“Why not?” I said. “She’d probably love to hear it.” And probably won’t for some time to come, I thought dismally, remembering what Eddie had told me about Arly’s defection to the Kountry Pantree camp. Obviously, the girl had not told her father about her job change yet. Maybe she was waiting until she didn’t need his help moving her artwork around. I wasn’t very impressed with young Arly Watson right then, actually. Her artwork was terrific, but I was mad at her for her dad’s sake.
Calvin Grigsby came in then, obviously dragooned by Arly, with a tall coatrack thing hung with coat-like objects made from what looked like human skin. He set it down, stared at it for a moment, then shook his head.
“I like what it says,” he said, “but it makes me feel like taking a bath.”
“That’s exactly my point,” Arly said, coming in behind him. There was a bulky object cradled very carefully in her arms, covered with a blanket. She put it gently down on the display case and let out a breath.
“Whew,” she said. “That’s a relief.”
Yolanda came over to have a look. “What’s this one, Arly? I thought you said you were only bringing three?”
“This one is new,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I think it has a profound effect on the viewer.” She whisked away the blanket. It was a large glass jar on a pedestal, painted with black and silver skulls and cross-bones. Inside the jar, about a dozen live hornets flew around angrily, trying to get out. It certainly affected this viewer profoundly. I backed away immediately.
“Jeez, Arly,” I said.
She grinned. “Weird enough for ya?” she said.
Yolanda shuddered. “That jar’s sealed up really, really tight, right, Arly?”
“You bet,” Arly said. “Don’t forget I’m allergic. These suckers may be scary to you—they’re deadly to me.”
“How on earth did you get them in there?” I asked. Arly put her finger beside her nose in the exact gesture I’d seen her father make a few days before. “My secret,” she said. Yolanda and I looked at each other, frowning. It was like somebody had brought in a bomb.
“I’m glad you didn’t make me carry that one,” Calvin said. “Oh, here, Polly. Hans said it was okay, as long as the Gazette got a credit somewhere.” He handed me a rolled up, poster-sized picture—the “attack photo”.
Archie crowed with laughter when he saw it. “Oh, perfect,” he said. “Now that’s what I’d call weird. That Berry woman looks like one of those hornets, all right.” He put an arm around his daughter. “Gotta go, sweet pea,” he said. “Polly here says I ought to tell you what I think, so I will. I may not understand this art stuff you do, but I’m damned proud of you.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and was gone. Arly, plainly taken by surprise, stared after him and put her hand to her face. I suddenly seemed to have something in my eye.
“We should hang that photo right where it belongs,” Arly said. “Right next to the Jar of Death.”
“Your title for the piece, I presume?” Yolanda said.
“Fitting, don’t you think?” Arly said.
“Oh, yes,” Yolanda said. “How long can those things survive in there?”
“Well, there are air holes, small ones, Polly, it’s okay, they can’t get out—and I put some honey at the bottom, so they should last a couple of days, if they don’t get too hot.”
“You’ve experimented?” I said.
“Oh, quite a lot,” said Arly. “I like to consider them a kind of medium, like clay or metal. Only alive.”
“No hornets were harmed in the making of this art,” I intoned. “Well, you’re a brave lady, Arly. It’s like you’re experimenting with using poison ivy as toilet paper.”
“Well, that’s enough for me,” Calvin said. “I’ll come back tomorrow and take some pictures after the Bath Tub Bash, if that’s okay.”
“That would be great, Cal. We’d appreciate the publicity,” I said.
“And that photo of the Audrey puppet with you and all those kids is amazing, Polly,” Arly said. “Front page material, except they’ll probably have to put a stupid Bath Tub Bash thing in next week to please the advertisers.”
“Oh—you’ve developed that one already, Cal?”
“Yeah, it’s downstairs in the darkroom at the paper,” Cal said. “Arly helps out down there, and gets to use the darkroom for her own stuff in exchange. She also gets to see the newspaper photos before anybody else, right, Arly?”
