The Devil's Dust (18 page)

So instead he says, “I like how you think, Inspector.”

T
he Coffee Time is busy with locals alternately discussing the murder of Wade Garson, the memorial service to be held for Mark Watson when the weather breaks, and debating whether the storm will be sufficiently ferocious to close the main highway. There are mentions of food reserves, canned goods and liquor and cigarettes and bingo cards, all the necessities of life. Outside the snow is picking up steadily. A bitter wind howls in from the northeast on a sharp angle that lifts and holds the flakes in mid-air, sometimes creating a momentary horizontal blur of pure whiteness. McKelvey smiles at Peggy as he comes in the door, tails of snow sneaking in with him. A dozen and a half heads turn in unison to watch him, and the place goes silent for a full second. He steps through the tables to the counter as conversation resumes. He hears his name whispered, and that of Wade Garson, Gallagher, Nolan, all of them mixed up in this together.

“Hello, stranger.”

Peggy smiles at him, and for the second time in less than an hour his body flushes with desire. He sees the two of them in back, bags of flour sending dust in the air like the snow outside, his hands on her hips, all over her body, her uniform shirt open to the fifth button, doughnuts in the fryer and a line of customers at the counter. He's not sure whether this is normal, or whether it is a side effect of drug withdrawal, but he feels like a teenager again, buzzing with strange hormones.

“Charlie?”

McKelvey snaps out of it and says, “Sorry, I haven't slept yet.”

Peggy pours coffee in an extra large take-away cup.

“It's the talk of the town, as you can imagine,” she says. “People are really starting to wonder if you and Gallagher and Nolan can handle this. Not that anyone's mourning the death of Wade Garson, exactly.”

“It's under control,” he says, and takes the cup and pours sugar from a glass dispenser. He has only started adding sugar since he began drinking the pitiful coffee here, trying to sweeten the bitter chemistry. “Listen, I wanted to thank you for that little saying you gave me. It made me think of things in a new way. My life in police work and my life today. What I'm supposed to be doing.”

He wants to tell her about his son and his loss and what he has learned, about the pills and how he feels like a man who has been wandering in a storm for years, simply putting one foot in front of the other, walking blind. He wants to tell her that the words in that poem are true, perhaps the truest words that ever described who he was and what he had tried to do all his life.
It all turned out wrong
, he wants to tell her,
but I meant to be a good man
.

“A couple of old-timers were in here yesterday asking about you,” she says. “Said they were friends of your father's. I hope you don't mind I told them you were staying at your old place.”

“I don't mind. Listen, I've got a favour to ask you. Something that you either say yes or no to, but you can't really ask any questions. Okay?”

Peggy stands straight and she waits, smiling with her eyes.

“Can you leave here, take a break for an hour?” he says.

She looks over her shoulder at the big round clock hanging on the wall.

“Sure. I can get Pauline in back to watch the counter,” she says. And her hands are already working behind her back to undo her apron.

Peggy sits in the cruiser. Like a bank-robbing duo, she has instructions to honk the horn if Gallagher pulls into the drive.

“This is the most fun I've had in two years,” she says, and grins like a schoolgirl. “And I know, I know, I can't ask any questions.”

McKelvey opens the door and slides out of the driver's seat.

“If I'm not back in ten minutes, you need to get out of here,” he says.

“Seriously?” she says, and her smile disappears.

He turns back, leans into the cruiser.

“I added that for dramatic effect,” he says. “Just honk if anyone pulls in.”

Inside the Chief's home, McKelvey is unsure what exactly he's looking for. Perhaps some obvious clue to the increasingly likely fact the Chief's gun was used in the killing of Wade Garson. Why the chief of police would kill Wade Garson is the question. Opportunity, sure. Anyone could have slipped in and out of that washroom at the back of the truck stop at that hour of the night. Motive is the thing. What motive would Gallagher have for shooting Garson? And then to toss his own handgun in a trash container at the murder scene. But before doing that, he takes the time to crack the revolver, pull out the spent shell, and toss it on the floor. The shooter is either Gallagher, and he wants to get caught. Or the shooter wants to frame Gallagher.

The home smells of oil heating. McKelvey has gained entry with little effort. It is a known fact that these old homes settle and shift as the ground freezes, so that doors and their locksets are often just slightly off-kilter. He gave the door a hard push above the doorknob and it opened. Had this not been the case, he was prepared to employ other measures, namely a butter knife pocketed from the Coffee Time.

