by Marc Strange
Orwell shook his head and stifled a laugh. “So she’s on record of having confessed to two different murders, only she got the methods wrong?”
“Or backwards.”
“Got anything else?”
“Oh yeah. Turns out we’ve got a file on this woman four inches thick. From September 13, 1987, to October 27, 1995, she called 9-1-1 fifty-four times. Prowlers, assaults, stalkers, rapists following her, assassination attempts. Fifty-four.”
“How many responses?”
“Actual investigations? Maybe seven. Patrol logs, maybe another fifteen. She wasn’t ignored, at least not at first, but after a couple of years she was kind of established, a crank, not to be taken too seriously, paranoid delusion, persecution complex, chronic confessor, that kind of evaluation.”
“Sounds like she was going through a bad patch,” said Orwell. “She seems to be functioning all right in Dockerty. Opened a dance school, teaches ballet to the kids, ballroom dancing for the grownups. Never any trouble as far as I know.”
Delisle looked away from the river and the bridge and wherever his mind had travelled. “She says she did something in her homeland that will never be forgiven, they’re going to send assassins after her to make her pay.”
“The body in the park, guy was an assassin?”
“Not hardly. Stockbroker. Riverdale. Wife and kid. He had coke in his system. Some white collar putz taking a walk on the wild side, got himself into a dangerous situation.”
“So what are you up here for?”
“Well, another guy turned up dead. Last week. On the Queensway. In a motel room.”
“She didn’t confess to that one, did she?”
“Far as I know, she was up here. But here’s the thing, this guy was Russian, he was a defector, he was a scenic designer for a ballet company and he was carrying her picture in his wallet.”
She had recognized him immediately as he drove by — not the sort of man you forget, so tall, that preposterous red hair, and there he was again, on the sidewalk across the street. He was even walking in rhythm with the music, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schéhérazade. The children in the room behind her were fighting the tempo, but the tall man below was floating along in perfect time. She wondered if he could hear it. The windows were closed, no traffic noise. Maybe it was a sign. A good sign. A sign that would cancel out a dead crow. It was possible, was it not? Of all the people looking for her, he was the one she always hoped would find her again. From that first time, when he came to the apartment on Quebec Avenue with that huge black man, that first look, standing in the hall, offering his badge toward her like a sandwich. Viktor had been there, getting drunk on her vodka, smoking her cigarettes, badgering her, hiding in the corner. Unlike Viktor, she had been happy to see the policemen, welcomed them into the apartment, offered them drinks. She didn’t like the big black man. He was too friendly, and he crowded her with his big smile and sexy voice, acting like her uncle, the one who always stood too close. But the red-haired man, she liked him, standing by the door, not leaning, but giving the impression that he was lounging, so relaxed. He had an easy smile. He had a nice voice. She wanted to get his attention.
“Yes, the man in the park. I know who you mean,” she said. “I killed him.”
They hadn’t believed her, they took her to the police station for questioning and that was all she really wanted, to get away from Viktor who was drunk and getting crazier every day, to ride in a car with the red-haired man, to have him pay attention to her for a while. And he drove her home as well, insisted even. She turned down a ride with the big black man, but she went home with the red-haired one. When she invited him inside, he demurred, but so charmingly, with a smile almost rueful, a smile that suggested another time, another place, ships that pass in the night, if only we’d met last week, and never that she was too old for him. He was a charmer. And courtly. A private part of her, the tiny part that wished for things, had prayed he would return some day.
“Mademoiselle?”
It was the tall girl, the graceful one, perhaps a model some day. But not a dancer. “Class is over now. I am tired today,” Anya said. “I will not charge your parents for this class. Go home.”
She heard them changing, leaving, still she watched the street, hoping for another glimpse of him. And there he was, coming out of the National Bank, talking to a pretty girl who kept fluffing her hair. Tsk. Such a flirt. Him, too. She watched him fold his cash and slip it into a pocket. He had such beautiful hands.
Her own hands were not attractive. Short fingers, the palms square and knuckles prominent. Her thumbs especially were distasteful to her, a heavy callus where she habitually bit her knuckle instead of chewing her nails. And to hurt herself. She knew how use her wrists to make her hands appear beautiful from a distance, to an audience, but offstage she held her cigarette inside a cupped palm like a convict in an exercise yard.
Maybe he will visit me tonight. That would be nice. I’ll wait for him. And if he is to be my assassin, I will welcome him.
Considering that she refused to tell him anything relative to her patient, Dr. Lorna Ruth gave Detective Paul Delisle more time than she’d expected to. She enjoyed looking at him. Kind of gorgeous, she thought, in a bony sort of way. He reminded her a little of someone she knew years ago, tall, loose-limbed, except her lover back then had been dark-haired. She watched this man move his chair a foot closer to her desk and then angle it toward the window, not confrontational, giving her some of his nice profile, shaggy red hair going a bit grey at the temples, wide mouth, deep creases when he smiled, which he did easily and often. She watched the way he made himself comfortable, stretched out his legs and entwined his long fingers. He didn’t fidget.
