by Gail Bowen
“Good decision,” I said.
“According to Val, it was,” Ed agreed. “Kyle liked the job he found with the air-conditioning company. Incidentally, he had listed Ariel as one of his references. Apparently, she helped him find the place he moved into too. It’s in those student apartments over on Kramer Boulevard.”
I took a deep breath. “Ed, did Val mention the possibility that Ariel’s interest in Kyle might have been more than that of a friend?”
Ed stiffened. “I take it you have a reason for asking that question.”
“I do,” I said. “Mieka and I had a heart-to-heart at the lake. Ariel was pregnant when she died, and the father of her baby wasn’t Charlie Dowhanuik.”
“You’re not suggesting that Kyle Morrissey …?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “All I know is that Mieka believes that Ariel wasn’t romantically involved with the father of her baby.”
“An accident?” Ed said.
I shook my head. “A helping friend. And that opens the field to a number of possibilities. I wondered if Kyle Morrissey was one of them. I saw his photo in the paper. He’s a good-looking man.”
Ed gave me a small smile. “A bodybuilder, dark and beautiful, but not my type, and not Ariel’s. According to Val, when it came to brains Kyle Morrissey was paddling in the shallow end of the gene pool.”
“Not swift?”
“Not swift,” Ed said. “And not ‘helping friend’ material. Ariel was a compassionate woman. If she thought Kyle Morrissey had been roughed up by the system, she would have done what she could to help him start over. That might have included helping him find a job and an apartment; it would not have included asking him to father her child.” Ed ran his finger over the frilled edge of the catelaya bloom. “I’m no expert on these matters, but what I don’t understand is why Ariel had to seek out anybody. She had it all: beauty, brains, grace. If she wanted to have a baby, why didn’t she just wait for the right man and get one the old-fashioned way?”
“I think she felt she was running out of time,” I said.
Ed frowned. “She was twenty-seven. You can’t be talking about biological time.”
“No,” I said. “I think Ariel felt she might be running out of time to live the life she wanted.”
“And Charlie Dowhanuik wasn’t part of that life?”
“Apparently not.”
At that moment, James Junior arrived with the wild mushroom pâté, and out of deference to the wizardry in the kitchen, Ed and I moved to lighter topics: the weekend at the lake, a wood sculpture Ed and Barry were having installed on their deck, Madeleine’s perfection. But despite our banter, the martinis, a half-litre of Pinot Noir, and sweetbreads so succulent even the Rombauers couldn’t have improved upon them, Ed’s question hung in the air between us, a shadow at the feast.
When we left Druthers, Ed looked up at the high blue sky. “Given the morning we’ve put in, I suggest we both take an afternoon off,” he said. “I’m going to make myself a pot of camomile, stretch out in the hammock, and get back to À la recherche du temps perdu.”
“Do you know I’ve never managed to get past the first chapter of that book?”
“I’ve never made it past page three,” Ed said cheerfully, “but on the first truly sweet day of May, I always try. It’s my summer ritual. And how are you going to extract the joy from this glorious day?”
“Checking out someone else’s remembrance of things past,” I said. “I’m going to try to get Kyle Morrissey’s aunt to talk to me.”
The only parking space I could find was in front of the used-furniture mart. There was a special on inflatable furniture – just in time for summer. I passed it up and continued down the street towards the video store.
The old lady was at her perch at the open window upstairs, and as soon as she saw me, she called out. “Nobody’s home at the dead girl’s house,” she said, “but I know things you’ll want to hear.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Come up and find out,” she said.
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
Not an errant weed or faded bloom marred the perky, girl-next-door charm of Ariel and Charlie’s bungalow on Manitoba Street. As a house-minder, Father Hill’s price was obviously beyond rubies. The lawn in front of EXXXOTICA could have used his ministrations. The dusty shoots that made their way through its hard-packed dirt were ready for extreme unction, but the woman down on her knees in front of the porn video store wasn’t praying. She had a razor blade between her fingers and she was scraping at her front window. Someone had papered it with photocopies of the image I had seen on Ariel’s Web page: the black background, the stylized sunflower, and the words “Never Forget.”
