Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  I’d expected Steve to be about half an hour, since traffic down 109th Street—which I figured he’d be taking from the station—tended to back up a bit at rush hour. It wasn’t much more than ten minutes before I heard him at my door, though. He did his usual knock before turning the key I’d had made for him, and I poked my head around the dining room corner to greet him.

  “Hey! Did you notice it was locked? Just for you, darlin’! I was just setting the table; you were quick.”

  He unlaced his shoes, kicked them off onto the mat by the door and walked toward me like a circus bear on its hind feet.

  “I am so beat. And I should have said, I wasn’t at the station. I was actually just down the way at the crime site.” “ His eyes lit up as he spotted the salad bowls. “Wow, it looks better than a night out at the Keg in here. What’s the occasion?”

  “I just wanted to do something with my hands, and I couldn’t bear the thought of turning on the oven or the stove,” I said, sitting down across from him at the small chrome kitchen table. “Dig in. There’s a fruit salad for dessert. I’m telling you this now just so you can conserve what room you need if you want it.”

  “Oh, I want it all right. This is fabulous. All I’ve had since breakfast was doughnuts. Cliché, right? You know Madeleine Williams? The forensics specialist? She brought three boxes of doughnuts to the LRT site, one for us and two for the construction workers. I think it was to keep them from carping about being held up from work. I assume they’ll get paid, though who knows. Their boss is dead, and he allegedly wasn’t all that hot on overtime when he was alive. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the station construction now.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t surprise too many people to see construction on that project delayed. I’m thinking the protesters will look at it as a sort of Christmas present—no need to make signs or sign petitions to guarantee another year of inaction.”

  “Who protests the LRT?” Steve ladled another spoonful of cheese salad onto his plate. “This stuff is addictive, by the way.”

  “Mostly people whose neighbourhood it would pass through, I think.”

  “You’d think they’d be happy. Apparently, the traffic noise levels go down exponentially for about four main arterial streets on either side of a train line.”

  I chewed on some tabouleh, and ran my tongue over my teeth before speaking.

  “It’s not the noise, as far as I could tell from the last protest, that held things up so long. It’s the potential riff-raff coming into their neighbourhood from undesirable areas of town, and the rabbit hole it would offer their teenagers to head toward the undesirable areas of town.”

  “There’s nothing they’re going to be able to do about their kids finding trouble,” Steve sighed. “Most of the panhandling kids we tell to move on along Whyte Avenue are actually just adventuring suburban kids, not runaways even. They sit around braiding embroidery thread into people’s hair and approximating that Haight-Ashbury feeling about fifty years behind the times, and then they head home to Riverbend and Rio Terrace.”

  “Back to the holdup; will you be done soon? How is it going?” I felt awkward about asking, but I figured that Steve would set the boundaries in discussing his cases, as he always did.

  “I think Williams got all she was looking for.” Steve shrugged. “Who knows how long it will take? The minute a killer adds something dramatic to the crime scene, things get exponentially weirder. It’s worse than just being a premeditated murder, in that the murderer packed in not only a knife, but some rope, notepaper, a Sharpie and a safety pin with which to attach the note. The thought of someone taking another’s life horrifies me, but doing all that advanced planning and setting the scene just creeps me out.”

  Steve’s words jogged my memory and popped what I’d been meaning to tell him back into my head.

  “Oh! That’s why I called you earlier. It occurred to me what Barbara Finster meant about thinking he’d be killed some other way.” I gathered our dirty dishes as I spoke, as if somehow declaring my news to a cleaned table would be more impressive.

  “Yeah,” Steve said, accepting my offer of the bowl of fruit salad from the fridge. “She didn’t seem so surprised he was dead, but more shocked that he had been hanged rather than beaten to death.”

  “Well, something occurred to me today while I was working on ballad lyrics. She didn’t say she thought he’d be bludgeoned to death; she said she was surprised they hadn’t used a blackjack on him, right?” Steve nodded. “That’s because that was his name: Black Jack Davey, just like in the old ballad. I’ll bet his mother named him David on purpose.”

