Stain of the Berry (19 page)

Better known as: knocking on doors.

My first stop was a house on Elliot Street, where two of the choir members, presumably a couple, lived.

An elderly man with a hacking cough and cigarette stained fingers answered the door. He told me he bought the house for a steal in March when the previous residents, "two lezzies," decided to up and move to New Zealand. According to him, they hadn't been back since. Scratch.

As I made my way to the next address in Pacific Heights on the west end of town (quite a distance from the Pacific Ocean or anything higher than a beaver dam), I attached the earpiece of my hands-free earphone to my ear and dialled Jared's number. There was something that didn't add up. He agreed to pick me up at my office near noon and we'd have lunch.

"I'm Jinny.
Who
are
you?"

Jin Chau was very thin, his shoulders scrawny under a well-worn, pink B.U.M. Equipment T-shirt that just barely reached the top of a pair of waist-squeezingly tight black jeans. He wore no socks and his narrow feet were noticeably paler than his face. At first I thought it was a no sunblock thing...until I looked closer and saw that Jin was wearing makeup; concealer to even out the ochre tones of his elongated face, mascara to make his dark eyes pop, eye shadow, a hint of lipstick and a pinch of pink on high but sallow cheeks. His once black hair (roots were showing) had been dyed red but ended up a faded, pinky-orange hue and was styled into a feathered puff that dominated the crown of his head, reminiscent of the Bay City Rollers.

"I'm Russell Quant," I told him, feeling rather unglamorous.

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"Yeeeesssssss you are," he purred, placing a hand on a hip in a gesture that was meant to be sexy. I noticed his nails were long and shone with clear polish and he wore a multitude of rings. "What can I doooooooooo for yooooouuuuuuu."

"I'm a private detective and I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions."

The sultry come-hither look dropped off his face faster than a shrimp turns pink in boiling water. Jin stomped away from the door into his living room, which, given the size of the suite, was about two stomps away. I took it as an invitation to enter, so I closed the door behind me and followed him in.

"Is this about Stephanie?" he crowed, his feminine, singsong voice now nasally. He leaned against a large, flat screen TV. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were a red leather couch and two armchairs, each oriented towards the television.

"No, it's not," I quickly reassured him.

"'Cause if it is, I don't want to talk about that bitch."

I took a quick gander around the place: a kitchen and smallish dining room were attached to the living room, down a short hallway were two closed doors likely for a single bedroom and a bathroom. The windows were covered with red plastic Venetian blinds and the floor was a nondescript beige carpet. In the kitchen, the few surfaces that weren't littered with magazines and newspapers were crammed with non-perishable (I hope) food stuffs and goodies in cellophane packages with writing on them I could not read. The eating area, by comparison, was rather tidy; sitting atop a black wooden table was an unlit candle, a plate with condiments including soy and hot chili pepper sauce, and a pile of red plastic placemats.

"It's a dump," Jin commented, his eyes following mine. "This place is my uncle's. My parents put me here. My uncle and aunt and grandparents live on the main floor and most of the other apartments in the building belong to relatives too. Of course no one wants to live with me, not even my parents." He shot me a challenging look as if waiting for me to agree with them. "Lucky for me. I don't want to live with them either."

"It's not so bad," I said. It really wasn't.

"So this isn't about Stephanie?"

"No."

"What do you want with me then?"

I took a deep breath and soldiered on. "You're a member of the Pink Gophers?"

"Yeah. So what. I'm not even sure if I'll go back this year. They have practices every Thursday night.

Every Thursday night all winter long.
Who can show up
every
Thursday night? Excuse me, I got a life, sisters." He said it like he was Beyonce.

I nodded, wondering if his membership in the chorus was some sort of court-ordered thing, kind of like community service. "Jin, some of the members of the choir have been having troubles over the past few months, weird, unexplained things, harassment. I was wondering if you've been experiencing anything like that?"

