Beach Strip

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  Walter stared at me, wearing his Bad Cop face before looking at the axe and tossing it into a corner of the shed. “I wasn’t threatening you,” he said. “I was moving things, looking around. Threatening you? Me, threaten you with an axe?” He pointed a finger at me. I hate people who point fingers at me, but in this case I thought it was better than the alternative, which would have been the weapon inside Walter’s jacket. “You really are nuts, aren’t you?”

  “Go to hell,” I said. Then, “Better still, go back to Central and leave me alone.”

  “Why don’t we just go inside and have a talk?” Walter said.

  “Not bloody likely.” Now that the axe was out of his hand, and assuming his finger wasn’t loaded, I was getting my courage back. “You want to talk, we can talk here.”

  “Or down at Central. You seem to enjoy visiting there.” He nodded in the direction of the war memorial. “My car’s parked just down the beach. You want to come with me, or you want to ask me inside for a glass of water? Christ, it’s hot in there.”

  WALTER SAT AT MY KITCHEN TABLE, looking around the room as though searching for something he might have left behind on a previous visit. I didn’t want him there, but I knew he could find one reason or another for getting me into Central Police Station and, for all I knew, behind the bars of the lock-up cells if he really wanted to. You learn these things living with a cop. You learn what they can and can’t get away with, and the higher you are in the pecking order, the more you get away with.

  I dumped some ice from the refrigerator into a glass, filled it with water from the tap, plunked it in front of Walter, and stood back to watch him drink the whole damn thing. When he finished, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and examined the glass as though he wished it were full again. “Damn it’s hot, ain’t it?”

  “You want to talk about the weather?” I asked. “Did you bring a warrant with you to talk about the weather?”

  “No,” Walter said, setting the glass on the table. “I want to talk about a really smart detective I knew who was married to a really stupid woman.”

  “Look, if you’re upset because I insisted on looking at Gabe’s investigation reports …” I began.

  Walter twisted in his chair to look at me. It was one of those up and down looks that men give women when they’re either undressing them in their mind or intimidating them with their power. I hoped it was the latter, in Walter’s case. “Why did you lie to me?”

  “About what?”

  “About the ring you now say Gabe gave you.”

  “Why is it any of your business what Gabe gave me? I gave him gifts too. You want me to go upstairs and show you the cufflinks I gave him for Christmas? Or how about the plaid jockstrap I got him for his birthday last year?” This was true. I found it in a shop specializing in Scottish wear. A bright orange Buchanan plaid jockstrap. Gabe loved it.

  “Did you buy the ring for yourself, maybe say Gabe bought it for you?”

  “Why the hell would I say that?” Only later did I understand what Walter was getting at.

  He ignored my question. “How do you explain that the man who gave the ring to you and the man who last had it in his possession are both now dead?”

  I sat in the chair. I didn’t want to argue with Walter, which would be a losing proposition for both of us, and I didn’t want to talk about Gabe being dead either. “You forgot to mention that both of them supposedly committed suicide,” I said.

  “Supposedly?”

  I shook my head and shrugged. I decided I would rather listen to Walter than talk to him.

  “Any more gifts like that one that you and Gabe might have bought?”

  “No.” I began examining my fingers. I needed a manicure.

  Walter seemed to think about that for a moment. Then, “If I find out you’re not telling me the truth, I’ll charge you with obstructing justice. I can always come back with a search warrant and tear the place apart, you know.”

  “Trust me, Walter,” I said, still studying my fingers. “I don’t want you here now, and if it kept you from ever coming back here again, with or without a warrant, I would swear the sky was orange, the world was flat, and that you have all the charm of George Clooney but you’re better-looking.”

  Walter shook his head. “You don’t seem to be the least bit interested in learning why I’m asking about Gabe or you having extra cash.” He tipped the glass back and dumped most of the ice cubes into his mouth.

  “You want to know why, Walter?” I said over the noise of him chewing the ice cubes. “Because the only reason you would ask is if you suspected Gabe of taking bribes or stealing evidence. Well, Gabe didn’t do that. He would never do that. The idea is so ridiculous that I’m insulted you would even suggest it. You knew Gabe, and you know what he was like.”

