The Dells

by Michael Blair

  “Doc says the decision should be up to them,” Rachel said.

  “Wise man,” Shoe said.

  “Haw.”

  “How long have you known him?” Shoe asked.

  “Doc? Almost my whole life. Well, since I was sixteen, anyway. He and his wife moved into the Levinson’s house around the time you moved to Vancouver. Jesus, almost thirty years.”

  “Are you and he romantically involved?”

  She made a face at him. “Nosy bugger, aren’t you? You want to know if we’re sleeping together?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, we’re not. He thinks he’s too old for me.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No, I guess I don’t. I’ve made that pretty clear to him. His wife died of cancer three years ago and I don’t think he’s over it yet. I’m not sure I am either. She was a great lady. Her name was Rachel too. That may also have something to do with it.”

  A comfortable curtain of silence dropped between them as a warm breeze rattled through the leaves overhead, punctuated by the distant trill of a woman’s laughter, a man roaring at his kids to get the hell inside this very minute, a dog barking, a door slamming, car tires squealing, and the far-off banshee wail of a high-performance motorcycle accelerating through the gears.

  “How well do you remember Marvin Cartwright?” Shoe asked.

  “Earlier today, if anyone had asked, I’d’ve said, ‘Not very well,’ but a lot of stuff is starting to come back. Bits and pieces mainly. Drinking hot chocolate with marshmallow after skating. Watching Mr. Blizzard after school on a big console colour television set with Marty, Bobby Cotton, and Mickey Bloom. Mr. Cartwright teaching us how to play chess in a room lined with books and records and drawings of birds. And the smell of disinfectant and bleach and his mother calling from her room in the back of the house. But I don’t remember what he looked like.”

  “It was a long time ago. You were pretty young.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “I don’t recall ever speaking to him. I certainly never went into his house. Like you, I also remember bits and pieces, some more vividly than others.” He had a sudden recollection of a man with his shirt sleeves rolled up, vigorously polishing the body of a dark green car as an awkward, gangly boy watched from the far side of the street. “For instance, I remember his car. It was English. A Rover, I think. British racing green. I have the impression it was old. Not new, anyway. He would work on it in his driveway. Change the oil, rotate the tires, tune it up. I always wanted to talk to him about it, but I never did.”

  “I don’t remember it,” Rachel said. “Boys and their toys. You never played tricks on him, though, like Hal and Dougie Hallam and Tim Dutton, did you?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “How come? I remember you getting into trouble at school for playing practical jokes. Like switching the signs on the boys’ and girls’ washrooms during a district track-and-field meet.”

  “Not the same thing at all,” Shoe said.

  “No, of course not,” Rachel said. She looked around as Maureen and Harvey Wiseman came out of the house. “I wonder where the hell Hal’s got to?”

  chapter six

  Hal had not gone far. After storming away from the table, he’d walked to the small park behind the houses across the street, where the following day they would be setting up for the homecoming festival. He’d plopped himself down on a bench, out of breath, his anger dissipated, and with it his sense of self-righteousness. He tried to rekindle the feelings of resentment, but it was like trying to set a match to soggy paper, so he gave it up. God, he was tired. He felt as though there were a powerful vacuum in the middle of his chest, sucking the life out of him. He hadn’t got a wink of sleep the night before and felt that if he closed his eyes he might never be able to open them again. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Oblivion sounded like a pretty good deal at the moment, all things considered. Good luck repossessing his soul.

  He fished around in his pockets for his cigarettes, a habit he’d only recently reacquired, after more than twenty years of abstinence. He didn’t find them; they were locked in the glove box of his car. What he found instead was a folded piece of notepaper. He unfolded it and peered at it in the dim light of the pseudo-Victorian lamppost a few feet from the bench. He couldn’t read it without his glasses, which were back at the house, but he knew what was written on it.

