Speak Ill of the Dead (21 page)

I figured by five, Sammy would be home from his afternoon activities and not out yet for the evening of wowing the ladies. I decided it would be better if he didn’t know I was coming.

Merv’s information had Sammy at a very snooty highrise just off Sussex Drive. Like my own building, Sammy’s had security designed to let the good people in and keep the bad people out. I decided that for the purposes of this visit, I was one of the good people.

A small rental moving van was parked outside of the building in the circular drive. I looked around to see if there were any movers I could pretend to accompany. But no luck.

I didn’t want to buzz Sammy’s apartment, since a surprise visit seemed more likely to elicit useful information. I stood by the door balancing my briefcase in one arm and pretending to dig for my keys with the other. A couple in tennis gear smiled as they let me pass in with them.

“Bad enough to have to work Saturday,” I said, “and now I can’t find my blankety-blank keys.”

“Isn’t it frustrating,” she said, “the way those blankety-blank keys always sink to the bottom of your purse and hide?”

“It never fails,” I said, as we stepped into the elevator.

“Sometimes I think if we had a system of personal access codes, it would be better. But I know I’d probably forget mine.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. Her male companion smiled. No doubt he was enjoying the natural superiority of one who always knew where his keys were.

They pressed the button for the twelfth floor. Sammy was on the twentieth. I pressed twenty-two and decided to walk down two flights. I was enjoying the sense of skulduggery.

I hoped it would be worth it in practical terms, and that the visit to Sammy would yield at least one or two small pieces to fill in the puzzle. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid of Sammy.

On the twentieth floor, the coast was clear. No one was in the corridor, but there was a movers’ dolly in the hallway, near Sammy’s door.

I knocked on the door of 2012, Sammy’s apartment. The knock was brisk, businesslike.

The door swung open. No one stood there to welcome me or tell me to go to hell. I knocked again on the open door. After a minute, I called out.

“Hello, hello. Mr. Dash, important message for you. Hello.”

There are times in your life when you behave intelligently and there are times in your life when your actions are about as stupid as they can be. I knew that. And yet I stepped into Sammy Dash’s parlour, wondering who was the spider and who was the fly.

“Hello. Mr. Dash. I have something urgent to tell you,” I called out, stepping along the foyer towards the living room. I passed a large corrugated cardboard box, with an illustration of a sofa on it. That explained the dolly, I thought.

My sensible internal voice was screaming, get out, get out, the man’s probably in the shower, he’ll probably call the police when he sees you in his apartment, get… A smell like rotten broccoli grew stronger as I approached the living area, expecting to be set upon by an enraged Sammy Dash, wearing only a towel.

Instead, I saw a pile of refuse. Dead vegetables, cans, meat wrappers, yogurt containers piled on a ruby red oriental carpet. Sticky stuff oozed out from under the debris. The pile was high, much higher than you would expect to find in one person’s apartment. It looked like a year’s worth of garbage.

I slumped into a leather armchair, held my nose and pondered the scene. Destructive, vicious. Someone must have broken into Sammy’s apartment. Someone with a major grudge and an imaginative notion of revenge.

I’m not certain why it took so long to realize that having entered Sammy Dash’s apartment without his invitation at the same time that the vandalism took place might look damned suspicious to some people.

Thanking God that no one had seen me enter the apartment, I stood up to sneak out. Still holding my nose. Someone else could report this, I’d be long gone when it happened. My sensible voice, which had been busy saying I told you so, starting screaming. This time I listened.

After a minute, I crossed the room to call the police and report the damage. It was only then I spotted the shoes sticking out of the pile of garbage. A banana peel dangled off one of the heels. A scoop of something, mashed potatoes with old gravy perhaps, was stuck to the other.

Couldn’t be, I told myself, although my heart rate accelerated into the unsafe zone and goosebumps crawled up my arms. Not possible, I kept saying, until I saw the hand, lying in a sticky puddle, clutching a piece of paper.

I leaned closer, my hand covering my nose and mouth. The hand belonged to Sammy Dash. I could see the rest of him half-hidden by rotting food. His eyes stared past me, over my shoulder.

