Leith said, “So neither you or Jamie went out that night? Well, I suppose if Jamie went out while you were sleeping, you wouldn’t know about it though, would you?”
Melanie studied him thoughtfully, almost smiling. “You think Jamie slipped out and killed him, then slipped back and put on this big act? Don’t bother. She can’t act. And she can’t drive. Even if she could, I’d have heard her take the car. It’s got a gutsy exhaust. I heard nothing.”
“I’m not saying that,” Leith said. “Just wondering if either of you went out.”
“No. We were drunk. Too placid to kill anyone, promise.”
“Okay.” Leith’s hand splayed on a manila folder that contained her first statement to the first-on-scene member. “We’ll likely be talking again, but one last question for you. Who would want to kill your brother? Any ideas?”
She looked about to say no, but her eyes widened, and her body tensed, as if danger had just walked into the room. “He saw this coming!”
“What d’you mean?”
Her hand had clapped to the side of her face. “Oz made friends and enemies everywhere he turned. He’s just impulsive. He can so easily say the wrong thing to the wrong person. It gets him in trouble sometimes. But lately, I think he mentioned he’s being followed.”
“Yes?” Leith said. “By who?”
“He didn’t say.” Melanie shrugged. “On the other hand, he’s been a drama king ever since he was a little kid. Always seeing monsters in the shadows. He used to have night terrors and was easily spooked. Which went against his grain, because he was also reckless, and he craved attention. So he’d get in trouble wherever he went and whatever he did. So when he started talking about stalkers, I actually thought it was comical. We all did. He did himself, when he was sober. Until this morning I’d have said he was just trying to make life more colourful. But he was right,” she said, and gazed at Dion. “My God, he was right.”
Leith put more questions about this strange feeling of being followed to her, but she had nothing to add. He then asked if she had anything else to tell him, on any aspect of the case, and she said, “By all means, no.” So he stood and escorted her out.
On his return he sat heavily. “Wow, our work’s cut out for us,” he said. “We’ll do Paquette next, and I’ll get the guys to round up Cleo meanwhile.”
Dion couldn’t remember who Paquette was, and thought Cleo must be Oscar’s daughter. He asked Leith why the child should be brought in. She was only six, and mentally challenged.
Leith said, “What child? Cleo, I’m talking about. Cleo Irvine, the angry ex. The one who gets it all. The one with motive written across her forehead. What page are you on?”
Fed up, Dion stood to say he wasn’t feeling well, that he was calling it a day, and that Leith could find someone else to sit in — but a commotion down the hallway distracted them both.
He followed Leith to the doorway and watched Constable Sean Urbanski getting physical with a man who seemed intent on charging in. Urbanski wasn’t putting his full weight into stopping the stranger, a tall, athletic-looking redhead. The man brushed past and approached Leith, putting a question to him in a voice ragged with emotion. “Are you in charge? What’s going on? Who killed him? Why?”
The man was moving too fast for comfort. Dion readied himself to block a blow. Leith, more optimistically, had shot up a palm, instructions to stop right there. The man held back, as ordered, but seemed to levitate with angry energy.
Leith said, “Yes, I’m the one to talk to. Sean?”
Urbanski said, “Jon York. I was told to show him in.”
Hearing his name seemed to sober the stranger. He stood gulping air. “Got a call from my wife this morning. Got here soon as I could. From Victoria. Travel complications you wouldn’t believe. What’s going on? Is it true? Is Oz dead?”
He was the fair-skinned type whose complexion showed every emotion. He was mottled now, pink and white with frustration and shock. Dion knew that mangled look from his years of dealing with people who had just had the rug pulled from under them. He knew that look from the mirror. He had also dealt with people who tried to fake the mangled look and couldn’t pull it off. He could tell this man Jonathan York was faking nothing. He was genuinely shattered, and that made him less interesting. Interesting enough, however, that he forgot his plan of storming out and leaving Leith in the lurch. He trailed after the two into the interview room.
