Cold Comfort (13 page)

Gilbert’s eyes narrowed. “Did he do this often?” he asked.

“Often enough.” A wary crease came to her brow. “But I can’t help thinking…” She looked down at her noodles. Then she looked up at Gilbert, her eyes now inquisitive. “You knew about the burglary, didn’t you?”

As if, because he was a detective, he knew about every one of the hundreds of burglaries committed every month in Metro.

“What burglary?” he said, frowning a bit.

“Our office was burgled the night Cheryl was murdered.”

He assimilated this information calmly, evaluating it as perhaps a major piece of evidence. Cheryl’s murder had a contralateral crime; the murder of her stepsister, Donna Varley. Now there seemed to be a contralateral crime to the tossing of Cheryl’s apartment. He would phone Richter in Burglary and get the details.

“And was anything taken?”

“No,” she said, and she now looked perplexed. “Nothing at all.”

Alvin Matchett wouldn’t meet Gilbert at police headquarters. Though the changeover in staff had been considerable in the last fifteen years, there were still many officers and detectives who remembered Matchett, and who couldn’t forget the Dennison shooting. Likewise, Matchett didn’t want Gilbert to come to the Parliament Buildings, especially with Ronald Roffey sniffing around. So they met in Queen’s Park, just north of the legislature. Temperatures had climbed, the winds had died, and the sun shone benevolently as they strolled the path toward the War Memorial.

Gilbert was apologetic but insistent; Matchett was grave but cooperative.

“It ended four months ago,” said Matchett. “It was stupid. I didn’t know what I was thinking. The whole thing was a mistake.”

“And Jane didn’t like it,” said Gilbert.

“She and I were…up until last June. But then I just got… I got tired of it all. The fitness thing, the vitamins, and the food, it was just too much for me. I’m getting old. Jane’s forty-two, she still thinks she can fight it, but she’s going to learn sooner or later.”

“So you and Jane—”

“For nearly two years. I actually lived with her for a while. You should see the biceps on her. She can bench-press two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. She’s got…and her pecs… anyway, we split up, and Jane took it hard, but I felt…I don’t know, I felt great. No more fighting free radicals by mega-dosing with antioxidants.”

Up ahead, an old man in a grey overcoat and fingerless gloves, his nose as red as a strawberry and as large as a tomato, fed bread crumbs to pigeons from a plastic bag. Students from the nearby Faculties of Music and Law strolled the park, enjoying the unexpected thaw.

“So when did you start seeing Cheryl?” asked Gilbert. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but you know how it is.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Gilbert recognized the refrain from the Dennison hearings.

“She came on staff about the end of May,” said Matchett. “I thought when Tom hired her he was doing her a favor, you know, family and everything. But she was qualified. She was a good fund-raiser, not only helped Tom’s campaign but the whole Tory campaign. That’s where we really got to know each other. Working the money thing for her stepfather. It was like our personal crusade.”

Out on Queen’s Park Crescent, a delivery truck backfired. The pigeons the old man was feeding leaped into the air and swept over Gilbert and Matchett. Matchett jerked to one side and ducked, raising both hands above his head. Gilbert stared at his old partner. Matchett looked up at the pigeons with phobic aversion.

“You’ve got a thing about birds?” asked Gilbert.

Matchett lowered his arms, watching the pigeons apprehensively as they circled back to the old man and the bread crumbs.

“I hate them,” he said. “I always have.”

“Then I’ll take back the budgie I got you for your birthday.”

“Good,” said Matchett. “Get me a cat instead.”

“I thought you were allergic to cats.”

“I am,” he said. “But they make great bird killers.”

Gilbert laughed.

They strolled to the other side of the park in silence, both of them in their own thoughts. An old Chinese couple practiced Tai Chi under a tree in the snow. When Gilbert and Matchett reached the War Memorial, Gilbert pointed across the street.

“That’s my car over there,” he said. “In the Law School parking lot. You’re sure you have enough time for this? I can come back after work if you want?”

Matchett watched the traffic, waiting for a break. “You just want the gun, right?”

Gilbert nodded. “That’s all.”

“Then we should have plenty of time.”

The Avenue Road bus rumbled by. They hurried across in the wake of the bus and entered the Law School parking lot. A young man stepped gingerly through the ice-covered lot carrying a double bass, coming from the Faculty of Music directly behind the Law School. Gilbert and Matchett got in Gilbert’s Lumina.

“What’s the best way?” asked Gilbert.

