“How long did he work with you at Bridges?”
“Off and on since late ’97, I guess, somewhere around there. We were just getting up and running, we barely had office space. He was eager to get in and help. And he brought a lot to the organization, to be quite honest. I would say we are where we are today because of a lot of the work Davis did. He got us several grants through the government. He was a whiz at cutting through red tape. The money started to flow our way.”
McKelvey finished the last of the coffee then picked a few grounds off the end of his tongue. It beat wiping whipped cream off the end of his nose.
“Why was he so dedicated, do you figure?” McKelvey asked. “What was his connection to the cause?”
“Davis is a very private person,” Dawson said, his tone making it clear the character trait was not necessarily a good thing in this regard. “I do know that he worked in foreign affairs in some capacity and that he spent a couple of years in the former Yugoslavia during the war. Actually, he lost an eye over there.”
The pirate from the photo, McKelvey thought. Okay. We’re heading somewhere together now. It was his job to keep Dawson talking. As long as people kept talking, there was a chance you’d discover something new. The trick was in not losing the momentum. It was the fine balance every cop walked when they sat across from a subject—to keep the thoughts rolling, the words coming, everything and anything, while not tipping off the fact that they had just heard something worth writing down. McKelvey played it that way right now. He nodded and turned the cup in his hand.
“Let me ask you,” he said, “is covering rent among the services that Bridges supplies its clients?”
His experience of sitting across from bank robbers and hold-up artists, these guys who had all the balls in the world but no brains, it had taught him to read body language as though it were his native tongue: the drop of a shoulder, the biting of a nail. He knew at the very core of himself that Dawson was hiding something.
“We had a parting of the ways,” Dawson said.
“Over financial matters?”
Dawson looked away. He chewed it. Finally he sighed and turned back. “That was a big part of it, yes. He went way beyond our mandate in terms of providing financial support to a client.”
“Donia Kruzik.”
“That’s right. Including her rent. He said it was a deductible for us, and that we couldn’t just sit back and not help these people coming over here with nothing. Some things went unaccounted for, and records weren’t kept. We’re probably at risk of losing our charitable status. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“I appreciate you taking the time,” McKelvey said. “It’s important.”
Dawson drank the last of the latte, and McKelvey got a whiff of the pumpkin smell. It wasn’t bad, actually. Like pumpkin pie.
McKelvey walked past the water fountain on his way back to the escalators. He spotted Leyden right away, sitting there on the cement lip of the fountain with a copy of the Toronto Sun held up, some character in a John Le Carre book. McKelvey stopped and drew a deep breath. He swallowed the urge to walk up and slug the guy in the face. He turned and smiled instead.
“Go for a walk?” McKelvey said.
Leyden stood up, folded the paper under his arm, and waved for McKelvey to take the lead. McKelvey walked back over to the escalators. Dawson passed them on his way down the mall, and he gave McKelvey a look, perhaps wondering who this second person he was meeting with.
“A partial print on the doorknob at Donia’s apartment,” Leyden said, drawing the words out slowly, as though he were trying make sense of them.
They went up the escalator. McKelvey watched the faces of the people coming down the escalator on the other side. He wondered briefly what sorts of thoughts were on their minds, wished for a moment he could slip into their stream and simply move through the mall without Fielding’s predicament weighing down on him, this logjam of life.
“Whatever her real name is,” Leyden said. “Let’s call her Donia for now, just to keep things straight. I had Kennedy get the geeks to run your prints. Just a gut feeling. And guess what?”
They got off at the main level. The daylight out on Yonge Street flooded the entranceway. McKelvey stopped short of the doors.
“Go ahead,” McKelvey said. “The suspense is killing me.”
“A partial print of Charles McKelvey,” Leyden said.
“How partial?”
Leyden smiled a little. “Pretty partial,” he said. “But still. Seems like a good chance you were there after all, at her apartment. But that’s not what you told me and Kennedy the other day. You said you’d never met her before.”
McKelvey needed to get away from Leyden so he could track down this Davis Chapman. From there to Donia and the guy who had attacked him in her apartment. And maybe, just maybe, right to Tim Fielding. It was the only connection he had. The “what” was still as obscure to him as the day Fielding had called. But he had a hold on the end of something, and he planned to pull himself to the top.
“I’m starting to think maybe you were right when you said there was no way Tim Fielding could do have killed the woman,” Leyden said. “Because maybe you did it. You know what I mean? You’re found in the apartment with the dead body. Your prints are found on her doorknob when you say you never met her.”
“A partial print,” McKelvey corrected. “Pretty partial.”
“You know what, McKelvey? I don’t like you. It’s true. I think you lasted on the force as long as you did through a combination of luck and balls. But your luck seems to be running out.”
“Are you saying you’re going to arrest me?” McKelvey said.
Leyden looked at him. They were eye to eye, identical in height. But where Leyden was lanky, McKelvey owned the thick upper torso and broad shoulders of his ancestors, bricklayers and miners.
“Might be getting close to that day. Right now I’m just saying things are starting to match up in a way that makes a man stop and wonder.”
