By the Time You Read This (9 page)

13

C
ARDINAL FEELS A STRANGE
happiness suffusing his body. Here the three of them are—Catherine, Cardinal and Kelly—at the Trianon Restaurant having the best meal Algonquin Bay has to offer. The Trianon is their tradition for special occasions: birthdays, wedding anniversaries, or sometimes just because Kelly is up for a visit. And here she is, visiting from New York, and Catherine is in a great mood, the hospital a distant, green-tiled memory. Cardinal’s heart is aloft in his chest like a helium balloon.

He may have had a little too much to drink, because he is bubbling over with sentimentality, saying, “This is great. This is the way it’s supposed to be. We could be a heartwarming TV show.
The Goode Family.”

Kelly rolls her eyes. “Dad, really.”

“No, look at us,” Cardinal insists. Okay, so he’s feeling all that Bordeaux, but he has to say it. “Beautiful, intelligent daughter, competent husband—”

“Mad wife,” Catherine interjects, and the other two smile.

Cardinal covers her warm hand with his. “I’m just so grateful,” he says. “Gratitude isn’t a big enough word for what I feel. I’m just so—”

“Dad, what are you going
on
about!” Kelly looks as if she’s going to signal for the cheque and catch the first plane back to New York. “Can’t we just have a normal conversation?”

“This is a normal conversation,” Cardinal says. “That’s what’s so wonderful. I dreamed Catherine was dead, and now here we all are together, just being normal.” He lays a hand on his heart, feels the warmth from that furnace of joy.

Catherine’s serious brown eyes, sizing him up, tiny parentheses forming at the corners of her mouth. “You dreamed I was dead?”

“And it was so real! It was horrible!”

“Poor you,” Catherine says. The honey of concern in her voice. She puts a hand on his cheek and he feels the heat of the blood flowing through her fingers. “Are you okay now?”

“Okay? Am I okay?” Cardinal laughs. “Oh, I’m so okay, they could bottle it and sell it on street corners. It would put heroin and ecstasy out of business. I’m so okay, I could …” His voice cracks, and now he can’t speak because he’s crying. He’s actually crying tears of happiness, tears of joy, wife and daughter rippling through his tears like computer effects.

The sensation of tears cooling on his face woke Cardinal up. He’d been sleeping on his back, and the tears were puddled in his eyes. His nose was running, his upper lip hot with a rivulet of mucus, tears cooling around his ears and neck. Such joy! He wiped his eyes and turned over on his elbow to tell Catherine.

The dream set his nerves on edge. Every move he made was amplified tenfold. The mere placing of a cup on the kitchen counter made a
clack
that hurt his ears. Water running in the kitchen sink was rough and ugly, mingling cutlery a torture. Even the newspaper, as he turned a page, made noises that were glassy and sibilant. And he could read nothing, take nothing in. Even the headlines were opaque.

And Catherine was everywhere. Every object in his house had its degree of Catherine-ness. Anything she had chosen was high on the scale. She had put effort into it, made a trip to buy it, thought about it. Anything she used daily was highly Catherined: in the medicine cabinet, her raft of medications, the little tubes of shadow eraser and moisturizer. Her hairbrush, with strands of her hair. Do you keep such things? How do you come to throw them out?

There were tulips she had brought home—was it two weeks ago?—long wilted in their vase. Cardinal couldn’t bring himself to toss them out; neither could Kelly, apparently. Then there were the photographs Catherine had chosen to frame: a portrait of Kelly, a quiet shot of the two of them she had taken with a timer. The music cabinet was stacked with CDs she had chosen: the
Goldberg Variations
, the
Well-Tempered Clavier
by Gould and by Landowska. Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow. Will I ever be able to bear that music? Should I throw it out?

In the empty kitchen, Cardinal poured himself a bowl of Corn Flakes. He never ate Corn Flakes, but he thought they were bland enough to go down without his noticing. He was staring at the flakes floating in milk when the phone on the kitchen counter rang.

Cardinal got up to answer it. There was a woman on the other end, not a voice he recognized.

“Hello, is Catherine there?”

Cardinal stood by the sink, gripping the phone, unable to move.

“Hello? Is this the right number for Catherine Cardinal?”

“Yes,” Cardinal managed. “Yes, it is.”

