Hayashida absorbed this, then reached for a pencil and pad of paper. He began writing, I assumed, Eugene Griswold’s name on the paper. I confirmed it by leaning forward to watch, and began spelling Griswold’s name aloud. “G-R-I-S—”
Hayashida muttered that he could figure it out for himself, damn it. “This Griswold guy,” he said, tossing the pad aside. “He work for Pilato?”
“Doesn’t work for anybody. He died about two hundred years ago. In Connecticut.”
He tilted his head. “Why are you wasting my time?”
“Mel Holiday knows the name,” I said. “And so does Mike Pilato. And you know this guy named Grizz. But nobody can put the pieces together. What is this, a police investigation or a game of charades? And why were you upset with me for wearing the ring Gabe gave me? You think he stole it?”
Hayashida was calm enough to ignore my questions. “Who else have you been talking to? About Gabe’s death?”
“Glynnis Dalgetty, Dougal’s wife. Dougal Dalgetty was supposedly killed by the guy called Grizz, although she thinks Gabe was—”
“Just so you know,” Hayashida interrupted, “Glynnis Dalgetty was convicted of manslaughter about ten years ago.”
My turn to sit back in the chair. “She was? Manslaughter?”
“Shot a guy in a hotel room. Said he was trying to rape her. Which, back then, might have been a possibility. Except she couldn’t explain what she was doing in the hotel room with a guy who used to work for Mike Pilato, one of Pilato’s guys who maybe tried running his own show or was caught skimming from Pilato’s take, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know where Glynnis Dalgetty got the gun, either. Or why the guy was naked. Or why she shot him six times, including twice in the head.”
“Glynnis?” I tried picturing her with a gun in her hand, pulling the trigger six times.
“It was enough to get her maybe fifteen years for second-degree murder, based on the facts. I mean, it was such an obvious set-up to us. The court didn’t see it that way, as a set-up, I mean. The court considered it practically justifiable homicide. All she got was a two-year suspended sentence on the lesser charge. Nobody here went for a murder conviction. Man with criminal record tries to rape helpless woman, woman defends herself, man loses his life, who cares? That’s what the court decided, based on her defence.”
“Sounds like she had a good lawyer.”
Hayashida nodded. “Took a week for him to talk her into a plea deal and accepting probation, and even less time for the prosecution to accept it. She wanted the charges dropped. She acted like that’s what she expected to happen, she’d just walk away scot-free. A month after she walks out of here, she and Dougal are driving around in a shiny new Mercedes-Benz, drinking good liquor until Dougal filled himself with too much Jameson one night and made a wrong turn off a dock into the bay. Somebody saw them and got them out, Dougal and Glynnis. I understand the Benz is still down there.”
“Who paid for the lawyer?”
“You want to guess?”
“You’re saying Mike Pilato got Dougal and Glynnis to kill somebody for him.”
Hayashida turned back to his computer. “No, I’m saying that you should be careful where you go or you could wind up next to Dougal’s Mercedes.”
“He was pretty talkative today. Almost charming.”
“Because he wasn’t talking business. He never talks business in his office. He’s afraid we’ve bugged it.”
“Have you?”
Hayashida smiled. “He takes lots of walks. With people he wants to talk business with. And he doesn’t want anybody listening in.”
“I don’t give a damn about his business, whatever it is, and it’s sure not hardware. What’s wrong with asking about Gabe? What’s wrong with flattering him a little, letting him think he’s charming me?”
He looked across at me. “I’m serious, Josie. If Mike Pilato snaps his fingers because he wants you dead, you’ll be gone before he can put his hand back in his pocket.”
I had come in like Nancy Drew and been reduced to Anne of Green Gables. “Glynnis Dalgetty thinks Gabe shot her husband.”
Hayashida said, “Maybe he did.”
He was staring at me, waiting for my reaction, which was to tell him that it was total crap, Gabe never shot anybody. Including himself.
Hayashida thought about this while I watched him watching me. Then he stood up, looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping, sat down again, and leaned toward me, his hands on his knees. “I think you should go get a coffee.”
