Lindstrom Alone Read online

  Copyright © 2018 John Moss

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5S 2R4

  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, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Publisher: Mary Ann J. Blair

  Front cover image: Igor Stepovik/Shutterstock.com

  Front cover design: Mumson Designs © 2017

  A Stonewood Imprint

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Moss, John, 1940-, author

  Lindstrom alone / John Moss.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-260-4 (softcover).–ISBN 978-1-77180-261-1

  (EPUB).–ISBN 978-1-77180-262-8 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8576.O7863L56 2018 C813’.6 C2018-900860-1

  C2018-900861-X

  This is an original print edition of Lindstrom Alone.

  1 BLACK NAILS

  HARRY WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY THE OPENING CHORD of Beethoven’s Fifth. Calls were rare; he was always surprised. He would have preferred a riff by George Harrison but the phone came with Beethoven on default and that’s how he left it. He picked up reluctantly.

  “Yeah?” he mumbled.

  “How are you managing?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’ve got a client for you, Harry. I’m sending her over.”

  He was pleased and annoyed. Ambivalence was part of their relationship.

  “Harry, are you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “It’s midafternoon.”

  “I’m looking out the window. Watching the weather.”

  “Is it interesting?”

  “Who is she, Miranda?”

  “Just talk to her.”

  “I’m on my way out.”

  “Do us a favour, Harry. You like me, remember.”

  “Miranda.”

  “Yes?”

  What could he say? He disconnected. He wanted to please her. Knowing Miranda Quin was pleased made his world a little bit bigger, a little more tolerable.

  He had just wrapped up a case. It was grisly, straightforward, and emotionally depleting. A distraught mother, the fury of an estranged father, the remains of a child. The woman’s parents had hired him to prove the events were inevitable and there was nothing they could have done to change things. He managed to turn their unbearable remorse into sorrow, something he seemed unable to do for himself.

  The first killer in Harry Lindstrom’s life was himself. Three years later, torn between rage and despair, death had become his vocation. He had been a philosophy professor; now he worked as a private investigator specializing in murder. The dramatic transition from exploring the fundamental questions of existence in a lecture hall to exposing the mysteries arising from murder seemed absurd and grotesquely inevitable. A defiant, proud, and solitary man of forty-two, he held the life of the mind in highest esteem, yet lived in a world of raw feelings and haunting emotions. He abhorred brooding yet brooded; he rejected bitterness, yet grief and guilt and anger defined him. Harry endured.

  He pushed his clothes along the rack in his side of the closet. Sliding his knee-length sheepskin coat from a wooden hanger, he felt a surge of sadness but looked forward to the reassurance of its heavy warmth pressed around him. Karen had the coat handmade for him their last winter together. She liked the way it was cut long enough to protect his legs in the Ontario cold. Before their final canoe trip, he had put it in storage in the cellar. When he burnt the house to the ground, it survived. The wool and leather still exuded the faint odour of smoke. Water stains blended with the patina from natural wear to make it look older than it was.

  He found a flannel shirt in the bottom drawer of the dresser and drew it on over a merino wool crew neck, which was warm to his skin. While he was buttoning the shirt, he walked out into the living room and gazed at the smouldering sunset. Harry lived on the Toronto skyline. From his windows on the twenty-third floor, the world was a constantly changing distraction. He paid extra for a southern exposure. In the blur of a retreating snowstorm, the first of the season, the view across the harbour and over the islands was a painting by Turner and the city was remote. The air above Lake Ontario was infused with an eerie red glow. December snow crowding the streets behind his building would melt into slush before it could be trucked away, but from his condo aerie he could imagine it crisp and even. He preferred real winter when the snow stayed. He preferred summer, late spring, early fall. He liked the seasons clearly defined.

  He sat down on the blue sofa with his coat folded over his knees. He tried to think of nothing. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves, he thought. Actually, his thinking was a sort of mental plagiarism. This was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thought. Wittgenstein was his favourite philosopher—not for his ideas, which Wittgenstein’s doctoral examiners at Cambridge, including Bertrand Russell, had found profoundly impenetrable, but for his irreverent wit. Whatever our purpose, I’m pretty sure it’s not to have fun.

  That was metaphysics Harry could relate to, even though Wittgenstein meant it ironically.

  And if it cannot be spoken one must remain silent!

  That was Karen, paraphrasing Wittgenstein.

  Harry had missed the great man at Cambridge by a full generation but the long drawn face and lanky gait represented themselves in his mind as a ghostly presence on his forays among the nocturnal shadows of the town. Wittgenstein was still there, always just slipping from sight.

  For a materialist, Harry, you’re surprisingly good at experiencing ghosts.

  And you, at being one.

  He was not about to argue philosophical materialism. But he distinctly recalled the carved grey stone, the pale brickwork, the checkerboard marble of Trinity College echoing Wittgenstein’s words, the burnished wood and worn plaster that were redolent with the convoluted clarity of his deeply serious, hesitant, intense, elusive, provocative ponderings. Wittgenstein thought in public. He did not merely issue the product of having had thoughts. You could watch him thinking! Even after he was dead. The reverberations of his mental machinations still resounded amidst the silences if you knew how to listen. And sometimes Harry did.