“May I speak to her, please?”

“Uh, no. She, uh—she isn’t here.”

“When will she be back, do you know?”

“No. I mean, I’m not sure.”

“Oh. Well, if I leave my name and number, could you have her call me when she gets in? Do you have a pen?”

Cardinal picked up a pen and listened as she told him her name and Toronto number. Catherine should call her about a weekend workshop in advanced digital photography. Cardinal held the pen above the little notepad that he and Catherine used to relay phone messages, but he wrote nothing down.

He escaped to work. Catherine had set foot in the squad room probably no more than half a dozen times. Except for her picture on Cardinal’s desk, there were no reminders of her there. It was a guy place, despite the presence of Lise Delorme and Sergeant Flower and Frances and the other support personnel. The squad room was a guy place; Catherine could not claim him there.

“You’re back,” McLeod said. “Just when the place was beginning to seem civilized.”

“I’m not here,” Cardinal said. “Just came in to clear up a few things.”

“Really,” McLeod said. “I just came in to catch up on my sleep.”

Cardinal grabbed his desk calendar and flipped it back to January. The Renaud case: two brothers who had pulled a series of break-ins. The back of their van had looked like a pawnshop when they were pulled over for a moving violation. It would have ended there, if one of their break-ins had not gone horribly wrong. One of the houses they broke into had surprised them by being occupied, and in a panic the brothers had beaten the owner half to death. Cardinal had interrogated them over a period of weeks, finally managing to get one to turn on the other. They were both in the Kingston Pen now, doing six years.

“What are you doing here?” Delorme said. She came right up and gave him a hug, and Cardinal, hypersensitized by grief, felt himself choke up. Delorme cast an investigative eye at his desk, the open calendar, and said, “Aha! Bad guys you have known and loved. Me, I’d say you’re tracking down whoever’s behind that horrible card.”

“Cards,” he said. “I got another one.”

Delorme scanned his face. “Same postmark?”

“This one’s from Sturgeon.”

Sturgeon Falls was about half an hour west of Algonquin Bay. It only took Delorme a second before she voiced Cardinal’s own thoughts on the matter. “Mattawa. Sturgeon. Assuming it’s from the same person, makes me think he’s probably from here. It’s like disguising his handwriting.”

“I’m pretty sure he used the same printer again, too.”

Delorme’s desk was right next to Cardinal’s. She sat down in her chair and swivelled to face him. “You gonna show me?”

“You didn’t want to know, before.”

“Oh, John. Don’t twist what I said.”

Calling him by his first name in the office. Cardinal was surprised by how it touched him. He pulled the card in its plastic sleeve out of his briefcase.

How she must have hated you. You failed her so completely
.

“Bastard,” Delorme said. “Assuming it’s a guy. Women can be pretty nasty too, I’m sure you’ve noticed. You think it’s the Renaud brothers?” She pronounced it
brudders—
her French-Canadian accent tended to flower when she was emotional. “If they did this, I will personally drive down to Kingston to kick their asses.”

“I don’t think they did it. For one thing, how would they even know Catherine was …”

“News travels fast in prison, you know that. And they’ve still got family in town. Someone could have mentioned it.”

“And then what? They get someone to send one card from Mattawa, and another one from Sturgeon Falls, but both out of the same printer? Seems like a stretch to me.”

“Well, you know your caseload better than me.”

Delorme’s phone rang. She picked it up and began talking in hushed tones to Larry Burke about the boy who killed himself in the laundromat. Cardinal had heard the news report on the radio driving in. It would be the most pressing piece of business on Delorme’s calendar this week, but she hadn’t mentioned it to him; she wouldn’t want to upset him with talk of a suicide. Cardinal was not sure he liked being treated with kid gloves.

He continued flipping through his calendar. Every few minutes someone would come by with some variant of, “Cardinal! Good to see you back!” and Cardinal would say again, “I’m not here.”

He went through his file drawer, thumbing back the tabs one after another. So many names, so many felons and miscreants, and yet very few seemed likely candidates for the position of card writer, let alone murderer.

If
she was murdered. Everyone else saw suicide; despite the fact that she gave no warning. And even though her note had apparently been written months before, it wouldn’t be enough, Cardinal knew. It wouldn’t be enough to sway even Delorme, let alone the coroner, a judge, a jury, and doubts were eating away at his own heart too.

