Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  She was sitting up with her back against the headboard, her red hair untied from its workaday bun, tousled from their lovemaking. She pulled the sheet to her waist and folded it there. McKelvey liked how she would sit like that, a tom-boy unafraid to show her parts in the locker room, this fisherman’s daughter with her curse words and her spitting on the sidewalk.

  “I’ve cut down on smoking after sex,” McKelvey said. “I found I was going through too many cigarettes.”

  He left out the part about the short, sharp pinch of pain at the moment of highest pleasure—the electrical current that shot through his core. The fact it had been happening for a few months now seemed to mean that it was, at some point anyway, something to be addressed.

  She turned to him, that smile on her face, those eyes. She said, “How many cigarettes?”

  “Oh,” he said and pretended to make a count. “No more than two packs a day.”

  Her elbow hit his ribs, and he let out a groan. He slid under the covers, and his hands found her waist and pulled her down so that they were head to head. His big hand moved up her thigh to her ass, across her back, warming her cool flesh. He kissed her on the mouth then moved down her neck, breathing the smell of her roll-on deodorant, and he kissed her tiny breasts that she so detested and he so loved, and he was back in the game again, alive, alive. She put a hand in his curls and gave a little tug.

  “Hey, hey,” she said, “I’ve got to be at work in forty minutes.”

  He pulled up beside her, and rubbed his face with his palms. She had arrived at his place just after four, an overcoat thrown over her pajamas. Like two kids stealing time together while parents were out of town.

  “Is this like a booty call?” she had said, whispering at his door. Her freckles, that bratty smile of hers.

  Now it was just after seven, and he wanted to be with her again before she got swept up in the work, and he knew what it was like to be on-call during a long weekend. Everything increased during the holidays—families pushed together, too much drinking and too many grievances left unsettled, too many things to buy and not enough cash. The booze cans were stuffed beyond capacity after the clubs let out, thugs carrying heat looking for a chance to gain some respect. He had wanted to make her a nice breakfast to make up for the last few weeks, the distance he’d put between them, but she said she had a Pop Tart in her glove compartment.

  “So,” he said, “I want to tell you straight up, I didn’t call you over to get information on Tim Fielding’s case.”

  “But since I’m here…”

  “Since you’re here,” he said.

  He looked at her and smiled. His boy’s smile. She gave him a serious look and shook her head. “I talked to Kennedy late last night. I can tell you that they completed their canvass of Fielding’s building. Pretty much a dead end there,” she said. “Apparently some old lady saw two guys leaving by the stairwell, which stood out as odd, and one of them might have been Fielding, but she can’t be sure. Poor old doll has early-stage Alzheimer’s. Surveillance video at the front shows you coming and going on the dates you said, also shows the victim coming in the front doors about half an hour before you got there. Camera on the east side of the building, by the laundry room door—the only other way in or out—was recently spraypainted by some taggers. Could be a coincidence or maybe not. Depends if you’re on the team that believes Fielding killed this Jane Doe in a jealous rage, or the team that believes Fielding is the victim in all this.”

  “Which team are you on?” he said.

  Hattie exhaled through her mouth. She shook her head. “I don’t know. I wish I could say, but it just… I mean, Christ, the evidence is overwhelmingly against your pal right now. And listen, they can’t find out who this woman is. No positive ID. Kennedy said they canvassed a few of the students in her class, showed the morgue photos, and yeah, they said it’s the woman they knew as Donia Kruzik. But who is Donia Kruzik and where did she come from, that’s what they’re trying to find out now.”

  “No word on Fielding?”

  “Our guys are working with the media to keep his face on the front page, keep the pressure dialed up. I don’t know,” she said, “you know him better than I do. Do you really think a guy like Tim Fielding could elude the police for a few days with this much heat on him?”

