Forty Words for Sorrow

They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.

‘Don’t ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn’t want to wake the kids.’

Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. ‘Downstairs,’ he said.

Delorme walked through the basement, amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men’s club. Fake Tudor beams criss-crossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble flame flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R.J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay police department.

Kendall had an open, congenial manner, perhaps partly to compensate for his small stature (Delorme was a head taller than the chief), and a big laugh that he used all the time, often accented with a backslap. He laughed too much, in Delorme’s opinion; it made him seem nervous, which perhaps he was, but she had also seen that genial manner vanish in an instant. When angered, which was thankfully not often, R.J. Kendall was a shouter and a curser. The whole department had heard him tear up one side of Adonis Dyson and down the other for undermanning the winter fur carnival, with the result that it became a noisy, rowdy affair that made the front page of the Lode for all the wrong reasons.

And yet Dyson still spoke highly of Kendall, as did most people who carried shrapnel wounds from one of his explosions. Once his anger was over, it was really over, and he usually made a gesture or two to soothe ruffled feathers. In Dyson’s case he’d gone out of his way – on TV – to give Dyson credit for downturns in robberies and assaults. It was far more than his predecessor would have done.

Dyson himself was in one of the red leather armchairs talking to someone Delorme couldn’t see. He waved a languid hand in her direction, as if midnight meetings were routine with him.

The chief jumped up to shake Delorme’s hand. He must have been in his late fifties, but he affected a boyish air, the way some powerful men do. ‘Sergeant Delorme. Thanks for getting here so fast. And on such short notice. Can I get you a drink? Off-hours, I think we can afford to relax a little.’

‘No, thank you, sir. This time of night, it would just knock me out.’

‘We’ll get right down to it, then. Someone I want you to meet. Corporal Malcolm Musgrave, RCMP.’

Watching Corporal Malcolm Musgrave emerge from the red leather chair was like watching a mountain emerge from the plains. He had his back to Delorme, so the granite block of head emerged first, pale hair trimmed to no more than a sandy bristle, then the escarpment of shoulders, vast cliff-face of chest as he turned toward her, and finally the rock formation of his handshake, dry and cool as shale. ‘Heard about you,’ he said to Delorme. ‘Nice job on the mayor.’

‘I’ve heard about you, too,’ Delorme told him, and Dyson shot her a dark glance. Musgrave had killed two men in the line of duty. Both times there had been hearings about the use of excessive force, and both times he had got off. Delorme thought, We really get our man.

‘Corporal Musgrave is with the Sudbury detachment. He’s their number two man in commercial crime.’

Delorme knew that, of course. The RCMP no longer maintained a local detachment, so Algonquin Bay fell within Sudbury’s jurisdiction. As federal police, the RCMP worked any crimes of national import: drugs at a national level, counterfeiting, commercial crime. Now and again the Algonquin Bay police would work with them on major drug busts, but as far as Delorme knew, Musgrave himself never put in an appearance.

‘Corporal Musgrave has a little bedtime story for us,’ the chief said. ‘You won’t like it.’

‘Have you heard of Kyle Corbett?’ Musgrave’s eyes were the palest blue Delorme had ever seen, almost transparent. It was like being scrutinized by a husky.

Yes, she had heard of Kyle Corbett. Everyone had heard of Kyle Corbett. ‘Big drug dealer, no? Doesn’t he control everything north of Toronto?’

‘Obviously, Special Investigations keeps you off the street. Kyle Corbett cleaned up his act at least three years ago, when he discovered counterfeiting. You’re surprised. You thought when Ottawa changed to coloured bills we stumped the counterfeiters, right? Bad guys all moved on to those oh-so-boring and oh-so-easy-to-copy American bills. You’re absolutely right, they did. Then a small thing came along called a colour copier. And another little item called a scanner. And now every Tom, Dick and Harry’s going into the office on Saturday morning and printing himself a batch of phony twenties. Major headache for the Treasury. And you know what? I couldn’t care less.’ Those arctic eyes sizing her up.

Delorme shrugged. ‘It’s not costing the taxpayer enough?’

‘Good,’ Musgrave said, as if she were his pupil. ‘Bogus Canadian currency costs businesses and individuals some five million dollars a year. Chicken feed. And like I say, it’s mostly weekend counterfeiters.’

