The Devil and the Detective

by John Goldbach

  9

  When I woke up I was alone. I knew I was alone immediately, before opening my eyes. I felt around nonetheless. Elaine wasn’t there. I sat up in bed. I looked around the room. I called out her name – ‘Elaine, Elaine, Elaine.’ I got out of bed and put on my pants and T-shirt and went downstairs, the whole time periodically calling out her name. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the den or the living room. I opened the front door. Her bmw was still in the laneway, exactly as she’d left it. Across the street sat an unmarked police car, a blue Ford, and the officer behind the wheel perked up when he saw me at the front door. I waved and shut the door. ‘Elaine!’ I yelled. No answer. The house was silent save for a low-level hum. I was worried, though not yet panicked. I checked every washroom in the house. There were five. I checked every bedroom. There were four. I checked the unfinished basement, which was full of boxes of books and cobwebs and bottles of wine and old sports equipment, like baseball gloves and lacrosse sticks and cross-country skis and an old-style football helmet, for example, and there was a chalk portrait of a woman, a brunette, though it definitely wasn’t Elaine Andrews. The woman in the portrait had light brown skin and brown eyes and wore a yellow dress from, I thought, the seventies. The background was light green. It was a nice portrait, actually, though obviously made by an amateur artist. There was an old microwave the size of a TV and there were boxes overflowing with old tableware. I went back to the main level. She wasn’t in the house. I checked every closet. There were thirteen. Soon, if she didn’t show up, I was going to have to notify the police. Nowhere in the house were there signs of forced entry, not in the living room or the den or the kitchen or anywhere else in the house. I checked the garage. There was nothing but firewood and motor oil and antifreeze and a snow blower and a lawn mower and two bicycles and rock salt and so on. I started panicking, my heart galloping, and as if a blinding white light exploded, charging through my mind and body, I thought: I’ll never see her again.

  10

  ‘Listen, Rick,’ O’Meara began, circling the kitchen table, where I sat silently, taking his bullshit because I felt on some level that I deserved it, ‘I know your client wasn’t the nicest woman in the world but you had a responsibility, Rick, a simple responsibility: to wit, to take care of your goddamn client if you’re going to have a sleepover and especially if you’re going to bang her. Did you bang her, Rick?’

  I didn’t acknowledge his question. I didn’t acknowledge anything, for I was fading in and out of other thoughts. I thought about Elaine’s and my life together, a life that would now never be, though I indulged some fantasies anyway, replete with our home and trips and perhaps children one day, and, later, grandchildren, and so on, but none of that would happen now. Nothing and no one would take the place of her, I thought. She’s disappeared. I’d look for her, I thought, but I knew she was gone – vanished into the thin, suffocating air.

  O’Meara continued chewing me out. ‘I’ve got all my men looking for her,’ he said. ‘You’ll lose your licence,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it.’ He kept circling, without stopping, quickening his pace. ‘I’ll admit,’ he said, ‘Elaine Andrews is a bit of a See You Next Tuesday, but you were still responsible for her.’ He continued circling the table, though I remained silent and immobile. I felt sick and weak. O’Meara, I could tell, enjoyed seeing me withdrawn and suffering and scared.

  O’Meara was called away, thankfully, by a uniformed officer, the one from the night before. I, however, stayed seated. My stomach seized and nausea made itself known and the room started to spin in my mind and before my wet, bleary eyes. I clutched my stomach and took deep breaths through my nose. Eyes closed tightly, I tried to focus, focus on something, without success. My heart, too, once again raced. I tried to quell the urge to vomit and knew if I tried to race to the washroom or the kitchen sink or the garbage I’d never make it. Slowly, I took deep breaths. I didn’t want to take in too much air at once and vomit as a result. I counted my breaths. I tried to slow down all thought. Nevertheless I thought about Elaine and her dead husband and feared she was dead now, too, as a result of my negligence stemming from overwhelming concupiscence. I thought about Elaine with a knife in her chest. It was too horrible – I concentrated on the infinite space created by my tightly sealed eyelids. Elaine’s okay, I told myself, Elaine’s okay, wherever she may be, she’s okay, she’s okay, I told myself, over and over and over again. I continued to count my breaths.

