Reckless Homicide

by Melissa Yi

She wants to and she doesn’t want to, but her fingers lightly brush the numbers, and maybe I see tears in her eyes, so I tell her, okay, you don’t have to feel bad.

  My mother was so beautiful that when the Germans invaded Poland, one of the officers took her as his mistress. You might think he’d want one of the Aryan girls, like Maria Apfel, but no, he chose my mother, and her hair was as black as coal, with pale skin like the moon. The paper boy used to call her Snow White before Hans showed up.

  Hans bought my mother real diamond earrings. He kept us out of the camps for a long time, and the earrings protected us a little longer.

  Look at me. I survived, didn’t I? I married a good man, my Mordechai. He loves me so much, he not only gave me this two-carat ring, he bought me these one-carat earrings. Yes, and my ruby and diamond necklace, too, you noticed.

  We did well, me and my Mordechai. But we’re generous with our money. Not only to the hospital, but lots of other charities too. Kinder un gelt iz a sheyneh velt.

  So, nu? You have my test results?

  3.

  "Hope? Hey, you look horrible," said Tucker, staring me up and down, which was kind of hard to do, since I was hunched in front of the computer in the corner of the residents’ room.

  "Thanks," I snapped, wrapping my white coat around me. I felt cold, but if anything, the residents’ room was usually too hot. As per usual, the place smelled like rotten fish and old fries, and the medical student had left the TV on, blaring MuchMusic.

  Tucker dropped his hand on my shoulder. He smelled like lemon cologne today, which was a nice change from the fish, and the slight wiggle in his fingers was a welcome distraction until I belatedly realized that he was also checking out what I’d left displayed on the computer monitor. "Is that what’s bothering you? This Jewish couple with a suicide pact?"

  I shivered. "I knew them. I was the one who told her she had metastatic cancer. She told me everything was fine, that she and her Mordechai had donated tons of money to the Jewish Hospital so that they’d be the best in the world. She even taught me a little Yiddish. Zay gezunt."

  "Be healthy," Tucker translated.

  I didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Tucker’s not Jewish, but languages are his thang. I nodded at him. "But while she was telling me this, she must have had this exit plan all along. I mean, they had pills stockpiled for years, with all the bottles neatly lined up in the car, and they’d sealed up the car windows and doors from the inside. They must have been so scared."

  Tucker held open his arms, and I hesitated before I leaned into his embrace. He’s such a joker, I’m never sure what to expect, but this time, he rocked me back and forth while Taylor Swift sang "Trouble" in the background. After a few minutes, he murmured into my hair, "I guess this is the wrong time to tell you that I got you a birthday present."

  I sat up straighter. "You’re right, it’s a terrible time."

  "So I’ll give it to you tomorrow."

  "Hang on." My eyes zoomed in on the bulge in his navy jacket. "You can’t leave me in suspense like that."

  "But isn’t that your schtick, detective doctor?"

  I tried not to mind that the Yiddish reminded me of Mordechai and Esther Dorn. "I like to solve mysteries, not have them dangled over my head."

  Tucker’s white teeth flashed in a smile, and I realized that he’d successfully distracted me. He said, "I’ll give you a hint. It’s not an iPhone."

  It really bugged him that Ryan had bought me one, but I couldn’t help that. I said, "Good. I already have one."

  He pulled a gift-wrapped package out of his pocket. "It’s better."

  He’d wrapped it in Christmas paper in November. What a nut. Usually, I like to save the wrapping, but for once, I shredded the cheap Santa Clauses spackled on green paper and pulled out a USB stick and postcard picture of a black background, a shot of Earth, and some crude multicoloured blocks. On the back of the postcards, he’d scrawled the words, "Diamonds! Happy birthday, Tucker."

  "It’s a video game," he explained to my blank face. "For a Mac. From 1992. Don’t you remember it? I got you a copy on this USB stick."

  "Um. Thanks." I was more confused than anything else. He got me an ancient video game for my birthday?

  "I thought it was funny because of the Hope Diamond. Get it?"

  "Sure," I said, even though I flinched. I’d never thought much about the Hope Diamond before, despite the association with my name. All I knew was that it was cursed.

