The Taken (8 page)

“Okay –” He flipped open his PNB and found Eldwin’s number. “You want me to do this here?”

“On speakerphone.”

He dialled and a woman answered. “What is it?”

“Um, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“Speaking.” She sounded mad as hell.

“This is Detective Constable James Wingate calling again.” “You called this morning.”

He and Hazel traded a look. “That’s right, Ma’am. I was hoping your husband was home. You said you were expecting him.”

“‘Expecting’ is the wrong word to use in relation to my husband.”

“So he isn’t home?”

“Wow, you
are
a detective.”

Hazel bent over the phone. “Mrs. Eldwin,” she said firmly. “This is Inspector Detective Hazel Micallef. I’d advise you to drop your tone.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Eldwin muttered. “What did he do?”

“Why do you think he did something?”

“Well, you’re bloody eager to get him on the phone.”

“We just need to talk to him,” said Wingate. “Clear a couple of things up.”

The unmistakable sound of ice tinkling in a glass came over the speakers. “Let me ask you something, detectives. What do you know about PIs?”

“I’m sorry?” said Wingate.

“Do they even exist?”

“Private investigators?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Eldwin –” he began in an effort to get her back on track, but Hazel interrupted.

“Are you considering hiring a PI? Do you think something’s happened to your husband?”

Eldwin snorted derisively. “God no. At least I hope not. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him before I got my hands around his neck myself.”

“What is going on here, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“He goes to town Friday, saying he’s got meetings and research – who has meetings on the May long weekend, huh?”

“Well, some people –”

“– and then calls and says he’s stuck in town until Monday. And then he stops answering his phone. What does that sound like to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “What does it sound like to you?”

She swallowed something lustily. “It sounds like the same old story to me.”

“Is he not the kind of person to have meetings?”

“He’s the kind of person to penetrate other women.”

“I see,” said Hazel. “So you think he’s having an affair. And you want to hire a PI to catch him in the act?”

“So how much?” Eldwin asked.

“How much what?”

“How much for a PI? And do I have to pay expenses too?”

Hazel was getting frustrated, but she could tell this Mrs. Eldwin wasn’t going to turn out to be willing, so Hazel was going to have to be careful if she wanted to get anything useful out of the conversation. “I’d say a hundred a day is fair,” she said. “But you could save that money.”

“Oh yeah? You guys going to offer me a twofer?”

“We’ve got resources private eyes don’t. We might be able to track him down for you. But we need somewhere to start. Do you know the names of any of his associates in Toronto? What about the number of the person he went down to meet?”

“Look in the gutters,” she said. “Back alleys, whorehouses, dingy bars, that sort of thing. You’ll find him sooner or later. Let me know when you do.”

She took another big long drag on a cigarette and hung up. There was a pause and then a dial tone. “Wow,” said Hazel, “did you run
her
through CPIC?”

“I will.”

“Okay, so Eldwin’s gone to ground for whatever reason, his wife is drinking before noon, and we still have two amateur
anglers at large. Where are we with Bellocque and Paritas? Do we have addresses?”

“Nothing for this Paritas woman, so I assume she and Bellocque live together.”

“How can there not be an address attached to her number?”

“Maybe it’s a cell.”

“Aren’t cells registered?”

He looked at her, a little sadly, she thought. “Well, they can be but you can also walk into Loblaws, buy your groceries, a bunch of flowers, and a prepaid cell with nothing but a handful of cash.”

“Fine. But you have an address for this Bellocque?”

He put his finger on it. “It’s a Gilmore address. You know where that is?”

“Yes, James. I live here, remember?” She shook her head. “Jesus, it’s been three days and we still don’t have a single statement. What the hell ever happened to
the police called, call back
as a working notion?”

“I’m sorry. I should have been more active yesterday, but the truth is, with this thing not changing much” – he gestured at the laptop – “and most of our primaries out on long-weekend DUIs and fender-benders, I guess I just thought some of this could wait until today.”

