Deadly Fall (36 page)

“Stop this,” Cassie said.

The boy whirled. “‘Stop pretending you're so nice. You're greedy and ambitious, like the rest of them.”

Paula looked up at the clock. 7:20
AM
. Vincelli had better arrive soon or they might have Isabelle barging in. Outside the window, pink streaked through a puffy cloud. She returned to the six youths circling the boy. Kendall had heard the commotion from the basement and had come up.

“We ought to teach him a lesson,” someone said.

I don't know who started it. The room was black, except for light from incense and reefer smoke. We raised our guns one by one and closed in on the boy.

“No, no, no.” The boy spun, aiming his gun wildly. He started to cry.

“The big talker's a baby,” someone said.

We moved closer. I bumped Callie's shoulder. A gun blasted. Smoke lit up the boy falling down. Another blast. My arm collapsed. Everything went silent and dark.

Felix had claimed his arm had been injured in a hunting mishap. This must have been the real cause. Paula skimmed to the part where he woke up in his bed. The gay friend was bandaging his arm. Felix fell asleep and resurfaced to find Samantha on a chair next to his bed. She told him the boy had been killed. They had put the body and guns in garbage bags, which they dumped in the Bow River. The boy was a runaway, she said, and wouldn't be missed. The others were removing the living room carpet, which was drenched in blood. Monday, they would varnish the hardwood underneath. The carpet had been crap, anyway. The landlord would find the new floor an improvement.

Pain seared Felix-the-narrator's arm. He argued they should call the cops.

“None of us wants to go to trial or jail,” Samantha said. “That's why we can't take you to hospital. They'd question the bullet in your arm. The only problem will be if it gets infected.”

Paula got up to re-zap her coffee. The roommates managed to dispose of the body without the neighbors noticing. None of the neighbors had made friends with the boy. If they thought about him at all, they would assume he was a newcomer, like Cassie and Ozzy, crashing with the group. The roommates were reasonably sure the boy hadn't been in touch with his family back east. To their knowledge, he had mailed no letters and placed no calls. This was long before e-mail and cell phones. Even if the body washed up, nothing would connect it to the group.

Felix portrayed himself as being against the cover-up. Was that self-white-wash or had that been the truth?

“We'll tell the cops we were playing around,” I said. “We were stoned.”

“On illegal drugs,” Samantha argued.

“No one does jail for pot.”

“Kendall says we'd be charged with manslaughter,” she said. “You do jail for that. The case would drag on all winter. We'd flunk out of school and have criminal records. Who would hire us?”

“I don't want a real job. I want to write.”

“Think of the rest of us. Think of Merritt. They print trial details in the papers. The whole world will know he's a fag.”

The whole world would know I was a coward and virgin. That seemed worse than doing jail and losing my guns.

The incident changed all their lives. Felix-the-narrator quit school, moved to Italy, and became a novelist. Ozzy took off to avoid the mess. He later committed suicide, which Owen did in real life. Was that partly caused by guilt from this event? Kendall went into law to fight crime. Cassie turned to Kendall for support and eventually married him. Samantha got pregnant. Felix wrote,
She called it an accident, but I wondered if she did it on purpose, creating a new life to replace the one we'd snuffed out.
The gay roommate went into medicine, as he had planned, but rather than pursue a lucrative career he went on to treat the down-and-out in San Francisco. Was that his response to the guilt, a more positive one than Ozzy's?

The doorbell rang. She returned the pages she had been reading to the top of the pile.

Vincelli apologized for being late. “Something came up.”

His dark suit and white shirt were wrinkled, his chin so bristly she wondered if he was growing a beard. His bare, shaved head needed trimming.

In the kitchen, she poured them each coffee. He selected the chair under the clock, reversing their positions of the previous visits. It threw her off balance to take his usual place facing the sink. Was this his point? She slid Felix's manuscript across the table. She had summarized the story over the phone.

Vincelli looked at the title page. “‘Spivving'?”

“That's ‘Spinning,'” Paula said. “Felix's writing's hard to read.”

“I'll say. It's worse than Novak's.” He returned to the page. “‘Spinning, a novel-in-progress. Fiction.'”

“The narrator grew up in Saskatchewan, like Felix,” she said. “He's a writer, a gun nut, and had a crush on a character much like Callie. All the others resemble his university friends. He barely disguises the names. There's one named Merritt the others might have lost touch with, as people do after they finish school. If the shooting happened, it gives the lot of them, including Felix, a motive for murder.”

Vincelli leaned back in his chair, his thumbs stuck in his belt, gunslinger-style. His jacket flipped back, revealing his gun. “My partner when I walked the beat dabbled in fiction. He called police work grist for his mill. I appeared in one of his stories as a character named Matt, a womanizing cop on the take. Definitely fiction.” He grinned.

A fully grown head of hair would nicely frame his handsome face that was irritating her at the moment.

He tapped the belt with his large fingers. “I told my partner about a scrape my cousin and I got into when we were kids. He blew our prank into a crime that would bar me forever from police work. Borrowing your uncle's car for a joy ride is not the same as driving while drunk, killing a pedestrian and leaving the scene. I'd hate to have that story held up against me.”

“I know all that, but—”

“Luckily, Novak can barely churn out police reports.” He chuckled.

She glanced at the manuscript. “You don't think this is worth investigating?”

“I'll decide after I read it.” He reached for a grape.

“Will you have time today?”

“We've got a murder case going to trial. We're short-staffed. My partner—”

“I know. Novak's off with a bum leg. Somebody else is on vacation. Your staff sergeant has been replaced by a coyote.”

“What I'm saying is, don't get your hopes up about this fiction changing the course of the investigation.”

“I hope you'll re-interview Kenneth, Anne, and Sam.”

“If it's appropriate, you can be sure we will.”