  He sat chewing the ice cubes and, I assumed, turning my words over in his mind. “I liked Gabe,” he said when he finished crunching the ice cubes with his teeth as though they were potato chips. “I don’t like you. Never did. Gabe deserved a woman with more class than you’ve got.”

  “If this is an attempt to seduce me, it’s not working,” I said.

  “See, that’s what I mean. Try to have a conversation with you, talk about something important, and you make a joke about it. And you toss in sex, as well. That’s the kind of woman you are. Gabe could’ve done better.”

  “Walter—” I began.

  Walter interrupted. He had a way of interrupting that was impossible to ignore. “I know about you,” he barked. “I did some investigating. Learned a hell of a lot about you. You could never keep a job for more than a year or so. Why is that?”

  “Because I can’t stand spending my days in the company of jerks. Which reminds me. Kindly get the hell out of my house now, or I’ll call a cop and then I’ll call a lawyer.”

  Walter smiled at that. He tilted his head back, dumped the remaining ice cube into his mouth, and chewed it like the others. When he finished, he stood up and ambled his way to the back door. “You should put that lock on your shed,” he said over his shoulder. “Anybody can go in there.”

  “I know,” I said. “Apparently it attracts perverts.”

  Walter paused halfway through the door into the garden and pointed his finger at me again. This time it appeared to be loaded. “I’m not finished with you,” he said. “You keep poking your nose into things and getting in the way of our investigations, you’ll hear from me again. And stay away from Mel Holiday.”

  I watched him walk through the garden, climb the stairs to the level of the laneway along the beach, and glance toward the caragana bushes where Gabe had died. Then he ambled off in the direction of the war memorial.

  I closed the door and sat at the kitchen table, remembering, regretting, and trying to forgive.

  BEFORE I MET GABE, I had a fling with a psychiatrist. I had gone to see him because I was feeling depressed over the kind of men I had been dating. When the psychiatrist convinced me after a couple of sessions that I was no crazier than the average divorcee, which did not make me feel as good as he intended, he suggested we have coffee sometime, since I was no longer his patient. He was a nice fellow, slightly British, with both the accent and the tweeds, and divorced like me. We had a few dinners and a couple of dirty weekends. We might still be dating if I hadn’t acquired the sensation that he was always practising psychiatry, even when he was on top of me in a waterbed. It destroyed my fantasy life. No matter what I was thinking at the time, I always suspected that he either knew what I was thinking or was trying to learn what I was thinking. Either way, he would be evaluating me, and you can understand what that would do to my visions of sandy lagoons in the Caribbean—or whips and midgets, for that matter.

  “Do you know what your trouble is?” he said during our last session in bed. We had been talking about my feelings and his sex drive, and vice versa. “Your trouble is that you’re a very moral woman trying to live an immoral life.”

  Which may be th
e most profound thing any man has ever said to me. If I meet him again, I’ll tell him that. But I probably won’t thank him.

  Sitting alone in the kitchen after Walter Freeman left, I thought about his words and I thought about what I had most recently done to prove they were true.

  I LOVE TO DANCE. Waltz, jive, samba, quickstep, you name it and I’m out there shaking my hips with two right feet. I can dance anywhere with anybody. I am especially good at dancing around my own guilt.

  A year ago, the idea of cheating on Gabe would have been as unthinkable to me as following the cormorants into deep water and chasing fish. Or maybe I was just fooling myself.

  Something about Gabe had begun to bother me. He was quiet, he was wise, and he was thoughtful when he wasn’t aloof. He was physically strong and comfortably predictable, and one day it began to dawn on me: he was my father. Not literally, of course, and not even emotionally. In all the characteristics that made him a man, however, he was my father or my father’s son. Whenever the idea entered my mind, I gave myself a mental slap across the face. I would be fine for a day or two, then I would go back to playing mind games. Did young girls who love their fathers grow into women who look for the same kind of man to be their lover? It made sense. The way I see it, the odds are so high against finding a guy who is loyal, gentle, strong, and doesn’t look as though he was a model for a gargoyle, that you might as well go for the tried and true, the comfortable and familiar. For most of us, those of us lucky enough to have good parents, this was their father. Or more accurately, a surrogate, a clone, a substitute. I think a lot of women do that. I worried that I was one of them. Maybe I was just bored.