  Yet he had no drive or desire to follow in Wittgenstein’s footsteps.

  Modesty, Harry!

  Karen’s voice was muffled. It annoyed him when she wasn’t easy to hear.

  Balance. I wasn’t cut out for the intellectual priesthood. I wanted a life. And then.

  Death happened.

  Death doesn’t happen; it’s not an event. Life stops. There’s nothing more. You cannot make an event out of nothing.

  Harry.

  I should be quoting Nietzsche.

  I’m sure you will, you often do.

  The floor shuddered and a faint rumbling echoed from the elevator shaft on the other side of the wall. Harry knew the comings and goings of his neighbours. Everyone else was home already or out for the evening. He kept a mental account of things like that. This would be his visitor direct from police headquarters. She must have slipped through the security door in the lobby.

  He draped his sheepskin coat over the wingback chair he had retrieved from his great aunt’s estate. It had come over from Sweden in the middle of the nineteenth century. The buzzer sounded as he appr
oached the door. He didn’t bother peeping through the spyhole. When he opened the door, she wasn’t what he expected. Miranda had said nothing about her being so beautiful that he would have trouble focusing, the same way he might with someone who was terribly disfigured. His visitor was maybe twenty years older than him with radiant white hair, on the verge of old age, and stunningly, sensually attractive.

  He stepped back and she walked past, straight to the window, and turned to face him with the sunset off to the side behind her so that she seemed surrounded by flames. Her features took on a light of their own, and for a moment he thought he could see the skull beneath her glistening skin.

  “Lindstrom and Malone?” she said. “There’s no sign.”

  “Can’t run a business in the building.”

  “But you do.”

  “It’s more of an existential diversion. Superintendent Quin knows about us, the building superintendent doesn’t.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “Not here.”

  The woman glanced at his silver wedding band. Harry looked away. Images of Bergman hovered like film clips at the edge of his mind.

  Ingrid or Ingmar, Harry?

  “What can I do for you …?” He paused, inviting her to fill in the blank.

  “Birgitta. Ghiberti.” The woman spoke her name in two distinct words, as if there was a barrier between her first name and her last.

  “Ghiberti. Renaissance sculptor. The bronze doors in Florence,” he said. He shrugged off Karen’s muted protest about being pompous. “I would have said you’re Scandinavian.”

  “Ghiberti is my married name. My own was Shtoonk.”

  “Really.”

  “You know Yiddish?”

  “No.”

  “It means fat, lazy, and stupid. I’m not Jewish.”

  “It happens.”

  “I kept his name after we divorced.”

  “And Ghiberti remarried?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Does that mean you’re a widow?”

  “Once removed.”

  She offered a wry smile and pushed her silver-white mane back from her face. Harry thought of Ilsa in Casablanca. Shrewd, damaged, desperate.

  Dangerous and alluring.

  Birgitta Ghiberti stepped forward out of the flames. She had piercing eyes, and yet she avoided making eye contact as she surveyed the room. Apparently not dissuaded by whatever she saw, she suddenly honed in. Her eyes flashed.

  “I’d like to talk to you about Bernd, my son.”

  Harry waited. He felt strangely on the edge of a precipice, walking in the dark beside a looming abyss.

  “I believe my son will try to kill you,” she said.

  For a moment his mind went blank, then spiralled, grasping for meaning. He could hear the silence that followed like the roar of waves crashing against rocks on the shore below. He smiled, he rarely smiled. He smiled because he was morbidly amused. He was engaged, curious, and pleasantly aggravated at the absence of subtlety.

  “I don’t feel very threatened,” he said.

  “He intends to kill me as well. He is a serial killer.”

  Harry could not imagine how he and this woman fit a common pattern as potential victims.

  “Normally he murders young women,” she said. “Usually blondes.”

  In a self-mocking femme fatale gesture she swooped her head forward and around so that her long silver hair flared away in a pale nimbus and settled back close to her skull.

  Harry shivered with revulsion but the revulsion was tempered with a tremor of apprehension.

  Was she pausing for dramatic effect? He waited.

  “Bernd has disappeared.”

  “That should be a relief to both of us,” he said.

  “I think he’s in Sweden.”

  “Superintendent Quin can put you in touch with the right people. I don’t do missing persons.”

  “You don’t understand.” Choosing her words with unnerving precision, she continued, “He will execute me, he will exterminate you. He is a very dangerous man.”

  Birgitta Ghiberti surveyed the room again.

  As a mawkish expression of pathetic fallacy, night was dropping into place behind her.

  “Perhaps we should sit down,” Harry said, settling into a teak and leather chair and motioning her to take the blue linen sofa. Her long legs flashed elegantly as she arranged herself in a formal design to convey poise and distress.

  “Would you care to elaborate?” he asked. “If you think he’s in Sweden, how are we threatened? And more to the point, why? I don’t even know the man.”

