Death of a Sunday Writer (3 page)

“Follow them, you mean? I don't think so. He wouldn't have been much good at that. A bit overweight.” Buncombe bubbled slightly, but controlled himself. “He just sat in a car in the street for fifty dollars an hour and took pictures of people going in and coming out of the door he was watching. The trouble was, as I said, David didn't even own a car, or rather he owned a lot of cars but none for very long, so when he got a job he usually had to rent one. He only worked when he had to, and he wasn't — very — good.” Buncombe emphasised all of the last three words equally, ending in a shout of laughter as if he had just expounded the most extraordinary paradox.

Lucy was forced to smile slightly, or to appear rude. “He must have been some good at picking winners, then.”

“Not even that! He lived hand to mouth, just holding his own.” He opened a drawer. “Now, here are the keys to his office and his apartment. And there's a package at the morgue.” Buncombe slapped the keys on the desk in front of her.

Lucy looked at the tag on the office keys. “Egerton Street. Where's that?”

“South off Queen, between Bathurst and Spadina.”

“And the apartment? Fortescue Road?”

“Off Bloor Street, near Bathurst.”

Lucy put the keys in her purse. “You say he actually named me in his will?”

“He made it early last year. At the time, he still had a bit of the money his mother left him — that's all gone now — and I was trying to get him to put something away for his old age. I like all my clients to make a will. People who die without a will create problems for us all. So he told me to go ahead, and when we looked for a legatee, he said there wasn't anyone except you. He remembered that you'd invited him to your wedding.”

“I'd forgotten.” An image of a jaunty little man in a bright green tie floated to the surface.

“He hadn't. Gamblers are very sentimental about things like that. I did a search and found that you were running — a hotel? — in Longborough.”

“A bed-and-breakfast.”

“He liked the sound of that. He talked of looking you up, but then he thought that if he died, it would be a pleasant surprise for you, so to speak.”

“What a nice idea. He might have won a lottery in the meantime, then I'd be rich.”

“He didn't, and you're not.”

“He tried, though, didn't he?” Discovering you are liked by someone you are hardly aware of is always pleasant. “And if I have any other questions?”

“Just call. I won't charge for a phone call.”

She walked through to Market Square to find a cup of coffee while she decided what to do. The restaurants she passed all seemed to be assuming it was lunch-time, but she wasn't yet hungry so she bought coffee from a take-out shop and found a seat on a bench in the little park opposite the St. Lawrence Centre.

So far, her inheritance had provided a small interesting outing. Now she had to dispose of her cousin's effects, and go back to Longborough. She wondered if, in arranging to stay overnight, she hadn't made too much of the expedition. Longborough was only a hundred and fifty kilometers away, and some people there commuted to Toronto daily. But if she stayed here, at least for a night, she could try to find some clothes. Surely there would be something in the Eaton Centre.

She sat in the park for half an hour, drinking her coffee, acknowledged by no one except an old tramp to whom she gave a quarter. In Longborough, a dozen people would have greeted her by now, and she smiled at the irony. When she had moved to Longborough in the first
place she wanted the world to evaluate her afresh, separate from the assumptions that were involved in being Geoffrey Brenner's wife, but she had not been allowed to remain a stranger long, once the librarians had understood her situation. It was slightly exhilarating to be once more anonymous.

She dropped her paper cup into a waste basket and looked at the address that Buncombe had given her. She would still have preferred to leave her car in the lot and take the Queen street-car but, now that she had driven through the city once, it seemed feeble, and the car would certainly save time.

David Trimble's office was one of a number of cubicles above a row of small stores at the corner of Egerton and Queen Streets. As Lucy started down the gloomy hallway, looking for the name, a door swung open at the far end and a policeman came out followed by another man, a middle-aged oriental — a well-groomed, athletic-looking man wearing bifocals, dressed in a grey sweatshirt and baggy pants.

“I'll arrange for a padlock until we find out who owns this stuff now,” the policeman said. “Can I help you, ma'am?”

“I'm looking for David Trimble's office.”

