Afterwards, Green was so deep in thought as he arrived back at his office that he failed to see Marianne Blair’s executive assistant lying in wait outside his door. Peter Weiss seized him by the elbow and spun him around.
“You haven’t answered any of my calls.”
Green shook him off. Around the squad room, heads turned curiously. “Do you want the case solved or do you want me chatting on the phone?”
“From what I hear you’ve been busy sleeping with witnesses.” “Actually, I was up all night watching a suspect.”
Weiss wrinkled his nose as if smelling a foul odour. “An Arab. Yes, I know.”
Green hesitated. Weiss must be getting his information from somewhere else. He hoped it was Jules. “A Canadian, Mr. Weiss. Of Lebanese origin.”
“CSIS should be informed.”
Green rolled his eyes. “This has nothing to do with international terrorism, or with Mrs. Blair for that matter. This is about Jonathan’s girlfriend.”
“Then you’re naïve, Inspector,” Weiss retorted. “If it’s an Arab, it’s political. If it’s a Jew, it’s political, if it’s a black, it’s political—”
“That’s your problem,” Green snapped, pushing past Weiss into his office. “I’m just investigating a homicide, and so far, the only politics involved are the ones I have to play with you guys. I don’t mean to be rude, and there’s no disrespect implied, but you’re wasting precious time. I’ll phone Mrs. Blair myself.” He picked up the phone as if to convey his sincerity. “I’ll tell her all I can. But I have several urgent leads to follow up, and that’s where I can help her the most.”
Weiss glowered in the doorway, searching for a toe-hold of authority. When Green began to dial, he spun on his heel and stalked out, flicking at the sleeves of his linen suit as if to rid himself of the taint of crime. Green’s tone with Marianne Blair was more diplomatic, but his message much the same. After dispensing with her as quickly as possible, he flipped hopefully through his stack of phone messages, but none was from Sharon. He called home but got the answering machine. It’s still early, he told himself. She could still be at the beach or at a friend’s, especially if she didn’t have to work until the evening. Full of hope, he called the ward where she worked, but the ward clerk told him Sharon had called in sick earlier in the day and requested a few days off. The woman was surprised he didn’t know and asked if Sharon was all right, because she had sounded strained and upset.
Green hung up, fighting a sense of foreboding. It was time for some serious damage control. He had to explain the necktie, but to do that he had to find her. That meant calling her friends, all smart, capable nurses like herself, who thought he was cute but entirely unreliable as a life partner. It meant calling his in-laws, who had been keeping their fingers crossed ever since their career-woman daughter had finally reeled in this rather unlikely marital prospect—Jewish at least, but a divorced policeman who’d forget to eat, sleep or change his clothes if no one was there to stand over him. His mother-inlaw’s screech would echo all the way from Mississauga, and his father-in-law would have them both packed on the next plane up. Green shuddered. Could he face that? On top of Lynch, Weiss, Marianne Blair and all the other naysayers on his back right now?
Closer to home and easier to drop in on without inventing excuses was his father, whom Sharon adored. She knew he stayed alive only for the moments he could spend with his son and grandson. She would never leave town without visiting him to say good-bye, and no matter what excuse she gave, his father would know the truth. For a man who sat alone in his apartment all day watching TV, Sid Green had an uncanny knack for reading people. He would know if Sharon were leaving for good.
But Sid Green’s knack for seeing through people might prove tricky, Green realized as he knocked and breezed into his father’s living room, trying to look cheerful. Sid looked up from his chair, where he was watching some indeterminate soap opera. There were spikes of bristle on his chin which his razor had missed, but at least he was still trying to shave, Green thought.
“What’s going on?” his father demanded irritably. Any change to his routine, no matter how pleasant, seemed to irritate him.
Green held up a paper bag. “I brought you cheese bagels from Nate’s. You hungry?”
Sid said nothing, but watched his son suspiciously as he slipped into the tiny kitchenette to heat up the food. Sensing the heavy silence, Green stalled in the kitchen, looking for an oblique approach to his inquiry. But as it turned out, he didn’t need one. Returning to the living room, he found his father’s rheumy eyes fixed on him knowingly.