The woman craned her neck to give me the once over. She was my age, with a mane of waist-length sun-streaked hair, a narrow face, close-set green eyes, the leathery tan of a rodeo rider, and an unusually large Adam’s apple. She was wearing jeans, a very brief white halter top, and a look of abject disgust. She tapped at the glass with the razor blade. “As if I ever could forget,” she said in a voice that could have been either an alto or a baritone. “Look at the mess they made of my window.”
I thought the words had been rhetorical, but she was being literal. She waved the razor blade in a gesture of frustration. “I said, look at my window. My grandmother recognized you. She watches your show every Saturday night. Look at my window, so you can tell your audience what you saw.”
“Ms.…”
“It’s Ronnie. Ronnie Morrissey. My grandmother’s name is Bebe, and she’s a big fan of your show.”
“Then she knows we don’t do investigative journalism. We just talk about politics. I’m not even a reporter. I teach at the university.”
“But you’re on TV.” She paused to let the words sink in. In the real world, the distinction I had made was irrelevant. “You know people who can help us get the truth out. My nephew didn’t kill anybody. He couldn’t kill anybody.” She made a fist with one hand and punched the palm of the other. Her nails were nicely shaped and painted a shimmering mauve, but not even her careful manicure could disguise the fact that Ronnie Morrissey’s hands were meathooks. “Do you have kids?” she asked.
“Four,” I said.
“I was never blessed,” she said, “but I raised Kyle like he was my own. I know what he’s capable of doing, good or bad. If the cops called me and said Kyle got into a fight with someone who called him a dirty name or if they said he’d knocked back a half-dozen beers and relieved himself in the middle of Albert Street, I wouldn’t be happy, but I’d believe them. I don’t believe this, not for a single, solitary minute.” She knitted her brow. “Any of your kids boys?”
“Two,” I said. “One of them’s twenty-four; the other’s seventeen.”
“Then you know how it is,” she said huskily. “Now do me a favour and check out what they did to my window.”
Ronnie hadn’t made much headway with her cleanup. The area she had cleared was the size of a TV screen in a motel room, and there were still bits of black paper clinging to the glass, but I leaned forward obediently. Inside was a display of XXX movies with titles like Extreme Cat Fights, Operation Penetration, and Come Gargling Sluts. Framed by the sombre black of Ariel’s poster with its by-now familiar plea, the movie titles had a certain film noir eloquence.
“Quite the mess, eh?” Ronnie looked at her razor blade thoughtfully. “And they’ve done this to his apartment and to the locker at the place where he works. Where he worked,” she corrected herself. “They put him on unpaid leave. An innocent man, but that doesn’t mean a darn thing any more. The police are still hassling him, too. Kyle doesn’t react well to pressure, so last night we packed up his stuff and moved him back here. It’s a darn shame – he was so proud of being independent. Look, Ms. Kilbourn, I’d better get back to my scraping. Bebe will fill you in, but you get it straight.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up at the old woman in th
e window. “I’m sending her up, Bebe.”
“I’m ready for her,” Bebe shouted back.
As Ronnie led me down the three steps that took us into EXXXOTICA, I wondered whether I was ready for Bebe. Convex security mirrors had been installed in the area around the cash register, and as Ronnie and I passed them, I caught sight of our reflections: two distorted funhouse women entering a distorted funhouse world. I’d been in some desolate places in my life, but my shoulders slumped under the weight of the store’s dingy misery. The room was long and narrow, and the light that made it past the handbills the Friends of Ariel had pasted on the front window was murky.
To reach the door that led to the living quarters, we had to navigate our way through racks of videos which offered the voyeur a smorgasbord of sexual delights: man with woman, man with several women, women together, men together, men with young girls, men with young boys. For the adventurer, there were dominatrixes with whips and dungeons, animals who were more than men’s best friends, and opportunities galore to revel in the joys of leather, chains, masks, uniforms, adult-sized baby clothes, and golden cascades.
