Stung

by William Deverell

  “Who are the six?”

  “Plant supervisor, crew boss, his foreman, the three night security guys.”

  “Names, addresses, phones, emails.”

  Gaylene, who’s sitting beside Howie, gets him to text her all this stuff from his phone.

  That done, Maguire asks, “They all happy in their work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You got a disgruntled crew boss maybe? Grievances? Issues about overtime or back pay.”

  “Not that I’m aware of.” Another shift and sniff. He looks disapprovingly at Maguire’s little voice recorder.

  “Maybe you can check your personnel records,” says Gaylene. “Someone may have an attitude about Vigor-Gro. It’s controversial. I heard it kills bees.”

  “What you heard is concocted, it’s propaganda. Vigor-Gro has been certified safe by U.S. and Canadian government testing labs.”

  “You keep a record of these pass codes?” Maguire asks.

  “On my computer at headquarters, and I keep a copy in my home office. No one else has access.”

  Maguire still has a niggle that he’s covering up somehow. “Kind of weird that this happens when one of your regulars got replaced by a temp with a dirty sheet, three convictions. It’s like they knew you were undermanned last night.”

  “Archie Gooch has been coming in on call almost six months. No complaints. He’s on a drug rehab program. My company likes to give a helping hand.”

  “They did blood and urine tests,” Gaylene says. “A ton of THC, but the bigger deal is opioids. He was wired to the hilt on oxycodone, and now nobody can wake him.”

  “Maybe he’s faking it,” Maguire says. “What’s on his blotter? Let’s see . . .” He passes Howie a printout: “Lifting a leather jacket — that shows balls — hit and run on a cyclist, a meth lab in his girlfriend’s basement, and beating on that girlfriend. What do you think, Howie, is Archie the susceptible kind of guy who’d take a bribe?” Greeted with a shrug. “I want your files on him. We want to know who he hangs with. Anarchists, maybe.”

  He turns to Gaylene. “I want all the guys who have the key codes brought in here today.” She leaves, already punching a number into her cell.

  “Don’t want to get personal, Howie, but where do you live?”

  “High-rise on Adelaide.”

  “Who lives there with you?”

  “Me, myself, and I. Since this spring when my wife decided we had irreconcilable differences.”

  “She keep a key to the apartment?”

  “I had the locks changed.”

  “You ever have friends over?”

  Hesitation. A tell. “Not recently. I was in Brazil for a week. We had some issues down there.”

  “Okay, but you ever have guests over to your apartment?”

  “A few guys from my office occasionally for poker. I keep my home office locked.”

  “Give us their names.”

  Howie goes to his phone again, texts these contacts. Gaylene returns. “The plant super will assemble everyone here for four p.m., sir.”

  Maguire worries that she’s going to make herself indispensable. He returns to Howie. “Any other visitors?”

  Another tell: a delay, a shrug. “I’ve been seeing a young lady.”

  “She stay over?”

  “Yes, sort of.”

  “When?” Maguire should call the outside man’s dentist, get some pointers on pulling teeth.

  “Let’s see. Weekend before last. Saturday, I think. I just got back from Sao Paolo.”

  “Name, phone, address.”

  “I don’t want to get her involved. Real innocent gal, she’s in the States right now with her sick mom . . .”

  “Name, phone, address.”

  “Well, okay. Jesus. Becky McLean. Works at a Rexall in North York. Not sure of her address.” He gives them a 647 number.

  “Got her photo?”

  “Thought I did. Couldn’t find it.” He goes into his phone again, scrolling. “Still not here. It didn’t take, I guess.”

  Maguire wonders why he would lie about that. He goes at him a little more, how he picked Becky up outside her pharmacy, their dates, dinners, a Jays game, a boat trip on Georgian Bay. Howie uncomfortable, perspiring a little, weirdly vague about the Saturday night sleepover. “We kind of made out, no big deal. We have a date Sunday at the Dome, Jays and the Red Sox.” He shows his season’s pass for two. Maguire writes down the seat numbers.

  “Mind if we come by this week and have a look at your security setup?”

  “Our Canadian head office, you mean? That’s in T.O.”

