Last Song Sung

by David A. Poulsen

  And writing it would force me to review again what we did know — mostly from newspaper accounts and the file folder Monica Brill had given us during her visit to Cobb’s office.

  I tapped at my keyboard for the next seventy-five minutes, constructing a piece I knew the Herald would use. I forced myself to stay away from conjecture and used only the information that was known: the details about what had happened in the alley behind The Depression that night and the few meaningful facts the police had managed to piece together as to what had happened after that.

  As I read it over, I realized the story was pathetically incomplete. But it was all we had for the moment. I added a plea for anyone knowing anything at all to please get in touch with either Cobb or me, and I texted Cobb to let him know what I’d done and that I’d like him to see the piece before it ran. I wanted to be there when he read it to gauge his reaction and answer any questions he might have. I added that I’d read through Monica Brill’s file folder and would bring it along. He got back to me in less than a half hour to say he liked the idea and to suggest we grab coffee or breakfast in the morning.

  I texted him back saying I was just heading out the door en route to Jill’s house and that I’d bring Monica’s file folder and a copy of the song lyrics the next morning. Then in capital letters I typed “BREAKFAST.” I was already running late for the strawberry shortcake festival, so I didn’t wait for the answering text.

  Before picking up my car from the parking lot behind Cobb’s building, I stopped off at the two-storey brick structure that had once housed The Depression. Parm promised terrific pizza and great wine; neither was an unworthy goal, in my opinion.

  Though Cobb and I had been in the place a couple of times, I’d paid little attention to the layout or decor. Once inside, I ordered a beer from the pleasant server I’d seen there before. She told me, in answer to my question, that she had been working there for a little over a year.

  While I waited for the beer to arrive, I looked around. Parm was pleasant, clean, and friendly. And offered nothing in terms of instant clues to the world that had existed there fifty years before.

  When the server delivered the beer, I asked her if she was aware that the basement of the building had once housed Calgary’s first folk club and coffee house. She shook her head and regarded me suspiciously. I introduced myself and told her I was writing a story about the club and other similar establishments from yesteryear for the Herald — sort of a “Where Are They Now?” piece.

  I was skirting, or at least stretching the truth, but didn’t want to scare her off by relating that the place had been the site of one of Calgary’s most infamous unsolved crimes. Later when she came by to ask if I wanted food or another beer, I asked if I could have a look at the basement.

  “It’s just storage now,” she said.

  “I understand,” I told her. “Just a quick look — it would really help me with the story I’m writing.”

  She looked around and apparently decided the young girl who was serving a couple three tables away from me could handle things for a few minutes while she showed me the downstairs area. She led the way to the stairs that wound their way to the basement level, turned on a light near the bottom of the stairs, and stepped aside at the bottom to allow me to see.

  “Like I said, we use it for storage.” She sounded apologetic.

  “No problem,” I said, and stepped past her to get a better look around.

  The ceiling was low. One wall was decorated with a carousel that was a symbol of a later club that had occupied the space, and most of the rest of the place was, as she had stated, storage. Metal shelving units, beat-up chairs, some dishes, a few pots and pans, and one worn but decent-looking chesterfield were the highlights.

  I stepped further into the room and tried to imagine where the stage might have stood, pulled out my phone, and snapped a couple of pictures of the space.

  The truth was, there was nothing there to indicate that the place where I was standing had once been a happening folk club where Mitchell, Lightfoot, Cockburn, and others had performed in the earliest moments of their careers. I’m not sure what I’d expected. Spirits of long-passed singers? Discarded programs from 1965? A dust-covered microphone?

  None of those things, of course, existed. And try as I might, I was unable to get any kind of feel for what had been there fifty years before.

  It was a storage area.

  I turned to the server and nodded. “Hard to imagine it as a club, huh?”

  She glanced around, shrugged. “I guess.”

  I thanked her, and we returned to the main floor. I finished my beer, paid my tab, and left what I hoped was a generous tip. Outside, I stood on the sidewalk and stared at the front of the building for a long while, again unable to conjure up ghostly images of yesteryear. I looked up and down the street, trying to determine what buildings still remained of those Monica Brill had noted on her map of the street as it was in 1965.

  I walked down the block until I found an opening that led to the alley and circled around to the part of the lane that was directly behind the restaurant. I was standing in the vicinity, at least, of where two people had lost their lives in a hail of gunfire and a young woman had been abducted and never seen or heard from again.

  Until now.

  If the CD that had been left for Monica Brill was, as she and I suspected, her grandmother singing. I kicked a few rocks around, snapped a few more pictures, and made my way back to the street. I crossed it and then walked to the parking lot at the rear of Cobb’s building. I climbed into my Honda Accord and headed off for strawberry shortcake and a painful movie experience.

  I hadn’t gone more than three blocks when I got a call — my first opportunity to try out the hands-free device I’d installed a few days before.

  “Hello.” I hoped I sounded like a veteran hands-free guy as I spoke.

  “Marlon Kennedy,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  I hesitated. “Kendall Mark,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You got something?”

