Dead Air

by David A. Poulsen

  “The major difference being, there are actual apes,” he said.

  I gave him a thumbs-up. As I bathed a calamari in tzatziki, I figured it was time to turn our attention to the matter at hand. “So, Larmer still alive?”

  “You sound like you’d be okay with my saying, ‘No, somebody offed him last Tuesday.’”

  I grinned. “It would save me the trouble.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s alive.”

  He didn’t say any more, took a slow sip of the wine, set the glass down.

  I pointed at him with my fork. “By the way, how is being a bodyguard not a twenty-four-hour job?”

  “It is. I have help.”

  “The guys I met last time we worked together?” Two of Cobb’s colleagues had once shown up, guns at the ready, in what could best be described as an armed standoff.

  “Them and a couple of others.”

  “Larmer’s in good hands.”

  Cobb smiled. “That’s the idea.”

  We ate more calamari, sipped more wine and whiskey. Cobb dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, leaned back in his chair. “So, any luck digging into the background of one Buckley-Rand Larmer?”

  “It’s early days but I found a few bits. I have a lot more to do before I can offer you much. A couple of names, though.”

  I told him what I’d learned about James Leinweber and Jaden Reese. When I finished he nodded.

  “Two suicides, both victims connected to Larmer.”

  “Two that we know of. I’m really just getting started on Larmer’s back story. Who knows what further skeletons, literal and figurative, might turn up in Larmer’s closets?”

  “I knew about Leinweber.” Cobb looked off to his right, out the window that offered a view of 4th Street passersby. He was thinking, remembering. “I did a little checking of my own when Larmer first contacted me, and I read about the suicide. Made a couple of calls. The Ottawa police looked into it at the time. Legitimate suicide, no indication of foul play made to look like suicide. Guy with a family, it shook up a lot of people, including the cops who investigated it.”

  “There are those who think that Larmer drove him to it. Destroyed the guy publicly.”

  Cobb nodded again. “I heard that, too. Doesn’t seem out of character for my client.”

  “I read some of the stuff Larmer put out there. Beyond vicious.”

  Cobb picked up his wineglass. “I didn’t know about Jaden Reese. Never heard of the guy. Anything more you can tell me about him?”

  I shook my head. “Like I said — early days. But Reese’s suicide seems like a very different scenario, at least as it relates to Larmer. With Leinweber he verbally crucifies the guy, maybe pushes him over the edge; with Reese, Larmer’s a hero and later the guy takes his own life, might have had nothing to do with Larmer.”

  Cobb nodded, didn’t say anything.

  “But I want to do a little more digging on that one,” I said.

  He nodded again. “Likely nothing, but won’t hurt to check it out … if you can.”

  “Leave it with me.” I paused, then, “Can I ask you something?”

  Cobb looked at me from under raised eyebrows, shrugged.

  I took that for an affirmative, but paused again as our waiter, who looked old enough to have served calamari on the Titanic, stopped by to see if we needed another round of drinks and to tell us our main courses would be out shortly. Both of us declined another drink and the waiter cleared some dishes and moved off.

  “Does it bother you working for a guy like that?”

  “A guy like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … How about a sleazy, bottom-feeding scumbag, or words to that effect?”

  Cobb turned serious. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Just wondered.”

  “Any more than it bothers lawyers who defend accused killers and rapists and drug lords. The law says everyone is entitled to a competent defence and that’s the way it should be. Same applies for keeping people, even unsavoury people, safe from those who would harm them … or threaten to harm them.”

  “The paycheque enter into it at all?”

  “Of course it does. This is how I earn my living.”

  I nodded. Had no reply at the ready.

  “Adam, there’s something you need to know. If people want to hire me to protect them from real or imagined dangers, I don’t put them through some ideology-testing program to determine whether they’re worthy.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Damn convenient.” Cobb leaned forward so I could hear him without his having to raise his voice. “I’ve spied on sleazy husbands and I’ve been hired by sleazy husbands to spy on someone else. I don’t differentiate.”

  I couldn’t think of a response, and finally said, “Huh.”

  We drank in silence for a time, then I said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t believe you’d do anything for money.”

  “I didn’t say that. There are lots of things I wouldn’t do for any amount of money. I won’t try to help someone get away with a crime I know they committed. And I won’t try to nail someone for something I know they didn’t do. But this isn’t about that.” His voice had taken on a hard edge. “This is about me working for a guy you don’t approve of. And the reason you don’t approve of him is you don’t like his politics.”

  I thought about that, and realized that’s exactly what it was. “What about you? How are you on the politics of the extreme right?”

  “Doesn’t enter into it at all. I have a client who is, or believes he is, in danger. He’s received threats to that effect. Not all my clients are Mother Teresa. But all of them deserve my best. And that’s what Larmer will get.”

  I digested that for a while before replying, “You’re right, and yes, you have the right to work for whomever you want. I just wish it wasn’t this whomever.”

