Flush Page 11

  I could easily creep out while their backs were turned, but on the other hand, if I made any noise at all, I would be caught. I decided to make my presence known and cleared my throat. Not loudly, just a little, as if it was a natural thing to do. They both turned.

  The boss took a step towards me and held out his hand, “Ralph Creston, I’m in charge of the case. And you are…?”

  I looked up, way, way up into the guy’s flat grey eyes. He must have been six and a half feet. And his eyes were a dull metal as they looked at me. This man could not be fooled. In fact, he probably had a bullshit meter running right now. But I tried to stall. Although I didn’t know why I felt I had to. What would it accomplish? Information. Right. That was my goal.

  “How do you do?” I lowered my eyes and looked down at my hand as it was swallowed up in his gigantic paw. He had an unexpectedly gentle grasp for his size and I liked the feel of his warm, soft skin. No sparks, it was not a flash and burn handshake, but a slow tingle crept up my arm. When I raised my eyes back up to his I detected a slight shift behind the cold steel, a small movement that revealed a very tiny opening, a reluctant crack, where some warmth shone through. Then I extricated my hand and turned to the underling, “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  The younger man smiled goofily, revealing a gap in his front teeth. I noticed that he had missed a few whiskers shaving that morning. He had a nail brush growing under his nose. “Larry Stokes.”

  I looked back and forth at each man, putting on a puzzled look. “I don’t recognize either of you from around,” I fabricated. “You guys must be from a different division.” A wild stab in the dark. Anything to get some information for my article.

  “And we’re in charge, so don’t forget it.” This from Larry, the smug little bug.

  Creston tried to smooth over the younger man’s steam-rolling bad manners. “We’re happy to collaborate with you guys, but all information has to eventually reach me. I’m sure you’re aware that we’ve been monitoring Everwave for the past year, as we do anyone who has access to Lake Ontario water. You know, international theft of water is no small crime. We’re thinking Todd Radcliffe could be the victim of a crime ring, but so far it doesn’t look like murder. No evidence has surfaced. But there are lots of ways to torture someone without leaving evidence. Or maybe he had a heart attack. There is no apparent cause of death.”

  I nodded sagely as he talked. This was going way better than I thought. They thought I was a plain-clothes police officer from the division that usually covered this part of Toronto. Whichever one it was. How lucky that they were from another cop shop. “And your information is invaluable to me.” I felt quite saucy. “What do you think happened here? No blood. The hand. No forced entry. But the temperature’s turned up.” I put my hands on my hips, hoping I looked as if I knew what I was talking about.

  “Hard to say,” grumbled Ralph Creston, “forensics have been through the scene. They dusted for fingerprints, nothing, wiped clean. But this place is pretty sterile. Maybe his cleaning person came in today. Everything possible has been examined. Samples were even taken from the soles of his shoes. His hand? Yes, it’s interesting, no doubt about it. It might be in a defensive position, so they scraped under his nails, you know, in case he fought off his attacker. Maybe he was strangled. Frankly, I have no idea. Yet.”

  What did I think about this Creston person? He’d said “cleaning person.” Hmmm. He wasn’t sexist, then. Respectful. “There are no signs of being strangled. No livid bruises on his neck.” I showed off my television expertise in murders, “No petechiae.” Look at me go. I mean, I could have said, “Red spots in his eyeballs.”

  Creston was frustrated. “So far it doesn’t look like a murder. More like a suicide. Hard to tell. He could have taken a bunch of pills. But the autopsy will reveal all. I’m requesting a full tox screen.”

  “When are you guys going to do the autopsy?” I might as well act deferential, giving these cops the sense of power they felt was their due. As if controlling the autopsy time and date gave them cajones. In reality I had no clue when autopsies were usually done and I wanted to know.

  But Creston was already turning to leave the room, with Larry’s rubber-soled shoes peeping like baby birds on the hardwood floor as he followed him. My question dangled loosely in the air. Was this a power play? I decided I had pushed my luck far enough and followed in their footsteps, lifting my feet carefully so my soles made no sound. I’d had enough attention. When the cops veered off to their corner in the very white den I kept silently trucking out the door.

