Raw Bone

by Scott Thornley

  “What are you doing? Stop that. What do you want? Why are you here?”

  Mac looked back into the furnace room. “Like I said, I had this proposition.”

  “You were tricking me at Children’s Services, weren’t you? At least now, you should tell me the truth.”

  MacNeice lobbed the ball back into the rec room. “No, Dylan, I believed every word of what I said. But if I had been through what you’ve been through, I wouldn’t believe me either. That was why I knew to come to the house. You wanted to finish it where it began, here in this house, across the street from Tom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dylan’s legs were shaking with a fatigue that ran up the whole of his body to his hands locked on the belt around his neck.

  “You’ve lost everyone who loved you; and worse, you’ve figured there’ll be whispering and cheap shots in the hallways of Mercy High,” MacNeice said. “And that’s just the short term. You’ll never have a parent there to see you graduate, get married, have your own kids. Your whole idea of who your parents are is upside down and I can’t argue with that, because it’s true. But you’ve left Tom and your teammates out of the picture. They don’t strike me as cut-and-run friends.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “I know Tom is your best friend and that you’ve known him your whole life. I know, when it comes to basketball and life, good times or bad, win or lose, you will have each other’s back.”

  “So?” He was sniffing, trying to keep the snot from running down into his throat.

  “Let’s think about Tom for just a minute. First he’ll be angry you hanged yourself and that you didn’t confide in him—your best friend. But then he’ll begin feeling guilty that he was useless at helping you survive what you were going through and he’ll start blaming himself. The guilt will deepen and it’ll stay with him till his grave. But there’s no point in you feeling guilty about Tom feeling guilty. And maybe the biggest hurdle for Tom is his sense that you betrayed him when you didn’t turn to him. That’s his problem though, isn’t it?”

  MacNeice walked back into the rec room and thumbed through a small stack of NBA game and highlight DVDs before calling, “I saw an empty Dr Pepper can upstairs. Are there any more of those?”

  At first Dylan didn’t answer—maybe he was trying to figure out what MacNeice’s strategy was—but then he said, “There are two left.”

  “You want one? I imagine you must be as thirsty as I am at this point.”

  MacNeice went upstairs. He found the two Dr Peppers and a half-full package of Fig Newtons in the fridge. He took the cans and cookies, went back downstairs and settled on the sofa. “You still with me, Dylan?”

  “You wouldn’t let me do this—they’d put you in jail.”

  “Who’d know?” There was a pause and he heard the stool rocking. “I’ll just say I got here ten minutes too late.”

  He put the Fig Newtons on top of a magazine, opened his drink and took a sip. Looking at the posters—LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin, Dirk Nowitzki and Chris Paul—he asked, “Why isn’t Bill Russell on your wall?”

  Long pause, then Dylan asked, “Who’s he?”

  “He was the Celtics centre who changed the game forever, I’m told.”

  “I thought Shaq and Kareem did that.”

  “Nope. I have it on good authority those two wouldn’t even have happened if the door hadn’t been blown open by Bill Russell.”

  “Well, I don’t care anymore.”

  “I look at these walls, the magazines, DVDs, the balls, the photo that was on the mantel and is likely now tucked in your bag, and I’d have to say I don’t agree. You do care. At your funeral, Tom Smylski will say that basketball was what you cared about most.” Then he added, in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could produce, “Basketball could save you now, Dylan.”

  For close to three minutes the only sound was the intermittent rapid rocking of the stool and Dylan’s coughing and spitting. Soon, whether he wanted to anymore or not, the boy would hang because he couldn’t balance anymore.

  “So what is your proposition?” Dylan struggled to say.

  MacNeice took a long, deep breath, his eyes welling with relief.

  “I refuse to speak to a man on a stool with a belt tied around his neck. Sorry, Dylan, but you need to come and hear me out. If you reject my idea, I promise you I’ll help you climb back up on that thing.”

  “What’s the move in all this?”

  “Only you and I are here, so what we say happened is what happened. If you accept my proposition, you’ll agree to at least outlive me and be the man I know your mother wanted you to be.”

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  “More than you, maybe more than her parents and certainly more than your father—all of which I’m willing to tell you.”

