The Arx (14 page)

“Detective,” Frank corrected her. “Detective Frank Langer. I called earlier.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “About Larry.”

She pressed a button again. “A Detective Langer to see you.”

“Send him in,” crackled a voice at the other end.

The girl nodded towards a hallway on Frank’s right. “First door on the left.”

Rawlings’ office was a disaster, his desktop obscured by stacks of paper, the drawers of the filing cabinets blocked half open by bulging folders stuffed into them.

Rawlings appeared to be in his fifties. His gray hair was mostly gone on top. He wore what was left of a suit – that is, the pants, a dress shirt, and tie loosened so it hung ludicrously below his unbuttoned shirt collar.

“Thanks for seeing me,” Frank said, shaking Rawlings’ hand.

“Have a seat,” Rawlings said, taking a seat himself behind his desk. “So – you wanted to know about Lawrence Retigo.”

“That’s right,” Frank said.

“You know, I talked to the cops already.”

Frank tensed. “Yeah, I’m aware of that.” He winged it. “Some new leads have come up that might have a bearing on the case.”

Frank leaned forward with his elbows on Rawlings’ desk. “We’ve come across information indicating that Lawrence Retigo’s death may not have been an accident.”

Rawlings sat up straight in his chair and his eyes opened wide. “What the hell would make you think that?”

“I’m not at liberty to reveal anything at this point,” Frank said. “I’d just like to know if Retigo was working on anything that might have gotten him killed.”

Rawlings threw back his head and laughed. “Lawrence Retigo?” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be insensitive. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Larry wasn’t exactly our star reporter. He covered stories like the woman with a potato chip shaped like Elvis’s profile, or the guy who could eat a hundred hot-dogs in one sitting.”

“He was never given any bigger assignments?”

Rawlings shook his head. “He was always a bit of an oddball. But he really started to go strange a couple of months ago – even for him. Losing it, you know? I was actually on the verge of letting him go. I kept him on mostly out of sympathy, hoping maybe he’d get his act together. Well, now it’s out of my hands.”

“Losing it how?”

“He jumped at the slightest sound. Kept the blinds beside his desk shut tight all the time. More than once I saw him peeking through the slats, like he was looking for somebody. Sometimes he’d take off in the middle of the day and not say where he was going.”

“There wasn’t anything he was working on that stands out – that could have made him a target?”

Rawlings shrugged. “Lately he was always hunkered down working at something, even when I hadn’t assigned him any stories. Larry always took his job pretty seriously. You’d think he was covering the moon landing instead of a cat stuck in a tree. But lately he got real serious – way worse than before. I asked him a couple of times what was going on, but he wouldn’t say.

“Anyway, you never know when some harebrained idea might turn out to be something. I didn’t see any harm in it – maybe I was wrong.”

“Anybody around the office he might have confided in?”

“He wasn’t tight with anybody here, especially lately. Everybody avoided him like the plague. He was too out there…”

“What about friends, or girlfriends?”

“I think he had a sort of on-again, off-again relationship with some girl named Grace. I don’t think it was all that serious. I never met her, but I might still have her name and address somewhere. He gave her as his next of kin – how pathetic is that? I can find it for you if you want.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Rawlings fought to pry open one of the drawers of the filing cabinet, hauling out sheaves of paper in the process and tossing them on top of the already large stack on his desk. Frank smiled, trying to imagine the man’s filing system.

With surprising speed, Rawlings snapped out a sheet of paper and copied something from it to a post-it note. He handed the note to Frank. “I don’t know how current this is – she might not still be there. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got.”

“Great,” Frank said. He rose from his chair, stuffed the note into his wallet, and turned to leave.

“That’s it?” Rawlings said.

Frank nodded. “For now.”

“By the way,” Rawlings said as Frank reached the door. “Aren’t you guys supposed to show your badges before you interview somebody?”

Frank’s throat tightened as he looked Rawlings in the eye. “You want to see my badge?” he said. He made as if to reach into his jacket pocket. There were a few seconds of strained silence.

“N…No,” Rawlings finally spoke. “I guess that won’t be necessary.”

Detective Frank Langer’s approach to an investigation was a lot like that of an artist to his work of art. Like a painter facing an empty canvas, Frank started with nothing, with zero knowledge about the new case. As the painter added brush-strokes until the finished work matched the image in his imagination, Frank pieced together bits of information until they coalesced into something real.

But while an artist imposed his own vision on the medium in which he worked, it was Frank’s job to allow the information he’d gathered to drive the investigation, to impose some form upon his mind. He maintained a holistic, unbiased impression that transformed itself like a Rubik’s cube when an important piece of the puzzle surfaced.

And while the artist typically defined the largest areas of a piece at the beginning, gradually refining the image into greater detail, in Frank’s work tiny details that weren’t in themselves important, but lent colour to the investigation, drifted in continuously, while profound revelations that completely altered the direction of the case could come at any time.

Frank’s gut told him that one of those revelations had fallen in his lap when he took his assailant’s wallet. He opened his notebook and re-read Retigo’s address on Newbury Place, in a rundown section of the West End. He didn’t really need to check the address. As it happened, he’d parked next to Retigo’s building several times before.

Lawrence Retigo lived across the street from Catherine Lesko.

On the phone, Grace Hatcher had sounded nervous and suspicious, but when Frank told her that some questions had been raised about Retigo’s death, she reluctantly agreed to meet with him. She insisted on someplace public. They settled on a Blenz on Robson Street.

