by Warren Court
“You playing detective now?” Sergeant Kenny said.
“Did you go to school with the Truscott girl?”
“I did.” Armour could sense the sergeant tensing. “I dated Barbara for about a month. Then she…” Kenny stopped himself.
“Then she what?”
“She got hurt. She went to a different school.”
“How’d she get hurt?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Which is it? I heard she was abducted. Maybe assaulted. Ran from the car, got hit by another one.”
“Whoa look at you. You come into this town, you start poking your nose around in everyone’s business. I don’t see a badge on you, I don’t see a private investigator’s license. You do have to be licensed to do this sort of thing you know.”
Armour knew that wasn’t true. “I was a journalist, I know the rules.”
Kenny reached in his pocket and handed Armour back the ticket. “Good luck with your investigation.”
He went back to his cruiser and paused.
“These folks around here won’t like too much for a stranger to come digging all this up again, especially after so many have tried before.”
He got in and Luke pulled away. Kenny didn’t look at Armour again.
That was stupid, Armour thought. He had been developing a rapport with that man, he might have been able to help him. He looked down at the ticket. It was for forty-five dollars. Great. Armour had enough to gas up and get out of Port Dover.
On his way out of town Armour saw a sign which said Eastman Lake Steel. ELS. Armour snapped his fingers and pulled over by the side of the road as a double tanker truck roared by and let loose with its air horn. Armour checked his notebook, Burke had written; Checked ELS, car found but driver has strong alibi.
Armour crept up to the exit for ELS and went down a paved road that had obviously been unused for some time. There were weeds in the middle of it and long grass on either side. He drove down through a dense set of pine trees. In the distance he could see large dark shapes and thin metal object spoking up into the blue sky.
About half a kilometre from the plant there were a series of signs directing visitors and deliveries to various entrance points. Armour took the one for visitors. The steel plant was surrounded by large grass covered mounds, almost like castle battlements. The building’s smoke stacks and a tower rose above them. The road took Armour between two of these mounds and the plant revealed itself.
Out in front was a two-story office building, beyond that were large industrial buildings, some connected by steel conduits and pipes. There were metal Quonset huts and a warehouse also. The office building windows had no glass and a piece of plywood covered the main entrance. There were parking spots in front of it. Armour could still make out ‘Visitors’ in yellow paint and parked. To the right of the office building was a large parking lot, shot through with tall weeds and in general disrepair. Scattered here and there were rusting piles of steel beams and other assorted industrial junk. Beyond the plant on all three sides were more pine trees.
Armour could tell ESL hadn’t been as big as Stelco or Dofasco, steel plants situated on Lake Ontario, but there were all types of steel factories in the world. Armour suspected that this place made some sort of specialty product, taking cold rolled steel from the bigger companies, melting and forming down into a specific shape, ingots or flat panels, or coils. Whatever. He was a Hamilton boy born and bred but he admitted he knew very little about the industry that had been a boon for Hamilton for most of the twentieth century. Now there was talk of replacing Hamilton’s steel giants with a tech park.
He got out and went up to the office building. This would be a great place to scavenge for old tools, he thought. Things he would put to use back at his house or sell to an antique shop. He should revisit the place with his friend who had a metal detector.
Armour looked in through one of the open windows and saw a bare room ravaged by exposure to weather. Peeling paint and rust on anything metal. There were obvious signs of animal inhabitants. He started to walk around the side of the building and came upon a huge steel bearing trailer, minus the tractor. It was almost solid rust and great flakes of it were coming off the body, the huge tires long since flat and grey with age.
Coming around the end of the trailer something yellow caught his eye. It was a sticker on the rear end of the trailer above a mud flap. It was only the top half of a sticker; the rest was torn away. it showed a man in a hard hat, with bulging muscles lifting a steel beam above his head like Atlas holding the world. It said Support Local… then that was it, nothing else remained on the sticker. Armour figured it was a local union shop, support sticker.
Then he remembered Burke’s files. The twelve-year-old witness who saw a brown car with a yellow sticker with a man on it. Could this be that sticker? Was that why Burke came out here? Armour suspected a lot of these stickers were stuck up back in the heyday of steel making and union busting in the province. He knelt down and touched the sticker with his hand and behind him he heard a click. The sound of a hammer of a pistol being drawn back.
13
“Stand up slowly. No sudden movements.” Armour raised his hands and turned slowly just like the man asked.
The man was a bit older than Armour, it was hard to tell. His face was blemished and looked almost swollen and when he spoke armour saw rotten black gaps where some front teeth should be. The ones that were there were twisted and yellowed. He was unshaved and his stiff grey bristles of beard caught the afternoon sun. He was wearing faded jeans, steel-toed work boots and a dark blue jacket that said Security on it.
“What the fuck you doing around here?” the man said. He had a long barrel revolver, probably a .38. He lowered it slightly so that it was down by his gut, but the business end of the gun was kept pointed squarely at Armour.
