The Devil and the Detective (3 page)

3

(T
ime: 1330h. Place: My apt. I pick the phone up off the mount, look at the number on the Post-it [i.e., Elaine Andrews's number], and I key said number into the number pad. The phone rings approx. four times before she picks up. I've already started the recording device.)

EA
née
J
: Hello …

RJ
: Hi. Elaine. It's me. Robert. Bob. Bob James. The detective.

EA
née
J
: Hi. I was wondering when you were going to call. How are you?

RJ
: A little hungover, actually, though fine. And I've resolved to cut way back on my drinking for the remainder of the case.

EA
née
J
: Don't do anything crazy. [
She laughs.
]

RJ
: Did I … ? Did I do anything crazy last night?

EA
née
J
: No. I did, though. I drove home.

RJ
: I shouldn't've let you.

EA
née
J
: You tried to stop me. You tried to tell me not to drive, that we'd order a cab, that the bartender would order us a cab. I didn't listen. It was too late, so I dropped you off, and you said I could crash at your place, that you'd take the couch, but I said goodnight and drove off. Anyway, I made it home fine, thankfully, though it was dumb of me to drive that drunk, especially … Anyway, it's over now, and I promise to watch my drinking and driving.

RJ
: Well, I'm glad to hear you made it home safely. What's going on at your house?

EA
née
J
: An officer stopped by this morning, though no one's around right now. Oh, wait … [
indeterminate background noises
] Sorry … Sorry about that … Do you want to get together?

RJ
: Soon. What did the officer from this morning want?

EA
née
J
: He was going through Gerald's desk, and he was taking pictures for his report, he said. I asked him what he was looking for and he said any evidence that would help the police department catch the killer. He took photographs of Gerald's desktop, as it was, covered with files, letters, journals, magazines, random notes with messy handwriting, and he kept taking pictures. He asked me questions, though I avoided answering them, because I've already answered those questions:
Where were you when your husband was murdered? What cause would someone have to murder your husband? Did you and your husband ever fight?
they ask. They ask all sorts of demeaning questions, the same ones, over and over, ad nauseam. He was checking me out, too.

RJ
: Who? The officer?

EA
née
J
: Yes. He was looking at my body, up and down, in a creepy way; he was leering, shamelessly leering, while I stood in my husband's den, waiting for him to finish and leave. He looked at me and said, ‘So you stand to inherit a sizable amount of money. Come over here,' he said and stupidly I obeyed, and he motioned for me to lean in, and then he whispered into my ear, ‘Now that you have all the money and don't have to fuck the old man you must be pleased.' I told him to get out. He laughed. I screamed, ‘Get out now!' He tried to talk so I screamed more, ‘Get out, get out, get out!' I screamed at the top of my lungs and then eventually he started backing out of the house. The neighbours to the right of us, the Walton-Fischers, were standing in their driveway, wondering what was going on. The officer got in his squad car and I didn't stop screaming till he was gone. It felt good to chase him out of my home.

RJ
: You did the right thing. He sounds like a maniac.

EA
née
J
: You should come over here. I don't like being alone here right now.

RJ
: Perhaps you should stay with family or friends while this investigation's underway, for the next few weeks at least.

EA
née
J
: I have no family anywhere near here, and I have no friends I want to stay with. I want to be in my home, even though Gerald was murdered here – I won't be scared away. Why don't you stay here, too?

RJ
: I should keep some distance from things.

EA
née
J
: Think about it. Anyway, come over soon.

RJ
: I will …

EA
née
J
: Bye.

RJ
: Bye.

