That Sleep of Death Read online

  THAT SLEEP OF DEATH

  THAT SLEEP OF DEATH

  Richard King

  A Castle Street Mystery

  Copyright © Richard King, 2002

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Editor: Doris Cowan

  Proofreader: Jennifer Bergeron

  Design: Jennifer Scott

  Printer: Webcom

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  King, Richard

  That sleep of death

  ISBN 0-88882-229-4

  I. Title.

  PS8571.I52917T48 2002 C813’.6 C2002-902327-0

  PR9199.4.K56T48 2002

  1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on recycled paper.

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  THAT SLEEP OF DEATH

  foreword

  Those of you who are familiar with the topography of McGill University will recognize that there is no such edifice as the Elwitt Building. I created the building, and named it after my late thesis advisor and friend, Sanford Elwitt, as I wanted a certain layout of offices and corridors unavailable in any existing building on the McGill campus.

  I also took the liberty of adding a few streets to the Montreal urban landscape. There is no du Collège Avenue in downtown Montreal and anyone familiar with the city will notice that the street bears a resemblance to McGill College Avenue. There are at least two other streets in the novel that do not exist but I leave it to the discerning reader to discover them.

  I must thank Maeve Binchey for inspiring me to write this mystery. In a talk she gave at the Ritz Carlton Hotel she urged the audience of over three hundred people to write a novel. “It’s easy,” Ms. Binchey told us. “Write ten pages a week and in thirty weeks it’s done.” She added that she expected to be thanked in the forewords of the three hundred novels that were certain to result from her talk. She somehow neglected to mention that six or seven rewrites would be required following the thirty weeks it took to write the first draft.

  Novelists, and especially first-time novelists, require a great deal of advice. I would like to thank all those who willingly gave me suggestions that I hope improved the manuscript. I would especially like to thank Barbara Kerr and Jan Whitford. Barbara read an early draft of the manuscript and freely gave me pages of notes, all of which improved the story. Jan Whitford spent many hours and many e-mails discussing the plot and characters with me. If this mystery novel fails to live up to the high standards set by Jan and Barbara the fault is, of course, mine.

  Louise Dennys took time from her busy schedule to read and discuss the book with me and I wish to thank her for her time and helpful suggestions. My friend and colleague Robert Cajolet helped me to ensure that when the characters spoke French they did so correctly.

  Doris Cowan made me understand that editors do more than find grammatical errors in manuscripts — a lot more. Her ideas were consistently excellent. She challenged me to find ways to improve the book and I hope that I lived up to her expectations. She performed miracles of literary alchemy on a daily basis.

  I would like to thank Jennifer Bergeron for meticulously copyediting the manuscript. She sought and destroyed all the annoying typographic and grammatical errors that play havoc with the pleasure of reading.

  Finally, my brothers Joel and Norman and my son Nicholas are constant sources of joy and support and I thank them for that.

  This book, like so much else in my life, is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Laura Schecter King.

  chapter one

  If I had known when I caught the shoplifter that it would lead to my becoming involved in a murder investigation I might have let him go. I think.

  The bookshop I co-own with my business partner Jennifer is called Dickens & Company. Our store is in the heart of downtown Montreal and I know many of our regular customers by sight. But we get a lot of impulse walk-in trade as well, some of it up to no good, so I keep my eyes open. I like to practise my observational skills. I’d never seen this guy before. He was skinny, clutching his backpack to his stomach, wearing a pale blue wind-breaker zipped up to the neck, a good seven inches shy of six feet with a bad complexion. We have a library security device and the alarm sounded as he tried to rush out the door. He didn’t actually make it out. I happened to be standing nearby and I just stepped over and grabbed him as he tried to shove past some incoming customers.

  I don’t know why but shoplifters tend to fall apart when they’re caught. They just give up. I held on to him and politely asked him to let me look in his backpack. There were three books inside, all of them with our store’s price stickers and none of them paid for. I took him into the stockroom at the back and called the cops. The shoplifter was desperately offering to pay for the books, begging me to take the money and call it quits. My policy is not to get into conversation with these hapless souls; there’s too big a risk I’ll feel sorry for them and let them go. So we waited for the police to arrive and he kept on talking. I guess he thought my silence was a bargaining position because he offered to double the price of the books if we could forget the whole thing.

  Luckily the cops arrived before this guy offered me serious money.

  Usually it takes about twenty minutes for a couple of patrol officers to arrive. But this time the cops were in the store almost before I could hang up the phone. And there were three of them; two in uniform, one in plain clothes. The uniforms stayed with the shoplifter in the stockroom to do the paperwork and to issue the warrant for fingerprinting and booking. The third cop, quite spiffily dressed in his plain clothes, accompanied me back into the store. His grey trousers had a neat crease, his paisley tie was done in a half Windsor, his black loafers were shined and his blue blazer looked new, though not particularly expensive. He was a bit taller than me, which made him a shade over six feet.

