Last Song Sung

by David A. Poulsen

  Then came a second find. A separate piece of paper that had been incorporated into a chapter listed Ellie Foster’s performance schedule dating back several months before her disappearance. If what had happened to Ellie had its genesis prior to her Calgary gig at The Depression, the schedule could prove useful.

  August 19–24 — Louis Riel coffee

  house — Saskatoon

  August 26–31— 4th Dimension coffee house — Regina

  September 3–15— The Tumbling Mustard — Ottawa

  September 18–23— The Mousehole — Toronto

  November 12–17— The Inquisition

  Coffee House —

  Vancouver

  December 5–6— Caffè Lena, Saratoga

  Springs, New York

  February 7, 11–12— Le Hibou — Ottawa

  February 24–March 3 — The Depression —

  Calgary

  Lois Beeston had been a diligent and thorough researcher, and reading her notes and even first drafts of some chapters gave me an insight into the Canadian music scene at that time, something I was very much lacking.

  I set her work aside and concentrated on mine, alternating between running tapes and peering through cameras and binoculars until my eyes were blurry and my head ached. Satisfied I had missed nothing while I’d been out and that nothing was brewing in either location tonight, I ran myself a bath, took two Tylenol, and promptly fell asleep in the tub, narrowly avoiding dropping Ian Rankin and Inspector Rebus into the water.

  I awoke just after seven with an idea, towelled off, and though a quiet evening with a book and early bedtime beckoned, I dressed again in street clothes and headed off into Calgary’s falling darkness to set the idea in motion.

  Bryan Adams and the first few bars of “Summer of ’69,” another new ringtone, roused me at 8:12 the next morning. I did my best been-awake-for-hours impression, but Cobb saw through it in seconds. Hard to fool a seasoned detective.

  “It’s damn near afternoon,” he told me in a voice that was way too jovial.

  “First of all, no, it’s not,” I said, “and secondly, it’s Saturday. In civilized countries, people get to sleep in on Saturdays.”

  “Okay.” I heard him chuckling, doubtless enjoying ruining my morning. “But I thought you’d want to know that I met with Monica yesterday, and we’ve got another week.”

  “That’s good. I found a couple of things in Lois Beeston’s research notes that might be useful, and I’m still working on Roosevelt Park and Darby O’Callaghan.”

  “Darby.”

  “Yeah, I got the first name from Lois Beeston.”

  “Good. Any luck with the lyrics?”

  “I worked on that, too, and so far, nada. But I’ve got better minds than mine working on them now.”

  “My strategy exactly. You up for coffee?” he asked me.

  “As opposed to more sleep?”

  “Life is all about making choices.”

  “And if I choose sleep?”

  “I phone back every ten minutes.”

  “I figured something like that. The Starbucks on 1st Avenue. Thirty minutes.”

  “There are Starbucks closer to Kennedy’s house. You missing your ’hood?” he asked.

  “Actually, I am,” I said, as we ended the call.

  I was sitting in an armchair when Cobb arrived, a few of what I thought were the more relevant pages from Lois Beeston’s work sitting on the table beside me.

  “I don’t see a coffee anywhere.”

  “I thought you might want to buy. Life is all about making choices.”

  “You’re a bitter man.” He chuckled and headed for the counter.

  When he returned a couple of minutes later with two grande Pikes with milk, I held up the piece of paper detailing Ellie Foster’s schedule. And I’d found a second list, this time noting the places she was scheduled to go after her Calgary gig. Vancouver’s Bunkhouse for a week, another week in Victoria, back to Ontario for a two-week gig in Toronto, then a return date at Le Hibou in Ottawa, where she clearly had been a popular figure.

  Cobb and I sipped coffee and traded pages back and forth for a few minutes before he finally said, “This has me thinking.”

  I looked at him. “About?”

  “If the song has some significance — and I’m guessing it does, or why was it left in Monica’s car? — and the song was presumably written before Ellie played The Depression, then there could have been something going on in her life before she got to Calgary that led to what happened that night.”

  I studied my coffee mug for a while before I answered. “Then why did the kidnappers wait until Calgary to do something?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one I’ve been wrestling with.”

  “Given how hard it’s been to find useful information from fifty years ago right here, I hate to think how much tougher it’s going to be trying to find leads in Toronto or Ottawa or Halifax.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that too.” Cobb nodded.

  “Something I’ve been thinking about.”

  Cobb raised his eyebrows, looked at me over his coffee mug.

  “I wonder who put the CD in her car.”

  “That would be nice to know, but if it were that easy, there’d be no need for people like us to investigate things.”

  I thought about that. “I guess, but I mean, it hardly makes sense that the kidnappers have had a change of heart after half a century and decided to offer the granddaughter some previously well-concealed clue to her grandmother’s whereabouts.”

  “Yeah, I’d say that’s not what’s happening here.”

  “So that leaves two possibilities, it seems to me,” I said.

  “Let’s see if your two possibilities are the same as mine.”

  “Okay.” I took a sip of coffee and then leaned forward. “One is that the tape has no significance beyond someone providing a nice souvenir memory of a long-lost relative.”