  “Yeah. Your home office too.”

  “Sure, Inspector. Be my guest.”

  “And we’ll need to take prints from you.”

  “No problem.”

  After Maguire lets him go Gaylene gives him a fist bump, a kind of salute to the old fart, he’s still got jism. “Like I say, Jake, a dork. What’s he hiding?”

  “Coke habit, for one.”

  3

  Thursday, September 13

  Operation Vigorous, they named this, from Vigor-Gro, but the Chief Superintendent likes to call it Operation Vigorish, maybe because of all the overtime he’s griping about even though they’ve hardly got started. As if it’s dirty money. But Jake Maguire’s crew has taken to call it that too, or Operation Vig, in jest. Or The Vig.

  Maguire wanted to run the case from the London detachment, so he could come home to a good wife and good cooking. But he’s stuck in Toronto, self-proclaimed Centre of the Universe, more aptly called Hogtown. For the unforeseeable future, he’s in a Best Western in North York with a short taxi commute to the Toronto OPP, near Keele and the 401. Operation Vig works out of a cramped space on the third floor — it’s barely able to contain Maguire plus two guys and one female, the total personnel they pried loose for him.

  The Vig has got a little complicated because material witness Archie Gooch is being fed through a tube and is now formally diagnosed as being in a coma though there’s nothing physically amiss — the heart still pumping oxygen to the brain, occasional spasms and twitches, but the eyes won’t open. The accepted theory is he got so stoned on his potent weed he stopped counting how many hits of oxycodone he was doing. Gooch was probably too stupid to look up the death stats.

  The Vig has seen little progress over the last two days. The theory of an inside job didn’t pan out. All of the six with access to the key codes were easy to clear. None could remotely be considered environmentalists or particularly corrupt. Bribery seemed out of the question anyway — the perps wouldn’t have had that kind of money. What they had was a pretty smart spy.

  Gaylene Roberts is doing the footwork on Howie’s little popsy, Becky McLean, or whatever her real name is. Maguire has kind of adapted to Gaylene since she got less snarky, plus she’s looking much hotter now that he knows she’s not a lesbian. So he got the Chief Super to assign her to help run the file.

  First thing she did is check with the manager of the North York Rexall where Howie picked Becky up. The manager never heard of any Becky McLean. No one by that moniker in the employment records.

  And of course she hasn’t called Howie after disappearing to wherever to see her allegedly sick mom. The number Howie gave them for Becky McLean was dead. Telephone records at Bell had a phony address. Not strictly phony, a nursing home in Scarborough where no one had heard of her.

  Amazingly, Howie is still confident she’ll show for their date at the Red Sox game Sunday night. Poor bastard.

  This morning Maguire is up in Howie’s suite on Adelaide, with Gaylene and a couple from Ident, lifting prints. Good luck to them because Howie’s cleaning lady scrubbed everything down pretty good, except for his office which he insists he keeps locked. Spacious, expensive digs, no female frills. Lots of CDs, a wall of boo
ks. A man cave in the current lingo, which is what Sonia calls Maguire’s own homely woodworking shed back of the garage.

  The dork is on a sofa looking like he got swallowed up in an earthquake. Even though Howie’s not talking to reporters he’s all over the news. Him and Chemican. After a media deluge yesterday, the press demanding answers from them over suspect test results on their Vigor-Gro and its effects on bugs and birds. Also some hanky-panky involving a Chemican-friendly Congressman with ties to the director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Making the evildoers look not so evil. Still, crime is crime. B and E and conspiracy, ten years max for each.

  One of the Ident guys calls from the entrance to Howie’s inner office. “Think we got a partial of a bare foot, sir.”

  Maguire goes in to where they’ve chalked around an impression being dusted on the tile floor, near a filing cabinet. About a size six. Eliminates Howie. Left foot, toes to heel, minus the arch. Imprinted on some kind of whitish, hardened liquid surface. There are other dabs and spots too, leading from the bedroom to the inner office, that shine in the light of camera flashes.

  The Ident guy bends low, scrapes a couple of samples into a plastic bag, bends lower, takes a sniff. “Some kind of congealed liquid. Not alcohol, I don’t think.”

