The K Handshape (43 page)

I could see her point. I went back to Barbara’s report. “Could I just ask you about one other case? In February 2002 the super, Mrs. Pereira, lodged a complaint about one of the residents who she said was harassing her son and quote, making inappropriate remarks and touching inappropriately, unquote. What was all that about?”

More tutting sounds on the other end of the phone. “In my opinion, Mrs. Pereira completely overreacted. The resident, Miss Cohen was her name I believe, was a sweet rather dotty old lady who was deaf as a post. To make sure people were talking straight at her, she’d turn them around. She was always very gentle about it but she liked to get up close so she could hear better, I believe. Mrs. P. said she had her son around the waist, which she might have done, but it wouldn’t have been lechery like it was with poor old Maria.”

“And inappropriate remarks? What about them?”

“I couldn’t make head nor tail of that from Mrs. Pereira. She is Portugese and has a heavy accent. But as far as I can tell, Miss Cohen had said something like ‘I love you sweetie,’ when he’d done something nice for her.”

“Was the boy bothered by that?”

“What boy?”

“The superintendent’s son.”

She laughed heartily. “Oh no, he wasn’t a boy. He was an adult. Must be in his late forties, early fifties. No, it didn’t bother him. I think he liked the attention he got from the old ladies. But his mother had such a grip on him. I doubt he could take a pee, excuse my language, without her permission.”

“Do you remember the man’s name?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Miss Bentley, I understand you are now the supervisor for all of the city lodges.”

“That’s right. I’ve been here since last year.”

“Have there been any complaints from residents in any of the other lodges that were to do with sexual harassments, assaults, or anything like that?”

“No… if there were I would call the police as I said. We are required by law to do that.”

“So there was nothing?”

“Not in my time, except…” Another pause. “There was one incident but it wasn’t a formal complaint or anything like that, and it didn’t involve a resident as such, but there was what you might call an incident at the Atrium Lodge last October. The granddaughter of one of the residents stayed over in the lodge. She has Down’s syndrome but is quite high functioning. She told her grandmother that a man had come into her room and asked her to do naughty things. The girl lives in Huronia Residence and apparently she says this at least once a week.”

“So it might have been a case of crying wolf once too often.”

“I doubt that.” Miss Bentley sounded quite huffy, as if I were impugning her reputation. “It was all a fabrication, all her imagination.”

I tried a different tack. “At the time this last incident happened, was there a lock on the front door?”

“Yes. All of the lodges were changed over at the same time. Do for one, you have to do for all.”

“And did the superintendent confirm that the door was securely locked?”

“Yes, of course… no, wait a minute, that was when Arthur Bennington was the super and he had a sudden appendectomy. He had complications and was off for a month.”

“So there wasn’t anybody checking on security?”

“Dear me, of course there was. In cases like this we always get in a temporary super.”

“The temps come from Reliable Cleaning Services, I understand.”

“That’s right. But Sergeant, please don’t make a mountain out
of a molehill. We, I, take the best care of our residents. These cases you have dragged up are isolated incidents. I discount Mrs. Pereira. Nothing happened.”

“Something did happen to Doris Bryant. That was not a figment of her imagination.”

Dead silence. “I am very sorry about that.”

I heard a beep on the line. “I have another call. I’m afraid I have to go.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

“Very well. Never mind, I’ll leave it.”

“You said, ‘in my time,’ earlier. Was there a complaint concerning sexual assault at another time?”

“I understand there was but I don’t know much about it. I can’t be expected to look over every single previous report, can I? The social worker in charge was Elaine Mortimer, who is an experienced woman. It would have been settled before I took over.”

“Can I have a copy of the report you’re referring to?”

“I suppose I can dig it up.”

“Please do. One other question. I see you use yellow notepaper for your report.”

“Yes, I do. I don’t type and I didn’t expect to be raked over the coals for it.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that. I just wondered if your notepaper is accessible to others. Did you ever miss any?”

“The answer to that is no. I keep it in my drawer and I suppose somebody could steal some if they were so inclined but it’s not exactly vellum, is it?”

