Barrington Street Blues

by Anne Emery

  “What did these people want?”

  She gave me the look of someone who has been around the block over and over again for decades, even though she was barely twenty-one. “What do they all want?”

  “Did they come out and ask for sex?”

  “No. I just told you. They pretended to be religious. Said they wanted to help.”

  “Help how?”

  “By taking people off the streets. They’d take the kids home, they said.”

  “Meaning they’d take them back to their parents?”

  “No, to some other home, I think. The gingerbread lady’s house maybe.”

  “Did anyone ever go with them that you know of?”

  “I saw this guy — he was stoned — he got in the car with them.”

  “What kind of car?”

  She shrugged. “An old man’s kind of car. Big, dark, boring, you know.”

  “So this guy got into the car.”

  “Yeah, and the lady drove and the cop got into the back seat with the dopehead, and they took off.”

  “Where was this?”

  “It was downtown. By that shitty-looking parking garage. What do they call it?”

  “Tex-Park?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. Years ago.”

  “Who was the guy they took with them? Any idea?”

  “Just some little loser who was always hanging around in front of that cool old building on Barrington Street, with the turret. The Khyber.”

  “Did you see him again after that?”

  She thought for a minute. “No, I never noticed him again.” “Where do you want me to drop you off?”

  “Same place you found me.”

  I resisted the temptation to lay into her about what she was doing with her life. It would have been pointless.

  “Take care of yourself, Candy,” I said when I let her out.

  “Yeah. See you in court.”

  “Without question.”

  The pizza would need reheating anyway so I further delayed my homecoming and made a detour downtown to the squalid, graffiti-covered parking structure at the corner of Sackville and Granville streets. I approached the attendant, a heavy-set man with jet black hair and the face of a boxer, and introduced myself.

  “I’m hoping you can help me. I’m trying to track down a young guy who went missing a few years back.”

  “Good luck.”

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “I been here eight years.”

  Now what? Did you ever see a boring dark car with a coppish-looking man and a plump woman in it?

  “You see hundreds of cars a day, right?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you ever see anything that looked like a couple cruising for young kids in here?”

  “You’re puttin’ me on. People drive in, they park, they drive out. What’s to notice?”

  “Did street people ever curl up here for the night?”

  “Not if I could help it.”

  “Did they though?”

  “Once in a while I’d see one drift in or out. I told them to move on.”

  “Who else used to work here? You aren’t here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

  “It just seems like it. But if you’re asking who else works here now that also worked here years ago, the answer is nobody. I’m the only veteran in this operation. We used to have students in here working part-time. One of them got so caught up in his homework, he missed some shitball who broke into nearly forty cars. What a genius. I was glad I wasn’t his old man, footin’ the college bill for that egghead.”

  “Do you remember the names of any of these students?”

  “Nah, they came and went. Well, I remember the bozo who missed the break-in. ‘Cause his name was Dudley. Dudley Douthwright. Fit him to a T.”

  Dudley did not sound promising as an eyewitness, but he might have known other students who worked at the place. Or, he might have failed to notice them. I thanked the attendant and headed home.

  There may have been a legion of God-fearing cops in the city, but the guy I pictured in that big dark sedan was Warren Tulk. When I got home I called Brennan. “Up for some more detective work?”

  “It could be arranged.”

  I relayed what I had heard from Candace. “So I’m more curious than ever about the Reverend Warren Tulk. I told you he has a bookshop.”

  “Right. His Word.”

  “Why don’t you drop in and do some shopping?”

  “I’ll ask him for an unabridged edition of the Summa Theologica.”

  “You already have a copy of the Summa. I saw the volumes in your room.”

  “I have one of my own, yes. But I’m tired of lending it out. Comes back all dog-eared and covered with beer stains. Sure, the works of St. Thomas make a lovely gift for those hard-to-buy-for individuals we all have in our lives.”

  “And while you’re at it, get him talking about kids, street people, that kind of thing.”

  “I will.”

  I said goodbye and heated up the pizza.

  †

  “Monty!”

  I was coming up from the cells in the Spring Garden Road courthouse on Wednesday afternoon when I was hailed by one of my wife’s closest friends. Liz was tall and athletically built with uncontrollable shoulder-length blonde hair. She attracted attention wherever she went; if she noticed, she never let on. “Liz. Should I even ask what you’re doing in this courthouse?”

  “As opposed to divorce court, I suppose you mean. My divorcing days are long behind me,” she sang out. “It got too expensive.” She explained her presence: “Speeding ticket.”

  “City or highway?”

  “Highway.”

  “Well done. I didn’t know she had that much power.”

  “She certainly does. And it’s the original engine.”

  “I know. Have you got her outside?”

  “Want to go for a cruise?”

  “Yeah.”

