Outside the rectory, I asked the first passerby where I’d find the nearest service station. It was a four-minute walk. The owner was able to direct me to an automotive paint shop, which gave me a folder displaying samples of available fast-drying pyroxylin colours. The closest shade to what Myrtle had described was called Whisper Green. When I started asking questions about it, the smooth-talking sharp-dresser behind the counter went to the shop area and brought out a man in goggles and paint-stained khaki overalls whom he called Sam.
“Do you know of any cars that come straight from the factory in this colour?” I wanted to know.
Sam, in his forties by the look of him, pulled off one leather glove and scratched his sandy moustache. He spoke with an Irish lilt, his there and the coming out dare and da.
“Any there are would be coming from General Motors. They’re boasting how much choice they offer, compared to the competition.”
I assumed he meant Ford, still wedded to black. “Have you ever repainted a car in Whisper Green or anything like it?”
“See any traces on my boiler suit?” With a soft chuckle, Sam turned slowly around to allow for a thorough inspection. “That colour hasn’t been out a year,” he added. “It’s never been used in this shop to my knowledge.”
“Has anyone bought the paint to take away?”
I turned from Sam to the counterman, who consulted his files and told me no.
Before leaving, I asked the two men how many car-paint competitors they could name and carried away the beginnings of a list. Before visiting any of these shops, however, I went back to the rectory to check the colour of the sample against Myrtle’s memory. When she’d recovered from her surprise at finding me back on her doorstep so soon after I’d left, she said, “Yes, that’s it — or maybe that with five per cent more white mixed in.”
The shade was distinctive enough that all the paint shops I was able to visit in the hours before closing time were able to answer my question with certainty. Unfortunately, the answer in every case was no — they hadn’t used Whisper Green or anything like it on any vehicles of any sort. They hadn’t sold any either. I also managed to reach a General Motors dealership. They told me none of their products were in what I was starting to think of as “my colour.”
I returned to the office tired and hungry close to eight o’clock. The official investigation into the murder of Nora Britton was twelve hours old. I hoped the rest of the team had progress to report.
The only one of my three musketeers I found in the detective room was Rudy Crate. He was jolly and full of the fine time he’d had at Choo-Choo Mansion. Mary-Maud had served him brownies. He’d discussed with Sir Joseph the relative virtues of Constable and A.Y. Jackson as landscape painters. He’d chatted with Frieda — that is, Lady Deane — about the depiction of François Villon in The Vagabond King and the perpetual appeal of the artist/criminal. He’d discovered nothing we could use, but it didn’t matter now that Myrtle had made it clear that the light-coloured roadster she claimed to have seen was green, not cream like Sir Joe’s.
I couldn’t think of anything further for Rudy to do at that moment and told him he could go home. He said he might as well stay a bit longer. Professor Linacre or some ichthyologist might still phone about the fish poison. While I thought this a curious display of keenness after the way he’d spent his afternoon, I told him to suit himself.
I asked around the detective room to see if anyone had anything I could nibble on while waiting to hear from Harry and Ned. No one did. I sat at my desk and drew up a list of suspects with Herman’s name at the head. The Deane household was now in the clear. Under Herman I wrote Ernestine — but how could she, without arousing suspicion, have delivered the poisoned cookies? Nora might not resent her, but I’d had no indication that she regarded Ernestine as a friend. Finally I added Myrtle with a question mark and the possibly fictitious man in the green car.
Twenty minutes later I was still scratching my head when Ned called from the pay phone in the lobby of his apartment building. He’d already been home and eaten some of his mother’s good meatloaf before speaking to me. I told him he’d done right and asked him not to tell me anything more about the meal unless he wanted my drool in his ear.
Ned reported that the first fish shop he’d tried informed him that, however much of a delicacy poisonous pufferfish or fugu might be in the Orient, it was not sold in Toronto. Skeptical, he sought a second opinion, a third, and so on till he’d canvassed twenty retailers — starting with Albert Pan in Kensington Market and ending with Ye Olde Fish Shoppe in Forest Hill Village. Those listed in the directory he phoned; those without phones he visited. Ned was pressing in his inquiries. He feared that fishmongers might have one story for government agents and another for gourmets. If — as seemed reasonable — customs officials made difficulties about allowing the importation of food that might kill, smuggling or deliberate mislabelling might still make that food available for a premium under-the-counter.
