Chapter 3

The desk phone was ringing as I guided the alleged Miss Clarkson out of the hotel towards the waiting cab. On seeing us, the driver jumped out and ran around to hold the door for us. Before we could get in, however, Rutherford was calling to me from the hotel entrance. I wasn’t pleased to see him there.

“Constable?”

“Call for you, sir. An Inspector Sanderson at HQ insists on a word.”

“Tell him I’ve left.”

“Too late for that, sir, I’m afraid.”

I knew a dozen constables that might have managed it, but this wasn’t the time or place to argue. I told the cabbie to wait, shooed Rutherford back upstairs, and went to the phone.

“Shenstone here.”

“Paul, I don’t recall sending you to the Beaconsfield Hotel. What are you playing at?”

I reported everything I’d done since seeing the window explode. At first, Sanderson seemed more interested in why I had been coming in to work so late. The truth was I had been up most of the night trying to get a mad girl-child named Dot Perkins out of my room, but I wasn’t about to go into that with the old puritan — even though I’d have been at my desk on time if I’d just given in to the imp. She was a shop assistant at the pharmacy where I bought my Aspirin. I’d made the mistake of giving her my address for delivery of some prescription medicine; now she thought she had a standing invitation to drop round whenever she craved male company.

I told Sanderson my alarm clock had failed to function. He said he’d be docking my pay — not a creative response, but no worse than my hackneyed excuse deserved. The ritual tut-tutting done with, the inspector said he wanted me to stay and direct the investigation. A police photographer was on his way.

“Let Rutherford handle that, sir. I’ve got to see to this woman’s injuries.”

“Constable Rutherford is not a detective, Paul. And I don’t recall hearing that your illustrious war record involved service as a medic.”

“I have had experience of how dangerous head wounds can be, and —”

“And I imagine your interest is all the greater when the wounded party is female.”

My patience was thinning. “Inspector, a grenade fatality in a hotel corridor is going to be front page fodder right across the country, and the public will be howling for explanations. If I let this ‘female’ out of my sight, we may lose the one witness that can make sense of the incident.”

Any reference to how the press would be exploiting a police story to the Toronto department’s detriment was sure to raise Inspector Sanderson’s blood pressure, but was a weapon with a high misfire rate. Instead of goading him on, it might make him dig in his heels — as he did now.

“Paul, you will get all you can from that crime scene and then come straight here to report to me in person. Is that understood?”

After assuring the inspector that I was not the one to have suffered a knock on the head, I sent Gabor to bring Rutherford down once more. I told the constable to take Miss Clarkson to the Toronto Western Hospital emergency department and not to lose track of her under any circumstances. I made sure he had the Beaconsfield Hotel phone number as well as Sanderson’s. To Lucy’s consternation, I retained her suitcase with me as I waved the cab and its two passengers off.

Before I could do anything with it, however, I was jostled from behind by someone in a hurry. Turning, I saw a face I knew. I had to look up to see it. Hastings MacDermid was a tall man with a tall head, and a lot of light brown hair on top of that. His newish summer suit and flatfoot straw hat looked a shade too stylish for the Beaconsfield.

“Hello, Hasty,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re registered here.”

There were lines in his face the war hadn’t put there, but his smile was as wide as ever and his wide, brown eyes just as humorous. When I’d first met him as a young lieutenant, just after my own commission came through, I’d made the mistake of asking him what the joke was. There wasn’t one. He’d just been born sunny.

“Paul Shenstone! Isn’t this a swell place? Put up at company expense for the whole run of the Exhibition. Golly, I’ve got to get down there. Why don’t you come along and see my death-defying act?”

“Another time. Right now I’d like you to look at a body.” It was a hell of a greeting, but I was glad to see him. Here was someone I could show a body to without fear of his throwing up. “I’m a cop,” I added by way of apology.

“Doesn’t surprise me a bit, PS. Always thought you’d be lost without the prospect of a scrap from time to time, not to mention the occasional whiff of danger. A body, eh? Lead on.”

Hasty had been confident after the victory at Vimy Ridge that we’d have the war won by the end of 1917. All wrapped up, I’d replied, except for a little postscript of a year or two. That’s when he’d started calling me by my initials.

I took him up to look at the bomb victim, already left too long unattended. I wasn’t overjoyed to see Floyd once again standing over the remains, but he assured me that all he was doing was making sure they weren’t interfered with. And, alone as I was, it was convenient to take him at his word.