  “I want to talk to you guys.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Got a time and place in mind?”

  “Belmont Diner. Thirty-Third Avenue Southwest. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Yeah, I think …” I started to respond, then realized I was talking to a dial tone. Kendall Mark, now known as Marlon Kennedy, had hung up. That call had removed any indecision as to where Cobb and I would be meeting in the morning. Except that now there would be three of us.

  I fog-walked through the rest of the evening, even the strawberry shortcake that was, I seem to recall, pretty damned wonderful. And the movie, when I was able to concentrate at all, was okay too. Mean Girls … Lindsay Lohan. I laughed a couple of times and nodded dutifully whenever Jill and Kyla gave me their told you this would be amazing look.

  After Kyla headed off to bed, a copy of Kathy Kacer’s The Night Spies in hand, Jill poured us each a glass of a Tuscan red and sat next to me on the couch.

  We didn’t talk much. Often we didn’t, content to be close to one another, allowing the music — she had selected R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People — to move through and between us. During the second glass of wine I told her of Monica Brill’s visit to Cobb’s office and the search for Ellie Foster that would be our focus, at least for a while.

  I showed her the lyrics of the song; she read them, shrugged, and said, “That’s going to take more concentration than I’m capable of right now.”

  “Roger that.” I nodded.

  “Although there is one thing I might be able to manage to concentrate on.” She placed a hand on my thigh.

  “Wicked woman.” I smiled at her.

  “The Eagles were singing about me.”

  “That was ‘Witchy Woman,’” I pointed out.

  She took my hand and b
egan leading me down the hallway. “Like I said, they were singing about me.”

  Three

  The Belmont Diner is located in Marda Loop, another of the older neighbourhoods in Calgary, and one of the coolest. A movie theatre called the Marda, long since gone, gave the area its name. Cobb and I were in a booth near the back of the Belmont by 8:30 the next morning, both wondering what Kendall Mark wanted to talk about.

  Cobb knew Mark much better than I did, having worked with him back when both men were detectives in the Calgary Police Service.

  Kendall Mark had been one of the investigators assigned to the 1991 murder of a nine-year-old girl, Faith Unruh, in a neighbourhood not far from where Jill and Kyla now lived. I’d learned of the little girl’s murder a few months before, when one of Kyla’s friends dropped it on us at dinner one evening.

  I had become fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with the case of the young girl, who had been walking home from school with a girlfriend. When the two parted at the friend’s house about a block from the Unruh house, Faith had continued on toward home. She never arrived, and her body was found the next morning in a nearby backyard. It was determined that she had been murdered shortly after leaving her friend, meaning the killing had taken place in broad daylight in a populated residential part of the city.

  Cobb had filled in some of the details of what had happened with the investigation. Police initially thought it would be relatively easy to find and apprehend the killer, given the circumstances of the murder. But that was not the case. Though officers worked hard and long for weeks, and then months, and eventually years, they had come up empty in the search for the killer. Cobb told me that the two lead investigators were never the same, the result of an emotionally charged investigation that failed.

  Cobb had also told me of a third policeman, Kendall Mark, who, while not directly assigned to the case, had developed an obsession with finding Faith Unruh’s killer. He had left the force and disappeared, the belief being that the stress of the case had gotten to him and he had simply “lost it” and gone away.

  My own fixation had taken me to the neighbourhood many times. I’d driven the street and alley where Faith had lived and died; I’d walked and stood near the yard her body had been found in — not in some ghoulish fascination, but simply, as I had hoped for with my visit to the site of The Depression, to get a feeling for the area and a sense of the place where the horror of Faith Unruh’s death had unfolded.

  Which was how I met Kendall Mark face to face. Well, not exactly face to face. I had been jumped and taken down in the alley behind my apartment one night. The man I initially thought was a mugger turned out to be a dramatically altered Kendall Mark, who had spent the years since the murder watching the former Unruh home and the spot where her body had been found. He had set up an elaborate surveillance system with cameras and monitors, all in the hope of one day seeing the killer if and when he returned to the scene of the crime.

  It was crazy, of course, the sad compulsion, the mania of a man who could not — would not — let go of the idea that he would one day confront the murderer of Faith Unruh.

  The cameras were located in the house Mark had purchased not long after the murder. It sat across and just down the street from the murder location. The cameras had filmed my presence at the scene. Kendall, who had changed his name and his appearance, came close to exacting his long-awaited revenge on the person he thought had to be the killer when he mistook me for that person. I had been fortunate to survive that night.

  Now Marlon Kennedy, a black man — formerly Kendall Mark, Caucasian — wanted to meet Cobb and me to talk about … something. Cobb and I had spoken with him a couple of times since the night in the alley when he’d been close to dispensing justice on the wrong person. In part, our conversations with him were designed to gain his assurance that the kind of vigilante action that had nearly ended my life wouldn’t happen again. I was fairly certain our entreaties had fallen on deaf ears. Kennedy had grudgingly agreed that he’d at least let us know before he did anything drastic, an assurance I wasn’t convinced would hold up if he once again felt that he had the killer in his grasp.

