Death of a Sunday Writer (10 page)

“Are you winning?”

“Soon.”

They left before the last race.

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“There are guys hanging around watching for the winners. You collect a big payoff from the last race and you'd never make it out of the parking lot alive.” He took her protectively by the elbow, glancing nervously around the parking lot.

Lucy watched the race-goers straggle in ones and twos to their cars. There were no hard men that she could see. “I don't believe you.”

“Then don't ask.”

“You just want to avoid the rush.”

“That's it? You're a smart one, Lucy.” Tse laughed. “How'd you make out?”

Lucy had had five winners: that is, she had backed horses to show in eight races and collected on five of them. She was up about three dollars, but Tse had paid the expenses. “You tell me and I'll tell you.”

Tse said, “I held my own.”

Lucy understood. “So did I,” she said. “I held my own.”

That night, Lucy drove home to Longborough to clean out her mail box. She had decided not to make any major moves for a few weeks or even months, and thus thought of herself as keeping David's little apartment as a
pied-a-terre
while she saw how the business went. Weekends she would still spend in Longborough. In fairness to the library, she had told them she would not be coming back immediately, if ever, but she was asssured that if she did want to return, they would probably be able to find work for her.

While she was eating her supper of a bacon and tomato sandwich, Geoffrey called. His voice was a shock. “Where were you today?” he enquired, as if he still had the right. “I called twice. Those librarian women told me you had to go to a funeral, and you had stayed in Toronto.”

“You know where I was, then.” More than anything else she had done in the last two years, more even than her affair with The Trog, her day at the races with Peter Tse and Johnny Comstock had made the world she used
to share with Geoffrey very remote. It was as if he was someone she used to know years before. “I stayed over to go to the races,” she said.

“You did what?”

“I went to the races.”

“Who with?”

“A man I know in Toronto.” He wouldn't pursue that, she knew, for fear of discovering that she had found a real alternative to him. She knew how much Geoffrey wanted to go back to the situation of two years ago, knew that she had one last painful piece of surgery to perform to separate them for good. She had been hoping that time would take care of it, that he would realise that their marriage was over, but he showed no signs of admitting it yet.

“Whose funeral was it?” he asked.

Lucy explained.

“Cousin? Cousin? I've never heard of a cousin called Trimble.”

“I mustn't have mentioned him, I guess. He was at our wedding. Anyway he's dead and I'm his heir.”

“His heir? His heir? What does that mean?”

Lucy's gorge rose steadily as the note of complaint in his voice increased. The man was impossible, but she had suppressed the knowledge by continually intoning to herself his good points, which had finally declined to two: he hadn't hit her, and he had provided. But freedom had wiped her vision clear, and the idea of coming once more under his nagging, denigrating influence was unthinkable. She explained what the word ‘heir' meant.

“I know what an heir is! Does that mean you're rich?”

She knew immediately what his concern was. It was not greed, but fear. ‘Rich' meant ‘out of my control'.
Geoffrey was sure that Lucy's little bed-and-breakfast venture would fail and take her money with it, that she would be unable to support herself and that she would then come to her senses and return home, say she was sorry, and he would pull up the drawbridge. All he had to do was wait.

Lucy considered her reply. She had opted for the peaceful way out too often, left him too often still hopeful. Now she said, “The lawyer is just sorting out the estate.”

“You
are
rich?”

“I have inherited his business.”

“What sort of business? How much can you sell it for?”

Here, too, she heard at least two kinds of fear. Was the business bigger than his? And did she have some idea of running it?

“It's a detective agency.”

There was a silence, then a roar of manufactured laughter, a mocking, dismissive torrent of noise. “Nancy Drew Brenner,” he cawed. “Have you bought your magnifying glass yet? You'll need a deerstalker, too.”

She waited until she guessed that he thought he had laid waste to the idea, then repeated, “It's a detective agency, and I'm going to run it.”

“Very funny, Lucy.”

“I'm not joking.”

“Now listen to me,” he shouted. “Don't be ridiculous. I'm not having my wife mixed up in this kind of thing. Taking pictures of people in motel bedrooms. Some of these people can turn very nasty. You have no experience of them.”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Have any experience of them?”

“Of course I don't, personally, but I know I'm not having my wife play about with them. A lot of low-lifes. And you don't know anything about business. Presumably it is a business? Lucy? Are you there? Lucy?”

Lucy was still there. She was resting the phone in her lap as his voice floated up to her. When she heard the interrogative note, she put the phone to her ear. “I won't do anything dangerous,” she said, feeling herself slip back slightly into his orbit.

“That's not the point. What am I going to say when people find out that you're sneaking around people's bedrooms, trying to catch adulterers?”

“Those days are over. Detectives don't do that any more.”

“Then what do these so-called detectives do nowadays?”

She chose a phrase from her reading. “Industrial espionage, mostly.”

“For God's sake. What do you know about that? Where is this detective business? I'm coming down to Toronto tomorrow.”

“No, you're not.”

“I'm coming down there first thing in the morning. Where is it?”

What would one of her favourite heroines say? she wondered.

The newer, tougher breed. ‘Fuck off?' She rolled the words round her tongue. ‘Up your ass, Geoffrey?' The thought braced her. “Geoffrey,” she said. “I'm not your wife any more. Stay away. Now and in the future. I'm not coming back to you. Find yourself another lady. I'm getting a divorce. And I'm changing my name back. If you come near me, I'll call the police.”

“I'm coming down there tomorrow.”

“If you come anywhere near me, I shall get a court order to keep you away.”

“You can't do that. You are my wife.”

“I can try.” She took a breath. “Stay away from me if you know what's good for you.” She hung up, feeling giddy.

