Slow Recoil (16 page)

He drifted off as the lights inside the cabin dimmed and his fellow passengers settled to sleep as best they could, and his mind played through the work that lay ahead, the snaring of The Colonel.

TWELVE

H
attie dropped McKelvey off in front of Union Station beside a line of yellow cabs. The drivers were standing outside their cars in front of the iconic station that owned a full city block with its grand arches and pillars. It was sunny and warm again, and the drivers were smoking and talking in a dozen different languages, waiting for trains and subways to bring them business on a slow Sunday morning.

“I'd drive you up to Tim's myself,” she said, “but I've got this pesky job thing going on. The triads were busy last night turning over the booze cans in Chinatown. I've got to go by and pick up Anderson, see if he's out of bed yet, the little pisstank.”

McKelvey had met Stu Anderson a few times. He was a kid on the Hold-Up Squad, the new breed. He had seen way too many cop shows on TV. He was thirty years old if he was a day, and he wore his blond hair spiked with gel, a snarly-lipped rock star. He was single, and he was still hitting the clubs to dance and troll for women, dragging his ass into work with bloodshot eyes, always smelling of that strong cologne he apparently bathed in. Anderson was always toying with his facial hair, growing these razor-thin lines across his jawline, or these goatees and handlebar mustaches, fads that lasted a few days at a time. McKelvey wasn't prone to jealousy, but this morning the thought of Hattie and Anderson driving around together rubbed him the wrong way. He knew the sorts of conversations that took place between partners working long hours together, sharing all these soul-deep secrets about life. Fortunately for him and Caroline, his partners had been for the most part chubby men with dandruff and bad breath. At least until Hattie came along. There had been sparks there from the beginning, the first time they'd worked a case side by side. How his stomach flipped a little when he was around her. Like now, how his hands were getting sweaty. Some pimple-faced kid at the high-school dance, for God's sake.

He opened the door and put a leg out, his hand up on the roof. He turned and smiled, but he didn't say what he wanted to say—which was something along the lines of “come over, I want you, I need you”—because he saw it there on her face and in her green eyes. She was pulling back, cutting herself a little space, doing some figuring. Okay, he thought. Fair enough. Forget Stu Anderson and his fucking spiked hair. Hattie was a big girl.

He got out of the car, then leaned back in. “Don't work too hard,” he said and immediately felt like an idiot, some dolt standing on her step with a bouquet of wilted daisies and a string of clichés.

“Charlie, listen,” she said. “I'm serious. Don't let this thing, whatever it is, get out of control. They've got this neat system now; you pick up the phone and call the police for help.”

“Right,” he said. “What's that number again, I can never remember.”

“You got a pen?” she smiled.

He pretended to flip open a pad and click a ballpoint.

“Nine-one-one,” she said, speaking slowly as though to a child.

“Got it.”

He nodded, still smiling, and closed the door. Hattie hit the gas and was gone. McKelvey stood there and felt the good morning sun breaking through, warming his battered face. He looked across at the grey façade of the Royal York hotel with its long-coated doormen on the sidewalk at the ready. Hot dog vendors were setting up their carts on opposite ends of the arches to the train station, the smell of their boiled dogs and grilled onions already filling the air. A great Sunday for a baseball game, for a walk along the beaches, for a pint on the patio of the Bier Markt down on The Esplanade, just to sit there under an umbrella and watch the beautiful women walk by. He thought briefly of popping a half tab of the pills, but shook his head—they were gone anyway, and good riddance. He had responsibilities, no time for a rocket ship ride to the moon. Tim Fielding, he thought. Why hadn't he just told the kid to call the cops? What an asshole, Charlie. You and your goddamned pride.

He had a cell phone, but it was at home on his dresser in need of a new battery or some other incomprehensible electronic part. He went inside the station to a bank of telephones across from the VIA Rail ticket counters and tried Fielding's number. There was no answer. He hung up. He waited a few seconds then tried the number again, thinking Fielding might be screening his calls. Still, there was no answer. Out for a Sunday morning walk, most likely. Or sleeping in. Still, he had to be sure. He pulled Hassan's card from his pocket and called the driver.

“Yes?” Hassan answered on the third ring.

“It's McKelvey,” he said. “Are you working today? I need a ride.”

“Always working,” Hassan said. “Where are you, Mr. McKelvey?”

“Just inside Union Station.”

Hassan laughed. “Go look outside. I just pulled up.”

McKelvey hoped this flash of serendipity was a sign of things to come, but he didn't really believe it. That wet wool blanket was hanging around his shoulders again, the sense of impending doom, the understanding that he was responsible for everything from here on out because, as Hattie had been so willing to remind him, he should have enlisted some help from the beginning. Like the police, she had said. The
real
police.

McKelvey had Hassan wait outside the building in a visitor parking space while he ran up to check in on Fielding. On the drive over, he had worked it out in his head. Without causing undue alarm, he would suggest Tim come and bunk with him for a few nights until Donia Kruzik turned up, her jealous husband or boyfriend had time to calm down, or the whole thing otherwise blew over. It would be a chance for them to live like a modern day version of Felix and Oscar, the Odd Couple. But in truth, he sensed it wouldn't be quite as easy as that. As he played through the key facts to date, the potential coincidence of the garage, the broken nose, the empty apartment—he suddenly remembered the magnet from the fridge. The immigrant support centre. A lead he needed to follow up, one he had almost let slip through his fingers. Out of practice, out of the game—was this the first trace of rust settling in? It was amazing how much of the job remained with him, the way he watched people, the small things he noticed as he walked the streets or talked with strangers— and yet also startling how quickly he had dulled at the edges. It was his age, and it was living alone and it was being “ex” this or that, the whole jarring experience of retirement. It happened so quickly. As though you were driving along the highway at eighty miles an hour and someone suddenly reached over and pulled the emergency brake. Here, pal, why don't you hop out here and go sit on that picnic table over there and let the people who still matter go on by?

