police. My husband’s dead. Why don’t you just leave me alone?”
Anna sensed the desperation in the old woman’s voice. Her maiden name,
according to the documents, was Marie LeBlanc, and she was just about
eight years younger than her husband. She didn’t have to talk with
them, though she probably didn’t know that. Everything now turned on
the dance of persuasion.
Anna hated dealing with the families of murder victims. Pestering them
with questions at such a terrible time, days or even hours after the
death of a loved one, was unbearable.
“Mrs. Mailhot,” Arsenault said in an official voice, “we have reason to
believe someone may have killed your husband.”
The widow stared at them for a moment. “That’s ridiculous,” she said.
The space between front door and jamb narrowed.
“You may be right,” Anna said softly. “But if anyone did anything to
him, we want to know about it.”
The widow hesitated. After a moment, she scoffed, “He was old. He had
a bad heart. Leave me alone.”
She felt sorry for the old woman, having to undergo interrogation at
such a terrible time. But the widow could kick them out any minute, and
she couldn’t allow that to happen. In a gentle voice she said, “Your
husband could have lived longer than he did. You two could have had
more time together. We think someone may have taken that away from you.
Something no one had the right to take. If anyone did that to you, we
want to find out who it was.”
The widow’s stare seemed to relent.
“Without your help, we’ll never know who took your husband from you.”
Slowly the space widened and the screen door came open.
The front parlor was dark. Mrs. Mailhot switched on a lamp, which cast
a sulfurous light. She was wide-hipped and even shorter than she had
first appeared to be. She wore a neat gray pleated skirt and an ivory
fisherman’s sweater.
The room was gloomy but immaculate, and it smelled of lemon oil.
Recently cleaned perhaps because Mrs. Mailhot expected relatives at her
husband’s funeral. Hair and fiber would be a problem. The “crime
scene,” such as it was, was not exactly preserved.
The room, Anna noticed, was furnished with great attention to detail.
Lace doilies adorned the arms of the tweedy sofa and armchairs. All the
white fringed silk lampshades matched. On little end tables
silver-framed photographs were placed just so. One of them was a
black-and-white wedding picture: a plain, vulnerable-looking bride, the
groom darkhaired, sharp-featured, proud.
Atop the walnut television cabinet was a line of identical little ivory
elephant figurines. Tacky, yet touching.
“Oh, aren’t those exquisite,” Anna said, pointing the elephants out to
Arsenault.
“Sure are,” Arsenault said unconvincingly.
“Are they Lenox?” Anna asked.
The widow looked surprised, then gave a proud little smile. “You
collect them?”
“My mother did.” Her mother had neither the time nor the money to
collect anything except her meager paychecks.
The old woman gestured. “Please sit down.”
Anna took a seat on the couch, Arsenault in the adjoining armchair. She
remembered this was the room in which Mailhot had been found dead.
Mrs. Mailhot sat in an uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chair all the
way across the room. “I wasn’t here when my husband died,” she said
sadly. “I was visiting my sister like I do every Tuesday night. I just
feel so terrible he died without me here.”
Anna nodded sympathetically. “Maybe we can talk a little about the way
he passed …”
“He died from heart failure,” she said. “The doctor told me that.”
“And he may have,” Anna said. “But sometimes a person can be killed in
such a way that it doesn’t look like murder.”
“Why would anyone want to kill Robert?”
Arsenault gave Anna a quick, almost undetectable glance. There was
something about the woman’s intonation: it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
She sounded as if she really wanted to know. The approach they took now
would be crucial. The two had been married since 1951–half a century
together. She surely had some inkling of whatever it was, if anything,
that her husband might have been involved in.
“You two retired here a few years ago, is that right?”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “What does this have to do with his death?”
“You lived on your husband’s pension?”
Mrs. Mailhot raised her chin defiantly. “Robert took care of the
money. He told me never to worry about those things.”
“But did he ever tell you where the money was coming from?”
“I told you, Robert took care of everything.”
“Did your husband tell you that he had one point five million dollars in
the bank?”
“We can show you the bank records if you’d like,” Arsenault put in.
The old widow’s eyes betrayed nothing. “I told you, I know very little
about our finances.”
“He never talked to you about receiving money from anyone?” Arsenault
asked.
“Mr. Highsmith was a generous man,” she said slowly. “He never forgot
the little people. The people who had helped him.”
“These were payments from Charles Highsmith?” Arsenault prompted.
Charles Highsmith was a famous, some would say notorious, media baron.
With holdings even more extensive than his competitor Conrad
Black’s, he owned newspapers, radio stations, and cable companies across
North America. Three years ago, Highsmith had died, evidently having
fallen overboard from his yacht, although the precise circumstances of
the incident remained a matter of some controversy.
The widow nodded. “My husband was in his employ for most of his life.”
“But Charles Highsmith died three years ago,” Arsenault said.
“He must have left instructions for his estate. My husband didn’t
explain such things to me. Mr. Highsmith made sure we always had
enough. That’s the kind of man he was.”
“And what did your husband do to inspire such loyalty?” Anna asked.
“There’s no secret about that,” the widow replied.
“Until he retired fifteen years ago, he worked for him as a bodyguard,”
Arsenault said. “And factotum. Someone who did special errands.”
“He was a man Mr. Highsmith could trust implicitly,” the old woman
said, as if echoing an overheard accolade.
“You moved here from Toronto right after Charles Highsmith’s death,”
Anna said, glancing at her file.
“My husband … had certain ideas.”
“About Highsmith’s death?”
The old woman spoke with obvious reluctance. “Like many people, he
wondered about it. About whether it was an accident. Of course, Robert
was retired by that point, but he still consulted on security. Sometimes
he blamed himself for what happened. I think that’s why he was a little
… funny about it. He convinced himself that if it wasn’t an accident,
then maybe Highsmith’s enemies would come after him one day. It sounds
crazy. But you understand, he was my husband. I never questioned his
decisions.”
“That’s why you moved here,” Anna said, half to herself. After decades
in major cities like London and Toronto, her husband had rusticated
himself had, in fact, gone into hiding. He moved to the place his
ancestors and hers had once made a home, a place where they knew all the
neighbors, a place that seemed safe, where they could keep a low
profile.
Mrs. Mailhot was silent. “I never really believed it. My husband had
his suspicions, that was all. As he aged, he became more anxious. Some
men are like that.”
“You thought it was an eccentricity of his.”
“We all have our eccentricities.”
“And what do you think now?” Anna said gently.
“Now I don’t know what to think.” The old woman’s eyes grew moist.
“Do you know where he kept his financial records?”
“There are checkbooks and all that sort of thing in a box upstairs.” She
shrugged. “You can look if you want.”
“Thank you,” Anna said. “We need to go through with you the last week
or so of your husband’s life,” Anna said. “In detail. His habits,
where he went, any place he traveled. Any calls he might have placed or
received. Any letters he got. Any restaurants you went to. Any
repairmen or workers who might have come to the house plumbers,
telephone repairmen, carpet cleaners, meter readers. Anything you can
think of.”
They interviewed her for the next two hours, stopping only to use the
toilet. Even when it was clear the widow was becoming weary, they
forged ahead, determined to push her as hard as she’d let them. Anna
knew that if they were to stop and ask to come back in the morning, she
might change her mind in the meantime about speaking to them. She might
speak to a friend, a lawyer. She might tell them to go to hell.
But two hours later they knew little more than when they began. The
widow gave them permission to inspect the house, but they found no signs
of forced entry at the front door or any of the windows. Likely the
killer if indeed the old man had been murdered got into the house by