Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  Paul Calihoo, whom Steve and Iain had spoken with yesterday at some length, and who just now had so tactfully left us in relative comfort, was a bit of an enigma to me. I knew he came from a long-time Edmonton family. In fact, there was a village of Calihoo, and a Calihoo Road, just west of the city. Paul’s great-grandmother was a folk musician who recorded various old-time Métis tunes from the area; Paul had been intrigued with the process and followed into this side of the music business when he finished his first degree in music. His instrument was classical guitar, and I knew he gave lessons in the evenings and on Saturdays. Aside from that, I didn’t know that much about him. He was newly married, he lived somewhere on the south side, I think close to Bonnie Doon, and he made good coffee.

  No one else came into the Centre regularly. People affected by the Folkways collection would probably include Carmen, the music librarian, and the two grad students assigned to the database. Of course, those people likely would manage to get by even if there wasn’t a Folkways collection to deal with. When it came right down to it, so could Paul and Dr. F. The only person who was tied solely to the collection and to the bequest money was me.

  I winced as this thought came clear to me. Both Steve and Iain saw that this bald fact had only just now occurred to me, and were quick to placate me.

  “Don’t worry, Randy, there are several other lines of questioning we’re following,” Steve said, patting my hand.

  “Like what? The guy threatens my livelihood and a few hours later he dies. Keller is just going to love this.”

  Iain grinned, likely thinking of other famous times the entire station had been entertained with Keller’s lacerating comments directed at me. Steve glared at him.

  “Honestly, the collection is not the only thing Finster was stirred up about, and quite frankly, the guy wasn’t the most popular fellow around. As you can see, I haven’t been recused from the case, which I certainly would be if Keller were seriously seeing you as a suspect.”

  Iain joined in with an attempt to console me. “We haven’t been able to find one workman who is anything more than merely neutral. Most of them thought he was an outright bastard to work for. The only thing is, there hasn’t been all that much construction work happening till recently, so they felt they were lucky to get what they could and just sucked it up whenever he’d pull the shit he pulled.”

  “Shit like what?” I asked. It seemed that there was little a boss could do that couldn’t be dealt with in court somehow, so I was curious to know how Finster had managed to still be a jerk.

  “He would find ways to pay the least he could, and was always sending people home with short hours if the weather changed or there was a slow-up on some piece of action further up the chain. While the workers had negotiated for benefits, he managed to swing the very minimum of policies, and refused dental coverage point blank, allegedly saying,” Steve flipped his notebook open, “that ‘you don’t need a twenty-four-carat smile to run a fork lift.’ The guy was a real charmer, by all accounts. No bonus, layoffs over the winter rather than holding the crew on a maintenance salary with repair and indoor work to cover the fallow time. He refused to hire back based on seniority, so it didn’t matter how loyal you were to his company, you took your chances heading back here for the season to work for Finster.”

  “Wow, how did he manage to get anyone to work for him at all?”

  “For a long time, there hasn’t been all that much in the way of construction, and there are certain specialized pros Finster needed who have set union salary scales. The money apparently is always on time, and is exactly what was agreed to, but there’s no sense of camaraderie, loyalty or fraternity. It’s a job site, ­nothing more, and Finster never lets them forget that.”

  “No joy in Mudville,” McCorquodale chimed in.

  “There is also Barbara Finster to contend with. She and her brother only saw eye-to-eye about hating everything else. They despised each other, and each held the other responsible for the distance between them and their parents. Barbara seemed almost relieved when we told her about her brother’s death. Her only words were, ‘Are you sure he wasn’t hit with a blackjack?’”

  “So, what you’re telling me is that I’m not a suspect?”

  “No,” Steve said in a very gentle voice. “What I’m trying to tell you is that you’re not the only suspect. There’s a big difference.” He and his partner stood up, looking tall and burly in the Centre with its glass cupboards housing fragile instruments, and the shelves of shatterable LPs and CDs. It was all so ephemeral, the stuff I loved, and just a breath of suspicion, a slight push of controversy could destroy it. Steve put his hand on my shoulder to comfort me as they left, but it felt like the strong hand of the disciplinary teacher clamping down an unspoken warning.

