Sticks and Stones Read online

  “We’re all taking them seriously, Denise,” and I thought again about my phone message.

  “No, not all of us. Everything, barring your student’s ­murder, has been brushed off as hijinks. That’s what made me talk to Mark in the first place.” She polished off the last nacho, and washed it down with a gulp of beer. “Let McNeely do what he wants. It’s not as if I signed some secrecy oath to be a sessional lecturer. Anything Mark got from me, he could have got from any first-year student with her eyes open for the last few weeks.”

  “Well, he probably had more fun getting it from you.” I gave an approximation of a leer.

  Denise grinned. “I’m sure he did.”

  We made plans to connect to help Grace on her mailout, then bundled up to brave the elements. Denise was off to Greenwood’s for some present shopping, and I walked with her across the street to get a couple of red checkered dishcloths and some long underwear from the Army & Navy. They were selling my favorite flowered Stanfields long johns three for $20, so I bought lavender, pink and mint green. I won over a suspicious lingerie clerk, who allowed me to put on one of my new purchases. I chose the mint green and felt much better on the trek home.

  Whistling “It’s a Marshmallow World in the Winter,” I made it to the Garneau tree lot without encountering a single suspect. Kinsey Millhone might have thought it a washout, but I was claiming it as a minor accomplishment.

  39

  AS SOON AS I GOT HOME, I PHONED GRACE. Actually, I tell a lie. After I found my yellow wash bucket, filled it with water and upended five old empty wine bottles into it to support the sad excuse of a Christmas tree I’d dragged home down 109th Street, and then swept up the ensuing ­needles from the floor, I called Grace. She was at home, cleaning up after the party. She explained that the mess wasn’t enough to have taken the whole day; she’d just decided to have a lie-in for the morning, and had spent three hours in bed with the biography of Vera Nabokov I’d been wanting to read.

  Her plan was for us to meet at her office at noon on Sunday, and sort and bundle the magazines into their mailing envelopes. That done, she could organize the whole postal sorting for Monday after office hours.

  “It’s no wonder the post office gives us a deal; we end up doing their whole job barring delivering it into mailboxes.”

  I promised to arrive via the High Level Diner, with warm cinnamon buns for everyone.

  Grace laughingly agreed to supply Wet Ones for our inevitably sticky fingers, and I rang off.

  The phone rang while my hand was still on the receiver, startling me a bit. I held onto it while it rang one more time, and then picked it up, sounding a little more hesitant than usual.

  “You get the message, cop cunt?” said a muffled voice.

  “Who is this?” I snapped, wishing at that moment for one of those newfangled Call Display phones.

  “Keep your nose and your pig boyfriend’s nose out of things, or you’ll be sorry.”

  There was a sharp click, then dead air. I found myself holding the receiver to my ear anyway, trying to hear something that would tell me who was targeting me for this crap.

  Finally, I put down the receiver and picked it up again, dialing Steve’s pager number automatically.

  He rang back within five minutes.

  “I just got another call.”

  “Is it on tape?”

  “No, I was home for this one.”

  There was a pause, then Steve spoke gently.

  “Randy, I’m not the one you should be calling officially on this. Hang up and call Karen and Kevin. Tell them what was said, what time it came in and all that. I’ve got another half-hour here, and then I’ll come over.”

  “Unofficially?”

  “Most definitely unofficially.”

  “Thanks, Steve.”

  I put the kettle on before calling Detectives Simon and Anderson. It was Karen Simon who answered, and it sounded as if Steve had mentioned I’d be calling. I reported what happened, and agreed to come in the next day to sign the report.

  Karen got me thinking when she asked the obvious ­question. “Who knows you're seeing a policeman?”

  I promised her I’d try to get together a list of who might have seen us together, then hung up to go and make the tea.

  Steve arrived at five-fifteen, five minutes later than he’d predicted. After holding me without words for a minute, he caught sight of the tree.

  “A Charles Schultz fan, I presume?”

  I laughed. “It isn’t that bad, is it?”

  We decided to head out to the Upper Crust for soup and munchies, and have popcorn for dessert.

  “You’re only allowed to eat the same amount as you string,” I warned, when we were back in the apartment.

  “You could moonlight as a slave driver,” Steve grumbled, jabbing himself in the thumb with a needle as he threaded another puffed kernel onto the line.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I teased, as I put my Muppets Christmas record on the turntable. Steve’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline as he heard Miss Piggy yodelling to the Twelve Days of Christmas.

  “That’s supposed to set the mood?”

  “I never said what mood, did I?”

  Steve laughed with me, but I could hear the strain of trying to pretend everything was hunky-dory in both our voices. I slumped down in front of him and leaned back, using his knees as a backrest. His hands moved onto my shoulders and began to knead them into pliability.

  “We might as well talk about it,” he said gently.

  “It’s not going away no matter how much we try to ignore it,” I agreed sadly.

  I told him of Karen’s question to me and the list I’d promised to make.

  “If you want, we can start on it now,” he suggested.

  “Might as well.” I nodded, shook myself into action, and stood up to get my trusty list pad and a pencil.

