The Price of Love and Other Stories (20 page)

“Can you think of anyone else who might have had a reason to hurt Valerie?”

“So you
do
believe me?”

I remembered Susan’s plea. “I’m keeping an open mind.”

Tony thought for a moment. “No. Since Val gave up modelling, she’s been doing a bit of teaching at the agency. Deportment, public speaking, that sort of thing. She gets along well with everyone.”

“Did she have any lovers?”

“Not that I knew of, and I’m pretty sure I would have known.”

“OK,” I said, getting up to leave. “Thanks a lot, Tony. If anything comes up, I’ll be in touch right away.”

Tony seemed surprised and alarmed that I was leaving so soon. He sat up abruptly and crossed his long legs. “You
are
going to help me, aren’t you? You do believe me?”

“What I believe doesn’t really matter. It’s what I can get the police to believe that counts. But don’t worry – I’ll do my best. One more thing: do you think I could have the house keys? It would help if you’d write down the address, too. I’d like to have a look around.”

“Sure. You can take Valerie’s set. I picked them up last time I was over there, after the police let me out. I couldn’t stand to stay in the house, not after what happened, but I didn’t like the idea of them just lying around like that.”

I took the ring of keys. A Mickey Mouse key chain. Cute. “Do you know what all these are for?” I asked.

Tony started counting them off. “Front door, back door, studio, agency. That one I don’t know.”

There was one key left, but it didn’t look like a door key to me. Too small. I thought I had a pretty good idea what it was.

“Did Valerie keep a safety deposit box?” I asked Tony.

He seemed surprised by the question. “Not that I know of. Why?”

I held up the key. “That’s why,” I said.

I wanted to find out where the safety deposit box was located and what its contents were, but I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get into it even if I found it. Technically, Tony would inherit everything of Valerie’s, unless her will specified otherwise, but criminals aren’t permitted to gain financially from their crimes. On the other hand, Tony hadn’t been convicted of anything yet, so nothing would happen. In the meantime, I had asked Tony to check with Valerie’s bank, and there was plenty of digging around for me to do while I waited for a result.

The Caldwell house looked like a cozy English vicarage right out of
Masterpiece Theatre
. I parked my 1998 Neon across the street among the BMWs and Audis, and, feeling vaguely ashamed of its
unwashed state and the dent in the front right wheel arch, I walked up to the door.

Outside the house stood a huge old oak tree, and I wondered if it would provide an intruder enough cover from the nosy neighbours. Even so, anyone who wanted to get in would have to get past the heavy door, which Tony told me had been locked, bolted and chained. There was no porch, just the dark panelled door set in the sandy stonework. The key let me into a small hallway, and a second door led into the living room. The police had taken the carpet, leaving the polished wood floor bare.

Three of Tony’s photographs hung on the wall. They were very good, as far as I could tell. I’d expected modernistic effects and cut-up contact sheets, but two of the three were landscapes. One looked like a Beach sunset, showing the Leuty lifeguard station in effective, high-contrast black-and-white, and the other was a view of a rocky coastline, probably in Nova Scotia, where the cliff edges cut the land from the sea like a deformed spine. Again, Tony had used high contrast.

The third was a portrait signed by Valerie, along with what I took to be her lip prints, dated two years ago. She was posing against a wall, just head and shoulders, but there was such sensuality about her Bardot-like pout and the way her raven’s-wing hair spilled over her bare white shoulders. There was something about the angle of her head that seemed to challenge and invite at the same time, and the look in her dark eyes was intelligent, humorous and questioning. For the first time in the case, I had a real sense of the victim, and I felt the tragedy and waste of her death.

Upstairs, I rummaged through her bedside drawers and checked out the walk-in closet, but found nothing I didn’t expect to. I assumed the police had already been through the place before me and taken anything they thought might be related to the crime. On the other hand, if they believed they had caught the criminal and had enough evidence against him, then they wouldn’t go to the
expense of an all-out, lengthy crime scene investigation. Not exactly
CSI
; they’d leave their lasers and luminol at home. Valerie’s clothes were high-quality designer brands, her underwear black and silky. I felt like a voyeur, so I went back downstairs.