The next morning, before she went into her office, Lucy poked around the back streets north of Queen, trying to find a place for her car, but the area was jammed. She parked, finally, right on Queen Street, which meant she would have to feed the meter every hour and leave before three-thirty. She promised herself to ask Peter for a better way.

She locked her car and spent a minute trying to decide if it was vulnerable to thieves, but the block seemed busy enough to be fairly safe. She looked up at the building and found she had parked almost underneath her own window, so at least she could look out during the day and check it. Now she looked across the street and noted the window of the travel agency from which had come the first report that her cousin was lying on the floor. The angle seemed strange. The two windows were at the same height, so how could the agent have seen David's body? She crossed Queen Street and entered the building at the door with the agent's sign.

The agency was small, a one-man-and-an-assistant business it looked like, the office area a bit larger than Trimble's, but part of it partitioned off to give the owner some status. He had apparently not yet arrived. At a desk in the window, an extremely attractive woman of about Lucy's age, with blonde hair swept up on top and wearing a red leather suit, was carefully finishing eating a very crumbly piece of pastry, leaning forward so that the flakes dropped on the paper napkin she had spread on her desk. When Lucy walked in, she leaned right over the napkin, turned her head, and without actually smiling, made it clear that she would be smiling in other circumstances. She began the business of getting the rest of the fragments of her pastry from her fingers, her lips, and the surrounding area on to the napkin. Then she folded the napkin, wiped herself off, and deposited the rubbish into a wastebasket. She reached for a Kleenex for the final polish, indicating with her head that Lucy should take the seat beside the desk.

All this took enough time for Lucy to look around the room and realise from the posters that the agency catered to the local Ukrainian population. The telephone rang and the woman answered it, listened, then spoke a sentence in, apparently, Ukrainian, a language that, like Russian, always sounded to Lucy as if it required an entirely differently engineered voice-box to create the sounds. The woman put the phone down, smiled at her, then switched voice-boxes and said in perfect, musical English, “Forgive me for feeding my face. Can I help you?”

Lucy took a moment to realise that she had been called to order. After her survey of the room, she had been admiring the travel agent, her clothes, her hair, her
make-up and her general poise, all of which made Lucy feel a bit of a peasant.

“Oh, yes, sorry. I don't want to travel anywhere. I'm Lucy Brenner.”

The agent put out a delicate hand.

“I'm in the office across the street,” Lucy said. “The one where the man was found dead. I — er — wanted to ask if I could speak to whoever saw him.”

“I'm Nina Sobcyk.” The agent looked across at Lucy's office. “It was me. I'm sorry. Was he a friend?”

“My cousin. It's all right. I hadn't seen him for twenty years.”

Nina Sobcyk inclined her head politely.

“What time was it?”

“When I saw him?” She thought about it. “Nine o'clock, about. I had only been in about fifteen minutes.”

“Who did you tell?”

“It took a little time. I phoned Peter Tse — he is our landlord, too — but he wasn't in yet, so I ran downstairs to get the people in the hardware store or the grocery to go up to his office, but Peter came along the street just then so I told him, and when I came back to the office I could see him in your cousin's office. Then the police and ambulance came.”

“How could you see him?”

“He had the blinds open, and the light was on.” She looked puzzled by the question.

“No. See. Look. Could I sit in your chair for a moment? Now, look. See? I can't see the floor.”

“Of course. I'll show you. Stand up and hold the chair while I get on it. It tilts.” She took Lucy's place and stepped on to the chair, then on to the desk. “The slat on this blind was stuck and I got up here to straighten it out.”

Lucy measured Nina's bottom with her eye. She's as big as me, she thought. I could wear a suit like that. She stood on the chair, waited for it to stop wobbling, then stepped up beside her. Side by side, the two women faced the street a few inches from the glass.

“Where were you exactly?” Lucy asked.” I want to stand in the same place.”

“A bit more this way. More yet. Back a bit. There.”

Lucy looked across the street at her office. Now she could see David's desk and a portion of the carpet. “You saw him sticking out, of course, from the side.”

“I couldn't see his face, but I could tell something had happened to him. I think we'd better get down now.” Nina pointed to the street where half a dozen pedestrians had gathered on the curb to watch the two women shuffle back and forth across the window sill. A fat man in a grocer's apron did a bump-and-grind routine to demonstrate what he hoped they would do next. Nina twisted the slatted blinds closed and the two women got down.

“Did you see anyone in the office?”

“Oh, no.” The agent registered mild alarm. “Do you think he was killed? I heard it was an accident, a heart attack.”

“I just want to be sure.”

“Don't the police think so?”

“Yes, they do. Did you ever see anyone in the office? Would you recognise anyone?”

“This is like
Rear Window.
No. I saw a few people in the six months I've been here, but no one I would recognise.” She smiled. “I saw a lot of your cousin. He used to look in the mirror a lot.”

“Admiring himself?” Lucy smiled and got up to go.
“Thanks for showing me. Can I ask you one more question? Where did you get that suit?”

“This suit?”

“Yes.”

“Where did I get it?”

“Where did you buy it?'

“Ackroyd's on Bloor Street.”

“Do they have other colours? We're about the same size and it looks terrific on you.”

“Yes, but they are very expensive. This was a present.”

Dear God, thought Lucy. I look like a peasant. Or Geoffrey's wife. “It's very nice. Now I must go to work.”

“What do you mean — work?”

“I'm going to take over David's business. David Trimble, my cousin.”

The woman looked at her doubtfully.

“I've got my first client,” Lucy said, with a touch of aggression. Then, “We can wave to each other from across the street.”

“Peter, give me some more words you might use as secret code-words to protect your diary.”

They were in her office later that morning, the omnipresent Tse having appeared as soon as she arrived.

“What are you trying to do now?”