  Another pause. “Okay.”

  MacNeice went into the furnace room and unlashed the belt from the bracket. He helped the boy off the stool and undid the buckle from his neck, then dropped the belt on the floor. He held Dylan by the shoulders. “I know it took courage for you to agree to listen. The truth is that’s only a fraction of the courage you’ll need if you accept my deal.” He walked him to the sofa and handed him the last of the Dr Peppers.

  “We’re going to talk about Bill Russell, about sacrifice, about competition and how that might save your life. But for the moment,” he said, “just enjoy your Dr P and the fact that you’re still breathing.” MacNeice clinked Dylan’s can with his, took a sip and swallowed. Then winced.

  Dylan was studying the detective’s face. “Do you even like Dr Pepper?”

  “Hate it.” He laughed. “What’s more, I don’t believe Pepper’s a doctor.” MacNeice sat back and waited for Dylan to recover a little.

  “Would you really have let me do it?” Dylan nodded toward the furnace room.

  “What do you think?”

  “Sir, I think … you’re seriously weird.”

  “That may be,” MacNeice conceded. “May I tell you about someone I loved who died a few years ago and the impact her death has had on me. You okay with that?”

  “Sure … I guess.”

  MacNeice began at the beginning, with his first sight of Kate, their first words, the first time their conversation wasn’t awkward, the first moment he admitted what had been true for him from the beginning: that he loved her and wanted to be with her forever.

  He told Dylan about how he’d reduced his life to its simplest form: work and Kate. About how, in the years they were together, she’d opened him up to music, art, reading and travel, and how even though their lives were completely different before they’d met, they managed to fold themselves around each other. How, in time, Kate made him better than he was, more of a man than a cop, and how he didn’t really know what she saw in him, other than a potential that she alone could identify. Anytime he asked what it was exactly, she’d smile and touch his cheek, and suddenly the question didn’t matter. Life was good and complete.

  “But I learned ‘forever’ can’t be measured in years when I got the call that Kate’s tests had come in and it was bad news. I felt the life being sucked out of me. The doctor was a family friend and he wanted to speak to me first so we could tell her together.”

  Dylan’s head was down on his chest, and tears were sliding down his cheeks.

  From that point, things went fast, MacNeice said. Days filled with waiting, days of chemotherapy that poisoned her and made her weak and angry and then just weak. He told Dylan how he’d looked for alternate treatments, plants, roots, Chinese herbs, and how each glimmer of hope was dashed by a further slide in her strength. Finally, she gave up.

  “Kate was semi-conscious for two weeks before she died. When her breathing stopped, a tear fell into the hollow below her eye. I’ve never been religious, but I put my finger in the little pooled tear as if it were holy water and touched it to my lips and my forehead. It was the last drop of her life left.”


  “Harsh,” Dylan said under his breath, and wiped his face with his sleeve.

  “What I know is, Kate died sure of my love for her. She left this world knowing we shared something worth a lifetime, and while it was cut short, she lives on in my experience of her.”

  He could see that these ideas had gone over Dylan’s head, so he told him how close he felt to her when he visited her grave out in the country, how he’d speak—out loud—about the weather, the birds and chipmunks, the sky and the scuttling clouds, the amber sunsets, about his current passions in music, his joy in listening to her practise violin, especially when she didn’t know he was listening. “In those moments, to me she’s alive again, just sleeping.”

  He told Dylan about the dreams, the ones that hovered over him like nightmares, where he was desperate to find her and couldn’t. He said things to the boy he’d never said to anyone. He was hoping Dylan would recognize something in it for himself. After all, rage and overwhelming grief had taken him into the furnace room. Those were emotions MacNeice knew well.

  “I’ve been told, by men I grew up with, that I should move on,” MacNeice said. “That I should look ahead, not back—and there’s much to be said for doing so. But I’ve resolved to let nature guide me. You know, when you see a leaf floating down a stream, and you watch it and follow it, at some point it leaves the current and circles around before coming to stop on the bank. Eventually, it sinks to the bottom and joins the leaves that took the same journey years before.”

  “Yeah … I’ve done that.”

