Dead Air

by David A. Poulsen

  Next I called Cobb.

  He answered with, “So, did your meeting come up to your expectations?”

  “Pretty much but only because they weren’t great expectations.”

  “Great expectations. Catchy.”

  “So when do you get off? I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Couple of hours. I’ve got one of the boys coming in to take over. I’m running a little behind on sleep.”

  “Maybe the beer’s a bad idea,” I said.

  “No, the beer’s a good idea. How about the Ship and Anchor? Decent food, has a patio. We catch some rays, get some refreshment.”

  “You had me at food. What time?”

  “I can be there about four.”

  “See you then.”

  I called Jill again, still no answer at either phone. Told myself again that everything was fine. Wasn’t sure I believed me.

  I looked at my watch — almost one-thirty. I decided to head for the Britannia Shopping Plaza on Elbow Drive. I wanted to load up on groceries, the kind I hoped Jill would like and Kyla could tolerate. And maybe stop in at Owl’s Nest Books, pick up something for Kyla. I’d come to know the folks at Owl’s Nest during the short-lived run of my own kids’ book, The Spoofaloof Rally. The store held the record for most sales anywhere of my one and only book. Unfortunately that record was six, leaving me a few thousand short of a bestseller.

  I cranked the Accord’s stereo, and twenty-five minutes into Amelia Curran’s Spectators, I parked my car and spent the next twenty-five wandering the aisles of Sunterra Market squeezing rutabagas and examining asparagus and stuffed veal. I loaded a couple of bags into the car, walked up the street to Owl’s Nest, and grabbed a copy of Marty Chan’s The Mystery of the Frozen Brains for Kyla. It sounded like something she’d like.

  Feeling more human at last, I spotted the Starbucks across the street and figured I had time for an iced caramel Frappuccino. I’d finished almost half of Kyla’s book before it was time to head back to 17th Avenue and my meeting with Cobb. At the end of every chapter I called Jill’s number. Nothing.

  Cobb was sitting at a patio table near the sidewalk when I arrived. He was working on a beer, and as I sat he pointed at his beer and raised his eyebrows.

  “As soon as possible,” I told him.

  The bar had Dos Equis on tap and Feist on the outdoor stereo. “You chose well,” I said.

  Cobb grinned. “Learn anything in your meeting with Larmer?”

  “It wasn’t a meeting; it was an interview.”

  “Tomato, to-mah-to. How was your interview?”

  “About as I expected. I didn’t learn much more about the guy. He’s tough, he’s smart, and he has no time for people who don’t think he’s pretty special. All of which I knew or at least suspected.”

  Cobb drank from his beer glass. “And how does that help with your research?”

  “I’m not sure it does,” I admitted. “Still, I’m glad I met with him. Bottom line — this is a guy who’s driven by a desire to elevate a particular ideology and is both calculating and ruthless in his dealings with those from the other side. That’s a formula for making enemies and I’m guessing Larmer has made plenty over the years. Discovering which one is angry enough to threaten him or even do him harm isn’t going to be easy.”

  “What was it you said before, take a number?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  I recounted my conversation with Lorne Cooney.

  “I’d be stunned if there wasn’t something connecting the Monday shootings in Hamilton and what’s happening with Larmer.”

  “Certainly a possibility.”

  Cobb looked at his beer glass, then at me. “So what’s next?”

  “For me? I keep digging. The guy has a past, what appears to be a shadowy past. I want to get behind the curtain that seems to block out so much of who he is and how he came to be that person. That’s where I think I should be concentrating my efforts — where I think I can do you the most good. The trick is to not get sidetracked by focusing on one person or one incident.”

  “Difficult not to do.”

  “Damn difficult.”

  Next I told him about my chat with Wilson Hall. Hearing it out loud, I realized it wasn’t all that relevant to the Larmer threats case unless Larmer was the other guy in the bar with Hugg the night of the brawl. And that I didn’t know. I paused at that point in the story.

  “Any chance you could get a look at the police report on that incident and find out who the other guy was?”

  He made a note in his pad. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I nodded and finished relating Wilson Hall’s commentary about that night and what happened, and didn’t happen, after.

  “This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about,” I said. “It’s too easy to get diverted onto something that isn’t what you’re paying me for.” It sounded like an apology and I guess it was.

  When I completed my recap, Cobb said, “Interesting stuff, though, and maybe even helpful in that it gives us a look at one of Larmer’s key associates. And don’t think what you’re doing is a waste of time. When I was a cop I learned very quickly that in every investigation there were going to be countless conversations, threads, encounters that would take me nowhere. And in a murder investigation the chances of solving a murder become less and less with the passage of time. But it has to be done. And every once in a while that conversation that you were sure was going to be a complete waste of effort turns out to be important.”

  “Thanks, Coach, that’s what I needed.”

  Cobb smiled. “No worries.” A beat, then two. “Besides, this isn’t a murder investigation. Time is important but not critical. Take the time you need and trust your instincts. I do.”

  “Again … thanks.” I was staring at my beer glass.

  “But there’s something else, isn’t there? Something that’s bothering you.”

