The Glass Coffin Read online

“If it will help Jill, of course,” I said.

  “Would it be possible for you to come down here?” Kevin asked. “I’m working on something.”

  “Another case?”

  He laughed. “Pigs,” he said. “Six dozen marzipan pigs.”

  “I’ve always wanted to learn how to make those.”

  “Today’s your lucky day. The marzipan’s wrapped and ready. I was planning to start cranking out porkers mid-morning.”

  “I’ll be there around ten,” I said. Kevin hung up, but I stayed on the line until I heard a second click. I wasn’t imagining things. Someone had indeed been listening in.

  Taylor was at the kitchen table in her pyjamas when I came down. She had a fork in one hand, a knife in the other. “Pancake day,” she said happily.

  “So it is,” I said. “I’d better get cracking.”

  I made the batter, then Taylor came over and, with great precision, poured her initials onto the griddle. She was doing the final stroke on the K when Angus swooped in. “Make way for a hungry man,” he said. “I skied along the entire creek, and now I’m up for some quality time with my new drum kit. But first, I need F-O-O-D!”

  Angus was pouring syrup on his stack of pancakes when Bryn and Jill came downstairs. Bryn immediately drifted towards my son. With her alabaster skin, her dark hair falling loose to her shoulders, and her chocolate-brown leather pants and matching turtleneck, she had the casual chic of a model in a Ralph Lauren ad. She glanced at my son’s plate. “Do you do this all the time?” she asked.

  “Every Saturday,” Angus said.

  “Lucky,” she said. Her tone was wistful, not mocking, and the pang I felt was as sharp as the one that I’d felt when Evan had confided that his mother called him “the snowman” because he was unable to love.

  After breakfast I called the home number of Dan Kasperski, the best and only psychiatrist I knew. If I’d needed further proof of his excellence, the fact that he didn’t make me grovel before he agreed to see Tracy that morning at 9:30 would have been plenty. I hung up and poured myself a second cup of coffee. I was going to need the extra caffeine; it was only eight o’clock, but my dance card was filling fast.

  Angus volunteered to take Taylor to her art class, but when Bryn suggested she go with him, Jill cut in. “Why don’t you come with me, Bryn?” she said. “I’m going over to NationTV and I want to show you off.” When Bryn left to pick up her jacket, Jill and my son exchanged glances that said more potently than words that she understood exactly how he felt about her stepdaughter. Despite her own troubles, Jill had extricated Angus from a tight spot. She was a good human being, and as I left to pick up Claudia and Tracy,

  I was determined that, this time out, virtue would not have to be its own reward.

  Given the proliferation of trees in our house, it seemed impossible that I could have forgotten it was Christmas, but when I walked into the lobby of the Hotel Saskatchewan that morning, the combination of muted carols and pungent evergreen was a jolt. The Big Day was only two sleeps away. I’d come early, hoping to talk to Felix Schiff before I hooked up with the weird sisters-in-law. I was standing at the reception desk asking the clerk to ring Felix’s room, when the man himself walked in the front door. He was dressed trendily with an expensive backpack and an outfit that conjured up images of sunshine, oxygen, and a day on the slopes, but Felix’s pallor and bloodshot eyes suggested that even navigating his way to the coffee shop was going to be a stretch. Not to put too fine a point on it, he looked like hell. When he spotted me and came over to shake my hand, I could see the sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “Everyone’s been looking for you.”

  “I’ve been checking out your city’s club scene,” he said. “Not cutting edge but, given my impaired memory of it, not without appeal.”

  “You found the possibilities of Regina after dark so seductive that you couldn’t wait until the reception was over?”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t that.”

  “Watching Jill marry Evan wasn’t easy for me either,” I said.

  “You had your family. I needed to be with someone too.”

  “But with strangers? Felix, that was …”

  “I know. It was stupid and self-indulgent.” He ran his hand through his hair, mussing it appealingly. “If it’s any consolation, I’m suffering. Can you forgive me?”

  His expression was painfully earnest, and I felt myself warm to him. “Hey, I have to forgive you,” I said. “Reliable ‘go-to’ guys are in short supply.”