“And I get to see the outtakes. It’s amazing how much film you waste, Cal,” she said. Cal took a good-natured swipe at her with the rolled up picture, and I quickly rescued it before it could get damaged.
“Thanks again for this, Cal,” I said as he left.
“So,” Dimmy said, emerging from the back, where she had been fussing with some lighting effects. “I’m all done. You need some help, Polly?” I hadn’t even begun to unpack my own work, but with everybody pitching in, we soon had the space looking very Toronto-galleryesque. Audrey was lit from above by a single beam from a halogen light Dimmy had brought for the purpose, and I told the others that Eddie had agreed to work the huge puppet for us for a couple of hours before the Bath Tub race. I’d warned him to take it easy, so he wouldn’t be tuckered out before the Big Event.
“Are we going to close up the show tomorrow while the race is on?” Arly said.
“We should, I think,” Yolanda said. “After all, we’re sort of stealing their audience, so we should, you know, be supportive.”
“My Dad’s determined to win it this year,” Arly said.
“Archie? In a tub?” I said. “Has he done it before?” I would have thought he was a bit, well, mature, to be a “tubber”, but I didn’t say so.
“Oh, yeah,” Arly said. “He’s done it for years. He’s really good.”
“Well, I hope he wins,” I said.
“So do I. It’ll be great when he beats that creep David Kane,” she said. I stared at her. That creep? Wasn’t Arly rumoured to be involved with him? Wasn’t she supposed to be planning to ditch her father’s business? I was awfully confused. Maybe this “anti-Kane” stuff was just a blind to convince people that she didn’t like him. Who knew? The teenage mind was a mystery.
I glanced at my watch. “Oh, hell, it’s almost four o’clock,” I said. “I have to go. I’m meeting Becker—listen, I’ll see you guys at nine tomorrow morning, all right? Have I forgotten anything?”
“Just your head, girl,” Dimmy said. “We were supposed to be going out to dinner after we set up, don’t you remember?”
“We were?”
“True love, must be,” Yolanda said. “All her buddies get ditched for the boy. How sad.”
“It’s not like that, Yolanda. I have to talk to him about . . . about some stuff,” I said.
“Like white dresses and bouquets, I suppose,” Yolanda said.
“What’s this?” Dimmy said.
“Oops. Sorry, Polly. Cat’s out of the bag. Girls,” she said, turning to look sternly at Dimmy and Arly, “not a word, you hear?”
The other two were preparing to do that girl-gossip thing. I could see it coming. That “Ohmigod, are you serious?” stuff that makes my teeth ache. I fled before it could start.
Twenty-Nine
I’m in a pot now, but plant me in a warm place and I’ll flourish in your garden for years!
—A little tag on a Bleeding Heart plant at the Kountry Pantree garden shop
When you’re late for something, you almost always end up driving behind one of those cars that’s going ten kilometres per hour. Susan has a theory about the drivers of these cars. She announces, whenever we’re together and stuck behind one, that the driver is an “old flat cap”.
Sure enough, if we get a chance to have a look at him, either by overtaking, or if his car goes off the road and comes to a gentle stop in a ditch, the guy driving is invariably an extremely old man, wearing a flat cap. I don’t know why this is.
I ended up behind an excruciatingly slow driv
er on my way to meet Becker, and he stayed in front of me right into the Tim Hortons’ driveway. When he pulled into a parking spot, I risked a quick look at him. A really old guy. Wearing a flat cap.
I scurried to the door, flung it wide and dashed inside, but Becker wasn’t there. It was only five minutes past four, so I was sure I couldn’t have missed him. Immediately, and quite irrationally, I might add, my first thought was “Dammit, he’s late.” I bought myself a coffee and a sour cream cinnamon donut and chose a corner table, away from the general Tim Hortons hubbub. Becker arrived five minutes later, doing the same dash-and-fling that I had done, though with more decorum, because he was a policeman in uniform and had appearances to keep up. I lifted my hand slightly as he surveyed the room, and he came straight over.
