Stain of the Berry (3 page)

"Actually," I said off handedly, "I've pretty much given up on her."

It was a bit of a lie. Or maybe not, I wasn't sure yet. I'd spent considerable time and energy attempting to track down my ex-neighbour over the past few months. And money. Truth be told, my investigation into her disappearance was a big reason why my bank account was about to file for social assistance. As a detective - and Sereena's friend - I felt a responsibility to find her and guilt when I continually failed to uncover even a sliver of a hint as to where she'd gone. In indomitable Sereena fashion, she'd pulled off the perfect disappearing act. All I or anyone else had to go on were bits and scraps that added up to…bubkes.

"I don't believe you," Anthony stated. "But I know you're discouraged. We all are. We miss her, and we're worried about her."

I nodded and was glad to see our wine arrive.

"But that's not all, is it?"

Ah geez, here it comes.

"Someone is turning thirty-five in about ten days," Anthony said after he'd tasted and approved of the wine. "And not embracing the idea I take it?"

"Y'know," I said, leaning in towards Anthony, suddenly wanting to talk about this. "I wouldn't mind the age thing so much if there weren't so many reminders. I was paying for gas the other day and this young dude behind the counter complimented my wallet and asked where I got it. I thought, hey, a hip, young guy thinks I have a hip, young wallet. I told him it came from Birks. And do you know what he said to me?"

Anthony winced in anticipation.

"He said, 'great, that'll make a perfect gift for my dad's birthday'! His
dad!
Anthony, I have a
dad's
wallet!"

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"Nonsense. I've seen your wallet and it is a stylish, sophisticated accoutrement. And it should be," he sniffed. "I gave it to you."

I kept on with my barrage of woes. "Sometimes the best I can do on the treadmill at the gym is a fast walk instead of a run, I found a white chest hair, and...aw shit, Anthony...the other night...my wonderpants felt tight around the waist."

My wonderpants. Everyone has a pair. They're black, never wrinkle, I've owned them forever yet they're always in style, and, most importantly, I've been told they make my ass look great. The whole point of wonderpants is that they always look good and always fit-even if you did eat a bag of Doritos the night before.

But now, I had to face the very real and undesirable possibility that my ass had outgrown their otherworldly powers.

Anthony sipped his wine contemplatively, then said, "It's much too soon for a mid-life crisis, puppy.

You're a six-foot-one, fresh-faced, sandy-haired Adonis for goodness sake, so don't rush out for a barbwire tat around your bicep or an age-inappropriate wardrobe from Abercrombie & Fitch. This isn't about aching traps or greying hair."

I gulped at my wine, hopeful for good news. "It isn't?"

"You just need a really good date."

Crap. Wrong answer. "I date."

"I’m not talking about random crushes followed by randy sex, I'm talking about meeting a man who gets your heart and head and blood racing."

"But-"

He shushed me. "Just wait, Russell, I'm not done. I'm not talking about marriage. I’m not talking about a move-in-set-up-house-get-a-crystal-pattern relationship. I respect your judgment on when and if that's right for you. I'm talking about at least opening yourself up to meeting some guys who might...shall we say, befuddle you enough to at least momentarily sway your judgment... regardless of the final outcome."

With sun reflecting off his shiny pate, the server delivered our food with quiet efficiency. For once I was hoping for a chatty waiter. I looked down at our plates. Somehow Anthony had ended up with a beautifully arranged but inconsequential salad of frilly greens whereas I sat before a pile of meat smothered in sauce. No wonder my pants were beginning to revolt.

"I don't understand a word of what you just said," I told my friend.

"No," Anthony said with a wicked smile. "I wouldn't imagine that you would. Therefore I've taken the liberty of arranging a birthday present for you that will explain everything."

"Oh?" Suspicion.

"His name is Doug Poitras."

Jiminy Cricket crack house cracker! And other curse-filled cusses raced through my head but not quite out of my mouth.

"You got me a man?" I asked in astonishment. "You got me a real, live, breathing man for my birthday?"

