“What room are they in?”
“Really, I—”
But I already had the big book open on the podium. The last page I flipped to was only half-filled with signatures. “Mr. and Mrs. George Linden” were registered in 203. I hit the stairs running.
Waste of energy. Two-oh-three was locked, and from the look of the paneled oak door and brass lock I’d have had to go back down to the first floor for a running start. The shoulder I used for battering was more brittle than it used to be. I called down to the landlady, and my scream must have been persuasive, because it took her only five minutes to climb twelve steps. I kept my ear to the door the whole time, but it was as soundproof as it was un-bust-down-able.
She had a Downton Abbey chatelaine fastened to her waist, supporting a bronze ring the size of a softball on the end of a retractable chain with ten keys dangling from it. Of course it took her another minute to find the right one, holding the ring half an inch in front of her goggles, but when she got to it with a little huff of victory, I snatched it out of her hand, ring and all. The chain caught and I almost pulled her down onto her face.
A dead bolt shot back into its socket and I slung the door wide, banging it into the wall and reaching from reflex for a gun I knew wasn’t there. Embezzlers usually don’t put up that kind of fight.
Someone thought different. That smell never failed to throw me back to my first day on the army firing range: the brimstone stench of sulfur and burnt powder.
I pushed the door in Aunt Gertie’s face—a more chivalrous act than it sounds—and turned the knob that shot the bolt home. The nearest thing to a weapon nearest me was a chubby brass lamp on a pedestal table under the wall switch. I yanked it off the table, snapping the cord at the plug with a fireworks show of sparks, and swung it up by the neck. It looked quaint trailing its frilly pink shade, but a bludgeon is a bludgeon.
And another waste of time I also didn’t have as much of as I used to. The bird had flown. That much I got from the open double-hung window across the room from me, the tatted pink curtains shimmering in the wind from Hudson Bay; or wherever the wind comes from in that part of the world.
Just for kicks I crossed to the window—it was open a few inches, letting in outside chill—and looked out on a residential neighborhood no different from the ones I was used to, not counting Detroit’s West Side, where the pedestrians wear Kevlar to visit the corner market. The old man in the fedora walking a dustmop terrier might have been a fleeing murderer in disguise, but he waited too patiently for the dog to take a leak against a bus stop bench to attract my interest. The rose trellis decorating that side of the house was tailor-made for Romeo and Raskolnikov alike to gain access to the room and egress from it. It was made of iron, not flimsy lath.
Which left me holding a faux-Edwardian lamp, staring at a corpse on the floor and a naked woman shrieking for the police.
Not my best visit to our friendly neighbor to the north; but then again, not my worst.
* * *
The detective’s name was Weber. I’d been hoping for something hyphenated, or maybe Gallic; I knew a genuine Mountie would be too much to ask for, but a little cultural color seemed like a reasonable request. He shook my hand and said that if he could call me Amos I should call him Bert.
“Not Albert?”
“We’re not so formal as you Yanks might think.”
He showed a fine set of uppers behind a fair moustache. Both went well against his tan. I hadn’t expected to see one that close to the Arctic Ocean, or for that matter good teeth; but the Old Dominion boasts a first-class dental plan. He might have been thirty or fifty in gray wool worsted, cut by a man who’d apprenticed in diamonds. His head was entirely bald, some by nature, the rest by way of a razor. It glistened like wax fruit.
“Fire away, Bert.”
“I might start with your relationship to this fellow at our feet.”
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t at our feet; I sensed a poetic turn in the Toronto cop’s approach to the worst in crimes. Guy Lennert lay off to the right, on the edge of the fleece rug in the center of the room, fully dressed except for his shoes, both legs stretched out toward a Queen Anne bed poofed up with quilts, pillows, and padded cylinders, and his fair-haired head jammed into a corner. His brow wore a Kali-style tattoo in the form of a bluish hole square between the eyes. The eyes themselves were felt circles, like furniture pads. At this stage they were good for nothing else.
“Here.” Weber handed me a fold of white linen from an inside breast pocket.
I wiped dried blood from my right cheek. “Mrs. Linden”—now sequestered in a vacant room, so that her story might or might not check out with mine—had gotten her licks in before I’d wrestled her into position long enough for the landlady to call the authorities. The handkerchief came away as pink as the curtains and lampshade. “I can put the cleaning on the expense account.”
“I’ll put it on mine.” He accepted its return. “You ought to have those scratches looked at. Human germs are more virulent than animals’. I wonder why that is?”
“Animals don’t kill for money.”