I thought he wanted me to play cop station waitress. “Where’s the machine?” I asked, looking around.
“Not here.” He kept his voice low. Anyone beyond the cubicle wouldn’t hear a thing. “There’s a Tim Hortons down the street, about four blocks down on your right. Go have yourself a coffee. In the last cubicle near the rear exit, if it’s available. Okay?”
When I stood up to leave, Hayashida whispered, “Ten minutes,” but it didn’t register immediately because I was looking beyond the cubicle to the open corridor leading to Walter Freeman’s office. I knew it was his office because the sign on the door said chief of detectives walter freeman and because the oversized son of a bitch was waiting for a man to enter the office ahead of him, a guy with sandy hair and a good physique wearing a neat blue jacket over a white shirt and brown chinos, a guy who was calm and smiling slightly and not foaming at the mouth and screaming for me to tell him where Grizz was, which is what he had been doing the last time I saw him. Just as he entered Walter’s office, Walter scanned the squad area to see who was watching, and I enjoyed a brief thrill of Up Yours when his eyes locked on mine.
“That’s—” I began, leaning toward Hayashida, who had been busy adding something to his notepad.
Hayashida looked up at me, frowning. I wanted to say more, but Walter had closed the door behind the guy in the windbreaker and was walking toward me, gesturing for the cop on the reception desk to join him as he approached.
I expected Walter to ask what the hell I was doing in a place where he didn’t want me, but he didn’t speak to me at all. Instead, he spoke to the duty cop, who was hustling across the floor at Walter’s command. “Evict this woman,” he said in his best supreme commander’s voice. “Tell her she’s been witnessed consorting with a convicted felon by law enforcement officers and inform her that if she sets foot in this building again without a direct request from someone in this department, she will be charged with trespassing.”
“This is a goddamn public building,” I said to Walter, who was already heading back to his office. “I just might charge you with police harassment, Walter. Consorting? What the hell does that mean? And what are you doing with a junkie in your office?”
The last few words were aimed at the door to Walter’s office, which did not answer back because it was closed.
The obedient duty cop appeared to be deciding whether to use kind words or pepper spray to encourage me to leave, but I gave him time to use neither.
“YOU’RE LATE,” I said to Hayashida when he slid into the booth opposite me. It was half an hour later.
“Walter,” Hayashida said, “would have me downtown patrolling washrooms if he knew I was here.”
“So why are you?” I asked. “Here, I mean.”
“You said something back there that’s important.”
“I said something important? You’re sure it was me?”
He looked across at the donut display. Cops are around donuts like squirrels are around peanuts. What is it, the fat? The sugar? The shape? “You said Glynnis Dalgetty believed your husband shot her husband.”
“She’s wrong.”
“I agree.” Hayashida tore his eyes away from the chocolate-iced lovelies to look at me. “Except, today the lab confirmed that the bullet that killed Dalgetty came from Gabe’s gun.”
“Then they’re wrong too. Gabe did not shoot that woman’s husband.” Before Hayashida could speak, I added, “And Dalgetty was kil
led, what? A month ago? Six weeks ago? And you’ve just learned he was shot by Gabe’s gun? Hey, when’re you going to hear that Princess Diana died?”
Hayashida opened his hands and stared at his palms. “We got a tip from somebody to say we should compare the slug from Dalgetty’s head with the one … the one we removed from Gabe. We knew they were both the same calibre, and probably came from the same kind of gun. But it never occurred to us to put both under the scope and check.”
“Dalgetty was executed.”
“That’s right.”
“Then so was Gabe.”
“Or, having killed Dalgetty, Gabe might have been remorseful or threatened with being identified as the killer …”
“Which would drive him to suicide.”
“It’s a possibility.”