“And look for Merritt in San Francisco. It would be easy to get the name of his real life counterpart from one of the others.”

“Don't you go doing that. Such interference could destroy the case.”

“I know. I'm not that stupid.” Paula sipped her coffee to hide any anger in her face. She debated if she should share her ideas while he was in this haughty cop mood. There might not be another chance if he dismissed the manuscript as valid evidence. “I've come up with some theories about the various people in Felix's story,” she said.

“Shoot.” Again the gunslinger mode.

“Some are obvious. The Samantha character could be a composite of Anne and Sam, although would Sam be so convinced of his son's guilt if he knew all these others had equally strong motives? Why would any of them murder Callie after all this time? I thought about that all night. Callie talked to Dimitri about guilt. People saw her arguing with Felix. Was she pressuring her friends to come forward with the truth about that old crime? If so, why now, after keeping silent for thirty years?”

He stared, chewing grapes. She was rambling, but couldn't stop. “A year ago, Callie found religion, after ignoring it most of her life. It could be that Dimitri got her back to the church. Religion is core to his life. They must have discussed it.”

“Are you saying her newfound religion prompted her guilt?”

“She also had a health scare, a spot on her mammogram during the winter. That can prompt people to make amends.”

“We'll investigate all possibilities,” Vincelli said. “That reminds me, we located Felix's laptop. He gave it to a friend on Friday to fix a bug.”

“Damn.” A missing laptop would have pointed to murder, not suicide.

“The friend also told us that Felix wrote first drafts in longhand. That jibes with our forensic expert findings. So far, there's nothing on his computers related to his alleged column.”

“Obviously, you would have checked wastebaskets for discarded paper.”

“There was a can by his desk. Empty.”

“Don't you find that odd, given the clutter of mail on the kitchen counter? Does Felix strike you as the type who would empty his wastebasket before everything was spilling out? Did you check his other garbage?”

“We know how to do our job.” His lip twitched.

She would rather he show anger at her arrogance than amusement. “I think his killer took his earlier draft attempts from the wastebasket.”

“Why are you so determined to prove us wrong?”

“Why are you so determined to wrap up this case? Is it because the acting staff sergeant wants this settled on his watch, so he'll impress the higher-ups and get the permanent position if and when it becomes vacant?” She waited for his denial or annoyance with her uppity remark.

He scraped back his chair. “I've got to get going. The staff meeting starts at seven thirty.”

“Will you bring the manuscript to the meeting?”

“I'd prefer to read it first.” He headed for the hall.

“Aren't you taking the story with you?” she asked.

He halted and turned around. “I forgot.”

“You will try to read it this afternoon?”

He scooped up the rumpled pages. “I may get it typed up first.”

“How long will that take?”

“Like I said, don't expect too much.”

While driving around the city to meetings with claimants, Paula wondered if there was a way to get Kenneth or Anne to admit the critical parts of the story were true, without jeopardizing the case. After tossing the candlestick at Sam, she wouldn't approach him again. Only one of those three, at most, was the killer. The others weren't involved in Callie's and Felix's deaths, unless they had acted together, an unlikely event. The easiest one to talk to would be Anne. Paula could just show up for their usual workout-chat and maneuver their conversation to the subject.

She drove across the Bow River. Being early for her meeting in the city's northwest, she detoured past Fit For Life
.
The bright blue building sparkled in the afternoon sun. She stopped the car across the street. No way could she face her friend who might be guilty of horrible deeds without a plan. As for Kenneth, she was sure now that he had kept his dog with him yesterday to conceal his facial expressions. He knew Felix hadn't killed himself for love and she would bet money Felix had revealed his plan to “out” the murder in his newspaper column when he visited Kenneth Friday night. Kenneth may have told the others Felix intended to expose the truth behind Callie's death. It was a stupid move on Felix's part. He must have been too drunk to think the consequences through.

Of the three or four suspects, Felix seemed the one least likely to be concerned about the story of the old murder coming out. He might even view a criminal charge or jail time as grist for his writing mill. That was why she didn't believe he was the killer. She wasn't clinging to the case for psychological reasons, as Hayden had suggested, or out of a stubborn determination to be right. And what if Merritt, whoever he was, had come out of hiding and was bumping off his co-conspirators one by one, either to silence the old crime forever or for a crazy sense of justice that would end with him taking his own life? That was a wild theory she would not share with Vincelli. He would say she'd gone over the top, but anything was possible.

Paula approached the claimant's house on a hill. The Rockies stretched along the horizon. Her cell phone rang. She pulled to the curb to take Hayden's call.

“I found some evidence at Felix's house last night,” she said. “The cops say they will check it out. I'm not sure I trust them to.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. It's a piece of writing Felix labeled fiction.”

“Writing about what?”

“An old crime that may have happened when Felix was in university. It's too complicated to get into over the phone.”

He paused. “If you want someone to talk it over with, I'll be at the office tonight.”

Sweet of him. Did he really think they could get back together after Sam and all the rest? Possibly they could.

The claimant shook
her hand, his too-satisfied grin a stabbing reminder that she had settled his hail damage claim too high. She suspected some of the damage was pre-existing and not due to hail, but hadn't been in the mood to argue. The creep had lucked out, but thought he had put one over on her. When all this was over, her professional self would be back. For now, thank God, today's meetings were ended. Since it was past rush hour, the quickest route home was through downtown. She took Memorial Drive to the Louise Bridge. Should she phone Vincelli to enquire about the day's progress with the case? Stopping at his office might exert more pressure. Police headquarters was on her way.

The security guard said Vincelli was in, but took ages to locate him. Policemen and civilian employees streamed past to the elevator. Finally, he reached Vincelli, who approved her entry to the premises he had hauled her to for questioning after Felix's death.