We’ll block the sale, Arthur vowed to him, with far more confidence than conviction.
He can hear Hubbell talking to an associate at Tragger Inglis. The terms bandied about are breach of contract, unjust enrichment, restraining order. Bullingham computed the cost of pro bono services, deducted that from the surge of new business its gesture will earn, offered legal aid to the Save Gwendolers.
Arthur can’t remember much of his cross of Angella this afternoon, except those gruelling moments when it blew up in his face. The Whalley Wanderers, Angella’s honour guard, three local merchants and a retired fire chief, standing proud in their bow ties. Arthur felt as if he were dying on his feet. Had a bottle been handy he might have ended a fifteen-year dry spell.
His former number-one suspect had given a brief reading at the Wanderlust on that last evening of March. Digital photos were taken of the literary event. Strangers bought her drinks. “Sweet Adeline,” that’s how the boys serenaded her from the stage. Lotis had uncovered this shatterproof alibi too late.
What, then, could account for Adeline’s molecules showing up in Exhibit 52? Contamination between exhibits seems likely, Angella’s DNA in accidental mix with Faloon’s, a scandalous forensic error. Dr. Munni Sidhoo may not be the expert she’s cracked up to be…
He can only pray her findings will be confirmed by Crown forensics-their DNA people are working overnight, checking her results. But then what? Did Angella engineer the murder some other way? How? Or does the answer lurk elsewhere, another paradigm?
Upon hearing Brian Pomeroy make noisy entry and smelling his steaming takeout cartons, Arthur rises, finds plates, chopsticks. Lotis is perched on the counter, morose, wiggling her flip-flops. Brian is digging into the bar, about to break his weak vow of temperance.
Hubbell protests that he’s expected home, his dinner is being held. “Got your second wind, I hope. By the way, Margaret is arriving tomorrow on the noon ferry. Told her I’d pick her up and bring her here.” He goes to Arthur’s ear. “You won’t whisper about you-know-what.” Margaret’s a casual friend of Hubbell’s wife. Marital cheating seems fraught with complication. How can it be worth the effort?
He’ll be in court when Margaret arrives, another misaligned attempt to link up. To ask her not to come would send a dangerously wrong message. Now it’s too late to call her, she’s early to bed, rises with the dawn. He wonders what she made of his pathetic messages of yesterday.
Lotis shouts. “Fucking Clearihue. Fucking Whalley Wanking Wanderers. Fuck everyone!”
Brian downs his shot of vodka and pours another. He seems somewhat in dread of her. Maybe he truly thinks she’s a dryad. Maybe he suspects she sees through him.
She has shed copious tears of grief and relief for Selwyn, reinforcing Arthur’s impression that her feelings are not platonic. Maybe she too is blind, denying these feelings, regarding herself as too tough to fall sway to the bourgeois concept called love. She’s devastated by the failure of the Gwendolyn campaign. Arthur wants to comfort her but isn’t sure how. He lacks hugging skills.
While picking at her chop suey, Lotis issues a string of epithets, crowned by a threat: “I’ll kill that cocksucker.”
“Right on, sister,” Brian says. “Kill the capitalist pig.” Drink has loosened the recidivist’s tongue. “There’s something I want to share with you, my love. I too am a kitchen communist.”
“Hey, man, get therapy. Release the self-centred child within. Learn to relate to normal human beings.”
“I’ll tell you about therapy.”
“Not interested.” She stalks away.
Arthur makes tea, leads Brian to the living room, where Lotis is making up the couch as a bed. “Shall we presume you’re staying the night?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
He regrets his formal tone, extends an invitation.
Brian is unrelenting: “You’ll want to keep your bedroom door locked, Arturo, so you don’t wake up with vampire bites on your neck.”
She says nothing, kicks off her flip-flops, bends to her packsack, pulls out a bag of dirty clothes, proceeds to the laundry room.
“I told you, she’s a loose cannon. It was her bright idea to test the jism for Angella’s prints. That test doesn’t hold up, we’re tits up, Adeline will be dancing off to sign a contract with Real Woman for a story about how she bested you again.”
He’s right, if the jury thinks Arthur targeted the wrong perp, they’ll suspect he’s been selling false goods all along. He made the mistake of running a prosecution, not a defence. Hubris.
Arthur steels himself when Brian asks if he may bend his ear. He supposes today’s session with Ms. Chow-Thomas went poorly. Here is a marriage crippled by truth and confession, too much sharing of sins.
“Caroline’s intimes were milquetoasts. A colleague of hers, American Poets 200, a pity whore, can’t get tenured, can’t get published. Lasted three months. Number two was in her birding club. Three or four times a year, always out of town. They allegedly share a quality I lack called sensitivity.”
Arthur slumps into a chair, feeling addiction prickles as Brian sips.
“Lila had the gall to tell me that Caroline’s relationships, her word, were a reaction to my womanizing, also her word.” His voice rising. “Womanizing! She’s been womanized, she’s infatuated with Caroline.” He explodes: “Damn it, that witch sent us off on that weekend with the sole intention of ending our marriage! She wants Caroline for herself! Christ, I’d like to strangle the conniving…”
He hits the brakes, steals a look at Lotis, who has just returned. She misses this chance, an easy score into an open net. Instead, she’s staring at Arthur with her wide bold eyes. Suddenly, where there was mystery, light appears. Tea goes down the wrong way. Arthur lurches from his chair coughing.
“We have to find Daisy,” he says.
31
It’s half past eight as Arthur sets out for his office, a vigorous walk along the shoreline. A trio of girls runs past, jostling him. “Sorry, Pops!” Arthur feels as a foreigner must, he’s a rural refugee, out of place among the flashy towers, the grunting traffic of the harbour. Margaret too will find this a test, it’s a poor setting for reconciliation. (About now, she’s packing her suitcase…Will she bring a suitcase? Does she even plan to stay overnight?)
Despite his anxiety, he had a sustained sleep, less troubled by all the clutter of the trial. He’s back on track, knows where he’s going. But he isn’t sure how to get there. The fingerprint on the fridge. He had almost missed that. There are so many bits and pieces. So much depends on the Crown validating Munni Sidhoo’s analysis. Everything.
Christ, I’d like to strangle the conniving…Brian’s rhetoric pointed Arthur to the cipher, the solution to the coded messages that keep getting dropped in his mailbox. What an odd sensation, that bonding of minds with Lotis. Last week’s dream of Dogpatch haunts him now: daisies everywhere, beckoning, whispering. Find me. Find me.
After Brian left, Arthur and Lotis continued to talk excitedly, she pacing in her underwear while her clothes were in the washer, oblivious to her roommate’s discomfort. Arthur set her tasks, directed her to contact Winters’s secretary. As of this moment they should be combing through every scrap of paper in Doctor Eve’s office. Locked since April 1, it may yield clues in old billings, appointment calendars, notes in desk drawers. A love letter hastily hidden between a book’s pages, overlooked as Doctor Eve sought to obliterate all traces of Daisy. “You are My Sunshine” sounds, it’s Lotis. “We have a name of interest. Desiree. Scribbled twice on an appointments calendar for last July, so the time is right. Nothing else, no last name or phone number. Desiree. Daisy.”