I needed time to absorb this. “The guy who went into Walter’s office today,” I said, “wearing a blue windbreaker. He’s a nutcase, a junkie, looking all over for Grizz because he needs a fix, I guess, or whatever they call it now—”
“He’s a narc.” Hayashida was watching me as though daring me to react, which was enough to shut my mouth. “Undercover. Sent over from Toronto. Trying to flush out the guy named Grizz. That’s how you do it. Get somebody putting out the word and hoping for a reaction. By the way, I hear the guys in the plumber’s truck got some good shots of you entering and leaving Mike Pilato’s place. I hear they’re pretty flattering.”
I said, “I need more coffee.”
“You say a word about this, about the narc or about Gabe’s gun being identified as the weapon that was used on Dougal Dalgetty, and Walter will find a reason to turn your house upside down and arrest you for having your lipstick smeared.”
“I don’t tell stories I don’t believe.”
“Doesn’t matter what you believe. I’ve been here nearly fifteen years. Biggest lesson I learned? Don’t screw around with Walter Freeman.”
I held my head in my hands. Nothing was what it had seemed a couple of weeks ago. So I thought about the Buddhist.
I dated a Buddhist just before meeting Gabe. I had been looking for somebody gentle, trustworthy, spiritual. He was all of that. He was also a strict vegetarian. I never got tired of the sex, but I sure got tired of tofu and being told that the world does not exist as we see it but as we imagine it. Or something like that. He was drifting from Buddhism into a mild addiction to hashish, which seemed to strengthen his spiritual side. It made me think that drugs are for people who can’t handle religion. Didn’t Karl Marx say something like that?
I was staring into my coffee cup, thinking about Buddhists and Karl Marx and remembering what it was like to live with a guy who ate one meal a day and how I never wanted to do anything with my life except live with Gabe on the beach strip and how that dream was gone forever and maybe I was the one who had destroyed it by sleeping with Mel Holiday, when Hayashida mentioned his name. “What?” I said, looking up.
“Mel Holiday.” Hayashida drained his coffee cup. “Talk to him. He’s been working hard on Gabe’s case. You need somebody to lean on. Maybe protect you.”
“Protect me? From what? From who?”
“We’re dealing with a murder and two suicides. Or maybe two murders and one suicide. Anyway, somebody was involved, somewhere.”
“Which suicide are you questioning?”
Hayashida stood up and looked around at everything except the donuts. “I don’t know.”
22.
That Buddhist I mentioned? He was a photographer. He did weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, portraits, anything people would pay him to aim a camera at. On sunny days, he would make a point of going outside just before sunset. He was waiting for the magic hour. That’s what he called the time when the sun was about to go down. In summer, the magic hour lasted, he explained, a full sixty minutes. In the winter, you were lucky to catch ten minutes of it.
The magic hour, he said, was when more light reflected on you from the sky than from the sun. It was indirect light, and it was flattering to everything. It was the best light in which to take photographs, and also the best light to study and appreciate the world around us. “It’s soft light, full light. Rich light. Look at trees during the magic hour,” he would say. “They are more majestic, more alive than in the hard light of noon. And look at people in the magic hour. They are more beautiful, more open, more accessible.”
At first, I was impressed with his artist’s eye. I saw what he meant. I understood his meaning. But his raving about the way the world is lit just before sunset became something of a rant by the tenth time he repeated it. Which is when I told him I agreed entirely, and what I really wanted to see in the light of the magic hour or the light of a candle wasn’t another bowl of tofu and bean sprouts, but a greasy cheeseburger I could call my own, and that this particular romance was over.
After Hayashida went back to Central, I left Tim Hortons in the magic hour. The world didn’t look any more attractive or accessible than it had an hour earlier.
I HAD LEARNED that Glynnis Dalgetty had killed a man, probably on Mike Pilato’s orders. I wanted to ask her about it. I wanted to know what it was like to watch bullets enter a man’s body and see him writhe on the floor until, I guess, she shot him in the head. Twice. What did the gun feel like in her hand? What was she thinking while she killed him? The colour of the Mercedes-Benz she’d get? Leftovers in the refrigerator? But I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with Gabe’s death.
