Fit to Die (29 page)

I typed in “unclaimed bank balance account canada” and got it on the very first citation:

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

…an unclaimed balance back from the Bank of Canada? …

ucbs
www.bank-banque-canada.ca/faq_english.htm

The Unclaimed Bank Accounts page was straightforward. All you had to do was type in the name, and it returned:

Unclaimed Balance

Information Name: DESROCHERS, LEONIE

Originating Bank: NATIONAL TRUST, 1535, RUE STE-CATHERINE, MONTREAL, QC, H3N 040

To my way of thinking, the only way a woman who taped over the flashing 12:00 of her VCR would know about a web page for unclaimed bank balances was if someone told her. And my guess was, that someone was Frank. So when he'd walked in on me, what he'd been after was evidence that he'd told her—the Bank of Canada's phone number, or claim
forms—something showing that she'd begun procedures to claim her money. Because he had killed her, and the way to avoid another jail sentence was to remove any evidence of the obvious motive.

And he was going to come back—real soon, if he hadn't already—to do a more thorough search, which meant somebody should be watching the place.

•  •  •

“I found the money,” I told Bernie over Mrs. D.'s phone.

He put me on hold while he told someone to check it out. I used the time to finish wiping fingerprint dust off the coffee table. I'd been cleaning for an hour; it was something to do while waiting for him to call me back.

“What if he does know about it?” Bernie finally said. “He can't inherit it anyway.”

“But he doesn't know that,” I argued. “That's what he's been looking for: her will. He tells her about the money, asks for it, she says no and he kills her.”

“But Annie, if she found out about it from him, when'd she have time to write the will?”

I look forward to the day Bernie can follow my thinking without my having to lay it before him step by step. “He sees her some time before Tuesday night, because Tuesday night's when she gave me the envelope. He'd found out about the money and asks her for it. She says, ‘I'll think about it,' or something. She writes the will, gives it to me. He comes back Wednesday night, she says no, he gets mad--” I heard a key in the front door. “He's here,” I whispered, hanging up and grabbing one of Mrs. D.'s novels to look like I was reading.

“Hello,” I beamed when Frank walked in.

“You move in or something?”

“Just keeping Bijou company.” The phone started ringing. “Somebody has to look after him.”

His eyes narrowed, darting from me to the phone and back again. “I told you, I got no place to put a bird.”

“Pity,” I said, shriller than you should say a word like that, but the phone was pretty loud, “your mother really loved him.”

We stared at each other a moment, waiting for the next ring, but it didn't come. “Look,” he said, “I got stuff to do here.”

“I understand,” I said, standing up. His face took on a self-satisfied look, like a teacher who'd just ordered a rotten kid to do something, and the kid obeys. He even stepped aside to clear my path to the door, so he had to turn around to follow me when I headed for the kitchen.

He found me rinsing the dustcloth. “Leave it,” he said. “You can go now.”

“Thanks, but I'd like to finish cleaning up.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“Yes, I do. I have to do it because I cared about your mother, and she cared about her things.”

“Well, they're my things now, so you can go.” “Are you sure?”

He stood there for at least half a minute before he finally gave me one piss-poor imitation of a skeptical laugh, and said, “She leave a will or something?”

“As a matter of fact, she did.” I brushed by him as I strolled back to the living room.

“No, she didn't,” he insisted, following so hot on my heels that he almost bumped into me when I stopped.

“Is that what you've been looking for?” I asked, turning to face him. “Because you won't find it here.”

“Where then.” More of an order than a question.

“Safe and sound.” I started to head for the wing chair, but he snatched my arm.

“Is this what happened on Wednesday? Did she refuse to give you the money, and you got angry and grabbed her?” He looked worried but didn't let go. “And then maybe she said something to you, and you got even madder, and pushed her too hard? Is that what happened?”

“You're crazy.” But he let go of me.

My arm hurt like hell, but I refused to rub it as I moved away from him. “You pushed her too hard and she fell, that's all. An accident.” If there was any justice, manslaughter.

“I wasn't even here.”

“They found your fingerprints. You didn't wipe them all away.” I could practically see the smoke coming out his ears as his mental machinery ground. “How could your fingerprints get into this apartment when you haven't seen your mother in twenty years?”

His lips started to twitch, and he blinked in what I mistook for confusion. Then he lunged.

He moved about as fast as he thought. Aiming for my neck, he caught my shoulder, knocking me onto the sofa while he continued on momentum, right into Bijou's cage. They both hit the floor at the same time, and I caught a glimpse of him, wet and chaffy, wiping birdseed and gravel from his eyes as I ran for the door.

Which whacked me right on the side of the head.

•  •  •

I wish I could have seen it, Bernie kicking the door in, gun in two hands yelling “Freeze!” like you see on TV. But I was out cold.

It took three days for the headache to clear. Bernie called on the first to ask how I was. I don't remember what I answered, but it took him two more days to call back.

“You wouldn't think he had the brains to find something like that,” he said in reference to the Bank of Canada web page.

Six-year-old kids can find web pages, but like my thought processes, I considered it wiser not to disabuse Bernie. Instead I asked if Frank's confession had been hard to come by.

“No,” he replied, sounding relieved I was willing to chat. “He believed your lie about the fingerprints. We never told him different.”

Frank DesRochers had called his mother several times from Hamilton, after years of no communication. Then he'd driven to Ottawa to persuade her to claim the money and give it to him—it went pretty much as I'd predicted. After he'd killed her, he'd returned to Hamilton so he could be home to receive the sad news of his mother's death.

“He said he wanted to start his own business.” Bernie's tone told me how much he believed him. “Probably drugs, but he needed a stake. Fifty-four thousand would have done it.”

