GEORGE WAS AT THE UNIVERSITY WHEN MAUREEN GOT to his place, so she just walked in. He never locked the apartment. He said that if people were determined to come in and rob him blind, there was no lock he knew of that was going to keep them out, and they would just end up doing a whole lot more damage if they had to kick down the door to get at his stuff. Maureen sat down and called Fluff. Whoever answered the phone said that Fluff was down at the boutique, giving Joyce a hand.
“Boutique Artistique—cool threads for kind heads,” Fluff answered the phone.
“Fluff, it’s me, Maureen.”
“Maureen.” Fluff’s voice registered a little coldness, and then she gave that apologetic little laugh of hers and said, “Joyce is just making me try out a new slogan for the shop.” Another little apologetic laugh. “What’s going on?”
“Yea, yea, I just wanted to ask you, Fluff, on that Tuesday, the last time you were talking to Bo”—Maureen could hear a little catch in Fluff’s breathing when she said Bo’s name, so she hurried on—“how did he sound?”
“Regular, you know . . . a bit pissed off, but then that was Trevor.”
“Did he sound agitated or excited at all?” Maureen asked, looking at the notes she’d taken at the library.
“No more than usual, you know. He was fed up with the job and he wanted to get away from the boys at DAFT, and he had a bad hangover, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yea. He just said he was sick as a dog with a hangover and he was gonna have to start taking it easy.”
“Did he sound”—what was it they said in the book?—“you know, down in the dumps, desperate or confused at all?”
“No, someone came to the door and he had to go.”
“What time was that, Fluff?”
“What, are you suddenly the Riddler, Maureen? Why are you asking all these questions?”
“Well, Fluff, I just want to know what exactly happened that day that Bo went missing.”
“Why? What good will that do? That won’t bring Trevor back.”
The thought that Bo could come back sent Maureen into a spin. Her thoughts went right off the rails for a second.
“Maureen? . . . Maureen? Are you still there?”
Maureen couldn’t answer. She was lost in a violent reverie, seeing herself on the floor that night, trying to shield her face from Bo’s kicking.
“Maureen, look I gotta go. Someone just came in the shop. Maureen? . . . ”
Finally, Maureen croaked out, “Okay, Fluff. See ya. See ya later on.”
Maureen hung up, still shaken from the thought of Bo being resurrected. She had to sit—her knees felt buckly. She fell back into the beanbag chair and felt a hardcover book under her. The page the book was open to said, “Section 23, The Offences Against the Person Act.” Maureen continued to read: “. . . whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously administer to or cause to be administered to or taken by any other person any poison or other destructive or noxious thing, so as thereby to endanger the life of such person, shall be guilty of an offence. The maximum penalty for an offence under Section 23,” Maureen read with mounting horror, “is ten years’ imprisonment.” She closed the book, Martin’s Annual Criminal Code, 1969. According to the back cover, George had borrowed it from The Law Society of Newfoundland Library.
George thinks I’m guilty . . . Maybe I am guilty? She could hear the big iron bars slamming shut all around her. Just then, George came in through the door. Maureen screamed and jumped up. George fell back, at first alarmed and then defensive. Maureen rushed to apologize.
“I was so lost in thought. I was in another world . . .”
“I don’t know what you’re getting so hinky about. You’re putting the Chinese angle on me, and all I’m doing is trying to come into my own joint. No need to throw another ing-bing.”
“I don’t even know what you’re saying. I’m sorry. I was just startled.”
“I could bounce, if you like.”
“What?”
“I could leave. What have you got there?” George asked, nodding toward the book.
“Oh, this was . . . I was . . . this was just . . .”
“Oh, Martin’s Annual Criminal Code,” George said, taking the book from her hands. All of a sudden, he was full of false jollity. “I guess I should have cheesed that.”
“George, I don’t know what you’re saying. Please, just talk to me like you’re a normal human being and not someone from one of those stupid Mickey Spillane books.”
“Not Mickey Spillane; it’s Raymond Chandler.”
“You think I’m guilty, don’t you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I gotta couple of Cs that says you will never see the inside of the calaboose.”
Maureen gave him a hard look.
“I’m just saying, whether you’re guilty or not, I don’t think you’ll ever do any jail time.”
“Why?”
“’Cause there’s too many people who’d like to see that booze hound in a Chicago overcoat.”
“George!”
“You know he—Bo—coulda been trying to put the Chinese squeeze on that crowd of dope dealers. You know, chisel ’em outta their drug fortune.”
“George, I found out today at the library that chlordane has an LD-50.”
George looked at her blankly.
“It kills 50 per cent of the people that it’s administered to, and I put a huge amount of chlordane into his orange juice.”
“But when did you find out that chlordane kills people?”
“Today.”
“Right. So, according to English law,” George said, flipping through Martin’s Annual Criminal Code, “an act doesn’t make a person guilty, unless that person’s mind is also guilty.”
“I don’t get it—what?”
“See, unless you had malice of forethought, mens rea, the guilty mind—did you mean to kill Bo with the chlordane?”
“No, I don’t think so. It was like I wasn’t the one who did it, like I was standing beside myself the morning when I did it.” As Maureen spoke, she could see herself pouring in the poison and spraying the food with the Flit gun, but it was like she was remembering a movie or like someone else had done the deed and she just happened to be there to witness it. Oh, now her head was really pounding, just on one side—her eye, the side of her nose, all the way to the back of her neck. “But according to what I read there, even if I didn’t kill him, I’m still a criminal. It says right in that book that if anybody pours any poison that endangers the life of a person, they’d be guilty of what they call in there ‘a heinous crime.’ I don’t know what to do. Maybe I just need to take off.”
“Yea, good thinking. Be a bim with a bindle. I mean, go on the lam . . . just run away. Look, it’s as easy as duck soup. All you gotta do is drop a dime on them.”
“Them who?”
“The boys, the DAFT boys. Put the finger on ’em.”
“Oh, George,” Maureen said in exasperation. “It’d be all right if you had a dust of sense, even two clicks to call a clue.”
“Now I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m already in trouble with the boys and with the cops, and now you want me to be a—”
“Snitch. A stoolie.”
“Yea, and tell the cops about something I don’t know that much about anyway. I’m just not smart enough for any of this.”
She could see herself getting up on the stand, not like Marlene Dietrich, a woman of mystery with a jaunty hat and all that composure, giving nothing away, remaining a fascinating question mark. No, she’d be up on the stand all red-faced and burbling, spilling her guts to all comers. Sometimes Maureen despaired of herself: she really was deeply shallow. Here she was, guilty of what was called cold-blooded murder in books, and she was worrying about how she was going to look on the stand.