by Gail Bowen
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 the 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 c
losed.”
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.
“I’m not very good at garage sales. I never seem to find the bargains.”
“Even a blind pig gets an acorn once in a while,” she said. “Give it a try.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”
She picked up a fresh skein of yarn. “Now tell me again what you’re going to do.”
“I’m going to hit the garage sales and look for Barbies. I won’t pay more than two bucks apiece, and I’ll check their feet to make sure they’re not chewed.”
Bebe Morrissey stared at me in disbelief. “Jesus Christ and all the saints of heaven,” she said. “How did you ever get a job teaching at a university? What you’re going to do, Joanne Kilbourn, is go to your friends at NationTV and tell them to start sniffing around the African prince and the guy with the birthmark. And you’re going to tell them to leave our Kyle alone.”
CHAPTER
7
We own the last swimming pool in our neighbourhood. Savvy people, sick of summers plagued by sluggish pumps, cracked tiles, clogged filters, and four-figure bills for chemicals, have had their pools filled in. More than once, as I’ve opened the envelope from Valhalla Pool Service, I’ve considered them wise, but Taylor loves to swim. She is not a natural mermaid. Her body is small and dense, but she fights gravity and churns through the water with such antic joy that every spring we pull off the pool cover and begin again. And because she is too young to swim alone, more often than not I struggle into my shapeless old suit and join her.
That Tuesday afternoon, there was no altruism in my decision to take the plunge. By the time I got back from visiting EXXXOTICA, my head was reeling from the aftershocks of a martini and wine at lunch and a day’s worth of information that had wrapped itself around my brain and wouldn’t let go. A big-time headache was on its way, and I was counting on hydrotherapy to banish it.
Ed Mariani had been wise to dig out his Proust. It was a sweet spring day. The lemony afternoon sun was warm, and the air was heavy with the scent of lilacs. It was a day to swim and, apparently, a day to bask. Willie followed us down to the pool and, as soon as he’d settled in at poolside, Taylor’s cats, Bruce and Benny, streaked out of the house and took their places across the pool where they could catch a few rays and keep an eye on him.
After fifteen minutes, the water began to do its magic. With every lap, the tension loosened its grip on my temples; by the time Taylor, tired of paddling alone, began to swim beside me so we could chat, I was ready to keep up my end of the conversation.
“There’s a meeting tomorrow for the parent-volunteers before we go on our field trip to the Legislature,” she said.
“T, when our kids were little, I just about lived at the Legislature. I don’t think I need to be oriented.”
She duck-dived and swam a few strokes underwater, conveniently out of ea
rshot. When she surfaced, she was ready. “There may be stuff you don’t know.”
“Try me.”
She dipped under and came up, showering drops. “What’s the building made out of?”
“Italian marble.”
She bobbed back under, and came up with a new question. “How many Members of the Legislative Assembly are there?”
“Fifty-eight.”
Now it was a game. This time she swam underwater to the end of the pool. “What does the Speaker do?” she asked breathlessly.
“Keeps things moving along; keeps the members in line.”
“Okay,” she said. “I guess you know enough.” As suddenly as if a cloud had passed over it, the joy went out of her face. “Have the police caught the man who killed Ariel?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
“But they are going to catch him.” The water beading her eyelashes made her look like a frightened naiad.
“Taylor, what’s making you so scared?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just remembered how that woman at the vigil said men had to be stopped or they’d kill us all.”
“I don’t remember anyone saying that.”
Taylor swiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You weren’t there. You were talking into the microphone. It was that lady with the flowers on her shawl…”
“Livia Brook.”
She nodded. “Livia said it to the woman you don’t like – the one who told us that men couldn’t come to the vigil.”
She shivered; whether it was from the power of the memory or the chill of the water I couldn’t tell. I put my arm around her shoulder. “Time to get out,” I said. “But Taylor, I don’t want you to worry about this any more. Everyone was upset the other night. People said things they didn’t mean. No one’s going to hurt you.”
“Or you.” Her tone was urgent. “Or Madeleine or Mieka.”
“No one is going to hurt any of us,” I said. “There isn’t an enemy out there.”
“Good.” She tried a small smile. “Can I stay in the pool a little bit longer?”