  Gaylene brushes a strand of hair from her nose, takes a turn, flakes a bit of the white stuff away, puts it to her nose. “Semen.”

  Maguire grins. He wasn’t expecting such expertise from this olfactory ace. He can’t fight off an image of her going down on her sweetie, taking a snort of come up her nose.

  He looks back at Howie, wondering how he got his pecker tracks all over his office floor. He’s staring blankly at a painting on the wall. Whales breaching. Time to put this nature lover on the grill again. Turn up the heat.

  Chapter 7: Arthur

  1

  Saturday, September 15

  Arthur’s Fargo runs faultlessly, the old girl pleased with her new battery, determined to prove she isn’t ready for the scrap heap. But Arthur won’t get to the church on time, because he and Stefan spent half an hour clipping Ulysses’s way out of a thick tangle of blackberries — the reckless pup had plowed into it while chasing a robin. Another lesson learned.

  It’s a pleasant, warm morning, with only a few wisps of cloud as Arthur pulls into the lot of St. Mary’s Church, where a dozen vehicles sit. The Save Our Quarry’s core group has gathered here for a session called on short notice.

  It was learned only late yesterday that Selwyn Loo would be arriving this morning, on Syd-Air from Vancouver. Much to Arthur’s delight, the famed environmental lawyer has agreed to take on the cause of Quarry Park, with pro bono aid from West Coast Environmental Law, with whom he serves as lead counsel. He has done his homework and has a report to make.

  Selwyn came on board after TexAmerica Stoneworks issued a writ against SOQ and its lead activists claiming general damages and an injunction to prohibit blocking, impeding, tampering, demonstrating, or in any other way interfering with its operations. A classic SLAPP suit. Arthur was served at his front door on Tuesday.

  About twenty stalwarts have assembled up front, and Selwyn is at the pulpit. “Sorry, I’m late,” Arthur says, hurrying up the aisle.

  “Find a comfortable pew, Arthur, and I’ll sum up,” says Selwyn, who has an uncanny ear for voices. A slender, handsome man. Dark glasses, a thin, white cane. Vancouver-born, tracing his roots four generations back to Hong Kong. He knows Garibaldi well — years ago he’d helped save the old-growth forests on the north end of the island: Gwendolyn Bay, now a national park.

  The ever-unavoidable Taba Jones moves down to make room for Arthur. It would seem an insult to take a less crowded pew, and once again they are tightly joined at the hip. He has already apologized to her for weaseling out (though that’s not how he put it) from her party last Saturday. He explained he’d got caught up watching TV coverage of the Bee-In at the Toronto lakeshore, where Garibaldi’s very own Margaret Blake shared the spotlight.

  Arthur and Taba have reached a kind of truce. She will stop vamping him if he stops pretending he can’t see her through his fog of denial. Arthur isn’t sure how that’s going to work out.

  Selwyn uses the pulpit as a leaning post — there are no notes on it, of course. He wouldn’t use them even if he had the gift of vision. He is almost off the Mensa scale, with what would normally be called — were he not sightless — a photographic memory.

  “Time is pressing,” Selwyn says. “Structures are going up at the quarry, all equipment is in place, and blasting begins in a week. On Wednesday we will be moving to quash their SLAPP suit and opposing their motion for an injunction. I will also argue my own motion to restrain them — until the appeal is heard of the bylaw issue that Arthur so valiantly fought.”

  Giving Arthur credit where none is due.

  “Hamish McCoy and Mattie Miller will support that restraining application by bringing an action in nuisance to prevent serious risk to their properties, their livelihood, and to McCoy’s works of art and Mrs. Miller’s alpacas. This course was wisely suggested by my eminent colleague, Arthur Beauchamp.”

  Arthur feels embarrassed by these inapt plaudits. He still feels a staggering loss of confidence from his poor showing in court. That patronizing judge, treating him like a senescent dimwit. Then getting busted at the ferry landing, a vaudeville show, Arthur playing the donkey.

  “Any questions?” Selwyn asks.

