Death of a Sunday Writer (4 page)

By the time she had finished looking around, she was hungry, and she walked back down to Bloor Street where she had noticed on some of the side streets people sitting outside, eating at not-very-expensive looking cafés, the sort of places where she could have some supper and watch the people on the street. She found a place in the next block which had an awning over the sidewalk and took a table. Although Kingston was only two hundred and thirty-five kilometres away, she had hardly visited Toronto for the last fifteen years because Geoffrey could not see the point. Now, sitting out on the sidewalk eating shepherd's pie washed down with a glass of wine made her feel that she might be anywhere. Amsterdam, perhaps, or Malmo.

That night, in her hotel room, she set about listing the errands for the next day. She still had to pick up Trimble's personal effects from the morgue. That, disposing of the office and apartment furnishings, and seeing Buncombe for the last time should do it. Her enthusiasm for her little outing was ebbing. Eating supper outside had been the high point of the day; being alone in a small cheap hotel room in downtown Toronto was less fun than she had thought it might be. After supper, she had driven down to her hotel and gone for a walk. She had a glass of wine in a bar on Front Street, where the thumping music and bad light had made it impossible to read her book, and now she wanted to talk to somebody, to be among familiar surroundings, at home in Longborough.

She found herself reminded of those first bad days after she had left her husband, and felt a mild panic. She was confused, now, because she thought she was well past the panic stage. She felt sufficiently free of Geoffrey that she had even told him where she lived in Longborough,
and he had visited her several times, always hoping she would be ready to return to him, but each time he looked a little stranger, more unfamiliar. Inevitably, then, she had progressed from feeling secure to feeling restless, as if life in Longborough was not the end after all, but the beginning of the road outside the prison gates. And yet, now, on her first outing to Toronto, she was scared again, having to remind herself that the first day of anything was always like this.

And then she remembered that The Trog was coming the following night. He had called the day before, from Bagdhad, it sounded like, judging from the background noise, and the idea of him cheered her up enough to send her to sleep.

The next morning the city looked friendlier, and she had a good poke around the Market area, a much-renovated part of downtown that smelled of French coffee and hot bread at that time the morning. (She chose the Market café for her own breakfast, though, because it looked like a Longborough diner and she wanted a bacon sandwich.) She window-shopped for an hour and, by the time she was ready to go back to Trimble's office, felt altogether better about her expedition and reluctant to abandon it so soon.

Her landlord was waiting for her at the office. She had the impression that Peter Tse spent most of his time gossiping around his building, but at the same time she was very glad to see him.

“You had a visitor,” he said, from the doorway, before she had switched on the light. “I told him to come back.”

“Did he say who he was?”

“No.”

“Did he ask for me or David?”

“He said anybody would do. He asked if you would be around today.”

“Did he look like a bad man?”

Tse grinned. “No. Maybe a little bit.”

“When's he coming back?”

“Eleven o'clock.”

She looked at her watch. It was ten-fifteen. “I'll wait here, then. I still have a few things to do here. Don't go far away, will you?'”

“I'll be along the corridor. You want to eat with me again? I'll pick you up at twelve.”

Caution of a lifetime dictated no, thank you, and then she remembered how wrong she had been about Tse's motives for mentioning the fifty dollars he was owed by her cousin. “All right. My turn to pay.”

“I don't care. What's your name? Your first name.”

“Lucy.”

He tasted the word. “Lucy. I'll call you that. You call me Peter. You can't pronounce my last name, anyway. The way you say it, it sounds like somebody else. Peter. Not Pete. Okay?” He flashed his teeth and went back to his own office.

Again, Lucy wondered whether a bowl of vegetable soup and the use of her first name added up to a pass in Chinese, and she looked at herself in the huge mirror that stood near the back wall and told herself not to be silly. Just to be thinking in these terms made her feel ridiculous, but she was a long way from Longborough and she didn't want to make a fool of herself or reveal the various kinds of naiveté that she was feeling.

