Out of the Cold (9 page)

“Morgan, he died because he passed out after drinking too much.”

“I'm
aware
of that,” Morgan said. “I'm just telling you what a woman told me. She said that he'd quit drinking. She thinks the police are lying about how he died—that they're saying he was drinking because they're trying to blame
him
, when the real reason he died is that he was barred—” She broke off suddenly. “Sorry,” she muttered. “That's what she said. I—”

“Who told you that, Morgan?”

“The woman in front of the TV.” She turned to point. “Oh,” she said, deflating a little. “She was there a minute ago.”

“What was her name?”

“I didn't ask. Look, Robyn, I'm sure she just—”

“It sounds like she might have known Mr. Duffy pretty well,” I said. “Maybe she knows something more. What did she look like?”

“Like a bag lady? Middle-aged. She was wearing a
lot
of clothes. And she had a little buggy parked beside her chair.”

“You mean Aggie,” said a voice behind me. I turned toward it.

“It's Andrew, right?” I said.

He seemed pleased that I knew his name. He peered at the bandage that was half hidden by my hair. “Are you okay?”

“I had to get a couple of stitches,” I said. “But I'm fine.” Still, I started fingering the bandage and wondering again about a possible scar.

“I heard you asking about Mr. Duffy,” he said. He had a funny, mumbly way of talking. His lips hardly moved, and he kept his head bowed a little so that, even though he was taller than me, he seemed to be looking up at me while he spoke.

“Do you know anything about him, Andrew?”

He shook his head. “He never talked to me. He didn't talk much to anyone. I seen him with Aggie a couple of times, though.”

“Do you know where we can find her?”

He shook his head again. “But she'll be back. She always comes back.”

“Do you know where Mr. Duffy spent his time when he wasn't here?”

“He liked an office building over on Victoria Street,” Andrew said. “It was his place. He did pretty good there too, considering how he treated people.”

“What do you mean?” Morgan said.

“He yelled at them sometimes.”

I knew what he meant. I remembered how Mr. Duffy had cursed at the man who had dropped a five-dollar bill into his hat.

“I seen him do it a couple of days ago,” Andrew said, looking shyly at Morgan. “A man was trying to give him something—”

“Money?” I said.

“I don't know. I guess. He was holding something out to Mr. Duffy, and Mr. Duffy was yelling at him. He was all huddled over, you know, like maybe he just wanted the man to go away. It was weird, but Mr. Duffy is like that sometimes. If some guy was trying to give me money—if
anyone
was trying to give
me
money—you know I'd take it.”

“Where was this?” I asked.

“Same place,” he said. “In front of the office building.” He peered at me. “Why are you asking so many questions about him?”

“Ben wants to hold a memorial service for him. I'm trying to help,” I said.

He thought about that for a moment. “If I hear anything,” he said, “I'll let you know.”

I watched him make his way to the door and wondered what had brought him to the street.

Morgan and I were on our way out of the shelter when Art Donovan called my name.

“I have something for you,” he said. He handed me a photograph. It was a group shot of what looked liked clients of the homeless shelter. “That's Mr. Duffy,” he said, pointing to the man on the far left. “It's not the greatest picture in the world, but it's the only one I could find of him. You can have it if you want.”

“Okay, that's that,” Morgan said cheerfully once we were out on the street again. “Let's go shopping.”

“Not yet.”

“Aww, come on, Robyn. There are only nine more shopping days left.”

“You said you'd help me, Morgan.”

“Excuse me, but what was I just doing?”

I gave her a look.

“Okay, okay,” she grumbled. “What do you want me to do?”

CHAPTER
SEVEN

“N

ow
can we go home?” Morgan said a few hours later. “My feet are killing me. I'm cold. And I still have spit on the front of my coat. That stuff sticks like glue. What if that woman—”

“Aggie. Her name is Aggie.”

“Right. What if
Aggie
has a communicable disease?”

“Why are you acting so squeamish today? You volunteer at the shelter.”

Morgan's cheeks, already red from the cold, got a little redder.

“You
do
volunteer there, don't you, Morgan?”

“I'd like to,” she said. “I know it's important to Billy. But you know how unpredictable my schedule can be.”

“So exactly how many times
have
you been down here?” I said.

“Come on, Robyn. If I came down here every single time Billy asked me to, I'd never have any time for myself.”

“How many times?”

“I was here once at the beginning of November.”

“For how long?”

“What difference does it make?”

“For how long, Morgan?”

She shrugged and looked down at the sidewalk. “Couple of hours.”

“A couple of
hours
?”

“I had a hair appointment. I dropped by to pick up Billy when I was finished, and I helped him sort out some clothing donations.”

“And since then?”

“Well ...”

That explained why Art Donovan hadn't remembered her name. I should have known. Morgan was my best friend. She was madly in love with Billy, even though she and he were polar opposites. But she was
not
a people person, especially not a homeless-people person.

“I thought volunteering to help live people would be better than volunteering to pick up dead birds,” she said. During the last migration season, Morgan had spent a day sorting through dead birds collected by the Downtown Avian Rescue Club. She had spent the following week complaining about the stench of death that she claimed clung to her hair. “It turns out I was wrong.”

“Sooner or later, Billy is going to expect you to actually show up,” I said.

“Maybe by then he'll be involved in something else. You know, something I can handle.”

Uh-huh.

“Robyn, can we
please
go somewhere warm?”

I looked up and down the street. The only possibility I saw was a place called Sal's Open Kitchen. It looked decidedly down-market. I glanced skeptically at Morgan.

A gust of icy wind caught us both, and we shivered.

