Night Game

by Alison Gordon

“Seems like a lot to me.”

  “With outside people or just among the players?”

  “Sometimes it don’t seem like they know whose apartment is whose, they’re in and out so much. Not how I was brought up to be. But I wasn’t a millionaire athlete, wasting my life.”

  This outburst of information seemed to startle Bonder. He looked around, bemused, then wiped his hands on his pants and picked up a rake that was leaning against the wall.

  “I have to get back to work,” he said, then put his mouth into a grotesque parody of a smile.

  “It’s been nice talking to you,” he said.

  Chapter 25

  I stopped at the Publix on the way home and bought a frozen mini-pizza and some salad stuff for dinner. I wanted an evening alone to prepare for my interview with June Hoving, and to try to make some sense out of everything I had learned.

  When I got to my room, I turned on the oven, changed into sweats, and poured myself a glass of wine before calling down for messages. I needed the fortification. There were ten of them: Jake Watson (twice), the city desk, Andy, Cal Jagger (twice), Esther Hirsch, Hugh Marsh, Gloves, and Sally Parkes.

  Duty first. I called Jake, filled him in on what was going on, and told him to pass it along to the city desk. Jake said that city side was worried about photographs for the feature. I promised to get hold of Bill Spencer.

  Going for pleasure next, I tried Andy, but couldn’t reach him, so I called Sally and caught up with news from home. Elwy, my beloved cat, had been to the vet for an ear infection and was put on a strict diet of dry food that costs twice as much as the canned food he loves. There had been another snowstorm the day before, covering the first shoots that had come up in the garden during a three-day thaw, God’s annual Toronto joke. Sally had met a promising man at a benefit for some native arts organization. It was a comforting phone call. I didn’t tell her about what I was involved in. She would only worry.

  When we were done, Sally passed the phone to T.C.

  “Kate, why aren’t you writing?” he asked. Unlike Sally, he reads the sports pages religiously.

  “I’m working on a feature for the weekend,” I said.

  “What about Domingo Avila? Did he really do it?”

  “His friends don’t think so,” I said.

  “Why don’t you catch the real killer, Kate? You can use the book I sent for your birthday!”

  “Thanks, T.C.,” I said. “I’ve got enough problems being a sportswriter.”

  He pumped me for ten more minutes about the fates and fortunes of the Titans under their new manager before I could get him off the phone.

  “I miss you, Kate,” he said. “So does Elwy.”

  “I miss you all, too,” I said. “I’ll see you in a month. Take care of Elwy, and give your mum a hug for me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Talk to you soon. I love you.”

  “Me too. Bye.”

  I put the pizza in the oven and slipped a tape into the machine. Ray Charles and Merle Haggard singing, “There’s no place like home and it’s lonesome in my little hotel room.” Perfect.

  Country music is my secret vice. I’ve developed the taste over years on the road with the team.

  I am a radio listener, mainly. At home, it’s the CBC, with its peculiar blend of information, music, and silliness, always searching for the elusive Canadian identity. American radio is another matter.

  I used to go up and down the dial in each new city for a station which played tolerable music and had decent news reporting. This proved to be impossible. The music was either Top Forty rap and crap, or insipid music-of-your-life and Barry Manilow. I finally settled on country, because it’s mainly melodic, tailor-made for lonely hotel rooms, and you can find a country station in every city in the American League—except New York and Boston, where I settle happily for jazz. The news reporting is pretty lousy and the announcers are right wing, but I tell myself that I’m taking the pulse of the Real America.

  I allowed myself five minutes of maudlin with Ray and his friends, then got to work.

  For half an hour, I sat at my computer and made notes of all the conversations I’d had since the funeral, cross-referencing into several files: one of each of the people I’d talked with, and two general ones where I put the information that could link with Lucy’s death, filed under motive and opportunity.

  When the buzzer went, I checked the oven. The pizza appeared to be ready, if not particularly appetizing. I put a quick salad together and put the pizza on a plate, poured another glass of wine, and sat down. For company, I picked up T.C.’s book.

  I skipped the chapters on finding missing persons and following paper trails and went to the good stuff: how to tail a suspect and how to set up a surveillance. The latter chapter advised bringing something along to pee in. That was all very well, but I wasn’t sure whom to surveil. There was also a chapter on finding things out from going through suspects’ garbage, which sounded intriguing, if unpleasant.

  I was mercifully taken away from reading about surgical gloves, and instruments for sorting through eggshells and used tampons, by the phone. It was Esther Hirsch.

  “I’ve just come from seeing our client,” she said. “He is very grateful to you and his friends and asked me to tell you.”

  “Great,” I said. “Meanwhile he’s still sitting in jail with a bunch of real criminals, probably being raped or something.”

  “Calm down, Kate. First of all, I think he can take care of himself. He is a big tough boy, agreed?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Secondly, we have managed to get him in safe custody, away from the general population.”

  “That’s great. Can I go see him?”

