None So Deadly Read online

  I thought about that. “Which would mean the times Kennedy and I saw shadows — something — in that alley … maybe it wasn’t an animal or … whatever. Maybe it was … the guy.”

  Cobb shrugged.

  “And that makes the marks on the trash can platform significant,” I went on. “Not some silly record of the times the person living in the house had taken out the trash or something equally banal and unbelievable.”

  Kennedy had discovered a series of marks — four perpendicular marks, then a diagonal line through them to make a group of five marks, then another set of five and one single perpendicular line on its own — eleven marks in all. In the hours before he went into that alley for the last time, he’d sent me an email telling me that a twelfth scratch had appeared. Whoever had been making those marks — Faith’s killer? — had been back in the alley again. And though I’d never know for sure, my guess was that Kennedy had gone back there to check on it again, to see if there was anything that might tell him something … and that was when the person driving the SUV-cum-murder weapon had somehow surprised and killed him.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, what do we do? I know we have no client. But Kennedy was … what … an associate? Are we in on it or not?”

  “I say we’re in. At least we sniff around, see if we can learn anything useful. We owe the guy that much. But it’ll have to wait a few days. I have to go out of town for a while on another case. Three, maybe four days at the most.”

  He was right. We didn’t have a client for the Unruh-Kennedy murders, so whatever investigating we might do was pro bono. And the truth was I had a magazine piece I needed to move forward with, so the time I could devote to that would be welcome. And though it sounded callous to say it, the Kennedy murder and its connection — if there was one — to the Faith Unruh murder of a quarter of a century earlier would be there when Cobb got back.

  “If the cops do decide to follow up on my surveillance connection to Kennedy, you think I need a lawyer?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, my guess is that at some point they’ll want to talk to you. Even so, I can’t see how they could possibly decide to charge you. Still, I’d have your lawyer ready in case you need him.”

  I nodded, not particularly reassured. “Where you off to?”

  “Victoria. Forty-year-old woman runs off with twenty-year-old mechanic who worked on her car. Sixty-year-old husband wants her back.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Fun like a case of malaria.”

  “What are you supposed to do — drag her back? I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is frowned upon in the justice community.”

  Cobb shook his head. “I just have to find them. Husband’s pretty sure they’re in Victoria or somewhere on the island. Somebody saw them on the ferry, gave him a call. Told him they’d seen his wife and their son but didn’t get a chance to say hi.”

  “Their son. Ouch.”

  “Yeah, so I find them, report back, and I’m out of it. Tidy paycheque that will offset the pro bono aspect of the Kennedy investigation.”

  Cobb left that afternoon.

  TWO

  The kid looked to be fifteen, maybe sixteen.

  He was good-looking, clean-cut, a tattoo on one bare arm but without metal in or on his face. He had clearly taken the time to dress in a way he felt appropriate for the meeting he had come for. Short-sleeved checked shirt (with collar), dress pants, and shoes — no ball cap, backwards or otherwise.

  I’d met him at the door to Cobb’s office, where he’d shaken my hand and asked if he could speak to me. I’d invited him in, told him to throw his coat and mitts on the window ledge.

  Now I was sitting at Cobb’s desk. The kid was across from me, nervous but seemingly unafraid. I reached back, turned down Sarah Slean on the CD player I’d brought into the office to background the piece I was writing for the National Post on Naheed Nenshi, the mayor who had been re-elected a few months earlier after a neck and neck campaign that it was predicted he would lose. The Post wanted me to examine whether Nenshi was, in fact, more popular outside Calgary than he was in the city. I doubted the premise but had to admit that I was a Nenshi fan, which might have tainted my ability to be unbiased. I was still in the research phase of the piece, and it was interesting, as it got me closer to the man than I had previously been. And while he had won a third term, there was little doubt that the lustre of the early years had been somewhat diminished.

  The music reduced to a murmur, I pushed my notes to one side and studied the young man opposite me.

  “Mr. Cobb, my name is Danny Luft,” he said.

  “Good to meet you, Danny,” I answered him. “But I’m not Cobb. He’s away on business and won’t be back for a couple of days. I’m Adam Cullen. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Do you do the same thing he does?”

  I shook my head. “Not quite. Mr. Cobb is the private investigator. I’m a freelance writer. I used to cover crime for the Calgary Herald. Mr. Cobb and I have worked together on a number of cases. When required, I conduct research that assists him in the work he does. Can I help you with anything?”

  I repeated that last bit, convinced that the kid had been caught by his parents with a little weed under the bed, or maybe he’d shoplifted a wallet or a CD from somewhere and was looking for advice, maybe even a little counselling. Stuff I could handle without Cobb.

  The kid shifted in his chair. “You ever kill anybody?”

  I swallowed once and moved some facial muscles around before I answered.

  “No, I haven’t, Danny.”

  “Me neither.” A beat. “How about Mr. Cobb? He kill anybody?”

