LITMIR.BIZ

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play the tapes and make notes on passages that could be edited out when she got to the CBC.

      “Tell Alice hello from me,” Annie said.

      I said I would.

      21

      SOMEBODY HAD ORGANIZED an anti-nuke demonstration outside the provincial legislature. I drove up University Avenue straight toward the legislative building and swung the Volks around Queen’s Park Crescent. The demonstration had drawn a small turnout, not more than a couple of hundred people. A young man carried a sign that read “Arms Are For Hugging,” and a folk trio sang a ragged version of “Blowing in the Wind” from the steps of the legislative building. A sunny Sunday in July didn’t strike me as prime time for a rally against nuclear disarmament. Schedule the same event for a brisk Saturday in October and two or three thousand concerned Torontonians would show up. They might even find some politicians on the premises.

      I crossed Bloor and began watching for Alice Brackley’s street on the left. Her neighbourhood was in the eastern Annex, where the battle against encroaching developers was being waged in the front lines. A handful of condominiums and some tacky reno jobs had insinuated themselves among the Annex’s dignified old homes, but the residents were showing stubborn resistance. The streets remained green and the houses had a proud, cared-for look. Alice Brackley’s street ran one-way into Avenue Road. I went a block north and parked under a chestnut tree. It appeared to be in sturdy health.

      I walked around the corner to the Brackley house. It was on the north side of the street, a narrow and elegant two-storey townhouse built of red brick that had been recently sandblasted. Two brass lamps were mounted on either side of the front door, and the bricked-over yard had four large wooden tubs overflowing with deep red impatiens. Except for two kids six or seven houses down from the Brackley place leaning on their bikes and absorbed in their talk, the street was deserted.

      No one responded to my first ring of the bell at Alice’s front door. Two more rings and a rap of the knuckles didn’t rouse any action. I looked through the small window in the middle of the door. The window had leaded panes, and I couldn’t see much past the entrance hall. It had a floor tiled in black and white and no sign of life.

      There was a walkway between the Brackley house and the house on the west that went to the back. I followed the walk and opened a high gate to a bricked-in backyard. Lady had something against green grass. There were more wooden tubs of flowers, geraniums this time, and a set-up of white lawn chairs and tables. A sliding glass door led from the yard into the house. The door was open, and someone had punched a hole in the glass next to the latch. The hole was big enough to reach a hand through, and the glass was sprinkled on the brick outside the door. I stepped over the glass and through the door into the living room.

      Alice Brackley was in the living room. She was lying on the broadloom, face up, with her neck twisted at a very uncomfortable angle. In my limited experience, only dead people assumed Alice Brackley’s posture.

      I stood where I was and listened for noises in the house. A couple of minutes went by, and the strain of listening produced a small pain in my forehead. The only sound was of traffic moving on Avenue Road. If anyone was in the house, he was the sultan of stealth.

      I turned and went back out through the sliding door and over the broken glass into the yard. A pair of monarch butterflies zigged and zagged among the geraniums. I sat in one of the white lawn chairs. The idea was to organize my thoughts and control my emotions. It might take a while. After three or four minutes, I realized that a phrase was running through my head. In for a penny, it went, in for a pound. Where had that come from? It made a perverse kind of sense. I’d been retained by Matthew Wansborough to look into possible dubious operations at Ace Disposal, and in the course of my investigations, admittedly of the ad lib variety, I’d committed a crime or two. It was too late to knock off the case even if someone—to wit, Alice Brackley—seemed to have been murdered. I got out of the lawn chair and stepped over the glass and through the door. In for a penny, it went in my head, in for a pound.

      I knelt down beside Alice Brackley and felt the carotid artery in the right side of her neck. No beat. I thought about applying other medical tests but rejected the idea. Touching a corpse wasn’t turning out to be much fun. Besides, Alice’s neck told me enough. It felt cold and stiff. Ms. Brackley had been alive at twenty after four when she phoned me. Eight hours later, her body had no warmth and rigor mortis was right around the corner. She must have died not long after she got off the phone, and the likeliest cause seemed to be a broken neck. There was a high red mark on her right cheek that looked like it had come from a blow. It wasn’t makeup. I stood up and shook off a small attack of queasiness.

      Alice was dressed for an evening alone. She had on a quilted dressing gown and fluffy slippers with heels. One of the slippers had fallen from her foot. The gold Rolex was on her left wrist. She was lying on beige carpeting that went wall to wall, and around her the living room was furnished in pieces that glowed and shone. Silk fabrics on the armchairs and dark wood tables with a high polish. The paintings on the walls didn’t go with the rest of the decor, stolid nineteenth-century landscapes and formal portraits of men with spade beards. Family heirloom stuff. Nothing in the room had been disturbed. Except Alice.

      I went upstairs. The master bedroom was at the back of the house. Mistress bedroom. Powder blue was its dominant shade. There was a duvet on the bed, and it and the sheet underneath were lightly rumpled, not as if someone had been sleeping between them but as if someone had been lying in them reading or watching television. A glass filled with brown liquid sat on a bedside table next to a push-button phone. The phone was powder blue. I sniffed the glass. Scotch and not much water. Two video cassettes for the VCR across the room lay among the bedclothes. I leaned over to read the titles without touching the cassettes. The first was a Fred Astaire movie, Funny Face, not one of the ten with Ginger Rogers. Audrey Hepburn. The other movie was titled Going Down on Stud Ranch. Alice had a dirty little secret.

      Two doors opened off the bedroom on the right side, one to the bathroom and the other to a dressing room. Whoever had done in Ms. Brackley seemed to have visited the dressing room and not tidied up afterwards. An ornate jewellery box had been knocked over and its contents dumped across the top of the French Provincial dresser. Some of the contents had probably departed with the intruder. The pieces on the dresser top were costume jewellery of the bauble sort that Alice would wear for slumming. There was no sign of the fabulous Brackley gold collection.

      I opened the top drawer of the dresser. It held three smaller jewellery boxes. I looked inside one of them and thought the contents seemed intact. The box held mostly shiny earrings in many shapes and sizes and materials. None of the materials was gold. I shut the box and pushed it into a corner. The edge of an envelope peeked out from under the box. It was an envelope from the Eddie Black photography people, and inside it was a bunch of colour snaps. I shuffled through them. They’d been taken on the patio of a beach house, probably Caribbean judging from the vegetation in the background, and they showed two people. Charles Grimaldi and the late Alice Brackley.

      All the photos but one had Grimaldi alone or Alice alone. Grimaldi wore a white swimsuit and tennis shoes. The rest of him was bare and tanned. He had more hair on his chest than Gene Shalit has on his head. Alice was in a yellow bikini. Good figure, and breasts substantial enough to get her a job at the Majestic. Grimaldi must have snapped the pictures of Alice and vice versa. The last photo showed Alice and Grimaldi together. Maybe a passing tourist took it for them. Alice was giving Grimaldi a lovey-dovey look in the photo. Grimaldi was beaming into the camera.

      I put the pictures back in the drawer, went downstairs, walked around Alice’s body, and left through the opened glass door. The kids on the bikes down the street remained engrossed in their conversation, and unless someone was spying from behind a curtain, I fled the scene of the crime undetected. I stopped the Volks at a phone booth outside the subway station near the bottom of Bedford Road and dialled 911. The cop wanted to know what I meant by trouble at the Brackley address and who was I, sir? Trouble that went with a break-in, I said, and told him I was a concerned citizen and a very influential chap. The cop sounded like he doubted it. I hung up and drove home to tell Annie about the murder of Alice Brackley.

      Poor

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