The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  I find Rory working on a laptop in his squat on the third floor of the building. A stained bedsheet he’s hung up in the window makes the room look even more drab and dusty. The only solid light comes from the glow of his screen and the greenish-lit aquarium that houses his turtle, Bubba. He has everything hooked up to a massive battery he charges at the laundromat once a day. Rory makes his money writing research papers for spoiled students with more money than brains. He steals his internet from the dilapidated library next door, where the only patrons are the bag ladies who sleep in between the shelves during the day. I’ve told him before there’s better money in writing mommy porn, tame S&M erotica for bored housewives. I know a guy who writes that stuff and publishes it online for ninety-nine cents a pop. He now flies to Iceland for the weekend with his girl on the thirty K he makes each month. I tried my hand at it once. You’d think I’d be good at commercial fiction, since it’s basically just writing down lies for cash, but it turns out it’s a little bit more than that.

  When Rory looks up from his laptop and sees me, he walks over to give a hug. I tolerate it as best I can, given I’m not much of a hugger. Rory had a bad smack habit a few years back, and my dad helped him dry out. Locked him in the basement at Rod’s and refused to let him out until he was over the worst of it. Threatened him with a quick death if he ever touched the stuff again. Even with my dad gone, he’s stayed straight. He loved the man for his help, and, by extension, me. Even if he did break every nail he had trying to scratch his way out through that cellar door.

  “How you doing, Candace?”

  “Good enough for rock ’n’ roll,” I say. But he can tell I’ve got more on my mind than that. “I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have the answers,” he says, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Then you can find someone who does.”

  Rory still has a hand in the game, supplying dope and coke to those who need it. Or guns, if their needs are more sophisticated. He’s the best type of guy to consult when looking for reliable information, able to navigate these filthy inner circles with his compass still straight and sober. He makes enough cash to afford something better than the squat, but he’s lived in these sorts of places most of his adult life and this squat has become his safe space. When he swore off his addiction it seems he needed to swear off most other creature comforts as well. He’s like a priest holed up in his monastic cell.

  “I want some information on the Daybreak Boys,” I tell him.

  “Shit, Candace. Can’t you get that information yourself?” Rory knows my dad used to work for the gang, providing the professional hits they needed to distance themselves from. But I don’t want to talk to them about Tyler and Lachlan. They’d end up asking too many questions of their own.

  “Not this time,” I say.

  Rory walks over to the aquarium, pinches some flakes from a canister, and drops them in for the turtle. Bubba swims nervously from one end to the other, his head bobbing back and forth, smashing at the glass. That turtle has never been the same since he got caught in the filter. “Okay,” he says, turning back to me. “What do you want to know?”

  “There’s a couple of kids I think might have been involved with them.”

  “Prospects?” Rory asks.

  I remember the leather jacket with the arms cut off that Malone and I picked up at the dry cleaners. “Maybe,” I say. “Although they could have just been dealing to their friends at the high school for them.”

  “The Daybreak Boys are cooking some pretty mean stuff for the average high-school kid.”

  “Yeah, I know the whole fentanyl thing. And that W-18 that’s a hundred times stronger.”

  “More than that,” Rory says. Bubba knocks his skinny turtle head more insistently on the glass.

  “What the hell can be more than that?”

  “They’re selling smack again.”

  “Big deal.” Heroin is hardly something the Daybreak Boys are unfamiliar with. They’re the ones who got Rory hooked on it in the first place.

  “Laced with W-18.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  There seems to be no end to the drug world’s creative development of shit that can kill you.

  “These kids, what’re their names?” asks Rory, putting the canister away. It has a picture of a red banana on it. Charlotte once went on a diet that consisted of only this colour of banana and green beans. The inside of her refrigerator looked like a Christmas decoration experiment gone terribly wrong.

  “Tyler Brent and Lachlan Reid,” I say. Bubba flips himself over, flailing in the tank. Rory reaches into the aquarium and sets him right again. When he pulls his arm out it’s covered in red banana flakes.

