Slow Recoil (5 page)

“You take sugar and cream, right?” the younger man said.

“Just cream,” McKelvey said. “I'm supposed to go for skim, but what the hell. It's a holiday almost.”

Fielding stood with the fridge door open, staring. After a moment he turned and held his palm up.

“Sorry,” he said. “No cream. And the milk's expired.”

McKelvey nodded, accustomed to his own lack of fresh groceries. He sat in the living room on the sofa and set his coffee on the table. It was one thing for his own fridge to carry little more than a block of crunchy orange cheese, but Fielding was better organized and took better care of himself than that. These were the variety of observations that allowed a cop to form his appraisal of a situation. Everything meant
something
. It was the part of his job had that always driven his wife crazy. On the way home from a house party, Caroline might say, “Charlie, for god's sake, those are our friends. Do you always have to watch people like that, like you're on duty?” And for the most part he was unaware he was even doing it. The insinuation seemed to be that he wanted to find the dark spot in every soul.

“Donia,” Fielding said, coming around the kitchen island to join McKelvey, “she's a student in my night school course I was telling you about. She's Bosnian, a survivor from the war. Her family was destroyed. She came over less than a year ago to work in a factory as a seamstress, working these industrial sewing machines. She wanted to get ahead, but her English isn't strong enough. She's from a small village. Her people were simple people, farmers and tradesmen. She always said that: simple people, but good.”

McKelvey took another mouthful of the black coffee. It was caustic, like Liquid-Plumr running down the back of his throat. His doctor had warned against this sort of carelessness, for the peptic ulcer which had hemorrhaged and escalated his retirement meant a lifetime of vigilance against those four horsemen of the apocalypse: booze, cigarettes, stress and coffee. He had grown sick of the bitter and bland low-fat yogurt, of a life lived on the narrow margin of the health food aisle. A man could only eat so much plain rice and couscous before he snapped, walked into a steakhouse off the street and bought a twenty-two ounce prime rib with all the trimmings.

“You met her through the night school,” he said, getting his facts down.

“I just…we hit it off. It sounds stupid, Charlie, I know. She's a beautiful woman, and there was something there. She's wounded, I suppose, and I'm obviously not a poster boy for the well-adjusted. We just seemed to fit.” Fielding threaded the fingers of his hands as he might do in demonstrating a point to his students. “We went for coffee and then it was lunch and then it was dinner. And then, you know…”

“You slept with her,” McKelvey said. Going easy here, for if he had been making inquiries on the job, he would have used guttural language in an attempt to draw some emotion, indignation— yeah, that's what you did with her, isn't it, you dirty dog?

Fielding nodded and said, “I hope you know me well enough to know there was nothing untoward about the situation.”

Untoward
, McKelvey thought. Was that a fancier way of describing the act of a teacher putting his prick in one of his students?

McKelvey said, “Go on.”

“We're adults here, Charlie,” Fielding continued. “She's not one of my Grade Six students with braces and a training bra.”

McKelvey pushed the mug away a little so he wouldn't keep reaching for it out of habit. He regarded his friend, saw the truth written across the man's face, and in fact had never suspected otherwise. Tim Fielding was one of those people walking the streets, bless his heart, who happened to lack the gene necessary for telling bold-faced lies.

McKelvey said, “So what happened?”

“She stopped answering her phone two days ago. She missed class on Wednesday night, and she hasn't missed a class in six weeks. Something's not right, Charlie. I'm no cop, but it just doesn't feel right.”

“You have a key to her place.”

“No, but she has a key to mine. We didn't spend the night together more than a few times, but when we did, she always stayed over here. She said her place was too small.”

“Where does she live?”

“She was in a unit off Blevins Place in Regent Park when she first came over last year. She said she had heard enough gunfire during the war, so she found a little apartment she could afford at Roncesvalles and Dundas, near the tracks over there.”

