Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  “Detective Leyden has agreed to take you to headquarters,” Hattie said. “No cuffs, no fuss. And listen, Charlie, they’re going to ask you a lot of questions. You know how it works. Be patient, for god’s sake, and let them do their job. I told Leyden I can corroborate the events leading up to you being in Fielding’s place to check in on him.”

  “Sounds like you don’t have much faith in me,” he said.

  “I have an unmovable faith in the fact that you don’t change,” she said. “Cooperate. You know the process at play here. You’re working within the parameters of the system, whether you like it or not. You’re a civilian, Charlie… ”

  Leyden drove him to the police headquarters on College Street. McKelvey rode in the front seat like a partner riding shotgun, and it brought him back to those better days, those long ago days of youth and midnight shifts and locker rooms boiling over with bravado and bullshit. Back then, back when life seemed either black or white, everything was boiled down to its purest essence: a code in the police book, a 216 or a 61, and you could drink half the night and swagger at the bar after pulling a twelve-hour shift. The police work back then had perhaps been rudimentary when compared with today’s science and digital voodoo—and a lot of the officers had been rough around the edges, to be sure—but they had worked cases based on their heads and their guts and a thousand hours of experience working in the blood and the filth of the streets.

  Leyden was perhaps forty-five, a lanky man with a build that made McKelvey think of a ball player, long limbs and lean musculature, broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He had a Marine-style crew cut buzzed to the bone on the sides so that you could make out every small nick or cut the man’s scalp had earned in a lifetime. Very little personality, McKelvey thought, and something about the man made him think of Clint Eastwood, all squints and grunts. He looked like a cop, if one could look like their occupation. As though as a kid Leyden had practiced in front of a mirror. McKelvey gave him a sideways glance and wondered if he himself had that same look. Perps and rounders recognized a guy like Leyden a mile away. The sport coat and the too-short tie, the never-smile, that look on his face that declared: Police, Police, Police.

  “Anybody call Aoki on this?” McKelvey said. He wasn’t nervous, not yet, but a little help from his old boss on the Holdup Squad couldn’t hurt. Last he’d heard, Aoki was in line for a jump to Homicide, the Holy Grail in copland. He understood she had finished her Master’s degree in criminology through night school.

  “Don’t know,” Leyden said.

  “Was your father a duty sergeant over at 51 back in the day?” McKelvey said, trying to make conversation.

  “Fifty-one, that was my uncle,” Leyden said. “My dad was on patrol for twelve years, hurt his back wrestling a guy he was taking in to the Don Jail. Got put on permanent disability.”

  A police family. The best and worst kind, McKelvey thought. How each generation came at the job a little harder, something to prove. He saw Leyden as a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, his old man at home on disability. His father must have been bitter at the world, reliving the old days, the lost potential. It would have been hard on a kid, then as he grew older, there’d be little choice between college or the cops.

  “Tough on the family,” McKelvey said. “The association look after you guys?”

  Leyden nodded and drove on in silence. McKelvey could respect a man of few words, yet at the same time he understood why perps were always yammering away out of nervousness, looking to fill the space, and it was only the most controlled and measured con who knew enough to keep his mouth shut. Everything you said in the presence of a cop was fair game for the record. Sometimes the adrenalin ran, and you just couldn’t stop it.

  On any other day they would have driven into the garage, the heavy door closing behind them. McKelvey well understood this territory, the geography of the police. The walk to the back doors, the duty officer waiting to sign you in, the hand off to the processing officer. This was the case for perps, but here, today, this was simply a conversation to straighten out how it was that a former police officer had come to be in a residence with a dead body, the tenant nowhere to be found.

  Leyden parked the unmarked cruiser out front, and they went up the walkway past the stone flower beds, the marble swept and tidy as though the place was a library and not the headquarters of the country’s largest urban police force. Leyden checked him through and left him sitting outside the bank of interview rooms. These spaces wherein McKelvey himself had squeezed the balls of countless crooks, the holdup crews. In his early days on the force, these rooms at the old HQ over on Jarvis Street were choked blue with cigarette smoke and, in fact, cigarettes were used as a bargaining tool. Some perp sweating like a bastard, facing a few years in the joint, could spill his guts for the discount price of a few smokes. But not now, now everything was clean and proper and sterile and recorded as part of the process of democracy.

