The first thing I figured was: he didn’t do it on purpose. Even if he was a slimeball pimp-drug pusher, he didn’t strike me as the type who would cold-bloodedly kill his mother. Besides, he didn’t have the brains to plan a trip to the video store. And the way she fell made it seem likely she was pushed. He was there, they got into a fight, and he pushed her. Then he didn’t ransack the place looking for whatever he wanted, because Mom’s dead, and he’s in a hurry to scram. But he did do a cursory search, because he knew he wouldn’t find anything when he opened drawers while I was there.
It was an easy scene to envisage: They shout, he shoves, she falls. He runs to check her, finds she’s dead. Maybe gets some blood on him. Uses the towels to clean his hands, wipe up fingerprints, which means he had a reason to worry about leaving fingerprints. And he searches the place. Search see Hidden see Secrets. Mrs. D. had a lot of them, including her own son. And the envelope. Which she gave to me to keep secret from Frank? So he wasn’t looking for the envelope, because how could he look for something he didn’t know existed? So what the hell was he looking for?
Looking for…searching for…searching…the web. But you can’t search the web for answers when you don’t even know the questions. Okay, try another tack. Play devil’s advocate. Pull a Bernie.
Could Mrs. D. have simply lost her balance and fallen? Did that really happen to old people? I got onto Google.com, and worked out the most efficient way to enter the search criteria. Old, people, and falling were just too vague. Okay, losing your balance. Losing balance? Balance was the most specific word, which should always come first when you’re using a search engine. I typed in “balance lost.” What I got was:
Results 1-10 of about 298,000 for balance lost. Search took 0.91 seconds.
Blueberries May Restore Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age/S
…Some Memory, Coordination and Balance Lost with Age By Judy…
www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/1999/990910b.htm
U-M freshman not drunk, may have lost balance
…freshman not drunk, may have lost balance Detroit Free Press…
www.freerepublic.com/forum/a362c2f0e24de.htm
C&EN 6/29/98: FINANCIAL ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheet
…ANALYSIS: Firms lost ground on income and balance sheets CAPITAL…
pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980629/anal.html
Lost your bank balance?
news sensation The Ketamine look, the Fashion world has been shocked this week…
www.nwnet.co.uk/n-23/xavier.htm
Bank balances and fashion. And Bernie thinks I think weird. The next page had more bank balance references, and $54,133.72 did sound like a bank account. Finally I hit one with the phrase “Unclaimed bank balance.” So far, all the pages had been American. Was there anything like that in Canada?
I typed in “unclaimed bank balance account canada” and got it on the very first citation:
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
…an unclaimed balance back from the Bank of Canada? …
ucbswww.bank-banque-canada.ca/faq_english.htm
The Unclaimed Bank Accounts page was straightforward. All you had to do was type in the name, and it returned:
Unclaimed Balance
Information Name: DESROCHERS, LEONIE
| Payee: Address: MONTREAL (QUE) Savings Account: 8135402 | Transferred to Bank of Canada: $54,133.72 |
| Last Transaction Date: 1973/8/17 | Transfer Date: 1983/12/31 |
| Status: Unclaimed | Outstanding Balance: $54,133.72 |
Originating Bank: NATIONAL TRUST, 1535, RUE STE-CATHERINE, MONTREAL, QC, H3N 040
To my way of thinking, the only way a woman who taped over the flashing 12:00 of her VCR would know about a web page for unclaimed bank balances was if someone told her. And my guess was, that someone was Frank. So when he’d walked in on me, what he’d been after was evidence that he’d told her—the Bank of Canada’s phone number, or claim forms—something showing that she’d begun procedures to claim her money. Because he had killed her, and the way to avoid another jail sentence was to remove any evidence of the obvious motive.
And he was going to come back—real soon, if he hadn’t already—to do a more thorough search, which meant somebody should be watching the place.
“I found the money,” I told Bernie over Mrs. D.’s phone.
He put me on hold while he told someone to check it out. I used the time to finish wiping fingerprint dust off the coffee table. I’d been cleaning for an hour; it was something to do while waiting for him to call me back.
“What if he does know about it?” Bernie finally said. “He can’t inherit it anyway.”
“But he doesn’t know that,” I argued. “That’s what he’s been looking for: her will. He tells her about the money, asks for it, she says no and he kills her.”
“But Annie, if she found out about it from him, when’d she have time to write the will?”
I look forward to the day Bernie can follow my thinking without my having to lay it before him step by step. “He sees her some time before Tuesday night, because Tuesday night’s when she gave me the envelope. He’d found out about the money and asks her for it. She says, ‘I’ll think about it,’ or something. She writes the will, gives it to me. He comes back Wednesday night, she says no, he gets mad--” I heard a key in the front door. “He’s here,” I whispered, hanging up and grabbing one of Mrs. D.’s novels to look like I was reading.
“Hello,” I beamed when Frank walked in.
“You move in or something?”
“Just keeping Bijou company.” The phone started ringing. “Somebody has to look after him.”
His eyes narrowed, darting from me to the phone and back again. “I told you, I got no place to put a bird.”
“Pity,” I said, shriller than you should say a word like that, but the phone was pretty loud, “your mother really loved him.”
We stared at each other a moment, waiting for the next ring, but it didn’t come. “Look,” he said, “I got stuff to do here.”
“I understand,” I said, standing up. His face took on a self-satisfied look, like a teacher who’d just ordered a rotten kid to do something, and the kid obeys. He even stepped aside to clear my path to the door, so he had to turn around to follow me when I headed for the kitchen.
He found me rinsing the dustcloth. “Leave it,” he said. “You can go now.”
“Thanks, but I’d like to finish cleaning up.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do. I have to do it because I cared about your mother, and she cared about her things.”
“Well, they’re my things now, so you can go.” “Are you sure?”
He stood there for at least half a minute before he finally gave me one piss-poor imitation of a skeptical laugh, and said, “She leave a will or something?”
“As a matter of fact, she did.” I brushed by him as I strolled back to the living room.
“No,