  Despite what he’d told that sanctimonious blowhard Jerry Renfrew, all was not well in the Schumacher household. Hal was certain Maureen was having an affair and the note was a list of the men with whom he thought she might be having it: Davy, the twenty-something kid who worked at the garden centre where Maureen seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time; Bob Nobbs, who lived two doors down from them in Oakville and who claimed to be some kind of writer, but since his divorce spent all his time reading magazines and drinking beer on a chaise lounge in his backyard; Ivan, the musclebound Neanderthal who worked at the gym Maureen went to three times a week; and Clark Sheppard, husband of Maureen’s best friend, Dinah, and supercilious jerk of the first water. There were two other entries, men whose names Hal did not know: the man who jogged by the house every morning as Hal was leaving for work, whom Hal simply called the Sweater; and the Samaritan, a man Hal had never seen but who Maureen had told him had helped her when her car had broken down in the parking lot of Maple Grove mall.

  Hal folded the notepaper and returned it to his pocket. He should go back to the house, he thought, face them, apologize for his behaviour. He could not move, immobilized by ennui.

  If Joe hadn’t lived in Vancouver, Hal would have included his brother’s name on the list. The last time Joe had visited Toronto, two Christmases ago, he’d stayed with Hal and Maureen, because he hadn’t wanted to impose on their parents, he’d said. It was all right to impose on him and Maureen, though, Hal had grumbled to Maureen at the time.

  “Oh, Hal,” she’d said, “don’t be such an old poop. He’s your brother, for heaven’s sake. And he’s no trouble, really.”

  “If he’s no trouble, why doesn’t he stay with my mother and father then?” Hal had replied.

  “Why don’t you want him to stay with us?” Maureen had asked.

  Because I don’t want him around you, he’d almost said. Or you around him.

  A bubble of gas rose painfully in his chest. He squirmed and belched. The pain eased, but his stomach burned, as though it were being slowly dissolved in acid. Just what he needed, he thought glumly. A goddamned ulcer. Christ, his life was turning to crap. Yeah, he chided himself, and whose fault was that? Face it, fat boy. You blew it. Now what’re you going to do to fix it?

  Still, it wasn’t fair. He’d worked hard all his adult life to build a secure future for himself and Maureen, only to see it all come crashing down around him because of a couple of bad judgement calls. What really rankled, though, was that his brother, who professed not to care about such things, had lucked into more money than he’d ever need simply by being in the right place at the right time. Things had always come easily to Joe, the grades, the jobs, the girls, whereas Hal had had to struggle for everything he’d achieved, including his wife.

  Only to watch it all slip through his fingers …

  Hal’s head bobbed and he realized he had dozed off. Jesus, he could’ve been mugged, he thought, nervously looking about. The small park was deserted. His bladder finally coaxed him off the bench and back to his parents’ house. He went in the front door, hoping to use the bathroom before having to face the others, but Maureen and Harvey Wiseman were in the kitchen, finishing up the dishes.

  Maureen draped the dishtowel through the fridge door handle. “Well, where did you get to?” she said, in that accusatory tone she was so good at.

  “I went for a walk,” he said sullenly, continuing down the hall to the bathroom. The door to his parents’ bedroom was closed. It was only ever closed when they were in bed.

  Aft
er using the bathroom, he returned to the kitchen. It was empty. He got a beer from the fridge, scoffing down a couple of leftover barbecued pork chops while he was at it, then went out into the backyard. Rachel and Wiseman stood at the base of the yard, on the edge of the dark woods, talking quietly. Maureen and Joe sat in lawn chairs placed close together at the top of the yard, facing the woods. They stopped talking when Hal let the screen door slam shut behind him.

  chapter seven

  Very little surprised Hannah Lewis anymore. She had learned early to take things in stride. But that afternoon, she’d been knocked for a loop when she’d realized that the tall, dark-haired man with the battered face and distant eyes was none other than Joe Shoe. She hadn’t let it show, of course, but it hadn’t been easy; she’d spent so much of her teens listening to her brother’s endless bitching about how Shoe had stolen his wife and destroyed his career that she’d almost come to believe it herself.

