Do or Die (26 page)

“Marianne tells me it's some Arab relative of Jonathan's new girlfriend.”

Green shook his head. “I would have told you if we had been definite. By the way, did Jonathan talk to you about his…ah, love life?”

Henry Blair gave a wry smile. “He was pretty private and I've always respected that. I knew about Vanessa Weeks, of course. I met her at Christmas when Jonathan and she came out to Vancouver for a visit. And I knew he'd broken up with her, which didn't exactly surprise me.”

Green frowned. “Why not? Everyone else was surprised.” Blair nodded with an air of weary wisdom. “I guess I've a little more experience with ambitious women. They're challenging, but somewhat hard to live with in the long term. You… kind of have to bury yourself.”

“Did Jonathan tell you why he broke it off?”

“He was vague, said something about it not being the right time for him to make a serious commitment, but that sounds like a euphemism for just getting fed up with it, don't you think?”

“Did he seem sad?”

“Sad?” Blair took a long swallow of wine. “Yes, he did. That's why I thought he may just have been unable to cope with her. You can't stand them, Inspector, but it's not easy to be without them either.”

That applies to life with any woman, Green thought wryly. Whether ambitious or just plain stubborn. “Did he mention anything about a new girl?”

Blair pushed a piece of roasted zucchini around his plate, untasted, and Green followed its progress with absorption,
longing to snatch it from his fork. “After Marianne told me about the Arab suspect, I remembered that he had said something about a girl a couple of weeks ago. Rachel, wasn't it? He said this girl was after him, and she wasn't easily discouraged.”

“So from what you could tell, he wasn't interested in her?”

“Not at that time. But last Sunday his attitude seemed to have changed. He sounded much more sympathetic to her. Concerned in fact, now that I think of it.”

Green leaned forward, the zucchini briefly forgotten. “Concerned in what way?”

“Well, that she was another pawn in the power game, just like him.”

“Pawn?” Green echoed in surprise. “What was he referring to? Who was she a pawn of?”

Blair looked across the table with bleak, heavy-lidded eyes. “I don't know. He didn't actually say much, but from the general theme of the discussion, I'd guess it was Halton.”

“Are you saying Halton was using her?”

“Oh no, I…” Blair looked blank, then surprised as if an idea had just occurred to him. “Do you mean taking advantage of her? Goodness, that could be what he meant. That would certainly be Halton's style.”

“You're saying Halton fooled around with his female students?”

“I suspect Myles fooled around with everyone. He is a man of enormous sexual appetites.”

Green pondered the implications as he watched Henry Blair abandon the grilled zucchini and busy himself with the wine. A creamy morsel of lobster claw lay forgotten at the edge of his plate, and Green's fingers itched. In the lengthening silence, Blair would not meet his eye. Green remembered his allusions to Marianne Blair and some secret from Halton's past.g

“Did those appetites include your ex-wife?”

Blair set his wine glass down hastily, splashing some wine onto the tablecloth. Clumsily he mopped at it with his napkin. “I'm sure that's quite irrelevant to the subject at hand, Inspector, and Marianne would have your head if she knew you'd asked it.”

Green shrugged. “Much of what I ask seems irrelevant, but I need to know as much of the big picture as I can.”

The waiter approached Blair's elbow and discreetly removed the plate. Green watched the lobster go with silent longing. Blair waited until they were alone and then folded his hands in his lap, his composure restored. “What precisely are you after? Why did you come to see me?”

Green leaned towards him. “You know something about Halton that you're sitting on. Something unsavoury about his past. I'll tell you frankly that I'm considering him a suspect in your son's murder—”

“What!”

Green waited patiently. He knew that once the outrage had spluttered out, Blair would come face to face with the question he had posed. All he had to do was wait. After a couple of minutes and a deep gulp which drained his wine glass, Blair calmed himself sufficiently to shake his head. “You are right about there being something unsavoury in his past, but I assure you it's quite in the past and it certainly has nothing to do with my ex-wife. A woman, yes, but not—”

“Henry! Inspector!” A commanding voice hailed from across the room and both men looked up in surprise to see Marianne Blair charging towards them through the tables, eyes sparking. Her grey hair protruded in irregular spikes, and her brown skirt flapped in her wake.