Ronnie paid the videos no heed, but I did, and the fact that the people who rented them lived in my city, shovelled snow from their sidewalks, walked past me in the park, and stood beside me in the checkout counter at the grocery store gave me pause. It was bizarro mondo out there, which might have explained the complex system of locks that had been installed on the door that separated the store from the house’s living quarters. Magician-like, Ronnie pulled a ring of keys from inside her halter top and opened the locks. The world on the other side of the door was reassuringly normal: a small entranceway with a floor of terra cotta Mexican tiles, a telephone table, and wallpaper with a vaguely Navajo pattern in sand, mango, and turquoise.
“Up the stairs and straight ahead, you can’t miss it,” Ronnie said, then she abandoned me.
Later, I came to realize that the walls of Bebe’s room were painted a soft dove grey, but my first impression was of retina-searing pink. Bebe, as it turned out, was not simply a watchful neighbour. She was an entrepreneur, and her business was reclaiming and refurbishing Barbie dolls. It was impossible to calculate at a glance the number of Barbies in her sunny front room, but it must have been in the hundreds. Hair braided into perky cornrows, teased into airy beehives, swept into chic chignons, or twirled into ringlets, Bebe’s battalions of Barbies were marshalled on every flat surface, poised to tackle the many roles of women at the beginning of the new millennium. But whether they were headed for the bike path, the ball, the board meeting, or the birthing room, all of Bebe’s Barbies were sallying forth in outfits crocheted from the same durable nylon yarn in the same eye-popping shade of bubble-gum pink.
Bebe was pretty sassy herself. She was wearing sequinned tennis shoes, white slacks, and a white sweatshirt with the legend “I Drove the Alaska Highway.” Her hair was dandelion fluff, she had a dab of cerise rouge on the wizened apple of each cheek, and her eyes were the blue of a distant sky. She was very, very old.
“I’m ninety-five,” she said. “Might as well get the question marks out of the way so you can pay attention to what I’m saying.”
“Good policy,” I said, wishing Ronnie shared her grandmother’s candour.
Bebe indicated the chair opposite her. “Take a load off your feet,” she said. “Though it’s not as much of a load as I’d have thought seeing you on TV. I’ve heard it said the camera adds ten pounds. That must be true.”
As she watched me take the seat she had assigned me, her eyes never left my face, but the crochet hook in her hands kept flying. “I recognized you the other day. That’s why I waved. I wanted you to go on TV and tell the country that Kyle is innocent, but you didn’t come in. You should have. That show you did Saturday night was as soft as boiled turnips. ‘What Would Queen Victoria Think of Today’s Canada?’ Queen Victoria wouldn’t give a damn, and neither did you. I was watching your face, Joanne Kilbourn. You knew that show was mush.”
“We pretaped it, so we could get away for the holiday weekend,” I said meekly.
Her crochet hook sped on, leaving behind it the gently undulating flares of the skirt for an evening gown. “I told Ronnie that’s what you done,” she said. “So can we expect more of the same on this week’s show?”
“There is no show this week,” I said. “We’re through for the season.”
“Then how can you tell the country that Kyle is innocent?”
“Is he?” I asked.
Her old chin jutted out defiantly. “As innocent as you are.”
I leaned towards her. “Then tell me what I need to know,” I said.
“Kyle didn’t kill Ariel Warren,” she said. “They were friends. He brought her up here to meet me. It took me five seconds to cipher out the relationship.” She lowered her voice. “Kyle’s not much in the brains department, but he’s got enough brains to know that Ariel Warren was out of his league.”
“He could have found that frustrating,” I said.
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” she snapped. “Useless words.” The crochet hook flashed angrily. “The point is he didn’t. Didn’t find it frustrating. Didn’t kill her. Case closed.”
It was time to try another tack. I leaned forward and peered out Bebe’s window. “You have a good view of the street up here,” I said.
“I see everything,” she said flatly. “And I’ve got the scrapbooks to prove it. Look at this.” She pulled a scrapbook from a pile beside her and handed it to me. “Open it for a surprise,” she said.
