Still Waters (2 page)

The uniformed officer wandered away to get help.

Miranda contemplated the dead man, wondering if his secret lives somehow intersected with her own, long before death had brought them together. “They'll go deep. It must be nine or ten feet.”

“Three metres, think metric” said Morgan conscientiously. “Even if it's heated, they need the volume to stabilize against temperature fluctuations.”

Metric came in when Miranda was a child; Morgan was five years older. He insisted that Fahrenheit generated a skin response, and Celsius was only numerical.

“We'll need to drain it,” she said.

“No.”

“We'll send in a diver then. Do you think there's a difference between a pool and a pond?”

“I'd say a pool is hard-edged and clear.” He looked down toward the ravine. “The soylent pea-souper, I'd call that a pond.”

“You're okay with a diver?”

“Yeah, it's better for the fish. There's a fortune in there.”

She smiled at the presumption of authority. He had seniority by several years, but they were both detective sergeants. Usually, she was in command. He preferred it that way.

Miranda strolled off toward the house, then circled around and walked out past the murky green pool into a narrow grove of silver maples that soared defiantly against the urban sky, their foliage blocking out the banks of office buildings and the CN Tower. From a vantage by the sudden slope of a ravine, the city reappeared at close quarters. This was how the rich lived. In Toronto at least. Miranda didn't know rich people anywhere else, and in Rosedale only when they were murdered, or as happened more often than people might think, when they did the murdering.

A police crew worked beneath her, combing among the overgrown rubble below the property line for anything out of place: a gum wrapper but not a Dom Perignon cork; a footprint, freshly broken twigs but not cut branches; evidence of urgency, not the residue of a carelessly cultivated life.

She gazed up into the leaves of the maple trees, vaguely expecting a revelation. That was how it occasionally happened, and she would walk out and surprise Morgan with an accounting that seemed to come from nowhere.
This time all she saw were blue-green edges shifting softly in the freshening breeze of early evening.

Generally, Morgan was the more intuitive one. He gathered random particulars until everything fell into place, while she extrapolated an entire narrative from singular details. She was deductive. Like Holmes, though Morgan wasn't Watson. More like Moriarity, she thought, but one of the good guys.

Morgan remained by the pool. He knew almost every fish by its generic name. He recognized a young Budo Goromo with markings the size of a cluster of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon with the bloom still on. Its other name might have been Bacchus, he thought, or maybe Lafite or Latour. Morgan got sidetracked for a moment, rifling through the files in his mind for the names of First Growth Bordeaux. This would be the garden of a Bordeaux drinker.
Premier grand crus
. Not Burgundy. These fish had been too carefully selected. Burgundy was always a risk.

And its third name is known only to God.

He shuddered. Morgan wasn't a believer, but the familiar phrase, whether as an epitaph for the Unknown Soldier or casually applied to fish in a Rosedale garden, sent a chill of loneliness through him.

“Have we heard who he is yet?” Miranda asked. She had been standing close for several minutes, watching him think.

Morgan shrugged. Neither of them carried a cell phone. Access meant control. Sometimes she compromised. Self-reliance wasn't always enough.

“Margaux,” said Morgan, apparently addressing the Budo Goromo. He was pleased. He had retrieved the name of another Bordeaux
grand cru
.

Miranda couldn't remember which Hemingway grand-daughter
hadn't committed suicide, Muriel or Margaux. One of them starred in a Woody Allen film.

Side by side they stared into the pond, intent on their separate reflections, while a surreal tableau was enacted around them. In a flurry of quiet activity the investigating team searched out myriad anomalies that would make the immediate past comprehensible. The grounds, a luxuriant green, though summer was gone, had been cultivated by generations long dead. The more distant past made the crime scene merely a passing disturbance.

The Ochiba Shigura disappeared into the depths and then returned, swimming slowly against the dead man's face, back and forth in a kind of caress or secret language. A powerfully proportioned Showa the size of a platter nibbled at the fingers of his left hand, which draped low in the water, though the body itself rested stolidly on the surface as if buoyed from below.

