The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  “And have you?” Detective Ramsay says.

  There is a point in the telling of every story where the author becomes his own editor. Not everything is included in an accounting of events, no record the complete record. Even the adulterer who cannot live with his conscience excludes the smell of his mistress’ perfume from his confession. Nations at war provide casualty numbers, but not a tally of missing arms versus legs. Deception, in the active sense of distorting the facts, may not be the cause of these absences. Most of the time it is a matter of providing the gist without inflicting undue pain. It’s how one can be truthful and keep secrets at the same time.

  This is how I later came to justify my telling Detective Ramsay, No, I haven’t been followed, don’t know what Petra was talking about in the ravine at all. Even as I take this path I’m aware it may be the wrong one. The police could be the only ones to keep me and Sam safe at this point. But there is something that makes me certain that such disclosure would only make me next. If I am being watched by the Sandman as closely as it feels I am, then I have every intention to play by his rules, not the law’s.

  Not to mention that I’m starting to get the feeling I may be a suspect in Petra’s murder. Trust me on this: one’s instinct, in such cases, is to withhold first, and figure out if this was a good idea later.

  “So why’d she call you?”

  “I suppose it was because of the writing circle we were in together. Years ago. She was trying to draw a connection between us, my book, the concerns she had about a stalker. It was rather vague.”

  “Vague,” he says, pausing to reflect on the word. “Tell me about this circle.”

  So I do. Give him all the names, the little contact information I have. Again, I decide to leave a couple things out. My meeting with Angela, for instance.

  “Just want to confirm the sequence of events with you,” he says. “You met with Ms. Dunn around five o’clock. Is that right?”

  “A couple minutes before five, yes.”

  “And you left her in the ravine twenty minutes later.”

  “Give or take.”

  “You walked home after this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you talk to anyone? Stop anywhere?”

  “I had a drink in Kensington Market.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “The Fukhouse. It’s a punk bar.”

  “You don’t look the part.”

  “It happened to be on my way.”

  “Would anyone recognize you from The Fukhouse?”

  “The bartender might. Like you say, I don’t look the part.”

  “When did you arrive home?”

  “It was evening. Some time after nine, I guess.”

  “That’s when you called over to the neighbour’s to check on your son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have any particular reason to be concerned for your son’s safety?”

  He was standing in my window.

  “I’m a widower, Detective. Sam is the only family left to me. I’m never not concerned for his safety.”

  He blinks.

  “That’s a long walk,” he says. “Even with a couple of drinks.”

  “I like to take my time.”

  “You might be interested to know that Ms. Dunn disappeared some time between your meeting with her and eight o’clock. Two and a half hours or so.”

  “Disappeared? I thought you said she was murdered.”

  “I said that’s what we believe.”

  How could I have gotten this guy so wrong? The combination of Ramsay’s leftover Scots accent and droll demeanour had me thinking that if they really suspected that I could have done whatever was done to Petra, they would have sent over one of their hard cases. But now I see that Ramsay is a hard case.

  “Do you know of anyone who would have a motive to do this to your friend?” he asks absently. “Aside from her shadow?”

  “I’m not her friend. Wasn’t. I barely knew her.”

  “‘Not friend’,” he says, scribbling.

  “As for motive, I have no idea. I mean, she mentioned her divorce, and how she was seeing her ex-husband’s business partner. It seemed like a delicate situation.”

  “This is during your twenty minutes in the ravine?”

  “It wasn’t much more than a name.”

  “And what name would that be?”

  “Roman. The boyfriend. Roman somebody. Petra was concerned that if her relationship with him came to her ex’s attention, it would cause her some inconvenience.”

  “Roman Gaborek.”

  “That’s him.”

  “Did your friend mention that Mr. Gaborek and Mr. Dunn are both leaders among the local organized crime community?”

  “She alluded to it.”

  “Alluded. She alluded to it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” he says, flipping his notebook closed. “Most of the time, people who hear about something like what you’ve just heard about ask how it was likely done. But you haven’t asked me a thing.”

  “I don’t have much of a stomach for violence.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t ask me then. Because Ms. Dunn, she met with considerable violence.”

  “I thought there was no body.”

  “But what the body left behind—well, it was indicative of certain techniques. Reminded me of four years ago. Remember?”

  If one were to enter this room right now, one might mistake Detective Ramsay’s expression as showing how much he enjoys moments like these. But I can see that it’s not pleasure so much as rage. An anger he’s managed to disguise, over the years, as something near its opposite.

  “Well, that’s it,” he says. I rise and offer a hand to be shaken, and when he finally takes it, the grip is ruthless.

  “Hope I was of some help.”

  “If you weren’t, you might yet be.”

  Ramsay goes to the door to let himself out and I follow, suddenly desperate to hear the click of the bolt closing behind him.

  “One last thing. The cap you say Ms. Dunn was wearing when she met you…”

  “Yes?”

  “What team was it again?”

  “The Yankees. Why?”

  “Nothing. They just never found a cap, Yankees or otherwise.”

