Erasing Memory (2 page)

He stared down at her.
Was this piece going to be your first triumph? You could be wearing your graduation gown
.

He took the latex gloves out of his back pocket and slipped them on with a snap. His wife had hated that he always carried these things about. Whenever she’d be searching for the car keys or milk money and felt the powdery latex on her fingers, she’d let loose a stream of furious cursing, which he always recalled when he reached for them. The memory of her exasperation briefly warmed him.

Time was running out—soon the Turks would arrive and the scene would dissolve in a wave of sick jokes. And then the baggie-footed, gloved-hand, plastic-bag-toting, Tyvek-clad forensic nitpickers would take over and she’d cease to be “human” forever. He asked himself what was missing, then thought,
Even a violinist has a purse
.

He searched the hall closet and the two bedrooms. Nothing out of place, nor any indication that anyone had been living here. But he found no vacuum cleaner either, though the cleaners could have brought their own. On the balcony, the sight of the lake rippling in the light of the half-moon, silhouetted by pine and birch—the music, the chiffon gown—made him realize what an exhaustingly sad scene this was. Standing at the railing, he looked down towards the blue grass and sand—nothing.

Turning back to her, he paused to listen, as if an answer would come from her lips. Squatting down, he reached under her shoulders and, lifting her up slightly, slid his hand beneath her. There under her ribcage was a small, glittering evening bag, not much bigger than his glasses case. He retrieved it and gently let her shoulders fall.

The magnetic clasp gave way with a little pop, but he had already felt its contents through the sequined fabric. It was full of optimism but little else. No wallet, no credit cards or identification, just a key and a lipstick—Barely Cherry. He looked at her mouth and said respectfully, “God bless the innocents, for they will be first to the slaughter.”

The key, on a small roundel fob, was for one of those locks guaranteed to be burglar proof. More optimism. On its brushed silver head were the letters
LT
, engraved with serifs and a slight descending flourish. That was all she had with her.

On cue, the heavy Chevys pulled up outside—two cars. Three doors opened and slammed shut. His time alone with her was up and he still had no clue, no idea and no advantage that his age and experience could produce, beyond knowing what the music was on the turntable and recognizing the bruise on her chin.

He heard one of the Turks ask, “Whose rig is that?”

“Judging by the stuff on the seat, I’d say MacNeice,” came the response.

MacNeice remembered that he hadn’t put the CD wallet away, and the volume of e. e. cummings was on the front passenger seat too. He was putting the key back in her bag as the three cops came in.

“That’s not your style, Mac. Too many sequins—wrong colour too.”

“I know,” MacNeice said. “I’m told I’m a winter, but I still prefer spring, don’t you, Swetsky?” He set the purse down beside the girl.

“Smartass. Whaddya got?”

“Well, she’s beautiful—and dead. There’s no apparent trauma. She just looks like she fell asleep and didn’t wake up.”

MacNeice reached over to the outlet and pulled out the plug of the Seabreeze. The needle ground to a halt in one of the grooves.

“Who placed the call?” Swetsky asked.

“Anonymous. Male. Gave the address. Said we’d find a body and hung up.”

One of the other Turks, Palmer, was already in a semi-squat with one arm down for balance. He leaned towards her face. With his free hand he pointed to the bruise under her chin and said, “I used to give hickeys like that, but I just don’t have the suction anymore.”

Swetsky, Palmer and Williams—the only black homicide detective in their unit—cracked up. MacNeice began removing his latex gloves. He sighed, discreetly, he thought, but Swetsky picked it up. “Come on, Palmer,” he said, “show some respect for the lady.” Palmer stopped sniggering only when he tried to stand up, his knee complaining.

“Right knee blown, Palmer?” MacNeice said.

“Yeah, but I get by, thanks for asking.” Palmer shifted his massive bulk over his hips to find the sweet spot where the pain would subside.

“That hickey is no hickey. The girl was a violinist.” MacNeice folded his gloves, shoved them into his back pocket and stepped onto the balcony.

“Where ya off to, Mac?” Swetsky asked.

“I’m going to check out the beach.”

At the top of the stairs down to the beach, he heard Williams say, “What’s his problem, Swets?”

“No problem. Check the bedroom.” He heard them snapping on the gloves, getting to work. Latex—the ubiquitous protector of evidence.