Fielding gave the address, and McKelvey pictured its approximate location. On the edge or even within the boundary of the so-called “Little Poland” neighbourhood. But first she had lived in Regent Park, having come to this country to escape war and instead having found the darkest the city could offer in terms of social housing gangs, handguns going off like firecrackers in Regent Park,
pop, pop, pop
—where the tough boys of 51 Division did all they could to prevent young black men from killing other young black men while witnesses stood by with their mouths sewn shut for fear of reprisal.

“Have you been to her place?” McKelvey said. “I mean her new place?”

“Just inside the lobby. I picked her up one time, about two weeks ago.”

McKelvey nodded, already working through the language he would use to somehow tune his friend into the workings of the big bad world out there without destroying this new ray of light that had entered his life. As far as he knew, Fielding had been on something like four dates since his wife's death at the hands of a repeat drunk driver more than four years ago. The wrong woman, or the right woman, would see him as an easy mark.

“So she's gone for a few days,” McKelvey said. “Maybe she's visiting a friend, a relative. You've been seeing each other what?”

Fielding shrugged and said, “Four weeks, I guess.”

“A month. Jesus, Tim. Maybe she's screwed off for a few days and doesn't feel like she owes you an explanation. Has that entered your mind?”

Fielding removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the pads of his palms. He put the glasses back on. He sat back, exhaled a long sigh. “Something's not right, Charlie. I know it in my gut. It's not like her to just take off without a word. I mean, she missed a mid-term on Wednesday night. She could fail the course, and she's put a lot into it. She's trying to make a better life for herself. But there's been something there that I could never quite put my finger on. Like she was waiting for something to happen.”

McKelvey saw that his soft approach had missed the mark. “How well do you really know this woman, Tim? That's all I'm saying. We can be friends with people or work with someone for fifteen, twenty years, then one day they do something that seems completely out of character. But is it really out of character? Or are we just shocked because we thought we knew every aspect, every angle to that person?”

Fielding sat there looking into his coffee and didn't say anything.

“She could be in a hotel room in Montreal right now with her husband,” McKelvey said, and stopped his foul imagination from going further. “Or maybe she's with her other boyfriend playing the slots down in Vegas for a long weekend getaway. Or anything else you can think of. You said yourself that you never stayed over at her place.”

“She's not married, and she doesn't have another boyfriend. I believe that much about her. Her husband was executed by rogue Serbs in the war. Listen, I know you're cynical, I know you think like a cop. That's why I called you, Charlie, because I'm not stupid enough to assume I can place a missing person's report on a thirty-two-year-old woman I met four weeks ago. They'll laugh in my face. I thought if I told you about us, about her just disappearing, you of all people would believe me.”

McKelvey sat there and ran his hand across his face, the extra day of stubble coming in rough as iron shavings. The things a man would do, would say, while in the throes of love or lust never ceased to amaze him. It was in this regard that all men were indeed created equally—pauper or prince, it hardly mattered: we all fall the same. He remembered this particular collar from his first year on the Hold-up Squad. Guy's married and has four kids, starts screwing around with a girl at the office. The girl has expensive tastes, she likes the thrill of opening gifts, that ooh-aah moment. She wants to eat out at all the hot places, dance at all the cool clubs. The guy's kids need braces and hockey equipment. His credit card gets maxed, he takes out too many loans that he can't pay. When McKelvey finally had the poor bastard sitting there in the corner of the interview room—showing him a black and white single frame printout from the security video capturing him standing in front of the bank teller—McKelvey asked him what could possibly make a guy with no criminal record walk into a bank with a pellet gun on a Tuesday afternoon in May. The guy got this look on his face—a mixture of sadness and stoicism—and he said, “I had no choice, man. I couldn't afford to keep her, and I couldn't stand to lose her. Either way I was screwed. You know what I mean?”

Now McKelvey exhaled a long breath across the room, across the morning that had begun with such promise. The end of summer, the beginning of autumn. He had some grocery shopping to do before the girls came to visit him on Saturday. He had a good coffee to buy and get into his system—something that wouldn't act as an instant laxative—and later still he had a stool at Garrity's on which to sit and circle classified ads for used vehicles he would not purchase. Ragged and ridiculous, perhaps, but he had a life to live. But yes, at the end of it all there was no denying that he did in fact have the time to go through some motions here, to give Tim Fielding a sense that at least something was being done.