  It was true, Fielding’s story had all the right elements—teacher and immigrant night school student embroiled in an affair, the woman turns up strangled in his apartment, the suspect gone missing…it would be front page on the Sun and the Star by that morning. Fielding’s apartment building was swamped with reporters and satellite vans. Both Kennedy and Leyden would be quoted as saying it was early days yet, that they would need the autopsy results before commenting further. They referred to Tim Fielding as “a person of interest” at this stage. They said they hoped he would present himself to help clear things up.

  “He didn’t do anything, and he didn’t run,” McKelvey said. “This woman he was seeing, Donia Kruzik—if that’s even her real name—she’s tied in with something. I think Tim was in the way or he was a loose end. He’s either dead or being held somewhere.”

  “Jesus and Mary,” she said. “She was eastern European, right?”

  “Bosnian.”

  “What are you thinking, sexual traffic, human smuggling? Organized crime?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said.

  He closed his eyes and tried as he had been doing every hour on the hour to bring forth a clear image of the man in Donia’s apartment. The head shaved to a dark stubble, six feet or maybe six-one, two hundred pounds but solid and lean, fist like a goddamned snow plow. But the face, it wasn’t there…

  He went to tell her about the support centre, Bridges, and the lead he planned to follow with the executive director. But he stopped himself. He knew what she would say, where her allegiance would ultimately fall. This case would attract a significant amount of media attention. The sort of file that made or ruined careers. He had backed himself into a corner; to come out now with the information about Jarko’s Automotive, the man in Donia’s apartment, the connection to Bridges, well, there was no way to come out clean.

  “I hate to eat and run,” she said and flipped the comforter back.

  She sat on the side of the bed, reached down for her panties, stood and wiggled them on, then found her socks and stooped to slip them on. McKelvey couldn’t help but watch as she got dressed in her pajamas, the sheets all tangled and the room filled with their smell. He was involved again, everything in his being flowing to that centre of demonstration. He tried to hide it by bunching some of the comforter.

  “You know I’d do anything for you,” she said, “but I have to tell you. I mean it. I have an interview next Thursday with Detective-Sergeant Rowland. I told you I took the tests. Well, I passed. I fucking aced them, actually. My course credits are good, and I’ve got references stacked from here back to Halifax.”

  She finished buttoning her pajama top and stood there, looking like a kid. McKelvey saw it then, what he was doing, and the cost of it all, always this cost that others had to pay. My god, she was young, if not by years, then at least by his benchmark. She had a good fifteen-year run left in her career. He couldn’t even make the night without getting up to piss three times. He smiled at her.

  “You’ll be the best homicide dick they’ve ever had,” he said.

  “You’re just saying that because I let you in my pants.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not. You’re cut out for it. I sure as hell never was, not to play at that level. But you are, Hattie. You’ve got the stuff to work in the system and still get it done your own way. To walk that fine line, I mean, shit. I never had that talent. The politics.”

  “That means a lot,” she said.

  He thought for a minute that her eyes were moist, and he saw again what he had done to her, the compromise he was asking her to make. How selfish it was, because on her own she would never cut the cord between them. He would have to
do it, let her go. Homicide Detective Mary-Ann Hattie. He could see it. How proud he would be. But he didn’t see himself in the picture standing beside her.

  “I’m not going to ask you to do anything that will jeopardize your chances here,” he said. “But you can do me one last favour.”

  She smiled; she couldn’t help it. “Go for it,” she said.

  He said, “Get Leyden off my ass. Guy thinks he’s in the Gestapo or something.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “What?” he said.

  “This guy really pisses you off,” she said, reaching down to pull on her flannel pajama bottoms, “because he’s exactly the same as you, Charlie. You guys could be brothers, for Christ’s sake.”

  He sat up, pulling up on his elbows. She zipped and buttoned her pants.

  “What are you taking about? I’m not like Leyden at all. I have some personality, don’t I? I don’t think I’m an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole.”