  I looked at him. “You know what? You’re good at this. And yes, there is something else.”

  He looked for a second like he thought I was going to launch into another rant about the evils of the right and how despicable it was for him to work for someone like Larmer. But that wasn’t it. Not this time.

  “It’s Kyla. And Jill. Both of them, I guess.”

  “What about them? If this is one of those rough-patches-in-a-relationship moments, I can tell you that Jill’s nuts about —”

  I held up my hands to stop him. “It’s not that. At least I don’t think it is.” I told him about Kyla’s illness. “I’m worried about her and I’m worried about her mother and I’m bothered that I’m not part of what’s going on. It seems … deliberate.”

  “Maybe it seems deliberate because it is deliberate,” Cobb said slowly. “You’ve got a kid with an ugly case of the flu or something like it, and you’ve got a mom who’s justifiably worried. You’re probably not on the radar for a couple of days, that’s all.”

  “I know you’re probably right, and I also know I sound like a jerk making this about me. I just want to be there for both of them and it sucks that I can’t be.”

  “You know what? I think I know Jill pretty well, and I’m guessing she knows how much you care and appreciates it more than you know. But this just isn’t the right time for you to be there. Who knows how physically sick Kyla is — vomiting, diarrhea, all of it. To a kid that stuff’s yucky and embarrassing and they turn pretty private, even though what they want most of all is a hug and a smile. You’ll get your chance and when you do, don’t forget the hug or the smile.”

  Sometimes I forgot that Cobb was a husband and a dad. And from what I’d seen and been able to gather, he was pretty good on both counts. I sat for a minute, then nodded. “For a gumshoe you’re a pretty smart guy.”

  “Now there’s a term you don’t hear nearly enough.” He grinned.

>   “I can’t decide whether I like gumshoe or shamus better. You have a preference?’

  He laughed and shook his head. “I’m okay with either one.”

  “And for the record, you’re a damn good friend, too.”

  The grin remained. “Yeah, don’t forget that when, because of me, some very bad people are trying to shoot your ass.”

  “You said that wasn’t going to happen.”

  “I said it wasn’t going to happen right now.”

  Both of us laughed and clinked our beer glasses.

  That night I made a couple more calls to Jill. Got the machine both times. Stopped calling because I didn’t want to wake her or Kyla if they were finally getting some sleep. I read for a while, fell asleep on the couch, woke up at two in the morning and stumbled into bed, fuzzy-headed and grumpy.

  NINE

  I slept badly, rose early, and with the first morning coffee in hand, reclaimed my spot on the deck recliner to do what I enjoyed most about mornings and my apartment — watch the city, at least my part of the city, come to life for the day.

  After a half-hour of tranquility I stepped back inside and headed for the shower. I emerged a few minutes later and saw that I’d missed a call from Jill. Called her back, got the machine. So much for tranquility. I called again fifteen minutes later — machine again. I decided the only way to deal with my worry over Jill and Kyla was to put it aside for a while and turn my attention one hundred percent to Buckley-Rand Larmer.

  I promised myself that I’d know more about Larmer by the end of this day than I did at its beginning. I just had to figure out how I was going to get that done.

  The computer hadn’t offered up much so far, but as I worked on a second cup of coffee I dialed up my Larmer file and stared at my pathetic list of “persons of interest,” realizing again how insignificant my efforts had been to date.

  I spent an hour looking for numbers for the eleven former Hope Christian Academy students, came up with four possibles. I hated making cold calls, always had, dating back to my earliest days at the Herald. “Hi there, you don’t know me but I’m hoping that you’ll tell me everything you know about a topic that is probably very painful for you and maybe even give me the clue to breaking the case wide open thus sending me on my way to a Pulitzer Prize.” Yeah, I hated making those calls and procrastinated my way into putting these four off until later in the day.

  I decided to get out of the apartment, hit the streets, do a little actual physical research. And I even had an idea where to start. A guy I’d known in high school, pretty good athlete, became a teacher after university; he taught in traditional schools for a time, then became the principal at a charter school — not a Christian school exactly but a school with family values as one of its important tenets. If there was anybody who could point me in the right direction to discover what I could about Larmer’s alma mater, Hope Christian Academy, it was Richard Deckard.

  Richard Deckard. The guy took a lot of grief in high school because of the name — Blade Runner had come out some years before, but it stayed popular with enough of us that Richard “Don’t call me Rick” Deckard came to hate the name, the movie, Harrison Ford, and a bunch of us who tortured him with questions about his “replicant” upbringing.

  I found R. Deckard in the phone directory, called his house, and listened to a voice I hadn’t heard in a couple of decades. Deckard remembered me and had read about me during the excitement (his word) of the previous winter. He agreed to meet me later that morning at the school — Hillcrest Academy — where he would be working on some things for the next school year.

  “So much for summer holidays,” I said, hoping I sounded suitably sympathetic.

  “It’s not so bad,” Deckard replied. “It’s amazing how much I can get done when there are no teachers or students around the place.”

