Last Song Sung

by David A. Poulsen

  “I have, yes.” I’d caught a CBC documentary some years before on Canada’s first-ever First Nations player in the NHL. “Cree elder. Former NHLer.”

  “Exactly right.” Bert sounded like he was happy I was up on my hockey history. Which I wasn’t. But I did know of Fred Sasakamoose.

  “He’d retired as a player a few years before,” Bert Nichol went on, “but he was coming to Calgary with the Saskatoon team, so I got to interview him. Good guy, as I recall. But it meant I missed that night at The Depression, all the shooting and shit … ah, sorry, Rose … all that stuff that went down that night.”

  He dropped his voice a decibel or two. “Heard about Ellie when I got home later that night. A goddamn … uh … bloody shame.” He dropped his voice even lower, to a whisper. “My wife doesn’t approve of bad language.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Listen, Bert, do you still have any of those stories you wrote about Ellie Foster?”

  A pause, then normal volume. “Naw. That was a long time before computers. I’d write ’em and send ’em off — lots of times, the editors didn’t even get back to me, especially if they didn’t use the stuff. Probably just chucked ’em. End of story.” He chuckled. “Literally.”

  “Yeah. Listen, Bert, any chance we could maybe have coffee and talk about The Depression a little?”

  “After all this time?”

  “It’s a long shot, I know, but her granddaughter is hoping to bring about some kind of closure to it, and —”

  “Granddaughter?”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause, longer this time. I was beginning to think I’d lost him when he finally said, “Listen, I know if it was my grandkids, I’d want people to help any way they could. Why don’t you come over here tomorrow afternoon? I don’t get out much, so meeting you somewhere might be a little difficult.”

  “That would be great. Can I bring anything?”

  A pause. “How about a Peters’ Drive-In milkshake? I could do with one of those.”

  “Done. What flavour?”

  “Chocolate and orange mixed.”

  “Got it.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be much help, but what the … the … what the heck, right? Always worth a chat.”

  He gave me the address, and we ended the call.

  I had just put my computer to sleep and was about to head back downstairs to the ground floor camera when my phone offered the first few bars of Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose.” I picked up, expecting to hear Jill telling me something she’d forgotten to say the night before. I was wrong.

  “Just checking in,” Cobb’s baritone voice informed me. “Making sure you’re not lying in a ditch somewhere.”

  “No ditch. Everything’s fine here, or at least as fine as terminal boredom can be.”

  “I can imagine,” Cobb said. “Actually, I had a couple of reasons for calling. Wanted to keep you up to speed on our other case.”

  “Ellie Foster.”

  “Yeah. I called in some favours. I got the actual homicide file from the shootings and Ellie’s disappearance. What Monica Brill gave us was bits and pieces, a summary.”

  The homicide file, I knew, was a comprehensive collection of witness statements, the reports of the investigating detectives, crime scene photos, forensics reports — in short, every piece of documentation pertaining to the homicide being investigated. I knew as well that some jurisdictions, particularly those in the States, called that collection the murder book. But the Calgary Police Service used the term homicide file, sometimes abbreviated to the file.

  “Anything there?”

  “I’ve given it only a cursory glance. I want to spend some time on it tonight. How about I stop by in the morning and we take a look at what we’ve got?”

  “Human contact. What a concept. I’ll have the coffee on.” I didn’t bother telling him about my conversation with Bert Nichol — figured that could wait until morning.

  Cobb laughed. “See you then.”

  I stood up and took a quick look out the upstairs window. Nothing to see but a house and backyard at peace. I ran tapes for an hour, took one last look at the Unruh home from downstairs, then did the same thing upstairs with the murder house (the name I’d decided to give it to keep them straight in my mind).

  A quick glance, then I was turning away to call it a night when something brought me back to the camera ­ — a movement, or maybe just a shadow. I grabbed the binoculars and brought them to my eyes, and while most of my being was telling me it was nothing, I couldn’t control the racing of my heart.

  “Come on,” I said out loud. “Kennedy’s been watching for years, but you’re going to stumble across the killer in a few hours? Give your head a shake.”

  But I stayed in place for another half hour, watching … and seeing nothing. I ran the tape back and watched it three times. Something had moved in the alley behind the garage. I was sure of it. I was almost equally sure that what I’d seen was a dog or cat, or maybe a waving tree branch caught by a gust of wind.

  Almost sure.

  My eyes were aching and tired from the strain of trying to see something in the blackness of the alley. I wanted to go to bed, to sleep and dream about something pleasant.

  But there was a part of me that wouldn’t let it go … couldn’t let it go. What if I’d had the chance to spot the killer, but ignored it, and he went on to kill again? And again. How would I live with that?