(
Call terminated at 1336h. I return the phone to its mount shortly after pressing the end key.
)

4

F
lowers, I thought, weren't such a bad idea after all. I called the florist, whose shop was just down the street, and I asked if I were to go through with my order, for forty dollars, to 19 Tower Street, could I maybe get a lift with the delivery driver. She asked me where I live and I told her and then she said, ‘Okay, sure. He'll pick you up in twenty minutes.' I prepaid over the phone with my Visa and asked for a receipt. While waiting I brushed my teeth again and reapplied underarm deodorant and sprayed on a little eau de toilette, a gift from a former girlfriend, and I also put on a clean shirt, even though the other wasn't dirty, because I wanted to appear fresh, despite the hangover. The delivery driver will be here any minute, I thought, and I put on my coat and grabbed a notepad and pen, put them in my inside pocket, and I grabbed my keys, with a small penknife and small flashlight on the keychain. I drank two glasses of ice water. I wondered whether I was forgetting anything, then I grabbed my wallet. I grabbed my sunglasses, too, remembering what a friend's uncle said to me once: ‘Never leave home without your wallet, keys and sunglasses.' I looked at my watch and decided to wait out front for the flower delivery driver, since he was doing me a favour.

The delivery driver showed up in a small black hatchback, and the back of the car was full of bouquets. The passenger-side seat, too, had a large bouquet on it but the driver, Darren, made some space for it in the back. Darren was tall and slim and I'd guess seventeen, though he told me on the car ride that he studied philosophy and history at one of the local universities, so he was probably around twenty, if not a few years older than twenty; nevertheless, he looked like he was seventeen. He asked why I don't drive and I said it's because I don't have a car or a driver's licence. He asked what I did for a living and I told him that I'm a private detective. I thanked him for picking me up. ‘No problem,' he said. The car, obviously, smelled of flowers; at first it was pleasant, though as Darren drove, slowly, I started to develop an acute headache.

I said to Darren, ‘Do the flowers ever get to your head?'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘All the time. Crack your window.'

I opened my window slightly, so as not to damage the ­flowers.

‘You have a headache?' said Darren.

‘Yeah,' I said, ‘though I'm also hungover.'

Darren drove fast and told me a story about a philosopher, one from a small mountain village, a hundred-odd years ago, who leaves his cottage and goes into town so as to get some flour, sugar, eggs, milk and meat, if there is meat, from a store that a friend of his, a philosopher too, runs from home. The two philosophers meet – Philosopher A, the one who leaves his cottage to go get supplies, and Philosopher B, the one who runs a small shop out of his home – and talk for hours about politics, science, art and love and drink mugs of some sort of mead. Philosopher A's convinced, Darren told me as he drove, that love as such, that love
qua
love, is nothing more than misfiring Spirit, Spirit clouding one's senses, confusing one and leading one astray, that is to say, blinding one: blinding one as a prisoner. But Philosopher B says, Spirit's what clouds your so-called senses, for it's what grants you the ability to imagine love in the first place. Love, too, can confine, he says, yes, true. But so-called Spirit, the fantasy of Spirit, this is necessary to possess the illusion, to be able to even have illusions – to generate more illusions one need be inhabited
ab initio
with so-called Spirit, says Philosopher B to Philosopher A. I know, says Philosopher A, that's why I think love's a lie. If Spirit's present in the beginning, as a sort of initial state, then once illusions are acquired, begetting more and more illusions, in time some illusions – ones based on non-truths, of course – transmogrify,
mutatis mutandis
, into exalted love. If this exalted love's born from lies, lies generated by Spirit, then
eo ipso
, he says, love's a lie. Although love may be a lie, as you yourself say, says Philosopher B to Philosopher A, it does bring to light some certainties on occasion. For example? says Philosopher A. Well, for example, after loving – while loving, even, from time to time – we can be sure that we are really separate, that some sort of commingling, even temporarily, a commingling of Spirit, never becomes one. We are always separated, says Philosopher B to Philosopher A, who responds by saying, You're probably right. Then Philosopher A tells Philosopher B about a young man, a man in his late twenties, who is visited one night by the Devil. The Devil comes to the young man, he comes to him on a street corner, and says to the young man as he's walking:
There are things you'll never know, as I'm sure you already know, things beyond your comprehension, and there are things you do know, things you have no idea you know, and it's impossible for you to free yourself of this knowledge, although this knowledge is beyond your comprehension, too.
And then the Devil laughed, says Philosopher A to Philosopher B, said Darren while driving me and the bouquet to Elaine's. I asked Darren what the young man said in response. He said nothing, Darren said. I asked Darren what Philosopher B said to Philosopher A after the story, and Darren said he said that although it's important to recognize the bottomless pit in others, it's also important not to be dragged into that hole, and that although we're separate and alone, it is in fact possible to drag someone into a pit. Then Philosopher A said,
Omne verum vero consonat
. And that's it, said Darren. We pulled up to Elaine's house and I thanked Darren for the ride and the story and then I asked why he told me this story, and he said he wasn't sure, that he'd just read it somewhere, and that he wanted to see what I made of it, seeing as I'm a detective. I told him I wasn't sure what to make of it, though I'd think on it. I tipped him the few dollars I had in change. He said thanks and gave me his card and I took my bouquet and he drove off in the flower-filled hatchback.