Leith tried to encourage York to sit — a seated witness was easier to control — but York didn’t want to. Dion wasn’t worried. York looked physically fit but not aggressive. He was about forty-five, with a curly cap of dark-red hair and a casual three-day beard. He looked both rich and hip. He wore eyeglasses of a jetty shape, with clip-on shades he’d maybe forgotten to unclip. He carried a dark leather shoulder satchel and wore a lead-grey Gore-Tex jacket over a lead-grey mock turtleneck, dark-indigo jeans, and vintage long-toed boots.
Leith was giving him the basic facts, that Oscar Roth had been found dead in his own home this morning by York’s wife, Melanie, and Oscar’s girlfriend, Jamie.
“Yes, I know all that,” York burst out, banging at his own forehead with a palm. “But who did it? Did you get him? Let me see the bastard. I’ll kill the fuck.”
Punch-drunk, Dion thought.
Leith told York to calm down, take a seat. He said they didn’t have a suspect, but of course the investigation was in full swing, there was an Ident team all over the house and property, and every lead was being run into the ground. York finally took the chair. He sagged into it, took off his glasses and covered his face with both hands.
Leith summoned Dion out to the hallway and closed the door. “This is going to be like pulling teeth,” he said. “I might as well talk to him alone. How about you go interview Ms. Paquette. Get Sean to sit in and take notes. And be thorough. Can you do that?”
“Yes, I can do that,” Dion said.
Leith went back to pulling teeth, and Dion, considering the assignment, stood riffling through his notebook pages, looking for a Ms. Paquette. The name escaped him, but by a process of elimination he worked it out. She was the dead man’s girlfriend, Jamie.
Sean Urbanski was working on the Liu homicides, coordinating reports and maintaining a flowchart that was starting to stagnate. He was slouched at his desk, chatting on the phone. He was in jeans and a black button-down shirt, untucked, and he looked dishevelled, as he had every day since Dion’s return. It was a change Dion found disturbing, like his old friend was suffering some kind of identity crisis. Or losing his beans.
Before the crash, Dion knew Sean as well groomed, a man who liked his colognes and cufflinks. But something had gone wrong. Now, if not for the computer monitor he sat before, he could have been some drug-dealing ape who had wandered his way into the office by mistake, blond hair hanging in tangles, chin unshaven, and a glittery rock in his earlobe.
Urbanski looked up. Dion told him about the interview and asked him to go set up Room 6 for video, get the witness in there with coffee or whatever, and he would be along himself in a few minutes. Urbanski grumbled something about short notice, but hoisted himself out of his chair and went to take care of it.
There was a set of washrooms on every level. Dion used the men’s on Level 3, as it was usually empty, then confronted himself in the mirror, studying his eyes while he scrubbed his hands. This would be his first interview since the crash. He transmitted a warning to his reflection: It’s going to be on tape. People will be watching. Whole courtrooms might be watching. Don’t screw up.
His reflection said nothing. It looked ridiculously young, scared, and angry. His reflection seemed to understand more than he did what a long fall he was on the edge of.
He neutralized his face to a professional calm, dried his hands, straightened his tie knot, and checked his suit for lint. Then he took a deep breath and walked out, down
stairs, and along the broad hallway to Interview Room 6.
It’s not complicated, he told himself. He put the facts in order. Her name was Jamie Paquette. She was the girlfriend of the rich dead man whose head had been smashed into a flashy black Mustang. Paquette and Melanie York had found the body this morning. Other than that, he knew little else about her, and that was his job, to gather what he could, start filling in the blanks, something any third-rank GI member should be able to handle.
“No problem,” he told the door. He pushed it open and stepped into the room. He went to the chair next to Urbanski, continuing to plot, compartmentalize, hold it together. He sat down, looked across the table at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and all his neatly aligned data points scattered.