  “Look, there’s lots of it I can’t stomach. There’s lots of Larmer I can’t stomach. And for the record I find Fox News and white supremacy and Beck and Limbaugh just as distasteful as you do. What I’m saying is that there’s a place for people who don’t think the way you do or the way I do. And that they have the same right to feel the way they feel that you have to feel the way you do.”

  “Not if feeling the way they do comes with —”

  Our ancient waiter couldn’t have timed the arrival of our main dishes more perfectly if he’d been listening to our conversation via a hidden microphone. He deposited linguine alla carbonara before Cobb and gnocchi in front of me, ground black pepper liberally over both, and left without a word. I wondered if he sensed the tension at the table, decided he probably did.

  I settled back in my chair, took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “You’re right,” I said finally. “They do, absolutely. And for me to feel otherwise probably makes me as bad as the most intolerant of the haters. So I apologize.” I looked at Cobb. “And for what it’s worth, I mean it.”

  “No apology necessary.” He smiled. “And for what it’s worth, I mean it, too.”

  “But just so we understand each other —” I leaned forward, took up knife and fork “— Larmer sickens me. I can’t help that and it isn’t going to change.”

  Cobb’s smile faded. “Fair enough. And I can tell you that I won’t be going for evening cocktails with the guy anytime soon. But he’s paying me to do all I can to keep him alive and safe. And I’d like you to keep helping me by staying on the research.”

  I drained my rye and diet, set my glass down. “Deal,” I said. “Let’s come back to Larmer later — give me time to cool off. There’s something else I want to ask you about. And to be honest, it’s a topic that won’t be any more pleasant.”

  Cobb’s eyebrows rose again as he manoeuvred linguini onto his fork. “Both barrels, huh.
Okay, hit me with your best shot.”

  “You ever hear of the murder of a little girl named Faith Unruh?”

  The fork hovered in mid-air. “You’re a real ray of sunshine today, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry. The topic came up unexpectedly and I thought you might be able to tell me about it. Or at least some of it.”

  Cobb put the forkful of linguine in his mouth, chewed slowly, and looked up at the ceiling for a minute, then back at me. Finally he nodded and said in something just more than a whisper, “One of the worst.”

  I told him about Josie’s pronouncement from the night before. “I wasn’t sure if it was real or, even if it was, if she had it right.”

  Cobb took a breath. “It’s real and she had it right. Come to think of it, that’s exactly the part of town it happened in. I’d forgotten that.”

  He wasn’t looking at me. Not then … and not when he began to speak again.

  “It was 1991. I’d only been on the force for two years and a report came in early in the morning just after I’d started my shift. I was a uniform then and worked another part of the city, but I remember it. Partly because of the horror of it, partly because we never got the killer, and partly because of what that case did to people who worked on it. A couple of people in particular.”

  “Josie said the girl was eleven years old,” I said.

  “Yeah, she had either just had a birthday or was just about to have one, I can’t recall exactly. The yard she was found in wasn’t her own. She’d walked home from school with a friend. The friend went into her own house and Faith continued on the final block by herself. Somehow somebody got her into the backyard of a house two doors down and across the street from where she lived, strangled her in broad daylight, and left her next to a garage with a piece of plywood over her. She was naked but hadn’t been sexually assaulted.

  “All of us figured this would be quick. We’d have the guy within a day or two — had to be someone who knew her or at least knew her route home and also knew that she’d be alone for that final block. There was a fair amount of blood near the body that wasn’t Faith’s, so we figured we’d have physical evidence, as well. And the fact that it looked like she’d fought her killer meant she might have had time to scream, too. The investigating team talked to everyone in the neighbourhood, even asked on radio and TV for anyone who might have been driving by — got several people who came forward, had to have been very close when it happened. Nobody saw or heard a goddamn thing.”

  Cobb stopped talking — I wasn’t sure whether it was to try to recall more or just to summon what was needed to talk about something that was clearly painful.

  He went on. “When she didn’t arrive home from school her parents went looking for her; they called 9-1-1 when darkness fell, and she still hadn’t turned up. The investigators said she must have fought like a demon to have caused that much blood loss in her assailant. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t raped. Or maybe he heard someone coming — we don’t know.”

  We don’t know. Speaking in the first person and the present tense. Like it had happened only days before, not twenty-three years ago.

  “Anyway, the neighbour found her when he went out to his car to go to work that evening. Worked nights at some plant or something — I don’t remember the name. And like I said, it looked like an easy one. No, that’s not right, none of them are easy. But maybe easi-er. Except it wasn’t … wasn’t easy at all. That time of day, how could an entire neighbourhood not have seen something, someone? Even her friend — the one she’d walked home with. They’d done that countless times. Nothing that day any different from any of the other days.

  “The guy was either the smartest or the luckiest bastard alive … or maybe both. Eight years later when I became a detective, it was one of the unsolveds I was assigned to look into. Several investigators had gone back at it since the murder — some damn good cops. Nothing. Same as what I came up with.”

  “And no other murders around that time — other little girls?” I asked.

