Grave Doubts (2 page)

“They took the Elgin Marbles!”

“The Parthenon looks better without them. Less cluttered.”

“Good night, Morgan.”

“Oh, no! No way. We’re going up there.”

“Come on!”

“We’re going headhunting; I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

“Morgan, go to sleep.”

“You wouldn’t have offered the temptation if you weren’t prepared for the consequences.”

He could hear her smiling.

“How do you know,
up there
?” she said. “Up where?”

“They’re wearing town clothes but the room is country.”

“Keep going.”

“See the fragments of plaster?” he continued as if she had
the photographs in front of her. “They’re dangling on horsehair from hand-split, swamp-cedar lath. You can see the crown moulding is local design, wood not plaster, and the baseboard is original. Upper Canadian, transitional farmhouse. Too bad they can’t salvage it. I’d say we’re talking about somewhere on the northern margins of early Toronto — before 1834 when it was still Muddy York — up around Hogg’s Hollow, east off Yonge. Within hearing distance of Highway 401.”

“Sometimes you’re fun, Morgan. See you in half an hour. Bring coffee.”

She hung up the phone and rolled over, pleased with herself. She had almost fallen asleep, waiting for his call. She knew, for all Morgan’s interest in pioneer cabinetry and oriental rugs and exotic fish and Arctic exploration and Easter Island and language acquisition and the history of ideas, that nothing got him going like an unresolved murder. And if they were absorbed in a mutual interest, her own disposition unaccountably mellowed.

She stretched languidly. Morgan would be closer to an hour getting there. She had time to enjoy the warmth of the room before preparing herself against the penetrating dampness outside. He refused to buy a car and trudging through accretions of icy slush from the Annex over to Isabella would take its toll. He would be late, chilled to the bone, and grumpy. Grumpy was different from morose. She could laugh at grumpy, and he would laugh back.

She was wearing only a T-shirt and men’s boxers. One of the advantages of a condo over rental is that she controlled her own thermostat.

Miranda had lived in the same place as a student. When she returned to the city after three years in the RCMP, she discovered the building was being converted to private ownership and snapped up her old apartment. Partly it was for
nostalgia — the reassurance of familiar terrain — and partly it was her fondness for varnish on the balustrades checkered by time, worn marble stairs, paned windows, and porcelain fixtures. Consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds! Someone said that. Probably Swift or Pope. It sounded eighteenth century-ish.

She thought of herself as “urban contemporary,” perhaps because she grew up in a village. Morgan was raised, impoverished, in Cabbagetown, just south of where she lived now, back when it was in transition to becoming an upscale address. He was a gentleman by nature not birth, and endearingly unkempt, but not shabby.

Her intercom buzzed.

“Morgan?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re here so soon.”

“I took a taxi.”

“You never.”

“I did. Are you going to let me in?”

“Did you bring coffee?”

“Yes.”

She buzzed him in, then unlocked her door.

She was in the bathroom, dabbing sleep wrinkles out of her face with icy water, when he called from the kitchen.

“Do you want milk in yours? I asked for double-double but they’re both black with no sugar.”

“Good,” she mumbled, applying lipstick as a token gesture. “Help yourself. I’ll stick with black.”

She walked out into the kitchen.

“You look good when you’re sleepy; very ethereal.”

“Like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw. Brunettes can’t be ethereal; we’re alluring.”

“Seductive.”

“In your dreams, Morgan.”

She did look attractive, rumpled. Sometimes he was very aware she was a woman.

“Doesn’t that make you think of erectile dysfunction?” she said.

“What?”

“Wuthering Heights.”

He grimaced.

Once, in this same apartment, they had made love. He remembered, looking at her now, that it was good, but they never tried it again.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We can drink these on the way.”

“No, just a sec, I need milk to cool it down. What’s it like outside?”

“The usual.”

“Cold, wet, and the sky is radiant?”

“Glowing putrescence, like a painting by Turner. Let’s go.”

In Miranda’s car, they reviewed what they knew about the case. It wasn’t their case but they were already committed. It wasn’t anyone’s case, really. It was a matter of historical interest, not criminal justice.