  “See you around,” I flipped over my shoulder, prancing quickly into the hall.

  Creston called out to my receding back, “Nice to meet you. What’s your name again?”

  But I was already shutting the apartment door and pretended I hadn’t heard his question. Two could play this game. What a bloody close call. So lucky. As I was shutting the door I heard Creston and Stokes walking towards it, the clue being Stoke’s telltale squeaky shoes.

  I ran down the hall and punched the elevator button. I had to get off the floor fast! My façade was slipping and wouldn’t withstand another verbal questioning from that huge brute of a man. What was his first name again? Ralph. Ralph Creston. Right. No elevator. I spied the exit sign for the stairs and tugged open the fire door. I clattered down the cement stairwell, my right hand holding tightly onto the square metal railing so I wouldn’t fall. I felt a hard lump pass by under my fingers. Somebody’s chewing gum. Ugh. When I got two floors down I pushed the fire door open, leapt across the hall to the shiny elevator doors, and stabbed the button. Repeatedly. Jab jab jab. Where the fuck was it?

  The doors opened so suddenly that I jerked back in alarm. My nerves were fried. I pushed L, which I assumed was for Lobby and not Lower because there was also a P, probably for Parking, which would be even lower. My mind was whirring like an egg beater.

  The elevator lurched and I thought immediately that I was going to plunge to my death. Panic-stricken, I looked at the numbered lights above the door. How far was I going to fall? The light flicked off the number eleven. Eleven? What? That made no sense. I was sure I had run down two flights, not three. I knew my math. Fourteen minus two was twelve. Not eleven. Twelve. I was sure of it. And then the twelve button lit up. What was going on? I didn’t want to go up. I wanted down. Oh my God, I thought, I must have pushed the up button when I was on Todd’s floor. This elevator was going up to get me. I felt a soft steadying of the elevator pulley and the doors opened at fourteen, right where I had been. And standing right in front of me were the two cops. Larry Stokes and Ralph Creston. Holy shit.

  The ridiculousness of the situation fueled my giddiness. I composed my face. “You going down now?” Oh Geez. Had I said that? I hoped I didn’t sound crude. Creston frowned and Larry stifled a snicker.

  “Just forgot to look in the kitchen.” I edged around them and headed towards the apartment.

  Larry called out in his too high voice, “We locked the place up, tight as a drum.” He laughed again.

  The elevator doors were shutting.

  “No biggie, I’ve got a key.” I pretended to search in my pocket, in case they could see through steel.

  “Let the body guys in, then,” came the muffled comeback.

  I was alone in the hall, worrying about the state of my mind. I had lost a whole floor somewhere along my escape route. Perhaps it was in the same place as my short-term memory.

  The drinking had to go.

  Damn. Security cameras. They would be hidden in corners and behind heating vents. Very discrete, and also impossible to detect. I eyed the flowering benjamina fiscus in the corner with suspicion. Maybe one was buried in the soil, its lens slightly above the edge of the terra cotta pot. I bent over to look closely. Nothing. I looked around and thought I saw some light reflecting off what could be a lens in the far corner of the hall. But mayb
e the cameras were fake, only meant to spook. But maybe not. So I pretended to hold a fake key in front of what might be a fake camera. I trotted up to apartment 1403, my arm held out, hand at doorknob height. As I approached closer to the door I saw a series of numbered buttons on a small metal box above the door handle. Keyless entry. Of course it was. Shit.

  I had never opened a keyless entry door in my life. The joys of being over fifty. I didn’t know what to do to make it look as if something had failed and I couldn’t get in. I was struck by what I hoped was a brilliant thought.

  Maybe the technology was the same as my car door. Maybe I didn’t have to know the combination of the little buttons, I could just press a button on a key fob and the door would open like a vehicle door, remotely. So with an exaggerated gesture I pushed an imaginary button with my thumb on an imaginary fob while my hand was aimed at the lock. I tried the door handle. When it didn’t open, surprise surprise, I shook the pretend fob and tried again. When the handle still didn’t open, I theatrically blew on the fob. I’d seen my kids blow on bits of technology when they didn’t work, like on a keyboard or into a CD player. I tried the fantasy fob again and when it still didn’t work, no bombshell there, I shook my head exasperatedly and walked back to the elevator.