  He opens the door and steps outside. Before he closes it, he shows me a smile. One he’s saved right for the end.

  The morning brings a funny thought: I’m about to be famous all over again. Whenever they come for me and I make the shackled walk from police cruiser to courtroom, cameras whirring, reporters begging for a quip from the Creep of the Day for the suppertime news.

  Then the clock radio clicks on. And I have the same thought all over again.

  It’s the morning news telling the city that Petra Dunn, forty-five, was abducted yesterday in the Rosedale ravine. Evidence at the scene strongly supports foul play. Police are currently questioning a number of “persons of interest” in connection to the crime.

  Person of interest, that’s me. Yesterday morning I got out of bed an unemployed pseudo-novelist, and just twenty-four hours later I’m facing a new day as the prime suspect in a probable homicide. But it doesn’t stop there. Because if Detective Ian Ramsay thinks I did in poor Petra Dunn, it follows that I did in Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and Jane Whirter four years ago too.

  Angela may have been right. The Sandman’s come back. And as far as best guesses go, it’s me.

  “Dad?”

  Sam standing in my bedroom doorway.

  “Just had a bad dream,” I say.

  “But you’re awake.”

  He’s right. I’m awake.

  The first thing I do, once I’ve showered and shaved, is take Sam to stay with Stacey, Tamara’s sister in St. Catharines. On the hour’s drive there I do my best to explain why a policeman came to talk with me last night, and why it’s best if the two of us are separated for a while. I tell him how sometimes people
get caught up in things they have nothing to do with, but that they must nevertheless endure questions about.

  “Process of elimination,” Sam says.

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “But I thought it was ‘innocent until proven guilty.’”

  “That’s only in courtrooms.”

  “Does this have to do with your book?”

  “Indirectly, yes.”

  “I never liked your book.”

  Of course he’s read it. Although forbidden to do so, how was he not going to read his father’s one and only contribution to the bookshelf? I can’t know how much of it he’s able to understand—a gifted reader, but still only eight years old—yet it appears he’s gathered the main point. The Sandman of The Sandman is real.

  Once home, I leave a message on Angela’s machine, asking her to get back to me as soon as possible.

  Waiting for her return call, I consider how many in the circle have already been in contact with each other. After the night at Grossman’s, I just assumed all of us went our separate ways. But there may have been relationships formed I had no inkling of at the time. Lovers, rivals, artists and their muses. The sort of passions that have been known to give rise to the most horrific actions.

  To kill the time, I check back on the Comment page at www.patrick.rush.com. Once more, it mostly shows the same obsessives debating the finer points of The Sandman’s plotlines, unearthing inconsistencies, along with differing personal impressions of the author (“He signed my book and asked if I was a writer too. And I AM! It was like he READ MY MIND!!” vs “actually saw PR on queen street the other day, trying (but failing) to look like a ‘normal guy,’ walking with a bag of groceries(!?) pretentious twat!”).

  I’m about to log off when the cursor finds the day’s most recent entry. Another bulletin from therealsandman:

  One down.

  Angela gets back to me. She has to work late tonight, but can meet me later on. For some reason I insist it be at her place (which she reluctantly agrees to). After she hangs up, I realize I need to see wherever she lives in order to make sure she’s real.

  I’m set to arrive at Angela’s around eight, which gives me time to put in a call to the only number other than hers I have from the circle. Len.

  “The police just left,” he says, skipping over hello, as though only a day sits between now and our last conversation instead of years. “Did you hear what happened to Petra?”

  “I heard. Was the man you spoke to named Ramsay?”

  “I was too freaked to really listen. Kind of a funny guy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Like funny strange and funny ha-ha at the same time.”

  “That’s him.”

  I would walk to Len’s apartment in Parkdale but the heat wave has once again broken the temperature record it set the day before, so I head west along King in the Toyota with the windows down. I turn left toward the lake, into one of the blocks of stately family homes long since cut up into dilapidated rooming houses. Len’s building looks even worse than the others. The paint peeling off the porch in long curls. The front windows obscured by pinned-up flags, tin foil and garbage bags in place of blinds.

  Len has the attic flat. The side entrance is open as he said it would be and I climb up the narrow stairs past the suffocating assaults of hash smoke and boiled soup bones and paint thinner seeping out from under the doors.

  Rounding the corner to the last flight, I look up to see Len waiting at the top. The big doofus stooped in the doorframe, spongy with sweat but otherwise looking relieved to see me.

  “It’s you,” he says.

  “Were you expecting somebody else?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  Len’s apartment is a single room. A small counter, hotplate and bar fridge in one corner, a bare mattress on the floor, and the only natural light coming from two windows the size of hardcover books, one facing the street and the other the yard. The severely sloped ceiling drops on either side from a beam that cuts the space in half, which allows Len to stand straight only when situated in the middle of the room. On the walls, movie posters bubbled with moisture. The Exorcist, Suspiria, Night of the Living Dead. The floor strewn with laundry that smells of a battle between deodorant and old socks.

  “Have a seat,” Len offers, scooping a pile of paperbacks off a folding chair. It leaves him to sit cross-legged on the floor. An over-heated kid ready for storytime.

