Still Waters (4 page)

Miranda glanced at his rumpled clothes and smiled. He would look good in Armani. She hadn't noticed before, but he had a day's growth of beard. Was it stylish, or had he forgotten to shave? Probably the latter.

“She didn't know there were no ashtrays. She doesn't look like a smoker,” he repeated.

“She doesn't smell like a smoker. You ever kiss a smoker, Morgan? Like sucking garbage through a straw.”

“You used to smoke.”

“That's how I know.”

“I never did.”

She wanted to kiss him right then and there. It wasn't a sexual impulse, at least not directly, not rising out of the hollow inside. It was the need to connect, by touching someone intimately who actually gave a damn about her after the lights were out. Maybe a little sexual, she thought, and thinking so made it sexual.

“Hey, Morgan.” Maybe she should reveal her anxiety, the horror and panic and strange sense of relief.

“Yeah?”

“Did you notice the books?”

“The koi books? Or the others?”

“Not many people these days buy hardcover books except lawyers and scholars with grants,” said Miranda. “Did you see the degree?”

“Linguistics.”

“Semiotics.”

“Same thing.”

“Not.”

Miranda had been holding an envelope in her hand that she had picked up from the floor near the wingback chair. It was a piece of unopened junk mail with some writing scrawled on the back. She handed it to Morgan.

He walked over to read it in light streaming through the French doors that wavered as the forensic people inside moved about, finishing their work. “‘Language is immanent but has no material existence.' Good opening. That's how I feel most of the time. Here but not here.” He
continued to read, mouthing the words with just enough volume that the hyphens were audible. “‘Language is imm-in-ent, preceding our being in the world; imm-anent, providing the dimensions of knowledge and experience. Language is consciousness, whatever the case.' I doubt if he was much for small talk.”

“It's interesting, though, isn't it?”

“Doesn't exactly solve the mystery.”

“Which one? About language and consciousness, or about death?” She smiled slyly as if she had been caught in a thought-crime. “Did you see the Rongorongo?”

“I saw you admiring it. You've got to wonder what's locked up in a language that no one can read.”

“Precisely,” she said. “But it's not the language that's indecipherable. It's the script. You can understand why a guy with a doctorate in semiotics might want to own it if he had the money.”

“And then he stores it beside a brolly stand with a clutch of old canes!”

“Strange guy, our lawyer-philosopher.”

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “So why would someone kill a philosopher. I mean, lawyers, even Shakespeare said ‘kill all the lawyers,' but a semiotician?”

“Morgan, this note? It contradicts its own declaration.” She wanted to go on. Words shaped thoughts in Miranda's mind; she wanted to let them out. But Morgan was back with the fish. She wanted to talk about language and writing, about Rongorongo, about speaking with the dead.

Morgan was bent over, peering through reflections of the night sky into the obsidian depths, but all he could see was an illimitable absence of light.

“You want something to eat?“ she asked. “Come on. The koi aren't going anywhere. Tomorrow they'll
tell us their secrets. Tonight they're in mourning, draped in black.”

“Fish and chips or sushi?”

Over dessert Morgan offered a discourse on carpets. The Kurdish runner in the den: antique, its pile worn, a tribal rug, coarse wool, natural dyes. The indigo blue a desert lake; abrash, the hue variations, like water under the desert sky. Persian. He didn't say from Iran. Carpets had more longevity than nation-states.

He went on to describe the Qashqa'i hanging as a wall piece behind the wingback chair.

She interrupted. “The runner! Why would a valuable carpet on a slate floor not have an underpad?”

Morgan smiled. He had read about rugs, subscribed for a couple of years to
Hali
, the opulent trade journal from England, had learned about designs and dying, weaving on hand looms by nomads, on village looms for the rich, about symbols and patterns, trading and auctions. But it hadn't occurred to him that there should be an underpad beneath the Kurdish runner.

“So we have a carpet problem,” he said. “Mystery upon mystery. Do you think she did it?”

“Eleanor Drummond? She had access, possibly motive — all mistresses have motives for murder. I doubt she did it.”