  “Isn’t one of those kids dead?” I guess Rory reads the papers, too.

  “Do you know anything about them or not?” I say.

  “What’s your interest?” He grabs a dingy cloth and towels off his arm.

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t.” He walks over and sits in an armchair that bleeds stuffing, pulls out a cigarette, and lights it. Tobacco is his only remaining addiction. “I can’t say I’ve heard the names in my travels. Other than the one kid’s murder.”

  “But you can make inquiries,” I say, taking a step toward him. He can tell I’m serious. It makes him curious and just a bit frightened.

  “Okay, Candace. I’ll do my best,” he says. I can see the yellow nicotine stains on his fingers, next to the school ring he got when he made valedictorian. That was before the Daybreak Boys introduced him to smack. My dad had hidden the ring from him so he wouldn’t hawk it, given it back when he got clean. It’s important to protect your past, he’d said. I watch as the tarry smoke of the cigarette wafts across the airless room toward me.

  “Make sure that you do, Rory.”

  I leave him with Bubba and the laptop, taking a deep breath of fresh air when I get outside. Cigarettes mixed with untapped potential always make me sick.

  CHAPTER 13

  “WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?”

  “I didn’t know this was like a day job, Malone.” When I came home after seeing Rory, there was a message to call Malone waiting at the E-Zee Market for me. I called her back and agreed to meet her on the corner of Summerton and Pine. Every street in this city is named after either a dead upper-class twit or a tree.

  As usual, I am riding in the back of the unmarked. I’m late because I had to pluck my eyebrows before I left. They’ve gotten a bit unruly lately. I’ve had a guy break my arm and never made a sound, but yanking those goddamn little hairs from between my eyes makes me blubber like a baby.

  Malone grits her teeth behind the wheel. I can see her in the rear-view mirror.

  “What are we in such a hurry for anyway?” I say. “Tyler Brent isn’t any more dead than he was yesterday.”

  “The first few days of an investigation are critical, Candace.”

  “Yeah, I may have heard that.”

  “And I finally got a subpoena to take Alice Corrigan in for an oral deposition. We need to go pick her up.” Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have called Malone back.

  When we pull up in the Corrigans’ driveway, the Mercedes AMG is still there, with the well-earned ding on the passenger side. It must be nice to have the cash to keep a hound like Lopez on retainer.

  The blonde answers the door. Her eyes flutter for a moment at the sight of me, and then her face resumes its usual paralysis. Not just because of the Botox. This is one badass woman, as I said before. She can play it cool with the best of the icy-hearted.

  Lopez and a man I assume is the husband sit on the couch with the blonde. We take a seat across the glass-and-chrome coffee table from them. I get the wingback chair with the embroidered satin upholstery. Malone gets a less comfortable Louis XVI knock-off. There is potpourri in a bowl on one of the end tables next to a ceramic Royal Doulton tart holding up her skirts.

  “I’m Detective Malone
, and this is my associate Ms. Fisher.”

  “This is Kristina and Greg Corrigan,” Lopez says, indicating his fellow couch mates.

  The blonde smiles and pours some lemon-infused Perrier into a tumbler of ice, not even looking up. Her husband consults his watch as if late for a meeting, which he probably is. Malone hands the subpoena to Alex Lopez. He spends a fair bit of time reading it before he hands it back to her.

  “I’m afraid Alice isn’t available for a deposition. She’s still extremely fragile, as we already told you.”

  “Fragile or not, Mr. Lopez, we have a subpoena.”

  “And I have a letter from Dr. Stephen Love stating that she is both suicidal and suffering from severe anxiety.” Dr. Love? Is this guy for real? But he hands Malone an envelope with embossed lettering on it. She puts it down on the coffee table without even opening it.