I staggered towards the phone, gagging. I never reached it. I didn’t have time to swing around when I heard the step behind me. I was dimly aware of a pair of tan shoes before I marvelled at the explosion of light in my head and heard my sensible voice say, I told you so, stupid, as I hit the floor.

*   *   *

The story as I told it to McCracken had a few editorial changes. Notably, that Sammy had agreed to see me and was expecting my visit.

“How did you get in? If the guy was dead, he could hardly have buzzed you in.”

McCracken was not an easy man to fool and I decided to keep the fabrications to a minimum. But I felt it was important to prevent any notion of unauthorized entry from edging into the conversation.

“A couple of tenants let me in with them. I must have looked respectable.”

“The things people do,” he said.

I was sitting on the sofa in Sammy’s apartment, holding my head and trying to figure out what happened.

McCracken was sitting on the chair, watching me.

“Now you’re telling me that Dash’s body was lying here, right on this carpet.”

“That’s right.”

“There’s no body now,” McCracken said.

Reasonable enough. There wasn’t. Except for a lingering, light odour of garbage masked by something else, floral bouquet carpet shampoo and room freshener I thought, there was no sign of anything unusual in Sammy Dash’s apartment.

“True,” I said, “but trust me on it.”

Mombourquette was lounging against the wall on the far side of the room, smirking rattily.

McCracken looked troubled. “Pretty weird story,” he said.

“But the lab boys will check out the rug. If there was blood on it, they’re going to find it.”

“Not if. Was.”

McCracken looked at me with a strange expression.

Concern?

“Whatever you say, but you’ve got to keep in mind that you’ve been hit on the head. That kind of injury can be…”

“Wait for the lab results,” I snapped.

But I knew he was right. There were things that were fuzzy. Something I should have remembered but couldn’t. Something that could help. What the hell was it?

“We’d better let someone in your family know what’s happened to you, whatever it was.”

“No,” I said, “they get hysterical. They’ll just make me worse. I’ll be all right. I’ll take a cab to the hospital and get checked out. Don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, right,” he said.

McCracken drove me to the Civic Hospital Emergency, to have my head examined. I leaned sideways with fatigue. Leaning back was out of the question. My stomach lurched and I closed my eyes.

“I’ll make sure your car gets home,” McCracken said, as he pulled into the Emergency area and parked. “You want to give me your keys?”

I wrestled my car keys off the key ring. All I wanted to do was sleep. But something else was bothering me.

“Blast,” I said, “the cats. Somebody’s got to feed the goddam cats.”

“Okay,” McCracken said, “if they keep you in, I guess I could let your sister know. I’m sure she’ll do it.”

McCracken took the upper hand with the nurse in charge in emergency.

“Police,” he said, flashing his badge at her. “Head injury.” When my medical information had been given, I was whisked into an examining room. McCracken, to my surprise, came with me.

“Just in case,” he said. “I’m not taking any chances. Your sister might hold me responsible.”

My sister. I remembered I was mad at her. It seemed very long ago and unimportant.

I didn’t much feel like talking, and after about two minutes McCracken went off for a cigarette. Who could blame him?

I lay there on my belly, head resting on crossed arms, thinking about what had happened. Who had killed Sammy Dash and why? Why hadn’t they killed me? Why had they moved Sammy’s body? Had any of it really happened?

My eyes popped open as the door squeaked. The resident who entered had not gotten to the lesson where they teach you to smile at the patients.

“I’m Dr. Granger. What seems to be the problem?”

“Someone whacked me on the head with something. I don’t know what.”

“When was this?”

I had to think. Nearly eighteen hours earlier.

“Is that a long time to be unconscious after a blow?” I asked.

“It happens,” he said, touching my head. “Does this hurt?”

I gasped and gripped the sides of the examining table.

“I think we need an X-Ray here.”

McCracken knocked on the door and entered. He and the doctor exchanged looks, both used to being in charge. I’m used to being in charge too, but I lacked the energy at that moment.

It was all I could do to hang on to my self-control until I got through the X-Ray. This didn’t get any easier when Alexa came scuttling around the corner of the Radiology waiting room, her face glowing with anxiety.

