Beach Strip (14 page)

Both bullets—”projectiles” in the language of the forensics lab—were identified as having been fired from Gabe’s gun, the ugly-named Glock G22, serial number HPD7836. Somebody named Amanda at the forensics lab had confirmed that projectile A, provided by Sergeants Holiday and Hayashida, was from the same gun as projectile B, retrieved from the body as described in Non-Accidental Death Report HP-04-289, the one I held in my hand, the one describing Gabe’s death. The lab also tested paraffin applied to Gabe’s right hand by the coroner and, using GSR analysis by energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, found particles containing lead, antimony, and barium.

“What’s GSR?” I asked Hayashida.

“Gunshot residue. Stuff that’s in the powder and leaks out when you fire a gun.”

He probably knew what “energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry” was as well. I didn’t care. The report said the bullet came from Gabe’s gun and that Gabe had fired it. I kept staring at the words, looking for the line that said this was all crap, all a game. I didn’t find it.

I looked up to see Hayashida watching me. “So?” he said, and reached to take the sheets of paper from me.

“Why does the coroner call the circumstances of Gabe’s death unknown instead of suicide, like Walter Freeman says it is?” I asked.

Hayashida began crumpling the sheets and dumping them into his wastebasket, one by one. “Don’t read too much into it. Walter needs evidence of criminal action. The coroner just needs to look for it, and when he doesn’t find something obvious, he writes that it’s unknown to him. If Walter finds evidence of homicide, he presents it to the coroner, who will confirm that it does not conflict with his findings.” He rubbed his hands together, as though removing any evidence that he had ever handled the reports. “What else can I do for you?”

“Where’s Mel Holiday?”

Hayashida stood and looked over the top of his cubicle. “Anybody seen Holiday?” he called. A disembodied male voice announced that he was out, gone for the day. Hayashida tilted his head at me. “Anything else I can do?”

“How about helping me prove that Gabe didn’t shoot himself?” I said.

“Not my case anymore,” Hayashida said, sitting down. He turned back to his computer, effectively dismissing me. “It’s Walter Freeman’s now. And Walter’s not talking to anybody about it.”

I STOPPED ON THE WAY HOME TO VISIT MOTHER
. I was feeling more alone than ever, and secretly wished that I had been more sociable with our neighbours, or that Tina was still here haranguing me, whichever was easiest.

Marci, the girl on duty on Mother’s floor, told me Mother was in her therapy session, so I asked if Helen Detwiler was available. I was feeling guilty about not doing my bookkeeping job,
although I obviously needed the time to deal with Gabe’s death. In truth, I was beginning to realize that I needed routine back in my life. I didn’t know when I would be ready to return to work, but it would improve my sense of self-worth. It would also provide me with opportunities to visit Mother and talk with her, waiting for her response to my questions written with chalk in her lovely handwriting.

Helen greeted me by rising quickly from behind her desk and approaching me with outstretched arms. “You poor dear,” she said, hugging me. “We’ve been so worried about you.” She stood back, holding my arms. “Tell me you’re all right. Tell me you’re going to get over this somehow.”

I assured her that I was handling it as well as I could, and asked about Mother.

“She’s fine,” Helen said, then added, “She’s wonderful, actually. So emotionally strong.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “Would you like me to bring her from therapy class?”

I told her no, just let her know I dropped by. “I’m hoping I can be back to work next week,” I said. “Perhaps I could start Tuesday.”

“Whenever you feel up to it,” she replied. “Mind you, no one does the job as well as you. I wouldn’t want you to think that we don’t miss you. But I’ll let the others know that we could see you here Tuesday. Perhaps you could let me know by the end of the week.”

Her words were comforting, but I left feeling even more despondent and alone, which is a dangerous mood for me. I wanted to see Mother, but I didn’t want to make a fuss about it. That was Mother’s way. Don’t make a fuss about things that concern you. Where Mother was concerned, I followed the rule diligently. At other times …

I stopped to buy groceries and a padlock for the garden shed, and arrived back on the beach strip just before four o’clock, wondering
if I had enough energy to cook dinner and enough appetite to eat it.

Two men had been at my house while I was away. One was the mailman, who had brought me a notice from some police official informing me that the first of Gabe’s pension cheques would be arriving soon, and I could expect to receive one each month for the next ten years. A quick calculation told me that the pension money plus my earnings from Trafalgar Towers would cover my expenses with a little extra for goodies, and that in ten years, when the payments would cease, I would be over fifty. Now I had two reasons to live it up over the next decade.

