web and looked up the care and feeding of budgies, and picked up a couple of Scrabble words in the process: cere and lutino. Then I looked up Scrabble and found a site where I could play by e-mail; but it cost money, and I wasn’t all that sure a remote human would prove a better substitute for Mrs. D. than my computer game.
When you’re self-unemployed, time management consists of choosing between what you ought to do and what you want to do. That Friday, I still hadn’t checked to see if anything besides the towels were missing and, because budgies.org said to change the water every day, what I wanted to do was assuage my guilt. So I trekked back up to Mrs. D.’s.
About the only thing not covered in fingerprint dust was Bijou; Mrs. D. would have been horrified. It made the apartment eerily different, like a familiar place in a dream. I concentrated on the cage, the only thing seemingly unchanged by the invasion. Poor tyke looked lonely. My mother used to leave the radio on for the cat, so I hunted around for a radio.
I’d never been in Mrs. D.’s bedroom and halted at the door with a creepy feeling that my nose would end up where she wouldn’t have wanted it poked. But, really, I was doing her a favour looking after Bijou like this. I told myself that twice before I went in.
A television and VCR sat atop a satinwood dresser that faced the candlewick-covered bed. She’d put masking tape over the VCR’s display panel. I lifted it off. 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00. I stuck the tape back down and thought she’d carried independence a tad too far by not asking me to help her set it.
No radio here. The kitchen? I was crossing the living room to get there when I heard the snick of a key in the lock.
The man who walked in looked even more startled than I must have. Another expression flicked across his face, too quickly for me to make out, and then he smiled like a shoe salesman. “I’ll assume you have a right to be here,” he said, the way shoe salesmen say “Can I help you?”
He was tall and good-looking in an overly careful way. His navy blue trench coat, beige slacks and oxblood loafers were all top-of-the-line Wal-Mart. As I studied his pale face, trying to decide if his hair were natural or Grecian Formula, I recognized the eyes and forehead. “You must be Mrs. DesRochers’ son,” I said.
He looked annoyed that I’d guessed his secret but nodded affirmation. “And you?”
“Just a neighbour. I’m looking after Bijou until someone claims him.”
I made purposeful, kootchey-coo sounds to the bird, trying to say “Aren’t you a little late to finally visit your mother?” with my body language.
He got some kind of message, because he stood there awkwardly while I pointedly ran my finger through the featureless patina of fingerprint dust on the coffee table, tsking for the shame of how this well-preserved furniture had suffered at the hands of heartless cops. He lit a cigarette without offering me one, took a deep drag, then came up with an explanation for his presence. “I’ve, ah, come to collect some papers.”
Lucky I wasn’t facing him full on, because an image of that lavender envelope popped behind my eyes, making them blink. “Be my guest,” I said to him sideways.
He pulled open some drawers but without much conviction. I knew he wanted me to leave, which is why I took my time. Finally, he ran out of patience. “She must have thrown them out,” he announced, slamming the bottom drawer of the sideboard.
“What, in particular, were you looking for?” I asked sweetly. “Maybe she mentioned it to me.”
“Oh, just some papers. Legal stuff…”
Not a man who thought fast on his feet. How hard would it be to rattle him? “Your mother never spoke about you, you know.”
He knew. “We didn’t get along,” he said as if that explained everything. “She ever talk to you about where she kept important stuff?”
“Bijou was pretty important to her,” I said, hoping to lay a little guilt on him. “Will you be taking him with you?”
“I got no place to keep a bird. Why don’t you just flush him?”
Did the Humane Society have a Most Wanted list? “You know the police are looking for you?”
A moment’s panic in his eyes, then, “Why?”
“To tell you your mother’s dead, I guess.”
“Oh. Ah, they already told me that.”
“Good,” I nodded. Why hadn’t Bernie mentioned it? “I guess you got the key from them?”
“Yeah.”
I had no idea where Mrs. D. normally kept her house keys. Nor did I know why I was so sure this man wasn’t honest. I think it was his grooming. I’ve never trusted guys who look like catalogue models.
“Well,” he said, hands in his trench coat pockets, “I guess I’ll have to see about getting this stuff cleared out.”
By way of answer, I held up my fingerprint-dust schmutzed hands and then headed for the bathroom to wash them. Maybe this sleaze was his mother’s rightful heir, but I hated the idea of his having charge of things she cherished.
When I got back to the living room, he was gone.
“He’s a slimeball,” I told Bernie next morning after he confirmed the guy had gotten the keys from the cops just before he’d walked in on me. Police HQ is only a ten-minute stroll away.
“What did he do to you?” he asked, sounding worried.
I gave him a blow-by-blow account of my meeting with the slimeball, and in return Bernie told me his first name was François, commonly known as Frank, and he had done time for pimping and drug dealing, which explained why Mrs. D. never talked about him. He lived in Hamilton and had been home when the cops called about his mother.
“It doesn’t take long to get from Ottawa to Hamilton,” I said. “He could have killed her and driven all night to get back.”
“We don’t know that she was killed.”
“What about the autopsy?”
“She had a bruise on her upper left arm.”
“There you go,” I said. “Someone hit her.”
“Old people bruise easy, she could have bumped into something.”
“How was her brain, Bernie?”
The preliminary autopsy confirmed that Mrs. D. wasn’t a stumbling, senile wreck. Bernie gave me the details with gruesome minuteness. He didn’t usually keep me that informed, so I figured it was his way of saying I was right. As a quid pro quo, I told him about the envelope.
He mumbled something that could have been merde. “What’s in it?”
The lavender sheet lay face up on the sofa cushion beside me, the single, fountain pen-written paragraph framed by the date and the signature. “It’s dated Tuesday, and she leaves fifty-three thousand, one hundred and thirty-three dollars and seventy-two cents to Guide Dogs for the Blind.” She used to cut the stamps off envelopes for them, too. “And
