“Partner out of town, is she?” he asked, taking one of those little mental leaps I found so hard to follow.
“Yes. She’s gone on a wilderness camping trip in Algonquin Park with her friend and his two sons. She’ll be back tomorrow or the day after.” There I was being imprecise again. He scowled.
“Business been good lately, has it?”
“Fine. Yes.”
“Don’t owe a bit of money or anything, do you?”
“No, as a matter of fact, we’ve actually turned a small profit the last few months.” I could predict the next question, and sure enough, out it came.
“Insured, are you?”
“Yes, of course.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out where he was going with this one: insurance fraud. Maybe that explained why Rod McGarrigle had been so evasive. But it was much worse than that.
“Then what?”
“Then what, what?” I asked, baffled by all the mental hopping around Lewis was doing.
He looked at me as if I were of subnormal intelligence and said, “What did you do after you realized you’d left your keys behind?” He clearly resented having to use all those words to get me back on track.
I told him how I’d gone to the shop, peered in the front door, realized something was wrong and gone round to the back to try to get in.
“Door locked, was it?”
“Yes. I used a chair to smash the window. Come to think of it, the chair was lying on its side close to the door. It had been knocked over.”
“Wind?”
“I don’t think so. It’s wrought iron and pretty heavy.”
“And then?”
“I reached through the broken window, pushed the bar, and got the door open, and went over to Alex.”
“Who was where, exactly!” Lewis went on. Clearly my answers were not yet precise enough.
“Wandering around in a daze,” I replied.
“His precise position?”
“Near the tan sofa.”
“Near?”
“In front of it. A couple of feet, more or less, in front of it.”
“His appearance, in detail?”
“Dazed, as I said. He had a cut over his left ear, and he was sort of staggering around.”
Lewis winced. He didn’t like expressions like more or less and sort of, I could tell, but at this moment I was too tired and sore to care.
“Say anything?”
“I think I asked him what happened, and then suggested he leave with me,” I replied, misunderstanding the question.
“He say anything?” Lewis asked, impatient at my inability to answer the question he was asking.
“He was babbling really. The only coherent thing he said was something about not being able to go because he had some unfinished work, an account he had to settle.”
For a second or two both policemen sat motionless, Mancino with his pen poised over his notebook, Lewis looking like the proverbial cat that had swallowed the canary. I looked from one to the other. Knowing Alex, it had simply never occurred to me that there was more than one way of interpreting what he’d said. Lewis, I knew right away, also thought there was only one interpretation, and it was not the same as mine.
“You can’t think Alex is to blame for this,” I gasped. “He would never do such a thing.”
“Exact words?” Lewis said finally.
“He was worried he hadn’t got all his work at the shop done!” I exclaimed. “That’s all.”
“Exact words?” Lewis repeated.
“He said, ”Not finished. Something I have to do. I have an account to settle with someone,“ ” I replied reluctantly. “It’s an old-fashioned expression, settle an account,” I added, horrified at the direction this conversation was taking, and upset that my report would reflect so badly on him. “Alex is getting on a little, and he’s lived all over the world, and he uses some rather quaint expressions. It means pay a bill. He’s been looking after the finances while my partner is away.”
“Known Mr. Stewart long, have you?” Lewis said, this time very quietly.
“Long enough,” I retorted. “About four years, long enough to know that he would never hurt a flea.”
Lewis said nothing. Mancino scribbled furiously.
“Have you figured out precisely what that other person was doing in my store?” I asked, anxiety making me belligerent as I desperately tried to get the investigation back on what I saw to be a more reasonable track. “Did he break in, not realizing Alex was still there? We don’t keep much cash in the shop, just a small float in the safe in the tiny office behind the front desk. Most people pay by credit card these days, so there’s rarely a large amount of money in the shop, but a thief wouldn’t necessarily know that,” I rattled on.
How had the thief got in? I wondered as I spoke. While the shop was open, perhaps, hiding in the storage room and then surprising Alex? Once the store was closed, both the front and back doors were locked. The back door was always locked: It had a panic bar for ease of exit but locked automatically behind you. It had been locked when I got there, that I knew for certain.
And the fire? We didn’t keep all that much in the storage room. We had a warehouse several blocks away where we kept the bigger pieces of furniture until there was room on the floor. The storage room contained some of our records, a place for our coats, and some of the smaller decorative items which we kept there to replace objects as they were sold. We didn’t keep anything flammable, and I couldn’t imagine how a fire could have started. Did that mean the fire had been deliberately set? Was the thief trying to cover his tracks? Was he even trying to make sure Alex could never identify him? It was a horrible thought.
My thoughts turned back to the present, and I found Sergeant Lewis watching me carefully. “So,” I said, “was it a robbery?”‘
“One possibility,” Lewis said.
I told him about the security alarm going off three times in the previous week. “I thought they were false alarms, but now I’m not so sure,” I said, pressing on despite his refusal to tell me anything. “Do you think someone was trying to break in then? Was the fire deliberately set?”
Lewis ignored me. Suddenly he leaned forward.
“Know this person?” Lewis asked, taking an eight by ten black-and-white photo out of his briefcase and setting it before me. If he’d wanted to shock me, he was very successful. It was the dead man in the store, photographed in such a way that I could see his face, his hair singed and one cheek burned, a dark ugly line on his neck. I gasped. Lewis waited.
“No!” I finally blurted out. Technically that was true, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be hooked up to a polygraph at that very moment.
“Certain?”
I nodded. There was no question I was being a trifle too literal here. I really didn’t know who the victim was. But I had seen him before. The problem was, every time I opened my mouth, I seemed to implicate Alex: Surely Lewis would never have suspected Alex if I hadn’t said what I had. I determined I would have to be very careful what I said from now on. Volunteering more than was asked for was not a good idea, it seemed.
“You know who he is?” I asked, adopting Lewis’s particular style of speech as my own.
It was his turn to nod. “Then why ask me?” I responded.
“Turned up in your storage room for starters. A little crispy have to say, but recognizable. Ever been to Peru?” he asked without missing a beat.