  "And I got you one little thing. Une petite chose de rien." He pulled a small, violet velvet jewelry box out of his pocket.

  My heart thudded. Tucker knew that I hadn’t made a decision between him and Ryan. He couldn’t possibly be handing me a ring. He grinned at me, though, and he seemed so carefree, I accepted the case and opened it.

  It contained a hair pin studded in diamonds. Even to my uneducated eye, the square pin at the top looked vintage. Maybe even like something from World War II. I know that Mrs. Dorn had said that her mother had received diamond earrings, not a hair pin, but somehow, I imagined a little girl holding this hair pin and using it to "protect herself a little longer."

  Tucker’s brow pleated, and he reached for me one more time. "Don’t worry, I picked it up at a pawn shop. It’s probably not even real. Are you okay, Hope? You look like you’re going to be sick."

  Originally published in Jewish Noir

  The War Of The Janitors

  When Mrs. Matheson's grade nine class flushed a box of tampons down the girls' toilets, Gordon Pinchuk sent me right in to take care of it.

  "It's a girl's problem, sweetheart," he said, smacking his gum and managing to grin around it. "They won't want a male sanitation engineer around. Them's the breaks."

  That was funny on two counts. First off, he called himself a sanitation engineer. One of my sons is studying to be a real engineer. Gordon's about as close to my son as a pigpen is to the Parliament buildings.

  The second funny thing was that when I dredged up those tampons, a sopping cotton batten explosion clogging up the pipe, I kept a wedge of it in my overalls and squeezed the water into Gordon's coffee when he wasn't looking. I enjoyed watching him drink every drop. He gave a big burp after. "Good coffee. Thanks, Birdie."

  I had to hide my face. I pretended to wipe off the counter with the side of my hand. "My pleasure," I muttered.

  Too bad he came to work the next day, as healthy and annoying as ever.

  "You just gotta understand him, Birdie," said Jake Henderson, one of our new young boy janitors at West Vincent High School. "He's an okay guy."

  "Really," I said, and eyeballed Colin McCallahan, the other young boy. I happened to know that he and Gordon were cousins by marriage, and the McCallahans and Pinchuks have never been close, mostly because the McCallahans would rather chew off their own toes than admit they knew the Pinchuks, let alone worked for them.

  Colin ducked his head. He had shaggy brown hair. If he'd been my kid, I would've made him cut it.

  "Yeah, really," said Jake. "Like, he gave me a boost the other day after I left my lights on. He didn't have to do that."

  "What a saint," I said. "It was probably the only work he did all day."

  "Aw, Birdie." Jake shook his head. He had a crew cut. Showed off his shining, blissfully ignorant face. I see a lot of faces like that in church. "You're too hard on him. You just don’t understand guys."

  "Listen. You like doing all the work while he sits around, drinking coffee and listening to the radio?" He also poked into other people's business, but I left that part out.

  "Well, he's the chief, ain't he? That's what the boss always does."

  I don't know if Jake was really that dumb, or if he just didn't want to rock the boat. That was okay. I had Ben Quincy, the vice-principal, on my side. Ben and I go way back. We went to school together. London, Ontario isn't as big a town as it pretends to be, and we've been friends practically since my little brother brought him home to play Hot Wheels. Only nowadays, it's Ben and m
e doing the playing, and it's not with toy cars.

  That night, I cooked a nice roast and noodles for Ben and we washed it down with ice-cold beer. Over coffee I told him about what the young'uns had said.

  "Ignorant," said Ben peacefully. "Just plain ignorant."

  "Still leaves us with Gordon. We can never vote him out. He's always got someone in his pocket. Jake's brainwashed and Colin owes him for the job."

  "Not to mention Bernice."

  We sat quiet for a minute, thinking about Bernice Pinchuk, Gordon's wife and Principal Williams' prissy secretary for the past century. She never moves aside when I come in to take her garbage and recycling. She makes me ask while she sits there in her suit and high heels, smelling like Jean Naté perfume. I've even seen her make Principal Williams wait. She claims she's busy.

  In a way, it's true. She's very busy. Not doing her job, though. Sneaking around. All the kids' files are in the principal's office with their school pictures, report cards, yadda yadda. The teachers' personnel files are in there, too, locked up tight in the principal's file cabinet under the flag, but that's never stopped her. Bernice is like a rat. She knows where all the poison is.