Anthony gave me a look drier than crust. "He can be returned, Russell."

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"How about we cancel the order altogether?" I suggested with little humour left in my voice. I did not want this. "I'll make the call. Where did you get him? The Hudson Gay Company? Boyfriends-R-Us?"

He ignored that. "Even Errall is getting back in the game. She's bringing the new woman in her life to your surprise birthday party."

Whoa. Too much new information at once. How did I-a detective, no less-not know about any of this?

"Errall is dating? I'm having a surprise birthday party?"

"I know little else about Errall's guest so don't ask. And I tell you about the party only because no one should be surprised by a social gathering in their honour. Ever. Especially you. The chances of you showing up in...well, in something as disastrous as your current costume, are much too high to risk. I'll send something over from the store of course."

I slumped into my plate of meat. "Now I really am melancholy."

"Ah, it never rains but it pours," he responded, nibbling on his delightful wee salad.

"Spouting overused cliches, Anthony? So unlike you." I had more wine. I usually don't go for roses - a
Chateau de Sours
Bordeaux from France - but this one wasn't bad and I needed the thirteen per cent sustenance.

Anthony delivered his next line with his smile awry. "In addition to Mr. Poitras, you seem to have another admirer." He nodded to somewhere over my shoulder.

I surveyed the street crowd but saw no such admirer. I gave Anthony an inquiring look.

"Over there," he said. "She's loitering near the Bulk Cheese Warehouse. Rather menacing looking really, a fetching Grace Jones meets the Terminator type. Staring daggers into you."

How could I miss that? I moved my gaze to the two-storey, grey brick building across the street and just caught the tail feathers of a tall, black woman with wide shoulders and a storm trooper gait before she disappeared around a corner.

She must be one of the street performers, I thought to myself. The Fringe brings out all kinds of characters into the streets. But something in the back of my mind warned me that I was horribly wrong.

The officious rapping on my front door came at the crack of dawn-not quite 9 a.m.-Thursday morning. I was just out of bed and barely dressed (a pair of loose, threadbare, grey cotton, U of S sweatpants) and a bit grumpy (no coffee yet).

My house is on a large lot at the dead end of a quiet, little-travelled street; a grove of towering aspen and thick spruce neatly hide it from view of the casual passerby. Inside, the house is a unique mix of open, airy rooms and tiny, cozy spaces, each appealing to me depending upon my mood. A six-foot-high fence encircles the backyard and at the rear of the lot, accessible by way of a back alley, is a two-car garage with a handy second storey I use for storage. My home is my castle, a place where I re-energize and take refuge from the world and expect to have my morning coffee in peace. So enough with the knocking!

I pulled open the front door ready to berate the devil in a blue dress behind it. Darren Kirsch may not exactly be the devil, and as a Criminal Investigations Division detective, he doesn't wear a blue uniform anymore, but close enough.

"Ever hear of calling before making an early morning raid?" I greeted him with a scowl. "Do you have the phone number for the police complaints department? You must know it off by heart. I'm sure you must give it out often enough." Low blow, I know, but no coffee is no coffee.

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Darren Kirsch is the archetypical City of Saskatoon policeman-six feet plus with a top-heavy, muscular body; short, dark hair; neat, dark moustache; deep-set, stern eyes and a snarly nose, but that particular combination on this particular big lug is actually pretty darn cute. Cute and as heterosexual as wearing socks with ugly sandals in the summer. He looked me over, from the freak show that was my morning hair, down my bare chest all the way to my unshod feet. He shoved the rolled up, plastic-wrapped copy of the morning paper that had been lying at my front gate into my abdomen and pushed past me, barking the command, "Read it."

I closed the door and watched the warm reception given this intruder into my morning by Barbra and Brutus. Turncoats. "Don't you need a warrant to barge in here like this?"

He crouched down to schnauzer level to scruff up the erogenous zones behind their ears. "These two don't seem to mind. Now read the paper, Quant. Page A5, the local news column." He stood up and headed toward my kitchen. The dogs and I followed.