“Sharon was here.”
Green kept his expression neutral. “Oh, really? When?”
“She already bought me cheese bagels from Nate’s. She made some for her and me, but she didn’t touch her own.”
“Did she…say anything?”
Still Sid held his gaze balefully. “She brought me some new pictures. Mishka, don’t do this to me again.”
Green blinked. “Do what?”
“Chase her away. She will move to Toronto and take Tony away from me. When I am dead, that will be time enough to get a divorce.”
“Hey, Dad, she brought over some baby pictures. Who’s talking about divorce?”
Sid didn’t reply, and Green felt his heart turn to stone. “Was she?”
Sid took a deep breath. “She took a picture from the drawer when she put her pictures away. She doesn’t think I saw, but she took the picture of you with your mother at the river. That time you carried her down there just before she died.”
Our last family picnic, on my twenty-first birthday, Green thought. Sharon had always admired that picture, but surely she knew how his father cherished it! “God, Dad, I’m sorry.”
“I have copies. But why did she do that, Mishka? To have a memory of you together, for Tony, when she takes him to Toronto.”
Green felt sick, but he forced himself to laugh. “She’s not going to Toronto, Dad. I asked her to get that picture. I…well, I need it for something.”
He didn’t know how he was going to cover up that lie, but right now it was the least of his worries. He stayed a few minutes longer, filling the silence with chatter, but he knew his father was unconvinced. As Green left, he searched for a way to cheer him up. Depression and loss could be fatal.
Passing a pharmacy on his way back to the car, he saw a window display advertising gifts for Father’s Day the next week. Some Father’s Day, he thought grimly. My wife and son in Toronto and my father near his deathbed, full of reproach. It was then that he thought of how to explain the lie. Blown up and beautifully framed, the picture would make a perfect Father’s Day gift. To a man mired in memories, it would be more touching than a hundred sweaters or dressing gowns. The problem was that if Sharon had indeed gone back to Toronto, he would have to steal yet another picture to make the gift.
Back in the office, there was still no message from her. Had she really left without a single word to him? Anger flared briefly. How dare she have so little faith! And so little appreciation of the pressures he was under? She’d seen him smeared in the press before, and she knew better than to believe a word they said! Surely when she calmed down in a few hours, even a day or two, she’d remember that. Reassured, he decided not to call anyone else, at least not just yet. If she still wasn’t back tomorrow, he’d begin the search in earnest. But she’d be back. She’d stuck by him before, kicking and screaming but still there, through worse than this.
Having forced his worry into the back of his mind, he turned back to the phone messages that had collected. More than half were from the press, and he tossed them into the waste basket. Fat chance I’ll call you bastards, he thought grimly. All you want is a juicy pound of flesh for the headlines. Carrie’s murder and my tie had done nicely today, but what about tomorrow? In the absence of anything else, perhaps a nice little story about my collapsing marriage. Or my inability to protect witnesses and my failure to charge the suspect staring me in the face.
Contrary to popular opinion, nothing was staring him in the face but reams and reams of information. To tease out the answer, to make sense of all the conflicting tides, could take days. The crux of the puzzle lay in the motive. Everyone else was betting on the Haddads. Sex and revenge were feelings the public—and his fellow cops—could understand far more easily than the panic of professional humiliation and lost dreams. On the surface too, the evidence clearly favoured Eddie Haddad— the knife, the bloody shirt, the lies about his whereabouts.
Sullivan, Jules and Marianne Blair were right. Most policemen would have arrested Eddie on the spot. So why was he holding back? On a mere hunch, based on the panic in Eddie’s voice and the earnest look in his eyes? Or was he, as Sullivan the pragmatist often accused him, winging out into the wild blue yonder, seduced by the complex psychic web of Halton’s group? There was a mystery there, as fascinating and sinister as any he’d encountered, but perhaps it was irrelevant. Perhaps Blair’s murder was a mere lucky coincidence for the student who had perpetrated the fraud. Green hated coincidences, the enemy of deduction, but sometimes they were true. Sometimes the obvious suspect was the right one.
