erased any prints.”
“That’s withholding evidence, Goat Girl.”
“Add it to my sheet, Earlie.”
He grinned. “From you, I’ll take it. The name, I mean,” he added quickly, as I reached into my pocket. “Not the money. The money goes to Becker.”
“Couldn’t it go into trust for Beth, or something?”
“Eventually. But now it’s evidence. It means something. Don’t know what, but it does. What does it say in your Nancy Drew thing here? The four hundred dollars is somehow important? Yeah. I think so too.”
“Have you guys been able to find out who he owed money to?”
“Nope. But Becker’s talking to some of Travers’s poker buddies over at Kelso’s tonight. Maybe you should go find him there and give him the money. Explain how you come to have it.”
“Me? Go into Kelso’s? Becker would kill me.”
“You have a point. Besides, the only women who go in there are usually working.”
“Working? You mean professionals? Dancers?”
He eyed me. “Not that you couldn’t pass. With the right clothes. A bit of makeup.”
“Thanks a bunch, Earlie. Just hang on while I run out to the truck and slip into my bunny suit.”
He laughed. “I took you for one of those feminists with no sense of humour.”
“Oh, I have a sense of humour, don’t you worry. We feminists find it comes in useful when we’re dealing with bottom-feeders.”
“Well, you’ll find plenty of them where you’re going. Bottom-feeders just about sums it up. In both senses of the word.”
“Will you come with me?”
“To protect you from Becker, or the clientele?”
“Both. He’ll go ballistic when he finds out I’ve been holding out on him. On top of everything else.”
“He’ll go ballistic, as you say, when he finds out I met you behind his back, too. Maybe you should be protecting me.”
“I don’t think you need much protection. You’re bigger than he is.” I hadn’t meant it to be mean, but he looked hurt.
“I may outweigh him, but he has seniority.”
“Oh. There’s that.”
He busied himself folding up my sleuth sheet and putting it away carefully in his pocket. He was in plainclothes—wearing the biggest tweed jacket I’d ever seen.
“We’re doing a post-mortem on Mrs. Travers,” he said.
“Good. I bet it shows she was drugged before she was hanged.”
“What would that prove? We found her stash. She was a regular dope-smoker and a pretty heavy drinker. If there’s evidence of drugs in her system, it’ll just indicate that she doped herself up before she did it. Pretty sad.”
“Sure, Francy smoked dope, but then so do I,” I said. “It was no big deal. Neither of us did coke. Neither of us took pills.”
“We only have your word on that. Don’t forget the note.”
“Are you going to look for the notepaper?”
“Already did. Found a big pile of it in the desk in the living room.”
“That’s crazy. It must have been planted by the killer. And besides, any handwriting expert will tell you it’s not her.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I just am, okay? Are you guys checking it?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Becker. You have a sample of her handwriting?”
“Yup. A note she left for me recently.” There was the “we’ll be fine” thing she left in my stash-box. It felt awful to think what optimism in her had written it, now. “But there’s probably stuff she’s written in her house. Thing is, I know for sure that there was no lilac paper there yesterday.”
“What makes you say that?”
I explained how Francy and I had torn the place apart the day before her death, looking for the money.
“I searched that desk myself. There was no lilac notepaper there then.”
“So your theory is that somebody went over there, got her drunk or stoned enough not to put up a struggle, hanged her, left a suicide note, planted the notepaper and left? That it?”
“That’s it.”
“Huh. You’ll have a hard time convincing Becker. He thinks he’s got the case all sewn up. He thinks she was nuts. I finally got him to agree with me that any woman who stays shacked up with a guy who beats her has to have a couple of screws loose.”
“There’s always way more to it than that. It’s not a case of just stay or go. Don’t you ever read about it? Don’t you guys ever do training courses?”
Morrison glared at me. “Of course we do. Sensitivity training and all that. Still doesn’t help when you come up against some poor girl who’s had her arm broken in three places and still won’t make a statement against the guy who did it.”
“Sometimes they stay for the sake of the kids,” I said. If we were going to hash the whole issue out at Tim Horton’s, we’d need another couple of donuts and a whole pot of coffee.
“Listen, Polly Deacon. I got all the training courses I could handle when I was a kid.” Morrison stared at me fiery-eyed for a moment and then looked away, out to where the lumber trucks were whizzing past on the highway. I didn’t say anything, just waited. Then he started talking quietly, as if he and I were the only people in the room. “The Honourable MPP who ran up against your aunt in that election way back then isn’t my real father, eh? He adopted me. My real Dad was a drunk—hit all of us every goddamn night and used my mother for a punching bag. She never left, never made the break, until Dad set fire to the couch one night. We all got out, but he just lay there in front of the goddamned television and burned to death. Mom snapped like a broken twig, and I spent two years bouncing around from one foster family to another. Now, tell me again how staying with a fucked-up wife-beater is good for the kids. Go ahead.” He had said it all very quickly, sending his words like darts straight into my gut. Francy’s story had been like that. Gut wrenching. Leaving me feeling inadequate, like my own deal wasn’t nearly as bad, so who the hell was I to talk? There was so much tension coming at me over the table that the air crackled.
“Oh, man, Earlie. I’m sorry. That’s horrible.”
“Damn right. Francy Travers just made me mad. I talked to her, and she just said the same things my mother used to say. Her, with her face half burned off. Did Travers do that to her? She didn’t tell me—not that I asked, eh.”
“No,
