“We don’t put tape up for decoration,” Bernie said. But despite the possibility of theft, he was in no hurry to send in the forensic team. “She was old, Annie,” he reminded me.
“What are you saying, Bernie? That she was senile? Because she wasn’t. She beat me at Scrabble all the time.”
“She was eighty-two.”
That surprised me. “So what?”
“You sound like you’d rather she was murdered.”
I just didn’t want her dismissed. “She wasn’t a dotty old lady,” I said.
Bernie paused to grind his teeth or something, then said, “Take a look around, don’t touch anything. And don’t break the tape,” he warned before hanging up.
Bernie and I had met during the investigation of my nephew Ivor’s murder, which got me more involved with family affairs than I’d been in decades. We aren’t friends, but he finds my thought patterns useful on occasion. He says my brain’s wired differently, so I make connections he wouldn’t. I once told him it’s an occupational hazard of subject indexers, but only once. I don’t want him calling the National Library when he needs a consultant.
I hadn’t told Bernie about the envelope; it must have Freudian-slipped my mind. I hadn’t even opened it, as if that act would make her death more real, even though—or because—I was pretty sure this is what she’d mean by “in case.”
Because Mrs. D.’s newest piece of furniture dated from around 1952, her flat looked like a scene from a PBS Mystery! My eyes zoomed in on the chalk outline under the window opposite her front door, travelled to the big bloodstain by the head, then panned up to the red smear on the radiator. There was nothing in the area she could have tripped over or stumbled against—unless you count sixty-inch shears a hazardous product.
The place definitely looked different, and it wasn’t just poor Bijou huddled silent in his cage like a street person in a doorway. The middle cushion of the sofa had a dent in it, something I’d only ever seen after having sat there myself. The doily on the back of the wing chair was off kilter, and the cut-glass ashtray wasn’t quite centred on the coffee table. I bet myself that, because of cutbacks, Bernie wouldn’t dust for fingerprints unless he had good reason to.
Hands in the back pockets of my jeans to avoid inadvertently touching anything, I went up to the birdcage and said, “Hi, Bijou.” He looked at me with a baleful black eye. “Guess you miss your mom, huh?” He responded with a slow blink. The cage was uncharacteristically messy, as was the area of carpet it stood on—chaff and gravel and feathers all over the place. Something like my apartment, although not so cramped and literally shittier. The food and water containers were the kind with long tubes that you filled from the top, and my conscience eased when I saw they were far from empty.
I scanned the room from this angle. Bijou’s cage stood about three feet behind the wing chair, and three feet in front of and to the side of the window over the radiator. I tested the distance. Mrs. D. might have stumbled on her way to talk to the bird, but she couldn’t have hit the radiator. In the light coming from the window, I could see smears in the ashtray, as if it hadn’t been properly wiped. Maybe Mrs. D. made an extra effort when she expected company, but that didn’t sound like her. She’d struck me as the kind of person who ironed nightgowns.
Bijou hopped off his perch for a snack, and I noticed his water cup had things in it I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, identify. On the assumption the cops would skip dusting the birdcage, I removed the container to clean it, but in the kitchen, the gleaming sink and counter tops needed protection. On TV the cops always use a handkerchief; I figured the kitchen towel would do.
There was no kitchen towel.
In the bathroom, there was no bathroom towel.
Who steals towels?
“Not everybody ties them through the fridge door handle,” Bernie told me when I called him. I hadn’t realized he’d taken in so much of my flat the couple of times he’d been here.
“She had one with roses on it that was strictly decorative,” I told him back. “Even that’s gone.” I’d confirmed that after I returned to Mrs. D.’s apartment, having cleaned and filled Bijou’s water container at my place.
Bernie mulled that over a moment. “Nothing else missing?”
“Hard to say, since I couldn’t touch the doors and drawers. But she must have had a visitor.” I told him what I’d spotted. “Unless your people sat on the sofa or used the ashtray.”
“Or she did.” He sounded insulted.
“You didn’t know Mrs. DesRochers.”
Bernie sighed like he would have to pay for the manpower personally and told me the forensic guys would be finished by the evening at the latest.
With nothing else to do, I got on the web and looked up the care and feeding of budgies, and picked up a couple of Scrabble words in the process: cere and lutino. Then I looked up Scrabble and found a site where I could play by e-mail; but it cost money, and I wasn’t all that sure a remote human would prove a better substitute for Mrs. D. than my computer game.
When you’re self-unemployed, time management consists of choosing between what you ought to do and what you want to do. That Friday, I still hadn’t checked to see if anything besides the towels were missing and, because budgies.org said to change the water every day, what I wanted to do was assuage my guilt. So I trekked back up to Mrs. D.’s.
About the only thing not covered in fingerprint dust was Bijou; Mrs. D. would have been horrified. It made the apartment eerily different, like a familiar place in a dream. I concentrated on the cage, the only thing seemingly unchanged by the invasion. Poor tyke looked lonely. My mother used to leave the radio on for the cat, so I hunted around for a radio.
I’d never been in Mrs. D.’s bedroom and halted at the door with a creepy feeling that my nose would end up where she wouldn’t have wanted it poked. But, really, I was doing her a favour looking after Bijou like this. I told myself that twice before I went in.
A television and VCR sat atop a satinwood dresser that faced the candlewick-covered bed. She’d put masking tape over the VCR’s display panel. I lifted it off. 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00. I stuck the tape back down and thought she’d carried independence a tad too far by not asking me to help her set it.
No radio here. The kitchen? I was crossing the living room to get there when I heard the snick of a key in the lock.
The man who walked in looked even more startled than I must have. Another expression flicked across his face, too quickly for me to make out, and then he smiled like a shoe salesman. “I’ll assume you have a right to be here,” he said, the way shoe salesmen say “Can I help you?”
He was tall and good-looking in an overly careful way. His navy blue trench coat, beige slacks and oxblood loafers were all top-of-the-line Wal-Mart. As I studied his pale face, trying to decide if his hair were natural or Grecian Formula, I recognized the eyes and forehead. “You must be Mrs. DesRochers’ son,” I said.
He looked annoyed that I’d guessed his secret but nodded affirmation. “And you?”
“Just a neighbour. I’m looking after Bijou until someone claims him.”
I made purposeful, kootchey-coo sounds to the bird, trying to say “Aren’t you a little late to finally visit your mother?” with my body language.
He got some kind of message, because he stood there awkwardly while I pointedly ran my finger through the featureless patina of fingerprint dust on the coffee table, tsking for the shame of how this well-preserved furniture had suffered at the hands of heartless cops. He lit a cigarette without offering me one, took a deep drag, then came up with an explanation for his presence. “I’ve, ah, come to collect some papers.”
Lucky I wasn’t facing