  Liz was well aware that I coveted her auto. The funny part was I generally had no interest in cars and bought whatever I could get a deal on when I needed a change. But this was a 1954 Chevy Bel Air, lovingly painted in pale, creamy yellow with white trim. The midMay sunshine blazed from the car’s glossy finish. She was parked around the corner beside the Sebastapol monument in the Old Burying Ground. Liz and I got into the Chev, rolled down our windows, and headed out on Barrington Street. We were the object of admiring glances as we cruised through the south end of Halifax. Inevitably, the name of our mutual acquaintance came up. “I was out with Maura the other night,” Liz said.

  “Mmm.”

  “Not in the best of cheer.”

  “When is she ever?”

  “She’s usually a million laughs when you’re not around.” How encouraging. “I’m sure it’s the same for you,” she added, as if that might take the sting out of it. “Of course, it probably had something to do with the jerk who accosted us at our table.”

  “Who do these waiters think they are?”

  “I’ll ignore that. Fanny, Maura, and I went out for dinner, then we repaired to one of the local establishments for our port and cigars. Gabbing away, having a grand old time, when this Romeo came over and said: ‘What are you girls doing out alone on a Saturday night?’ Alone! Of course, you know what he meant by that.” She gave me a sidelong glance.

  “Alone as in, not with him.”

  “Right. Three women in a bar without a man. That constitutes ‘alone’ in his lexicon.”

  “Would I be right in assuming you discouraged his advances?”

  “Maura did. By the time she finished with him, I don’t imagine he was able for any more advances that night. My point is: maybe the single life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For Maura, I mean. It suits me fine. I don’t mind telling these clowns where to get off.”

  “But you think Maura’s grown weary
of telling people off? Is that even remotely possible? If so, we’ll all be the better for it. More to the point, is she unattached these days?” Was she still seeing someone called Giacomo, is what I wanted to know.

  Liz shrugged. “You know Maura. If there is someone, the experience is complete in itself; she’s never felt the need to blab that kind of thing to her friends.” As we pulled up in front of the courthouse, she added: “We’re all coming to see your band tonight at the Flying Shag. She’s looking forward to it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because she said: ‘I’m looking forward to the Shag.’”

  “Shag as in the nickname of the Flying Stag, or shag as in —”

  “Get out of my car.”

  Looking forward to the evening? With me? That, from Liz, was the equivalent of any other female friend putting her hand on your arm, looking soulfully into your eyes, and spending an hour telling you she thinks there’s hope for your “relationship” if you make the right moves in the wife’s direction. I knew years would go by before Liz would ever get this personal again. Of course, maybe Maura was looking forward to the night out for reasons that had nothing to do with old Monty. But I wouldn’t dwell on that.

  I opened the door and got out, then caressed the car’s gleaming finish. “I’ve got a gentle touch if you ever need someone to polish your rear panels there, Liz.”

  “Piss off, Monty. See ya!” I waved, and she purred away. I walked from the courthouse to my office, buoyed by the conversation but still cautious from long years of experience with my estranged spouse.

  Chapter 6

  I’m not some long-lost someone, just dropped in to say hello. It’s the same old loverman, baby, lost so long ago. ‘Cause I was born to believe I never could deceive.

  — Gordon Lightfoot, “Same Old Loverman”

  Maura, Liz, and Maura’s other best friend, Fanny, were putting back the draft and whooping it up at the Flying Stag. The Stag — we called it the Shag — was a low-ceilinged bar located at the end of a suburban strip mall that also boasted a cheque-cashing service, a laundromat, and a pawnshop with a grimy, barred front window. My blues band, Functus, still played here on occasion, of which this was one. I looked upon my wife’s presence as a sign of hope. In two more days she would be flying to Geneva for an international conference on poverty law. She would be out of the country for three weeks. The fact that she would spend one of her last nights in Halifax listening to old Monty and his blues harp had to mean something, did it not? I got the impression, from the mellow look on her face, that she had been lifting a few before her arrival. I, too, had a glow on from a couple of hours with my fellow Functi, at Comeau’s on Gottingen Street.

  “No, you don’t,” Maura said, seemingly out of the blue. When I followed her glance, I saw she was responding to Ed Johnson’s sweatshirt, which said: “Do I fucking look like a people person?” She was right: he didn’t.

  But he had the people on his side during our first set. “House of the Rising Sun,” with Ed on vocals and organ, was spellbinding. Not for the first time, his impassioned take on the old standard made me wonder just how close he was to the truth when he dismissed his family with the comment that they were “trash.” Charlie Trenholm, our drummer, caught the mood and gave us an insistent, heavy drum beat that underscored the hard-luck drama of the song.

  I alternated between guitar and harmonica for the set, then Ed and I sat down with Maura, her two pals, and Ed’s wife, Donna. The person who had freely chosen to sign on with Ed Johnson for life — for better or for worse — was a handsome woman with an angular face, long dark hair, and stylish glasses. She had the air of one who sits back and watches the whole circus go by, making her own observations and not sharing them with the wider world. One thing she knew without any doubt was that Ed, although he would rarely admit it, would be lost without her.

  But I was intent on my own wife; when we had finished the set, Maura had looked me up and down with eyes made lazy by intoxicants.