  “No, it’s a very restricted list. Counsel and family.”

  “But his family’s in the Dominican Republic,” I began. “No, wait a minute. Alex Jones is a second cousin or something. Does that count? Could he get in to see him?”

  “Maybe it could be arranged.”

  “Who should he contact?”

  “Just give him my number.”

  “Okay. What else did Dommy have to say?”

  “That he is completely innocent,” Esther said. “That he has no idea what happened that night. There’s more. Nothing that needs following right now.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Some interesting stuff has turned up about our friend Detective Sergeant Barwell,” she said. “Not to do with Lucy, but it certainly speaks to his character.”

  “I’ve got some pretty juicy stuff, too,” I said. “Directly related to Lucy. But you go first.”

  “It’s just that there have been a couple of complaints about him to the department. One was for sexual harassment of a suspect. Another for assault. He was cleared both times, but six years ago he was suspended for six months for falsifying evidence in a drug case.”

  “Not a good cop,” I said.

  “You might say so,” she said. “What have you got?”

  I told her about Dick Teensy and the date rape. She swore.

  “Why does none of this surprise me?” she asked. “We had better get together.”

  “Let me get my stuff in order and do the interview with June, first,” I said. “We’ll do it tomorrow night.”

  “Why don’t you come to my place for dinner?” she asked. “I’ll get Cal, too. It would be a bit more private than meeting in restaurants, and I don’t think you probably want us to be seen at your place.”

  “Good thinking,” I said. “How about seven?”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “But don’t go to any trouble,” I said.

  “I love cooking,” she said. “It’s my Jewish-mother genes. And how often do I have people to feed?”

  “If you’re sure,” I said.

  “And if
you have any more stuff for me to dig out, feel free to call. I never go to bed before midnight.”

  “You’re terrific,” I said.

  “Hell, no,” she said. “I’m just having fun.”

  While I was at the phone, I called Alex and gave him Esther’s number. Then I tried Andy. Still no answer. I left a pathetic message on our machine and went back to work.

  Chapter 26

  After an hour, I took a break, put on the kettle, and got into the shower, letting water as hot as I could stand it pound down over my neck and shoulders. I swear computers were designed by quack chiropractors out for business.

  While the tea steeped, I did some stretches and warm-ups to work the rest of the kinks out. Then I took a mug of sweet and milky tea to the desk.

  I scrolled through the information in my computer, taking notes in longhand. I don’t travel with a printer, and sometimes things make more sense on paper than they do on the screen.

  By 11:00, I had a bunch of paper to shuffle around, but inspiration was still refusing to strike. I was considering packing it in for the night when the phone rang. I almost ignored it. I didn’t really feel like talking to Andy, because I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to tell him what I was doing. I finally picked it up, trying to sound sleepy so he’d feel badly for disturbing me.

  “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” he said, but it wasn’t Andy. “It sounds like I woke you up. This is Cal Jagger.”

  “No problem.” I said. “I am just sitting and mulling.”

  “Mulling what?”

  “Not wine. Suspects,” I said.

  “How many have you got?”

  “At least three, so far,” I said. “Troy Barwell, the rapist cop with a sexual inferiority complex; Axel Bonder, the KKK janitor with the loony son and both motive and opportunity; and Step-daddy-o just on general principles.

  “Plus, I have a whole bunch of question marks about other people.”

  “Like?”

  “Oh, Stinger Swain, Hank Cartwright, Constable Sweeney, you, an unrelated madman acting alone, none of the above, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and All.”

  Cal laughed.

  “I think maybe you had better sleep on it,” he said. “I just called to say I’ll be at Esther’s tomorrow. If you need me, I won’t be in the office until the afternoon. I’m doing some stuff for my day job.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m seeing June. I’ll bring my notes to the meeting. See you at seven.”

  I decided to give Andy one more try. I was in luck.

  “Been out carousing all night?” I asked. “Some behaviour, I say. Ignoring your hearth and home, Elwy pining for your company. But do you care? Ha!”

  “Elwy’s not pining,” Andy laughed. “He is being cuddled as we speak. I didn’t call, because I only got in a few minutes ago, and I thought it was too late. But you’re right, I was out having a good time. It’s always tons o’ fun at a crime scene.”

  “Oh. Anything interesting?”

  “Not particularly. A bad one. Hooker murder in an alley behind a crack house. An empty crack house, now. Since last night, when it happened.”

  “How old?”

  “Maybe seventeen. She was a runaway from Regina. A Native girl. Known to the guys at Vice.”

  “I hate that.”

  “They had tried to get her to go home,” he said. “They got her in at Covenant House, but she didn’t stick.”

  “So she ends up dead.”

  “She ends up dead. And we’ll solve it the way we usually do. It’s just a matter of time before one of the dealers gets picked up for something else and cuts a deal by caving in on one of his buddies.”

  “Her poor parents.”

  “Poor all of us.”

  “Lousy for you, too,” I said.

