Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Best known for his award-winning Yorkshire police series starring Inspector Banks, Peter Robinson is also the author of non-series books and a score of short stories. His stories have claimed several awards, including the Macavity, the CWA’s Short Story Dagger, and 2001’s Edgar for Best Short Story (for “Missing in Action” from EQMM). Mr. Robinson’s latest Banks novel is Close to Home. This new tale introduces a Toronto P.I.

1

Dazzling sunlight spun off the glass door of Angelo’s when I pulled it open and walked in at eleven that morning, as usual.

“Morning, Mr. Lang,” said Angelo. “What’ll it be?”

“I’ll have a cup of your finest java and one of those iffy-looking crullers, please.”

“Iffy-looking! All our donuts are fresh this morning.”

“Sure, Angelo. I’ll take one anyway. How’s business?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Watch the game last night?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t tell me, they lost again, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Angelo is a diehard Blue Jays fan. He gets depressed when they lose. He’s been depressed a lot this summer.

Angelo looked over my shoulder, out to the street. “Hey, wonders never cease,” he said. “Looks like you’ve got a customer.”

“Client, Angelo, client. You get customers. I get clients.”

“Whatever. Anyways, this one you’ll want to see.” He whistled lasciviously and sculpted an impossibly voluptuous shape in the air with his hands.

Curious, I took a plastic lid for my coffee and, juggling the cruller in my other hand, tried to make a dignified exit. Could this be it, after all this time? The legendary beautiful blonde of private-eye fiction come to life at last. In my office?

I took the stairs two at a time and saw her standing there in the hallway, about to knock on my door. She turned, and I could see an expression of distaste on her face. I couldn’t blame her. She was Holt Renfrew from head to toe, and the place doesn’t get cleaned often. Under the dim glow of a bare sixty-watt bulb, the old linoleum was cracked and veined with years of ground-in dirt.

Angelo’s mimed shape hadn’t been far wrong, if a tad over-generous. She was certainly beautiful, but there was something else. I knew her. Damned if I could remember from where, but I knew her.

She smiled and held out her hand. “Mr. Lang. It’s nice to see you again.”

I gestured her into the office, where she brushed crumbs off the chair with her white-gloved hand before sitting down, crossing her legs, and turning her nose up at the view. It’s not great, I know, but it’s cheap. We’re in a strip mall on the Scarborough side of Kingston Road, opposite one of those clapboard hotels where the government houses refugee claimants. I parked my coffee and cruller on the cluttered desk and sat down. Now I knew where I recognized her from, but the name still wouldn’t come.

She peeled her gloves off and gave me another smile. “Susan,” she said, as if sensing my embarrassment. “Susan Caldwell.”

“Of course,” I said. “Nice to see you again, Susan.”

Susan Caldwell. She had been one of my students ten years ago, in another life, when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto. Now I remembered. Susan had been notable mostly for her long blond hair and a rather ill-advised essay on Darwin’s influence on Wordsworth’s thought. The blond hair was still there, along with the dark blue eyes, button nose, long, shapely legs, and a nice curve at the hips. Impure thoughts passed through my mind, but she was only about five years younger than me, and she wasn’t my student anymore.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I need help.”

“Why choose me?” Nobody else ever does, I might have added, but didn’t.

“I remembered that article about you in the paper awhile back.”

Ah, yes, the famous article. When I couldn’t find an academic position after getting my Ph.D. in English, I followed my adolescent fantasy, fueled by years of Hammett and Chandler, and enrolled in a private investigator’s course. I got the qualification, served my apprenticeship with a large firm, and now I was out on my own. LANG INVESTIGATIONS. It had a ring to it. Anyway, the newspaper had done a feature on me, labeled me “The Ph.D. P.I.,” and it sort of stuck. Embarrassing, but it brought in a curious client or two, and now here was the lovely Susan Caldwell sitting opposite me.

“People who need me are usually in trouble,” I said.

“It’s not me. It’s my brother.”

“What’s the problem?”

“He’s been arrested.”

“What for?”

“Murder.” She leaned forward and rested her hands on the desk, so bound up in her plea for her brother that she didn’t even notice the dust. “But he didn’t do it, Mr. Lang. I know my brother. He wouldn’t harm a fly.”

Now that she mentioned it, I did remember hearing something about the case. I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to true-crime stories, especially when they involve celebrities, but sometimes you can’t avoid picking up a few details, especially if it’s close to home. “Tony Caldwell, right?” I said. “The famous fashion photographer. He’s accused of murdering his wife.”

“Yes. But he didn’t do it.”

“Ms. Caldwell, Susan,” I said, “I don’t usually investigate murders. The police don’t like it, for a start, and I try to stay on good terms with them.”

