The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  “Mostly. Some are two bucks.”

  “Jesus, kids must get some allowance these days.”

  McKelvey has opted to join Nolan rather than sit in the cruiser as it cools off. One street behind Main, the arcade is sufficiently tucked away from the eyes of parents and teachers seeking truant students. The teens look over at the two men now and whisper as though they are seeing Halley’s Comet, a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle to behold.

  McKelvey is used to this treatment, and then some. Walking into an after-hours club up in the hornet’s nest of Jane and Finch in Toronto nets a cop more than dirty looks, it’s taking your life in your hands. For some reason he thinks of the murder of Constable Todd Bayliss, shot to death by a Jamaican who had been scheduled for deportation. His mind flashes with images of that hot summer of 1994. The racial tensions were high following the killing of a white woman at the hands of black robbers at the Just Desserts Café in Yorkville, then the killing of the bright young cop.

  He and Nolan make their way over to a middle-aged woman reading a paperback behind a counter stocked with candy bars and licorice that looks as dried and tough as leather. She sets the book on the counter. The title on the spine is Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. McKelvey isn’t convinced.

  “Laney,” Nolan says, and gives a little nod.

  The woman smiles and nods and shrugs at the same time. Laney is a compact woman — or “petite” if McKelvey were using the vernacular of the day — but she exudes a strength within her small frame. She wears no makeup and is pretty in a sort of tomboy fashion. Her brown hair is tied back but some strands have escaped and fall loose at the side of her face. The fine wrinkles engraved across her upper lip tell McKelvey the woman has likely smoked for the better part of her life.

  “Officer Nolan,” she says.

  “Back in business, I see.” Nolan turns to survey the room.

  “Can’t afford a day off. I don’t have a town pension. Every buck popped into one of those machines means there’s a chance I might clear my rent this month, and who knows, maybe even eat.”

  “This is Charlie McKelvey,” Nolan says with some pride, a boy showing off a new friend to the neighbourhood. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  McKelvey nods and holds out a hand, which Laney grips with the strength of a dock worker. Her eyes hold him in a confident gaze that is venturing toward defiant.

  “We just wanted to come by and ask a few questions,” Nolan continues. “You were understandably upset the other night.”

  “Having kids stab each other in your business tends to be upsetting.”

  “Scotty Cooper said he got drugs here, from the arcade,” McKelvey says, jumping straight in. He can’t help himself.

  Laney turns her whole body to regard McKelvey for a moment.

  “Imagine that,” she says finally. “Drugs in an arcade. Like doughnuts in a police station. It comes with the territory, guys. Cut me some slack. I don’t strip-search the kids when they come in here. But I sure as hell don’t allow them to smoke dope or sell it within eyesight. I’m one person. What they do in the washroom is beyond my reach. Why don’t you ask their parents what they’re doing?”

  McKelvey looks around. He catches and holds the glare of a tall teenage boy. The boy stares back with eyes of pure hatred. McKelvey recognizes the look, understands something of the philosophy that drives this attitude. As he did with his own boy, with words that fell on closed ears, he could tell this kid the truth about life. The unalterable fact of the matter is that life and man work in reverse of each other, in that a man owns more swagger when he knows nothing of the world than once he has tasted the bitterness of longing and loss, despair and defeat. McKelvey supposes there is no magic to this; it is simply the power of humility to remind a man of his insignificance. Teenagers are not only the centre of their own narcissistic universe, they are the sun and the moon and the gravitational pull all at once.

  “They sell dope in the washrooms, sure,” McKelvey says, turning back to Laney. “A few grams here and there. But what about adults? What about strangers? Anybody strike you as out of place coming or going from the arcade in the past couple of months?”

  Laney thinks, chewing her bottom lip a little.

  “Wade Garson?” Nolan offers.

  McKelvey cringes inside, for the young officer is leading. It is akin to putting words or memories in the mouth of a witness. He makes a mental note to point out the behaviour once they are alone. A good cop never corrects his partner in public.

  “Sure,” Laney says. “Wade comes in two or three times a month, I guess.”