She stopped in mid-step the second she spotted McCracken. Her hand shot up to fix her perfect hair. A reflex, I guess. Once she glanced at me, the anxiety was back.

“Oh, Camilla,” she said.

“I’m fine. You should see the other guy.” It was a well-worn joke in our family. This time, it happened to be true.

A smile fluttered around Alexa’s mouth. “Are you sure?” she said, hugging me.

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ll see what the radiologist has to say.”

I took a look at her. She wasn’t wearing lipstick, or even any makeup. Her hair was caught back in a pony tail, a style which was probably invented for her. If she still had her hangover, it didn’t show. She must have been in the garden when McCracken called, because she was wearing faded jeans and one of her late husband’s shirts.

McCracken was staring. For some reason, his collar seemed to be tight.

Alexa gave me a little pat on the arm, before she turned to him.

“Hello, Conn,” she said.

I hated sitting there waiting for X-Rays while the two of them pretended to engage in normal conversation. But every now and then Alexa would turn her attention to me.

“Maybe they’ll have to keep you in, as a precaution. You could have a concussion, dear. Do you feel sleepy? Nauseated?

Let me see your pupils.”

McCracken gazed at her with admiration.

“I can’t stay in,” I said. “I have to get home and look after the goddam cats.”

*   *   *

It was only after McCracken was gone and Alexa had squeezed every drop of information possible out of the radiologist and we were in Alexa’s car driving home that I remembered to give her hell.

“You used me as bait to call up McCracken. You didn’t have the guts to just call him. The man dragged me off to a café and gave me a lecture about sticking my nose in this investigation.”

Alexa kept her eyes on the road. “Looks like that was good advice. Which you didn’t take, and now look at you.”

She had a point.

“Anyway,” she added, “I’m glad I called him. So there.”

My apartment is a five minute drive from the Civic, and we pulled into the driveway before I could badger her any more. Good thing. I didn’t want to hear any romantic drivel about McCracken.

Alexa fussed all the way through the foyer and up to the sixteenth floor in the elevator.

“I’m all right,” I said as we walked down the hallway toward my apartment. But I almost toppled over as I went to insert my keys in my apartment door and found it unlocked.

Images of dead cats flashed through my mind, and I felt a wave of nausea.

Alexa grabbed my arm. “I knew you weren’t ready to come home from the hospital.”

“The door,” I whispered, “the door is unlocked. Did you leave it unlocked?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“No way. You take off and call the police. I’m going to stay here and catch the cat-killer.”

“You can’t stay here.” Her voice took on the familiar desperate edge.

“Never mind, go call the police.”

We heard a clumping noise just as the door swung open.

Mrs. Parnell stood there, leaning against her walker. Cats flanked her ankles. They rubbed up against her as she inhaled on her cigarette and blew a great deal of smoke in our direction.

“Well, it’s about time you turned up. I thought these damn cats were going to starve, they howled so much. First you create a noise nuisance bringing them here, and then you neglect them. Not a great track record.”

Alexa rallied, once she recovered from the shock of seeing someone in my doorway

“Camilla has been in the hospital having a head wound attended to. She was injured in an attack last night.”

I liked Alexa’s approach. It had the nose-in-the-air-and-you’d-better-remember-just-who-you’re-talking-to technique that had always worked so well for the MacPhee sisters.

Alexa propelled me past Mrs. Parnell and into the living room, where I slumped on the sofa.

“And as for you, Miss,” Alexa snapped, “what were you going to do to the cat-killer when he came out of your apartment? Hit him with your purse?”

She had a point. Having dumped me on the sofa, she bustled off to the kitchen.

Mrs. Parnell thumped back into the room, followed by her new friends. “Head injury? My dear Ms. MacPhee, I am so sorry to have accused you unfairly. But is it serious? Should you not be still at the hospital? And who attacked you? And why?” She slid herself into the armchair and squinted at me in concern.

“Not too serious, Mrs. Parnell. I got hit on the back of the head. The x-rays indicate I’m all right. But if I’m not, Alexa is watching me like a vulture. I have no idea who did it. As for why, I think I discovered a body before the murderer was willing to have it found.”