“There’s a man
tied
to a chair somewhere, James. A man we were pointed to by a broken, drowned mannequin. What about that seems not urgent?”

He breathed slowly to get his heart to stop pounding. “I hear you, Skip. But the truth is, we don’t know if that man is ‘tied’ to a chair, or if he’s in any danger, or even if what we’re seeing is real. And the truth is …”

“What? What is the truth?”

“The truth is, I’m not sure who’s the lead on this now. Is it me? Because if it is, I think you need to trust me to run it my way.”

She looked at him flatly, but he saw the fire behind her eyes. “Thirty-six hours have passed in idleness over a question of chain of command? Is that why you’ve been sitting on your ass?”

He stilled his face. She’d never spoken to him like this before. “I should go run Mrs. Eldwin through the database. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

“Go see Burt Levitt and show him a picture of the mannequin. See if it means anything to him. Ask where a person could buy one or find something like it.”

“Fine,” said Wingate, and he left without another word. The space he’d been standing in seemed to be buzzing. She had an instinct to call him back in and apologize right away, but she let him go. She’d been itching for weeks to come back to work, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure her head was right.

She’d spent much of Sunday in Glynnis’s office with the door closed, reading the newspaper and keeping an eye on the site, but nothing had changed from the night before. Against their expectations, the camera’s pan hadn’t progressed anymore. It was as if someone had jarred it during that first hour after Wingate had discovered the page. It had been panning through the same visual field since then and it was making her more and more nervous. Maybe this was why she’d snapped at Wingate. She wanted them to
make
something happen.

She returned her attention to the screen. The camera was midway through its usual movement. In a minute, it would terminate on that mysterious, nervous leg. She watched it until
it did. Was this the house? The house where a corpse with a note attached to it had just been dropped off, according to “The Mystery of Bass Lake”? She didn’t want to make the wrong connections, but her mind was eager to find a link, any link, between these things.

She looked at her watch. It was just past noon. In three hours, the highways heading south were going to fill with sad revellers returning to the city, and she was going to have to have more cars on the road to deal with the inevitable mess. Like the first snowfall of the year, when it seemed as if people simply lost their minds, the end of the Victoria Day weekend always meant a massive traffic snafu. By 5 p.m. every tow truck in the county would be on call.

She popped the lid of her Percocets and gazed into the vial. There were still twenty or more left in the bottle. She put one of the white pills in her mouth and swallowed it dry. On Sunday, she’d taken only two, and at their correct intervals. And she’d had only one this morning, but foresaw it would take at least three to get through the day, and she knew the next one she took would be more out of want than need. If she could get down to only the ones she needed, then she’d come off them. It was probably a good idea to come off them. Soon.

She knew, and she’d been told, how addicting these pills were, but she’d been on them in one form or another for almost three years, and although she depended on them now, she still told herself she was not dependent on them. And if she was, wouldn’t someone tell her? Wouldn’t someone notice? In any case, if she
really wanted
to stop, she would and could. Of course she knew addicts always told themselves they could stop at any time, so her confidence was not evidence one way or the other.

But she knew herself. She knew her weaknesses were things she could exercise her will over when she wanted to. The things you told yourself tended to come true, and Hazel told herself she did not have a problem. If she did, she’d have to wait until she was out of the woods before she dealt with it.

She checked the screen on her desk again and watched the feed from the beginning of the pan. Now that she knew how it ended, just the sight of the waterstained back wall of the space was enough to get her heart pounding. She stared at it, willing it to show her something new, and her phone rang. She jumped.

“Jesus,” she said into the receiver.

“No, Spere.”

“Tell me you’ve got something for me, Howard.”

“Nothing good,” he said. “The DNS number resolves to gobbledegook. Not even a provider we can trace comes up. It’s just out there, beaming in from outer space, for all we know.”

“What about those pictures James sent you? What are they?”