  We rang off and I grabbed jeans and a Houston Texans hoodie, topped it off with a Willow Park Golf Course ball cap, and headed for northwest Calgary. I took a longer route out of habit. 4th Street Northwest wasn’t the most direct way to where I was going, but because it housed Queen’s Park Cemetery, it was a road I had frequented in recent years. As I’d done hundreds of times since Donna’s death, I slowed and turned left into the gentle, tree-lined lanes that led eventually to the resting place of the woman to whom I’d been married for seven amazing years. My stops varied in length — sometimes just a few minutes, often longer. Occasionally I took a bag lunch with me and sat on the grass, eating a sandwich and staring at her name on the headstone.

  Today would be a short visit, but I knew that after the stop I’d feel better about the day and about … pretty much everything. The first minutes were always the same, fighting back tears, often unsuccessfully, as I grieved Donna’s being gone. Then as I stood before where she lay, eventually the peace would engulf me. I wasn’t one to talk to the person I was visiting as I knew some people did, except as I was leaving when I whispered, “Bye, babe, I love you,” and walked slowly back to my car. I did that every time and I did it this time.

  On the way out of Queen’s Park, I performed a second ritual. I lifted my ball cap, something else I always did, as I passed the spot where Donnie Goss lay. He was six years old when he was assaulted and murdered at the Calgary Zoo sixty-seven years before. I had written about it several years ago and would be forever touched by the way the small city that was Calgary back then poured out its sympathy and love for the boy’s family and its loathing for the man who took a child’s life. Just weeks after the murder, a Calgary movie theatre interrupted that evening’s film to announce to the crowd that there had been an arrest in the Donnie Goss murder investigation. Several kilometres away a similar scene played out at a baseball game at Calgary’s Buffalo Stadium. Both crowds applauded the news. The killer, who had previously taken the life of another boy in Vancouver, that one eleven years old, was executed a few months later in Lethbridge, alongside four German prisoners of war in the largest public hanging in Canadian history.

  This time as I drove past Donnie Goss’s gravesite, I was reminded of the murder of another child, Faith Unruh, a murder still unsolved, the victim’s killer likely still on the streets.

  Out there. Somewhere.

  After leaving the cemetery, I continued north on 4th Street to McKnight Boulevard, where I rolled west into North Haven, an unpretentious middle- to upper-middle-class neighbourhood that housed Hillcrest Academy. Like several of the city’s charter schools, this one made its home in a building that had been a public school until it was decommissioned by the school board and purchased by the people behind Hillcrest.

  The building was long and low, its one-storey, brick-and-mortar, nondescript exterior sitting across from a strip mall and kitty-corner to a Baptist church.

  My last encounter with a private-school principal had not gone well, and for a few minutes I sat in the Accord, not moving, looking across the street to the school, working at pushing unpleasant memories from my head. Eventually I switched off the ignition, opened the car door, and stepped out into the warming, soon-to-be-hot July day.

  The main entrance into the school was locked, but Deckard must have been listening for me, because seconds after I banged on the door, he opened it, grinning and extending a hand.

  “Hello, Adam, good to see you, it’s been a long time.”

  “A very long time.” I shook the offered hand and as he stepped back, I moved into the cooler air of what appeared to be an important intersection in the school. Halls from three directions met where we were standing.

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me, Richard,” I said. “I’ll try not to keep you from your work any longer than necessary.”

  “No worries.” He grinned again. “It is summer holidays, as you pointed out. Come on, I put on some coffee in the staff room. You drink coffee, I hope.”

  “Only because taking it intravenously is frowned upon.”
>
  “A man after my own heart.”

  He led the way down a hallway with walls still plastered with the previous term’s student art, some of it very good. Of course, given my own utter lack of artistic skill, I’ve always found anything recognizable impressive. But even my untrained eye could note the talent of several of the Hillcrest kids.

  Like hospitals, schools have their own distinctive smell. Unlike hospitals, that smell is something I don’t mind, though it’s hard to analyze. The combination of books, floor wax, sneakers, and young energy is not unpleasant, though in July the sneakers and energy were missing, the school a reflection of the emptiness of its halls and classrooms.

  The staff room was large and had a friendly, comfortable feel to it, but not comfortable enough for teachers to hang out for more than recess, lunchtime, and maybe the odd spare.

  “Grab a seat, Adam. How do you take your coffee?”

  “Just milk if you have it.” I took a chair at the table that sat in the centre of the room and watched him pour the coffee. Not a big guy but still fit-looking, with thinning hair and a ruddy complexion. Sweatsuit and expensive-looking sneakers for off-hours at the school.

  He brought the coffee and we sat in awkward silence for a few moments, sipping and looking up at the ceiling like it was the Sistine Chapel. I’d noticed it before — what had happened the year before with Cobb and me and Donna’s killer had been pretty big in the media at the time. And ever since, people had trouble making small talk with me. “Hey, Adam, ol’ buddy, what’s been happening with you?” or “So, Cullen, long time no see, you stayin’ out of trouble?” were conversation killers. Which was okay. I’d never been a big fan of small talk.

  That being the case, I figured it was up to me to get the ball rolling. “Richard, I’m hoping you can help me with something. I’m looking for information about Hope Christian Academy, a charter school that was around for quite a while but closed a few years ago.”