—

T
HE STAIRCASE, AN ENAMELLED
metal job intended to look clean and modern, shivered under his weight. The shore grass was soft and damp and the coarse sand beyond dark. The water was black, the waves a lazily undulating silver. Someone was already out in a motorboat, trolling for pickerel by the sound of it. There was a slight breeze, pleasant for a mid-June night.

“Seabreeze,” he said out loud. Why would anyone own a Seabreeze in a digital age? He turned away from the water and began to follow the shaft of light from the living room window. At the foot of the stairs he stepped sideways to position himself just under the leading edge of the balcony. Sighing again, he put his hands in his pockets, closed his eyes and dropped his head.

For a few moments he drifted, swaying—not to any music in his head, just swaying. He listened to the heavy feet moving slowly across the cottage floor twelve feet above him, until the sound of squealing brakes announced the arrival of the forensics team.

The balcony above him sagged under the weight of two more men, baggies on their feet, scanning the beachfront with flashlights, the cones of light crossing and seeking like searchlights in old war movies. The men didn’t speak, and just as silently they soon went back inside.

His eyes having adjusted to the dark, MacNeice turned his attention back to the beach. The smell of the grass, lake and pine carried by the breeze was like scented silk on his face. Roughly fifty feet or so to the right, over on the dark and dimpled sand, was a triangular shadow. He moved slowly towards it, putting on the latex gloves again.

He realized what it was well before he reached it—the Schubert jacket. He picked it up by the edges, blew off the grit and turned towards the yellow slice of light coming from the cottage. When he got there, he squeezed his palms together and peered inside the elliptical opening, expecting to find it empty, but there was something inside: a neat white rectangle with a deckled edge. He flipped the jacket over and tilted it so that the paper slid closer to the opening. A photograph.

A smiling brunette, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. He took out the photo and held it up to the light. The girl in the image—the woman who now lay dead in the cottage—was sitting on a beach recliner in a one-piece; another recliner was off to the side with a towel and beach bag beside it. Two pairs of flip-flops lay between them. On the back of the photo there was handwriting in pencil, too faint to make out in the dim light. He turned it over again to look at the girl.

She had the figure for a bikini but she was wearing a one-piece, modest by the standards of a decade or so ago, when, he assumed, the photo had been taken. Her legs, firm and tanned, were closed—not forced together by modesty or shame, just gently together. He had a photograph of someone he loved in that same pose—all smiles and sunshine—it was somewhere in the mess of his desk drawer. That drawer was a stark contrast to the cottage above, so neat that even a corpse couldn’t mess it up.

The place had been built with money but in haste, as if more attention had been given to the idea of a beach house than to building it well. It looked as if it had never been lived in. The nearest neighbours were out of sight, a hundred yards in either direction. They’d be interviewed, as would the person trolling around in the outboard, but MacNeice guessed that no one would know the people who owned this cottage.

He made his way up the stairs to the balcony and, preferring to avoid the swarm inside, walked around to the breezeway and into the garage. Through the window he could see that Williams had assumed a position at the bar where he pretended to ignore the forensics team. Swetsky, catching sight of MacNeice, came out the side door to meet him. “He’s sulking.”

“I can see that.” MacNeice was holding the album and the snapshot the way choirboys do their hymnals.

“Whaddya got?”

“Schubert. A piano trio. It was on when you arrived.” MacNeice held the jacket up so Swetsky could read the title, careful to tuck the snapshot behind it.

“You don’t say.”

“Swets, do me a favour—get that key from the purse and bring it out here for a minute.”

“Sure, but why not get it yourself?”

“I need to get some things out of the car. While you’re in there, push the button to open the garage door, okay?” As Swetsky went inside, happy to have a mission, MacNeice propped the Schubert jacket against the wall of the cottage, wedging it so it wouldn’t fall, then slipped the snapshot into his jacket pocket.

