by L.H. Thomson
The man frowned. “No. No, I don’t think so. They pretty much all park outside.”
Not a crack or meth dealer, then, as those customers live close. Probably weed, maybe steroids. He got the homeowner’s contact details and cautioned him they might have to call upon him again, or ask him to give a formal statement.
“You think that’ll help?” the man asked.
“I should find out, eh?” Carver proposed. “I’m going to head on over there.”
2
Carver crossed the street as quickly as the slush would allow, hands jammed into the pockets of his top coat. His shiny black Oxfords were covered in rubber overshoes, but he tried to lift his feet enough to ensure the mess wouldn’t dampen his socks.
If they played this right, he figured, it was possible both detectives could be off shift on time, at six, if a little luck rolled their way. He glanced briefly over at the techs crouched by the victim and quickly crossed himself, conscious again of the gravity of the moment.
Mariner headed towards the house and saw his partner approaching. He stopped at the top of the front path, the home’s front yard like the others, the snow a foot deep at least after several days of bad weather. “What’s up?”
“Caller puts the shooting potentially around midnight and a half-hour before he called it in. Figure twenty outside on the first response, so fifty minutes minimum from time of death, assuming it happened here. Conservative take? I’d say slightly more than an hour.”
“The way it’s been coming down, no wonder they can’t find shit. He say anything else?”
“Looks like we’ve got a drug house at the bottom of the street. You think that’s a coincidence?”
Mariner didn’t answer. There were all sorts of problems with making assumptions; he knew that. But Carver was Carver and he had an arrest record every detective envied. He was a closer and was going to check it out either way. Mariner wasn’t certain he was always right, but Carver got rid of red names on the big board, even if he could be an arrogant bastard.
They approached the house; Mariner noticed a snow-covered sedan in the open-side car port, which had proven no match for the blowing conditions. The path to the front door was flanked by eight-inch ice walls, carved by a snow shovel’s edge. Carver waved at the constable down the street, gesturing for him to come over. A few moments later, he’d joined them. “There’s a gate on the side; head around back,” Carver told him. “Make sure we don’t have any runners.”
Carver waited until the constable had time to get into position then knocked on the door.
Nothing.
He knocked again then said loudly, “Police! Anyone home?” He glanced sideways towards the front window; a lamp suddenly went out. “Someone’s pretending they didn’t hear us.”
Mariner made a sniffing motion, scrunching up his nose. “You smell marijuana, partner?”
Carver smiled. At least it was genuine this time; he’d had other partners with furtive senses of imagination. And while the smell of weed wasn’t enough “probable cause” under Canadian drug laws to search the place without a warrant any more, it was reasonable grounds to knock on the door and ask questions. “Open the door please,” Carver barked. “We know you’re in there.”
He waited for a few moments.
The door opened a crack. A woman, short – tiny, even – in her twenties, peeked out. She had ginger hair in a pageboy cut and her pale blue eyes were wide and nervous. “Yes?”
In the background he heard someone hiss “Put the fucking chain on!”
The smell of pot grew stronger. He could see an opening to another room over her head, directly to the left of the front door, and Carver leaned on the door so that it swung open enough to see properly. It startled her; the woman stumbled backwards a step, unable to resist his weight. He glanced over at the room quickly. A small, dark-haired man in a t-shirt and jeans crouched by a coffee table. He had shoes on, wet and messy, and frantically tried to sweep everything off the table top and into a bag. The pile of marijuana was considerable, a mountain of green sitting next to a chrome scale and a pile of plastic baggies. A stack of bills toppled next to the weed.
“Police!” Carver pushed past the woman and into the home.
“I didn’t say you could―” she objected as she was shoved aside.
The young man on his haunches by the coffee table turned a head of dark hair; he looked shocked for a split second as they barged in, then he sprinted towards the back of the home. Carver ran after him, through the cramped, dark living room with its brown carpet and flower-print sofa, into the small, outdated u-shaped kitchen. Before Carver could reach him, the man thrust open the back door and sprinted outside… right into the arms of the constable with the thick winter coat.
The smaller man struggled, but the constable pushed him down into the snow on the back step, under the dim bulb of the porch light, his face forward, arms pulled roughly behind him as the police officer handcuffed him and put weight on him. A few doors away a back light came on, and a dog barked with an urgent tone.
The detectives were there a moment later. Carver leaned over the man being restrained. “What’s your name, son?”
“Fuck you! I didn’t do nothing!” He struggled with the restraints and the partial bulk of the constable.
The constable felt something between them. He reached under himself to the man’s waistband, and his prisoner struggled even more. “What’s this…?” The young officer’s gloved hand came out holding a pistol. “Looks like a nine.”
Gunshot wounds were big enough to be a nine millimeter, Carver thought. The officer passed him the gun; he took his pencil from inside his jacket pocket and pushed it down the barrel, so that he could receive it like a flag, without touching it and potentially ruining prints. “Fired very recently, I’m guessing. Is that right, sir?”
“I’m not saying a fucking thing,” the man protested, his accent bearing the slightly Gaelic lilt of the Maritimes. “You planted that, you cocksucker!”