Still, she couldn’t tell him anything. “You know that, Detective.”
“That’s okay, I don’t want to be pushy anyway, it’s just one of those things I have to check out, one of many, you know how it is, if you’ve dealt with cops before, you know how we do things.” He didn’t seem to be seducing her. Had he been guileless she would have been suspicious — she was alert to guileless behaviour and didn’t believe in it. “I would like to know if you’ve had any other police interest in her. Asking questions. Surely that wouldn’t be unethical.”
“You’re the first.”
“When she was living in Toronto, at one point a judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation. Is this part of that?”
“She wasn’t ordered to see me, and I’m not preparing a psychiatric evaluation for the police. I was recommended as someone she might feel comfortable talking to.”
“Who recommended you?”
“Tsk. I can’t tell you that.”
He smiled. Such a charming smile. “Does she? Feel comfortable?”
“I think so. She is candid, helpful.”
“Maybe I could tell you the version I know, and you could tell me if it’s way off the mark from the one you know. She confessed to a couple of murders in the city a few years back. It was determined that she was a compulsive confessor. There was no evidence that she had been involved.”
“And now you’re having second thoughts?”
“In a way. It’s probably the same for psychiatrists. Cops don’t believe a story just because it sounds convincing. We take it for granted that everybody lies. We listen as carefully as we can, try to extract the facts when we can, make sure we get the dates down, and times, and addresses, and names, the things we can verify on our own. All the rest is stories. Versions of stories. Usually self-serving versions of stories. So we hear them out, check everything we can check and reserve judgement.”
They considered each other across the desk for a moment.
“You married?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Free for dinner?”
“Yes,” she said.
And so she gave him more of her time than he had ex
pected her to.
Anya smoked her first cigarette in four hours, standing in the doorway of the Gusse Building waiting for her taxi, her regular cab driver, the same man every night. His name was Ed. He let her smoke in his car. The street lights were on, there was cowboy music coming from the Irish House around the corner, a purple pickup cruised by, loud hip hop, heavy bass vibrations rattled the window of the florist shop next door. Across the street, five young people, two boys, three girls, were laughing and shoving each other. Anya watched from the shadows, watched the other shadowed doorways, the lane entrances, the parked cars, the roofline above the shops, the second-storey windows. She watched for flickering movement, for things out of place. When her cab pulled up, she dropped her cigarette to the pavement and squashed it as she stepped toward the curb, looking both ways before opening the passenger door. There was no sign of the red-haired man.
“Go the wrong way for a while,” she said.
“You got it.”
She looked out the back window.
“I heard about this technique they have now where they tail you from the front.” Ed watched her watching him in his rear-view mirror.
“I know of that,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact. “One in front, one far behind. Also from parallel streets they can tail you. But that requires a bigger team.”
“Jeeze, how many spies are after you this month?”
“Unless they already know where I live, in which case it does not matter.”
Ed thought she had great legs. Sometimes after class when she was wearing tights under her trenchcoat and she swung on the back seat to look out the rear window, once or twice the coat had opened to reveal her long flanks. She wasn’t tall, but her legs seemed very long.
“I’ll be taking next week off,” Ed said. “I won’t be driving.”
“Who will take over your shift?”
“Couple of new guys; I’m not sure.”
She would have to find some other way home. Ed the cab driver thinks it is a game. He likes playing spies and assassins with her, taking a different route each time while she watches for tails. She has not told him everything.
Look at her apartment. She does not live there, she perches there, on the edge of the bed, the chair, the table. Her suitcase is small and never completely emptied, always half-packed with the necessities for flight, papers and money and new clothes, a coat never worn, never photographed, a grey-brown wig, ugly and credible. Her face without makeup can be old if she wants it that way, the bones are sharp and fine, the eyes deep set. If she has to run again, she has routes picked, schedules and timetables memorized, she knows all the back doors in and out of her neighbourhood. She took this place because of the windows; the front overlooks the street, the bathroom window is two metres from the roof of the next building. An easy leap. Even with a suitcase and an unfamiliar coat. She can still fly. Ask her students, awe and reverence in their adoring child faces as she demonstrates. She can fly still. She has been flying all her life.
Tea in a glass by the window in the dark. Watching the street. Tea with a spoonful of jam, like her grandfather’s tea. Her grandfather Bula, who taught her to watch. Sitting by the window as she has done so many nights. Waiting. Always waiting. Like the others who didn’t watch closely enough. Waiting by windows as she waits most nights sipping sweet black tea and smoking Canadian tobacco. She loves Players cigarettes. And the jam in her tea is not Polish plum jam. She has been corrupted, she knows. Sometimes she uses sugar cubes. Sometimes she eats white bread. She deserves a few small comforts. While she waits.