  Many hands are raised. Arthur settles back with a sigh of relief. A great burden has been lifted. He’d phoned Selwyn out of desperation early this week, was astonished to hear these golden words: “I’ll get right on it, my friend.” Arthur would have gone out of his mind trying to grapple with writs and restraining orders.

  Lost in his thoughts, he’s unaware the meeting has finished until Taba gives him a nudge. “Hey, space case. How about introducing me.”

  Selwyn, she means, who taps his way down a few steps to greet and embrace Arthur. Selwyn says he’s pleased to find him in such robust health — a deduction somehow reached by simple physical touch. Arthur returns the compliment, thanks him effusively for stepping in, and introduces Taba.

  “You’re fantastic,” she says, hugging him.

  “Well, you seem pretty fantastic yourself,” he says, lingering into the embrace.

  Arthur understood he was gay. Maybe not.

  “We’ll have some fun with these Texas jackboots,” he says. “Arthur, I’m hoping you can spare some private time.”

  “Of course. My day is free. In fact, I’d like to invite you to stay the night at Blunder Bay.” Selwyn has always enjoyed his times there.

  “If it doesn’t put you out, I’d be delighted. We can pick each other’s brains.”

  * * *

  As the Fargo rolls into Blunder Bay, Selwyn finally concludes a long conference call with West Coast Environmental staff about the SLAPP suit and the nuts and bolts of the multiple restraining orders. “Sorry, just clearing the decks,” he says.

  BC’s new anti-SLAPP legislation has given Selwyn all the ordnance he needs but he also seeks a declaration that TexAmerica’s attempts to silence the protesters be declared frivolous, vexatious, and contrary to Canada’s Charter of Rights.

  Arthur hears distressed calls from a dozen Canada geese in the near pasture — Stefan is there with Ulysses, trying to persuade the invasive flock to shit elsewhere. These big, arrogant destroyers are protected under the Migratory Birds Convention Act, though few seem to migrate anymore. But there’s no protection from the wolfhound speeding toward them like a dog possessed, and in panic several fleeing geese crash through the treetops beyond the fence line. None seem to suffer more than a loss of pride.

  Arthur describes the scene to Selwyn, who expresses eagerness to meet Ulysses. The pup, elated with his triumph, is already bounding toward them with those amazing long strides. Typically, he
can’t find the brakes until he’s past them, sending up clumps of grass and dirt. Stefan hurries along behind, with his latest companion, Mouser, a one-eyed feral cat he’s tamed.

  Selwyn seems a little awed as he and Ulysses inspect each other, the dog’s nose probing in the usual inappropriate places.

  Arthur parts them, gives Ulysses a rub. “Good dog. Well done, boy.”

  “Majestic animal,” says Selwyn, then recites from William Robert Spencer’s paean to a brave wolfhound: “‘Oh, where does faithful Gelert roam, the flower of his race.’”

  Arthur completes the stanza: “‘So true, so brave, a lamb at home, a lion in the chase.’” It is not the first time he has bonded poetically with Selwyn, a lover of nineteenth-century romantics.

  Selwyn clasps Stefan’s hand. “Arthur tells me you have an amazing rapport with animals.”

  “It’s a little talent I have.”

  Solara hollers from the deck of her house: “I’m making us a picnic lunch. Y’all got half an hour.”

  2

  After Arthur shows Selwyn to his room and makes tea, they move to the parlour, sharing the sofa.

  “Selwyn, the bylaw issue you alleged that I fought so valiantly was actually a majestic flop, and I think you know it. You have not buttered me up without good reason.”

  “You see through me. Yes, you may not be completely at home in the civil courts but that pales against your mastery of the criminal side. Hear me out. You’re aware of the unusual event a few nights ago at Chemican’s plant in Sarnia?”

  “Of course.” Margaret had been on the phone about that break-in, which came almost on the heels of her successful bee funder.

  News reports had described a bizarre scene: a lithe, long-haired young man had sneaked into the plant, opened valves that emptied the tanks of Chemican’s infamous bee killer, Vigor-Gro, then raced past security masked in helmet, safety goggles, and two sets of ear protectors. He has not been found or identified. It complicates matters that one of the night watchmen collapsed while running away in fright, and is in a coma.