  Felix’s mouth curled in the smallest of smiles. “That is my role, isn’t it? The dependable one – the one everyone counts on.”

  “There are worse roles,” I said.

  “And better ones,” he replied, “but like the knights in medieval romances, we must take the adventures God sends us.” He straightened his shoulders. “Speaking of, it’s time for me to behave in a courtly manner and wish Jill and Evan well before they go on their honeymoon.”

  I looked at him hard. “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  I put my hand under Felix’s elbow and guided him across the lobby to the gift shop. There were stacks of newspapers just inside the door. I picked one up. The photo of Evan that dominated the front page was a good one. He was leaning toward the photographer, his face animated, one hand raised as if he were explaining something. The type announcing his murder was seventy-six point, the size reserved for the tragedies of princes, prime ministers, and pubescent heartthrobs. Felix’s hands were shaking so violently, he could barely hold the paper, but he read the story through to the end.

  “I have to make a phone call,” he said.

  “To Jill? She’s staying with me, but she was planning to go over to NationTV to see whether they’re sitting on any information that hasn’t been made public.”

  For a beat he stared at me without comprehension. When he emerged from the thicket of confusion, he was stunned but functioning. “I can help at NationTV,” he said. “I still have connections there.”

  “Good, because Jill’s going to need all the help she can get.”

  Felix zipped his jacket and pulled on his winter gloves. When he touched his hand to his forehead in a little salute, I felt a welcome rush of reassurance.

  They say that timing is everything. That morning the timing of Evan MacLeish’s small coterie of mourners was abysmal. Thirty seconds more and Jill’s knight errant would have been out of the building. As it was, Felix was crossing the lobby just as Claudia and Tracy stepped out of the elevator. Given her temperament, I would have put my money on Tracy as the one to strike, but Claudia was the viper.

  When she spotted Felix, she strode over and stepped in front of him. “Satisfied?” she said. “The path’s clear now. You’d better stock up on vitamins, lederhosen-boy. You’re going to be busy.”

  Felix reacted quickly. “Keep your mouth shut.” He grabbed her shoulders and pushed with such force that she lost her footing. Circled by bystanders whose faces registered both shock and delight, Claudia went down like the proverbial bag of hammers. Felix didn’t hang around to witness her humiliation. He was already at the front doors. The young man in livery didn’t miss a beat. He held the door for Felix and touched his hat. “Have a good day, sir,” he said, but he didn’t wait for a tip.

  I helped Claudia to her feet. “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Family honour,” she said. Her tone was sardonic, but she was pale, and she seemed a bit dazed.

  “Why don’t I drive you to Dan’s office,” I said.

  Claudia laughed shortly. “Tracy and I don’t seem to be managing very well on our own,” she said.

  I led the two women down a short flight of stairs to a side door. It meant walking an extra block to the car, but I didn’t want to risk a rematch between Felix and Claudia. Before we hit the street, Tracy donned a pair of Jackie O sunglasses.

  “I don’t know why you bother with th
ose,” Claudia said peevishly. “Nobody recognizes you without your tutu and your orange sneakers.”

  Dan Kasperski’s office was in a converted garage at the back of his house in central Regina. A large proportion of his clients were adolescents, and his office was fitted out with posters of cool-for-the-moment bands and magazines that covered the range of adolescent dreams from Seventeen to Modern Drummer. When I’d needed advice about a drum kit for Angus, I’d known exactly where to turn. Dan knew everything there was to know about drummers and their art. The space next to his waiting room housed his personal passion: a Red Yamaha Stage Customs drum kit and a dazzling array of Sabian and Zildjian cymbals. He had soundproofed his garage himself.

  He had also replaced the hard-packed cinder of the yard with good soil in which he planted wildflowers and indigenous grasses that murmured in the wind. In warm weather, Dan’s young patients sat beside him on a bench, listening to the grasses, smelling the wildflowers, and watching koi swimming placidly in a pool hand-dug in an area that had once between a cemetery for abandoned car parts. The metaphor was ready-made, and Dan used it when he talked to kids who said they could never turn their lives around.