  Steve grinned. “Trust you to find it. He is named that, in fact. On official paperwork his name is Jack David Finster. I’ll bet you’re right and I’ll bet his mother called him Black Jack Davey when he was little. In fact …” Steve got a ruminative look. “Hang on, I have a hunch. Can I use your phone?”

  He leaned over to grab my phone from the cradle on the desk by the window of the dining room, and punched in some numbers.

  “Hey, Corinne, it’s Steve Browning here. Can you check something for me? I need the complete name for Barbara Finster, of the Ye Oldie Barbara Shoppes. Yeah, I’ll hold.” He grinned at me as he held the receiver to his ear. “Right. Thanks a load. Bye.”

  “Well?” I wasn’t quite sure why he needed details on David Finster’s sister, or what he was getting at.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what those two had against their mother, and folk music in general. I mean, really? Imagine hating folk music. It’s like saying you don’t like Kraft Dinner or human rights.” He picked up his dessert spoon and waved it at my nose. “But now imagine being a Finster with a mother so obsessed with folk music that not only does she open her house to itinerant musicians, but she names her children Black Jack Davey and Barbara Allen?”

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! For real? What do you bet there was Sweet William planted under Barbara’s bedroom window when she was a kid? What a burden, especially if Mrs. Finster was anything like my mother, who will occasionally use a family pet name in the middle of something official, like high school graduation dinner.”

  Steve laughed.

  “What was your family pet name?”

  I shook my head violently.

  “Nope, Copper, you’ll never get that outta me. It’s too embarrassing for words.”

  Steve pulled my chair toward him with his feet on the legs of the chair, and gave an experimental tickle.

  “We have ways of making you talk.”

  “You have ways of making me spew fruit salad all over your dress shirt, but I’m still not going to tell you,” I said, wriggling to get loose. Steve’s grip tightened just a bit.

  “I could just wait and ask your mother the next time your folks come through town, you know. It would be so much easier if you’d just tell me now.” He pulled me over onto his lap. I forgot sometimes just how strong he was. Of course, I wasn’t actually resisting arrest.

  “I may have to tell her about your interrogation methods if you do,” I countered, gasping a bit as he licked my neck right under my ear.

  “Oh, dear. Well, I guess we’re just going to have to move to the mother-doesn’t-need-to-know level of discussion.” We rose from the chair in a tangle and moved toward the bedroom, working on wayward buttons as we went. After-dinner coffee could wait.

  11

  ~

  There was a sense of release in our relative abandon that had a lot more than chemistry involved in it. While we hadn’t been able to get together for almost a week due to conflicting schedules, this was more than that. We made love in a sort of fury, trying to signal to each other with physicality what we couldn’t bring ourselves to say in words. I know you’re just doing your job. I know you’re not guilty of any crime. I love you and trust you to the very marrow of my bones. I have faith in your ability to get me through this. So many things that we couldn’t say for fear of offending the other by even a
dmitting to thinking it needed to be said. It all got said. And heard. At least I’m hoping that’s what I was hearing. We lay, spent, on our sides facing each other, listening to our synchronized heartbeats, smiling. After about half an hour, with the evening sounds of the city coming in through the open living room windows, we made love again, this time with no need to convey anything but direct connection.

  Steve wasn’t planning to spend the night, which was fine by me because the heat of the night made lying next to anything warm almost unbearable. Making love was one thing; the thought of curling up next to each other in a twin bed for eight more hours wasn’t a charming picture. We decided to share a tepid shower to cool us off, both literally and figuratively, before he headed off to his place. I was towelling my hair, wearing one of his T-shirts since they were looser than my own pyjamas, when the phone rang.

  “Hello? Yes, he’s here.” I handed the phone to Steve, blushing, though it was only about nine-thirty. For all McCorquodale knew, we could have been playing canasta. Of course, we hadn’t been. Steve chuckled at the sight of me, and then turned his attention to the call.

