Morgan and Miranda were greeted at the door by a Filipino woman who showed them into a formal receiving room that was dark and excessive, with numerous old photographs in sterling frames propped in strategic formation, a genealogical gallery that seemed to have reached its terminus about the time of the Great War and before the Great Depression. Everything was “Great” back then until the age of irony set in. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled back and ferns in the window, a perfect camouflage for someone observing the street without being seen.
When Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros entered the room, it was with a sense of occasion, as if her presence gave the encounter significance in excess of what a dead lawyer might conjure, especially one found in a fish pond. Yet she was herself neither stately nor ancient, and while she may have preferred to avoid crowds since Toronto had become so cosmopolitan — as she would describe it, her tolerance for ethnic diversity implicit — she wasn’t bound to stay in by virtue of any crippling condition. She simply enjoyed the role of reclusive widow, which she did with relish for Mormons, meter readers, and homicide detectives, even for policemen in uniform. Since the Georgian Room at Eaton’s had closed a generation ago, she hadn’t been south of Bloor Street.
On the floor was a magnificent carpet. Morgan recognized the stylized peacocks of an antique Akstafa from the southern Caucasus. In spite of that the room made him uncomfortable. While the women talked, he assessed the furnishings. Apart from the carpet, it all seemed in opulent bad taste, a sad relic of Victorian imperialism. He asked for the bathroom and was surprised when the Filipino maid answered the ring of a small crystal bell to show him the way.
There was a convenience on the same floor at the back, he was told. He was led through a panelled dining room and caught a glimpse of the garden. When the maid seemed about to wait for him outside the lavatory door, he motioned her away a bit awkwardly, trying in the gesture of his hand for casual civility, neither excessively familiar nor imperious. It was the first time in his life that he had encountered someone in the role of servant who answered to a bell. Instinctively, he wanted to call after her that he was from Cabbagetown, at least as alien from all this as Manila.
Back in the dining room, he examined the huge Heriz carpet spread almost wall to wall, then gazed outside. The garden was rather dismal, compared to its neighbour, but to his surprise there was a large green pond.
When he returned to the receiving room, he asked Mrs. de Cuchilleros if she kept koi. No, she explained. Not really. A few, nothing to speak of. She wasn’t sure. Thirty years ago, when they bought the property, Robert Griffin had asked if he could keep a few fish in her pond, and on several occasions, she didn’t know how often, she had looked out very early in the morning and seen him by the pond as if standing vigil. He would stare into the water like an Inuk hunter — which meant Eskimo, she explained — and then without coming to the door he would leave. There was no upkeep; it was a natural system. Sometimes in the autumn he came over and skimmed leaves off the surface. It never froze over completely in winter. She had seen movement in the murky water but couldn’t say if it was fish, flesh, or foul. She spelled out the last word for the sake of the pun.
“Does it smell?” asked Miranda. “The pond next door is fresh.”
“No,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros, annoyed that her jest had provoked a literal response. “Not at all. It is as fresh as his.” She summoned her maid and said something to her in apparently fluent Spanish. A colonial habit, Miranda thought. Spanish is the old language of the Philippines, supplanted by English and Tagalog, but both women would regard it as the appropriate language of servitude — the maid speaking it out of deference and Mrs. de Cuchilleros, because she could.
The maid responded with a brief expletive and left. “No,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros repeated. “I asked Dolores if she ever noticed a smell — I hardly ever go out there — and she said no. So there you are, my freshwater oasis. If there are fish in it now, I expect they’ll stay for the duration. No one feeds them, they get enough wild insects, as opposed to the tame ones, and they live longer than people. I have a gardener come in most days, but he just mows to the edge of the pond. It’s clay, you know, brought in by the Griffins generations ago, the one who built this place. It’s a nice old pond. My first husband loved it.”
“Mrs. Cuchilleros, were you married before?” asked Miranda in surprise.
“De Cuchilleros, my dear. Jorge de Cuchilleros was my only husband, my first and last.”
“Oh,” said Miranda.
When they said goodbye and were outside, Miranda took Morgan by the arm and led him around through the walkway into the lawyer’s garden, talking all the way. “My first husband. How quaint. De, and my dear. Her little jokes. She’s a caricature. What she said to the maid, besides asking about the smell, was ‘Do not serve tea.’ Did you notice she called her Dolores, almost the same as your mother’s name?”
“Darlene.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Sorry. I thought it was Delores. Did you find anything when you went to the bathroom? She gave me the creeps. We should have asked to see the attic. Reminds me of Psycho, Anthony Perkins rocking in the window. I wonder if she had children.”
Morgan said nothing.
“She killed him!” Miranda blurted.
“Anthony Perkins?”
“She killed Robert Griffin.”
Morgan smiled. He liked when she held his arm. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he could feel the curve of her breast as they strolled through the garden.
“I’d better check in with Legal Affairs,” she said, pulling away from him. “See you about five.”
He watched as she walked away. She should always wear skirts. How did a woman decide if it was a skirt or pant day? He never understood the subliminal conspiracy in the way women dressed, how one day it was décolletage and another short skirts. One short skirt in the morning, and he knew it would be legs and short skirts for the day. He thought of a joke: would a community of nuns aspiring to sainthood all experience stigmata at the same time of the month? It was a woman’s joke. To him it was more of a mystery.
4
Kumonryu
Miranda left with the keys. Morgan could still feel the weight of her hand on the inside of his arm. Walking around to the front of the house, he descended the ramp from street level to the garage where the door was still open from the night before. He ducked under the yellow tape marking it a crime scene and entered a large vault with enough space for three or four cars. Only a classic Jaguar two-seater was parked there at the moment. He didn’t know the model; he had never developed an interest in cars. Growing up where buses, the subway, and trolleys were the alternatives to pedestrian transit, he had never known anyone who actually owned a car until university. Even then he wasn’t much interested in students who insinuated cars into the sanctuary of a campus with gardens and manicured lawns in the heart of the city. He didn’t learn to drive until after his degree, teaching himself on a rental automatic, using fake ID, graduating to standard shift a few weeks later.
Morgan had never worked traffic. His university specialization in the sociology of deviance got him into investigations from the start, so he didn’t work his way up from the streets. He liked to present himself as an academic bumbler, but as Miranda