Hard Winter Rain

by Michael Blair

  As Shoe turned to leave the store, he caught sight of the store’s owner watching him with sad brown eyes through a gap in the row of plastic-sheathed garments hanging from the overhead conveyor.

  Shoe drove to Barbara’s apartment building. The narrow, poorly lit vestibule was shabby with wear but had recently been washed down with some aggressively pine-scented cleaner. The glass of the inner door was reinforced with wire mesh. To the right of the door there were four rows of four mailboxes each. The box for apartment 401 was labelled “B. Reese.” There was a button above the mail slot, but no speaker grill. He pressed the button and waited. There was no response. He pressed it again, but still there was no answer.

  It was almost four when he got back to the office. He found Sandra St. Johns in her own office, sitting on her sofa, feet up on her coffee table, laptop in her lap. He knocked gently on the doorframe. She looked up, put her feet down, and moved the laptop to the table.

  “Come in,” she said, tugging her short skirt lower on her long thighs.

  “Do you recall Patrick ever mentioning the name Claire Powkowski?” Shoe asked.

  “No. Who’s she?” Shoe told her. She shook her head. “He never told me what he and Mrs. Ross talked about.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then stood and moved past him to close the door. Her perfume, light and flowery, tickled his nose. She went back to the sofa but did not sit. She looked as though she had something to say.

  “What is it?” Shoe asked.

  “I wasn’t completely honest with you the other day,” she said, head down, not looking at him. Shoe waited. There were tears on her lashes when she finally looked up. “Patrick and I were having an affair.” She picked up a stack of file folders, tapped them on the desk to align them, and put them down again.

  “It was just sex,” she said. “At least, it was supposed to be just sex.” She smiled ruefully. “You don’t want all the sordid details, do you?”

  “Please, no.”

  She smiled gratefully.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked.

  “Sure. No one dies of a broken heart, and mine isn’t broken, just a little bent.”

  More than just a little, Shoe thought.

  “But it wasn’t just that I wanted to tell you,” she said. “A couple of weeks before he resigned I had the feeling he was trying to make up his mind about something. I thought maybe it had to do with me, like he was thinking of dumping me. Then he told me he was leaving and I realized that that wasn’t it at all, that he’d just been trying to make up his mind about resigning. But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “When Patrick and I were—” She paused, blushing, then went on. “Well, we didn’t talk much. When we did talk, it was usually business. Except once, about a month ago. There was a report on TV about that woman in Abbotsford who turned her son in to the police for sexually assaulting the little girl next door. I made some stupid remark about how she couldn’t have loved her son very much to have done that. Patrick said, maybe that was true, but maybe it was because she loved him that she’d reported him. I said, ‘It must have been awfully hard then,’ and he said that when we were faced with hard choices, generally the right thing to do is the one that’s the hardest to do.”

  “And you don’t think Patrick’s ‘hard choices’ had anything to do with you or with leaving the company?” Shoe asked. “Could he have been talking about leaving Victoria, asking her for a divorce?”

  “No. Although he felt guilty about being unfaithful to her, Patrick had no intention of leaving her. He loved her, even though he thought she might have been having a lesbian relationship with some friend of hers. As for leaving the company, I don’t think that was a hard choice at all, after Mr. Hammond’s refusal to go public. I think Patrick had the idea that he could get rich off stock options. He wanted very much to be rich. I never realized how much.”

  “Thank you for telling me this,” Shoe said. Sandra opened the office door. “By the way,” Shoe said, “did Patrick keep notes?”

  “He was a compulsive note taker,” she said. “He made notes about everything. And his day wasn’t complete until he’d transcribed them into his daily journal on his laptop.”

  “What about his handwritten notes?” he asked.

  “As far as I know,” she said, “he shredded them as soon as soon as he’d transcribed them into the laptop.”

  The information technology department occupied a cramped but bright corner office one floor down. A polite young man with yellow hair and a silver ring through his left eyebrow consulted his computer and informed Shoe that according to his records Patrick O’Neill hadn’t turned in his laptop.

  “How will I know it if I find it?” Shoe asked him.

  The young man wrote the model name and serial number on a sticky-note. “Check with security,” he said. “Maybe they’ve got it.”

  Upstairs, Shoe knocked on the door of Del Tilley’s office. The door was so heavy and solid that his knuckles made hardly a sound. He knocked again, harder, and wondered what Tilley had in his office that he needed a security door. Feeling perverse, he thumbed a random sequence of numbers into the security lock. To his utter surprise, the door opened.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Del Tilley demanded.

  “I’m trying to find Patrick O’Neill’s laptop,” Shoe said, peering over Tilley’s head into his office. It was dark and windowless, the only illumination supplied by a small halogen desk lamp that cast a bright circle of light in the middle of the desk.

  Tilley stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. “Well, I don’t have it,” he said. He moved away from the door so he could stand farther from Shoe.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where it is, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Now go bother someone else. And don’t fool with the lock to my office again.”

  Shielding the lock with his body, Tilley entered the code that unlocked the door, opened it partway, and slipped into his office, leaving Shoe standing in the hall. Shoe stood there for a few seconds, staring at the closed door, then went looking for Charles Merigold.