She was interrupted in the process of trying to get comfortable in her situation by a knock on the door. Immediately after the knock, the door opened and a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants entered and sat down. Before she could stop him he had taken an envelope out of his shirt pocket and spread three pictures on the desk, moving aside the bric-a-brac to make room.

“This is the man my wife called about. We want to know where he is, if he's safe.” He looked hard at her. “My wife made an appointment with Mr. Trimble. Is he in? You know about this?”

“Mr. Trimble is no longer in business. He's dead. I'm his cousin.”

“You his partner?”

“No, the business is closed. I'm just clearing out the office.”

“I made an appointment.” He stared at her aggressively. Eventually, he heard what Lucy had said. He gathered up the pictures. “I'll have to go somewhere else, I guess. Shit.”

“Have you lost someone?”

“You could call it that. My son. He's disappeared. Over a week ago. Personally, I'm glad. I've been trying to get him out of the house for ten years. He's thirty-three. But my wife is worried, so I'd like to find him, so I can have some peace.” He considered what he had said. “He's not
my
son. This is my second wife; he moved in right after we married. He lives in the basement, breeds tropical fish. We came home from a movie last Monday and he was gone. Took his favourite fish with him, thank Christ. I told my wife, if he's taken the fish then he hasn't been kidnapped. Nobody's going to take a tank full of goddam
guppies, are they? No kidnapper, I mean. But she wants to know he's all right.”

“I can't help you, I'm afraid. If you want a detective agency, try the Yellow Pages. Maybe you said something to offend him.”

“Yeah? I wish I knew what. I'd make a sign and hang it out the front window.”

Lucy wondered how many more like him might appear. It was a long way from her first fantasy about Trimble's world. No distraught, beautiful molls, pleading for help. No man with blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, gasping the two words that meant everything before he died in the doorway. No foreigner with the Luger and the thick accent. She knew why, of course, for none of these characters had appeared even in Lucy's fiction for at least twenty years. As she had known before she had inherited her cousin's business, real private detectives deal with shop-lifters, not assassins. Searching for a missing tropical-fish fancier was probably typical. And yet.

She turned to the computer. Peter Tse had said that this was probably where Trimble had stored his recent records, and she set about retrieving them. She had been trained by the library in the elements of WordPerfect and she had no trouble calling up the files. Trimble had not developed many.

The first was labelled NEWCL, which she guessed correctly meant new clients. Tse was right about the
slowness of Trimble's detective business. In the last six months, there appeared to have been four new clients — and none of their cases looked interesting.

All except one were what Trimble called “surveillance” — watching homes to see who came out and went in over a given period of time. Each ended with a dull little summary, a report, which Trimble presumably printed to give to the client along with his bill. There was no mention of money received, and Lucy suspected that Trimble was not in the habit of keeping accurate records of untraceable income, fees paid in cash. The exception to the surveillance cases was a missing persons' case. Trimble had apparently found the person, a runaway girl, in twenty-four hours by going down to a young people's shelter on Yonge Street.

Watching for adulterers and looking for strays. It didn't seem very difficult. What about someone who had been missing for a year? Or twenty? What if someone was trying to trace a relative, someone who emigrated from Scotland — say, twenty years before — a situation that was close to the centre of about a third of the mystery riddles she was familiar with? Where would you start? Lucy found herself musing over whether her library experience would help. The fantasy, the notion that she might try her hand at her cousin's trade had been lurking at the edge of her consciousness from the time that Walter Buncombe had told her what Trimble did for a living. Lucy was completely aware of the situation she was in. She was a voracious reader — even Geoffrey had not been able to limit that — and she had read not only most of the crime section of the Kingston Public library, but a fair amount of the mainstream fiction also, including Jane Austen. She was familiar with
Northanger Abbey
and believed herself
in no danger of mistaking the real world of her cousin, the “watcher”, for the world of the private eye romances she was fond of. Not at forty-seven years old.