  “Don’t leave town, eh?” Detective McCorquodale grinned wolfishly at me as he closed the door behind them.

  10

  ~

  I suppose that when you are being watched by the police as a possible killer, you should appear squeaky clean and aboveboard in all aspects of your actions and life. We’d all been tense and quiet for three days, and today I felt like playing hooky. It was Poe’s Imp of the Perverse in action: well, they suspected me of murder; what would be the harm in racking up a few small misdemeanours while I was at it? It wasn’t even lunchtime, but there was no way I was going to be able to concentrate on work today. Humming “Frankie and Johnny,” I closed up my laptop, stuffed it into my backpack and locked the Centre behind me after leaving a note for Paul. I had enough music downloaded for research purposes that I could work from home as easily as from the Centre for a week without running out of things to do.

  “He was her man, but he was doing her wrong,” I warbled as soon as I was sure there was no one in the sculpture garden between the Fine Arts and Law Buildings. This was a nice little courtyard I often came to when having an outdoor coffee break. A small amphitheatre was created with bricks and railway ties, and around it, metal sculpture guarded the pathways. Once, years before, when I was touring my folks around the campus, my mother saw this place and brightly said, “Oh look, they’ve beaten their ploughshares into ploughshares.” While I’d never cared one way or another for the metal sculptures before, they now always gave me a slight laugh.

  But not today. Nothing was going to get me out of the funk I was in, except maybe Steve getting down on one knee and saying, “Of course you could never be a murder suspect, Randy. I know you are incapable of ever committing such a terrible action, and it would never in a million years cross my mind that you would even consider such a thing. Forgive me.”

  And that was going to happen. Sure. We had barely spoken since he and his partner interrogated me at work a few days back, only phoning to let me know the bare basics of what was happening. Him and his damn ethical behaviour, refusing to discuss his work at a time when information could do me the most good. How could he doubt me?

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t see why I might be a suspect. After all, I had access, I had a motive of sorts, and I didn’t have any great alibi, since it turned out that, according to the forensic pathologist, Finster had been killed around the time I was wandering alone through the river valley. Of all the stupid things to do—had I but known, I would have taken several bondable members of the young Conservative MBA association along with me, complete with chronometers, digital cameras and copies of the day’s newspaper for me to hold in the photos. You never know when you’re going to need an alibi. Maybe I should have one at the present moment, too. I felt like stopping the guy whipping past me on the bike to say, “It’s eleven-thirty, and my name is Randy Craig. Just remember that in case it’s needed.”

  My anger at David Finster for inconveniencing me by being murdered and my annoyance at Steve for not sweeping it all aside had subsided to simple irritation by the time I kicked my sandals off at home a few minutes later. He was just doing his job, and I’d been on the other side of the scenario often enough to realize that he d
idn’t jump to conclusions or dismiss worries that to another person might seem like paranoia. Of course, this was a man who had saved my life more than once and stood by me through some pretty terrible times, since I seemed to collect trouble like garbage attracts wasps. I owed Steve a lot, so if I had to go through the motions of being one of several suspects, then so be it. I would do more than that for love. Just as long as I didn’t become the prime suspect; that I would not stand for.

  I ate some crackers and slathered some peanut butter on a rice cake, then cleared away my lunch and breakfast dishes before hauling my laptop out of my backpack and settling in for the afternoon. I turned on my CD player to whatever I’d loaded the day before. Out came the opening tune from Close to Home, a Mike Seeger compilation of tunes he’d collected in the Sixties. I pushed myself into the corner of my overstuffed chesterfield, drew my laptop on top of me, and started to compile a list of songs that struck me as being popular inroads into the collection. I was thinking of a series of splash pages for the website, each one based on a particular song to start them off. Perhaps we could organize the folkwaysAlive! stage with the same themes.

