In one way or another, they had all killed Mario.
They would all pay, he thought.
All.
22
At four-thirty, Elaine Helwig and Donald Barbour were heading back to Nishiyama in his company Oldsmobile, weary but satisfied from a lengthy day at Safeco Insurance in Mississauga, where they had been demonstrating a new line of both software and hardware. He eased to a red light on the Lakeshore.
She glanced at him. “Think they’ll buy?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think so. Eventually.” He ran his left hand across the five o’clock shadow on his cheek as he pondered it. “This is a strange business, this. With companies like that, the primary thing to accomplish is to convince them that all their competition has already opted for new equipment. Got to make them believe that they’ll lose an edge if they fail to keep up.” He shrugged. “Paranoia being what it is in this world, it’s never as hard as it should be. People convince themselves that they’re falling behind.”
Elaine paused before commenting. “Well, aren’t they?”
He turned to look at her, found himself smiling at the smile she was offering him, found himself glad, as always, that she was with him.
The light turned green.
“You know,” he said, “that they’ll buy—if they buy at all—because of the hots that supervisor, Norton, had for you.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Who’s being silly? A blind man could see it. He gave off palpable waves of desire. Those closest to him—and you—at lunch were cascaded in a fine mist of seething, corporate lust.”
She giggled. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Yeah. Sure. Right. Ridiculous.”
“It was my sheer professionalism.” She slid him a mocking glance.
Now it was his turn to shrug, and to continue smiling. “Want me to drop you off at home? Or want to go back to the office? Or...want to go somewhere and have a bite to eat?”
Don Barbour had asked Elaine to have dinner with him on a variety of occasions, and each time had received the same thank-you-but-no-thank-you. He liked her a lot, and she felt the same way toward him—or so he thought. How could anyone ever be certain of these things, especially in the fencing stages? he wondered. She was, in his eyes, a classy, attractive woman. He wasn’t positive what the state of her marriage was, but he had sensed for some time now that it was in that gray range of most marriages he knew: somewhere between acceptable and tense. Much like my own, he thought. One does not, he reflected, arrive at forty-four years of age, with a seventeen-year marriage and two teenagers in tow, without a deep and perceptive understanding of how most of the world’s domestic lives are unfolding. Nor does one arrive at this point, he knew, without some curiosity regarding just who and what else may be out there. It was the rare relationship he had known that managed to encompass a universe for the two participants, a universe that excluded the complexities of other relationships. Donald Barbour did not consider himself a man who chased women. In fact, he did not. But, on occasion, things happened. Things that he did not seek out. Things that were a normal part of everyday life in the business world. And you sometimes met people. People you liked.
People like Elaine Helwig.
So he had graciously, and even admiringly, accepted her refusals to join him for dinner. He wasn’t sure what he wanted from such a get-together. He just felt certain that it would be pleasant. And that had been enough.
“I think I’d like that,” she said. “Let’s get a bite to eat somewhere. I’ll call home and see if I can get Mrs. Chan to stay with Barbie till I get back.”
Don raised one eyebrow in pleasant surprise. “Great. Anyplace in mind?”
“Nope. You pick it.”
“I know a nice spot for some Italian food. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds perfect. Can you stop at a V-booth first chance you get?”
“Sure.”
“The sooner I get Mrs. Chan, the better. We shouldn’t start making plans that aren’t going to happen. She’s a vital part of this culinary departure, I hope you realize.”
“Of course she is. Where would any of us be without Mrs. Chan?”
“Exactly. Where?”
They both chuckled. Elaine felt a tiny rush of adrenaline. Passion and risk, she thought. Where have you been for so long?
And what am I doing?
Seated across the table from Don Barbour, Elaine saw a good-looking man with solid, middle-class WASP features. He was the firmly entrenched stereotype of the successful businessman—in many ways, everything that Mitch was not, nor would ever want to be, she reflected. Ruggedly handsome, his moustache was full and black, in contrast to his hair, which had begun to salt-and-pepper. The eyes were blue, the skin tanned, the crow’s feet at the corners of the piercing eyes indicative of what was for her the proper level of experience and maturity. He was a sexy and desirable man.
She felt like a schoolgirl on a date. She also felt the rush of quiet excitement that accompanied the secret, the forbidden. Mitch worked till midnight. Mrs. Chan was at her place. Don seemed unconcerned about accounting for himself to anyone, and this made Elaine wonder idly about his relationship with his wife. Was working late at the office a regular occurrence?
As if reading her mind, he said, “I phoned home about three. Said I was going to eat at a restaurant, then meet a client.” He paused. “I was, too.” Then he smiled. “And I’m doing it, aren’t I?”
“Am I a client?”
“Is this a restaurant?”
“A client can be many things.”
“There are many types of restaurants.”
“A client can be a customer, a personal follower...”
“There are Italian restaurants, German, French...”
“In ancient Rome, a client was a poor or humble person who depended on a noble or wealthy man for assistance.”
“Japanese, Chinese...” He trailed away. He glanced at her sharply. “Did you say you were poor and humble?”
“No. Nor did I say you were noble or wealthy. That’s why we get along so well. We listen to one another and care.”
