“Yes, Daddy,” she whispers.
“It’s important sweetie, because that pill or powder or cigarette could make you very, very ill, even kill you.” Her eyes widen and she nods.
Sam comes and puts her arm around Ellie. “No need to frighten her, Cal,” she says, her voice gentle. “Remember, this is West Van, it’s a good neighbourhood”
“It’s a rich neighbourhood That makes it an ideal target for the drug gangs. They make so much money they can afford to pay high school kids to distribute for them. Maybe even some elementary school kids too.”
Maybe if drugs were legal, they would be harder for school kids to get; the gangs and their teenage hoodlums would be out of the drug business. But then, who would be selling drugs, the tobacco companies? Heroin Lite and Crack Menthol?
Anyway, it’s time for a change of subject and my second salvo.
“Sweetie, we need to talk about something else. When that boy called me a filthy junkie, he was only using words. He probably doesn’t even know what a junkie is. It was wrong of him to try to hurt you by saying that, but it was more wrong of you to hit him. I want you to promise me something else: if anyone calls you a name or says something to hurt you, instead of hitting them all you have to do is say, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.’ My mommy taught me that.”
“She was my grandma, right Daddy?”
“Yes sweetie, she was.”
“OK, Daddy, I will. I’m sorry I hit Nate.”
“That’s good sweetie.”
She nestles comfortably on my lap and slips her thumb into her mouth. I didn’t know she still sucked her thumb: the ignorance of the absentee father.
“OK, Ell,” Sam chimes in. “Time to go have a bath and get ready for bed… and take that thumb out!”
Without complaint, Ellie slides off my lap and skips out, leaving Sam and me in the kitchen together with the elephant of that almost kiss. Sam is making Americanos with her fancy automatic espresso machine. “Thanks for doing that, Cal. I really appreciate it.”
“No prob. I appreciate you letting me explain it. Especially over such a great meal. Thank you Sam, I really am grateful.”
She smiles, almost shyly. She looks at me and the smile morphs into something more intense. “Cal, you will go into detox and rehab like you promised?”
“Yes Sam, of course I will.” I note the irritation in my voice but then remember all the failed promises that I have made to her over the years. “Sorry.”
She hands me an Americano and leads me out of the kitchen. I want to enjoy the sway of her hips as I follow her, except that there is something wrong. Incongruously, Roy comes to mind; Sam is walking like Roy when he is trying to hide the fact that he is drunk: walking in an exaggeratedly careful manner. She had a glass and a half of Chianti but that’s not enough to make her tipsy. Was she drinking before I arrived, I wonder?
I follow her into the living room with its spectacular view of English Bay, still impressive at night. The room makes me uncomfortable. It is full of reminders of George: photos of him sailing, riding a Harley Davidson, shaking hands with politicians and sports figures—the rich man’s vanity gallery. There are no pictures of Sam or Ellie which seems very strange to me.
“Is there anything I can do to help you with detox, Cal?” Sam asks as we settle on the leather furniture, far more George’s style than hers.
“No thanks, Sam. It’s going to be five days of hell but I’ll get through it somehow. Then I’m scheduled for three weeks of rehab, learning to live my life without drugs. But you know what really frightens me?”
Sam shakes her head. She looks lovely.
“What do I do after rehab? A lot of people who go through rehab end up using and are back on the streets within two, three months. I can’t handle the thought of that. I’ll need to find a job, but as what? I have a Masters in English Lit. and twelve years experience as a cop. It doesn’t qualify me for much. A security guard, maybe, but no one would hire me once they do a background check and learn my drug history.”
“Do you think there’s any hope that you could get back on the police force, maybe in a civilian role at first?” she asks.
Although I feel a thrill at the thought, I just shrug. “That might be where hope is coldest and despair most fits.” I ask myself, not for the first time, if I am becoming bitter. Still, the line that came unbidden to my mind is from All’s Well that Ends Well, so maybe it’s a good omen. “My one chance is that if I could solve Kevin’s murder, it might, just might, buy me a pass back into the department.”
She makes no attempt to rein in the frustration in her voice. “Do you honestly think that Kevin was murdered and that you can prove who did it in the next nine days, Cal?”
“I have to, Sam. I have to.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “I know you do,” she says, “It’s part of you, a part of you that—”
Her words are cut off as Ellie bursts into the room, still dripping from a lighting-quick bath.
“Daddy, Daddy, I have this great idea. Why don’t you have a sleepover here and we can have breakfast together tomorrow and you can come with me and Mommy and see the new school I might go to. Can you, Daddy, can you? Pleee-eeease.”
I look at Sam. She is smiling… and she doesn’t say no. She looks at me but, for all my cop’s intuition, I cannot read what is behind those lovely green eyes.
“Tell him Mommy. Tell him.”
I want, so much, to hear Sam ask me to stay that it hurts. But, by the same token, it will be way more painful to hear her say No… so I preempt, “I’d love to, sweetie, but I have to go. There is a man I have to meet early in the morning.”