  “So, how have you been?”

  “Okay. Not writing much. I haven’t been able to think straight for a while now. It’s hard to write spooky stuff when you’re living spooky stuff.”

  Over Len’s shoulder, stacked atop makeshift shelves made of milk crates, I notice my book. The cover tattered, the pages within fattened by greasy-fingered rereadings.

  “I couldn’t sleep for a week the first time I read it,” Len says, following my gaze.

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to be. The best parts weren’t yours.”

  “No argument there.”

  Len glances at the door, as though to make sure it’s locked. All at once the haggard, skittish look of him reveals he’s been cooking away up here far longer than is healthy.

  “When was the last time you went outside?”

  “I don’t like to go out much any more,” he says. “It’s like when you have a sense that you’re being watched, but when you turn there’s nothing there? I have that all the time now.”

  “Did you tell Ramsay about it?”

  “No. It’s a secret. A secret agent secret. You tell and you’re dead.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “He asked about you.”

  “What did he want to know?”

  “If you had any relationship with Petra outside the circle. What I thought of you.”

  I keep my eyes on Len as he selects what to reveal. He doesn’t seem the sort of man who can stand too much pressure, so I do my best to apply some in my stare.

  “I told him you were my friend,” he says finally.

  “That’s it?”

  “I don’t know anything else.”

  “Aside from the source for my book.”

  “Aside from that.”

  “And?”

  “And I didn’t tell him about it.”

  “Who else have you spoken to?”

  “Petra called. Angela, too. She told me about Conrad’s accident. Even Ivan came round just the day before yesterday. All of them scared shitless.”

  “Not William?”

  “Are you kidding? The day that guy looks me up it’s time to move.”

  All at once, the stifling heat in the room closes in on me. There isn’t half enough air for two sets of lungs to live on, and Len is getting most of it anyway, panting like an overfed retriever.

  “Angela told you about Conrad’s accident?”

  “I told you she did.”

  “But did she tell you that anyone else was in the car when he died?”

  “Was there someone else?”

  “No. No, there wasn’t,” I say, banging my head on the ceiling when I stand. “Sorry, but I’m late for another meeting.”

  “Who with?”

  “Angela, actually.”

  “She must be pissed with you.”

  “Apparently she’s decided to let it slide.”

  Len scratches the islands of beard along his jawline.

  “I want to show you something,” he says.

  Len uncrosses his legs and rolls over the floor to the milk-crate shelves. His thick fingers plow through the piles of comics, digging down into the wreckage of toppled towers of books. By the time he finds what he’s looking for his T-shirt is black with perspiration.

  He scrambles over on hands and knees to where I’m standing and hands me a book. A literary journal I have heard of, The Tarragon Review. One of the dozens of obscure regional publications that print short stories and poems for readerships that number as high as the two figures.
r />   “You in this?” I ask, expecting Len is trying to show off his first appearance in print.

  “Check out the table of contents.”

  I read every title and author on the list. None of it rings a bell.

  “Look again,” Len urges. “The names.”

  The second time through I see it. A short story titled “The Subway Driver.” Written by one Evelyn Sanderman.

  “San-der-man. Sand-man. See?”

  “Are you saying Evelyn wrote this?”

  “At the back,” Len says, excited now. “The Contributors’ Notes.”

  The journal’s last pages feature short biographies of the volume’s writers, along with a black-and-white photo. At the entry for Evelyn Sanderman the following paragraph:

  Evelyn is a traveller who is fascinated by other people’s lives. “There is no better research for a writer than to get close to a stranger,” she tells us. This is Evelyn’s first published story.

  Next to this, a photo of Angela.

  “When was this published?”

  “Last year.”

  “And why do you have it?”

  “I subscribe to everything,” he says. “I like to follow who’s getting published and where. It feeds my jealousy, I guess. Some mornings it’s the only thing that gets me out of bed.”

  Len is kneeling before me now, looking crazed with the heat, the rare visit of human contact. The sharing of a plot twist.

  “Can I borrow this?”

  “Go ahead. I kind of want it out of here anyway,” Len says, eyes ablaze with the narcotic rush of fear.

  “The Subway Driver” is good. The critic in me insists on getting this said upfront. A totally different voice from the one who told the story in Angela’s journal. This time, the narrative tone is chillingly anesthetized, a man transported through a crowded urban environment, unnoticed and hazy as a phantom. But there are also moments of heartbreaking despair that cut through to the surface. Not Angela’s voice at all, or any other strictly fictional creation. It’s because the voice belongs to someone real. To Ivan.

  As the title partly suggests, “The Subway Driver” is a day in the life of an unnamed man who speeds a train through the underground tunnels during the day, and scratches at chronically unfinished stories at night. What really takes me by surprise, though, the revelation that leaves me shaking in the front seat of the Toyota where I’m parked outside Len’s rooming house, isn’t this blatant borrowing from the biography Ivan presented to us during the Kensington Circle’s meetings, but the private back-story, the tragic secret I assumed he had shared only with me.