“Serves him right,” she’d muttered before flipping to the entertainment section to see if she could ferret out something cheap to do come Friday.
A week later, she’d seen the picture of Trisha they’d printed on the front page under the banner: MURDERED. So cute in pigtails and wearing a rhinestone-studded dress and a tiara, the last photo her mother had ever taken of her. She’d remembered what she’d said and it felt like a knife in her chest.
Lester Mann was saying something, and Amy looked back at him, just catching the end of it.
“… hard on all of us.”
She nodded.
“Would you like something to drink?”
Amy’s mouth was sticky-dry but she shook her head, waiting until he’d turned to Robert to pry her tongue from the roof of her mouth so she could wet her lips.
“I’ll have a scotch.”
Robert shrugged himself off the stool and circled behind the bar. Ice clinked in a glass and then Lester Mann was talking again.
“You know, you’ve just cost me a lot of money.”
“Sorry?”
“Rachel, my secretary. She had her suspicions. She wouldn’t be worth a damn to me if she didn’t. She has a daughter in Toronto, two grandkids. She was going to retire next year, so she could be closer to them. She won’t mind leaving early. And now with a nice bonus to get her settled.”
The drink in his hand now, Lester Mann took a sip.
“You have information for me.”
“Terrence Bell.” It was all she could do to get the name out.
“Yes?”
“You’re looking for him?”
“Maybe. Do you know where he is?”
She shook her head and Lester Mann frowned.
“I was there when they took him.”
This made him pause, swirl his drink, glance to his son.
“And where was this?”
“Somewhere, um, it was a large house. A ranch. In the country. Abandoned I think.”
“I know the place. Funny he should take you there. It was just the two of you then?”
“There was someone else.”
“Does this someone else have a name?”
“Curtis Mays.”
“Ah.”
Smiling, he scratched his chin, a calculated move meant to make her think he was considering what she’d said, that he was undecided on the matter when he wasn’t.
“It would appear that I owe someone an apology. An associate of mine. He told me a story. I didn’t believe it. He said that Terrence would come back, that was the point of the story, that all I had to do was wait. Unfortunate, that Curtis returned early. All this could have been avoided … No use going down that road though. Too many questions. Hmmm. Sorry, I’m not making sense. Anyway, one mystery solved, not the most important but we take what we can get. As good a rule in business as in life.”
Then: his eyes roving up and down Amy, like a grandfather inspecting his daughter’s child, not altogether pleased with what he sees.
“Yes, I see. You were … a gift. A welcome-home present. Some friend. I wonder … hmmm. Did he pay you or was it enough that it was Curtis Mays?”
Stoic now, not a word.
“I have offended you. Not my intention.”
Back to his drink, swirling it again, looking inside his glass as if it were a crystal ball.
“I knew they were friends, of course. I try to keep my business and my private lives separate, not always possible I’m afraid.” Then with another glance at his son, “You’ve seen him play?”
The faintest nod, a shadow moving on her face, in response.
“I have assurances, from an associate, that he’s coming to play for me this year, although I have no contract. Odd to want to do that. A bad move for him, I daresay. He’ll lose millions. We don’t exactly pay a premium this far north. Of course there’s always next year and the year after. He’s a man of principle, I understand. Would you say that’s fair?”
“I’d say he’s a man.”
“Yes? Oh, I see.”
He clicked his tongue against his teeth and reached for his glass but didn’t take it, letting his hand settle on the bar beside.
“The people who took him, I’m talking of Terrence again, of course. Did you see who they were?”
“There were four. Two were wearing masks.”
“And the others?”
“One was driving, I couldn’t see him.”
“And the last?”
“A woman.”
“You saw her face?”
“No.”
“Was she an Indian? Could you tell?”
“She had long hair, black and straight. It shimmered in the moonlight. That’s all I saw.”
“An Indian.”
“She didn’t strike me that way.”
“I see.”
“It was dark.”
“Hmmm.”
A quick sip, enough to get the taste out of his mouth, of the woman, not much younger than his daughter and about as useful to him.
“I’m afraid you haven’t told me much I didn’t already know. Was there anything else?”
It took only a few minutes to tell him the rest. Afterwards, Amy left the way she came, a cheque tucked in her purse. The secret door shutting behind her, Clayton Farber walked out of the guest bedroom and Robert poured his father another drink. While he waited, Lester Mann asked Clayton what he thought about the business with the gun and the one bullet. Clayton waited until his boss’s drink was in hand before answering that he thought it was peculiar.
“But should I be concerned?”
“No.”
