Murder on Location (17 page)

I couldn't find a diary or journal telling me why she had wanted to kill poor David Hayes, and there was nothing of interest in the bedside table drawers except prescription sleeping pills. Across the bed lay a fur coat that some women would marry for. But David Hayes couldn't have given Miranda Pride anything more than the glance of youth.

I slapped my hands down on my thighs in exasperation, just a bit more noisily than I'd intended.

I listened to the room for a moment: the distant sound of typing, punctuated with a bell at the end of every line, an occasional bang or thump from the heating system and the sound of traffic thirteen floors below. I looked up. I was right, one of the bedroom windows was open, the curtains billowed in the sunlight. I moved toward the open window. A shadow rocked gently against the light.

There was no mistaking the body among the curtains. It was Miranda Pride. Miranda Pride of
The Secret of Cynthia Carrol
and
Woman of Abilene
. I'd seen her hounded to death in
Dark Streets
and dragged screaming to the guillotine in
Madame du Barry
. Now she was hanging in the hotel curtains, her eyes staring down at me with mild surprise, and the Pride mouth, something she could have signed cheques with, hanging limply open.

For a minute I just stood there, as if the curtains would close and then she'd take a bow. The confusion of reality and fiction doped the shock. I moved backward to a chair and sat down hard. I looked at my shoes for a long time. Shoes were real. Solid black, of the earth. The chair beside
the window was real. I raised my eyes a little: Miranda's feet were bare. The hem of her red nightgown and negligée fell to her ankles and moved with the curtains in the slight breeze. I could hear the steady sound of the falls on the wind. It didn't help me to start moving. I listened to the hum, almost electric, or like a summer insect in the garden. I wasn't taking this very well at all. I fished out my cigarettes but put them back again. I forced my head to tilt up again. Her hands hung limply at her sides; I hadn't notice her rings before. I took counsel with myself, decided that action was needed. Taking a deep breath, I got to my feet and then sat right down again. The second time it worked. I put the chair next to the wall and climbed on the windowsill. A piece of nylon curtain rod was fastened to the stout bracket holding the curtain rod. The cord disappeared into the chair and folds of a scarf around Miranda Pride's neck. Her head was tilted almost quizzically to the right. There was no question about whether she was dead. In death—as in life—Miranda did dead very well.

FOURTEEN

Chris Savas is a good cop and he knows me well enough to have told me on several occasions that I'm a good detective but would make a lousy cop. After that Friday he took it all back. He had me taken apart and put back together again by three of his best men. They were good. They were smart. They tried the ‘good guy-bad guy' routine and, to make matters worse, they smoked up all my cigarettes. Chris stuck his nose in the door only often enough to satisfy himself that I wasn't gaining on them, and then went back to his desk. It turned out Miranda Pride had asked Savas about me the day before. He said it sounded like she had business to throw my way.

I tried to keep Lowell Mason's name out of it as long as I could, but I'd warned him that it might have to come out, so I told them I was working on a case involving Mason's missing wife. By the time they were finished with me, I felt like I'd spent the last forty-eight hours in a Turkish bath with a busted thermostat. My legs felt like they didn't want any part of this. It was guilt by association. They didn't even know me. When I stumbled out into the hall, Savas was there, working away at what was left of his lunch with a toothpick, leaning in his doorway.
He motioned me to follow him as he ducked inside and cleared a chair of files so I could try to sit down. It was a friendly gesture and much appreciated. He handed me his cigarettes and matches and then took them from me when I couldn't coordinate the effort. When I put the lighted cigarette between my lips, it felt like God was in heaven again. Savas was looking at the report with some interest. He'd seen most of it in rough at various stages. Some of it he knew without seeing. He was that kind of cop. For a while he left me to the cigarette and the view of Grantham from his window through dirty Venetian blinds to the county courthouse, a not unfriendly limestone building from the middle of the last century. There was something classical and restful about it. I looked at icicles hanging from the eaves of the pediment, at the starlings clustered on the dirty snow by the fountain. I looked at panhandlers conferring about the economy.

