A Murder of Crows

by David Rotenberg

High above Walter saw the man with the dwarf girl and again wondered who they were. Then he settled in to wait. He was good at that—he’d waited all his life for rich people to finish this or that.

  Outside the church, government-supplied limousines picked up the mourners and drove them away.

  Suddenly Decker felt someone looking at him. He turned. A tall man with long grey hair wearing a very expensive suit was openly staring at him.

  Then Yslan was at his side and between him and Viola Tripping. “Hey!” Decker protested.

  “Viola needs to come with me,” Yslan said.

  “Just a second,” Decker said, stepping in front of Viola. He was standing three steps down from her on the church’s front steps, so they were eye to eye. “What did you mean about the president’s death aura?”

  “Someone’s going to be killed—soon.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone with a huge aura. The president’s carrying that aura.”

  Yslan stepped in and said, “She’s exhausted, Mr. Roberts. This chitchat can wait.” She turned the girl/woman and marched her quickly back toward her locked and windowless room.

  As Decker watched them go he wondered if the huge aura Viola saw the president carrying had anything to do with the president’s lying when he said it was “a day completely devoid of joy.” Was there something good in this day? If so—what?

  It was May 1, 2011. Navy SEALs were taking their final practice run in their mock-up of a certain Pakistani compound, completing the end of a nine-year search. The final sighting of bin Laden in his lair had been relayed by the watchers to the SEALs, who had passed it on to the president. For both the Seals and the president of the United States, May 1, 2011 was not a day “completely devoid of joy.”

  Mr. Bin Laden had one day left to live; the countdown was nearly over.

  63

  A RESPONSE TO PRESS—AFTER

  TRISH

  Cussed when she saw the photo of Decker and Viola Tripping on the front page of the National Post. Then she yelled at the photo, “Decker, phone home!”

  She tossed the paper aside and noticed the mess of her apartment. How the hell had it gotten so out of control? It never used to. But even as she wondered where she had put the vacuum cleaner she forgot about the apartment’s disarray and turned her powerful mind to the professional problem at hand.

  Why the hell had the CBC insisted that she cut any reference to the Hung Boy in the sixth episode of the documentary series that she and Decker were working on?

  She reran the meeting at CBC in her mind.

  She’d stared in disbelief at the pin-striped CBC executive across the desk from her. No doubt he lived in Riverdale. Trish often thought that if you fired twenty shots at random in Riverdale you’d rid the world of at least ten of these stuffed-shirt bureaucrats who spent their time at the public tit while claiming they were protecting Canadian art. Then she’d looked to Erika, the CBC-appointed show runner.

  Erika shrugged then looked away, as if something in the atrium was of more interest than the show that they’d been working on for almost eighteen months.

  “So it’s settled,” pin-stripe said and picked up a file from his desk as he made the traditional motions to indicate (a) that the meeting was over and (b) that Trish should get out of his office—that he was a busy man, a “doer” and this bit of biz was done, done, done.

  When he glanced up he was surprised that Trish had not moved; and more, it looked like he’d need a forklift to move her from her seat. He’d opened his mouth, but Trish beat him to the punch.

  “Why? Just tell me why you want the material on the boy who was lynched in the Junction cut from a documentary series about the Junction. Just, in twenty words or less, tell me why.”

  After a sigh clearly meant to indicate that such explanations were beneath him, he said, “It’s gratuitous.”

  “The racist crap we found, the anti-Semitism we uncovered, the presence of over fifty percent of the prison halfway houses in the city and the out of control violence of the thirties—those weren’t a problem, but this one gay boy’s death—his murder—is a problem?”

  “The dead boy’s cut. Got it?”

  She always hated the way CBC bureaucrats pretended they were Hollywood moguls. These guys were grant writers, not producers.

  Trish turned again to Erika. “Anything to say about this, or did you already know? Fuck, you already knew.”

  “Language,” pin-stripe interjected.

  “The buyer’s always right,” Erika said.

  “What CBC hymnal’s that from?”

  “What?”

  “Erika, what if the buyer’s an idiot?”

  Pin-stripe almost rose to the bait, then turned away.

  Something in all this struck Trish as particularly odd. She wished that Decker were here—he was good at reading stuff like this.

  “Well?” pin-stripe asked.

  Trish rose, turned on her heel and left the office without agreeing to cut anything.

  She’d placed more than a dozen phone calls to Decker, none of which had been returned. She needed his help to find out why CBC wanted the dead gay boy cut from the show. What issue could they possibly have with the fact that a gay boy had been lynched in 1902 across from the library in the Junction—and that his murder had never been transferred to the police blotter of the Toronto police force when the Junction, suddenly and for no discernible reason, joined the big bad city?

  She looked at Decker’s photo in the newspaper again and muttered, “Come on, Decker. Decker phone home.”

  EDDIE

  Stared at the photo of Decker and the tiny woman on the front page of the Toronto Star and wondered who the small creature was. Then he wondered if Decker was okay. Helping at Ancaster College was a far cry from going on truth-telling sessions. And breaking into PROMPTOR was exposing both of them to scrutiny in a way that they’d never been exposed before.