Ellie is vocal in her disappointment and Sam, cheeks flushed, cannot meet my eye.
21
Cal
The smells and snores of sleeping men in the dorm of the backpackers’ hostel are keeping me awake… or is it really the thought that I could have been sleeping at Sam’s house? In a clean bed in a warm, sweet smelling guest room, or perhaps in… but I dare not even think about that.
My garbage bag of possessions is in the bed with me, safe, I hope, from a thief in the night. My refusal of Arnold’s offer of a bed in a clean rooming house feels pretty petty right now. A roof over one’s head should never be taken for granted.
We’re moving. Today.
How I hated those words.
For as far back as I can remember, every six to nine months, as inexorable as the passing of the seasons, my mother and I would move. My objections were dismissed, countered by harsh commands to pack my things into boxes and garbage bags. We would load our meagre possessions into a truck that my mother had begged, borrowed or rented and we would make a series of trips back and forth from one home to the next until, long past midnight, we fell into our beds, exhausted.
As a child it was a source of great puzzlement to me. As a youth, a thing of embarrassment and anger. Until the day I understood. Then it became a beacon of pride.
It was the Monday of the long weekend in September, nineteen ninety-four. The night before my first day in grade twelve. She had cooked a special meal: lobster soup, thick porterhouse steaks with fries and Caesar salad, followed by strawberries and cream. An unheard-of extravagance and I marvelled at what it might portend.
After I had done the dishes, she asked me to sit with her in the living room. She sat on our old winged chair, the floral pattern of its slipcover faded from years of washing. My mother was a striking woman with steel grey hair curled into the same style she had worn since as far back as I could remember. She smoothed her plain grey dress over her knees and locked her gaze on me.
I could sense momentous events in the wind.
“Tonight, Cal,” she said, her voice redolent with the flavor of her European roots, “we will talk about University. You will need to choose where you are going and what it is you want to study.”
With the conceit of youth in full bloom, I said, “No ne
ed, Mom. I’m gonna join the police force. I’ve decided to apply to the Justice Institute.”
To my amazement, my rigid, forceful and stern mother did not object, either to my goal or to my use of the word gonna. “That is very good, Cal.” She nodded. “Even from age six, you have said you want to be a policeman. You will be a good policeman because you are a good man.” It was the first time she had ever referred to me as a man.
“So tell me,” she continued, “what do you want to achieve as a policeman?”
I rambled on about helping people and making the world a safer place, the idealism of youth—betrayed so profoundly by me now—pushing me to heights of hyperbole. When I ran out of steam, she nodded and said, “Good. These are worthy goals. Noble ones. In order to achieve such things, you will need to move into a position of power and influence within the police force, no?”
I agreed, stunned that she had any idea of my ambitions. She let the colloquy of my goals and dreams run its course before saying, in a voice so quiet that I had to lean forward to hear, “In the old country, I grew up in a time of great political unrest and I did not receive the education that my parents planned for me. By the time you were twelve, you knew more than I did. A thing of pride for me but also a hard thing for a parent to digest.”
I remember feeling embarrassed by this, thinking about the ways I must have hurt her by flaunting my teenage knowledge. I wondered why she was baring her soul to me and was uneasy about where this conversation might lead.
“But one thing I do know for sure is this: I have cleaned many, many offices of big-time doctors, lawyers and businessmen and I have noticed that the bigger and better the office, the more certificates are on the walls. I have studied those certificates. The more powerful the man, the more degrees he has. I have seen with my own eyes the value of education.
“And so have you. Mr. Wallace, Kevin’s father is a very important man isn’t he? And didn’t you once tell me that he has three degrees?” I remembered the time I told her about Mr. Wallace’s accomplishments and blushed at how I had tried to rub her nose in it. I feel myself blushing now at what Mr. Wallace would think if he knew.
“Yes, but—” She held one finger to her lips but it was her intensity that silenced me.
“It has been difficult for you, moving once, sometimes twice a year, hasn’t it?”
I hesitated, wrong footed by the change in subject. “No, Mom. I understand. Really.”
“I appreciate you saying that, Cal. But, it’s not true. It was difficult for you. I know. And you didn’t understand. You still don’t. But now it is time for you to learn the truth.”
She lit a cigarette—her one vice which she restricted to just two a day, home rolled fourteen at a time, every Sunday night—and inhaled deeply and gratefully.
I too inhaled; I had been holding my breath.
“I always knew your father would leave me,” she sighed. I sat very still, scared to break the spell. She had always refused to talk about my father. I knew nothing about him. Perhaps this was about to change.
“I knew I would be faced with having to bring you up on my own. So from the moment you were born, before even, I was determined to make sure you got the very best education, no matter what. But how? I was unskilled and uneducated so I had to make do with minimum wage jobs.”
Her lips pursed. “I’ve never talked to you about your father and maybe that was wrong, I don’t know. But this I will tell you. When he walked out on us, I swore that I would never let you be contaminated by him. I would never accept anything from him. He offered money and tried to bribe me to let him see you but I refused and I had the law on my side. I had a restraining order forbidding him to come near either of us.”