‘So why the fuss about Corbett? If you don’t care about phony money –’

‘Kyle Corbett is not counterfeiting money. Kyle Corbett is counterfeiting credit cards. Suddenly we’re not talking five million dollars. Suddenly we’re talking a hundred million. And that’s not Bob’s All-Nite Esso getting hit. Or Ethel’s Kountry Kitchen. We’re talking major banks, and believe me, when Bank of Montreal and Toronto Dominion get upset, we hear about it loud and clear. Which is why our guys and your guys – not to mention the OPP’s guys – have been working a JFO for the past three years, trying to take Corbett down.’

Dyson leaned forward, apparently worried at being left out of the conversation. ‘Joint Forces Operation. November 1997.’

‘November 1997. JFO includes our guys, Jerry Commanda with OPP, and your guys McLeod and Cardinal. We have solid information that Corbett’s happy band of brothers has a stamping machine, five thousand blanks and a very expensive supply of holograms at his club out behind Airport Road. But when the forces of righteousness swoop down, Corbett and Co. are doing nothing more exciting than playing pool and drinking Molson’s.’

The chief was now thrashing at the fire with a poker, sending sparks flying. ‘Tell her Episode Two.’

‘August 1998. Solid intelligence puts Corbett and his merry men in West Ferris with Perfect Circle. You’ve never heard of Perfect Circle, so don’t pretend you have. Perfect Circle runs the biggest counterfeiting operation in Hong Kong. They have reciprocity with Corbett. In other words, they exchange stolen account numbers for use overseas. You buy a new Honda in Toronto with an American Express card out of Kowloon and, before anyone’s the wiser, you’ve driven it to hell and gone. And vice versa. Perfect Circle, as their name suggests, also manufacture dead-perfect holograms. They’re Asian, right? High tech is in their blood.

‘Meanwhile, our two horsemen have gone their separate ways: one’s quit to go into the private sector, the other’s doing fifteen-to-life for killing his wife.’

‘Right. The high-rise guy.’

‘If you’d met his wife, you’d know why. Your Detective McLeod gets wired to the Corriveau murders, and the OPP has Jerry Commanda sequestered in Ottawa on some no-doubt crucially important training course.’

‘There’s no need to malign ongoing officer education,’ the chief put in. ‘Your point is, Detective Cardinal turns out to be the single unit of law-enforcement continuity on Kyle Corbett.’

‘Exactly. Drum roll, please.’

Kendall turned to Dyson. ‘Didn’t you tell me there were rumours about Cardinal when he worked in Toronto?’

‘We did our homework, Chief. There was nothing substantial.’

Musgrave didn’t even slow down. ‘Age of globalization. Perfect Circle are doing the grand tour from Hong Kong to BC to strengthen their linkage in Vancouver. Solid information says they’re headed for Toronto, stopping off for a courtesy call in Algonquin Bay. According to this information, Corbett and the Yellow Peril have a meet set for the Pine Crest Hotel – the Pine Crest! It’s like they’re the Ladies Auxiliary or something. Perfect Circle guys arrive on time. Appointed hour rolls around, JFO stakes out the hotel. No, we did not do the musical ride. And no, we were not in full-dress uniform. This was a strictly old-clothes operation. Guess what happens?’

Delorme didn’t say anything. Corporal Musgrave was enjoying his pedagogical act; it wouldn’t do to interrupt the flow.

‘Nothing happens. No Corbett. No Perfect Circle. No meeting. Once more, the combined forces of the RCMP, the OPP and the Algonquin Bay police department have come up empty. Dumb flatfoots. So stupid. Can’t get anything right.’

The chief was standing by the fireplace, poker in hand, his face in shadow. It was rare to spend more than ten minutes with R.J. and not hear that preposterous laugh of his, but hearing Musgrave’s horseman’s tale had clearly depressed him. He said in a subdued voice, ‘It gets worse.’

It did indeed get worse. Another piece of solid information. Another date and time. The single change: this time, Jerry Commanda was back playing left wing for the OPP. Another raid. Another zero. ‘This time,’ Musgrave added, ‘Corbett files suit for harassment.’

‘I remember that,’ Delorme said. ‘I thought that was pretty funny.’

Dyson glared at her.

Musgrave shifted in his chair. It was like watching a continent change shape. ‘You’ve got the facts. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. You have any questions?’