His eyes narrowed as he considered this. "Since when? We stopped singing after Christmas. Didn't even have a spring concert :his year. Haven't seen them since. We'll start up again in September, I suppose." His words came out quick and precise, clipped at the end like he either didn't want to spend much time talking or didn't want to spend much time talking to me.

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I didn't know the answer. When did the boogeyman start coming around? All the witnesses were either dead or not talking to me. "Since Christmas." It was a shot.

Jin shrugged. "Life is weird. Always weird shit happening."

"Nothing out of the ordinary?"

"My bike got trashed. Really made me mad too. A girl's gotta have wheels, you know." Jin's face took on a new look, one manufactured through sporadic practice to appear soft. Although he kept talking, I could feel his wanting eyes roam up and down my body with a message all their own. He pulled away from the TV and stepped nearer to me. I held my ground.

"And someone egged my windows." He fingered his plume of hair, ensuring every discoloured strand was perfectly erect. "I wish I could live on the top floor, or in another building-maybe something fancy like a penthouse or something. But this is all my parents will pay for," his eyes turning to flint as he told me this. "My uncle is robbing them blind as it is. He's charging them six hundred a month. Six hundred!

Can you believe it? For this dump!" His arms and hands fluttered about the space around him. Can an apartment with a flat screen television still be a dump?

"He tells them he's giving them the special family rate, and they believe him. They're stupid; so that's what they get for being so stupid and wanting me out of the house." His shoulders rose and fell with an emphatic gesture a la Bette Davis. "I don't care. I'll get out of here myself one day. I'm working part-time at my cousin's garage and part-time at my other cousin's hair salon. That's pretty good money when you don't have to pay rent. So I'm getting some extra money together. Maybe in a couple months I can move.

"Oh," he added as an afterthought, "I had to change my number once because some asshole kept calling me late at night and hanging up. Probably wanted to get some of this..." He swivelled non-existent hips.

"But was afraid to ask for it. I don't have time for that, mister sister, no way. Except for the right man." He waited a beat, then, "but other than that, nothing really weird or out of the ordinary."

Life for Jin Chau was a very different adventure from my own. I gave him a card and left.

When I got back to PWC a minute or two after noon, Jared was already waiting for me in his Jeep Cherokee. I'd tracked down three more of the names on the choir list and, with slight personal differences, each had experienced some form of harassment but nothing severe enough to warrant more than a nuisance complaint to the police. Nine down, two to go.

Jared surprised me with an outing to the Berry Barn, a U-Pick/restaurant/craft shop /greenhouse combo located several kilometres south of the city in the middle of a twenty-seven acre plot of saskatoon berry bushes. It was a beautiful day for a drive down Valley Road with its gentle curves, mounding hills and postcard views. I regretted not taking the Mazda so that we could drive with the top down and bask in the sweet scents of Saskatchewan summer that meld so perfectly in this valley: the rich, green freshness of newly sprouted grass at the Instanturf farm; the swirling flavours of chocolate, vanilla and butter pecan from What's the Scoop ice cream shop; the flowery scent of rose bushes, honeysuckle vines and million bell petunias for sale at Floral Acres greenhouse; the hot haystack aroma of canola and flax ripening in surrounding farmer's fields; and the wafts of sweetness from the U-Pick Strawberry Ranch.

We were lucky to land the last two-seater on the restaurant's deck overlooking the South Saskatchewan river and made short work of the menu, each of us ordering cream soup served in a hollowed out, round loaf of whole wheat bread, iced tea and, of course, a slice of saskatoon berry pie. So busy were we enjoying the ambiance and our idle chit-chat that it wasn't until we got to dessert that I finally tackled some business.

"I've been working on the Pink Gopher contact list you emailed," I said. "Thanks for that, by the way."

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He smiled, and I smiled back noticing a hint of purple staining his lower lip.

"What do you call that shade of lipstick?" I asked innocently. "Plum? Lavender? Amethyst?"

