The Killing Type (5 page)

She smiles and shakes her
head.

“Well, I don’t know that bit of
Shakespeare, but I think I know what you’re getting at. In my lucid
moments, such as they are, I do know that I am crazy to think this
way, but I can’t help being affected, feeling scared even, when I
am being irrational. Sorry, I’m blabbering now and not making any
sense.”

The waiter arrives with our soup just
as I am shaking my head to reassure her that she is making sense,
or that if she isn’t, it’s quite understandable. I wonder about her
motivations as much as about my own. The primal, primeval,
primitive, primordial ones, even tip-tapping in alphabetical vowel
playfulness like that, do not apply in my case: I have no interest
in sexual congress, even the kind that is tempered with what the
magazines, the cinema, even apparently real people, like to call
love. Wait, wait, wait—it is not bitterness or an aversion to
having (or causing) a broken heart, and certainly it is nothing
misogynous or otherwise grandly negative. A matter of practicality,
really: being disconnected makes it easier to get one’s work done.
I also do not have any particular interest in smoking her out (an
atrocious colloquialism I heard on television last night, from a
seriously overacted crime investigator) about the killings. I don’t
have enough evidence to suspect her yet, and I am disinclined to
fish around (from the second of the back-to-back episodes: must
stop watching that box!) for any right now.

As for her, well, I don’t think she’s
a killer. There’s a certain innocence about her that isn’t
compatible with a murderous streak—though, of course, murderous
streaks are notoriously unpredictable. Whenever those magnificently
coiffed reporters—women with elegant-anvil jawlines, men with
overdeveloped trapezius muscles making their sport coats fit
funny—whenever they interview the distraught suburban neighbour of
the man who has been keeping heads in his freezer for years, or has
beaten his wife to death with a hammer for suggesting a divorce,
or—well, the killer is always remembered as a quiet guy whose
actions come as a complete surprise. Why is it that we never hear
that he was always trouble? So, I don’t actually know anything at
all about Tony of course, and it’s just a feeling, as prone to
being inaccurate as any other—a feeling I have that she couldn’t
kill anything.

The soup is good. Our eyes meet across
the table after the first simultaneous sip and we nod at each other
vigorously and raise our eyebrows as if we are approving something
much more significant. I have to admit that there is the tinge of
something in her eyes that I just can’t figure out, a glint like on
a well-polished knife blade, a darkness like down the barrel of a
gun, and it gives me a chill, even here with my face above the
wafting warmth of the dahl. I look down.

“This is only the second time I’ve
been here,” she says, and I look up while she mesmerizes me again.
“Yeah, second time. It was almost exactly a year ago now that Mitch
and I were here. I don’t know what ever happened to him,” and her
voice drifts away while I wait for any bit more of information that
she is willing to divulge.

“You broke up?”

“No, no, nothing like that. We weren’t
like that. Just met up once and came here and then he was
gone.”

I consider for a moment that this
might be some kind of bizarre oblique confession, and I search my
database of a mind for keyword Mitch. Nothing.

“Oh, a date?” I offer.

“Right. One night. You know, that kind
of thing.”

That kind of thing. In fact, I don’t
really know, not from personal experience at any rate. We both
finish our soups, Tony exactly one sip behind me, like the swimmer
who misses touching by just a couple of hundredths of a second. The
waiter has been monitoring from the bar at the back of the
restaurant, and he is there at the side of our table immediately.
The bowls go, nods are exchanged, and the dishes arrive in all
their splendour within about a minute. The smells waft again and we
are both smiling broadly.

“I have a confession to
make,” she says, and I nearly guffaw a hunk of naan and lamb
vindaloo. I look up. “I’d noticed you in the library before,” she
continues, “right in there among all that murder stuff. I didn’t
quite
stalk
you or
anything, but I thought that it was interesting that you were
interested in the same stuff I am, and so I kind of, well, waited
around for you.” She stops. “This is kind of
embarrassing.”

I laugh in spite of myself, in spite
of my minutest worry—about what, I don’t know—my own safety? I fake
it a little, trying not to divulge being concerned or, frankly,
flattered.

“That shouldn’t be embarrassing at
all. No problem. Thanks for telling me ...” and perhaps three or
four similar reassurances which convey very little truthful
information. I was a good poker player when I lived in Toronto—a
group of us from the department played for dollar bets every
Saturday night—and the skills necessary for that much-underrated
game serve me well in real-life human interactions in which a
little dissembling is necessary for protection against revealing
too much to an adversary whom I’m not sure I can trust yet. She
smiles, looks down, then up, and then down again to resume her
eating.

The non-fatal confession, and perhaps
my own transparent reply, have had a dampening effect on the
conversation. Her comments are confined to the food now, and I do
no better. She sneaks a look at her watch, and the whole business
makes me sad and disappointed, seeing the efforts at whatever
degree of genuine human contact reduced to a dueling restaurant
review. Some of the dishes are excellent, some are middling, and
some are horrid, and when we are going our separate ways on the
sidewalk outside the restaurant, I feel somewhat that everything
has cancelled everything else out, the meal and the evening
amounting to nothing. I’m surprised when she speaks up.

“We should do this again,” she says
and the invitation doesn’t seem perfunctory.

“That would be—would be
wonderful.”

She shakes my hand and then seems to
position herself for landing a hug, but apparently thinks better of
it and simply starts walking away, waving nervously and saying
something that I can’t quite catch. I consider for the briefest
moment querying her on it (as if it might be a vital clue to
something or other), but I change my mind, turn exactly 90 degrees,
and head home.