Hasty took in the scene with a few more “gollies”. He said he was sure he had never seen the deceased before. His room was at the back of the west end of the third floor. He thought he’d heard something vaguely explosive just before nine o’clock, but hadn’t been particularly curious. His attention had been taken up cleaning the spots out of his suit (which I noticed was a spot-revealing silver grey) and massaging his bow tie into an approximation of symmetry. Since the bang wasn’t repeated, he didn’t investigate. He even wondered if his subconscious had thrown up a sound memory from the war years, although that sort of thing didn’t tend to happen to him. Forward looking, that was Hasty Mac.

He told me he hadn’t looked along the second-floor corridor as he came down the stairs from his third-floor room and so hadn’t noticed the body; he’d been preoccupied with the fire extinguisher demonstrations he was contracted to do for the Conflagration Corporation. I described Lucy Clarkson of Room 29. Hasty said he’d never seen her either. Before I let him trot off to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds I got his assurance that he’d be coming back in the evening and staying at the Beaconsfield till the end of the holiday weekend.

“Then what?” I said. When I’d last seen him, seven years ago, he’d been full of the idea of using his discharge pay to enrol in some business college.

“Then it’s off to another fall fair. The season’s just beginning, so I’ve a couple of months to find something more long-term. Say, this case you’ve got on your hands looks pretty serious, but let’s get together while I’m in town.”

I said I’d drop by one evening.

“Splendid! You know, PS, it took me a moment to recognize you after all these years. Why’d you shave off your moustache?”

“It made me look too much like Ronald Colman,” I said. “I was sick of folks asking for my autograph.”

It was a eureka moment for Hasty. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “I can see that!”

How do you joke with someone that gullible?

When MacDermid had left, I found I was still carrying Miss Clarkson’s suitcase. I tried the catches; they wouldn’t move. The lock would have been easy enough to force, but I didn’t like to do so until I’d had another chance to speak to the owner. Besides, I had enough to keep myself out of trouble. I had Kaiser Frank lock the case in the hotel safe and write me a receipt.

The police photographer and another constable showed up, which made life a lot easier. I was even happier to welcome onto the scene a fresh-faced, fair-haired acting detective named Ned Cruickshank. I’d worked with him before and found him wet behind the ears, but keen. On his own initiative, he’d brought a fingerprinting kit.

By the end of the morning, this is what we had.

A dozen of the Beaconsfield’s twenty guest rooms had been rented out the night before, six on the second floor and six on the third. Occupants of two of these twelve rooms were reported to have checked out during Frank Gabor’s first hour of work today, between seven and eight. Among the vacancies were Room 27, the one next to Lucy Clarkson’s, and number 28, the room across the hall from hers, as well as the two on each floor with private baths, rooms that rented for sixty cents more a night. None of the eight vacant rooms contained anything beyond standard hotel furnishings. On each floor was located a shared bath and separate water closet for the rooms without facilities of their own. These showed signs of a day’s normal use, nothing out of the ordinary.

None of the guests we spoke to that morning recognized the deceased. The nearest occupied room was number 26, that of Jenny and Floyd Peters of Waterloo, Ontario. He was a railway telegrapher. Until their marriage in April, she had clerked in a dry goods shop. They were in town to visit the Canadian National Exhibition, too long after the wedding for it to feel like a honeymoon, but their first trip together nonetheless. Isabella Lang, the elderly by-the-month resident of Room 22, was still asleep when we knocked. Like the hotel itself, she had plainly seen better times. There was a rip in the armpit of the silk kimono in which she came to the door. A bottle of invalid port stood on her dresser beside a silver tea service. Her window was closed despite the heat, and the odour of toilet water hung heavy in the confined space. She said she’d been wakened by something like an explosion, but had dropped off again immediately. It was such a noisy hotel, being right on Queen Street, that she couldn’t afford to pay attention to every bang and pop. On the other hand, a Belgian tourist by the name of Pierre Leclercq said he had looked out the door of his room, number 23, when he heard the bomb. He’d observed one man standing over the body of another and judged it prudent to lie low. He said he knew nothing more about the incident, so I let him bustle off to see the less gruesome Toronto sights. He wanted to take in a real skyscraper and had read that the tallest building in the British Empire, all twenty storeys of it, was to be found on the northeast corner of King and Yonge Streets.

