Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  Then he made a restaurant reservation for the evening.

  And then he ate.

  A few hours later, lying on the bed, dressed in his suit trousers, half-listening to the first splatter of rain slap against the plastic over the skylight, he wondered what Stevie would make of this new information. Or if he should even tell her. The thought of her made him start. He switched on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. If he didn’t soon leave for her house, they would be late for the Galleries Portáge opening. He leapt off the bed, put on his suit jacket, gave himself a check in the mirror and raced downstairs. He was looking forward to the evening in a way he hadn’t thought possible earlier in the day, before Stevie had come.

  He was slipping into his trenchcoat in the downstairs gloom when suddenly a burst of light turned the windows incandescent and a clap of thunder beat the air so ferociously he had to catch his breath. Alvarez, who had followed him downstairs, scuttled under a nearby table. The fresh penetrating odour of ozone filled his nostrils as he opened the back door. Lightning and thunder continued to attend a torrent of hard rain but it seemed farther away, at a safer distance. Leo stepped into the yard, collar up, only to be alarmed by another sound, this one yawning and terrible. He looked up and saw through the brightening sky a black shape hurtling toward him. He jerked back. The lightning had cleaved a dead limb of the old oak tree and it crashed to earth right at his feet. Like an afterthought, the key that he always kept hidden in the tree trunk followed. It jingled onto the stone path and caught one feeble ray of the setting sun.

  28

  Vanity Fair

  Winnipeg’s business and community leaders were out in full force for an exclusive preview opening Saturday evening of Galleries Portáge, the multi-million-dollar, government-subsidized mega-project intended to revitalize…

  Leo peered past the orchestra, awkwardly jammed into a sunken courtyard below, sawing its way through some piece he didn’t recognize—Mahler?—to Doug Whiteway, one of the Go! lackies, who was scribbling in a pad. It was the kind of crapola story he’d be stuck with next week when he went on general assignment. Guy would grind him down with fluff stories and evening and weekend shifts until he quit in predictable disgust. If Guy didn’t find some excuse to axe him in the interim, that is.

  And this time, he thought grimly, watching Whiteway tap a kilted gentleman on the back, there was no angel to mysteriously intercede.

  Well, let’s see, if he were writing this up—and sometimes he couldn’t help doing ledes in his head—he’d be excising the “exclusive” bit in no time. Better not to let the unwashed who were paying for this sucker through their taxes know they were being excluded from the champagne opening. Which meant “government-subsidized” would have to go, too. And he would probably end up substituting a more hopeful “expected” for the more cautious “intended.” After all, ripping out part of the heart of Portage Avenue and building a shopping mall in its place had been sold to the public as a saviour of the decayed downtown.

  How easily self-censoring came in the journalism game.

  Oh, what the hell, some persnickety, turnip-up-his-ass copy editor would change it anyway.

  And speaking of saviours, wasn’t that Harry Mack, the new owner of the Zit, Whiteway was interviewing? He recognized the face from photographs. Sleek, silver-haired, and opulent, like some of those grain-fed televangelists that stank up the airwaves late at night. What he hadn’t known was that the Christer wore a kilt. This was ominous. The Rossiters had had an agenda when they owned the paper—the glories of the Liberal party—but they spent money like drunken sailors. Brock Hayward, the Bay Street vampire who bought the Zit before Leo came on board, cared only about money, and attacked the payroll and capital expenditures with a rusty scythe. Now, with Mack, who took the Zit off Hayward’s hands when no one would buy it, it looked like agenda plus cost-cutting.

  Not to libel the Scots, of course.

  He could imagine what Mack was saying to Whiteway: “an estimable addition to the downtown fabric…will undoubtedly reinvigorate Winnipeg’s core…blah blah blah.”

  Everyone at the Zit knew Mack’s henchmen were busy scouting property on the fringes of the city. The plan was to abandon the downtown like so many rats fleeing a sinking ship and build a new plant in the fortress suburbs where most of the readers lived anyway.