  “Serial killer? We don’t think so. At least not in Calgary. Of course the guy could have left the city and done something similar somewhere else, but we never came across others that matched up.”

  “What about the family? The parents have any serious enemies?”

  “They weren’t the perfect all-Canadian family, for damn sure. The father dabbled in drugs, mostly recreational, not the heavier stuff, at least not that he admitted to or that we could learn. Didn’t deal, just used. Died a few years after Faith’s death — aneurysm when he was at work. He was a welder, worked over in the Manchester industrial area. Mom wasn’t an angel, either — word was she was having an affair at the time Faith was murdered. So there was no shortage of suspects, but all of them had alibis — ironclad.”

  “‘Word was’? The affair wasn’t confirmed?”

  “The mom’s story was that there was no affair. Just a good friend who happened to be male. She married him about a year after her husband died. But we couldn’t find any dirt on the guy and nobody could say for certain that there had been anything going on before Mr. Unruh made his departure. So … word was.”

  “And no match for the blood.”

  “Nope, that was pre–DNA registries and the like. Of course, the DNA has since been done — a few years ago — but no match in any of the databases. Not yet.”

  “Cold case.” I repeated Kyla’s words.

  “Very.”

  “Anybody looked at it recently?”

  Cobb shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m not in that loop anymore.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  I glanced at his empty wineglass. “Feel like another?” I asked.

  Cobb looked at his glass, then shook his head. “You thinking there’s a story there? That why you’re interested?” It wasn’t accusatory and, anyway, it was a valid question.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t been thinking of it … but maybe. Any chance writing something might trigger some clue or some witness who saw something and never thought anything of it, you know …”

  “America’s Most Wanted?” Cobb shook his head. “After all this time, it’s damned unlikely.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “Next to.”

  I agreed. “Yeah. Like I said, I wasn’t thinking of writing anything. It’s just … ever since Josie told us the story, I can’t stop thinking about it. Like most of last night. I guess maybe having Kyla almost the same age, it bothered me more than a lot of stuff would. Almost a quarter century, and nothing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any chance it was bad police work … one of those times when cops actually interview the killer and miss it?”

  “A Paul Bernardo miss? I don’t think so. When my partner and I were assigned to take another look at the case, that was one of the first things we went back at. Every interview, every potential witness, see if there was somebody who looked okay but wasn’t. I found nothing. My partner found nothing. And she was good. We even went back and talked to some people who still lived in the neighbourhood. I mean, at the time we were looking at the case, it was almost ten years since Faith had been murdered. We came up empty. And believe me, I spent a lot of nights just the way you spent last night.”

  I nodded. “That must be the toughest part of police work.”

  He started a nod, but changed it to a shake of the head. “No, the toughest part is when you nail the guy and he gets off. Those are the ones that put good cops in therapy. But something like what happened to Faith Unruh, knowing the son of a bitch was still out there, that’s pretty damn tough, too.” He released a sigh. “I changed my mind. Let’s have that drink. I’m up with Larmer tonight, but I don’t start until eight.”

  I looked at my watch. Four-twelve.

  “You driving?”

  “On foot.” He pointed to his w
rist. “Fitbit. Eleven hundred and fifty-four steps from my office to here.”

  I signalled the waiter.

  “You write that story, Adam, you’ll have to write about the original investigating team. Two veteran guys — near as I could tell they worked their asses off. One, a guy named Lennie Hansel, was only about three years from retirement. The Faith Unruh case haunted the guy. He was dead less than a year after they gave him his watch.”

  “Hansel,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Small smile. “You can guess what all his partners were called.”

  “I have a pretty good idea.”

  “This particular Gretel’s real name was Tony Gaspari. Grew up in the Italian part of old Bridgeland, not far from where you live. He was as obsessed with the Faith Unruh case as Hansel. Obsessed to the point of literally losing his mind. Cost him his family and eventually his health — at least his mental health.”

  “He dead, too?”

  Cobb shook his head. “He’s in a home. Can’t do much for himself. I stopped in a couple of years ago. He knew me but couldn’t connect me to his past life. I’m not sure he was aware he had a past life. The doctor said what he has is something akin to post-traumatic stress dis­order. Said some days he’s pretty good. Warned me against talking about police work and especially the Unruh case.”

  I shook my head.

  “There was a third guy. It wasn’t his case but he got caught up in it. Spent all his non-work hours on it … for years. He was single, no family. The thing got weird. He became more and more immersed in the case. And then he just disappeared.”

  “What do you mean? Like he moved away? Trying to escape the thing, something like that?”

  Cobb shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. Thing is, nobody knows. One day he didn’t come in to work and they sent a couple of guys to check on him, see if he was all right. The house was empty. Neighbours said he’d sold it. And he had because the people he sold it to moved in a couple of weeks later. But Ken was gone. Never turned up again. Kendall Mark. I didn’t know him all that well, but people who did said he just lost it. Been showing signs of some mental problems for a while. And it was the Unruh case did it to him.”