Frank got there early and staked out a quiet table in the corner. The place wasn’t busy; they weren’t likely to be disturbed.

“I’m a little overweight,” she’d admitted as she gave a description so he’d recognize her.

That’s an understatement
, he thought when she walked in and introduced herself. Her appearance was deeply at odds with her name. She wasn’t a very attractive girl – obese, with frizzy black hair like steel wool and freckles that would look cute on some girls but for some reason didn’t on her.

She wore a tank top and skin-tight Capri pants that emphasized her bulges in all the wrong places. Conspicuous on her right wrist was a charm bracelet with a jumbled mass of figures that jingled whenever she moved her arm.

After his experience with Rawlings, Frank didn’t want to take any chances. He brought the fake but realistic-looking police badge he’d gotten as a gag gift at one of the parties at the squad. He was glad he did; she asked to see his badge first thing and his quick flash of the fake was enough to convince her.

Frank ordered her a coffee and a blueberry muffin and they sat down to chat.

“You look kind of beaten up for a cop,” she said as she dumped three packets of sugar into her coffee.

Frank tensed. He decided to take the offensive. “We’re not here to talk about me. We can have this conversation down at the station if you want.”

A panicked expression swept across her face.

She’s got something to hide,
Frank thought. G
ood.

“Relax,” he said. “I don’t care what you’re into. I just want to know about Lawrence Retigo.”

She sat back in her chair.

“Larry and I were never that close,” she said, her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. “He was just somebody to hang out with.”

“How often did you see him?”

“We spent a lot of time together when we first met.” She smiled. “He was fun then, always laughing and making jokes. We had some laughs.”

“There was nothing strange about him?”

“Strange how?”

“You tell me.”

“Well, I was kind of creeped-out by some of his ‘preferences’ in bed. I won’t go into detail – let’s just say there was lots of rope and plastic sheeting involved. I never dreamed I’d be going to Home Depot for marital aids.”

Her bracelet jingled as she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I could handle that, but a few months ago things changed.”

“Changed?” Frank said.

She took a big bite out of her muffin. “He turned into some kind of paranoid dick-wad. Said he was onto some big story that would make us both rich, but he’d never tell me what it was. I started seeing him less and less, and when I did he wasn’t the same guy from before. It was like he wasn’t there – like he was always someplace else.

“He’d jump at the slightest noise. He’d stare at people on the street. He kept saying we were being tailed. He’d go through these weird maneuvers in and out of back doors and down alleyways, so nobody could follow.”

“Did you ever see anybody?”

She shook her head. “It was like something horrible was chasing him, but if it was there I never saw it. I kept asking what was going on but he said if I knew, my life would be in danger. I told him he should give up on the story – that it was affecting his mind, but he said it was too late – he was in too deep. One of my girlfriends told me she thought he was crazy. I started thinking maybe she was right.”

“He ever talk about a woman who lived on his street?”

“Woman?”

“A woman living in the apartment building across the street from him.”

She scrunched up her nose. “What kind of a kink do you think I am? He never talked ‘threesome’ if that’s what you’re implying.”

Frank changed the subject. “When did you see him last?”

“I never saw him for ages, then finally we met two or three weeks ago, but he hardly talked to me. He got freaked out about something and said he had to leave – he’d forgotten something he had to do. Good riddance, I thought by that time.”

“And that was the last time he contacted you?”

“He called me on my cell phone about a week ago. I had it turned off, but he left a message.”

“You still got it?”

She scowled at him. “Don’t you need a warrant or something for that?”

“You’ve been watching too much TV. We can always go downtown…”

She stiffened. “Okay…” She fished through her suitcase-sized purse and pulled out a pink flip-phone.

“There’s nothing bad in it anyway,” she said.

She punched a few of the keys, then handed the phone to Frank. He held it with his chin as he listened to the message and made notes. He handed the phone back to her.

“By the way,” he said, “you got keys to Larry’s apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“I need to take a look around.”

“Can’t you get it from the manager or something?”

Frank swallowed. He could feel the sweat rising under his shirt. “I talked to him already,” he said. “Larry had a special lock installed. We don’t want to have to break down the door.”

She looked like she was about to complain again, but then said. “I guess. He’s dead now, what’s it matter?”

She dug through the voluminous purse for the keys and gave them to Frank, then stood up and slung the purse over her shoulder. “I gotta get ready for work.”

“I’ll get the keys back to you in a few days,” he said as she turned to go.

She headed for the door.

“Hey,” he called after her.

She turned back to face him.

“Do me a favour,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t erase that phone message till I see you again.”

A Secret Revealed

Rebecca would say he was paranoid, but a little voice in Frank’s head told him that, based on what he’d uncovered so far, whoever he was dealing with had to be very rich, very intelligent, very methodical, and probably very dangerous.

He shuddered as he thought about the call he’d gotten from Art Crawford that morning. The investigation of the body at the University had suddenly been curtailed and the death ruled accidental. No medical examiner in their right mind would come to that conclusion.

He approached Retigo’s apartment complex warily, strolling along on the other side of the street, scanning the surrounding buildings.

When he was close enough, he stole a glance at Catherine Lesko’s window. The curtains were almost completely drawn and there was no sign of movement through the tiny gap that remained. He was about to look away when the curtains swayed slightly. His stress level ratcheted up a notch.