Sundowner Ubuntu

by Anthony Bidulka

  Yes! My investigation had stalled at high school and the summer after grade ten when he’d gotten into trouble with the police. I needed something to move me further down the timeline. This could be it.

  “After he got out of reform school?” I asked, beginning to jot down the particulars of her call on the top page of a blank pad.

  “I wouldn’t know about that…I guess so…it was a few years after I graduated from high school myself.”

  Without Kirsch’s help I wasn’t sure I’d ever know the real details of Matthew’s incarceration. I had to pick up his scent after he was freed. “Tell me what happened. Where and when did you see him?”

  “Like I said, it was a few years after graduation. I was living in Saskatoon again and taking my nursing training at SIAST, so I guess this was maybe fourteen, fifteen years ago. I was downtown shopping with a girlfriend, and we’d gone into a submarine shop to grab something for lunch. And there he was, behind the counter.”

  “He was working there?”

  “Yeah, he had the apron and everything, and he was making subs. It was busy, so he didn’t look up much except to take orders, so I don’t think he saw me. He looked different, grown up from when I’d last seen him. He would have been twenty-one or so by then.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. I was—gosh, it sounds so silly now—but I got flustered at seeing him, and I just pulled my girlfriend out of there, and we went somewhere else for lunch.”

  I got the details about the exact location of the sub shop and asked if there was anything else she could remember.

  “Just one thing,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Oh?” My cheeks reddened. “What for?”

  “The roses, Mr. Quant.”

  I had instructed the florist to keep me anonymous. “How did you know?” I asked the nurse.

  “You strike me as just that kind of guy.”

  Forecasters were calling for the first day of above-freezing temperatures for the year. But I was taking no chances; I’d worn a thick, zip-up fleece under a black leather overcoat, a scarf, and black leather gloves to work that morning. I put them on as I headed out to find what there was to find at a submarine shop where someone who might have been Matthew Ridge worked over a decade ago. This case was becoming more like an archeological excavation than an investigation. Although I’m a hopeless optimist, my expectations of discovering something useful were not high.

  The shop in question was on College Drive across from the U of S campus and, not surprisingly, still in business. Submarines have long been a diet staple for much of the city’s university population, which descends on Saskatoon each fall like a horde of hungry locusts with a meagre meal budget. I arrived early enough so the lunch rush was still a ways off. Even so, the staff was keeping busy, prepping the mounds of shredded lettuce, slices of sweet pickles and juicy tomatoes, and piles of meat-like stuff that would be consumed throughout the day. The kids behind the counter looked at me like I was from Uranus when I asked them about a guy named Matthew who worked there fifteen years ago. I quickly moved on to the manager, who just as quickly passed me on to the owner, Wanda Woo, who just happened to be in the back, punching numbers into a massive contraption that might have been the first calculator ever invented.

  “What you want?” she asked with a pinched nose and mouth, her sharp eyes full of suspicion when I’d sat myself down opposite her on a stool made of splinters.

  “Well,” I began hesitantly, “don’t laugh, but I’m looking for an employee who worked here about fourteen or fifteen years ago.”

  “Not funny,” she accurately pointed out.

  “His name was Matthew Ridge and I thi—”

  “Moxley.”

  I stopped there because I had no idea what she’d just said. Was it something in Chinese? Was she telling me to get the hell out of her sub shop? Had she sneezed? Should I say gesundheit? Was I simply lost in translation?

  “Moxley,” she repeated.

  “Mooooooxleeeeeeeey?” I slowly repeated after her, with what I hoped was an inquisitive oriental-flavoured upturn at the end of the unfamiliar word.

  “Moxley,” she said with an authoritative nod. “No Ridge. Matthew Moxley. No Matthew Ridge.”

  Light bulb. If I understood her correctly, she was telling me that there was no Matthew Ridge who’d worked here, only some guy named Matthew Moxley, who, unfortunately, was not who I was looking for. I was immediately disappointed, but really, the chances were low I’d find my quarry in a submarine store he might have worked in fifteen years ago based on a possible sighting by an ex-girlfriend who hadn’t seen him in five years. And not only that, how many Matthews might have worked at any one fast-food outlet in fifteen years? However, if I’ve learned anything from my dear schnauzer Barbra whenever she sees me near the treat jar, persistent mooching pays off. Sometimes.