Elaine answered the door dressed in jeans and a black woollen turtleneck sweater. She said hello and then sneezed. ‘
Gesundheit,
' I said. She thanked me. I handed her the bouquet. I told her that I'd picked it up for her. She said she loved lilies. She seemed genuinely surprised and touched. This was my first time entering the Andrewses' home. It seemed bigger on the inside than it did from the outside – much bigger, in fact. I followed her into the kitchen where she was drinking a cup of steaming tea. She offered me one and I accepted. She asked me if I take sugar or milk or lemon and I said lemon would be good, for there was a lemon out on a cutting board. We drank tea in silence and that was fine by me. For a minute, I even started to read the newspaper sitting on the kitchen table. A developer wanted to build on an ancient Cree burial site. Elaine started to speak and told me about phone calls she'd been receiving; when she picked up, the person on the other end wouldn't say anything, simply waited, waited for her to get frustrated and hang up, but she said she wouldn't hang up, that she'd give the person on the other end
a piece of her mind
, telling them that they're sick fucks to fuck with a woman whose husband's just been murdered, bloodily murdered with a knife to the chest, and that if they weren't such goddamn cowards they'd speak up, say their piece, then leave her alone. I asked her how many of these phone calls she'd received and she said seven. Seven over the past eight hours. I asked her if she'd told the police and she said, ‘Fuck the police.' We sat sipping from steaming mugs of tea and I thought about the phone calls and the murder and wondered if they were related: it sounds counterintuitive, but she was a beautiful woman, I thought, one who might perhaps attract these kinds of callers. I asked her if she'd ever received calls like that in past and she said yes but not so many in one day, in the past they were spread out, spread out over days, weeks, months, she said. I asked her if the calls started after she married Gerald. And she told me she'd been getting the calls since moving into the house I was standing in, the house Gerald was recently murdered in, and then I asked if I could see where she found the body.