What convinced Ned in the end that no shop sold fugu flesh, legally or otherwise, was the food-preservation argument. While experiments with rapid freezing promised a brighter tomorrow, today’s freezer technology was still not good enough to bring dead fish across the Pacific to Toronto in peak condition. Simply put, any fugu you could have put on your dinner table would have been too mushy to be worth the price you’d have had to pay to get it there.
So it was that Ned came to believe that the creature that interested him was more likely to be found in a menagerie than a food store. He contacted the Riverdale and High Park zoos. Neither had the fish; neither knew where one could be found. He visited the Walker House Aquarium attached to the Walker House Hotel at Front and York Streets. Aquarium director James Palmer had in his collection exotic goldfish, fighting fish from Siam, and a pair of piranha, but no pufferfish. He was just suggesting Ned direct his inquiries to the New York Aquarium in Lower Manhattan when an associate recalled that the owner of a private zoo had shown up last winter with a selling price for various fierce or poisonous fish, including a two-year-old female fugu. The Walker House specialized in smaller and more colourful fish, and since the curious but less decorative fugu could grow to three feet in length, the offer had been declined. The fugu and other exotic fish had subsequently been advertised for sale in the daily papers. The seller called himself Wild Bill Templeton, and kept his creatures on an acreage outside Whitby, a town forty miles east of Toronto. Ned told me he could do no more until he got authorization from Inspector Sanderson for a long-distance call.
I undertook to speak to the inspector on Tuesday morning.
I’d just rung off when Harry got in.
“You should be at home changing diapers or building a playpen,” I told him. “It’s late.”
Harry shrugged off his fall coat and grinned. “Think the old man will give me a day off after I solve this case?”
I perched myself on the edge of Harry’s desk while he slouched in his chair. “Are you close?” I asked.
“No further than from here to Timbuktu. First, Ernestine. The chili-chocolate mix was family lore. She later looked for it in cookbooks. Not there.”
“So who did she tell?”
“Maybe a few people, in idle chat. She doesn’t remember who, except — she’s unshakable on this — she never told Herman. Not that it was a big secret, but it never came up. He didn’t cook and didn’t care what he ate. She just started thinking about chili and chocolate again when Nora suggested a happy family reunion.”
“Anything new from Elizabeth Street?
I told Harry we now had a better idea of what shade of car we were looking for, but he had no new roadster sightings to report. In the afternoon, he’d talked to a number of Nora’s neighbours, both ones he’d missed in the morning and ones he’d spoken to before he had Herman’s picture to show. The bright boy that sold cigarettes thought he’d seen the party in the picture over two weeks earlier, which squared with Herman’s claim to have visited Nora’s studio on October 1.
“The problem with spotting Nora’s visitors,” said Harry, “is that she shared a street door. Any friend or lover of hers might get lost among the antique fiends and bric-a-brac addicts that dropped money at Carl Moretti’s shop.”
“What about after shop hours when Moretti locked up and went home?”
“Well now, there I learned something interesting and pretty well useless.”
“Spill, Harry.”
“There’s a fella on the street that calls himself Grummy and dresses like a bookie, though he won’t admit to having any occupation. This afternoon he told me he regularly cuts down the lane behind Moretti’s and has on occasion after dark seen a rope ladder hanging from the second-floor window.”
“Do you buy it?”
“I didn’t until I met two more residents that claimed to have seen the same thing. So someone could have visited Nora without showing his face on the street.”
“Or her face,” I added, although I had trouble seeing Myrtle as this someone. She’d told me she wouldn’t have ventured up the painter’s scaffold, a stable structure compared to a swinging rope ladder. “There was no ladder in the studio Saturday morning,” I told Harry. “But by then it could have been removed by Nora, her night visitor, or Lou Sweet, the oaf that broke in.”
“Think he could have brought her the poisoned cookies?” Harry asked.
“Where could he have got them?”
“If you’ve no better use for me tomorrow, I could see if I can establish any link between him and Ernestine.”
“Let’s decide in the morning. At least we know where to find Lou. He couldn’t make bail today and is remanded in custody pending his trial.”
After Harry left, I apologized to Nora for having got no nearer to finding her killer. There was no kindly ghost to forgive me. Drained and depressed, I took myself to the King Edward Hotel and treated myself to a steak dinner that, food and tip, cleaned my wallet out but for the last three shinplasters. I put these together with two dimes and a nickel from my pocket and bought myself a ride home in a dollar taxi.