Dead Air

by David A. Poulsen

  He paused, took a breath, let it out slowly. “Like I said, that case has caused a lot of suffering. And not just for friends and family. You might think about that if you decide to start poking around.”

  “Yeah. Don’t imagine I’ll be doing much of that. I’ve got a feeling that digging into Larmer’s past will keep me pretty busy for the next while.”

  The drinks came then, and almost as if their arrival was a cue, we didn’t talk anymore about Faith Unruh. Or Larmer, for that matter. And damn sure not politics. Didn’t talk much at all, really. Finished up with a little back-and-forth about the Flames most recent signing, both of us trying to end it on a light note, both of us failing.

  But I had one last point I wanted to make before we headed off in separate directions. “I’m going to want to talk to Larmer … and probably Hugg.”

  Cobb shook his head. “I don’t like it, Adam,” he said. “I don’t want him knowing that I’ve got someone checking into his past.”

  “But you told me he’d approved money for research. This is research.”

  Cobb looked at me for a long time but didn’t say anything. Then he shook his head. I felt like a teenager asking Dad for the car for all the right reasons and getting turned down just because he was my dad. My anger began to rise again, but this time I was determined to keep it in check.

  “I think I understand,” I told him. “You don’t want him to know that the guy doing the research is a wild-ass lefty who hates the ground he walks on.”

  Cobb smiled. “Something like that, maybe.”

  “Okay, how about if I can do it without his knowing that I’m even involved with you?”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “People in my profession interview guys like him all the time. I set it up like I’m doing a story on him, a freelance piece. We meet, I ask questions, he answers questions. He even knows me, albeit not well, but well enough to know I’m a legit journalist.”

  Cobb didn’t answer right away.

  “Mike, I need to talk to the man to help me with looking at his life past and present.”

  “You said you wanted to talk to Hugg, as well. Why Hugg?”

  “Same answer. They’ve been joined at the hip for a long time. I need to know both of them better than I do now. Which, in the case of Hugg, is not at all.”

  “And you want to do this when?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “I get that it would benefit you to have a face to face,” Cobb said slowly. “Just as long as you can keep the fact that you and I are working together on this out of it. These aren’t stupid people.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Or people you should underestimate.”

  “I get that, too.”

  The waiter came by one last time, but both of us shook our heads.

  Cobb told me he was going to grab a couple of hours of sleep before starting his shift with Larmer. He paid the bill. “I pay it now or pay it later when you expense it. Might as well handle it now.”

  I grinned at him and we left the restaurant and walked to the corner, nodding our goodbyes before I turned right to cross the street and he went left — glancing at his Fitbit as he moved off. I’d parked on a side street next to a Jugo Juice. I’d never been in one so decided to give it a try. I bought something with peach in the name, then sat down to check messages on my iPhone and pass some time before driving after the two drinks.

  It was maybe an hour before I climbed behind the wheel of the Accord.

  I was only twenty minutes or so from my apartment even in rush-hour traffic, which was building about the time I left the juice place. But when I got home I had no desire to actually go inside. I parked on the street in front of my building as a stiff breeze was beginning to lower the temperature. I pulled a light windbreaker out of the back seat and set off on foot, I wasn’t sure where.

  I wanted to walk and think. There was a lot to think about. I was still in a state of — I’m not sure what, some kind of stunned horror at the tragedy that was Faith Unruh and how her murder had impacted so many lives. And unless her killer had died in the years since he’d murdered her or been jailed for something else altogether, he was still out there presumably enjoying his life. I knew that there were those instances when cold cases were solved years after the crime was committed. It didn’t happen nearly as often as television would have us believe, but the arson death of my wife and what happened years later was proof that it did happen.

  But for now I had to focus my energies on Cobb’s client Larmer and what my friend needed from me to help him keep the guy alive and well.

  The temperature dropped further and the wind whipped up, but I walked on — south to 1st Avenue, then east to 12A Street at the bottom of the hill that led up into Renfrew. A couple of solid old neighbourhoods, although Bridgeland had become hip and funky in recent years. I loved living there … and walking there. I circled around 12A Street back to 1st Avenue and retraced my steps. Thinking. Thinking hard, but mostly grasping.

  Connections.

  I still thought there had to be a connection between what had happened in Hamilton and what was going on with Larmer. I wasn’t a believer in coincidence, and despite the differences in the two situations — one man shot from behind in a parking lot, not once but twice, the second time fatally, and the other facing threats of violence — it seemed to me far-fetched to think the two weren’t somehow connected.

  But what was the connection? A left-wing nut-job deciding to even the playing field by ridding the airwaves of some of the right-wing talkers? Someone from the right generating sympathy for his side by making it look like an extremist from the other side was so filled with hate that he was wasting some of the right’s on-air apologists? Or someone who just happened to hate both Larmer and the guy in Hamilton enough to settle some score with them and no one else, with the fact that both were conservative commentators having nothing to do with the two incidents?

  I had a lot of trouble giving any credence at all to that last scenario.