  “We know he does,” says Nolan. “We know he moves marijuana around town.”

  “And she knows, too,” McKelvey says. “Don’t you? I’d say Wade Garson even gives you a cut off the top. Either in cash or in product.”

  Laney looks over to the group of kids huddled at a racing game. She looks back to Nolan and McKelvey.

  “I don’t sell drugs,” she says. “I don’t allow kids to smoke in here.”

  McKelvey leans in and folds his arms across the counter. He has been here a thousand times before. Working the Hold-up Squad, it was always a variation of the same interview, the same perp, the same stupid lies that always led to the same places.

  “It’s how it works,” McKelvey says. “You’re a business owner who can hardly make ends meet. Catch as catch can, right? So you take a few grams or a few bucks and turn your back while Wade heads to the men’s room. No harm done.”

  Nolan seems now like a spectator at a duel. He is no longer on the inside of this, but on the periphery.

  “Mark Watson was stabbed right over there in that washroom,” Laney says, visibly upset. “You think I want anything to happen to these kids? Jesus Christ, Eddie, you knew me when you were a little kid around here. I went away, you know, I got out of this shithole. But I came back to work in the lab at Carver. Stupid me. And when I lost my job, well, what was there to do? This place was sitting boarded up for more than a year. I went out on a limb to get it up and running again. So you ask the kids around here, Mr. McKelvey. Ask them where they go when they’re cold or lonely or just want to get away from the fighting that goes on in their homes. They come here, that’s where.”

  McKelvey is about to comment on the touching nature of the monologue, something about the woman’s altruism, when Nolan steps inside the circle once again.

  “Laney, you’re not in trouble here. We just want to know what’s going on around Saint B. Where do you think the kids are getting the meth from?”

  She sits back and sighs, and folds her arms across her chest.

  “I wish I knew. I mean, there haven’t been any strangers around that I know of. There’s that Italian-looking guy from the U.S. He’s been in a couple of times to kill the hours. Doesn’t talk much. He changes like fifty bucks at a time and plays the shooting and hunting games over there. And, of course, locals. There’s Carl.”

  “Carl Levesque?” McKelvey asks.

  She nods.

  “He comes by every couple of weeks. Pathetic, actually. He thinks he might have a shot with the girls. It’s like watching a train wreck, how he comes out of the washroom with his comb-over all slicked back. I’m pretty sure he smokes pot and shares a joint once in a while with the older kids. But I can’t prove it.”

  Nolan gives McKelvey a sideways glance.

  “Thanks, Laney,” Nolan says. “We’ll give you a call if anything else comes to mind.”

  They take a couple of steps and then McKelvey pulls a classic Columbo tactic. He stops and turns back as though he has suddenly remembered an important question.

  “You went away,” he says. “To school?”

  Laney nods. “University of Toronto. The big city.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Toronto? It’s like an old boyfriend, I guess. I only miss it once in a while, and always for the wrong reasons.”

  McKelvey smiles at her.

  “I hope your dad’s
doing okay,” Laney says to Nolan in a softer, friendlier voice. It can be no other way in a small town. Once official business is conducted, they are free to be their real selves once again.

  “Thanks,” Nolan says.

  The daylight is nearly blinding as they step outside. The silence rings in their ears now that they are removed from the constant hum and thrum of the video games.

  McKelvey stops and glances back.“I don’t know how she sits in there all day and all night.”

  “She’s right, though,” Nolan says. “If this place closes, where will they go?”

  “I’m sure Carl Levesque would take them in … the girls, anyway.”

  They climb into the cruiser and Nolan turns the engine. “You think she’s in on this? Moving the drugs?” he asks.

  McKelvey certainly believes the woman allows Wade Garson to peddle marijuana with impunity, likely for a kickback of one form or another. At the very least, she knows full well what goes on under her roof, and in this way she is morally, if not criminally, implicit.

  “She knows the arcade is the place for drug deals,” he answers, “but whether she knows anything about the movement of meth, who knows. When you interviewed Scott Cooper, he said the drugs were just there.”