  As Tracy rushed towards the garage office that chilly day, she didn’t spare a glance for the half-dozen bird feeders placed with such care around the garden, nor did she notice the pains Dan had taken to ensure that each stone in the garden wall complemented its neighbours. She was a woman on a simple and well-defined mission. She wanted to get a prescription and she wanted to get the hell out. Venturing into this weird place was simply the price she had to pay.

  We heard Dan before we saw him. He had been drumming, and when he opened the door of the converted garage, he was glistening with perspiration and life. It was twenty-five below zero, but he was wearing cut-offs and a sweatshirt. I made the introductions. He shook hands with Tracy and Claudia, and drew Tracy inside. “Come talk awhile,” he said. He looked at me. “Kitchen’s unlocked,” he said. “You know where the tea is.”

  “All I want is to get out of the cold,” Claudia said. She was warmly dressed, but she was hugging herself and her teeth were chattering. “It’s bitter out here.”

  We sat down at Dan’s kitchen table, slid off our coats, and stared silently at the snowy garden. Finally, I said, “So do we talk about the elephant in the living room or not?”

  “I don’t want to talk about anything,” she said. “In the last twenty-four hours, my brother was murdered; a man I liked died under questionable circumstances; a man I don’t like humiliated me in public; and the child I cared for from the day she came home from the hospital told me to bite her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I hadn’t added up all you’ve had to deal with.” I leaned forward. “Claudia, I never knew you’d taken care of Bryn.”

  “Who else would have?” she said.

  “I just assumed her parents …”

  “They were building their careers. Focused. I was twenty-three years old with a shiny new diploma and no idea at all about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”

  “And you took over the care of an infant. That’s a pretty selfless decision for a twenty-three-year-old.”

  “Not for a twenty-three-year-old who’d had the kind of parenting I’d had.”

  “That bad?” I asked.

  Claudia’s mouth curved in an ironic smile. “No point talking about it,” she said. “It was no worse than what happened to Evan – no worse than what happened to the other kids we knew. The unwanted children of the rich live in their own particular hell. It’s just so difficult to spot under their picture-perfect lives of private schools, ski holidays, and idyllic camps in the Muskokas.”

  “Where were your parents?”

  Claudia tented her fingertips and regarded them thoughtfully. “Well, my father had the good sense to be dead by that point. That left Caroline, and the only reason she had children was because contraception was an imperfect science, and my father had scruples about abortion.”

  “Your mother told you that?”

  “No, our housekeeper. Mrs. Carruthers made that particular contribution to our education. Caroline pressed her into service to care for Evan and me until we were old enough to be packed off to school. When Bryn was born, I saw that history was about to repeat itself, so I stepped in.”

  “And Annie didn’t mind?”

  “She never noticed. Annie and Tracy were living the high life. They’d ignore Bryn for days, then they’d wake her up in the middle of the night so Evan could film them playing with her. I don’t have a maternal bone in my body, but I knew that was wrong.”

  “And you came to love Bryn,” I said.

  Claudia shook her head. “She wasn’t an easy child to love, but I did come to feel responsible for her – for both of them. After Annie died, I was all Bryn and Tracy had.”

  “Caroline was there,” I said.

  “In body if not in spirit,” Claudia said. “And to give Caroline her due she has allowed us to share her beautiful home on Walmer Road for lo these many years. Our family may be dysfunctional, but we have nice digs.”

  Tracy didn’t bother coming inside when she and Dan emerged from his office. She spotted us through the window, waved the prescription in her hand, and gestured for us to join her. Neither Claudia nor I had to be asked twice. When the two women headed for my car, I turned to thank Dan. He was a man with a ready smile, but in that moment he looked deeply troubled. “Keep an eye on her, Jo. I’m faxing her psychiatrist’s office. I know he’s out of the country, but someone must be covering for him. I’d rest easier if I knew someone familiar with her case was handling Tracy Lowell. Until then …” Dan waved his hands in apology. “I’ve said too much already.”

