Sundowner Ubuntu

by Anthony Bidulka

  I plugged in the earphone of my cell and dialled Clara Ridge’s number.

  “Hello, you have reached the answering machine of Mrs. Clara Ridge. Please leave a message, time of your call, and a return phone number after the tone.”

  “Mrs. Ridge, it’s Russell Quant, Wednesday afternoon. I’m just on my way back to Saskatoon from Estevan.” I consulted my watch. “I should be back in town by about eight.” I gave her a brief outline of what I’d found out so far, ending with the fact that her son was likely to be living somewhere on the African continent, working as a teacher or caregiver to children, and that we should talk about things at her earliest convenience. I left her all my numbers and hung up.

  Her earliest convenience turned out to be about an hour out of Saskatoon.

  “Russell Quant,” I answered the ring of my cellphone.

  “You found him?” Clara Ridge.

  “Sort of,” I answered, trying to ignore a pet peeve I have for people who simply assume you know it is them calling and don’t bother to identify themselves, as if no one else would ever be calling you. “As I explained on my message, according to the minister of his church in Estevan, the last time he heard from Matt, he was in Africa.”

  “But you have contact information for him in Africa? You know where he is?”

  I could understand Mrs. Ridge’s being anxious to have news of her son’s exact whereabouts after twenty years, but I did not want to raise her hopes too high. “The information I have is over a year old. And even at that, the minister thought Matt moved around a lot. I’m sorry, Mrs. Ridge, I can’t guarantee Matt is still at this address.”

  “You’re sure about this? You’re sure it’s him?”

  I wasn’t entirely clear where she was going with her line of questioning. “As I said, Mrs. Ridge, I only know what I was told by the minister and the principal at the school Matt taught at. I’m quite convinced they were telling me all they knew, and with great sincerity, but of course there is a chance Matt is no longer in Africa. And at the moment, I’m afraid I don’t have many more leads to follow up on.” I hesitated, and she seemed to be thinking about what I’d told her. I added, “That’s not to say there aren’t other leads out there. I just haven’t found them yet.”

  “I see. Well, I need to give this some thought, Mr. Quant.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll get back to you. Thank you.”

  I wondered if I’d ever hear from her again. I was glad I’d gotten a retainer cheque.

  About half an hour before reaching the outskirts of Saskatoon, blackness descended upon my car like an asphalt tarp; I was listening to a Mario Frangoulis CD and felt warm and safe. I decided to call my message manager for news of the day. I was half expecting (hoping for) a message from Jared. The longer we went without talking about things, about his request for my help in ending his relationship with Anthony, the more awkward it would become, and the greater the chance of the silence between us causing irreparable damage to our own friendship. I had pretty much decided I was going to call him if he hadn’t called me. But my plans went flying out the window with a sorrow-filled message I was not expecting at all. I pressed on the gas pedal before the final words were out of the caller’s mouth. I needed to get to the hospital fast.

  Chapter 7

  I recognized three of the faces in the Royal University Hospital waiting room, a trio of women sitting with another woman and a man I did not recognize. As I approached, they turned their weepy, puffy-eyed faces up to me, and Edda, the ninety-year-old whom I’d thought the most stoic of the Ash House residents, released a fresh deluge of tears. I crouched down next to the small group, and Loretta immediately reached for my hands and buried them within the damp-Kleenex-lined cocoon of her own.

  “Thank you for calling me,” I said to her.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she answered, dabbing at her cheeks, which were streaked with failing makeup. “It’s just that…well, you gave us your card, and I thought perhaps you and Ethan were friends.”

  The way she said “friends” left little to the imagination about what she really thought, and I found my cheeks heating up again. Why did they keep doing that?

  “The others weren’t so sure,” she continued, shooting long-faced Hortense a look. “But your card said you were a detective, so I thought…well, I thought this was something you might want to know about regardless, seeing as it happened the same night you were at the house.”

  “What exactly did happen, Loretta?” I begged to know.

  “It’s Ethan.” She began to tear up, and my insides grew cold as I felt her little hand tighten around my own. The bright gold of her many rings dug into my skin, and her now-chipped, teal fingernail polish was in stark contrast against the white of the Kleenex.

  “It was last night,” she began again, looking at the others as if seeking agreement on the timing. But the tears were too heavy, and she pulled away to find another hanky in a purse that matched her outfit.

  “We got back from the movie around eleven-thirty,” dark-haired Hortense with the severe pageboy, and the most composed of the group, took over the story. “Everything seemed fine in the house. Mary-Jane and Dmytro were in bed and heard nothing strange.” I was guessing Mary-Jane and Dmytro were the two elders I did not recognize, Ash House residents I hadn’t met when I visited. “But that beast must have gotten into the house somehow, without them knowing. He was waiting for poor Ethan, in his bedroom, and he attacked him and almost killed him!”

