Ogrodnik Interior 2.0c (3 page)

“Really, you’re going there? I just put my father in the ground and you
think I’m worried about female companionship?”

“Yeah, I am going there.
You need someone in your life.
Jake’s not around and your dad is gone. You have nobody.”

Elliot nodded but said nothing.

“What happened to that online dating site you told me you were going to try?”

“I tried it once, and I’d rather have a Tabasco enema than go through that again.”

“It didn’t go well?”

“To say the least. My dating profile was built by answering over a hundred questions. Hell, they even asked me what my preferred sexual position was. I told them anything that didn’t include a magazine and my hand.

“My date and I had a 97% compatibility probability. I guess we fell into the other 3%. I took her to Magnan’s for supper. She sent her steak back to the kitchen three times and then, finally satisfied with it, took one bite and decided she wasn’t really hungry. After that I spent the rest of the evening dodging questions about my net worth. It was the most agonizing eighty-three minutes of my life.”

“Yeah, but did she have big tits?”

“Go ahead; laugh it up. I’d like to see you put yourself out there.”

“So you’re going to quit after one try?“

“You know what I loved about Sarah? I loved the sound of her laugh. I loved it when I’d catch her looking at me for no reason. How do you map out those qualities in a profile questionnaire? Randy, compatibility can’t be forecast with a pile of data points. I’ll wait and meet someone the old-fashioned way.”

“You mean like clubbing someone over the head and dragging her back to your cave by the hair?”

“Ha. Not that I have anything against good old cave sex. I mean, meeting someone during the course of my everyday life and when something clicks, it’ll be unforced and natural.”

“Okay, okay, moving on,” he said raising his hands in a mock surrender.

“How’s Jake doing?”

“I came here to discuss my future, and you’re grilling me like a T-bone steak,” Elliot protested for a moment and then gave in when he saw they were falling on deaf ears. “I guess he’s good. We didn’t have much time together at Dad’s funeral, and we really don’t talk much anymore. Mostly we exchange messages on Facebook.”

“That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a solid father/son relationship. You two used to be so close.”

“Yeah, well, he’s got his life, and I’ve got mine. Times have changed.”

Mesman looked at his friend thoughtfully. “Where did it go wrong for you? Six years ago, you were the crown jewel of this faculty, a two time Perkins-Bohr winner and one of the most influential criminologists in the country. Look at you now. It’s like you’ve given up on life. What happened to the Elliot Forsman I used to know?”

“You know damn well what happened,” Elliot said with a tone of resignation as he leaned back in the chair. “The old Elliot fell off that platform with Sarah. Now all that’s left is a bitter PI wanna-be who doesn’t have the stones to move on in his life.”

“When are you going to accept that it was not your fault? There are two truths in this world; one, shit happens, and two, we can’t do anything about number one.”

Elliot didn’t respond to Randy’s attempt to rationalize his situation and changed the subject.

“Before Wilcox gets here, we need to discuss my future at the school.”

“What makes you think Dean Wilcox is coming here?” asked Randy, talking in a high pitch as he always did when he was intrigued.

Elliot scanned the desk and surrounding area before replying. “It’s almost 8:45 on a Friday morning, and you already have an empty mug of coffee on your desk. I also see that your desk lamp is turned on. It’s difficult to notice because of the sunlight pouring in, but you’d have only needed that light before the sun comes up, which is about 6:40 a.m. this time of year. On top of that, the chair I’m sitting on is usually against the far wall with reams of paper on it, so you’ve gone to some effort to make room for a visitor. This is April 29th, and I know that professor evaluations are due in to the Dean at the end of this month, which is today. So to summarize: coffee already consumed, desk lamp on but not needed for the past two hours, office tidied up waiting for a visitor and professor evaluation reports due today. It seems obvious. No?”

“Damn, I love it when you do that shit!” said Randy with a grin. “I don’t want to push you out the door, but when are you going to leave the school for good and work on your investigation practice full time? You know you want to. It’s been four years since you switched to teaching night classes so you could start up your PI practice. I thought you’d have packed it in and left the university years ago.”

“That’s what I’m here about. I came to tell you that I’m going on sabbatical, effective immediately and for an indefinite period.”

Randy reached for his coffee and took a sip without taking his eyes off him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I want to get my life back on the rails, and I’m going to start by finding my father’s murderer.”

“Well, I’m happy for you. Normally I’d scoff at approving a sabbatical on short notice, but in your case, I endorse it 100%.”

They continued their banter for another ten minutes and agreed that one of the teacher’s assistants would take over Elliot’s night classes until Randy lined up a new professor.

It was 9:00 a.m. on Friday, and Elliot had work to do before meeting Rivka at the office.

Elliot still had time to get over to his father’s house to poke around, so he drove over to Elm Avenue in lower Westmount to the house that he grew up in. He’d been back to the house a number of times in the past month. All the little things like emptying out the fridge and turning off lights were done in the week immediately following the murder, and since then he’d stopped in and picked up the mail once a week.

The first thing on his agenda was to determine what his father had been working on prior to his death. Hubert was a retired physician whose idea of retirement was not to while away the hours with a good book or play Canasta with the blue hairs. To his father, retirement was a chance to do all the things he never had time for when he was working.

Elliot checked the mailbox before climbing the stairs to the house. His father shared a mailbox with his downstairs tenant, Anne Simmons. A couple of years ago, his father decided that the basement in-law suite was going to waste, so he put an ad in the paper looking for a tenant. He didn’t need the money, and Elliot thought that the amount of rent he charged was nominal at best. He also thought that his father was probably lonely and just wanted someone to share an afternoon tea with on occasion. He chose Anne Simmons, a forty-something, single woman of modest means who turned out to be everything he was hoping for.