The other man had been in my garden shed, because the door that I knew had been tightly closed when I left barely an hour ago was now wide open. I walked out the back door and crossed the garden, unwrapping the new padlock and considering the best place to hide the keys. I had little intention of entering the shed in the future. I just wanted to ensure that the guy who went in while I was gone wouldn’t be there again.

I was wondering just who this might be, since Wayne Honeysett was already dead, when I reached the open door and realized I was a little late in keeping somebody out. Because somebody was already there, glaring at me from inside the shed, holding an axe in his hand.

I
think I screamed. Not one of those screams that stop trains and break crystal, but the scream I might make if I saw a mouse run across the kitchen floor. I took a step backwards, unsure about what was more menacing—the axe, which Gabe had bought to break driftwood he collected on the beach for our fireplace, or the expression on Walter Freeman’s face.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked. I kept walking backwards into the middle of the garden, where I knew people passing on the boardwalk behind the house would have an unobstructed view of me confronting a chief of detectives and potential axe murderer.

Walter slapped the face of the axe into his palm. “I wanted to ask you that down at Central,” he said, in a voice that reminded me of wet gravel. “What the hell were you doing
there?
”

“It’s a public building, Walter,” I said. “This, on the other hand, is private property. That’s a big difference, right? And why are you threatening me with an axe?”

Walter stared at me, wearing his Bad Cop face before looking at the axe and tossing it into a corner of the shed. “I wasn’t threatening you,” he said. “I was moving things, looking around. Threatening you? Me, threaten you with an axe?” He pointed a finger at me. I hate people who point fingers at me, but in this case I thought it was better than the alternative, which would have been the weapon inside Walter’s jacket. “You really are nuts, aren’t you?”

“Go to hell,” I said. Then, “Better still, go back to Central and leave me alone.”

“Why don’t we just go inside and have a talk?” Walter said.

“Not bloody likely.” Now that the axe was out of his hand, and assuming his finger wasn’t loaded, I was getting my courage back. “You want to talk, we can talk here.”

“Or down at Central. You seem to enjoy visiting there.” He nodded in the direction of the war memorial. “My car’s parked just down the beach. You want to come with me, or you want to ask me inside for a glass of water? Christ, it’s hot in there.”

WALTER SAT AT MY KITCHEN TABLE,
looking around the room as though searching for something he might have left behind on a previous visit. I didn’t want him there, but I knew he could find one reason or another for getting me into Central Police Station and, for all I knew, behind the bars of the lock-up cells if he really wanted to. You learn these things living with a cop. You learn what they can and can’t get away with, and the higher you are in the pecking order, the more you get away with.

I dumped some ice from the refrigerator into a glass, filled it with water from the tap, plunked it in front of Walter, and stood back to watch him drink the whole damn thing. When he finished, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and examined the glass as though he wished it were full again. “Damn it’s hot, ain’t it?”

“You want to talk about the weather?” I asked. “Did you bring a warrant with you to talk about the weather?”

“No,” Walter said, setting the glass on the table. “I want to talk about a really smart detective I knew who was married to a really stupid woman.”

“Look, if you’re upset because I insisted on looking at Gabe’s investigation reports …” I began.

Walter twisted in his chair to look at me. It was one of those up and down looks that men give women when they’re either undressing them in their mind or intimidating them with their power. I hoped it was the latter, in Walter’s case. “Why did you lie to me?”

“About what?”

“About the ring you now say Gabe gave you.”

“Why is it any of your business what Gabe gave me? I gave him gifts too. You want me to go upstairs and show you the cufflinks I gave him for Christmas? Or how about the plaid jockstrap I got him for his birthday last year?” This was true. I found it in a shop specializing in Scottish wear. A bright orange Buchanan plaid jockstrap. Gabe loved it.

“Did you buy the ring for yourself, maybe say Gabe bought it for you?”

“Why the hell would I say that?” Only later did I understand what Walter was getting at.

He ignored my question. “How do you explain that the man who gave the ring to you and the man who last had it in his possession are both now dead?”

I sat in the chair. I didn’t want to argue with Walter, which would be a losing proposition for both of us, and I didn’t want to talk about Gabe being dead either. “You forgot to mention that both of them supposedly committed suicide,” I said.