  “Be me and Detective Kennedy,” Leyden said, and with that he headed, McKelvey assumed, up to his desk in the Homicide Squad where he would confer with his partner on the facts thus far. Which were few and far between, McKelvey knew. They wouldn’t have ID’d the victim yet. There was nothing. Just a whole lot of questions and curiosity.

  A young duty officer came over to where McKelvey was sitting.

  “Can I get you a coffee?” the officer said. He was thin and looked too studious to be a cop, glasses and bowed chest. Perhaps like Leyden, this kid’s father had been on the force, and the son’s life had been decided for him. It had been the same with McKelvey’s father; the man toiled and bled in the mines, cursed and swore about the crappy pay, and yet he didn’t speak to McKelvey for three years after his son left Ste. Bernadette to become a Toronto cop. Rather than feel happiness at his son making a break from the dead-end life in a dead-end town, McKelvey’s father had never quite forgiven him. McKelvey had the nagging sense, however, that it was generational jealousy rather than anger.

  “No thanks,” McKelvey said. “I remember what the coffee was like here.”

  “We’ve got pop, water, juice. Just let me know, okay?”

  The kid sort of smiled at him then opened the door to one of the interview rooms—or interrogation room as the old guys referred to them. The kid would have been told that McKelvey was ex-cop, they would have passed on that information as a professional courtesy, and he seemed a little embarrassed to be escorting this man who had been throwing the cuffs on bad guys a hundred years before his entry into the world was even mulled.

  “You don’t have Steam Whistle on tap, by any chance,” McKelvey said.

  The kid laughed, shook his head and walked away with his shoulders stooped.

  McKelvey slipped inside. There was a conference table and four chairs, two on each side. A strip of fluorescent lights overhead bathed the room in institutional white, and within the light fixture, McKelvey knew, there was a video camera. He waited in the interview room for forty-five minutes, his mind going back to specific days when he’d sat here, right here, turning the vice. The fundamentals of police interrogation had not changed in a hundred years. It was only the degree of pressure, or more precisely the application of said pressure, that had been fine-tuned over the years thanks to liberal courts and the asserted rights of the individual to not be walloped across the head with the Yellow Pages. The act remained, at its very core, all about control. The copper must be seen to be in charge from the moment a suspect was pinched on the street. Handcuffed, thrown in the back of a cruiser, taken downtown and made to wait. The atmosphere, a room too hot or too cold, the mood, access to fluids or solids, sleep or a place to shit, it was all in the hands of the interrogator.

  McKelvey himself had in his prime been a master of this game. He would sit down across from a suspect and chat a while, perhaps ask if they were hungry or thirsty or in need of a good long smoke, then he would tell them that he would pop out and see what he could do about their request. Later—maybe an hour, maybe two—he wou
ld come back in and get right at the questions, completely forgetting whatever it was he had promised. Come at them with questions like artillery salvos, boom boom boom—where the fuck were you at seven o’clock last night, who is your girlfriend’s mother’s sister, where did you go to school, what make of car did you say you drive…

  Leyden and his partner finally came in, each holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. Wisps of steam rose and curled from the cups. The same diarrhea-inducing sludge McKelvey had put through his system for years, the brew bubbling on the broiler in the squad room for six or seven hours at a time, black and thick as dirty oil. That and the poor diet of cops on the fly had almost killed him. How many of their brethren had been felled not by bullets but by cholesterol and stress and cigarettes and caffeine?

  “Bob Kennedy. Sorry for the wait,” the younger investigator said as they came in, his hand out for a shake. He was a thirtysomething with freckles and orange hair parted on the left, the sort of aggressive hair colour that caused a kid to be teased without mercy. He looked to McKelvey like the sort of person who was always sunburned in summer, always red-cheeked and peeling. He was a thickly built man with big hands, knuckles swirled with curly blond and red hair. He owned the perpetual face of a boy, and it looked to McKelvey like the man probably didn’t even have to shave every day.