Through the room, conversations trailed off. Leaded glass
partitions divided the dining hall into intimate cubicles, but Green could still see heads swivel at the tables along her route. Marianne Blair seemed oblivious.

“Marianne to his rescue, as always,” Henry muttered, reaching for his wine glass, only to discover it was empty. He put it down with a sigh and raised his head to face her as she reached the table. But her eyes had skewered Green.

“What on earth are you doing now! Wasting taxpayers' money as well as time?”

More heads swivelled. While Green was counting to ten and formulating a reply, Henry Blair jumped into the breach. “No, Marianne. The worthy inspector thinks Myles Halton may have killed our Jon.”

She was struck dumb for a moment and groped blindly for a chair from the next table. “Ridiculous,” she managed once she had fallen into it. “Myles thought the world of Jon.”

“He also has a violent temper,” Blair replied. “You know that even better than I.”

Mrs. Blair flashed her ex-husband a quick look. Of puzzlement or of warning, Green wondered, and in the next breath she answered the question. “I'm sure the inspector doesn't want us wasting his time airing petty grievances from the past.”

“I'd hardly call Darlene a petty grievance, Marianne. Nor that poor son of his.”

“Myles has paid his dues for that a hundred-fold!” she shot back, giving Green a faint inkling of what their marriage had been like. “He's made it his life's work, as you well know.”

“Yes, well it shows what a guilty conscience can do,” Blair sniped drily. “Still, I suppose one should be grateful he has a guilty conscience. It raises him above the level of your common psychopath.”

“Henry, enough!” Mrs. Blair slapped her hand upon the table, making the silverware jump. She glowered at him, jowls shaking and brows drawn low together. Looking at her now, Green noticed that she had touched her cheeks with blush and her lips with a shade of pink that almost matched her coral silk blouse. Almost, but not quite. Once again, her attempt at fashion coordination, although expensive, fell just short of the mark.

“Are you saying Myles Halton is responsible for his son's condition?” he probed blandly.

The two stopped their verbal ping-pong to gape at him. Mrs. Blair thrust her chin out pugnaciously, and her ex turned to her as if to ask for permission. Neither said a word.

“How?” Green pressed. “By smashing up the family car while drunk? No. A violent temper, you said.” Still, the Blairs sat tight-lipped. An idea dawned. “He beat the kid. Too hard, one too many times.”

Mrs. Blair glowered, but Green sensed her hesitation.

“That's it, isn't it!”

She was now shaking her head vigorously. “No! You've got it all wrong!”

“Well, he's got it half-right, Marianne.”

“All right!” she snapped, swinging on her ex-husband. “You're determined to tell him, aren't you! You never could stand Myles. He was too brazen for your tastes, never played the gentleman's game quite well enough. So here's your chance to get even.”

Blair shut his eyes against her venom. “Marianne, I'm doing this for Jon. Someone has murdered our Jon.”

Her jowls quivered, and the flame died from her eyes, leaving them bleak. Her hand trembled and half-reached for Blair's before drawing back to clutch the top button of her
blouse. “Do you want to tell him?”

His voice was unexpectedly tender. “No, you tell him.”

She glanced around the room, for the first time seeming aware of others. Behind the glass partitions, dinner conversation had returned to normal, but nonetheless she lowered her voice. “Only a handful of people know this story, and I want you to know that under any other circumstances I would never violate Myles' confidence like this. But Henry is right. Jonathan has to come first and avenging his death is the only thing I have left. I trust that you will respect the confidential nature of what I'm about to divulge and will not make public—”

“The public will hear only what becomes a matter of public record, at least from me.”

