The Devil You Know: A Novel (23 page)

Because the gangs are stupid that way, Angie said. No one’s
going to notice a white lady with big hair happens to be hanging around everywhere they go.

But in fact it must have worked, because the series won an award for investigative journalism, and now Angie has driven every make and model car from economy through to luxury sedans.

The best thing I learned on that job, she said, was that I’ll buy Japanese next time. Great pickup, great on gas. Across the board. Now there’s an article for you.

I
took Angie’s Turismo down to Port Dalhousie, Bernardo’s high-end neighborhood in the city of St. Catherines, and spent the first afternoon parked too far away to see much of anything. The street was gridlocked with locals taking a leisurely drive past the murder house. It was Saturday, so no one was at work. The police had only just got their search warrant the night before and the best thing that I could see to report on was a transport that showed up around 3:00 p.m. and took away Bernardo’s gold sports car. At the end of the day, a couple of officers walked out of the house carrying some white file boxes and a full black garbage bag and that was it. A lot of rubberneckers. Something like this really draws the community together.

I’d seen the details of the warrant and knew they didn’t have much recourse to do anything. Angie had said they were picking the place apart, but the truth was that police weren’t allowed to take down any walls or do damage to the structure, so they had to be in there looking for stuff that was in plain sight. If they found video, it had to be watched inside the house. What they wanted was to find evidence that the first girl, Leslie Mahaffy, had spent time inside. They knew Kristen French had. They knew she’d been alive for thirteen days. I spent a little time shooting the shit with people as they went by. An old woman stopped and got out of her car but left it running; the driver’s door hung open while we talked. She was small and only slightly hunched, wearing a gray-green tweed
suit with a long skirt and a matching hat. She had her lipstick on. I thought she might be a retired school principal.

The old lady pointed a finger at the yard. She wanted me to see the way the house and the garage met. You could pull your car into the garage and shut the door and get into the house through the side door, she said, and no one on the street would ever see you.

People love privacy, she said. But now you see what happens out here. High fences on every side. She grabbed on to my hand and then let go. We always knew what our neighbors were up to, she said, and we didn’t have this, this, this. She waved her arm in circles at the house and her voice got louder with every
this
. Like it was the house—suburban architecture—and not some human that had done it.

There was nothing to see, but I had to file a story. My job was to keep finding new ways to talk about the same thing. You have to keep feeding it, Angie said, so that when something really breaks people are still paying attention. I listened to the talk stations all day. Every hour there was a sound bite, new or repeated, it didn’t matter. Two-minute interviews. A dwindling level of expertise after only a few days. The old lady was my man-on-the-street. Why tenements were safer than suburbs, she said, and then I said it, too.

S
unday morning I left the city early because the media crush was going to make it hard to find a good spot, near enough to the house to actually see it. On the way down to St. Catherines I pulled over for coffee and a pee at a diner just off the highway, on a service road between Grimsby and Beamsville. It was about 6:00 a.m. I’d known a theater student in college who was from Beamsville and categorized it as the worst place on Earth. The whole Niagara region has this lovely reputation for Shakespeare and fresh peaches, but you get down there and it’s shiny and desolate. Rich grape estates, poor market gardeners. Suburbs where girls go missing and turn up in the lake, chopped in pieces. Beamsville also happened to be Task Force headquarters.

There were two transports and a cop car parked at the diner and inside I saw two truckers and a waitress wearing a pink uniform. She poured my coffee into a Styrofoam cup and added the cream herself before snapping on the lid. Her nails were bitten down ragged but still painted mauve, and I wondered how much nail polish she ingested, doing that. I’d once read a statistic on the amount of lipstick the average woman swallows over the course of her lifetime and it’s something like twenty-one tubes. Feel the mash of all those tubes between your teeth for a moment. Dense and slippery. I ordered toast and peanut butter along with the coffee, then waved the waitress back and asked for a club sandwich and an extra coffee to go, because I knew I’d be sitting in front of the house all day and might not be able to get away for something to eat. The cook dinged a bell when my food was ready. The toast was white and square and it came with those packets of jelly on a rack, grape and raspberry and marmalade. I went to open up the raspberry but my thumb slid. The jam rack sat on the counter all day every day and the packets were slick with ambient grease.

While I was waiting for the rest of my order I sat at the counter and sipped the coffee and burned my tongue. There was a copy of a rival daily just lying there and I flipped through the front section to see where we were at. Bernardo was A1 and A6. Like the
Free Press,
this paper was publishing two kinds of articles: A1 pieces that were all hard facts drawn from daily press conferences, and heartstring A6 half pages about the relief in the community and for the victim’s families. Some of the articles quoted the fathers of the girls in this case, French and Mahaffy, and some of them quoted a mother in a different case, a six-year-old girl who’d been found dead a little while before and whose murder had been resolved immediately. The papers talked to her because she was an expert on closure and relief.