“No,” he agreed.

“She delivers herself, or a version of herself, as someone too self-possessed, too emotionally self-sufficient, to bother killing her lover. It was a business arrangement.”

“The murder?”

“No, her life.” Miranda tinkered with her cutlery.

“So who do we think did it?”

“
We
don't know, do we?”

“I think the koi are the answer,” he said. “Maybe we should have drained the ponds.”

Miranda ordered coffee, black, for both of them. He usually took double-double.

“You should have seen the diver in the lower pond,” said Morgan. “She virtually disappeared. For goodness' sake, it swallowed her whole. Twenty thousand gallons of pea soup.”

When he said “for goodness' sake” and “my gosh” and “holy smoke,” she liked him best. “How do you know that?” she asked.

“I saw her. She had to feel her way, like being submerged in soylent green.”

“The gallonage, how do you know that? Nobody knows twenty thousand gallons.”

“Grade ten geometry,” he said. “It's easy to calculate.”

“Geometry was in grade eleven.”

“I know about what interests me — or maybe I'm interested in what I know about. Koi interest me. Carpets interest me. A good carpet on slate, that interests me. Wine interests me. Really good wine,
premier grand cru, brunello di montalcino, trockenbeerenauslese
.” Each designation he enunciated with an appropriate accent — French, Italian, stage German. “I read about the stuff. I don't drink it.”

“Who came from the Coroner's? Was it Ellen Ravenscroft? She seems to turn up whenever you're on a case.”

“Uncanny coincidence. I'm a homicide cop, she's a coroner.”

“Come on …”

“She's earthy. I like her. What did you think about Eleanor Drummond?”

“Definitely not earthy. I can't imagine that woman in ‘snuggle' mode even on a rental basis.”

“She's stunningly beautiful.”

“Yeah, like a magazine layout — she looks airbrushed. Seriously, you found her attractive?”

“Yes and no. More yes than no.”

“It's time to go home,” she said, shifting in her chair.

As he rose to his feet, Morgan reached over and gave her shoulder a companionable squeeze. She flinched. He didn't seem to notice, but she was surprised. It wasn't him; it had something to do with the dead man in the pond. She couldn't see the connection. She settled back.

“Think I'll stay for a bit. No, really. Good night, Morgan.” She watched him walk away. “You can stay, too, if you want,” she added softly as he wandered away through the tables.

He waved backward with a small hand gesture, then she heard, trailing off in the ambient din as he approached the exit, “There's got to be a Chagoi.”

And he was gone.

Miranda's condo on Isabella Street was Gothic by neglect, not design. The fountain in the courtyard hadn't seen water since the Great Flood. The fascia drooped behind gingerbread swirls; acid-worn gargoyles leered over down-spouts that leaned precariously away from the eaves.

In the lobby she paused to pick up her mail and press her own buzzer before letting herself in. Years ago whimsy had turned into ritual; she felt reassured, knowing the sound was filling her empty apartment. She carried a scaled-down 9 mm Glock semi-automatic in a shoulder holster or holstered against the small of her back, or in her bag when it was too hot to wear a jacket, but she had no desire to use it. The buzzing would scare away burglars; and sometimes she could sense the reverberations still lingering to welcome her home.

Miranda was fond of the old place. The stair treads were worn marble, the wood trim was walnut, darkened by age, the fixtures were bronze. There was an air of
decadent longevity rare in the centre of the city. She had lived here as a student when the building was still apartments. It was seedy enough to seem subversive but structurally sound and aggressively urban.

When she returned to Toronto after three years away, she had raised a down payment, retrieved her furniture from storage, and moved back in. It was as if she had never been away. She felt toward her apartment the kind of myopic affection usually reserved for an appallingly inappropriate lover — of whom there had been several, she thought as she paused at the foot of the stairs to jettison flyers into the trash bin.

The bin was overflowing. It, and having the walkway shovelled in the winter, were the only perceptible services for the condo fee. There was no lawn to speak of, no gardening to be done beyond the annual trimming of a few stunted spirea bushes in the courtyard and a couple of grotesque forsythia against the sidewalk out front. The lobby was cleaned just enough to maintain an aura of genteel dinginess.