  “She has? That was quick. Yeah, I’ll come get you. Give me twenty minutes and then be outside.” He hung up the phone. “The coroner’s finished with the autopsy, and some of the forensic details have come through. Iain wants us to go in and collate some of that information with the interviews we’ve completed to date. Apparently Keller is breathing fire to get a bead on this. Prominent citizens don’t get killed in Edmonton all that often, and when they do, we jump to the pump.” He tucked in the tails of his shirt and leaned over to kiss me. “Thanks for the oasis, love. I don’t know if this is my second wind or my seventh, but I hope it will see me through till two or so. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  He was out the door and back to work by the time I padded over to the bathroom to hang up my hair towel. I turned off the lights after straightening the covers of my rumpled bed. Tonight was too hot for any sort of covering. I’d just have to risk not falling off the side of the globe tonight, and I lay down, imagining myself a marble statue carved on top of a queen’s tomb—a tomb in a very cool crypt.

  It must have been an earlier crash of thunder that woke me, but I opened my eyes to an almost simultaneous flash of lightning and a BOOM of thunder so loud that I thought my ears were going to start bleeding. Another flash of light made everything in my small room show up clearer than usual, since my room was always rather shrouded and dim. Suddenly the rain began, like a rush of snare drums.

  I looked at the clock. It was just past midnight. I hoped Steve wasn’t caught out in this downpour. While the ground could use the water and the air could use the cooling down, I had suspicions it would turn into hail shortly. Although the thunder was coming about ten seconds after the lightning flashes now, the storm didn’t seem to be abating. I lay there watching the ceiling of my bedroom light up intermittently, wide awake.

  It’s not that I’m frightened of thunderstorms; in fact, I quite enjoy them. I defy anyone to get back to sleep during one, though. It would be like falling asleep in the middle of a Fourth of July fireworks display in Celebration, Florida. I finally gave in and sat up, pulled on the blind cord and leaned back against the wall of my bedroom to watch an amazing light show. Chain and sheet lightning alternated and then flashed simultaneously.

  Luckily, it didn’t turn to hail. I sat watching the rain a little longer before crawling back under the covers. There were too many residual horror movie effects from the thunderstorm to reimagine myself as a funerary sculpture this time. I lay still and tried to visualize my to-do list for the following day. Before I knew it, I was waking up to my insistent alarm clock. Even with all the interruptions of sleep, I felt better rested than I had all week. Regular sex was sort of like playing the banjo—it felt so good, but it wasn’t necessarily something you talked about.

  12

  ~

  Paul, of course, was already sitting behind the counter organizing a box of cassette tapes when I walked in whistling. That’s seriously one of the best things about the Centre. Although it resembles a library in many respects, keeping silent isn’t necessarily encouraged. My imp-of-the-perverse need to make noise in libraries was easily fulfilled around here. Paul looked up and smiled. I smiled back and headed to my carrel. As I hauled my laptop out of my backpack, I realized I’d been whistling the insufferably cheery “Gypsy Rover,” likely because the whole Black Jack Davey connection was still on my mind.

  After about an hour Paul came over to tap me on the shoulder. I was interested to notice that he hadn’t startled me. Maybe it was just that Paul had an easy way about him, but I certainly didn’t have that dents-in-the-ceiling tiles reaction I’d had with David Finster. Of course, maybe Finster’s overtly negative attitude was what I’d been reacting to.

  I had a phone call. It was Denise, who had blown back into town the night before and wanted to know if I was available for lunch. I gave a brief consideration of my liverwurst sandwich and apple, and figured they’d keep for supper.

  “Sure! Where do you want to meet?”

  “How about the Faculty Club at one? The main rush will be over by then.” Denise had joined in the previous year, partly to schmooze and network, but also because she calculated how much money she spent eating out, how much she spent on groceries that went bad in her fridge because she couldn’t stand to cook for one person, and how much energy she devoted to worrying about whether she was eating well according to Canada’s Food Guide. Ever since, she kept milk, bread and eggs in her fridge and ate lunch and dinner at the Faculty Club. Wearing her pedometer, she determined that by walking between the Club and the Humanities Building twice a day five times a week, in addition to her walk back and forth from campus, she managed fourteen kilometres a week in free exercise.