Next, I moved into the kitchen, where the parcel of books still lay on the table, brown paper and string loose around it. The books, first editions of early Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, were from an antiquarian dealer in Halifax, I noticed, and the string was a quaint, old-fashioned touch. The only thing missing was the knife itself, which the police had taken as evidence.

The door opened onto a back stoop, and my intrusion scared off a flock of red-throated house finches from the bird feeder. Judging by the untidy lawn surrounded by its flagstone path, neither Tony nor Valerie had been very interested in gardening. At the far end, the lawn petered off into bracken and roots where the ravine threatened to encroach, and finally the land dropped away. I walked to the end of the garden and noticed that the ravine was neither too steep nor too overgrown to be accessible. There was even a path – narrow and overgrown, but a path nonetheless. You certainly wouldn’t have had to be a mountain lion to gain easy access from the back.

The ground had been hard and dry at the time of the murder, I remembered, and we’d had a couple of heavy storms in the last week, so there was no point in getting down on my hands and knees with a magnifying glass, even if I’d had one. I stood at the end of the lawn for a while, enjoying the smell of the trees and wildflowers, listening to the cardinal’s repetitive whistling and the
chip-chip
sounds of warblers, then I went back inside.

Fine. Now I knew that it was possible for someone to get up and down the ravine easily enough. But how about getting into the house? I sat at the kitchen table, toying with the string. I could think of no way of getting through a locked screen door without leaving a trace, unless it were either open in the first place or somebody had opened it for me. Valerie might have opened it to someone she knew,
someone she felt she had no reason to fear. If she was distracted by her anger at Tony, her surprise at seeing a friend appear at the back door would surely have overruled any caution or suspicion she might otherwise have felt. On the other hand, if the door was locked when the police arrived, that was a problem.

As I sat twirling the string around my fingers and idly glancing at the two first editions in their nest of brown paper, I became aware of a niggling discrepancy. It was unconscious at first, nothing I could put my finger on, but, as it turned out, it was
on
my finger. I unravelled the string and tried to fasten it around the books. It didn’t fit. Much too short. I looked around on the floor but saw no more, and I could think of no reason why either Tony or the police would secrete a length of string.

I went over to the screen door and examined the catch, which looked like an upside-down earlobe, and, sure enough, when I looked closely, I noticed faint scuff marks around the narrow neck. Making sure I had the house keys in my pocket, as an experiment I opened the door, hooked a length of string over the catch, then shut the door, standing outside, holding the string. When I tugged gently, the catch engaged, and the screen door locked. I let go of one end and pulled the string towards me. It slid free. Like many old screen doors, it wasn’t a tight fit.

I still had nothing concrete, no real evidence, but I did have the solution to a very important problem. If Valerie
had
let someone in through the back, then whoever it was could easily have killed her, left the same way, and locked the screen door from outside. Now I knew that it
could
be done.

Jacqui Prior, my next port of call, lived in an apartment off the Esplanade, close to the St. Lawrence Market, the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, and all the wine bars and restaurants that had
sprung up around there. I found her in torn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, lustrous dark hair tied back in a ponytail, busily packing her belongings into boxes she had clearly picked up from the local LCBO store. While she seemed surprised to see me, she was also curious. She said she was just about to take a break anyway and offered me a cup of Earl Grey, which I gladly accepted.

There was a superficial resemblance to the photograph of Valerie Pascale I had seen at Tony Caldwell’s house, but Jacqui seemed somehow unformed, incomplete. She had the kind of face that was beautiful but lacked the stamp of a personality. I imagined that was probably what made her a good model. She must be the kind of person who would shine and sparkle in front of the camera, given a role to play. Her olive skin was smooth as silk, perfect for beauty soap, shampoo, and bath oil commercials, and I could imagine her looking wholesome in a way that Valerie Pascale didn’t.

“Where are you moving to?” I asked.

“I’ve found the perfect little house in Leaside.”