  “You been around, eh?” Kennedy said, pulling up a chair, smiling like an old pal. “Finished up your tour in Hold-up. I hear you had some good collars in your day. The Royal Bank Bandit. I remember reading about that. I was working for the Barrie Police back then. We thought he might have been good for one of our bank jobs, too.”

  Ah, McKelvey thought, small town cop makes big city detective. He pictured Kennedy in a photo with his mother on the day of his swearing in, goofy kid with a goofy grin. The whole while Leyden sat there picking at a nail, his head down as though he were sitting in algebra class and couldn’t wait for the bell to ring.

  “We had our days, that’s for sure,” McKelvey said.

  “I bet you did,” Kennedy said, and McKelvey could tell the man wanted some stories, tales of the good old days.

  “How’d you hurt your eye there?” Leyden said. He didn’t look up. And it wasn’t so much a question as a declaration.

  “Too much Irish whiskey one night, tripped on my laces,” McKelvey said.

  Leyden smiled a small smile and nodded once.

  “I’m sorry about your son and all of that business with Raj Balani,” Kennedy said, almost blurting it out, glad to have said it and now it was done. “Balani was a good cop at one time, from what I understand. Not the first guy in the Drugs Squad to get in over his head. Dirty business that stuff. Anyway, you know how this goes. We’re covering bases here, just ticking off the boxes. We appreciate you coming in like this so we can get you out of the way. So how do you know Timothy Fielding, and how did you come to be in his residence?”

  “He’s a friend of mine. I went to check on him. He’s been worried about his girlfriend. She wasn’t returning his calls, and it looks like she up and took off a few days ago,” McKelvey said.

  “This girlfriend, you know her?”

  “Never met her.”

  “She the dead woman back there on the floor of his bedroom?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never met her.”

  “No idea who the dead woman is?”

  “Not a clue,” McKelvey said.

  “Did you kill her?”

  McKelvey started to laugh, but he stopped himself. The techniques, the catching the perp off guard. Get him revved up, squeeze some emotion out of him. Kennedy was trying too hard, not a natural at this, coming in too fast and clumsy. What did they expect, he would be curled in the fetal position and sucking his thumb within the first five minutes?

  “Like I said, I went to check on my friend. He wasn’t home. I found the woman on the floor of his bedroom. I called it in right away. You should probably write that down.”

  Kennedy shot him a look as though he were both angry and hurt by the comment. He flipped the page in his notebook and scribbled a few lines.

  “Okay,” Kennedy continued. “All right, so your friend’s girlfriend, you were never at her place or vice versa, never bumped into each other at his place?”

  A sticking point. But at least for now, for now it was something he would skate around. No good could come from prattling off the whole strange story. Admission of his innocent checking in on Donia Kruzik’s apartment would keep him in this box for a day.

  “I’ve never met her,” McKelvey repeated. “They haven’t known each other long.”

  “About how long is that?”

  McKelvey shrugged. “He said a month, maybe six weeks. Something like that.”

  “So you stopped by to check in on your friend, your friend who has been having troubles with his girlfriend of a month or so...”

  “I didn’t say he was having troubles, Kennedy. What I said was, he was worried because she wasn’t returning his calls, and she had missed a class. They met through his English as a second language night school course.”

  Leyden made a few notes in his black pad but seemed otherwise disinterested.

  “So you went in—you have a key?” Kennedy said.

  “The door was unlocked.”

  “The door was unlocked?”

  “Correct.”

  “Hmm, okay. Did you find that unusual?”

  “I can’t speak to my friend’s habits with regards to security,” McKelvey said, “but yes, I made a note of the fact.”

  “So the door is unlocked, you go in and you look around as you said, and boom, there’s a dead lady on the floor. Holy shit. You must have panicked. I mean, where’s your friend, Mr. McKelvey? Where is Tim Fielding? Any ideas?”