She took a deep breath and twisted her button, searching for a starting point. “When I was at Simon Fraser University, I had a close friend named Darlene Etherington-Hughes. Darlene came from a wealthy Toronto family who had made their money generations ago in textiles. She was a very beautiful girl, but she'd attended a sheltered girl's boarding school and when she came on the university scene, she went a little wild. She was easy prey for the would-be Don Juans.” Her wayward hand left the button and wandered down onto the table to toy with the packets of sugar. She studied the labels.

“Like Myles Halton?”

She nodded, her eyes intent on the sugar. “Myles and his fraternity brothers. By then he was in fourth year and a big man in the fraternity. Darlene and I were a year behind, and usually he went for the freshman girls. Back then he was a good-looking man—still is, but he's put on some weight. He was all muscle then, and his hair was thick, wavy and black. That and those blue eyes were a knock-out combination.
Anyway, Darlene was no small prize. Beautiful, old money, some brains, but she had the typical spoiled heiress ego, and when they started to date they fought like cats and dogs. He was used to blind adoration, and she wasn't the blindly adoring type.” She raised her eyes from the sugar to flash Blair a wry smile. “We never are, are we, dear?”

He returned the smile ruefully. “Daddy's fault, I know.”

It was an affectionate exchange, old and practised between them. There is still a lot of fondness between these two, Green thought.

“Myles was genuinely intrigued by Darlene,” continued Mrs. Blair, her eyes back to the sugar. She had begun to split the packet apart along its seam. “She was rather a notch above his usual fare, and I think as much as Myles ever loved anyone, he probably did love Darlene. But he had some fatal character flaws, which are all Henry was ever able to see.”

“They are rather looming, my dear.”

She shrugged, not to be drawn into another ping-pong match. “Then more than now.”

“What character flaws?” Green demanded. Hunger was sapping his patience. “A violent temper? An overdeveloped sex drive?”

She nodded with a smile. “Both. Plus a colossal ego and a fierce competitiveness. Myles always had to be number one, in his work and in his love life. He cheated on Darlene left and right, but he'd go mad with jealousy if another man so much as winked at her. One day someone did, and she winked back. A harmless flirtation at a party, that was all it was. Everyone had had too much to drink, and you know how those frat parties could get.”

Green did not know. He had earned most of his university credits at night school, squeezing courses in part-time between
his shifts on street patrol. “What happened?”

“Myles took the guy outside, beat him up, and then turned his fists on Darlene. Myles was a boxer, in fact, he could have been a professional if he hadn't valued his brains more than his brawn. When he turned those huge fists on petite Darlene, he broke three ribs and ruptured her spleen. The trouble was that she was three months pregnant at the time and had not yet told him.”

Suddenly, the pieces fell into place. “And he damaged the baby.”

Mrs. Blair nodded. “It was born severely brain-damaged. Myles was utterly distraught with himself. He has a strong fatherly streak which is evident in the way he treats his students, and he would have loved to have had a son to nurture. He married Darlene, mostly out of guilt, and pays the most expensive private institution in the States to care for his son.”

“There were no charges?”

“Darlene never told anyone. Her family suspected, I think, but it was all neatly swept under the carpet with the marriage.”

“And since then all his research has been directed at understanding the brain?”

“It's his life. He barely knows his wife and daughters. Henry here thinks that's just because he's a man's man, but I think it's guilt. The work is a kind of penance.”

Across the table, Green saw Henry roll his eyes, but he wasn't so ready to dismiss the idea. He had seen the passion in Halton's eyes when he had talked of his work.

“What do you think he'd do if someone was threatening to take it all away?”

Marianne started to reply, then froze and stared at him in disbelief.

*    *    *

On his way through to the hotel lobby, Green stopped to buy himself three chocolate bars, and by the time he was through the front door, one was already gone. Instead of catching a taxi back to the police station, he decided to walk. The evening was warm and breezy, and it was an easy fifteen minute walk from the Château Laurier across Confederation Square and down Elgin Street to the station. He needed to sort out what he'd learned and plot his next move. Halton, he decided, was a man of some moral integrity but even more ambition. Not only to scale great academic heights but also to assuage a deep and haunting guilt. It was an odd prescription for murder, but a powerful one nonetheless.