“I appreciate the professional courtesy. I wish I could help you,” McKelvey said, “but I’ve got some errands to run.”
Leyden watched him walk into the sunlight and slip out the main doors.
TWENTY-ONE
Kadro was parked across from the condo building on the edge of the Distillery District when the breaking news came over the radio:
A 51-year-old has been found dead in Toronto’s fashion district. A police source says afternoon cleaning staff at a garment warehouse on Spadina Street discovered the body of the business owner in his office late this afternoon. Forensic and homicide investigators are at the scene. The victim’s identity has not been released pending notification of next of kin …
Kad had run into the twenty-four hour Metro up the street and bought a handful of scratch tickets. It put his mind in neutral, this getting lost in that slow reveal of what lay behind the sheen of foil, and he supposed this was the actually the first step towards compulsion. This was probably how it happened. He knew plenty of veterans from the war, these men his own age who shot dope in the bathroom of the garage where they worked, drank vodka with their breakfast toast, stumbling through anesthetized. Or else they were so addicted to the adrenalin surge that had come with every firefight—this knowledge that bullets were aimed at your head, coming so close they sounded like the zing of angry hornets—they forever sought the confrontation and the danger as though cursed with an unnameable affliction. They fell to organized crime, they ran women and guns and robbed and killed. It was as though once tasted, the palate forever craved the distinct flavour of death’s sharp edge. Post-war life had been a letdown. They were all still struggling to make ends meet, still meeting in the pubs to talk about the politics and the graft and the broken promises. At least in war, Kad thought, we knew we were alive.
This operation with Bojan Kordic had been seamless. In and out. The look in Bojan’s eyes. That tiny and momentous moment. Kad would take it with him to his own grave. A
nd what was it there in those eyes, this mixture of fear and acceptance, as though the man had known this day would eventually come, as though some part of him had been expecting it. And yet still he had begged for a reprieve. This was the open door through which Kadro dragged the man backwards through time. To that summer day, to those fields outside Kad’s village, to the windswept sky and the sounds of artillery in the distant hills.
“My father,” he had told the man behind the desk in his native tongue. “He was in his sixties. And when you executed him, my mother’s health suffered. I was off in the hills fighting, and she was left to die alone. July 1995. You remember?”
Bojan did not say anything. His eyes spoke for him. He sat there without moving, a pen held between his fingers, the blood gone from his face.
“That day has travelled years and miles to catch up with you.”
“Please,” Bojan said. “I have a daughter…”
“This,” Kad had whispered—the final words this man would hear in this life—“is in the name of the dead.”
Kad got through four of the scratch tickets now—three “try-agains” and one “free ticket”—before he set the them aside and used the cellphone Turner had given him to call the home number written on the business card the policeman had left behind with the superintendant. McKelvey. There was no answer. The line kicked into a message on an answering machine. No name disclosed, simply a recitation of the number the caller had reached. Kad hung up and looked out the windshield across the street.
McKelvey darted across Yonge Street and disappeared down the stairs into the subway at the under-construction Dundas Square. He was just in time to catch a train. He slipped into the car, held onto a pole, then got off at the first stop, Queen. All to shake Leyden, though he doubted the man had followed him this time. He came up into the air of the day, darted through the slow-moving traffic on Yonge, then headed south toward Front Street.
He went down the stairs and into the pub in the Flatiron Building at the split axis of Front, King and Wellington. There was a payphone against the wall near the washrooms. He fed the machine with change and waited.
“Hattie,” she answered.
“I’ve got a name,” he said.
She said, “Hello to you, too.”
“Sorry. I’m in a hurry.”
“Well, Jesus, why didn’t you say?”
“Davis Chapman,” he said. “Apparently he works for the government in some capacity. If there’s any way you can run it. I don’t know, maybe you need Kennedy in on this. Christ, I just need some space to figure this out.”
“Don’t you think it’s time to turn this over to Kennedy and Leyden?” she said. “You know, make it official? Playing the devil’s advocate here, what happens if Tim isn’t found alive? You won’t look good in all of this, Charlie. You’ve obstructed justice.”
Obstructed justice. He turned the words over like a bad taste. He wasn’t obstructing anything; he was looking after a friend. It was too late to come around now and spout off some breathless admission of the facts thus far. Fuck, he’d be sitting in a cell at Metro West Detention Centre before you could say obstructed justice. And the time it would take Leyden and Kennedy to catch up on the facts, well, Fielding would be dead.
“I find this Davis Chapman guy, I can maybe figure out who this Donia Kruzik woman was, where she came from. What was she doing here? He’s the closest link I’ve found.”
“What’s Davis Chapman’s connection?”
“He was Donia Kruzik’s liaison through an immigrant support centre. He paid her rent through the centre, covered a bunch of her expenses that went against policy. I met with the director, he said he’s half expecting an audit to come down on him.”
“So this Chapman guy had personal motives where Donia was concerned. Do you think Donia was brought over here as a sex worker?” Hattie said. “Maybe Chapman was using the support centre as his base for recruiting girls then covering their expenses behind the guise of a non-profit. Jesus, that’d be a pretty good idea.”