“Just badly exposed snaps, I’m afraid. I’ve sent them to Allen Barry, our imaging guy, but he’s in Toronto, so it might be a while before he weighs in.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

“A pleasure as usual,” said Howard Spere.

Burt Levitt’s store was still called Micallef’s; it had been the town’s largest clothing store since 1890, and no one was ever going to change its name. It had been sold to Levitt after Hazel’s father died in 1988, and when people came in asking for Mr. Micallef, he presented himself without correcting them. In small towns like Port Dundas, the forces of multinational retail had been successfully held at bay for a long time, but now the tendrils of Walmart and Mark’s Work Wearhouse and other bottom-liners were reaching further and further, and a cornfield to the south of town had been asphalted over and planted with big box stores. Levitt was feeling it, but not as badly as the mom-and-pop grocery stores, the few that had survived on the main drag. His time was coming, he knew it, but there were still enough of the older generation who were loyal to him that he could keep going.

James Wingate had never seen the store in its heyday. The ceiling was still wired with the capsule and pulley system that had once been used to shoot cash from various departments to
the cashier, who sat at the back of the store, receiving payments and making change, which would be ferried back across the ceiling to the customer. Hazel could remember the sound of the little compartments zipping over her head and the squeak of a wooden cup being unscrewed to disgorge its contents. Micallef’s was the only store in Ontario to still have its original cash trolley.

Now the system was dusty and rusted in places and the various departments had been collapsed to make a single room. Levitt had cut employees back from the five who came with the store in 1988 to three, including himself. James had never been inside the store before now, and it had never occurred to him, in his six months in Port Dundas, to go in. But crossing its threshold, he was reminded of the Simpson’s store at Yonge and Queen streets in Toronto that his mother had taken him to to shop for a suit when he was nine. It smelled the same way and the fixtures looked the same. He had the instinct that Levitt would know something about mannequins.

Levitt, now almost eighty, came around from the cash desk and shook Wingate’s hand. “I’d heard rumours about new blood during that nastiness with poor Delia Chandler, but I admit this is the first time I have proof of your existence, Sir.”

“I guess it’s a good sign that you rarely see a detective in the shop.”

“Not necessarily,” said Levitt. “Even detectives have to buy underwear.”

Wingate smiled sadly and made a mental note to come to Main Street next time he needed something. He unsnapped his dossier case and pulled out three pictures of the Gannon Lake mannequin. His walkie buzzed; it was Hazel. He said, “I’m
where you told me to go,” and he turned it off. He held the pictures out to Levitt. “Hazel sent me over to show you these. It’s of something we found. We’re wondering what you make of it.”

Levitt took the pictures from Wingate and retreated to his cash desk, where he spread the pictures out in a row and put his glasses on to look at them. “Rather beat up, isn’t she?”

“Where would a person get something like this?”

Levitt took his glasses off. “Oh, there’s all kinds of places you could buy a mannequin. Or steal one. You can even buy them online now. This girl is rather old, though – not quite as old as mine, but not exactly up to date.”

“Would you know if you were missing one?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “But I’ve never had anything like this. I’d guess she was at least twenty years old. The new ones now are much more realistic, and you can get them Chinese, overweight, black, short, voluptuous, whatever you want. You’d think you were shopping for a mail-order bride from looking at the manufacturers’ catalogues.”

Wingate looked around the store. All of Levitt’s mannequins were headless. He realized he preferred headless mannequins to the headed ones: mannequin faces sent a chill down his spine. He recalled a horror film he’d seen in his teens where store mannequins came to life. Had the person who’d sunk their mannequin seen the same film? “Is there a place where unloved mannequins go? Like some kind of mannequin dump?”

“Yeah,” said Levitt. “It’s called eBay.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. So we have little or no chance of figuring out where this one came from.”

“Even if your girl still had a mouth, I doubt she’d be able to tell you anything.”

Wingate thanked Levitt and went back out onto the sidewalk and started back toward the station house. Then he stopped and took his PNB out of his pocket and wrote “Headless also = mouthless. Silenced.”