Quite right. And at best it was only a slender connection to the anonymous letters sent to Deidre. But then spiderwebs look slender and are virtually indestructible.

We hung up. It was part of my job to make mountains out of molehills, then you can knock them down again if you have to. I’d rather have four unnecessary mountains than one overlooked molehill.

My suspicious friend at Reliable Cleaning Services had faxed Barbara a list of their employees. Each column recorded the name of the temp, where they were sent, and for how long.

I laid it alongside of Barbara’s report. At Sunshine Lodge, the
one complaint, fanciful or not, from Mrs. Salamonica had occurred when the lodge was using temps. The incident with the girl with Down’s syndrome at Atrium Lodge was also at a time when Reliable Cleaning Services was supplying supers.

Bingo.

I reached for the phone and punched in Miss Bentley’s number. This time she sounded decidedly frosty. She obviously now considered me a confirmed impugner.

“Miss Bentley, you said you couldn’t remember the name of Mrs. Pereira’s son. The one who was supposedly being harassed by a resident. Do you have it written down anywhere?”

“No, I don’t. He had a different last name, as I recall. Something to do with a stepfather he didn’t get along with. He kept his own father’s name.”

“Does the name Sylvio Torres sound familiar?”

“Why yes, that’s it. I was thinking Sylvester, but no, that’s it. Sylvio. What is happening, Sergeant? They haven’t reopened the complaint surely.”

“No, they haven’t, but I’m going to.”

I got off the phone, grabbed my papers, and raced out of my office. Time for a team meeting.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

While the team was assembling, I made a couple of phone calls. One to Elaine Mortimer, the social worker Miss Bentley mentioned, the other to the Huronia Institute. The team had assembled quickly except for Leo, who excused himself and decided to stay with Joy and Loretta at the house. He said things were going as well as could be expected. He’d even learned a few signs by now. I didn’t tell him at this point what I’d discovered.

I’d got everybody copies of Barbara Cheevers’s report and the list from Reliable Cleaning Services and we were going over it.

“Torres and his mother, whose name is Belva Pereira, were the supers at the Sunshine Lodge for one year, 2001 to 2002. This means that Torres could easily have copied the master key and gained access to the building whenever he wanted to. As we know, there was no sign of forced entry into Doris Bryant’s apartment. He also made sure she couldn’t see him. Doris was a resident when Mrs. Pereira was superintendent.”

I told them what Avril had reported about Mrs. Pereira’s complaint. “It seemed completely innocuous but his mother resigned and kicked up a fuss. I’d say she was revealing a high level of protectiveness.”

David, who always liked to be shown as eager and attentive, pointed to the Reliable list. “I see he was hired out again at the end of April 2002 for a week. He was sent to Leisure World on West Street. And a resident there lodged a complaint on June 10, Chris has given us that report separately. The resident said a man entered
her apartment and tickled her. There is no reference to his being masked or of her face being covered.”

I took up the thread. “The woman is eighty-nine and suffers from macular degeneration so her eyesight is very poor and it was dark. She couldn’t give a description of the man except, get this, that she kept referring to him as a farmer. Nobody made sense of that, but I’m guessing she may have meant he was wearing overalls, and I saw Torres in a pair of blue overalls when I was at his apartment.”

“Has that come up anywhere else?” asked Ray.

“No. Doris never saw him because he blindfolded her. But she told Grace he smelled of disinfectant. Cleaning fluid, maybe? She also used the word
stroked
, by the way. She said he stroked her legs.”

Nobody likes hearing stories like this no matter how experienced we are and there was a brief silence around the table. I let everybody have a breather to absorb what I was saying, then I continued.

“There was one more complaint from yet another lodge, the Atrium. This did not involve a resident as such, but was concerning her granddaughter, who is a Down’s syndrome woman. She says a man came into her bedroom and asked her to show her bum-bum but she was scared and she shouted for her grannie. Grandma is hard of hearing and it took a while to wake her up and by then the man, if there was one, had fled. Now ladies and gentleman, if you look at the Reliable list, you can see that our Mr. Torres was hired out to the Atrium while their super was off sick. He was there one month earlier.”