  “Frankie and Johnny” was still running through my head, so I typed it into a file and started brainstorming. I could go through Pete Seeger’s collection of outlaw songs and pick some, along with Leadbelly’s “House of the Rising Sun.” The other song that sprang to mind, of course, was “Tom Dooley.”

  I pulled my hands back from the keyboard after typing this last title. Why on earth would someone have done that to David Finster? Not just why would someone have killed him, but why go to such an effort to stage the body? Obviously it was the Tom Dooley reference that really had the police breathing down the Centre’s collective neck, but was that the reason for the gruesome scene? To deflect the police to us, or was there really something about the folk scene and David Finster that needed to be examined? Maybe someone should be checking to see if he’d ever got someone called Laurie Foster pregnant.

  What was it Barbara Finster had said when told about her brother’s death? Something about assuming he’d have been beaten with a blunt instrument instead of stabbed? I wondered what kind of a relationship they had, that she would have previously considered the way in which her brother might be murdered. There were so many times I thanked the stars and my parents that I was an only child.

  I looked down at my laptop. Almost without realizing it, I’d opened a new file and had writing various cryptic phrases like: Tom Dooley, stabbed, hanged, bludgeoned to death(?), pregnant, Barbara Finster, LRT station, trains, midnight special, folk music, university contracts, construction, family, bequests, Centre, Folkways collection, Lillian Finster. As far as I could tell, there weren’t all that many obvious connections. Nothing added up. I hoped Steve was going to have better luck with this train of thought. I saved the file as “Murder Case” and turned my mind back to the outlaws.

  Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was likely another good place to search for outlaw and criminal ballads. I heaved myself off the sofa and went over to my stereo. One of the best gifts Steve ever gave me was the Smithsonian/Folkways collection, which he’d presented me with when I landed my present job. I opened up the LP-sized box set, and pulled out my own sixty-eight-page Smithsonian booklet and the facsimile of Smith’s original liner notes book. “Stackalee” was a possible choice, and Smith also had included the Carter Family’s version of “John Hardy was a Desperate Little Man.” I had to admit I preferred the Seventies version of “Stagger Lee.”

  I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and on my way back into the living room, I heard Mississippi John Hurt singing “Frankie,” his version of “Frankie and Johnny,” and stopped still. I wondered if Hurt was the first to record the turgid tale of Frankie who shot her perfidious lover Johnny. It was different from the version I knew best, Pete Seeger’s. I always liked the Pete Seeger verse about her “rooty-toot” shooting through the door after peeking over the transom window into the hotel room where Johnny and Nellie Bly were up to no good.

  Maybe it was just because Seeger was so loyal to the words that you heard every one. I hit Pause on my CD player, and went into my iTunes to find the Seeger version from American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 1. No, I was right, John Hurt spent more time on the aftermath of the shooting and Seeger spent more time on the actual shooting.

  That was the fascinating thing about studying folk or roots music: there were so many variants. It must have been amazingly exciting to wander into the Appalachian Mountains at the turn of the century and discover age-old ballads being sung as Shakespeare might have originally heard them. Even more exciting was tracing the line from old version to newer layering. That might not be a bad idea for a theme page, too—the linking of songs through time. I opened another file and stared at the blank white square.

  For instance, there was the whole linking of Woody Guthrie’s “Gypsy Davey” that became the “Whistling Gypsy Rover” when the Irish Rovers got hold of it. There was another older English version, but its title wouldn’t come to me. Steeleye Span had sung it, and so had Dave Alvin. The more I tried to come up with the title, the less it was going to happen. I wrote down “Gypsy Davey” and “Whistling Gypsy Rover” and created a blank line by holding down the underscript button a bit. It would come to me eventually, or I’d stumble over it somewhere.