"Oh man," he said with a boyish grin, wiping at his chin with a napkin. "Is it all over my face?"

"Nah," I told him. "Just on your lips. It looks good actually."

He raised an eyebrow as if uncertain whether to believe me but kept on eating.

"But there's someone missing," I told him.

"Missing? What do you mean?"

"Your list had eleven names. The photo I showed you was of twelve people."

He cocked his head to the side and narrowed his golden eyes as if concentrating. After a short bit of head counting, he said, "Nope, that's right, there were only eleven of us in the choir this year. Who's the twelfth person in the picture?"

I pulled the photo out of my pocket and laid it on the table top. "Moxie Banyon. Did her name not make the list for some reason?" I asked, expecting to hear that she'd joined the group late or simply never gave her contact information to whoever had put the list together.

"That's right," Jared said as if just remembering a forgotten fact. "Moxie was there, but she wasn't a member of the Pink Gophers."

I raised my eyebrows at that one. "But she's in the choir photo."

Jared tapped the photo. "This isn't an official choir photo or anything like that, Russell. It's just a picture we took when we were all together. If I remember it right, this was taken in December. Tanya and Moxie had just gotten together like the month before. Tanya was a member of the group; Moxie paid her own way and came along with us just so she and Tanya could be together that weekend. You know how it is with new love." He reached over the table. "Hey, you've got some berry on you."

With his thumb he wiped away the offending piece of fruit from my chin.

"Came along with you? Where was this photo taken?"

Jared laughed his easy, breezy laugh. "Crazy story actually. It was December, first part of the month I think, and the Pink Gophers had been in Regina competing in a multi-provincial gay chorus competition. It was a lot of fun. There were choirs from Manitoba and Alberta and BC and even one all the way from Nova Scotia."

"So this picture was taken at some hotel in Regina?"

"Better than that. It was taken at a motel in Davidson!"

I was chewing on the last of my pie and accepted a refill of my iced tea from a grandmotherly waitress.

"You've lost me."

"We were stranded on the way back to Saskatoon after the competition. It was one of those freak storms that forecasters don't know about until they arrive. We were only halfway home when we realized we were in trouble: the highway was all but invisible. We were over an hour away from Regina and over an hour away from home, so we had to stop because the roads were quickly becoming impassable; the first town we got to was Davidson. We were lucky to find even a handful of motel rooms left to share-everyone was getting off the roads-and we stayed the night. We took the photo to commemorate the 83 of 163

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experience. The next morning we drove home."

I was chewing on this new information, my eyes idly following the course of a group of kayakers on the nearby river when I heard Jared ask, "Are you okay? You're frowning."

"This changes things a little, that's all."

"What do you mean?"

"I was beginning to suspect that if there was something suspicious about Tanya and Moxie's deaths, the answer could be found in this group tied together by one thing in common: The Pink Gophers."

"Couldn't that still be true?"

I shook my head. "Not really. Not if Moxie wasn't a member of the choir. Whatever is happening to these people isn't happening because they were members of the Pink Gophers," I explained, "it's happening because they were in this specific picture on this specific day."

Jared nodded slowly.

I glared at the seemingly innocent faces in the picture, twelve people, all with jubilant smiles on their faces, safe from a raging blizzard, having fun, not a care in the world. I knew of or had met some of them: Jared, Tanya, Moxie, Duncan, Jin. Was one of these twelve the boogeyman? If so, what was it about this day, the moments and hours leading up to and /or following the taking of this snapshot, that drove one of them to such drastic measures?

"What can you tell me about that day, Jared? Anything strange happen? Was anyone acting out of character? Did anyone have an argument, anything like that?"

"Gosh, Russell, I'm going to have to think about that. If I had to answer now, I'd say no, nothing happened. There was a storm. We stayed the night. The next day the storm cleared and we went home.

That's it."

After paying the bill and a quick stop in the greenhouse where Jared picked up a hanging basket of blue lobelia, we headed for the parking lot.