  “I’m just tired of seeing all these lives wasted.”

  “I wish I was there to cheer you up.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “But hearing your voice helps. Thanks for calling.”

  “I wish you were here, too,” I said.

  We listened to the silence for a while.

  “So, what are you up to?” he asked.

  “Promise not to get mad?”

  “You’re messed up in that murder, aren’t you?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “A bit,” I said.

  “Yeah, I saw in the paper that they had arrested that kid,” he said. “I figured you’d get your nose in it somehow. Then T.C., asked me why you hadn’t been writing, and, with the keen detective’s mind for which I am so famous, I put two and two together.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “With you, there’s no use,” he laughed. “If I reacted every time you did something stupid like this, I’d be in a fury half my life. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “No, you’re too tired.”

  “I’m wide awake. Just give me a minute to get a pen and paper. I’ll take some notes.”

  “Thanks.”

  I listened to the sounds down the line; Elwy meowing indignantly at being moved, Andy answering him, then the echo of Andy crashing around in the next room.

  “Be right with you,” he shouted hollowly. “Don’t hang up.”

  Then I heard the tinkle of ice cubes and he was back on the line.

  “Got myself a Scotch while I was at it,” he said. “Now I’m all set. I’m on the couch, Elwy’s back on my lap, and you have my almost undivided attention.”

  I fought back a wave of longing to be with him, picked up my notes, and moved the phone to the bed.

  “Well, I’m swimming in motives, here,” I began. “There are a whole lot of people who had a reason to hate her. Tell me something. After all the years you’ve investigated murders, can you get inside the heads of the suspects?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I can understand why some of these guys could hate Lucy, and wish she wasn’t around to bug them, but I am not capable of imagining how they take the next step. Deciding to kill her, taking the gun, going out to the beach and shooting her, then calmly going on his way.”

  “That’s because you are a basically non-violent person,” Andy said. “Partly because you are a woman, partly because you are a genuinely nice human being.”

  “Well, thanks very much,” I said.

  “No, really. You don’t hate. You don’t bear grudges. You don’t see the world as a frightening place where people are out to get you. You just sail along, bless your heart, believing that everyone is basically good and wishing that life was fairer than it is.”

  “You make me sound like Pollyanna,” I grumbled. “Like a simp. I think there are bad people. I think some of the people I’ve encountered in this case are scum-sucking creeps who ought to be put away.”

  “Aha,” he said. “There you have it. Put away, not blown away. Right? See what I mean?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “That’s why you are having trouble.”

  “But you don’t think that way either,” I said.

  “Not personally, no. But I do professionally. I have talked to enough of the other kind of people to understand how they think. To them, the world is full of scores to settle or scores to make. If someone is in their way, they simply remove them and don’t think anything of it. I’m talking about the real psychopaths here. Not the domestic killings, say, where the killer calls 911 in tears or turns himself in the next day.”

  “So I should look at the case and imagine that I was someone who put no value on human life. Then I could take the next step.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Because if I don’t, all of this stuff just seems far-fetched.”

  “There are lots of reasons people kill. For money and sex are two biggies. Another is in response to some sort of threat, to eliminate a perc
eived enemy and save one’s own life.”

  “Self-defence, you mean.”

  “Not literally. I’m not talking about cases in which someone is holding a knife to another one’s throat.”

  “You mean if I think someone is threatening my job or good name or prosperity,” I said.

  “Or freedom. A drug dealer suspects his buddy of being a snitch, and it’s goodbye buddy. In that kind of situation, some guys run to escape the threat. Other ones stay and eliminate it.”

  “Gotcha. What else?”

  “Revenge is another obvious one. The murderer who blows away someone who has done him wrong in some way. This ties in with the third, most psychopathic one, in which the murderer becomes the executioner. This is where we get into the real creeps. They decide that the person deserves punishment, and just do it. The guy who kills prostitutes, for example, because they are immoral. Or blacks because he doesn’t like blacks.”

  “Well, I have to tell you, we have both types of possibilities here,” I said. “Let me call you back in five minutes.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t want to run up long-distance charges while I pee,” I said.

  “I’ll be here,” he chuckled.

  Chapter 27

  Five minutes later, exactly, I was back on the phone, at my desk with a fresh cup of tea, a clean ashtray, and a blank page turned in my notebook. I’d turned my computer back on.

  “Okay,” I said, when he answered. “I’m ready to go.”

  “Hit me,” he said. I could hear the yawn in his voice.

  “Darling, you don’t have to do this if you’re tired,” I said.

  “No, no. I like hearing you play detective,” he said, sounding amused. “Besides, if I have some input, you are less likely to do something really stupid and get into trouble you can’t handle.”

  “Well, while I was in the john I thought about what you told me, and it seems that I’ve got some suspects here that fit into your categories, some of them into both.”

  “All right.”

  “First, and most popular in my books, is your friend Detective Sergeant Troy Barwell.”