Not Safe After Dark (31 page)

Mitch felt and, sure enough, part of the floorboard was loose. He lifted it easily with his fingernails. Underneath, wedged between the joists, lay a package wrapped in old newspaper.

‘That’s it,’ said the old man. ‘Take it out.’

Mitch did. It was heavier than he had expected.

‘Now put the board back and replace the carpet.’

After he had done as he was asked, Mitch carried the package over to the bed.

‘Open it,’ said Mr Garibaldi. ‘Go on, it won’t bite you.’

Slowly, Mitch unwrapped the newspaper. It was from 18 December 1947, he noticed, and the headline reported a blizzard dumping twenty-eight inches of snow on New York City the day before. Inside,
he found a layer of oilcloth. When he had folded back that too, a gun gleamed up at him. It was old, he could tell that, but it looked in superb condition. He hefted it into his hand, felt its
weight and balance, pointed it towards the wall as if to shoot.

‘Be careful,’ said the old man. ‘It’s loaded.’

Mitch looked at the gun again, then put it back on the oilcloth. His fingers were smudged with oil or grease, so he took a tissue from the bedside table and wiped them off as best he could.

‘What the hell are you doing with a loaded gun?’ he asked.

Mr Garibaldi sighed. ‘It’s a Luger,’ he said. ‘First World War, probably. Old, anyway. A friend gave it to me many years ago. A German friend. I’ve kept it ever
since. Partly as a memento of him and partly for protection. You know what this city’s been getting like these past few years. I’ve maintained it, cleaned it, kept it loaded. Now
I’m gonna die I want to hand it in. I don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.’

Mitch set the Luger down on the bed. ‘Why tell me?’ he asked.

‘Because it’s unregistered and I’d like you to hand it over for me.’ He shook his head and coughed again. ‘I haven’t got long left. I don’t want no cops
coming round here and giving me a hard time.’

‘They won’t give you a hard time.’ More like give you a medal for handing over an unregistered firearm, Mitch thought.

‘Maybe not. But . . .’ Mr Garibaldi grabbed Mitch’s wrist with his talon. The fingers felt cold and dry, like a reptile’s skin. Mitch tried to pull back a little, but the
old man held on, pulled him closer and croaked, ‘Sophie doesn’t know. It would make her real angry to know we had a gun in the house the last fifty years and I kept it from her. I
don’t want to end my days with my wife mad at me. Please, Mr Mitchell. It’s a small favour I ask.’

Mitch scratched the side of his eye. True enough, he thought, it
was
a small favour. And it might prove a profitable one, too. Old firearms were worth something to collectors, and Mitch
knew a cop who had connections. All he had to say was that he had been entrusted this gun by a client, who had brought it to his office, that he had put it in the safe and called the police
immediately. What could be wrong with that?

‘OK,’ he said, rewrapping the gun and slipping it in his briefcase along with the will. ‘I’ll do as you ask. Don’t worry. You rest now. Everything will be
OK.’

Mr Garibaldi smiled and seemed to sink into a deep sleep.

•

Mitch stood on the porch of the Garibaldi house and pulled on his sheepskin-lined gloves, glad to be out of the cloying atmosphere of the sickroom, even if it was minus ninety
or something outside.

He was already wearing his heaviest overcoat over a suit and a wool scarf, but still he was freezing. It was one of those clear winter nights when the ice cracks underfoot and the breeze off the
lake seems to numb you right to the bone. Reflected street lamps splintered in the broken mirror of the sidewalk, the colour of Mr Garibaldi’s jaundiced eyes.

Mitch pulled his coat tighter around his scarf and set off, cracking the iced-over puddles as he went. Here and there, the remains of last week’s snow had frozen into ruts, and he almost
slipped and fell a couple of times on the uneven surface.

As he walked, he thought of old Garibaldi, with no more than a few weeks or days left to live. The old man must have been in pain sometimes, but he never complained. And he surely must be afraid
of death? Maybe dying put things in perspective, Mitch thought. Maybe the mind, facing the eternal, icy darkness of death, had ways of dealing with its impending extinction, of discarding the
dross, the petty and the useless.