  Nolan nods. “That’s right. He did. Verbatim. ‘They were just there,’ he said.”

  “Maybe someone left the drugs in the washroom,” McKelvey offers.

  “By accident or on purpose?”

  “Maybe both. Dealers in the city who work the parks and malls and high-school hangouts usually give kids one or two freebies; a little baggie to whet your whistle. When you go looking for more, there’s a cost.”

  “Makes sense. Laney probably only checks the washrooms once or twice a week. Would be easy enough to leave some packets out where the kids would be sure to find them. And I know for a fact Wade Garson has left marijuana in the can for some of the boys.”

  “We’ll suppose that for now. Until something else makes sense.”

  McKelvey then turns to the younger man and asks, “So, did Laney babysit you when you were a kid or something?”

  Nolan blushes a little.

  “Actually, yeah, she did.”

  Their next canvass takes them to Gaylord’s Drugs on Main Street. They could have walked over in five minutes from the arcade, but McKelvey has Nolan park the cruiser right in front of the drug store.

  “Mr. Gaylord won’t like us taking up a spot in front like this,” Nolan says. “He tries to save it for the older customers who pull up like it’s a drive-thru.”

  “We want the good people of Ste. Bernadette to see you out doing your job, Nolan. Police work is one part process, one part luck, and one part optics. This is their tax dollars at work. Makes them sleep better at night.”

  Stepping into Gaylord’s Drugs — which as far back as McKelvey’s own childhood has been a source of giggles and endless variations on poking fun at that name — is like stepping into a time machine. It is the 1950s again, and McKelvey is standing just inside the door, smelling the perfume of this place: freshly rolled gauze, pine floor polish, a top note of something bitter and chemical, like the powder from crushed pills. The layout is the same. Four aisles of bandages and cold medicines, feminine products, hair dyes, toothbrushes, a turning rack of dime novels at the front, the drug counter along the back. McKelvey pauses at the book rack and gives it a slow spin. Zane Grey. David Goodis. Elmore Leonard. Pulp fiction and westerns and war novels, romances with torrid covers painted in glossy oils. This is the very place McKelvey whiled away long hours as his mother got snarled up in local gossip during her “quick stop in” to fetch a prescription.

  McKelvey is surprised to find that Ethan Gaylord, the grandson of the founder, Harold Gaylord, has followed in the family tradition. He is thirty-five years old and the spitting image of his father and grandfather. Tall, thin, with stretched, blanched flesh that is nearly alabaster. You can see the blue veins spread beneath his temples and cheeks like a road map. He wears his blond hair longer than his previous generations, and it is combed back.

  “Officer Nolan,” he says, standing three feet above them on a raised platform. Dressed in a white smock, with his pale skin and golden hair, he looks like a member of the choir hovering above the masses. The counter is accessible by entering a swing door that locks from the inside. Behind Gaylord there are shelves upon shelves of drugs in boxes and large bottles. McKelvey does the same thing he did when he was a kid, which is to scan those shelves, wondering what in the hell all these different drugs are for, imagining grotesque afflictions, picturing old Harold Gaylord grinding powders in his bowl for Mrs. Tavistock’s bulging goitre, this bizarre and mysterious world of the apothecary.

  “Ethan.” Nolan nods. “How’s business?”

  Gaylord continues to count pills, dividing them three at a time with a wooden tongue depressor. “The same,” he says in a voice eerily similar to his grandfather’s. “I’m down to one assistant two days a week. I would close if I had any sense. But then where would that leave the seventy percent of Saint B that happens to be over the age of sixty-five?”

  “Tough times all around,” Nolan says.

  “We need our damned mayor to step up to the plate.” Gaylord pauses in his work and raises his eyes to his guests. “This idea that we can wait until hydro contracts are signed and all these thousands of linesmen come up here to build new transmission, well, I’ll be retired or bankrupt by then. We need immediate action.”

  “I hear you,” Nolan says. “Listen, this here is my colleague, Charlie McKelvey.”