I was amazed to hear her talk to me about my father. I wanted to know more but did not dare to interrupt, lest I shattered the moment.
“So it was up to me to provide for your education. I tried to save. I made budgets and plans but I could never begin to save enough. Then one day, it came to me.” She looked off into the distance, shaking her head.
“What, Mom?” The mention of my father presaged more revelations, maybe keys to some of the puzzles of my youth.
“All the budgets told the same story. We only had enough money for rent, food and clothing. I remember thinking, ‘If we didn’t have to pay rent, the problem would be solved.’
“So I stopped paying rent.” She said it casually, with a shrug, as if this was the obvious solution. “The landlord called me up and I told him I was having a little difficulty and that I would pay him soon. The next month, he was a little more forceful, but I made more promises and he didn’t do anything. It wasn’t until halfway through the third month that he lost patience and served me with an eviction notice.
“So I looked for a new apartment and we moved in the middle of the night. A midnight flit, I called it. I put the three months of rent that I hadn’t paid into a savings account.
“From the time you were seven years old until last summer we did the same thing a total of fourteen times. Every year it got more difficult to find a landlord who would take us. But I always found a way. Always.” There was a bitterness in her voice, which I did not dare try to interpret or ask about, for fear that I would learn what no child should know about his mother.
“The year we didn’t move was the year you started at Magee. I wanted you in that school so badly. Just before the school year started, I moved us to that little house in Marpole, just inside the Magee catchment area, and stayed there a year so that you would be able to establish yourself at the school. We had to move twice the next year to make up for it.”
She looked at me hard, her face at its most uncompromising. “Every penny of rent money that I saved is still in that account together with interest. By the time you graduate from Magee next summer there will be over thirty-five thousand dollars, which is plenty enough for you to take two degrees and you will spend every penny of it on your education.”
My mouth hung open at her revelation. With the selfishness of youth, I had always considered the inconvenience and embarrassment that our constant moves caused me and I heaped the blame on her head, mainly in silence but sometimes openly and with great acrimony. Now all I could do was try to fathom the enormity of the sacrifice she made for me. A proud woman, she subjected herself to great humiliation in the eyes of our landlords and her friends and neighbours to do this thing for me. Her goal was a better life for her son.
Her son, who has betrayed her sacrifice by living like this.
Hidden in the darkened room, my face burns with humiliation and shame.
22
Cal
I have to find Roy. I have to get to the bottom of his furious outburst at Beanie’s. He’s somehow at the epicentre of Kevin’s death and I have to know what he knows. I have been searching for him all morning: Beanie’s, the bottle recycling depot, the Savoy pub and all of his preferred hangouts. I talked to a couple of his drinking buddies but they clammed up. They have been told not to talk to me; Roy does not want to be found.
I have combed the downtown east side and now I have to do it all over again.
Then I see the peripatetic Nelson, running in his flat-footed gait along the other side of Pender Street, on a vital mission known only to himself. It is the first time I’ve seen him since the incident with black shirt and Goliath at the Lion Hotel, when he took me to where Roy was being loaded into an ambulance. Although he hardly speaks, he sees everything in his travels. If anyone knows where Roy is, it is Nelson. I just have to find out how to get the information out of his addled old brain.
“Nelson!” I call. But he hardly ever responds to anyone or anything; Roy is the only one who can communicate with him. I start running along Pender, waiting for a break in the traffic so that I can cross. “Nelson!”
Without warning, he turns and crosses Pender towards me, ignoring the traffic, the tails of his shabby gabardine raincoat flapping in the wind. Two cars screech to a halt and I wince at
the sound of an SUV plowing into the back of one of them.
To my surprise he runs straight at me and I say, “Hi Nelson.”
Without breaking pace, he gives me a fleeting glance, an instant of eye contact, and I can tell that he is terrified. “C’mon, quick.”
I jog along beside him, car horns honking behind us. I want to stop him but he becomes very agitated when stationary. “Nelson, have you seen Roy?” I ask in my most reasonable tone.
Without any warning, he turns right on to Carrall and I overshoot, skid to a halt and run to catch up to him.
I resist the urge to grab hold of him. “D’you know where Roy is, Nelson?”
“Huh.”
Roy can often interpret his grunts but I have no idea what he means… except that I can smell the fear.
“Is that a yes or a no, Nelson?” I ask, trying to keep my voice reasonable.
“Huh.”
His fear transfers to me; it’s got something to do with Roy.
I follow him across Hastings.
“Nelson! Have you seen Roy?” I want to calm him but I sound like I’m talking to a fractious child.
“Huh.”
His grunt pushes me over the edge. I grab his arm, pull him to a halt and turn him so he is facing me. I shake him. “Nelson, I need to find Roy,” I enunciate slowly.
He squirms in my hands and I feel like I am abusing a wounded child; it feels wrong but I have to know where Roy is. “Nnnn… Nnnn…” he says and, with a burst of unexpected strength, he twists out of my grip and darts into an alley.
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set) Page 12