“I don’t know,” McKelvey said. “It could be anything. But he’s the direct link to Donia Kruzik. My gut says he’s involved in her murder and Tim’s framing. As for motive, I’m coming up empty at this point.”
Hattie said, “Well, your gut has never been wrong before, has it?”
“Once or twice,” McKelvey said. “But not this time.”
“I’ll see if I can tack his name onto some other stuff we’re looking at, slip it through,” she said. “But I’m also going to share any details of relevance with Kennedy. That’s my deal, and it ain’t open to negotiation.”
“As long as you call me first,” he said.
Maxime had lost track of the white Corolla after it had pulled away from the factory, but now he came back to it again by driving with one eye on these foreign roads and one eye on the GPS receiver. It wasn’t the traffic here—for anyone who had driven a car in downtown Paris was forever desensitized to the concept of snarl and chaos—but the fact that he was still adjusting to this orderly ebb and flow of things. He wanted to honk his horn and steer around those waiting to make a turn, do what was necessary to move things along. Canadians were polite to the point of frustration. The triangulation of the GPS brought him to within a block of the vehicle. He slowed and passed along Front Street, and sure enough, there it was, parked at the curb. The vehicle was empty. Maxime found a spot on the other side of the road, having pulled a quick u-turn in front of this old building that looked like the Flatirons in those iconic pictures of New York City.
He watched the Corolla from across the street for a few minutes, and the area around the vehicle. His mind clicked through the links in this long chain. Bojan Kordic, whom Maxime had been sent to collect with his red notice, was now dead—of that he was certain. How unfortunate that he had been too late to both save the man and bring him to justice in a proper court of higher authority—this was the line he was preparing for his eventual final report on the matter. In truth, Maxime felt Bojan Kordic had received precisely what he deserved. He would focus now on the second ticket for one Goran Mitovik. He would need to make contact with the local authorities before long and have them put some eyes on Mitovik’s house. But this tailing of the Corolla, or more to the point, of the man driving the Corolla, was of paramount importance. It was through this link that Maxime was certain he would make the connection to the Colonel.
The jet lag was settling in now. His body had moved beyond the initial stage of exhilaration, adrenalin-induced alertness— those first glorious hours in which you were as close to full-blown mania as was possible without drugs—and he now put his head back against the headrest, and he yawned until a tear squeezed from the corner of his eye and rolled down his cheek. A coffee, that’s what he needed. But not a cheap North American coffee from a drive-thru, weak as piss and ruined with excess cream and sugar. An espresso, dark, strong and deadly effective. Ah, je m’ennuie de la France!
TWENTY-TWO
Tim Fielding’s body—like that of all humans—was comprised of sixty to seventy per cent water. It was water that was the common denominator of all major bodily functions: from absorption at the cellular level, to circulation via the turgidity of veins and arteries, to digestion and excretion—most everything depended on water to make it work. Tied to a post and blindfolded, Tim Fielding was slowly dying from dehydration.
After eight hours, his head began to pound, and his lips grew dry. He managed, for a few hours at least, to manufacture sufficient saliva by turning and rolling his tongue, and this helped keep his mouth moist. He even took small, but not insignificant pleasure in swallowing tiny sips of this self-produced saliva, his mind running through favorite beverages like some sort of desert island game—Dr. Pepper, how he’d discovered its sickly sweetness as a child while on holiday in Florida, or no, how about Canadian Dry Ginger Ale, truly “the champagne of gingers ales” or what about that rare Rusty Nail he allowed himself on special occasions, the rich marriage
of single-malt scotch and a shot of honey-sweet Drambuie… At the twelve-hour mark, even this self-generated hydration became nearly impossible, and Tim realized his best chances were in conservation. He tried to sleep with his chin on his chest, and when he could not sleep, he breathed through his nose rather than his mouth to reduce the drying effect.
At eighteen hours, his mind began to play tricks. His thinking process was muddled. He woke with a start several times, his world plunged to darkness, shivering and likely feverish, and he couldn’t produce tears any more.
The dirt-throat thirst was nothing compared to the excruciating pain, then the numbness that spread from his bound arms to his shoulder blades. There was the indignity, too, in those first confused hours. Sitting there on the cold concrete floor, he had tried to hold it at first. The cramps had made it impossible. He sat there in the dampness of his own making, and he wondered what he had done in this or a previous life to deserve such a fate.
The things a man thought about in these long hours. The small worries that had occupied his life, the guilt or the hard feelings, the grudges held, the hours lost sitting waiting at red lights. It occurred to him he had never been to Las Vegas. He wasn’t a gambler, but still. He had never been to New York City, either, for that matter. Wasn’t there something inherently wrong with a man who approached his fortieth year without ever having been to a strip joint? He had never accepted that rolled joint at a house party, never really thrown caution to the wind for a night. Perhaps it was his parents, teachers both, and their moral and ethical guidelines, but he suspected it was something else. It was him. It’s me, he thought. I’ve been afraid my entire life. And not just since the death of my wife. No, it was long before that. Since I was a boy. Always content to take a back seat and watch the world roll by.
Slow Recoil Page 19