  “He’s a good cop because he doesn’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t believe in anything or anyone, just the holy trio of motive, opportunity and evidence. He has to see it to believe it. Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, well, you have no self-awareness, Charlie McKelvey, and I can’t help you there. Look at the facts, the circumstances. I would be keeping an eye on you, too, to be honest. You haven’t exactly been as forthcoming as I think they would have assumed a former cop to be in all of this.”

  There was no point trying to explain to her why Leyden was a dickhead and he himself was simply highly determined to follow a line to its end point.

  “If you bump into him, tell he’s not fooling anyone. And he can kiss my ass, okay? If he has questions, he knows where to find me. I’m not hiding from anybody, I’m right here. But this following me around, the fucking cloak and dagger act, it’s wearing thin.”

  “It’s ironic,” she said.

  “What is?” he said.

  She smiled and said, “Oh, you know. You’re asking me to get Leyden off your ass. And last night his partner Kennedy is asking me to reach out to you.”

  “Reach out to me. For what?”

  “He asked if I could talk sense to you, that’s all. Pull a favour, he said, and ask McKelvey to stop being such a closed door on this. It’s actually called ‘obstruction of justice’, but that’s just the technical terminology. He asked me why you were being such a hardass on all of this. They know you know more than you’re saying. You’re not the only cop in the room, Charlie.”

  He sighed and sat up on the side of the bed, suddenly aware of his vulnerability. Here he was naked under the covers like a newborn baby. He reached out, got his khakis and stood to pull them on.

  “What a fucking fiasco,” he said. “I’m trying to protect Tim, okay? Things look really bad for this guy right now. I take responsibility for that. I need some time to clear a few things up, that’s all. A day or two. Just get that hall monitor Leyden off my tail.”

  “Oh, Charlie,” Hattie said.

  “Oh, Charlie, what?” he said, zipping his pants.

  “You drive me crazy.”

  He said, “Well, that makes two of us.”

  EIGHTEEN

  It was beyond comprehension, a surreal nightmare. Tim Fielding emerged from the cocoon of semi-consciousness to find himself with his hands tied behind a post or a beam of some sort. Blindfolded. Smells of dampness, wet concrete and something else, a sickly sweetness. Malt or hops. A brewery or a tavern? He began to hyperventilate, and he cried a little until his stomach hurt, then he stopped because there was simply nothing left to do but slow his breathing. Calm down. One step at a time, Tim. One step at a time…

  The man at his door. He’d been punched. Then bits and pieces of memory or dream—tied up, carried, and yes, stuffed in the trunk of the car.

  Slices of blinding light—arrows in his eyes when the trunk was raised. Too bright to make out the features of the men, or even how many they numbered. Two, he guessed.

  Donia. Where was she, and what was her connection to all of this?

  Who was she, and what had he found in her?

  He thought back to their conversations, their time together. He saw her face, her beautiful and sad face, and the sound of her soft voice that first night she’d surprised him by saying yes when he’d asked her to go for coffee. So out of the ordinary for both of them, they came together in their awkwardness and shyness, found this shared experience of having lost a spouse so young in their respective marriages.

  “My husband,” he remembered her saying. “He was… executed.”

  He’d thought in his naïveté that she meant as a prisoner, that he had been executed as a criminal. And it was true in a sense, for she had told him—the closest she had come to shining a light on her past—she had told him how he had been murdered during the war. But then, seeming to sense she had betrayed her secret memories, she had closed up again. He told her about his wife and the drunk driver who ran her down on the street as she was leaving work. How everything left you in that single moment when the telephone call startled you. Your whole life draining from you in one rush.

  Who was this woman?

  There was no clue to her past beyond the meagre facts she had set out: she had lost her husband, she had come to Canada to both escape the memories of her brutalized homeland and to start again. And she wanted to learn to speak and write English better than she could.

  “Here I can be anybody I want,” she had said. He remembered it now.

  He called out, and his voice echoed. A large room then, empty. Factory or warehouse? Sounds of the harbour, gulls and boats—if he listened closely, with intent and focus. He was near the lake, of that he was certain, as certain as a blindfolded man can be.