The living room was smaller than I'd expected, which was strange, since the house's interior I'd imagined to be much smaller from the outside but in general was much larger save the living room. The room was impeccably decorated, however, with a small elegant vase on a small side table and a painting on the northeast wall, a painting almost solidly dark, though there looked like there might be a town and a jetty, perhaps, seen from the water, from the estuary, on a dark and foggy night, though I wasn't sure what it was supposed to be. The couch had been removed. Its impression remained in the carpet. There was a coffee table, with no couch. There was the side table, too. Nothing was on either table – save the vase on the side table – but that was because the police took everything, Elaine said, and I asked her what'd been on the table and she said an ashtray and some magazines and books and so on. ‘I don't know specifically,' she said. There was a large window looking out onto their backyard, though it didn't appear to have been tampered with. Elaine said that it was shut, too, last night, the night of Gerald's murder. I stared out the window, onto the Andrewses' well-maintained backyard, thinking about the case and, more specifically, thinking about Elaine, who stood beside me, looking out the window, and I caught her looking at my reflection in the window when I looked up and at hers. She looked back out onto the yard. The sun was setting and the bushes and lawn looked dark and green in the setting sun. I yawned, unintentionally, and registered hunger. I hadn't eaten in a long time. Possibly days, I thought. The remaining leaves on the trees flapped in the wind but through the thick window we couldn't hear either the flapping of the leaves or the howling of the wind, if in fact the wind was howling, which it probably wasn't, for the leaves flapped gently, from the looks of it, from the living room, where not twenty-four hours ago Gerald Andrews had been stabbed to death. I looked over at Elaine's reflection again and again caught her looking at mine in the windowpane. I wondered what she was thinking. I hoped she was thinking,
I like him
. That seemed doubtful, however, despite the connection we were forming; no, she was probably wondering what I was thinking, whether I was currently solving the case, while staring out onto the lawn, lost in thoughts, thoughts re the case, while she stared at my reflection, wondering what I was thinking, thinking about the case, perhaps, or thinking about her; it was quite possible that she was wondering what I made of her, while I stared out the window, onto their nice backyard, sizing her up in my head, while she watched me do so. I think she thinks I suspect her, I thought. When she was looking at me, the first and second time, when she was looking at my reflection, the first and second time I caught her, both times, she averted her eyes quickly, perhaps nervously, though it was hard to tell, I thought. I'd hoped she was looking at me because she was attracted to me and couldn't take her eyes off me, though it was more than likely she was wondering what I made of the case. Re that, however, I didn't make much. I didn't know who killed Gerald and I had a few suspicions, but I was developing ideas slowly, piece by piece, all the while, of course, willing to dismiss my ideas, let them fade away completely if, for example, some more compelling ideas came along, though that wasn't happening, and everything on offer, for the most part, was unconvincing, as far as I could tell. No. There wasn't much to go on.

‘Have you eaten?' I asked.

‘No. My appetite's been pretty much nonexistent.'

‘Well, nevertheless, we should eat,' I said.

‘What would you like?'

‘Is there any good takeout around here?'

‘There's an excellent Chinese place near here that delivers. Mou Gui Fang. Szechuan and Cantonese but it's known for its Szechuan. It's spicy, a lot of it. Do you like spicy food?'

‘Sounds perfect,' I said.

We couldn't decide between the Moo Goo Gai Pan or the Kung Pao Chicken so we went with the Moo Goo Gai Pan and the Kung Pao Ming Har, a similar dish to the Kung Pao Chicken, according to Elaine, but made with shrimp instead of chicken. We also ordered the Spicy Black Bean Beef, the steamed vegetables, two orders of steamed rice, two vegetable spring rolls, two Hot and Sour soups, an order of Szechuan Spicy Noodles and the Chef's Special Pork. Elaine said she had plenty of wine and beer or anything else we might want to drink. I offered to put the food on my credit card but Elaine insisted that she wasn't going to have me spend my money, not while I was a guest in her home, she said, not while working on her husband's case. I thanked her.

We sat in the kitchen drinking ice-cold beer while waiting for the food. Elaine looked tired. I was tired, too, but the beer was doing me a world of good, though at first it made my heart beat a little fast. Elaine twirled her hair while she flipped through the newspaper (
The Examiner
, i.e., a local rag). She looked up at me looking at her and took a sip of her frosted beer. She looked young, I thought, while she looked at the paper and played with her hair. She didn't seem to mind my watching her. Perhaps she liked it, I thought, perhaps it made her feel safe, having me watch, while she was reading, ensuring that she was safe to do so, safe from obscene callers and knife-wielding murderers. The truth be told, however, I don't carry a gun, nor do I own one, though I'm not bad in hand-to-hand combat. I took nine weeks of jiu-jitsu a couple of years back. I remember the moves. I do push-ups and sit-ups every day, too, like a man doing time.