The book was filled with newspaper clippings of people who would have considered themselves movers and shakers in our small city. Beside each picture was a list of XXX movie titles.
“I read the Leader Post, cover to cover, every day.” Bebe explained. “When I spot a photo of one of our customers, I cut it out. Then at night I get out the rental book and I write down what they rented. You never know when something like that might come in handy.”
I closed the scrapbook and looked at her steadily.
She read my gaze. “But we’re not here to talk about that, are we? Today is about Kyle. As usual the cops have got their blinders on. There’s a lot likelier possibilities than our boy but, of course, nobody’s ever accused the cops of being able to take in the big picture.” Her mouth snapped shut, defying me to disagree.
“I need more than your opinion, Bebe,” I said.
“I’ve got more than my opinion. I could see every move she made. And the one she lived with, too,” she added triumphantly.
“Charlie.”
The hook stopped, and the old blue eyes looked at me with real interest. “Charlie,” she repeated. “So that’s his name. I never did know it. He kept to himself – not that you’d blame him with that face. The only time he went out was in the afternoons – I guess that’s when he worked.”
I took a deep breath. It was time to ask the question that had been nagging at me from the moment I saw the dying tomato plants on the kitchen table of the house next door. “Bebe, when was the last time you saw Ariel?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Two weeks ago Tuesday,” she said, rosy with the excitement of a person who had a humdinger of a story to tell. “About this time of day. Usually, you can set your clock by that guy with the face, but that day he came home early. He went inside. He wasn’t there long, then she came out, and Charlie was chasing after her. He was kind of crying and yelling at the same time.”
“Could you hear what he said?”
Her old head bobbed vigorously. “I had to lean out the window to pick it up clearly, but I heard every word, and I wished I hadn’t. I don’t like to see a man act like a whiny kid, and that’s how he acted.” She raised her voice in a falsetto. “ ‘Don’t leave me. I’ll do anything. I’ll be anything. Just stay.’ ” Bebe made a moue of disgust, and resumed her normal tone. “You would have thought he’d have more pride,” she said, “especially with another man there, listening to every word
.”
I was baffled. “Where did the other man come from?”
“He was in the house with Ariel when that Charlie came home early.” She stopped crocheting, pursed her lips thoughtfully, and raised the little party dress in the air. “Needs another flounce, don’t you think?”
“A dress can’t have too many flounces,” I said.
Bebe narrowed her eyes at me. “You think I don’t know you’re making fun, but I do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, you’re not. You’re worried if you get my dander up, I won’t finish my story, but I will. It’s too good a story not to finish. Now,” she said, “what I surmise is this – Charlie walked in and caught Ariel and her new boyfriend doing what comes naturally.”
“Having sex,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and tweaked her thumb and forefinger over her lips in a buttoning gesture.
“All right,” I said. “You don’t have to be explicit. Had you ever seen the man before?”
“Just that once, but I’ll never forget him.” Her eyes sparked with lust. “A magnificent-looking man – like an African prince.”
“He was black?”
“As the ace of spades,” she said. “And if the police had any brains at all, they’d be out looking for him and for that one with the birthmark and they’d be leaving Kyle alone.” She jerked her crochet hook free of the brilliantly pink yarn. The little dress was complete, and the interview was over. I picked up my purse and stood up.
Bebe waggled her finger at me. “Make sure you pass along what I told you to someone who can get it on the air.”
“I appreciate your seeing me,” I said.
Her expression grew shrewd. “Do you want to show your appreciation?”
I opened my bag. “I don’t have much cash with me. Could I write you a cheque?”
“I don’t want your money. I want Barbies.” She pointed to a large wicker basket beside her chair. It was half filled with dolls, naked but with hair newly washed and fingers tipped with fresh pink nail polish. “You get these from garage sales. Of course, they’re not like this when I get them. They’re a mess, but I clean them up, and make their little outfits. I’ll pay you two bucks a doll – no more, or my profits get eaten up. Be sure to check their feet. That’s where the puppies chew, and I can’t sell a doll if the toes are chewed off.