  With a hiss, Del Tilley slammed the lid of the laptop shut. “Shit, shit, shit!” he swore. He’d tried everything he could think of, from O’Neill’s birthdate to Victoria’s name spelled backwards to O’Neill’s mother’s maiden name, but still the computer refused to start up. What, he wondered, was so important anyway that O’Neill needed a boot password to prevent anyone else from starting up his computer?

  He lifted the lid, fearing that he may have damaged the fragile liquid crystal display, but it seemed all right. Gently, he closed the computer and put it in a drawer of his desk. Although there probably wasn’t anything of vital importance on the hard drive, he knew a hacker who, if he couldn’t crack the password, could dump the contents of the hard drive to a data file.

  His telephone rang. He looked at the call display before answering. It was an outside call on his direct line, but no number was displayed.

  “It’s me,” a voice said when he picked up the phone. A woman’s voice, but not a feminine one.

  “You got my message?” Tilley said.

  “No,” the woman replied. “I’m psychic.” She sighed heavily, breath hissing in the earpiece of Tilley’s phone. “Of course I got your message. What do you want?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Tilley said.

  “Very funny,” the woman said. “But feel free to waste my time. It’s your nickel.”

  “That’s right. You would be wise to remember that.”

  The woman sighed. “Tell you what, bud. Next time you want something, call someone else. I got no patience for amateurs.”

  Tilley’s knuckles cracked on the handset. He forced himself to relax. If this woman needed to think of him as an amateur, that was fine with him. It afforded him an additional layer of protection should she ever be turned.

  “My situation has changed,” he sa
id. “I won’t be needing that last shipment after all. I’m sending it back.”

  “Suit yourself,” the woman said. “It still goes on your bill. Which, I might add, is overdue.”

  “You’ll get your money,” Tilley said. “But I’m not going to pay for equipment I don’t use.”

  “This ain’t Sears, bud. All sales are final. Once you take delivery, the equipment is yours. It don’t matter to me whether you use it or not. All I care about is getting paid.”

  “I told you,” Tilley said. “You’ll get your money. Something’s come up, though. I’ve had to adjust my timetable, move things up. You’ll have to give me a little more time.”

  “How much more time?”

  “I don’t know. Not long.”

  The woman sighed. “Listen, bud,” she said, “we all got problems, but if I don’t get my money soon, one of the problems you’re gonna have is me. And, trust me, you don’t want that.”

  “Don’t threaten me.”

  “It’s not a threat,” the woman said.

  Tilley’s teeth ground. “All right. You’ll have your money by the end of next week. Now, what about that other matter?”

  “Yeah, about that,” the woman said, the brusqueness gone from her voice. “The little dyke may have made me.”

  “What do you mean, made you?” Tilley snapped.

  “Yeah, well, it happens.”

  “You’re supposed to be a professional.”

  “Up yours, donkey kong. It was you that wanted me to get close enough to pick up their conversation on the tape. Aw, fuck it. I’ve had it with this amateur-night shit. You want the tapes, pay me what you owe me. All of it. In cash. Today.”

  With an effort, Tilley controlled himself. “I can’t get my hands on that much cash today,” he said, his voice grinding in his throat.

  “Tough titty,” the woman said.

  “Can you give me till Monday?” Tilley said, despising himself for pleading with this woman. It would clean out his bank account and max out both his personal and company credit cards, but he could probably manage it.

  “Fine. You got till Monday. But if you’re not here by twelve hundred with the cash, the tapes go into the bulk eraser.” The line went dead.

  Stifling a howl of rage, Tilley slammed the handset down. Something snapped off and flew across the office, ricocheting off a cabinet. The handset hung on the base unit in two pieces, joined by thin coloured wires. Tilley swept the ruined device to the floor. The dial tone taunted him. A quick slash of his boot heel shattered the base unit but failed to silence the tone. He wrapped the cable once around his fist, ripped the jack from the outlet under the desk, and threw the mangled telephone into the wastebasket.

  Victoria was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing, but when she picked it up, all she heard was a dial tone. Had it been part of the dream? she wondered. She looked at the clock beside the bed, the numerals glowing bloody in the darkened bedroom. Jesus, she’d slept most of the afternoon away. And yet she felt as though she hadn’t slept at all.

  This was no good, she thought. As much as she might want to, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life in bed. She might as well just kill herself and get it over with, but she knew she no longer had the strength, the courage, or the will. Christ, what a bloody awful mess she’d made of her life. The British had an expression: cock-up. That certainly summed up her life. Cock-up.

  She got out of bed and went downstairs. The house was dark and quiet. She turned on some lights and the kitchen radio. It was tuned to Consuela’s “oldies” station, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder singing “Ebony and Ivory,” insipid and obvious. She turned it off. She was hungry but didn’t feel like eating. A nagging urge somewhere inside her called out to her to have a glass of wine, but she ignored it and made a cup of herbal tea instead.