  “Catch many shoplifters?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “Our security system is pretty good, so the smart thieves go elsewhere. Students know the system because it’s the same one as they have in libraries. Every once in a while we catch some dummy who doesn’t know what he’s up against.”

  “How does the system work?”

  “Magnets,” I told him.

  “Magnets?”

  By this point in the conversation he’d only uttered a dozen words but it was clear he was French Canadian. His English was almost completely unaccented, but he pr
onounced the words with a slightly different emphasis. It’s just a difference in syncopation, something I’ve noticed in people who’ve been fluent in both languages from an early age. I was glad we were speaking English. He probably guessed, correctly, that my French would be painful for him to listen to.

  “Yeah, there’s a magnetic strip hidden in the books,” I explained. “If we don’t de-magnetize the book at the cash the alarm rings when the book, and the person carrying it, leaves the store.”

  “Are you the owner?” he asked.

  “One of two,” I said. “My name is Wiseman. Sam Wiseman, and my partner is Jennifer Riccofia.”

  “Gaston Lemieux. Nice to meet you.” Then he added, in a kind of mumble, “Detective sergeant,” and extended his hand so that I could shake it. Which I did.

  I was curious. “Is it a new policy of the police to send a detective along on a shoplifting call?”

  “No. The force has this training thing where division people ride with patrol officers. They want us to keep in touch with what’s going on in the city. And the patrol officers get the benefit of my years of experience.” I thought I could hear a shade of irony in his voice as he said that, but I couldn’t be sure. “This is my last day of this duty for this year.” He didn’t add “Thank God” but he sure implied it.

  While we talked, his eyes were on the books, and he started off around the store, taking a good look at the displays. It wasn’t clear whether he was looking for evidence or checking out the merchandise. When we got to the fiction section, he pulled The Luck of Ginger Coffey, by Brian Moore, off the shelf and started to read it.

  This was unusual behaviour for a police officer, to say the least. “What do you do normally?” I asked.

  “Murder,” he replied, putting the book back. “I’m attached to the homicide division.” He selected another book and leafed through it. This one was The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope, Penguin edition. “I used to read murder mysteries and detective novels but they were too much like work. Lately I’ve started reading Dickens,” he said, replacing the Trollope on the shelf and picking up Dombey and Son. He looked at me and gestured with the book in his hand. “Your store’s name is ‘Dickens and Company.’ You must have everything written by Dickens.”

  “Well, almost everything. But really we called the store Librairie Dickens & Compagnie because of the language laws. We only carry English books and the Dickens part of our name is our way of getting that message across.”

  “I see,” he said.

  I hoped I hadn’t offended him by mentioning the fact that in Québec only French company names are allowed on the outside of commercial establishments. The difference of opinion on this subject between English and French Quebeckers is sometimes quite sharp.

  Apparently he didn’t mind my frankness. “Dickens is becoming one of my favourites,” he said. “Along with Balzac.” He ran his fingers through his black hair, replaced the book (a depressing novel even by Dickensian standards) and picked up another one. “I’ll take this one,” he said, handing me a copy of Nicholas Nickleby. “I’m told it’s one of his best.”

  Hmm, I said to myself. Did he expect me to give him a free book? For a moment we stood silently looking at each other in the middle of the store each with a hand on the book. Then he caught on, and laughed.

  “I didn’t mean ‘I’ll take it,’ I meant I’d like to buy it.”

  “I knew that,” I said, trying to cover my embarrassment. We walked over to the cash and he paid for the book. “Don’t forget to de-magnetize it,” he said. “I don’t want to set off your alarm.”

  By this time the uniformed cops were finished with the shoplifter and had escorted him out of the store. One of them came back in and asked Lemieux, “Êtes-vous pret? Nous avons fini.”

  “Oui, un petit moment. Attendez-moi dehors.” Turning to me he said, “Nice talking to you. The next time I come I hope it will just be for more Dickens.”

  We shook hands again and he left.

  And that was how I met Gaston Lemieux.

  I have always considered myself pretty well integrated into Québecois society — for an anglo. When I meet francophone writers, especially those whose books had been translated into English, we always have a lot to talk about: the differences between the French and English book businesses, rights, marketing, publishers, bookstores, and of course books. My partner Jennifer Riccofia and I have a great relationship with the French-language booksellers, because we don’t compete with them and we’re able to help them track down English books for their customers.

  But the more I hang out with Québecois the more I realize how cut off I am. When it comes to talking to regular people, people with whom I don’t share a professional connection, I’ve often found that we have almost no common vocabulary. We don’t watch the same television shows or read the same magazines or listen to the same music. So this detective sergeant with an interest in Dickens was a surprise.