But just then a shadow blocked his doorway, and he looked up to see Brian Sullivan leaning against the frame. He tossed a file down on Green’s desk.
“Well, buddy, if you were looking for an easy answer to our problems, you can forget it.”
* * *
“There’s not one fingerprint in Carrie’s whole apartment!” Green echoed incredulously.
Sullivan shook his head. His hair stood in straw tufts, and his eyes were red from rubbing. “Nothing useful, and no fibres or tissue we can pin down either. This killer’s no fool. He anticipated all the angles.” Sullivan sighed. “And that’s not all the bad news, buddy. The black hair we got from the shirt? It doesn’t match any of the Haddads. Not even Eddie’s.”
Despite the forensic dead ends, Green felt a surge of triumph. His intuition had been right! Better than all the computer scans, the forensic minutiae and the balancing of probabilities that formed the core of everyday detective work.
“It doesn’t really mean anything,” Sullivan muttered, dropping into the chair opposite. “I mean, it weakens the case against Eddie, but it doesn’t kill it. One black hair…it could have been there for months.”
“The shirt was washed.”
“Spot washed, forensics says. Mike, it’s staring you in the face. The kid is as guilty as hell.”
Green wavered. He remembered the neat little bullet hole in the centre of Carrie’s forehead and felt a hard fist form in his chest. He rose. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe—”
The phone shrilled at his elbow, making them jump. Green pounced on it, hoping it was Sharon, but instead the gravel voice of the desk sergeant came through.
“There’s a Mr. Pierre Haddad down here, Inspector. He insists on seeing you.”
Raquel’s uncle was tight-lipped and grim as Green ushered him into an interview room near his office, and when he spoke, it was obvious he had rehearsed the speech carefully.
“Inspector Green, you notice I have brought no lawyer with me. That is because I want to cooperate with the police. My sons and I have done nothing wrong, and we trust that the Canadian justice system will not betray us. I know that the knife and shirt from the murder were found in my garage. I know that my son Edward has lied about being home with us that night. We have talked about it and I believe his explanation. I also believe that you are an honourable man and did not put the knife there. So I appeal to you, as an honourable man, to listen to our side of the story. There can be only one explanation. The Haddad family has been framed.”
Although he had just been thinking the same thing, Green tried to look sceptical. He arched an eyebrow. “Framed? Why would someone do that?”
Haddad looked at him as if he thought him a complete fool. “Obviously, so you would blame us instead of him.”
“I mean, why you?”
“Perhaps someone saw the boys arguing with Jonathan Blair earlier and took advantage of the situation.”
“A pretty long shot, Mr. Haddad. They’d have to know who your sons were, who Raquel was and her connection to Jonathan, and they’d have to want Blair dead. Not many people fit that bill.”
“Probably only one, Inspector. The murderer.”
Green continued to play devil’s advocate, using Haddad to explore the theory. “It leaves a lot to chance, and it implies Blair’s murder was a spur of the moment thing. When the killer sees a chance to blame your sons, he goes off to the library and sticks a knife in Blair’s gut. That’s another thing— the knife. He had to get himself a Bedouin knife.”
Haddad waved a hand in dismissal. “Those things are everywhere.”
“But he’d have to buy it. The fight with Blair was at six-thirty. Many stores are closed at that hour on Tuesday, and even so, it probably would take him more time to hunt one up.” Green shook his head. Detective Gibbs had not yet been able to find where the knife had been bought, and Green knew that if it took Gibbs this long, it would take the killer even longer. “This was much longer in the planning, I’m afraid.”
“Then it was planned to blame my son Eddie,” retorted Haddad.
Green analyzed the implications. “For that, the killer would have to know an awful lot about your family.”
“Raquel could have told anybody about us. That is how the killer could know everything. Even that we did not want her to see Jonathan Blair.”
