Forty Words for Sorrow

Someone had left The Toronto Star on one of the chairs, and Woody snatched it up. ‘The Leafs, man. I can’t believe this team. It’s like they have this appetite for self-destruction. This craving. So unhealthy.’

‘Woody, listen to me.’ Delorme took the paper with its two-column headline: No Leads on the Windigo Killer. ‘That bunch of burglaries down Water Road is giving me hives, okay? I’ve got you cold for the Willow Drive job, but I know you did the others too. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time and energy: confess to one, we’ll maybe forget the others.’

‘Now hold on.’

‘Confess to one, that’s all I’m saying, and I’ll see what I can do. I know you did the others too.’

‘Hold your horses, there, Officer Delorme. You don’t know I did them.’ Woody’s grin was beatific; it held no trace of guile or suspicion or malign intent. Honest men should have such grins. ‘You’re indulging in exaggeration, plain and simple. If you suspect me of some old burglary, well, I can understand that – I have been known to keep company with objects not my own, after all. But suspect is not know. You could drive a Mack truck between suspect and know.’

‘There’s another count, Woody. Suppose somebody actually saw you? Then what? Suppose somebody actually saw a blue ChevyVan pulling away from the Nipissing Motor Court?’ The proprietor of the motel hadn’t in fact got a decent look at him, but he had seen someone driving off in a van just like Woody’s. Three thousand dollars’ worth of TVs missing. No jewellery.

‘Well, if the guy saw me, I guess you’d put me in a lineup. Ms Delorme, you’re single, aren’t you?’

‘Suppose they saw your van, Woody? Suppose we have a licence plate?’

‘Well, if they give you the licence plate, I guess you better hang me for that one. You look single to me. You have the air of a single person. Officer Delorme, you ought to get married. I don’t know how I’d get through life without Martha and Truckie. Family? Children? Why, it halves the sorrows of life and doubles the pleasures. It’s the single most important thing there is. And police work involves a lot of pressures.’

‘Try and pay attention, Woody. A blue ChevyVan was seen driving away from the job on Water Road. You say you were home, but other witnesses say your van was not parked in your driveway. Add that to the one who saw your van at the scene, and what do you come up with? Ten years.’

‘How can you even say that to me? Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. Hell, you know as well as I do, nobody ever sees me. I like to go about my work undisturbed. God’s sake, ma’am, I didn’t get into this business to meet people.’

Sergeant Flower knocked on the door. ‘His wife’s here. She paid his bail.’

‘I’m going to nail you for the whole bunch, Woody. You can make a plea now, or you can make me catch you. But I’m going to nail you for the whole bunch.’

‘If I wanted to meet people, I’d be a mugger.’

One ability Delorme prided herself on was a knack for putting anything that wasn’t immediately essential out of her mind. When, later that afternoon, she drove along the winding south branch of Peninsula Road, Arthur Wood had left her thoughts entirely and she was once more in the murky waters of Corporal Musgrave’s suspicions.

The road got narrower and narrower, until tree branches heavy with snow scratched at the roof of the car. The white woods reminded her of a sleigh ride long ago. Thirteen-year-old Ray Duroc and she had lain among the heap of juvenile bodies and kissed with closed mouths until her lips were bruised. Last she heard, Ray was living on the other side of the world – Australia or New Zealand or some damn place – where the trees were green instead of white and the sun actually put out some heat.

She noted the names on the mailboxes, then a sharp left, and then she was almost past the driveway before she saw it. There was no name nailed to the tree. She parked the car on the side of the road and went down the driveway on foot. There was a big brown Mercedes at the end of the drive. Delorme didn’t even want to think what it had cost.

After Corporal Musgrave, former senior constable Joe Burnside was pure oxygen. Joe Burnside was blond, six-foot-four in his socks – where does the RCMP find this species, Delorme wondered – and happy as a clam. ‘You’re working Special? I know you. You’re the one that bagged Mayor Wells! Come in! Come in!’

Delorme shed her boots and joined him in the kitchen, where he poured her a steaming cup of coffee. She revised her estimate: six-foot-six if he’s an inch.