  We were stuck under Gordon and Bernice's thumbs until the second coming, or retirement, and sometimes, it seemed like the son of the Lord would get here faster than sweet old age 65.

  "I wonder why they married each other," said Ben.

  "Because they're both monsters." I climbed on his lap to end the discussion.

  He shifted his weight and kissed my hair, then rested his cheek against mine and kept talking. "I think it's because they both like ferreting out secrets and manipulating other people. You said Gordon's always opening up teachers' desks and trying to break into kids' lockers, right?"

  I nodded, tucking my head under his arm. He smelled like Old Spice and himself. Sometimes I was ashamed how much I wanted him. I tried to keep my mind on the conversation. "Yeah, that's what he does instead of working. I saw him jimmying a kid's lock once and he said he was helping the principal because the kid was a drug dealer."

  Ben's shoulders shook with laughter. "They probably break into people's houses for fun."

  "Or computers." I kissed the side of Ben's jaw. Ben got my boys interested in computers way back when.

  "Hey, that gives me an idea. We've been talking about Gordon. Maybe we should talk about Bernice."

  "I've got an idea, too," I said, and he finally grinned and gave me the kiss I'd been waiting for.

  ***

  The next morning, I walked by first period English. I could hear Gordon Pinchuk bellowing from a block away. "You God-damned kids! Get off the desk! Yeah, you, smartass. Right now. If you're not sitting in your chairs when the teacher gets in, you'll be sorry." Bang! He cracked the teacher's pointer against the wall.

  I peeked in and saw Gordon, six-two and built like a linebacker, prowling back and forth across the front of the room, slamming the pointer against his palm.

  As usual, he wore a white cotton shirt, Lee jeans, and those almighty cowboy boots. White cotton. As a janitor, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  A big kid, not as tall as Gordon but headed that way, stood beside the teacher's desk. And judging from his shirt, he really was a football player: a young one, not an ex-jock.

  This was almost too good to miss, but I had a mission—Bernice. More women's work, except this time, I was volunteering.

  The kid said, "You don't have to yell."

  Gordon lowered his voice, but he looked like steam was coming out of his ears. "Sit down."

  The kid said, "You're not the teacher."

  "Until the teacher comes, I am the authority here. Now sit down and shut up!"

  A very skinny, almost anorexic, girl whispered, "Danny..."

  The big kid didn't move. You might not think a young teenager could be too scary, but kids are giants these days. It's all the hormones in the milk. This one looked big enough and stubborn enough to cause trouble.

  I almost laughed. Gordon glanced over his shoulder, forcing me to hoof it to the principal's office in time for Bernice's coffee break, pushing my cleaning cart ahead of me for cover. Ben was planning something with her computer. He wouldn't tell me what, just that it would be easier with her password.

  Oh, no. I sucked in my breath as I neared the office. The basilisk was still in her lair. Instead of saying hi, Bernice pinched her nose and stared at the computer screen like it was the magic mirror from Harry Potter. But I knew she'd seen me.

  I checked my watch again. Why on earth had she skipped her break today, of all days? Now I had to clean while she pretended not to see me. I shuffled over to the photocopier and banged the bin.

  "Quiet, please," said Bernice, as if I was a kindergarten kid instead of a 56-year-old woman.

  "Sorry," I muttered, dumping the papers in my recycling bin and banging again. For one wild second, I thought I'd snoop over her shoulder and check if her password was written on a Post-it stuck to her monitor, the way Ben thought it was.

  Bernice adjusted the gold chain attached to her glasses and eyed me over the heavy black frames. "Birdie. Must you do this now? It's very disruptive to the work environment."

  I wiped my forehead. "Sorry." I was sweating already.

  "I realize you aren't familiar with offices, but we require peace and quiet."

  Her password wouldn't be stuck there anyway. Ben didn't know sneaky women. They expect everyone else to be even sneakier.

  "It's much more convenient for you to work after hours."

  I unlocked my tongue. "Okay."

  She sighed and kicked the garbage can under her desk. "But, since you're here..."

