by Scott Mackay
She looked around the apartment disconsolately. “I want to clean this up,” she said. “When do you think I can clean it up?”
“We’ll try to finish as soon as we can,” he assured her.
The two of them just stood there. Gilbert had dozens of questions to ask Mrs. Lau but he found he couldn’t bring himself to utter the necessary words when he saw so much grief in her eyes, hadn’t meant to ask questions today anyway. But he was a homicide detective and it was his job to ask questions, to push forward even at the most hurtful times—more than just his job, a matter of his own integrity, a commitment to fight this bad thing that had never had any right to happen in the first place.
“Are you going to stay here?” he inquired. “Or are you going to move?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have much money and the rent’s cheap here. Foster owns this building.”
“You were playing an instrument,” he said.
She nodded distractedly. “The erhu,” she said. “I used to play that same melody to Edgar when he was a baby. It helped him sleep. He was a restless child.”
Gilbert looked at his hands. “Is there anything you want to add to the statement you gave Detective Lombardo on Friday night?” he said. He felt like he was stepping over broken glass.
She shrugged weakly. “I told him everything,” she said. “I wish I could be more use.” She said this in a nearly guilty way.
“We can’t find Pearl Wu.”
Again, the shrug. “She comes and goes. She and Edgar have their episodes.”
“Did Edgar know her well?”
“They’ve known each other for years. Ever since Hong Kong.” She looked as if she might elaborate, but she turned away, as if she had decided against further comment.
“Does Edgar have any other friends we might talk to?”
She continued to stare out the French doors, her expression wistful and apathetic, a woman too grief-stricken to care about anything. “Edgar had his own life,” she said. “He had his own friends. I would hear them come up and down the stairs, but he never bothered to introduce any of them to me.” Acknowledging her own marginalization in her son’s life, she grew sadder still.
Gilbert hesitated. If she had heard Edgar’s friends coming up and down the stairs, why hadn’t she heard the gunshot? The point stuck, something he couldn’t find a way to explain, an inconsistency that made him think she might be filtering everything she told him.
“You have no idea where Pearl Wu might be right now?” asked Gilbert. “We really have to talk to her.” Pearl had become the frustratingly absent center around which his investigation now revolved.
“Pearl’s a busy woman,” said Mrs. Lau. “She has three offices in Toronto. She looks after her husband’s concerns here. She has meetings. She has appointments. She could be anywhere.” May Lau looked at him with apprehension. “I take it you know what my son did to Pearl.”
Gilbert again hesitated. He knew and understood this aspect of grief. The need to expatiate the sins of the departed. “We have it on file,” he confirmed.
She turned away, looked at the coffee table. She appeared mystified, baffled. “I don’t know why he did that,” she said. Her voice was softer still. She adjusted her plastic comb. “He’s never talked about it.” She shook her head. “He confessed to the crime, he pled guilty, he went to jail, but he won’t tell anybody why he did it, not even his lawyer. He’s stubborn that way. Not even Pearl knows why he did it. It’s against his nature to raise his hand against a woman. Or a man, for that matter. Edgar is…was…highly principled in his way.”
Wind blew rain against the panes of the French doors. “We’re a little concerned about Pearl,” said Gilbert.
May Lau’s face hardened. “I don’t think she would kill my son,” she said. But her conviction was forced.
“Under the circumstances, we’re going to have to talk to her,” said Gilbert. “She was up here around the time of your son’s murder.” Gilbert glanced at the French doors, wondering about them. “Did you see her leave at all?”
“No.”
“You still have Detective Lombardo’s card?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Please call us if you hear from Pearl. We’ve got to talk to her.”
May Lau nodded tentatively. “I will,” she said, but she said it as if she didn’t mean it, and as if she didn’t have the strength to do anything but grieve for her son.
When Gilbert got home from work that night, late as usual, his wife, Regina, waited for him in the front hall. She looked upset, had her head tilted to one side, a hand on her hip, and her blue eyes were solemn.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Jennifer’s home,” she said, glancing at the stairs.