Carver turned to Mariner, who had just snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. “Here, bag this.” Then he nodded to the constable. “Make sure he doesn’t have any more weapons and see if he has some ID.”
The younger man patted the suspect down. “Got a wallet here. Seems we’re talking with … a Mr. Paul Sidney. That right Paul?”
“FUCK YOU!” the man yelled, so angry he spat slightly, struggling intensely. “Get off me, you fucking pig!”
Behind them, they heard a noise. His wife came to the kitchen door, her face turning from shock to anger.
“You,” Carver said to her authoritatively. “Stay put.” Then he leaned in towards her husband. “Now, you might want to restrain yourself, Mr. Sidney, or we’re going to have to do it for you. That’s going to involve a Taser. Have you ever been hit with a stun gun before, Paul?”
His body relaxed, his face suddenly shifting from anger to worry. “Look, I didn’t do nothing. I swear. I just picked up the piece, man; I swear to God!”
His wife had had enough. “Get off him!” she screamed. She dove at the constable with her hands in claw form, trying to rake his face with her nails as she screamed like a banshee. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!”
But she was tiny, with bird-like limbs, and the detectives pulled her off of the pile and held her down with ease, the pain written across her face more from the anguish of the moment than the restraint, her eyelids clenched firm. Mariner pulled a wrist tie from his coat pocket and slipped the loop over her hands, quickly pulling it tight so that she was immobilized.
It took just a few moments to read the couple their rights before leading them back through the house to the street outside, up the sidewalk with their heads hung low, to the back seat of the detectives’ unmarked brown sedan. The neighbors continued to watch as the blue-and-red-and-white strobe light of the adjacent police cruiser spun its pattern across the darkened street.
3
The legal clinic sat on a side road just of
f of Ninety Seventh Street, in an unofficial part of Chinatown. The attached brown brick building had a big front window from its long period as a retail store. Its neighbors were an herbal remedy shop on one side, with green window script in both English and Chinese, and a storefront evangelist on the other. It was on the tougher end of the long street’s downtown section, just north of the graffiti-strewn railroad underpass, a block from One Hundred Seventh Avenue.
Sensibly located, the adjacent Boyle McCauley neighborhood had been lower income since its founding at the turn of the last century. It was mostly small bungalows, rooming houses or walkup apartments over aging storefronts. Little Italy dialed up the neighborhood pride a few blocks to the east, but as a whole, the area needed help. It started life in the earliest days of the twentieth century, as the neighborhood where the “less desirable” immigrant population could be housed while fulfilling service roles in the new downtown business core, which separated it from the early west side of the city and Inglewood, once the domain of politicians and career makers, now recovering itself.
Crime was always higher around Ninety Seventh, particularly in Norwood, a residential neighborhood north of One Hundred Eleventh Avenue that was slowly being reclaimed, gentrified. There was a push on a plan to mix income levels in areas around downtown, to end the concentration of poverty. Lots of folks thought it was a great idea, while just as many worried about how the poor would be able to afford so much improvement, or how they’d feel about potentially being moved into subsidized housing halfway across the city. They feared, maybe rightfully, that it would be difficult for the social assistance agencies concentrated near the neighborhood to offer the same level of service. Relationships and trust would be lost.
It weighed on Jessica Harper as she drove downtown from her townhouse in Castledowns, near the city’s northern border. Her clients were usually destitute, often uneducated or with poor English skills. They needed her nearby, she reasoned.
She followed the business- and strip-mall-laden Ninety Seventh most of the way, six-lane traffic heavy and slow, most people smart enough to drop their speed to account for the slippery conditions. The occasional young guy driving like suicide was on his mind cut around other cars like they weren’t there. The practical brown sedan had winter tires, and Jessica was in no great rush. New blades kept the windshield clear. A small dreamcatcher totem hung from her rear-view mirror.
The drive gave her time to think, to plan ahead. Her non-profit had a lease on the clinic’s building for another decade. But she knew the city could claim “eminent domain” if it was rebuilding the entire neighborhood; it could offer the owner something slightly north of market value. She’d be forced to figure out a new location, a new lease, maybe even new funding to help pay for it. It didn’t seem fair, given the work they did. No one ever said helping people would be a popularity contest, she told herself.
She turned on the car radio for the distraction. The CBC was part-way into the eight o’clock news and she cursed her bad luck for getting up so late.
“…and will likely now grant an extension so that Sidney can find a new lawyer, Janet.”
“Thank you, John. That’s John Richmond at the courthouse.”
Damn, missed the front end. Jessie had followed the Paul Sidney case since Brian Featherstone’s death, three months earlier; every lawyer in town had, because the victim was an oil executive. Wonder if he recused himself, or…?
She parked on the street across from the clinic, ignoring the meters and knowing she’d likely only be there for twenty minutes. She had an appearance for a client at the courthouse, eight blocks away, in an hour. Jessie locked the car; then she crossed the street quickly and took the three concrete steps up to the entrance. The air smelled like exhaust fumes and wet dirt. The streets offered a background din of bus engines, brakes, emergency sires, and horns slammed in frustration.
