The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  The witness Marcel Leroux had been found hanging in his cell, true, but he had not died. Not right away. His throat was a purple bruise, his brain destroyed by lack of oxygen. Officials began the difficult task of locating next of kin. His nearly lifeless body was removed from the jail in Owen Sound where he had been housed in secrecy awaiting the trial. McKelvey listened to the news as he drove his little truck to a coffee shop around the corner from the police headquarters. The all-news station reported there would be a significant and far-reaching investigation. How the witness had come to do the job—uninterrupted—was beyond fathoming. A so-called expert on organized bike gangs was explaining to the news reporter that Leroux was a “pioneer”, the first member of the Blades to turn against his brethren. While the organization had deeper roots in the southern United States, they were new kids on the block up north. Eventually, the expert said, every organized crime faction must face this cold hard reality; personal survival trumps loyalty. The Hell’s Angels had had their sellouts, and the Mafia, too. It was only a matter of time.

  “I would imagine,” the expert said, “it finally dawned on Mr. Leroux that, once he testified and was sent to prison as part of his plea bargain, he would require protective custody twenty-four hours a day. He would always look over his shoulder...”

  Now it was Duguay who would be looking over his shoulder, McKelvey thought as he parked and walked up the sidewalk. The coffee shop was always busy with cops and office workers from the nearby towers. He breathed in the rich scent of freshly ground beans, soil and wood, the flash of chrome and hissing steam. Young men and women of university age joked and moved like dancers behind the counter, repeating orders in their sing-song voices. McKelvey spotted Hattie at the back, seated at a round table. She gave a wave when she saw him, and he made a drinking motion as he went to the counter. She held a mug aloft and shook her head. He ordered a large black coffee, bold as the law would allow, then went to the milk stand and poured a little sugar in, stirred and stirred. He took a sip as he negotiated his way to the table. Someone recognized him, an old duty sergeant, and McKelvey nodded in return.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” he said and took a seat.

  “Any excuse for a coffee,” she said.

  He took a mouthful and waited for the furnace working in his belly to respond. It was quiet. He said, “Funny, I’ve never seen you drink anything but coffee. I thought all of you people from the east coast were tea drinkers. Like a religion or something.”

  She told him she was an unrepentant four-cup-a-day coffee drinker and how her mother completely ruined her for tea, practically pouring the stuff down her throat three or four times a day. They drank tea with breakfast and supper, they drank it to cure the common cold, hangovers, athlete’s foot and unemployment. They simply guzzled the stuff, and “no excuse for a cup was ever too shady,” she said.

  McKelvey was tired, and he knew he looked worse than he felt. Hattie had said as much. “Look like a drunk with a hangover and a bad cold,” was how she had put it. Now the coffee shop began to bulge with the lunch crowd, and they ordered pre-wrapped deli sandwiches and more coffees. McKelvey picked at his roast beef sandwich but couldn’t muster an appetite.

  “Are you okay? You’re a little pale,” Hattie said, working on a mouthful of egg salad.

  “Just some heartburn,” he said.

  “Did you get the flu shot this year?” she asked.

  “Come on, Hattie, what are you, my mother?”

  “I wish you’d call me Mary-Ann sometimes,” she said and licked at a dab of egg at the corner of her mouth.

  “And yet you call me ‘McKelvey’. Always have,” he said.

  She shrugged and smiled. With her red hair and freckled cheekbones, she struck McKelvey as the sort of woman who forever remained a little girl at heart. Despite her best attempts to alter perceptions, despite even the fact that she carried a gun and was a damned fine shot on the range, she hadn’t let the job completely snuff that softer side buried in there. He wondered if she struggled at times with the evil things men do within this world of violent crime. And it was men, almost entirely. McKelvey could see her clearly as a precocious eight-year-old with pigtails asking a million questions and driving her parents around the bend. She had been a tomboy, he bet. He saw her wearing a dress with a tear in it from a nail down at the dock, watching her father fix the netting on the boat, or simply waiting for him to come back from the sea.

  “It’s more acceptable to call a guy by his last name,” she explained. “It doesn’t take anything away from his machismo. In fact, I would argue that it adds to his image as a gruff, unemotional male. Like in team sports, everybody calls out the player’s last name. For a woman, on the other hand, calling her by her last name erodes a little of her...I don’t know, her femininity.”

  They looked at each other until their little smirks grew to smiles.

  He said, “Is that your rousing manifesto for woman’s lib on the edge of the twenty-first century?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It sounded better in my head.”

  He pushed his plate aside and asked her about Balani. McKelvey had an impression of the man that was somewhat tainted by something he’d heard on the street.

  “You guys have a little bad blood?” she said.

  “Who said that?”

  “Just something I heard. How he didn’t appreciate your involvement. Who knows. Cops are gossip whores, right. Everybody talks about everybody behind their back. Like high school, except we get to carry guns.”