  What were the motives at play here? A kidnapping for ransom? What the hell did he have to offer anyone, besides a teacher’s pension? It didn’t make sense. It was Donia, something about her. Who was she? Charlie had been right, of course. He had no idea who she really was, who he was fooling around with.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, wiggled his hands to no avail, and willed with all of his remaining energy to send McKelvey a sign, a signal.

  Come for me, Charlie…

  NINETEEN

  Bojan Kordic brought the razor to the neckline and, with the fore and middle fingers of his free left hand, pulled the skin taut. The razor made its familiar scraping sound as it slid upwards following the grain of the hair, mostly grey now. He paused there in mid-motion, face pasted with rich sandalwood lather, the straight razor which had belonged to his father spread open in its sterling silver “V”—the only piece of home, of his past, that he had carried with him to this new country. Now he owned a new name, a new history.

  He paused. He thought he saw something move in the mirror. The slightest ripple of the shower curtain behind him. He slowed his breathing. The tap dripped. He shifted his weight, gripped the razor, then pivoted on his hip, thrashing open the plastic curtain. Empty, of course. A shampoo bottle on the edge of the tub teetered over from the momentum and fell with a hollow clunk. It was getting to him again, the war. Those days, so far removed, and yet burned into his memory for repeat play without advance notice. The images came back while sitting in a meeting at work, or reading to his daughter at night, these flashes, sounds, smells. He had been waking from terrible dreams lately, too, dreams of faces, arms, hands reaching out to him…

  After shaving, he went quietly down stairs and ate a bowl of hot oatmeal while scanning the international box scores for soccer in the Toronto Star. He did not like hockey, although in order to talk business in this country he kept up on the progress of the Maple Leafs, the player names and trades, even bought tickets to take clients to games, feigning passion when the Leafs scored. He did not like hockey or baseball or basketball, but he missed the old rivalries in soccer, the open air stadiums in his old country. He ate alone in the silence of the kitchen until his wife came down in her robe and put coffee on.
And then his daughter, the jewel of his eye, came down the stairs. She came over and asked to sit on his lap while she dribbled Cocoa Puffs down the front of his dress shirt. She was dressed in her new Lilo & Stitch nightgown, her new favourite movie character.

  “Do you really have to go to work on the long weekend?” his wife said.

  “I have paperwork to catch up on,” he said, “my sales and inventory reports. I won’t stay more than three or four hours. How about we take a hike in the bluffs when I get back this afternoon?”

  Then Bojan Kordic grabbed his overcoat and his briefcase, kissed his wife and daughter goodbye, and, with a heart full of gratitude, pulled out of his suburban driveway in his silver Subaru Forester. He did not notice the white Toyota Corolla pull away from the curb a little ways down the street and follow him through his neighborhood maze, out to join the line of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway moving south towards the downtown.

  Maxime Auteuil was quite certain the driver of the white Toyota Corolla was unaware that he was being followed. How interesting—the follower being followed. And it was quite conceivable, he mused, that he himself was being followed as well—this strange chain to infinity. Though not likely. He glanced in his rearview and side mirrors. It wasn’t the first time he had done this; he had become something of an expert in the tracking and tailing of people during his days working undercover, tracing the drugs and arms shipments through the ancient port of Marseille, that cavernous underworld of dangerous characters. He had followed suspects for weeks, sometimes even months. He’d watched people shave, shit, shower, shuffle along in the mundane ruts of their life, he’d seen it all and written it down in a notebook for later recall and testimony. The only difference here was the lack of familiarity with the landscape, the lay of the land. He had waited a moment before pulling from the curb, and now he was three cars back on the parkway. It was a beautiful country indeed, and this city, what he had seen in his first twelve hours, was not bad at all. It was no Paris, no Lyon, to be certain, but it had its charms. It was new and clean, for starters, even though the food was horrible and the wine even worse.