  In April, Gabe had to travel to Montreal to appear at the trial of a major gangster. The guy had been arrested here, and Gabe had interrogated him before releasing him to the Montreal cops. Gabe was needed to give evidence about the gangster’s dirty work in Quebec, which would take him away from home for almost a week. I wanted to go with him, but he refused, saying it was business and he would take me some other time for a vacation, but not when he was travelling on public money. I threw a tantrum, a stupid spitting and hissing fit, when he left.

  I had planned to keep busy working and visiting Mother, plus reading and painting the kitchen, but the night after Gabe left, Mel showed up in a V-neck sweater, tight jeans, and deck shoes, which I thought was just about the sexiest thing I had seen since Elvis died. Do I have to paint a picture? If I did, it would be with a bottle of Teacher’s whisky before and tears after. In bed, Mel talked about leaving policing, about taking me to a B & B he knew in New England, about buying a place on a lake up north, where we could live together and listen to the loons at night, he and I in bed, naked under a duvet. “What would we live on?” I asked, and he said there would be enough money, but I didn’t think much of loons and I didn’t want to live anywhere except on the beach strip, and I had no plans to leave Gabe. I had just wanted—what? Maybe to prove I could love a man who did not remind me of my father. Maybe to help me get over becoming forty-one years old.

  I said never again, and never lasted about a month, until I decided I might as well be hanged for being a whore as for being an adulteress, and I met Mel at his apartment in the middle of the afternoon, and once more at a motel down the highway to Toronto. And that was it.

  I handled it the way most people handle things they are ashamed of doing. It’s not them who did it, and it wasn’t me who went to bed with Mel. It was some crazy person with totally different values. Okay, it was me, but I had become mentally unbalanced on three different occasions and was not totally responsible for my actions. The first time, I was drunk and lonely and angry and frightened, which sounded like enough excuses. The second time I figured, what the hell, the worst had already happened. The third time was closure. Two naked bodies humping on a sway-backed bed, thinking, We’ll always have Paris, except it wasn’t Paris, it was a Motel 6.

  There is a line between knowing and suspecting, and Gabe straddled that line in the days before he died. Things were different in ways that I cannot identify or describe. Maybe it was how Gabe seemed to be watching me whenever Mel was around, or the way I would hand the telephone to Gabe when Mel called, without saying anything beyond hello. Maybe I talk in my sleep. It was the unknowing, the wondering if Gabe knew, that I couldn’t stand. I would be selfish again. I would confess to Gabe. That’s why I wanted to reveal everything to him the night he died.

  The thing I couldn’t figure out was, how could Mel and Gabe work together like they did? I wondered about that until I read a magazine article titled “Why Women Will Never Run the Boys’ Club.” The subject was the failure of women to become top business executives, and I expected the usual claptrap on female hormones and nest-building instincts. Instead, it talked about playing team sports, which interests me about as much as Bulgarian politics, but I read enough to understand the point of it. Boys tend to play team sports more than girls, and they are more intense and aggressive. The article explained that playing intense team sports teaches boys to co-operate with other boys they dislike. “He may be a jerk,” the guy who wrote the article said, “but if he’s a great linebacker,” whatever that is, “and I need him to cover my flat, I can work with him.” His flat what? I didn’t know, but I understood the point: men can find a way of working together on something even when they’re competitive with each other on something else.

  Gabe enjoyed working with Mel, at the beginning at least. Cops, Gabe believed, needed a special way of thinking and acting. You couldn’t think first and act later, because you could get shot or run over while pondering things. And you couldn’t act first and do the thinking later—that’s how innocent people get shot by cops who mistake a pocket comb for a gun when it’s in somebody’s hand and the light is poor. Gabe said Mel had the ability to think and act simultaneously. “Like an athlete,” Gabe said. “Like a pro athlete. The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper. Flies off the handle too fast.”