Twelve
Breaker Zone
After a not-so-productive interview, Leith released Jonathan York and returned to the GI office, where he found tempers flaring. Cal Dion and Sean Urbanski were facing off between the desks, calling each other names. A bit of a crowd had gathered to watch and egg them on. Leith could see as he waded through the onlookers that the fight was just at the shoulder-shoving stage, which meant it was about to escalate to fisticuffs if somebody didn’t step in fast. He raised his arms referee-style, one for each combatant, and said, “Hey, guys, cool it. What’s up?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Urbanski said from the end of Leith’s right arm, not to Leith, but to Dion. “I didn’t do nothin’. What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re what’s the matter with me, you fucking chimp,” Dion said from the end of Leith’s left arm, not to Leith, but to Urbanski, poking at him with an angry finger. “You’re not as smart as you think you are, Sean, in fact you never were, and now you look like shit to go with the IQ, so good for you, you finally got a matching set.”
“Hey, hey,” Urbanski shouted. “I was yanking your collar, man. I was fooling around. Jesus, what’s up with that shit? You’re gonna wanna work on that personality of yours, pal, what’s left of it.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Leith told them.
“Brain-dead damaged fucking loser.”
“And still two miles ahead of you.”
“Oh really?” Both of Urbanski’s hands went up, balled into fists, not to throw a punch but to give his ex-pal the classic double-bird up yours sign. “You sure could’ve fooled me in there just now. Think you’re a genius? You’re an amateur. You’re worse than amateur, you’re retarded. But hey, we got it on tape, right? Wanna rewind, retard? You wanna fuckin’ rewind and watch it all and then tell me how many miles you are ahead of me?”
“Yeah, I do, and we will, and then you’re going to shove it up your —”
“Shut the hell up, both of you,” Leith bellowed, loud enough that they actually did.
* * *
Leith, the unsung mediator who really didn’t have time for this garbage, listened to their stories, separate and apart.
In private, in the “soft” interview room, Sean Urbanski told Leith that Dion had botched the questioning of Jamie Paquette from beginning to end — which wasn’t a big deal, we all have our bad days — but afterward Urbanski had cracked a joke, just between two red-blooded guys, something about the interviewee being a good-looking woman and Dion going zombie over it, which again is perfectly okay, perfectly natural, a guy sees a pretty woman and his nuts take over, happens all the time. Pressed further, Urbanski admitted his jokes were maybe off-colour, had maybe even verged on roughhouse, maybe kinda hardcore porn, and he’d expressed a criticism or two as well for the way Dion had run the show, which was worse than lame. But the jokes were just that, jokes, and the criticism was constructive, no cheap shots, nothing a pal couldn’t handle, which, too bad, but Dion was obviously a pal no more, and what was wrong with him anyway?
“I thought he was cured,” Urbanski finished, still rosy at the throat and temples. “I thought they fixed his head, and he’s back with us. But he isn’t. He’s some kind of … Borg shit imposter with no sense of humour.”
It was more or less what Doug Paley had said. Different monster but same idea.
“What was he like before?” Leith asked. He knew Dion as a walking grab-bag of trouble, but there were two sides to him, it seemed: before the crash and after. Not having known him before, he had to wonder about the personality split, and how deep it went. And more particularly, where it might go from here.
Urbanski said nothing but got up and walked out, to return a minute later with a single snapshot. “That’s what he was before the crash. Two Christmases ago, at my place. A good dude.”
In the colour photograph, Leith could see festive decorations and what appeared to be a bunch of drunks jeering at the camera. A house party. Urbanski was in there, raising a beer bottle, and fat, balding Doug Paley, and the skinny tomboy JD Temple in a green elf cap. And a hefty Italian-looking individual, maybe thirty-five or so, the loudmouth type, hand a blur caught mid-gesture and mouth working at getting some point across. That point was now buried in the sands of time. The words were directed at Dion, but Dion was looking straight into the lens, sweaty, exultant, and fully present.
“Who’s this guy?” Leith asked of the loudmouth in the foreground, though he could guess.
“That’s Looch,” Urbanski said, quietly. He took the photo back, flicked at it and made a macho harrumphing noise, maybe to neutralize any sentimentality he might be betraying as he added, “Luciano Ferraro. He died in the crash. Which is totally fuckin’ wrong. Miss him like hell. We all do.”
