Blood Wine Page 10

  “Was he in court for that?”

  “No, but we talked during the investigation. And we’d talked before, about the murder his ‘associate’ went down for. So he saw me, came back out of his garage and we chatted on the street. He invited me in for a drink. He assured me his wife was home. We both laughed. There was no way I was going into Vittorio Ciccone’s house for a drink. That was about it.”

  “That was it? You talked. That makes him innocent.”

  “It does when the man who was murdered was murdered in Hamilton, same time, an hour’s drive away.”

  “But there were witnesses — weren’t there?”

  “There was confusion. It was outside a Tim Hortons. A couple of cops stopping in for a donut saw it happen through the window. In spite of the night glare. They said Ciccone got out of his car, walked over to this drug dealer, shot him in the head, a single shot, and drove off. They swear it was Ciccone.”

  “Did they get his licence?”

  “So they say. They rushed out, got his licence, but didn’t chase him. They stayed with the dead man, watched him die. They didn’t recall the licence number until later that night.”

  “Ciccone isn’t a guy you’d mistake for someone else.”

  “Exactly, not unless you wanted to.”

  “You think it’s a set-up?”

  Miranda stopped. They were under a streetlight, his eyes cast in deep shadow, only pinpricks of light glistening from his pupils. She could not bring his face into focus. She thought how desperately the police wanted to bring the man down. Her new friend’s interest puzzled her. She shrugged.

  “I couldn’t say, I wouldn’t say that. I only know that I saw him, and his car, in Rosedale, the same time as the shooting.”

  “Then —”

  “It’s not my call.”

  She was abrupt. Philip let the matter drop and walked her the rest of the way home in congenial silence, leaving her at the security door without making overtures to come in.

  The next day they met for lunch. Three days later, they had lunch again and spent the afternoon in bed at her place.

  The lobby of The Four Seasons was more self-consciously opulent than either Morgan or Miranda were comfortable with. They came in through separate doors at the same time and converged in the main concourse. Miranda felt an uneasy familiarity. Both of them tried not to look like locals hoping to catch a glimpse of Bruce Willis or maybe a Baldwin.

  “Did you call her?” Morgan asked, gazing past Miranda with what he assumed was worldly disinterest.

  “No, I thought you would.”

  Morgan pulled her silky blue knickers out of his pants pocket and shook them with an exaggerated flourish. Seeing an elderly man sitting within hearing, he said clearly, “I think you left these in my room last night.”

  “No,” exclaimed Miranda in an equally theatrical projection. “They must be your boyfriend’s!”

  “Nice,” he said, lowering his voice to exclude their startled audience of one.

  Spivak and Stritch came walking across the lobby toward them.

  “Here’s trouble,” said Miranda under her breath.

  “The funeral director and his future client,” Morgan quipped. Spivak stopped to hack up phlegm, which he spat unceremoniously into a wad of tissue and stuffed into his pants pocket.

  “Gentlemen,” said Miranda. “What brings you to The Four Seasons? Are you joining us for brunch?”

  “Is it Sunday?” said Stritch. “They only do it on Sunday. I hear it’s exquisite, the best on the continent.”

  “It must be Sunday,” said Miranda, who had lost track of what day it was.

  “It’ll just be the four of us,” said Spivak.

  “What do you mean?” Morgan responded, picking up on the declarative edge to Spivak’s announcement.

  “She’s not here.”

  “She’s checked out?”

  “She never checked in.”

  “We dropped her off,” said Morgan.

  “You dropped her off, you didn’t check her in.”

  “She had a room, she reserved it from Headquarters.”

  “Yeah, she had a room, but she didn’t show up, she didn’t use it.”

  “Spivak,” said Miranda, “we drove under the portico. There was a doorman, he opened the car door, the officer who drove us, he got out, she told him she’d be fine. She looked like hell, in a tousled Hollywood sort of way — like a make-up crew had spent hours making her look beautifully damaged —”

  “Is this going somewhere?” said Spivak.