  “Wish I knew,” McKelvey said.

  “We’ll find him,” Leyden said without looking at him, still cleaning a nail. “Be better if he came in on his own to help clear things up. Doesn’t look good for him. ’Course you know how it works.”

  “If I hear from him,” McKelvey said, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Right,” Leyden said.

  It went like this for a while, perhaps an hour, Kennedy asking the routine questions, then doubling back and trying to catch McKelvey in a lie. At least it seemed that way to McKelvey, and he had to wonder what stories had been told about him in the months that followed his shootout with Duguay. The off-hours investigation into the murder of his son, the implication of a dirty biker squad detective. The limits he had exceeded, the boundaries pushed. It didn’t matter that McKelvey had been a good cop, at least a decent cop, working his way up the old fashioned way: a seeming lifetime in patrol cars across four divisions until he cracked enough good cases to make the move to the Fraud Squad, which is what sealed his distrust in appearances, then finally, and until the end, the domain of armed robbers and crackhead gas station jackers in the Hold-up Squad. All those hours logged, those miles walked, those collars made, mattered not at all when your career ended beneath a cloud.

  “How did Fielding meet his girlfriend?” Kennedy asked.

  “I told you. He was teaching a night school course. English as a second language. She was enrolled in the course. She was a student. They went for coffee or something like that, and they hit it off.”

  “We’ll need the name of the school and all of that, if you have it.”

  “I know where he works days,” McKelvey said. “They’ll have what you need.”

  “One question,” Kennedy said, and he ran his hand over his orange hair, then his red face, which wore a combined look of reticence and bewilderment. “Why didn’t you just tell your pal to, you know, wait it out a few days, cool off. How is it he knows there’s something wrong with this girl he’s been seeing what, a month?”

  “I went easy on him,” McKelvey said. “He’s a widower. Lost his wife a few years back to a drunk driver. I guess I didn’t have the heart to be an asshole. I figured she was stringing him
along, maybe even a husband at home. I was trying to protect him.”

  Leyden cleared his throat.

  “How about you, Detective? Anything else?” Kennedy asked his partner.

  Leyden shook his head.

  “Well, thanks for your patience, you know, as we run through all this shit. You know how it is. We’ll have your prints on file,” Kennedy said, and put a hand inside his shirt pocket and produced a swab kit. “Be good to get a DNA sample, get you excluded from the get-go. You don’t have a problem with that, do you, Mr. McKelvey?”

  McKelvey almost corrected him—had the words formed and on his lips. That’ll be Detective-Constable to you, Freckleface. How quickly we forget. He was indeed Mr. McKelvey now. And for always.

  “Swab away,” McKelvey said, and hooked his cheek with a finger.

  Leyden came to life, sleek in his movement, as though he were simply sitting one minute then standing the next, shoulders squared. Something about the man bothered McKelvey, as though Leyden didn’t see himself as one of them, a brother in blue, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. There was an air of superiority, the feeling that Leyden would never go for a beer with the boys after work. A perfect candidate, McKelvey thought, for a gig in Professional Standards, some asshole willing to investigate the real or imagined trespasses of his own kind. Leyden leaned over and set his business card on the table in front of McKelvey.

  “Call any time,” he said, and left the room.

  “Not the most talkative guy,” Kennedy said after the door closed. “I don’t mind most of the time, you know, but imagine a twelve-hour stakeout with that guy? Jesus Christ, it’s like watching paint dry.”

  FOURTEEN

  Maxime was to be met at Customs by a sergeant from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Sergeant Robert Marshall was the liaison officer within the Toronto office of the RCMP’s War Crimes and Special Investigations Enforcement division, which was headquartered in Ottawa. Maxime followed his fellow weary travellers down the ramp and through the tunnel, stretching and yawning as they hefted laptops and handbags, shuffling like the living dead. In the terminal, he shouldered his suit bag and scanned the throng of people lining up for Customs. He spotted Marshall off to the far right, a tall, balding man with a thick black mustache standing there with a cardboard sign that said “Auteuil”.