  Gabe said those things in the first few months of working with Mel. Lately, he had seemed to avoid talking about Mel at all. Which made me think he knew.

  Mel had told me Gabe never gave a hint of suspicion about our affair. They continued working as a team, covering drug deals and homicides, which frequently overlapped. Perhaps Gabe could not believe that his friend and partner would sleep with his wife. Perhaps Gabe was better at hiding his emotions than I knew. Perhaps I was imagining Gabe’s suspicion as a result of my own guilt. Perhaps Mel was shielding me from the truth.

  I THOUGHT ABOUT ALL THIS AND MORE, sitting at the kitchen table after Walter left. When I grew bored with my known thoughts, I took another look at the list on the refrigerator door and realized that, when Walter Freeman was chewing the ice cubes, he had a perfect view of my list of fourteen things I knew for sure. Walter didn’t have to be very bright to figure out that the list represented my attempt to unravel the mystery about Gabe’s death and the role of poor Wayne Honeysett in it. And he didn’t need the eyes of an owl to discover that I considered him a creep, although this wouldn’t qualify as earth-shattering news to him.

  It was the last item on the list that I kept reading over and over. Mel was the only one who was beginning to agree that Gabe might not have killed himself, so he was the only one I could trust. I would talk to Mel as soon as I answered the pounding on my back door, which I opened without checking to see who it was.

  17.

  This time he was almost calm, which made him threatening. He wore the same tattered clothes and his hair was just as matted, but he didn’t rage like the first time, and although his eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy, they did not bounce like Ping-Pong balls dropping down a flight of stairs. They were fixed on me. The voice may have been calmer, but the script was unchanged. “Where’s Grizz?” he said. I tried to push the door closed, but he pushed back against me. “I gotta see Grizz,” he said. “Where’s he at?”

  I screamed, hoping somebody on the street or the beach would
hear, but he was already inside the room and pushing the door closed behind him. I thought of the butcher knives on the rack near the stove, but when I tried to picture myself grabbing one and turning to thrust it into his chest, the picture changed to me losing a wrestling match and finding the knife in his hands instead. I kept backing toward the kitchen anyway, hoping that I would block his view of the knives until I found both my voice and the cordless phone.

  “Get out of my house!” I shouted at him. “The police were just here. They’re coming back—”

  “Tell me where Grizz is,” he said.

  “I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about! Just get out, get out!” My hand found the cordless telephone, but my fingers were shaking too much to dial. My feet were as reliable as ever, and I turned and ran down the hall to the front door. I unlocked and opened the door before he could reach me and stumbled blessedly into the sunshine. Traffic was busy on Beach Boulevard and on the highway bridges, and a family was strolling past on the other side of the road. Instead of flagging down any of them, I dialed 911 and screamed at the operator, who answered with a maddeningly calm voice. I told her a strange man had burst into my house and I wanted the police here, damn it, to throw his ass into jail.

  She took my address and kept me on the line, and as I spoke to her I walked to the side of the house where I could see him on the boardwalk, heading toward Tuffy’s. He looked confident and relaxed, and the sight of him made me both angry and brave, roughly in that order. “He’s on the boardwalk,” I said, “heading south.” Walking into the garden and up to the boardwalk level, I kept him in my sight and gave her a complete description of him—about five foot ten, maybe 175 pounds, around thirty years old, unshaven, straight sandy-coloured hair, greasy denim shirt, equally greasy overalls cut into shorts, worn grey Adidas sneakers, no socks.

  He was perhaps a hundred feet ahead of me, strolling among the usual summer traffic on the strip—the in-line skaters, the skateboarders, the joggers, the boppers, the old folks, and two people in motorized wheelchairs. “Do not approach him,” the 911 operator advised me, just as I heard sirens out on Beach Boulevard, first one, then another.