  Eventually, my nausea passed, or at least abated, and I was still left sitting alone at the kitchen table, the table where Elaine and I had eaten Chinese takeout and flirted and talked about her dead lover and her dead husband. Bodies were piling up and I had no clue what was happening; Elaine’s whereabouts were my only concern but my hands were tied till O’Meara let me go, I thought, but then I decided that if O’Meara was going to leave me unattended I was going to split. I stood up and started toward the front door. O’Meara was barking orders into his cellphone like a maniac and he screamed when he saw my hand on the front door’s handle.

  ‘Where in the goddamn do you think you’re going!’ he screamed, and I tried to ignore him, but a uniformed officer grabbed my wrist and O’Meara said, ‘Cuff him,’ and the officer quickly twisted my arms behind my back and clasped on the handcuffs.

  ‘You have no right to do this,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll take them off when you learn to stay put,’ said O’Meara. ‘Stick him in the office, where he won’t get in the way.’

  I sat at Gerald’s desk, manacled, looking at the spines of the hundreds of books that lined the walls of his den: The Warren Buffett Way, One Up on Wall Street, Buffettology, The Alchemy of Finance, Business @ the Speed of Thought, The Downing Street Years, Diplomacy, Years of Renewal, and so on and so forth. Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson, M.D. He only reads books by successful people, I thought. Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, Forbes® Greatest Business Stories Ever, The Reagan Diaries, My Life and Work: An Autobiography of Henry Ford, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Mein Kampf, The Wealth of Nations, The Prince, Leviathan, The Art of War and so on. Plus he had two sets of encyclopedias: Britannica and World Book. He had some nice dictionaries in English, German, Italian, French and Spanish. It looked like he had a bunch of books on tape, too. I was stuck in Gerald’s desk chair, handcuffs digging into my wrists, waiting for I’m not sure what. Gerald’s dead, Adam’s dead, and, most likely, I thought, Elaine’s dead. At the very least she’s gone. I wanted to get back to my apartment. I needed rest and time to think about the case. I’d gotten too close, obviously, and lost all perspective. I’d lost the forest for the trees, so to speak. Something had gone terribly wrong, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Something happened while I was trying to figure things out, while I was being, quite willingly, seduced by Elaine. So much escaped me. Everything changed while I had my head up my ass.

  11

  ‘Rick! Rick!’ I woke up feeling far from refreshed. My nose stung as I inhaled. O’Meara was standing over me, holding the cherry of a lit cigarette directly under my nose. I coughed and gagged. My eyes stung, too. ‘Rise and shine, sleepyhead,’ O’Meara said. ‘I’m going to uncuff you but you’re not free to go. Understand?’ He looked out of focus to my bleary eyes. ‘Understand?’ he said and pushed me.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said.

  He released me from the handcuffs and I rubbed my wrists, like in the movies, I thought, and kept rubbing my wrists. They were red and chapped and sore and I felt generally sick. ‘Can I get something to drink?’ I said.

  ‘I want you staying put in this office,’ said O’Meara. ‘Is that clear?’

  ‘Clear as mud.’

  O’Meara left and I sat rubbing my wrists. I was parched. My mouth tasted awful. I opened Gerald’s desk drawer and inside was mainly just a mess of papers – bills and receipts mainly – and some business cards. I sorted through them quickly but only recognized a lawyers’ card, Bouvert-Adamson (Bouvert was the name of the lawyer Elaine gave, I th
ought, when she first called), and I slipped it into my wallet. I looked around at the books and stood up and tilted my head and read the spines on the shelves. I pulled down a copy of The Art of War and opened it to a bookmarked page: ‘18. All war is based on deception,’ it said at the top of the page.

  O’Meara’s voice and footsteps were approaching. I shelved the book and slid back behind the desk. O’Meara entered the office.

