Murder At Midnight Page 4

  * * * *

  The irresistible aroma of roasting beef wafted out of Meg’s kitchen. Scott helped set the table, then sat down to watch the six o’clock news.

  “Anything new and exciting?” Meg set down a bowl of pretzels on the coffee table, before joining him on the couch.

  “Nah, just the same old, same old” he replied wearily. “Another earthquake, a flood, and a plane crash in that order.” He reached for a pretzel as the telephone rang.

  “I’ve just spent an enlightening couple of hours,” Ben laughed. “Courting and grilling the reticent Roxanne. Who, was anything but withholding after several cocktails in the Purple Onion.”

  She told him, between greedy sips at her Singapore Sling, that Philip Mitford, the owner of the company had been horrified (not surprisingly), by all the sensational publicity surrounding the murder of one of his staff members. And to make matters worse, the suspicion that another one might be responsible for the crime.

  Lisa Craig had been a receptionist at Mitford, since she left high school. The company had employed Garrick Boyd for slightly over a year when the tragedy occurred. Philip Mitford fired him at once.

  However, Boyd had kept in touch with one of the other salesman, and through him Roxanne learned about his name change and present whereabouts. “Of course, it was told to me in the utmost confidence, and I just know I can trust you to respect that.”

  “Roxanne is not much of a judge of character,” Scott laughed. “Thank heavens for that.”

  Tired of being hounded by the press, Boyd changed his first name to Darryl a couple of years ago, and moved out of Vancouver. The Chalmers Real Estate Company in Whistler, a fashionable ski-resort about eighty miles away, currently employed him.

  So Garrick, or Darryl as he now called himself, appeared to have done all right for himself, Scott decided.

  * * * *

  On a glorious April morning, echoing with birdsong, Scott set out on the two-hour drive to Whistler. The Sea-to-Sky Highway was a narrow winding stretch of road hacked out of an almost sheer cliff, with a perilous drop to the ocean below. Notorious for a high incidence of fatal accidents, it was known locally as the Killer Highway or the See to Die.

  “How the fuck did you find me?” Boyd asked furiously, when Scott finally caught up with him. He was holding an Open House, at a luxurious new apartment complex streaming with banners.

  Scott took a wary step backwards from this powerfully built man with the imposing head, which seemed to sit directly on his shoulders.

  “Look, why don’t we arrange to meet at a more appropriate place later on?” he suggested. Then seeing the angry scowl and obstinate expression added. “You know if you are innocent, it can only be in your better interests to co-operate in trying to find the real murderer.”

  A plumbing van stopped abruptly outside the show home, its stereo blasting out an old rock tune from the sixties.

  “No service cars are allowed at the front entrance,” Boyd rebuked the driver. “Kindly park round the back, and keep the racket down.”

  After that minor diversion, which seemed to invigorate the churlish realtor, he picked at his thumbnail for several moments before agreeing reluctantly to meet Scott later on.

  “I really don’t have much choice do I?” he asked belligerently. “If I don’t co-operate you’re likely to broadcast details of my present location in that scandal poisoned rag you work for.”

  “No, I would not,” Scott, responded defensively. “I happen to subscribe to journalistic ethics.”

  * * * *

  The Black Friar Inn, a mock Tudor building that overlooked the ski lift to the north of Whistler village, had low rafters and subdued lighting from wall lanterns. Scott ordered a beer, and settled back to wait for Boyd. The dark cloak of twilight spread over the afternoon, and a tiny crescent moon peeked down from a sapphire sky.

  “Sorry I’m late.” The antagonistic voice so close to his ear caught him by surprise. Boyd wore a suede jacket with a silk scarf, and shoes polished to the brilliance of mirrors. He ordered a Perrier on ice, and swivelled the glass around moodily when it arrived.

  “Why on earth would I want to kill Lisa Craig?” he asked suddenly. His brown eyes were stormy with emotion. “I loved the girl for heaven’s sake. It was just that incompetent drunken cop who tried to pin it on me, because he couldn’t be bothered looking for the real killer.”