‘Man, you gotta get out of police work and into the money,’ he was telling her ten minutes later. They were sitting in overstuffed armchairs that faced a blinding white view of Four Mile Bay. ‘With your background? Your achievements? You’re perfect! Look at me – eight years a corporal in the Commercial Crimes Unit and now I’ve got my own business – me! Joe Burnside! Trust me, I’m the last guy I would have thought could do it and I’m telling you, I’m turning offers away. There’s more work than we can handle. And you know where it’s not going? It’s not going to the RCMP. Excuse me a second.’ He crossed to a couch where a bony old collie was curled up asleep. He bent down close to its head and yelled, loud enough for it to hurt Delorme’s ears, ‘Get offa there, you lazy-ass good-for-nothing mutt!’

The dog opened a glassy eye and regarded him calmly.

‘Deaf as a post,’ he muttered, and pulled the dog from the couch by its collar, leading it like a pony to the fireplace, where it lay down once more and returned immediately to its canine dreams. ‘Everybody says I should put him down. Well, people that don’t have dogs say put him down. They don’t cost you a dime for fifteen years, then the minute they get sick, people say kill ’em. Sorry, you want to talk business. Puts me off, though. People have no loyalty. How long you been doing white-collar?’

‘Six years.’

‘You see what’s happening? With cutbacks? I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll tell you, the Mounties are just toothless. Toothless. They’re taking everybody off white-collar and putting them on the street – you know why? Because street work is visible and white-collar isn’t. People like to see their tax dollars at work. And with the Mounties going out of business, that means someone’s gotta take up the slack. Good ol’ private enterprise. Which – I’m happy to say – is me. A two-month investigation on copyright infringement? Piracy? Forty thousand bucks. And Corporate America is happy to pay it – it’s mostly US companies that hire us. And the great thing about Americans, they don’t trust you unless you ask for a lot of money.’

He’s born again, Delorme thought, he should be a preacher. But all she said was, ‘Kyle Corbett.’

‘Ohhh,’ Burnside groaned theatrically. ‘Don’t remind me. Kyle Corbett. That one really hurt.’

‘You had the background sewn up. You had solid stuff. It was you and Jerry Commanda all the way.’

‘We had a source. Good source, too. Guy named Nicky Bell worked with Corbett for years, but happened to be facing an unrelated charge on computer porn that Corbett didn’t know about.’

‘And he gave you a time and a place.’

‘A time? A place? No, no, no, Nicky Bell was the best singer since Gordy Lightfoot. He gave us months of stuff. Me and Jerry picked that bird clean. But the big windup was gonna be at the Crystal Disco out behind Airport Road, and for that we needed one of your guys. We got John Cardinal – smart guy, but always depressed, it seemed to me.’

‘What happened then?’

The affable manner disappeared. Burnside’s face – formerly as bright and wide open as Four Mile Bay – suddenly darkened. It was like an eclipse. ‘You know what happened,’ he said. ‘Or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘You hit the club. You came up empty.’

‘Bingo.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing. That’s just the point, isn’t it. Everything went right. Everything went exactly according to plan. It was like watching the insides of a Swiss watch. Except for the ending. Corbett was tipped off. You know it and I know it. But if you’re expecting me to say who I think did it, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s no proof of anything.’

‘What did your source tell you?’

‘Nicky? If you think anybody’s ever going to see Nicky Bell again, you’re in the wrong line of work. Wife confirmed there was a suitcase missing from his house, some clothes were gone, but I think that’s just cover. I think Kyle Corbett sent him to the bottom of Trout Lake.’

The dog was back on the couch, but Burnside didn’t seem to notice.

As Delorme was putting her boots on, he looked her up and down. She got a lot of that, but for once she didn’t think it was sexual. ‘You’re working that Windigo thing too, aren’t you? Well, I know you are.’

‘Yeah, I am. I’m moving out of Special.’

‘Windigo’s an ugly case.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘A real ugly case, Ms Delorme. But investigating your own partner, well, there’s a lot of cops – Mounties, OPP, you name it – a hell of a lot of cops would say investigating your own partner’s a lot uglier.’

‘Thanks for the coffee. I needed warming up.’ Delorme did up the snaps of her coat, put on her gloves. ‘But I never said who I was investigating.’

