Paying People Mind
By Zach Gladstone
The first time Grandma solved a murder she was seventy-eight years old. A rich member of her parish board was found dead in the church’s upstairs office. He was slumped over a desk, shot in the back of the head. A handwritten note on the desk in front of him read “9:37”. Grandma proved the paper was planted there to falsify a time of death. The man’s wife and her lover were arrested for the crime. They both tried to cover each other’s tracks with bogus confessions to the police. But Grandma paid them mind and now they’re both behind bars. Or at least, the wife is. Her lover was found swinging in his cell with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. That’s what Grandma called it when she got involved. Paying people mind. Not meddling, or gossip. Paying people mind.
A year later, Grandma found her stockbroker dead in his backyard, lying on the ground next to the patio table with a spilled glass of lemonade in his hand. His ex-business partner who was being investigated for insider trading was the number one suspect. But Grandma had another theory. Turns out the stockbroker’s maid was manipulated by her boyfriend into slipping yew berry seeds into her boss’s oatmeal. Grandma said she felt sorry for the maid, who was only nineteen. That she’d fallen prey to a wolf pretending to look out for her. Grandma spat on the ground. But she didn’t bat an eye as she watched the detective guide the maid’s head down into the back of the cruiser.
None of us should’ve been surprised when Grandma found the body of a librarian while volunteering at an adult literacy program. Yet we were all shocked when a week later she helped trace the librarian’s body to a young woman who was found dead in a torched car on the other side of town. The librarian’s husband had a girl on the side and decided he didn’t want either of them. At least, that’s how Grandma put it. Thinking about all of this, I guess it was only a matter of time before we found Grandma sprawled at the bottom of her stairs in a rumpled heap of blue woolen cardigan and oddly angled limbs.
A neighbour let herself in one morning when Grandma wasn’t answering the phone and found her. She had been lying there all night, still wearing her outfit from the day before with all her makeup on too. Grandma was always concerned with her appearance. She never ate messy food in front of guests at dinner and never let anyone see her in comfortable clothing. I don’t think she even owned a sweatshirt. When I was a kid, seven or eight, I spent the night at her house and saw her with a green facemask on and curlers in her hair. She reacted as if I’d walked in on her stark naked. She’d be happy to know that she was fully dressed and ready to start the day when they found her corpse.
Besides all the murderers she met, she led a normal life for an eighty-five-year-old Protestant woman. She had heated discussions at bridge club, always stayed late to clean up after church potlucks and had the highest score on her bowling team. If that’s all her life had been, then maybe she’d only have a one paragraph obituary and a post about the memorial on the church website. She did get those things and a police file.
After the second murder, she was interviewed for a few magazines and newspapers. Journalists always expected her to offer up a golden secret she had for reading people and solving crimes. But she would just spend the interview bending their ear with anecdotes about her bowling technique or ask them to promote the next church charity event. A reporter for the Toronto Star asked if she thought she was putting herself or her family in danger. Grandma told him she’d dealt with a lot of people with her “murder run ins.” She had a few choice words to describe them. Dangerous wasn’t one of them. Grandma wouldn’t budge on that. Even after the reporter pointed out that the last victim had their head bashed in against a bookcase
Grandma was flippant about the killers she met. Going on as if she were dealing with a neighbour who never took in his bins after trash day. At Sunday brunch, she was even more casual when she told me and my mom that she found a threatening letter on her doorstep. The typed letter warned her to stay out of other people’s business if she didn’t want to get cut up into little pieces, wrapped in black garbage bags, and buried in her backyard. Mom said to call the police and demanded that Grandma come stay with her. Grandma asked her to pass the maple syrup. Grandma liked living on her own and she wouldn’t give that up. Mom started to argue, but Grandma shut her up by telling her not to ruin brunch. Threatening letters she would put up with, but you could never spoil a meal that my grandma was hosting.
Three more letters arrived. All typed on single sheets of paper folded in two and all left on the front doormat. The second letter said that when they found her the police would have to have to I.D. her through her dentures. Grandma laughed that one off, saying she didn’t have dentures. She left the letters out on the table when I came over for coffee. I was able to get a glance in before she tucked them away in a nearby drawer. I sat on her sagging couch while she sank into her La-Z-Boy armchair. Instead of talking about the fact someone was writing to her to say that her days were numbered and that she’d be rotting in a shallow grave, she asked me about my accounting work.
Grandma helped me get this job. A few years ago, she slipped on a spilled bottle of shampoo at a pharmacy and really screwed up her hip. As she was brought into the ambulance on a stretcher, she saw a billboard for a “you don’t pay unless we win” lawyer. She called him on the way to the hospital and one mediation later she was having her physio appointments paid for by that very pharmacy. She also got a new friend out of the deal, because she had lunch with that lawyer, my boss, every week. I know he told her all about the cheque problem.
When I was fourteen, Grandma found out I was smoking. One of her friends from the bowling league saw me standing with a few high school seniors next to a bus stop, coughing my lungs out after taking a drag off a Pall Mall. Grandma cornered me at Sunday dinner, telling me to take whatever cigarettes I still had and throw them out. If I did that, this would stay our little secret. She told me not to waste my money on Pall Malls, that I might as well smoke a wet rag from a body shop. I didn’t laugh, but I told her I’d chuck them. I remember how she looked at me when we had this talk. She stared at me like she was trying to see through me as I stood outside her bathroom, the scent of potpourri wafting into the hallway. Like she was trying to decide if any of this was clicking.
It was the same look she was giving me that afternoon as she asked me if I knew why the firm’s client was given a payout that was two-hundred dollars short of what he was quoted on his settlement agreement. Did my bosses ever figure out why the numbers weren’t adding up? Grandma always acted like she was three steps ahead. Because just by looking at you, she could tell if things were clicking. Just by paying you mind.
She knew I was lying when I told her I’d get rid of the Pall Malls. Not because she saw me smoking again or found my new hiding spot. Because she just knew. Mom kicked me out a week later when Grandma told her. I showed up at Grandma’s door that night, begging to sleep on the couch. She told me to take a hike. I slept in a bus station shelter instead. When Grandma saw someone doing wrong by her measure, she couldn’t keep it to herself. Whether it was shooting your husband in the back of the head, slipping poison into your boss’s breakfast, leaving the body of a woman next to the periodicals at the library, or even smoking cigarettes as a teenager behind your mom’s back. Or skimming off the top of a trust account.
Pleading with Grandma or promising you’d never do it again wouldn’t stop her. The same goes for leaving threatening letters on her porch in the middle of the night when most of her neighbours were asleep. But now, Grandma was lying at the bottom of her staircase. Her stare that would try and look inside your smile was gone. Now replaced with a pair of vacant, empty eyes resting in a head, stiffening into place.