“The guys around here, do they blame Cal for the crash? Do you?”
Urbanski shrugged. “The file says Cal was blindsided. He wasn’t exactly taxiing along, though, the traffic guys say. But we’ll never know exactly how fast he was doing it, will we? You gotta wonder, though.”
“About what?”
“What they were doing out in Cloverdale, middle of the night, tearing up the fuckin’ road. Smacks of something to me.”
“Like what?”
Urbanski shrugged again, but this time didn’t elaborate.
Leith finished up by advising him to keep a lid on his temper, and be patient with his coworkers. Especially Dion, who was clearly struggling. And maybe tone down the language while on the job, okay? It’s not good for the image. Urbanski promised to stop swearing.
To close off, Leith asked him for any impressions he’d formed of the sexy witness, Ms. Paquette, the source of all this trouble. Urbanski had only three words for her, spoken with passion: “Fuckin’ spice, man.”
* * *
Dion’s version of the fight wasn’t much different from Urbanski’s, except he denied botching the interview. “I took it slow,” he said. “I was thorough. I got what I needed from her.”
“Well, I guess, like Sean says, we have it on tape. Want to see?”
Judging from the slant of Dion’s mouth, it was the last thing he wanted. But he accompanied Leith to the case room, to the banks of computers along one wall. Leith sat down, brought a computer to life, and with some trial and error got the file uploaded off the in-house server. He told Dion to take a seat. Dion did so but kept his chair at a distance, watching the screen only occasionally.
The opening frames showed Jamie Paquette sitting alone on her side of the table, waiting to be grilled. Because she was seated it was hard to say, but Leith guessed her to be tall and lithe. Her skin was pale, her long hair golden blond and artfully tousled. Smudgy mascara only added to her charm. Her lower lip caught the light, a solemn mouth, attractively puffy. She looked frightened. Not surprising, considering she had just found her boyfriend bashed, head-bagged, and asphyxiated in her own home.
He saw her knuckle at her eyes, worsening the smudges, then sit hugging herself.
On the monitor, Urbanski entered the room and set a cup of something in front of her. He took a chair, introduced himself, and made the usu
al small talk, not too imaginatively. Something about the weather, and then something else about the weather. He pushed a box of Kleenex in front of her. She gave him a small smile as she swabbed her nose.
It wasn’t a careful swabbing, Leith noticed. And considering how beautifully done-up she was, that lack of care meant something. It meant she had put vanity aside for the moment. It meant she had bigger things on her mind than ruined makeup or reddened nostrils.
After a delay Dion entered the room. He closed the door and took the chair next to Urbanski, and due to the camera angle remained more or less off-frame. Even so, as he checked out Ms. Paquette for the first time he was visibly a man transfixed.
He recovered his wits a moment later, but the interview that followed wasn’t great. Not quite the botch-up Urbanski alleged, but definitely not prize-winning. Dion started unconventionally by asking Jamie where she’d grown up. Leith wondered why it mattered.
Jamie said, “John Oliver, mostly.”
The high school? Leith thought.
“So South Vancouver?” Dion on the screen asked.
“Yeah. Forty-first.”
Dion asked if she recalled how and when she had met Oscar Roth.
She lifted a hand to illustrate something twirling midair. “I was dancing. The Penthouse, I think. He bought me a drink.”
So Jamie was a stripper. Or an ex-stripper. Interesting. Strippers tended to drag along in their wake criminals and drugs, and often the twisted, pimp-like mentality of their lovers. Was Oz a pimp?
“When was that?” Dion asked.
“After.”
“After what?”
“What?”
“When did you meet Oz? What month, what year?”
“Oh, um.” Her voice was almost too soft to pick up. “Last year.” Her hands clutching the Kleenex seemed to be squeezing the life out of the thing. “It was springtime, like now. But hotter. They had no air conditioners in the rooms. We had to walk down, like, two flights of stairs. It was …”
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