(2012) Cross-Border Murder (9 page)

“Not usually. But keep nipping at my heels like a beagle and I will be.”

She smiled, but a dog-like hint of sadness in her eyes made my heart ache.

I dropped her off at the motel. It was quiet. But then it was Friday night. Nearly all of the out-of-town customers had probably gone home for the weekend.

When I got home I made myself a coffee, took it upstairs to the den and called Phil Ryan.

“Lousy game wasn’t it,” he sighed.

“Yeah. We’ve got to stop believing in the home team. We’ll be dead by the time the Expos get into the World Series.”

“Don’t say that. We got to believe in something. Keep believing and eventually you come out a winner.”

“What did you think of Gina Montini?”

“Impressive. Maybe there’s hope for the next generation. Impressive, yeah, impressive.”

“Know what she said on the way home?”

“No. What? That she found me impressive?”

“No. I took that for granted.”

“So, what did she say?”

“That there was something strange about the police file.”

“Why did she say that? Did you tell her anything?”

“She said that when she asked you about the file, you hesitated and stared down at your feet. She wondered why because it was the only time you did not watch her face for a reaction. So she jumped to the conclusion that there was something strange about the file.”

“Sharp kid. So what did you say?”

“I told her the truth.”

I was expecting an outburst of anger. But it didn’t come. I sensed he was confronting a situation that was new to him.

“What she knows,” he mumbled, “is only hearsay.”

“True.”

“I’ve got to protect myself and my friend.”

“I know.”

He seemed to mull that one over. I wanted to examine the contents of the file for myself. After all there might be something in it that would mean something to me and not necessarily to him. I mentioned that to him.

“Yeah, maybe. But maybe things will resolve themselves without your having to see it. I mean, unless you see it, anything I tell you, anything you write will still be only hearsay.”

“True.” I decided to give in gracefully, if only for the time being. “Right. So what did you find in it? Anything of interest?”

“Not all that much to be truthful.” He said. “Except there is a note, initialed by the prosecuting attorney at the time, saying that the case was dropped at the request of External Affairs in Ottawa. It must have been inserted just before it was sent to the archives and sealed, because I never saw it before.” External Affairs meant pressure from the States.

“I wonder where that prosecuting attorney is now?”

The question drew a grunt from Ryan. “He’s now a discreet muckywuck in the justice department in Ottawa.”

I sighed. I was tired. “It figures. He’s not likely to be very helpful.”

“Nope. Not unless it turns out to be in his self-interest. So you may as well scratch him from your list.”

“I already have.” I gave him a synopsis of what I had found out from our stringer in Washington.

“Shit! That sounds really interesting.”

“Yeah, it is. So what else is there in the file?”

“As I said, nothing much that’s very significant. In fact I’m disappointed because I thought I had done a more thorough job at the time. Once it was confirmed that Montini’s prints were in the office, and that we had an unimpeachable witness who put him in the building around the time of Monaghan’s death, we kind of stopped there. We didn’t follow up any of the contra-indications or widen our interviews. But then back in those days we had a caseload backlog. Still, I wished we had been a little more thorough.”

“What contra-indications?”

“Oh, the fact that Monaghan probably had a lot of enemies.”

“What indicated that?”

“No one we interviewed had much good to say about him. Two students, for example, that we questioned because they had been in the building that evening said that he was a mean professor who consistently under-valued student work. They said he even went so far as to write letters making it very difficult for certain students to get into graduate school. Unfortunately, they couldn’t supply us with any names, so we didn’t follow it up. We could have gone through all his letter files with a fine tooth comb, but we didn’t. Even his wife acknowledged that he was cold and arrogant.”

“I know. I’ve spoken to her.”

“You’re not letting any moss grow on your ass, are you?”

I explained about her refusal to tell me anything of significance. But that she might talk to Gina.