  I didn’t mind joining her, but I made sure I had some cash to hand her for my share. All that signing for meals could get a person in hock pretty quickly, and I didn’t want to add to that possibility for Denise.

  I found myself humming again on my way back to the carrel. It was going to be good to see Denise, who was, aside from Steve, probably my best friend in the universe. It helped that we had so much in common, but it was our differences that added the real strength to our friendship. Though we were both English majors, Denise had pushed on for the PhD and was swimming with the sharks in the chum-filled waters of university tenure-track hiring. I, on the other hand, opted to get my MA and try to find teaching work at the college level, which wasn’t quite the joyride I’d assumed it might be. While I loved teaching, it wasn’t easy to get hired full-time, and the life of a gypsy sessional was just as stressful as that of a freelance writer, which was what I had been prior to heading back into the seeming safety of academe.

  It hadn’t all been a waste of time, though. I’d met some great people while working on my thesis, especially Denise. I discovered I enjoyed being around universities more than being away from them. I also met Steve through my teaching, though not in a totally conventional way. He was considered the officer most likely to understand university dynamics and had been assigned to a case in which I was involved. So, all in all, life in the ivory tower had been pretty good to me.

  Denise and I had gravitated toward each other mainly because we were approximately the same age. While I was out working as a writer for several years between degrees, she did two MAs, one in English and another in Film Studies, before coming to Edmonton for her PhD in English. We were slightly older than the nose-to-the-grindstone kids who were steamrollering through from BA to PhD in ten years or bust, and we were just that much younger than the group of women whose children were finally all in school, allowing them seven hours a day to fulfill themselves at last. Aside from our age and proclivities for literature and film, Denise and I were pretty different. She came from a big, well-off family down east; I was the only child of an Armed Forces family, meaning that we moved every four years. I spent some of my teen years in E
dmonton, but bounced around quite a bit until my father finally retired to teach photography at Ryerson.

  Denise was also outrageously gorgeous, but oblivious to it. That was one of the things I liked best about her. While she had no false modesty about her looks, she didn’t trade on them. She understood the power of the gift, but she was a strong feminist and much prouder of her intellect than of her profile.

  I, on the other hand, was sort of a granola-chewing Midge to Denise’s paté-munching Barbie. I knew I was not quite what my friend Leo would have called the “standard cutie,” but I wasn’t so exotic that I stood out a mile from the crowd. I tended to wear clothing as either armour or afterthought, where Denise wore it casually and still managed to make either an aesthetic or a political statement.

  Denise had spent all of spring session down east at Stratford doing some research in the Festival Theatre’s archives, and then took a quick break to visit her family in Toronto. I missed her, and it would be great to fill her in on what had been happening around here. It would also be great to hear about her adventures. If I knew her, she’d been invited to at least one gala and probably danced the night away with one or another of my theatrical idols.

  Of course, since I was looking forward to seeing her at one o’clock, the entire morning seemed to drag. I checked my watch to discover an entire ten minutes had passed since I’d last checked it. I sighed and turned off the Dock Boggs CD I’d been listening to. I might as well fill the time filing CDs. Sometimes, all you’re capable of is grunt work. Genius comes into play when you can actually spot those times.

  When I finally managed to shuck off the chains of work and hustle over to the Faculty Club, Denise was sitting in one of the wingback chairs in the foyer of the Faculty Club waiting for me. Of course, she looked radiant. While everyone had adopted summer casual, there was still an air of formality to the Faculty Club that demanded something. Denise’s orange sandals matched her orange blouse, which was tucked into loose-fitting faded blue jeans. An orange braided cord was wrapped around her head like a hair band and ponytail holder all in one, the way Aphrodite might have done her hair if she’d been around. Denise rose as I pushed through the tall glass door.