“The police.” She spat out the word as if it were a cockroach. “Don’t talk to me about the police! They’ve just decided Tony’s guilty and that’s that. They’re not even looking for the real killer.”

“They must have a good reason,” I said.

“Well, maybe they think they have a good reason, but they don’t know Tony like I do.”

“What could I do that the police can’t?”

She looked me in the eye. “You could believe me, for a start,” she said. “Then maybe you could talk to him. At least you could keep an open mind.”

She had a point there. There’s nothing the police like more than an open-and-shut case; it’s neat, like balancing the books, and it makes the statistics look good. And most cases are open-and-shut. Why should Tony Caldwell’s be so different? Because his sister said so? If I killed someone, I’d hope that my sister would refuse to believe it, too, and defend me just the way Susan was defending Tony. Still, I was tempted to give it a try.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s staying with me. He just came out on bail. Our parents live in Sarnia, and Tony’s not supposed to leave Toronto.”

“Give me the details,” I said.

Susan sat back in her chair and spoke softly. “It was about one o’clock in the morning. Tony and Val — that’s Valerie Pascale, his wife — had been out, and they just got home.”

“Where do they live?”

“The Beaches. Or Beach. I never know which.”

“Either’s fine with me. Go on.”

“The neighbors said they heard them arguing loudly. Then, after it had been quiet for a while, Tony called the police and said his wife was dead.”

“Is that exactly what he said?”

“On the phone, yes, but when they came, before they warned him or whatever they do, they say he said, ‘I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, Val.’ ”

That didn’t sound good. “Did they argue often?”

“They loved each other very much, but it was a pretty volatile relationship. Valerie grew up in Vancouver, but she was half French,” Susan added, as if that explained it all.

“Did Tony explain what he meant by the comment?”

“He said that he was apologising for the argument, that he was sorry the last words they’d had together were angry, and that he’d never have a chance to make up.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He admitted they’d had a quarrel, and said he stormed off upstairs. I know this might sound odd, Mr. Lang, but he had a shower. If you knew Tony, you’d know he’s a compulsive showerer, and he always does it when he gets upset. Ever since he was a kid. When he went downstairs about twenty minutes later, he found Valerie dead in the living room, stabbed. He says he doesn’t remember much after that.”

“You say she was stabbed. What about the knife? Did the police find it? Were Tony’s fingerprints on it?”

“It was just a kitchen knife, I think. He said he’d been using it earlier to cut the string on a parcel.”

“So his prints were on it?”

“Only because he’d been using it to cut the string.”

Again, it wasn’t looking good. “Did he confess?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Was there any other reason the police charged him so quickly, then?” I asked, almost dreading the answer.

“Well,” said Susan, shifting uneasily in her chair. “I suppose so... I mean, you know, when they got there... it might have looked bad.”

“Yes?”

“Well, when the police arrived, Tony was kneeling beside her body holding the knife, and he was covered in blood. Valerie’s blood.”

2

The police refused to talk to me and warned me off the case, as expected, so I decided to have a word with the accused next. Susan Caldwell lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the Yonge and Eglinton area, or “Young and Eligible,” as it was known locally because of the hordes of singles who filled the apartment buildings and frequented the restaurants, bars, and clubs every night. Susan was waiting when I arrived, and without further ado she showed me into her brother’s room.

Tony Caldwell lay sprawled on his bed reading a photographic magazine. He looked more Queen Street West than East in a white T-shirt with Japanese characters scrawled in red across the front, black jeans, hollow cheeks, and gelled, spiky blond hair. Handsome if you liked that sort of look, effeminate if you didn’t. I didn’t care either way.

I introduced myself, and he gestured me to a hard-backed chair by the window. We were on the twelfth floor, and below I could see lunchtime swarms of office workers hitting the trendy Yonge Street bistros and trattorias.

“I really didn’t do it, you know,” Tony said. “It happened exactly the way I told the police.”

“Tell me about that evening. Who was there? What were you doing?”

Tony propped himself up on a cushion. “Val and me, Jacqui Prior, my business partner Ray Dasgupta, and Scott Schneider and his wife Ginny. We were supposed to be celebrating. Jacqui had just been chosen as the new Cherub girl. It’s a whole range of soaps, bath oils, shampoos, and stuff due to be launched next year. Major multinational campaign. Anyway, Jacqui was the face, the look, and our studio got the contract for the still photography, so we all had a lot to celebrate. Scott is Jacqui’s agent, so he and Ginny were over the moon, too. You’ve no idea what a boost that will give Jacqui’s career — not that she’s done badly so far, but it’s a whole new ballgame for her. For all of us, in fact. It’s like we’ve all suddenly moved into the big time.”

“When did things start to go wrong?”