  “Balani’s problem is he focuses on the big show. He wants the glory of the big-name case so he gets his name in the Star and the Sun, and he forgets about the little details that make a case. All I ever wanted was for them to take a look at some of the information I was pulling together. I spent hours out there on the street, talking to people, to some of these kids. You think I don’t know what happened here? He treated me like I’m some fucking beat cop.”

  She shifted a little, looking into his eyes, and said, in a voice absent of malice or accusation, “We’re all guilty at times of letting our hunches lead us around by the nose. Even when the evidence isn’t there or it points somewhere else. We’re only human.”

  But it had been upside down from the very start, something off about the whole thing. McKelvey had watched as Gilmartin and Balani bumbled their way through what they ignorantly assumed was an open-and-shut drug murder that would likely never be solved. McKelvey stopped getting information. He pushed things farther than he should have, he saw that now. He got aggressive because something in Balani’s ego brought out the worst in him. Words were exchanged on more than one occasion. McKelvey finally reached the limit of his frustration. He put Balani against the wall of a corridor one day, used the strength of anger coursing through his body like an electric pulse to hold the bigger man in his place. Everything started and ended that day.

  “This is my son,” McKelvey had said. “Don’t cut me out!”

  Hattie wiped her mouth with a napkin then neatly folded it in two and set it beside her plate. “Sometimes,” she said gently, “we’re too close to something. To see it clearly.”

  McKelvey opted not to share the rumours he’d heard on the street concerning Balani. About his years on the Drug Squad. How he liked his dope. How his work on the joint task force would now allow for the perfect mixture of power and lack of accountability. But kids on the street said stuff like that about cops on the Drug Squad all the time. It was a grey area, word against word. He drained the mug and said, “Let me ask you something. Between you and me. Okay?”

  She nodded and waited.

  “Are you still friends with that woman over in Court Services?” he said.

  “Gail,” she said. “We’re still friends, yes. Why?”

  But she knew. She knew why. She knew him, and she knew his mind. He chewed his thumb a little, playing through the words in his mind. He needed to be careful here. It was a fine line. But she didn’t wait for hi
m.

  “Hey,” she said, leaning in, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Is that so?”

  “They’re going to release Duguay. You and I both know it. But let the joint task force do its job, Charlie. They’ll probably have a tail on him the minute he steps outside the courthouse. These guys have spent a year and a half working on this project, you think they’ll stand by and watch a scumbag like Duguay sail off into the sunset? He won’t be able to take a piss without someone writing down the time and location.”

  “I’m tired of waiting,” he said. “Waiting for Balani. Waiting for the Crown. I can’t wait any more. Christ, I’m not getting any younger.”

  “What are you looking for?” she said, resigned to the fact that she would have to offer whatever help she could.

  “You can bet they’ll have a tight wrap on the proceedings for this,” he said. “I’d appreciate knowing when and where. That’s all. I just want to make sure this asshole doesn’t slip away. I want to be there to look at his face.”

  “That’s it, eh?”

  That, and to begin the process of following this man. He would become Duguay’s shadow. Watching, waiting.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Cross my heart and pinky promise.”

  He held out his crooked pinky, and she smiled and brought hers in until the digits were intertwined, locked in a schoolyard pledge of the ages.

  “Well, I’m off to an interview,” Hattie said. “How about you?”

  “Guess I’ll go over and do a little paperwork. Since I’m down here,” he said.

  She shook her head as she got up from the table. He put his hand out and she smiled again and moved past it, giving him a light kiss on the cheek.

  “Be good,” she said.

  He felt his face rush with blood, and he looked quickly around the coffee shop.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I kept my tongue in my mouth.”

  At the police station, McKelvey started to fix a coffee at the stand, but it had been brewing since seven that morning. It smelled like a blend of old tires and burnt plastic. He tried it, shivered, and tossed the cup in the garbage. In the washroom, he was bent over the sink to splash some water on his face when the door opened and someone came in. It was Rogers, a young and recent addition to the Hold-up Squad. Probably the one who would take McKelvey’s job. The department was big on succession planning.

  “What are you doing in?” Rogers said, moving to the urinal. “Thought you were off for a couple of days.”

  McKelvey raised his head, water dripping from his pasty face. He felt awful and looked even worse. His body was in the throes of a fever, or else something was shutting down. Rotting from the inside out.

  “Yeah, well, I was born here,” McKelvey said. He grabbed some paper towels, wiped his face, dried his hands and tossed the balls of paper in the waste basket.

  Rogers was unzipped, his head tilted back, and he said, “You’re dedicated, that’s why. Old school. All of you guys, you treat it like the army or something. The Marine Corps. My generation, we’re not interested in working eighty hours a week. Loyalty only goes so far, right. We want a gym and a cafeteria that serves salad. Flex time.” He laughed as he zipped up his pants and turned to the counter to wash his hands. McKelvey ran his fingers through his hair and regarded the younger man. He was thirty years old if a day, and the rest of his life was spread before him like a buffet. The things I thought I knew back then, McKelvey thought. And with each day he lived, with each year that passed, it became all the clearer that nobody had a goddamned clue.

  “You don’t look so good, if you don’t mind me saying,” Rogers said. “You got that flu?”

