Murder At Midnight Read online

  “But even so,” Scott chuckled. “By what she told me of Victor and his obsession with Lisa, she just might have something.”

  “I very much doubt that. Victor was always an odd fish, and it’s true that he did

  moon after Lisa. But the idea that he killed her is stretching credibility a bit too far.”

  She went on to explain that Victor had never been violent. “He was your typical gentle giant type,” she said. “Not playing with a full deck, but quite harmless.”

  “Give me a sense of what Lisa was like?” he asked. “What were your impressions of her?” It took Jessica so long to reply that Scott began to doubt if she would. The rain hammered down on the roof, and a siren wailed in the distance.

  “She wasn’t an easy person to get to know,” she said at last. “Oh outwardly she was friendly and completely normal, but I believe there was another side to Lisa that she let very few people see.”

  “What makes you think that?” Scott felt intensely excited about these new revelations about Lisa, his Lisa, from someone who had known her well.

  “Call it feminine intuition, or whatever,” Jessica smiled. She leaned forward, refilled their coffee cups, and asked him if she could tell him something strictly off the record?

  Scott nodded. Anticipation coursed through his veins like an electric current.

  “Lisa liked men,” she confided. “What I mean to say is, I think she was highly sexed.”

  So there it was again, thought Scott. Her boyfriend Boyd had suggested the same thing. And even he, himself, with no intimate knowledge had suspected a deeply passionate nature.

  “What makes you say that?” he pressed Jessica. “Did she have a lot of male friends?”

  “Only Boyd that I know of.”

  “Then what gave you the idea that she was so hot?”

  “Lisa exuded sexuality, Mr.Preston. Eyes followed her wherever she went.”

  “Boyd seemed to think that he hadn’t been her first boyfriend,” Scott said. “Have you any idea who any of the others might have been?”

  Jessica shook her head. “Lisa’s passionate nature must have been sorely restricted by her upbringing. Her mother and aunt seemed quite puritanical. The upshot is, she just didn’t discuss that sort of thing openly.”

  “But you think that she indulged in a full sex life anyway?”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “Do you think this might be why she was murdered?”

  Jessica nodded. “If Boyd found out about it…well he had a notoriously violent temper.”

  * * * *

  Scott went carefully over his notes that evening, writing down his impressions of the witnesses as he did so. Vera Holt was a reasonably reliable source, although one had to take her propensity for gossip into account at all times. The woman had literally never taken her eyes off the street, while they’d been talking.

  Jessica Drake, on the other hand, had impressed him greatly, with her excellent recall of events that had played out over two decades before.

  Her observations about the intimate side of Lisa’s nature had been most revealing, and led one to the inevitable question: Could Lisa have been sleeping with other men behind Boyd’s back? When he found out about it, had he killed her in a fit of jealous rage?

  Perhaps that is what they had been arguing about at the Peach Tree Inn? Now the name “Ronnie” overheard by the waitress, was taking on new significance. Could this “Ronnie” have been one of Lisa’s lovers?

  Flynn jumped up on his lap, aggressively friendly. Tomorrow, Scott resolved, he would pay a visit to Lisa’s mother and aunt.

  But the two women had moved from the shabby apartment where he had seen them last, and left no forwarding address. He scoured around the grim streets of the Downtown Eastside. It was here that prostitutes stuck needles in their arms in doorways and drunks collapsed on the grotty sidewalks. This was the dark underside of Vancouver, that few tourists ever saw.

  Scott looked for the contacts he had developed here over the years. These included fleabag hotel porters, bartenders and sex trade workers. As crime reporter for the Morning Herald, it was necessary to have eyes and ears in all the most disreputable places.

  Now he was anxious to get the word out that he was looking for Adelaide and Bernice Craig.

  A brawl, in progress outside the seedy Alhambra Hotel had attracted a small crowd. Scott crossed the road to avoid it, dodging his way across East Hastings Street, between traffic stalled in the evening rush.

