Seeing and Believing

by Norah McClintock

  I stared at her. How did she know all that?

  Detective Canton asked me again why someone would say they’d seen me go into the convenience store last Friday night just before the Lees were shot.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They must be mistaken.” Or lying. But who would lie about me like that? “I already told you, I was home that night.”

  “The person who called didn’t just give an accurate description of you, Mike,” Detective Canton said. “They gave your name. How do you explain that?”

  There was only one answer to that. “They were lying.”

  “Right,” Detective Mancini said. “Your best friend Vincent Taglia is seen running out of the store. We find him with some of the stolen money on him. He claims he doesn’t know who the guys were who did it. Claims he can’t even describe them. You’re with him when he gets arrested. You claim you haven’t seen him in months, but you go and visit him while he’s in detention. You talk to him on the phone, too. All of a sudden you’re in a lot of contact with a guy you claim you haven’t had any contact with in months. And your pal Sal gets beaten up as a warning for him not to say anything. But the person who called Crime Stoppers, that person is lying. Is that it, Mike?”

  “I don’t care what you think,” I said. “I was home the whole night.”

  “Home alone,” Detective Mancini said. “With no one to back you up.” He was staring at me as if I were a piece of garbage, which made me even more nervous than I already was. I was afraid that he wouldn’t believe anything I said. But I had to try. I focused on Detective Canton, who was slightly less scary than Detective Mancini.

  “That store was robbed around ten o’clock last Friday night, right?” I said.

  Detective Canton nodded.

  “And you said someone called Crime Stoppers and said they saw me go into the store just before then, right?”

  Detective Canton nodded again.

  I sucked in a big breath. They weren’t going to believe me. I knew they weren’t. But I had to do something, and maybe Susan could help to convince them. I could feel my face turning red when I told them that I had turned the TV on at around eight, had watched it for a while, and then, at nine-thirty, had turned on the VCR and had sat there for the next hour and a half taping the final episode of Susan’s favorite TV program and a special about it. My cheeks burned as I told him which program it was.

  “That’s the one about those women in Manhattan, right?” Detective Canton said.

  “I taped it for Susan,” I said. I glanced at her. She had that same I’m-so-sorry-Mike look on her face that she’d had when she told me the bad news about what had happened to the tape. “There’s no way I could have been at that store at ten o’clock because I was home taping that program.”

  Detective Mancini shook his head.

  “You could have programmed the VCR to record it while you were out,” he said.

  That’s when Susan interrupted. I guess she decided we had nothing to lose.

  “But Mike knows I don’t like watching commercials,” she said, “so he sat there and stopped the tape whenever a commercial came on and started it again when the commercials were over. I know. I watched the tape.”

  “You can program a VCR to skip the commercials,” Detective Canton said.

  “You can program some VCRs to do that,” Susan said. “But you can’t program John’s to do it. It’s practically first generation. John doesn’t believe in throwing away anything that still works.”

  Boy, did she ever know Riel.

  “If you watched the tape, you could see places where Mike was a little slow on the play button after the commercials ended, or a little slow pressing pause when the commercials came on,” she told the detectives. “If Mike had used a VCR that could skip commercials, you wouldn’t see that.”

  Detective Mancini was still shaking his head.

  “He could have asked someone else to tape the program for him,” he said. “That way, he could use it as an alibi.”

  “True,” Susan said. “But if that were the case, don’t you think when he gave me the tape—the day after the robbery—that he would have made a big deal about it? Don’t you think if he got that show taped just to have an alibi, he would have told you about it right away? When you first talked to him, did he mention the tape? Did he tell you what he was doing? No, he just said he was watching TV, right?”

  Detective Canton had to admit that she was right.

  “He didn’t mention the tape when he talked to you, and he didn’t make a big deal about it when he gave it to me,” Susan said. “He just slipped it to me and told me it was a surprise. Does that sound like someone who was establishing an alibi?”

  I glanced at the two detectives, but I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.

  “He didn’t say anything about it because he was embarrassed about watching the program, weren’t you, Mike?”

  I nodded and held my breath. Then Detective Mancini asked the question that I had been dreading.

  “I don’t suppose you happen to have this videotape, do you?” he said.

  Susan sagged in her chair and got that sorry look on her face again.

  “I loaned the tape to a friend of mine. Her son taped over it,” she said.

  Detectives Canton and Mancini exchanged glances. Detective Mancini rolled his eyes, like trying to use a videotape that had already been taped over was the lamest thing he had ever heard of.

  “I have it in my backpack,” I said. Susan gave me a look. I knew what she was thinking: What good would it do? “It’s true what Susan told you,” I said. “Her friend’s son taped over it. He taped an episode of CSI.”

  “Well I guess that makes you flat out of luck,” Detective Mancini said. I knew he was probably just playing bad cop to Detective Canton’s not-so-bad cop, but he scared me anyway.

  “CSI is only an hour long,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “The show I taped was ninety minutes.”

  “So?” Detective Mancini said.

  “So if you fast-forward, you can see the last part of the show I taped. You can see what Susan said—where I tried to skip the commercials and where I was a little off.” I reached for my backpack.