  “We sympathize with the young lady’s emotional state,” Malone says, nodding to the parents. “But we need to talk to her.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that you can’t,” Lopez says, adjusting his tie. He and Malone are in a pissing match. I wait to see whose yellow stream will reach across the coffee table first. I’m thinking it’ll be Malone for the win when she stands and looks up the circular staircase to the bedrooms. “Well, maybe I’ll just have to go and get her myself.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” the father says, glancing at his watch again. “Alice isn’t here.”

  The blonde looks at him like he just blurted out the brand of her favourite vibrator. Lopez adjusts the crease in his dress pants.

  “Her parents and her doctor thought it best for Alice to recover somewhere with fewer disruptions,” the lawyer says, taking back control of the conversation.

  “Where is she, Lopez?” Malone says, sitting down again, not even bothering with the niceties any longer.

  “She is staying with her maternal grandmother for an indeterminate amount of time,” he says.

  “Well, then I would ask that you provide us with that address,” Malone says, the terse tone of her voice making it clear she’s not really asking.

  “I could, but I don’t think it would do you much good.”

  “Maybe you’ll let me be the judge of that,” Malone tells him.

  The blonde, Kristina, takes a sip of Perrier and grimaces from the tartness of the lemon. Or perhaps it’s something else. “Alice left yesterday on a plane for Madrid. My mother has a home on the southern coast of Spain; she retired there some years back with my father. It’s the best place for our daughter right now.”

  “Madrid?” Malone says, not believing what she’s hearing. But I’m not that surprised. Kristina has rock-hard balls.

  “I have a copy of her itinerary here.” Lopez pulls yet another envelope from his briefcase. With all this useless fucking paper we could make Peter Pan party hats for all of us.

  “She left at eleven yesterday morning,” Kristina says. The day after we first tried to talk to Alice and right around the time Lachlan Reid was showing us the bloody T carved into his gut. These people don’t waste time.

  “You can confirm with the airline, if you wish,” the lawyer says. Malone is now clearly standing in a puddle of the lawyer’s urine. “But Mr. and Mrs. Corrigan would be happy to answer any questions you may have.”

  Kristina’s face goes blank, her version of welcoming. The father, Greg, looks impatient.

  “Fine,” Malone says, knowing this shit they’re pulling is anything but fine.

  We didn’t get much out of the parents. Yes, their daughter was in “some kind” of a relationship with Tyler Brent. No, they didn’t realize he had another girlfriend, but Kristina thought that Alice was about to break up with him anyway. She was a girl with more important priorities. Yeah, I think, like carving up Tyler’s nuts.

  They didn’t know Jessica Mendler or her parents. They didn’t travel in the same circles. I bet they didn’t. They also made it quite clear that their daughter didn’t involve herself with gangs or even with boys who might. Preposterous, Kristina Corrigan said, defending Tyler for probably the first time ever, if only to prevent his character from contaminating the family name. Malone spent a long time digging into that angle, asking for known associates, but she’s wasting her breath. After about fifteen minutes of dicking around, which is about as neutered as Malone’s subpoena, the father says he’s late for a meeting.

  “Can you tell me where Alice was last Saturday night?” Malone asks, checking off that box before we go.

  “Well, of course, she was here with both of us,” Kristina says, indicating her husband, who’s already risen from the couch and has an ear glued to his phone. “Saturday is family game night. I believe we played Life.” I remember playing that game as a kid, little pink and blue pegs in the cars representing all the family members. I always made my blue-peg husband sit in the back. Something tells me that most seventeen-year-old girls don’t stay home on a Saturday to play The Game of Life. They’re too busy living it.

  The lawyer leads us to the door. It’s not exactly a voluntary parade. I notice Alice’s school picture in the hallway and am struck again how much her hazel eyes look like her mother’s.

  “I don’t suppose you know anything, Detective Malone, about some damage sustained to my car?”

  “No, I don’t,” she says, her eyes sparking again. I guess it’s not just me who has that effect on her. “Have you filed a report?”