He pushed them out of his mind and reached into what he called his Halfway-In Box, which was where he put material that had to be dealt with that he never had time for. Among the notices of policy changes, upcoming conferences, court paperwork, there were Department of Corrections notices of recent releases. These were not just Cardinal’s cases, but all criminals from the jurisdiction.

He could hear Delorme talking quietly into the phone. “Larry, it wasn’t your fault. You should talk to someone about this. You’re allowed to be human.”

Delorme sounded impossibly far away, as if Cardinal were underwater. He felt like a drowning man, his lungs filling with grief. These released felons and miscreants were just so much wreckage to cling to as he waited for rescue, and what would rescue consist of?

Catherine alive.

Still, he carried on, and by the time he was done he had a short list of three candidates. All were living in Algonquin Bay, all had been released in the past twelve months, and all had served at least five years in prison thanks to John Cardinal.

14

A
LGONQUIN
B
AY HAS A
lot of churches, and some of them are quite attractive, but St. Hilda’s Catholic Church is not one of them. A ghastly red brick structure on Sumner Street, St. Hilda’s has not been improved by the addition of a corrugated tin roof that is painted, unconvincingly, to look like weathered copper. Still, it is one of the benefits of the city’s ever-shrinking congregations that the church lots provide acres of free parking.

Cardinal parked in St. Hilda’s shadow and walked along Sedgewick Street. This area was known as a “mixed” neighbourhood, meaning among its shabby bungalows and bony-looking duplexes you could find elementary school teachers, young cops or the likes of Connor Plaskett.

Connor Plaskett had conceived an interest in glue sniffing while still in short pants. Later on he developed an affection for marijuana and alcohol in all its forms, although bottles of cheap port became a favourite, perhaps because of the sugar content. At one point, following a nasty altercation with a city bus, he had seen the light and joined AA.

He got sober, he started a business in Web design, he got married. His business grew to the point where he could support his new young wife and child quite comfortably. Then the Web bubble burst, he rapidly went broke and alcohol provided a ready anaesthetic.

Plaskett was coming out of a two-week bender when he took it into his head to rob a local convenience store. And he did it with the help of a gun. He had the presence of mind to take the videotape out of the security system, not realizing that the tape he took away with him was a dummy set up for precisely this purpose, so that the prospective thief would not take the tape that mattered.

So it was that Connor Plaskett appeared on the six o’clock news demanding that the teenager behind the counter hand over all the day’s receipts.

It was one of the easiest cases that Cardinal had ever had to clear.

Plaskett was then unlucky in his prosecutor and his judge, not to mention his wife. He was sent up for five years, and while he was away, his wife discovered that she had in fact been lesbian all her life and left him (taking the child with her) for a woman who climbed hydro poles for a living.

Plaskett took it badly, contriving while in prison to become re-addicted to old substances and even to add some new ones. He emerged after serving his full five-year sentence in worse shape than he had begun it.

Shortly after, Plaskett had accosted Cardinal one night outside the Chinook Tavern. Cardinal had just finished arresting someone else entirely—someone he could not now even recall—when Plaskett came reeling out of the tavern and recognized Cardinal.

“Fucker,” he had said, spraying spit and beer fumes into the cool night air. “Motherfucker. You totally destroyed my life.”

“No, Connor,” Cardinal had said. “I think you deserve the credit for that.”

“I had a family before you came along. I’m gonna fix you good.”

Plaskett had staggered over and taken a pathetic swing at Cardinal before collapsing right there in the middle of the parking lot. Cardinal had taken his car keys off him, pushed him into the back seat of his clapped-out pickup and shut the door, dropping the keys off with the Chinook bartender.

Number 164 was a tiny brown and white bungalow that leaned noticeably into the wind, as if it too were sniffing intoxicants. Number 164B turned out to be the door to the concrete block addition that had been cemented onto the house in a misguided attempt at improvement.

Cardinal pressed the bell but heard nothing from inside. He rapped on the door, onto which a picture of a Christmas wreath had been stencilled some years before.

A harsh voice, possibly female, answered, “Just a minute!” This was followed by a crash, as of a tea tray falling from a great height, and a series of unimaginative curses.