Gallagher keeps a tidy home for a bachelor, but then McKelvey supposes an intruder would say the same about his condo in Toronto's historical Distillery District. He enters at the back and steps into a clean and sparse kitchen. There is a small table and two chairs, some toast crumbs and a couple of coffee mugs left on the counter. He opens the cupboards and finds plates and glasses, then checks below the sink. There are two empty whisky bottles standing by the drain pipes. These would be the bottles Nolan emptied when he fetched the Chief.

The living room is just as sparse; however, this room owns a little more character, a taste of the man. There is a painting on one wall of a western scene — a couple of faraway riders crossing a sun-baked prairie on horseback — a small TV on a chest, a long coffee table that appears to have bull horns for legs. McKelvey can't help but pause a moment to admire the gleaming polished horns, four of them, holding this tablet of wood upright. On the coffee table there are two or three copies of a glossy magazine,
Cowboys and Indians
. There is the corner of a manila envelope sticking out from underneath them. McKelvey sets the magazines aside and sits on the couch to check the mail. The envelope is letter-size, addressed to Chief Gallagher. The postmark says
DETROIT
, and the date — McKelvey squints to read the smudged ink — looks like late December.

The envelope is already ripped open, so he pulls the contents free with his index finger and thumb. Two or three tickets are paper-clipped to a letter.

Chief —

Remember, ashes to ashes and dust to dust!

Let's see this through to the end.

Come on down to Motown to celebrate.

Tony

There are two tickets to a Red Wings game — dated for a Saturday in February — along with a plane ticket from Sudbury to Windsor. McKelvey files the material back into the envelope and stands. He is moving down the hallway when a horn blast makes him jump. His heart pounds as he takes fast and long strides to the kitchen, to his boots which are by the door.

He has trouble shoving his feet into the boots, and he swears and feels like a goddamned kid again wrestling with footwear instead of taking the time to unlace. He finally manages to crush the leather and lining sufficiently to accommodate his feet, and he opens the door and slips outside. He locks and closes the door behind him and comes around the side of the house to see Constable Nolan standing by the driver's window of McKelvey's cruiser, talking to Peggy.

Nolan steps back and gives McKelvey a searching look.

“What were you doing, Charlie?”

“Stopped by to see if you and the Chief were back yet. We interviewed Celluci, and Madsen ran a GSR on his hands. He tested positive for black powder.”

Nolan nods and blinks. The younger cop is not convinced, McKelvey can tell.

“Black powder,” Nolan says, “like they used in older ammunition.”

McKelvey nods. “Where's Gallagher? I thought the plan was you would stick by him, keep an eye.”

“He drove over to the funeral home to talk to Dr. Nichols.”

The two men stand there in the Chief's snow-packed laneway, Peggy in the cruiser trying not to look at them. It is snowing steadily now, and their shoulders and Nolan's ever-present toque get dusted with flakes that exist for a moment and then dissolve.

“So,” Nolan says, seeming shy to ask, “what were you
really
doing over here? I mean, after we found the Chief's gun at the scene and everything. You must have some ideas.”

“Well,” McKelvey says, “probably the same thing you were doing coming over here if the Chief was headed to the funeral home.”

“Spying?”

McKelvey shrugs. “Spying sounds so …
dirty
.”

“Surveillance?”Nolan offers up.

McKelvey considers this and nods, as though it is in fact the exact word he has been searching for to complete his crossword. For now, he will keep his discovery of tickets and the letter from Celluci to himself. Alone it proves nothing more than perhaps the fact the Chief is open to accepting a bribe. As a non-elected public official, McKelvey isn't even sure it would count as anything more than a gift accepted in bad taste. It is the strange wording in the note that has his mind working —
ashes to ashes and dust to dust
.

“So what's next?” Nolan asks.

The snowfall is increasing in intensity by the minute. If the much-hyped storm delivers as advertised, then their work will become all the more complicated. On the plus side, McKelvey thinks, nobody will be able to leave town.

“I'll take Peggy back to the shop,” McKelvey says, “and then we should sit with Madsen and start back at square one, starting with the Travis Lacey attack on you. Work our way forward. Throw all of our cards on the table and see if we can get a few pairs.”

“And what about the Chief?”

McKelvey tilts his head back and looks up into the stone-coloured sky. The flakes are mesmerizing, a pattern that blurs all relation to sky or ground, and he can't keep his eyes open. But the snow is wet and cold on his face, and he feels like a kid again, and it crosses his mind that he wants to live, he does indeed, and maybe that has not been made as clear as it could have been.

