Murder on Location (11 page)

“Mrs. Mason, I'm just a peeper. I'm good at tracing people like you for their husbands. I do divorce work when I can get it. I work for a couple of lawyers when I can, I do all kinds of things, but, when I can help it, I stay
clear of murder. The cops are a hard act to follow. They know their business.”

“Poor David. Why would anyone want to kill him?”

“Actors are funny people.”

“David wasn't an actor. Not a
real
actor, I mean. Sure, he was a wonderful Mitch in
Streetcar
, and he could read well, but he could do it because he didn't take it all that seriously. Not like me. I'd kill for a part. “She bit her lip. “Well, almost.” She took a breath and tried to be helpful. “David was more interested in writing, really. He's written some wonderful TV scripts and plays. I suppose now, nobody will ever produce them.”

“Then why did you two take off together?”

“We both hoped to get bits. For the experience, you know.”

“And for ‘the experience' you broke up your marriage? That's pretty hard to swallow, Mrs. Mason.”

“Call me Billie. Everybody calls me Billie.”

“Well?”

“Well, it was a long time coming. I could have taken off a year ago, but I stayed. I tried to make it work.”

“Maybe you didn't like you husband's business friends from Atlantic City? Maybe that Piccadilly bunch made for a crowded bed.”

“Where did you hear …? What has that got to do with this? I didn't leave because of them.”

“Let's not forget poor David. You say he wrote plays for television. Did he show them to anybody?”

“I guess he showed them to Monty Blair. Yes, as a matter of fact, Monty was quite excited about some of them. He thought David had real talent and tried to get him launched. I met Monty when I was in high school. He presented a best actress award to me for Portia in
The Merchant
. He took an interest in me too, until his sister put an end to it. She was always jumping to the right conclusion where Monty was concerned.”

I tried to picture Monty Blair. For an instant I could hear his languid drawl as he ordered up more amber and fewer magenta lights on stage. Grand and portly he was standing halfway back in the empty auditorium of the Grantham Collegiate. That was back in Grade Nine and my introduction to both theatre and Monty Blair. His death at the end of the seventies robbed Grantham of its greatest cultural resource and most memorable character with one snip of the shears. I tried to fade the lights on that and get back to business.

“David told me he'd been working. Would that have meant writing?”

“I guess. There haven't been any scenes with bits yet, just extras.”

“Can you think of any reason why his writing could have got him into trouble?”

“Of course not. He's never had anything produced, and he's only published theatre reviews in the
Beacon
.”

“What about your husband's pals, the ones who'd like to grind your bones to make their bread.”

“They're a pain for me, not for David. He doesn't know anything about all that. It's all over anyway.”

“You say it's over. It's what
they
say that matters. What if they killed David? Try to give that some thought.”

“Oh, my God! I didn't think! They wouldn't! Oh, poor David! Do you really think the did it, Mr. Cooperman?”

I can't remember very much about the rest of that conversation with Billie. My imagination kept over-acting. I saw myself trussed up like a Christmas turkey with a dead canary in my mouth. I remember that for a long time we just sat looking at each other. She was crying. The coffee was cold and the room seemed empty. I was holding her hand tightly. Her nose and knuckles were pink, like she was shaking off frostbite. I got her to agree to meet me at noon the next day, Friday, in the same place. I promised that for the time being I would leave her husband out of it. Then I remembered my 6:30 appointment in Grantham with the very man I was double-crossing. I would be late—but Lowell Mason wasn't holding my hand.

NINE

I crossed the parking lot to collect my car. Moving from hotel to hotel, it was easy to forget it was January out there, where the weather was making a pitch to be noticed. I had the motor going, and was about to start on the road to Grantham, when I saw that the headlights fell on the cracked windshield of David Hayes' Jaguar, and, more important, on someone sitting behind it. I turned off the key, listened to the disappointed sound of the motor dying, then went to investigate.

In spite of her head-hugging hat and miles of silken scarves, I recognized Miranda Pride's head resting on the steering wheel. For a second I got that nasty sensation in my stomach, but it went away when I saw her shoulder heave in a sob. She raised her head and blew her nose into a balled handkerchief. She tilted her glasses up to her forehead when she saw me looking through the window at her, but put them back in place to hide the red eyes and stained face.

“Oh, it's you,” she mimed through the glass, leaning across to unlock the door on the passenger side. I walked around the car and got in. I stared at Miranda and she stared at the crack in the windshield. “I wasn't going
anyplace. I just wanted to get away for a few minutes. The police want to talk to me about David. I don't think I can do it. Usually, I'm my own favourite subject, but … Have you got a cigarette?” I dragged out my pack of Player's and she took one without using her eyes. I had matches and did the honours. Her face, in the flickering flame, seemed to shimmer. The shadow of her nose darkened her cheek and showed off the good bones beneath that sculptured well-known face. She held her head like a monarch on her way to the scaffold, proud and contemptuous. I burned my thumb, and she became a silhouette lit only by the mercury lamps of the parking lot. Her coat had slipped off her shoulders, but she didn't seem to feel the cold.

