Getting Away With Murder

EIGHTEEN

The tree that Dulcie Osborne had crashed into was still standing beside the sharp curve on the Lewiston-Youngstown highway. Even through the storm, you could still see where she and many other drivers had ploughed into it after misjudging the curve. In her case the steering of her car had been tampered with, so the death was not purely accidental. That had happened years ago, when I was first dealing with a case in Niagara Falls. I hadn’t been down this road often enough in the interval to become inured to the sudden appearance of the tree as I came around the curve. There was a guard-rail now. I was safe from the deadly white oak, although I had nearly come a cropper a few times on the terrible roads that night.

The Patriot Volunteer hadn’t changed either. You could hear the live band from the parking lot. At five to one, the place was jumping and, if the licence plates in the lot told the truth, most of the jumpers paid Canadian taxes. The hat-check girl fought me for my coat and shook the snow from the collar like it was a vicuna. Most hat-checks have no sense of humour. The maitre d’ couldn’t find an empty table until I crossed his palm with paper. He led the way to a small table close to the double kitchen doors, where news of the orchestra could be had by e-mail.

Basically, the Patriot Volunteer was got up to look like a frontier fort, with waiters dressed as minutemen and waitresses in hoop-skirts. A collection of muskets, drums, bunting in red, white and blue furnished most of the decor. There were reproductions of scenes from the Revolutionary War: the crossing of the Niagara on the morning of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the shelling of Fort Niagara, the burning of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The New Yorkers tended, just as we did on our side of the river, to confuse the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They were both costume pictures with three-cornered hats and clap pipes. The orchestra, a band of seven or eight sidemen, made no attempt at historical accuracy, so they blended better with the clientele. Most of the men were necktied and jacketed; the women wore cocktail dresses, except for a few in long dresses- suggesting that this was still a place to come to put the icing on the evening you had already had.

When the waiter insisted that waiting was something one did while holding a drink, I tried that red stuff that I’d run into at the Wellington Court: Campari and soda. The waiter frowned as though such a drink was quite out of place in colonial America. I thought that it should fit in very well considering that the cocktail was invented just down the road at Lewiston.

Julie came in with an entourage of five people: three men and two women. The three women together couldn’t have weighed much more than two hundred pounds. One was blonde, hacked about the head with sheep-shears and wearing a long man’s undershirt and making less of an impression in it than I would. Her collarbones were her most prominent frontal appendages. The other model, I took the first apparition to be of that profession too, was a gaminelike presence with red hair sculpted close to her head all the way around. She looked a little more womanly than the first: I could tell right off when she was facing me. She wore a long dress of rumpled earthy colours and never smiled. The three men were wearing dinner jackets, one in pink, one white and one in a floral pastel print. They all surrounded Julie, who seemed to be eating it up like chocolate, if she allowed herself to eat chocolate. I recognized her froth her parents: she had her mother’s height and sharp features and her father’s animation. She wore an amber-coloured dress that clung to her body like it had been put on with shellac. It was a good body, if a little undernourished. Her smile, under a set of big brown eyes, was nothing less than terrific.

They marched through a gap between the tables, followed by a platoon of minutemen, busboys and the maitre d’, forming squares around my tiny table, then moved off in good order to a big table with a Reserved sign and flowers on it. I was dragged along as a hostage. If we were any closer to the orchestra, we would have had to join the union. I carried my Campari and a minuteman brought my soda. How Julie recognized me, I’ll never know. Champagne came to the table in a magnum, with pink foil on top. There were also cans of Diet Coke and Pepsi for the working girls as well as bottled bubbly water.

“I’m Julie Long,” said Julie, whose last name had been the chief mystery I’d run into so far. “My Mom told me what you looked like. If that hadn’t worked, I was going to test voices. It would have been fun.” The pastel-jacketed guy in the blue aviator glasses was introduced to me as Didier Santerre, the publisher of Mode Magazine. The gamine was Morna McGuire, the local modelling success story, and I didn’t catch the full names of the others. The blonde was Christa. One of the men was a make-up artist called Pierre, and the other was Felix, a designer of rainwear from New York, who apparently was paying.

“How are we going to talk with this floor show in our laps?” I inquired. Julie just rolled her eyes.

“You have to forgive us, we’ve been on an all-day shoot on the Maid of the Mist. You can’t believe how cold it was. We nearly sank the boat with our electric generator. We needed so much light!”

“Couldn’t wait for spring?”

“Can you believe this weather? It’s-”

One has to fight the weather in this crazy business,” said Santerre. “When it’s cold, one shoots for summer. When it’s hot, naturally, one shoots with artificial snow and ice. But otherwise, we would have to anticipate the season by an impossible margin. The lead-time is bad enough already.” We exchanged names and handshakes.

“We had to get them to put the boat in the water early. Imagine what that cost?” the blonde interjected.

“What’s your place in all this?” I asked Julie.

“Julie has flair, style éclat,” the boyfriend answered again for her. I was beginning to regret the bridge toll I’d paid to get here and the one I was going to have to pay on the way back. Julie tried on a shy smile at Santerre’s praise. It didn’t suit her.