“I thought she wasn’t coming back for another three days,” said Gilbert.
“I’m as surprised as you are,” said Regina. “She came on the afternoon train. She broke up with Karl. She didn’t even phone ahead, that’s how upset she was.”
Gilbert’s first reaction was one of vast relief. Karl Randall, to his mind, was a supremely negative influence on his daughter’s life, a young man who followed his dangerous impulses much too quickly, and who had a way of goading Jennifer into bad decisions.
“Is she all right?” he asked.
“She’s in her room. Crying.”
Nina, his younger daughter, fifteen years old, came out of the living room with pine cones and wire, raw materials for a Christmas wreath.
“I don’t blame her,” said Nina, with sincere sisterly commiseration. “Karl is such a hunk.”
Gilbert stared at Nina. Men were hunks now. He had to make the adjustment. “She’ll get over it,” he said.
“No,” said Nina, “she won’t. How many chances do you think she’s going to get, Dad? Look how tall she is. And look at the way she wears her hair. She was lucky to get Karl in the first place.” Nina shook her head in a world-weary way. “I don’t know why she had to go and blow it. I was hoping to see Karl this Christmas.”
Coming from a fifteen-year-old, these words irked Gilbert. “If you want my honest opinion,” he said, “I think the guy’s bad news. He stole his friend’s car, and he almost overdosed on heart medication. What kind of idiot would do that?”
“Let’s not characterize Karl as an idiot just now,” said Regina. “I think that’s the last thing Jennifer wants to hear.”
“Who dumped who?” asked Gilbert.
“He dumped her,” said Regina.
“Then he’s an idiot,” said Gilbert, failing, despite considerable effort, to keep his hard line under control. “He won’t find another girl like Jennifer.”
“He’s not going to want to find another girl like Jennifer,” said Nina. “Have you seen the makeup she’s wearing lately? No one goes Gothic anymore.”
“Nina, sweetheart, please,” said Gilbert. “I know you’re a bright kid. I just wish you’d show it more often.”
He wondered when Nina had become so opinionated; then he remembered that she had Regina as a mother.
“Could you go up and talk to her?” said Regina. He looked at his wife. Nineteen years of raising girls and they still hadn’t figured it out. “I tried to talk to her but she won’t listen to me. I think she needs her father.”
Those words always scared Gilbert. “What do you want me to say to her?” he asked.
“You’ll think of something.”
“I liked Ben a lot better,” said Gilbert.
“Dad, Ben was three years ago,” said Nina. “And they weren’t even intimate.”
Intimate. He had to make the adjustment on that one too. “Do we have to go into the details?” he asked.
“At least Karl and Jennifer were intimate,” said Nina.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean they were good for each other,” said Gilbert. “And now look what he’s done to her. She’s all upset. God knows what it’s done to her grades. I wish she wo
uld have stayed away from him.”
“Dad, the world doesn’t revolve around grades,” said Nina.
“Yes, my darling, it does,” he said, in a tone of anything but endearment. He took off his coat and dumped it over the banister. “He’d have to do this right now, around Christmas, wouldn’t he? It’s just what we need.”
“Christmas is the most depressing time of year for over sixty percent of the population, Dad,” said Nina. “We’ll be no different from anybody else.”
“Tell her to come down and eat something,” said Regina. “I have those ribs simmering in the Crock-Pot. I picked up a Caesar salad at Marvelous Edibles.”
“This single household must keep that place afloat,” he complained, slipping off his rubber overshoes.
“And by the way, a Jeremy Austin called from 52 Division,” said Regina.
Constable Jeremy Austin, the constable Benny Eng said they should talk to if they wanted more information on the illegal Chinese gaming houses downtown, and which ones Edgar Lau might have worked at. But why would he call Gilbert at home?
“Did he leave a message?” he asked.
“No.”
“I bet it’s about a murder,” said Nina. “You see what I mean about Christmas, Dad? Joy to the world, goodwill toward men.”
“Why don’t you go watch Old Yeller?” said Gilbert. “It might cheer you up.”