  “In which case, why break into her car — why not just hand it to her?”

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “Which means there is some significance to the tape, and the person leaving it had a reason to want to be anonymous.”

  “I had this conversation again yesterday with Monica, and that’s pretty much the conclusion we came to as well.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “You keep tracking the two guys from The Depression —”

  “O’Callaghan and Park.”

  Cobb nodded. “I’m going to work the phones.” He held up the two pieces of paper with Ellie Foster’s performing schedule before and after Calgary. “This will help. I’m sure Carrington and Wardlow did some checking. But maybe they didn’t work that angle as hard, or maybe they missed something. Even though Wardlow actually went to Ottawa, I didn’t see anything in their reports that indicated they looked hard at some out-of-town angle. Looks like they ruled it out after his trip out there.”

  I nodded. “That’s what it looked like to me.”

  “I’ll see if I can find any other cops who were around from that time — maybe there was something going on that will give us something to look at.”

  “Doesn’t sound easy.”

  Cobb smiled. “You know what they say … if it was easy —”

  “Yeah,” I said, cutting him off. “I know what they say.”

  I’d stopped by my apartment to pick up a few more clothes, a box of CDs, and a combination CD player and turntable to help me get through the remainder of my tenure at Kennedy’s place.

  I was back at Kennedy’s and looking at the upstairs tape from the morning when Bryan Adams and the guys informed me of an incoming call.

  “Hello.”

  “Roosevelt Park. Hello back at you.”

  I pulled back from the tape machine and sat at the working ta
ble, where I had a notebook and pen at the ready.

  “Mr. Park,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

  “In your message you said you wanted to talk about Ellie Foster.”

  “That’s right. Her granddaughter has hired a private detective named Mike Cobb to see if he can find out what happened to Ellie and to find her if she’s still alive. I’m working with him. We thought you might recall something that could be helpful in our efforts.”

  “Shit, what’s it been, forty, fifty years?” Park was laughing as he said it. “You boys got zero chance of finding Ellie Foster.”

  “I understand your skepticism, sir.” I worked at keeping my voice even. “But we believe our chances are a little north of zero. I’d like to sit down with you, kick around a few things about The Depression. I know some of the performers stayed with you when they were appearing there. Was Ellie one of those people?”

  “Yeah, Ellie stayed at my place. At least some of the time. When she wasn’t camped out with the dude she’d hooked up with.”

  “You know the dude’s name?”

  “Uh-uh. She never told me, and I never asked. Wasn’t any of my business.”

  “I’d be happy to buy you a coffee, Mr. Park. If you have time.”

  “Hey, I got time up the yingyang. But I don’t drink coffee. What I do is eat lunch.” He laughed again.

  “In that case, I’d be pleased to buy you lunch. Have you eaten yet today?”

  “Hell, no. Well, that’s not exactly true. I have eaten, but not so much that I can’t manage a little more. Especially when it’s free.”

  Park sounded like a piece of work. Lunch could be interesting.

  When I stepped into the Swiss Chalet on Macleod Trail, it quickly became clear that Roosevelt Park was a large piece of work. It appeared that he’d “managed a little more” fairly regularly over the years. I’m not good at guessing weights, but I was fairly sure that the first number on the scale would have been a three.

  He was sitting at a window booth about halfway down, and apparently he figured out who I was as soon as he saw me, because he waved me over. He didn’t get up, but stretched a monster hand across the table and we shook. At least he shook. My hand just went along for the ride.

  There are two kinds of people who weigh three-hundred-plus pounds. There are big people, and there are fat people. Roosevelt Park was not a guy with a belly that looked at you over the top of the table. He was big all over.

  He grinned at me. “I ordered us a beer. Hope that’s okay.” He pointed at the can of Bud Light that sat at my place.

  “Beer is always okay,” I said as I slid into my spot.

  “You ever been to a Swiss Chalet?”

  “I’m a newbie to the experience.” As I glanced at the menu, I got the feeling that it might differ slightly from the Chopped Leaf in terms of its attention to healthy eating.

  “I recommend the chicken,” Park said.

  “I bet when you go to A&W you order a burger.”

  “Damn straight.” He nodded. “They got a few other things here, but you wanna go with the chicken.”

  We ordered chicken, and when the woman who took our order had moved away from our table I pulled my notebook and pen out of my jacket pocket.

  “Oh my,” Park said. “Official.”

  “More like bad memory.” I tapped my head. “How long have you lived in Calgary, Mr. Park?”

  “We gonna get along, you need to stop calling me Mr. Park. I answer to Rosie.”

  I smiled at that. “I answer to Adam. How long, Rosie?”

  “Came here in ’62. Stampeders signed me. I played a total of four games — two pre-season, two regular season. Tore my Achilles, and that was that. No more football. But I liked the place. Never left.”

  “Where’d you play college ball?”

  “Oklahoma. I’m a Sooner, baby.” He grinned again, which I was figuring out was Park’s default facial expression. Hard guy not to like.

  “I might not be able to buy you lunch, after all,” I said. “I’m an Oklahoma State grad. Cowboys, baby.”