  McKelvey nods. Gaylord scans the face and nods his familial recognition.

  “Your father was Grey McKelvey, yes?”

  “That’s him. I remember coming in here when I was sick and my mother talking with your father or grandfather. They were both working behind there at one time. I’d always leave with a lollipop.”

  “Not many kids around these days,” Gaylord says.

  “Speaking of kids,” Nolan breaks in, seeing his opening, “what do you think about all of this news about meth going around Saint B?”

  Gaylord is finished counting the pills. He sets his hands on the counter and looks down on his visitors as though he is about to deliver Mass. He takes a moment to gather his thoughts. He is a man used to measuring, counting, ensuring all the proper steps are followed.

  “With all due respect, I’d have to question the effectiveness of our local constabulary,” he says. “I’m not an expert in recreational drugs, but I can tell you, from what I know, the production of methamphetamine is dangerous but easy. And once entered into a society, especially one as closed as Saint B, it is very difficult to root out.”

  Nolan’s cheeks have turned a deep shade of red in response to the pharmacist’s admonishment.

  “One of the key ingredients in meth is cold medicine, is that correct?” McKelvey asks.

  “Specifically, pseudoephedrine.”

  “In English?”

  “Sinus medicine. Sudafed and Contac and the like.”

  McKelvey scans the rows of lozenges and throat sprays and boxes of over-the-counter cold and sinus medicines that fill the space along Gaylord’s drug counter. He picks out a box and holds it up to read the ingredients on the side.

  “So, like this right here?” McKelvey shakes the box.

  “Correct.”

  Nolan reaches into his coat and produces his notepad and short pencil. He makes a few notes and then says, “So Ethan, you notice any missing stock in the last few months? I mean, of this sinus medicine.”

  Now it’s Gaylord’s turn to blush a little. He sighs and his lips work for a moment as he prepares his statement.

  “I don’t have the help I need,” he says. “So my inventory leaves something to be desired of late.”

  “Surely you’d notice a few dozen boxes going missing,” McKelvey says.

  Gaylord stares, and then blinks, but he has nothing to say.

  “We could he
lp you go through your orders, check against sales,” Nolan adds.

  “I’ll poke around, see what I can find for you.”

  “I appreciate that,” Nolan says. “Be in touch.”

  Nolan and McKelvey turn for the doors and Gaylord clears his throat.

  “One thing, at least,” Gaylord says. His face is drawn serious, intense. “Maybe this meth problem is the final straw that we needed in order to get some action around here. Maybe people will sit up and notice this dying little town.”

  “Let’s hope you’re wrong about that,” Nolan says gravely.

  “Mr. McKelvey,” the pharmacist calls after them as they turn to leave. He produces a red sucker and holds it out. “For old times.”

  “Thanks.” McKelvey reaches for the sucker, the past flooding back through his body in a physical vibration. He turns the sucker in his fingers and then tucks it in his jacket pocket. How simple life is when you’re young, he thinks, the simple and grateful joy of a proffered sweet.

  Outside on the sidewalk, standing in the day’s strong sunlight and cold, McKelvey turns to Nolan. “If the drug business fails, that guy could always double as an undertaker.”

  Nolan slips his notepad into his coat and shakes his head. “Gets more depressing around here every day. I’ll drop you at home. I have to go and check in on my dad.”

  They slide inside the cruiser. Nolan picks up the radio and hits the talk button so that the cab fills for a quick moment with a burp of squelch. He lets Shirley Murdoch know that he is booking off to tend to his father.

  “Ten-four, doll,” the woman replies.

  Nolan hangs the mic and pulls away from the curb. “I’ll drop you at home,” he says. “Since you’re not working with me.”

  McKelvey turns to the young cop and smiles. “Thanks, doll.”

  Fourteen

  McKelvey sits on the edge of the bed and dials Jessie Rainbird’s number. It rings seven times and then flips to voicemail. Hearing her recorded voice makes him feel lonely and guilty, and he could almost cry. He hesitates at the beep which announces his invitation to leave a message.