“Dad, don’t make fun of my favorite movie,” said Nina. “You’re just going to make me resent you more than I already do.”
Still, it was odd, thought Gilbert, as he climbed the stairs to Jennifer’s room. Why would Austin call him here and not at headquarters? It made Gilbert think that Austin might know more about things in Chinatown than was reasonably healthy for a rank-and-file officer to know, as if the things he knew were things he’d sooner not tell anybody at headquarters. Maybe the man was in trouble of some kind.
He knocked gently on Jennifer’s door. “Jennifer?” he said. “Jenn, hon, it’s me. Can I come in?”
No answer. He knew she was at the age where he had to respect her privacy, but he yearned for her, needed her, hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving, and was aching to give his eldest a hug. He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
She sat at her desk slouched in her chair staring out at the rain. Gilbert couldn’t help thinking that Nina might be right. Even though he himself thought Jennifer the most beautiful creature on earth, she might not get many chances after all. She was tall, manlike, didn’t have such obvious pretty features as Nina, was a quiet and brooding young woman, characteristics that didn’t lend themselves well to the social rituals of university life. Not only that, she was smart, with marks in the eighties and nineties, and that could scare away as many men as it might attract. She didn’t turn. She continued to stare out the window. Her limp blond hair—with a turquoise streak—hung from a center part and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a few days. She wore bell-bottom jeans, seams split and filled in with faded paisley cloth. Everything old is new again, he thought.
“Mom told me you’ve had a rough time,” he said. He looked around the room. Her suitcase sat unpacked on the end of her bed. A Limp Bizkit Significant Other poster hung on the wall. “Am I going to get a hug?” he asked.
She swung slowly round in her swivel chair and stared at him with her oversized blue eyes. He had to admit, Nina was right about the eyeliner too. Gothic. Too much eyeliner. The cult of the young urban vampire, after its initial craze, now seemed dated. His tall, gangly, socially graceless beautiful eldest daughter. He spread his arms. He felt like crying to see her so sad. She rose, came near, her lower lip quivering.
“He left me, Dad,” she said.
He left me. It sounded like such a grown-up thing for Jennifer to say. Okay. He had to make another adjustment. He put his arms around her, and was surprised, even startled, when she clung to him, arms around his back in a desperate squeeze, her body jerking with an agonized sob, as if what she had had with Karl were more than just puppy love after all. The prick, he thought. The absolute prick. To do this to his daughter. She had never held on to him like this. Squeezing him harder and harder. Shaking. Trembling. Crying. She couldn’t control herself. He pictured her coming home on the train alone that afternoon, not bothering to phone, just running to the train station, traveling through the gray winter landscape, past the fallow cornfields and dull brown barns of southern Ontario, with the rain constantly coming down.
“I didn’t do anything,” she finally said. “I didn’t do anything at all, Dad.”
He had never heard her cry like this before, as if her agony reached right to the marrow of her bones. She was a woman now. He could hardly believe it. It was as if the gyroscopic center of her soul, that which gave her all her emotional balance and poise, had been jostled, and jostled seismically, enough to rip her apart.
“I know you didn’t, sweetheart,” he said. “I know you didn’t. And if it’s any consolation, he’s not exactly the best thing that ever happened to you. Sometimes bad things like this—”
But he instantly recognized his blunder. He felt her shoulders stiffen. She pushed him away. “What did you say?” she said, looking at him with accusatory eyes. “He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I love him, Daddy. I love him. And I know you’ve always hated him.”
As if she had to blame anybody but herself or Karl for the breakup, choosing her father as the most convenient lightning rod around.
“I don’t hate him,” he said, wincing at her words.
“You don’t know anything,” she said. “You don’t know anything at all. I slept with him, Daddy.” As if she were throwing down the gauntlet. “I slept with him a hundred times. And I loved every bit of it.”
He didn’t know what to say. He felt that any words, no matter what they were, would just backfire. “Mom wants you to come down and have something to eat,” he said. That seemed safe enough.