  “Well, yes and no. A lesser establishment might have turned her away. This place would assume her eccentricity was a function of wealth and power. They would be gracious.”

  “Yeah, well, she never made it through the revolving door.”

  “Swing doors, Spivak. Uniformed doormen.”

  “Yeah, and no one saw her come in. We’ve been here for a couple of hours —”

  “And you didn’t call us,” exclaimed Miranda.

  “Didn’t cross my mind,” said Spivak.

  “What have you found?” said Morgan in his most collegial voice. “Did you talk to the doorman on duty?”

  “Caught him going off shift. He remembered an unmarked police car dropping off a woman. He described her as a ravaged blond.”

  “Nice turn of phrase,” said Miranda.

  “He lost track of her,” said Stritch sadly. “She disappeared behind a pillar. She didn’t come into the lobby.”

  “Did the security cameras catch anything?” Morgan asked.

  Spivak motioned for them to follow him and they walked behind the customer service desk into an office. Spivak gestured to the house security man to replay the tape.

  Good quality footage from a high perspective showed their car wheeling into the brightly lit portico; two doors opened, the driver’s and the back passenger-side door. Elke Sturmberg emerged and gazed around, then stared straight up into the camera before waving the doorman back and the driver away. She leaned down and made a gesture of goodbye through the car windows. As the car pulled away she stepped towards the door and out of the camera’s scope.

  “Okay,” said Morgan. “What about inside, is that on tape?”

  The security man switched to a second screen that was keyed up to begin playing a few seconds before the exterior shot lost track of the blond.

  “Nothing,” said Spivak. “She didn’t make it through the door. There’s a blind spot close to the building. The camera’s trained on the cars, not the people coming in.”

  They turned away and walked back into the sumptuous lobby.

  “Did you interrogate the people on the desk?” Miranda asked.

  “No,” said Spivak. “We thought we should leave that for you.”

  “You didn’t know we were —”

  “Sarcasm, Miranda,” Morgan interjected. “Detective Spivak has of course interviewed everyone concerned. Detectives Spivak and Stritch are doing their jobs very well. We, if we’re co-operative, will observe and pick up what we can, and contribute what we can, whenever possible.”

  Spivak nodded benevolently, not quite sure whether Morgan was being deferential, defensive, or bitchy. It didn’t seem to matter very much which it was.

  Eeyore Stritch was leaning to look beyond his partner into the dining lounge, admiring the brunch buffet.

  “What do you think?” said Miranda. “Dutch treat.”

  “It’s expensive,” said Morgan.

  “Not for what you get,” said Spivak, folding his arms across his protuberant gut. “It’s all-you-can-eat.”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan. “Dutch treat.”

  “Right on,” said Stritch, revealing beneath his usual gravitas a hint of the sensual enthusiast.

  Eating here, this is a measure of our confusion, Morgan thought as they waited for the maître d’ to seat them. We’ve gone through Dante’s Inferno with a woman who turned up out of nowhere with a smoking gun and a severed hand and bonded with M
iranda. An old woman died, a million-dollar wine conspiracy has been brought down, a winery has disappeared from the face of the earth. The stranger, a beautiful blond, has also disappeared, presumably only from Toronto. Why not have a good meal? The words did not come to him with such clarity, but the sentiments did, the review of events scrolling by through his mind like a film on fast-forward.

  Superintendent Alex Rufalo hovered over the four detectives, who were seated at two pairs of back-to-back desks just outside his office. He gave them a gloomy smile.

  “Detective Quin, you’re not here,” he said. “And you other three? I came in for some peace and quiet. You turn up after Sunday brunch at The Four Seasons, your star witness is missing.”

  “Nope, she’s not,” said Spivak, struggling to suppress a burp.

  “Not?”

  “She’s missing, but she’s not a witness. Well, she’s a possible witness, maybe, but we’re not sure of the crime.”

  “Would you like to clarify that?” said the superintendent, turning to Morgan.