Miranda asked Morgan to dig her cellphone from the depths of her purse and call headquarters to let them know what they were doing. His own was, inevitably, battery-dead and in his sweater drawer along with anachronistic cuff links and a gold, hardly used wedding band.

“We happened to be in the area,” Morgan explained to Alex Rufalo, their superintendent, and after a brief exchange dropped the phone back into her bag.

“We’re not the only ones who work late,” he said.

“We’re not working, remember?” She paused. “Rufalo went home before I left. There must be something up to bring him back in. The office as sanctuary, no?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

Miranda pulled the Jag up in front of a nondescript frame house, sliding roughly against the curb as she parked.

“Damn slush,” she said. “This is the address. There’s a patrol car down the street. A light in the upstairs window. What do you think? Doesn’t look like much.”

“This’ll be it.”

“Okay,” she said, getting out of the car. Despite the telltale light in the upper window, a book-cover cliché foreshadowing dread and doom, the place looked deserted and remarkably ordinary.

As Morgan clambered awkwardly from the low-slung car, he expounded. “Ontario country vernacular. Storey and a half, steep gable, central hall, symmetrical design; Georgian with early Victorian pretensions. God forgive the aluminum siding. It’s clapboard underneath.”

“You figure so?”

“Yeah.”

They dumped the dregs of their coffee out onto the icy snow but, without any place to leave them, held on to the cups. They knocked on the door and waited. Morgan scrutinized the blank wall overhead, trying to estimate where the arched transom would have been. As a practical concession to warmth, it was probably covered in about the same time as the surrounding farmland became housing tracts.

The door opened and a uniformed policewoman stood squarely in the middle, backlit by a dull glow from the kitchen.

“Yes?” she said. The woman did not seem intimidated by late-night callers at a murder scene.

There was a moment of awkwardness as she waited for an explanation, which Miranda found pleasing, knowing they were not automatically assumed to be police.

“Officer?” Miranda did not recognize her. “I’m Detective
Sergeant Quin, this is Detective Morgan.”

The woman nodded without introducing herself. “You’re a sergeant too, I imagine,” she said, glancing at Morgan, then back to Miranda. “I wasn’t expecting anyone just yet. Are you coming in?”

“Please,” said Miranda.

The policewoman led them through refuse and rubble into the kitchen. The kitchen itself was bright and hospitable.

“I’ve got some coffee,” she said. “You might as well use your own cups. I’ve been letting it steep to counter the smell.”

“It doesn’t smell,” Morgan observed. “It’s just an old house. Smells like burnt coffee.”

“I’m surprised you’re alone,” said Miranda. “I’m surprised the stove’s working.”

The woman shrugged. “Wrecking crew left the power on. Most of the wiring’s been stripped, or at least the fixtures. Some rooms are dark, others not. Like a bad horror flick, without the music. They’re all bad, I guess.” She indicated the location of the desiccated lovers with an upward nod. Her features softened for a moment. “Those two aren’t very good company; they’re sort of into each other. If it wasn’t for the missing parts, they’d be kind of sweet.”

“Sweet?” Morgan said. “They’re dead.”

“The dead in one another’s arms, Detective.” He waited for her to finish her thought, but that seemed to be it. She gazed into his eyes without smiling.

The woman poured them coffee. Miranda liked her; she warmed to anyone who could serve coffee that smelled so rank without an apology. Morgan was wary; her confidence seemed almost a reprimand for assumptions about her uniformed status.

They sat at the grey Arborite table, sipping. The woman was young and, despite the androgynous uniform, attractive. The coffee was execrable.

“It’s not necessarily murder,” said Miranda. “It could be a third party honouring their dying wishes. A ghoulish accomplice; except what would he — or possibly she — have done with the heads?”

“Could have been separate acts,” said the policewoman. “They could have died embracing; then someone stole the heads for souvenirs and sealed the remaining remains in the wall.”

“‘The young in one another’s arms,’” said Morgan, delivering the phrase in quotation marks, catching up to her previous statement.

“Yeats. He wasn’t talking about dying, Morgan. He was talking about sex.” Miranda cast a conspiratorial glance at the young policewoman.

