Fit to Die (28 page)

“You didn't know Mrs. DesRochers.”

Bernie sighed like he would have to pay for the manpower personally and told me the forensic guys would be finished by the evening at the latest.

With nothing else to do, I got on the web and looked up the care and feeding of budgies, and picked up a couple of Scrabble words in the process:
cere
and
lutino.
Then I looked up Scrabble and found a site where I could play by e-mail; but it cost money, and I wasn't all that sure a remote human would prove a better substitute for Mrs. D. than my computer game.

•  •  •

When you're self-unemployed, time management consists of choosing between what you ought to do and what you want to do. That Friday, I still hadn't checked to see if anything besides the towels were missing and, because budgies.org said to change the water every day, what I wanted to do was assuage my guilt. So I trekked back up to Mrs. D.'s.

About the only thing not covered in fingerprint dust was Bijou; Mrs. D. would have been horrified. It made the
apartment eerily different, like a familiar place in a dream. I concentrated on the cage, the only thing seemingly unchanged by the invasion. Poor tyke looked lonely. My mother used to leave the radio on for the cat, so I hunted around for a radio.

I'd never been in Mrs. D.'s bedroom and halted at the door with a creepy feeling that my nose would end up where she wouldn't have wanted it poked. But, really, I was doing her a favour looking after Bijou like this. I told myself that twice before I went in.

A television and VCR sat atop a satinwood dresser that faced the candlewick-covered bed. She'd put masking tape over the VCR's display panel. I lifted it off. 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00. I stuck the tape back down and thought she'd carried independence a tad too far by not asking me to help her set it.

No radio here. The kitchen? I was crossing the living room to get there when I heard the snick of a key in the lock.

The man who walked in looked even more startled than I must have. Another expression flicked across his face, too quickly for me to make out, and then he smiled like a shoe salesman. “I'll assume you have a right to be here,” he said, the way shoe salesmen say “Can I help you?”

He was tall and good-looking in an overly careful way. His navy blue trench coat, beige slacks and oxblood loafers were all top-of-the-line Wal-Mart. As I studied his pale face, trying to decide if his hair were natural or Grecian Formula, I recognized the eyes and forehead. “You must be Mrs. DesRochers' son,” I said.

He looked annoyed that I'd guessed his secret but nodded affirmation. “And you?”

“Just a neighbour. I'm looking after Bijou until someone claims him.”

I made purposeful, kootchey-coo sounds to the bird, trying
to say “Aren't you a little late to finally visit your mother?” with my body language.

He got some kind of message, because he stood there awkwardly while I pointedly ran my finger through the featureless patina of fingerprint dust on the coffee table, tsking for the shame of how this well-preserved furniture had suffered at the hands of heartless cops. He lit a cigarette without offering me one, took a deep drag, then came up with an explanation for his presence. “I've, ah, come to collect some papers.”

Lucky I wasn't facing him full on, because an image of that lavender envelope popped behind my eyes, making them blink. “Be my guest,” I said to him sideways.

He pulled open some drawers but without much conviction. I knew he wanted me to leave, which is why I took my time. Finally, he ran out of patience. “She must have thrown them out,” he announced, slamming the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

“What, in particular, were you looking for?” I asked sweetly. “Maybe she mentioned it to me.”

“Oh, just some papers. Legal stuff…”

Not a man who thought fast on his feet. How hard would it be to rattle him? “Your mother never spoke about you, you know.”

He knew. “We didn't get along,” he said as if that explained everything. “She ever talk to you about where she kept important stuff?”

“Bijou was pretty important to her,” I said, hoping to lay a little guilt on him. “Will you be taking him with you?”

“I got no place to keep a bird. Why don't you just flush him?”

Did the Humane Society have a Most Wanted list? “You know the police are looking for you?”

A moment's panic in his eyes, then, “Why?”

“To tell you your mother's dead, I guess.”

“Oh. Ah, they already told me that.”

“Good,” I nodded. Why hadn't Bernie mentioned it? “I guess you got the key from them?”