  Doc Watson’s voice cut through my reverie. That was the beauty of a CD-changing stereo; I was always being surprised by a song. My machine had a turntable that housed three separate CDs, and I usually changed out only the front disc. Whatever was still on the machine eventually came on after what I’d just loaded, and sometimes the transpositions were odd. This latest surprise wasn’t too bad, although as far as I knew, Doc Watson didn’t sing about Frankie and Johnny.

  I loved Doc Watson’s voice; it was as mellow as honey running in the hot sun, even when singing the silly “Froggy Went A-Courtin’.” I’ve always loved that song, from the Burl Ives version I heard as a child to the slightly sillier version we’d sung out at summer camp. I particularly liked all of Doc’s sound effects. My cousin’s daughter once referred to it as “The Mouse’s Wedding Song,” and it took us ages to realize that this was what she’d been talking about. My mother and aunt and cousin and I had laughed ourselves silly. Wouldn’t you know that a man must have named the song? Any self-respecting woman from four to eighty-four knew that a wedding was always all about the bride, not the groom.

  Maybe I could make another through-line of variations on “Froggy Went A-Courtin’.” It could be a whole sideline of the website: the evolution of the folk song. For that matter, I wondered if there were any variants of Tom Dooley other than the Kingston Trio’s cleaned-up version. Maybe searching them out would provide Steve with a clue. If folk music was going to be a suspect in all this, maybe it could also be a solution.

  I craned forward from the chesterfield to look sideways over to the clock in the dining area office. It was four o’clock. Although I’d been working steadily, I hadn’t got all that much done besides figuring out a Murder Ballad page and working up a possible sub-series page, all because of trying to remember the through-line backwards from “Whistling Gypsy Rover” to—“Black Jack Davey!” That was the name of the original English ballad. I knew it would come to me eventually.

  Black Jack Davey. Now why did that sound so familiar? Suddenly it hit me. It was what Steve mentioned about Barbara Finster’s response when she was told about her brother’s death. She didn’t say she’d expected someone to bludgeon him to death. She said, when she heard about the Tom Dooley reference, that she “was surprised they hadn’t used a blackjack.” She was referring to the ballad. I had to call Steve.

  Iain McCorquodale answered Steve’s direct line, and said that Steve wasn’t available. He was sounding a little cagey, so I didn’t press things. I asked him to have Steve call me when he had time. I made sure Iain wrote down that it was a matter of business, not a personal call,
just in case Steve assumed that I was just calling to make a dinner date. This was important.

  It wasn’t so important that I was about to try to explain it to Steve’s partner, however. He was a very nice guy as police officers went, and I didn’t mind sharing Steve with him, but he was really a cop’s cop, and I knew he disapproved a bit of Steve’s candour with me about work. It’s not that I went about blabbing anything or even that Steve divulged confidential information. It was just that I knew Iain would never in a bazillion years speak about precinct work to the women in his life. I knew from Steve that Iain was the son of a cop who was apparently completely mum to Mom, and his mother had never seemed to show any interest in his father’s day-to-day activities. As a result, I think Iain was the same way with his wife, and was vaguely suspicious of women who found their man’s work interesting.

  I tidied up the notes and CD cases, and decided to spend some time in the kitchen. It was still too hot for cooking, but surely I could figure out something yummy that wouldn’t require anything more than perhaps boiling water. I stood looking into the open fridge, not particularly caring to decide anything quickly, mostly enjoying the breeze. If Steve decided to drop by, we could make do with salads. I might even have enough in the way of apples, bananas, strawberries and pears to make a fruit salad.

  I was tearing up pieces of romaine lettuce when Steve called me back. He sounded really tired. I told him I’d had an insight about something to do with his case, and that I had a cold supper almost ready. He opted to wait on the information and told me he’d see me as soon as he’d navigated the traffic. I put down the phone feeling a bit better about the situation we were in. Steve might be a police officer dealing with a puzzling murder case, and I might be a suspect in that case, but at least we loved each other and he liked my cooking. Things would sort themselves out.