  While I bent over, she tapped her scarlet nails and clicked her tongue. I glanced at her computer screen. No Post-Its. Her screen saver read, "MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!"

  It was like she was reading my mind. I swallowed hard.

  Bernice said, "Excuse me. I haven't got all day."

  The metal rim of her garbage can still hung in my fingers. I emptied the can. Ben had said he could work around her password. Like I said, he started my boys on computers, so he should know what he was doing. Still, my heart hammered hard enough to bruise a few ribs too.

  "Are you on drugs?" Bernice was saying.

  I forced a laugh. "Nah, just wool-gathering. Takes your mind off."

  Her penciled eyebrows lifted. "Ohhh, poor Birdie. Is something wrong?" She got out of her chair to croon at me. Her eyes stayed unblinking behind those cat-eye glasses. "I thought maybe you were looking down. Is it your health? Your boys? Or dear Ben?"

  I tried not to react even as my guts squeezed into my throat. How had she figured out me and Ben? We tried to be so quiet about it, even staying out of the same room at school.

  She chuckled. "I thought so." She shook her index finger at me as she whispered at me. "Naughty, naughty Birdie! Doing the horizontal hooplah with Ben Quincy. I bet his wife would be very sorry to hear about that. And how could the children respect their vice-principal…."

  "That's enough," I said. I was shaking so hard, my cart was trembling along with me. "What do you want from me?"

  "Oh, Birdie. It's not what you can do for me, it's what you can do for our school. Morale is so low, you know. I think you should start with staying late to clean any locker graffiti. It's getting bad on the second floor."

  "That's Jake's job," I said automatically.

  "Ohhh, is it? I just think it would be such a nice thing for you to do. To help the school out and all."

  Right. To interfere with my meetings with Ben. To cement the relationship between Gordon and his latest crony. She was too savvy to ask for money. Yet.

  I thought of my boys' tuition. Even with bursaries and one scholarship, we needed the money badly. Still, I tried. "If I stay late, I qualify for overtime. It's part of our contract."

  Her eyes narrowed. "How clever of you, Birdie. I'll have to see if I can dig up this contract of yours."

  Too l
ate I remembered her pencil-pushing power. "No, never mind." My cell phone vibrated against my waist. I hoped Ben had something because I sure didn't. "I'm happy to do it."

  "That's so generous of you, Birdie. A real treat for school spirit. Especially if you do it on the house?" She smirked.

  "Of course." A pox on both your houses. Someone famous said that. It sounded about right.

  ***

  Ben called me again after work. "Where are you?"

  "Cleaning. Can't talk." I scrubbed a yellow locker. Yellow showed everything. You could scrawl messages with a ballpoint pen, for Pete's sake. Why on earth didn't they paint them something dark? Sure, the kids would still scrape the paint off to make their mark, but it would take them a hell of a lot longer.

  "Okay." He exhaled, waiting for me to explain, but I didn't. For all I knew, Bernice had bugged the halls on top of monitoring the security cameras. She'd fire me for talking instead of working. Ben said, "Meet you after? I got something for you."

  For a second, I smiled, but he was so serious, I realized he meant the Pinchuks. "On her?"

  "On him."

  Right now, I really wanted Bernice's blood, but I'd take Gordon's any day.

  And by the time Ben came over to tell me about it, it was definitely bloody. One of the girls, Christy Sommers, had come to Ben complaining that Gordon had sexually assaulted her.

  "Does she have any proof?" I asked, glancing over my shoulder. Even in my own house, Bernice made me jumpy.

  Ben made a face and tucked a stray lock of my hair behind my ear. "I don't know that she can prove he touched her butt when she came back looking for her math book, but she's willing to testify. That should be good enough for a suspension, at least."

  For a second, I let myself dream. Who'd head up the custodial staff while Gordon picked his teeth at home? Well, who had the most experience? Who was the most dedicated? It sure wasn't the two boys who hadn't met Mr. Clean until I personally introduced them at West Vincent.

  Then I remembered Bernice's eyes glittering. "You sure about this?"

  "Positive. I talked to Christy about making a formal complaint and pressing charges and she said she'd start tomorrow. She's waiting for her dad to get back from a business trip."