13

D’Anunzio’s was still a magnet for teenagers, just as it had been when Cardinal was growing up. Part fruit store, part soda fountain, at first glance D’Anunzio’s had always been an unlikely hangout. But Joe D’Anunzio, with the manners of a monk and the girth of an opera star, numbered everyone who came into his store among his friends. He looked after his soda fountain with the expertise of an old-time bartender and treated his young patrons like his old ones, letting them linger for hours in the wooden booths at the back over their Cokes and chips and chocolate bars. As kids, Cardinal and the other altar boys had always trooped over from the cathedral after mass, and later, when they had grown out of their surplices and soutanes, they would come to D’Anunzio’s instead of mass – substituting Rothmans and Player’s for the frankincense, Aero bars and ice-cream floats for the bread and wine.

Cardinal sipped his coffee and watched the kid playing the video game.

In Cardinal’s day it had been a pinball machine. Pinball was more physical, less hypothetical, and for your nickel you got lots of bells and rattles. Under the ministrations of the youth at the controls, its replacement uttered an irritating series of beeps and boops.

‘When did that house burn down, Joe?’

‘Over on Main there?’ Joe served cherry Cokes to two blond girls who had their hair cut identically: buzzed on one side, long on the other. Both sported nostril studs, which looked to Cardinal like chrome zits. In his day the girls had worn their hair long and parted in the middle, giving them – at least to Cardinal’s nostalgic eye – a gentle, soulful look. Why did these girls scar themselves with fashion?

Joe came back the length of the counter to the cash register. ‘November, I think it was. Early November. Must’ve been five or six fire trucks out there.’

‘You sure it wasn’t later? After New Year’s?’

‘Definitely not. It was before my hernia operation, and that was November tenth.’ Joe swung his girth around and poured more coffee into Cardinal’s cup. ‘How could you miss a fire like that?’

Two missing kids. And November was when Catherine had started to drift. Cardinal had had other things on his mind.

He took his coffee to the other end of the counter, near the front window. On the west side of the square, a funeral was coming out of the cathedral, four men in black suits bearing a coffin on their shoulders. They had to be freezing with no overcoats on. Across the square in the empty lot stood a man wearing a green and gold parka with matching toque. He was writing notes of some kind, his breath ragged plumes lit by the sun.

Cardinal left the soda fountain and dodged through the traffic on Algonquin. The man was filling in a form on a clipboard. Cardinal introduced himself.

‘Tom Cooper. Cooper Construction. Just certifying our lack of progress with the demolition guys. They were supposed to clear the entire mess away by Tuesday. It’s now Friday. It’s hard to find professionals in this town. I mean real professionals.’

‘Mr Cooper, I imagine a contractor keeps an eye out for lots like this. You wouldn’t happen to know of any other vacant houses on Main West?’

‘Nope. Not on Main West. Got one over on MacPherson. Another one out on Trout Lake. But in town here they don’t stay empty long.’

‘It’s just I heard there was an empty place on Main West. Empty in December, anyway. Some teenagers were hanging out there, possibly a drug thing. You hear about anywhere like that?’ Cardinal could hear the hush in his voice. Such a frail thread, this lead, the slightest weight might snap it.

Cooper pressed the clipboard under one elbow and squinted west up the street, as if an empty house might appear there. ‘Nothing on Main that I know of. Oh, but maybe you’re thinking of Timothy.’ He swung back around, seeming to pivot on his heels. ‘It’s not really a Main Street address, but it’s on the corner.’

‘The corner of Timothy and Main? By the railroad tracks?’

Cooper nodded. ‘That’s it. No way teenagers were hanging out there, though. Place is sealed tight as a drum. It’s been in probate court for over two years. Contentious family’s what I heard.’

‘Mr Cooper, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘This wouldn’t be in reference to that wretched Windigo thing, would it?’

Cooper, like everyone else in Algonquin Bay, was keeping abreast of the case. Any suspects? Was it strictly a local thing? Any chance of the Mounties coming in on it? You couldn’t blame people for being curious. Cardinal had to listen to a theory involving a satanic cult before he could get free.

He drove the half-dozen blocks to Timothy Street, taking it slow over the ridge of the railroad tracks. The northern line was mostly freights taking oil up to Cochrane and Timmins. The hoot of its whistle as it crossed Timothy woke Cardinal every night when he was a kid. A lonely sound but somehow comforting, like the cry of a loon.