  Leo watched Mack grow squinty-eyed with delight in his own company while Whiteway vigorously recorded every pearl to drop from his lips. Where was Martin? Why wasn’t he dancing attendance? Or Guy? Meanwhile, to Leo’s right, the coiffed, gowned, and suited, plastic champagne flutes in hand, rode up one gleaming silver escalator, and to his left, they rode down again. Humanity flowed like a river past immaculate fig trees, past the lottery booth, past the spindly clock tower, past the orchestra, past the butcher’s, the baker’s, the candlestick maker’s, and the House of Sunglasses/Cookies/Chintz/Cheese, through pools of soft light and around pools of gurgling water. And then they flowed by it all over again, because there was really no final destination, no magnificent sea into which one could be subsumed.

  Hundreds of card-carrying members of Winnipeg’s booboisie, lured by free nosh and booze and with nothing better to do with their time, found themselves trapped, wandering aimlessly around a downtown shopping mall Saturday evening.

  The occasion was a riffraff-verboten preview opening of Galleries Portáge, the multi-million-dollar, government-subsidized mega-project without a snowball’s chance in hell of revitalizing…

  Well, there are the ledes of your dreams. And then there’s reality. Besides, a good lede shouldn’t exceed twenty-five words—Axel had presented this as gospel when they were at the Dauphin Courier; he had read it somewhere—and that lede bordered on logorrhea. Maybe if “lured by free nosh and booze” was deleted. Leo began to count it out in his head. Then he spotted Stevie. She was wearing a dress that seemed to worship every curve of her body. Ledes flew from his head.

  “What took you so long?”

  “What were you thinking so hard about?”

  “Ladies first.”

  “Men designed this building. Not enough stalls in the women’s washroom. Your turn.”

  “I was thinking about the Scottish clearances of the nineteenth century.”

  Stevie frowned.

  “Doesn’t matter. What do you think of Galleries Portáge so far?”

  Stevie’s eyes raked the space, then settled on his. “I’m having this overpowering sense of déjà vu.”

  “Funny. So am I. Champagne?”

  An anorexic twentysomething in a spandex body suit flitted by with a tray of drinks. She was one of several dozen gussied up in harvest colours and fake leaves to look like some sort of autumn sprite, which was odd because in the mall it was endless summer. They must have hired the entire corps of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, too, for this schmoozefest, Leo thought, snatching a couple of glasses off the tray, while the young woman pliéd absently.

  “Blecch!” Stevie grimaced, sipping hers. “I’ve sucked on tastier pennies.”

  They turned to gaze down over the courtyard, at the busy orchestra and the teeming crowd.

  “Wow,” Leo deadpanned as another sprite floated by with appetizers. “Does life get any better than this?”

  He grabbed a couple of shrimp from the tray and looked at Stevie inquiringly. She shook her head. “I spy Surface and Psyche in the conga line for the escalator,” she remarked.

  “Huh?”

  “My parents. It’s my brother Will’s joke. My father fixes people’s exteriors and my mother fixes their interiors.”

  Leo glanced down through the cross-bars of the clock tower. Stevie’s father he liked. He was quiet, with a slightly amused turn to his mouth. Stevie’s mother, however, was something else altogether. From their brief encounters, he had the sense she was weighing him in some balance, like a pile of bananas, and found him wanting—unripe, perhaps, or poor value for the weight. The grocery analogy always came to mind whe
n he thought about this. Once, not long after meeting her for the first time, he caught a glimpse of her at Grant Park Safeway (she didn’t see him) bearing down on her cart as though she were driving a tank through enemy territory. When he’d called to pick up Stevie not an hour ago, she had sat him down while Stevie was upstairs getting ready and said, “I understand you’re sleeping with my daughter.”

  Leo’s throat had seized.

  “Well, good. It’s about time. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with you.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Leo had managed to squeak.