Green took the reasoning one step further. For this frame to work, it was equally important that the family know about her affair with Jonathan. The killer needed the Haddads to make a fuss and to make public their hostility towards Blair. Yet the Haddads said she never talked to them about her friends.
“Tell me,” he asked as casually as he could. “How did you find out Raquel was seeing him? Did she tell you?”
Haddad took a deep breath. The faint pink of shame tinged his cheeks. “Jonathan wasn’t the only one. There were others before. When Raquel came to this country, she seemed to go wild. She is so beautiful. The men, everywhere, they chase her. She liked it. She saw how the Canadian women do what they want, go out with boys, choose whoever they want, and she wanted that too. Even before I knew about Jonathan, I decided to send Raquel back to Beirut when her courses were over. But then I found out they were going to move in together.”
Green hid his surprise. Certainly Jonathan’s mother knew nothing of such plans. In fact Jonathan had told his father only days before his death that he was coming back to Vancouver, perhaps for good.
“What makes you think that?” he demanded.
“I found a note from Jonathan to Raquel. It was a—a…” Haddad flushed. “A love letter. Disgusting. Jonathan talked about getting an apartment next week. That made up my mind for sure.”
Green frowned. “Where did you find this note?”
“Last Sunday night my boy Paulie found the note on the front walk. She must have dropped it on her way in. When I read it, I said that’s enough.”
And that’s when the phone calls to Lebanon began, Green thought to himself. “Did you ask Raquel about the note?”
Haddad nodded ruefully. “Tuesday afternoon, at the university. That was the argument you know about. I asked her about the note and I told her about Lebanon.”
“What did she say about the note?”
“She said it’s not true. There is no note. Jonathan and her are not…together. But Raquel always lied to me. Hid things from me.”
Green’s antennae began to quiver. “Do you still have the note?”
Haddad reached into his pocket and extracted a folded sheet of paper. He held it a moment in trembling hands before reluctantly handing it over.
My Darling,
I can’t stay away from you! I grow hard just writing this note. I want you, I need you, and I’m sick of sneaking around and grabbing stolen hours with you. To hell with your uncle. To hell with my mother and the stuffed shirts we work with. We’re going to do it! I’ll tell my mother I’m taking a trip, we’ll get that place and we can stay in bed for the rest of our lives! I can’t believe I’ll be able to fuck you whenever I want you. Which is always! Only one more week! Hold on, baby. I am, hard as it is (just the way you like it). I love you madly!
Jonathan
* * *
Sullivan reread the note, then held it up to study it from a distance. They were sitting in Green’s office, having thanked Pierre Haddad for his help and promising to get back to him. The plastic evidence bag crackled in Sullivan’s hands. Inside was an eight-by-eleven sheet of standard white computer paper.
“Pretty impersonal way to send a love note,” Green muttered. “Looks more like an office memo.”
“People who do everything by computer operate like that. I get lots of memos just printed by computer. Nobody bothers with writing anymore. At least the guy signed it.”
“Right…” Green rested his head in his hand. “But you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty damn convenient. Hardly anything we can match it to, to check if Blair really wrote it…and this business of it ‘accidentally’ dropping on Pierre’s front walk. Give me a break.”
“You’re saying it’s a plant?”
Green swivelled to face Sullivan. “Let me ask you this. What would be your reaction if you found a note like this from Lizzie’s boyfriend?”
Sullivan grinned. “Lizzie’s only sixteen. I’d kill the guy.”
“But if—”
“What every father’s would be, Mike. Furious. Just like the Haddads. I’d probably try to send her to my sister in Alberta.”
“So this note would be almost sure to provoke a reaction?”
“Absolutely. He pushes all the buttons—crude sex, defiance of parents…just wait till you have a daughter, Mike. You’ll want to protect her from the likes of us till she’s thirty-five!”
I have a daughter, Green thought with a sudden pang. A daughter and a son, but perhaps I’ll never get to know either. He forced the idea out of his mind with an effort. “This killer is clever, Brian. Look at the frame!”