“Just before the cappuccino. We’d had quite a bit to drink, and Val had been moody all evening. Finally, she hit us with the news. When everyone got around to toasting Jacqui for the fiftieth time, Val said something about her face not being so photogenic if she didn’t keep her hands off me. You can imagine how that heated things up.”

“Was it true? About the affair?”

“I’m not proud of it, but I won’t deny it.”

“How did Valerie find out?”

“I don’t know. I thought we were discreet.”

“Could someone have told her?”

“I suppose so, but I can’t imagine who. I didn’t think anyone else knew.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, there was a very embarrassing scene in the restaurant, and Jacqui had to take Val to the washroom to quiet her down.”

“Didn’t that surprise you, Jacqui and Val going off together after what had just happened?”

“I never looked at it that way. They’d been best friends for an awful long time. But Val was a lot calmer when she came back, and Jacqui left almost immediately with Scott and Ginny. Val and I stayed a bit longer with Ray, drank some more, but it was obvious the party was over. We started arguing again in the cab on the way home. When we got there, the fight went on. I tried to calm things down, but Val was really wild. She’s always been extremely jealous. Anyway, I was looking for a distraction, and I remembered there was a package of books I wanted to open. Modern first editions. I hadn’t had time in the morning. I got a kitchen knife to cut the string, then Val started on at me again for being more interested in the books than in what she had to say, which, to be honest, was nothing really but a string of insults aimed at me. That was when I threw the knife down and went for a shower — they always seem to calm me down — and when I came back she was dead. That’s all there is to it.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“Nothing at all. The shower’s pretty loud.”

“Could someone have got in the house while you were showering?”

“I don’t see how. The front door was locked and bolted, with the chain on.”

“And the back?”

“The door was open because it was a warm evening, and we get a nice breeze from the lake, up the ravine, but the screen door was locked. I know because the police kept going on about it when they were trying to get me to confess. They kept telling me how it couldn’t have been anyone else, that there were no signs of a break-in.”

“How long had you been seeing Jacqui?”

“Only a couple of months.”

“Was it serious?”

“I don’t know.” Tony sighed, running long, bony fingers through his hair. “She’s a hard one to fathom. I thought I was serious, but maybe I was just infatuated. Jacqui’s a fascinating woman, complicated, very difficult to get to know.”

“You say she and Val were old friends?”

“Yes. Had been since high school. They both went into modeling, out in Vancouver first, then they came to Toronto about five years ago. That was what hurt Val most — that it was her closest friend. It wasn’t so much that I’d been with another woman, though that would have been bad enough, but that I’d been with Jacqui. We’d always flirted a bit in public, you know, just in fun. But one time we were alone and things just got out of hand.”

“Can you think of anyone else who might have had a reason to hurt Valerie?”

“So you do believe me?”

I remembered Susan’s plea. “I’m keeping an open mind.”

Tony thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “Since Val gave up modeling, she’s been doing a bit of teaching at the agency. Deportment, public speaking, that sort of thing. She gets along well with everyone.”

“Did she have any lovers?”

“Not that I knew of, and I’m pretty sure I would have known.”

“Okay,” I said, getting up to leave. “Thanks a lot, Tony. If anything comes up, I’ll be in touch right away.”

Tony seemed surprised and alarmed that I was leaving so soon. He sat up abruptly and crossed his long legs. “You are going to help me, aren’t you? You do believe me?”

“What I believe doesn’t really matter,” I said. “It’s what I can get the police to believe that counts. But don’t worry, I’ll do my best. One more thing: Do you think I could have the house keys? It would help if you’d write down the address, too. I’d like to have a look around.”

“Sure. You can take Valerie’s set,” he said. “I picked them up last time I was over there, after the police let me out. I couldn’t stand to stay in the house, not after what happened, but I didn’t like the idea of them just lying around like that.”

I took the ring of keys. A Mickey Mouse key chain. Cute. “Do you know what all these are for?” I asked.

Tony started counting them off. “Front door, back door, studio, agency. That one I don’t know.”

There was one key left, but it didn’t look like a door key to me. Too small. I thought I had a pretty good idea what it was.

“Did Valerie keep a safety-deposit box?” I asked Tony.

He seemed surprised by the question. “Not that I know of. Why?”

I held up the key. “That’s why,” I said.

3

I wanted to find out where the safety-deposit box was located and what its contents were, but I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get into it even if I found it. Technically, Tony would inherit everything of Valerie’s, unless her will specified otherwise, but criminals aren’t permitted to gain financially from their crimes. On the other hand, Tony hadn’t been convicted of anything yet. Something to talk to a lawyer about. In the meantime, I had asked Tony to check with Valerie’s bank, and there was plenty of digging around for me to do.

The Caldwell house looked like a cosy English vicarage right out of Masterpiece Theatre. I parked my 1998 Neon across the street among the BMWs and Audis, and, feeling vaguely ashamed of its unwashed state and the dent in the front right wheel arch, I walked up to the door.

