A Killing Spring (13 page)

“How are you, Jill?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “How are you?”

“Never better,” I said. “But I need to speak to Tom. Is he there?”

“I’ll see if he can come to the phone.”

When Tom Kelsoe picked up the receiver, he barked his name in my ear, and I felt my gorge rise. But this wasn’t about me. I tried to make my voice civil.

“Tom, Julie Gallagher has decided against a funeral for Reed, but some of us at the university have been talking about a memorial service. You and Reed were so close. I thought you’d want to be part of the planning.”

He cut me off. “I don’t get off on primitive group rituals, Joanne. I think the idea sucks. I won’t help and I won’t be there.” He slammed the receiver down.

I turned to Ed Mariani. “Tom declines,” I said. “And without regrets.”

Ed put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself up heavily. “Then I guess it’s up to us,” he said.

Reed Gallagher’s memorial service was held at the Faculty Club on Friday, March 24, a week to the day after his body had been discovered in the rooming house on Scarth Street. In every detail of the planning, Ed Mariani’s watchword had been dignity; the service seemed to become his way of reclaiming for Reed the respect and regard which his bizarre death had stolen from him. The rooms I walked into that afternoon were an invitation to celebrate civility and the pleasures of the senses: simple bowls of spring flowers touched the tables with Japanese grace. At the grand piano in the bar, Barry Levitt, trim in a cream cable-knit sweater and matching slacks, was leafing through his sheet music, and in the club’s window room, a buffet with hot and cold hors-d’oeuvres had been set up beside a well-stocked bar. Ed Mariani had done Reed Gallagher proud, but as I picked up a glass of champagne punch at the bar, I was edgy. I’d been tense all week, made restless by the deepening mysteries in the lives of two people I didn’t really know. One of those people was Reed Gallagher.

Ed Mariani and Barry Levitt had volunteered to organize Reed’s memorial service, but they had entrusted one job to me. Because I had keys to the Gallaghers’ condominium, I was to find photographs and memorabilia for the display celebrating Reed’s life. At first, I burrowed through the boxes of memorabilia I found in his closet as dispassionately as an archaeologist on a dig, but as the man Reed Gallagher had been began to emerge, Annalie’s cryptic allusion to Santayana took on a haunting resonance. Try as I might, I could not reconcile Reed Gallagher’s sad and tawdry death with the life that was emerging from the boxes and cartons that surrounded me. As Mr. Spock would say, it didn’t compute. Nonetheless, the more I dug, the more I became convinced that the answer to the enigma of Reed Gallagher’s last hours lay somewhere in his past.

By any standards, his life had been extraordinary. Before he had turned his hand to teaching, he had covered wars and political campaigns and natural disasters. He had been present at many of the events that had defined our history in the past quarter-century. He had known famous people, and he had, if one could judge from the affectionate inscriptions on plaques and photographs, been liked and respected by those who worked with him and knew him best. Everything I came up with reflected a life lived with gusto and commitment. Perhaps more significantly, my burrowing uncovered no evidence of the negligence Annalie’s message had suggested, nor did it bring to light even a hint of an ache so ferocious that it would someday drive Reed Gallagher up a flimsy fire escape to his appointment in Samarra.

But, as I kept reminding myself, my job wasn’t to analyse; it was to gather together what Barry Levitt called my Gallagher iconography, and that afternoon, as I stood in the Faculty Club looking at the graceful mahogany table
that held my handiwork, I was pleased with the job I had done. Reed Gallagher had not been badly served by his iconographer.

Scattered among the awards and testimonials were pictures of Reed flanked by two prime ministers, of Reed gripping the hand of an American president, of Reed conferring with media figures like Knowlton Nash, Barbara Frum, Peter Newman, and Richard Gwyn, people who come as close to being legendary as our country permits anyone to be. But my real coup was a picture of Reed with a woman who, in all likelihood, would be of no significance to anyone in the room but me.

