Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  7.

  LIFE ON THE INSTALMENT PLAN

  From the air, the reserve of St. Theresa Point is a tidy collection of houses and open ground tucked into the vast stretch of wilderness that is the Canadian Shield. It’s a barely noticeable interruption in an endless mosaic of treetops, rocky islands, and ink-dark lakes. This is the sort of landscape a hunter would prize as an untouched paradise, accessed only by small plane or, during the coldest months, an ice road laid out across the frozen land and water.

  Once on the ground, an altogether different picture emerges. After landing on a small, rocky airstrip and crossing the lake by boat, the reserve, so orderly and neat from above, displays multiple wounds of neglect. Houses, squashed up together as if huddled for warmth, are not much more than makeshift trailers. There are stores, schools, and community centres, but hardly anything for sale and very little to do. Five hundred kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, St. Theresa Point is not an easy place to supply. Bulky or heavy items can only be trucked in when the winter ice road is open, and everything costs three or four times more than it would in the city. It is a close-knit community, but one burdened by isolation and poverty. There are problems with unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide. For decades, residents have had to manage without clean drinking water in their homes or indoor toilets. “We live in Third World conditions,” reserve leaders have said repeatedly, angry that their voices are hardly being heard.

  This isolated reserve was home to Cody Mason, Tina’s boyfriend in the summer of 2014 and the witness O’Donovan regarded as key to understanding her movements in the days leading up to her death. Cody grew up in St. Theresa Point in a tiny, cramped trailer with his parents and siblings. In phone calls to the police that summer, he showed an eagerness to help.

  Later, when O’Donovan finally met Cody face to face, he suspected the boy suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome because of his pinched facial features and slowness of thinking. Certainly, the teenager was not an academic kid; he had dropped out of school around the age of twelve, before finishing Grade 6. His ability to speak and read English was limited, and he preferred to use his mother tongue of Oji-Cree. Like most of the kids on his reserve, Cody had a longing to escape the smallness of rural life. At the age of fifteen, during a trip to Winnipeg, he had disappeared from his guardians. The police were informed and a missing persons alert issued before the teenager was found and safely returned home. Two years later, just before his eighteenth birthday, Cody was given another chance to spend time in the city. His father, who’d been injured in a vehicle accident and needed to be evacuated to Winnipeg for treatment, elected to take Cody with him. The pair flew south in May 2014 and remained in Winnipeg until the St. Theresa Point administrative band council said they could no longer finance the trip and insisted they return home.

  In their interviews with detectives, Tina’s family remembered Cody as quiet and uncommunicative but always physically close to the teenager. To Tina’s Uncle Steve, his presence had been menacing, and he believed Cody was a controlling influence. Over time, though, O’Donovan came to regard Tina’s boyfriend as having been both fond and protective of her. Cody told O’Donovan that he and Tina had promised never to leave each other, and the detective felt the behaviour that Uncle Steve interpreted as overbearing was just Cody’s way of showing loyalty. And it was true that as long as Cody remained by Tina’s side, she had stayed alive.

  When Cody flew home, the young couple promised to keep in touch by Facebook, but he told police he hadn’t heard anything from Tina after leaving Winnipeg on August 6. Later, he read the same Facebook post that Thelma saw on August 17, describing how a body the police had pulled from the Red River had been identified as Tina. This was followed by more posts by Tina’s family and friends, some of whom pointed a finger of suspicion at Cody, asking if he was the one who had dumped her body in the water. That had frightened him. Cody planned to return to Sagkeeng to attend Tina’s funeral, but was apprehensive about the welcome he would receive and scared he might be attacked.

  After his team had ruled Cody out as a suspect, O’Donovan demanded that he be handled with care, cultivated for information rather than interrogated harshly. He deliberately picked the pair of detectives assigned to interview him, choosing the senior and sympathetic officer Esther Schmieder and her partner, Rob Stephanson, whom he trusted to keep the conversation relaxed. Their task was to find out everything Cody and Tina had done in the weeks prior to the discovery of her body and, now that the Homicide Unit was aware of the 911 call, if Cody could shed any light on Tina’s relationship with the mysterious older Sebastian.