Outside the house stood a huge old oak tree, and I wondered if it would provide an intruder enough cover from the nosy neighbors. Even so, anyone who wanted to get in would have to get past the heavy door, which Tony told me had been locked, bolted, and chained. There was no porch, just the dark, paneled door set in the sandy stonework. The key let me into a small hallway, and a second door led into the living room. The police had taken the carpet, leaving the polished wood floor bare.

Three of Tony’s photographs hung on the wall. They were very good, as far as I could tell. I’d expected modernistic effects and cut-up contact sheets, but two of the three were landscapes. One looked like a Beach sunset, showing the Leuty lifeguard station in effective, high-contrast black-and-white, and the other was a view of a rocky coastline, probably in Nova Scotia, where the cliff edges cut the land from the sea like a deformed spine. Again, Tony had used high contrast.

The third was a portrait signed by Valerie, along with what I took to be her lip prints, dated two years ago. She was posing against a wall, just head and shoulders, but there was such sensuality about her Bardot-like pout and the way her raven’s-wing hair spilled over her bare, white shoulders. There was something about the angle of her head that seemed to challenge and invite at the same time, and the look in her dark eyes was intelligent, humorous, and questioning. For the first time in the case, I had a real sense of the victim, and I felt the tragedy and waste of her death.

Upstairs, I rummaged through her bedside drawers and checked out the walk-in closet, but found nothing I didn’t expect to. I assumed the police had already been through the place before me and taken anything they thought might be related to the crime. On the other hand, if they believed they had caught the criminal and had enough evidence against him, then they wouldn’t go to the expense of an all-out, lengthy crime-scene investigation. Not exactly CSI; they’d leave their lasers and Luminol at home. Valerie’s clothes were high-quality designer brands, her underwear black and silky. I felt like a voyeur, so I went back downstairs.

Next I moved into the kitchen, where the parcel of books still lay on the table, brown paper and string loose around it. The books, first editions of early Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, were from an antiquarian dealer in Halifax, I noticed, and the string was a quaint, old-fashioned touch. The only thing missing was the knife itself, which the police had taken as evidence.

The door opened onto a back stoop, and my intrusion scared off a flock of red-throated house finches from the bird feeder. Judging by the untidy lawn surrounded by its flagstone path, neither Tony nor Valerie had been very interested in gardening. At the far end, the lawn petered off into bracken and roots where the ravine threatened to encroach, and finally the land dropped away. I walked to the end of the garden and noticed that the ravine was neither too steep nor too overgrown to be inaccessible. There was even a path, narrow and overgrown, but a path nonetheless. You certainly wouldn’t have had to be a mountain lion to gain easy access from the back.

The ground had been hard and dry at the time of the murder, I remembered, and we’d had a couple of heavy storms in the last week, so there was no point in getting down on my hands and knees with a magnifying glass, even if I had one. I stood at the end of the lawn for a while enjoying the smell of the trees and wild flowers, listening to the cardinal’s repetitive whistling and the chip-chip sounds of warblers, then I went back inside.

Fine. Now I knew that it was possible for someone to get up and down the ravine easily enough. But how about getting into the house? I sat at the kitchen table toying with the string. I could think of no way of getting through a locked screen door without leaving a trace, unless it were either open in the first place, or somebody had opened it for me. Valerie might have opened it to someone she knew, someone she felt she had no reason to fear. If she were distracted by her anger at Tony, her surprise at seeing a friend appear at the back door would surely have overruled any caution or suspicion she might otherwise have felt. On the other hand, if the door was locked when the police arrived, that was a problem.

As I sat twirling the string around my fingers and idly glancing at the two first editions in their nest of brown paper, I became aware of a niggling discrepancy. It was unconscious at first, nothing I could put my finger on, but as it turned out, it was on my finger. I unraveled the string and tried to fasten it around the books. It didn’t fit. Much too short. I looked around on the floor but saw no more, and I could think of no reason why either Tony or the police would secrete a length of string.

I went over to the screen door and examined the catch, which looked like an upside-down earlobe, and surely enough, when I looked closely, I noticed scuff marks around the narrow neck. Making sure I had the house keys in my pocket, as an experiment I opened the door, hooked a length of string over the catch, then shut the door, standing outside, holding the string. When I tugged gently, the catch engaged and the screen door locked. I let go of one end and pulled the string towards me. It came free.

I still had nothing concrete, no real evidence, but I did have the solution to a very important problem. If Valerie had let someone in through the back, whoever it was could easily have killed her, left the same way, and locked the screen door from outside. Now I knew that it could be done.