  ‘Did you fuck her, Rick?’ he said. I didn’t answer. Again, he said, ‘Did you fuck her?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Are you telling the truth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If her body turns up and we find any of your DNA, even a hair, a single pube, I’ll make sure you’re locked up for eternity.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘This is serious, Rick. You don’t sleep with your client when you’re on a case. It’s these kinds of stunts that kept you from becoming a detective.’

  ‘I am a detective.’

  ‘A real detective.’

  ‘I am a real detective.’

  ‘Right. Keep telling yourself that, Rick.’

  After a few more minutes of O’Meara’s bullshit he said I was free to go for the time being, stressing the point, for the time being, over and over again, and I said whatever you say, then searched my wallet for Darren’s card.

  I used Gerald’s desk phone. Darren picked up after three rings. I asked if he wouldn’t mind grabbing me – said I’d explain in person – and he said he’d be there in fifteen minutes. O’Meara watched me the whole time but I didn’t give a shit. He didn’t intimidate me. He never does, I thought, though he thinks he does. He thinks going to the academy and rising up through the ranks of the force to become a detective like him is what I wanted, but that’s where he’s wrong, I thought. I never wanted to be that kind of detective.

  I sat on the front porch waiting for Darren. The police officers weren’t so friendly and I was anxious to leave the scene of the crimes. Light pink clouds drifted westward in the sunset. Parts of the sky were a deep clear blue. Darren pulled up to the house in his flower-filled hatchback and lightly beeped the horn twice. He waved.

  Right away I thanked him for picking me up and said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ He nodded and drove off. I told him everything, for some reason, that is to say, I told him about Gerald’s murder and Elaine calling, O’Meara, the narrowish bar, the surfeit of whiskies, waking up on my couch, receiving a call from Elaine, O’Meara again, dinner, drinking, sleeping with Elaine, waking up alone, the interrogations, the handcuffs and so on and so forth. Darren listened. I told him about what an asshole O’Meara is, about how we’ve never gotten along, even when we first met, though then we were civil.

  ‘It sounds like you two are competitive,’ said Darren, ‘like your jobs are too similar for you to be friends – odium figulinum, trade jealousy.’

  ‘Perhaps, though I’ve always felt that our methods and motivations – our modi operandi,’ I said, showing him I knew a few words in Latin, too, ‘are so different that it cancels out what our trades have in common. I don’t even feel like we’re playing the same game. Ours are different trades, in many ways.’

  I still agreed with him, though. There was no denying that we didn’t get along, without a doubt.

  ‘Do you think Elaine’s all right?’ said Darren. I said that I wasn’t sure. ‘What’s your next move?’ Darren said.

  I opened my wallet and read the address on the Bouvert-Adamson business card. ‘I figure someone will still be at the office if we get there soon.’ Although the sun was setting, it wasn’t yet six o’clock. Darren said he could get me to their law offices in ten minutes. He said he knew the old building well because he’d photographed its gargoyles for an architecture forum.

  ‘Actually, technically they’re not gargoyles – they’re chimeras,’ he said. ‘They don’t spout water.’

  I said, ‘Cool,’ and nothing else. We drove on in silence. Darren respected my privacy; he let me think, uninterrupted. I watched the city go by, anonymous buildings housing anonymous people, some of whom were up to no good. I didn’t care, though. It was a Montreal that didn’t concern me. I wondered, however, if Elaine was hiding out in any of those buildings or homes, holed up with a lover, one she never mentioned, not Gerald or Adam or me but someone secret, or at least kept secret from me – or perhaps she was being held in an apartment against her will, tied up, blindfolded, hungry, tired, scared, hurt, bloody or worse. We drove on to the lawyers’.

  Adorned with menacing-looking gargoyles, or chimeras rather, as Darren had explained, sat the stout old building. It looked like a less dilapidated, though less benign, version of the old building I inhabit. Dark clouds gathered above it and its chimeras. I was going to meet the lawyers, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what they knew, if anything, for Elaine only mentioned her lawyer, Bouvert, once, saying that he’d recommended me specifically, giving her my telephone number, though I’d never met the man in my life. I recognized the name but I’d never met the man. Darren pulled up to the curbside and said he’d wait.