“What do you think of these Blue Jays?” Hassan said, glancing in the mirror.

“I think they need to win another World Series,” McKelvey said. “You get sort of used to it, you know, the parades and the street parties. Seems like a long way off these days. Hard to believe that was only seven, eight years ago. Be nice to even make the playoffs for starters.”

“My wife says they need a woman to manage the baseball team. Only a woman, she says, can stand back and see the whole picture. In my country, Mr. McKelvey, in my country she would be shot for saying something as foolish as that. But here, in my kitchen, she tells me what she thinks. Oh, does she tell me what she thinks. Are you married, sir?”

McKelvey went to respond in the affirmative—the old habit of prattling off police codes or his Social Insurance number, it was that automatic.
Married?
What exactly were he and Caroline, besides about three thousand miles apart? Neither one of them had mentioned divorce in the nearly two years of their twice monthly phone calls. It was all cordial updating on life's little wins and losses, the new muffler for the car, the weather and what was going on in the news, and of course their shared joy in measuring the growth of the only grandchild, Emily. They were legally separated, the details of their arrangement set out in pages of legalese. But to the question, at least in legal and technical terms, yes, they were married. It was strange, McKelvey thought, how they had stumbled and fumbled through the past thirty years to end up in this strange place, this new and uncharted landscape. It was then that he realized how much he had missed her these past few years. Even before the trouble with Gavin, even before all of the grief, he had stopped trying. To talk to her, to listen, to reach out and touch her sometimes for no reason at all. To hold her. The things that would not have cost him at all, the things that seemed so easy in hindsight.

“We're separated,” McKelvey said, “by three provinces.”

And a Y chromosome, he was going to add. He caught Hassan's quick glance in the rearview, and he couldn't hold the man's eyes. He turned to the window and watched the city rushing past. Here was again, yet again, in the centre of a mess of his own making. He imagined Caroline slowly shaking her head, perhaps even smiling as she said something like, “Here you go again, Charlie…why don't you ever ask for help?”

McKelvey, the Blunderbuss.

“Good ones are hard to find,” Hassan said. “Remember that.”

“I'll remember it,” McKelvey said.

Hassan smiled and said, “I can't forget it, because my wife tells me every day.”

McKelvey knocked at Fielding's door and waited. He leaned in to listen, but, unlike the cheap door at Donia Kruzik's apartment, this was solid wood reinforced with steel. You get what you pay for. He tried the doorknob without expectation and was surprised when it turned in his hand. He pushed the door open and felt his heart in his chest, this mess of wires connected to his ribs, and he closed the door behind him.

“Tim,” he called out to an empty apartment for the second time in a week.

Goddamn, he thought, and he knew in his gut that something wasn't right. He looked around, over at the kitchen and the island bar, the living room, nothing out of order. He walked over to the two-piece bathroom off the living room, pushed the door and looked inside. Then he walked over to the master bedroom. The door was closed. He put his hand on the doorknob, hesitated, uncertain now whether he should walk back out and call Hattie, or maybe just sit on the couch and wait for Fielding to come back from his walk or his trip to buy fresh bagels, wherever the hell he was. But it was just fear, something he had to get past. The same brand of certainty that had brought him over here was telling him now that what he had come for was behind that door, waiting for him. He took a deep breath, turned the knob, and eased the door open to reveal the body of a woman sprawled face-down beside the bed.

The room was in chaos, the mattress askew, sheets torn off, books and magazines and a reading light knocked from a night table and scattered on the floor. He went to the closet on instinct and rushed the doors open, then went to master ensuite bathroom and did the same with the shower curtain, even the doors on the vanity, knowing from experience how impossibly small a human could make themselves when it came to the necessity of hiding from the police. And he wasn't about to get blindsided twice in the same week, a shadow springing from behind a shower curtain with a butcher knife. He reached out and felt the towels that were hung, and they were damp. Fielding had showered that morning, he had been in the apartment. Or someone had, at least.

I'm fucked, he thought, easing back into the bedroom. Fucked six ways to Sunday. First witness on the scene is the first suspect. Without adjusting her body, he bent over and touched the woman at the carotid artery with two fingers. There was nothing, and she was somewhere on the colder side of lukewarm, her flesh already beginning to turn the blue-grey of early death. What, a couple of hours? She was about five foot six, maybe a hundred and forty pounds, her dirty blonde hair shoulder length. One arm was tucked beneath her belly and the other was outstretched, the hand reaching for something, perhaps the light or a cordless phone, a last desperate clutch at faint hope. He squinted and noted that between the strands of tousled hair there appeared to be darkened flesh. He gently moved the hair and confirmed it. The neck was dark with bruising, the deep purple of strangulation. Hands or a ligature, he couldn't tell, he wasn't an expert in these matters—the crime scene and forensics folks would take photos, measure, create diagrams and schematics. But given the width of the line of bruising, his money was on a ligature of some fashion. He looked around the room, around the floor, for anything that might have been employed in the task—the belt from a bathrobe, a tie—but there was nothing that he could see.