“I guess we hope he doesn't have a matching card.”

M
adsen sits in the police station alone, the compilation of evidence and notes spread before her. She has a cup of Earl Grey tea, something stale rummaged from the poorly stocked kitchen. The fridge is a horror show of old yellow mayonnaise dried and cracked like plaster inside a nearly empty jar, some ancient cheese slices sprouting patches of wispy grey fur, an opened box of Arm & Hammer baking soda for no apparent purpose, a jug of water, a Tupperware containing nondescript leftovers that were in their original life a stew, perhaps chili or meatloaf. Boys, she thinks, and their mess.

What she has before her is also a mess.

“Good Lord,” she mutters to herself as she regards the file of notes recorded by the municipality's so-called coroner. There are no admissible tire tread casts from the Garson fire, the scene itself ruined for evidence by the trampling of Dr. Nichols. The fire marshal's early report indicates some sort of accelerant was employed in the blast, but the heat was sufficient to burn away all other useful evidence. The truck stop is visited daily by a hundred different people leaving prints and DNA behind, especially in a washroom. What she needs is a continuum of evidence putting Tony Celluci closer to a motive and an opportunity to kill the small-time drug and junk dealer Wade Garson. But the blowing snow outside means her promise of forensic assistance is delayed another day.

She is looking at the spent shell casing in the plastic evidence bag when McKelvey and Nolan enter the station. They kick snow from their boots and the sound reminds Madsen of being a kid in school, coming in from recess with red cheeks, a snowsuit soaking wet, the smell of wool mittens drying on a radiator.

“You boys out making snowmen?”

Nolan sets a box of doughnuts on the desk. “Breakfast of champions,” he says.

“It's way past breakfast where I come from.”

“Brunch of champions?”

He opens the box and, like a big kid, puts his tongue to his upper lip as he peruses the varieties. He chooses a Boston cream and takes a big bite.

“Do you ever take your toque off?” Madsen asks him. She leans over and peers into the box of doughnuts. “You should let that injury breathe a little. Not good to keep it wrapped up like that all the time.”

Nolan reaches up with his free hand and absent-mindedly touches the toque.

“I think I fell asleep with it on last night.”

Madsen decides against a doughnut and turns back to the papers before her. She has compiled all of the various notes into a one-page synopsis.

“These are all the subjects interviewed,” she says. “The names circled indicate subjects with opportunity and or motive.”

McKelvey takes the page and sits with his back to the window in the Chief's chair. Madsen watches him reading, thinking. Nolan stands with his back to the wall, finishing his doughnut.

“You gravitate naturally to that chair, did you know that?”

McKelvey looks up at her. His face is innocent, a boy's, and it is obvious he has not thought about this — taking the Chief's chair.

“We've got Laney the arcade owner, Gaylord the pharmacist, Celluci from Detroit, Carl Levesque, and … we need to add Gallagher,” he says.

“These are people of interest for Wade's murder or for producing the meth?” Nolan asks. He has finished his doughnut and is wiping his hand down the side of his dark uniform pants.

“Let's pretend for a moment the two are connected — which seems obvious to me, but maybe not,” Madsen says. “If we're looking at Celluci, the issue with Wade Garson may have been around his land, period. If we're looking at this as a connection, I'd suggest we're dealing with a partnership that turned sour. Someone — maybe someone on this list — was producing meth and distributing it with Wade Garson.”

“Laney may know her arcade is used for deals,” Nolan says. “But I can't see her working with Garson, and she sure as hell isn't a killer.”

McKelvey nods. He regards the list again. “Who had access to the murder weapon besides Gallagher?”

Nolan looks to his boots and thinks for a minute.

“Gallagher, me, Constable Younger … and Celluci. The Chief was having a drink with Celluci a few days ago in here and I remember the drawer being open, the lockbox sitting right there. Who knows, maybe the Chief showed it to him. He liked to do that every once in a while. Show it off. He'd say how it was a modern version of the gun Doc Holliday used to carry around to poker games, except Holliday used a .32, not a .38.”

Madsen makes notes, updating the profile sheet on Celluci.

“In terms of the meth production, your creepy local pharmacist would have the professional ability, he certainly has access to some of the ingredients, and his general attitude toward the recent spike in crime seems alarming,” McKelvey says.

“He was in bed with his wife when Wade was killed,” Nolan says.

“And Levesque?” Madsen asks. “Who knows this guy?”

A loud banging on the front door startles all three of them.

