if Bryn really is involved in Evan’s death, you can’t cover it up. Kevin’s a good lawyer. He’ll be able to talk to the Crown about what Evan did to his daughter…”
Jill put her hands over her ears, like a child shutting out the world. “I don’t know what happened between Bryn and Evan. I don’t want to know. I just want her to have a life. I want us to have a life. Is that too much to ask?” When Jill raised her face to me, the misery in her eyes killed the answer in my throat.
“We can talk in the morning,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ll phone Kevin and tell him to call off his investigators.”
“Why not let them keep working?” I said. “They might find evidence that implicates someone else.”
“And they might not,” Jill said. “You know the old axiom: a smart lawyer never asks a witness a question to which she doesn’t already have the answer. I don’t have any answers, so I can’t afford to have people running around asking questions.”
“What happened to ‘And the truth shall set you free’?”
Jill met my gaze. “Will you ever be able to respect me again?”
I put my arms around her – in part because I wanted to reassure her, but also because I didn’t know what to say.
The next morning when I came back from taking Willie for his run, there was a note on my plate telling me that Bryn had insisted on keeping her appointment with Dan, and Jill and she had gone to his office in a cab. Clearly, Jill was no more eager than I was for a face-to-face, and I was grateful she had spared us both an encounter that would have been beyond awkward.
I had no idea when Kevin Hynd started his business day, but I was in no mood to wait. I was also in no mood to roll over and play dead while a friend made decisions that could land her in jail. When he answered his phone, Kevin sounded foggy, but my precis of the night’s events galvanized him. “We need to talk, Joanne,” he said. “I’ll put on the coffee pot.”
My pulse quickened as I spied Further’s multi-coloured, Day-Glo, spray-painted exterior. Like Ken Kesey, the owner of the iconic, iridescent bus from which Kevin’s business took its name, I was going into uncharted territory, but Kesey had a garden of pharmaceutical delights to ease his passage, and I was going in straight.
Kevin opened the door immediately. “I saw your car pull up,” he said. “Welcome.” Mellow in blue jeans and a mohair sweater the colour of a frozen grape, he helped me off with my coat and ushered me into his kitchen.
He handed me a mug of coffee and a plate filled with still-warm biscotti. “Comfort for the body and the soul,” I said. “I’m a lucky woman.”
“We at Further aim to please.” He pulled up a chair opposite me. “Your timing couldn’t have been better, Joanne. Shania called just after you did. She’s on her way over.”
“News?”
“Apparently,” he said. “But it can wait. Let’s enjoy the moment.”
The coffee had a chicory bite that conjured up New Orleans and the biscotti were dotted with pistachio nuts and cranberries that made them simultaneously savoury and sweet. Giving myself over to sensual pleasures was easy, but as I reached for a second biscotti, I knew it was time to fill Kevin in. I omitted telling him about Jill’s decision to call a halt to the investigations, but even without that information, Kevin was uneasy.
“Her mind is clouded by fear and love,” he said. “She’s making bad choices.”
“My thinking exactly,” I said. “So what do we do?”
Kevin shrugged. “Stay the course,” he said. “See what Shania comes up with, and keep hoping that neither of us has to remind Jill that mother love is not a justification for condoning murder.”
The Shania of my imagining was a woman with big hair, a midriff she was proud to bare, and three navel piercings. The Shania who walked into Kevin’s shop had a small, plug-shaped body, a round, flat face, almond eyes, coppery-red hair that was smartly buzzed, and skin the colour of strong tea. She was dressed in layers that she proceeded to strip away: first a pea jacket with wooden toggles, next a heavy satin jacket with a mandarin collar and frog fastenings, then a turquoise silk shirt covered in birds of paradise. When she came to a simple cotton T-shirt with a picture of Jim Morrison, she stopped.
Kevin introduced us, offered her refreshments, and smiled. “Whenever you’re ready, Shania.”
“I’m always ready.” She turned to me and said, “A word about my methods. I have a good brain, and I use it. Kevin has given me photos of the principals and accounts that are as detailed as he can make them. If he was aware of the actual words used by one of the principals, he attempted to relay them accurately. The value of a true verbatim account is beyond rubies, but even close is good. After Kevin and I talked, I went home to contemplate.” Her face was split by a slow moon-like smile. “I must thank you, Kevin, for that exquisite box of Thai sticks.”
Kevin touched his forehead in a small salute. “I knew you’d appreciate them.”
“Oh I did,” she said. “And they speeded an epiphany. As I sat in my room, smoking and mulling, one sentence nagged. You reported that Inspector Kequahtooway told Joanne that Felix Schiff seemed to ‘disappear off the face of the earth for sixteen hours.’ That action didn’t jibe with Joanne’s description of Mr. Schiff as a ‘go-to- guy.’ What, I asked myself, would make a man known as the one to be counted on in a pinch vanish when his friend’s need for him was so great?”
“Because his friend asked him to,” I said.
Shania nodded. “Of course, that raised another question. What had Mr. Schiff been asked to do during those hours? Here two figures of speech fused in my mind: Inspector Kequahtooway’s image of Mr. Schiff ‘disappearing off the face of the earth’ and the image you used, Kevin, when you paraphrased the inspector’s remarks. You told me that Felix Schiff had ‘vanished into thin air’?” Shania gazed first at Kevin, then at me. “Are you following my train of thought?” she asked.
The penny dropped. “Felix flew somewhere that night,” I said.
Shania nodded approval. “Precisely. I took Mr. Schiff’s photo out to the airport and showed it to someone who’s been known to share information with Kevin and me. After a little detective work of his own, our contact discovered Felix Schiff had flown to Toronto on the early-evening flight and returned the next morning.”
I remembered Felix’s appearance when he’d come into the hotel the morning after Evan was murdered. He looked like hell, but it wasn’t because he’d been cruising the club scene. He’d travelled three thousand miles in those hours, but except for the time he’d been seated on airplanes, his whereabouts was unaccounted for. “What was he doing in Toronto?” I said.
“That’s still to be determined,” Shania said. “But as a rule these quick flying trips indicate the need to cover something up or recover something. Kevin, I think your client should give Richard Shanks the go-ahead to hire more people to find out exactly what Felix Schiff was up to that night.”
Kevin shot me a look.
“Just tell Richard Shanks to do what he has to do,” I said. “If the bills for the detectives get out of line, I’ll cash in my pop bottles. And let’s make sure the former housekeeper gets special attention.” I looked at Kevin. “Does Shania know about the cooperative Mrs. Carruthers?”
Shania answered for him. “I do,” she said. “Did Mrs. Carruthers’s sudden departure from the household where she’s worked for fifty years raise a question in your mind, Joanne?”
“It did,” I said. “And there’s something else. From all accounts, Caroline MacLeish is incapable of living in that house alone. If Mrs. Carruthers has really moved on to greener pastures, why hasn’t Caroline called and asked her daughter to come home?”
Kevin arched an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that if I were to phone the MacLeish household at this very moment, the mysterious Mrs. Carruthers might answer the phone?”
“My guess is she wouldn’t be far away,” I said.
Kevin pulled an address book from his pocket, consulted it, then picked up his cell.
The speech he gave to the person who answered the phone in Toronto revealed that, as a prankster, Kevin was canny as well as merry. “This is Jim Morrison,” he said.
Shania beamed and glanced fondly at the image on her T-shirt.
“I’m with CHJO Radio,” he continued. “We’re doing a story on Evan MacLeish. The word out here is that MacLeish’s mother is some kind of nutcase. Would anybody at that address be willing to talk to us about her on air?”
I could hear the sputter of outraged denial from where I sat.
