It was more than a little unusual for Gaston to suggest a drink during the day, even though we were close to the cocktail hour and completely out of character for him to drink while on the job. There is no way Gaston would violate that rule of conduct, so I knew that something else was going on. He explained that we were going to the St. Paul Pub to follow up on a lead.
During the short drive to the pub I told Gaston what I had discovered in the cartoons. Pointing out that, because the cartoonist changed the men in the tub to women, and because he focused the action on the baker, it was clear that he knew Agnes was up to something.
I wouldn’t say that Gaston doesn’t have a sense of humour, it’s just that his sense of humour is understated. He shows his appreciation for an intelligent joke with a smile, not a guffaw. I was quite surprised, and a little hurt, when he burst out laughing at my exposition.
‘Sam,’ he said, bringing himself under control, ‘first of all the original of the rhyme is ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, three maids in a tub’. You ought to read more poetry.’ He laughed at his own joke and continued, ‘and, secondly, that is the most ridiculous theory I’ve ever heard.’
‘Don’t you think Agnes is a suspect?’
‘Of course I do. She’s replaced Ben at the top of my list, but my suspicion has nothing to do with the cartoons in Reflection.’
He had parked the unmarked police car in a no-parking zone, knowing that he wouldn’t get a ticket. Most people don’t know this, but all unmarked police cars have a dark blue mark on their licence plates. To the uninformed eye, the colour blends into the azure blue of the fleur-de-lys that Québec uses on its licence plates, but other cops and the ‘Green Onions’, the people that hand out parking tickets, know what to look for. The dark blue mark saves the police department countless hours getting tickets cancelled.
I was pleased that Ben was moving down on the list of suspects but, more importantly, I wanted to know what Gaston had learned that put Agnes at the head of the list. As we had now arrived at the pub, I could not ask him. Gaston identified himself and asked the bartender if he knew Elias Dornal. Gaston had a photograph of Dornal on his iPhone, taken from the staff file at Reflection. He showed it to the man tending bar who recognised him immediately and directed us to the other bartender, Pam, a very attractive woman with masses of curly shoulder-length red hair. She had a long face, a prominent nose and green eyes. We moved down the bar to where she was conversing with a couple of customers. Gaston again presented his I.D. and asked her if she knew Elias Dornal. He didn’t have to show the photo.
‘Of course I knew him. He was one of my regular customers,’ Pam answered.
The St. Paul Pub had, in its early days, been designed to look like what the designer took to be the look of a typical British pub. The workmanship was pretty good and the place looked like it was copied from a photograph of a pub in a travel magazine. The bar was made of dark brown wood and ran three-quarters of the length of the long room. The back quarter was reserved for tables and chairs and two booths. There was an open space that could have accommodated an additional table or two, but there was a dartboard – of course – on the back wall, and the space was necessary for the players.
There were four clusters of levers for the beers on tap. The better bars and pubs in Montreal had a large selection of beers on tap.The back of the bar was crowded with bottles of hard liquor and had a wonderful collection of single malt whiskies. I could easily imagine Gaston returning to the place on his time off to sample some of the Scotch on display. I calculated that it would take him the better part of a month to work his way through the collection. I would have happily joined him in his research and I made a mental note to return to the St. Paul next time I was looking for a bar to go to. I imagined the place would be pretty busy as an after-work hangout for the people who worked in the office towers a couple of blocks to the north of Old Montreal.
Gaston and I sat down on bar stools and he said, ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about him.’
‘Sure,’ Pam said, ‘what’s it about? I can’t imagine a sweet guy like Elias being in any trouble.’
‘I gather you haven’t heard, then,’ Gaston said sombrely.
‘Heard? Heard what?’
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, mademoiselle,’ Gaston went on. ‘Elias Dornal has been murdered.’
The blood drained out of Pam’s face and she took a step backwards, as if she had been punched. I thought she was going to faint but she leaned against the work area behind her and I saw tears form in the corners of her eyes. She closed her eyes and let the tears trickle down her cheeks. She breathed deeply, trying her best to regain control of herself.
‘Can I get you something?’ I asked. ‘A glass of water?’
Pam didn’t say anything, but she picked up a glass from the counter next to her and turned on the water at the bar sink. The bartender we spoke to when we walked in noticed that she was in distress and he came toward us and asked if everything was all right.