  “I know,” she’d clucked, patting his knee maternally, and turned to a discussion of Manitoba leading the nation in crime-rate increase, which had been on the front page of the Examiner that morning. “Call us Killerpeg,” the headline read. Her argument: Tory government. His counter-argument: meaningless statistical anomaly. Or maybe it was Ben Johnson’s fault.

  “What’s it like having a mother who’s a psychologist?” he asked Stevie, biting into the shrimp, watching the Lords step onto the escalator.

  “Psychedelic.”

  “As in ‘mind-expanding’?”

  “As in ‘bizarre.’ No Dr. Spock for me. I remember coming home early from school in grade six and often finding the living room full of naked people shrieking their heads off. It was her primal-scream period. I’ve told you my mother’s American. They met when my father was doing his residency in San Francisco. My father says being American is half the explanation of her.”

  “Was your mother naked, too?”

  “I think I blocked that part.”

  “Freaky.”

  “It didn’t seem that odd, really. I was just annoyed because I couldn’t get my homework done. The noise carried upstairs. Finally, one day my father came home unexpectedly early. What’s the orchestra playing? It sounds so familiar.”

  “I think it’s Mozart’s Mall Concerto. What did your father do?”

  “Put his foot down. My mother went shopping for an office the next—”

  A sudden movement diverted them. The clock tower, all Tinkertoy spindles and whirligigs, seemed to shudder as gears and wheels began to click and twirl, triggering a set of bells. The clock chimed cheesily. 8:00. Below, Richter, his baton in the air, jerked his head up. His eyes blazed with a kind of fury as he beheld the clock mindlessly tolling the hour.

  “Holy crap,” Leo said, “if looks could kill, this clock would be a mass of uncoiled springs.”

  “Doing Muzak for a mall opening is likely killing him.”

  “The price is right, probably. The WSO isn’t swimming in moolah. Sources say,” he added, thinking of Liz. And where was Liz? He’d sidled past Spencer earlier, but he was arm-in-arm with a woman not his wife—mostly likely his mother, given her age, unless he was moonlighting for an escort service.

  “They should scrap this Taste of Winnipeg book and do Maestro Richter’s Workout’n’Weight Loss book instead,” he added, noting Richter’s arms thrashing the air.

  “May be one of the reasons why symphony conductors are so long lived,” Stevie said. “Von Karajan and George Solti are still conducting and they’re in their eighties.”

  “You’re smart.”

  “She saw it on Sixty Minutes.” Stevie’s father joined them.

  “Thanks a lot, Daddy.”

  “It’s a good aerobic workout.”

  “Anyway, Richter is older than he looks.” She leaned toward Leo and said out of the side of her mouth, “He’s had a little work, you know. So has his wife.”

  “Stevie!” Dr. Lord frowned. “What I say about my patients isn’t supposed to leave the house.”

  “Oh, really, Daddy. No one can hide the fact they’ve had a facelift.”

  “But some people think they can. And that’s the way they want it. Richter is a very private person. Besides,” he added, dropping his voice as the orchestra finished the piece, “for him, it was only a little work around the eyes.”

  “Oh, yes, his eyes,” Stevie said. “Like Bowie’s—one blue, one green. Didn’t you tell me that?” She addressed her father.

  “Really?” Leo turned to look. “Hard to tell from here.”

  “I think he wears contacts anyway.”

  “It’s called heterochromia of the iris,” Dr. Lord explained. “It can be an indicator for certain genetic disorders or syndromes—”

  “Isn’t that Caitlin Clark down there?” Stevie interrupted, pointing over the railing.

  Leo followed her eyes toward a blonde woman wearing a rose-coloured dress talking to a man whose back was to them. “I think so, yes.”

  “Would you excuse me, then?” She handed Leo her glass. “There’s something I want to ask her.”

  Stevie edged her way between her father and Leo and headed toward the down escalator.

  “So, is he sick—Richter, I mean?” Leo asked Dr. Lord, keeping one eye on Stevie.

  “No. He could have a propensity to deafness, if it’s the syndrome I’m thinking of. But it’s pretty rare, and I don’t think there’s any indication he has a hearing problem.”