  Cody and his accompanying child welfare officer had checked into an airport hotel in Winnipeg two days before the funeral in Sagkeeng. The detectives chose this as their venue to talk, hoping the more relaxed atmosphere would encourage the teenager to open up. Over a soft drink, Cody said he would answer their questions as best as he could.

  He described how, after arriving in Winnipeg that summer, he had been walking through the North End by the Salter Street Bridge when he caught sight of a pretty girl. She introduced herself as Tina, told him she was sixteen, and said that she had run away from home and had nowhere to go. Finding her attractive, Cody invited her to stay with him and his father in the apartment they were renting on nearby Selkirk Avenue. She agreed and spent the next few days sleeping on the couch.

  “Do you want to be my boyfriend?” Tina had asked one night as the two of them sat elbow to elbow, sharing a beer.

  “I said yes,” Cody said. He described their relationship as being close, but not sexual. Later, reading through the notes of the interview, O’Donovan wondered if Cody had said this to protect himself now that he knew Tina was fifteen and under the age of consent.

  On O’Donovan’s instructions, Stephanson and Schmieder took their time with their subject, making the effort to appear gentle, modulating their voices to suppress any hint of urgency or frustration. After a while Cody began to open up, describing the weeks he had spent with Tina. From what the detectives could understand, the couple’s time together had been erratic and nomadic. Cody’s father had objected to Tina staying too long, so they had moved around, exploiting whatever opportunities that came their way.

  Cody said Tina hated the Ndinawe group home she had been placed in by Child and Family Services, so the couple would alternate between Cody’s father’s apartment, Joseph Nanacowap’s place, her Auntie Angie’s house, Cody’s grandma’s home, and the rooming house on Furby Street. They would stay long enough to sleep, be fed, and use Facebook before moving on again. By day, they would hang out in the Portage Place mall, the place known to child welfare officers as a mecca for underage drug transactions and sexual exploitation. Sometimes they would take a bus ride to the more upmarket Polo Park mall, where they would sit in the food court or check messages from friends on the free-to-use laptops in the Apple Store.

  Cody described meeting Tina’s ex-boyfriend Larry Dumas, the deaf boy who had brought Tina home when she had run away in May and who communicated by writing messages on his tablet or pieces of paper. Because of their shared interest in Tina, the meetings had sometimes been tense. He recalled a time in Portage Place when Larry had bumped into them and become annoyed because he noticed love bites on Tina’s neck. When the police checked this story with Larry, he accused Cody of getting Tina into drugs. But Cody told detectives it had been the other way around. He said he didn’t take drugs, but he had seen Larry selling crack cocaine and pushing Tina into doing it as well, though Larry did not confirm these allegations. Cody said this had made him feel uncomfortable, so he would walk away whenever it was happening. Later, Cody admitted he had tried marijuana, crack, and pills himself, but in his initial police interview he was careful to stress that it wasn’t his idea to sell drugs for money.

  Tina had got to know another dealer for whom she would sell small baggies of weed. Her method was to wander around the North and West End with Cody by her side an
d strike up conversations with strangers on the streets. “Do you want to get high?” she would ask with a disarmingly impish smile.

  Whereas Cody was shy, Tina had been confident and unafraid of approaching people, even the older tattooed men obviously in gangs. But selling drugs on the streets was a risky business. Cody told the officers that at one point, Tina owed a small amount of money to her dealer. She was a tough kid who seemed not to care about the consequences, but Cody was more easily scared, so he stepped in to pay off her debt. In that way, he said they had been good for each other. He knew he wasn’t as bright or as spirited as his girlfriend, but his silent presence grounded her and helped steer her away from trouble.

  The couple often came across the same people hanging out, including two black men who would sell car rides for money. One was skinny and short and drove a large grey SUV. Cody remembered him because he had once picked them up for free and returned them safely to Cody’s father’s apartment. That man had a friend, another African immigrant, who had a dark four-door car in which he also used to give people rides. When the detectives relayed these details to O’Donovan, he asked his team to check if these were the same men as the ones from Furby Street already under suspicion.