“You bit off too much this time, Benny.” I didn't even bother to nod. “I could see it when you were holding back about Hayes. I told you. 'Course you didn't know it was going to end up with the suicide of one of the truly greats of the movies, did you?” He was calm again and I was glad of it. So I just listened to Savas sermonizing about where the domain of the peeper leaves off and the realm of the policeman begins. It was a routine thing for Savas and he didn't get personal about it or even suggest that he was taking himself more seriously than necessary.

“Tell me, Chris, was it on the up and up? The suicide, I mean.”

“There's none of the usual evidence of a faked hanging. No funny business. No evidence that she was pulled up after she was unconscious.”

“Did the cord tell you anything?”

“Ordinary nylon curtain cord. She put the slipknot in the middle of a twelve-foot length taken from her bedroom.”

“Taken? How? Cut? Pulled? What?”

“Just untied and removed from the track. If this one's fishy, Benny, we're dealing with a clever bandit.”

“Just a routine suicide, then?”

“Looks that way. But I'm not with the coroner's office. They're the experts in things like this. I've checked out the circumstantial stuff: a chair near the windowsill, and the drop.”

“Drop?”

“Yeah. It was consistent with where she was standing before she jumped. In fakes you get people jumping from above where they should have been. Easy to spot.” Savas was beginning to get itchy. He didn't like sitting around jawing when he was in the middle of an investigation.

“Okay, Benny? We'll be in touch with you about the inquest. Both inquests! Shit, don't find any more bodies for a few weeks. Can't you do a little honest transom gazing? Try it out.” He let a heavy paw hit my shoulder in an almost accidental way. I got up and wandered out into the late afternoon. The light was gone and the nighttime cold was closing its jaws on us again.

I hadn't had any lunch, so I went up to the United on automatic pilot without taking much in except dirty cars dripping salt and rust in the parking lots and a few shoppers who hadn't yet abandoned the centre of town for the shopping plazas on the edge of the city. I ordered a chopped egg sandwich on white with a vanilla milkshake. Today I felt like climbing back to basics. A couple of girls in high leather boots were leafing through the magazine rack near the door and giggling to one another over what they saw. The salt was eating up the leather, leaving a jagged white line of slow destruction behind.

“What's the matter with you today?” It was one of the waitresses. I forget her name. “Not a peep from you. And where have you been keeping yourself the last week? Are you two-timing me or something?” I gave her a grin, but she could see there wasn't much behind it, and started to leave me to eat my crusts alone.

“How well do you know Niagara Falls, New York?”

“It's a change after this place. What do you want to know about it?”

“The Surf Lounge. Where is it and what sort of bar is it?”

“Just a bar near the tracks, that's all. Sort of a neighbourhood bar. Nothing fancy, just a joint close to the bridge. Why? Were you leading up to something? If you were, that's not the way to get there.” I sipped at the milkshake and wondered whether I had a full tank of gas.

I hadn't been across the border in a couple of months. I used to go across often enough to make an annual
bridge ticket pay, but nowadays it wasn't worth it. On the Canadian side I answered questions of a skinny man in his fifties who looked carefully into my back seat and trunk, and asked where I'd been born, where did I live and how long did I intend to remain in the United States. From the Rainbow Bridge I was able to get a new perspective on the ice bridge. From here, the illuminated vault of ice just out of reach of the falls was impressive enough to make me slow down. The horn of the car behind got my mind back on business. On the American side, the guard took my bridge money and instructed me to have a good day.

I took a turn through Niagara Falls, New York, trying to stay off the beckoning tendrils of freeways which would like to scoop me up and let me off on the far side of Buffalo. The whole place looked like it had been hit by a fire-raid and the rebuilding had stopped when the job was only half done. The street of theatres I remembered from when I was young had vanished. A large deserted convention centre occupied a nearby site. I followed a street of brick and wooden two- and three-storey buildings across a railway track, with dirty snowdrifts high between the rails. More shopworn snow leaned up against the sides of dog-eared stores and walk-up apartments. Board fences showed the latest in graffiti including a backwards “N” and the word “PRIVATE” with a dot over the capital “I”. At the corner not far from the railway track I saw the neon sign advertising Schlitz Beer. The
sign above the door, looking faded and tired, read
Surf Lounge
. I parked the car and went into the dim interior.