The designer, Felix, whose pink “smoking” appeared to have lost its lapels, was pouring out the champagne into far more glasses than there were people. The models were covering the glasses nearest them with their hands. One said she never drank champagne, the other said she ingested nothing after six. I liked “ingested.” She added that it was an inflexible rule.

“Who’s trying to kill your father?” I asked over giggles, and Julie’s turned head as she spoke with Santerre in French. When she turned back to me, with a little flip of her head and a smile, she said that her mother had robbed her of a night’s sleep with the news.

“Can’t imagine my life without Daddy,” she said, biting down on a slim piece of carrot. “He has always encouraged my interest in fashion and design.”

“I was guessing you got this from your mother.”

“True. Mommy adores clothes. She loves Sonia Rykiel better than the truth. But Daddy actually puts his money where his mouth is.”

“I thought you two didn’t get along?”

“Heavens no! He loves it now that I’ve found myself. Now that Didier and I have found one another.”

“That was written in the stars, chérie,” Santerre added. From it I guessed that Mode Magazine was in need of a backer with the financial clout Abram Wise could give it. As long as Wise was putting up part of the money, Julie could think herself into any social butterfly net she liked and Daddy would keep on paying. But, after all, that was what Abe Wise did best.

“Are you two planning to make this permanent?” I asked, trying on a wide ingenuous smile.

“Just as soon as we can make it legal,” Julie said, patting Santerre’s left hand with hers. There was a white mark on the third finger of one of the hands. It was Didier’s. “I’m still legally married to my old John Long but not for long,” Julie said making Didier and Morna laugh. The others were involved, thank God, in a conversation of their own. “But my divorce will be final in three months. I’ve already got my decree nisi. So, I’m going to do the bride thing again. Getting to be a habit with me, as the song goes, but this time, I think Didier’s going to make an honest woman of me.”

“My compliments to the bride and congratulations to the groom or vice versa.” Both beamed at me and then at one another, exchanging hugs and kisses.

“Benny,” Julie said, leaning into me in a friendly but unnecessary way, “would you be an angel and get a white paper bag from the front seat of our car?” She said it in such an intimate way that I thought she had fallen under the magic spell of my charm. In fact, the reverse, for the moment, was true. “I’ve got a perishing headache and there are some Tylenol there.” She took car keys from her bag and told me the car to look for. I took them from her and made my way out into the dark and the snow which was still coming down.

I found the dark red Le Baron under a white shroud and the paper bag with the bottle of pills inside. On leaving, I noticed that one of the headlights had been damaged. Expensive repairs. The night was cold on the back of me, and my fingers tingled from handling the car door. I rushed away from the unpleasant truth about the drive home into the noise and light of the Patriot Volunteer.

“You’re an angel, Benny!” Julie said, as she took two pills with a swallow from her champagne glass.

“It’s a terrible night out there!” I said, hugging myself and trying to get warm.

“Let’s leave it out,” drawled Christa, who was holding a sipping straw, and trying to focus on my eyes. Felix and Pierre had straws in front of them too, although they were drinking champagne. Didier was twisting one around in his fingers and got rid of it under the table. Julie lent me an arm to restore my circulation. Santerre applied stimulants of a more conventional kind than they had just treated themselves to. I moved in closer to Julie and tried to keep my mind on my job.

“Tell me, Julie, has your father ever mentioned his feud with Ed Neustadt to you?”

“Is that the one who just died?” I nodded. “I think he once said that he was the only man who ever questioned him in a police station. Imagine! With all he’s done! It’s incredible!”

“But, your father has no record. That means, Neustadt didn’t follow through. He was still ‘assisting the authorities,’ they call it, and then they let him walk. In law, a miss is as good as a mile. Why do you think he hated Neustadt?”

“Ask him. He never told me. Maybe he hates to be beholden to anyone. I can understand that.” She reached over to get another glass of champagne and toasted me over the rim. She was in great spirits and I was rapidly going downhill. Everybody who knows Abe Wise says just about the same thing about him. If there was a conspiracy, at least it had a good leader. I was yawning into my wine glass. It was time to go home. Our little group was being closely watched by other people in the room. When the designer got up to dance with Christa, the blonde ragamuffin in the underwear shirt, the waiters stared. Didier got up and pulled Julie after him. He must be French after all, I thought. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew leading the way to the dance floor.

“You’re a detective?” Morna asked. I smiled a sad admittance.

“I’ve got an office on St. Andrew Street,” I said, wondering what I could say to this exotic creature.

“My grandfather worked with Pinkerton’s for thirty-five years. He used to tell us stories about his cases. He should have been a writer.”

“They’re a big outfit. Go back to the Civil War.”

“I knew that. What’s his face, the writer, used to be a Pinkerton.”

“Hammett,” I said. “Dashiell Hammett.” She had lovely deep green eyes under her red hair.

“Do you want to dance?” she said with a golden smile.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”