‘No,’ Pam said.
‘I’m afraid we’ve brought some bad news. One of her customers has been murdered. We’ll need to ask her some questions,’ Gaston added.
The bartender told us to take one of the empty booths at the back of the room. He turned to Pam and said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, Pam. Go and talk to these guys and then take the night off. I can handle things.’
‘Thanks, Bruno,’ she said and we walked over to a booth.
We sat in silence for a moment or two to give Pam some time to recover from the shock of learning of Elias’s death. Obviously he meant more to her than others who knew him.
‘Do you feel ready to answer some questions?’ Gaston asked solicitously.
Pam sniffled and dabbed her eyes with a napkin and nodded.
Gaston took out his notebook and a pen and asked, ‘What is your full name?’
‘Pamela Morissette.’
Gaston wrote her name in his book and continued, ‘When was the last time you saw Elias Dornal?’
‘Yesterday, late in the afternoon or early evening. He was going to some book thing and he came here for a drink before he went.’
‘Was this unusual?’
‘Not really. He dropped in here once a week or more. I think he had a crush on me.’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘And you didn’t mind being harassed?’
Pam responded angrily. ‘I didn’t say he was harassing me. I said he had a crush on me. He was a very sweet guy. Not my type, but a sweetheart.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Pam was the second person to say something laudatory about Dornal.
‘He was funny and great to talk to. It didn’t matter what we talked about, he knew a lot about a lot of things. And there were times when I had problems that got me down and he was a wonderful listener and helped me to put things in perspective. Like I said, a real sweetheart.’
‘So you would consider yourself a friend, yes?’ Gaston asked.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about things that were bothering him? About any problems he was having or people who were bothering him. That kind of thing?’
‘Well,’ Pam said and paused for a second or two to think, ‘not really. Most of the times he came in it was to work. He was a writer, you know. But occasionally he would talk about the people he met in the book business and how they made his life difficult; hard to do his job and stuff.’
I was about to comment when Gaston put a restraining hand on my arm, signalling that I was to keep my mouth shut.
‘He worked here?’ Gaston asked.
‘Right here, in fact, in this booth. He would plug his laptop in and write. It’s pretty quiet here on Wednesday nights once the after-work people go home, so he had plenty of space to spread out.’
It occurred to me that Elias might have preferred to work outside the office if he was working on the stories about corruption. They were published under a pseudonym, and if Ambroise Laval really was Elias Dornal, then he wouldn’t have wanted to work at the Reflection office while the rest of the staff was there.
‘Are you saying that he tended to work here more on Wednesdays than any other night?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, Wednesdays. He would come in after dinner and stay until almost eleven. He used our Wi-Fi.’
Gaston made a note in his notebook. ‘Did he seem pressured, like he had a deadline to meet?’ he asked.
‘No, not really. He always had time to talk if I wasn’t busy. Around 10.30 he would get a little preoccupied and he would send off whatever it was that he was working on, and that would be that.’
This information was of great interest to Gaston, and he continued to ask Pam questions about when Dornal appeared to be the busiest at his computer, taking the time to get it all down in his notebook. I knew that Reflection came out on Thursdays and thus Elias had to file his copy Wednesday evening at the latest, but this was true of all the writers, and cartoonists for that matter, who worked for the journal. I knew for a fact that the deadline for advertising copy was Wednesday noon, and Agnes liked to have all the stories in a couple of hours after that. I guessed Dornal was usually late with his copy.
‘Did he come in at other times or was he only here on Wednesday nights?’ Gaston asked.
‘Well, yes and no. He came in at other times as well, mostly after the evening rush. But, as I said, he only worked on Wednesday nights.’
‘What did he do the rest of the time?’ I asked.
‘He read or we talked. He was really smart and knew a lot of stuff. I take night courses once a week and he would help me with my term papers and book reports.’
From talking to Pam and Chantal I realised that I had to make some adjustments to my opinion of Elias. He may have been a pain in the ass as far as I was concerned, but he was clearly a very likeable person if you met him in the right circumstances. I came to the conclusion that the way he behaved within the narrow confines of the book business had more to do with how he saw his role, than him being a total jerk. I felt bad that I had not seen this while he was alive. It would have made him easier to deal with and would have saved us both some stress.