The black lettering on the front door window read, “Legal Assistance Society of Edmonton.” The glass was clean, polished, and Jessie could see her long black hair framing the reflection of her face. Yay! Three months unbroken, a new record.
The door chimed when she pushed it open, a leftover from its earlier days as a regular storefront. But instead of being filled with shelves and counters, the room was sparsely furnished, perhaps forty feet deep, with a small office at the back and just an empty twelve-seat waiting area in the front, along with a reception desk.
A woman with short jet-black hair and Jessie’s olive-brown complexion sat behind the desk, answering phone calls in rapid succession.
“No, ma’am, that wouldn’t make a difference, unfortunately. Ms. Harper is far too busy to take something like that on. And Fairview is just too far… All right then… I hope you do, ma’am. Thank you for calling. Wow, that one was rude. Good morning, Legal Assistance Society. No, we can’t handle a divorce. He what? You need to call the police, ma’am. Uh-huh. No, don’t dial nine-one-one unless he’s there right now and a threat. Is he there? At work. Okay, I’m going to give you the number for Downtown Division…”
A few moments later the receptionist hung up the phone. The nameplate on the desk read Rhonda Wilson, but the similarities between her and the younger woman were striking. Rhonda face was heavier, with more lines, and her eyeglasses framed with thicker plastic rims, brown and practical. Though Jessie used her father’s last name, she shared her mother’s dark almond eyes.
“You have an insane number of messages,” Rhonda said. “And you’re late.”
“Your support is appreciated as ever, Mom.” Jessie paced the cheap carpet towards her office. “You know they plowed my car in again today.”
“In Edmonton? In Winter? Shocking. You also have a client coming in for a quick consult in ten minutes.”
Jessie looked at her phone. “I have to be in court in fifty…”
“She’ll only take twenty. We’re right down the street from the courthouse, sweetie. You’ll make it easily. And she sounded pretty desperate.”
It would be cutting it close. But that was fairly typical. “Fine. But if she’s late, I have to go.”
Rhonda shooed her towards the office. “Go put your face on. You forgot again.”
Jessie loved her mom, but Rhonda could also be infuriating. She had a knack for organization and getting things done, but she also had an immature streak a mile wide. For a long time, Jessie wondered if her mother had ever fully grown up, eventually accepting that she probably never would.
She hung her coat up on the hook by her office door, then carried her legal briefcase over to the desk, setting it down beside her office chair. The case was wide, bulky, and she needed it close at hand. Her mother’s last line bothered her, so Jessie retrieved her compact from her purse and checked her makeup. As suggested, it was near non-existent. “I can’t have forgotten…” she began to say to no one in particular.
Rhonda leaned around the corner of the door.
“Those messages waiting for you … a couple of them are from David Nygaard.”
Jessie’s head slumped. What a morning…
“Mom…” she said in her least patient tone.
Rhonda held up both hands in mock surrender. “Anyway, he called.”
“I broke up with him four months ago. It’s practically stalking at this point.”
“Stalking?!? Because he calls you every so often to see how you’re doing? He’s a police officer. He’s concerned about you. It’s sweet.”
“No matter where I am in the city, he seems to pop up out of nowhere every other week. It’s getting creepy.”
“Creepy? David Nygaard!?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know he’s a big slab of a man, that’s what I know.” Rhonda had a dreamy look, the same look she’d get on the day they drew the Dream Home lottery. “He’s rugged, and handsome, and he’s crazy about you. Creepy?” She had no problem exaggerating her level of disappointment, transparent as Jessie found it. “In my day, a guy who pursued a woman wa
s romantic and charming.”
“In your day? Mom, you were fifteen when you had me. I remember your day; I was in junior high school. And they had restraining orders back then, too.”
“Don’t bring your father into this,” Rhonda protested. “We worked that out a long time ago.”
“You still have that rolling pin in the kitchen drawer.”
“And he still has a dent in his forehead. Probably did him some good, shook out some of the stupid. Anyway, you should just remember that I deserve grandkids, for all you put me through growing up, and give David another chance.”
Jessie made a shooing motion with both hands. “Bye-bye, Mom.”
She waited until her mother had gone, then took a seat back behind her desk. Then she realized she hadn’t asked about the client, and wondered who was unfortunate enough to need her help on a Monday morning in February.
4
“Ms. Harper?”
The woman in the office doorway was tiny, perhaps four-feet-eleven inches tall, insulated in a polyester padded winter coat, the kind you found at Wal-Mart or the SAAN store for less than should be possible, in a shade of green that seemed to glow slightly. It contrasted with her ginger hair and pale blue eyes. She took off a pair of white wool mittens and put them into the pockets.
Jessie rose from behind her desk and offered the woman a seat. “Please, Miz…”
“It’s Andrea, Andrea Sidney.” She sat down and undid her coat, putting her purse on the ground beside the chair, then glanced around the small office, studying Jessie’s law degrees, looking over the horizontal bookshelf full of reference volumes. The dark wood unit was topped by a solitary white vase with a very lifelike-but-artificial yellow daffodil in it.
“Sidney? As in…”
“Paul’s my husband, yes.” She said it nervously, quickly adding, “We have a daughter who’s three, but she’s with her grandma back home in Antigonish.”