Chapter 6

Sometimes a mystery in real life can
be solved by studying fictional ones, and there is the added
benefit to me in that such research satisfies a scholarly urge
which has lain unroused for well over a year now (how the time
flies!).

I get up early on a brisk
Friday morning, walk to my neighbourhood coffee place (they’ve
called it, alas, the Coffee Place since 1984), and sit for about a
half hour with the
Globe and
Mail
, a latte, and an exquisite cranberry
scone before I set to planning my strategy for the day. Once the
last crumbs of news and biscuit have been consumed, I sit for a
moment or two and watch the traffic hurrying by (whence and to
where? I wonder), a young girl also right there out on the
sidewalk, standing still, underdressed for this weather, but
standing quite still looking up at the sky—

Distractions.

I decide that I will spend some time
digging out information about the Canadian mystery novel. Where did
it come from? Where has it gone? What is it at all? I exit the
Place just as an old man enters whom I recognize but just cannot
identify. He nods affectionately and pauses ever so briefly,
apparently expecting me to do the same. Not wanting to prolong the
awkwardness, I point at my watch in a vague attempt to indicate a
pressing appointment, and he seems genuinely pleased. He is
babbling something or other as I step out onto the street and the
door whooshes closed behind me.

It’s a short walk to the
library and I luxuriate in it even more as a brisk wind pushes at
my back. The sun is out, too, and I have to squint when it peeks
out from behind clouds occasionally. The library is modestly
crowded, just the way I like it. I find out that the first crime
fiction by a Canadian was a novel now known as
The Mysterious Stranger
, by Walter
Bates. It was published under that title in New Haven, Connecticut,
in 1817, and later in the same year (I believe) in London, England,
under a cacophonous mouthful of a title, beginning
Companion for Caraboo
and
going on for nearly a hundred words.
¹

Bates was in fact born in
the United States, but he eventually moved to Canada and settled in
Kingston, Ontario.
²
The other
writer with some claim to the title of first Canadian mystery
writer was at least born in Canada—actually near Kingston, on Wolfe
Island, just a 15-minute ferry ride from the city across the mouth
of the St. Lawrence River. His name is Grant Allen and he published
a collection of short stories entitled
An
African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious
Colonel Clay
(London, 1897).

One or two hundred years
later, and the crime fiction which crowds the review pages of the
newspapers is almost all American. The reviewers crow about the
books being
more than
crime fiction: one is “a brilliant history of a time and
place,” another teaches “some really important and useful lessons,”
and the plot of still another (I
can
go on) is “woven with ancient lore.” The only
Canadian in the gaggle has apparently squawked out a book with a
“grisly set-up” and “plenty of well-written
gore.”
³

As a scholar, I don’t know what to
think. I don’t expect anything like what might be called
“improvement” in the course of the literary history of any genre.
Literature is not a moral adventure, a macrocosm of the story about
starting from nothing and developing into something better. Joyce
is not superior to Homer: he is just writing about three thousand
years later. Still, I would have at least hoped that the state of
the lowly mystery, crime fiction, the narratives of murder—I would
have hoped that they would not have degenerated into dullness and
didacticism and mere bloodshed.

“Anything interesting?” I hear behind
me, and at first my concentration prevents me from realizing that
the question is directed at me.

“Andrew?”

I turn around and see Rachel gleaming
in front of me. Perhaps it is the reading I have been doing all
day, mysteries on mysteries, but I don’t have the sudden joy I
should have in seeing her again. Damn this impressionable head of
mine, but the first thing I think about is how she could possibly
know I would be here. Why is she following me around? Why is she
spying on me? What is she up to that she needs to be sure that I am
secured so that she can carry on with her nefarious
activities?

“Hi, Rachel.” Cold,
factual.

The dear girl, not at all aware of the
ridiculous machinations going on in my mind, and positively
brimming with a joie de vivre that I haven’t experienced since my
early halcyon days at Toronto U.—the dear thing just smiles down on
me, now squirming awkwardly in my seat.

“How goes the research?”

“I’m taking a bit of a break today,
sort of,” I say as she makes her way around to where I am sitting
and plonks herself down confidently on the low table.

“Sort of?”

“Yes, just doing some research into
murders generally. Murder mysteries, actually.” I might suspect the
girl for some unfounded fantastical reason, but she is disarming.
“What have you been up to?” I dare, and before she can answer:
“It’s quite a, well, coincidence meeting you here?”

“No, not really, I guess. I mean, I
often come down here to the university library. Sort of like a
busman’s holiday thing, I guess.” She chuckles. “But I often come
down here just to read some of the papers that we don’t get at the
public library, that kind of thing.”

“So you’re reading
newspapers?”

“Well, today, no, not today actually.
Just thought I’d have a look around.”

Somewhere now deep inside me I do
realize the utter inappropriateness of my interrogation of her.
Even the thought of her being somehow involved in two murders is so
outlandish as to defy reason. I relax and accept the fact that I am
chatting with a friendly librarian.

“That sounds productive.”

She sits up straight on the table and
fixes me with her eyes. “Listen,” she says, “can I ask you
something, or—not so much a question, but could I offer
something?”

“Of course, but I’m not quite sure
what you mean.”

“It’s simple really. I’m not meaning
to interfere with your work or anything: I have a lot of respect
for any kind of research, especially research which can have
practical results in real life, I do. I guess I’d just like to
offer my services”—she blushes—“I mean to say, I know a lot about
sources, and I’d just like to say that if you need any guidance in
getting at those local sources, I’d be more than happy to help you
out. That’s all.”