Slattern
, although well within his vocabulary, was not a word that occurred frequently to Cardinal. But it certainly did when the door opened.

The woman looked as if she had been rolled to this address across a field of mud and broken glass some months before and had not yet had a chance to clean herself up. Her eyes were red, her knuckles scabbed, her hair an unnerving tangle and possible wildlife habitat.

“Whaddaya want?” A lot of that broken glass had got into her voice.

“I’m looking for Connor Plaskett.”

“Good,” she said. “So am I.”

She opened the door, and Cardinal stepped into what had apparently been intended to be a kitchen but looked like a rag-and-bone shop.

“Excuse the mess,” she said. “Got no cupboards.”

In the murky light that slipped through the tiny window Cardinal could make out a sink against one wall, a hot plate sitting atop a half-size fridge, and some apple crates that formed makeshift cupboards which moisture and overuse had reduced to wreckage.

Cardinal followed the woman into the next room, which was even murkier. She sat on an unmade sofa bed so low that her chin was barely above her knees. Cardinal leaned against the door frame. The place stank of old cigarette smoke and wet carpet.

“Where’s Connor?” he asked.

“Damned if I know. Cigarette?”

“No, thanks. What’s your relationship to him?”

“Fuck-buddy.” Seeing his look, she gave a snort and said, “What didja think? Financial adviser?”

“And you don’t know where he is right now?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Well, if you don’t know, I suspect his parole officer doesn’t know either, and that would put Connor in breach.”

“Really,” the woman said. After many tries she had finally got her lighter to work and was sucking avidly on a DuMaurier. She released a stream of smoke in Cardinal’s direction. “Bummer. Whaddaya want him for?”

“It’s in connection to a recent death.”

“Connor couldn’t kill anybody. He can barely tie his boots.”

The hellish surroundings were eloquent testimony to that. While it might have made a reasonable lair for someone capable of stalking a woman and murdering her, it didn’t look the home of someone who could get it together to buy a card, type it out and mail it from Mattawa or Sturgeon Falls.

But Plaskett’s words rang anew in Cardinal’s ears:
I’m gonna fix you
.

“Where does Connor hang out these days?” Cardinal said. “I’m going to need addresses.”

“Christ, Connor doesn’t go nowhere—that’s what’s so weird. He sits in front of that TV watching football all day and all night. I can’t get him to do a damn thing. I’m going to have a beer. You probably don’t want one.”

“No, thank you.”

She went to the fridge and pulled out a can of Molson Canadian. She popped the top and drank most of it in one go. When she went to sit back down on the bed, she misjudged and knocked over an end table, sending the phone clattering to the floor. She squinted at it for a few moments as if trying to recall its name.

“That reminds me,” she said finally. “Had a funny phone conversation last night.”

“Who with?”

“Christ, I don’t know. I didn’t know the guy. Said he was a friend of Russell McQuaig, who’s like a drinking buddy of Connor’s, and Russell tole him to call. Him and Connor take off to Toronto every now and again. Hit the big lights, you know. Personally, I couldn’t give a shit about Toronto. Too dirty. Anyways, this guy tried to tell me that Connor wasn’t coming back.”

“What do you mean, not coming back? He took off to Toronto and some stranger called you to say he wasn’t coming back?”

“Yeah. I think so. Something like that.” She rubbed at her filthy hair. “Actually, now that I think of it, he even tried to tell me Connor was dead. Yeah.”

“You seem to be taking it pretty well.”

“Well, yeah, ‘cause like I didn’t know this guy from Adam. Why should I believe him? And second of all, if Connor was dead, the police and that would have had to call me, right? The hospital or whatever. They would’ve had to call me and like notify the next of kin.”

“‘Fuck-buddy’ isn’t generally recognized as next of kin,” Cardinal said. “They would have called a blood relative first, or even his former wife, before they would call you. A hospital might not even know of your existence.”

“Well, I don’t know.” She brushed a web of hair away from her face as if it were fog. “You think Connor’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Cardinal said. “It should be easy enough to find out.”

“Shit, I hope he’s not dead,” the woman said. She tipped her head back and poured the last of her beer down her throat. She crushed the can and tried to stifle a belch. “I really couldn’t face moving again.”