The ringing of Gaston’s phone snapped me out of my reverie. He pulled it out of his inside jacket pocket and answered it. I could tell that the conversation was not personal because he kept referring to the person on the other end of the conversation as constable. Other than that, I did not get much out of the discussion as Gaston’s side consisted mostly of ouis. He ended the call by saying, ‘À toute à l’heure,’ which told me that he had to get somewhere on police business.
He stood up and I followed.
‘Thank you very much for your help,’ he said to Pam. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’
He turned to me and said, ‘I have to go now, Sam. I can drop you at your store if you like.’
I said goodbye to Pam, offering her my condolences too, and followed Gaston out of the pub.
Once in the car, I asked him, ‘Where are you headed?’
‘I just received a call from the police computer crime division. They cracked Dornal’s password and have access to all his files and emails. I want to see what’s there.’
‘That’s great,’ I enthused. ‘How would it be if I came along with you?’
‘How would it be, Sam?’ he asked, with a smile that I was beginning to understand was no longer inscrutable, but more bemused. ‘It would be impossible. I can’t even tell you where the computer crime division is located, much less take you there.’
Crestfallen, I said, ‘There may be things about the book business that I could help you with.’ This was my last hope at accompanying him.
‘Sam,’ he said drawing out the single syllable of my name. ‘I think I can figure it out.’
I made one final attempt to remain in the loop of the investigation. ‘Of course, of course. How about this? I’ll make some calls to other people in the book business and see if they had any contact with Dornal yesterday or the day before. If you drop by for coffee tomorrow morning I’ll fill you in.’
There was a couple of moments’ silence while Gaston thought this over. We pulled up in front of the store. ‘If I have the time, Sam, sure. I need some books anyway.’
I got out of the car and watched Gaston drive up to Sherbrooke Street and turn left. That told me that wherever the computer crime division was, it wasn’t at police headquarters. He would have turned right to get to that building.
I walked into the store, spent a few minutes talking to the staff and being brought up to date, then headed to my office.
Jennifer was at her computer working on orders of backlist titles and looked up when I came in and sat down. ‘So, Fenton, what’s up?’ she asked, again using her pet name for me for when I played hooky from work to assist Gaston.
‘The game is afoot,’ I responded. ‘I learned two things today; the most surprising of which being that Dornal was not that bad a guy. There were people that actually liked him and had nice things to say about him. The second is that there are people other than Ben on Gaston’s list of suspects, and that is good news.’
‘Sam,’ Jennifer said, ‘I think it’s time for me to be brought up to date.’
‘I have to make some phone calls, but once I have we can go out for a coffee.’
‘Okay,’ Jennifer responded. ‘I’ll finish these orders while you do that.’
I called a couple of other booksellers I was friendly with, to see if they had seen Dornal at any point following our book launch. I also called the local publishers who were there and asked them the same question.
No one had seen him. And the people I talked to were surprised to hear that he had been murdered. None of us thought that lousy book reviews were a sufficient reason to kill someone.
The consensus: there were things about Elias Dornal we were all unaware of.
It was close to 7.00 when I made the last of my telephone calls and Jennifer turned off her computer terminal.
The Café Paillon was closed so we headed for a Starbucks that was a couple of blocks away from the store. While we drank, I brought Jennifer up to speed, ending where my involvement in the investigation did – with Gaston heading off to the computer crime division without me.
‘And you think Agnes killed one of her most popular writers? Why would she do that?’ Jennifer asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I responded lamely. ‘I know that Ben didn’t do it, so it must have been someone who knew Elias and didn’t like him. Agnes didn’t like him. Surprisingly, I was able to find some people who thought highly of him, but most of the others I talked to didn’t have strong feelings about him one way or the other.’
‘You’re missing the point, Sam. If we take it as a given that Ben is innocent, then it is just as obviously true that somebody else is guilty. If it wasn’t Ben, and you don’t think it’s Agnes, then you need to poke around and see if you can find some other suspects.’
Sometimes I need the obvious explained to me, and it is usually Jennifer who does the explaining.
‘You’re right, of course,’ I agreed. ‘I know that Gaston is busy at the computer crime lab, so I’m going to talk to a group of writers and see if they can think of anyone who would have a motive for killing Elias.’