“You've found it. Who are you? What do you want with him?”

“I'm his cousin. I came to clean out his office.”

“Somebody already did.” The policeman pushed open the door and stood back for her to look in.

The office had been wrecked. All the desk drawers were up-ended. The contents of a filing cabinet had been
dumped out. A box of computer paper had been emptied on the floor. The little computer itself looked undamaged, though the monitor had been lifted off the drive unit. A few books had been taken out of a bookcase and lay about the floor.

“I understand your cousin died,” the policeman said.

Lucy nodded. “Burglars?”

“I guess. Young kids looking for cash, I would think. Real crooks usually take stuff like that.” He pointed to the computer.

“Have you been in here lately?”

“I've never been here before. I haven't seen my cousin for twenty years.”

“In that case you won't know if anything was missing. I understand he died of a heart attack just recently.”

“So I was told.” She looked around at the mess. “I should report this, shouldn't I?”

“He already did. That's why I'm here.” The policeman nodded towards the oriental, who put out his hand. “Peter Tse. T-S-E, pronounced See.”

“The janitor?”

“This is my building. I own it.”

“I'll go back and make my report,” the policeman said. “You'll want some time. I was going to padlock the office. The lock is busted. You want me to do that now, still?”

“Yes, please,” Lucy said. “How long will it take?”

“I'll have the guy in the hardware store downstairs come right up.” He walked off, down the corridor.

Lucy had no idea what to do next. Peter Tse followed her into the office. “Pretty bad,” he said. “A bad mess. But I don't think they got anyfing.” He smiled companionably and sat down.

“How do you know?” Lucy walked over to the window that looked out on Queen Street, resenting very slightly the way Tse had invited himself in. He had an odd but faintly familiar accent, certainly not Canadian, probably Hong Kong or somewhere like that.

“David never had anyfing. He borrowed fifty dollars from me the day before he died. He always owed me fifty dollars. And sometimes the rent, too.”

“I'll settle his debts as soon as I can,” she said over her shoulder. She wondered if she was being conned. It seemed an easy way for the landlord to pick up fifty dollars.

Tse stood up and carefully placed his chair behind the desk, then dusted off his hands. “I didn't say that because of that. I don't mind fifty dollars. I just said that because you asked what they got. You think David might have had some money? He never had money. These toughs just broke in to look for things to steal. I don't mind fifty dollars. I liked David. So I lent him fifty dollars. Okay?” He turned towards the door.

“I'm sorry. But what about the rent?”

“It's all paid up until the end of the month. He paid the first and last month's rent and he is one payment behind, so at the end of the month it's finished.”

“I have two weeks to clear this out, then?”

“All the time you want.” He walked out, leaving the door open.

Lucy righted a second chair, sat down and pressed her hands between her knees. She had been rude to that Chinese man, because she was nervous. He was just trying to be helpful. The man from the hardware store appeared and screwed on the hasp for a padlock. She paid him and added the keys to her ring, then looked around for a point to start cleaning up. She had just
refolded the computer paper when Peter Tse appeared in the doorway, which she had carefully left ajar.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Tse,” she said immediately. “I didn't mean to sound rude.”

Tse looked at her through the top of his bifocals, his head down. Satisfied, he smiled. “Yes, you did. And now you're sorry. Okay. You look hungry. You want to come and eat with me?”

This was sudden. She had no Chinese friends in Longborough, but there was a mythology about the men, she remembered reading somewhere. They found middle-aged Caucasian women irresistible. No, they found them disgusting, smelling of milk products. Either way it didn't matter at noon on Queen Street, west of Spadina, surely. “I wouldn't mind a bowl of soup,” she said.

“Let's go. He put on your lock? Let's go.”

He shepherded her along the corridor and down the stairs outon to the street, and into a Portuguese coffee shop. While she drank her soup and he ate some dark grey fish, Tse talked. First he established that she did not know her cousin or anything about him. Then he explained.

“David was,” he paused searching for a word, “bad,” he concluded.