  He studied the photo carefully. Was it a girl or a very small woman at Decker’s side?

  He pulled his desk light closer and bent it down toward the photo.

  The girl/woman drew his eyes. There was something about the way she held her body. But what? Then he understood: it was the same way his own daughter in far off Portland, Oregon, stood—after she’d been crying.

  THEO

  Was looking at the photo on the ninth page of the Globe and Mail. Theo was naturally surprised to see Decker in the midst of a U.S. calamity. As he folded the paper he thought of his friend.

  “How much do I know about you, Decker?” he said aloud to the thousands and thousands of books in his used-book shop.

  Then he smiled. “Not much, I guess. Not much.”

  The phone rang and he picked it up. “Pizza Tarantino—viscera on the side, viscera on top, your choice, heart attack discount available upon request.”

  “Hey, freak face, has Decker called you?”

  “Nice to hear from you, too, Trish.”

  “Yeah. Have you heard from him?”

  “No. Did you try Eddie?”

  “The other freak face. Yeah I tried.”

  “And?”

  “Yeah, he’s spoken to him but that’s all he’d tell me.”

  “Then leave a message.”

  “I did. Twelve to be precise.”

  “Well then . . .”

  Trish Spence had hung up.

  EMERSON REMI

  Looked at the image on his iPhone in the wood-panelled bar of the spooky old CPR hotel, the King Edward, on King Street in downtown Toronto—and smiled.

  He hadn’t filed a story for the Times in almost eight months. Nor had he returned phone calls from his Princeton friends. Or from anyone. He just sat in the bar every day—and waited.

  And today that which he was waiting for—really from the time he’d last seen Decker in Cincinnati in the old synagogue some sixteen months ago—had come back to him.

  He allowed his index finger to trace the lines of Decker’s face and said a
loud, “Hello brother, welcome home. So very nice to see you again.” And finally he didn’t feel so profoundly alone—such a freak—a man with a brother is never really alone.

  LEENA

  Saw a reproduction of the photo on the National news as she finished closing up her restaurant. It gave her a start. Her old boyfriend looked older—much older—and stooped. As if he were carrying something heavy on his back. She glanced in the mirror and saw her own image there—older, much older, and not just a bit stooped herself. Damned time, she thought.

  MARTIN ARMISTAAD—INMATE BW212890 LEAVENWORTH PENITENTIARY

  Saw the image of Decker and the tiny woman on the wall TV between the beefy shoulders of two bare-chested, tattooed fellow inmates. Then one of them reached up and turned the channel to cartoons or professional wrestling—what was the difference? But Martin had seen enough to know that if the camera had panned in all likelihood Special Agent Yslan Hicks would have come into view. That would have been an unexpected treat. Then he thought of the tall man and the tiny woman—these two . . . Two whats? he asked himself. But he knew the answer to his own question before he’d completed it.

  Two more of his kind. Two in the clearing—not at the crystal palace but in the clearing, like him.

  He smiled and plodded his way back to his cell. He took out his calendar, which he’d already annotated using the pi ratio to find relevant days. The previous one had been the day of the blast at Ancaster College. He flipped the page to May. And there it was, only one day away—May 2, 2011—and it was a quadruple helix day. Something big was going to happen on May 2, 2011.

  He checked his stock market tables—nothing there for tomorrow. So it had to be something else in the events of men—something big, something really big.

  64

  AN OBJECT OUT OF PLACE—AFTER

  DECKER’S MARINE OPENED THE BASEMENT DOOR OF THE CHURCH and indicated that Decker was to enter.

  Decker hesitated, then stepped through the door with a “Yes, boss, yes” that he didn’t complete before the door slammed shut behind him.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the place. He found old churches pretty creepy but as he looked around he realised that old church basements were even creepier, and this one’s obsessive symmetry—well, was just plain odd.

  The wide space was unfurnished and spotless, and like all good Calvinist buildings, perfectly symmetrical. Its walls were nothing more than mortar and raw fieldstone holding back the earth, but the stones were meticulously stacked—and matched the pattern of stonework on the opposite wall.

  The floor was mostly compacted soil, although one area dead centre along the north wall did have a cracked cement slab upon which sat a huge rusting oil furnace that was shut off at this time of year. The thing was as big as three Cadillacs stacked one on top of the other. On either side of it were twin cement industrial sinks at which two fingerprint techs were plying their craft on a mop handle.

  Over their heads dead centre was the grated entrance to the brushed-metal ductwork that bisected the ceiling. The grating sported the clear markings of recent welding.

  Decker walked to the centre of the room and turned slowly to take it all in—the door, the furnace, the sinks, the ductwork, the stairs on the far side leading up to the chapel in perfect balance with the exit door—and immediately sensed that something was out of place, although as he rescanned the area he couldn’t say exactly what.

  Yslan came down the stairs from the church with two men at her side. One was a square-shaped Slav. The other was dressed like he came out of the film Men in Black, so Decker assumed he was a security officer of some sort.

  Yslan quickly introduced them to Decker, although she didn’t bother introducing Decker to them—which was just fine with Decker.

  “Both these men saw Walter Jones in the church before the president spoke.” Then turning to the men Yslan said, “Tell me again about the last time you saw Walter Jones.”