  “That’s me. I am a leaf swirling around now in a little eddy, not quite stopped, but no longer captive to the current.” MacNeice put his hand on Dylan’s shoulder. “Perhaps everything I’ve just said—or nothing—applies to you. But I want you to consider that not even death can alter the fact that your mother loved you.”

  Dylan was looking down at his empty can and nodded slowly.

  “So let me tell you about the proposition. Not surprisingly, it involves basketball and Bill Russell.” MacNeice waited until the boy turned to him. “It also involves a friend of mine, a guy who played basketball when he was your age, who loves the game as much as you do, and needs your help.”

  Chapter 25

  The scent of patchouli preceded undercover officer Zeno Trakas down the corridor. Vertesi’s contact from Vice was every bit the sight that he was the smell. He wore a pale ochre suit with wide lapels, a Mediterranean blue silk shirt and a gold medallion hanging from a heavy gold chain around his neck. The medallion floated in a bed of black chest hair that rose all the way to his neck. Trakas rolled a toothpick with his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other as he enjoyed the wide-eyed stares of MacNeice, Williams and especially Aziz. Smiling at her, he lifted his massive eyebrows and said, “You like what you see, eh?”

  “Detective, you are an … exotic.”

  Suddenly the shtick dropped and Trakas said, “Enough of that. Okay if I sit?”

  Vertesi pushed his chair toward him, and Trakas turned it so he could face all of them and settled in. He took the toothpick from his mouth and shoved it into his jacket pocket. Leaning over his legs like he was about to draw a diagram on the carpet, Trakas wiped away an imaginary speck from his cream-coloured leather shoes. “So you want to know about grenades? Who has them, how do you get them and who got one delivered to him in Dundurn?”

  Vertesi said, “Exactly.”

  Trakas’s beat was weapons traffic, mostly handguns, Uzis and assault rifles crossing the border at Fort Erie. His cover was an actual family connection in the port of Kalamata in southern Greece, through which many of the weapons coming from and going to the Middle East were smuggled. He smiled broadly, displaying a gold incisor. Noticing MacNeice’s reaction to the tooth, he put his beefy fingers in and pulled it out. “Cap. No big deal.” He slipped it back in his jaw and winked at Aziz.

  “Okay, so there’s BBT. Barry and his brother Shawn Bailey, twins out of Ithaca—that’s a Greek name, by the way—they hooked up with a kid from Dundurn, named Luther Tirelle, a Jam-Can who went down to Cornell on a full scholarship.”

  “Football?” Williams asked.

  “Stereotyping, detective.” He made a tsk-tsk sound through his teeth. “Luther went to Cornell on a business scholarship, but dropped out after second year because he wasn’t learning anything.”

  “Meaning he was a lousy student.”

  Trakas shook his head at the absurdity of such clichés coming from a black man. “No, Luther had the highest scores in his class, and his profs were grooming him for big things in business. Instead, he founded Bailey and Bailey and Tirelle—BBT—but that means something else on the street … Anybody?”

  “Bacon, bacon and tomato?” Williams said.

  Trakas didn’t take the bait. He looked up at Vertesi and over to Aziz, who both looked back, then swung his head toward MacNeice.

  “Big Bang Theory,” MacNeice said.

  “Exactamundo. If I had a cigar, sir, it would be yours.”

  Trakas told them that Tirelle’s mission with Big Bang Theory was to supply the Canadian side of the border with superior quality and reasonably priced weaponry for all occasions.

  “The money goes south, the weapons come north, and the gangs of the Golden Horseshoe hit the streets evenly weaponized, because they were all buying from the same supplier—BBT.”

  Trakas cast a look around the cubicle to make sure they were keeping up with him. “Now, to the grenade in question. Grenades are an infinitesimal part of BBT’s business, there’s just not that much demand. This one took out two people. Interestingly, Luther is as upset about that as we are. I got him on the phone right after I heard a grenade had exploded in Gage Park. I reminded him that not one incident of gangs and grenades had ever been recorded. And that now, especially with the death of that cop, everyone was going to bear down on the border, thinking the gangs are going crazy.”

  Vertesi looked up from his notebook. “What if it was a Canadian grenade?”