“If it is a frame,” Sullivan reminded him. “The only thing we have to substantiate that theory is one black hair. And that could belong to Eddie Haddad’s girlfriend, for all we know.”
“But it doesn’t. It belongs to the killer.”
“As they say, tell that to the judge.”
Green swivelled his chair back to his desk and stood up. “Let’s get this down to Paquette and see what forensics can find. Then we’ll take it over to the documents guy at the RCMP lab and see if it’s really Blair’s signature. Maybe then we’ll have more than one black hair.”
Green had hoped to get the note analyzed quickly, but just as he and Sullivan were crossing the main lobby towards the Ident Unit, Deputy Chief Lynch emerged from the elevator. Clutched in his fist was a newspaper. Oh fuck, Green thought to himself.
“Green! Get over here!”
Green sent Sullivan on ahead to Paquette’s lab and steeled himself to face Lynch, who propelled him into an empty waiting room and slammed the door behind them.
“I don’t need this shit!” Lynch flung the tabloid down on a chair. “I put myself on the line for you. I promised the bigshots you could deliver, and what do you give me? This!” He stabbed the front page with his finger.
“It’s not worth wasting our energy on, sir,” Green replied, although he knew it sounded lame.
“Wasting our energy?” Lynch echoed. “That’s all you can say? The press calls us all a bunch of whores and incompetents, with you topping the list—”
“The press tries to sell papers. They do whatever it takes, you know that, sir. If they don’t have facts, they make them up. I can’t control what they print.”
“You could if you’d answer their calls!” Lynch shot back. “Or answered Media Relations’ calls. Or mine! If you told anybody what the fuck you were doing, then maybe it wouldn’t look like nothing.”
“What do you want me to do? Answer calls or solve the case?”
The Deputy Chief shoved a finger in his face. “Listen, sonny, this is not Adam Jules you’re talking to. I don’t give a fuck about your homicide record. It doesn’t do me bugger all good if you’re sitting on your ass letting this Arab bastard run around loose. Pick him up before I assign the case to someone else.”
Green could feel the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Gritting his teeth he counted slowly to five. “He’s not guilty, sir,” he said when he dared.
“Not guilty! What are you, God? The way I hear it, the case is open and shut.”
“The man was framed.”
Lynch turned purple. “You working for the defence now, Green? Do I have to make myself clearer? Arrest the guy.”
“Sir, we’d look stupid if—”
“We’d look stupid?” Lynch seized the paper and threw it in Green’s face. “What do you call that! You’ve got till the end of the day to lay a charge in this case, or you’re off it!” He spun around and slammed out of the room.
In the silence that suddenly fell, Green could hear his own heart thumping. He retrieved the loathsome newspaper from the floor. He had never seen the Deputy Chief so angry. He doesn’t give a damn about the truth, thought Green bitterly. He just wants to look good, and heaven help the person who messes that up. I bet if I solved the case tomorrow, he’d be the first here for the pictures. My best buddy.
Fuck him, he thought, shoving the newspaper in the trash. What Lynch thinks isn’t important. What’s important are the facts.
With that in mind, he went out to rejoin Sullivan. He ran into him just emerging from Ident’s corner of the building, teasing Paquette over his shoulder as he left.
“That was fast,” Green said.
“Not much to analyze.” Sullivan waved the note. “There were only three legible prints on it. Haddad’s right thumb and index finger and his son Paul’s right thumb. The rest are just smudges, but nothing at all like Blair’s.”
“Hah!” Green cried, the adrenaline still pumping from his clash with Lynch. “Don’t try to tell me Jonathan Blair wore gloves when he wrote his love notes.”
“No, I won’t try to tell you that. It’s fishy, that’s for sure.”
Green strode down the hall. “He’s smart, but he’s not as smart as all that. He couldn’t find a way to put Blair’s prints on the note so he had to leave it blank. Stupid mistake. Now let’s see how good he is at forging.”