Two
Tuesday, March 15
Detective Stacy Crean (“rhymes with brain,” she informed people who got it wrong) had been working solo or as part of a task force for over a year. She revelled in it; the utility investigator, filling in when people got sick or stuck in court for days on end, a little bit of undercover work (at least until her face got plastered all over the Register the previous fall and pretty much wrecked that angle for her), working cases at her own pace, driving her own car. She was going to be very sorry when it came to an end, perhaps as early as the end of the week. Billy Meyer was retiring. That meant his longtime partner, Randy Vogt, would be looking for a new sidekick. It was inevitable. Lieutenant Emmett Paynter, Chief of Detectives, would call her into his office to make it official: an arranged marriage, no way out, this is your new partner, deal with it, make it work.
She didn’t hate Randy Vogt, she just didn’t like him very much. He had a loud voice that he exercised more than necessary, he put stuff on his spiky black hair — mousse or gel, she didn’t know — plus he wore Brut, her least favourite men’s scent, and then there were the plaid jackets and the flowered ties. The man was hard on her ears, nose and eyes. When Billy Meyer had his hernia operation, she’d been stuck in a car with Randy for six weeks. It wasn’t an ideal pairing. He’d insisted on driving, sloppily she thought, and always took the lead even when she would have been the smarter choice.
Might as well enjoy your last few days of independence, she told herself. It was a fine, fresh March morning, the sun was shining, not too cold, and she was on her way to Dockerty High to talk to an assembly about how much marijuana was being consumed by certain elements of the student body and why that wasn’t such a good thing. She didn’t expect it would make much difference; the kids who were already smoking pot would continue to do so. Maybe she could convince one or two not to start in the first place. In the grand scheme of self-medication, pot didn’t rank as high on the “dangerous drugs” scale as crack and crystal meth and the weird chemicals that kept cropping up. Pot was a fact of life, had been since the sixties pretty much, she’d certainly indulged a time or two, but things are always simpler before people figure out how to make tonnes of money from them. Pot was very big business these days. Some of the people involved in grow-ops were dangerous.
She was half a block from the high school when her cellphone buzzed. Her morning was being rescheduled.
“Stacy?”
“What’s up?”
“Sunset Motel. Owner thinks one of the guests might be dead.”
“Uniforms?”
“Dutch is there. He says he can’t get in. Door’s blocked or something.”
“On it,” she said. “Tell him to sit tight. And call the school. Tell them I can’t make it.” She did a smart U-turn and headed for the highway. She never liked giving lectures, anyway.
The Sunset Motel faced east and never saw a sunset, while half a klick further south on Highway 35, the windows of the Sunrise Motel faced due west. Neither operation was particularly concerned by the incongruity, nor, to anyone’s knowledge, had the owners considered swapping monikers. A second patrol car was pulling into the parking lot as Stacy arrived. A uniformed officer climbed out and headed for unit fourteen. Dutch Scheider was standing by the door. Stacy recognized the new arrival, Drummond, “Drum”: barrel chest, always sticking it out. The motel manager came scuttling across the lot in her direction. “You can’t park there,” she said. “People need to get in and out.”
Stacy flashed her badge. “Who rented the room?”
“Mr. Smith,” she said. “Probably not his real name.”
“You think?”
“He paid cash.”
“And you haven’t seen him this morning?”
“Not since he checked in yesterday.”
“Was he alone?”
“Far as I know.”
“Okay, just wait in the office please. We’ll see what’s what.”
“The girl can’t get in to clean, I’ve got people coming, I don’t want police all over the place all day.”
“Just wait over there please, ma’am. Let us do our jobs.”
“If there’s a body, I don’t want a big mess.”
“That will depend on what’s in the room, won’t it?”
Dutch gave Stacy a small salute as she approached. The other uniform was leaning on the door, trying to force it. “You call for backup, Dutch?” she asked.
“Just passing by, Detective,” said the newcomer. Stuck out his chest. Yeah, that was him.
“Drummond, right? Listen, don’t shove on the door any more. If that’s a body in there, we don’t want to smear it across the rug. Dutch, any other way in?”
“There’s a bathroom window ’round back. It’s kind of high up. And a tight squeeze.”
She pulled on a pair of gloves. “Show me.”
There was a muddy path flanked by a bank of dirty snow along the back of the cabin. The bathroom window was high and narrow, partly open. “Footprints under the window,” Stacy said. “Yours?”
“I stayed back here.”
“Good. Pay attention to where my feet go.” She skirted the prints and edged close to the wall. “Those marks? Ladder maybe? Give me a boost.”
Dutch made a stirrup of his hands and hoisted her high enough to grab the sill. She pulled herself up with arm strength and hung for a moment checking the window frame. “Some scratches under the window.” She slid it all the way open and pulled herself through. She was standing in the shower stall. “Mr. Smith? Dockerty Police.” There was no response. “Go around the front,” she called out. “I’ll open the big window.”
“Right,” she heard Dutch say.
She slipped off her wet boots, left them in the shower stall and checked the bathroom. The toilet seat was up. There was a towel on the floor.
The bedroom was dark, the drapes were drawn. The body of a man, naked except for boxer shorts and one red sock, was crumpled on the rug, his head and shoulders wedged against the bottom of the door. There was a lot of blood. Stacy crouched, placed two fingers against his throat. No pulse, the skin cold. She pulled back the drapes.