  Susan was almost smiling as she said, “And I’d be happy to give you my friend’s name. She’ll confirm that that’s the tape I gave her. And her son can confirm that that’s his handwriting on the label—he put that on the cassette after he taped his program.” She took a notepad and pen out of her purse, wrote something on it—her friend’s name and phone number, I guess—tore out the page, and handed it to Detective Canton, who studied both it and the videocassette.

  “Oh,” Susan said, “and if you’re thinking maybe he taped it at some other time, you’d better check your TV listings. The program was only aired the one time. It was a real event.”

  She smiled at me. She was amazing. I thought Riel had made a good decision when he proposed to her. I hoped he wasn’t going to mess things up.

  The two detectives looked at each other.

  “I bet you get a lot of tips on Crime Stoppers that don’t lead anywhere,” Susan said. “I bet there are people out there who even give you false tips, you know, given that callers don’t have to identify themselves and aren’t asked for a name. This kind of thing must happen from time to time.”

  Neither detective said anything.

  “So, do you have any other questions for Mike?”

  “Not at this time, no,” Detective Canton said.

  “Can I have a receipt for that videotape?” Susan said politely.

  We waited while they got Susan what she wanted. She looked at me but didn’t say anything until after we were back in her car. Then, as she pulled out onto the street, she said, “When did you find out about the tape?”

  “Just last night. I didn’t even have time to tell you about it before Canton and Mancini turned up this morning. Then, on the way to the station, I was trying to figure out what I was go
ing to say to them.”

  “Well, good thinking, Mike,” she said.

  “Thanks for coming with me, Susan. You were great,” I said. “How did you know what to say to them? Before we left the house, I mean?”

  She shrugged. “The police come around ER sometimes and want to talk to someone I’m treating. If you have to deal with them, it makes sense to know what they can and can’t do. John filled me in. But you handled yourself really well, Mike.” She smiled at me for a moment. Then her face got serious again. “You know what I wish, Mike? I wish they had call display at Crime Stoppers, because I wish they could catch whoever called in that so-called tip and charge them with filing a false report. It’s probably just a prank. But it’s not a funny one, is it?”

  She had that right. All the way home, I thought about who could have called the cops on me. Whoever it was knew my name and what I looked like, which meant it was someone I knew—or someone who knew me. But who would do that to me? And why?

  When Susan and I got back to the house, there was a message on the phone: “It’s Rebecca. It’s eleven o’clock on Friday morning. Can Mike please call me?”

  I checked my watch. It was eleven-fifteen. I started to punch in her number but stopped when Susan said, “Mike?” I put the receiver down. “I have to go,” Susan said. She said she had to get to work. She told me she was sure everything was going to be fine now. She told me she’d tried again to get hold of Riel, but hadn’t been able to. She said that she’d left a message for him to call her and that when he did, she would explain to him what had happened. She told me not to worry.

  After she left, I called Rebecca, who said, “How fast can you get over here?”

  “Ten minutes if I run,” I said.

  “Run, Mike.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “It’s important.”

  I locked the front door and jogged all the way to Rebecca’s house. It took me eight minutes.

  The door to her house opened almost as soon as I knocked. Rebecca pulled me inside and dragged me through to the kitchen. A slim woman with brown hair and brown eyes was sitting at the kitchen table, holding a coffee mug.

  “Mike, this is Megan Doherty. Megan, this is Mike McGill.”

  Megan smiled at me. “Becca was just telling me about you,” she said.

  Becca? I’d never heard her called that before.

  “And Megan was telling me about Cecilia Lee,” Rebecca said. “Sit down, Mike.”

  I dropped into an empty chair.

  “The church Megan goes to works with an agency that helps new Canadians get settled.”

  “There’s a group of us at the church who volunteer with the agency,” Megan said. “They pair us up with someone who’s new to the country. We meet them for coffee or whatever, answer their questions, help them practice their English, show them around the city.”

  “Megan was paired with Cecilia Lee,” Rebecca said.

  Megan nodded.

  “When Cecilia first arrived, she barely spoke English. She was from a small village in China. She found it very intimidating living in the middle of a big city. And, of course, she married someone she didn’t really know and who was twenty-something years older than her.”

  “Megan got to know Cecilia well,” Rebecca said.

  “I don’t know if I’d say well,” Megan said. “We had a language barrier at first. And her husband wasn’t exactly thrilled about her going out to have coffee with me. To be honest, I think he would have preferred it if she never left the store. When she started coming to church, he gave her a hard time about that.”

  “Megan didn’t like Mr. Lee,” Rebecca said.

  “I tried to keep an open mind,” Megan said. “But after a while, Cecilia began to cancel our meetings, and it was always because her husband needed her to do this or that. Finally I started going to the store to see her. He didn’t like that, either, but I refused to let him chase me off. I felt sorry for her. She told me that she didn’t mind working hard or putting in long hours. She thought that would mean she could send money home to her family. She had three younger sisters, and she promised she would send them gifts. But it didn’t work out that way. Her husband never gave her a dime. He bought all the food, paid all the bills, bought all of her clothes—not that he exactly went broke on that.”

