by Scott Mackay
“Good. I think we have to go by the book on this one.”
“So Tim knows about these e-mails?”
Lombardo nodded. “That’s why we have to make such an effort to be aboveboard.”
“Fine by me,” said Gilbert, his voice hardening. “We’ll put the scarf in. And we’ll put the perfume in, too.”
The two detectives gazed at each other.
“Are you all right?” asked Lombardo.
“It’s a bit of a shock, Joe,” he said.
“I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw those e-mails,” said Lombardo. “But then I realized she’s probably got a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
Gilbert lifted the sheaf of e-mails. “Is that it?” he asked. “Are there any more of these?”
“We don’t know,” said Lombardo. “We haven’t searched all Boyd’s e-mail folders yet.” Lombardo motioned at the e-mails. “God knows what kind of filing system he uses, but it’s taking us a while to figure it out.”
“I’m sure it made perfect sense to Boyd. He makes up his life as he goes along.”
“He’s got encryption software tangling up everything,” said Joe. “You should see the techno-nerds in Computer Support. They’ve never had so much fun. They’ve got a nickname for him now.”
Gilbert’s response was half-hearted. “What are they calling him?” he asked.
“The Evil Genius.”
“Huh.”
Gilbert looked at the e-mails again, then glanced at Lombardo, who had a worried look on his face.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” said Gilbert, his voice flat, resigned.
“Tim…he wants…you know…he just wants the file…to add up neatly.”
“I already told you, we’ll put the scarf and the perfume in.”
Lombardo’s eyes narrowed and he shifted uncomfortably. “Actually, it’s more…it’s just that you and Regina…on the night of the murder…you were at the Royal Alex…and he…you know, the way you lost each other. He wants that worked out.”
“Worked out how?” But then Gilbert understood, and something squeezed inside him. “Oh, c’mon, Joe.”
“He’s being careful, Barry, that’s all. That’s the way Tim is. He used his duck phrase again. He said it was quacking like a duck…you know…the scarf, the perfume, and you guys at the Royal Alex…but he was willing to admit that it wasn’t really walking like a duck. At least not yet.”
“At least not yet?” said Gilbert. “Joe, that’s got to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
Lombardo sighed. “If you could just tell him…you know…that Regina went home…tell him about Nina’s friend who has HIV…so he won’t think Regina went over to GBIA.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Or maybe have Nina speak to him personally.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Gilbert had to protect Nina’s confidentiality.
“Okay.”
Gilbert gazed at a fifty-year-old ballistics microscope.
“Tim’s just going to have to take my word that Regina was nowhere near GBIA on the night of the murder,” he said.
“And I’m sure your word is all it will take,” said Lombardo.
To work after these revelations proved impossible for Gilbert.
He called Regina at East York Collegiate Institute, where she worked as an English teacher.
“Could you meet me at home for lunch?” he asked.
She hesitated. They didn’t often meet at home for lunch. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I can’t talk right now,” he said. “We’ll talk at home.”
“Is it about Nina?” she asked.
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “Just meet me at home as close to noon as you can.”
He fidgeted at his desk while he waited for the lunch hour to come. But as the lunch hour was still a long way off, and as he simply couldn’t sit still at his desk another minute, he left headquarters, pent up with nervous energy, and went outside to see if he could get rid of some of it by walking around.
He headed up Bay Street, only dimly conscious of how hot it was, not really concentrating on where he was going, just walking, trying to alleviate some of his anxiety. He hiked north to the Polo Center, glanced up at the building, thought of Daniel Lynn, then spied in the distance, west on St. Joseph, the shaded expanse of Queen’s Park. The shade looked inviting. He could kill some time sitting in the park for a while. It would give him a good chance to think. And to calm down.
He walked along St. Joseph and crossed Queen’s Park Circle to the park.
Lofty maples rose sixty feet high. After last Friday’s rain, the grass under the trees was lush and green.
He walked to the middle of the park where a bronze statue of King Edward VII, Victoria’s son, stood amid its own bed of impatiens. The king rode a bronze horse. Gilbert found a bench, sat down, and looked up at the trees. He took a few deep breaths, and caught a whiff of hot dogs from the hot dog vendor down the way. A woman in a tight track outfit practiced tae kwon do by a tree. She looked good, and she knew she looked good, and she wasn’t fooling Gilbert in the least. Exhibitionism took many forms, as he well knew from working in the Sex Crimes Unit years ago.
He thought of Regina. He knew he could trust Regina. They’d gone through so much together. A gray squirrel jumped onto the bench and approached him boldly. He wished he had some bread crumbs for the little guy. Regina would have her reasons, and they would be good reasons, and her reasons would explain away all this ridiculous anxiety.
He spent another hour in the park. He bought an iced tea from a roadside vendor. He walked slowly back to headquarters, his mind going round in circles.
He signed out one of the Luminas and drove home. He brought the printed e-mails with him.
The Windstar was in the drive—Regina was in the house already. But when he went inside, he couldn’t find her anywhere.
Jennifer sat in the den reading the latest John Grisham novel.
“Is your mother anywhere around?” he asked.