  “No, I haven’t,” he says. “But believe me, I will.” Then he slams the Corrigans’ door in our faces. If I didn’t want to get away from this house so badly, I’d go back in and strangle him with his designer skinny tie. But at least the blonde kept her head about her. She’s no singing scarlet tanager.

  “I can’t believe the nerve of that asshole,” Malone says as we get in the car. She watches her door this time as she opens it. Kristina Corrigan stands guard in the upstairs window, watching us.

  “Even if Alice isn’t guilty of something, they’re sure making it look like she is,” Malone says, looking over her shoulder as she puts the car in reverse. “Although it’s hard to believe a girl of that age could have done something so cold-blooded.” She pulls out of the driveway.

  I see Kristina Corrigan snap the heavy brocade curtains closed across the window, knowing that cold blood can be inherited just as easily as eye colour.

  There really isn’t that much to do but paperwork now. Malone has to go back to the office and work on something that might compel the Corrigans to put their daughter on a plane back to the States. Later she’ll supervise the removal of Lachlan Reid’s computer. The warrant for that just came through. She’s also trying to get a hold of the security company that Jessica Mendler’s father works for, to verify his alibi.

  She drops me where she picked me up, and I start walking over to Rod’s, taking a few nips from the silver-plated flask I lifted from the liquor store last night. Usually, I don’t bite the hand that feeds me, but it was just so damn shiny, I couldn’t resist. I thought originally that I’d give it to Uncle Rod as a peace offering, but the weight of it feels too good in my hand. I’ll tell him I called his mother. That’ll make him happy. I’ll even tell him I was talking about visiting the old lady. Better he hears it from me. And less suspicious.

  I knock and wait for him to answer the door, assuming he’s still steamed about the ladder. He greets me at the door with the look of a man forced to stay on a roof for two hours after it started to rain. Then he lets me in. The look mixed with the access says he’ll probably forgive me, but he’s going to make me suffer first. Charlotte is in the kitchen making meatloaf that she’s currently testing for doneness with an oven-mitted thumb. I guess the two of them made up.

  “Hi, Charlotte.”

  “Hi, Candace,” she says so icily I think the damn meat might freeze in the pan. She shoves the meatloaf back into the oven and turns up the temperature.

  “Well, well, well, the prodigal Scarpello returns,” Rod says, all snarky. He’s definitely
not going to make this easy.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Don’t leave me on the fucking roof again.”

  “I won’t.” I don’t tell him I’m sorry. Not my style.

  “Honestly, Candace, don’t ever try that bullshit again. Not with the likes of me. Sure, if you were anyone else, you’d be eating cod tongue through a straw.”

  “I was upset.”

  “As upset as Mrs. Boddis next door, who thought I was after seeing her in her girdle?”

  “Nobody wears girdles anymore, Uncle Rod.”

  “Well, then her Spank, or whatever you call it.”

  “Spanx,” Charlotte corrects him, leaning into the pass-through from the kitchen. Rod glares at her, and she beats a hasty retreat.

  “Whatever the case, it was a start for the old girl. I felt like a goddamn pervert.”

  “I called Agnes today,” I tell him.

  “My mother?” he asks, surprised. The mention of her softens him a little, but he’s still suspicious. “Why were you after calling her?”

  “I was thinking of maybe visiting her. The next time you go back home.”

  Rod smiles and his whole face changes. “Ah, she would be right tickled if you did that, wouldn’t she, Charlotte?”

  Charlotte mumbles from the kitchen, quite possibly remembering her own visit to Newfoundland and what happened afterward. I can still see the scar from the fishing lure hook at the base of one of Rod’s fingers. It’s shaped like a little white sailboat.

  “She said her sciatica is acting up,” I tell him, further trying to placate him with my recounting of the old woman’s afflictions.

  “Ah, that would be the weather,” he says. What is it with meteorology and these Newfies? They’d blame AIDS and 9/11 on the goddamn change of seasons if they could.

  He walks over to the couch. The coils inside squeak as he sits down. Not because he’s heavy but because the couch is probably older than his mother.