After letting himself in, he stood in the kitchen and surveyed the room as if he’d never been there before. He looked at every object in the kitchen and silently questioned its reason for being there. Elliot spent his teenage years growing up in this house and being here was like slipping on a pair of warm gloves on a cold day. It was an older, two-story brownstone from the turn of the century and although outdated by today’s standards, it had a feel of warmth and family to it. It held a lifetime of good memories for Elliot, and he’d be sad when he sold it.

Years of learning and teaching in criminology had taught him about discipline and process when tackling complex problems. Investigating his father was just like any other data related problem. Gather information until you are able to create a probable theory, and then try to either prove or disprove the theory.

The logical place to start was in his office at the back of the house. Elliot knew his father spent a good deal of time in the office, and it was also where he would find the computer. He turned on the light and stood there, confused for a moment. The top of the desk was almost bare aside for a few of the expected desktop accoutrements. The computer was gone. He knew it was there immediately after his father’s death because he’d had made the rounds to all the rooms and remembered turning it off. Had he given it to someone? Or taken it home? Elliot questioned his sanity for a moment and then discarded that thought. No, someone had been in the house and taken the computer. What else did they take? A quick tour of the house indicated that nothing of obvious value was missing. The silverware was still in the buffet, and the new flat screen TV was untouched. His father’s personal belongings in the bedroom were not disturbed, so he returned to the office for a closer look.

The lack of dust on portions of the desktop showed him where a computer and keyboard had once sat. He could also see the clean rectangular image of where a stack of paper had once been. A quick check of the desk drawers didn’t reveal anything, but he did find a sizable gap where documents may have been in the top drawer of a three drawer filing cabinet. Whether or not the documents existed in that place before the robbery, he would never know.

He contemplated reporting the theft to the police, but his gut told him to let it be for now, so he soldiered on. The computer would likely have yielded the best clues as to his father’s activities, but there was still work he could do, so he started in the office. Overflowing bookshelves covered the lion’s share of three walls, and the musty smell of outdated publications filled the air like an invisible fog. In the corner directly facing the open door was a threadbare La-Z-Boy that still retained the imprint of his father’s cheeks left behind from many years of afternoon naps. Apparently, his father left quite an impression.

Eating up most of the real estate in the room was a massive antique desk in the far corner that the house must have been built around. Elliot sat down at the desk to survey the room from his father’s perspective. His eyes were immediately drawn to a framed picture on the desk. It was a picture of himself, his father, and Jake as they coasted in toward the dock after an early morning of fishing. Jake was still a lad of nine or ten so that made the picture about ten years old. He remembered the day clearly;
Sarah had come down to meet us at the dock and brought a picnic lunch. We put the gear away and pulled the boat up onto Dad’s trailer before sitting down with a bucket of the colonel in the shade of a large oak tree that bent out over the launch area. The tree kept the heat of the day from us, and the sound of the breeze rustling the leaves muffled the ambient city noises that might otherwise have intruded. The wafting fragrance from a thicket of wild lilacs beside the oak tree blended with the usual dock smells of oil and old fish in an odd way that I found pleasing.
He remembered that he thought it smelled like paradise might smell.

Elliot put the picture down and refocused. He surveyed the room from the perspective of the desk chair, but nothing jumped out at him, so he got up and inspected the bookcase and its contents. They consisted of a mix of medical journals, medical reference books, and bestsellers from the last twenty years. They were all carefully organized in an order that only his father would understand, possibly sorted alphabetically by size. He walked along the shelves pulling the occasional piece that looked like it had been stuffed into its cranny recently but didn’t find anything relevant. There was a light layer of dust on the front edge of the shelves except for the edge in front of some pharmaceutical reference books. He inspected them briefly, found nothing out of the ordinary and returned them to their original places. On the shelf below the pharmaceutical books, there was a newspaper folded and shoved in on top of the row of books. Finding a newspaper was not unusual given the assortment of periodicals his father kept stashed in the shelves, but this was the financial section of the
Montreal Gazette
from March 3rd, four weeks before the murder. His father didn’t have the paper delivered to the house anymore, so he had gone to some trouble to bring the paper into the house and stash it on the shelf. He folded the paper and put it in his backpack so he could examine it in detail later.

He checked the family room, the master bedroom, and the bathroom, but noticed nothing unusual or out of place. That brought him back to the kitchen.

Again, nothing out of place, but on the wall was one of those calendars where each day had a square in a month long grid. His father used the squares to jot down appointments and phone numbers. There were three memos jotted down, one in March and two in February.

On February 8
^th
,
there was a memo to have supper with Elliot.
He has one child, and he needs to write down his birthday as a reminder
? he thought.

On February 17
^th
,
he had an appointment with Dr. Baldwin. Since his father was out of the practice, he needed a GP, and he had chosen long-time friend and associate, Dr. Ray Baldwin. Elliot would talk with Dr. Baldwin.

Finally, a week before he was killed, he had a phone number and the name Dr. Alex Banik; Elliot didn’t know the name. He took the calendar and put it in his backpack along with the newspaper. Having already exhausted the few places he thought might tell him about his father’s activities, he left to go back to the office.

Elliot’s drive to the office took him from lower Westmount, where his father lived, and west along Sherbrooke Street for a mile or so. His father’s section of Sherbrooke was a mix of high-end residential and open park areas, and as he drove west, it gradually became more retail oriented. By the time he arrived at the corner of Marlowe, the makeup of Sherbrooke consisted primarily of boutique shops and family run restaurants at street level with rentals on the floors above. The JFK Investigations office was in a second-floor walk-up above a greasy spoon called Sammy’s Diner. Elliot ducked into Sammy’s to get lunch.

“Sammy!”

“Elliot, my friend. How are you doing? What can Sammy do for you today?”