“A tough cookie. A real cool one as I remember. When we asked her about whether she thought Montini had killed her husband as a result of an argument over the affair she was having with Montini, she actually laughed in our faces. Neither of them, she said, cared enough about her to fight over her. Certainly not her husband. In her view neither man had that kind of fire in their bellies. As for Montini, she said, if her husband had said boo, Montini would have beat his breast, asked for forgiveness, and backed out of the office on his Catholic knees. She actually used those words! But then, I remember, she tossed her head and said that she indeed wished that Montini had cared enough! And who knows, maybe he had!”

“Her assessment of her husband may have been accurate.”

“Yeah, according to her Monaghan was only interested in her money. She had apparently helped fund some of his earlier outside projects.”

“But would he have been able to continue tapping her source of money if they were that estranged?”

“I don’t know. That’s the kind of thing we didn’t follow up. But I suspect that would have been one of the conditions of any agreement to separate, or to his continued willingness to turn a blind eye to her getting affection elsewhere. Maybe he had some kind of hold over her. I don’t know.”

I mentioned the names of the people in the photo and asked how many of them had been interviewed. It took a minute for him to check the file.

“Only his wife and Professor Hendricks.”

“Why him?”

“Because he had the office next door. The walls are not very thick. We wanted to know if he had heard anything recently which might bear on the case.”

“And what did he say?”

There was another pause.

“He admitted that he had heard raised voices earlier in the day but was never able to identify who might have been in the office with Monaghan at the time. I remember him as a strange bird. Almost obsequious. Gave the impression that he was making a real effort to be helpful to us. But in the end nothing he said was of any damn use.”

I mentioned Dean Gooden. I had to explain who he was. Nothing in the file. That didn’t surprise me.

“You have to understand,” Phil said, “that most of the interviews we conducted were technical. The security guards, the student who knocked on his door the next morning and had the temerity to open the door when he found it unlocked and discovered the body, departmental administrators, that sort of thing. Moreover, once we had focused on Montini most of our work was concentrated on buttressing the case against him.”

“I understand,” I said. “Did anyone speak out against Montini? Suggest that he was probably guilty?”

“No I don’t think so. That is if you discount the sour grape remarks that Mrs. Monaghan made.”

I took a different tack. “Is there anything in the file about a Dr. Bull and his satellite cannon project.”

“Yeah. I think so. Hold on.” I thought I could hear him leafing through the file. “Ah, here it is. Monaghan had a particular file drawer allocated to that project. In fact, there’s a notation here to the effect that perhaps someone had searched hurriedly through those files not too long before the murder. The evidence is circumstantial. Apparently those files were not in the same impeccably neat condition of his other files. He seems to have been an unusually meticulous person, at least about his office work.”

“Any follow-up?”

“Nope. Sorry. But there was no way for me to think there was anything special about that particular project. Not that I understood what was in those files, but an expert told us it was a project that had been supported by government money and was all above board. Why does it interest you now?”

I explained about Bull’s eventual assassination and something about the real nature of Bull’s project. All revelations, of course, which had emerged only years after Monaghan had been murdered.

“Interesting. But none of that was known to us at the time,” he added somewhat defensively.

“I know.” The rest of my coffee had gone cold. “Well, it looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us. Oh, by the way, did you interview Mrs. Montini?”

“Yeah, I did the interview myself.”

“And?”

“She insisted we had the wrong man, that her husband was innocent. The standard stuff. She was believable, but she had nothing to offer which warranted further investigation.”

“But she convinced you that she really believed her husband was innocent?”

“Yeah, she was really in his corner. No sign of sour grapes. That Montini must have been something. Seems to have been a different person from the one that I arrested. I mean, to conduct a secret affair with the wife of a married man who gets murdered, to disintegrate mentally as a result, and to still have your wife and your daughter believe in you, well, that’s something a bit special isn’t it?”

“Yes, it probably is.”

“The kind of wife and daughter most men would be proud to have. Of course the fact that the daughter is also bright helps, doesn’t it.”