Almost lost among duplicate Victoria's Secret catalogues and an alumni magazine from the University of Toronto was a manila envelope with no return address. Miranda might have thrown it out but for the spidery handwriting. Grasping her mail, she started up the stairs, then stopped and pulled away the cellotape holding down the manila flap. There was a one-page letter, a fragile newspaper cutting, and a legal document of some sort, folded in the middle. The letter was dated yesterday. She looked at the postmark on the envelope. It was obscure but genuine. Yesterday, as well. The letter, which began rather quaintly, “My Dear Miranda,” was signed by a dead man.

Miranda shuddered, and with her mail held tentatively
in hand like a urine specimen, she hurried upward to the relative security of her third-floor home.

Once inside, with the lights on and everything familiar, she set the mail down, deliberately unread, and went into her bedroom, which doubled as a study, where she methodically eased out of her clothes. In the shower she let the pulsing flow of hot water work away the tension of the day that as usual had settled into her neck and shoulders. She put on cotton pajamas imprinted with grazing moose. She flipped on her computer and walked out into the cramped kitchen, where she was momentarily surprised to see the mysterious contents of the manila envelope still on the counter.

“Why don't you get a decent apartment,” Morgan had asked after their one brief tryst.

“Was that your problem?”

“We were good,” he had said, neither amused nor taking offence. “I thought we were very good. Did you have a problem?”

“Screw you.”

“Miranda...”

Sometimes he used her last name. Usually, the first. Tone could make it mean anything. Then it had conveyed good-natured wariness.

She always called him Morgan; she liked the sound. Soft and abrupt, a controlled expletive, like swearing at someone you loved. Yet she had found herself repeating his first name during sex.
David, David.
She almost never called him David to his face.

Ellen Ravenscroft had once challenged her about “the name thing.”

“His last and your first — what's with that?”

“It's not about power,” Miranda had responded.

“Of course it is, love. It's always about power.”

Not always, she now thought. Sometimes words were just words.

When Morgan and she undressed that time and had faced each other, she had felt uncomfortably disconnected. She was thinking about Ellen, about how much Ellen would like to be in her place. But the moment to stop things had passed. It had seemed more intimate to resist or explain. And then she had abandoned herself, and it was as good as Morgan had suggested.

During their prolonged coital embrace — that was the term, inept as it was, that had come to her mind — she had luxuriated in the indulgent pace. Morgan was physically uninhibited — strange for a man — and yet emotionally shy. He was a lovely lover and that had frightened her. She had never been married, never lived with a man, not because she didn't have needs, but because she needed too much.

“I like this apartment,” she had told him. “I've been here from day one. Second year university, after first year in residence. I shared it with a roommate. She had this room, the boudoir, and I had a fold-out in the living room. I lost the toss of a coin. Then she started having layovers — guys laid her and stayed over. Alphabetically, she was working through the student directory. I don't think she even liked it much. I lived in her vestibule. My love life, of course, was zero. She tried buying me off, but I didn't want leftovers. We tossed another coin and I won. She left, she became a lawyer. I practised celibacy. Turned out it didn't take practice.”

“You must have saved a fortune by now. And no car.”

“Nor you.”

“Bad driver.”

“Bad driver, poor lover, no sense of humour. Most men won't acknowledge their failings.”

“Miranda, I —” he had begun, stifling his protest, then touching her gently.

“It's a clean well-lighted place.”

“Yeah, and it smells good. There's nothing, nothing, as erotic as the smell of a single woman's apartment.”

“Go home, Morgan.”

And he had gone.

Miranda wasn't prepared yet to read the letter. She picked up the newspaper cutting and smoothed it on the counter. It was actually an entire tabloid page, torn along one edge and tattered as if someone had repeatedly handled it. Top, centre, a photograph. Standing third from the right, a little distorted by the glare of a flash, an earlier version of herself. She didn't remember posing for the picture or its publication.