They battled the last of the Saturday shopping traffic as they made their way over to the RCMP Headquarters. Drivers baking in the heat honked and sat on one another’s bumpers. Inching east along the Queensway, Sullivan glanced over at Green, who was staring out the side window.
“So what did Lynch want? More of the same?”
“He wanted to show me today’s headline.”
Sullivan grimaced. “Yeah, I saw it. But people don’t really believe everything they read.”
Green nodded mechanically. The adrenaline rush had begun to subside, leaving a shakiness and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. His earlier optimism had deserted him. What if the newspaper was right, and he never solved the case? What if Sharon had finally given up? What if he had finally destroyed, through his own self-absorption, the last of the affection that had kept her with him?
Was there any way to get it back? He felt the ache in his stomach as he remembered the years before he had found her. Not as years of glorious sexual adventure, but as years of hope and pain and disappointment, looking for the one Great Love of his Life. A family, children, a place to come home to—how much he had wanted those things then! As an only child, with his mother dead now and his father a frail old man, he dreamed of being surrounded by family that would chase out the loneliness he had felt all his life. After a string of romantic failures, he had thought Sharon was the one. But maybe it was his destiny to be a loner, to have nothing but his work, his colleagues and moments of physical release when he needed them. Would he never move on? Would he never grow up? Was he destined to fail every woman who felt something for him? The ache tightened his chest and stung his eyes.
God, get a grip, Green! he scolded himself. You’re wallowing in self-pity because you haven’t had a decent meal or a decent night’s sleep in days. You feel guilty about Carrie, and rightly so. And your marriage has hit a rough patch, that’s all! Is anybody’s marriage perfect? Sharon’s working too hard, I’m working too hard, the baby’s exhausting and the damn apartment’s too small! We can fix all that.
He took a deep, cleansing breath and raised his head just as they turned into the RCMP parking lot. “The best thing we can do, for all our sakes, is solve this damn case.”
The documents expert at the RCMP lab took only ten minutes to compare the ‘Jonathan’ on the note to one on a memo Blair had written to Halton. During that ten minutes, he didn’t say a single word. The silence was broken only by the rustle of paper and the shuffling of his footsteps. When he finally spoke, it was like a gunshot in a deserted room.
“It’s a tracing. Pen pressure’s too even and the hand was moving much too slowly. There’s a minute tremor in the lines which you only get if you’re moving slowly. A good likeness in terms of letter formation. A quick glance, even someone familiar with his signature—they wouldn’t notice anything wrong.”
* * *
“I knew it!” Green pounded the dash of Sullivan’s old Chevrolet. “I knew it was a set-up. Eddie Haddad a cold-blooded killer? Give me a break.”
As Sullivan steered the car onto the Queensway entrance ramp for the short hop from the RCMP Headquarters back to the Elgin Street police station, the sun was sinking deep into the murky western sky. Heat still hung over the city like a wet sponge. Sullivan lowered the visor with a sigh. “What next? Do we pick up Miller or go home?”
Green squinted ahead into the hazy red glow. “I never did like Miller as a suspect.”
Sullivan groaned. “Who else, Mike? Difalco? Rosalind Simmons, maybe? Or how about the cleaning lady?”
“How about Halton?”
“Halton.” Sullivan shook his head in disgust. “Ask yourself the first question in a murder investigation, who stands to gain by Blair’s death? Miller. He fits all the criteria. Brains, inside knowledge, access to Blair’s computer, motive in spades and no alibi for the night of Blair’s death. He said he was alone in his office at his computer all evening. No one can substantiate that.”
“That’s the point. Wouldn’t someone as smart as Miller have set himself up a better alibi if he were planning to kill someone?”
“Miller’s a genius, but in street smarts he’s a real dud. He’s obsessed with his research, and you know as well as me that obsessions can blind a guy. And with his history of mental problems—”
“I know it fits, but it just doesn’t sit right,” Green said. “Blair was upset by his discovery about the data tampering. He was thinking of leaving Halton’s program. Why?”