“Supposedly?”

I shook my head and shrugged. I decided I would rather listen to Walter than talk to him.

“Any more gifts like that one that you and Gabe might have bought?”

“No.” I began examining my fingers. I needed a manicure.

Walter seemed to think about that for a moment. Then, “If I find out you’re not telling me the truth, I’ll charge you with obstructing justice. I can always come back with a search warrant and tear the place apart, you know.”

“Trust me, Walter,” I said, still studying my fingers. “I don’t want you here now, and if it kept you from ever coming back here again, with or without a warrant, I would swear the sky was orange, the world was flat, and that you have all the charm of George Clooney but you’re better-looking.”

Walter shook his head. “You don’t seem to be the least bit interested in learning why I’m asking about Gabe or you having extra cash.” He tipped the glass back and dumped most of the ice cubes into his mouth.

“You want to know why, Walter?” I said over the noise of him chewing the ice cubes. “Because the only reason you would ask is if you suspected Gabe of taking bribes or stealing evidence. Well, Gabe didn’t do that. He would never do that. The idea is so ridiculous that I’m insulted you would even suggest it. You knew Gabe, and you know what he was like.”

He sat chewing the ice cubes and, I assumed, turning my words over in his mind. “I liked Gabe,” he said when he finished crunching the ice cubes with his teeth as though they were potato chips. “I don’t like you. Never did. Gabe deserved a woman with more class than you’ve got.”

“If this is an attempt to seduce me, it’s not working,” I said.

“See, that’s what I mean. Try to have a conversation with you, talk about something important, and you make a joke about it. And you toss in sex, as well. That’s the kind of woman you are. Gabe could’ve done better.”

“Walter—” I began.

Walter interrupted. He had a way of interrupting that was impossible to ignore. “I know about you,” he barked. “I did some investigating. Learned a hell of a lot about you. You could never keep a job for more than a year or so. Why is that?”

“Because I can’t stand spending my days in the company of jerks. Which reminds me. Kindly get the hell out of my house now, or I’ll call a cop and then I’ll call a lawyer.”

Walter smiled at that. He tilted his head back, dumped the remaining ice cube into his mouth, and chewed it like the others. When he finished, he stood up and ambled his way to the back door. “You should put that lock on your shed,” he said over his shoulder. “Anybody can go in there.”

“I know,” I said. “Apparently it attracts perverts.”

Walter paused halfway through the door into the garden and pointed his finger at me again. This time it appeared to be loaded. “I’m not finished with you,” he said. “You keep poking your nose into things and getting in the way of our investigations, you’ll hear from me again. And stay away from Mel Holiday.”

I watched him walk through the garden, climb the stairs to the level of the laneway along the beach, and glance toward the caragana bushes where Gabe had died. Then he ambled off in the direction of the war memorial.

I closed the door and sat at the kitchen table, remembering, regretting, and trying to forgive.

BEFORE I MET GABE,
I had a fling with a psychiatrist. I had gone to see him because I was feeling depressed over the kind of men I had been dating. When the psychiatrist convinced me after a couple of sessions that I was no crazier than the average divorcee, which did not make me feel as good as he intended, he suggested we have coffee sometime, since I was no longer his patient. He was a nice fellow, slightly British, with both the accent and the tweeds, and divorced like me. We had a few dinners and a couple of dirty weekends. We might still be dating if I hadn’t acquired the sensation that he was always practising psychiatry, even when he was on top of me in a waterbed. It destroyed my fantasy life. No matter what I was thinking at the time, I always suspected that he either
knew
what I was thinking or was trying to
learn
what I was thinking. Either way, he would be evaluating
me, and you can understand what that would do to my visions of sandy lagoons in the Caribbean—or whips and midgets, for that matter.

“Do you know what your trouble is?” he said during our last session in bed. We had been talking about my feelings and his sex drive, and vice versa. “Your trouble is that you’re a very moral woman trying to live an immoral life.”

Which may be the most profound thing any man has ever said to me. If I meet him again, I’ll tell him that. But I probably won’t thank him.

Sitting alone in the kitchen after Walter Freeman left, I thought about his words and I thought about what I had most recently done to prove they were true.

I LOVE TO DANCE.
Waltz, jive, samba, quickstep, you name it and I’m out there shaking my hips with two right feet. I can dance anywhere with anybody. I am especially good at dancing around my own guilt.