  I returned and sat cross-legged in front of the tree. Steve slid off the couch and sat across from me. I wrote: PEOPLE WHO KNOW ABOUT US across the top of the list, and to be bloody-minded I put Staff Superintendent Keller right on top.

  Steve, who was probably an expert at reading upside-down, smirked.

  “Well,” I said, “starting with the night in the downstairs ­toilet, there’s Denise and Leo and your crime scene guys.”

  “I don’t think you have to add Trent and Michaels; it ­doesn’t sound like their MO.”

  “Then there’s Grace, I guess. And everyone at Grace’s party. And then there's your Father Masson from St. Joe’s.”

  Steve smiled again, but I put the priest’s name on the list anyhow.

  “I’ll bet you anything Denise told her reporter about us.”

  “Denise has a reporter?”

  “Yes, Mark Paulson. She’s the mole McNeely’s really after. I met her today for nachos, and she’s worrying me.” I told Steve about Denise’s rather zealous desire to duke it out with McNeely about freedom of the press. I also assured him that I hadn’t told her any “inside” information about the ­investigation, including the nasty phone calls I’d received.

  “The last thing I want is to see it in the paper, and I just can’t trust Denise not to spill it all to Mark. She is really hung up on him.”

  “You sound as if being hung up on someone is a bad thing.” Steve smiled, stroking my knee. I blushed.

  “You just don’t know Denise. She’s usually so contemptuous of guys who fall for her looks.”

  “Maybe it’s her brains he’s after.”

  “Hmm.” I thought back to my one encounter with Paulson. He hadn’t struck me as much of an intellectual, but that could be me projecting my image of journalists on him. And my image of journalists was taken from movies like The Front Page, rather than from much first-hand knowledge.

  I had one friend who worked for a newspaper, and she was well nigh bristling with integrity, so maybe I should be giving Paulson another chance. I thought that maybe what really burned me about Mark Paulson was t
hat because of him I’d lost an access to confiding my own woes to Denise. Or maybe I was just jealous he was taking all her time.

  I looked at the list. “Jane Campbell and the woman at the Student Help office, I suppose.”

  “Put them down, but I’m not sure if they would clue into the fact we’re seeing each other from that visit.”

  It was tough to try to visualize who might know about aspects of my personal life. When it came down to it, any one of my students might have seen us together. Or someone might have seen us at a restaurant or a movie and known Steve was a cop from his questioning around campus. It ­didn’t have to be someone I actually knew, either. Although it made my skin crawl to think an anonymous jerk was watching my movements, in a way it felt better than thinking it was someone close enough to know about my private life.

  “I told McNeely I was seeing a member of the police force,” I suddenly remembered. It gave me satisfaction to write his name down on my suspect list, not that I really considered any of the names we’d culled satisfactory suspects.

  Steve was curious, so I told him about McNeely’s raking me over the coals for the leak to the press. Steve was incredulous that the man thought he could keep wraps on the events that had occurred. Telling him made me think of someone else that might just know more about me than I wanted him to.

  “Rod Devlin might have seen us together. He came to the House that day you were there.” I tapped my pen on the pad resting on my knee. I was seeing Devlin walking into the Varscona Hotel again in my mind, wondering why it was he was still down here when his boys were up in Fort McMurray mourning their mother’s death. Of course, that was me extrapolating. They might have been angry with her leaving earlier, so angry that her death was just another departure, not something to mourn as much as rail against.

  What was Devlin doing here anyhow? How closely were the police monitoring him? He had seemed a sad and lonely man to me, someone to feel sorry for, but I’d heard of sad and lonely men opening fire on entire fast-food restaurants before.

  Steve brought me back to the matter at hand. He took the list from me, and turned it so that he could read it in the conventional way. After a minute, he reached out a hand for my pencil. I put it into his palm the way nurses hand scalpels to surgeons. He began to notate the list. Finally, he looked up.

  “Aside from the useful inclusions of ‘All U of A students’ and ‘All U of A faculty’, there are a few people here that Karen and Kevin might want to look at.”

  “Let’s see.”

  I took the list back from him. He had started by putting checks and exes by names, and then finished off by circling several names. A couple of them I could understand, but some of the others surprised me.

  “Grace? Denise? Do you really think they’d pull anti-­feminist stuff?”

  “We can’t assume that all the events are the acts of the same person, and you have to look beyond obvious motivations sometimes.”

  “Well, I can see Rod Devlin, but McNeely? Not that I wouldn’t mind him getting a taste of his own medicine, but I really can’t see him ransacking my office.”

  “Why not?”

  I paused, unable for a moment to explain. “Because books got hurt.”

  Steve’s amazing eyebrows shot up again, so I rushed to try to explain my seemingly stupid answer.

  “Whatever he is, he’s an English prof. You don’t get into this business without a deep-seated respect for the written word. There is no way I could see him pouring coffee on Shakespeare, no matter how tired the volume looked.” I ­giggled, at my own unintended joke. “That goes the same for Denise and Grace, and Leo, for god sakes. Anyway, they’re my friends, they wouldn’t do anything to harm me.”

  “Technically, those phone messages are warnings. Friends warn friends away from perceived danger.”