  Of course there was a fourth option — that, in fact, the two situations weren’t related at all. I decided that possibility would go on the back burner for the foreseeable future and that I would focus on … what? I was finding it difficult to separate the gathering of information about Larmer, in effect the compilation of a profile, from the assembling of a group of potential suspects, which Cobb had indicated was not what this was about.

  A profile of Buckley-Rand Larmer. I could do that. The truth was that so far I simply didn’t have enough information. Which, after all, was what I was being paid to acquire. I’d always considered myself a pretty good digger and I decided that starting the next morning I’d find out just how good.

  I’d arrived at a park on the corner of 9A Street and 4th Avenue. I sat on a bench and watched a couple of kids about Kyla’s age tossing a Frisbee back and forth. I hoped my being there wasn’t creeping them out.

  The wind had let up and the late-afternoon sun had eliminated the need for the windbreaker. I took it off and laid it over the back of the bench. An errant throw brought the Frisbee close enough for me to pick up and send it back to the closest kid. He dropped it. He’d dropped quite a few, but was grinning as he yelled a thanks at me. Apparently, I wasn’t creeping them out.

  I felt myself reviving — a flow of energy I hadn’t felt for a while. Truth was, my heart hadn’t been in a job that brought me close to someone like Buckley-Rand Larmer. But I felt like I was turning a corner. The chat with Cobb had done that. There was work to do and it was the kind of thing I liked. And did well. I thought back to some of the work I had done before Donna’s death. Research and writing, putting some pretty good stuff together, some of it on my own and some a collaboration with two of my favourite people in the world — Lorne Cooney and Janice Flynn.

  And thinking of them trig
gered a thought. Lorne had written a piece about the Hamilton shooting — pretty in depth. He’d even flown down and spent some time in Hamilton, did a nice job, as I recalled.

  I headed back to my apartment feeling a little better about myself and my place in the world than I had at the beginning of my walk. I was walking faster. A man with a purpose. A summer that had been focused almost solely on the fortunes of the Killarney Bobcats now had added meaning, maybe even importance. As long as I didn’t let myself get bogged down by how much I didn’t know — about Larmer, about Hugg, about anything — I’d be fine. That’s what I told myself. It wasn’t a terribly positive message, but it wasn’t completely negative, either.

  Back home I pulled a Rolling Rock out of the fridge, built myself two baloney sandwiches, and sat down to watch an episode of Downton Abbey, which I’d taped a few days before and not yet watched. Nothing like forty-seven minutes with early-twentieth-century British aristocracy and their servants to purge the soul of self-doubt.

  Supper, such as it was, completed — I’d finished it off with a sliced banana awash in milk … fruit and dairy in one serving — I decided not to wait for the next morning to get started.

  I washed up some dishes, then settled back at my desk, cellphone in hand. My attempt to contact Wilson Hall had so far been unsuccessful. I’d been able to get a number for him that morning, called, and got his machine, left a message. The story of my life. I dialed his number again. Machine again, didn’t leave a second message.

  I checked my email, hoping for good news, and got some. Patsy Bannister had forwarded the list of names of kids she’d come up with from Larmer’s Christian school. Eleven names. Those calls I’d make the next day. Maybe even learn something more about the Jaden Reese incident.

  For now I wanted to call Lorne Cooney. Lorne and I had worked together, first during our Calgary Herald days and since then on a few freelance projects. A laughing Jamaican, Lorne Cooney was a lefty politically and willing to tell you about it every time the opportunity arose and sometimes even when it didn’t. He was passionate, vocal, and wickedly funny in his verbal attacks on those who happened not to share his views.

  Got him first try. First ring.

  “I think it’s time we had lunch,” I said into the phone. “I need some Cooney wisdom and maybe a plate of … what’s that crap you like at Mucho Burrito?”

  “It’s not crap, man; it’s a little something I like to call ‘chili rellenos Jamaican.’”

  “Yeah, that.” I said. “How about we get some and I pick that reggae-clouded mind of yours for a while?”

  He laughed. “This is perfect. I work out at a gym a couple of blocks from my favourite Mucho Burrito location. I put the pounds on, I take the pounds off. What could be better?”

  He gave me directions and we agreed to meet at one the next day. “After the lunch rush,” Lorne reasoned.

  As I hung up the phone, I felt my mood almost completely rehabilitated. Lorne Cooney often had that effect on me, which left me wondering why I didn’t make a greater effort to spend more time with the guy.

  I knew the answer, just hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge it. Some years before, Lorne had been the guy to relay the message that I needed to get home right away, that something was wrong. The something that was wrong was that a twisted, sadistic killer had set fire to my house, a fire that took my wife’s life. I’d spent the next few years obliterating everything about that night from my mind. Including Lorne Cooney. I was shooting the messenger and I knew it. But it didn’t stop me from keeping one of my best friends at arm’s length for a long time.

  In the last year or so, Lorne and I had resumed our friendship and I was glad of it. We never spoke of that night — we didn’t have to — but I knew that Lorne, like Cobb and Jill, understood.