As he cleared the breezeway, MacNeice could see that the small turning circle among the pines was now lined with vehicles, including the pathologist’s black Suburban. Palmer was sitting in the passenger seat of one of the Chevys, talking on his cellphone. He glanced vacantly up as MacNeice went by, then turned his head away to continue the conversation. From the look of it, he was getting into something hot and heavy. He had a reputation with women—often somebody else’s. Maybe
another cop’s wife or, like the last time, a firefighter’s. That one had ended with his Indian motorcycle—the real love of his life—going up in flames at 4 a.m. outside his apartment. When the pumper truck arrived, the first firefighter out of the truck was the woman’s husband. No charges were ever laid, and Palmer was still paying off the bike.

From a weathered black Samsonite case in the trunk of his car, MacNeice removed a Sony digital camera, one of those little black jobs that clock in at ten megapixels and can capture almost as much as the Nikon SLR the crime-scene boy was currently clacking away with inside. MacNeice closed the lid and laid the photo on top of it. He took several shots, zooming in for detail, and then turned it over to take several more of the back, making sure the flash wasn’t bleaching out the writing.

The garage door opened so smoothly and quietly behind him that it was only the sudden wash of light that gave it away. Swetsky appeared, latex gloves on, purse in hand. MacNeice stifled a grin.

“There were prints and partials on the clasp, lipstick, key and fob,” Swetsky said. “No idea yet what killed her.”

“Poison, or something worse. As for the cottage, it was cleaned before we got here.”

“Why do you figure poison?”

“Something about the way she smelled—up close, I mean.”

As Swetsky handed over the purse, MacNeice passed him the snapshot. With a wry smile, Swetsky said, “I knew you had something else, dammit. I knew it.” He stared at the photo for a long moment, losing the smile. “Shit, she really was a beauty.”

MacNeice took a tin of putty out of his case. Taking the key, he pressed it into the putty. “These types of keys are
registered. We might as well find out to whom before the Tyvek boys do. The company’s Lock Tight.” Swetsky watched him remove the key and put the tin back in the case, next to a bar of seventy percent dark chocolate. As MacNeice was photographing both sides of the key and fob, Swetsky noticed Palmer, still on the phone, and shook his head slightly.

“Strictly speaking, Mac, this isn’t kosher.” Swetsky wasn’t referring to Palmer.

MacNeice put the key back into the purse. “Neither are you. Neither am I. You are a second-generation polack and I’m a Glaswegian thrice removed … not that we couldn’t be all that and kosher too, mind you.”

“
Thrice
. Christ, that’s nice.”

MacNeice took back the photo, dropped the purse into Swetsky’s hand and said, “I’ll grab the Schubert jacket from the breezeway—the snapshot was inside it. We’ll give them both to the nerds.”

Walking through the garage to the breezeway door, MacNeice couldn’t take his eyes off the snapshot. The play of light seemed to animate it somehow. He wasn’t listening when Swetsky said, “Did ya notice? No oil stains, no tire-tread marks, no nothing. We’re walking on virgin concrete here.”

Turning the photo over, MacNeice finally registered what it said:
Lydia and Margaux. Friends Forever. 7.00

“Am I talking to myself here?” Swetsky said.

MacNeice glanced at him standing under the twin fluorescents, the tiny clutch bag at his side. “Don’t get used to carrying that thing around, Swets.” He slid the snapshot back into the sleeve, then handed them to Swetsky and said, “Would you hand this stuff over? I’ll put where I found it in my report, but I’ve seen the beach and now I’m going home.”

Swetsky nodded, and as he turned towards the breezeway door, stopped to say, “Mac, how’d you get here? Or better still, why’d you get here? You’re not on shift, and this isn’t your usual territory.”

“I was coming back from the cemetery when the call came over the radio.” He hesitated. “I’m going to request the lead on this, Swets, if that’s okay with you.”

“Sure, no problem. But d’ya mind telling me why?”

“Let’s just say I have a soft spot for violinists. I’ll call it in to Wallace on my way back to the city.”

Swetsky nodded again. “I’ll get Palmer and Williams to talk to the neighbours and I’ll check the ownership on this place. We’ll walk copies of this snapshot around too.”

MacNeice had stopped listening again, so Swetsky headed back through the door to the cottage.

A
T HIS CAR
, M
AC
N
EICE
pulled the keys out of his pocket, happy that he’d parked close to the road and wasn’t blocked in. He glanced back once at the cottage, and through the open front door he could see four Tyvek-covered nerds—three men and a woman—working closely around the body. They were quiet and thorough, using gadgets only they knew the purpose of.