His twenty-year-old looked up from her legal thriller.
“You’re both home?” she complained, as if she resented having her privacy invaded. “What are you both doing home?”
“We’re having lunch together,” he said.
Jennifer went back to reading. “She’s in the backyard,” she said. “Fighting the war of the weeds.”
He went into the kitchen, opened the sliding glass doors, and stepped out onto the cedar deck. Regina, wearing a straw sun hat and canvas gardening gloves, stooped over the garden, diligently digging away at fescue and crabgrass. The temperature was punishing back here. A cicada whirred in the birch tree. The Galloway teens and some friends talked about something or other next door by the pool. The smell of chlorine, not unpleasant, sweetened the air. A hornet landed on the barbecue, a brief touchdown, then flew off, sinister and dark in the bright sunshine.
He walked quietly over the grass to Regina. The garden glowed with the last of the irises and the first of the poppies. In the back bed near the compost, Regina’s young tomato plants grew up through their metal frames. Regina turned. She got up. Her fair face was flushed with heat.
He stopped.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
She grinned, but it was an unsure grin. She rubbed her nose with the back of her gloved hand. A bag of Miracle-Gro sat on the grass next to her.
“Well?” she said.
“I found out about you and Boyd,” he said.
She stared at him across the sunlit yard from under the shade of her hat brim.
“I thought you might,” she said.
She gave him a weak shrug, then waited. He lifted the envelope of e-mails and handed it to her.
“Here,” he said, approaching her, dimly noting that the grass was speckled with white clover like stars in a green sky. “Your e-mails. At least what we’ve found of them so far.”
“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He called me. Back in January. He was in bad shape.” She gestured at the e-mails. “If you think there’s something more than just friendship in those e-mails, you can rest easy. I should have told you. But I knew how much it would upset you.”
“Why would he call you?” asked Gilbert. “After twenty-three years?”
She glanced to one side where a bumblebee hovered like a speck of gold above one of her white peonies.
“He was in bad shape,” she said. “He needed someone to talk to.”
Gilbert frowned. “So you went to see him?”
“Barry, I had to. There’s nothing more pathetic than a fifty-seven-year-old drug addict. I do drug counseling at the school. I thought I could help him. Until I realized he was beyond help.”
“If he needed help, he should have gone to a rehab center. Or to his doctor.”
“I urged him to do both,” she said. “He said he would, but he never did. I understand now that he just wanted my attention. I really wanted to help him. I was so shocked when I saw him. He looked about eighty years old. I never knew drugs could mummify a person like that.”
This, then, sounded characteristic of Regina. She was a source of succor to a lot of people, himself included. Boyd had tapped into that, not because he ever planned to stop drugs, just because he wanted some of her female attention. When someone called for help, she was there, no questions asked. He believed her story, every word of it.
“You could have trusted me with this,” he said.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said.
This, too, was characteristic of Regina. She went to unbelievable lengths to spare anybody the smallest upset.
“You still should have told me,” he said. “I’m here to share your burdens. And Boyd’s a big one.”
She looked away. “I know what he did to you,” she said. “I didn’t want him touching you in any way ever again. I thought I would see him once or twice, try to do what I could for him, and that would be it. But Glen gets so needy. Once or twice turned into a half dozen times. When I found out he was murdered, I knew it was just a matter of time before you discovered what I’d done. And I was dreading it. Several times I came close to telling you. But then I always held back, thinking I could somehow spare you.”
He shook his head. He knew he had to tell her about the scarf, that it was more than just the e-mails, and that a whole silly set of coincidences had inadvertently put her, at least technically, on their list of suspects.
“Sometimes life has a way…” But he didn’t finish because he saw Regina was really upset. “It’s okay,” he said. He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “This is just one of those things.”
“I don’t know how he could have destroyed himself so badly.”
He remembered Boyd’s corpse, the eyeliner around his eyes, his wrinkled face, the track marks on his arms, the painted toenails, a man prematurely aged by abuse, and that pricey Italian scarf around his neck.
“You’re missing a scarf, aren’t you?” he said.
“Pardon?”
“A fancy Italian scarf you bought in Hazelton Lanes in February.”
At first she was puzzled, but then a look of incredulous horror came to her face as she realized what he was talking about.
“You’re kidding,” she said. She gave the garden a fretful glance. “Shit.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m going to smooth it over.”
“I’m sorry, Barry.”
“Don’t worry.”
“It’s going to be awkward for you,” she said.
“Tim just wants to…you know… with all the press attention, he doesn’t want any surprises.”
She glanced hopelessly at the fescue. “Do you want me to phone Tim?” she asked. “I’ll speak to him, if you want. I hope he seriously doesn’t think I had anything to do with Glen’s murder. I was wondering where that scarf went. Let me call Tim.”
“No, it’s all right,” said Gilbert. “I just thought you better know. I’ll smooth it over. I’ll tell him you were trying to help Boyd, and that should be enough.”
Eleven
Gilbert visited the pretty house on Regal Road the following day to speak to Magda Barcos about her fugitive brother.