  “Len Barthrop, an alcoholic?” Scott was surprised. He’d never heard that before.

  Boyd laughed quietly, a bitter grudging sound. “Hell I should know,” he replied angrily. “I was a drunk myself at the time, and we both belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  Lisa and he had parted angrily at the Peach Tree Inn, after she accused him of flirting with a girl at another table.

  “Who was ‘Ronnie’” Scott asked? On seeing Boyd’s blank expression added. “The waitress at the Peach Tree, said that she heard the name mentioned during your argument with Lisa.”

  A slowly dawning look of intense discomfort flitted briefly across the blunt features. “I don’t recall,” he replied gruffly. But it was clear to Scott that he was lying. Who then was the mysterious Ronnie? And why had the mere mention of his name triggered such a dramatic response?

  Boyd continued with his story, his composure now intact. He said that the last time he saw Lisa alive was when she boarded the bus that would carry her to her doom.

  “I do feel responsible for what happened to her,” he admitted, taking a long swig from his glass. “I shouldn’t have let her go off like that by herself, and I’ll regret it to the end of my days.”

  “So who do you think murdered her and why?”

  Boyd looked decidedly uncomfortable as he flicked an imaginary piece of fluff from his immaculate coat sleeve.

  “Oh, just some crackpot prowling around the park I suppose,” he answered noncommittally. But once again, Scott sensed that he was lying. Boyd knew more than he would admit about the murder of Lisa Craig. He was hiding something! Either he did kill Lisa, or he knew who did.

  What had Lisa seen in this surly character, Scott wondered? She had been such a lovely girl, and pleasant too, by all accounts. He felt a sharp pang of jealousy over a girl who had been dead for over twenty years. That Boyd had actually “known her” in the biblical sense of the word simply gored him.

  “Were you Lisa’s first boyfriend?” he asked on impulse. Although he knew that the answer would probably torture him further.

  “Why do you want to know that?” he countered defensively.

  “Oh, just to get a sense of what she was like.”

  “Well she wasn’t any blushing virgin, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  So Lisa had been hot, mused Scott. He had guessed as much. Yet, perhaps Boyd was just lying again?

  A couple of drinks later, Scotch for Scott and more Perrier for Boyd, and they wrapped up the less than cordial interview.

  * * * *

  Scott had driven for about forty miles, on his way back to Vancouver––the clamour of foghorns getting louder––when he had to slow down because of decreased visibility. It was almost midnight, and not very much traffic on the winding narrow road.

  He would never be absolutely certain what happened next. It had been so sudden and with a devastating degree of speed.

  Did he see the blazing headlights first, which abruptly appeared from the rear, and scourged the interior of his car with blinding light? Or, did the car crash into him first before the excruciatingly brilliant lights flashed on.

  All he did remember for sure, was trying desperately to regain control of his car as it careened across the Sea-to-Sky Highway, in a headlong dive towards the rugged cliffs and the unforgiving sea far below.

  As Scott fought desperately to regain control of the ricocheting automobile, which hurled him at high speed towards the cliffs, normal time ceased to exist. It became instead encapsulated into that one panic driven, heart-stopping moment that seemed to drag on and o
n forever.

  An oncoming car swerved to avoid hitting him, its horn blaring out a furious warning.

  He jerked the steering wheel hard to the right, and pressed both feet down on the brake pedal. The car lurched and skidded, grazing the side of the road and sending the gravel hammering up its sides. But it finally came to a shuddering stop, its engine spluttering in protest, with its nose pressed hard against a barbed wire fence.

  Scott allowed himself to exhale at last, a long ragged breath of relief that eased his trembling limbs and shaky hands. He could hear the clamour of the restless ocean churning against the cliffs below and the roar of the occasional car that swooshed past him on the lonely road.

  “God, but that was a close call,” he finally exclaimed, to test his powers of speech as much as anything else. The blast of a ship’s horn that resonated for many miles through the fog-choked midnight, answered him.

  * * * *

  “Do you think it was Boyd?” Ben asked, his face anxious in the twilight. They had been covering a story about a recent spate of burglaries in the Ladner area and were enjoying a stroll afterwards along the banks of the Fraser River.

