“I’ll get your number,” I said, “and let you know when would be a good time.”
He wasn’t the type to insist on paying the bill. He got a point from me for that.
“I’ll be off to the library,” he said as we stepped out of the Mayflower and into the very bright sun.
“I’ve got some stuff to check out. Let’s walk over to together,” I said. Death Row reprieve for Alvin.
“Sure.”
He was the kind of person you could be comfortable with, without talking. I liked that.
As we reached the corner of Elgin and Laurier West, across the street in Confederation park, 15,000 tulips exploded into view. He stopped to look. Robin would have too. This could be a perfect match.
We jostled by the camera-toting tourists enjoying the Festival of Spring. By my calculations, there was a tourist for every tulip.
“So,” I said, while we raced the light across Elgin, “did I ever tell how I feel about the parole system?”
“Let’s not ruin a perfect morning.”
We said good-bye inside the library. I galloped up the stairs to reference and he headed for fiction. He was planning to do the W’s. Wodehouse. Westlake. Wright. Wolfe.
I was planning to do the W’s too. Wendtz.
There was only one Rudy Wendtz in the city directory. He had an address on the Queen Elizabeth Driveway and his employment was listed as prmtr. After a while, I figured out this must mean promoter. But what did promoter mean?
I let my fingers do the walking and sure enough, in the yellow pages under Promotional Services, I found “Events by Wendtz”.
What kind of events, I wondered, give you the kind of income you need to live at that address on the Queen Elizabeth Driveway?
* * *
Back in the office, there was no sign of Alvin. With luck, he’d caught the first flight back to Sydney to resolve the family crisis.
Wherever he was, I had free access to the phone. I checked in with the Findlays. Robin was in bed.
“Perhaps when Brooke gets here…” Mrs. Findlay let her sad, flat voice trail off. “It’ll be good to see her.”
“Well, yes,” I said, “especially after her long walk.”
Mrs. Findlay always pretends she doesn’t hear my Brooke comments.
“And you too, will you be here tonight?”
“Count on it,” I said.
“Oh, that’s good. Robin has been finding the visits from the police very upsetting. Wait a minute, here she is. She says she wants to talk to you. Are you sure you should be out of bed, dear? Dr. Beaver says…”
“What police? What visits?” I shouted into the receiver. But no response.
“Camilla?” Robin sounded like an exhausted mouse. “I think they’re going to arrest me.”
* * *
She looked like hell when I shot through her front door twenty minutes later. In sharp contrast to the perky, bright, blue flowers marching across every free inch of the Findlays’ kitchen, Robin had definite grey undertones. She was wearing an old United Way campaign tee-shirt with tea stains down the front, grey jogging pants with a hole in the knee and pink pig slippers. Deep half-circles were gouged under her eyes. Her blonde curls hung in greasy strands. She clutched a china cup of camomile tea, and her knuckles were white.
Why? I asked myself. I’d seen the same body, minutes afterward. Why was she so psyched out? Not that it wasn’t distressing. Not that you wouldn’t have nightmares. I still jerked awake in the night with Mitzi’s dead eyes winking at me. But I wasn’t reduced to a psychiatric case. Logic told me that stable, sensible, unimaginative, dependable old Robin should have been in the same state I was. After all, it wasn’t someone she loved or even someone she knew as far as I could tell. I knew it could be explained, and I knew Robin was keeping something from the people who loved her. I wanted to grab Robin and shake the truth out of her.
So instead I said, “You look like roadkill.”
It was intended to make her laugh. But all it got was a little nod of agreement.
“I know,” she said.
“More coffee, Camilla?”
“No thanks, Mr. Findlay,” I said, watching him wipe his hairy hands on his blue and white checked apron. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Mr. Findlay without an apron.
“A little lemon coffee cake?”
He slid the lemon coffee cake towards us on small blue-rimmed plates. Forks and blue napkins arrived on the table seconds later.
Mr. Findlay’s coffee cake is not the sort of thing I’m ever going to turn down. I was through mine in a flash. Mr. Findlay had replaced the first piece while both of us watched Robin fiddle with her little plate, never even touching the fork. Her nails were bitten to the quick.
I took a deep breath.
“Tell me what the police asked you.”
Mr. Findlay scuttled from the room.
She looked at me with unfocused eyes.
“A lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“What was I doing there, did I know her, was I angry with her, did I kill her.”
I nodded. I understood why the police would ask that sort of thing. Of course, they didn’t know Robin like I did. You couldn’t blame them for seeing guilt in Robin’s refusal to say why she went to see Mitzi Brochu that afternoon.
“It was awful,” said Robin. Whether she meant finding Mitzi or being grilled by the police was unclear.
“Who questioned you?”
“I don’t remember his name. But he came here to my parents’ house and he badgered and badgered. He thinks I killed her. I know it.” She bit her lip.
“Was it the retriever or the rodent?”
A tiny flicker of Robin’s old smile twitched.
“It was the ratty-looking one. He kept trying to trick me.”
Mombourquette. I shivered. I hated the thought of his rodential mind. And even more the idea of him invading the Findlays’ blue-flowered territory, trying to trap Robin for a murder she could never have committed.
“They’ll be under pressure from the media to get an arrest. I was there with the body. Covered with blood.”
She caught me by surprise. The old Robin spoke for just a minute before disappearing back into the sedative-induced mental mire.
“You’d better get a good defense lawyer. You don’t even need to talk to them without a lawyer present. You know that.”
She half-smiled.
“You’re a good lawyer.”
“I mean a defense lawyer. One of the big ones.”
“I want you.”
Robin had always been stubborn, even from the first day when we met in kindergarten and she wanted the red crayon. Some people might have interpreted her collapse as wimpiness, but I knew it was just another way of being obstinate.
“I don’t get people off,” I said, “I try to keep them in jail. This is not the right attitude for your case.”
“I