  Less than a week later he had the information he wanted.

  The rooming house on Keefer Street was dirty, scarred and cheap; with broken down steps and small mean windows strung with ragged curtains or old newspapers. The crooked hallways stunk of dampness, stale cabbage and urine.

  The Craigs lived on the ground floor, beside a broken down back door that opened onto a garbage-strewn alley.

  Bernice opened the door, cautiously without removing the chain. She was a stocky woman with cropped black hair and agitated eyes.

  “I’ve spoken to you before,” she said, her voice strong yet cultured, and so at odds with the dreadful surroundings.

  He told her that he needed more background information on Lisa.

  A door slammed on the floor above and someone screamed out an obscenity in a drunken voice.

  “You better come in then,” she said. “Adelaide’s out just now, but will be back shortly.”

  The room looked well kept with a cramped kitchen, and a recess just big enough for two single beds and a chest of drawers. White lace curtains hung neatly on the windows, which overlooked a boisterous tavern with a flashing scarlet neon sign.

  “We try to make the best of things,” Bernice volunteered, as if reading his thoughts. “But it’s been very difficult for my sister and I. One doesn’t mend after… something as awful as that.”

  A rowdy burst of drunken song wafted up from the street below, and a police siren screamed its warning from several blocks away.

  Bernice offered him tea, which she served in a floral teapot with matching cups. A vase of strongly scented hyacinths stood in the centre of the table.

  “What can you tell me about Lisa?” he asked, helping himself to a biscuit. “That may not be in the police reports, I mean. I find that it’s often the small, seemingly inconsequential things that hold the key to solving a crime.”

  “I really don’t know what more I can say,” replied Bernice. “I already told you everything last time.”

  “But this is another day,” insisted Scott. “You never know what could float to the surface, so to speak?”

  Bernice shrugged and looked unconvinced. But she started talking about her murdered niece anyway.

  As Scott drank his tea, she painted a picture of a very normal young girl. “Her greatest ambition was to marry and have a family,” she said. “Lisa adored children, and she would have made an excellent mother.”

  Then much to Scott’s distress, she broke down and wept.

  He cleared his throat awkwardly, as the depth of this woman’s grief, even after so many years, made him feel uncomfortably akin to a voyeur. He fixed his troubled eyes on a moth, batting its dusty wings against a floor lamp. This was the all too human side of a tragedy such as this, that so few people ever saw.

  “Do you believe that Boyd is guilty?” he asked, after the emotion-laden moment had passed.

  “Absolutely,” she spat out the word like a mouthful of poison, her eyes glinting with rage. “I always hated that viper, and if Lisa had only taken my advice and had nothing to do with him, she would be alive today.”

  “What about Victor Kenny?”

  “…Victor? What about Victor?” she challenged angrily.

  “Well, it’s been suggested,” he replied carefully, “that he was quite taken with Lisa and might even have been responsible for her death.”

  “Bah…” Bernice snarled dismissively. “Victor was a strange boy, but harmless, quite harmless.”

  “
Ms.Craig,” Scott began carefully, for he knew he trod on dangerous ground. “Did Lisa have any boyfriends prior to Garrick Boyd?”

  “Boyfriends,” Bernice exclaimed contemptuously. “Of course not. My niece was a respectable young woman. She’d been brought up properly.”

  “Speaking of Lisa’s upbringing,” Scott continued, all too aware of the mad gleam in Bernice’s eyes. “Was her mother a widow?”

  “A widow?” Bernice repeated the word incredulously. “Of course, she bloody well wasn’t.”

  “Then was she divorced from Lisa’s father?”

  “Look, I don’t see what all this prying into private business has to do with nailing that bastard Boyd for murdering my niece,” Bernice raged. “Sometimes I have a good mind to do the job myself. Kill the bastard the way he did Lisa.” And with her strong build and volatile temper, she would probably be quite capable of the task, thought Scott.