  “Are you sure old Father Masson there wasn’t a Jesuit? You argue too well.” I was getting a little steamed with Steve. “And why didn’t you circle Mark Paulson? Or consider it could be some kid in one of my classes?”

  “Have you ever noticed one of your students when we’ve been together?” Steve asked patiently, in that smarmy interview tone I’m sure he took with the recently traumatized.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean a thing. One of them could have seen us from a distance. Or whoever it is could be stalking me.” I tossed the list down on the floor. “I don’t think this is such a useful exercise. It excludes too many variables. If you set your detectives sniffing after my friends, they may blinker themselves to another possibility.”

  “Who worries you most on that list?”

  “Rod Devlin, of course.” I spoke without hesitation.

  “Why?”

  “Because he was in the House. Because he’s the husband of the murder victim. Because I don’t know what makes him tick. Because he’s big and big guys frighten me.”

  “Because you don’t know him.”

  “Well, of course! Who wants to think that someone they know and maybe like wants to harm them? Anyhow, what about Paulson? I’m sure he overheard us talking about the journal. He could have headed right over and broken into my office.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He didn’t head right over, even though he knew you weren’t there.”

  Steve had a point, but I didn’t want to let Paulson off the hook. “So he went home and planned first. So what?”

  Steve took my hand, and forced me to look him eye to eye. “Whose name on that list bothers you the most? I mean which name do you most not want to see there?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “You mean Leo, don’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Denise said you were interrogating him at the party.”

  “Did she?”

  “Were you?”

  Steve tilted his head, like a puppy or a kid who has broken a window with his baseball. “We were talking. I couldn’t be interrogating him. It’s not my case.”

  I looked at him and wondered how well I actually knew this man who could probably draw an accurate map of every freckle on my body. Although I usually considered myself a pretty good judge of character, I’d been known to make mistakes before, especially when the pheromones kicked in.

  “Okay, tell me, why should Leo be considered a suspect?”

  “Well, we’re looking for someone who has an antipathy to women.”

  “And Leo fits the bill because he’s gay? That’s ridiculous! Just because he doesn’t want to bed them doesn’t make him a misogynist. Most of Leo’s pals are female.”

  “I just think you should keep an open mind about this, Randy. Your life might depend on it.”

  He was serious. Thoughts of Gwen leapt into my mind and I shivered.

  “Okay, if it makes you happy they can call on Leo and Denise. But let them know that these guys are my friends, will you?”

  “Who knows, maybe they’ve let it slip to someone you don’t know about,” Steve didn’t sound too convincing.

  Changing the subject, I told him about my appointment to see Jane. He seemed pleased by the news, but a little ­distracted.

  “Do you still have the instruction book for your answering machine?” he asked, which led me to believe it was not my subtle vanilla-laced scent that had set his mind wandering.

  “Sure, I guess so. You want to see it now?” So much for ­perfume. I hoisted myself up and went to rummage in the bottom drawer of my desk. I returned triumphant and handed him the manual.

  Steve flipped through, then clicked his tongue as he found what he’d apparently been looking for.

  “Look, Randy. It’s possible to tape all your calls, even those you answer, without your caller being aware of it. All you do is press this button after you’ve picked up the phone.”

  I acknowledged that pushing a button would probably be better than having the police tap my phone line, although Steve
warned me not to rule out the possibility.

  “It’ll be up to Kevin and Karen how they want to play it, but this guy is probably calling from a public phone booth. That’s the great benefit of detective shows on TV; everyone’s now too educated to leave prints or talk from their own phones.”

  “Or lick envelopes, or leave fibers in their car trunks,” I added. “How do you guys ever catch up with the bad guys anymore?”

  Steve winced, and I was sorry I’d joked. After all, Gwen’s murderer was still at large.

  “Luckily,” he said, “most of the bad guys are too stupid to read, and all the really good plots are in books.”

  We ended up reminiscing about truly great mystery and thriller plots. I was voting for Three Days of the Condor, but Steve made a good case for Wait Until Dark. Talking about movies made us both realize that it was almost time for the eleven o’clock showing at the Garneau Theatre around the corner, so we bundled up and headed out, joking about overdosing on popcorn.

  When we got back from a thoroughly forgettable and highly enjoyable two hours, I’d almost forgotten the phone call. That is, until we both saw the red light winking at us on the answering machine.

  40

  MAYBE IT’S MY MOTHER,” I SAID WEAKLY, knowing full well she wouldn't call after eleven at night. Not unless it was an emergency. My stomach knotted. Maybe it was an emergency. I rushed to the machine with a burst of adrenaline.

  With Steve right behind me, I punched the red blinking button. The machine whirred, and Denise’s voice came on. I was so relieved it wasn’t a family crisis or the nasty caller that it took a minute for her message to sink in. Steve’s grip on my shoulders brought me back in focus.

  “Randy.” Denise’s voice sounded strained and rushed. “I’ve just heard from Grace. Campus Security called her. There’s been a fire at her office, and they want her over there. I’m meeting her there. Meet us at the Humanities Building if you get home to hear this. It’s twelve-forty-five. Where are you?” Her last words sounded angry, but I assumed that she was just venting frustration.