  Decker listened closely, periodically closing his eyes. He only asked one question; “After the gratings on the ducts are welded shut, is there a way to get into them?”

  “Nope—or out for that matter. A good weld—and we do the best—is stronger than tempered steel.”

  Decker nodded and glanced at the duct cover over the sinks and understood what had disturbed his sense of semblant order in the first place. The place was so orderly—everything in its place. Everything complete, balanced, except the welds on the grating over the duct entrance—and the grating itself. There were four screw holes in the grating, but only three screws.

  For a moment he stared at the thing and thought, There’s a mass murderer up there. Walter did come to see the funeral.

  The outsider got in.

  But now it’s his choice how his life ends. If he calls for help someone’ll hear his cries and they’ll come and get him—and probably execute him. Or if he doesn’t call for help . . . Decker wondered how long it would take to starve to death.

  The two men completed their accounts and Yslan dismissed them. Once they were gone she turned on Decker. “So?”

  “What?”

  “Truth, were they speaking the truth?”

  “For sure.”

  She looked more closely at him, then spun quickly and took in the place, the way she’d seen Decker do—the exit door, the sinks, the furnace, the ductwork. She was sensing something amiss and a thought was rising in her mind when one of the fingerprint guys said, “It’s his prints on the mop handle.”

  Yslan thought, Yeah, that’s what happens when you use a mop.

  Then she looked back at the room and Decker, and the thought that was rising . . . had vanished and she was once more bewildered.

  When she looked at Decker he was smiling.

  “What’s the smile about?”

  “Nothing, Special Agent Hicks, nothing,” he said as he took one last look at the welded seal on the ductwork and the hole without a screw that threw off the place’s perfect symmetry.

  65

  THE LEAVING OF A DREAMER—AFTER

  GARRETH PUT ASIDE THE BRUCE HUNTER NOVEL THAT HAD momentarily distracted him. He granted the man’s knowledge of firearms and the particularly sordid culture that surrounded them. The book, like so much fiction, was about retribution. Revenge. Funny how the writers of the religious right missed the idea that revenge belonged to Him—it’s pretty clear in the Book, Garreth thought. He remembered a saying about revenge being best served cold but had never really understood what that meant.

  It had been Garreth’s experience that unless you were willing to involve yourself in real violence there was no revenge in the world. People can do the most awful things to each other but there is no way of getting back at them unless you are willing to go outside the realm of human morality—something that Garreth had done exactly one time, thanks to meeting Decker Roberts on that cold January day. If he’d never met that kid he’d never have taken that money from those Vietnamese drug dealers—and slid to his own personal hell.

  He flicked on CNN and was surprised to see the footage of Decker and the diminutive woman entering the church down the hill from Ancaster College.

  For a moment he considered leaving his surveillance of the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic and heading to Dundas, New York. But he quickly put aside the idea. The town would be loaded with feds. Besides, he was all set up for a capture here, and he was pretty sure that Roberts would eventually come for his son, since the info he’d gotten from his cop friends on Vancouver Island said that Decker Roberts was out there fourteen months ago and tore the place apart trying to find the boy. He would eventually come after him again—and when he did, Garreth would be waiting for him. For retribution.

  He wondered briefly if there could be a connection between Decker in Dundas, New York, and yesterday’s early morning departure of the grey-haired freak who ran the dream clinic.

  He’d been watching the place for days, and the routine was pretty much standar
dized. The actors, or whatever they were, arrived between 6:15 and 6:30 in the morning, already in costume—be it orderly, nurse or patient. Three hours later the grey-haired freak, who he now knew was named W. J. Connelly, arrived and stayed until 1:00 or 2:00. Then he got in his fancy car and drove off. The actors left at 10:00 p.m.—like clockwork.

  But not yesterday. Yesterday a limo arrived for the grey-haired freak. He was carrying a travel bag and a computer case. And he was clearly angry that the limo was late.

  After reaming out the driver he got in the car, and off he went. For a moment this confused Garreth, since he wasn’t heading toward the San Francisco Airport. Then he consulted a more detailed map of the Bay Area and saw that the limo had headed in the direction of a private airfield. He made some calls and established that indeed that was where W. J. Connelly was headed—his corporate jet at the ready.

  He cracked a new bottle of bourbon and took a long pull.

  He tried to remember when he’d had his last drink—and couldn’t.

  Garreth had seen Decker’s kid only twice since he’d set up surveillance on the converted warehouse. There was no sign on the building or any indication what went on inside. But there were barred windows on the second floor through which he’d spotted Seth Roberts—and taken a series of digital photos of the young man with the help of his long zoom lens.

  When he first saw him he’d had a shock—the likeness to the five-year-old Decker Roberts, his father, was startling. Granted, this young man was older, but you didn’t need fancy aging software to see how that kid back then could grow into this young man. Well not that kid into this man. He reminded himself that it was this young man’s father whom he’d known as a five-year-old kid—a kid who murdered a six-year-old girl—and sent his life spiralling out of control.

  The second time Garreth had seen Seth he was at the side of the tall grey-haired freak. He took more photos.