I was thinking how fifty-four thousand isn't enough money to turn somebody's life around, let alone end it, when Bernie added, “What I don't understand is, how could you forget about that much money?”

“It probably wasn't that much when she originally banked it.” I'd already done some calculating. “Don't forget, it was earning interest in the good old days of double-digit inflation. It doesn't take long at eighteen per cent. And she may have assumed it was still sitting there.”

We discussed how well Bijou was settling into his new home; to my undying gratitude, one of Bernie's subordinates had taken him. Then he asked, “How're you feeling?”

“A lot better. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”

He made a
pfff noise.
“You scared the shit out of me, not answering. It was stupid, confronting him like that. Especially when you think a guy's a killer.”

“You mean my not answering the phone persuaded you he was a killer?”

“You always answer by the second ring,” he said defensively.

“Anyway, he's not a murderer—not technically, just a manslaughterer.”

“Don't sound so disappointed. What made you so sure she didn't just fall, anyway?”

I'd never been sure, I'd just disliked Bernie's version of her death. “She was my friend,” I said, because it was an easy answer.

Bernie said he understood.

Author's note: All the web pages in this work of fiction are real. Because the web changes by the minute, your search on Google may return different results.

MELANIE FOGEL
is the editor of the Ellis Award-winning
Storyteller, Canada's Short Story Magazine.
Her own writing has appeared in publications as diverse as
The Canadian Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff
and the
Ottawa Citizen.
She is also the author of two how-to books for writers.

ROSE DESHAW

All the time I was washing pots in the prison at Kingston Pen, I was playing golf in my head. Tournament level shots on perfect greens. Birds chirping in a cloudless blue sky and everything effortless, the way it is in those golf videos where the pros make it look so easy.

I had a computerized golf game in my cell. Through that small, barred window I watched the weather grow warmer and made my plans. The morning after my release, I would arise with dew on my spikes, sure-grip gloves on my hands and the name of Mike Weir, that overcomer of setbacks, on my lips. I would play the perfect game. The vision grew as my parole came closer.

Unfortunately, as the loot I'd stashed had been recovered, I would only be able to afford the municipal course. It's a leftover space, nine holes amid the granite of the Canadian Shield, steep outcroppings of rock over which balls go flying like lovers over leaps. But having caddied it as a kid, I knew every inch by heart.

When that old prison gate finally slammed behind me, I gazed in the direction of the course like a dog from the pound looking towards home.

“Remember, Simmonds,” the guard warned, “be careful.
Get your parole revoked, and you'll be back in here serving the rest of the sentence.”

Return to prison darkness when the fairways were greening and the aroma of golfer's sweat hung pungent on the breeze? It wouldn't happen. My downfall has always been my bad temper and hanging with the wrong crowd. During the time inside I had aced the Anger Management course, remaining unprovoked when Squint Hogan swiped the Nerf ball and bed slat I used to practice my swing and when Gooseguts Malloy ratted to the warden about the holes I'd scooped out in the yard to make a putting green. On the outside I would be living with my father, as gentle a golf partner as you could wish for.

The first tiny crack in my plan appeared when Dad asked me to postpone the solitary first game to fill out a foursome with a man he knew and his nephew. “This fellow, Fairbanks, is supposed to be a real pro,” he said. “It would be pretty difficult to get another player at such short notice.”

Impossible would've been more like it. It didn't take me long to discover that nobody in his right mind ever played with Fairbanks twice.

•  •  •

We were a sober little foursome, making our way to the second tee. Fairbanks, his nephew, Fat Freddie, my father and I. Fairbanks hadn't shut up since we started. “If nature intended women to play golf, they'd be built differently. Longer arms, bigger biceps and more stable personalities,” Fairbanks commented. I would have liked to have Martha Nause, the recent Du Maurier champ, hear that or give the great Marlene Stewart Streit five minutes with the man after those cracks about female players. But I decided he was just an aging
buffoon, the dream customer for all those tacky golf gimmicks sold in joke stores: plastic score counters, golfer's crying towels, tee caddies and club covers with cute little golf sayings on them.

As if to provide an object lesson, feminine laughter drifted towards us. Four women in two golf carts were teeing off at the first hole. I could see a flash of their pink and yellow clothing through the trees.

“It's bad enough playing a municipal course peopled with blue-collar workers and pensioners,” Fairbanks reiterated. “But I have always drawn the line at women.”

My pensioner father flinched at Fairbanks's list of those imposing their unwanted selves on the world of golf. But who cared? I had robbed five banks in order to afford the leisure to golf at all. It was love at first swing when the game first caught my eye across a crowded green. Everything about it feeds my passion, including the fact that golf started in Canada fifteen years before the States. My only complaint about the game is attitudes you sometimes run into: attempts to reserve it for an upper class elite, or, as in Fairbanks's case, for men only as well.

Meanwhile, the man hadn't stopped talking. But for lack of an “off” switch, his nattering was like one of those canned lectures you stick in your ear at museums and galleries. “Since women can't be considered serious players,” he was saying, “it behooves management to restrict their presence at peak times, especially weekends and holidays.”

I moved to the tee and prepared to hit. “Wait,” he held up a hand to stop me just as I began my swing. “I've noticed you've been topping the ball. Try moving up and shift your weight toward your heels.” Following that advice, I sliced neatly into a sand trap about seventy-five yards to the left.

My blissful vision of the perfect game blipped out like a
soap bubble, and a red haze intruded between me and the rest of the world. An early warning sign of anger. Use the techniques I learned inside, I told myself. Positive self-talk. You can do it. Deep breaths. Remember to have a sense of humour…