  Morgan had eaten moderately from every food group represented, including shellfish, crêpes, salads, and pastries.

  “That’s pretty much it,” he said. “We’ve got a witness, but no crime; we’ve got a crime, but no witness. We’ve got crimes, witnesses, victims, but no suspects.”

  “And no leads,” declared the superintendent. “Four of Toronto’s finest, and we have chaos.”

  “Three,” said Miranda. “I’m not here.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said the superintendent, pausing for emphasis, “you three get down to some serious brainstorming. Since you’re not here, Detective Quin, you can referee. I’ll be in my office.”

  As he retreated through his door, the others relaxed. There is something inherently Presbyterian about people like us, thought Miranda. We feel guilty for having a sumptuous meal, even though we paid for it ourselves, and it’s Sunday, for goodness sake, we’re not on company time.

  But, of course, cops, like priests, work twenty-four seven, regardless of the hours they punch in on the clock. The superintendent, like a bishop, was a reminder of their commitment, as well as their fallibility.

  “You were right,” she said, looking at Morgan.

  “About what?” Spivak demanded, as if he were being left out of something important.

  Morgan shrugged.

  “The apron,” said Miranda. “An old plastic apron of my mother’s. It’s missing. And a pair of rubber gloves from under the sink.”

  “So the killer dug it out of the guy’s gut,” Spivak muttered, “while you were lying there. Nice.”

  They talked, arranging known facts into a variety of scenarios. When a coherent pattern refused to emerge, they concluded there were not enough facts.

  They drew a chart on a chalkboard and stared at it.

  Morgan recalled the old woman, how she lived blithely in the midst of a wine conspiracy of epic, and, as it turned out, deadly proportions. People died over wine, and the old woman died when the scam closed down. And she understood nothing that was happening around her. “Maybe we’ve got it wrong,” he said.

  “What?” said Miranda. “It’s not about an international wine conspiracy?”

  “Yeah. No, it is, but we’ve been caught up in our own perspective, like old Mrs. Oughtred. Mr. Savage is playing us.…”

  “Who’s Mr. Savage?” said Stritch.

  “Sort of the generic bad guy,” said Miranda.

  “Exactly,” said Morgan.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Spivak. “Make sense.”

  “There’s a bad guy,” said Morgan, “who killed Philip Carter and assaulted Miranda. There’s a bad guy who tortured and executed the ring-man, there’s a bad guy who blew up the winery and old Mrs. Oughtred, and there’s a bad guy who has been running the wine fraud, using the old lady’s place in Niagara to blend fake Châteauneuf-du-Pape and smuggle it into the U.S. Maybe they’re all the same guy, maybe not.”

  “And?” said Spivak, feeling he was missing something or being left out.

  Morgan stared at him then made a leap from one track to another. “We’ve been assuming the man who killed Philip Carter framed Miranda so he wouldn’t be caught.”

  “Yes,” Miranda said. “And?”

  “But what if that was his purpose from the outset?”

  “What?”

  “To set you up for a fall. The man called Philip Carter, he was collateral damage, not you.”

  “Why bother?” said Miranda. “I wasn’t the one connected to Bonnydoon.”

  “But maybe this wasn’t about Bonnydoon.”

  “What, then?” demanded Spivak impatiently. “Why go after Miranda? What about the semen?”

  “This guy is meticulous and inevitably imperfect.”

  “Imperfect?” Miranda queried.

  “Yeah, too careful,” said Morgan. “Imagine you’re him, you make mistakes, then you cover them — or you’re so careful you don’t see them happening. The semen? It never occurred to him you would be checked. Why should you be, you’re in bed with your lover, you killed him. The rape kit’s irrelevant. He knows about killing, he doesn’t know forensic procedures.”

  “Why go after her?” Spivak repeated. “What’s the connection?”

  “Ciccone,” said Morgan. “Why Miranda, why now? Vittorio Ciccone.”