They sat on the back deck. The back garden was a perfect floral showcase. The flower beds to the left grew festively with poppies and irises. Five pygmy fruit trees shaded the weed-free grass. A garden shed, made of white and green aluminum, girded by two compost bins, stood off to one side. Hydrangea climbed the fence.
Mrs. Barcos, a stout widow dressed in black, came out the sliding glass doors with a tray of lemonade and a bowl of grapes. Magda sat there rigidly, back erect, knees together, fists clenched on her lap.
“Esto te calmaria a ti y a tu amigo,” said Mrs. Barcos.
“Gracias, Mama,” said Magda.
Mrs. Barcos paused, glanced at Gilbert, then turned back to her daughter as she put the grapes and lemonade on the table.
“Esta todo bien?” she asked.
“Sí, Mama,” said Magda. “Todo esta bien.” A strained grin came to Magda’s face. “Mama, porque no vas adentro? Esta muy caliente para ti.”
Mrs. Barcos paused. She obviously sensed all was not right. “Sí,” she said. “Sí.”
The old Colombian woman went back into the cool interior of the house with a look of extreme reservation on her face. Magda turned to Gilbert with the suddenness of a bird and gave him a sweet but nervous smile.
“Is my brother going to be all right?” she asked. “That other detective…Ballantine.”
“Bannatyne,” corrected Gilbert.
“He was so mean.”
Gilbert shrugged. “He’s a bit old-school,” he said. “He likes to shake things loose fast.” Gilbert cast a covert glance toward Mrs. Barcos’s retreating form. “Your mother doesn’t know yet, does she?”
Magda’s green eyes narrowed in distress as she pursed her lips. “No,” she said. She flexed her delicate shoulders forward, as if she were cold. “And it is my sincere wish we keep it from her as long as possible.”
Though her impulse was noble, Gilbert knew it was ultimately futile. No doubt Magda characterized her brother differently than Al Valdez did. A wasp flew in from the garden, hovered above the grapes, then banked into the sunlit yard.
“Detective Bannatyne says you…that you were shocked,” said Gilbert.
Her distress deepened.
“I don’t believe half the things Detective Bannatyne told me,” she replied, her lower lip curling. “My brother’s not a monster. He looks after us. He’s given us a new life in Canada. We are happy. We have money. We have nice things.”
Gilbert sighed. What he had here was a mountain to move. Clouding the mix was his own personal goal of wiping the Boyd case off the board as fast as possible by putting Barcos behind bars quickly.
“I believe Colombia uses the Napoleonic system of justice,” said Gilbert. “A suspect is guilty until proven innocent. It works the other way around here. In Canada, a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. Your, brother’s been accused of some crimes, but that doesn’t mean he’s guilty, despite what Bob Bannatyne says. As far as I’m concerned, Oscar’s innocent. I’ll believe he’s innocent until twelve jurors tell me otherwise. In the meantime, he’s at considerable risk. He should turn himself in before he gets hurt. Do you have any idea where he is?”
She gazed at the grapes on the table. “No,” she said.
He again sensed her innocence, realized it wouldn’t even occur to Magda to lie to him, but he chipped away at her anyway.<
br />
“He hasn’t called here?” he asked.
“No.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” asked Gilbert.
“A week ago. Or maybe ten days ago. Before that storm. In any case, he hasn’t called here. I haven’t seen him. I’ve phoned everywhere I can think of, even back home, but he’s nowhere to be found.” She turned to him with a frantic look in her eyes, and gripped the arm of her wicker chair. “I’m worried about him. I wish he would call home. Mama’s nerves have never been so bad. He’s usually good about calling.”
Tears collected in her eyes. She wiped them away. God, he hated this, to see her suffering like this, and to have to disillusion her so unflinchingly about her brother. He could see Magda loved her brother unconditionally. It didn’t matter to her if he was a murderer.
“Do you think he might call you?” he asked in a softer tone.
“I hope he does,” she said.
“Because if he does…” He lifted a glass of lemonade, the glass beading with condensation, and took a sip. “You should urge him to surrender. He’s only going to make matters worse for himself if he runs or hides.”
“Yes, of course, I will try to make him understand this,” she said. “But Oscar has a temper. And he’s stubborn. And reckless. And he always thinks he’s right.”
Gilbert let her sit a bit. A robin landed on the bird feeder, but when it saw them, it flew away, and observed them from a safer perch on top of the garden shed.
“I would hate to…to see him hurt,” said Gilbert. Let the gentle manipulation begin, he thought. “I would hate to think he would try to fight the police. There’s no way he could win. And if he tried to fight us with a firearm…well…that would be foolhardy.” Gilbert took out his card and gave it to Magda. “Here’s my number.” He flipped the card over. “And here’s my home number. Call whenever you like. If you hear from him, and if you think you can get him to surrender peacefully… because I know it would break your heart…and your mother’s heart…if he somehow tried to fight it out with police and wound up getting hurt, or maybe even shot. If he wants to surrender to me personally, then, sure, we can do it that way. All I want to do is see him home safe again. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure he doesn’t get hurt if you can get him to cooperate with me.”