  I thought about how to reply to that, decided to answer the question with one of my own — a tactic I’d seen Cobb use more than once. “Why do you feel you need to know that?”

  He looked at me for a long moment before answering. “I guess it’s … it would probably help if he at least knew stuff about it.”

  “About killing people?”

  “Yeah.”

  I opted for honesty, or at least something close to it. “I believe in carrying out his duties as a policeman and later as a private investigator, he may have had to do that, yes.”

  “He’s probably the guy I should be talking to, then.”

  “Are you in some trouble, Danny?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. At least, not yet.”

  I leaned forward, my elbows on the desk. “Here’s the thing,” I said, “Mr. Cobb is out of town on a case. He phones in every morning. Maybe if you tell me what’s going on that makes you think you need a private detective’s help, I can relay that information to him, and he and I can discuss how best to help you. In the meantime, I’ll certainly do all I can for you.”

  He considered this and finally nodded slowly. “Yeah, that should be okay,” he said. “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “How about we talk about that after you’ve told me what brought you here?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Would you like a pop? I’ve got a couple of Cokes in the fridge.”

  He shook his head. “No thanks.”

  “What grade are you in, Danny?”

  “Ten,” he said. “I go to Beaverbrook.”

  Lord Beaverbrook High School. Southeast Calgary. A long way from Cobb’s office.

  “You drive here this morning?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m only fifteen. Took the bus and the CTrain.”

  I nodded. “Okay. So, why don’t you go ahead and tell me about it?”

  He moved his head slowly up and down once, then a second time, fidgeted in the big, brown leather chair that could have held two of him, and finally spoke, slowly enunciating the words, his voice quieter now, as if he were guarding a secret.

  “I have a girlfriend … Glenna.”

  He paused and I waited for more.

  “Her dad is kind of a big deal in Calgary. He’s got a lot of money; he’s on quite a few of those
boards, you know?”

  “Boards of directors?”

  “Yeah, for different companies and stuff, quite a few of them,” he repeated. “Glenna told me that makes him pretty important and also pretty rich. He was the head of the Chamber of Commerce, and he was on city council for a few years.”

  I sat back and thought about that. “Are you talking about Wendell Claiborne, Danny?”

  “Yeah, that’s Glenna’s dad.”

  The kid was bang on. Wendell Claiborne was a very big deal, one of Calgary’s uber-rich, seriously powerful and a major player in Alberta’s newly amalgamated United Conservative Party. I’d never met Claiborne, but had read enough about him and seen him being interviewed often enough that I didn’t much like the man. From accounts I’d read, he and the mayor had butted heads repeatedly both in and out of council chambers when Claiborne was on council.

  “He doesn’t like you dating his daughter?” I said.

  Danny shook his head. “No, that’s not it.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “Well, he … he wants me to kill his wife.”

  I reached over and picked up the cup of coffee I’d been working on for the half-hour or so before Danny Luft had knocked on the door of Cobb’s office. It was cold now, but I needed a minute to think about what I’d just heard, and sipped the tepid brew as I considered my response.

  After I set the cup back down, I said, “He told you that.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “Are you sure you heard him right? Understood correctly what he was saying?”

  “I understood him all right.”

  “Okay, let’s go back a bit. How did all this come about?”

  “I started going out with Glenna about three months ago. She’s great and her parents seemed okay … at first, anyway, but then one night I was over at Glenna’s place and we heard them having this huge fight and —”

  “When you say fight,” I interrupted, “are you talking physical? Was anyone hitting anyone else?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. They were in a different part of the house, so we couldn’t tell, but Glenna said she’s heard them screaming at each other like that other times.”

  “Did she say if it happened a lot?”

  Danny shrugged. “I don’t think so. I mean, she didn’t say how often her parents were like that, just that she’d heard it before.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “So, last Saturday night, Glenna’s parents were out, not together. I mean, they were both out, but they had gone to different places, you know?”

  “I understand.”

  “Anyway, Mr. Claiborne came home early and caught us smoking some weed. I thought he’d freak but he didn’t. He just told me to go home and to never bring dope into his house again. I thought he was, like, pretty cool to deal with it like that. Then yesterday morning he phoned me at home before I left for school and told me he wanted me to come to his office after school.”

  “And you went to his office.”

  He shook his head. “He texted me later and said he wanted me to meet him at this park not far from my school instead.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s what I did. I met him there.”

  “Was there anyone else at the park when you and Claiborne were there?”

  “I didn’t see anybody except for a couple of little kids on a set of swings. There was a woman with them, maybe one of their moms or a babysitter or something, I couldn’t tell. We were at the other end of the park from them.”

  “Right. So, what happened?”

  “That’s when he told me that he wanted me to kill Mrs. Claiborne.”

  “Just like that? He said, ‘I want you to kill my wife.’”

  “Pretty much, yeah. And then he said I had to do it because if I didn’t he was going to tell my dad I was a druggie.”

  “Did he tell you how he wanted you to do it?”

