Crime Machine

17

DELORME CAME INTO THE SQUAD ROOM and stood in front of her desk, which was next to Cardinal’s. It was her habit to check her e-mail without sitting down and before even taking off her coat. She did that now—Cardinal knew the sound of her keystrokes by heart—in a penumbra of cold air and the smell of snow. Then she took off her coat and shook it, sending tiny water droplets onto his desk. She always did that, on purpose, and she always said sorry, as if she hadn’t.

“I’m having an idea,” Cardinal said. “I realize I haven’t had an idea since 2006, but I’m having one now.”

“No, remember in August that time? You said, ‘Let’s stop at Tim Hortons’? That was totally you. Me, I would never have come up with something like that.”

“I’ve been replaying that phone message over and over in my head, and here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking this girl sounds First Nations—not strong, not obvious—but you know, that slightly compressed sound they sometimes have? Vowels a little flat, and maybe a little more in-the-nose kind of sound?”

“Nasal, you mean?”

“I’m not describing it right. Listen to it again. Try it with headphones.”

They both had the message on their computers now. Delorme sat down and put on her earbuds and listened again. “You could be right,” she said, a little loudly, before it was even finished. She put her hands over her ears and listened to the end. She took off the buds and swivelled to face him. “Definitely. I should have heard it before.”

“So if Randall Wishart is having an affair with a First Nations girl, the question is, how did they meet?”

“They could’ve met anywhere. It’s not like she’s going to be living in a teepee.”

“A wannabe real estate tycoon married to a hotshot financial whiz has an affair with a First Nations kid, and you think they could’ve met anywhere? You really think we’re that multicultural? Not to mention the age difference, which sounds substantial.”

“Maybe she moved and he sold the family’s house.”

“Possible.”

“So let’s check Carnwright’s recent sales. Or maybe there’s something on the Lode online or ABdaily.com.”

Cardinal shook his head. “Already did. Nothing useful. But it occurred to me that there’s going to be more Web stuff on Laura Carnwright than on him. That’s the thought I was having when you came in and shook snow all over my desk.”

For the next few minutes there was the sound of the two of them tapping at their separate keyboards. In the far corner of the squad room Ian McLeod was yelling at his lawyer. McLeod, as Delorme had once put it, was born for divorce the way some men were born for the army or the priesthood.

They announced the various headings to each other as they clicked on them: Laura Carnwright on the recent upturn … Laura Carnwright on rezoning the west end … Laura Carnwright talks to the Canadian Club on the country’s prospects for a green economy.

“Here we go,” Delorme said. “Aboriginal art show.”

“I don’t have that,” Cardinal said.

“It’s under Images. She’s at the Macklin Art Gallery. Kind of dumb to have an affair when you have a wife who looks like that, no?”

“He’s got pictures of her all over his office.” Cardinal leaned over to look at her screen. “And you know what else he’s got in his office? He’s got Native art.” He stood up and took his coat from the coat tree and put it on. “I have a sudden urge to visit an art gallery. What about you?”

“Can’t. I’ve got to set up my ATM stakeout. Don’t look like that.” She put on her Chouinard voice. “‘The citizens of this town do not lie awake nights worrying they’re going to be attacked by Russian mobsters. They worry about being mugged taking cash out of the ATM.’”

Jane Macklin turned out to be much younger than Cardinal had expected. And she didn’t resemble his—admittedly vague—idea of a gallery owner. She was thirty at most, and looked like someone who might cut hair in an upscale salon. Her own hair, dyed jet black, was styled in a pageboy that looked as if it had been cut with a laser. The Aboriginal art, she told him, had been taken down several months earlier.

“It was probably my most successful show,” she said. “Sold practically everything. We had artists from all over northern Ontario. If you’re interested, I can arrange to show you some interesting work. I just need a little advance notice.”

Cardinal told her who he was. “We’re trying to find someone—a young woman. We don’t know her name, but she may have been one of your artists for that show.”