They both smiled.
“So we’re finally having dinner together,” he said.
“That’s right. What can it mean?” she asked coyly.
“It could mean we’re both hungry. That we both deserve a nice meal that someone else cooks for us. Especially you.”
“Why me?”
“Because, I must admit, I wouldn’t be cooking my meal anyway.”
“Do you ever cook?”
“Not often. I’m not home in time. You should know about that. Besides, Ruth is better at it than I am. We’re both happy with our roles. It’s hardly what one could call an imposition. I do what I do, and she does what she does. We both pull our weight. In a lot of ways, she’s got a much better deal.”
“How’s that?”
“She doesn’t have to watch guys like that Norton today make a fool of himself.”
“Hey! Wait a minute! You said he had the hots for me. Since when does that make him a fool?”
“He was too obvious.”
“Ah! You think the drool gave him away.”
He shook his head. “That, and when he accidentally swallowed his pencil when you touched his hand while laughing at his joke about the Japanese camera that went ‘crick.’”
“I didn’t laugh!”
“You smiled too obligingly.”
“You can’t have it both ways. You want him to buy...” She shrugged innocently.
He nodded, beaten.
She watched his blue eyes twinkle, feeling herself drawn down into a vortex of illusion and distraction. Not to have to make dinner was a start. To be out like this, treated like a very special somebody was yet another vital part of it. Escape from Mitch, and whatever it was that was haunting Mitch, was more of it. And some assertion and defiance were mixed in, too. It was everything blending, roiling, coming apart, separating into unid
entifiable fragments that left her curious, daring, and vulnerable. Turning to Don was a natural consequence, she knew. It made sense, in a way that turning to Jan Prudhomme could not at this point. She needed masculine company, masculine approval, masculine understanding of herself—things she was not currently getting from Mitch—things she had not gotten for a long time.
She thought of the missing money. Their money.
“I’d like some wine,” she found herself saying.
He let his eyes roam over her face. He saw a mature, attractive woman, a lovely lady, light-years distanced from the fluffy-headed blonds so many of his business acquaintances took up with, much to his embarrassment. This was a lady a man would want to be seen in public with—not just somebody to take to bed for a diversion. We make an attractive pair, he thought proudly.
“An excellent idea,” he said. “In vino veritas.”
“Is it possible to find truth in a ten-dollar bottle of Chianti?”
“It’s possible to find it in a four-dollar bottle of gin.”
“All of it?”
“Whoever finds all of it?”
“Whoever looks for all of it?”
“Those ancient Romans you were talking about, maybe. Nobody else that I know of. Who wants to know the truth? Most of us are satisfied with pleasure, with the moment. Aren’t you?” He reached across the red-and-white checked tablecloth, careful to avoid the slim, flickering white candlestick that let shadows dance enchantingly about them, and took her soft hand in his.
She looked down at the hand engulfing hers, understanding the gesture fully. The small shadows shifted and jumped on their joined flesh. Before closing her hand with his, she looked up into his eyes. “Have you ever read Plato?”
He frowned, puzzled. “I thought we were delving into Roman history.”
“Let’s diversify. Let’s toss in a Greek here or there.”
He sensed that she had not yet made a decision about their own future from the limpness of her hand in his, so he went along with her tentatively. “Years ago. More years than I care to think about, actually. When I was an undergraduate. We all read The Republic. Had to. Why?”
“Then you’ve read the Parable of the Cave?”
“Have I?”
“If you actually read the assigned book. Did you?”
“Um, let’s see. Mmm, yes, that particular one I did read. It was Aristotle’s Ethics I faked my way through. What did you fake your way through?”
“Most dates when I was a teenager. Anyway, back to the Parable of the Cave...”
“I read every issue of People magazine, from 1977 to 1997. How’s that for educated?”
“Awesome.”
“Ask me about Mick Jagger’s third marriage. I know everything.”
She dropped her eyes.
“I’m sorry. You wanted to tell me something.”
She shrugged. “It seemed to fit.”
“Fit what, Elaine? Tell me. I didn’t mean to be so flip that something important would get lost.”
She looked back up at him. “In the Parable, we’re all in the Cave, staring at shadows flickering on the wall of the Cave, with our backs to the light that’s casting the shadows. We mistake the shadows for what is Real. We never get out of the Cave.”
The slim, pale taper shimmered, its wavering shadow sliding and jumping across the skin of their joined hands and wrists. They both saw it.
“I’m just trying to find out what’s real, what’s true. Can you understand?” It was her last, imploring stand.
The waiter arrived.
His hand tightened on hers. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
It was acceptable, she decided, this conjunction they had arrived at. She knew she had been staring at shadows on the wall for far too long. She had to look in a different direction, follow whatever leads were provided for her, take a chance.
She had to. And she understood this in a way that was impossible to fully articulate.
They ordered wine.
23
When Mitch checked in at the station at noon, Huziak stopped him with a gentle touch on his arm as he passed.
“Captain wants to see you.”
Mitch let about five seconds tick by before answering. “What for?”
Huziak shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Huziak nodded.