  “I am afraid by coming here I have forged a deadly connection between you.”

  “Not if I don’t take your case.”

  “He won’t know that you haven’t. He knows I am quite persuasive.”

  “How will he know that you’ve been here?”

  “I will make sure that he does.”

  Harry nodded appreciatively. For a moment he might have been back in his tutor’s lodgings at Trinity, prepared to debate the delusional wonders of logic over a glass of vintage port. Only this wasn’t an intellectual exercise.

  “Your son will murder me because you have asked me to save you from being murdered. Whatever my response, I am a condemned man. Seems reasonable enough.”

  “I’m glad you understand,” she said.

  The woman has no sense of irony, Harry.

  “This is not about us,” said Birgitta Ghiberti. “Our deaths are incidental.”

  Oh really.

  “We must be worried about the young women,” she said. “He has killed many. He will kill many more unless we stop him.”

  Altruism put Harry in a more sympathetic humour than extortion. Past victims were nebulous in his mind, but the passion of her plea on their behalf seemed ominously specific. Was the urgency an expression of genuine concern? She had made herself aggressively vulnerable, an anomaly he found intriguing.

  Anomaly, bullsquat. She’s a predatory, cannibalistic, silver-haired black widow arachnid.

  He ignored the clumsy metaphor.

  Simile, Harry. They’re exactly alike.

  “I’m listening,” he said to his guest. “Explain, why do you suspect your son is a killer?”

  “I know, I do not suspect, Mr. Lindstrom. Or is it Professor? Or Doctor?”

  “How much did Quin tell you?”

  “About you? Very little. That you were a philosophy professor and are now a detective. An intriguing vocational trajectory. I take it you didn’t have tenure.”

  “I had tenure.”

  “Do you have children, Mr. Lindstrom?”

  Miranda had been relatively discreet! Harry was relieved, even though the evocation of private sorrow was distressing.

  “No,” he said. “They’ve gone.”

  “We can’t keep them forever, can we,” she observed.

  No, we can’t keep them forever—Karen’s voice, deep inside, and curiously gentle, wistful, resigned, acquiescent.

  “No, not forever,” Harry echoed. Miranda had not shared the details. “What kind of proof do you have?” he asked. It seemed an awkward question.

  She opened her capacious and expensive handbag and took out a small tin box, the kind loose tea comes in from specialty shops. It was battered and the label was obscured by stains the colour of earth. He could make out the words Hulda’s bland-something and Visby Gotland. A pair of aged and sinister eyes glowered through the smudges of dirt.

  She pried open the lid and leaning forward she turned the box delicately on end over the coffee table. The contents spilled out, bracketed by a stack of newsmagazines and an unlikely bowl of artificial fruit. They appeared to be a clutter of dried fish scales, catching colourful crescents of illumination from the overhead light.

  Harry sat motionless. Fingernail clippings, dozens of them, with nail polish of various hues, and oddly, all of them meticulously blackened on the inner curve. He reached out, hesitated (there was s
omething repulsive about other people’s bodily detritus), picked up a few and dropped them into the palm of his hand.

  “Not the most evil fetish I could imagine.”

  Birgitta Ghiberti reached over and touched his open hand with her fingertips. Her enamelled nails dug into his flesh. They were a deep red, the colour of dried blood, and they were artificial.

  “Trust me,” she said. “These are souvenirs of death.”

  Harry flinched a little, and dropping his selection back onto the pile, he pulled his chair close to the table. The woman’s long legs flashed across from him as she made herself comfortable again, unselfconsciously putting herself on display. He slid a lamp closer and taking up a pencil sorted through the parings.

  “Obviously from many different women,” he said. “I’m assuming they’re all women. And Nordic, yes? Swedish. Most of them are buff or pink. Lighter complexions. A few quite garish. Prostitutes, perhaps.”

  Or women with bad taste, Karen offered.

  “Or darker skin,” he countered, playing Nick to her Nora, out loud. “Mediterranean, maybe. Is there such a thing as black nail polish?”

  Goth, Harry. Of course.

  Birgitta Ghiberti stared at Harry and for a startling moment he thought she was aware of his interior dialogue. But she seemed to be waiting for him to catch up.

  “Let’s concede for a minute these are actually evidence of murder,” he said. “How do you connect them with your son?”

  “I found the box hidden in a burial mound last summer.”

  “A burial mound?”

  “In Sweden. We have a farmhouse on the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea. There is a root cellar in a pile of rubble. Generations of children have terrified themselves playing inside it, insisting it was an ancient grave and at one time a site for human sacrifice.”

  “And your son played there as a child? I assume he’s grown up now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he save them?”

  “To punish me.”

  “For what?”

  The woman gazed across at him and smiled sadly, but made it clear she was not about to elaborate; perhaps she couldn’t. Her smile was strangely unsettling. He thought for a moment, as if trying to separate the words from the thinking they expressed. He did not want to trivialize her apparent distress. “Have you considered they might be the remains of some childhood game?”