“Listen,” McKelvey said, “I don't know what you're expecting from me. I'll go on over there and check out her place. Maybe ask a few of her neighbours or the super, or something like that. That's all I can do here, Tim. I'm not on the job any more. I'm not a private detective.”

“I'd appreciate it,” Fielding said, relief written on his face.

“If and when it comes to that, I can put you in touch with someone on the force who won't laugh in your face,” McKelvey said, getting up and moving for the door. “But that's about all I can do here.”

“I'll get my keys,” Tim said.

McKelvey got to the door then turned. He said, “Thing is, I should head over there myself, take a look around. I think it's better that way.”

Fielding stopped and took it in. He nodded as though he understood this was a requirement of police business, how things worked. McKelvey didn't want to explain the fact that Fielding would be the first obvious suspect if anything
untoward
had happened to the woman, god forbid. Begin at the nucleus, work your way out. McKelvey saw the school teacher leaving his fingerprints all over the apartment…

“I can at least give you a lift over there.”

McKelvey smiled, pulling the card from his shirt pocket. “I've got a driver.”

He used Fielding's cordless phone to call Hassan. He asked the driver to meet him in front of the building. Then, against his better judgment, he shook his friend's hand and promised to report back within the hour. In the elevator he shook his head at himself, at this whole thing, and dug his fingers into his pants pocket, where he found a half tab of the painkillers—he had broken a few of them in half, and he carried them around from time to time like loose change. In case the pain got too bad, or whatever. Maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was simply because they were there, and he could. Too much to think about, and anyway, he didn't need to make any justifications here. He was far beyond the days of reporting to any sort of supervisor, real or imagined. He pressed the button for the ground floor, snapped his head back and swallowed the tab dry.

THREE

H
assan pulled his cousin's cranberry-red Crown Victoria up to the front entrance. McKelvey watched the big boat swung in on a wide arc, just like an unmarked cruiser from the old days, and his mind spun back: him at the wheel and a partner riding shotgun, easing the unit up to the curb to put the screws to a crew of the usual suspects the morning after the armed robbery of a Mac's Milk—where were you around eleven last night, Alexander? And what about you, Damon James? The inherent sense of authority and purpose that flowed through his being as he stepped from the car, sunglasses on, big gun slung in its holster. The Man, the 5-0, the Heat, the goddamned King of Kensington. It was the best and worst job in the world, and like the city itself, he wanted to be able to say that he could leave it all behind, just walk away, but it was a lie. He knew in his heart of hearts that a part of his identity had been forever altered: now that there was no squad room, no courtroom prep with an ambitious Assistant Crown looking to make a career case, no administration or backwards bureaucracy to buck and bitch about, no drinks with the boys after the late night shift, no stakeouts with bad coffee and cold pizza, no sense of pride at the making of a good collar, no shield, no more no more. Welcome to civilian life, Charlie. Ain't it grand?

McKelvey got in the back of the taxi with the nagging sense that a mild depression was settling in, this imperceptible autumn frost. He had no idea what he thought he was doing here, pulling some part from a
Spenser for Hire
episode. Maybe Hattie wasn't so far off the mark when she accused him of “reckless meandering in retirement”. She said the point was to slip out of his uniform and into a whole new life, a new world—but he was stuck, a man without hobbies, a man without a plan, without a family. He saw the coffee mug again, “World's Best Teacher'.” The world needed all the Tim Fieldings it could get, the ones who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believed the promise of the advertisement. McKelvey knew it was the string that held their friendship together—the chasm that fell between his own bleak view of humanity and the school teacher's unflagging investment in the future generations. He saw something there within the younger man that he either wanted or knew he ought to want. Right now, the half pill was performing at half duty, confronting the impending depression with a small smile. Perhaps it was a smirk.