  “What about someone named Matt Ridge? Or I wond….” I stopped there because Mrs. Woo had hopped down from her seat to her full four-foot-one height, ambled over to a time-worn filing cabinet, bent at the waist to open a bottom drawer, pulled out a file without seeming to have to even search for it, and returned to her seat. She shoved the file at me with the word, “Moxley.”

  “But I’m lo….”

  She shook her head as if disgusted with the denseness of the matter in my head. “No Ridge. No Matt. No Matthew Ridge. Moxley. Matthew Moxley.”

  I took the file and saw the name Matthew Moxley scrawled on the label in barely visible pencil.

  “All good,” Mrs. Woo assured me. “We pay him, he work. We pay his taxes. All good. No trouble.”

  I began to comprehend. Mrs. Woo thought I was a Canada Revenue agent checking to see if she’d properly remitted Matthew Ridge’s payroll taxes, CPP, and EI. I did not bother to correct her and opened the file under the topic of “What the heck.” The records were immaculate and in chronological order, starting with his application form on the day he first stepped into the sub shop, to semi-regular evaluation reports and pay hike information, to his short letter of resignation a couple of years later.

  “No trouble. All good. We pay. He work. He gone now.”

  “I see, I see,” I said, getting a far-out idea. I pulled out the Mount Royal yearbook and showed her a picture of Matthew Ridge. “Is this Matthew Moxley?”

  She nodded so hard I worried she’d hurt her neck.

  I felt that little head rush that detectives get when they unexpectedly come upon a major clue—a near erotic sensation. I had just discovered that Matthew Ridge had, for some reason, at some point, become Matthew Moxley.

  I had new prey.

  “May I jot a few things down?” I asked Mrs. Woo.

  She pushed a nub of a pencil and scrap of paper across the child-size desk that separated us. I had my own, but to be polite I accepted and used hers to record the details in the file that I thought I could use to track down Matthew Moxley. When I was done, I thanked the submarine shop proprietor, and left with her suggestion that I try the new spicy meatball and Italian cheese sub on the way out. I was sorely tempted.

  For as long as I can remember, the intersection of Broadway and Taylor has been home to a drugstore, a gas station, a Cheesetoast restaurant, and, more recently, a greenhouse (open during summer months only). And a block away, on a street named William Avenue (which only people who live there know about), I found the former home of Matthew Moxley. My knock at the front door was answered by a scowling woman peering out from behind a screen. She ordered me to use the other door—as if I should have known better—and sure enough, when I rounded the nondescript sixties bungalow to the south side, there she was in the other doorway, arms akimbo, scowl in place.

  “Can’t you read signs?” was her less-than-sunny greeting.

  I gave her a questioning look as I scaled the four steps of the stoop.

  “There was a sign at the front door, clear as sky, telling you to use this other door. A sign just like that one.” She pointed a reed
y, sharp-nailed finger at a foolscap taped to the clapboard siding of the house, right next to the doorbell. In bold, cap letters written in thick, black ink faded with age, were the words: “RING DOORBELL FOR MAIN FLOOR ONLY! FOR BASEMENT TENANTS GO DOWN THE STAIRS AND KNOCK ON THE APPROPRIATE DOOR.”

  “The front door is for show only,” she explained. “I got good carpets up there, and I don’t need you or anyone else tracking street dirt or snow or who knows what all over them. I’d have to hire some overpriced carpet cleaning company to come in with all their hoses and sprays and vacuums. Don’t need that, do I?” She shook her head with unambiguous conviction, setting the loose skin at her neck to quivering. “So,” she challenged me, “are you ringing or knocking?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She expelled an exasperated sigh and once again pointed at the foolscap sign with its curled-up corners. “Ringing or knocking?”

  I studied the instructions a second time. “Oh, well, I guess I’m ringing. Are you the owner of this house?”