A scamp, she remembered. “Why?”

“He knew some bad people. They came to his office. Betting people.”

“He was a private detective. He was bound to have bad people among his clients.” It was something she probably knew more about than he did, in theory at any rate.

Tse laughed. “He didn't do much detective stuff. Mostly betting.”

“But he did have some clients.”

“A few. Not too many. He didn't work very hard on the detective stuff.” Tse continued to grin at the idea of Trimble, the detective.

“If he borrowed the rent from you, he wasn't a very good bettor, either, was he?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes he won. Sometimes he paid me two or three months rent. Other times I lent him a few dollars.”

“Why?”

“I liked him. He was a bad bugger, but a nice man.”

“How was he — bad? Was he swindling people?”

“Oh, sure. I don't know who, though. He was a swindling type of man. I think he worked for bookies, too.”

“How?”

“He helped them find people.”

“What kind...”

“People who don't pay. When he found them the bookies made them pay.” Tse nodded several times to emphasise the words.

“You mean he was an enforcer?”

Tse roared. “David couldn't enforce a duck. No, he found the people, then the enforcer came.”

“How do you know?”

Tse showed his teeth. “People have told me they've recognised some of the ones who come to David's office.”

“Do you think the bookies or the enforcers could have been the ones who broke into the office?”

“Why? No. That was just toughs. Kids. Why would bookies break into David's office?” He was genuinely puzzled.

“I don't know. That policeman thought it was kids
looking for money. But maybe it was someone else. Do you know what case David was working on when he died?”

Tse grinned. “I don't think he had any cases lately.” His emphasis was derisive. “He's been in his office a lot lately, reading, playing with the computer.”

Lucy said nothing.

“What are you going to do?” he asked her.

“Clean up the office, I guess. Find a way to get rid of the stuff.”

“I'll clean up for you. I'll buy his stuff. I've got tenants who want a chair or a desk.”

“But then...oh, no.” Lucy was looking forward to finding out about her cousin, having a good poke around his private life, but she couldn't say that to Tse. “No, that's my job.”

“Okay. If you want to sell anyfing, though, maybe the computer, I'll buy it.”

“I'll have to see.”

She worked steadily through the afternoon. The phone rang twice for her cousin; both callers rang off immediately at the sound of her voice. At the end of the day, she felt she had properly sorted the mess into two discrete piles. There was the material that seemed to have come out of the desk drawers. Most of this had to do with horses. There were pictures of horses, old clippings of accounts of major races, race programmes, guides to making money by gambling. There was some clean underwear, two laundered shirts, socks, toothpaste, combs, a pair of hair brushes, a bottle of cologne from Trumper of London, a pair of reading glasses.

The pictures that had been pulled off the walls were also about horses, and as the afternoon wore on, Lucy began to get an impression of her cousin. Within the limits of his fluctuating income, he was a dapper dresser who affected a British 'Members Enclosure' style of costume, and was obsessed with horses, not just with betting. There was evidence — some pictures, a book on equitation — that at some earlier and probably lighter period Trimble had even tried to ride.

From the filing cabinet, she learned that his last case as a private detective was apparently three years before. Each case was recorded on a single sheet of hand-written paper in a file folder. There were fifty or sixty such folders. She pointed this out to Tse on one of the many occasions that he put his head round the door to see how she was getting on.

“Try the computer,” Tse said. “After he got the computer he put everything on it. I told you, he never stopped playing with it, moving paragraphs, stuff like that.”

Of course. She reserved the computer for later.

At six, Tse appeared again, and she asked him how to get to Trimble's apartment.

Trimble had lived in a building south of Bloor Street, near Honest Ed's; she found her cousin's name among the tenants listed in the basement. A brief look around the tiny studio apartment told her that it was no more than a camp. There was a single bed, an armchair, a television set and a kitchen table and chairs. Mostly there were clothes, slightly horsey jackets, an off-white raincoat of a military type, and even an old pair of riding boots. It seemed a sound idea to call the Salvation Army to cart it away.