  My skin was twitching, and my heart was beating an irregular drum solo in my chest as I listened to the story. I had a thousand questions, details I was desperate to know, but instead I asked, “How is he?” I cringed and realized I didn’t want to hear bad news about this man.

  “They don’t know yet, but it can’t be good,” Hortense reported. “He’s been mostly unconscious this whole time.”

  “Was Ethan able to tell anyone who did it?”

  She shook her head, the sturdy sheaths of her raven hair moving along with it. “I don’t think so.”

  Damn!

  “Have you seen him? Can I see him?”

  Another shake. “His immediate family are the only ones allowed in right now. We’ve been staying here as much as we can, just in case.”

  “To show our support,” Loretta added, having collected her wits about her. Her lovely eyes were rimmed with red, and her fine silver hair was a flattened version of the puffier coiffure she’d sported the night before. “We all love Ethan so much. This is too horrible.”

  I shook my head in sympathy. “How could this have happened?” And why?

  Hortense’s dark eyes regarded me from beneath thick eyebrows. “There is one person who could tell you.”

  I was back at Ash House twenty-four hours after my first visit, but this time under much worse circumstances. Frank answered my knock and invited me to join him in the sitting room where he’d been sitting by the fire, reading a John Sandford novel. Except for the gentle murmur of logs being devoured behind a fireplace grate, the place was like a tomb, so different from the laughter and joviality of a day ago.

  “Someone needs to be here, I guess,” he told me in a subdued voice, the vitality sucked out of him like juice from an orange. “We’re taking turns. Everyone thinks I should be resting up, recovering from my ‘ordeal,’ but hell, the only one who went through an ordeal is that poor boy. Besides, someone’s gotta look after the kid.”

  The kid?

  “I can hear you,” a child’s voice rang out from around an unseen corner, the unexpected sound bouncing off the walls like a Ping-Pong ball.

  “That’s what you get for eavesdropping,” Frank called back.

  “I can take care of myself. And I’m not a kid.”

  “Says you.”

  This whole conversation taking place between Frank and the disembodied voice was amusing but puzzling. Who was this kid he was talking to? And why was a kid living in a retirement home?

 
; “If you’re busy listening to other people’s conversations, that must mean you’re done with your homework and ready for bed. Is that correct?”

  The only response was the sound of speedy footfalls escaping up a set of stairs to the second storey and far away from us.

  I gave Frank a questioning look.

  “Simon,” he said as if the name itself were explanation enough.

  “Is he someone’s grandson?”

  “I suppose she’s everyone’s grandkid in a way, but Simon is Ethan’s daughter.”

  “Oh.” I’d thought Ethan was gay. Hadn’t he said so himself? And I thought he was single. And…oh just stop it, Quant. It makes no difference, and this isn’t why you’re here, is it? I moved on to why I was. “Frank, I understand you saw what happened? I know this may be difficult to talk about b—”

  “Bollocks! Nothing difficult about it. Yeah, I saw the bastard.”

  My neck hairs stood up with a thrill at his words. “Have you talked to the police?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Can you tell me what happened?” I suppose it wasn’t really any of my business, but once a cop, always a cop. Besides, I had been there that night, and I liked Ethan Ash. If there was anything at all I could do to help, I wanted to do it.

  “I have a hard time getting to sleep until I pee, and I have a hard time peeing because of my prostate.”

  Too much information.

  “We came home from the movie, and everyone headed off for bed except for me. I stayed down here, right where we’re sitting right now, and read this here book, waiting for my bladder and all the other internals involved to tell me it was time to pee. We have an elevator, but I like to use the stairs every so often—for the exercise—and that’s what I was doing, heading up the stairs to the bathroom—couldda used the one down here, but I thought I’d head for bed right after I did my business, so I might as well make one trip because my bedroom is on the second floor, see—so I was heading up, and I’d just reached the second floor when I heard something from further up the stairwell. Only thing on the third floor is Ethan’s rooms, see. The noise was muffled, but I swore it sounded like someone was fighting. And I have been in fights in my life, see, so I know the sound. So, I think to myself I should go check it out, and if it’s nothing, I’ll have gotten even more exercise—and, to tell the truth, I was suspecting I wasn’t quite ready to pee yet anyway—but if it’s something, well….

  “By the time I get to the door of Ethan’s suite, all I can hear is some grunting. You know, young man….” And here he stopped and looked at me with furry eyebrows arched high over startlingly clear blue eyes. “For a minute there, I though I might be interrupting something else.”

  I made some sort of sound in response; half whimper, half groan.

  “But, see, I still couldn’t pee, so I decided to knock anyway. All of a sudden, the sounds stopped. There was silence, and I called out Ethan’s name, to see if he was all right. Well, next thing you know, the door flies open, and I get knocked to the floor like a mop.”

  Here we go, now the good stuff. “Someone came out of the room and pushed you down?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  I ignored the question and asked, “Did you see who attacked Ethan?”