“Back down to Wellesley and across. Then right on Parliament to Winchester.”

Gilbert started the car.

As they drove eastbound on Wellesley, they resumed their discussion.

“Anyway, Jane was jealous,” said Matchett. “She wouldn’t cooperate. This was her response to the whole thing, her way of getting back. Not that she was much involved with the election. She was too busy running Tom’s office, handling the day-to-day stuff. But when we needed help, she was a real pain. Say we needed a car at a certain location at a certain time. Before Cheryl, she’d go to the carpool herself and deliver it personally. Not later on. Sometimes we’d be lucky to get a car at all. Or if we had a pile of stuff to fax, she’d always get it out late and she’d pin the blame on Cheryl. I don’t know why. As if making my life inconvenient was going to change things. I still have clothes over at Jane’s place. I’ve been trying to arrange a time to go over and get them. No dice. I think I’m just going to have to wait until she cools down.”

They caught the red light at Church Street, in the heart of the gay section; several slim young men with short hair and mustaches strode by; Gilbert couldn’t help wondering, why short hair and mustaches all the time?

“You don’t think…” He faltered. “I mean she was jealous, but she was jealous in a normal way. She didn’t flip out.”

Matchett looked at him with a mocking grin. “You know, with you around, everybody in this city is going to be a suspect sooner or later. Jane may have her idiosyncrasies, but she’s not whacka-whacka.”

“But she came back to earth, didn’t she?” said Gilbert. “Once you and Cheryl split.”

Matchett took a deep breath, thinking it over. “She got a little better.” He stared at the dashboard, thinking. “Then again, I still haven’t got my clothes back.”

“Why exactly did you and Cheryl end it?”

The light turned green and they eased across the intersection.

“I guess when the election was over there just didn’t seem to be any fizz left,” said Matchett. “We had nothing to talk about. We had no real mutual interests. We made no conscious decision to end it. We just more or less went back to our other lives. We picked up old patterns, and those patterns didn’t include each other. Her stepsister moved from Sudbury about that time. I guess her stepsister had troubles of one kind or another. I was sorry to hear about her murder.”

“Did you ever meet Donna?”

“I met the lot of them. Her stepbrothers came down in early December, I don’t know why, family meeting of some kind. I can’t say that Donna and Larry are my kind of people. I don’t mean to be…you know…I tried to like them, but I just found them…I don’t know, trashy. Real down-and-outers, losers with dirty hair and bad teeth. Dean was all right, though. I think he’s a dentist or something.”

They passed the government-subsidized high-rises of Jamestown and turned right on Parliament. A family meeting. Gilbert would have to make a note of that. He was beginning to think Bannatyne was right; maybe their prime suspects in both murders might turn out to be the Varley brothers.

They turned left on Winchester past the old Winchester Hotel, with its cheap draft, cheap drunks, and cheap rooms, a leftover from Cabbage Town, when the area was still the city’s worst slum, before all the trendies and yuppies invaded.

“I’m right here,” said Matchett, pointing to a huge Edwardian house. “I have the whole third floor.”

Gilbert found a parking spot along the curb. “I still haven’t figured out Cheryl’s family tree. Dorothy was her birth mother?”

“That’s right.”

“So Dorothy married Craig Shaw, and together they had Cheryl. Joe’s still digging through the Registrar’s records. We’re still trying to piece it together.”

“Craig Shaw was a big shot with Lac Minerals, back when Lac Minerals was still a going concern. He was killed in a cave-in touring one of their new operations in Quebec.”

“That much we’ve learned.”

“Cheryl was around ten at the time.”

“Any other children from that marriage?”

Matchett unsnapped his seat-belt. “Nope,” he said, “Cheryl’s the only one.”

The two men got out of the Lumina and headed across the street. God, that sun felt nice.

“So Dorothy then married Paul Varley,” said Gilbert.

Matchett nodded. “Some time in the early seventies.”

“And he already had three children.”

Matchett pushed the gate open. “Larry and Dean were quite a bit older. Larry was nineteen and Dean was seventeen. Then again, Donna was younger than Cheryl. Cheryl was twelve when her mother married Paul Varley. Donna had to be about nine.”

“And were things all right?” asked Gilbert. “Did Cheryl get along with her new family?”

They went up the walk. Matchett took out his house keys.