“And I thought for sure you were an art lover when you walked through that door.”

“No, my wife—” He caught himself about to use the present tense. “And my daughter’s an artist down in New York.”

“New York. Wow. Tough town. You said you’re trying to find a young woman?”

“Around nineteen or twenty years old.”

“We had a few younger artists in the show. They’re taking the traditional forms in some interesting directions. But twenty—I don’t think we had anyone that young. This would be someone local?”

“Probably.”

“There was a woman from the Nipissing reserve, but I think she must be late twenties at least. She sold a big piece about two minutes after we opened.”

“Oh, yeah?” Cardinal took a leap. “Would that be Laura Carnwright who bought it?”

Miss Macklin gave him a funny look. “You know Laura?”

Cardinal drove out of town along Main, past the residential area, past the turnoff to St. Joe’s—formerly a Catholic girls’ school, now a home for retired nuns—past the Fur Harvesters’ warehouse. Cars were circling the lot, looking for parking, and others were parked along the shoulder of the road. Three men were huddled around the side door, smoking and laughing. He made a left and drove past the sign saying NIPISSING FIRST NATION.

Sandra Kish lived in a tiny white bungalow with a single sapling out front that looked in danger of shivering to death. A blue Chevy Echo gleamed in the driveway. Cardinal pulled in behind it, noting the snow tires and undamaged tail lights.

Ms. Kish might have been in her late twenties as Ms. Macklin had said, but it was impossible to tell. She was the kind of fat that flattens the features and smoothes the skin. She could have been twenty-eight; she could have been forty.

Cardinal had interrupted her working on a painting and she was not pleased to see him. He told her who he was and that he was investigating a major crime.

Miss Kish showed no interest. “Ugh. Crime. I stopped reading the newspaper years ago.” She was dressed in paint-spattered jeans and an enormous T-shirt that had once been yellow but was now dotted and streaked with many colours, mostly red. A headband creased the doughy skin above her eyebrows. “I just can’t afford to absorb all that negative energy. It interferes with the work.”

Her front room had been turned into a studio, rich with the smells of paint and wood and mineral spirits.

“That looks familiar,” Cardinal said, pointing to a panorama-shaped canvas propped against one wall, a fantasia of animals linked together by whiplash-shaped tongues. “I saw something a lot like that in a real estate office the other day. Except the tongues were blue.”

“Carnwright’s, I bet.”

“You’re right.”

“She put it in the office, huh? I thought she was going to put it in her home. Well, I guess the office is better. More people will see it.”

“This would be Laura Carnwright we’re talking about, right? She bought it at the Macklin Gallery show?”

“That’s right. She’s a lovely person, a powerful spirit. Very knowledgeable.”

“And you know her husband too, of course.”

“Not really. Laura introduced him—but she had to pry him away from the catering table, and he went right back to it, far as I know. I had the impression she was the art lover of the two.”

“Did you see him talking with anyone else?”

She shook her head. “I barely noticed him.”

She flipped through the lean-tos of canvases, pausing now and again to show Cardinal a painting, as if that had been the sole purpose of his visit.

“That exhibition was amazing,” she said. “I sold all three of the pieces I had up. See, that’s the hard part about art, not making it, not selling it. What’s hard is getting it out there where people can see it. They should have more First Nation shows like that. I mean, this was world-class—they had Champlain’s catering it, for God’s sake. People see class like that, they want to buy.”

Her voice was low, with a smokey rasp to it, nothing like the panicky teenager’s they’d heard on Delorme’s voice mail. You think you have a great lead and it turns to dust in your hands. As he was heading for the door, Ms. Kish seemed to pick up on the fact that he had asked her almost nothing.

“That’s it?” she said. “I thought you were working on a major case.”

“Unfortunately, I’m having kind of an uninspired day. You ever experience those?”

“It’s been known to happen. When it does, I find by far the best thing is to curl up on the floor and cry.”

“Thanks,” Cardinal said, stepping out into the cold. “I’ll have to try that.”