  “Of course I saw him. He pushed me, didn’t he?”

  Frank was getting ornery and maybe needed to pee, so I thought it best to move the tale along with as much haste as possible. “Were you able to give the police a description?”

  “You bet. Don’t know if it’ll help though. I didn’t see much of his face.”

  My heart sank. All of Frank’s bluster was to cover for the fact that he really hadn’t seen much of anything. I’d seen that type of reaction before in witnesses; they wished they could help and felt guilty they couldn’t, so they make a big to-do about what they did see and hear, which often amounted to not much.

  “But I know it was a man.”

  I asked a few more leading questions, but aside from the fact that the figure was definitely not a woman (or his pride would not allow it to be), it seemed Frank could provide no further details, until one last bit that set creepy-crawlers to dancing over my skin.

  “If he hadn’t pushed me down, I might have caught him, you know,” Frank said. “He wasn’t that quick on account of his leg.”

  “His leg?”

  “There was something wrong with his right leg. When he was running away and down the stairs, I saw that it lagged behind him, see. He had to pull it along after himself. Maybe got hurt in a war or something? Whatever, that fella had one hell of a limp.”

  My mind flashed back to the night before, walking the chilly March streets from my car to Ash House. I had had a sense that I was being followed; I’d seen nothing, but I’d heard something. Someone walking behind me. Someone with a limp.

  I didn’t get a lot of shut-eye that night, what with all the men keeping me busy. So topsy-turvy in fact was my sleep, that eventually both Barbra and Brutus hopped off the bed in search of quieter spots (if they don’t get a full eighteen hours of sleep, the next day is absolutely ruined).

  Matthew, Jared, and Ethan were the guys in bed with me. I could not get them out of my mind. As soon as one was banished, another would pop up. I pictured Matthew Moxley, somewhere in Africa, tending to children, far from reach. I fretted about Jared and his request to help him break up with Anthony. What was driving him to do this? It was so wrong! Would he do it with or without my help? How would Anthony react?

  And then there was Ethan Ash, now lying in a hospital bed. The fact that I hadn’t been able to see him made it worse; my imagination was filling in the missing image with horrible possibilities that were probably much worse than reality. I hoped.

  And then, as I was finally about to slide into sleep, a fourth man entered my dreams—Alex Canyon—and the night was lost.

  Because of my rough night, I was late getting to work the next morning, so I was surprised when I pulled into the PWC lot at the same time as Errall. She was driving a brand new, ice grey BMW 5-Series. I caught up with her as she hoisted a briefcase out of the swanky vehicle’s trunk, which thunked shut with the impressive solidness only money can buy.

  “Wow,” I commented. “Nice wheels.”

  She seemed to be ignoring me. Nothing new there.

  “Late start today?” I asked.

  She pulled the couture-cut edges of her pristine black coat’s collar up around her face, either to keep warmth in or to block me out. I prefer to think it was the keep-warmth-in thing. She answered me with a blast in the face from her two laser-blue eyes, which looked a little tired this morning (a rude and very Errall-type greeting). Her hair was pulled back into a discreet bun, which usually meant she had an important meeting or wasn’t in the mood for dangling hair.

  We entered through the back door of the building, and she headed straight through to the front foyer and her office while I stayed behind in the kitchen, knowing Lilly would have a fresh pot of coffee going. I poured myself a cup, sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t one of those flavoured varieties that I can barely swallow (unless the flavour is rum or Bailey’s), and, assured that it wasn’t, sludged myself toward the stairs and my office.

  As I passed by Lilly with a salute of my coffee cup in lieu of a good morning, the sight of Clara Ridge sitting in the waiting room pulled me up short. I looked at Lilly, who gave me a smile, her eyes wider than usual, saying something like: “She just showed up. She wasn’t in your appointment book. I tried calling you at home, but you didn’t answer.”

  I greeted Mrs. Ridge and invited her up to my office. As we got settled, I noted that the woman looked a little less perfectly put together than on our first meeting; the wig was a little less shellacked, the makeup not quite right, and her nails were scrubbed clear of the bright red of a few days ago. Nevertheless, she was still handsome, maybe more so without the disguising layers of cosmetics.

  Before taking her seat, Clara pulled a
thick envelope from the pocket of her brown fur coat and placed it in front of me on my desk. I looked at it questioningly.

  “I’d like you to go to Africa.”

  My tongue grew dry, and I experienced unfamiliar surges somewhere in my brain as I processed the unexpected words.

  “I thought about this all night,” she told me. “I have the money, so why shouldn’t I spend it on what I really, really want: to find my son. I can’t do it. I don’t know the world in that way. I’ve never been out of Saskatchewan. But you—you can do it, can’t you?”

  Oh sure. No problem. I go to Africa all the time. They have the best deals on spices and colourful bolts of fabric.

  But, of course, I could do this.