4

Jacqui Prior, my next port of call, lived in an apartment off The Esplanade, close to the St. Lawrence Market, the Hummingbird Centre, and all the wine bars and restaurants that had sprung up around there. I found her in torn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, lustrous dark hair tied back in a ponytail, busily packing her belongings into boxes she had clearly picked up from the local LCBO store. While she seemed surprised to see me, she was also curious. She said she was just about to take a break anyway and offered me a cup of Earl Grey, which I gladly accepted.

There was a superficial resemblance to the photograph of Valerie Pascale I had seen at Tony Caldwell’s house, but Jacqui seemed somehow unformed, incomplete. She had the kind of face that was beautiful but lacked personality. I imagined that was probably what made her a good model. She must be the kind of person who would shine and sparkle in front of the camera, given a role to play. Her olive skin was smooth as silk, perfect for beauty soap, shampoo, and bath oil commercials, and I could imagine her looking wholesome in a way that Valerie Pascale didn’t.

“Where are you moving to?” I asked.

“I’ve found the perfect little house in Leaside.”

“Leaside? Won’t that be a bit quiet for you after all this?”

She smiled, showing perfect dimples. “I like things quiet. I need my beauty sleep.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I sipped some Earl Grey.

Jacqui frowned. It could have been real, or it could have been a model’s frown. I didn’t know. “It’s awful about Valerie and Tony,” she said. “I feel terribly responsible in a way, but I don’t see how I can help you.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “People do what they do. I’m just not convinced that Tony Caldwell did what he’s been accused of.”

“Oh? What makes you think that?”

“Just a few inconsistencies, that’s all. You and Valerie were old friends. How did you meet?”

“We were at high school together, then we both went to UBC. We shared an apartment in Kitsilano.”

“So you knew her pretty well?”

“As well as one could know Valerie.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She wasn’t exactly an open book, you know.”

“She had secrets?”

“We all have secrets. Valerie could make the most innocent thing into a secret. It was her nature to be mysterious, enigmatic. And she liked to be in control, liked to have the upper hand. She needed to feel that, ultimately, if the walls came tumbling down, she’d be safe, she’d have an escape route.”

“Didn’t work this time,” I said.

Jacqui wiped away a tear. “No.”

“Who told her about your affair with her husband?”

Jacqui looked shocked, and I was beginning to feel more and more that I was being treated to her repertoire of faces. She was good. “Do we have to talk about that?”

“I’m trying to help Tony.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I don’t know how she found out. I’m sure nobody knew about us.”

“What happened when the two of you went to the washroom?”

“Nothing. We just talked it out, that’s all. Sort of made up.”

“Sort of?”

“I told her I’d end it with Tony. She was still upset, but she accepted my word.”

“Would finishing with Tony have been difficult for you?”

“A little, perhaps. But it’s not as if we were in love or anything.”

“So it was just an affair? A fling?”

“Yes. Oh, don’t sound so disapproving. We’re both adults. And it’s not as if I was the first.”

“Tony had other affairs?”

“Of course.”

“Did Valerie know?”

“She never said anything to me.”

“Are you sure you don’t plan to go on seeing Tony now that Valerie is conveniently out of the way?”

“I don’t like what you’re implying. I’ve lost a very good friend. There’s nothing ‘convenient’ about that.”

“A good friend whose husband you stole.”

“I didn’t steal him. Don’t be so melodramatic. These things happen all the time.”

“Where did you go after you left the restaurant that night, Jacqui?”

“I came here. Scott and Ginny dropped me off. They’ll tell you.”

“Did you visit Tony and Valerie’s house often?”

“Sometimes.”

“When was the last time?”

“About a month ago. They had a barbeque. We were all there. Me, Ray, Ginny, Scott.”

“So you knew the ravine well enough?”

“We all went for a walk there, yes, but look—”

“And you had plenty of time to get back out to the Beach the night Valerie was killed, if you wanted to.”

“I don’t drive.”

“There are taxis.”

“They’d have records.”

“Maybe. But Valerie would have let you in the back door, no problem, wouldn’t she?”

“What are you talking about? Why should I go to the back door?”

“So you wouldn’t be seen from the street. Because you went with the intent of killing Valerie. You just didn’t know that Tony would get the blame. When you found out he was in the shower and Valerie was alone, you seized the opportunity and killed her.”

Jacqui stood up, hands on hips. “This is ridiculous. On the one hand you’re saying I went there with the intention of killing Valerie, which is absurd, and on the other hand you accuse me of seizing the moment. Which is it? It can’t be both. Look, I don’t want to talk to you anymore. You’re not a real policeman. You can’t make me.”

She was right. I had no special powers. Standing, I reached in my pocket for the key. “Recognize this?” I asked.

She looked at it, pouting. “No.”

“It’s a safety-deposit key,” I told her. “Were you ever aware of Valerie having a safety-deposit box?”

“No. But I told you she could be very secretive.”