  Neither Cobb nor I said much at first. We drank coffee but decided to wait on ordering breakfast until Kennedy arrived.

  “Any ideas?” I said after a few minutes.

  “About?”

  “What he wants to talk to us about.”

  Cobb shook his head. “No clue. Maybe there’s something he wants us to check out that he can’t since he’s gone underground, or maybe he just wants to throw out some ideas, although I doubt that.… Mark isn’t a real team guy. I’m not sure he ever was. Or maybe he just wants to buy us breakfast because he likes our company. So, to repeat: I have not the faintest idea why he called us.”

  I nodded, drank some coffee.

  Cobb said, “You?”

  I shook my head. “I mean I guess it’s possible he’s got something and your little pep talk about the evils of vigilantism has him wanting to play by the rules and involve us in the apprehension of the killer.”

  “Yeah, not likely.”

  “I know I’ve asked you before, but do you think he’s … I don’t know …”

  “Unhinged?”

  I set my coffee cup down. “Well … yeah.”

  “I don’t know.” Cobb spoke slowly. “I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, so I can’t answer that. I’d say he’s damaged. This case did that to him, or at least it was the one that put him over the edge. But is being that consumed with finding a killer any stranger than being obsessed with making money and never thinking about anything else … or a guy wanting to reach some magic total on an Xbox game and spending twenty hours a day locked in a room playing the damn thing … or someone spending twelve or fourteen hours a day bodybuilding? Hell, if obsession equals crazy, then there’s a lot of wingnuts out there.”

  “Actually there are a lot of wingnuts out there.”

  Cobb held up his hands. “Fair enough. I’m just saying a lot of us have obsessive behaviours. I’m not sure that necessarily means we’re nuts.”

  “So what’s your obsession?” I asked.

  “Right now it’s breakfast. I hope he gets here pretty damn quick.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “What the hell do we call him?”

  “Tell you what, why don’t we ask him?”

  On cue, Kendall Mark, a.k.a. Marlon Kennedy, walked into the restaurant. Without, it seemed to me, ever actually looking at us, he made his way slowly in our direction, his eyes taking in the room like there was actually a chance that Faith Unruh’s killer might be in here.

  Habit, I guessed.

  He sat down next to Cobb, which I found a bit strange. The two bigger men were sharing a space that clearly hadn’t been designed with people that size in mind. I guessed that, as with a lot of cops, current and former, journalists were not his favourite people, and he preferred a little discomfort to having to share space with a member of the fourth estate.

  The waitress returned to our table with a coffee pot. Mark nodded at her, and she poured him a cup and topped up Cobb’s and mine.

  “Ready to order, gentlemen?” she said.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Cobb answered. “I’ll have the breakfast special, please — eggs over medium with rye toast.”

  She looked at me.

  “Pancakes, please,” I said. “With sausages, and I’ll have a small orange juice.”

  She turned her attention to Mark.

  “I’ll have what he said,” he aimed a thumb in Cobb’s direction, “but with whole wheat toast.”

  The waitress moved off; no one spoke as we doctored our coffee.

  Cobb broke the ice. “I’m guessing you’d prefer that we call you by your new name.”

  “Yeah, I’d prefer that.”

  I made the mental adjustment and nodded that
I was onside. A minute or more passed before Marlon Kennedy spoke again. “Nine thousand days.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, and Cobb lifted an eyebrow as his response.

  “In a month or so it’ll be nine thousand days that I’ve been watching Faith’s house and the place where they found her body. Nine thousand days that I’ve either been watching or checking tapes with the cameras working. Not one day off. Some milestone, huh? I’m thinkin’ that a lot of people — people like you — would think that’s some crazy shit.”

  I thought it best not to mention that we’d just been having that very conversation. Kennedy took a swallow of coffee, and when neither of us answered, he went on: “A white guy takes oral medication and bombards his body with ultraviolet rays to change his skin to black, changes his name and stakes out a place for twenty-four years — what the hell’s crazy about that?”

  It was a funny line, but there was no humour in either Marlon Kennedy’s voice or his face.

  “Why’d you call this meeting?” Cobb said.

  “Couple of reasons. First one is I need to be away for a few days.”

  “And?”

  “I need somebody to be there.”

  “You’ve got your cameras and tape machines.”

  Kennedy shook his head. “They need to be checked — make sure they’re working right. And I need somebody to look at the tapes, see what’s been happening at the two locations. And to be there … a pair of eyes when mine can’t be.”

  The waitress arrived with the food, so the next couple of minutes were given over to distributing, passing, salting, and peppering. All three of us took a couple of bites before Kennedy set his fork down and looked first at Cobb, then at me.

  “My ex-wife’s dying,” he said. “We split about a year and a half after Faith was killed. She just couldn’t take me anymore. She said I’d changed, and she was right. But it was never a hate thing between us. I never blamed her for leaving. In fact, she’s the only person, other than you two guys, who knows about … what I do.”