A year ago, the idea of cheating on Gabe would have been as unthinkable to me as following the cormorants into deep water and chasing fish. Or maybe I was just fooling myself.

Something about Gabe had begun to bother me. He was quiet, he was wise, and he was thoughtful when he wasn’t aloof. He was physically strong and comfortably predictable, and one day it began to dawn on me: he was my father. Not literally, of course, and not even emotionally. In all the characteristics that made him a man, however, he was my father or my father’s son. Whenever the idea entered my mind, I gave myself a mental slap across the face. I would be fine for a day or two, then I would go back to playing mind games. Did young girls who love their fathers grow into women who look for the same kind of man to be their lover? It made sense. The way I see it, the odds are so high against finding
a guy who is loyal, gentle, strong, and doesn’t look as though he was a model for a gargoyle, that you might as well go for the tried and true, the comfortable and familiar. For most of us, those of us lucky enough to have good parents, this was their father. Or more accurately, a surrogate, a clone, a substitute. I think a lot of women do that. I worried that I was one of them. Maybe I was just bored.

In April, Gabe had to travel to Montreal to appear at the trial of a major gangster. The guy had been arrested here, and Gabe had interrogated him before releasing him to the Montreal cops. Gabe was needed to give evidence about the gangster’s dirty work in Quebec, which would take him away from home for almost a week. I wanted to go with him, but he refused, saying it was business and he would take me some other time for a vacation, but not when he was travelling on public money. I threw a tantrum, a stupid spitting and hissing fit, when he left.

I had planned to keep busy working and visiting Mother, plus reading and painting the kitchen, but the night after Gabe left, Mel showed up in a V-neck sweater, tight jeans, and deck shoes, which I thought was just about the sexiest thing I had seen since Elvis died. Do I have to paint a picture? If I did, it would be with a bottle of Teacher’s whisky before and tears after. In bed, Mel talked about leaving policing, about taking me to a B & B he knew in New England, about buying a place on a lake up north, where we could live together and listen to the loons at night, he and I in bed, naked under a duvet. “What would we live on?” I asked, and he said there would be enough money, but I didn’t think much of loons and I didn’t want to live anywhere except on the beach strip, and I had no plans to leave Gabe. I had just wanted—what? Maybe to prove I could love a man who did not remind me of my father. Maybe to help me get over becoming forty-one years old.

I said never again, and never lasted about a month, until I decided I might as well be hanged for being a whore as for being
an adulteress, and I met Mel at his apartment in the middle of the afternoon, and once more at a motel down the highway to Toronto. And that was it.

I handled it the way most people handle things they are ashamed of doing. It’s not them who did it, and it wasn’t me who went to bed with Mel. It was some crazy person with totally different values. Okay, it
was
me, but I had become mentally unbalanced on three different occasions and was not totally responsible for my actions. The first time, I was drunk and lonely and angry and frightened, which sounded like enough excuses. The second time I figured, what the hell, the worst had already happened. The third time was closure. Two naked bodies humping on a sway-backed bed, thinking, We’ll always have Paris, except it wasn’t Paris, it was a Motel 6.

There is a line between knowing and suspecting, and Gabe straddled that line in the days before he died. Things were different in ways that I cannot identify or describe. Maybe it was how Gabe seemed to be watching me whenever Mel was around, or the way I would hand the telephone to Gabe when Mel called, without saying anything beyond hello. Maybe I talk in my sleep. It was the unknowing, the wondering if Gabe knew, that I couldn’t stand. I would be selfish again. I would confess to Gabe. That’s why I wanted to reveal everything to him the night he died.

The thing I couldn’t figure out was, how could Mel and Gabe work together like they did? I wondered about that until I read a magazine article titled “Why Women Will Never Run the Boys’ Club.” The subject was the failure of women to become top business executives, and I expected the usual claptrap on female hormones and nest-building instincts. Instead, it talked about playing team sports, which interests me about as much as Bulgarian politics, but I read enough to understand the point of it. Boys tend to play team sports more than girls, and they are more intense and aggressive. The article explained that playing
intense team sports teaches boys to co-operate with other boys they dislike. “He may be a jerk,” the guy who wrote the article said, “but if he’s a great linebacker,” whatever that is, “and I need him to cover my flat, I can work with him.” His flat what? I didn’t know, but I understood the point: men can find a way of working together on something even when they’re competitive with each other on something else.