“I can hardly feel my fingers,” she said. “And my face feels numb. I could be drooling and not even know it. If Sal's is heated, that's good enough for me.” She changed her mind as soon as she pushed open the door. “On second thought, maybe we should go someplace else.”

“The closest someplace else is at least five blocks that way,” I said, pointing.

“But that's
into
the wind,” Morgan said. She took another look at Sal's long, narrow interior. One side was taken up by a counter that ran the length of the place. Three of its stools were occupied. Half a dozen fourperson tables filled the other half of the room. A couple tables at the rear were occupied by men drinking beer.

“Maybe if we sit up front,” Morgan murmured. She headed for the table closest to the window and gingerly inspected a scarred, vinyl-covered chair before dropping down on it.

  .    .    .

“I still can't believe she spat at me,” she said. Morgan had spotted Aggie, the woman she had talked to at the shelter, as we were dividing up the places that we needed to visit.

“I guess she doesn't like to be called a liar,” I said.

“Well I guess
not
,” Morgan said. “But why did she spit at
me
? You're the one who made her angry.”

Morgan had dragged me over to where Aggie was standing, rooting through some garbage bins in an alley alongside a convenience store, and had demanded, as only Morgan can, that Aggie repeat what she'd said earlier about Mr. Duffy. At first Aggie didn't want to talk, so Morgan fished in her pocket and surrendered all of her spare change. Then, when Aggie repeated what she had told Morgan, Morgan looked triumphantly at me. When I (stupidly) told Aggie what everyone else had said—that Mr. Duffy couldn't have quit, because he had passed out from drinking too much—Aggie had flown into a rage. That's when she'd spat at Morgan.

“I think she was aiming at me,” I said, “if it's any consolation.”

“It isn't,” Morgan said.

A sad-looking man in a grease-spattered apron shuffled over to us.

“I'll have a latte,” Morgan said.

The man shook his head and gestured at the menu signs that hung over the counter.

“I think your choices are coffee, tea, or beer,” I said.

She looked at me as if I must have been mistaken.

“Espresso?” she said to the man.

He shook his head again.

“Two coffees,” I said.

The man shuffled away.

“Perfect,” Morgan muttered.

“Let's drink our coffee, get warm, and go over what we found out. Then we'll get out of here,” I said. My dad had been right. When you start out knowing next to nothing about a person, when that person doesn't have any forms of ID, it takes a lot of legwork just to gather some puzzle pieces, never mind assembling the puzzle. “I'll go first.”

“No,
I'll
go first,” Morgan said. “I want to get this stuff out of my head and out of my life.”

The aproned man slid a couple cups of murky coffee in front of us. Next to each cup were two little containers of cream. Morgan peered at them as if they contained poison. But she peeled the tops off both of them, sniffed the contents, dumped them into her cup, and stirred. She took a sip and made a face.

“Well, at least it's hot,” I said.

Morgan made a face, pushed her coffee aside, and started to tell me what she had found out: “He hung around at least three of the six thrift shops in walking distance of the homeless shelter. I say
at least
'cause the people I talked to at the other three shops couldn't say for sure whether he'd ever been in their stores. That photo that Mr. Donovan gave us isn't the greatest.” We had made a photocopy of it. Morgan had taken the original with her. I'd shown the copy to a few people, but Mr. Duffy's face was pretty hard to make out. “But for sure Mr. Duffy visited three places on and off over the years, looking for a pair of pants, a shirt, a sweater—stuff for winter. But—and explain this—lately he started looking for other stuff: clothes for a small girl, a warm coat for a woman. When he bought that stuff, he always ended up bringing it back a couple of days later.
Always
. What do you think that's all about?”

I had no idea.

Morgan continued: “There are two pharmacies in the area and two small grocery stores. The people in all of those places recognized Mr. Duffy. They all acted like I was crazy when I asked about him. They said he was a nuisance. One of the pharmacies got a clerk to follow him around whenever he was in the store. They were sure he was stealing stuff. But they never actually caught him. The man who owns one of the grocery stores said the same thing—except he actually caught Mr. Duffy in the act. The man said he was taking packages of spices—coriander, cumin, stuff like that.” She looked intently at me, checking to see if I grasped what she was saying. “Fruit, bread, canned goods—that would make sense. But why would a homeless guy steal spices? The man said Mr. Duffy begged him to let him keep the stuff. The guy finally gave in, but he told Mr. Duffy that he'd call the police if he ever came back. He said Mr. Duffy was so grateful that he actually thanked him.

“I went to the public library. Sometimes people like Mr. Duffy go there to beat the weather. The librarian I talked to was really nice. She remembered him and said mostly he was well behaved. She said there are several homeless people who stop by regularly. They just want a place to sit for a while. She said that Mr. Duffy read a lot of magazines. Especially computer magazines. Like, cover to cover. And you know the couple of shelves of old books that have been taken out of circulation, that they sell for a fifty cents or a dollar? She said Duffy bought one or two almost every time he came in. Novels, usually classics—Dickens, Tolstoy. Lately, though, guess what? He started buying picture books. Kids' books.

“He visited the neighborhood walk-in clinic every couple of months.” When she saw my expression change, she added, “Yeah, I perked up when I heard that too. I thought maybe we'd lucked into something. But no one could tell me anything about his medical history,
of course
. That's confidential. Apparently he always insisted on seeing the same doctor. Turns out
he's
out of the country with Doctors Without Borders. I left a message on his office phone in case he ever calls to check his messages. Who knows? Maybe he'll get in touch with you. And that's it—that's all I could get.”