Honour Among Men. Barbara Fradkin

much I’ll say.

      “Did you see her arrive?”

      “She was already here.”

      “Already dead?”

      “Maybe. It was dark, and I didn’t notice.”

      “Was anyone else around here last night?”

      She shifted restlessly, wincing at the stiffness of her joints. “Mr. G, your cops already asked me all this. They took notes up the ying yang. Now I gotta go before I lose the best part of the day.”

      Green pulled his wallet from his inside jacket pocket. “It’s just that sometimes, after the shock wears off, witnesses remember more details.”

      Twiggy’s eyes flicked to his wallet before travelling up the slope towards the buildings on Bronson Avenue. She poked her tongue through her teeth. “I might have seen her earlier. With someone.”

      “Man or woman?”

      She stared into the distance, worrying her teeth with her tongue. “It was just a vague impression. I saw more the jacket than the woman.”

      “When was this? The same night?”

      “Maybe, maybe not. The nights all blur together, you know?”

      “What were they doing together? Did it look like drugs? Soliciting?”

      “I just remember them on a street over there, outside some fancy place.” When she pointed a stubby, yellowed finger towards downtown, Green noticed an oozing sore on the finger where the skin had cracked. “Talking.”

      “Hear anything?”

      She cast him a disdainful look before stubbing out her cigarette and beginning her struggle to rise. Green reached to haul her up, then extracted twenty dollars from his wallet. “Treat yourself to a proper breakfast, and check that finger out at the clinic.” He extended his card with the money. “And Twiggy, you be sure to call me if you remember anything more.”

      A jagged smile lit her doughy face as she plucked the bill from his hand. “Sure thing, Mr. G. My memory’s a funny thing these days.”

      Actually, Twiggy’s memory was still remarkably sharp for details that were important to her survival. Such as the whereabouts and activities of all strangers who came into her personally declared sphere of operation.

      She waited till Green had disappeared around the edge of the wall before she made her move. Stuffing her newspapers under her arm and dragging her garbage bag behind her, she struggled up the muddy slope and headed to the seat in the nearby bus shelter. There, shielding her actions from the suspicious eyes of the police officer guarding the scene, she emptied her garbage bag onto the bench beside her. She pawed impatiently through the crumpled bedding and the pile of smelly clothing, picked up a small cardboard box and pried off its lid. Inside were two pairs of homemade bead bracelets and a gold ring now much too small for her swollen fingers. They were remnants of another lifetime, kept only because they were worth more in memories than in cold hard cash.

      She frowned at the inside of the box. Too small. She groped through the clothes for a better hiding place, but everything was damp and stained. As a last resort, almost reluctantly, she picked up the two books that had weighted down the bottom of the garbage bag. One was a paperback picked up at a church rummage sale for 25 cents. If Life’s a Bowl of Cherries, What am I Doing in the Pits?, by Erma Bombeck. Bombeck had been dealt one of life’s crappier hands but had risen to fame and happiness, only to be struck down by a fatal disease at the height of her success. Twiggy had been unable to resist the irony, and indeed, Bombeck’s humour had brought her through many a desolate night.

      But the paperback wasn’t big enough. Not for what she had in mind.

      The second book was a thick hardcover tome with gilt lettering and a splintering spine. The Collected Works of Charles Dickens. Twiggy picked it up and let it fall open naturally to reveal the treasures that lay inside. Two photos, lovingly preserved against the crush of life on the streets. Like the jewellery, they were remnants of another lifetime. Carefully, she tore the newspaper along its crease and folded the page into four. Flipping to a fresh spot, she tucked the small square between the pages of the book.

      Another remnant, valuable not to her past, but perhaps to her future.

      After Green left Twiggy, he headed up to speak to Detective Bob Gibbs. He opened the passenger door and slipped in just as the young detective was lifting his coffee cup from its holder. Gibbs started, spilling coffee all down the front of his impeccable white shirt. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he searched for his voice.

      “Sorry about that, Bob,” Green said, rescuing the cup and setting it down. Bob Gibbs had many talents, but a confident disposition was not one of them. Still, in the current state of CID, you had to take the good with the bad. He glanced at the screen on Gibbs’s laptop. “How’s it going?”

      Gibbs found his voice. “It’s still early, sir. How . . . how did you know . . . ?”

      “I was just driving by. Any luck with missing persons?”

      “It’s no one local, at least recently. But I’ve asked MisPers to check Quebec and Ontario.”

      “There may be a military connection.”

      Gibbs blinked in surprise, and a faint flush crept up his neck. “Are you . . . should I . . . ?”

      “It’s your case, Bob. I’m heading to the office to meet with Superintendent Devine. But because of the military line of inquiry, I’d like to be kept in the loop.”

      A shout from down by the water interrupted any reply Gibbs might have attempted. Green peered out of the car window and saw an officer gesturing towards the water at the base of the pumphouse wall. Green and Gibbs got out of the car for a better look and saw Lou Paquette striding over towards the spot, cameras bouncing, yelling at them not to touch anything. Without a moment’s hesitation, Gibbs and Green hurried back down the slope, reaching the scene only seconds after the Ident officer. The young uniformed officer who’d made the discovery was on his knees, leaning out over the water, oblivious to the damp seeping into his pants. A strange pink mottled object lay in about four feet of murky water.

      “I think it’s a purse, sir,” he said. “Looks like it got stuck on the lip of the culvert.”

      Paquette was already chasing everyone away so that he could photograph it. Gibbs and Green waited patiently with the others until he had completed the photos and had fished the purse out into a large plastic pan. Water oozed from it as it gradually deflated. It was large enough to carry a small tank, Green thought, but it was hideous. Something even his wife Sharon, with her practical streak and her sense of humour, would have left on the rack. Shiny black vinyl with big, floppy, pink daisies stuck all over it.

      Paquette pried open the clasp, methodically removed the contents and laid them beside it in the pan. A hat and scarf, two lipsticks, a glasses case, a half-eaten pack of Dentine, half a dozen cheap pens, black gloves, an empty Tupperware container, a hair brush, bits of sodden paper, and three large rocks.

      Paquette hefted these, looking perplexed.

      “Could they have gotten into the purse when it bumped along the bottom?” the young uniform asked.

      Another officer elbowed closer. “The clasp was shut.”

      Green stepped forward and pulled on a glove before picking up one of the stones. It was heavy. Not something a woman would be eager to lug around in her purse. It was grey and irregularly shaped, certainly not chosen for its beauty. He studied the rocky shoreline thoughtfully. Similar grey stones of all sizes poked through the mud.

      “The killer put them in there, hoping to make the purse sink,” he said.

      Paquette’s