I figured out pretty early on that to make a go of being a private detective in this city, I needed a contact in the police department. Kirsch is mine. We're still working on figuring out where the line is that we shouldn't cross, and we most definitely are still working on deciding whether we even like one another, but we help each other out when we can. Although I suspect him to be a closet homophobe and he suspects me of suspecting him, it works for us.

By the time I freed the
StarPhoenix
from its protective packaging, flopped onto a stool at my kitchen island, found the page Darren directed me to and read the news column, he'd managed to find the makings for coffee, set it to perk and let the dogs out the back to enjoy the start of what looked to be another bright, shiny day.

I felt Darren hovering over me and his thick arm brushed my bare shoulder as he pointed to one of the brief articles. "This one," he said hoarsely.

I read the four or five lines again while he watched. It was about an apparent suicide during the early hours of Wednesday morning. A young woman, name not yet released, jumped from an eighth floor balcony of a building on the corner of University Drive and Broadway Avenue. I had walked right by that building on my way to meet Anthony for lunch at the Fringe. Even so, other than a sense of sadness at the loss of life, the story meant nothing to me. I looked up at Darren questioningly.

"Where are your mugs?"

I pointed to a cupboard and watched in idle fascination as super-hunk-cop served me up my morning Java. What was going on? Why was he here?

"Do you know anything about this?" Darren asked, placing his butt on a stool opposite my own.

"No. Should I?"

He didn't immediately answer, instead watching my face as if trying to decide something. "The woman who jumped, her name was Tanya Culinare." Another pause. When I didn't react one way or the other, he asked, "Does that name mean anything to you?"

"No, Kirsch, it doesn't. But I'm getting the feeling you think it should. Why don't you stop with the games and tell me what's going on?" My near nakedness-even though I was in the kitchen of my own home-was making me feel inferior to Kirsch in his bland but serious looking suit and tie, and I wasn't liking the sensation much.

"We searched Miss Culinare's apartment, looking for a suicide note..."

Uh-huh.

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"We found a note. Next to the phone."

Okay, you got me. Morbid curiosity. "What did it say?"

"Only two things. Your name. And your phone number."

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Nothing had come out of my recent visit from Constable Darren Kirsch. Yes, the dead woman had a scrap of paper with my name and phone number on it, but I had no idea who she was-other than the faint suspicion that she was the mysterious after-midnight caller who'd hung up on me several days earlier.

Curious, but ultimately it led nowhere, which left me with absolutely nothing to do. Professionally speaking, that is.

I'm the kind of person who has little problem filling time one way or the other. I love my work, but in its absence I can always find a million things that need doing or ways to entertain myself. And so I found myself playing Mr. Butch around PWC for the next couple of days, doing those tasks that Errall as landlord would hire someone else to do but to which I offered myself as a confident expert. I replaced a cracked window pane in Beverly's office, cleaned out the eavestroughs, sprayed recalcitrant thistles in our parking lot with weed killer and made an ill-fated attempt at fixing a leaky kitchen faucet. At the end of the week, I presented Errall with a healthy bill for my services, which she paid with a cutting barb: something about believing J should pay
her
for giving me the opportunity to exercise my flagging masculinity.

So, after all that manly-man toil, I was happy to spend Saturday getting my hair cut, nails manicured and aching muscles massaged in preparation for a boys' night out with my friend Jared, Anthony Gatt's long-term partner. Jared's successful career as a fashion and runway model had all but ground to a halt since he'd recently turned the model-death-knell age of thirty five.. .see, it is a cursed age...and he was in a state of flux as he figured out just what it was he was going to do with the rest of his life. This was lucky for me because I was in the mood to play and he had all the time in the world. Our plan was to meet for drinks on Earl's deck, one of the best in town, follow that with a late curry dinner at the Taj Mahal, then maybe a few more drinks and some dancing at Divas.