I was told that six of the guest rooms — including Hasty’s — were rented to parties not currently occupying them. Frank Gabor finally pulled himself together enough to have a proper look at the body, now waiting for an ambulance to take it to Grace Hospital for autopsy. The nervous hotel clerk swore that the deceased wasn’t Gladys Crew, the journalist from Room 32. This was a start. Nor, he asserted with gathering courage, was the bomb victim anyone he’d seen before. Not the Italian businessman Leo Di Giovanni from Room 38. Certainly not Room 24’s Bartholomew Rogers, who had mentioned that he’d been taken on by a local boat builder and was living in the hotel while he looked for an apartment in the neighbourhood. Mr. Rogers had been seen to leave for work before the blast. On the other hand, Gabor had never set eyes on Room 33’s Dan Ewart, listed in the register as unemployed, or on the couple in Room 25. Their name was recorded as Pollard and they had a rural route home address. These three people had checked in and presumably gone out between seven p.m. and seven a.m., when Gabor’s overnight counterpart Alex Horvath was on duty.

I asked Gabor whether anyone could have entered or left the hotel after 7 seven without his knowledge. He said not by the front door, at least not this morning. He hadn’t left the desk. I called him on that. All right, he said, but he hadn’t been away for more than thirty seconds. Not even a call of nature since coming on duty. There was also the back door by which the cleaning woman had arrived. It required a key to open from the outside. As far as Gabor knew, there were only three keys: the one Marija Babic held, one held in the office behind the front desk, and one in the possession of the owner-manager, Mr. Ferraro, who seldom visited the premises. On the exterior wall of the west end of the building, there was a fire escape, accessed by windows in the second- and third-floor corridors.

Ned and I went upstairs to have a look. The two windows were held closed by catches on the inside, but would not trigger a fire alarm if opened. Ned brushed all the catches for prints, but none came up. I did, however, find a deposit of black soot on the hall floor inside the third-floor access window. Soot very like that which my fingers picked up when I ran them along the slats of the escape’s top landing just outside. The fire escape was the standard open-work steel structure, painted black, with passage from the third floor to the second by metal stairs and from the second to the ground by a metal ladder on tracks. Counterweights kept the ladder up when not needed. When I stepped onto it, it rolled — with less clatter than a passing streetcar — down its tracks. Once I reached the ground and got off, the weights lifted the ladder out of reach again.

I had a look from outside, front and back, at the one-storey butcher shop on the hotel’s east side. I saw no way up to the flat, tarred roof. The butcher told me that the only access would be by ladder, and that he didn’t keep one on the premises. I went back into the Beaconsfield by the front door and up to the broken window at the east end of the second floor. From there, I had a look down at the butcher’s tarred roof, glistening with glass shards. I put the drop from sill to roof at seven feet. Unless he’d been an acrobat, the small, dead man would have had a hard time getting into the hotel that way. Also, anyone on the south side of Queen could have seen him propelling himself in through that window. I sent a man to check. None of the south-side shopkeepers had seen anything of the kind.

When we’d finished with Gabor and the guests, I had a word with Marija Babic. She was a squat, square woman of about forty. A few wisps of brown hair showed from under the red cloth she’d fashioned into a turban. She said the back door had been closed and locked as usual when she arrived. I hadn’t intended to make her look at the body, but something about her convinced me she could take it. She stood studying the damaged face with her hands in the pockets of her blue checked smock. She was sure she had never seen the man before. I took down her address and told her that she was not to clean any of the rooms today. In fact, she could let me have her pass key. She handed it over, luckily without asking to see a warrant. Her only question was whether she could now go home.

I didn’t have the authority to close the Beaconsfield and, frankly, didn’t see any point in doing so. But if the hotel were to remain open for business, the bloodstains on the hall floor had to be cleaned up and the window patched or fixed. We had photographs of both; they would have to do. I instructed Mrs. Babic to clean the baths and WCs as usual and put special effort into sweeping and scrubbing the floorboards of the second-floor corridor. She snorted something sarcastic, presumably in Serbian, and stumped off to pick up her kit.

Ned Cruickshank passed her in the hall. “The stretcher party’s here, Sergeant. Shall I let them take the body?”

“Tell them there’s to be no dissection until the night clerk Alex Horvath has had a look at him. Better yet, phone the pathologist and tell him. Then get Horvath down there. Mr. Gabor should have his address. With any luck he’ll be asleep in his bed by now and easy to find.”

“And delighted to see me,” Cruickshank said ruefully.

“If you wanted to be popular, Ned, you chose the wrong line of work. Here, hang on a minute. Before we lose sight of this bird, let’s see where his clothes come from. Check the insides of his shoes; I’ll take the messy end.”