“I was just driving by. Wanted to investigate.”
“Investigate what? You’re trespassin’.”
“You work here?”
“Of course, I fucking work here. What, are you some sort of village idiot?”
“No, I mean can you tell me about this place? When did it close down?”
The man coughed, turned his head quickly and let fly a yellow green mucous ball then snapped his head back to Armour.
“Get back in that shit box of yours and get the fuck out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” Armour said and he started to back away from the man, his arms still raised.
“I catch you here again I can arrest you. Or worse.”
Armour walked backwards until he’d put enough distance between him and the guard, then turned and walked quickly to the car. Again, he was thankful for the electric starter. The hand crank was finicky and sometimes backfired. He got the car going and in a flurry of loose gravel he was out of there. He turned back once and saw the security guard still standing there, watching him leave, the gun now pointing at the ground.
Armour dropped his jacket over the arm of his couch, went into the kitchen and made himself a South Side Gin Fizz, muddling the lemon juice and mint leaves with the Bacardi white rum. He opened his ice box, a vintage Westinghouse, and pulled out a metal ice cube tray. Lifting the metal bar of the tray violently the ice cubes went shooting off in all directions.
“Damn it.” Scooping three up he put them in the shaker and returned the rest to the ice box. He shook the drink with ice and strained it into a coupe glass and topped it up with some seltzer out of a bottle he had handy. The gas had not leaked out and the soda was still fizzy.
With the cold cocktail in hand and his note book he went out to his porch to catch the last of the day’s sun. The days were getting shorter now, the heat had subsided and he was looking forward to fall. Some of his trees had started too turn. Time to get the bushel baskets out for the garbage men, the ones who drove the yard waste truck. Armour didn’t know why the city wouldn’t let him burn his leaves. He loved the smell of that. Who didn’t? He had tried
one time and a by-law officer had come down the road and spoke to him sternly. Told him that it was against the law and he could be fined. Armour had doused the leaves. Luckily when he bought the house there were a half dozen bushel baskets in the garage and the men, reluctantly, begrudgingly, took them and tossed their contents in the back of their truck. It saved him buying those paper bags that everyone else used. That, to him, made no sense at all.
With his drink empty, Armour opened his note book and went over things. He added Eastman Lake Steel next to his entry about the files from Burke’s house and added a bit about the sticker –like he was going to forget that revelation any time soon. He could find out which local it was, that might be useful. Who would know about that then? What he didn’t add was the gun toting security guard, something else he would not forget.
Unions were a tough bunch, he knew that they had deep connections to organized crime. Organized crime. No, he couldn’t go see Johnny Pops, that would take guts that Armour would never profess to having. But he had once when he needed to.
He remembered his first encounter with Johnny Pappanillo. It had not gone too bad and in the end, although Johnny had given him nothing, he had walked out of that social club in down town Hamilton with information useful to solving the Krantz torso murder of 1926.
He could go see him again. No, he couldn’t, too dangerous. The phone rang and he went in to answer it.
“Hi, Mel.”
“Armour, what’s up? Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days.”
“I know, I’ve been out of town.”
“You, Armour Black, go somewhere?”
“Yeah, I’m still looking into that thing. You know.”
“The murder. Oooh, do tell.”
“Not over the phone,” Armour said.
“Has to be in person huh. Armour if you want to see me you don’t have to invent excuses like solving a cold case.”
“Huh, what?” Melanie laughed at his befuddlement.
“I’m working tomorrow, why not come in and see me then? I suspect you’ll need some computer resources. It’s mother internet you’re interested in, not me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh so you are interested? Great.”
“Melanie,” Armour said.
Melanie laughed. “Just get your butt in here, I’m on the day shift. See you tomorrow.”
“Right, good night, Melanie.” He hung up and replayed the conversation in his brain and her flirtations finally made an impact. He smiled.
14
Armour waited patiently in the coffee shop across from the library. Popping into the library first, Melanie had disengaged long enough to point at the coffee shop and mouth the words “five minutes”.
Armour ordered a strong black coffee. He hadn’t slept that well again last night and the coffee brought him around fully. The streets were wet with rain and Armour could see shining maple leaves that the wind had carried down from a small park up the street.
Melanie didn’t bother using the cross walk, she J-walked quickly, dodging traffic. She was wearing a yellow canary rain jacket and danced around the puddles. She took the jacket off, shook it once and put it over the back of the coffee shop chair.
“Yo, what’s up?” she said sitting down. “It’s good to see you.”
The waitress came back over and Melanie ordered a caramel double latte something. Armour chuckled.
She said. “Don’t laugh. Try a sip, you’ll be hooked.” When her coffee came it did smell good, like candy.
“What do you have for me?” she asked.
“It’s just a jumble really.” He took the photo out of the girls’ soccer team. It was getting noticeably creased now, it had been in and out of Armour’s jacket so many times. He retrieved his notebook too.