The house was an old Victorian place with a wraparound veranda. The red brick above the boarded-up windows was blackened with years of railway soot, so that the building looked not just blind but black-eyed. Massive icicles were fixed to the roof corners like gargoyles. The yard, which was large by Algonquin Bay standards, was surrounded by a high hedge.

Cardinal got out of the car and stood on the snow where the front path should have been. Except for the faint hieroglyphics of bird tracks, there was not a single footprint.

The stairs to the veranda were filled in with hardpack snow. Gripping the rail, Cardinal stomped his way up and examined the front door, also boarded over. The public trustee’s seal was intact. The lock had not been tampered with. He checked the boarded-up windows, and then did the same around the side of the house.

The crossing bell started to clang, and as he checked the side door a train clattered by, a long one.

Anyone breaking into this house would be likely to go through the back: there was nothing there but the high hedge and the railroad tracks. And thieves liked basement windows. Trouble was, the basement windows were buried below the snow. Using the heel of his boot, Cardinal dug a trench along the back wall of the house.

‘Damn.’ He’d scraped the back of his leg on the thick crust of ice. About four feet from the corner he found the top of a window. After clearing away the crust, he pulled the rest of the snow away with his hands.

‘Gotcha,’ he said quietly.

The Provincial Court in Algonquin Bay is on McGinty Street. It’s a modern, plain brick building with no pretensions; it might be a school or a clinic. Perhaps in compensation for its plainness, the sign that announces it as Provincial Court, District of Nipissing, is the size of a highway billboard.

The receptionist told him Justice Paul Gagnon was in traffic court until lunch, and lunch was booked for a meeting.

‘See if he’ll squeeze me in, will you. It’s for the Katie Pine case.’ Cardinal knew Gagnon would never grant him a search warrant to pursue some runaway Mississauga youth who was now over the age of sixteen. He filled out the necessary form and, while waiting for court to get out, called in to headquarters. Delorme was out on the Woody case and was not expected back for at least another hour. Cardinal felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her out of this; she’d been upset about handling his backlog.

Justice Gagnon was a small man with very small feet and a toupee that was two shades lighter than his hair. He was a few years younger than Cardinal, a completely political animal whose robe drowned him as if he were a child. His voice was a reedy pipe.

‘Sounds pretty feeble, Detective.’ Gagnon hung his robe on a coathook and put on a camel-hair sports coat. ‘You think the person who killed Katie Pine and abducted Billy LaBelle may have stayed in the Cowart house? And you base this on information received second-hand from Ned Fellowes at the Crisis Centre – information that doesn’t even relate directly to the killer but to another missing person, this Todd Curry.’ Gagnon checked his tie in the mirror.

‘The house was broken into, your Worship. I’m sure the parties contesting the will would want that investigated anyway. But if I go through them, it’s going to take a long time and upset people who are already upset about the will.’

Gagnon’s skeptical eye fixed him in the mirror. ‘For all you know, it may be one of the family who broke in. Maybe to haul off some contested stick of furniture. Family heirloom. Who knows?’

‘The window is only about ten inches high, maybe two and half feet wide.’

‘Jewellery, then. Grandpa’s pocket watch. My point, Detective, is that you have no substantive reason to suspect a killer was there.’

‘It’s the only place I have reason to suspect the killer set foot, other than the shaft head on Windigo Island. He likes deserted buildings maybe. The Curry kid was last seen alive saying he was going to stay in an abandoned house on Main Street.’

Gagnon sat down behind a desk that dwarfed him and examined the form. ‘Detective, this address is on Timothy.’

‘It’s at the corner of Main. It looks like it’s on Main. The Curry kid was from out of town. He probably thought it was Main Street.’

Justice Gagnon looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to run. I have a lunch with Bob Greene.’ Bob Greene was the local member of parliament, a voluble fool of the back benches.

‘Just sign the warrant, your Worship, I’ll be out of your hair. We have zero leads on Billy LaBelle, and as for Katie Pine, this is it. This is all we’ve got.’ Katie Pine was the magic number – Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle were a combination that would slip the tumblers in Gagnon’s tiny heart. Cardinal could hear the mechanism turning over: famous case equals opportunity. Opportunity seized equals advancement. Personal advancement equals justice.