  I decided to walk across the street and have a look around. Total darkness had long since settled on the street, and I took one last long look before I left the house. Earlier I’d noticed a flashlight on the windowsill next to the rifle, and now grabbed it. I hesitated and actually considered taking the .30-06. I shook my head at that insanity — just what the neighbourhood needed, a stranger wandering the back alley with a weapon. Yeah, that would hardly draw any attention at all to the house where the street’s recluse lived.

  Instead I pulled on my jacket, tucked the flashlight into a pocket, and descended the stairs. I stopped in the kitchen long enough to take a nearly empty bottle of bread and butter pickles out of the fridge. A glass jar, surely a dying breed. I dropped the last couple of pickles onto a side plate, rinsed the long, skinny jar, and stuffed it under my jacket. Not as effective as a .30-06, but possibly useful in hand-to-hand combat. So did you take a knife, a hammer, brass knuckles? No, I opted for an empty pickle jar.

  As prepared as I thought I could make myself, I slipped quietly out the front door. It was just after eleven, and the street was in the process of settling for the night. Several houses were already in darkness, including the one I was headed for.

  I took a minute to look at the houses where it appeared that at least one person was still up. I looked at the windows, most with curtains pulled and muffled light behind them as residents read, watched TV, tapped away at computers, or got ready for bed. No one at any of the windows was looking out on the street as a stranger crept carefully along, flashlight now in hand.

  I went the opposite way down the street, turned left at the corner, then left again at the alley. The house was seven in from the corner — I’d counted while I walked down the street. I hadn’t used the flashlight at first; there was sufficient light from the street lamps to allow me to navigate. But once in the alley, by the fourth house in, darkness had pretty well encircled me, and I flicked it on.

  I slowed my pace as well, listening to my breathing and the crunch of the gravel beneath my runners as I walked — convinced that anyone within a two-block radius would be able to hear both. At house number six I stopped and pointed the flashlight first one way, then the other. Saw nothing, detected no movement. Heard nothing but the distant hum of an occasional vehicle.

  I tried to determine where the movement I’d seen had been. Everything looked different once I was actually in the alley. I kept my hand over the flashlight
, removing it periodically and letting the beam illuminate the alley for a few seconds at a time before covering the light again. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I moved again now, slowly and carefully inching forward until I was behind the garage on which the camera was trained. I looked across the way, and between houses I could see Kennedy’s house, knowing that I would now be on the tape. I bent down close to the ground and could no longer see the window of the Kennedy house. The back fence of the property blocked my view of the house from this angle. Which meant that the camera could not now see me. And that meant that something — or someone — creeping along close to the ground would likewise not be visible from Kennedy’s roost.

  The significance of my discovery, it seemed to me, was minimal. A dog or cat could move through the alley undetected. So could someone crawling along the ground. But it seemed to me people seldom slithered, snake-like, along gravelly — or any other — surfaces. Unless, of course, that someone was somehow aware that there was a camera trained on the area and that he or she could be seen if walking upright. Rather hypothetical. Rather ridiculous.

  What was more likely, of course, was that it had been a small animal that I’d seen, or that animal’s shadow, thus rendering my evening’s excursion utterly unproductive.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to be thorough. I again cast the beam of the flashlight around the area behind the garage. Saw nothing. Then I went over the ground in smaller pieces, moving the light and my vision back and forth across the alley … again, seeing only gravel, dirt, and a couple of garbage cans against the fence. They, too, would be invisible from Kennedy’s vantage point, and I stepped closer to them, thinking, though not with great certainty, that whatever I had seen had to have been in this general area.

  The garbage cans, their grey metal shining when I splashed the light on them, were on a small wooden stand maybe a foot off the ground. I scanned the area again and saw nothing … except for a single piece of paper, clearly something that had escaped the confines of the trash bins. I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket, if for no more reason than to avoid returning from my wild goose chase completely empty-handed.

  One last look around, splaying the light first here, then there. Nothing. Not even a second scrap of paper. I made my way back up the alley to the street and retraced my steps to Kennedy’s house. Once inside, I returned the flashlight to the upstairs windowsill and out of curiosity rewound the tape to see what I had looked like prowling the lane behind the murder scene. I first saw flashes of light created by my placing my hand over the flashlight, then removing it. Then I was on the screen, moving slowly, clearly visible despite the darkness and shadows of the alley. I rewound the tape, watched it again, and was surprised to note that as dark as the alley had been, and even though I was never in the flashlight’s beam, I was recognizable — a testimony, I supposed, to the quality of Kennedy’s equipment. Watching the tape, I realized my expedition had, in fact, borne some fruit. Going down there had been useful in terms of providing a frame of reference for what I was seeing when I looked through the viewer of the camera.

  And having provided at least a little justification for my nocturnal prowl, I reset the tape and headed off to bed. I was asleep in seconds, but it wasn’t a peaceful night. I woke several times, tossed and rolled around the bed, and dreamed of shadows.

  Unpleasant shadows.