Miranda settled on the retaining wall with her back to the pond. She looked at the huge brick house that opened onto a portico one storey below street level across the back, embracing the garden with an intimacy that belied its grand proportions. Miranda tried to penetrate the architectural layers of the house, finding clean Georgian lines nearly obscured by unseemly Victorian flourishes and superfluous Edwardian columns and porticos. She decided the house had remained in the same family over the years, the changes accruing as each generation imposed its own taste on the last, and the next.

She twisted around as the dead man swung by and gently tugged at his jacket collar. The corpse shifted, brushed against the edge of the pool, and slumped over onto its side. In a rush of water it settled on its back, floating face up, open eyes limpid, opaque.

Miranda flinched, her breath caught in her throat.

Again she was struck by the sickening familiarity of death. Something happened to human features in extremity. The very obese, the emaciated, faces contorted in pain or by fear, and faces in absolute stillness, bore similarities in kind. Fat men looked alike; corpses resembled one another like kin.

Morgan bent close to examine the dead man's face, then leaned away as if coming to a dissenting judgment about a celebrated portrait after evaluating the brush strokes. They watched while the body drifted away from the wall and slowly rolled over again.

“That's better,” said Morgan when the face was no longer visible. “His name is Robert Griffin. He's a lawyer.”

“Really?” said Miranda. “And you know that because?”

“He was news about a year ago.”

“Good or bad?”

“Rich. There was a piece in the
Globe and Mail
buried beside the obituaries.” He chuckled at the pun. “It wasn't a big enough story to make television.”

“But you recognized him wet?”

“Yeah. They used a file photo. He looked sort of dead already. He spent a fortune at Christie's in London for an artifact from the South Pacific.”

“And that was newsworthy?”

“Something called Rongorongo, a wooden plaque from Easter Island about the size of a small paddle blade with writing on it.”

“Rongorongo?”

“It's filled with opposing rows of hieroglyphs. It's the writing that's Rongorongo, not the board, and the people from Easter Island can't read it now. No one can
read it. They still carve replicas, and no one knows what they say.”

Miranda had studied semiotics in university. She wondered if this accounted for the poignancy she felt for a language indecipherably encoded. She tried to imagine not being able to read your own writing.

Morgan continued. “The islanders, they call themselves Rapanui, the island is Rapa Nui, two words, they used to have joke tournaments. Koro 'ei.” He savoured the words. “Jest fests, the losers laughed, and had to throw a feast, a weird form of potlatch —”

“Morgan —”

“I think there are fewer than twenty authentic Rongorongo tablets around, pretty well all in museums. He paid half a million.”

“Well, Mr. Griffin!”

It pleased them to have arrived at the victim's identity without resorting to actual research. They watched him drift by as if he might reveal more of himself if they waited.

“No shoes. He wandered out from the house in socks,” said Morgan, dispelling any doubt that this was the dead man's home. “Where did Yosserian go? I thought they were hauling him out of there.”

“Mr. Griffin seems a little soft around the edges,” said Miranda, who didn't work out but was trim. “Not in very good condition.”

“He's dead,” said Morgan, who occasionally worked out but mostly skipped meals.

“I doubt if he even played golf. Too pallid to belong to a yacht club. Clothes not sufficiently stylish to suggest peer influence. I'd say he's a loner. But don't you think it's peculiar, a high-priced lawyer, and I've never heard of him?”

“Cops and the law don't always connect. Sometimes it's a matter of luck.”

“You'd think he'd have some sort of a public presence, Morgan. Look at the house.”

“I'm not sure he had much of a presence at all. He looks exceptionally ordinary.”

“As you say, he's floating in a fish pond. Let's get him out before the family comes home.” Miranda turned to see that Yosserian was standing by with another officer, apparently not wanting to disturb their forensic deliberations. She caught his eye, and they moved forward.