“As far as I know, yes,” he said. “I don’t think she was ever that close to the boys. They were so much older. Larry was already moved out. And Dean, I don’t know, I think he left for Guelph a year later. He went to school there. So it was really only Donna. Donna’s not too terribly bright. I think Cheryl must have dominated her.”

He opened the door and they went inside. “So then Paul Varley died,” said Gilbert.

“About two years later,” said Matchett. “In a snowmobile accident. Apparently the girls were with him. They were miles from nowhere, up in Onaping Falls. The girls weren’t hurt, but by the time they got help, Paul Varley was already dead.”

Gilbert shook his head. “That’s too bad.”

“Kind of rough, isn’t it?” said Matchett, as they began climbing his private set of stairs to his third-floor apartment. “To lose two fathers in the space of four years. But Cheryl’s resilient. The more you get to know her, the more you see that. She’s got a tough little spot inside her nobody can touch.”

“And her mother married Webb when?”

“Some time in the mid-eighties. Donna stayed in Sudbury. She wanted to be close to her brothers, even though by that time Larry had been in and out of jail a number of times. Tom has his constituency up there, but when he became the member for Sudbury West, they moved down here. Cheryl wanted to be with her mother. And she wanted to go to school here so it all worked out.”

They climbed the second flight of stairs to Alvin Matchett’s apartment. The building had been newly renovated and the hardwood steps gleamed. Matchett opened the door and they went inside. The more Gilbert thought about it, the more he realized he would have to drive up to Sudbury.

“I keep it in the bedroom,” said Matchett, flicking on the light.

“Do you want me to take off my shoes?” asked Gilbert.

“No, it’s all right. I’ll just be a second.”

Matchett hurried down the hall. Gilbert glanced around while he waited. The mishmash of furnishings in the living room, the way they looked so hastily arranged, gave the place an impermanent unlived-in look. Peering into the kitchen, Gilbert saw three pizza boxes stuffed between the fridge and the counter and a half-finished frozen dinner on the table.

Matchett returned from his bedroom carrying what looked like a metal attache case.

“You just want the gun, right?” he said. “You don’t need the case.”

“Maybe a couple of your rounds to test-fire.”

“Sure.”

Matchett lifted the snaps and opened the case.

And they both just stared.

The gun wasn’t there. Only its hard-foam case impression, as detailed as a foundry mold, cut cleanly in the perfect shape of a Heckler and Koch .45, but empty, gone, taken. The eleven-round clip was there, snug in its own perfect little mold. So were the custom shoulder mount, the owner’s manual, the registration papers, a can of gun oil, two tins of ammunition, and the gun club schedule. But the actual weapon was gone.

Gilbert looked at Matchett, waiting for an explanation, waiting for him to go back to his bedroom and maybe find the semiautomatic in his dresser drawer. But Matchett just stared at the empty mold in disbelief. Then Matchett turned to Gilbert; it was like the two of them were rock climbing; and Gilbert was already at the top pulling Matchett up by a rope; but now the rope snapped; and Matchett’s expression was frozen in that instant of the snapping rope, with the realization he was falling, and that there was nothing Gilbert could do to save him. Matchett looked at the empty case again, as if he had to convince himself. Gilbert waited patiently.

“Barry, this is…” Matchett’s face flushed, and he turned quickly away, rubbing his hand over his brow, his mouth slackening in astonishment, the veins above his temples bulging. “Barry, the gun was there. You know me. I’m careful about firearms. The gun was there, I know it was. I do everything by the book. The only time that gun comes out of the case is at the range.”

“Maybe you were cleaning it,” suggested Gilbert. “Maybe you left it in your bedroom somewhere.”

Matchett gave his head a brief shake, dismissing the idea outright.

“I never clean it here,” he said. “We have a workbench at the club. I always…”

He looked down the hall, clutching at the remote possibility that he may indeed have cleaned his gun here after all. He broke suddenly away from Gilbert and hurried to his bedroom. He ducked quickly inside. Gilbert, hearing him pull open dresser drawers, followed quietly behind. He stopped at Matchett’s bedroom door. Matchett ferreted madly through underwear and socks, opened the next drawer, looked through sweatpants and sweaters, opened the next drawer, searched through pants and shorts. Then went to his closet, opened the built-in drawers there. Then checked under his bed. Got desperate. Under the pillows. Finally between the mattress and the box spring. Then stopped, walked to the window, checked the ledge, kicked a pile of clothes out of the way, put his palms against the sill, and leaned forward, staring out the pane at the sunny street below, as if he believed the gun might be out on the roof.