“Still …”
twenty-eight
While that ‘Still …’ hung in the space between Lester Mann and Clayton Farber — paid for his ability to interpret any such deviations in punctuation his boss might throw at him, down to the last dot — Curtis Mays was on his motorcycle speeding towards Walter Hering Sr.’s house. He had wasted an hour trying to find the park that was supposed to be near the fifth fire on his strip of newspaper. He was driving around the east end, looking for a familiar set of swings and a slide, a ball diamond, a merry-go-round. It was a place he’d been and like almost every other place his memory had charted in Regina, he’d been there with a girl. They’d started out in the open, lying in the middle of the field. His hand had found her breast underneath her sweater. It was October and there was a chill wind. Her nipples were hard to his touch and they’d felt hot like kernels of corn about to pop. “Stop,” she’d said. “Someone will see us.” “Let ’em,” he’d said, already then connected to a future he couldn’t see beyond the throb in his pants and the taste of her skin, like vanilla. She protested again, and he relented, moving with her but refusing to take his hand off her breast until they were lying down under a maple tree, hidden by what little shadow it stole from the moon.
Unable to find the park, he’d stopped and asked a mother pushing a young boy in a stroller who’d know, if anyone did, where it was. She’d looked confused for a moment before telling him that it was in the south end. Following her directions, he found soccer nets in place of a ball diamond and no maple trees as far as he could see, and he knew he’d been mistaken about it being the park where he and the girl had been together. He could, however, smell the flavour of smoke in the air. Circling the block, he saw that he’d already been to the ruins at the end of the street. He stared at his ripped shred of paper. There was only one address left: Mann Court. This one he didn’t know and pulled up to the first bus shelter he passed so he could check for it on the map guarded in a Plexiglas case.
A teenage girl, huddled in one corner, shivered like she was cold, though she was wearing a hooded sweater and jeans and it was as hot that day as it was likely to be for the rest of the summer. Her hair was
as red as sunset and, her head lowered, he couldn’t see her face. Her hands twisted inside the pockets of the hoodie and when she spoke her voice shook.
“Mister.”
Curtis ignored her, using his finger to trace down the index of streets until he found the one he was looking for.
“Mister.”
Turning away from the map, Curtis caught a flicker of movement as the girl shot out from the corner. Recoiling, he backed away from the bus shelter, too scared for her to be just a teenage girl, high and begging for money to get higher still. He imagined she was something else, something sent to collect him, or maybe just the part of him that mattered. He bumped against his bike, more frightened than he’d ever been in the service (or so he told me years later when memory of the one was dulled by memory of the other). He waited for her to look up, expecting a black hole in place of a face, her eyes glowing yellow. But she just shuffled out of the shelter and down the sidewalk so that he never saw what she looked like and couldn’t know for certain that he was wrong.
All the way to Mann Court, fifteen blocks on the map, the girl’s face grew darker still in his memory until it was as black as the spots of darkness made by the fires. It seemed like it wasn’t really a face, it was something else, something following him — the black of asphalt bathed in shadow and tarnished with stains as thick as motor oil — and he had to fight to keep the motorcycle under one hundred, and to stop at red lights, and to brake into corners. When, in front of 17 Mann Court, he’d turned away from the burnt wreck of a house and saw Desmond leaning against his car, he knew he’d been right: something was following him.
It made sense then, that he’d want to hurt Desmond, first by throwing stones at him, then, that feeling too much like play, by pushing him hard against his car, making him wince and understand that it wasn’t a game. Pushing him, he’d really been pushing Terrence, that was the face he saw, for laying with Clive Winkle, and for lying to him all these years, and for disappearing and for dragging him after for no reason except that he owed him a debt that he could never repay.
Watching Desmond drive away, and not knowing how many pages were stacked against him, he thought again of his father. He thought that maybe what was really following him was what followed all sons who left home to seek their way in the world, certain they’d never find it unless they made a clean break, a permanent fracture, and that if he saw his father again the rest would take care of itself, such was the path that all sons must tread.
Driving, he let the road steer him towards Argyle Street. He circled twice in front of his sister’s house then parked down the block at a phone booth. He dialled her number and when she picked up he told her he was calling to see if his suits were ready. She said she didn’t know anything about any suits. She was irritated, rushed, her day filled with endless trials and her brother just another one.
“Listen, I’ve got to go. Vi’s had a rough morning —”
“Did you tell him I was back yet?”
“Who?”
“Dad.”
“Why would I do that? Curtis, really, I have to go.”
She hung up and there, in the dead air between the click and the grating buzz reminding him to hang up too, Curtis thought of me. Cycling through the names and the places, and the dark bits and the good times, not understanding any of it more than he did when he woke up that morning, where was it? (It’s been so long.) Woke up aching, hurt beyond measure, at, yes, Salvation’s house, with her brother watching over him, like a devil or a guardian angel depending on your point of view. The memory was clouded even then, like mine has become but for different reasons, so that he mistook Sally’s couch for Rita’s, the one he never laid upon but which he could have just as easily. He thought of Rita, coming into her living room in the middle of the night, watching, then lying down, holding him while he slept, just to be close to him. Thinking of Rita clutching him on the couch, he thought of her brother lying with Clive. He tried to conjure a way for him to use it, the image of his best and maybe only friend in the old man’s arms, letting him stroke his cheek with hands as soft as whipped cream, and do other things, things that Curtis wouldn’t imagine. But no matter how hard he called the image up or how well he populated it with what he remembered of The Inner Sanctum, layering Terrence’s laugh on top of it and the way the air whistled between his teeth when, excited by something, he drew in a sharp breath of air, it wasn’t enough to drive a wedge between this moment and the last.