“He was so young,” she said. “It's a dirty trick.” Her voice was hoarse and husky, and she looked straight through the glass at nothing. “We took a walk by the falls. I only met him a little over a week ago. I thought about him at a terribly sad party in New York. You know parties that go brittle and break? It was that kind of party, and all I could think of was David here by the falls. We walked there again when I got back. The trees, even the twigs, were encrusted with ice. He was enchanted. I remember all the things he said. We talked all night and I remember it all. That's the way I am when I'm with a person. I am there one hundred per cent. Oh, Mr. Cooperman, why? Why?” I didn't say anything. We just sat and finished our cigarettes. It was like it had been with Billie, only with less talking. She seemed fragile, as
though anything I might say would only hurt her. After a few minutes, she shivered, pulled her coat around her and looked at me closely for the first time. “I was in love with David,” she said. “Funny, isn't it? I loved him and I'm not even sure he liked me. Why do I never come out even?” She got out of the Jaguar and walked through the back entrance of the hotel without looking back.

This time I didn't like the looks of Lowell Mason. I didn't like the way he kept me waiting, staring at a bunch of bad photographs of over-priced bungalows, I didn't like his taste in office furniture, which ran to cigarette burns on blond wood finish, and, when he was finally sitting across from me, perspiring and ingratiating, I didn't like the wiry curl in his hair. He may have been my only client, but I would have traded him in for a little tidy legal work.

“Well, then, Mr. Cooperman, how are we getting along?”

“I told you we were up to our armpits in murder. That's not getting along at all. I have to talk to Staff-Sergeant Savas by Friday noon, so we haven't much time to shoot the breeze. You didn't know Hayes, you said. Has anything come back to you since we talked?”

“Sorry. I may have met the fellow after a performance. I went to the play and to the cast party. But, honestly, I don't know where he fits. Terrible thing. I mean, a thing like this.”

“Yeah, I know. It cut Billie up pretty bad when I talked to her this afternoon too.”

“You saw her? Where? How?” His eyes flashed an angry warning. “Why didn't you let me know?”

“Take it easy. I've got some answers for you. I saw her in the Falls at the Colonel John this afternoon just after I talked to you. She's all right. Nobody's murdered her. She just isn't ready to come home yet. From the way she's talking, she doesn't want to come home at all. She's on the brink of an acting career that she thinks is going somewhere. There's a lot of hot air down at the Falls this week, a lot of promises are being made and most of them will be broken. The movie company's here for two more weeks. I'd say her acting career will be over in fourteen days. I think she's latched on to somebody who said he could do her some good. I'm sorry. But that's the way it looks to me.”

“I see.” His lips made a prissy straight line. “Thanks for being direct. Any idea?”

“Not even the bad breath of an idea. Tell me: you didn't look very relieved when I told you she hadn't been killed. Is that my imagination?”

“Of course I'm relieved. What do you think?”

“I think you're gelding your information, Mr. Mason. I can't get full results with partial facts. I may be a genius sometimes, but a magician I'm not. Tell me about it. Tell me.”

“If I could. Ha! Oh if I could tell you half of it.”

“I know it has to do with the mob. You can level with me. That's what you're paying me for.”

“Where did you find out about the … what do you think you know?”

“A CBC film unit doing a film on organized crime did an interview with Billie. They claimed to be interested in her acting, but that was just a come-on. What could she have told them? Come on, Mason. Open up.” Mason's face went white around the nostrils and pink at the cheekbones. I read that as agitation, although he just sat there with his hands neatly folded in front of him. He started a couple of sentences but broke them off after a few words. They didn't have much life in them so he let them die. He got up and walked across to a cupboard, looking back at me as he went.

“You take a drink, Mr. Cooperman?” He pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club and added a few ice cubes from a half-melted tray that had been out of the pint-sized fridge for about half an hour.

“I'll have a short one. With water,” I said. He did the pouring, the mixing and, for the next couple of minutes, the drinking. I tried to see where the cracks were.

“The CBC, you say?” was all he said. Cool, I thought, very cool.

“Yeah. Some sort of special unit. I've talked to the boss. He told me about all the fun you're having.”

“There's nothing I can tell you, Cooperman. I've said all I can say.”

“You haven't said a word. Okay, let me do some guessing. You've got some partners you don't talk about. People who don't want their names in the paper. They're publicity shy, but they're bright and brassy in the money department. They have sweetened the business for you.

Let you in on a few good things. Told you when to bet and when to fold. Just as long as a little of your money mixes in with theirs, they're happy. Silent partners. Only they haven't been so quiet since Billie left home. They've noticed. They've asked questions. They don't like it. They want things to go back the way the were: you and Billie keeping house and your mouths shut. They don't know about that CBC interview?”

“God, no!”

“All right. So you brought me in to get her back just to make them happy. They're calling the tune. Do they know about me?”

“Of course not.”

“You're a terrible liar, Mason. Who did you tell? I've got to know that much. Did you tell Pritchett?” He was jiggling the ice so noticeably he put his other hand over the top of the glass. He was looking at everything in the office but me. “Easy stages, now. First, you told them that Billie went away. Did they buy that in the beginning?”

“Yes, to start with. Then she was seen. In the Falls. I don't know who saw her. But they were asking again. I told them that it had to do with her theatrical ambitions.
They didn't like that. The wanted her with me, where they could keep an eye on her.”

“Where they could watch the pair of you. Just a small laundry. When they got itchy, you threw them a bone. Me. You had to show that you were moving heaven and earth to get her back.”

Now Mason flared. But it was all show. He was like an inflated paper bag, puffed up with anger, just before you burst it. I said nothing, until he wore himself out.

“Well, what would you have done in my place?” he finally said.

“You don't pour a strong enough drink for me to answer that one.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to try to do what you're paying me to do. She's a tough woman, Mason, and she'll do all right on her own. So whether she comes back or not depends a lot on you.” I put down my glass on a stained, gritty windowsill and got up to go.