“I’m sorry, Polly. I couldn’t get away—” he began.
“No. It’s okay. I was late, too,” I said. “Go get a coffee. There’s no rush.”
“Actually, I’m kind of coffeed out,” he said. “It’s been that kind of day.”
“Okay. Get a juice, then. A tea. Something to do with your hands.”
“I’ll just sit here and twitch, thanks,” he said and sat down opposite me. “So,” he said, and went no further.
“So,” I said. Pause. “You said we needed to talk. Or I did. One of us did.”
“Well, you did. But I agree we need to,” he said. We both just sat there. I sighed. This was slow going.
“Why don’t we do this,” I said. “It appears that there are two distinct kinds of conversations we need to have. One of them is personal. Why don’t we tackle that one first and get it over with, and then we can move on to the information sharing part of the deal, where I tell you stuff and you tell me stuff and we solve the Watson case together.”
“Sounds reasonable,” he said. He took a quick look around to see if there was anyone sitting near us. There wasn’t. His eyes were all over the place. Mine probably were, too.
“Becker, can I ask you a couple of questions?” I said.
“Is this the personal part or the information part?”
“Personal.”
“Yeah, Polly,” he said. “Go ahead. I know what it is.”
“You do?”
“But I’m not going to play any guessing games with you, so you might as well just go ahead and ask your question.” His arms were crossed and his voice had tightened up like an over-tuned guitar string. Man do I hate this bad cop stuff.
“When I called you this morning, and woke you up, you got out of bed and went into the living room, right?”
“Right.”
“Were you alone in bed?” There. I’d said it. Becker exhaled and put his chin on his chest. He stayed like that for a good while.
“Nothing happened,” he said, speaking to the knot in his tie.
“Spare me, please,” I said. Now that I knew, I wished I hadn’t asked. I guess it’s always like that. Like when you wake up from an accident and you know damn well your arm is missing, but you still have to ask the doctor about the empty sleeve.
“Second question,” I said. “Becker, why on earth did you ask me to marry you?”
“I thought, if you wanted to, it would be a good thing,” he said, looking up, finally. “But I knew on Monday that you didn’t and that it was a stupid idea. Sorry I asked.”
“Oh, I’m not sorry,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it non-stop ever since. It’s been very clarifying. But jeez, Becker . . .” The rest of the sentence had something to do with him at least waiting until I’d had a chance to say “no thank you” before boffing Lefevbre, but I didn’t get the chance.
“I know. Call me names, now, okay?” he said. “Make a scene or something. I know you want to.”
“You want a scene? Really? Then how would I tell you about all this stuff I found out about Watson?” I do the jokey thing really well, sometimes. He smiled and relaxed a bit. I felt like throwing up.
For the next hour, I told Becker everything I knew or suspected about the Kountry Pantree project. I told him about Vic Watson’s ancestry and how he was the only possible vendor of Lot 6, Concession 4—the land that the developers were using for the superstore. I told him that maybe only Duke Pitblado and possibly David Kane knew this. I reminded him that Vic had publicly been against the project.
I filled him in on all the details of the Town Council’s faking the vote on the initial proposal, the mayor’s current conflict of interest and possible earlier involvement, and the fish habitat thing, which it seemed Becker hadn’t quite grasped at the Tuesday night meeting. I told him what I’d heard in the secret session, and that I’d seen the mayor shredding documents. I suggested that taken together, there might be enough evidence to stop the Kountry Pantree project, at least for a while. There was certainly enough to prompt some sort of inquiry.
I shared my disgust at David Kane’s headhunting practices and what it would eventually mean to Archie Watson, Emma Tempest and God knew who else. (I did not share the rumours I’d heard about Arly and Kane, or tell him about Kane’s Bath Tub/costume deal with Eddie. Kane was a creep—that was enough.)
Finally, I gave him the bar napkin with Serena Elliot’s three-person hospital visitor list on it, explaining why she had written them down. Whether or not the names were significant depended on whether or not there was anything funny about Vic Watson’s death, I said.