And yet, now that she had confirmed the truth, she began to wonder again, in a different way. If all real private detectives did was watch, she could surely do that, couldn't she? What about missing persons? What records would exist? In no time at all she was in the middle of a daydream involving lost heirs, changed names, new and assumed identities, all of which Lucy Brenner would unpeel to the core with the help of her library training.

She shook herself and called up the next file. It was labelled “Kingdom.” The first page began,
The black, billowing clouds which had promised to drop their ominous loads from the beginning of the equine proceedings parted momentarily as a shaft of golden sunlight pierced the sky to liqht up a red cap in the middle of the qroup of straining horseflesh. The eight conditioned descendants from the teeming loins of those four original Arab stallions swept together around the curving timbers of the final bend to grapple with the last furlong. In the middle, Night Fighter, my favoured steed, threaded its red-capped rider throuqh the throng as I cheered myself hoarse. It seemed as if “Paddy” O'Rourke, that wizard of pace from the “ould sod” had worked his magic again because his mount gathered its miqhty muscles in the last few Yards for a titanic effort, forcing his head under the wire by the inches it needed to be my first winner. Nothing again would ever equal that first thrill, but I have had many like it.

The narrative stopped here, then began again. This time, the eight superbly trained descendants of the fertile Arabian imports preceded the black billowing clouds, and
the syntax was adjusted to heighten the drama, each sentence getting its own paragraph. Trimble's labour of love, his life story in the form of a history of his greatest wins, continued with many revisions for seven pages, roughly a race a page. Then it stopped for a series of titles:

My Kingdom for a Winner
A Bet in Time
Days at the Races
Turf Love
Life Among the Longshots
A Mare's Breadth

Then a new narrative began:
The next two minutes would decide his fate. Jack Crabshaw patted the service revolver in his pocket, knowing he had the courage to use it if he had to. Hadn't he almost done so in '59 when his burnous had slipped on the way to Mecca? His house, his business, his family's well-being, the surgery his crippled daughter needed, all were riding on the six-to-one shot now being loaded into the stalls. He had scraped and borrowed every cent for one last bet, the one that would finish it, one way or the other, forever. “They're off.”

A paragraph later, the black billowing clouds parted once more and Night Fighter again saved the day.

This narrative in turn began again. This time, Night Fighter lost. Jack Crabshaw sought out a quiet place under the stands to shoot himself, but, crouched there, he overheard the owner of Night Fighter explain to a crony that the race had been fixed, that Night Fighter had been held up. Now Crabshaw decided to shoot the owner of the horse.

The file was thirty pages long, moving continuously between fiction and non-fiction as Trimble tried to make literary capital out of his obsession. Towards the end, a new story began:

Chapter One

“They're at the post.”

Jacob Yeo lifted his glasses to watch the starting gate. This was his last chance. His house, his business, the surgery his crippled daughter needed, everything was riding on one last bet, this five-to-one shot he had been training for this moment. This would finish it one way or the other.

“They're off.”

Dome Light was slow out of the gate. Something was wrong. He could make it up, surely, but already he was ten lengths back of the field, his head down, his tongue hanging out. Solar Plexus had raced into an early lead and was now in front by a wide margin. As they approached the last bend, Yeo began to pray. It was now or never. But the gap widened. When Solar Plexus passed the Post, Dome Light was still twenty lengths behind the rest of the field. Mechanically Yeo walked to the unsaddling enclosure and went through the motions.

“What happened?”

The jockey shrugged. “He's been got at,” he said.

The signs were unmistakeable. The yellow foam round his mouth (check this), the heavy sweating — he had been drugged. Out of the
corner of his eye, Yeo saw the jockey on Solar Plexus watching them, and he knew then where to start looking. Yeo was ruined, but he wouldn't go quietly. He intended to find out who had done this thing and kill them, one by one, starting with the jockey on Solar Plexus. (This is it. Move to a new file).