  “Should I increase your spousal support payments, Collins?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” What payments? Neither of us was making any payments; we shared the expenses relating to the kids, but there were no other financial complications.

  “A clothing allowance at least. How old are those jeans? They look as if you put them on when you were seventeen and grew into them over the ensuing decades. Can’t be very comfortable.”

  “Is that a blues harp in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” This from Fanny. In contrast to the tall, blonde Liz, who had gone through two divorces, Fanny was short, dark, freckled, and married to her childhood sweetheart. They had a houseful of kids.

  “You’ve got her where you want her now, Collins,” Ed chimed in, “eyeballing your fine masculine form.”

  “And the T-shirt,” Maura continued, as she so often did, as if Johnson hadn’t spoken. “Is that a picture of Dutchie Mason circa 1975? It’s so faded I can’t make it out. And then there’s your face. They make disposable razors now. They’re cheap.”

  The truth was I had about eight loads of laundry stacked up at home, and I had not been able to get to them. I hadn’t shaved in the morning because I had overslept, had a quick shower and rushed off to work. I didn’t bother to explain.

  “Maybe she’d like you better if you looked more like an opera conductor,” Johnson offered. “Didn’t you name your daughter after some opera queen? I don’t know what you guys see in all that screeching and melodrama, but who knows? Give it a try. Appear before her in a coat and tails, your golden locks swept back, your face the very portrait of artistic disdain. That’s what she wants, Collins, not a scruffy-looking blues guy in a torn T-shirt. So tart yourself up and next thing you know, you’ll be playing her like a violin.”

  “You mean he’s going to take something long and rigid and move it back and forth, and back and forth, while I make sounds that people describe as almost human?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Nah, wouldn’t want to wake the neighbours. Sorry.”

  “Bagpipes,” Johnson tried.

  “Let me get this straight. Collins would be dressed in a plaid skirt and he’d have me hiked up in his armpit somehow, squeezing me and —”

  “Are you people barristers of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia,” Fanny asked us, “or white trash what just don’t know how to act?”

  “I’m both,” Ed answered. “I won’t speak for the other two.”

  “You’re getting me nowhere, Johnson,” I said to him.

  “I never said it would be easy. Here, have another brew and try to hit on somebody else. How about Liz here?”

  “Thanks, Ed, but I’ve gone off men,” Liz replied. “Not worth the trouble. But you, Maura, come on. Look at him.” She pointed to me. “He’s so sweet. Kinda like a shopworn altar boy. How can you resist?”

  She could resist, as I knew all too well. I turned the conversation to other matters, and drank too much beer. We did our next set and, because we had an extra horn player, ended it with a big number, namely Chicago’s “South California Purples,” with myself as lead vocalist. This performance was directed towards one end, namely pleasing my wife; it was one of her favourite songs. At one point during the piece I saw her big grey eyes on me. She looked away when I caught her. Did I have a chance after all?

  “That didn’t sound half bad,” she conceded when I returned to the table. Her speech was a bit slurred. She got up to go to the washroom and stumbled over her chair leg. Perhaps the sacrament of marriage could be renewed. I followed at a discreet distance and, when she emerged, I was ready.

  “Come outside for a minute.”

  “Whatever for?”

  I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her along till we were standing in the shadows against the outside wall of the bar. She put up only token resistance, and I didn’t want the opportunity to pass us by.

  I said to her in an urgent whisper: “Let’s get in the car and —”

&nb
sp; “The car!”

  “No! I meant get in the car and drive to my place where we can be alone and —”

  “We can’t leave our friends, and the band! And we’re too blitzed to drive. You’re like a god-damned teenager.”

  “I feel like one.”

  “Yes, you do, now that you mention it. Oh, Monty, this is preposterous. Back off.”

  “We won’t be gone long. Just —”

  “We won’t be gone at all. Monty, I’m heading inside. I’m going to order a glass of ginger ale. And I am never going to drink this much again. Ever.”

  She stalked off to the entrance of the bar, and I followed behind, dejected.

  My last set was the blues personified, and I was the object of inquiring glances from everyone but my former wife. She did not look in my direction again.

  †

  She had to face me the following day, however, because she was one of the organizers of a conference on criminal law being held at the Lord Nelson Hotel. I was giving a talk on “Mens Rea, Murder, and Fundamental Justice.” To be taken seriously by the judges present, I had a shave and a haircut, and wore my most serious navy suit with my whitest white shirt, and a sombre tie. My presentation was scheduled just before we were to break for dinner. I discoursed upon the law and wove in some criminal court war stories. Given the attention and laughter accorded my presentation, I counted my performance a success.

  “No more skin-tight jeans, I see,” Maura remarked, as the waiters began serving pre-dinner drinks.

  “They got a little uncomfortable last night. Quite suddenly.”

  “Yes. I remember. Your talk went over well.”

  “Maura, listen. I apologize for last night and for any disrespect I seemed to be showing you. I was an idiot.”

  “No more than I was!”