“Leaside? Won’t that be a bit quiet for you after all this?”

She smiled, showing perfect dimples. “I like things quiet. I need my beauty sleep.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I sipped some Earl Grey.

Jacqui frowned. It could have been real, or it could have been a model’s frown. I didn’t know. “It’s awful about Valerie and Tony,” she said. “I feel terribly responsible in a way, but I don’t see how I can help you.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “People do what they do. I’m just not convinced that Tony Caldwell did what he’s been accused of.”

“Oh? What makes you think that?”

“Just a few inconsistencies, that’s all. You and Valerie were old friends. How did you meet?”

“We were at high school together, then we both went to UBC. We shared an apartment in Kitsilano.”

“So you knew her pretty well?”

“As well as one could know Valerie.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She wasn’t exactly an open book, you know.”

“She had secrets?”

“We all have secrets. Valerie could make the most innocent thing into a secret. It was her nature to be mysterious, enigmatic. And she liked to be in control, liked to have the upper hand. She needed to feel that, ultimately, if the walls came tumbling down, she’d be safe, she’d have an escape route.”

“Didn’t work this time,” I said.

Jacqui wiped away a tear. “No.”

“Who told her about your affair with her husband?”

Jacqui looked shocked, and I was beginning to feel more and more that I was being treated to her repertoire of faces. She was good. “Do we have to talk about that?”

“I’m trying to help Tony.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I don’t know how she found out. I was sure nobody knew about us.”

“What happened when the two of you went to the washroom?”

“Nothing. We just talked it out, that’s all. Sort of made up.”

“Sort of?”

“I told her I’d end it with Tony. She was still upset, but she accepted my word.”

“Would finishing with Tony have been difficult for you?”

“A little, perhaps. But it’s not as if we were in love or anything.”

“So it was just an affair? A fling?”

“Yes. Oh, don’t sound so disapproving. We’re both adults. And it’s not as if I was the first.”

“Tony had other affairs?”

“Of course.”

“Did Valerie know?”

“She never said anything to me.”

“Are you sure you don’t plan to go on seeing Tony now that Valerie is conveniently out of the way?”

“I don’t like what you’re implying. I’ve just lost a very dear old friend. There’s nothing ‘convenient’ about that.”

“A dear friend whose husband you stole.”

“I didn’t steal him. Don’t be so melodramatic. These things happen all the time.”

“Where did you go after you left the restaurant that night, Jacqui?”

“I came here. Scott and Ginny dropped me off. They’ll tell you.”

“Did you visit Tony and Valerie’s house often?”

“Sometimes.”

“When was the last time?”

“About a month ago. They had a barbecue. We were all there. Me, Ray, Ginny, Scott.”

“So you knew the ravine well enough?”

“We all went for a walk there, yes. But, look –”

“And you had plenty of time to get back out to the Beach the night Valerie was killed, if you wanted to.”

“I don’t drive.”

“There are taxis.”

“They’d have records.”

“Maybe. But Valerie would have let you in the back door, no problem, wouldn’t she?”

“What are you talking about? Why should I go to the back door?”

“So you wouldn’t be seen from the street. Because you went with the intent of killing Valerie. You just didn’t know that Tony would get the blame. When you found out he was in the shower and Valerie was all alone, you seized the opportunity and killed her.”

Jacqui stood up, hands on hips. “This is ridiculous. On the one hand, you’re saying I went there with the intention of killing Valerie, which is absurd, and on the other hand, you accuse me of ‘seizing the
moment.’ Which is it? It can’t be both. Look, I don’t want to talk to you anymore. You’re not a real policeman. You can’t make me.”

She was right. I had no special powers. Standing, I reached in my pocket for the key. “Recognize this?” I asked.

She looked at it, pouting. “No.”

“It’s a safety deposit key,” I told her. “Were you ever aware of Valerie having a safety deposit box?”

“No. But I told you, she could be very secretive.”

“Any idea what she might have kept in it if she had one?”

“I don’t know. Money? Jewellery? Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got more packing to do.”