  Six

  Cobb arrived just after nine and came, as he always did, bearing gifts: Starbucks coffee and bakery items that had definitely not come from Starbucks.

  Before we sat down to coffee, I showed him around the place, augmenting the tour with commentary explaining Kennedy’s way of conducting the surveillance and recording of what he observed. Cobb was silent during the tour of the two rooms, nodding occasionally but offering no comment until we were sitting at the kitchen table, coffee poured and butterhorns warmed and buttered.

  “He hasn’t spared any expense,” Cobb commented after a sip of the Pike Place.

  I nodded. “State-of-the-art equipment, and up to date, meaning he must upgrade fairly regularly.”

  Neither of us spoke for a couple of minutes, but I noticed Cobb shaking his head.

  “What?”

  “Damned sad,” he said in a soft voice. “You spend virtually every hour of your life staring at two places; you spend all your money making that possible, and the first break you take from it in over twenty years is to be with your ex-wife while she’s dying. I’d say that’s pretty damned sad.”

  Kyla had expressed much the same sentiment.

  “Can’t argue that.” I broke off a piece of the butterhorn, chewed, and swallowed. I looked at Cobb. “You ever tell anybody about …” I looked around the room. “About this? About finding Kennedy? Any of the guys you both worked with?”

  Cobb shook his head. “Didn’t think that would be a good idea.”

  I nodded, and that was the end of conversation until we’d finished eating. I topped up the coffee with some I’d brewed before Cobb had arrived. He snapped open an old-school briefcase and pulled out a long manila file folder thick with pages.

  I looked at the folder as he removed a long elastic band from around it. He extracted an envelope, reached inside, and pulled out several photographs. He didn’t say anything until he had them spread out on the table between us.

  I scooched my chair around a bit to get a better look at them. Cobb pointed. “There are more, but this is a pretty good representation. This one,” he said, laying a hand on one of the photos, “is Jerry Farkash. He played guitar and occasionally keyboards. And that’s Duke Prego, who played bass; he had joined the group only a couple of months before they came west.”

  I studied the two pictures — the first, of Farkash. He was face down in the alley, head turned away from the camera, much of the back of his skull blown away.

  “Shot from behind,” I said.

  Cobb nodded. “Might have been trying to run from the shooter. Hard to know for sure, but that seems likely.”

  The second photo showed a man sitting with his back up against a tall, wooden fence that bordered one side of the property. He looked like he was resting after a hard workout and would be getting to his feet when he caught his breath.

  Except for his eyes. Even in the floodlit back lot and alley, even in the slightly grainy black-and-white photo, it was clear that the life was gone from Duke Prego’s eyes … and wouldn’t be coming back. There would be no catching of breath ever again. I looked at the victim photos for a couple of minutes — trying to take in every detail of the bodies and of the ground around them, knowing that Cobb had already done that. I saw nothing that offered up anything that might be useful.

  There was also a photo of the garbage cans; I assumed they were the ones Guy Kramer had taken shelter behind. There were four, they all looked to be metal, and one was on its side. I thought back to my nocturnal prowl of the night before, the garbage cans behind the house where Faith Unruh’s body had been found.

  The last two pictures were of the alley, one labelled “looking south,” the other “looking north.” I remembered from my other reading that the car had come from the south — that had been in Kramer’s statement.

  I stared at the south-facing photo for a long moment, then looked up at Cobb.

  “They had to know.”

  “What?”

  “The killers had to know Ellie and the band guys were out there. Either they went for a smoke break at exactly the same time every night, and the shooters knew when that was, or one or both of them had been in the club that night. When Ellie and the guys went outside, they left, got in their car, and drove down that alley.”

  Cobb said, “I’ve thought about that too. I think it’s the latter. I just don’t think you could count on the break taking place at exactly the same time every night.”

  “So that means one of the shooters … or both … was in The Depression
that night while Ellie was performing.”

  “Or a third person was in the club and commun­icated with the killers that Ellie and the others had gone outside. Either way, it’s clear, or at least likely, that someone in the club that night was part of this. And I’m fairly sure Carrington and Wardlow had the same thought. Carrington wrote that he was frustrated that they couldn’t talk to more of the people who were in the club that night, that quite a few had left during the chaotic moments that greeted the news of what had happened outside. They tried to get names, got a few, but Carrington admits they missed some, including maybe some who left while the band was taking its break and before the shooting started.”

  I looked at the photos for a moment more, saw nothing that told me anything significant.

  I drank some coffee and looked at Cobb. “Any chance that either Farkash or Prego was the target? And that Ellie was just there and they grabbed her because she was a witness … or maybe thinking they’d have a little fun with her before killing her?”

  “Another theory of the original investigators,” Cobb said, “but they got nowhere with it. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep it on the back burner as a possibility.”

  “Anything else that might be useful in there?” I tapped the folder.

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. A couple of names, maybe. And one or two things we might want to check on.”