  “I doubt it,” Spivak proclaimed. “Ciccone needs her.”

  “You testify next week?” Morgan asked.

  “Tomorrow. I did the preliminary nearly two months ago, explaining how I knew him, how we ‘connected’ through the Ferguson case.”

  “Ferguson?” Stritch asked in a quiet and sombre voice, not wanting to intrude on the strange thought processes going on around him, yet needing at least minimal information to keep up with the exchange.

  “A little girl, raped and murdered by her stepfather —”

  “Okay,” said Stritch. “So, why would Vittorio Ciccone want to get rid of his best chance for acquittal?”

  “Maybe somebody else did,” said Morgan. “An enemy in the wine trade.”

  “Then why kill Philip, why not me? Why not keep it simple?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why would Ciccone have any interest in wine?”

  “I just think he does.”

  “Come on, Morgan,” said Miranda. “Compared to the millions in drugs, a few bottles of fake wine are small-time.”

  “Maybe,” said Morgan. “Although Elke Sturmberg figured there was big money in a quality wine scam.” He paused. No one else said anything. “It’s like we’ve got a contour map with no names on it. There’s no key, and we’re just assuming north’s at the top of the page.”

  “I think I’ve found your key,” said the superintendent, emerging from his office. “Not exactly found, since she’s disappeared, apparently without a trace —”

  “Elke Sturmberg?” said Miranda.

  “There’s a report on my desk. I just got to it. A John Doe was fished out of the Humber late Friday night, riddled with bullets.”

  “Wiseguy,” Spivak suggested. “Biker?”

  “Connected with our missing blond,” said Morgan.

  “Seems the slugs they dug out of the cadaver were from the gun we found in her purse.”

  8

  Tim Hortons

  When Miranda walked along Isabella Street on her way home after the fallout from Elke Sturmberg’s status shifting from missing to wanted, she was distracted. She did not notice the warm evening air, the trees rustling softly overhead, the occasional passerby, nor did she notice the black limousine parked in front of her building until she was beside it, and then she paid it only passing attention.

  She had studied language in university, linguistics and semiotics, and she often amused herself among words while on another level engaging in subliminal deductive analysis, working her way toward the resolution of a criminal conundrum. When Vittorio Ciccone’s voice called to her quietly thr
ough the open window in the back of the limousine, she was wondering about the directionality of prepositions. Why do Torontonians walk “along” a street like Isabella that runs east-west, but “down” a north-south street like Yonge or Avenue Road? Do New Yorkers walk up and down the avenues, but along, no across, the grid of numbered streets in Manhattan? Are some prepositions longitudinal and others latitudinal?

  “Miss,” the voice hissed. “Miss Quin.” She did not hear the summons with the falling sound of her own name.

  The driver got out of the car and called her. “Hey you, Miss Quin.”

  She wheeled around and, responding to what seemed a sinister situation, her hand swung back to where her semi-automatic would be if she were carrying it, which she was not.

  “You’re on suspension,” said the voice she recognized as Vittorio Ciccone’s. He knew she had been reaching for her gun, even though she never in actuality had drawn on anyone who was not in the midst of a criminal act.

  “Mr. Ciccone.” She leaned down and looked through the window, where he was sitting in shadow. “We shouldn’t be talking.”

  “It’s legal,” he responded. “I asked my lawyers. They said it was legal. I’m a free man, still innocent, on bail. You’re a temporary civilian, a witness on my side.”

  “Not on your side,” Miranda countered. “I’m not doing you any favours.”

  “Oh, but you are,” he said. “And there are people who do not like what you are doing.”

  “Cops? Some don’t like it, they want to see you go down.”

  “Get in, we need to talk.”

  “Thank you, but no. We’re not friends. I don’t like what you do. If the jury overrides my testimony, that’s fine with me.”

  “You would see an innocent man go to jail,” he laughed.

  “You have a strange way of defining innocence.”

  “And you have a strange way of determining guilt, Detective. Okay, you stay there. But listen to me.”