Eight o’clock. Belle was tapping her foot, rearranging the salt and pepper. When did the restaurant close? Other diners were finishing their coffee and dessert, calling for the bill. With a sudden urge, realizing that she needed a bathroom, she avoided the questioning eyes of the waitress.
Minutes later, she emerged from the washroom momentarily relieved, only to see her server gesturing. “Belle Palmer? There’s an urgent phone call for you.”
In the shiny chrome and walnut-veneer bar area, a phone sat near the mint dish. When she answered, a shaky voice spoke in halting tones. “I’m at Mel’s. He’s gone, and I don’t know what to do.” Scarcely could Belle respond than the phone went dead. An outage, or had Miriam hung up?
After leaving twelve dollars on the table, she returned to the van, seething while she attacked the frosted windshield, breaking the cheap plastic scraper with her fury. Gusts whipped tiny tornados around the parking lot. What was wrong with Miriam? If the man had stood her up, why panic? Couldn’t she have come to enjoy the meal in spite of his rudeness? Perhaps he wasn’t the paragon he’d been painted. Belle felt her stomach rumble and buckled her seatbelt over the bloat of two beers without food.
Leaving New Sudbury and heading across town, she proceeded to Balmoral Drive on Lake Ramsey, where Melibee’s condo crowned a huge, pseudo-modern Italianate horror very near the spot where a tiny cabin had sheltered Franklin W. Dixon, aka Leslie McFarlane, creator of the Hardy Boys series. Had the town fathers thought about erecting a plaque for tourists? If she ever needed a second job, she had a few promotional ideas. She trudged through ankle-high drifts and skidded along the path to the lobby. With a chilled finger, she ran over the addresses, noting the penthouse. Then she rang the bell, turned as the bevelled glass door snicked open and headed for the elevator.
With her realtor’s eye and a thinly disguised sneer, she paused to assess the decor. Bauhaus whorehouse, black marbleized floors, red padded leather walls and baroque chandeliers in the lobby. Muzak warbled from the plush speakers in the elevator, but she couldn’t decipher it. 999 strings?
After a dizzying fifteen-storey lift, the doors opened to reveal an anteroom with dark Jacobean wainscotting, clay jugs with pampas grass from warmer places and striped Colonial style wallpaper. Using an imp’s head, she knocked at the double, brass-fitted doors. When no one answered, she pushed gently, ready to read Miriam the riot act.
Inside, all was still except for the ticking of a giant Seth Thomas grandfather clock. She shuffled her boots onto a rubber mat, testing the depths of the taupe carpet on her frozen toes. Ahead was an interminable shadowed passage. “Miriam,” she called. “Where are you?”
A spectral figure moved into the hall, then leaned with despair against the wall, where a dim plaster sconce cast a sickly light. Miriam wore a striking new dress, soft folds of apricot silk with golden threads and a cowl. Normally scorning makeup except for a dab of powder, she must have gone to a professional. Matching eye shadow, liner, shadows to minimize her Roman nose and perfectly lined lips. But her face was contorted in pain. “He’s gone, Belle.”
“So you said. But why stand me up?”
Miriam pulled away to stumble down the hall, punctuating her movements with choking sobs. Following her into a living room, Belle glanced over the turquoise suede sofas, the granite fireplace, the massive windows with lights from Lake Ramsey’s million-dollar mortgages sparkling in the distance. Patio doors led to a deck large enough to feast the Supreme Court. At her elbow was a gigantic Victorian sideboard redolent with lemon oil, a silver urn with an open bottle of Moët et Chandon swimming in water. Two glasses. Someone had been having a party. So where was Melibee? Off on a sudden business trip?
She felt a tug at her arm and looked down at a man’s body, his head bruising an exquisite Persian rug.
Three
Mel.” Miriam slumped into a cushioned chair so deep that her legs stuck out like a rag doll’s, shaking hands covering her face.
“Was it a heart attack? Have you tried . . .” Wondering if she recalled any CPR other than the dog variety where one blew into the nose, Belle leaned forward when she heard Miriam gasp. Her friend had risen to turn on a tole lamp. Blood trickled from the man’s ear, pooling into a grotesque halo. Instinctively, Belle knelt and reached for his throat, the skin slightly scratchy with a final five o’clock shadow. He seemed neither warm nor cold, but at ambient temperature.
“I see.” Or did she? Fell and hit his head? Curious as she was, from that angle it was hard to judge the overall impression of the man. He wore an indigo blue silk dressing gown and shiny black leather slippers. A tiny moustache marked one side of his slack face, the thinning, unnaturally dark brown hair mussed by the fall. At his throat, a small gold chain winked. One well-manicured hand with buffed nails held a fire iron. And unless she was wrong, he couldn’t have been more than five-foot-two. A little powerhouse with a Napoleon complex? While Miriam hyperventilated in hoarse breaths, Belle rose and walked around the circular sofa arrangement. Near the wall of windows lay a large, awkward object. She stooped and reached out a tentative hand.
“Don’t touch it! I did, and now what will—”
“What are you talking about?” Belle pulled the silken cord of an ornate cut-glass chandelier, and a light halo fell around her feet. “My God. He was hit with a piece of Inuit sculpture?” Carved from green soapstone, easily measurable from her wood-buyer’s eye, this sixteen-inch walrus, from demure flippers to its flat-faced, whiskered muzzle, reclined on its side. A few years ago, a disturbed man had slipped past the Mounties into 66 Sussex Drive, made his way to the second floor bedrooms and threatened the Prime Minister, who had grabbed a similar piece to defend himself. His wife, calm as a psychiatric nurse, had talked the man into surrendering a penknife.
Noting the bloody smears on the artifact, she backed away and stood next to Miriam as the silence expanded. The metronomic ticking echoing down the hall reminded her of a childhood song: “And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.”
“Let’s just leave. Someone else can find him. Elena, his cleaning lady tomorrow morning. No one needs to know. We can wipe off the—”
Belle shook her head, attempting to quell a rising panic about her friend’s behaviour. Miriam had been gutsy enough to bark down a mugger in Toronto who had tried to steal her purse on the way back to her hotel after a performance of Mamma Mia. Why was she acting so illogically? Possibly because her beloved was cooling under the laws of forensic science, and she had already incriminated herself. How long had he been dead before Miriam arrived?
“Then you may be eliminating the murderer’s prints, too. And Melibee may have told someone about the dinner, jotted the date in a planner. Steve’s mentioned details like that more than once. If you tell the truth, why would anyone suspect you? What’s the motive?” Her eyes glazing over, without even a blink, Miriam clutched a tufted pillow like a lifesaver, growing oddly quiet.
Belle used her cellphone to dial Steve’s number, speaking briefly about the discovery. Then, like a sensible Scot, she went to the kitchen and located a box of Earl Grey tea. Brewing up a pot in a china version of an English cottage, aromatic bergamot steam puffing from the chimney, she ladled pure buckwheat honey into their cups, stirring slowly. Melibee had a tempting pantry, bearnaise sauce, asparagus soup, canned truffles and goose liver pâté. What might his fridge hold? Then she chastened herself for letting a magpie mind run on in the stark face of tragedy. He was a victim, after all, deserving of respect. As far as she knew.
Miriam sat mute, removed to another world, while Belle, whose attempts at conversation fell like leaden shots, browsed through Architectural Digest, Harper’s, and Antique Journal, American magazines