Mitch felt Huziak’s eyes burrowing between his shoulder blades as he headed for Karoulis’s office, amid the controlled din and clamor of the shift changeover.
He rapped softly and evenly on the captain’s door.
“Come in!”
Mitch pushed the door open and stepped into the room. “You wanted to see me, Captain?”
He thought he saw a pained shadow cross Karoulis’s face fleetingly, then disappear. “Yes, Mitch. Come in, please.”
Mitch stepped in and closed the door behind him. He remained standing. Karoulis placed his hands on the top of his desk and pushed himself up and out of his seat, sighing, eventually ambling around to the open area of the office where Mitch was standing.
Mitch waited.
Karoulis gazed into his eyes. Mitch stared back, unwaveringly. There was, Mitch sensed, a moment of real contact, just for a second, as they understood and tried to appreciate each other. There was no fencing. It was a standoff: two warriors, veterans, appraising, separating and weighing the disparate elements of respect, admiration, fear, hatred, envy. Men did this with one another, he had always felt, in a way that women did not. It was almost atavistic; tribes could be at stake.
Without taking his eyes from Mitch’s, Karoulis slowly held out his right hand, awaiting Mitch’s clasp. Mitch’s eyes flickered questioningly to the hand, trying to assimilate the gesture. He still couldn’t put it all together.
“Thanks, Mitch.”
Mitch was silent, watching, listening. Karoulis continued to watch and study his face.
“What for, Captain?”
“For volunteering to help with the Fedwick dragnet. I’m trying to see everyone involved, and thank them personally.” His hand was still frozen in midair.
Mitch glanced down at it, then back at the captain’s face. He reached out and clasped the hand, squeezing it firmly.
“The fact that Fedwick didn’t make it doesn’t alter what you and the others did. The fact that we haven’t caught the killer, or that the dragnet did not actually snare him, in no way diminishes your commitment and effort.”
Mitch nodded. “You don’t have to thank me, Captain. I think what you did took a lot of guts. I think it was the right thing to do.” He paused. “I know it was the right thing to do.”
“I appreciate your words, Mitch. They help.”
Their hands parted. Karoulis moved a meter or so laterally out of Mitch’s “body space,” turned, and faced him again, studying him intently.
“What do you think, Mitch? Have we moved into a time when we need new attitudes toward crime, toward how we should be doing our job?” He was probing, delicately, casually. Mitch sensed his own protective barriers tingle to alertness.
“I told you—I think you did the right thing. It was new. Nobody’d ever done it before. Did it work? I don’t know. It didn’t not work. Nothing was lost by it. If anything, it unified us, made us feel as though someone cared.”
“The press didn’t like it.”
Mitch let an unsavory tone slide into his words. “The press didn’t get shot. The press is a bunch of self-appointed, overly theoretical dabblers in rhetoric. They create controversy to sell newspapers. I wouldn’t put too much stock in their opinions, Captain.”
Karoulis was staring at him intently. “Who would you listen to, then, Mitch?”
Mitch stared back at him. “You have to listen to yourself, Captain. You have to go inside yourself, and see what’s there. You have to be willing to take a chance to do what you know is right.”
Karoulis leaned against the front of his desk pensivel
y. Neither man spoke for a moment. “What if you’re wrong? What if you make a mistake?”
“You didn’t make a mistake.”
“The union’s still going to take me to task.”
“Maybe you made a political mistake. That’s not even on the same board as a moral mistake. They’re different animals.”
“Suppose someone on the dragnet had gotten killed, too?”
“They volunteered. I volunteered.”
“Suppose you shot and killed someone and it was an innocent party?”
Mitch’s eyes narrowed. The tension was tangible in the room.
“What are you getting at, Captain?”
“Suppose someone had fucked up? Suppose someone had gotten antsy, maybe spinning off from my own hysteria? Then what?”
“You weren’t hysterical.”
“How can you know when you’re hysterical?”
The two men eyed one another warily.
“If you were hysterical, no one would have followed you, Captain. No one would have followed your suggestion to volunteer. We can think for ourselves.”
Karoulis lit a rare cigarette, breaking his three-day abstinence, inhaling the smoke deeply into his lungs and letting it seep throughout his body before expelling it in a steady stream. He glanced at Mitch, at once both curious and amazed at the man’s composure. “Have you ever killed anyone?” he asked, suddenly.
Mitch stared at him without answering. The smoke coiled in lazy tendrils toward a ceiling fan. The room was eerily silent.
“If I ever kill anyone, Captain, I’ll be certain that they deserve it.”
“How can you be certain of such a thing?”
“They’d be killers themselves. Or worse. There are worse, you know, Captain.”
“You’d be playing God.”
Mitch shook his head. “God looks after souls. That’s way out of my line. If,” he added, “there’s a God at all.”
Karoulis continued to watch, to study the man before him. He knew he should be chilled, but he wasn’t. He was trying to sort out his own reactions to what he was hearing, seeing, and feeling. Especially to what he was feeling. “How can you be sure that someone’s a killer? How can you know? You could make a mistake.”
Mitch merely shook his head.
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