  “Shit, we kicked your asses all over the field.” He laughed.

  “And we kicked yours all over the diamond.”

  He laughed even harder at that. It became clear that Rosie Park was a regular at this establishment, and that was even more evident when “the usual” that he had ordered arrived at our booth. The usual for Roosevelt Park consisted of what I guessed to be at least two complete chickens — maybe more. Bordering on a flock.

  I’d settled for a quarter-chicken dinner. Cobb and I had skipped breakfast that morning, and I was pretty hungry myself. We fell to eating and finished at about the same time. Rosie didn’t take many conversation breaks. The lunch — all of it — consumed, Rosie worked his way out of the booth with surprising dexterity and made a trip to the washroom. On his return, with coffee in front of us, we at last resumed conversation. I kicked it off.

  “You talk to the cops after Ellie Foster disappeared?”

  “Sure. A couple of times.”

  “You mention the boyfriend?”

  “Well, I’m sure I did. But, of course, I didn’t know who the guy was, so I couldn’t tell them much. And, on top of that, boyfriend might have been the wrong word altogether. I don’t even know that there was only one guy. I just know there were some nights that Ellie didn’t use her bed at my house.”

  “You sure her companion was male?”

  “Oh yeah, that I am sure of. Ellie was hetero. She liked men … maybe a little too much.”

  “So how do you know she wasn’t camped out at a friend’s place?”

  “Stuff she said. How she looked when she showed up to change clothes. I knew.”

  I thought of something. “The two guys in the band — where did they stay?’

  “Don’t know. Not at my place. She wouldn’t have wanted that anyway.”

  “Really? Why is that?”

  “She couldn’t stand one of them. Only kept him around because he was a hell of a songwriter. And even then, she was planning to run his ass after the Calgary gig.”

  “Which guy was that?”

  “The bass player, Duke Prego. Came from the Maritimes or something. Guy was an ass.”

  “What was it about him that made him an ass?”

  “Hey, we’re going back in time here. But I remember for a guy who was as bad as he was on bass, he thought he was amazing. That drove Ellie nuts.”

  “How did Ellie get back and forth to The Depression from your … wherever she’d spent the night?”

  “Caught rides. Didn’t need to rent a car; everybody wanted to give that lady a ride.”

  “Okay, let’s go back to the night she disappeared. Were you there that night?”

  “At The Depression?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “No, I had a job. The Stampeders helped me out — got me a job as a shipper-receiver. I was working late that night. Went home and crashed. Didn’t hear about it till the next morning on the news.”

  “What did you think when you heard it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you have any thoughts at all about who might have done it?”

  “Well, shit, of course I had thoughts. Everybody had thoughts.” He stopped long enough to drink some coffee. “But I didn’t have any idea, not really. I mean the damn thing made no sense.” Another pause, more coffee. “I honestly thought she’d show up again. That whoever took her would release her, or the cops would find her. For the first while I was sure that somehow, some way, she’d come back to us.”

  He lowered his head, looking down, remembering something he wasn’t likely to tell me about. After a minute or so, he raised his head and looked at me.

  “But she never did.”

  “No,” I
said, “she never did.”

  “You find her, I’d like to know about it.”

  I nodded. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  I’d just climbed into the Accord when my phone chirped an announcement that I had a text. It was Lois Beeston letting me know that Darby O’Callaghan lived in Cochrane, just northwest of the city. She also gave me a number to reach him at. I called, got his machine, gave my regular spiel, and asked him to call me.

  Back at Kennedy’s place, I went through the report from Carrington and Wardlow’s initial investigation. I’d studied it, been through it a few times, couldn’t remember any mention of Ellie Foster seeing someone — or more than one someone — during her time in Calgary. I found the notes that followed their initial conversation with Roosevelt Park. There was a description of Park, even a photo of his house, a big old two-storey, and a notation that Ellie stayed there while she played The Depression. But no mention of a possible lover, boyfriend … nothing. Either the investigating detectives had thought it was insignificant and hadn’t pursued it or they had checked it out but didn’t record what they had learned because, again, it wasn’t germane to the case, or because they hadn’t found the guy or guys.

  I texted Cobb a summary of my conversation with Rosie Park — I left out the details of the meal — and turned my attention to my surveillance duties. I was in the upstairs bedroom staring through the camera lens at the house across the street when Cobb called back.

  “Ready for a road trip?”

  “Sure. But only if it’s to Hawaii, Mexico, or maybe Greece — I’d like to see the Acropolis,” I replied.

  “How about Claresholm?”

  “Claresholm, Alberta?”

  “You’ve heard of it.”

  “Heard of it, driven through it, and I’m sure it’s nice, but it doesn’t really bump Hawaii, Mexico, or Greece out of my top three.”

  Cobb chuckled. “Sometimes I don’t get you at all. I think it’s time we had a chat with Mr. Carrington.”

  “Is he able to chat?”

  “I called the seniors home he’s in. Cottonwood Village. Talked to a nice lady who said he’s lucid, has some issues with short-term memory, but some days he’s pretty good. She said as long as we don’t cause him a lot of stress or tire him out too much, we can talk to him.”