I had searched hard for a photograph of Annalie, but in the end I had almost passed it by. My aim had been to balance photos of the public Reed Gallagher with some that captured his private moments, and I had found some lovely and evocative snapshots: Reed as a teenager, taking a chamois to a shining convertible with fins while two middle-aged people beamed with parental pride; Reed as a college boy in a bathing suit, exulting in the pleasure of holding a sweetly curved young woman in his arms; Reed as the very young editor of a small-town newspaper, proudly showing off his twin proofs of authority, a shining brass nameplate on his desk and a brand-new moustache on his upper lip.

By the time I came upon the carton that Reed, in his large and generous hand, had labelled
RYERSON
–
DESK STUFF
, I thought I’d made all my choices. But remembering Reed’s affinity for the students at our J school, I decided to see if I could ferret out something from his early days as an instructor. The yellowed newspaper clipping of the photograph of Annalie and Reed was in an envelope with a clutch of odds and ends: a dry cleaner’s receipt, an old press pass from a
PC
leadership convention, a ticket stub from a Leafs-Blackhawks game. In the photo, Annalie, in her capacity as editor of the
Ryersonian
, was presenting Reed with a bound copy of the past year’s issues. Both she and Reed were smiling.

Her full name was Annalie Brinkmann. On the phone, her voice had been filled with lilt and magic, but the picture showed a plain girl, heavy-set and wearing horn-rimmed glasses which had apparently failed to correct an outward-turning squint. Twenty years can change many things, and the girl of twenty is often barely discernible in the woman of forty, but I was hoping the picture might jog the memories of some of Reed’s friends from the Ryerson days. There was even an outside chance that Annalie herself would appear. Ed had written an elegant obituary of Reed for the
Globe and Mail
, and placed a notice of Reed’s death in the
Toronto Star
. Both had mentioned the time and place of the memorial service. If Annalie was a newspaper reader, chances were good she would know about what Ed Mariani had come to call Reed’s last party. It was a slim straw to cling to, but if I was lucky, one way or another, the memorial service would link me and the woman who had left such a troubling message for Reed Gallagher three days after his death.

The newspaper clipping was unmounted, and I would need a frame. Fortunately, there was a small silver one at hand that was just the ticket. I didn’t feel the smallest pang as I replaced the photograph of Tom Kelsoe with the one of Reed and Annalie Brinkmann. Tom had made it clear that he didn’t want to be part of Reed’s last party, and it was a pleasure to honour his request.

As the guests started arriving at the club, it seemed that Tom and Julie were the only people who had chosen not to come. Twenty minutes before the farewells were scheduled to begin, the room was packed, but newcomers were still appearing. I scanned the door eagerly, looking for two faces: one was Annalie’s; the other was Kellee Savage’s.

Kellee still hadn’t shown up. As acting head of the School of Journalism, Ed had checked with all her instructors. Their reports had been the same: Kellee Savage hadn’t been in class all week. Ed and I had taken turns calling the number Kellee listed as her home number, but we’d never connected. When I told Alex I was growing uneasy, he was reassuring. Kellee Savage was, he said, a white middle-class twenty-one-year-old who had got drunk and humiliated herself in front of her friends. Nothing in her life pointed to a fate worse than a bad case of embarrassment. In his opinion, when she screwed up her courage, she would be back.

Alex’s logic was unassailable. Even I had to admit that Kellee’s disappearance fell well within a pattern I knew. It was not uncommon for university kids to disappear from classes for a while, especially this close to the end of term. Sometimes the triple burden of a heavy workload, parental expectations, and immaturity was just too much, and the kids simply bailed out. Among themselves, the students called the syndrome “crashing and burning,” but the image was hyperbolic. Most often, after a week or so, they came back to class with a stack of hastily completed term papers or a doctor’s note citing stress and suggesting mercy.

The rational part of me knew that in a small Prairie city, a twenty-one-year-old woman should be able to drop out of sight for a week without setting off tremors of concern. But we are not ruled by reason alone, and that morning I’d made a decision. Ed had put a large announcement of Reed’s memorial service in our local paper, and he’d posted notices all over campus, inviting students to come and pay their final respects. If Kellee Savage was in town, she would know about the service. Given her apparent closeness to Reed, if Kellee Savage had one decent bone in her body, she would be at the memorial service that afternoon. I had decided that,
if she didn’t put in an appearance, the time had come to find out why.