  The question Schmieder and Stephanson were keen to ask was whether Cody knew someone named Sebastian.

  Cody recognized the name immediately. Yes, he had known Sebastian. The first time they met was sometime in mid-July, in the early hours of the morning. Cody had been holding a can of Budweiser as he and Tina walked down Charles Street, in the North End. Suddenly, an older guy with long salt-and-pepper hair cycled past, which caught their eye because he was balancing the large bulk of a car muffler on his shoulder.

  “Hey, we’ve got nowhere to go,” Cody shouted on impulse, and the man braked and came to a stop beside them.

  The teenagers said they were lost and asked for directions to Selkirk Avenue. Cody remembered how the man’s accent sounded strange and unfamiliar.

  “Call me Sebastian,” he said and explained that he was a scrap metal collector who was going to sell the muffler for cash. He told them he knew a place where they could stay for the night: an empty basement in an apartment building a few blocks away.

  “I have the keys to the city,” he said when they arrived, taking out a screwdriver and using it to pry open a door. Downstairs were old blankets lying on the floor, where, he gestured, they could sleep. Early the next morning he returned to let them out, handing them a twenty-dollar bill to buy breakfast.

  After that, the three of them had hung out several times over the summer. Once, Sebastian called out to Cody from across the street, asking for help in breaking into a small yard of junk metal. Another time they met up on Selkirk Avenue. Sebastian always seemed to be on the lookout for metal and copper wire, which he would pile up on his bike or in a stolen shopping cart and wheel to scrap merchants for cash.

  On one occasion, the pair followed Sebastian into the yard of a house on Alexander Avenue, a street that led down to the dock on the Red River, close to where Tina’s body was later found. He showed them a small tent pitched in the yard, which he explained was his home. Peering through the tent flap, Cody could see he had stored the muffler inside, along with some red-and-black striped blankets and a bunch of pills in bottles. As they chatted, Sebastian picked up one of the bottles and tipped out four or five pills, which he handed to Tina. They were gabbies. He showed her how to snap open the capsules and snort up the powder inside. Tina devoured them in seconds. Sebastian didn’t take any himself, preferring to inject crystal meth into his arm.

  Cody remembered another time when the three of them left the North End and crossed an old steel bridge over the Red River into the quieter, more affluent suburb of Glenelm. Here, late one evening, Sebastian took them to meet friends of his who lived in the last in a row of plain-looking townhouses, conspicuous in the leafy old neighbourhood. The friends were a couple in their late twenties or early thirties. The woman, who introduced herself as Sarah, appeared part Indigenous, with long dark hair dyed with pink streaks and shaved short over her left ear. Tina liked this, because it mirrored how her own hair was shaved. Sarah’s boyfriend, who was also Indigenous, was introduced as Tyrell. Cody related to the detectives how they had sat around drinking Budweiser until Sarah and Tyrell went upstairs to bed. Sebastian left, and Cody and Tina crashed on a bed in the living room. The next morning, Sebastian returned to take them away.

  Excited by the insight Cody was giving them into Sebastian’s world, Schmieder and Stephanson asked if they could drive him around to point out the places he’d mentioned. But first they stopped by McDonald’s for a burger, a treat for the boy from the remote reserve, where fast food was a luxury. When they reached Glenelm, Cody wasn’t able to recognize Sarah and Tyrell’s townhouse, so the detectives turned to Alexander Avenue, driving slowly to let Cody study each house in turn, hoping he could remember the one with the tent in its backyard. When they reached a house with a chain slung across its entrance, he told them to stop. “This is it,” he said, and the detectives noted down the number: 686. Through the car windows, they could see the dome of a small camping tent pitched in the yard behind.