Morgan began compiling a list of doomed lovers in his mind, from Hero and Leander to Sean Penn and Madonna. Himself? No.
Doomed
elevated something that was simply sad.

The young woman seemed in no hurry to show off her charges, and for Miranda and Morgan it was a matter of pacing.

“So where’re you from?” Morgan asked.

The officer flushed with anger. Miranda blanched. In an immigrant society you never ask people of colour where they’re from. You either know, or it’s not your concern.

“I’d guess southwestern Ontario,” Morgan blithely continued. “Down past Waterloo County — that’s where Miranda’s from. Do you have a name?”

“Naismith. My family is from Halifax. Africville. Until they tore it down. I thought you were figuring maybe Jamaica. Dat girl, man, her come from de islands?”

The Caribbean cadence was derisive, but Morgan wasn’t sure if she was mocking him or herself. That was the point, thought Miranda.

“Africville? United Empire Loyalists.”

“Good stock, as they say in the people trade. We predate the Loyalists. Freed-men, before the Revolution, when Halifax was still called Chebucto by the Mi’kmaq. But I grew up within sight of Detroit; we’re not from Africville anymore.”

“And went to the University of Windsor,” said Morgan, trying to connect.

“The University of Western Ontario. Where I was rushed by the African Club, the Afro-American Student Coalition, the West-Indian Association, the Moorish-American Movement. La Societé Franco-Afrique, you name it.”

“Nothing Canadian?” said Morgan, unsure whether that was a good thing or bad. That is the point, thought Miranda. It was both.

“Nothing Canadian
and
black; they were mutually exclusive. I could be professionally black or honourary white. That was it! I was in demand socially by every white group on campus so they could pretend we were exactly the same.”

“Cursed by the colour-blind,” said Miranda.

“You’ve got it,” said the young woman. “If you think invisibility is a bitch, try being the object of tolerance.”

“So,” Morgan asked, carefully, “is Toronto — the most cosmopolitan city in the world, as they say — any better?” He was fascinated by how much attitude she revealed, and how little was shown of what she actually felt.

“Well, sir, here I’m an ethnic minority. Before I was just a minority. You tell me.”

Blowing steam across the top of his coffee, Morgan lapsed into personal reflection. He had never been invisible but he had certainly been isolated. By choice? Is it ever by choice?

Listening to the silence, Miranda realized that from the moment the front door opened she had been aware the young woman was black. She had admired her dark complexion, her gleaming hair, her bold face. Miranda was suddenly
uncomfortable, knowing she would not have catalogued the features of a white officer unless the person was either extremely homely or outrageously beautiful.

Their eyes connected and for a brief moment each woman looked into the depths of the other, each at a loss as to what was revealed.

“What have you done for a toilet?” Miranda asked. “I see most of the plumbing is gone.”

“Haven’t had to. But I figure I’d just go outside.”

The two women pushed at the back door, ratcheting it open against the drifted snow, and Miranda stepped out. She was back before the officer had even poured herself a refill.

“That,” said Miranda, “was not pleasant.”

“But quick,” said Morgan.

The two women chatted for a while, sitting at the Arborite table, nursing their coffees. Morgan, standing, leaned against a counter, grinding his soles on the floor. He sat down. The women tried to open their conversation, to make it inclusive, but he only listened, and periodically glanced at the ceiling, trying to envision the macabre scenario overhead.

Miranda looked at her partner over the rim of her cup. She felt almost sorry for him. Delay somehow relieved his guilt for wanting to subvert professional disinterest and plunge into the Gothic depths of what promised to be a really good story.

“I’m going up,” he finally announced, rising to his feet again.

The muted groan of his chair against the battered linoleum startled them. A faint moaning echo reprised as the other two slid out their chairs and joined him shuffling through rubble as they made for the stairs.

chapter two
The Room Upstairs

Demolition had been arrested in its earliest phase, although the place must have been deteriorating through seasons of freezing and thawing for years. Thick layers of wallpaper had peeled off in great patchwork swathes, revealing plaster that looked pulpy or had crumbled away. Horizontal strips of hand-split cedar showed through gaps where a salvaging contractor had retrieved old fixtures and woodwork. The stair railing was gone, but the wood trim hadn’t been touched yet.