Or perhaps not. Maybe the old man just lay there day after day running baseball statistics through his mind; or wishing he’d slept with his neighbour’s wife when he had the
chance.

As Mitch walked up the short hill, he cursed the fact that you could never get a decent parking spot in these residential streets. He’d had to park in the lot behind the drug store, the
next street over, and the quickest way there was through a dirt alley just about wide enough for a garbage truck to pass through.

It happened as he cut through the alley. And it happened so fast that, afterwards, he couldn’t be quite sure whether he felt the sharp blow to the back of his head before his feet slipped
out from under him, or after.

•

When Mitch opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the night sky. It looked like a black satin bed-sheet with some rich woman’s diamonds spilled all over it.
There was no moon.

He felt frozen to the marrow. He didn’t know how long he had been lying there in the alley – long enough to die of exposure it felt like – but when he checked his watch, he saw
he had only been out a little over five minutes. Not surprising no one had found him yet. Not here, on a night like this.

He lay on the frozen mud and took stock. Despite the cold, everything hurt – his elbow, which he had cracked trying to break his fall; his tailbone; his right shoulder; and, most of all,
his head – and the pain was sharp and spiky, not at all numb like the rest of him. He reached around and touched the sore spot on the back of his head. His fingers came away sticky with
blood.

He took a deep breath and tried to get to his feet, but he could only manage to slip and skitter around like a newborn deer, making himself even more dizzy. There was no purchase, nothing to
grip. Snail-like, he slid himself along the ice towards the rickety fence. There, by reaching out and grabbing the wooden rails carefully, he was able to drag himself to his feet, picking up only a
few splinters for his troubles.

At first, he wished he had stayed where he was. His head started to spin and he thought it was going to split open with pain. For a moment, he was sure he was going to fall again. He held on to
the fence for dear life and vomited, the world swimming around his head. After that, he felt a little better. Maybe he wasn’t going to die.

The only light shone from a street lamp at the end of the alley, not really enough to search by, so Mitch used the plastic penlight attached to his key-ring to look for his briefcase. But it
wasn’t there. Stepping carefully on the ribbed ice, still in pain and unsure of his balance, Mitch extended the area of his search in case the briefcase had skidded off somewhere on the ice
when he fell. It was nowhere to be found.

Almost as an afterthought, as the horrible truth was beginning to dawn on him, he felt for his wallet. Gone. So he’d been mugged. The blow had come
before
the fall. And they’d
taken his briefcase.

Then Mitch remembered the gun.

•

The next morning was a nightmare. Mitch had managed to get himself home from the alley without crashing the car, and after a long, hot bath, a tumbler of Scotch and four
extra-strength Tylenol, he began to feel a little better. He seemed to remember his mother once saying you shouldn’t go to sleep after a bump on the head – he didn’t know why
– but it didn’t stop him that night.

In the morning, he awoke aching all over.

When he had showered, taken more Tylenol and forced himself to eat some bran flakes, he poured a second cup of strong black coffee and sat down to think things out. None of his thoughts brought
any comfort.

He hadn’t gone to the cops. How could he, given what he had been carrying? Whichever way you looked at it, he had been in possession of an illegal, unregistered firearm when he was mugged.
Even if the cops had been lenient, there was the Law Society to reckon with, and like most lawyers, Mitch feared the Law Society far more than he feared the police.

Maybe he could have sort of skipped over the gun in his account of the mugging. After all, he was pretty sure that it couldn’t be traced either to him or to Garibaldi. But what if the cops
found the briefcase and the gun was still inside it? How could he explain that?

Would that be worse than if the briefcase turned up and the gun was gone? If the muggers took it, the chances were someone might get shot with it. Either way, it was a bad scenario for Mitch,
and it was all his fault. Well, maybe
fault
was too strong a word – he couldn’t help getting mugged – but he still felt somehow responsible.