“Just go, okay?” she said. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t think you even care.”
She fell on her bed in a heap. He wished he could do something. But she had to simmer down. So he left her there.
He went out into the hall. And found Regina standing there. Regina was crying too. Joy to the world. Goodwill toward men. This was going to be a great Christmas.
“You blew it, didn’t you?” she said.
He nodded. “But good,” he agreed.
Six
In the homicide office the next day, complimentary danishes, donuts, and coffee sat on trays near the front. Acting Staff Inspector Tim Nowak, after eight months of steering the squad through the pitfalls of employee reductions and budget restraints, had finally been appointed the official head of Homicide. Detective Support Command had sent the complimentary eats to the squad room to mark the occasion. Now the party was breaking up. Tim Nowak, a tall, thin, gray-haired man in his early fifties, stood at the office door shaking hands with well-wishers.
“He’s more an administrator than Bill Marsh was,” said Gilbert to Lombardo. “Marsh should have stayed in uniform. He was a street cop through and through.” Gilbert sometimes longed nostalgically for the street. “The worst thing they ever did to Marsh was make him staff inspector of Homicide.”
Lombardo looked at the new staff inspector doubtfully. “I hear Tim’s in good with Command.”
Gilbert raised his eyebrows. “Is that a bad thing?”
Lombardo took a sip of his coffee. “It can be,” he said.
“I worked with him in Fraud twenty years ago,” said Gilbert. He pondered his half-finished danish, the yellow lemon goop in the center a little too hard, a little too old. “He knows how to write a report.”
“I can deal with that,” said Lombardo, his tone brightening. “I write a good report.”
They gazed at the new staff inspector. Nowak spoke as smoothly as satin to his well-wishers, handling the public relations aspect of his new appointment with a grace, diplomacy, and patien
ce Marsh had lacked. Marsh had certain buttons. You had to be careful which ones you pushed. The problem with Nowak, he had no buttons. He was unflappable. The crowd dwindled to a half dozen. Two latecomers, looking as groomed and practiced as Nowak, men Gilbert had never seen before, entered the office. They said a few words to Nowak and shook hands with the staff inspector. Then all three glanced toward Gilbert and Lombardo. They exchanged a few more words and retreated to Nowak’s office.
“Did you see the way they looked at us?” asked Lombardo.
“I saw,” said Gilbert.
“What’s that about?” asked Lombardo.
“I don’t know.”
The two detectives sat for a few moments. Every month, week, and year Gilbert worked with Lombardo, he felt a stronger-growing solidarity with the man. There might be sixteen years between them; Joe might be the last great playboy of the Western world while he himself was a happily married man; Joe might be a second-generation Italian and he a plain-as-white-bread WASP; but they both thought the same way about the job, the job, and so, under this new circumstance, with strange latecomers staking them out in their own squad room, they instinctively followed each other’s lead and hunkered down together, waiting for whatever fecal matter was inevitably going to hit the fan.
Gordon Telford, one of the detectives in their squad, approached with a handful of magazines. Telford was a tall man with red hair, a mustache, freckles. He wore a double-knit suit, polished Bostonians, and a tie with conservative stripes. Today he had what looked like a ketchup stain on his shirt. His Bostonians were mud-splattered. The knot in his tie was askew. He looked, in fact, like a homicide detective.
“I thought you might want to take a look at these,” he said, putting the magazines on Gilbert’s desk. Chinese magazines, with dazzling Chinese writing all over them. Telford flipped to a spot halfway through the first one and pointed. “That’s her,” he said. “That’s Pearl Wu. Before Edgar Lau performed his unscheduled surgery on her.”
The woman in the fashion layout posed in a series of alluring evening gowns against the glittering nighttime skyline of Hong Kong. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five in these shots. Was she beautiful, wondered Gilbert? Within the definitions of her trade she indeed possessed those qualities that constituted the modern-day conception of beauty. But nothing particularly distinguished her. She looked as if she were made of plastic, doll-like and immutable, there simply for the purpose of being looked at.