“Did the Down’s woman say anything about him being masked?”

“No, she said he looked like one of her teachers, whatever that means. The woman has a long history of being seductive and then saying some man asked her to expose herself. The case was not taken to the police for this reason but the institute does have it on record along with nine other incidents this particular girl reported.”

“Is that it for the lodges?”

“Yes, but Deidre went with somebody she knew. Torres lives two blocks away; he walks his dog. Why would she suspect him if he offered her a ride home? He was also walking Lily at the end of my street after I found that note in my mailbox. He gets around,
that man does. And … one more thing. There is a doghouse outside in Doris’s backyard. Having the dog gives him a reason to be out on the streets at all hours but he could leave her in the kennel when he goes inside to do his prowling.”

“I’ve just thought of something else,” said Ed. “Remember he told us that he saw an officer writing out a ticket for Taylor’s camper van? We have been unable to find any record of a parking ticket being issued so I assume he made it up. I’m wondering what he was trying to conceal.”

“Where he was. I saw Deidre’s bed; it’s pretty narrow. It’s fairly certain that Taylor visited her a few weeks ago. She wanted another sperm donor. He’s a tall guy and I sort of doubt he would have stayed the night with the two of them in that bed. What if he left the house in the wee hours and Mr. Torres saw him? Sylvio wouldn’t want to admit he was on the streets at that hour, so he made up a story about the ticket. Directed us toward Taylor quite nicely.”

“Clever sod, isn’t he?” said Jamie.

“And ruthless. My guess is that Deidre was only one of various people he was keeping an eye on. I am convinced he targets the vulnerable and or the disabled.”

“But Deidre was a strong young woman,” protested David.

“She was, but in his eyes she was disabled. He might have thought she’d be weaker than she was. And perhaps he hates what he’d see as deformity, but at the same time he is excited by it.”

“Do you think he wrote the letters?” David asked.

“I’d bet a month’s wages on it. It’s just too much of a coincidence that Miss Bentley was using yellow paper when he had a temp job in the building. Maybe he liked the look of it, professional and all that.”

“We’ll get a search warrant,” said Katherine. “Does he have a vehicle?”

“Yes, he owns a 1999 green Ford van.”

Ed laced his hands behind his head. “It’s time to have a talk with Mr. Torres. And a look into that van of his. Do you want to come, Chris?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

We were there within ten minutes. Mrs. Pereira was as dour as ever in her black dress and tightly drawn grey hair. She regarded us with thinly disguised hostility, not anxiety, which I thought would be a more normal response.

“He no here. What you want?”

“We’d like to talk to him.”

“What about?”

Mrs. Pereira was the kind of woman who projected such sour energy, it was hard not to respond in kind. Whatever had happened in her life had turned her as bitter as absinthe. Ed was the one who was speaking to her but she didn’t look at him, addressing her answers to me. She struck me as one of those women who are on the edge of madness most of their lives. Not certifiable but mad nonetheless: for whom the world is a place of danger, where people can never be trusted, and the only way to handle it is to keep your own den as small and tightly controlled as possible. She was a woman it would be easy to hate and I wondered if that was what happened to her son. A hatred he then acted out on other, more vulnerable women.

I forced myself to smile. “Is Sylvio out walking Lily?”

“Yes. Why should he no walk her?”

“Where does he usually go?”

“I don’t know. He walk dog, not me. She his dog.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Pereira.” Ed handed her his card, which she handled as if it had been dropped in shit. He nodded at me and we went outside.

“Whew, nasty old bat, isn’t she? What shall we do? Wait until he gets back?”

“I suppose that’s all we can do but frankly I’d like to find him right now before he finds somebody else.”

“So far he’s only worked at night, Chris.”

“True, but he’s accelerating. If we assume he’s the one who killed Deidre and molested Doris, that’s only two days apart.”

“I’ll put out an all car alert.”

“Good idea. Let’s have a look out back and see if he’s taken his van. If not, we can impound it.”

We went around to the parking lot at the rear of the building. The spot that said Reserved For Superintendent was empty.