They were nearing the Nicholas off-ramp, which led to Green’s apartment. “Mike, where are we going?”
Green wasn’t sure he’d be able to get food past the sick knot in his stomach, but the half-eaten bagel he’d managed at noon was long gone, and dizziness was setting in. If he wanted to keep going, he had to eat. “Nate’s Deli. I need to think.”
Sullivan groaned as he steered the car off the Queensway onto Nicholas Street. “This is the third meal I’ve eaten out in a row. Mary will kill me.”
Green waved a distracted hand. “No, she’ll kill me. She always does. Miller’s guilt would never have made Blair feel like quitting Halton.”
“But Halton has nothing to gain by knocking off Blair. Miller was the one screwing up his program.”
“Yes, but Blair was the one threatening to blow the whistle.”
“Mike, that doesn’t make any sense. You’re right, you need food—your brain cells are dying. Why ask Blair to look into it if he didn’t want the truth known?”
Green scrambled to keep ahead of Sullivan’s logic. This was how they worked best together—Green making his wild intuitive leaps and down-to-earth Sullivan trailing along with the safety net. “Because Halton was passionate about his research, the same trait that makes him such a good suspect. He had to know the truth so that his future research would not be based on a lie. But then he asked Blair to keep it quiet, and Blair refused. Which would have really screwed up Halton’s bid to work with Yale and finally play with the big boys. He had to knock the kid off. It fits, Brian. It’s convoluted, but it fits.”
Waiting behind a string of cars turning left onto King Edward Street, Sullivan gave him a long exasperated look. “I think Miller fits better. Come on, Mike, face it. You just like to see the big guys fall.”
Green grinned. “What do you want from a scruffy little kid from Lowertown? I admit Miller’s past strikes a chord. We’re both working class, inner city Jewish kids. But I don’t give you a hard time every time you go sappy over some Irish Valley boy—”
Sullivan laughed. “Oh, not much.”
“How about Difalco? He fits the profile perfectly. Now there’s a guy we can both dislike. Rich, arrogant, spoiled…”
“Yeah, but he’s got an alibi. Plus no motive.”
Green snorted. “Lateral thinking, Sullivan. That’s exactly what makes Difalco and Halton suspicious. This killing is brilliant and premeditated. Whoever did it would have set himself an airtight alibi.”
Sullivan manoeuvred the car off Rideau Street into the parking lot of Nate’s Delicatessen. For a moment he was silent as he concentrated his energies on squeezing the oversized Chevrolet into the last tiny space on the congested lot. Then he turned to Green.
“But Halton’s alibi does give us a small problem. Half a dozen sailing cronies place him in Toronto five hundred kilometres away. I’d say that was pretty airtight.”
Green shook his head. “Not if you look at the timing. Yesterday I double-checked his story with his sailing buddy from York University. Halton was out sailing on Tuesday, that much is true. But according to Dr. Trent, he insisted on an early dinner, passed up his usual double martinis, and left shortly after seven. A fast driver in a good car could make it in under four hours. Halton has a BMW. It’s cutting it close, but it’s possible.”
Sullivan laughed. “With wings.”
They swung open the door to the deli and felt the blast of air conditioning. Both heaved a sigh of relief. Nodding to the waitress who approached, they headed towards the back.
“Brian, don’t forget this killer is smart! Do you think he’d go to all the trouble of setting up this frame and not give himself a decent alibi? Miller’s a sitting duck! He left the whole evening wide open, with no one to substantiate his story!”
Sullivan eased himself into the booth and picked up the menu. “Come on, a guy like Halton’s much more likely to get someone else to do his dirty work.”
Green froze half-seated, his thoughts racing as he suddenly remembered Difalco and the stolen files. “Two people! Each supplying only half the picture. One who had the motive, the other the means and opportunity. And who else but the golden boy? Brilliant, Brian! That’s it!”
“Mike!” Sullivan waved the menu wildly. “Food!”
But Green was already across the room.