“Okay, so that’s my information,” I said. “Do you think you might feel up to reciprocating?”
Becker put the napkin away in his notebook, in which he had been scribbling—not a lot, but a little. Presumably some of what I had said, he knew already.
“Polly, I am a police officer conducting an investigation,” he said. “I can’t just blab about the case to someone who isn’t authorized.”
“You said a while ago that you wanted a scene,” I said. “This is going a long way towards getting one, Becker.”
“If you made a scene, I would know you were faking it,” he said. “It’s too late for that now.”
“Don’t you bet on it,’ I said. “I have been keeping my emotions under very tight control, and I could blow at any moment.”
“What do you want to know?” he said. “The sergeant is right over there, dammit.”
“Oh, goody. An audience,” I said. And that really was very fortunate. There was no leverage in making a scene unless there was someone important in the cheap seats. “Please can you tell me why you went to Toronto?”
“We took tissue samples to the forensic lab at Metro,” he said.
“Vic’s?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He died of a heart attack, brought on by a massive rush of adrenaline,” he said.
“What, he was excited to death?”
“In a way. There’s a name for it, but I don’t have it off the top of my head. Adrenaline is what the lab guy told me, in layman’s terms.”
“Well, that’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Not if someone said something to him that made him so upset that he had a heart attack,” Becker said. “I have to wait until our guys can sort of explain the results.”
“But saying something to somebody isn’t murder,” I said.
“Not in our books,” Becker said. I didn’t ask him how come he had to take Constable Marie Lefevbre down to the city with him. Maybe it’s a rule that partners have to do field trips together. I decided to believe that, for the sake of my own adrenaline.
“I guess that means there isn’t a case, then, as far as Watson is concerned.”
“I guess not. At least, not unless something else comes up.”
“Hey, Becker. Where’s Bryan?”
“What?”
“Your son? Bryan?”
“Oh,” he said, looking surprised. “He’s back with his mother, of course. I thought you knew that.”
“Why would I know that?”
“She came back early from Calgary yesterday and picked him up from Morrison�
�s place.”
“Your wife?”
“Catherine, yeah. She had someone housesitting at her place and didn’t want to kick them out, so she took Bryan over to my apartment. They were waiting for me when I got back.”
“But...”
“Well, she was bagged and wanted to go to sleep and I was wired from the Toronto trip, so I called up Morrison and we went out for a couple of beers at the Slug and Lettuce.”
“And you called me . . .”
“Way too late. Sorry about that. My apologies to your aunt. We thought you might like to come out and party a little bit.”
“I probably would have.”
“You really have to get a phone, Polly.”
“So you went drinking with Morrison . . .”
“. . . who stayed at a friend’s place, and I took a cab home. Catherine was asleep in my bed and, well, you know how deadly that couch is, Polly, and I’d been driving all day, so I just crawled in beside her. But I swear nothing happened. Neither of us would have been interested.”
“And Lefevbre?”
“Who? Lefevbre? Constable Lefevbre? I dropped her off at the station when we got in from Toronto. How come—oh. Wait. I get it. You asked ‘was I alone in bed this morning’, right?” He was gazing at me with a shocked expression, which quickly turned into contempt. I was frozen in my seat, a horror of my own washing over my body so that I couldn’t have moved if you’d set fire to me. There was a long, cold silence. He just stared into my face. Finally, he spoke, very slowly and quietly. “When I asked you to marry me—what was it? Last Saturday?—I thought I knew you pretty well, and I thought you knew me. Enough, anyway, to give us a good start. But Jesus Christ, Polly. You don’t know me at all, do you? You must think I’m some kind of, I don’t know . . . animal. To believe for even one second that I would . . . after I . . .”
“Mark,” I said.
“No,” he said, “spare me.” He stood up and picked up his hat. Then he left.
I got up from the table, went into the ladies’ room and threw up again and again and again.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 73