  The dream had left her depressed and physically drained, although she couldn’t remember any of it. She opened the sliding glass doors onto the broad kitchen patio where on summer mornings she and Patrick would sometimes eat breakfast together. Today the stones were slick with rain and the rooftops lower down the mountain were shrouded in impenetrable grey mist. She stood in the doorway, breathing the cool, wet air. A pressure between her shoulder blades propelled her forward, out onto the wet stones of the patio, where the rain beaded in her hair and soaked through her blouse. She was aware of the cold, but it was soft and soothing against her skin.

  She closed her eyes and saw herself standing naked in the rain in an unkempt garden. It was night, and the pale, diffused light shining through the misted glass walls of the small conservatory off his kitchen cast grotesque, desultory shadows before her.

  “For god’s sake,” he said. “Someone will see.”

  She turned around. Bill stood in the doorway. “Who?” she said, spreading her arms, feeling the cool rivulets of rainwater running between her breasts and across her belly, tickling though her pubic hair, rushing down her thighs. “There’s no one around, no one will see.” She whirled and the shadows danced.

  “You’ll catch your death,” he said.

  “It’s not cold. It feels good.”

  “Come in,” he said sternly, reaching toward her from the shelter of the retractable awning over the kitchen patio.

  She grasped his wrists and pressed his hands to her cool, wet breasts. He resisted as she tried to pull him out into the garden, into the rain, still holding his hands to her breasts.

  “C’mon,” she teased. “You won’t melt. Take off your clothes. I bet you’ve never fucked in the rain, have you?”

  He wrenched his hands free.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, following him inside. “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer. Her jeans and shirt and underwear were strewn on the floor. He gathered them up, thrust them into her hands.

  “Get dressed.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked again. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  He did not reply, just turned and walked away.

  Wriggling into her jeans, shrugging into her shirt, she followed him out of the kitchen and down the wide hall toward the front of the house. Rainwater dripped from her hair and her bare feet left wet footprints on the thick Oriental carpets.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, following him upstairs. “Why did you ask me here this weekend?”

  He still did not answer. He went into his bedroom and closed the door.

  “Fine,” she said petulantly to the closed door and stamped down the hall to the guest room, directly across from his wife’s room. His wife was away, he’d told her, visiting relatives in Seattle, but it was common knowledge around the office that Elizabeth Hammond was a hopeless alcoholic who spent more time in rehab than out.

  Victoria towelled her hair dry in the ensuite bath, undressed, and got into bed. It took her a long time to fall asleep, but sometime later she was awakened when the bedroom door opened and light spilled in from the hall. He stood in the doorway, wearing only pyjama bottoms, his small hairy belly hanging over the waistband. Even in the semi darkness it was obvious that he had an erection. She lifted the bedcovers. Beneath them, she was naked.

  Without a word he removed his pyjama bottoms, got into the bed, and lay on top of her. He spread her legs with his knees and entered her with a single hard stroke. It hurt at first, but she quickly became wet. His thrusting soon became more urgent, then he grunted, and she felt the hot rush as he spent. She held him inside her, locking her legs around him and rocking her hips, but he twisted away. She whimpered as he withdrew from her. Then, still without uttering a word, he retrieved his pyjama bottoms and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  She lay there a moment, then got up and went into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Well, what did you expect?” she demanded of her reflection.

  After dinner the next evening, she poured a glass of cognac and took it into his study. “What’s this?” he asked, looking up.

 
“A drink.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  She put the drink on his desk and began unbuttoning her shirt.

  “What are you doing? Stop that.”

  She ignored him, opening her shirt. Her breasts were bare and her nipples were hard and erect. Without removing her shirt, she unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them. She wasn’t wearing underwear. She moved around his desk and swivelled his chair toward her. Dropping to her knees, she undid his belt and unzipped his trousers.

  “No,” he said, pushing her hands away. “Stop. I don’t want you to do this.” As if to belie his words, his erection tented the front of his shorts.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, reaching through the fly front of his shorts and freeing his erect penis. She bent her head.

  He stood abruptly, shoved himself back into his trousers, and stalked out of the room.

  Later, she lay in bed in the guest room, keeping herself ready for him, but she was asleep when he finally came into the room. And, like the night before, he said not a word, just entered her, spent quickly, then withdrew and silently left.

  And again, the following weekend, it was the same. For almost three months it continued, every couple of weeks, the same, until...

  “No, please,” she said, holding him as he tried to withdraw from her. “Don’t leave. Stay.”

  “Let me go,” he insisted.

  “No, please,” she pleaded, clutching at him as he stood. “It doesn’t have to be like this. I—I love you.”

  He growled, pushed her roughly away, and bolted from the room. He never came to her again.

  Barbara took two quarters out of her purse and went down to the payphone in the lobby. The first call she made was to the dry cleaning store, but Mrs. Seropian still would not let her speak to her husband. The next call she made was to the funeral home in Burnaby that had handled her mother’s arrangements. She asked for Mr. Saunders, the funeral director.

  “How can I help you, Ms. Reese?” he asked when he came on the line.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Saunders,” she said, “but I lost both my jobs and I don’t know when I will be able to make the next payment on what I owe you. I’m very sorry.”