“Any idea what she might have kept in it if she had one?”

“I don’t know. Money? Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got more packing to do.”

Jacqui’s response to the whole safety-deposit-box issue was just a bit too rushed and casual for my liking. I followed her to the door trying to decide whether I believed her or not. I wasn’t sure. The problem was that Jacqui Prior wasn’t a WYSIWYG sort of woman. Tony Caldwell had called her complicated, but in a way she struck me as shallow, empty without the role to assume, the correct expression to wear or gesture to make. As I rode the elevator down to my car, I found myself wondering if I was being manipulated. Just how much did Jacqui and Tony’s affair have to do with what happened to Valerie? In my mind’s eye, I saw myself as Charles Laughton riding his stairlift in Witness for the Prosecution. Had they planned it between the two of them, I wondered, and was my getting Tony off part of their plan? Was I being used in their game?

If Tony Caldwell or Jacqui Prior hadn’t murdered Valerie, then who else might have done it? Discounting the passing-tramp theory, my money was still on one of the dinner guests: Jacqui, Ray Dasgupta, Scott and Ginny Schneider. Valerie would have let any one of those four in the back door. But which one? And why? And what part did the safety-deposit box play? Maybe I would find out something from the others who’d been at dinner that night.

5

I found both Scott and Ginny Schneider in the office of their modeling agency just off Spadina, in the garment district. On the surface, Scott seemed very much the outgoing, charming type, while Ginny was more reserved. They were both in their late thirties, and I’d guess from her cheekbones that Ginny had probably been a model herself in the not-too-distant past. Her husband looked more like a trendy stockbroker in casual business attire.

“I thought the police had settled the matter of Valerie’s death,” Scott said.

“They’ve arrested Tony Caldwell, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “But that doesn’t settle anything.”

“How so?”

“I’m just not convinced. I understand Valerie worked for you?”

“She helped out sometimes, yes. She’d been a model herself, and quite a good one, too, so she was able to work with some of the girls and with the clients, help us with our selections. It’s an important part of the business, and it can be very tricky, matching the model to the product.”

“Was anything bothering her around the time of her death?”

“Her husband’s affair with Jacqui Prior, I should imagine.”

“Did she talk to you about that?”

“No. We only found out at the dinner, along with everyone else.”

“You, too?” I asked Ginny.

“Yes.”

“And were you surprised?”

“Naturally,” said Scott, looking over at his wife. “We both were.”

“Do you have any idea how Valerie knew?”

“I’m afraid not. We certainly didn’t tell her.”

“Well, you couldn’t tell her if you didn’t know yourselves, could you? You must have worked closely with Jacqui, though. Did she ever let anything slip?”

“Nothing. Look, Mr. Lang, I’m very sorry about Tony and everything. I’ve known him for a number of years and count him as a good friend as well as a business colleague, but don’t you think the police know what they’re about? He and Valerie did have a terrific row — we all witnessed that — and not long afterwards, she was dead. It makes sense. Any one of us could snap under pressure like that.”

“Indeed we could,” I said. “Any one of us. Where did you go after you left the restaurant?”

“We dropped Jacqui off at her apartment, then we went home,” Ginny answered.

“Did anything unusual happen on the way?”

“No. Scott had had too much to drink, so I drove.”

“Where’s home?”

Scott answered this time. “Scarborough, down near the bluffs.”

“So you weren’t too far away from Tony and Valerie’s place?”

Scott’s bonhomie vanished in an instant, and he stuck his chin out. Ginny looked on coolly. “What are you getting at?” Scott said. “You come around here asking damnfool questions, and then you start accusing me of murdering Valerie?”

“I haven’t accused you of anything,” I said.

“You know what I mean. You certainly implied it.”

“I merely implied that someone other than Tony could have done it.” I looked at Ginny. “Did either of you go out after you got home?”

Ginny looked down at her hands folded on her lap before answering, “No.”

“Of course we didn’t,” Scott snapped. But something was wrong. Ginny didn’t want to look me in the eye, and Scott was blustering. Was she protecting him?

I took the safety-deposit-box key from my pocket. “Have either of you seen this before?”

They both looked genuinely puzzled. “No,” said Scott.

“Never,” said Ginny.

“Okay. Thanks for your time.” I pocketed the key and headed back to my car.

Tony Caldwell’s photographic studio was located in that urban wasteland of movie studios and sound stages between Eastern Avenue and the Gardiner, where Toronto pretends to be New York, London, and even a distant galaxy. At least parking in one of the vast empty lots was easier than around Spadina, which had cost me a small fortune. The studio had an empty feel to it, but Ray Dasgupta was in the office working at the computer. He stopped and looked up when I knocked and entered. I told him who I was and what I was doing.

“You probably think it’s odd, me working here while all this is going on,” he said.