  When the steel doors opened I stepped in and looked carefully at the floor numbers above my head. Ah ha! No number thirteen. I hadn’t lost a floor; there was no floor. The builder must have simply avoided the problem of not selling condos on a bad luck thirteenth floor by omitting it all together. Well, that trick sure fooled Todd. He bought a condo on the fourteenth floor, which was really the thirteenth, and look what happened to him.

  What had happened to him? Had he taken a pile of pills and killed himself? But where was the pill bottle? I hadn’t seen one. Oh wait, yes I had, a bottle of sleeping pills in his medicine chest. They were over the counter. Would that be strong enough to kill him? He didn’t look murdered. He looked asleep. Except of course for the dead mouse smell. I reviewed what I knew so I could write the article. The cop guy in charge was Ralph Creston. I would have to find out his rank or whatever it was called. And where he was from. The unfortunate sidekick was Larry Stokes. I’d need his rank as well. The deceased had been found lying on his bed. No apparent cause of death. No blood. No signs of a struggle. No finger prints anywhere. No forced entry. Not a burglary. If it was murder then Radcliffe must have known the guy. Motive was a mystery. Creston said something about lake water. My story was taking shape.

  Then I laughed at myself. It looked like a suicide, but that wasn’t a story. And somehow I didn’t believe it. Why would he make a date for next Tuesday if he was planning to off himself? Plus he seemed light-hearted, happy even. I was skeptical of the suicide theory. And someone had turned the heat up to confound the time of death.

  The elevator doors opened at the main floor and two guys in crisp brown uniforms were there, waiting with a collapsible gurney on an accordion type of contraption. A folded black bag in plastic wrap was balanced on top. Good luck getting into the apartment guys! And then I saw a uniformed police office behind them with another guy. He was wearing a grey shirt with the name Donald monogrammed in red over his breast pocket. Must be the super. He had a hand full of key fobs.

  At least I didn’t have to let them in to Todd’s apartment. Not that I could. Thank God for bad communication.

  I unobtrusively slipped behind them and out into the street. I walked a hurried, stilted, penguin-kind of walk towards my car, gathering speed on stiff legs as I got closer. I called Cindy as I held the phone with my ear to my shoulder, all the while searching in my purse for my car keys.

  But all I got was her answering machine, so I left her a short message as I tucked behind my steering wheel. “Okay, good story, I saw the dead body, I got good intel.” I tapped the phone to end the call.

  Was that the right lingo? Intel? That’s what they said on Criminal Minds, anyway. I whizzed back to the Express building and when I saw that Doug wasn’t in his office waiting for my return, I knocked excitedly on Shirl’s door. I was bursting with all my news and had to tell someone about my achievement. Doug opened Shirley’s door, straightening his tie and coughing while Shirley sat demurely behind her desk. Oh, please. Couldn’t they stay off of each other for an hour?

  Doug sidled around me slightly turning his back, “S’cuse me.” He held his jacket over his arm so that it hung over his belt. Right. And then he beetled back to his office, shutting his door.

  “What’s with him?” I asked Shirley while pointing my thumb at Doug’s closed office door, although I knew the real answer. It was a game. A ballgame.

  “Oh,” Shirley replied breathlessly, checking her lipstick in a small pocket mirror. “Oh, something important came up.”

  Righto. “So, I got into the apartment and saw him. He looked so, I don’t know, kind of like a prophet in a way, just lying there, on his bed. There were no clues at all. He looked like he was sleeping, except his eyes were open.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “There were some cops from a different division. Why would they be there? What does that mean? I think this is bigger than we thought.”

  “No, what did the police say? When you gave your statement? Do you need legal representation?”

  Shit. “I haven’t given my statement yet.” I mumbled.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Shirley’s eyebrows shot up, moving the stiff yellow straw on her head back an inch.