  Shoe had done neither, of course. Shortly after Ron’s “accident,” and two months before her death, Sara had set Hannah straight, explaining that her marriage to Ron had ended long before she’d met Shoe because Ron had insisted that she choose between marriage and her career as a police officer. Likewise, it had been Ron who, in a jealous rage after discovering that Shoe and Sara were seeing each other, had gone after Shoe in the locker room with his nightstick. If Ron’s injury and resulting forced retirement was anyone’s fault, it was his own, not Shoe’s. Shoe had simply been defending himself. Moreover, had Shoe not told the division commander that he and Ron had been roughhousing and that Ron’s injury had been an accident, for which Shoe had nevertheless received a reprimand, Ron would not have qualified for a disability pension.

  “Most of Ron’s troubles are of his own making,” Sara had told her. “Maybe one of these days he’ll realize it.”

  Hannah lucked into a parking space immediately in front of her three-storey row house in the Danforth, across from the old, scaffolding-encased Greek Orthodox church that was in its fifth year of restoration. She’d got the house in the divorce, otherwise she might not have been able to afford to live in the area. As it was, the upkeep and the taxes were slowly bleeding her dry. She loved her house, though, and the neighbourhood, even if parking seriously sucked.

  As she locked up her ten-year-old Pathfinder, her cellphone began to ring. She swore when she saw the number on the call display, and pressed the button that sent the call directly to her voice mail. Florence De Franco had called at least twice a day for the past three days. Obviously, she’d weaselled Hannah’s unlisted numbers out of her husband, who was a city councillor, as well as a member of the civilian Police Services Board. Dominic De Franco had denied giving Hannah’s numbers to his wife, but there was no other way she could have got them.

  Inside, the message light on her landline phone was blinking. She pressed the recall button and swore again. Her brother had called twice and Florence De Franco had called three times. Wearily, she accessed her voice mail. Both had left messages. She fast-forwarded and erased them all without listening to them. She knew what they were about.

  In June, Councillor De Franco’s wife had gone into Ron’s copy and print shop to place an order for invitations to a charity event she was organizing. The day after the invitations had gone out, however, someone noticed that the date was wrong — August 12 had been transposed to read August 21. Ron was certain he’d used the date Mrs. De Franco had given him, but admitted it was possible he’d transposed the numbers when he’d filled out the order form. Either way, he offered to tear up the bill and mail out corrections at his own expense. Mrs. De Franco, however, would have none of it. She accused him of purposely trying to sabotage the event, claiming he’d made an indecent proposal, which she’d rebuffed, and that sabotaging the event was his way of getting back at her.

  “It’s crap,” Ron told Hannah. “She’s not bad looking, but nothing to write home about.” As if it mattered.

  Ron sent out the corrections, hoping it would end there. No such luck. A few days later, Mrs. De Franco filed a police report, alleging that Ron had vandalized her car and sprayed herbicide on her prize-winning roses. Likewise crap, apparently. The police couldn’t find any damage to the car and the roses looked fine. According to a reporter friend of Ron’s at the Toronto Sun, Mrs. De Franco had a history of making nutty allegations. She’d evidently accused mail carriers of reading her mail before delivering it, gas station attendants of making sexual advances by suggestively poking the pump nozzle into the gas filler, and her vet of injecting her dog with a drug that made it hump her leg. Her allegations against Ron were just more of the same. Now the woman was accusing Hannah of abusing her police powers to have her phone tapped and have her followed. Things were getting out of hand.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Christ, now what?” Hannah muttered as she went to the door and peered through the peephole. “Shit,” she said when she saw her brother’s balding pate shining under the porch light. She was briefly tempted to leave him standing there, but he must have been waiting nearby in his car for her to get home. She opened the door.

  “You’re working late,” he said.