“Who's out in this weather?” Nolan wonders as he slips down the hall.

A man's voice, loud and angry, fills the hallway, interspersed here and there with Nolan's voice trying to calm him. The voice grows louder as it draws closer to the squad room, and then the voice has a body, a large body, a towering man dressed in big snowmobile boots and a brown canvas work jacket covered in snow, his jaw covered with a trimmed red beard, his eyes sparking high voltage.

“You better find Carl Levesque before I do,” he says. “I swear to God, I'll kill that son of a bitch. I swear to God I will …”

Nolan puts a hand on the man's shoulder.

“Mike, it's not a smart thing to do, uttering death threats in the middle of the police station. Have a seat. Calm down for a minute.”

The big man slides his shoulder so that Nolan's hand falls away, but he takes the advice and sits in a chair by the door. He leans forward, clasps his massive hands, and rocks a little to burn away the energy running through his body.

“What happened, Mike?” Nolan asks, sitting on the edge of a desk.

“I just found out my daughter, Casey, my sixteen-year-old daughter, has been over to Carl Levesque's place. I found a joint in her backpack and this,” he says, and reaches into his breast pocket. He hands over an inch square of foil. “He tried to fool around with her, the scumbag.”

Nolan accepts the foil, examines it, then passes it to Madsen. She finds an evidence baggie in her black case and drops the foil inside.

“Is that the meth stuff everybody's talking about?” Mike asks, and suddenly the anger and threats are gone, and he looks smaller slumped in the chair, a worried father.

“We'll have to test it,” Madsen says, “but it looks like it could be. There's powder residue. We'll need to speak with Casey.”

He nods. “And what about Levesque? You gonna arrest him, too?”

“Nobody's being arrested, Mike, not just yet,” Nolan says.

“That's what people are saying, that you guys don't have a goddamned clue what you're doing. Wade Garson gets his brains blown out and kids are stabbing each other high on meth and nobody's in jail yet.”

“It would be good if we could talk with Casey alone,” Madsen says. “I could come over to your house so she doesn't have to come in here.”

Mike stands, and his long frame is once again revealed. He turns for the door but stops and turns back. “Threat or no threat, I'm telling you. You better find that piece of shit Carl Levesque before I do.”

The father turns and slips down the hall. The front door opens and chimes, and a blast of cold air rolls like a tumbleweed all the way back to the squad room.

“Looks like we're splitting up,” Madsen says. “I'll go talk to Casey.”

“I've got Levesque,” McKelvey says.

Nolan looks between the two of them, the kid picked last for the ball team.

“Nolan, I think you should go talk to Celluci,” Madsen says. “You weren't there when we interviewed him. It'll keep him on edge, knowing we're still asking questions. Maybe find out if he has any plausible explanation for the GSR on his hands.”

Nolan nods but it's obvious he has something on his mind. Madsen and McKelvey wait.

“And the Chief?” he finally asks.

Madsen looks across the desk to McKelvey.

“I've been avoiding the subject,” McKelvey says with a shrug. “I don't know what to make of the guy. I was hoping we could move this forward a little bit before we threw this in his face.”

“You know him better than we do,” Madsen says, looking straight at Nolan. “You should be the one to go and talk to him.”

“Do I just go and say, ‘Hey, Chief, we think we found your gun'?”

Madsen leans back in her chair. She sighs and brushes hair from her face. “You're a big boy, Constable. Get your Chief to come in here and open his lockbox for you. Tell him we found a gun that looks like his and we need to discount him so we can move on down the list. Unless you want me to come with you and hold your hand, I suggest you buck up and do your job.”

Nolan's face folds in on itself like a boy who has been scolded. What makes matters worse is the fact he has a dab of chocolate icing in the corner of his mouth. Madsen doesn't know whether to go over and smack him or wet a tissue with her tongue and clean his face.

“Be better if you guys aren't here,” he says. He moves to the phone on the desk and cradles the receiver while punching in a number from memory. “Dr. Nichols. It's Ed Nolan. I know, I know. It's really coming down. Listen, is Chief Gallagher there?”

Madsen and McKelvey are standing now, zipping their coats. They both watch Nolan's face in an attempt to decipher the one-sided conversation. Nolan hangs up the phone and turns to them.

“Chief never showed at the funeral home.”

“I thought you said he was going to see Dr. Nichols after you checked on Wade Garson's place,” McKelvey says.

Nolan shakes his head. “That's what the Chief told me. But Dr. Nichols said he's been alone all morning. Just him and Wade Garson's body.”