  Danny nodded. “He told me he’d help me to make it look like somebody broke into their house to rob the place and then shot Mrs. Claiborne when she discovered the intruder in their home.”

  “And you were to shoot Mrs. Claiborne.”

  “Yeah, I was supposed to come over there and after I … did it, that’s when he would make it look like someone broke in. He said he had somebody who would help him with that part.”

  “And what were you supposed to shoot Mrs. Claiborne with?”

  “He said he’d take care of that.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “He said he’d have the gun there for me.”

  “He’d provide the gun,” I said.

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “You know anything about guns?”

  “My dad’s ex-military. He takes me to the range sometimes. I can shoot okay.”

  “Did Claiborne say what kind of gun?”

  “Revolver. That’s all he said. I didn’t ask what kind.”

  “And when is this all supposed to happen, Danny?”

  “He said Saturday night.”

  “This coming Saturday night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, he threatened to tell your parents that you’d been smoking weed.”

  “My dad, yeah.”

  “Danny, that’s not a big enough deal to make you kill somebody. So you get grounded for a while.”

  He shook his head. “Did you hear what I said? My dad’s ex-military. He’s as straight as they come. No drugs, not weed … nothing. And it would be a hell of a lot worse than grounding.”

  When I didn’t respond, he elaborated. “I missed school for a week one time.”

  “Because of your dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He hit you?”

  He nodded. I looked at him to see if he was lying. It didn’t look like it. If anything, it looked like he was ashamed to have told me.

  “Danny, that sounds like abuse.”

  He shook his head again. “It’s not like he beats me up all the time or anything. And it’s not like a couple of other kids I know where every time the old man gets drunk, somebody gets hurt. My dad’s not like that. A lot of the time he’s a pretty cool dad to have.” He paused. “But if he loses it, like he would for this …” He paused again. “And there’s something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He told me he’d pay me ten thousand dollars if I did it.”

  “Claiborne said he’d pay you ten thousand dollars to shoot his wife,” I repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  “And rat you out to your dad if you didn’t.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can see where that would be a tough decision except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re talking about killing someone here — taking a person’s life.”

  A pause, then a nod. “I know.” His voice was soft and he spoke slowly. “That’s why I’m here. What do you think I should do?”

  “I’m guessing he told you not to tell anyone about his proposition.”

  “Yeah, but I figured maybe a private detective … you know, I couldn’t really go to the cops.”

  I nodded. “Okay, Danny, what you do is you leave this with me. I’ll talk to Cobb — Mr. Cobb — right away. How do I contact you?”

  “Do you text?”

  I smiled. “Yes, Danny, I text. I own a colour TV, too.”

  He missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it, instead giving me his phone number.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” I said. “You don’t do anything. You don’t go to the Claiborne house; you don’t take any calls from Claiborne; if he texts you, you don’t reply. You do nothing, except maybe your homework, and you wait for me to contact you. You understand, Danny?”

  “How do I see Glenna?”

  “You see her at school; you see her at the mall, in the park, on a street corner. But you don’t go near Claiborne — not at his house, not at his office, nowhere. You got that?”

  �
��Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

  “By the way, have you told Glenna about her dad’s … proposal?”

  “Not yet.” He was clenching and unclenching his fists one at a time. It wasn’t anger, I didn’t think. More frustration — a kid who’d been given a burden he was far from able to handle. I guessed that thought had occurred to Claiborne, too, and that was what made Danny Luft the ideal candidate for a psychological takeover. I was looking forward to a face to face with Claiborne, but decided that had better wait until after I talked to Cobb.

  I’d been a little rougher than I needed to be on the kid and wanted to back things off a little. “Listen, Danny, we can help you. I’ll talk to Mr. Cobb in the morning and, like I said, I’ll text you, okay? The thing is you haven’t done anything wrong, remember that. And you did the right thing asking for help. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  He stood up. “Okay, Mr. … what did you say your name was?”

  “Cullen. Adam Cullen.” I reached into a jacket pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to him. “My number’s on there, Danny. You call me or text me if something happens that you think I should know about … or if you’re scared or you think Claiborne’s up to something else … anything … you contact me, okay?”

  “Right. Um, thanks a lot. I …” He stopped talking and looked at the floor. “You haven’t said how much this will cost.”

  “I’ll discuss that as well with Mr. Cobb,” I told him. “And I’ll talk to you soon about … all this,” I said. “That’s a promise.”

  When he’d gone I went to the big window that looked out over 1st Avenue and watched Danny come out of the building, turn north, and head for downtown and, I guessed, either a bus or the CTrain to take him home. I hoped the kid could be trusted to do two things — keep his mouth shut about Claiborne’s offer and stay well away from the man who’d made that offer — until Cobb and I worked out a plan.

  I called Cobb but didn’t reach him. I left a message telling him to get back to me ASAP but wasn’t sure if he’d be checking messages, especially if he was hot on the trail of the runaway lovers.

  I reached back and cranked the volume on Sarah Slean. She had just begun a song called “The Devil & the Dove.”