  After dropping Cody back at his hotel, Schmieder and Stephanson returned to the Public Safety Building to brief O’Donovan about what they had learned. When their boss heard Cody’s testimony, he decided not to bring the teenager straight in to the station. In his view, Cody’s statement could wait, but 686 Alexander couldn’t. It was possible Sebastian was still there. O’Donovan signalled to Detective Sergeants Jeff Stalker and Myles Riddell to go immediately. Both were experienced officers with a solid background in the case, having already taken part in the duvet cover canvass and interviewed several of the witnesses.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you live here?” Jeff Stalker asked the young woman who appeared when he knocked on the door of 686 Alexander. He and Riddell had already noted that the backyard was open to the street, meaning anyone could come and go from the tent without disturbing the occupants of the house.

  The woman identified herself as twenty-year-old Tracey Beardy. At first, she looked puzzled when Stalker asked whether an older man named Sebastian was living in the tent, but then her expression opened up. “Oh, you mean Frenchie?” she said, and gave a perfect description of the man Cody had spoken about: white, in his early fifties, with long, greying hair that he liked to wear in a little ponytail.

  Tracey told the detectives she had met Frenchie a year or two earlier, when she had been working in a doughnut shop in the North End. It was open twenty-four hours, the sort of place where cops on the night shift would stop by for coffee. Frenchie would come in because he had nowhere else to go, and she would watch him sit for hours, nursing one cup of coffee. Sometimes she would sell him a day-old doughnut for cheap, letting him stay because he wasn’t doing any harm. He could be useful helping to load the shelves when a new batch of doughnuts was ready.

  Tracey said her fifteen-year-old sister, Chantelle, had come into the shop a few times and chatted to Frenchie, as had her mom, Ida. Back then he seemed like a cool guy, and they had invited him to their house to hang out. He brought beers and a little weed, which he shared with the girls. Tracey said he hinted that if she let him stay in the house he would have sex with her in return, an idea she described as “a bit gross.” But her mom, who had a soft heart for hopeless cases, had taken pity on him. She had found out he was sleeping rough down by the river, and she offered to let the man stay in the family’s tent, which she allowed him to pitch in the yard.

  By this point, the other occupants of 686 Alexander had gathered around to find out who Tracey was speaking to. Stalker explained they were there to ask about Frenchie and that he and Riddell would interview them in turn, noting down their names and ages.

  Chantelle spoke first, confirming she had often hung out with Frenchie and knew he was also called Sebastian. Ida was initially less willing to talk. The
forty-six-year-old was the family’s matriarch, a battle-hardened, plain-speaking woman with a voice made coarse by years of drinking and smoking. She had had her own trouble with the police and didn’t seem pleased to see the officers in her kitchen. But when she realized none of her children were under suspicion, she relaxed and began to open up.

  “I feel sorry for people who are homeless, so I let him stay in my backyard,” she explained. Frenchie had been there since July, but Ida said she hadn’t seen him since somebody had stolen his bike and Frenchie had smashed up her barbecue with a hammer. In the summer they had lit a fire pit outside and, even with the vicious mosquitos, enjoyed sitting around it in the evenings, drinking beer and roasting hot dogs and s’mores. “Frenchie would be there drinking strawberry margaritas,” she told the detectives. She seemed as disapproving of his taste in alcohol as she was of his taste in women. She had not liked the way he stared at fifteen-year-old Chantelle when she wore her summer shorts. “It was creepy,” she said, adding that Frenchie always seemed to want to get her daughter drunk or high.

  Most of the time, Frenchie had been high himself on crystal meth. Once, she found him doing the drug inside her house and kicked him out, only for him to come back a few days later. She would sometimes take pity on him and allow him to use the shower or wash his clothes in the bathroom sink. He had a collection of blankets and bedding that she believed were stolen from the thrift store, Value Village, because she had seen their tags still on them. She described how he would fold these up inside the tent away from summer bugs or hang them out to air on the fence. She had seen them so many times that she could easily recall their patterns and colours.

  “Did you ever see Frenchie bring guests back to the tent?” asked Stalker, knowing that Cody had said he and Tina had visited. Although the detectives had not explained why they were there, the family had already guessed they were asking about the famous murder: the girl in the river, Tina Fontaine.