  “Beethoven was deaf and wrote music.”

  “But I don’t think he had to conduct an orchestra. Oddly enough, I passed someone earlier here with an indicator for the same syndrome.”

  “Who?”

  Dr. Lord shrugged. “Never seen him before.” He looked over Leo’s shoulder. “You’ll have to excuse me, too. My wife is signalling to me. How’s your back, by the way?” he added, turning.

  “Much better, thanks,” Leo called after him as Beethoven’s Galleria Symphony swelled up from below. Nice of you to ask. I’m not kidding.

  Leo handed both glasses to a passing sprite, then, noting Stevie and Caitlin had disappeared down the first-floor gauntlet of shops, decided to wander down the second-floor equivalent.

  The occasion was a riffraff-verboten preview opening of Galleries Portáge…

  he continued, composing copy in his head as he passed various members of Cabinet, city hall, the business community—and their wives, of course.

  …the multi-million-dollar, government-subsidized mega-project without a snowball’s chance in hell of revitalizing the downtown.

  “Twenty years ago, Main Street was razed to build the Centennial Concert Hall with the promise of urban renewal,” said some critic I’d find if I was really doing this story, “and Main Street is still a wasteland. Why would anyone think a mere building would reverse decades of decline?”

  Invited guests vacuuming canapés down their gullets Saturday night and guzzling great quantities of Canadian champagne were generally pleased, however, with the bland mega-square-foot structure that seals off three blocks of Portage Avenue like a bunker.

  “It’s spectacular,” said one sozzled suburbanite who will probably never darken the place again…

  Leo grazed his way down the toyland Main Street, past the gallery of twinkling shops, accepting the finger-food offerings of various pixies, imps, and fairies, refusing the so-called champagne, nosing in doorways at the piles of goods he wasn’t interested in buying, and pausing to exchange scornful remarks with various and sundry—mostly Zit colleagues—whose expressions morphed from that vaguely stupefied look creatures get in enclosed spaces to an ironic detachment when they realized they were vaguely stupefied creatures in an enclosed space.

  Symptoms of Mallaise? Or, perhaps, Mal de Mall?

  The average copy editor’s boredom was measured in punning headlines. Leo had done a stint once, filling in for someone on leave.

  Having a Mall, Wish You Were Here

  Fear and Malling in Winnipeg

  The Mall that Ate Downtown

  And so on.

  Leo yawned. Where had Stevie got to?

  He spied Axel leaning against a balustrade that appeared to overlook another courtyard. Or, rather, he spied a familiar ponytail trailing down the back of a very loud suit jacket.

  “What the hell is this?” he said, fingering the fabri
c, noting the obnoxious blend of colours.

  Axel spun around, and smacked Leo’s hand away. “It’s Manitoba tartan.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “It’s called irony, Leo.”

  “Really? You’re too subtle for me. It looks more like you went rummaging through some Shriner’s closet. I know—you’ve spent so much time on the Nautilus, you don’t fit into anything else.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Leo snickered. “Enjoying all this?” He glanced down over the balustrade at another water feature.

  “In a postmodern kind of way,” Axel replied.

  “Which means what exactly?”

  “Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”

  “What are you being such an asshole about?”

  Axel glared. “Well, gee, let me think. Lots of stuff, but in your case maybe it’s because my oldest friend thinks I’m a murderer.”

  “I didn’t say that. When did I say that?”

  “I didn’t say ‘say.’ I said ‘thinks.’”

  “You’re a mind reader suddenly?”

  “I didn’t appreciate that remark in the church.”

  “About Merritt and the money? Get over yourself.”

  Axel continued to glower. Leo regarded him for a moment. What a sulky bastard. “Well, maybe I’ve hit bone then,” he said hotly. “You doth protesting too much and all that crap.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You’ve always done stupid impulsive things, Axel. You were the one who said, ‘hey, why don’t you steal that car?’”

  “You could have said ‘no thanks.’”

  “You were the one gung-ho to pick up that dope that time.”