for there. I’m glad you gave it to me though; helped clear up any doubt I had. See, we couldn’t find any evidence of premeditated murder. Everyone who knew her is accounted for. And we have no motive besides the obvious. It isn’t final yet, but I’m going to mark it down as a robbery gone bad.”
Rebecca opened her mouth to speak but he lifted his hand for her to wait. “Someone, some punk, maybe a few punks, broke in planning to rob the place, probably thought it was empty. Mrs. Kochinsky confronts the guy or guys, they panic. She was an excitable woman, maybe she starts to yell. One of them loses it, knows he has to shut her up, and pulls something around her neck. Maybe some rope he brought with him. I’m sorry, Doctor, but doesn’t that make sense to you?”
Her heart plummeted; he was giving up. “It makes perfect sense. Except that someone’s trying to kill me.”
Wanless observed her more carefully, searching her face with opaque blue eyes as if he would find some clue on the surface of her skin, some hidden message her mouth had not revealed.
“Did you meet anyone at this club? Maybe you had a few drinks?”
At first she was angry at the implication. Then she thought of the wine, the two glasses sipped during her conversation with the Capitán. “ I met who I intended to meet. And I’m not drunk, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
Wanless sat back in his chair, the tips of his fingers arched together in a steeple. His voice was softer. “I’m not insinuating anything. You’re upset, as you have every right to be. People interpret things differently when they’re upset. I don’t have to tell you, Doctor. And I’m not saying you weren’t followed. But maybe the guy was after something else. Do you have an old boyfriend who might be trying to scare you? A disgruntled patient? You see, there are other possibilities.”
“I know it was Goldie’s killer after me. I lead a very quiet life and believe it or not, I have no old boyfriends and no patients angry enough to run me off the road.” She felt her blood heating up and could barely contain her anger. “I can’t believe you’re finished with this case. You barely started. Is it because the victim was just an old woman?”
“Now you know that’s not fair,” he said, sitting forward. “If anything, her being a senior citizen makes the crime more despicable. But I’ve got to be realistic. Look at my desk. I forget what colour it is. These files just keep piling up. How many homicide detectives do you think there are? It’s the same old story: overworked and understaffed.”
“So Goldie’s killer is going to get away because you don’t have the time?”
“Look, Doctor, I know how frustrated you are. If I thought it would do any good, if I had a shred of evidence that it was premeditated or someone she knew did it, I’d keep going. But there’s nothing.” He lifted a large envelope from under the morass of papers. “You’d better take Mrs. Kochinsky’s file back. I’m done with it.”
She rose to her feet, her face burning. “You want evidence? You’ll have evidence soon enough.” Her heels clicked against the floor as she headed to the door. “It’ll be my body at the morgue.”
chapter twenty-four
Friday, April 6, 1979
Detective Wanless saw to it that a constable followed Rebecca in a squad car as she drove home. The young uniformed officer watched her open the front door with her key and turn on every light, going nervously through the rooms as he waited in the hallway. In the kitchen she turned on the floodlamps that bathed the backyard in artificial light. Even if the driver of the van knew her name, she thought, she was not listed in the phone book. He would have to find her address some other way, like following her home. She had lost him this time. But how did she know he hadn’t followed her before?
The constable waited at the foot of the stairs while she climbed to the second floor and wandered from bedroom to bedroom, flicking on the lights. By the time she was finished, the house blazed with lights in every room and closet.
She smiled sheepishly at the constable. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
But she wasn’t fine. She felt completely alone and without help. Wanless, with his professional sympathy, had made up his mind about her the way she had made up her mind about Goldie. Would Goldie still be alive if Rebecca had believed her? She slunk into bed, feeling the old familiar pang in her heart. Stop it! she cried to herself, Goldie’s paranoia had precursors; it had been a valid diagnosis for Rebecca to make. Even Wanless saw that. She imagined that he considered his reasoning about the case was sound, too. Her blood froze when she took the comparison to its logical conclusion: Goldie had ended up dead in her own living-room. Rebecca had no intention of submitting to that fate.
Even with the kitchen knife stashed away in the drawer of her nightstand, Rebecca slept fitfully, the glare of the van’s headlights piercing her shallow dreams. Sometimes Capitán Diaz got out of the van and sometimes it was Feldberg’s face she saw coming toward her.
Feldberg. Seeing him at the club was a shock. And the relationship with Isabella. How long had he been cheating on Chana? Before her illness, Rebecca guessed. Was that a motive for murder? How was he involved with Diaz? She seemed to have come to a dead end with the Capitán.
If only Chana could talk. There was no one else to ask about Feldberg. She was loath to go to sleep; if only she could keep looking for the killer round the clock. Maybe then she could survive. He knew her; that was his advantage. She had to find him. In that twilight between sleeping and waking, she saw Feldberg in his leather armchair, his legs crossed, one knee pointing toward her. “Too many letters’ ” he whispered. “Why should Chana miss Goldie, they wrote and wrote, always writing. She told Goldie everything.”
Rebecca opened one eye to check the clock: 7:10 a.m. She told Goldie everything. Rebecca sat up with a start. There would be letters. Goldie might have kept letters from her sister. But would Chana have written anything important in them?
By eight-thirty, in the muted light of a grey morning, she was heading along Eglinton Avenue toward Bathurst. Her eye caught every dark van that passed by. How was she ever going to feel safe again? She parked on a side street south of Goldie’s duplex. The yellow police tape flapped in the chill morning breeze, but no police stood guard. Their investigation seemed over. They were giving up.
She ignored the tape strung across the front door and tried to turn the knob. The door was locked. Traffic on Bathurst drifted by as always, people going to work, people going for breakfast. Good God, what was she doing here? She squared her shoulders. Trying to survive, that was what.
She walked down the lane to the side door, looking over her shoulder. Maybe she had missed him in the mirror. Maybe he was watching her right now. She tried the side door. Locked.
She stood a long moment facing Bathurst, scanning the circumscribed view of the street that the lane afforded her. If he were there, she would see him. She had to stay calm, keep her head clear.
She walked further down the lane toward the garage, wondering if Feldberg would see the irony of her asking him for the key. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the back the blinkered bedroom window reflected the morning light.
“Argentina too hot,” Goldie had said more than once. “In Poland, air was fresh. Canada, too. Air fresh. Can’t sleep with window closed.”
Rebecca glanced around at the backs of the houses facing the rear of