  “Gladys Nussbottem. Owned this house for forty years. If you’re looking for a place to rent, all the spots are taken. But if you come back in late April, I’m sure there’ll be some empty then. It’s when the students go, you know.”

  Gladys Nussbottem was a tall woman, thin on top, thicker at the bottom, closing in on seventy. Her hair was a dull grey as was her wardrobe, her face pale, her forehead wide. She sported a healthy nose and buck teeth, and a receding chin making it look as if perhaps her Maker had run out of bone and cartilage by the time He got to it.

  “I’m not looking for a place; I was hoping to ask you some questions about a former tenant of yours.”

  She looked at me for a spell, her flickering eyes giving me a lengthy once-over. I must have passed muster because she invited me in with a limp flip of her wrist. I followed her up a short flight of stairs that led up from a miniscule landing from which a second set led down to a dim, dark hallway with several doors on each side leading into what I guessed were tenant quarters and perhaps shared bathroom, washer/dryer, and storage facilities. Posted on the wall along the way up to the main floor were more signs in various states of fadedness, as if added through the years as Gladys Nussbottem thought up more rules to live by, like: “WIPE YOUR FEET” and “NO PETS ALLOWED,” and my favourite, “LEAVE CURRY FOOD OUTSIDE AND SUSHI TOO.”

  “You can sit there,” the landlady said once we’d arrived in her kitchen, indicating a sturdy-looking chair alongside a Formica kitchenette-sized table. On one corner of the table she’d taped a small sign with the instruction: “PLEASE LAY DIRTY KNIFE IN YOUR PLATE—NOT ON THE TABLE.” A quick pass over the room revealed many others just like it, including one on the fridge telling all to “KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES.” But then how do you get stuff out? I took my seat.

  “I have tea made,” she told me. “But that’s all I got, unless you want some water?”

  I thought it best not be become beholden to this woman for anything, besides, I’d be too nervous about making a drink ring or setting the glass down in the wrong place. “No thank you,” I answered politely.

  She settled herself in the chair across from mine. “So what’s this all about then? And maybe you’d like to tell me who it is I’m talking to?”

  “Quant, I’m Russell Quant.”

  “Okay then,” she responded, unimpressed, taking a sip of cold tea from a chipped coffee mug.

  “I’m looking for a young man who I believe was a tenant of yours several years ago.”

  “Oh yes.” She held her cup with both hands and fingered it like a piano.

  “Matthew Moxley.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I know it was some time ago, but I was wondering if you might remember him?”

  “Of course I remember him. Who do you think I am? Some doddering, forgetful, old woman?”

  “Ah, no, but it was quite some time ago, I just thought….”

  “Wasn’t that long ago.” And to prove it she proceeded to give me the exact dates he moved in and moved out. “He was a good boy. He followed all the rules. He always kept his room clean, and when he asked to have a cat and I pointed out the No Pets sign, he was fine with it. He was a hard-working boy, too. I think at one point he was working three jobs at the same time, selling shoes, bagging groceries, and clerking at some submarine shop downtown. Finally he got enough money together I suppose, or got loans maybe, or a bursary, I don’t know for sure which—he started up at the university. I don’t know what he was taking. He still kept a couple of his jobs, though.”

  I was impressed. This didn’t sound at all like the same guy who got into constant trouble at school and abused alcohol and drugs. I guess he grew up. Maybe reform school really had reformed him. Maybe when Matthew Ridge became Matthew Moxley, a few other things changed as well. But, just to be certain I wasn’t scurrying down the wrong rabbit hole, I showed Mrs. Nussbottem the yearbook photo.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s him. Good-looking fellow, I suppose. He was a little older when I knew him, but yeah, that’s him.”

  “Did he have any friends or family visiting him that you know of?”

  She shook her head. “No. Didn’t have time, what with all that working and schooling, but he got a boyfriend. Don’t know where he found the time to get one, but he did. Eventually that’s why he moved out. They wanted to live together, and the rooms downstairs are a little small for a couple. I rent to students, not lovebirds.” I supposed she should have had a sign up for that.

  “You don’t happen to know where Matthew is today, do you?”

  “If I kept in touch with every person who’s lived in this house, I’d have no time for anything else. Who do you think I am, Mother Teresa?”