  “Not too much,” I said. “Dan, I put you in a tight spot. I shouldn’t have presumed on our friendship.”

  Dan shook his head. “You saw someone who needed help, and you got help. That’s not presuming on friendship; that’s being a responsible human being.”

  “One more question, and this is hypothetical. Could an overdose of beta blockers be fatal?”

  “Jo – an overdose of Aspirin can be fatal. But if I can read your subtext here, Tracy’s prescription is short term.”

  “But if someone – not Tracy – we’re still talking hypothetical here – were to be given a larger dose?”

  “It would depend on the dose and on the person. It always does. You know how beta blockers work. They slow the heart rate and reduce the force of heart muscle contractions. An overdose could cause hypotension and bradycardia.”

  “In lay terms?”

  “Severe low blood pressure. Severe low heart rate. Heart failure.”

  “Death.”

  “It could happen.”

  Claudia insisted that she and Tracy take a cab back to the hotel. She said I had already done enough, and I didn’t argue the point. I had done enough. That didn’t change the fact that there was still more to do, and I welcomed the chance to be alone to ponder Dan’s information before I made the next stop on my rounds. Kevin Hynd’s Day-Glo painted patisserie, Further, was in the Cathedral Area, so-called because its citizens lived their lives beneath the shadows cast by the twin spires of Holy Rosary. As I drove past newly gentrified houses and specialty shops, the dark possibilities of pharmacological dirty work seemed a world away.

  Kevin’s business on 13th Avenue was flanked by shops called The Little Red Meat Wagon and Pinky’s Nail Salon – steak, cake, and fake – one-stop shopping for the unreconstructed hedonist. If we can judge a human being by the kitchen he keeps, Kevin Hynd was stellar. The walls of his shop were painted the rosy gold of peach butter. Like me he had a pegboard wall, hung with pots, pans, sieves, and strainers. Unlike me, his kitchen had gleaming industrial-sized ovens, three Kitchen Aid mixers, a stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a wooden worktable smoothed by use and so beautiful that I would have traded my signed copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking for it. Julia
Child would have approved, and she would have approved of Kevin, a chef who might have been a dead ringer for Jerry Garcia but who was approaching the mound of pink-tinted marzipan in front of him with the reverence of the serious cook.

  “Greetings,” he said. “Wash your hands, put on some gloves, and be bold. We’re all novices.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but we need to talk first. The preliminary findings of the autopsy on Gabe Leventhal suggest he didn’t die of natural causes.”

  “Whoa!” Kevin flopped the marzipan onto a marble pastry slab. “So what happened?”

  “His blood sample was suspicious; he had bruises that didn’t come from the truck driving over him; and there were scrapings of tissue and blood under his fingernails.”

  “Evidence that he was defending himself against somebody,” Kevin said.

  “Right,” I said. “And my guess is the pathologist will discover that the mystery assailant was Evan MacLeish.”

  “Is that just a gut feeling?”

  “No, but everything I’m going on is circumstantial. Evan was wearing makeup the day of the wedding, but I could tell he’d been in a fight, and when Gabe disappeared, Evan moved in a little too quickly with his explanation that Gabe was a hypochondriac who refused to deal with any doctor except his own in New York.”

  “Certainly an avenue worth exploring.” Kevin broke off a chunk of marzipan the size of a baby’s fist for each of us.

  “So where do we start?” I asked.

  “First you have to Think Pig.”

  “To catch the tiger, you must imagine the tiger.”

  Kevin raised an eyebrow. “Excellent. Now working with marzipan is like working with Plasticine. Pinch off what you think you’ll need, roll it between your hands into sausage shapes, and give each little sausage a nip, a bend, or a flatten until it looks the way you want it to look.” Kevin made two balls, stuck the smaller one onto the larger, and smoothed it effortlessly into a snout. He made indentations for the eyes and then made and flattened two balls into ears. I started working with my own marzipan, copying what Kevin had done. He watched until he seemed to decide I could continue on my own. Then he broke off a larger piece of marzipan and worked it into a body.