Cycling again, randomizing the past into a different pattern, hoping this one, or the next, would be coherent, provide a clue at least, Curtis, by chance, stumbled upon the first rule of detective work: solve the mysteries you can and let the rest take care of themselves. Sifting through his memories, there I was: an imprint as clear and defined as any he’d seen; a clue to things he could only guess at, and a cop as well.
I saw him pull up in front of headquarters. I was at a window on the third floor. My office doesn’t have one and if I want to look onto the street I have to stand by the water cooler, a paper cup in my hand so when someone walks by I can take a sip. Since I’d left him at Halton Brothers Auto Wreck, I’d figured out why I’d taken him to see the chair Lawrence Madding was sitting in when he’d met Lester Mann and also what I wanted from him and the bullet. The reasons being what they were, one and the same, I’d sworn off ever seeing him again, but that didn’t stop me from forgetting to breathe when I watched him dismount. He walked towards the front door, the exact nature of his stride hidden by the height and angle, and I returned to my office to wait for the phone to ring. I gave it three minutes and when it didn’t, I picked up the receiver and called down to the front desk.
“Anyone come in asking about me?”
“Who?”
“Steadman.”
“Detective Steadman?”
I let him get away with that one, him sounding so young and so likely to complain if my hand slipped next time I saw him.
“So?”
“Huh?”
“Did anyone come in looking for me?”
“Not since I’ve been here.”
“He probably wouldn’t have known my name.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind.”
The phone was halfway back to the cradle when I heard a burst of applause. I put it back to my ear but by then the line was dead so I called back downstairs again. It rang seven times before another uniform picked up, this time a woman, the sound of hands clapping just then fading.
“What’s going on down there?” I asked.
“It’s Curtis Mays.”
twenty-nine
It was Bob Hammond who intercepted him. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, to maintain, as his annual review does, that he’s a good police, that he goes about his duty with humble reverence for the principles of law and order, that market forces and the desire to buy a new car every three years, a TV every two, doesn’t distil in him the same compulsion that it does in damn near everybody else you bump into on the street. I’d like to, if only because I myself have faltered so often (no use hiding it here, the end being what it is and words on a page so unlikely to change it) and would like to think that there are some out there who have not. I’d like to think Bob Hammond was one of them because he takes the time to drop by now and again to make sure I’m still alive. And also because he was the only person who read my report who wasn’t paid to.
(A few weeks after I’d submitted it, he tracked me to my spot between the plastic rubber tree and the water cooler.
“I read your report.”
I turned to look at him and was surprised to see he was wearing a quizzical expression, like he was trying to reconcile what he’d read with the person who’d written it. Finally, he smiled and clapped me on the shoulder, the only physical contact we’d shared over our twenty-some years in the service.
“See you arou
nd.”
After that, true to his word, he’d pop his head in my office once in a while, smiling when he’d see me, and say, “Still here, huh?”
I’d respond with, “They’ll have to strap me to a dolly and wheel me out,” or simply, “Damn straight.”
And he’d say, “That’s the spirit.”
He kept this up for five years until I took my package and my watch, four years after they’d first offered it to me. Then, never one to vary a routine, he’d drop by the house and stick his head through my kitchen door, where he knew he’d find me on any day of the week if it was before eight in the morning or it was raining or too cold to go out, wearing the bathrobe and slippers I’d bought with a bit of the money I’d secreted in a box on a shelf above my workbench.
“Just checking.”
That’s all he’d say, his meaning clear. The first few times he said it I smiled and thanked him, telling him I appreciated it but later, I just nodded so he wouldn’t have to add, “No bother.”)
I want to believe that when Curtis came in asking about me — no name but a face and a general description so that who he was looking for would have been obvious to even the most junior uniform assigned to the front desk — the uniform didn’t then pick up the phone, as he’d been instructed, to call Bob Hammond, telling him, Curtis Mays’s here, and yes he asked about Detective Steadman, but no I said he was out, and that Bob Hammond, thanking him, hadn’t then made a quick call himself, repeating the message, reduced to its essence: “He’s here.”
I want to believe that it was just a coincidence that Bob happened by the front desk and that when he caught sight of Curtis it was with a genuine sense of astonishment that he’d exclaimed, “Curtis Mays, while I live and breathe!”
Cipher Page 18
