safety deposit box until he needed it for something else. And the chequing account—it appeared he was laundering money. She shook her head. This could be a wild goose chase—she had no concrete reason to think Robertson was a blackmailer. However, on the off chance he was, Rhona would obtain warrants to enable her to scrutinize withdrawals from JJ Staynor's, Tessa Uiska's and
Marcus Toberman's accounts to see if any of their withdrawals matched Robertson's deposits.

At police headquarters on the way to her own office, she stopped to check how Featherstone was making out with the list of runners. Without waiting for an invitation, she sat on the chrome and green plastic visitor's chair while Featherstone finished an ongoing phone conversation.

“We have to match every name on the list of runners with an address.” Featherstone listened. “That's your problem. You'd better figure out how to solve it because I want names, addresses and phone numbers and I want them yesterday.”

After the constable banged the phone down and shook her head, she reached for her notebook. “Anything else I should be working on?”

Rhona crossed her legs and admired the colour and workmanship of her cowboy boots. “You heard someone tried to break in to Robertson's house last night?”

The constable nodded and doodled on the pad. From where Rhona sat, it resembled a mustachioed desperado.

“And
someone
shot at his wife when she was running this morning and
someone
left what might have been a letter bomb in the front hall of the manse.”

“I heard about the shooting but not about the letter.” Featherstone jotted down a few words and enclosed the desperado behind prison bars.

“I had the bomb squad pick it up, but I feel pretty sure it wasn't a bomb.”

“Psychic power?”

“No, when I saw it, I left it alone ,not only in case it was a letter bomb, but in case we could lift fingerprints or
DNA
. It would have been in A-1 condition if Ms Grant's dog hadn't picked it up. He pranced into the kitchen and dropped the
envelope at her feet as if he was bringing her a great treasure. Obviously, since I'm here to tell you about it, it didn't explode, but it's dripping with dog saliva.”

Featherstone rocked in her swivel chair and giggled. “Like the movies. They'll be shooting a movie titled Simpson and—what's the dog's name?”

Rhona hated being the butt of a joke but recognized the humour in the situation. “MacTee. They should have named him Zamboni—he produces more drool than a rink watering machine.”

“It doesn't have the same ring to it as
Turner and Hooch
, but
Simpson and MacTee
might go somewhere.”

Rhona directed what she considered her “dagger to the heart” glare at the constable.

Featherstone's smile vanished. “Are you giving Ms Grant extra protection?”

“Not yet. If whoever shot her had wanted to kill her, it would have been easy. I think he intended to scare her. How are you coming with the list?”

“Should have it done by the end of the day. The routine stuff's finished. We've run a survey of out-of-towners. The minister from up the valley, Leach, may have had a motive, but Robertson did him dirt a long time ago, and it's hard to believe he'd nurse a grudge all these years. As far as we've been able to figure out, the other out-of-towners had no reason to kill him.” She extracted a paper from one of the tidy piles on her desk. “I have a list of runners you've talked to or still plan to interview. Tell me if I've missed anyone?”

She passed the list to Rhona, who skimmed the names. “I've talked to each one at least once. I'm assuming the killer didn't strike out of the blue, that he'd had some contact with Robertson in the last while. Each of those people connected to
him, but at the moment I'm following another tack. I have Robertson's appointment diary, and I've written down who he saw in the last couple of weeks.” Her brow wrinkled. “One thing puzzles me. If the killer's name appeared in the appointment book and he later broke into the office to locate an incriminating document, why wouldn't he have taken the diary?” She chewed absentmindedly on her lower lip. “Maybe the killer's name wasn't there, or maybe it was, but he had a legitimate reason to be there. Therefore, it wasn't necessary for him to remove the book or, maybe the b and e guy and the killer aren't one and the same.” She removed her tortoise-shell glasses, raised them to the light and cleaned them on her sleeve.

“I've followed up on Tessa Uiska, she's a physician, a surgeon actually, a friend of Hollis's and the wife of the doctor who attended the body at the race site. Her name appeared in the appointment book four times. She produced a cock and bull story about organizing a birthday party—it sounded about as true as an out-of-tune piano. I'm not satisfied. We're investigating her financial affairs but no bells and whistles.”

They winked simultaneously. As often as Rhona claimed to be a linear thinker who operated strictly according to the rulebook, both women knew she never discounted intuition.

In her own office, Rhona picked up her pen, a white ballpoint advertising Richardson's Towing Service, and phoned the lab about the brown envelope. The technician informed her the envelope held a single sheet of paper with the message, “Tell me you'll shut up or I'll kill you.” No subtlety there. Other than the obvious, what could she surmise from the message? Probably the killer wasn't a hundred per cent sure of Hollis's ability to identify him or her or he would have confronted her directly. He was fishing. If Hollis knew who he was, she'd contact him: if she didn't, he'd
relax. Rhona suspected the message would be meaningless to Hollis, whose repeated assertion that she didn't have a clue about the killer's identity, or about the information he thought she had, rang true with Rhona.

Attending to the items in her in-basket came next. The top document referred to Staynor. Eleven years earlier, a court in Waterloo County had convicted Staynor of assault and sentenced him to community service. Because it had happened before computerization, there would be a delay while court officials retrieved the dead file.

A man expertly knifed, and she had two prime suspects with motive, means and expertise. All she had to do was prove her case.

Friday morning, when the first twittering birds woke Hollis at five thirty, she felt compelled to say a private goodbye to Paul. Despite what she'd found out about him, he had been part of her life for three years, and it was time to close the chapter, no matter how painful it had been. The strength of this compulsion shocked her, but she accepted it and realized she had to follow form to banish future regrets. She searched through the writings of the disciples of the Buddha until she located the perfect passages, marked them and prepared for the ceremony.

She ignored the aches and pains, the reminders of her brush with the gunman and the tractor-trailer. Instead, she removed her jewellery, clipped her nails and scrubbed herself clean before she considered her closet.

Depending on your culture, either black or white represented mourning. To please his gods and hers, she chose black silk pants, a black lace camisole and a Nehru-style cream jacquard silk jacket.

Properly prepared, she lit incense and candles and settled in the lotus position on a purple silk cushion in the corner of her bedroom she'd set aside for meditation. She concentrated on her breathing, centred herself and allowed her mind to quiet. Thinking of how life might have been, she mourned for Paul and for herself. She confronted her pity, her rage at him for forcing the killer to believe murder was his only option, and
her fear for her own life.

After reading several passages relating to death and to life, she ended her ceremony with a reading from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead:
“Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns . . . Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home.”

When she'd finished, she quietly extinguished the incense and candles. A feeling of peace flowed through her body.

The ring of the doorbell startled her and set her heart thumping; however, almost immediately, she realized Elsie, reliable, coffee-loving Elsie, had arrived.