  “You know how it is,” she said, stepping back to let him in. She closed the door behind him. “What’s up?”

  “Haven’t you listened to your messages?” He followed her into the living room.

  “No.”

  “The light on your phone isn’t blinking. You erased them without listening to them, didn’t you?”

  She sighed. “C’mon, Ron. Gimme a break. It’s been a long day.”

  “You know what that crazy bitch says I did now?”

  “No,” she said. “And I don’t want to know.”

  But Ron wasn’t listening. “She says that I hired someone to hide in her closet, videotape her getting undressed for bed, and post the videos on the Internet. I’ve had it up to here with this crap. I’m going to get me a lawyer.”

  “Save your money, Ron. The woman’s obviously got psychiatric problems. No one takes her seriously. Just ignore her.”

  “Hell with that. I did some poking around and found out she was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. Hah! Nothing borderline about it. Last year, when her husband claims she was on vacation in Mexico, she was locked up in the psych ward of Mount Sinai. Sleazebag’s been covering for her for years. She’s been busted for everything from shoplifting to public indecency. If she doesn’t stop this crap, I’m going to send what I got to my buddy at the Sun.”

  “Christ, you really are your own bloody worst enemy, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  “If you go dragging her psychiatric history through the muck, you’re going to need that lawyer. Let it go.”

  “You’re afraid that if I make a stink it will wreck your chances of promotion.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. But it wasn’t entirely untrue. Being a cop, and a female cop at that, was tough enough without making enemies on the Police Services Board. “Have you eaten? I’m going to fix myself something.”

  “I’m okay. Wouldn’t turn down a beer, though.”

  “Help yourself.” He did, and when they were seated at the table in her kitchen-cum-dining room, Ron with a beer and a can of dry roasted peanuts, Hannah with a salad and a glass of white wine — a big glass — she said, “You’ll never guess who I saw today.”

  “Okay, so tell me.”

  “Joe Shoe.”

  “No kidding. Where?”

  “At his parents’ house in Downsview.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Working a case.”

  “Don’t tell me he killed someone.”

  “No. He’s in town visiting his family. Last night a man who used to live in the neighbourhood was beaten to death in the woods behind his parents’ house.”

  “Bad timing. How is he?”

  “I didn’t recognize him at first. He’s been livin
g out west. Vancouver.”

  “He still a cop?”

  “No. He’s some kind of corporate investigator. He looks like he’s taken his share of lumps, though.”

  “I hear the corporate world can be pretty dog eat dog. The vic …?”

  “What about him?”

  “Any leads?”

  “Nothing much so far. Early days yet.”

  “What was the name again?”

  She smiled dryly. He smiled back. She hadn’t mentioned the victim’s name. She said, “Cartwright. Marvin Cartwright.”

  “Cartwright?” Ron said.

  “That’s right. What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Sounds familiar, that’s all.” Hannah finished her salad and poured herself another glass of wine. Ron refused a second beer.

  “I’m driving,” he said. “Speaking of which, I should get going.” He stood. “If you see Shoe again, say hello for me, will you?”

  “Sure,” Hannah said, walking him to the door.

  “Tell him … ” Ron paused, seeming lost in thought for a moment. Hannah let him find his own way back. “Tell him, if he’s got time, to drop by the shop. We’ll go grab a beer or something, get caught up. Tell him … ” He hesitated, then said, “Tell him it’d be good to see him.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. He kissed her quickly on the cheek and almost ran down the steps.

  No, nothing much surprised her anymore.

  chapter eight

  “Goddamnit, Hal,” Maureen said, bracing herself against the dashboard as Hal braked suddenly. “What the hell is going on with you? And slow down, for god’s sake. Or pull over and let me drive.” She immediately regretted the offer, hoped he wouldn’t take her up on it; she’d had a couple of glasses of wine too many herself.

  “I’m not drunk,” he snapped, mashing the horn button because the car in front of them had slowed to make a right turn without signalling.