“There's no family coming home,” said Morgan. “They'd be here already. It's too late in the season for Muskoka, everyone's down from the cottage by now. The yard's too orderly. No bikes, no barbecue. The big Showa wants food, he's nibbled those fingers before. Look at that. The Ochiba — look at him nuzzling. They're closer than family. These fish are Griffin's familiars.”

“Familiars.” Miranda often repeated Morgan's key words, sometimes to mock him but sometimes intrigued. “That's creepy. With scales.”

“They don't all have scales. Some of them are Doitsu.”

Miranda was equivocating about whether or not to give him the satisfaction of asking for an explanation when a stunning young woman emerged from the shadows of the walkway along the side of the house. She moved toward them with an air of belonging.

“Maybe I'm wrong,” said Morgan.

“She's not family.”

The woman stood to one side and gazed at Robert Griffin as he was hauled over the pool edge and spread out on a groundsheet. While the officers manoeuvred the bag, she seemed to focus on the rasping of the zipper and
the squishing liquid sounds as the body settled into its plastic receptacle. Then she spoke with deliberate calm. “You're quite right, Detective. I'm not family.”

“Really,” Miranda said, realizing her disparaging comment had been overheard. The striking young woman was one of those people defined by style. Someone you had trouble imagining with a home life or childhood memories. A prosperous self-reliant urban adult of purposefully indeterminate age.

Somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-two.

She had the subdued flare of a woman who read
Vogue
to check for mistakes, Miranda thought. She probably subscribed to
Architectural Digest
, never travelled by bus, and arrived early at the dentist's so she could read
Cosmopolitan
.

Miranda brushed imaginary creases from her skirt and straightened her shoulders inside her jacket. She glanced at Morgan. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.

“I take it you knew the deceased,” Miranda declared too formally as she gazed into the woman's eyes, searching for personality.

“Yes, I did,” said the woman. Then, as if she were ordering a martini, she added, “I was his mistress. I still am, I suppose.” The woman smiled. “Wives become widows. There's no past tense for a mistress.”

Mattress, thought Morgan, but said nothing. She was an interesting anomaly, not because she was the mistress of a flaccid man with a comb-over but because she obviously didn't need to be. She was addressing Miranda. He turned away. There was a jousting so subtle neither woman seemed aware of it, and it didn't include him.

“Griffin didn't like
mistress
,” the woman said. “I rather like it myself.
Lover
is just too depressing.”

“Was he depressed?” Miranda asked with a hint of aggression.

“Why, because he killed himself? He wasn't a man to die from excessive emotion.” She paused. “From business perhaps. He never talked about business.”

She made it sound like suicide could have been a tactical ploy.

“It's unexpected, if that's what you mean,” she continued. “But not surprising. Robert was a very secretive man, but he could be quite impulsive.”

The woman studied the black plastic bag, tracing the zipper line as if it were a wound. Her features softened, then she glanced up directly into Miranda's eyes, her dispassionate aplomb instantly restored. For a moment Miranda felt an unnerving bond between them.

“With some people, you know, you can't really tell,” said the woman.

“What?” Morgan asked. “If they're dead?”

“Whether they're depressed,” she said. “I suppose he might have been.” She smiled as if forgiving herself for a minor oversight.

Miranda looked at her quizzically. The woman didn't seem concerned about a display of grief. Perhaps that would come later. Perhaps, more ominously, she had dealt with it already. Or sadly, thought Miranda, she felt nothing at all.

“Do you have access to the house?” Miranda asked.

“Do you mean, have I keys? Yes, of course.”

“Then perhaps we could look inside,” said Morgan.

“Of course,” said the woman. Touching Miranda on the arm, she casually amended her assessment of the victim's mental stability. “He sometimes took Valium.”

“Sometimes?” said Miranda. “It's not an occasional drug.”

“He said he had trouble sleeping.”

“And did he?”

“We didn't sleep together, Detective. I'm not his widow.” She seemed vaguely amused by her own witticism. “My name is Eleanor Drummond.” She held her hand out to Miranda, then Morgan.