“What makes you think that’s why Mr. Linden—Lennert, according to you—was killed?”
“Pass, Lieutenant. Or is it Leftenant? I don’t speak the language.”
“Inspector. Meaningless, really, except for a couple of hundred more loonies in the bank. I’m still performing the duties I was as a sergeant.” He folded his arms, frowning down at the dead man. “Between us, you’re probably right; though my chief won’t enjoy the prospect of one of your American hired killers invading our country. We give you hockey players, Tim Horton’s Donuts, Michael J. Fox, and this is what you offer us in return.”
“You also offer us yards of snow from Alberta, coins we can’t spend, and bad coffee. You’re American, too, don’t forget. So far no one’s dug a channel across the continent.”
He laughed, without the ring of irony. I started to like him; I didn’t like that. “I haven’t the science at my command, but experience tells me this man was slain with a thirty-eight—using your country’s measurements—or a nine-millimeter—using ours and on occasion yours. Mrs. Lennert, and for now we’ll pay her the courtesy of addressing her by that name, says she was in the shower and didn’t hear the shot. Do you agree with this account of the circumstances?”
“I never argue with a naked woman.”
“Are we sure it was a professional killing?”
“I wouldn’t sign a statement saying it, but it was too clean for the average civilian. No footprints, no spent shell casing, which means he probably used a revolver.”
“He had time to pick one up that was ejected from a semi-automatic.”
“He might have, if he thought it wouldn’t bounce or roll somewhere out of sight so he’d have to get down on his hands and knees and search. But if he did, it still means he was cool enough to leave the place as he found it, not counting the cadaver.”
“Pros often ditch the weapon at the scene. It would be untraceable if he’s as good as you say.”
“He couldn’t be sure he won’t need it if the getaway’s messy. He caught a break when he heard the shower running on his way in over the sill and found Lennert alone in the room, but he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t come out before he left. Another thing these boys seldom leave behind is a witness.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a boy.”
“I wouldn’t rule it out, but hit women aren’t as common as you see in the movies. The mob trains most of them, and it isn’t an equal opportunity employer.”
“So now the Mafia has come to Canada. Your country is building its wall on the wrong border.”
I played with a cigarette, not intending to light it. The local forensics team wouldn’t thank me for giving them one more clue to subtract. “Not enough outrage, Inspector. Try again. The silk shirts have had a presence here since Prohibition. Unless Lennert had something doing in that direction, I don’t like them for this. This button might have studied under them, but right now he’s got more enemies in the boardroom.”
“There’s always your client.”
“I thought of her first, but I told her I doubted he had the money with him.” I didn’t add I’d checked while the landlady was comforting the blonde outside. Lennert had a few hundred on him. They hadn’t unpacked, so the drawers were empty, and the suitcases didn’t have false bottoms. The bathroom was small enough to frisk in a couple of minutes. The woman’s shopping bag held lingerie only. The shams, pillows, spreads, and bolsters on the bed kept me busy long enough for my cheek to stop bleeding. It was like strip-searching Marie Antoinette. I put it all back together just in time to greet the inspector.
“Still,” he said, “hell hath no fury.”
“It hath in her case. Anyway, why hire me to look for her husband if she had someone else doing just that, with the bonus of taking him out when he found him?”
“Finding people is your specialty. Maybe you were the Judas goat and didn’t know it.”
“I don’t like to brag, but I know when I’m being followed. As often as I’ve been, I look for it out of habit.”
“A corporate contract, then. Or have I been reading too much John Grisham?”
“Fiat-Chrysler wouldn’t hardly stoop to throw the switch for less than a couple of hundred million. If this were my case, I’d take a look at the investors who got fleeced the most. On top of the best motive, they’re in the bracket that can afford to hire an expert. You get what you pay for, and if you’re the type that haggles, you stand a good chance of dealing with an undercover cop.”
“Can I take you at your word it’s not your case?”
“You can dip it in bronze and hang it in your office. When it comes to hunting contract killers I’m so far out of my league I can’t see the scoreboard.”
He was still holding my credentials. He looked at them again. “For a private detective, you seem to know a lot about the trade in murder.”
“I know a little bit about a lot of things.”
Car doors slammed below. That would be the morgue wagon and the boys and girls who collect butts and blood spatters. Weber gave back my folder. “Wait downstairs. We need a statement you will sign, and I’ll arrange an escort to see you don’t catch any red lights between here and the bridge. Or do you prefer the tunnel?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. The day I’m having, I could fall off one or drown in the other.”