I had also learned a little about Mike Pilato. I wanted to learn more.
The street where White Star Hardware Distributors was located had been deserted barely an hour earlier. Now the plumbing van was gone, and in the early moments of the magic hour it had become a combination playground, village square, and movie set. Teenage boys raced their skateboards along the pavement and up over the curbs. Girls their age in halter tops and shorts exchanged earbuds for their iPods or other music devices, closing their eyes, raising their clenched fists, and dancing on the spot to music only they heard and, I suspected, only they could tolerate. Two older women, their heads wrapped in bandanas, stood speaking and gesturing to each other while two men their age, who I assumed were their husbands, watched the procession on the other side of the street, the side where White Star Hardware Distributors was located and where Mike Pilato was.
Pilato still wore the black and gold shirt and black trousers. He walked with two men, Pilato doing the talking while the men kept pace with him and listened, nodding and sometimes gesturing with their hands to communicate expressions I interpreted as agreement, surprise, or anger. They were accompanied by four younger men, two about twenty feet ahead and two a similar distance behind. All four appeared to have purchased their clothes from the same tailor: open-necked shirts with wide collars, dark trousers, and black pointed-toe shoes. They also appeared to buy their sunglasses from the same place: dark Ray-Bans that hid their eyes completely. The three with hair seemed to patronize the same barber, a man who appreciated thick, dark hair and did his best to enhance it. The fourth man’s head was shaved, the better to reveal a tattoo on his skull. The tattoo was an arrow pointing forward to a word above his forehead that I couldn’t read.
The seven men—Mike and his two partners, plus the four men who reminded me of outriders in old movies about cattle drives—were performing some kind of choreography. Whenever Mike and his friends stopped while Mike said something obviously important, the outriders halted as well. When Mike began walking again, the younger men matched their pace, their heads swivelling constantly from side to side.
When I slowed the car, lowered the window and called out to Mike, all seven men stopped walking and glared at me. I felt as though I had been asked to identify myself at a border crossing and had used the name Mrs. Osama bin Laden.
Instead of speaking to me, Mike looked at the two outriders ahead of him and nodded.
The man with the arrow on his head walked quickly into the street ahead of my car. His partner, I sensed, w
as behind me. I suppose, if I had pressed the accelerator to the floor, I could have run down Arrowhead, but I assumed this would be a suicidal act. Arrowhead walked to the open window on my side of the car and spoke without looking at me. “Keep moving,” he said.
I said I wanted to speak to Mike Pilato for a moment.
“You can’t,” he said. “Just get the hell out of here.”
“Why won’t he talk to me? He’s right over—”
“Drive away.”
“Okay, he’s busy, I can see that—”
“Drive away. Now.”
“Will you give him a message?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t see why—” I began. This time it wasn’t Arrowhead who prevented me from finishing my sentence. This time I stopped talking because something struck the back of the Honda with the force of a gunshot. I twisted in my seat to look behind me. Arrowhead’s partner had hair on his head, a misaligned nose on his face, and a small sledgehammer in his hand. Where the heck had he gotten a sledgehammer? It hardly mattered, because he swung it again, and the Honda lurched forward from the blow.
Before pressing the accelerator to the floor, I looked across at Mike Pilato, who raised one hand, palm out, and someone barked a short flurry of Italian words as the Honda, like a horse who had just been slapped in the ass, sped away from White Star Hardware Distributors.
“I HAVE TWO DENTS IN MY CAR that you could hide grapefruit in.”
The hand holding the last of my brandy in a glass from the kitchen was shaking. The hand holding the telephone was not, so Mel’s voice remained loud, clear, and comforting in my ear.
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to Pilato, tell him he’s gone over the line.”
“How can those guys do that? How can they just walk out on the street and start smashing somebody’s car with a sledgehammer?”
“They went too far. So did you.”
“Mel, it’s a public street, damn it!”
“Not when Mike Pilato is having a meeting on it.”
“Meeting? He’s walking with two greaseballs—”
Beach Strip Page 20