“I suppose it takes your mind off other things,” I said. “And no doubt there’s work to be done.”

“Mostly bookkeeping.”

“What’s going to happen to the studio now?”

“I don’t know. Tony was the real creative energy behind us. I’m not much more than a glorified administrator. Oh, I know a shutter speed from an f-stop, but that’s about as far as it goes. Tony has a flair for striking up relationships with his models...” He paused. “That wasn’t meant to come out the way it did,” he said. “I mean behind the camera.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “But seeing as you mention it, how much do you know about these other relationships?”

Ray sucked on his lower lip, frowning.

“It’s not that tough a question, Ray,” I said. “Jacqui wasn’t the first, was she?”

“How do you know?”

“Never mind. But if anyone ought to know, it’s you, his partner. How many? How long?”

Ray squirmed in his chair. “Always,” he said. “As long as I’ve known him, Tony’s been chasing women. He couldn’t seem to help himself.”

“And Valerie didn’t know?”

“I don’t know whether she suspected or not, but she never acted as if she did. Not in public.”

“And you think she would have done something if she’d known?”

“Yes. Valerie is a proud woman, and jealous, too, not someone to take an affair lightly. She might not have divorced Tony. After all, she’d given up her own career, and she liked the lifestyle, but...”

“Maybe she’d have killed him?”

“But he’s not the one who’s dead, is he?”

Still, it was another possible scenario. Maybe Jacqui was the last straw. Perhaps there’d been a struggle, Valerie with the knife, trying to kill Tony, and things had turned around. That didn’t help me much, though, as he hadn’t even tried to claim self-defense. “What do you think of Jacqui?” I asked.

Ray’s lip curled. “Jumped-up little slut. It’s not as if she can’t have any man she wants. Why Tony? Why steal her best friend’s husband?”

“And Valerie?”

Ray looked away, clearly disturbed by the question.

“Ray? Something you want to tell me?”

“Look, I... I would never have... I mean...”

“Were you in love with her, Ray?”

His silence told me all I needed to know.

“Was it you who told Valerie about Tony and Jacqui?”

Ray jerked his head in an abrupt nod, then turned damp brown eyes on me. “How could he? How could he treat her like that? Oh, she never looked at me twice. It’s not that I thought... or even hoped... but I couldn’t bear to see it anymore, them carrying on the way they did, and Valerie not knowing.”

“So you told her.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Just before dinner.”

“Did you kill her, Ray?”

“Why would I kill her? I loved her.”

“Maybe you went round to the house later and found her alone, Tony in the shower. You thought you were in with a chance now, but she turned you down, laughed at you, and you lost it. Is that how it happened, Ray?”

For a moment, I thought he was going to confess, then he said, “No. I didn’t do it. But I’d have a closer look at Jacqui Prior if I were you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of something Valerie said when I told her about the affair.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I’ll ruin her. The little bitch. You see if I don’t. And don’t think I can’t do it, either.’ ”

6

“You’d better not have come around with more of those ridiculous accusations,” Jacqui Prior said, flopping on the sofa and crossing her long legs.

I took out the safety-deposit-box key and held it in front of her. “I’ve been talking to Tony,” I said, “and we’ve been through some of Valerie’s papers. According to her Visa bills, there’s an annual fee of forty dollars at a BC credit union. The people there were not forthcoming, but they did admit that Valerie rented a safety-deposit box. I asked myself why she kept a box in Vancouver when she lived in Toronto.”

“And?”

“It’s my guess she got it while she was still living there, and she doesn’t need frequent access.”

“So it’s probably empty.”

“But why keep paying? She can’t have forgotten about it. The annual bill would remind her.”

“So what’s your explanation, great detective?”

“That there’s something in it she wants to keep.”

“And how does that relate to me?”

“The two of you grew up in Vancouver.”

“So?”

“What’s in the box, Jacqui?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“You’re lying.”

“How dare you!”

“What’s in it? Was it worth killing her over?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“So you say. But the way it looks to me is that you had the best motive. You were having an affair with her husband. She threatened you. And she was keeping something in a safety-deposit box in Vancouver that may be related to you.”

“That’s just conjecture.”

“But it’s pretty reasonable conjecture, you must admit.”

“I’m admitting nothing.”

“Well,” I said, standing to leave, “the police will probably be less polite than me, and there’ll no doubt be media interest. Your choice, Jacqui. If you’re innocent, you’d be far better off telling me the truth. I don’t have to tell anyone.”

I could see her thinking over her options: Whether to tell me anything. How much to tell. How many lies she might get away with. In the end, she came to a decision. “I need a drink first,” she said, and went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured herself a Pernod. It turned cloudy when she added a few drops of water. As an afterthought, she asked me if I wanted anything. I said no.

“Strictly between you and me?”