  ‘You don’t have to. I can get a cab from here. I appreciate you grabbing me from the Andrewses’ in the first place, but you don’t have to wait.’

  ‘It’s no problem really,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait. And if you don’t come out in half an hour I’ll come in and get you.’

  ‘I think I’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘It’s just her lawyer.’

  The elevator never came, so I climbed six flights of stairs to the Bouvert-Adamson offices. The reception area was large, with an empty waiting area to the side, with leather chairs and a table covered in current magazines. An attractive woman sat behind a sparse, tidy work station. Right away she asked if she could help me. I said yes and told her my name and that I’m a private detective, a private detective representing Mrs. Elaine Andrews in the case of her murdered husband, Mr. Gerald Andrews.

  ‘Mr. Bouvert will want to see you right away,’ she said, standing, and I said I figured he would.

  Bouvert’s office was large, too, with large windows behind his desk that looked out on the street. Everything was black leather. I sat in a large black leather chair in front of his desk. The walls were book-lined and there was a black leather couch and to its side a small locked metal cabinet in which I imagined he stored liquor and cash and possibly a gun. Bouvert was a large man, well dressed, wearing a dark grey suit, with a dark tie and what looked like black pearl cufflinks, though it was difficult to tell. He was bald and kept the few hairs he had close cropped. He wore a heavy watch that I imagined was platinum with a pearl face. His teeth were bad. He didn’t say much after introducing himself and shaking my hand. He motioned for me to sit down and then he sat down behind his desk. Leaning back in his chair, he stared at me in silence.

  A younger, slighter man in a dark suit similar to Bouvert’s entered the office. Bouvert looked at me and said, ‘Bob, Al. Al, Bob.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Al.

  I nodded.

  ‘Bob here was the detective Elaine Andrews called after she found Gerald Andrews’s body,’ said Bouvert.

  ‘Did you see the body?’ Al said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure, Bob?’ said Bouvert.

  ‘Sure I’m sure. I didn’t see the body, even for a second. I hadn’t been inside the house till yesterday, early evening, around five or so.’

  Bouvert and Al exchanged knowing looks, though as to what they knew, I had no idea whatsoever. Al seated himself on the black leather couch. Bouvert stood up and walked around to the front of his desk and continued his questioning, resting his ass on the lip of his desk and leaning, saying, ‘Did she mention anything about another man? Did she talk about any men other than Gerald?’

  ‘I have a question first. Why’d you recommend me to her?’

  ‘Pardon me?’ said Bouvert.

  ‘Why did you recommend me to Elaine?’

  ‘I didn’t.�
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  ‘She said that you told her to call a private detective, then gave her my number.’

  ‘Mr. James, I’m sorry to contradict your story, but I never told her to call a private detective.’

  ‘Then why did she call me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bouvert.

  Al sat silent and stolid on the black leather couch.

  ‘Did she mention me to you at all?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bouvert. ‘Yesterday afternoon Elaine and I talked. She sounded withdrawn, but I expected as much. I asked if she wanted me to come over to keep her company, and she said that she’d called a private detective. She said you were on your way over. I asked her why she’d hired a private detective and she said that she wanted to get to the bottom of the case as soon as possible. I thought that made some sense.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I told her I’d call again soon and said goodbye and she said goodbye and that was that.’

  Al remained mute and motionless.

  ‘And that was the last time you talked to her?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Bouvert seemed to be telling the truth. I didn’t think he told her to call me, but some questions still remained unanswered: Why did she call me? Who put her in touch with me? Why did she lie, saying that her lawyer, Bouvert, gave her my number? I put these questions to Bouvert and his associate, but neither seemed to have the slightest clue as to why she had called or who put her in touch with me. When I began asking questions about Gerald, neither seemed to want to talk to me anymore. I insisted, though: ‘Why would someone want to murder Gerald Andrews and target his wife?’