  “No, I went straight to the crime scene. I wanted to get there fast, before they moved the body.” Like I knew about these things. “They were coming in with a gurney right when I was leaving.”

  “Let’s get this straight.” Shirley was looking mightily pissed off. “You didn’t follow my directions. You went straight to the crime scene even though I specifically told you, not once but twice, to immediately give a statement to the police. You didn’t follow your editor’s instructions.”

  Well, not quite true, I thought. Shirley Payne was technically my editor, but not on this story. On this story I was to answer to Doug. And Doug had known I was going straight to Radcliffe’s apartment because I had called him to ask for the number. I had told him where I was. Maybe my mistake in calling him would save my bacon with Shirley. Suddenly I had an epiphany about where my kids got their deviousness.

  “Well, I wasn’t sure about the reporting chain and who was my boss.” Not a lie so far, not really. “I didn’t know the best course of action.” Not knowing an apartment number was not knowing where to go, which was a course of action, still not a lie. “Anyway, I called Doug for information from outside Todd’s condo building. He didn’t know the information, but he knew I was there, and he didn’t tell me not to go in.”

  Shirley sat back, shrewdly assessing my choice of words and the politics of this situation. She hadn’t been fooled. While she was thinking, she smiled the kind of smiles mothers have when kids say “wasn’t me.” But her relationship with Doug eventually won the battle.

  “Oh, well,” she said, conceding the point I’d won in this inning of saving my ass. “If Doug knew, then I guess it’s okay. Hard to know which editor to obey. But I think it would be best to go right now to the police station and give your statement. It would be hard to cover this story if you’re a suspect. So get that cleared up right away.”

  I backed out of the office as graciously as I could. I’d narrowly dodged a bullet.

  13.

  I PUSHED THROUGH THE SMUDGED GLASS doors of the police station and was yelled at to stop right where I was by a stout guy with a walrus mustache sitting behind the information desk. He boomed at me to wait. Not here, over there, on the bench. He flung his massive arm to the right. So I waited. Despite having had four children, two of which were idiot boys doing illegal things, I miraculously had never been inside a police station before. I looked around with curiosity as I sat waiting
on a long metal bench like a good little girl.

  The first thing I noticed was the colour of the place, or rather, the lack of colour. Everything was washed out, even the lighting was muted. The air vibrated with a faded grey-blue light from all the computers. The walls were coated a pewter grey. The steel desks were enameled with a glossy grey metal paint. This was a far cry from the energetic and vibrant room I had expected.

  In front of the computers sat very young men and women, toddlers I thought, who were wearing dark uniforms. Babies really, with unlined faces and shining, optimistic eyes. On their shoulders were the dark badges flecked with white of the Toronto Police Force. It looked to me as if everyone were waiting. The kids, or rather, the force, were all tapping away, keeping themselves occupied, I thought, until something actually happened. They were probably on Facebook.

  I pulled out my cell phone and pretended I was texting. I held it in front of my face and squinted, trying to look as if I was having trouble reading the screen in the bad lighting. I was actually taking a video of my surroundings so I would be able to describe where I was, later. When I was writing my great story. If it was a murder. Slowly I scanned the room. Fluorescent lights. Grubby grey carpet. Glass offices on the perimeter with blinds drawn. Smudged stainless steel coffee percolator in the corner. A stack of cracked mugs. Metal garbage pails. Black chairs. A fly buzzing over some spilled soft drink on the floor. Humming noise from a vending machine. Shouting from behind a door.

  My hand froze.

  What? Shouting behind a door? What were they shouting about? I strained my ears to hear. I could only make out a vowel here and there. What was the name on the door? Something Stapelton. Staff Sergeant Stapelton? Shit, I needed glasses. With a sudden burst, the door flung open and out stormed of all people, Creston and Stokes. Oh no. What should I do? Here I was sitting on a chipped steel bench, looking like the civilian that I was, clearly waiting for the police. I could not pretend that I was a police officer, not here. Creston’s iron hard eyes burned in his reddened face and met mine with a metal clang. He barged towards the bench, his finger pointing at me accusingly. “You were at the crime scene,” he roared.