you got a minute?” Reeny asked.
“Of course,” I said. We went into my office. “What’s up?” I asked.
“It’s about last night,” Reeny said. “Let me make it up to you. Let me cook you dinner tonight. That is, if you’re not busy.”
“I’m not,” I said. I’d’ve cancelled an appointment with God Almighty Himself (Herself? Itself? Themselves?), or even Willson Quayle, to have dinner with Reeny. “I’d be pleased to let you cook dinner for me. But you have nothing to make up for.”
“Yes, I do,” she replied. “We were having a very nice evening until I brought up the subject of Chris.”
“Actually,” I said, “I brought it up.”
“Yes, but I backed you into a corner.” She stepped closer to me. There was a fine dusting of tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose and, I couldn’t help but notice, across the tops of her breasts. She smelled of sun and soap and musky perfume. “I’ll see you later, then,” she said, and kissed me quickly on the cheek.
At five a man came into the studio from the stairwell. Bobbi and I were sitting at her desk, playing cribbage and drinking beer, waiting for Willson Quayle to call. The man was tall and dark blond and, judging from the look on Bobbi’s face, good-looking. Despite the warmth of the day, he was wearing a long coat over his dark suit. His striped tie was slightly askew and his polished black shoes were creased with wear. He introduced himself as Sergeant Gregory Matthias of the Vancouver Police Department.
“You’re here about the dead man,” I said.
“Yes, that’s right.” He looked at Bobbi then back at me. “Would you mind answering one or two questions? It won’t take long.”
“Not at all,” I said. Bobbi nodded.
We made ourselves comfortable in my office, Bobbi and Sergeant Matthias sitting at opposite ends of the old leather sofa. Matthias refused a beer — reluctantly, it appeared. He took out a notebook.
“Would you mind going over it again?” he said to me. “How did you find him?”
“He was just there, in the chair on my roof deck.”
“And you have no idea how he got there.”
“Well, he had to have gone through the house,” I said. “But there were a lot of people there that night. A number of people say they saw him, but no one I’ve spoken to knows who he is or who he came with, assuming he came with anyone.”
“And what time was it you found him?”
“About nine in the morning.”
Matthias scribbled in his notebook.
“Are you with missing persons?” Bobbi asked.
“Homicide,” Matthias replied.
“Homicide?” I said. My heart thudded, but it wasn’t the same kind of quickening I had experienced earlier upon seeing Reeny in her summer dress. Not the same kind at all. “Christ, he wasn’t murdered, was he?”
“The coroner has so far been unable to determine the exact cause of death,” Matthias said. “Until we know that, we have to treat it as suspicious. Right now we’re just trying to get a line on his identity. Did you have a look around to see if he might have dropped his wallet somewhere?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think of that. I didn’t find anything while I was tidying up after the party, though.”
“Do you mind if we take a look around?”
“No.”
“How about later this evening?”
“Uh, I’m not going to be home this evening,” I said.
“Tomorrow then? About eight?”
“In the morning?”
“Yes.”
“That would be all right, I guess,” I said.
“The people at your birthday party, did you know them all?”
“My next door neighbour, Maggie Urquhart, brought a friend I hadn’t met before. His name was George, I think. My dentist brought his new wife. Her name is Stella. And a couple of friends brought dates I didn’t know. But otherwise I knew everyone else. Of course, there could have been some party crashers. I was pretty wasted by eleven o’clock.”
“How about you, Miss Brooks?”
“Was I wasted by eleven?” she asked with a dimpled smile.
Matthias smiled back. “Did you know everyone at the party?”
“For the most part, but there were a few I didn’t. Mostly Tom’s friends from his days at the Sun, before I knew him. I did see the dead guy, though.”
“Where?”
“On the roof deck.” The skin around her mouth grew pale.
“What time was that?”
“About one, just before I left.” She swallowed. “I thought he was asleep.”
“For all you know,” Matthias said gently, “he may well have been. The coroner put the time of death at around two in the morning.”
“My sister told me she might have seen him in the kitchen,” I said.
“Was he with anyone?”
I shook my head. “He was getting ice out of the fridge.”
“Does she know what time it was?”
“She didn’t say.”
Matthias scratched in his notebook, closed it, and stood up. “That’s all for now. I’ll probably see you in the morning.” He shook hands with me, then offered his hand to Bobbi. She grasped it and hauled herself to her feet. Either that or she was trying to haul him down onto the sofa with her.
“Brooks,” Matthias said to her. “Any relation to Sergeant Norman Brooks of the Richmond RCMP? He mentioned to me once he had a daughter who was a photographer.”
“He’s my father,” Bobbi said. “Do you know him?”
“We worked together a couple of times, before he retired,” Matthias said. “Next time you see him, please give him my regards.”
“I will,” Bobbi said.
After Sergeant Matthias left I said to Bobbi, “Should we call Quayle?”
“If he was really in such a goddamned hurry for us to get started on this, he’d’ve called by now. T’ hell with him.”
Easy for her to say.
