Read Online Beautiful Lie the Dead by Barbara Fradkin - Free Book Online

Order s had been around, everyone loved a good old-fashioned crime investigation, so Sue produced her badge and asked for his help tracking down an old lead. The toothpick was whipped out and the guy was all ears. The Montreal Gazette was on microfilm and he could get it in a jiff, but 1978 was a lot of papers. Any idea when in 1978?
    â€œBring them all. You’ll have to show me how to use the machine,” she said, giving him a wink.
    He sat her in the corner at one of the viewers and loaded the first tape for her. January 1978 appeared on the screen, blurry and harsh black against white. This is going to give me one mother of a headache, she thought as she turned the dial and the pages whirred past. She’d barely been a twinkle in her mother’s eye back then and had no memory of life before computers. This is goddamn prehistoric. How the hell did cops do research back then?
    In 1978 the economy was in shambles—what a surprise—and the politicians in the minority government were bickering— another surprise. Quebeckers were on strike, and businesses were crashing all over Montreal. The Gazette , which she knew was Quebec’s main Anglo voice, was full of screaming headlines about the Quebec government’s new language law and the repression of English rights.
    Quebec sure was a lively place, she thought as she scrolled through the months. Being a small-town Ontario girl, the only politics she’d grown up with was whether the town council had been paid off when developers won their bid to pave over some prime farm land.
    She was skimming so fast through the blurry print that she nearly missed the first article entirely. It was tucked into the bottom of the second page of the July 13 issue, a mere mention of an unidentified male found dead in an apartment on McTavish Street near McGill University. McGill was the word that caught her eye. There were few other details, other than to say the body had been found by the landlord after a family member expressed concern. The city was engulfed in a heat wave. The landlord was quoted as saying the man was hanging from a hook in the closet, but police refused to confirm any details.
    She spun the dial forward to the next day’s paper, but despite a careful search, there was no mention of the man. The following day had a small sidebar that the man had been dead for several days but that his identity was being withheld pending notification of family members. It was not until the weekend that a half-page spread on the front page of the Local News section identified the dead man. “Popular law professor’s life ends in tragedy”, the headline said. There was a large photo of him in full court gown, looking into the camera like he was about to address a jury. But even the silly outfit and the prissy expression could not hide the guy’s good looks. Dark curly hair, wide eyes, cheekbones and nose like a perfectly carved Greek god. He looked no more comfortable in that pointy, strangling collar than she would. He belonged at the helm of a yacht in the Caribbean. Below the photo was the caption “Maître Harvey Longstreet divided his time between McGill Law School and a select law practice involving criminal code appeals, but still found time to author several books on appellant law.”
    Sue combed through the article carefully. It read like a press release from the family. Although Longstreet had apparently taken his own life in the apartment he maintained downtown close to the university, the word suicide wasn’t even mentioned. According to his Uncle Cyril, Longstreet used the apartment as a retreat for rest and work during his hectic, sometimes eighteen-hour days. There was a bunch of quotes from students who adored him, from colleagues who hailed him as the next Clarence Darrow—Sue wasn’t sure who that was but had a vague recollection of a famous American human rights trial lawyer—and even from an old