  “Didn’t you hear?” I said. “He died yesterday.”

  “Oh,” Megan said. The news seemed to shake her. “I’m sorry. What I said—it must have sounded terrible.”

  “You didn’t know,” Rebecca said. It looked to me like Rebecca hadn’t heard either.

  I didn’t see what the big deal was. If the guy was a creep when he was alive, how did his dying change anything?

  “Why didn’t she just leave him?” I said. “I mean, if he treated her that way.”

  “I think she was afraid to,” Megan said. “I got the impression that her family wouldn’t have approved if the marriage didn’t work out. Then she got pregnant. But this guy, her husband … ” She shook her head. “She told me that he emptied the cash register regularly—as if he was afraid she’d take money and spend it on something for herself. Cecilia told me that the most money he kept in the register was one hundred dollars, and a lot of that was small change. The rest he kept locked in his metal box.”

  Metal box? Sal had said something about a box. So had Vin.

  “You mean, like a lockbox?” I said.

  Megan nodded.

  “Tell Mike about Amanda,” Rebecca said.

  Megan sighed. “According to Cecilia, the first time Amanda came into the store, another customer accused her of shoplifting. That customer wanted Cecilia to call the police. But Cecilia isn’t like that. She’s the kind of person who always tries to understand other people. You know, who always gives someone a second chance.”

  “So she let Amanda go,” I said.

  Megan nodded. “I wouldn’t have. But who knows? Maybe Cecilia knew what she was doing.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Amanda came back the next day and apologized. At least, that’s what Cecilia told me. I thought she must have misunderstood, but she insisted. She said Amanda apologized and even offered to pay for what she’d taken. She said Amanda stayed around for a while and talked to her. I never really figured out how, but the two of them seemed to hit it off. Cecilia’s husband didn’t approve, of course. Especially of Amanda—I mean, just the way she dressed. Cecilia told me he came in one time when Amanda was there, took one look at her, and chased her out. Apparently the man who caught Amanda stealing had described her to Cecilia’s husband. He told Cecilia she was never to allow Amanda into the store. Cecilia told me all he saw was her hair and her tattoo. That’s what he called her, The Tattoo. That bothered Cecilia.”

  “I bet Mr. Lee didn’t scare Amanda,” I said.

  Megan shook her head. “Amanda started going to the store when Cecilia’s husband was away. I dropped by one time when she was there. She and Cecilia were talking and looking at fashion magazines. Cecilia was laughing. She looked really happy. And her English was improving fast—she was learning all the designers’ names. She asked me about some stores downtown that Amanda had told her about and how expensive they were. She said she wished she could buy things like that for her sisters—you know, really nice things, expensive things instead of just the basics.” Megan shook her head again. “Then, when I got a new job as manager of a video store, Cecilia asked me to help Amanda by giving her a job, even though she had no experience and no references. I took her on part-time, fifteen hours a week, as a favor to Cecilia.”

  “We heard you fired her pretty soon after you hired her,” Rebecca said.

  “She lasted two weeks. She was late all the time. I tried to be understanding—I know she doesn’t have the best home life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her mother died when she was a child. Her father has had a bunch of girlfriends. And, according to Cecilia, the father drinks a lot. I
gather life around Amanda’s house is pretty miserable, and I’m sorry about that. But what could I do? The rest of the staff was complaining. It wasn’t fair to them that Amanda showed up late all the time. I knew I was going to have to let her go. Then she left me with no choice.” She hesitated.

  “I caught her stealing. DVDs mostly. I didn’t want to press charges. It can be such a hassle, all that court time. And I didn’t want the district office to know I’d used such poor judgment—we’re supposed to insist on references, and we’re supposed to check them before we hire anyone. It was bad enough that I hadn’t done that. But to have that person turn out to be a thief? I didn’t want the grief. So I put down the loss as shoplifting and put in Amanda’s record that she was let go because she was habitually late.” She looked at Rebecca. “I’m glad in a way that I didn’t get the chance to tell Cecilia what happened. She would have been so disappointed. For some reason, Cecilia believed in her. Me—to be honest, I started to wonder if Amanda was hanging around Cecilia’s store because she wanted to steal from there, too. I feel terrible that I couldn’t make it to her funeral. I had a meeting at head office that I couldn’t get out of.”

  I kept thinking about the lockbox.

  “Where did Mr. Lee keep that metal box?” I said.

  “I have no idea,” Megan said. “I saw him with it up at the register that one time. He and Cecilia lived in an apartment above the store. Maybe he kept it there. He also had a sort of office in the storeroom at the back of the store. He could have kept it there.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I didn’t think it was any of my business.”

  After that, Rebecca and Megan talked some more, mostly about Rebecca’s sister and a bunch of other people I didn’t know. I listened for a while, and then I told Rebecca I had to leave. She walked me to the door. When I filled her in on what had happened with the cops, she hugged me.

  “I knew it was going to be okay,” she said.

  I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t been nearly so confident or that I still wasn’t 100 percent convinced they believed me.