  “I’m certainly not ruling him out,” Scott replied. “He is one nasty honcho. I think Len Barthrop may have been bang on the money in believing him to be Lisa’s killer.”

  A swan glided by, scarcely disturbing the glassy surface with its graceful passage, followed by a family of ducks.

  “On the other hand,” he continued thoughtfully. “It may have been a genuine accident. The Sea-to-Sky Highway on a foggy night is not the safest place to be. And I was rear ended right around a particularly nasty curve.”

  “It’s possible,” Ben agreed dubiously. “But if that were the case, you would have expected them to at least wait around long enough to see if you were alright.”

  Scott nodded and stooped to throw a pebble into the river. “Either way, I don’t plan on going out that way again for a while, at least not after dark.”

  The close call with certain death and his escalating obsession with Lisa Craig had left him feeling depressed and out-of-sorts.

  Violet expressed concern about this fit of the doldrums “Get outside more, play sports,” she advised. “There’s nothing like a vigorous game of tennis to whack things into perspective.”

  “I might just do that,” Scott agreed. But although he and Ben spent many hours together at the Stirling Sports Club, the dark feeling of ennui did not dispel.

  “Well then you need a woman in your life,” Violet declared. “I don’t mean one that’s been dead for twenty years. You’re spending far too much time brooding over Lisa Craig. It’s just not healthy.”

  Scott knew that she was right. When he got involved with the case before, it took a massive degree of willpower to break himself free from its spell. Now the old telltale signs were starting to pop up again. Yet he couldn’t let go, not yet. He felt in a strange inexplicable way that he owed it to Lisa, to find her killer. That only then, would they both find peace.

  “Why don’t you take Meg out for dinner?” Violet suggested. “She’s a nice girl, and you’ve just been ignoring her.”

  “Not quite,” Scott disagreed. “I’ve been visiting her regularly since she was attacked.”

  “That’s not quite the type of thing I had in mind,” Violet argued. “You don’t want to spend a lonely old age all by yourself. It’s time you thought about marrying and settling down. Wouldn’t you like to have a family of your own?”

  “Yikes,” Scott exclaimed in mock protest. “You’ll have me haltered and at the altar before I know it.”

  Ben was more blunt with his recommendation. “You need to get laid,” he advised.

  But Scott harboured so many unhappy memories about former affairs that he tended to disagree. He just hadn’t got enough out of any of them to make the downside worthwhile.

  And although he was attracted to Meg, and she let him know it was mutual, there remained the very sticky wicket about them working together, which he felt reluctant to cross.

  So he did what he had always done when times got rough, threw himself into his work with even more gusto than before.

  “Hey, we might just make a star reporter out of you yet,” Greg beamed approvingly. “Now if only Ben would follow your example!”

  * * * *

  The same neat laurel hedge still surrounded the small bungalow where Lisa had lived with her mother and aunt. A flaming rhododendron bush flanked the front path. But the Craigs had moved from this place of painful memories many years ago. Scott had found his footsteps leading him there again, on a sort of romantic pilgrimage. He needed to feel close to Lisa’s earthly home. He hadn’t been there since writing an update on the case, a couple of years ago.

  “They’re living in a really rough part of town,” reported the next-door neighbour, a ferret-faced woman, named Vera Holt. “They began to drink heavily, and just plain go to seed, after Lisa’s murder. Of course, it’s not surprising, is it?”

  It was the first time he’d met Vera.

  “Adelaide––Lisa’s mom––had a complete nervous breakdown after the tragedy. And Bernice, her aunt, didn’t fare much better.”

  Vera, who turned out to be a veritable font of neighbourhood gossip, told Scott the two women used to run a small insurance agency, and that Lisa worked there after school and on weekends. He already knew all this, of course. Had actually interviewed the two women in the past. But it never hurt to listen to someone else’s take on a situation.