Today’s A6 was a large photograph of a woman who claimed to be Bernardo’s ex-girlfriend, wearing sunglasses and heavy lipstick. The quality of the paper made her lips look black. She said the police
were wrong, they had the wrong guy. No reporter had interviewed her. She was writing letters to the editor every day.

The two transport drivers were also at the counter, farther down, with a couple of empty stools between them but talking all the same, the way men do in a place like that. One was clean-shaven and older. Early sixties, wearing work pants and boots and he didn’t have a jacket or a coat, but a green down vest was slung over a chair behind him and I figured that’s what he was wearing against the cold. Bernardo was lucky, he said, that he was safe in jail.

They ever let that fucker out, someone’s going to string him up. Cut off his cock and choke him with it. Jam it down his own fucking throat. I’d do it myself, he said. If that was my little girl.

Just then the cop came out of the bathroom. He was still zipping up his fly and looked surprised to see a woman sitting there. He let his gaze rest on me for the count of three and then turned to the truck drivers.

Lot of folks talking like that, he said. He said he’d been on the scene when Kristen French was found and the three men threw around some details for a while. Some of it was stuff I’d heard before. Some of it was brand-new to me. The cop shook his head and drank his coffee. He said he didn’t know how much longer he could do this job.

He was married. Bernardo. This was the younger trucker speaking. That’s the thing I can’t understand. You get the wife, too? It’s the wife I want to hear about.

The trucker was ten or fifteen years younger but in worse shape, with a large, hard belly and a ragged beard. He had acne under the beard, with facial hair wispy enough that you could see the pimples through it.

The waitress brought me my sandwich in a Styrofoam clamshell.

She worked for my girlfriend’s vet, the waitress said. The wife. My friend knew her. Saw her every time she took her cat in for shots, always said, Hello, how are ya. Real friendly! Young, blond. Clean uniform. Always smiling.

The waitress looked at me. At the vet! Dealing with little animals!

I
got back out to the highway and worked my way down into the suburbs and found the street. There were about four other cars already there. There’d been a black Honda behind me all the way down the service road from the diner and now it pulled up to the curb and stopped, too. There was a uniform cop standing around on the porch but nothing else going on. I turned off the engine and tipped my head back and closed my eyes. I was low on sleep. My eyes felt hot and bruised.

I let my neck loosen and rolled my shoulders back and opened my sore eyes again. There was a face in the window. I jumped back and grabbed at the parking brake and also my seat belt. He was crouching low down next to my car and waving a sheet of paper at me. I rolled the window down an inch or two. Mid-fifties, gray flattop, coat open.

I’m with CVQR, he said. He shouted it like my window was still shut and he had to get my attention. I rolled the window down a couple more inches. He handed in the paper. CVQR is all-news radio.

Is something wrong, I said.

No! No, no. I just wanted to let you know, he said. Here. He reached a hand in through my open window. Name’s Dave Snodden. I followed you in, see? He pointed back at the black Honda.

You’re a reporter?

Not exactly. I do some production, he said. But the thing is, I was born here. I’m from St. Catherines.

Okay, I said.

I’d like to take you around, he said. I mean, if you’ll let me.

I looked at the paper he’d handed me. It was divided into eight sections. In each section, he’d written
Dave Snodden
and his phone number.

What do you mean?

Oh! Not like that, Dave Snodden said. Listen. It’s just. We’re all
out here trying to make a buck, right? I grew up here. I’d like to take you around, show you all the places. Take you down to the lake where they found Leslie Mahaffy’s body parts, and over to the church lot where he grabbed Kristen French. So you can see how it happened. He gestured back to the Honda again. I got a car right there.

I still had my seat belt on. I told him, Not today. He seemed like the kind of guy you have to be nice to when you’re turning him down. Sort of happy-go-lucky but possibly instantly full of rage. When he was a few feet away from the car, I locked the doors. I did that before I rolled the window up even. After that I didn’t close my eyes again.

Just after eight a white van rolled in and the forensics squad got out, already dressed for work. They wore white paper suits and black boots and gloves and their faces were obscured enough that I wondered if it was the same team that shipped away the gold car the day before, or a different team, and if the same people had to go in and pick through the cupboards and the toilet tanks and electrical panels every day, no matter how long this took, and if they also dreaded what they were hired to find.

If they found a video, it couldn’t leave the house. I thought of the cop I’d seen in the diner, grim and disappointed. I knew they’d likely view it on some Task Force A/V, brought in for the purpose, but instead I pictured them all getting comfortable in Bernardo’s living room, slouched forward around his TV, sitting on his couches and beanbag chairs, a bunch of men in space suits watching another man torture girls until they died. I pictured their faces as they watched.