  “What the fuck is it with everybody? I’m fine,” McKelvey said.

  “Right. Well, you have an awesome day, Detective,” Rogers said on his way out, giving McKelvey a pat on the shoulder.

  “An awesome day,” McKelvey answered, nodding. “I’ll do that.”

  He sat at his desk looking through the thick file that contained all the information he had gathered on Gavin’s case. Names and dates, locations and co-ordinates, time-frames stacked against witness statements, photocopies of crime scene photos. Always going back and looking for something he might have missed, his greatest fear, to miss an obvious link in this thing.

  He scanned the autopsy report again, for the hundred and sixth time:

  City: Toronto

  Name of Deceased: Gavin Charles McKelvey

  What followed were nearly two pages of cold specs regarding Gavin’s height and weight, hair colour, distinguishing features, every square inch of his flesh catalogued for posterity. He recalled the mixture of surprise and regret as he stood there looking down at the body, discovering for the first time the tattoos the boy had kept hidden beneath his shirt.

  Manner of death: Homicide

  Cause of death: Gunshot wound, head

  Body identified by: Father

  Autopsy authorized by: Coroner, Chief Medical Examiner

  Photographs by: Dr. Harold Manners

  Investigating Officers: D/S Raj Balani (lead); Constable Kevin Gilmartin (responding)

  Summary of gunshot wound: The entry site is situated on the left upper forehead where it measures 0.6 inches to the right of the anterior midline. The wound is circular, having a diameter of 0.21 inches. Gunpowder residue is located in the wound and the immediately underlying tissue. The course of the projectile runs through the skin and soft tissue, producing hemorrhage to the left frontal lobe. Several curvilinear lead fragments retrieved from the wound. Projectile proceeded through the frontal pole of the brain in a downward direction to perforate the cerebral peduncles and pontine region. The projectile then impacts with the occipital bone. A large calibre, mushroom-shaped projectile is retrieved and forwarded to Forensics for Ballistics Identification.

  Shot in the head. Face to face with his killer. The trajectory suggests the killer is taller than the victim—or else the victim was forced to kneel. His punishment for a drug debt or an argument, or nothing. His boy died for nothing, and that knowledge was what tortured McKelvey’s soul with each breath that he drew; that his boy died for absolutely goddamned nothing, and here he was, still alive in spite of himself, in spite of all the places he had been, the risks he had taken. And it was true, absolutely true, that McKelvey would have exchanged his life for that of his son—without hesitation. It was what he wanted more than anything, to be able to deliver that gift for his wife and his son. The midnight pacts made with god and devil both.

  It was in these moments when he sat with his file of papers, his ragged clutch of faint hope, that he understood with a sense of shame what had happened to him. To them all. His family. In many ways what he had allowed to happen to them, the three of them. Whether through his direct negligence or inadequate fathering, or through the anger he had displayed when his son’s course veered from the track, this was his failure to bear alone. Caroline had been a good mother. She had tried to be a good wife. But it is impossible to be a wife to a stone. And now, just like the family members of crime victims who overnight begin sporting photo buttons of their loved one and calling for the police to take action, this was all McKelvey was left with: the residue of memory, regret. His file folder, his papers, the single-minded drive towards justice and revenge. This was what came to a man who was filled with self-loathing for words left unsaid, a touch left undone. A bitterness and anger, a deep disappointment with himself, that boiled in his veins like a toxin.

  Sometimes he saw the face of his boy as a young child, the ever-present cowlick and the boundless energy and curiosity, and he would close his own eyes and try to reach back there and hold the boy or kiss his forehead, physically reach back there through time and once again hold the body close to his chest, the body of his boy forever sleeping on that bed of steel...

  It was after seven when McKelvey looked up from the file. He’d gotten lost again. He gathered the papers back in order, put the file in his briefca
se. He said goodnight to those still labouring at their desks, making calls, doing paperwork. He felt momentarily unburdened, as though the fog was finally lifting, and he could see an end to the suffering, a finite point on the horizon that promised peace. For he knew what he must do. For his boy. For himself. For Caroline. For the ghost of a family. A more lucid thought had never been conceived.

  The night is cold and clear. It occurs to McKelvey that he has not started his Christmas shopping. But Christmas for the past two years has seemed less like a holiday and more like a black hole. The days are long, the nights even longer. He sometimes drinks too much and Caroline gives him a look...

  Now his stomach flares as he slides behind the wheel of his truck.

  He tastes blood. A scent of what—gauze? Razor blades in his stomach, a mouthful of rust. Head spins with an intoxicated dizziness. He brings a few fingers to his lips, then pulls them away; they shine with blood, greasy like fingerpaints. He is weak, and he can’t turn the engine on.

  McKelvey fumbles with his seatbelt, stumbles from behind the wheel.

  The open door buzzes in the night, the drone of an alarm.

  He gropes at the seat in an attempt to locate the files, teetering there like a drunk leaving a bar after last call. He makes out a blurry form moving at an angle across the lot, but he is already sliding down the side of the truck.