‘Just one,’ Delorme said. ‘What exactly do you mean by “solid”?’

That was the only time the chief had laughed that night. Nobody else cracked a smile.

Now, two months later, Delorme was feeding the shredder in her Special Investigations office and hoping without much optimism that her new partner would come to trust her. As she carried a wastebasket full of shreds to the incinerator, she saw Cardinal putting on his coat. ‘You need me to do anything?’ she asked him.

‘Nope. We got a positive ID back on the dental records. I’m just going out to tell Dorothy Pine.’

‘You sure you don’t want me to come?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll see you later.’

Terrific, Delorme muttered to herself as she dumped the trash. He doesn’t even know I’m running a check on him, and still he doesn’t want me for a partner. Great start.

6

To reach the Chippewa Reserve, you follow Main Street west past the railroad tracks and make a left just after the St Joseph’s mother house, formerly a Catholic girls’ school and now a home for retired nuns, at the junction with Highway 17. There are no signs to the Chippewa Reserve, no gates; the Ojibwa have suffered so much at the hand of the white man that to lock the door against him now would be pointless.

The most remarkable thing about entering the reserve, Cardinal often thought, is that you don’t know you’re on the reserve. One of his very first girlfriends had lived up here, and even then he hadn’t registered its status as a separate enclave. The prefab bungalows, the slightly battered cars parked in the drives, the mutts chasing each other over the snowbanks – these could belong to any lower middle-class neighbourhood in Canada. Of course the jurisdiction changed – law enforcement here was in the hands of the OPP – but you couldn’t see that. The only visible difference from any other part of Algonquin Bay was, well, the place was full of Indians, a people who for the most part moved through Canadian society – or rather, alongside it – as silent and invisible as ghosts.

A shadow nation, Cardinal thought. We don’t even know they’re there. He had stopped a hundred yards past the turnoff, and now, since the day was sunny and a seasonable minus ten, he was walking with Jerry Commanda along the side of the road toward a perfectly white bungalow.

When not encased in a down parka, Jerry was extremely thin, almost frail-looking – a deceptive morphology, because he also happened to be a four-time provincial kick-boxing champion. You never saw what Jerry did exactly, but the most recalcitrant villain, in the course of a disagreement with him, would suddenly turn up horizontal and in a highly vocal mood of compliance.

Cardinal had never been partnered with him, but McLeod had, and McLeod claimed that, had they lived two hundred years earlier, he would have probably turned on his ancestors and happily fought the white man at Jerry’s side. The detectives had held a big party for Jerry when he left, a party he did not attend, being no lover of sentiment or fuss. When he moved to OPP, he could have taken an assignment at any of the townships the provincial force covered, but he had asked to work exclusively on reserves. He got the same pay as the municipal police, except – a point on which he was infuriatingly verbose – he was exempt from income tax.

Last night, Jerry had irritated him by pretending he hadn’t been aware of Cardinal’s exile from homicide. Jerry’s sense of humour tended to be opaque. And he had a disarming habit, perhaps ingrained in him from countless hours of tripping up suspects under interrogation, of changing topics suddenly. He did so now, by asking about Catherine.

Catherine was fine, Cardinal told him, in a tone that suggested they move on to something else.

‘What about Delorme?’ Jerry asked. ‘How’re you getting along with Delorme? She can be kind of prickly.’

Cardinal told him Delorme was fine too.

‘She has a nice shape, I always thought.’

Cardinal, though it made him uncomfortable, thought so too. It was no problem having an attractive woman working in Special – with a separate office, separate cases. It was another to have her for a partner.

‘Lise is a good woman,’ Jerry said. ‘Good investigator, too. Took guts to nail the mayor the way she did. I would have chickened out. I knew she’d get tired of that white-collar stuff, though.’ He waved to an old man walking a dog across the street. ‘Of course, she could be investigating you.’

‘Thanks, Jerry. That’s just what I wanted to hear.’

‘Got our new street lights working,’ Jerry said, pointing. ‘Now we can see how homey it’s getting around here.’

‘New paint jobs, too, I notice.’

Jerry nodded. ‘My summer project. Any kid I caught drinking had to paint an entire house. Made them all white because it’s more painful. You ever try to paint a house white in the summer?’

‘No.’

‘Hurts your eyes like a bastard. The kids hate me now, but I don’t care.’

They didn’t hate him, of course. Three dark-eyed boys carrying skates and hockey sticks had been following them since Jerry came out of his house. One of them threw a snowball that hit Cardinal in the arm. He packed some snow together in gloveless hands and hurled one back, way off the mark. Must have been ten years since he’d thrown anything other than a tantrum. A skirmish ensued, Jerry taking a couple of missiles indifferently in his skinny chest.

‘Ten to one the little guy is your relative,’ Cardinal said. ‘Little smartass there.’

‘He’s my nephew. Handsome like his uncle, too.’ Jerry Commanda, all hundred and forty pounds of him, was indeed handsome.

The boys were chattering in Ojibwa, of which Cardinal, no linguist, understood not a word. ‘What are they saying?’

‘They’re saying he walks like a cop but he throws like a girl, maybe he’s a faggot.’

‘How sweet.’

‘My nephew says, “He’s probably going to arrest Jerry for stealing that fucking paint.”’ Jerry continued translating in his monotone. ‘“That’s the cop that was here last fall – the asshole that couldn’t find Katie Pine.”’

‘Jerry, you missed your calling. You should have been a diplomat.’ Later, it occurred to him that Jerry might not have been translating at all; it would have been like him.

They walked around a shiny new pickup, approaching the Pine house now.

‘I know Dorothy Pine pretty well. You want me to come with you?’

Cardinal shook his head. ‘Maybe you could stop in later, though.’

‘Okay, I’ll do that. What kind of person kills a little girl, John?’

‘They’re rare, thank God. That’s why we’ll catch him. He’ll be different from other people.’ Cardinal wished he were as certain of this as he sounded.

Asking Dorothy Pine last September for the name of her daughter’s dentist – so he could get her chart – was the hardest thing Cardinal had ever had to do. Dorothy Pine’s face, the heavy features scarred by a ferocious, burnt-out case of acne, had expressed no trace of grief. He was white, he was the law, why should she?

Until then, her only experience of the police had been their sporadic arrests of her husband, a gentle soul who used to beat her without mercy when drunk. He had gone to Toronto to find work shortly after Katie’s tenth birthday and had found instead the business end of a switchblade in a Spadina Road flophouse.

Cardinal’s finger shook a little as he rang the doorbell.

Dorothy Pine, a tiny woman who barely cleared his waist, opened the door and looked up at him and knew instantly why he had come. She had no other children; there could be only one reason.

‘Okay,’ she said, when he told her Katie’s body had been found. Just the one word, ‘Okay,’ and she started to shut the door. Case closed. Her only child was dead. Cops – let alone white cops – could be of no assistance here.

‘Mrs Pine, I wonder if you’d let me in for a few minutes. I’ve been off the case for a couple of months and I need to refresh my memory.’

‘What for? You found her now.’

‘Well, yes, but now we want to catch whoever killed her.’

He had the feeling that, had he not mentioned it, the thought of tracking down the man who had killed her daughter would never have entered Dorothy Pine’s head. All that mattered was the fact of her death. She gave a slight shrug, humouring him, and he stepped past her into the house.

The smell of bacon clung to the hallway. Although it was nearly noon, the living-room curtains were still drawn. Electric heaters had dried the air and killed the plants that hung withered on a shelf. The place was dark as a mausoleum. Death had entered this house four months ago; it had never left.

Dorothy Pine sat down on a circular footstool in front of the television, where Wile E. Coyote was noisily chasing the Road Runner. Her arms hung down between her knees, and tears plopped in miniature splashes onto the linoleum floor.

All those weeks Cardinal had tried to find the little girl – through the hundreds of interviews of classmates, friends and teachers, through the thousands of phone calls, the thousands of flyers – he had hoped that Dorothy Pine would come to trust him. She never did. For the first two weeks she telephoned daily, not only identifying herself every time but explaining why she was calling. ‘I was just wondering if you found my daughter, Katharine Pine,’ as if Cardinal might have forgotten to look. Then she’d stopped calling altogether.

Cardinal took Katie’s high-school photograph out of his pocket, the photograph they’d used to print all those flyers that had asked of bus stations and emergency wards, of shopping malls and gas stations, Have You Seen This Girl? Now the killer had answered, oh yes, he had seen this girl all right, and Cardinal slipped the photograph on top of the television.

‘Do you mind if I look at her room again?’

A shake of the dark head, a shudder in the shoulders. Another tiny splash on the linoleum floor. Husband murdered, and now her daughter too. The Inuit, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house.

Cardinal went down a short hallway to a bedroom. The door was open, and a yellow bear with one glass eye frowned at him from the windowsill. Under the bear’s threadbare paws lay a woven rug with a horse pattern. Dorothy Pine sold these rugs at the Hudson Bay store on Lakeshore. The store charged a hundred and twenty bucks, but he doubted if Dorothy Pine saw much of it. Outside, a chainsaw was ripping into wood, and somewhere a crow was cawing.

There was a toy bench under the windowsill. Cardinal opened it with his foot and saw that it still contained Katie’s books. Black Beauty, Nancy Drew, stories his own daughter had enjoyed as a girl. Why do we think they’re so different from us? He opened the chest of drawers – the socks and underwear neatly folded.

There was a little box of costume jewellery that played a tune when opened. It contained an assortment of rings and earrings and a couple of bracelets – one leather, one beaded. Katie had been wearing a charm bracelet the day she disappeared, Cardinal remembered. Stuck in the dresser mirror, a series of four photographs taken by a machine of Katie and her best friend making hideous faces.

Cardinal regretted leaving Delorme at the squad room to chase after Forensic. She might have seen something in Katie’s room that he was missing, something only a female would notice.

Gathering dust at the bottom of the closet were several pairs of shoes, including a patent leather pair with straps – Mary Janes? Cardinal had bought a pair for Kelly when she was seven or eight. Katie Pine’s had been bought at the Salvation Army, apparently; the price was still chalked on the sole. There were no running shoes; Katie had taken her Nikes to school the day she disappeared, carrying them in her knapsack.

Pinned to the back of the closet door was a picture of the high school band. Cardinal didn’t recall Katie being in the band. She was a math whiz. She had represented Algonquin Bay in a provincial math contest and had come in second. The plaque was on the wall to prove it.

He called out to Dorothy Pine. A moment later she came in, red-eyed, clutching a shredded Kleenex.

‘Mrs Pine, that’s not Katie in the front row of that picture, is it? The girl with the dark hair?’

‘That’s Sue Couchie. Katie used to fool around on my accordion sometimes, but she wasn’t in no band. Sue and her was best friends.’

‘I remember now. I interviewed her at the school. Said practically all they did was watch MuchMusic. Videotaped their favourite songs.’

‘Sue can sing pretty good. Katie kind of wanted to be like her.’

‘Did Katie ever take music lessons?’

‘No. She sure wanted to be in that band, though.’

They were looking at a picture of her hopes. A picture of a future that would now remain forever imaginary.

7

When he left the reserve, Cardinal made a left and headed north toward the Ontario Hospital. Advances in medication coupled with government cutbacks had emptied out whole wings of the psychiatric facility. Its morgue did double duty as the coroner’s workshop. But Cardinal wasn’t there to see Barnhouse.

‘She’s doing a lot better today,’ the ward nurse told him. ‘She’s starting to sleep at night, and she’s been taking her meds, so it’s probably just a matter of time till she levels out – that’s my opinion, anyway. Dr Singleton will be doing rounds in about an hour, if you want to talk to him.’

‘No, that’s all right. Where is she?’

‘In the sunroom. Just go through the double doors, and it’s –’

‘Thanks. I know where it is.’

Cardinal expected to find her still adrift in her oversize terry dressing gown, but instead, Catherine Cardinal was wearing the jeans and red sweater he had packed for her.

She was hunched in a chair by the window, chin in hand, staring out at the snowscape, the stand of birches at the edge of the grounds.

‘Hi, sweetheart. I was up at the reserve. Thought I’d stop in on the way back.’

She didn’t look at him. When she was ill, eye contact was agony for her. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve come to get me out of here.’

‘Not just yet, hon. We’ll have to talk to the doctor about that.’ As he got closer, he could see that the outline of her lipstick was uncertain and her eyeliner was thicker on one eye than the other. Catherine Cardinal was a sweet, pretty woman when she was well: sparrow-coloured hair, big gentle eyes and a completely silent giggle that Cardinal loved to provoke. I don’t make her laugh often enough, he often thought. I should bring more joy into this woman’s life. But by the time she had begun this latest nosedive, he had been working burglaries and was in a bad mood himself most of the time. Some help.