Death of a Sunday Writer (7 page)

This time he paid for his room in American dollars.

“Peter,” she said the next morning, using Tse's first name at his insistence. “I'm keeping the agency open.”

Tse was trying to make the carpet lie flat under her door. “Be nice if you did stay,” he said. “But you don't know anyfing about detecting.” He spoke casually, dismissively, as if to an irritating child, stamping down the edge of the carpet.

“I can learn. I'm going to start by shadowing Mrs. Lindberg, and work up from there. I won't accept anything dangerous. Besides, I want to find out something about David, and I can do it best from here. Do you know any of his friends, his acquaintances?”

“I saw a few of them. Bad guys, Lucy.”

“Everybody is, according to you.”

“You wouldn't like these people. Bums, deadbeats — one guy who used to bet with David didn't even wash. You always knew he'd been here.” He grinned.

“Sounds like Longborough Library. Where can I find these people?”

“All at the race track. But I am telling you, go back
to Longborough.”

“You want another month's rent?”

“I don't know if I want to rent to you. I don't like this. You can't follow people about, like David did.”

“I'm going to try. At least I've got a car.” She moved over to the window overlooking Queen Street. “Who was it that first saw David?”

Tse joined her at the window. “Across there.”

“Which one?”

“Nina in the travel agency.”

“Nina?”

“She works in the agency.”

Lucy crouched down until she got the sight lines right. “How could she see in?”

“The light was on. She looked over and saw David on the floor.”

“Then what?”

“She ran over to get someone to break the door open, then she saw me coming along the street. She knows me.” He looked across the street at the woman sitting at her desk. “She's my tenant.”

“You own that building, too?”

“And the one next to it.” Tse switched from his regular cockney accent to a parody of Charlie Chan. “Chinese man work velly hard, make pisspot full of money while white man watch. Now richest man in Toronto.”

“Don't be silly, Peter, and don't swear. What happened next?”

“You married, Lucy?”

“Yes, but I don't live with my husband. What happened next?”

“You got a boyfriend?”

“That's enough. What happened next?”

“I came to the office right away, and there he was, dead. I called the cops.”

“You didn't touch anything?”

“I switched off the light and pulled the curtains so no one could see. All the windows across the street were full of people looking.”

“Where was he lying?”

“Right here.” Tse pointed to the floor by the desk. “I'll show you.” He lay down beside the desk. “See?”

“Was there any blood? Were his clothes torn?”

“He fell down dead. A heart attack. He just came to work. He had a cup of coffee on his desk.”

“All right. Now I have to see the police.”

“Lucy, David was your cousin, right? Why is it you haven't seen him for twenty years?”

“The two families lost touch, I guess. You know?”

“No. My family gets together. We like each other. How come Anglo families don't like each other?”

She turned to look at him and saw that he was teasing her. “We do, really. It's just that we don't like anybody much. Now leave me alone. I have to get ready for the police.”

Her first stop was the morgue to pick up her cousin's personal effects. She asked the attendant to get rid of David's clothes, taking with her only the envelope of valuables — a billfold with seventeen dollars and two credit cards, a plastic wallet-sized lens for reading the small print in telephone books, a watch, and a pair of hornrimmed bifocals. From the morgue, she went to the police headquarters on College Street where she tracked down the sergeant who had investigated Trimble's death. He listened to her questions, tapped at a computer, found what he wanted, and read it to her. “David Trimble died of natural
causes. A massive coronary. There was an autopsy. No sign of foul play. Take a look.”

Lucy leaned over to read the screen. “There was an abrasion on his cheek,” she pointed out.

“I did notice that at the time,” the sergeant said. He pressed a key. “Read my report.”

The abrasion was noted. It was consistent, the sergeant's report said, with having hit his head on the desk as he fell. Lucy opened her mouth to speak.

“Read on.”

Next came the laboratory report. The technicians had found a trace of David's skin on the metal edge of the desk.

“I see.” She thought about it. “Could he have been threatened, frightened by someone who knew he had a bad heart? I know of several cases like that.”

“In Toronto?”

“Not in Toronto, no.” One was on the Balkan Express in 1936; two others were in England, one in a vicarage, the other at the University of Oxbridge. “But if someone did that, wouldn't it constitute a kind of assault?”

“There was no evidence of anyone else in the room, except the landlord who found him. The room was locked. No break-ins, nothing disturbed. It was natural causes, Mrs. Brenner. He was practically an invalid according to the pathologist. Anything could have brought it on, or nothing.”

“But what about this break-in?”

This was news to the sergeant. Lucy told him what had been happening.

The sergeant listened, then explained. “Queen and Egerton is kind of cosmopolitan. When the word got out that your cousin had died, there'd be any number of local
citizens who might decide they'd take a look, pick up anything that's loose.”

“But they didn't steal anything.”

“Maybe they were looking for money.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

“It isn't a coincidence, is it? A coincidence has to be surprising. Talk to the Break-and-Enter squad. They'll tell you that there were a hundred and eighteen breakins in the Queen and Bathurst area last year.”

“How do you know?”

“I don't. I'm making it all up. But that would be about average.”

“Won't they investigate further?”

“Investigate what? They'll be around to find out if anyone saw anything. But you don't know if anything was stolen. What's to investigate?”

Lucy said, “Did you take pictures?”

“Of the body? You want to see?” The sergeant opened a file drawer and pulled out an envelope. Inside were a dozen coloured photographs, taken with a flash camera. As Lucy reached out a hand, the sergeant pulled the pictures out of reach. “Hold on. He didn't look very peaceful and there's — other things. Do you know what happens when someone dies?”

It was a detail ommitted from all but the most naturalistic stories, but she knew what the sergeant was talking about. “I'd still like to see them.”