As the Faculty Club filled to overflowing, I began to circulate, looking for someone whose age suggested they might have known Reed in the Ryerson days. The group through which I made my way was an oddly festive one. Ed had let it be known that he didn’t want to see anyone wearing a scrap of black at Reed’s last party. The weather had continued mild and sunny, and both women and men had broken out their spring best. The swirl of pastel dresses and light suits made the rooms look like a garden party. When Barry Levitt sat down at the grand piano, and the bass player and the drummer took their places and began to play “Come Rain or Come Shine,” the party took off. People had drinks, filled plates at the buffet, and visited. As the afternoon wore on, I exchanged pleasantries with many very pleasant people, but although a handful of them had known Reed Gallagher when he was at Ryerson, none of them displayed a shock of recognition when I mentioned Annalie Brinkmann’s name.

There were more than a few famous faces in that room. For much of his career, Reed Gallagher had worked in the major media markets of New York and Toronto, and as I wandered, I saw some of our students in earnest conversation with people they could have known only by reputation. Success is a magnet, and our students were drawn to that small band of the elect who by anyone’s criteria had succeeded: Americans who anchored television newsmagazines and supper-hour news; Canadians who wrote regular columns in Canadian newspapers that mattered or books that topped the best-seller list. But as had been the case since I was an undergraduate, the celebrities that no student could resist were the Canadians who had made it big in the U.S.A. When Ed Mariani went to the microphone to announce that
the formal part of the afternoon was about to begin, he had to make his way through a group of J-school students jostling one another for a place in the circle that surrounded Peter Jennings. His manner held the implicit promise that, while the Holy Grail could only be found south of the border, it was waiting for their Canadian hands.

Ed didn’t speak long, perhaps five minutes, but he touched on all the essentials: Reed Gallagher’s integrity as a journalist, his commitment as a teacher, and his steadfastness as a friend. In closing, Ed said that perhaps the most fitting epitaph for Reed Gallagher could be found in H.L. Mencken’s catalogue of the characteristics of the man he most admired: “a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and an all-embracing tolerance.”

I glanced at the table near the windows where the Media class had congregated; from the rapt expressions on their faces, it was apparent that Mencken’s words still had the power to inspire. It was an emotional afternoon for the J-school students. Ed concluded his remarks by inviting people to come up and share their memories. As Reed’s friends and colleagues walked to the microphone, drinks in hand, to speak with tenderness about Reed Gallagher’s passionate curiosity or his decency or his fearlessness, the students were visibly moved. They were young, and they had not had much experience of death; for many of them, the eulogies for a man who had been laughing with them the week before were an awakening to mortality. Linda Van Sickle was fighting tears, and when Val Massey put his arm around her, she buried her head gratefully in his chest. Then Jumbo Hryniuk, who was sitting next to Val, reached over and gently stroked Linda’s hair, and I was struck again by the cohesion that existed among the students in that particular class.

As the afternoon wore on, I found myself tense with the effort to catch Annalie Brinkmann’s characteristic lilt in the voice of one of the eulogists, but I never did, and by the time Ed Mariani joined me, I’d resigned myself to the prospect that Annalie was a no-show.

When the last speaker left the microphone and the jazz trio struck up “Lady Be Good,” Ed leaned towards me. “Come on,” he said, “there’s someone I want you to meet. My one famous acquaintance. You’ll like him – I promise.” I followed Ed across the room, and he introduced me to a journalist from Washington, D.C., whom I recognized at once as a regular on the “Capitol Gang.” Ed’s friend had some rivetting stories and some even more rivetting gossip, and I was enjoying myself until I noticed that suddenly all the pleasure had vanished from Ed Mariani’s face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Ed pointed towards the memorabilia table. “Look over there,” he said.

Tom Kelsoe and Jill Osiowy were standing in front of the display. They had ignored Ed’s edict about wearing black, and they were dressed in outfits that were almost identical: black lace-up boots; tight black pants; black shirts. Standing side by side, so close together that their bodies appeared fused, they seemed more like mythic twins than lovers. As soon as Tom Kelsoe saw me looking, he leaned down and whispered something to Jill. Then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone.