The Reluctant Detective

by Finley Martin

  Anne focussed the telephoto lens and snapped a shot. Not good, she thought. The rear of the pick-up and the side of the transport trailer masked a clear view of the man. So she snapped a few more just for luck.

  The man disappeared between the double tires looking for the valise. Then he checked futilely between the other tires. After a few moments, he returned to his truck and drove away on a course which led west of town.

  Grasping for straws, she thought, as she put the car in gear and headed home. That phrase ought to have reinforced disappointment within her, but strangely it didn’t. In fact she felt a curious elation.

  Maybe grasping at straws isn’t such a bad thing, she mused. When you’ve got nothing between your fingers, grasping at straw feels… hopeful.

  15

  “And you’re going in early… why?”

  “I told you, Mom.”

  “No… no you didn’t, but humour me anyway. Tell me again.”

  “Mrs. Higgins said that she would like some help setting up the gym. Me and Karalee and Margaret said we would help. She asked us when we could come in. We said, ‘whenever.’ She said, ‘How about a half-hour before the buses come in.’ We said, ‘That sounds great.’ Then she said, ‘I really appreciate it, girls. Thanks.’ And that’s what happened. You have dark circles. You should dab some makeup on them. Looks kinda gross… and why is the window down… it’s cold in here.”

  Anne didn’t know where to begin. So much had rankled her in so few words. Should she challenge Jacqui on her slaughter of pronoun usage? Should she take exception to her tone? Is she not speaking to me like I’m a simpleton? And dark circles? One late sonofabitch of a night and I already look like Nettie’s hag, she thought. What annoyed Anne the most, however, was Jacqui’s perkiness. Especially this morning, her perkiness took the shape of a personal affront, a revocation of her right to feel crotchety and tired and hungry and coffee-less and disoriented. Where on earth should she begin? Nowhere, she finally decided. Anywhere else and she knew that she would regret it.

  Instead, Anne struggled to prop a smile in front of her face and said, “Well, we’ll just have to get you there as soon as we can, won’t we?”

  Jacqui smiled and gave a little bounce in her seat as if that would speed her on her way.

  Anne rolled up the driver’s-side window. Only a grating, fractured rim of glass crept above the window frame. The noise of it drew Jacqui’s attention from the radio.

  “There. That’s better now, isn’t it?” Anne smiled cheerily. Jacqui’s mouth opened as if to speak, but she stopped, faced front, and said nothing more until the car pulled up to the school door. Then she got out and waved good-bye.

  The medium coffee with double cream and sugar passed from the drive-thru window into Anne’s hands. She pulled over into an empty parking space and slowly sipped it with her eyes closed. It was hot and sweet and humanizing. She would like to have kept her eyes closed for a few more hours. But that was impossible. Each sip of caffeine flipped on a light switch in her brain until there were no more dark cozy spaces in which to hide.

  With half a cup of coffee in her stomach, Anne could better appreciate Jacqui’s enthusiasm for the last day of school before summer. In spite of school being only half a day, most students would show up to get back locker deposits, pick up report cards, play games, munch candy, and just goof off with classmates they wouldn’t see for a few months. It would be fun.

  Then she wondered what the boys who had broken into her car were doing this morning. Surely, by now, they would know what they had gotten. It was a stunning amount of money. Would they take off somewhere? Go on a spending spree? They might if they were stupid but, if they had brain enough between them, they’d lay low and, if they were students, they probably would come to school as usual and avoid drawing unwanted attention to themselves. That gave Anne an idea. It was a long shot, true, but it was worth the try.

  Anne pulled out of the drive-thru and drove six blocks to the Central High School. It was eight o’clock. Only a trickle of early-morning students had begun to arrive.

  There were two entrances for students. The first was at the front of the building where the main doors opened into a foyer bordered by administrative offices. Rural students who arrived by bus disembarked there. The second entrance faced the side of the school and led directly to gym and locker areas. Local urban students arrived there on foot from neighbouring city streets. Students who drove also used the side entrance, but parked their cars in a distant student parking lot.

  Anne backed her car up onto the pavement leading to the side doors and edged it off to one side. Although a brick pumping station partially concealed it from afar, anyone about to go inside the school could not avoid noticing it and, because this was a customary spot for commercial pick-ups and deliveries, it didn’t seem out of place. Anne popped open her trunk and took out her camera case. She slung the camera around her neck, set the empty case on the hood, and leaned casually against the front left fender of the car.

  From that vantage point Anne could see every student approaching this entrance. At the same time, no student could avoid noticing Anne, her car, the broken window, and the camera case. As she waited, an old proverb rolled around in her mind: “Innocence walks blindly into the future, but guilt stumbles over its past.” And she hoped that the wisdom in it would hold true this morning.

  By 8:15 the dribble of students grew into a stream. As students passed, Anne made eye contact with as many as she could. Some smiled in response; others looked blankly; a few were completely absorbed in chatter; one girl stopped to ask if Anne’s car had broken down and left disappointed that she wasn’t able to help. In another fifteen minutes the stream of students heading to home room through the side entrance dwindled into clusters, packets, and solitary stragglers.

  One stray, a scrawny kid in jeans and an oversized hoodie, rounded the pumping station and started up the driveway but, when he saw Anne, he started. It was a subtle, minuscule reflex motion, but a self-conscious change in his pace followed, and he avoided eye contact.

  Looks promising, Anne mused. Let’s see how easily he spooks.

  She slowly raised the camera and caught him in the frame of her lens. Then she heard a shout: “Hey! You can’t take pictures of students! Put that camera away!”

  Anne’s head spun toward the voice behind her. The kid stopped. Then he bolted. By the time Anne had turned back, the kid was twenty yards away, crossing the student parking area, and headed for the fence separating the school grounds from nearby homes.

  Anne was determined not to lose him, but he had a good start, and he leapt like a gazelle. She couldn’t catch him on foot. So she jumped into the driver’s seat. Her car door slammed at the same time as the engine roared to life. She dropped the transmission in gear and the wheels spun, fishtailing away, one of the tires on soft grass slinging a stream of mud toward the sputtering teacher behind her.

  The engine laboured under Anne’s heavy pedal, and the car roared up the access road. It was not a direct path toward the kid’s escape route but, once she had cleared the school grounds, she cut across into the residential area and began a slow pattern sweep. Even if the boy went to ground, at least now she had a description. No photograph, though. That teacher had interrupted that. An hour, two at the most, would be the limit of the kid’s patience. Then he would surface again, and she would nail him.

  The flashing rack of lights on a police cruiser brought Anne to the curb. The cop took his time checking the registration and ownership and insurance documents and, when he was finished, he came alongside Anne’s car.

  “Teacher at the high school reported a woman chasing a student across the campus. Know anything about that, Miss Brown?”

  “See the window that’s not there,” she said. “He did that last night.”

  “Did you see him do it?”

  “No.”


  “Any witnesses?”

  “No.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Another open-and-shut case,” he said.

  Anne bit her tongue and stared stonily ahead.

  “Look,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” Then he scratched his head. “Maybe you’re not right. My point bein’ you can’t chase kids across town for no reason. My advice: go home… cool down… let it go. But stay away from the high school… otherwise they say they’ll bring trespass charges. Understand?” Anne nodded. “Then have a good day.”

  It took less than three minutes for Anne to return to the school and pull her car into the student parking lot. She took off her light jacket, tossed it onto the front seat, and pulled her hair into a pony tail. Then she walked through the main entrance and into the library.

  “Closed,” said the librarian curtly.

  “I just wanted to look over the yearbooks. Won’t be a minute,” said Anne.

  “Closed,” she repeated. Shouldn’t you be in home room? Go.”

  “I’m not a student. I’m a mother. What I mean to say is, my daughter will be starting high school here next year and she’s mentioned the names of a few older students who attend Central. I just wanted to check them out. Put a face to a name. You know. A parent can’t be too careful these days.”

  “My god, a parent who cares. We may have to preserve you under a bell jar in the science lab with the other endangered species. And you’re how old?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Oh my! I’d kill for those genes.”

  Hennie Lovebetter, the librarian, passed three volumes of yearbooks over the counter and pointed Anne to a quiet sunny spot near the window. Anne started with grade eleven classes. After a few pages they all began to look alike. Then she turned to the sections showing trade classes, specifically automotive. She found a grinning shot of Carson White in a small group shot around a stripped-down V-8 engine. She compared it with one of his from an academic class snapshot. Bingo! This was her guy.

  Anne returned to Hennie’s desk and slid the books toward her.

  “Thanks.”

  “Find what you needed?”

  “Does the name Carson White ring a bell?”

  “Like the old Gong Show. Oh I guess you wouldn’t remember that. Too young. Anyway, that’s a bell that doesn’t ring so sweetly,” she said and rolled her eyes.

  “Local boy?”

  “Lives up around Filmore and Condon somewhere.”

  “Tough guy?”

  “He likes to think so. But he’s no Bill Sikes. Errant perhaps. One of Fagin’s tenth-round draft picks, if you follow. The deeper you find his hand in your pocket, the bigger the wad of remorse he can cough up. Think your daughter fancies him?”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “Atta girl.”

  16

  Anne unlocked the door to her second-floor office on Victoria Row and hit the button on her answering machine. She listened to the recorded messages as she unlocked Billy’s office and swung the door open into a bath of sunshine.

  As soon as she stepped into it, she felt awakened with a new energy. Then a phone rang. It was her cell phone.

  “Hello.” Anne heard thick breathing on the other end followed by a familiar voice.

  “You didn’t deliver the money,” he said. There was a deadness in his voice.

  “There was a break-in and…”

  “I know, and I don’t care. I’m only interested in results. Can you retrieve the money? Yes or no?”

  “Yes, I know who took it.”

  “Time is short. Do it. You’ll find a more formal expression of my concern on your desk.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  Anne never got an answer. The line went dead. Then her eyes travelled toward the big oak desk near the window. Something glinted in the sunlight. There was a sheet of paper on the desk. On it someone had drawn a primitive “smiley face” – only this one wasn’t smiling. Instead, it carried a stunned expression, and, where its nose should have been, stood a shiny brass 9 mm cartridge.

  Anne stared at it, and Billy’s sunny room slowly drained of its warmth.

  All the cards weren’t on the table, but Anne already knew two things about this game that she didn’t like: first, the stakes were too high; second, she was in no position to fold. The 9 mm shell proved that. She had to play this hand out, whatever the risk. But the only risk she really worried about was the chance of Jacqui being caught, somehow, in the middle. That choice was clear. Jacqui had to disappear quickly and secretly. But how to do that might not be easy, given a client who could walk through two locked doors and had the means to get her private cell phone number.

  Anne could still smell the ink from the marker pen which made the drawing. The brass casing glittered in the window light. Anne took a powder brush from her purse and dusted the cartridge with talc. The natural lubricant on the bullet would hold a fingerprint, but there was none. Not even a smudge. It had been wiped clean.

  Anne paused over Billy’s desk for a thoughtful moment. Then she sat down in the big leather chair behind it and leaned back. If the client has learned all these tricks, then he’s not likely an amateur, Anne thought. He probably knows, and has known for some time, that Billy is dead. That means he’s been using me. But for what? What can I do that he couldn’t do himself? What do I know that could possibly be of any use to him?

  No answers came to mind.

  Anne glanced at her watch. It was nearing eleven. She had planned to treat Jacqui to a special lunch at The Blue Peter after school, but she had work to do before that, and there no time to spare.