“Of course.”

“When Valerie dropped her little bombshell and all hell broke loose, I took her to the washroom.”

“I’ve always wondered what went on in there.”

“She told me she’d ruin me.”

“How?”

“When Val and I were students,” Jacqui said, “we were... well, to put it mildly, we were a bit wild. We got into coke and stuff in a fairly big way and it can skewer your judgment. There was a man. We thought it would be fun to make a video. He didn’t know. No copies. Only the original. Need I say more?”

“The three of you?”

“Yes.”

“And Valerie kept this?”

“I told you she liked control.”

“Why would she want to have control over you?”

“Not me, you fool. Him. He was a politician. Still is, and climbing the ranks.”

“So Valerie used it to blackmail him?”

“She never used it for anything, as far as I know.”

“But that gave him a motive for killing her. Who is he?”

“He didn’t even know about it. I’m sure of that.”

“But Valerie threatened to use it against you?”

“Yes. This Cherub contract is a really big deal, and I need to be squeaky-clean. It’s a family line, so if it got around that their cherub wasn’t quite as cherubic as they thought, I think you can see where that might lead.”

“The unemployment line?”

“Exactly.”

“You do realize, don’t you, that you’ve just given me another motive for your killing Valerie? If she made the video public, you’d have been ruined.”

“No. You don’t understand. There was no video.”

Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t think I wanted that thing lying around, do you? I can make myself look enough like Valerie to fool people, especially strangers behind the counter in a bank, and her signature is easy enough to forge. One day, while she was at the dentist’s, I borrowed her key and her ID.”

“So you’re saying—”

“Valerie didn’t know, because she never checked from one year to the next, but the video was gone. I destroyed it. That safety-deposit box was empty.”

“Then who...?”

Jacqui put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said, turning pale. “Oh, God, no!”

“You again,” said Scott when I called at their Scarborough home early that evening. I had spent the rest of the afternoon doing the sort of digging I usually do when I’m not investigating murders. Ginny walked through from the kitchen and nodded a curt greeting.

“What can I help you with this time?” Scott asked.

“When you were driving Jacqui home from the restaurant the night Valerie was murdered, you asked her about what went on in the washroom, didn’t you?”

“So what? I was curious.”

“And she told you that Valerie had threatened her with something that could ruin the whole Cherub deal.”

“She did? I don’t remember.”

“Oh, come off it, Scott! You mean to tell me you were so curious you can’t even remember what she told you?”

“What does it matter?”

I leaned forward. “It matters because it gave you a motive to kill Valerie.”

“That’s absurd.”

“No, it’s not. I’ve been doing a bit of research this afternoon, and I’ve discovered that your precious agency is in serious financial trouble. You’re in debt up to your eyeballs — second mortgages, the lot — and you can’t afford to lose the Cherub contract. When you thought that was in jeopardy, you knew you had to get rid of Valerie. Maybe you planned on killing them both, but when you saw Tony wasn’t there, you changed your plan.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” said Scott, “but that’s all it is.”

I knew he was right. What I’d discovered, and what Jacqui had told me, might point the police in Scott’s direction, but they’d need much more if Tony were to be set free.

“You know what the sad thing is?” I said. “You did it all for nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jacqui was upset. All she said was that Valerie had threatened to ruin her. What she didn’t mention was that she no longer had the means to do it. You killed Valerie Pascale for nothing, Scott.”

Ginny turned pale. “What did you say?” she asked.

“Don’t, Ginny!” Scott warned her.

But it was too late. Ginny glanced at her husband, turned back to me, and said, “Do you think for a moment I would let her destroy everything we’d worked for?” She looked over tenderly at Scott, who was gnawing on a fingernail. All his deepest fears had now come true. If he wasn’t an accomplice and had, indeed, passed out, he must at least have suspected and worried that the truth would come out. “She deserved to die,” Ginny went on. “She was going to ruin all of us just because of a stupid adolescent affair. And now you tell us it was all for nothing.” Her laugh sounded like a harsh bark.

“You still have no evidence,” Scott said. “Ginny will deny everything. Do you realize what you’re doing? You could ruin all of us, Jacqui, Tony, Ray included.”

I stood up to leave. “Jacqui will survive. And so will Ray. The one thing neither of you seem to have given a moment’s thought to,” I said as I headed for the door, “is that Tony Caldwell is awaiting trial on a murder charge. A murder he didn’t commit. Think about that when you lament your business losses.”

After I’d shut the door behind me, I slid my hand in my inside pocket and turned off the tiny digital recorder that had been on the whole time I’d been with Scott and Ginny. Maybe it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it would be enough to get Tony free and reopen the case. And, who knows, perhaps Susan Caldwell would be grateful enough to have dinner with me. We could talk about Darwin’s influence on Wordsworth.