“What’s this?” Melanie said as she studied the photo and sipped her candy coffee.
“Girls’ soccer team, high school in Port Dover. 1989”
“Where’d you get this?”
Armour grinned sheepishly.
“You stole it. Armour Black, you scoundrel. Why take it? You know these girls?”
“One of them.” He pointed at Barbara Housen. “I don’t know her obviously but I’ve learned a little bit more about her. She’s the reason I took the photo. Something about it caught my eye.”
“Okay, that’s not the girl who was murdered though?” Melanie said.
“No, it isn’t. This is two years before that. Doubtful they even knew each other but who knows?”
“I don’t get it, why take it?”
“I don’t get it either, not yet.”
“The spell,” Melanie suggested.
“I think so. The girl in the car driving, her leg, her arm. It might be this girl. But…”
“But what?”
“There’s more to it. I can’t put my finger on it. I wonder if you know how we can track this girl down.”
“You couldn’t find her out there.”
“I found a waitress who knew her. Said she got hurt.”
“Oh, that’s something. Hurt as in…?”
“Not sure but she left school shortly afterwards. She ended up in a wheelchair.”
“She probably went to some sort of special school. They might not have been set up to handle the mobile challenged.”
“What?”
“Wheelchairs, Armour, wheelchairs. Ramps, elevators, special washrooms. We had to outfit the library years ago, cost a bundle.”
“I bet.”
Armour remembered he’d used that wheelchair ramp one day going into the library. He had parked around the corner and as he came around the building there was the ramp. He got half way up when a fellow in a wheelchair wheeled around from the front entrance way and started barreling down on him. Armour almost had to leap over the railing. The guy had not even looked at Armour, like he wasn’t there. Armour had never used it again.
“Okay so if you want, I can take this on,” Melanie said. “I can research any special schools, see if we can find her.”
“I was hoping you could. I checked the phone book out there, no Housens in it.”
“Okay. While I’m doing that, what are you going to do?”
“The detective on the case put a witness statement in his case files.”
“How’d you get a hold of those?”
“I didn’t. Spoke to his widow, he had the files in a box in his crawl space. She let me read them.”
“You charmer.”
“Anyway, he shouldn’t have them. I think he stole them because he was afraid someone might go through them and find that there was at least a solid lead. He even checked on it.”
“What kind of lead?”
“A twelve-year-old boy saw the Truscott girl an hour before she was murdered. He also saw a car, a small brown job.” He consulted his notes. “Two-door. Looked foreign. There was a yellow sticker on it with a man wearing a hard hat.”
“Okay. A sticker, that’s the lead?”
“Burke, the detective went out to a steel factory, checked to see if he could find the car. I went there, same plant. It’s closed down now. It’s spooky as all get out.” Armour wasn’t going to mention the run in with the security guard, he didn’t want to worry Melanie.
“Go on.” Melanie sipped her coffee two handed and smiled, she loved this stuff. Armour could tell.
“Well, I saw that same sticker on the back of a truck. It’s a local union sticker. That’s why he went out there, he probably recognized what it meant by the boy’s description. There’s no other mention of his going back there, questioning anyone from the plant. He found a car that might have been the one the boy saw, but the driver had a solid alibi so Burke dropped it. The next day, he got the confession out of the Macintyre boy. I spoke to his parents. They’re very upset by the whole thing.”
“What about the guy himself, who spent time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit?”
“He was even more upset.”
“I be
t.” Melanie said and sipped away.
“He hung himself in his parent’s garage.”
Melanie was shocked. “Armour, wow. So sad.”
“Yeah. They’re nice people and this has torn their life apart. In more ways than one. I feel…”
“That you need to bring some closure to them.” Melanie finished his thought.
“Whatever I find out they said they didn’t want to know. But I want to find out anyway. Plus, these spells aren’t going to go away until I do.”
“Armour, I think you have to accept the fact that these spells might not go away. You might not solve it.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Just trying to look out for you, Armour. If these spells continue I think at some point you should seek help.”
“I have. They gave me these.” He pulled the green pills out of his pocket.
Melanie looked at them. “Fairly light dose. I take these.”
“You do?”
“Yes, for my panic attacks. Do you get those too?”
“I don’t know. What do they feel like?”
“Like a rushing sensation comes on your body. When you’re doing nothing at all suddenly you feel like you’re running the hundred-yard dash. They even wake you up.”
“Yes, I get those. They wake me up too.”
She stretched her hand across to his. It was warm from her coffee cup. “Well looks like we have something in common.” She retracted her hand and snatched up the photo.
“I gotta get back to work.”
“And I have to go see someone.”
“Who?” she asked and batted her eyelashes.
“I’d rather not say.”
“What?”
“Just someone I have to go see. They might have some information on this steel workers local.”
“No, Armour don’t.” Melanie was no dummy, she knew what Armour was intending to do.