  FIVE

  A fter I called Lorne, I’d been able to track a copy of his story in the Herald online archives. I read it twice. So the next day when we met at the Mucho Burrito downtown, I had a pretty good handle on what he’d written. But with Lorne, as with Patsy Bannister, there was always stuff that hadn’t made it into print, sometimes because there was just no way of knowing how accurate one’s impressions and suspicions really were.

  Twenty minutes after our arrival, Lorne was gazing fondly down at the glob that had had our server shaking his head sadly as he put it together, topped off with the contents of a jar of some spice Lorne had brought with him. I had opted for the chimichangas, which earned me a relieved smile from the same server.

  For the first part of our lunch together, we ate, drank Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and I laughed a lot while Lorne recounted the mishaps of the previous several weeks of his life. I had long been convinced that he would have been a huge success in stand-up comedy but hoped he’d never try it, because the world of journalism couldn’t afford to lose many more Lorne Cooneys.

  He turned his Jamaican accent off and on depending on the context of what he was saying. Heavy accent for humorous rants against the ways of a North American world he portrayed as “on the eve of destruction” (to quote the long-ago song), and almost no accent for normal conversation.

  I was on the last section of my chimi when Lorne leaned back, breathed in deeply, then out, and said, “That Cooney wisdom you referred to on the phone — anything specific, or you just want me to prattle on so you can wait for a couple of gems along the way.”

  I patted my mouth with a napkin. “Good as that sounds, I do have something I’d like to throw at you.”

  “Throw, brother, throw.”

  “March 2012, Hamilton. Radio talk show host gets gunned down in the parking lot next to the station. Then when that doesn’t do the job, he’s shot a second time five months later, this time for keeps. I wondered what you might know, I mean, I read the piece you wrote, which was excellent, by the way, but I was hoping you might have a couple of things that didn’t make it into print.”

  He tapped his temple. “The juicy bits.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lorne drained his glass, called to the tall, skinny guy who’d served us that he was switching to beer, and looked at the ceiling for a long minute.

  “Dennis Monday,” he said. “Big-time fake. Fake hair, fake teeth, couple of facelifts, never had an original idea in his life. The guy who shot him the first time did ol’ Denny a giant favour, man. Story is, he was on his way out, low ratings that were getting lower by the week … he gets popped but survives, comes back to the station after his recovery and he’s suddenly a rock star, not only on his own show but across the network that owns several of those stations.”

  “They never got the guy who shot him.”

  Lorne shook his head. “Don’t know that they even got close. Monday … oh, by the way, the name’s fake, too, he’s really Dennis Bratvers. Got ‘Bratwurst’ in school, figured that wasn’t a cool name for a budding radio star, changed it to Monday.… Anyway, he never saw the shooter, remembers a car in the parking lot when he got to his, but it was dark and he couldn’t describe it at all. He went to the passenger side of his car, which meant he had his back to the other car, opened the door, and was bent over putting some stuff into the car when pop, pop, he goes down, loses consciousness immediately, and remembers nothing after opening the car door.”

  “Shooter take anything?”

  “Not from Monday’s car, at least the police don’t think so, and Monday didn’t figure anything was missing. What the shooter did take were the shell casings. Monday was shot with a Smith and Wesson 380. They got the slugs out of Monday’s back and shoulder, but with no casings, finding the exact gun is more difficult.”

  “Think it was a hit?”

  Lorne shrugged. “In some ways it feels like that, but this guy was a nothing. Why waste a hit on a radio personality with almost zero listenership?”

  “Sending a message?”

  “What message? You suck on the radio s
o we’ve decided to shoot your ass.”

  I finished my drink, shook my head when our waiter arrived with Lorne’s beer and glanced at me. “Do you know if he’d received any death threats before he was shot?”

  “Never heard about any, and the way Monday milked the thing after he got back on the air, I figure he would’ve said so if there had been any.”

  I told Lorne about Cobb’s being hired as bodyguard for Buckley-Rand Larmer and the threats Larmer had received.

  “So you’re wondering if there’s a connection?”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “Somebody out there trying to rid the world of right-wing radio talk.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not an unworthy goal, man, that’s for damn sure.” Lorne grinned, then turned serious again. “I guess it’s possible. But why threaten Larmer? Why not just pop him? The way I hear it he has more enemies than Vladimir Putin, so even if you didn’t want to kill him yourself, it shouldn’t be too hard to find somebody who would.”

  “Maybe even a pro.”

  “If the first Monday shooting was a hit, I hope whoever paid for it got their money back. If the idea was to silence Monday, exactly the opposite happened. And if the shooter was an alleged pro, he’s probably been sent back to Triple A.”

  “Maybe the idea wasn’t to kill him — just wound him, scare him off and maybe some of the other talk types at the same time. Then he comes back, is even noisier than he was before, and boom! second hit, this time no mistake.”

  Lorne drank some beer, thought about that. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “but I keep coming back to the fact that the guy was a zero, so none of it makes sense.”

  “Do the police think the two Monday shooters were one and the same guy?”

  “Can’t say for certain, but what they’re pretty sure of is that it’s the same gun. Again the casings were gone. But they got the slug, just one this time, and this time in Monday’s brain.”