“Yeah.”

I had no idea where Mrs. D. normally kept her house keys. Nor did I know why I was so sure this man wasn't honest. I think it was his grooming. I've never trusted guys who look like catalogue models.

“Well,” he said, hands in his trench coat pockets, “I guess I'll have to see about getting this stuff cleared out.”

By way of answer, I held up my fingerprint-dust schmutzed hands and then headed for the bathroom to wash them. Maybe this sleaze was his mother's rightful heir, but I hated the idea of his having charge of things she cherished.

When I got back to the living room, he was gone.

•  •  •

“He's a slimeball,” I told Bernie next morning after he confirmed the guy had gotten the keys from the cops just before he'd walked in on me. Police HQ is only a ten-minute stroll away.

“What did he do to you?” he asked, sounding worried.

I gave him a blow-by-blow account of my meeting with the slimeball, and in return Bernie told me his first name was François, commonly known as Frank, and he had done time for pimping and drug dealing, which explained why Mrs. D. never talked about him. He lived in Hamilton and had been home when the cops called about his mother.

“It doesn't take long to get from Ottawa to Hamilton,” I said. “He could have killed her and driven all night to get back.”

“We don't know that she was killed.”

“What about the autopsy?”

“She had a bruise on her upper left arm.”

“There you go,” I said. “Someone hit her.”

“Old people bruise easy, she could have bumped into something.”

“How was her brain, Bernie?”

The preliminary autopsy confirmed that Mrs. D. wasn't a stumbling, senile wreck. Bernie gave me the details with gruesome minuteness. He didn't usually keep me that informed, so I figured it was his way of saying I was right. As a
quid pro quo,
I told him about the envelope.

He mumbled something that could have been
merde.
“What's in it?”

The lavender sheet lay face up on the sofa cushion beside me, the single, fountain pen-written paragraph framed by the date and the signature. “It's dated Tuesday, and she leaves fifty-three thousand, one hundred and thirty-three dollars and seventy-two cents to Guide Dogs for the Blind.” She used to cut the stamps off envelopes for them, too. “And a thousand to me, and the contents of her apartment to the Salvation Army.”

Bernie didn't say anything for a moment, then: “You know where she'd come up with a figure like that?”

“Her bank account?”

“She was getting the Old Age supplement.”

That didn't mean anything. I knew people working three jobs who collected EI.

“I wouldn't count on spending any of that thousand,” Bernie warned me.

“It's handwritten, a valid will.”

“That wasn't what I meant.”

“She wasn't senile,” I said, real slow.

“Okay. By the way, did she have a cleaning lady?”

“She never said anything about one.”

He had a hard time believing a woman of Mrs. D.'s age could keep an apartment that clean. “She must have spent all her time polishing.”

All those evenly coated surfaces came back to me. “Are you saying there were fewer fingerprints than you'd expected?”

That's just what he was saying, and we argued some more about Mrs. D.'s ability to look after herself and her home.

“Her place was always immaculate,” I said, as if her standards were normal. “I mean, she wasn't anal about it, but she didn't have a heck of a lot else to do.”

“Gee, I didn't know you were so busy,” Bernie wisecracked. I definitely had to keep that man out of my kitchen.

“If he knew about the money, he could have killed her so he could inherit it,” I said.

“She could've just fallen, Annie.”

“But not from a brain seizure or anything?”

“No.” Bernie knew he'd upset me and gracefully changed the subject by asking me to drop off the will.

I looked at the lavender paper again. She'd signed it Léonie DesRochers (Mrs.). Until I'd opened it, I hadn't even known her first name. Léonie, the acute accent a bold stroke, almost a tick. She'd probably been born Francophone. I admired her Scrabble prowess even more. “He's a slimeball,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Yeah. Annie, if you see him again, just walk away. And call me.” He gave me his home phone number. I felt like I'd been promoted.