  Anne grabbed her jacket from the coat rack and hurried down the stairs. Her fingers sifted blindly through the scraps of paper, business cards, receipts, and tissues in her pocket until they came to one that felt familiar. It was a note, written in an elegant hand in ink, and a phone number.

  It was only six blocks from the office to Billy Darby’s apartment. Anne hadn’t been there since Billy had died, and she wouldn’t have gone there so soon after his death if it were not something she felt compelled to do. But there she was, standing in the middle of his apartment, surrounded by familiar pictures, cheesy knickknacks, mementos and, most painfully, the pathetic traces of a dead man’s daily life. A soiled shirt tossed in a corner, a half-emptied cup of coffee on a side table, sections of The Guardian scattered across the sofa, rumpled bedclothes, and a closet door ajar. The only sound came from the bathroom tap. The valve was not quite closed, and drops of water drummed out a slow measured beat that echoed in the ceramic washbasin.

  Anne caught her breath and, afraid to be suddenly swept up in a wave of sentiment, she grabbed the spare set of keys to Billy’s car and dropped them in her purse. Then she picked up the receiver of the kitchen phone and dialled the number on the note in her pocket.

  “Hi. This is Anne Brown… Anne Darby. I need some help.”

  17

  Anne felt as if she had fallen onto someone’s living room floor when she slid into the driver’s seat of Billy’s Ford sedan. Her feet didn’t meet the pedals, and she could see little above the steering wheel. Billy had been the last person to drive it, of course, and he had been a big man, 6’4”, 240 lbs. It took a few minutes while she sorted keys and started the engine, and a few more while she fumbled with the seat adjustment. After that, she realigned the rearview mirrors, took a final look behind her, and backed out of the driveway.

  Her first stop was the Queen Street Glass Repair. She tossed her keys on the counter, told the clerk where she had left her own car, and said she needed the broken window replaced. Then she went home, packed a large gym bag with enough of Jacqui’s clothes to last a week, and returned to Victoria Row. This time she parked around the corner and entered The Blue P
eter restaurant through a rear door.

  It was just after noon. The restaurant was busy. She had the gym bag in tow. It was unwieldy, and, as she passed through, it snagged the wings of several chairs. Some of the hooked chairs were occupied, and the few disdainful looks which darted her way were parried by Anne’s trail of excuse-me’s as she made her way toward the last empty table near the serving doors.

  “Hey, little girl! Runnin’ away from home?” asked Mary Anne MacAdam, the owner.

  “That’s every mother’s dream… at one time or another.”

  “Trouble at Green Gables?”

  “Everything’s good at home, but storm clouds are pilin’ up other places. Got a minute? Can we talk?”

  Mary Anne held up her hand to indicate that she’d be right back and headed into the kitchen. Anne shoved the sports bag full of Jacqui’s clothes behind the table and settled into her chair. One of the patrons that Anne had nearly unseated levelled another withering stare at her. Anne avoided looking, but she could still feel the woman’s eyes.

  “Storm clouds, is it?” Mary Anne slid into the seat across from Anne. “Are you referring to the ‘up-yours’ signal Ruby Red-Lips over there is sending you?”

  “No, but I am sorry about the disruption… really.”

  “Forget about it. When a place is packed, it gets crowded. And if Yogi Barra didn’t say that, then he should’ve. People come here for good food, not wide open spaces. If Miss Red-Lips is miffed, I can recommend any number of near-empty restaurants for her dining pleasure. So what’s up?”

  “Good news and bad news. I’ve got two clients. One’s a sweetheart, the other’s poison.”

  “Quit. Send him packin’.”

  “It’s not as simple as that. I wish it were. But it’s partly my fault. I screwed something up. Now he’s made some not-so-veiled threats.”

  “Call Ben. He’ll straighten him out. A couple knocks on the head is all that any normal idiot needs to change his mind.”