Rigour had set in, and I could see Cruickshank’s pink cheeks getting pinker with the effort as he wiggled the deceased’s left shoe back and forth. Although the acting detective’s suit was still new, dating from his recent promotion out of uniform, he was kneeling on the dirt-tracked floor, not trying to do his job from a fastidious crouch.

“Take your time, Ned,” I advised. “Loosen the laces a bit more. Hang on now.”

The shoe slipped out of his grasp as the body shifted position. I was lifting the deceased’s shoulders to get a look inside the back of his jacket. The movement stirred up the smell of blood that was developing nicely in the heat. Cruickshank cleared his throat.

“Bata shoes.”

“Wear them myself,” I said. “Made in Europe, exported everywhere. I don’t think we can make much of that. Any soot on the soles?”

Cruickshank gave them a rub and showed me his fingers.

“Any black particles like that on your own shoes?”

He checked and said not.

“Then I’m guessing one of the hotel guests unfastened a window, being careful not to leave fingerprints on the catches, and let our bomber come up the fire escape. Aha, the tag inside his collar has a red star on it. Ever seen one of those?”

“Not in a jacket. Is it from Russia, do you think?”

“Macy’s.”

When Ned Cruickshank had left to rouse the night clerk, I used Marija Babic’s pass key to have a preliminary look at the rooms of the guests that had left for the day. It wasn’t to be a thorough search as I had no warrants — and on present evidence no hope of getting any. I just wanted to see if I could narrow the field of suspects.

Isabella Lang remained in her room and I didn’t disturb her. I discovered that Bartholomew Rogers had by his bedside a book about Italy under Mussolini. For his part, Dan Ewart had in the bottom of his wardrobe a pile of leaflets on the subject of “Socialism in one country,” that country being the Soviet Union. Not likely to become a Book of the Month Club selection any time soon, I figured. All the same, I picked up a copy for bedtime reading. The Beaconsfield Hotel was turning out to be more international than the League of Nations.

There were no surprises in the next few rooms. Leaflets from the exhibition strewn around Floyd and Jenny’s bower, especially ones from the auto show featuring the new, improved cars of the coming year. Maps of North America on Pierre Leclercq’s dresser. A neat row of male toiletries on Leo Di Giovanni’s. Two peaches and three apples on the Pollards’ window sill. What caught me up short was Room 32, Gladys Crew’s. There was nothing there: no clothes, no grooming aids, nothing to eat, and no reading material — except for a copy of Ewart’s pamphlet in the waste basket. I wondered if the newswoman had slipped out without paying. Not so, however. When I got Gabor to show me the register, I saw he’d simply neglected to tell me she’d left, having squared her account and returned her key in the proper form at 8:30 that morning.

I next phoned Grace Hospital. They had the body, but Cruickshank and Horvath had not yet arrived. I instructed the pathologist’s assistant to send the deceased’s clothes to Dalton Linacre, the chemistry professor at the University of Toronto, with instructions to analyze any powder residue found and see if he could tell us more about the bomb.

Gabor was hanging around the phone listening to my end of the conversation.

“Anything more you’d like to tell me?” I asked him.

“No, nothing.”

“You think of anything, remember anything, hear anything, see anything, phone this number.” I wrote it out for him. I should have had business cards, but the city was on one of its economizing binges — stopping just short of acting on Mayor Thomas Foster’s suggestion that it would be cheaper to reimburse robbery victims from public funds than to hire police. My name and number didn’t take up a whole page of my department-issued notebook, so I gave Gabor only the bottom half. “Otherwise,” I went on, “business as usual. Don’t talk about the case with anyone. Now let’s have that suitcase from the safe.”

He got it for me, a little unsteadily.

“I could use a drink for the road as well.”

“I don’t —”

“Skip it, Frank. You’ve been tippling all morning.”

He straightened his tie. “I was going to say I don’t have a glass.” There was malice in his smile.

“Let’s have the bottle then.” I could have had him fetch me a glass from one of the guest rooms, but I was ready to go, and there was no pus actually flowing from the swelling on his lip. I poured a generous ounce of plum brandy into my mouth and swallowed it down. My chaser was a cone of fish and chips from the shop across the alley from the hotel. I took the opportunity of asking the proprietor if he’d noticed anything around the time of the blast, but he hadn’t arrived at his shop till 9:30. An eastbound streetcar was coming, so I didn’t probe further. I jumped aboard with lunch in one hand and Lucy’s case in the other.