All he could do was hope that whoever took the gun would get rid of it, throw it in the lake, before anyone came to any harm.

Some hope.

•

Later that morning, Mitch remembered Garibaldi’s will. That had gone, too, along with the briefcase and the gun. And it would have to be replaced.

There’s only one true will – copies have no legal standing – and if you lose it you could have a hell of a mess on your hands. Luckily, he had Garibaldi’s will on his
computer. All he had to do was print it out again and hope to hell the old guy hadn’t died during the night.

He hadn’t. Puzzled, but accepting Mitch’s excuse of a minor error he’d come across when proof-reading the document, Garibaldi signed again with a shaking hand.

‘Is the gun safe?’ he asked afterwards. ‘You’ve got it locked away in your safe?’

‘Yes,’ Mitch lied. ‘Yes, don’t worry, the gun’s perfectly safe.’

•

Every day Mitch scanned the paper from cover to cover for news of a shooting or a gun found abandoned somewhere. He even took to buying the
Sun
– which he normally
wouldn’t even use as toilet paper up at the cottage – because it covered more lurid local crime than the
Globe
or the
Star
. Anything to do with firearms was certain to
make it into the
Sun
.

But it wasn’t until three weeks and three days after the mugging – and two weeks after Mr Garibaldi’s death ‘peacefully, at home’ – that the item appeared.
And it was big enough news to make the
Globe and Mail
.

The newspaper shook in Mitch’s hands. It had happened. Somebody had died because of him. But while he felt guilt, he also felt fear. Was there really no way the police
could tie the gun to him or Mr Garibaldi? Thank God the old man was dead, or he might hear about the shooting and his conscience might oblige him to come forward. Luckily, his widow, Sophie, knew
nothing.

With luck, the Luger was in the deepest part of the lake for sure by now. Whether anyone else had touched it or not, Mitch knew damn well that
he
had, and that his greasy fingerprints
weren’t only all over the grip and the barrel, but on the wrapping paper, too. The muggers had probably been wearing gloves when they robbed him – it was a cold night – and maybe
they’d had the sense to keep them on when they saw what was in the briefcase.

Calm down, he told himself. Even if the cops did find his fingerprints on the gun, they had no way of knowing
whose
prints they were. Mitch had never been fingerprinted in his life, and
the cops would have no reason to subject him to it now.

And they couldn’t connect Charles McVie to either Mr Garibaldi or to Mitch.

Except for one thing.

Mitch had drawn up McVie’s will two years ago, after his marriage to Laura, his second wife.

•

Mitch had known that Laura McVie was younger than her husband, but even that knowledge hadn’t prepared him for the woman who opened the door to him three days after
Charles McVie’s funeral.

Black became her. Really became her, the way it set off her creamy complexion, long blonde hair, Kim Basinger lips and eyes the colour of a bluejay’s wing.

‘Yes?’ she said, frowning slightly.

Mitch had put on his very best, most expensive suit, and he knew he looked sharp. He didn’t want her to think he was some ambulance-chaser come after her husband’s money.

As executor, Laura McVie was under no obligation to use the same lawyer who had prepared her husband’s will to handle his estate. Laura might have a lawyer of her own in mind. But Mitch
did
have the will, so there was every chance that if he presented himself well she would choose him to handle the estate too.

And there was much more money in estates – especially those as big as McVie’s – than there was in wills.

At least, Mitch thought, he wasn’t so hypocritical as to deny that he had mixed motives for visiting the widow. Didn’t everyone have mixed motives? He felt partly responsible for
McVie’s death, of course, and a part of him genuinely wanted to offer the widow help.

After Mitch had introduced himself, Laura looked him over, plump lower lip fetchingly nipped between two sharp, white teeth, then she flashed him a smile and said, ‘Please come in, Mr
Mitchell. I was wondering what to do about all that stuff. I really could use some help.’ Her voice was husky and low-pitched, with just a subtle hint of that submissive tone that can drive
certain men wild.