  As soon as the cops and the shoplifter left the store I got back to some of the chores of running a bookstore.

  I have a photograph of myself and Jennifer Riccofia that was taken at the party we held for our grand opening. Jen and I are standing at the front of the store, leaning against the window so that the name, Dickens & Company, is just above our heads. My left arm is circling her narrow waist and she has her right arm around my waist. Jennifer isn’t tall: she just comes up to my shoulder. We are leaning against each other so that my head is resting on hers. We both have curly hair, mine is brown and hers is red, and the light streaming in the window gives us an innocent, happy, almost angelic look.

  I used to have the photo tacked up on the bulletin board in our office, but everyone who saw it thought, I guess from the way that Jen and I are smiling in the picture, that we were married. I got tired of explaining that we are not, in fact, husband and wife, so I had the picture framed and set it on my desk in a place where only I can see it.

  We met about eight years ago when I was the manager of one of the stores in the Classic Bookshops chain and Jennifer was the Montreal and eastern sales representative for Murray & Kerr, a publishing house based in Toronto. We’re same age, thirty-five. We became friendly — at one time I thought I would like to be more than that, but we somehow jumped that stage of our relationship without falling and landed on friendship.

  We were soon seeing each other once or twice a week for lunch or dinner or a movie. We talked about work a lot of the time. I was getting restless managing a chain store and I told Jennifer about my frustrations. She was discontented, too, tired of the travelling and more and more convinced that she was too far from the centre of publishing activity, Toronto, to advance her career. But she loved Montreal and wasn’t prepared to trade it for the head-office culture of Toronto. It wasn’t long before our weekly crab sessions turned into planning sessions for the type of bookstore we both dreamed of owning. And pretty soon we started talking seriously about joining forces.

  Six years ago, with money begged, borrowed, saved and in my case inherited (not a large fortune, just an education fund set up by my Zaide Moishe), we opened Dickens Company Bookstore in downtown Montreal. So far, neither of us has regretted our decision; things have worked out very well. Dickens & Company is in the black and Jennifer and I are making a living, not getting rich, but we’re happy.

  Our lives as booksellers developed a regular pattern. Jen looks after the buying and hires and fires (rarely) the staff. I take care of accounting and marketing. I also spend a lot of time worrying about our inventory and how we are going to pay for all the books we keep ordering. Jennifer is used to my whining and mostly ignores it.

  A week after the shoplifting incident, I was going over a stack of invoices trying to calculate our inventory level.

  “Do you realize how much money you’ve spent on books over the last three months?” I asked her, showing her my stack of invoices.

  “A lot, I imagine. Some wonderful books came out and we had to have them. D
on’t worry. They’ll sell. They always do, don’t they?”

  I had to admit she was usually right but worrying about money was part of my nature. Jennifer wasn’t like me at all in that respect. She was always more or less sane about the business and didn’t seem to mind reassuring me at regular intervals.

  “Sam,” she said, “you worried about the same things last year and we had our best year ever. We even made more than a nominal profit. Everything will be OK.”

  She was right, of course. Jennifer is the ideal bookstore partner. She can read vast amounts of publishers’ catalogue copy and from that morass determine which books to buy and in what quantities. She’s intelligent, sure of herself and her opinions, and also a good listener. The publishers’ reps who call on her quickly learn to respect her. As for me, well, having me around is good for Jennifer’s ego, I guess: it means there was always someone around who is more absent-minded and disorganized than she will ever be.

  About three weeks after the shoplifting incident, Gaston Lemieux walked into the store. Despite my pride in my memory for faces I didn’t recognize him immediately. He was off duty and wearing casual clothes, which of course are very different from a policeman’s “plain clothes.”

  This time he bought Bleak House.

  We talked about books for a while, and I suggested that we go and get a cappuccino at the café around the corner on Sherbrooke.

  “Why not?”

  I told Jennifer I’d be back in a half hour or so. Gaston and I went out out into the warm late-spring afternoon, and strolled around the corner to my favourite hangout, the Café Paillon.

  The place is owned by Jake and Jackie Paillon. They are European, although I don’t know what country they come form. They speak English and at least three other languages that I recognize, French, German, and Italian, and a few that I don’t. I’m pretty sure that Jake was originally Jacques and that Jackie was Jacqueline, but I’ve never figured out when or why they anglicized their names. The café has ten tables and a bar with six stools; it’s frequented by students and faculty from McGill University. The prices are low and the place isn’t overdecorated. The white walls are covered with framed prints, chosen for their colours, not their artistic school. Impressionists are mixed with Warhols and Picassos. There’s a corkboard near the door where people advertise articles for sale, apartments for rent and events to attend. The ambiance is friendly and low key.