  Trakas dropped his head, took a deep breath and said, “It wasn’t. I can tell you the military base it came from, south of the forty-ninth. And here’s some news: it wasn’t one grenade, it was two. Luther sold the two grenades to one customer for five K. Which is a deal, ’cause one goes for three K. So why the deal, you might ask?”

  “I’m asking,” Williams said.

  “Luther knew the guy who bought them and gave him a family discount. Get this: Luther says this client has no connection to gangs, the Mob or terrorists. Luther won’t tell me who it is—he’s certain the cop was an accident, by the way—but he’s still pissed at the guy.”

  “Where’s Tirelle now?” MacNeice asked.

  “He’s nowhere you’re interested in.”

  “He’s an accessory to murder. If he’s here or even in the States, why not arrest him?”

  “With all due respect, sir, stick to homicide. We’re taking down the cross-border shoppers, and we know pretty much—with this exception—what’s coming in and we’re getting better at tracking where it goes. I need Luther Tirelle and the Bailey boys just where they are. Luther’s in the mountains of Jamaica and he doesn’t need to come back to run his part of BBT. He does it all online.”

  Trakas stood up, shook everyone’s hand, hiked up his collar and then paused at the exit of the cubicle to say, “That smell?” He inhaled deeply. “For you, at least, it’ll fade.”

  He smiled—in character again—took the toothpick out of his jacket pocket, slid it between his lips and followed Vertesi to the exit.

  MacNeice went into the corridor and opened a window as Williams raced to the other side of the office, where he opened another. Aziz took a small hand sanitizer from her briefcase and doused her hands with it, rubbing them together as if she had come in contact with an infected alien.

  When Vertesi came back, MacNeice was writing “BBT” on the whiteboard. The young detective smelled his chair before deciding it was safe to sit down
.

  Aziz gave him the hand sanitizer. MacNeice added the name Luther Tirelle and a question mark on the board. “Let’s find out where Tirelle went to high school.”

  “Already on that, sir,” Ryan said. Thirty seconds later: “Geez Louise. Here’s his graduation photo, and can you guess where it’s from?”

  “Our Lady of Mercy High,” MacNeice answered.

  “Exactamundo! Sorry, sir, I couldn’t resist, but yes, Tirelle’s a 2002 Mercy grad.” Ryan clicked several times, then summarized what he’d found: “Luther Tirelle, twenty-seven, grew up in Dundurn, Ontario. He lived with his mother, then, after she went back to Kingston, Jamaica—no reason given—he moved in with his grandmother, who stayed on in Dundurn until 2009, when she moved to Oakville, Ontario, to live in a home by the lake—purchased for her most likely by her grandson. His ambition in high school? Win a Nobel Prize for business innovation in the new economy.”

  “Like that’s going to happen,” Vertesi quipped.

  “Not so fast, wasn’t Nobel into explosives,” Williams said.

  MacNeice said he was interested to know if there were any extracurriculars mentioned during his years at Mercy. The only thing Ryan could find online was noted below his name; it simply read, “Go Panthers Go.”

  “So Tirelle is another reason for you two to get over to the school,” MacNeice said. Vertesi and Williams nodded as they picked up their raincoats.

  Chapter 26

  The vice-principal, Celestine Brion, welcomed Vertesi and Williams into her office. Haitian by birth, she still spoke with a soft, lilting Creole accent. Guiding them to two chairs placed in front of her desk, she sat down herself and folded her hands together on top of a red file on the desktop. “This has been devastating for all of us at Mercy,” she said, “not only because of what happened to our colleague, but because of Dylan. He told his coach and his teammates that his mother was the body that was found … It’s unspeakable.” Coffee arrived, carried in on a tray by the school secretary, and Brion opened the door of her credenza to retrieve a package of chocolate biscuits. “They’re from Montreal, baked near where I grew up. They make coffee taste especially good.” Both detectives took their biscuits and their coffee—black, no sugar—and sat like students before her. The coffee and treats were enjoyed as if time wasn’t an issue. After Brion cleared the cups, she said, “That’s the way all meetings should begin, no?” She sat behind her desk, put her hands together again and said, “I’ve only worked here for three years, but Mr. Westbrooke has been principal for fifteen. He wanted me to tell you that he will answer any questions you might have that I can’t help you with.”