“What, in particular, were you looking for?” I asked sweetly. “Maybe she mentioned it to me.”
“Oh, just some papers. Legal stuff…”
Not a man who thought fast on his feet. How hard would it be to rattle him? “Your mother never spoke about you, you know.”
He knew. “We didn’t get along,” he said as if that explained everything. “She ever talk to you about where she kept important stuff?”
“Bijou was pretty important to her,” I said, hoping to lay a little guilt on him. “Will you be taking him with you?”
“I got no place to keep a bird. Why don’t you just flush him?”
Did the Humane Society have a Most Wanted list? “You know the police are looking for you?”
A moment’s panic in his eyes, then, “Why?”
“To tell you your mother’s dead, I guess.”
“Oh. Ah, they already told me that.”
“Good,” I nodded. Why hadn’t Bernie mentioned it? “I guess you got the key from them?”
“Yeah.”
I had no idea where Mrs. D. normally kept her house keys. Nor did I know why I was so sure this man wasn’t honest. I think it was his grooming. I’ve never trusted guys who look like catalogue models.
“Well,” he said, hands in his trench coat pockets, “I guess I’ll have to see about getting this stuff cleared out.”
By way of answer, I held up my fingerprint-dust schmutzed hands and then headed for the bathroom to wash them. Maybe this sleaze was his mother’s rightful heir, but I hated the idea of his having charge of things she cherished.
When I got back to the living room, he was gone.
“He’s a slimeball,” I told Bernie next morning after he confirmed the guy had gotten the keys from the cops just before he’d walked in on me. Police HQ is only a ten-minute stroll away.
“What did he do to you?” he asked, sounding worried.
I gave him a blow-by-blow account of my meeting with the slimeball, and in return Bernie told me his first name was François, commonly known as Frank, and he had done time for pimping and drug dealing, which explained why Mrs. D. never talked about him. He lived in Hamilton and had been home when the cops called about his mother.
“It doesn’t take long to get from Ottawa to Hamilton,” I said. “He could have killed her and driven all night to get back.”
“We don’t know that she was killed.”
“What about the autopsy?”
“She had a bruise on her upper left arm.”
“There you go,” I said. “Someone hit her.”
“Old people bruise easy, she could have bumped into something.”
“How was her brain, Bernie?”
The preliminary autopsy confirmed that Mrs. D. wasn’t a stumbling, senile wreck. Bernie gave me the details with gruesome minuteness. He didn’t usually keep me that informed, so I figured it was his way of saying I was right. As a quid pro quo, I told him about the envelope.
He mumbled something that could have been merde. “What’s in it?”
The lavender sheet lay face up on the sofa cushion beside me, the single, fountain pen-written paragraph framed by the date and the signature. “It’s dated Tuesday, and she leaves fifty-three thousand, one hundred and thirty-three dollars and seventy-two cents to Guide Dogs for the Blind.” She used to cut the stamps off envelopes for them, too. “And a thousand to me, and the contents of her apartment to the Salvation Army.”
Bernie didn’t say anything for a moment, then: “You know where she’d come up with a figure like that?”
“Her bank account?”
“She was getting the Old Age supplement.”
That didn’t mean anything. I knew people working three jobs who collected EI.
“I wouldn’t count on spending any of that thousand,” Bernie warned me.
“It’s handwritten, a valid will.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“She wasn’t senile,” I said, real slow.
“Okay. By the way, did she have a cleaning lady?”
“She never said anything about one.”
He had a hard time believing a woman of Mrs. D.’s age could keep an apartment that clean. “She must have spent all her time polishing.”
All those evenly coated surfaces came back to me. “Are you saying there were fewer fingerprints than you’d expected?”
That’s just what he was saying, and we argued some more about Mrs. D.’s ability to look after herself and her home.
“Her place was always immaculate,” I said, as if her standards were normal. “I mean, she wasn’t anal about it, but she didn’t have a heck of a lot else to do.”
“Gee, I didn’t know you were so busy,” Bernie wisecracked. I definitely had to keep that man out of my kitchen.
“If he knew about the money, he could have killed her so he could inherit it,” I said.
“She could’ve just fallen, Annie.”
“But not from a brain seizure or anything?”
“No.” Bernie knew he’d upset me and gracefully changed the subject by asking me to drop off the will.
I looked at the lavender paper again. She’d signed it Léonie DesRochers (Mrs.). Until I’d opened it, I hadn’t even known her first name. Léonie, the acute accent a bold stroke, almost a tick. She’d probably been born Francophone. I admired her Scrabble prowess even more. “He’s a slimeball,” I said, thinking aloud.
“Yeah. Annie, if you see him again, just walk away. And call me.” He gave me his home phone number. I felt like I’d been promoted.
Bernie’s shot at my housekeeping skills hadn’t bothered me, much. But I got to thinking about myself at Mrs. D.’s age. Would I end up one of those crones with six cats? (Highly improbable.) Blue hair? (Almost impossible.) In an apartment crammed with odd bits of my life? (Very likely.) So maybe I should clean up. Right. As soon as I did more important things, like…
Bernie’s not lazy; why wouldn’t he link the bruise on her arm to the crack on her head? Why wasn’t he working from the assumption she’d been shoved against that radiator? On the other hand, why was I so sure that Mrs. D.’s death hadn’t been old age catching up with her?
No, I didn’t “rather she was murdered.” Maybe I was just looking for something to occupy my idle brain; maybe I resented Bernie’s insinuation that old people die so easily; maybe I didn’t want to think about myself dying all alone like that. Finally, I decided the reason didn’t matter as much as proving that somebody had murdered her.
Crime see Suspect see Motive. Okay, a slimeball’s a pretty good suspect, and money’s a pretty good motive. If Mrs. D.’s $54,133.72 was real, and Frank knew about it.
Presumably Mrs. D. knew about it, so why were her kitchen cabinets full of yellow-label cans? Would she have been saving it all to give to Guide Dogs for the Blind? How could we have talked so much without her telling me more about herself?
There’d been a Mr. DesRochers, but all I knew of him was that he’d been in the War. And she knew Pitman shorthand, which she’d offered to teach