  Certainly not. New direction. “Do you remember the name of Matthew’s boyfriend?”

  I was not surprised to see her nodding. “I do. A unique name it was. I remember it because he was named after my favourite tree. It’s not the tallest, or showiest, or most colourful in the fall, but it’s a good, strong, sturdy, disease-resistant tree made especially for prairie conditions.”

  Wha…? “His name was…Poplar?”

  Her near-absent chin swung back and forth as she told me, “Ash. Ethan Ash.”

  Back at the office, I had about as much luck as a lobster in a seafood restaurant tank finding a sniff of anybody named Matthew Moxley living in Saskatoon, Regina, or the surrounding areas, so I changed gears and went in search of Ethan Ash. It didn’t take long to track one down who fit the general description (plus fifteen years) given to me by Gladys Nussbottem: about six feet, a little beefy, brown hair kept too long for Gladys’s taste, a little-boy smile, and big feet that “tracked in snow like a shovel.” There were a dozen Ashes in the phonebook although no one admitting to the name Ethan—a name I kinda liked—but I did hit upon a woman who was his mother (or who I presumed was his mother). She told me her son Ethan owned, operated, and lived in a private care home facility for elderly residents called Ash House. It was located on Elliott, a leafy street in Varsity View, one of the oldest parts of town near the river and handily close to the Royal University Hospital (best known in Saskatoon as RUH). I consulted my watch—it was going to be another late dinner for Barbra and Brutus—and off I went.

  Within seconds of sunset, the outdoor temperature had plummeted faster than inhibitions at a shooter party, so I was hoping to find a parking spot that would keep walking distance to a minimum. After circling the block twice, I had to settle for one around the corner from Ash House. After locking the car, I steeled myself inside my coat, buried hands inside my pockets, and fast-walked toward the house with its charming, hand-carved sign swinging in the chilly wind from a post in the front yard.

  I was about halfway there when an odd noise attracted my attention. I stopped, glanced about, but the shadowy streets were barren, everyone happily snuggled up indoors on this refrigerated evening.

  I kept on.

  There it was again.

  T
his time I didn’t stop but slowed my pace considerably and controlled my breathing so I could make out the sound more clearly. It was definitely coming from behind me—clump, scrrrrrape, clump, scrrrrrape, clump, scrrrrrape.

  I stopped.

  The noise stopped.

  I started up again.

  So did the noise.

  There was no doubt now. I was being followed.

  Chapter 5

  Clump, scrrrrrape. Clump, scrrrrrape. Clump, scrrrrrape.

  I stopped and swung around as menacingly as I could. I peered through the falling darkness that seemed to be following me down the street—darkness and someone with a limp. But no one was there. Or was there? Were there places someone could be hiding? Behind trees, fences, cars? Yup, lots of hiding places. Or was I being paranoid? Could be. Maybe the sound was someone shovelling their driveway, or pulling their garbage out to the curb. All I knew for certain was that I was getting colder by the minute, and I either had to start chasing my ghost in and out of every cubbyhole on Elliott Street or get indoors.

  I turned and marched towards Ash House, my ears at the ready. Nothing. Either I’d imagined it, whoever it was was innocent and finished with whatever task they had been doing, or the bad guy was onto the fact that I was onto him and wisely decided to stay hidden.

  Ash House was one of those enchanting properties that really stick out, like a chocolate-covered, jam-filled bismarck decorated with frilly icing, sitting in a bakery display window amongst a bunch of plain-Jane, powdered-sugar doughnuts. I could picture people walking by, wondering why their own homes and yards didn’t look nearly as good. The house balanced the unusual colour combination of an earthy burgundy mixed with highlights of harvest yellow and dusk blue. Small patches of lawn were bordered by trellises and clay pots that in spring would likely explode with colourful flowers and shrubs. Benches and tables beckoned passersby to sit for a relaxing spell, amongst bird feeders and musical wind chimes. Edwardian lampposts welcomed me down a brick pathway to a rocking chair on the porch and a gaily painted front door with a big, brass door knocker that looked like a lion’s head.