  He could see that he wasn’t going to get any more coherent conversation out of Bernice, at least not that day. He felt a twinge of guilt for getting her so riled up. There was a sudden calamitous thumping on the ceiling that sounded like a herd of wild buffalo rumbling across the western plain.

  “It’s just the Clancy’s having their usual nightly scuffle,” she explained with a long-suffering grimace. This common occurrence seemed to calm her down. She picked up a piece of plaster that had flaked off the ceiling and landed on the floor.

  Scott excused himself and took his leave. Adelaide had still not returned, and the whole sordid and sorrowful atmosphere of the place was beginning to get him down.

  The women could be reached through a pay telephone on the second floor landing. He quickly jotted down the number before hurrying out into the fresh mildness of the spring evening.

  * * * *

  “If Boyd did do it,” Ben speculated, the motive must have been sheer, out-of-control rage, triggered by jealousy.

  “A crime of passion,” Scott agreed, swivelling around in his chair to look out the rain streaked window. The massive North Shore Mountains wavered in the distance. “Boyd was already out and driving around at the time Lisa was murdered. So it would have been an easy matter for him to head over in her direction. Perhaps he didn’t intend to kill her, but an argument ensued and he just lost it?”

  “Yeah, well for some reason I don’t buy it.” Ben argued, propping his feet up on the corner of the desk. “The way I see it, the popular consensus is to string this guy up, because he’s a nasty son of a bitch, and there’s not a more likely culprit on the horizon.”

  Scott nodded slowly. “I’d agree with that,” he conceded. “Although, only up to a point.”

  “So you think he did it too?

  “Probably. Although I’m by no means convinced. Tomorrow, I’m going to have a word with Victor Kenny.”

  “Ah, the other likely suspect!”

  “Well according to Vera Holt he is.” He recalled the gossipy woman’s quite vicious denouement of her neighbour.

  All agreed that the simple-minded Victor had been enamoured of Lisa. But the question was, had he murdered her?

  * * * *

  Victor lived in a narrow two-storey clapboard painted dark green. A lopsided old house, it squatted on a large treed lot. Scott climbed the steep wooden steps. There was an air of furtiveness about it, which he found disquieting.

  He knocked several times before getting a response, although he had caught the slight movement of a curtain in the lone upstairs window.

  The door opened a mere crack, just wide enough for the occupant to peer suspiciously out. A paunchy unshaven character, he had insect eyes, magnified grotesquely by heavy spectacles.

  “Victor Kenny?” Scott asked.

  When the man did not respond, he began to wonder if perhaps he was actually dumb, meaning medically incapable of speech.

  “I’m Scott Preston of the Morning Herald. I wondered if I might have a word with you?”

  “What about?” The silent giant finally spoke. Not however, in the deep booming voice Scott had anticipated, but in a high-pitched almost feminine contralto.

  “It’s about a former neighbour of yours, a Ms. Lisa Craig.”

  An explosive round of emotions played out behind the heavily distorted eyes. Then without a word the door was slammed unceremoniously in his face. As Scott stood there, not quite sure of his next move, an ice-cream van came sauntering down the street playing a tinny rendition of the Entertainer.

  * * * *

  “So what do we know about this bozo?” Ben asked. He took a long swig from a beer bottle.

  “Well according to local gossip,” Scott smiled, “in the person of Vera Holt, Victor was actually born in that house and has lived there all his life. His parents were quite elderly and when they passed away, he stayed on.”

  “No girlfriends, scandals, that sort of thing?”

  “Well apart from his infatuation with Lisa, there doesn’t seem to be much else. In fact, according to my source…”

  “Who may or may not be reliable,” Ben interjected cynically.

  “…He hasn’t had a visitor since a distant relative appeared for his mother’s funeral, almost fourteen years ago.”

  Scott popped a handful of peanuts into his mouth and reached for his glass. “Of course, there are his many disputes with neighbours.”

  “So what has he been doing, running a lawn mower at midnight?”

  “Well no, actually the problem is that he doesn’t run it enough, at any time.”