I had to admit that it did. I wondered whether I would have rushed into this if the young woman who had appeared at my door had been just some dumb, confused, run-of-the-mill daughter. “I’m committed to seeing this thing through,” I said, “can I count on your help?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Sure. Why not? I mean, what the hell, either we end up concluding that the original arrest was valid or, as Gina put it, we get one of those rare chances to make amends. Maybe, it’s lucky we both chose to be pushed into early retirement. I mean, if I was still in harness I would have been so busy I probably would have just tuned you both out.”

“I probably would have done the same. Maybe there’s a hidden divine purpose to early retirement.”

He laughed. “That’s a bad joke. We used to have a saying that if you don’t keep on the swing you get thrown right out of the loop. I still believe that. And the divine has nothing to do with it.” He chortled. “Do you know what a friend of mine who is seventy-five is doing? He joined a ski club for god’s sake. He’s risking his brittle bones going down hills twice a week just so he can belong to a group and feel young again. Ridiculous isn’t it?”

“About as ridiculous as going to fifty ball games a year or chasing a little white ball around a golf course. You do play golf don’t you?”

“Yeah. But that’s different.”

“How?”

But he did not answer. Instead he said sadly, “I’m going to let you win this one. We sound like two old codgers sitting on a porch arguing about everything because we got nothing better to do. But we have. It’s getting late.”

“Right. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.”

I pushed my scattered notes into a pile at the side of my desk. Then I turned off my desk lamp, and tried to stare out of the den window. But a heavy darkness hid almost everything from view. The scene mirrored my own state of mind.

CHAPTER SEVEN
 

By noon Gina and I were on the road, heading for an area around Burlington, Vermont, where Steve and Stella Symansky now lived and worked.

In the darkness of my bedroom the night before, I had begun to acknowledge for the first time, in a truly palpable way, that our investigations could put us in physical danger. My instincts still told me that the Symanskys’ CIA connection was probably marginal in Monaghan’s murder. And Winston University had never been more than a minor institutional cog in a city where murders still do not exceed one hundred per year. I was convinced I was still dealing with inflated egos for whom events had suddenly taken a nasty, unexpected turn. Did the Symanskys pose a danger? Certainly not yet, I thought. But later might be a different story. And I knew enough about violence to know that it could suddenly re-emerge, and nearly always when one least expected it. So when I had phoned Phil Ryan earlier that morning, I had taken the precaution of telling him where we were going and when we expected to return. There was a part of me that felt that I was being excessively cautious. Even cowardly. A foolhardy courage had never been one of my strong suits. But his response made me feel better. In essence, he told me that in any investigation, informing someone of where one was going and what one was doing was a habit which had to be nurtured, and the only way to nurture it properly was to do it even when one felt there was no evident reason to do so.

As we drove down the four lane highway which connected at the border with Interstate 89, Gina and I discussed what we hoped to achieve in our conversation with the Symanskys who were expecting us in about an hour’s time. To say that we had anything resembling a plan was ludicrous. We were going on a fishing expedition. We finally did agree to the following: I would ask the questions and she would do the observing and mental note-taking; I would keep hidden our knowledge of their clandestine work for either the FBI or the CIA unless at some point I felt it could not, or should not be avoided; and she would intervene only towards the end if she felt I had missed an important line of inquiry.

When we arrived in Burlington we had almost 30 minutes to spare. We drove past the college over which Steve Symansky now presided, and picked up hamburgers and coffee at a McDonald’s. Like McDonald’s, the five college buildings were built to supply a demand. Unlike McDonald’s they were not garish in style. All were squat, red-brick and mortar. Fortunately the buildings had been sensibly laid out on grounds that were spacious and well kept. The result was a quiet oasis in between the old city core and the growing suburban sprawl around it.

Not surprisingly, the Symanskys’ house was just a half a block down the street from the campus. Slightly Victorian in style, it had a turret on either side, high, wide windows with stained glass panels at the top, and the ubiquitous spacious front veranda typical of well-to-do New England homes built before air-conditioning had become common-place.