A bar of dark hardwood ran the length of the tavern on my left with a few tables along the wall to my right. The place was deserted, except for a cop sitting at one end of the bar next to the wall and the bartender standing as far away from him as he could manage.

I ordered a Miller's Highlife. American beer is lighter than Canadian and doesn't lay you out as fast. The bartender served it and mopped the mahogany half-way between where I was and where he had been. He didn't look very talkative. His face reminded me of Mr. Punch. His chin and nose were conspiring to meet at a later date. I tried him on the movie being made on the other side. I couldn't get it to light. He'd seen everything and he didn't want to talk about anything. I thought I'd seen the cop flicker. So I tried again.

“I see that Miranda Pride killed herself across the river.” The cop looked up.

“Just as long as she does it on the Canadian side. Geez, I never found it hard to look at her. She's a pip.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I've seen her a few times. I guess I liked the
Sally
pictures best.”

“That's right. I forgot that. Killed herself, you say? She was one of the top stars in her day. Haven't seen her lately. I didn't see it in the paper. Was it on TV?”

“It'll be on tonight. Just happened a few hours ago.”

“Geez. Good-looking woman like that.”

“She was married to Neil Furlong, the writer. He used to live over the river. I watched the bartender, who hadn't said anything and didn't even appear to be listening. He stopped moving his cloth along the bar. His jaw looked like it was trying to decide whether to move. “Furlong's made a lot of money from TV, and they say Miranda Pride was worth quite a lot herself.”

“You do a lot of talking on one beer, Mister.” It wasn't what I'd expected him to say. Still it sounded more cautious than aggressive.

“I didn't see the sign,” I said. The cop was enjoying this.

“Don't get wise. There's no sign. Talk all you want, but I'm telling you to pick something else. Furlong's been bad news in this place. I wouldn't give him a used bottlecap if he wanted one. I knew some nice people that he scuppered. He's not liked in here, so sing a different tune if you want to sing at all.”

“You knew Mattingly?” I asked, looking him in the eye. He slowly took the butt of a cigarette from his thin lips and looked at me through slits.

“What's your game, Mister?”

“I'm a friend of Harvey Osborne. Harve took a poke at Furlong at the Colonel John Butler Wednesday night. I was there. It was a good punch, landed squarely where you would have planted it yourself.”

“I asked you a question. I don't hear any answers.”

“I'm just nosing around. Harve could get into trouble if Furlong lays a charge. It looks like Harve could be put away if he gets convicted.”

“Yeah, and Neil'll write another play about it. Make another million.”

“He used to come in here, didn't he?”

“Drink your beer and clear out!”

“Tell him, Hatch,” the cop chipped in; “it might help Osborne. Assault's serious stuff.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, taking a fresh cigarette and lighting a match but not doing anything further about it until the match burned down to his finger. “Furlong used to come in here with his friends from the railway at first; then it was his acting friends. They came from both sides of the river. They put on a show at the Patriot Volunteer once and once at the high school. Came in two or three times a week. Always had a lot of people with him. They were always cracking jokes and playing games.

“Sometimes Clark Mattingly would be here with Flo. Sometimes they'd join in the games and get to talking. When Furlong wrote that play he had Clark Mattingly to the life, and I'm telling you as a man who knew him for over ten years. Flo was my own half-sister, for your information. Furlong should have waited a year before putting that play on TV, he could have put in the part about how Flo started drinking after Clark killed himself, Flo who never took more'n two or three drinks a night. I tried to get her straightened out, but I couldn't get through to her. Nobody could. Then she froze to death one night in
the alley behind the billiard parlour. He was in Toronto by then. Probably never heard about it.” His cheek twitched and he opened a beer for himself, which he poured into a tapered glass.