The major indignity was clear, and Lucy tried to concentrate on David's face and the general position of his body. He did not look in pain, but one eye was open, and his face was dark. Lucy turned the pictures over, one by one.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don't know,” she confessed.

“If you find anything, let the forensic boys know. They couldn't.”

He had succeeded in making Lucy feel naive, but she felt a friendliness in him that encouraged her to ask for his help. “There's something else I want to do.” She took some breath, nervous of her next idea. “I'm going to write a memoir about him, but to do that I have to speak to his friends. David was writing his own memoirs and there's a lot about different people on his computer, but I don't know who they are.” It had struck Lucy that she would perhaps get more cooperation if she implied that material, perhaps of a scandalous nature, already existed on David's computer.

The sergeant waited politely.

“He was a gambler,” Lucy said.

“I figured.”

“Can you tell me who his associates might be?”

“I just knew him dead. I don't work the gambling scene.”

“Could I find someone who could help me?”

“You plan to talk to bookies? Stuff like that? Do you know any names?”

“There are some.”

The sergeant looked up a number and punched some buttons on the telephone. “Richard,” he said, when he was connected. “I have a lady in my office, relative of David Trimble, guy who died, private investigator. You knew him? You know who he hung around with? This lady would like to know where she could find some of them. Yeah, I bet you would, but would you talk to her? This afternoon. Right.” He put the phone down and turned back to Lucy “He's on the
fourth floor. He's busy now but if you come back late this afternoon, he'll see you.”

Lucy went back to the office and collected up all the pictures in which Trimble had been photographed with other people, putting these in a plastic grocery bag. Next, she switched on the computer and retrieved the file for “My Kingdom for a Winner.” Three times
the black clouds billowed over the racecourse as Night Fighter came round the bend,
but eventually, working her way through the narratives, she came to the material she had noticed the first time, the outline for the future:

1. My First Big Win — Night Fighter

2. Beating the Odds — How I tracked down J. Cull at the Queen's Plate.

3. The greatest coup of my life.

4. Dual Forecast, both bad. I am told the worst re: heart.

The list ran to twenty-three items, most of them apparently accounts of bets Trimble had won. The items
were in chronological order and the last three probably occurred in the last year:

21. Beating the odds — How I became Oscar T's least favourite client.

22. Nick of Time — the bet that saved my life.

23. He who lauqhs last — How I won a bet by coming last.

Lucy read it through and noted names on a slip of paper, folding the note into her purse. Before she switched off, she tried an idea on the “Diary” file that she had not yet unlocked. Perhaps her cousin had simply used his own name to protect the file? But the answer came back with the same result: “Enter Password.” She did not think the word would be arbitrary; it had to be significant so that Trimble would not forget it. She would find it when she knew her cousin better.

Peter Tse appeared, and Lucy told him about the locked diary and asked him if he had any suggestions. “Try Journal,” he said. She punched in Journal. No good. “Try Secret.” No good. “Private.” Tse said. No good. She switched off and Tse asked why she was so keen to get into the diary file. She told him.

“You going to ask the police about his pals?”

“I already have. I'm going back this afternoon.”

“Good luck.”

She drove first to Trimble's apartment and went through all of Trimble's clothes carefully, but her cousin had apparently been scrupulous about his wardrobe, always
emptying everything from his pockets before he hung up his clothes. She shook out his shirts and unrolled his socks, but there was not even a stray coin.

Next, she emptied the fridge: frozen dinners in sealed packets, canned food, half a loaf of bread. Dumping the bread, she put the frozen food back into the freezer compartment, and the cans back into the cupboard where they belonged.

She was left with the bed, an armchair, a rug, a television set, and a lot of framed pictures of Trimble — all group photographs in which Trimble and one or more other men were posed at the racetrack. The one peculiarity of the pictures was that in each, Trimble was wearing an empty camera case, from which Lucy deduced that all of them were taken at his request with his own camera.

There was nowhere else. The bathroom contained all the expected items as well as a lot of old-fashioned toiletries, including a tin of brilliantine and another bottle of toilet water from Trumpers of London. Lucy squeezed, shook, held up to the light, unscrewed, and generally made sure that nothing as big as a nutmeg could have been concealed (she also looked in the toilet tank), and came to the conclusion that there were no secrets in the apartment.

On the way out of the building, she bumped into the janitor and asked him what the situation was with David's rent.

“He paid the first and last month, so if you give me notice then there is five weeks left.”

“Is there a big waiting list for these apartments?”

“Not now. Last year we had calls every day, but lately it's calmed down.”

“If I wanted it, could I just take it over?”

“I'll ask the manager. You'll have to sign another lease.”

“Would you do that? Ask him for me? By the way, you can have all the clothes in the closet. Throw the underwear and socks away.”

“Can I have the shirts? Thanks. Mr. Trimble had some nice shirts. I'll use the socks for rags.”

“Take it all. I'll call you in a few days about the vacancy.”

“There won't be no problem.” He winked and grinned, and Lucy realised she had been bribing him.

When she returned to the office Lucy now thought of as hers, she called Buncombe, the lawyer, and explained what she planned to do. Buncombe was as bad as Tse, pointing out to her, by implication, that she was a foolish, middle-aged woman, far too naive even to think of getting involved in the boredom, the sleaze, the hand-to-mouth existence of a private investigator. So concerned was he that he dropped his affectations and spoke normally.

“What about the risk?” she asked.

“Forget about the risk. Think about the sleaze. You'll be one step up from a debt-collector, about on a par with a magazine subscription salesman.”

“I'm going to try it. If it's too sleazy, whatever that means, I'll quit. It won't get boring for a while, at least, and I'm not broke. I can manage. But I may have to pass a test or something. Do you know? Or do you know anyone who knows? You must use private investigators sometimes. For the sleazy stuff.”