The JP furrowed his toy brow, timing his resistance like a modestly talented actor. ‘If there were people living in this house, no way would I sign this. No way would I let you disrupt a sovereign household on grounds this tenuous.’

‘Believe me, your Worship, I know how tenuous this is. I wish I had something ironclad to give you, but unfortunately the killer decided not to leave his name and address next to Katie Pine’s body.’

‘That’s not a high moral tone, I hope. You’re not lecturing me, are you?’

‘God, no. If I wanted to lecture JPs I’d have been a politician.’

Justice Gagnon vanished into his overcoat as if into a fog, then re-emerged decisively from cuffs and collar. He snatched up the bible from his desk and shoved it at Cardinal. ‘Do you swear the contents in the application are true, so help you God?’

Five minutes later Cardinal was back at the Cowart place, scooping snow away in handfuls from in front of the basement window. His knees were numb as wood. The snow was stratified into alternate layers of powder and ice. Cardinal went back to the car and retrieved a shovel from the trunk.

There were crowbar marks at both ends of the two-by-four that held the plywood in place, and the nails were loose. The two-by-four came away easily, then the plywood. There was no pane of glass behind it.

Cardinal removed his down coat, and the frigid air sucked the breath out of him. He dropped to his knees and crawled backwards into the opening, lowering himself inside. Snow got under his shirt and into his pants, melting against his skin. He could feel a platform, possibly a table, under his feet. Whoever had broken in had probably put it there to ease his exit.

Cardinal pulled his coat inside after him, fought with the zipper, then stood there on the table flapping his arms and exclaiming at the cold. The few footcandles of light that squeezed through the window did little to ease the darkness.

He climbed down from the table – a laundry table, he could now see – and switched on his flashlight. It was a heavy-duty instrument that took six D-cells and on occasion had doubled as a billy club; the glass was cracked and the tube dented. It swept a white beam like a cape over the silent furnace, the washer and dryer, a tool bench he immediately envied. There was a drop saw he’d seen going at Canadian Tire for close to five hundred.

Even in the cold he could smell the stone and dust, the raw old wood, the laundry smells from the washer and dryer. He opened a door, breaking old spiderwebs with his flashlight, and found shelves of preserves – peaches, prunes, even a gallon of red peppers that looked like fresh hearts.

The stairs were new, unfinished and open. The flashlight beam revealed no obvious footprints, but Cardinal kept to the edges and took the stairs two at a time to preserve any marks he might have missed.

The door opened to the kitchen. Cardinal stood for a moment to take in the feel of the house. Cold and dark, it exuded despair. Cardinal held in check the excitement of the chase, the sense of something about to happen. He had long ago learned to distrust such feelings; they were almost always wrong. Evidence of intruders did not mean a killer had been here, or even the errant Todd Curry.

The kitchen looked untouched. A thin layer of dust covered every surface. A narrow flight of stairs was tucked in the corner with a cupboard underneath. Cardinal lifted the latch with the toe of his boot, revealing neat rows of canned food. On the wall above the cupboard, a calendar from a local sporting goods store showed a man fishing in a plaid hunter’s jacket with a little boy laughing beside him. A sudden memory of Kelly, a summer vacation, a cottage; her little girl’s excitement at catching the fish, her squeamishness at baiting the hook; how his daughter’s brassy hair had flashed against the deep blue sky. The calendar showed July, two years ago, the month the owner had died.

In the plastic garbage pail he found nothing but a crushed donut carton from Tim Hortons.

The dining room was furnished with heavy old furniture, and Cardinal, no expert in such matters, had no idea if it was antique or reproduction. The painting on the wall looked old and vaguely famous, but Cardinal was no art critic either. Kelly had been appalled one day to discover he had no idea who the Group of Seven were, stars of Canadian art history apparently. The glass doors of a cabinet displayed pretty glassware, neatly arranged. Cardinal opened a cupboard and found bottles of Armagnac and Seagram’s VO. The chair at the head of the table was the only one with arms, and the fabric was a good deal more worn than the others. Had the old man continued to eat at the place of honour long after his family had dispersed? Had he sat here, imagining his wife and children around him?