•  •  •

Bernie's shot at my housekeeping skills hadn't bothered me,
much. But I got to thinking about myself at Mrs. D.'s age. Would I end up one of those crones with six cats? (Highly improbable.) Blue hair? (Almost impossible.) In an apartment crammed with odd bits of my life? (Very likely.) So maybe I should clean up. Right. As soon as I did more important things, like…

Bernie's not lazy; why wouldn't he link the bruise on her arm to the crack on her head? Why wasn't he working from the assumption she'd been shoved against that radiator? On the other hand, why was I so sure that Mrs. D.'s death hadn't been old age catching up with her?

No, I didn't “rather she was murdered.” Maybe I was just looking for something to occupy my idle brain; maybe I resented Bernie's insinuation that old people die so easily; maybe I didn't want to think about myself dying all alone like that. Finally, I decided the reason didn't matter as much as proving that somebody had murdered her.

Crime
see
Suspect
see
Motive. Okay, a slimeball's a pretty good suspect, and money's a pretty good motive.
If
Mrs. D.'s $54,133.72 was real, and Frank knew about it.

Presumably Mrs. D. knew about it, so why were her kitchen cabinets full of yellow-label cans? Would she have been saving it all to give to Guide Dogs for the Blind? How could we have talked so much without her telling me more about herself?

There'd been a Mr. DesRochers, but all I knew of him was that he'd been in the War. And she knew Pitman shorthand, which she'd offered to teach me. I'd never had the heart to tell her voice-recognition systems were doing to stenography what hypertext had already done to book indexing.

At that dead end, I went back to thinking about why Frank had killed his mother. I even said it out loud that way: Why
did Frank DesRochers kill his mother? It's a different question from: Why did Frank DesRochers kill Mrs. D.? It got me figuring another way.

The first thing I figured was: he didn't do it on purpose. Even if he was a slimeball pimp-drug pusher, he didn't strike me as the type who would cold-bloodedly kill his mother. Besides, he didn't have the brains to plan a trip to the video store. And the way she fell made it seem likely she was pushed. He was there, they got into a fight, and he pushed her. Then he didn't ransack the place looking for whatever he wanted, because Mom's dead, and he's in a hurry to scram. But he did do a cursory search, because he knew he wouldn't find anything when he opened drawers while I was there.

It was an easy scene to envisage: They shout, he shoves, she falls. He runs to check her, finds she's dead. Maybe gets some blood on him. Uses the towels to clean his hands, wipe up fingerprints, which means he had a reason to worry about leaving fingerprints. And he searches the place. Search
see
Hidden
see
Secrets. Mrs. D. had a lot of them, including her own son. And the envelope. Which she gave to me to keep secret from Frank? So he wasn't looking for the envelope, because how could he look for something he didn't know existed? So what the hell was he looking for?

Looking for…searching for…searching…the web. But you can't search the web for answers when you don't even know the questions. Okay, try another tack. Play devil's advocate. Pull a Bernie.

Could Mrs. D. have simply lost her balance and fallen? Did that really happen to old people? I got onto Google.com, and worked out the most efficient way to enter the search criteria.
Old, people,
and
falling
were just too vague. Okay,
losing your balance. Losing balance? Balance
was the most specific word,
which should always come first when you're using a search engine. I typed in “balance lost.” What I got was:

Results 1-10 of about 298,000 for balance lost. Search took 0.91 seconds.

Blueberries May Restore Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age/S

…Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age By Judy…

www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/1999/990910b.htm

U-M freshman not drunk, may have lost balance

…freshman not drunk, may have lost balance Detroit Free Press…

www.freerepublic.com/forum/a362c2f0e24de.htm

C&EN 6/29/98: FINANCIAL ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheet

…ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheets CAPITAL…

pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980629/anal.html

Lost your bank balance?

news sensation The Ketamine look, the Fashion world has been shocked this week…

www.nwnet.co.uk/n-23/xavier.htm

Bank balances and fashion. And Bernie thinks I think weird. The next page had more bank balance references, and $54,133.72 did sound like a bank account. Finally I hit one with the phrase “Unclaimed bank balance.” So far, all the pages
had been American. Was there anything like that in Canada?