  “So, his place is a mess, what else?”

  “Oh just being a royal pain in the ass in general,” Scott, explained. “Burning rubbish in his yard; pieces of old automobiles lying around; running an unlicensed dog kennel, etcetera.”

  “Yikes, sounds like a likely candidate for a capital crime. One can almost feel his frustration and misery.”

  “Seriously, he is a weird sort of a character.” Scott looked thoughtful. “But whether that translates into murder or not is impossible to say.”

  Chapter Three

  The carousel horse was a prancing delight, all blue and white and gold. “Isn’t he a charmer?” Violet gave the scarlet saddle another admiring rub with her polishing cloth.

  The horse had been delivered to Granny’s Attic that afternoon, and placed in the window to show it off to best advantage.

  “You know these sweethearts are getting so hard to find, that I have a good mind to keep him for myself,” she announced. “What do you think, Scott?”

  “Oh yeah, whatever you say,” he replied absentmindedly, his thoughts still percolating around the Craig case. What were Lisa and Boyd really arguing about on the night of her murder? And why was Lisa walking in the opposite direction from her home when she got off the bus on that ill-fated night?

  Both her Aunt Bernice and Jessica Drake, Lisa’s closest friend, had stated the murdered girl did not have a jealous nature. That being the case, Boyd must have lied about the cause of their altercation. Why would he do that, unless it was sensitive in some way and related to her murder?

  So did that make him guilty? Or did it simply mean that he had guilty knowledge?

  “Walking in the wrong direction?” Jessica had been quite astonished by this latest piece of evidence, when she read about it in the Morning Herald. But she had absolutely no idea why her friend would have done so.

  Bernice was just as dumbfounded. “There’s nothing in the other direction except rows and rows of houses,” she declared. Her eyes burned into Scott like braziers. “I mean there isn’t a corner store, or anything like that she could have been making for.”

  “Well the most likely conclusion is that she was going to visit someone,” Scott suggested.

  But Bernice nixed this idea immediately. “I knew all Lisa’s friends. None of them lived in that direction.”

  So the tantalising questions, spun around in Scott’s tired brain, much as the carousal horse once had, to the screams of delight from excited children.

&n
bsp; * * * *

  “I’ve got a strike…I’ve got a strike,” Meg cried. Her well-aimed ball flew down the bowling lane, sending all five pins crashing down at once.

  “Hey, that’s not fair,” Scott, joked. “If I’d known you were such a virtuoso at the game, I’d never have brought you here.”

  He noticed that the intense ceiling lights brought out the golden highlights in her hair and it fluffed around her face like a nimbus.

  Difficult to believe that only two short months ago, she lay injured and almost frozen to death, in the eerie entrails of Roanoke Park.

  “Your turn, come on now, let’s keep it brisk,” she laughed.

  Then all of a sudden, in the midst of that noisy and happy venue, a look of haunted fear stole across her face as incongruously as a midnight stalker.

  “What’s wrong Meg?”

  “…I don’t know,” she replied haltingly. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “I just had a sensation of tall dark trees spinning above me, round and round and round…”

  “Your memory is returning.” Scott felt a surge of excitement. “Don’t fight it Meg,

  let it come.” He felt sure that when she remembered her attacker, they would have Lisa Craig’s murderer as well. There was little doubt that they were one and the same.

  He fetched her a glass of water.

  “Look, I have an idea,” she said. “ I’ve been thinking about it for a while. If I returned to the…scene of the crime so to speak, it might trigger my memory faster?”

  “You mean you’d be willing to go back to Roanoke Park?” Scott was shocked. For considering the ordeal Meg suffered on that sinister midnight, it amazed him that she would volunteer to go near it again.

  “I don’t know that that’s such a good idea,” he advised, although he agreed that it might act as a catalyst for memory recall. “Maybe you should run it past your therapist first?”

  “I already have, and although she wasn’t thrilled by the idea, she didn’t out and out veto it either.”