  “Oh she was a lovely young girl,” Vera reminisced, weeding out a flowerbed at the side of the driveway. Her hawk-like eyes never strayed far from the street. “Always a cheerful hello as she passed by; very nicely mannered.” She leaned towards Scott, confidentially. “Her mother was never married you know. Lisa never knew her father.”

  “No I didn’t know that,” he admitted. He didn’t really see how it would make a difference? Still it was precisely this type of gossipy background information that often proved to be the most useful.

  “Did Lisa have many friends, I mean besides Garrick Boyd?” He handed Vera the packet of crocus seeds slightly beyond her reach.

  “Not really. She wasn’t a gregarious sort of girl. Although she did have one quite close friend, that she had gone to school with.”

  “Do you happen to recall her name?”

  Vera brushed the earth from her fingers and rose somewhat stiffly to her feet.

  “Indeed I do. Her name is Jessica Drake and she’s a librarian. At the main branch, downtown.”

  After he thanked Vera for her assistance, Scott asked her as an afterthought, if the police had ever interviewed her.

  “Nah,” she answered scornfully. “In fact, I even contacted them myself after Lisa’s murder, but they never got back to me.”

  So Len Barthrop conducted a less than thorough investigation. He settled on Boyd as the killer early on in the enquiry, not bothering to gather any more information, or look elsewhere.

  “Do you think Boyd is guilty?” he asked on impulse.

  “Absolutely not,” she replied firmly and with a great deal of venom. “What’s more, I have a darned good idea who is!”

  “Really?” Scott registered surprise.

  “His name is Victor Kenny and he lives two houses down by the lane.” With that quite startling denouement, she jabbed an accusing finger in the appropriate direction.

  “Now let me get this straight,” said Scott. “You have reason to believe that this…Victor Kenny killed Lisa, and you reported your suspicions to the police?”

  “You’re darned tooting I did,” stated Vera. “I left messages on their damned answering machines, and even spoke to one of them. But they just didn’t want to know.”

  “Do you happen to recall who you spoke to?”

  “I sure do. The character in charge of the investigation.”

  Scott mulled over this latest development, and its possible bearing on the case, as he telephoned J
essica Drake. It always gave him a thrill of excitement, when he was about to meet someone who had had the privilege of knowing Lisa Craig.

  Jessica lived in a small apartment house not far from Scott’s. Her suite, on the top floor, gave her easy access to the roof. It was here that Scott found her, feet propped up on a milk crate reading Jane Austin.

  “Good stuff,” he remarked. “ Sense and Sensibility was on television recently.”

  She had a guarded expression, but when she smiled the radiance transformed her. Scott took in the strong features, and the brown hair swept back in a ponytail.

  “I don’t think there’s a day passes that I don’t think about Lisa,” she confided. “And twenty years is a lot of days.”

  She told him that she had last seen Lisa a couple of days before she was murdered. “We had lunch together in the Blue-Moon on Burrard Street.”

  “How did she seem to you? Did she appear worried about anything?”

  “Yes, she was quieter than usual. I’ve often wondered since, if it had anything to do with what happened afterwards?”

  It had been an overcast afternoon, now it suddenly began to rain; large heavy splatters that fell rapidly on the old roof.

  “This is where I came in,” she laughed and made a dash for the door. Scott followed carrying the chair.

  Her apartment had a high ceiling and long multi-paned windows. Books lined one entire wall. “Take a seat and I’ll make some coffee,” she invited.

  “Did Lisa confide in you at all about what was going on in her life?”

  “Not latterly. After she began seeing Boyd, she seemed to want to isolate herself. She became uncharacteristically remote and secretive even.”

  “You didn’t like him then?”

  Jessica shook her head vigorously. “I couldn’t stand the man.”

  “So you think he killed her?” Scott sipped cautiously at the bitter coffee, before adding another sugar cube.

  “Definitely,” she replied, without a moment’s hesitation.

  “What do you know about a man named Victor Kenny?” He fired the question quickly to catch her off-guard.

  Jessica looked surprised then snorted derisively. “You’ve been talking to Vera Holt,” she accused with a grin. “You know in olden times women like her were bridled and ducked as scolds.”