Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  “That’s the way it usually goes. And there’s nothing in the file to say anything different.”

  “So why are we sending out a new press release, then?”

  Dean didn’t say the most straightforward reason out loud — that doing something was far better than another day of spinning wheels, doing next to nothing in a windowless office.

  “Maybe we’re shaking trees. Just to see what falls out. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that we’re supposed to be doing.”

  Dean could almost see the way Scoville felt, as if exasperation was radiating off him like a colour. So he took a chance and told him the real reason: “If someone in the media picks this up, even just for a little while, it’s going to put the pressure on everyone from the chief on down. This town’s too small for people to go missing and stay missing. Some reporter makes this their bread and butter for a while, the brass are just going to tell us to drop everything else until it’s sorted out. Then we get to go visit this Walt guy, make him uncomfortable. Uncomfortable people do sudden things. And that would suit me just fine.”

  He put his coffee down.

  “The Carter one’s got meat on it,” he said, but he said it to empty air. Scoville was already looking down again. Dean thought about the case for a moment, and for some reason suddenly imagined Julie, running away. Turning her face back over her shoulder toward him as she ran. And it struck him that she looked afraid.

  He shook his head, shook the thought away. Dean wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, bringing Scoville into what he was thinking about Mary Carter — he didn’t know the other officer that well yet.

  But then Dean saw that Scoville was looking up at him again, as if he’d suddenly discovered intelligent life on an otherwise-empty planet.

  “Beats chasing endless teen runaways gone jittery on ecstasy,” Scoville said. “You want to shake it up? Shake away.”

  Chapter 16

  juice

  meat — T-bones

  cat food

  receipt book

  crackers

  juice mix

  crackers

  On a Post-it note, the sticky top folded over once so that the paper had a kind of top-edge-turned-down, slightly stiffer spine. I remember thinking, right when I found it, “This one’s a man.”

  A man for sure. You could almost see him moving through the store the way men always seem to do, like they’re playing at being soldiers on a mission.

  Combat shopping. Everything checked off in his head as he went, not a single glance side to side. Alone and in deep, behind enemy lines. It sounds a little melodramatic, but some of them move through the store like it is completely hostile territory, like everyone is singling them out as a stranger. And it helps to be a stranger; strangers can shove their cart into line just ahead of someone with a cartload meant for a whole family, and do it without a moment’s regret.

  This wasn’t a note from the kind of person who would ask for any sort of help, even if he can’t find the canned coconut milk to save his life and time’s ticking down before the date comes over. (See, sometimes coconut milk’s with the ethnic food, around the pad Thai sauce and the curry. Other times, like it was done for a lark, you’ll find someone has stocked it in with the bar mix — “Would you like a pina colada, or a nice tall rum and coconut milk?” And if a shelver is really pissed off, try vegetarian food. Or you could ask me — because I know. But he won’t ask. Won’t even think of asking.)

  Male grocery shopping? I’ve been there. I’ve certainly seen it, and I’ve even done it myself. And it’s always done with purpose — get in, do the list, get out — like there’s some kind of pride in that. Show me a distracted man in a grocery store — a guy who meanders, or who keeps picking things up and putting them down — and I’ll show you a man who really doesn’t want to get home. That’s a man who needs an excuse to be doing something else, anything else.

  For the rest of us, the purpose is just too much of a driving force, and a list is the one thing that proves you’ve gotten everything done. It’s there in the man wiring — it’s all about the getting through. Here’s a problem — solve it. The urge to check each thing off just as quickly as you can. Like you’re supposed to run through the checkouts at the end and smack a bell and shout, “Done!” and then hold both your arms in the air, waiting for all the applause.

  Tell me there’s no difference between men and women, and I’ll take you straight to the aisle where the canned tuna is. It’s on the left-hand side, heading toward the checkouts, slightly higher than knee level. That’s all I have to do.

  Women will stop and bend down to look at all sorts of cans, comparing prices between different brands and who knows what else. There’s more kinds, more brands, more styles of tuna than there is pasta. Chunk light in oil or water, solid white, skipjack, yellowtail — and that’s before you start comparing brands. Men? Grab some chunk light in water, throw it into the cart — “Done!”

  You can almost hear them thinking “See? Record time.”

  As if that somehow makes any kind of difference to anyone.

  Watch sometime, and just see if you can actually prove me wrong.

  Women have crashed into me with their carts, sure, heads down and running fast. I’m not saying they can’t be in a hurry, can’t button down with purpose. I’ve been hit by serious, hard-looking women with shiny tap-tapping hard-soled shoes and mouths drawn so tight that their lips seem to have no colour in them at all. Anyone can be in a hurry.

  But men ram their carts into me ten times as often, cutting around the corners at the ends of the aisles as if they were race car drivers on that last desperate curve before the finish.

  I don’t want to make it look like everyone’s typecast, but the fact is that sometimes they are. Saying “it takes one to know one” sounds trite, but it’s true just the same. Set a purpose, get it done. And if you don’t get it done, and get it done fast, it’ll eat away at you like nothing else. It’ll downright consume you. We’re wired that way — and it’s not the only wiring we’ve got.

  Tom Quinton across the street, he always wanted to fuck Mary.

  Sorry, but there’s no polite way to say it, because, straight up, it was true.

  For years and years, he lived right across the street — and he was married, too, the whole time. It started almost as soon as we bought the place.

  We used our marriage money for the down payment, and that very first day — the two of us out looking at the front of the place we’d just bought — that old letch Tom Quinton was across the street, looking Mary up and down like his eyes were right inside her clothes, his hands on her smooth skin. Thinking about cupping her naked ass. I caught him at it then, and more than once after that, and so did she — but Mary just laughed at the whole damn thing. Laughed and did a little pirouette there in the living room as soon as we went inside, like she was showing it all off. Like she was making fun of me for being upset about it.

  That just made me more angry. Not at her. Made me want to go across the street and belt Quinton one. Or, more likely, go over all smiles and new-neighbourly to borrow some tools and then return them all broken, the saw blades with teeth missing, a power drill with the bits overheated and snapped off. Screwdrivers bent, if it took me pounding on them with a hammer to do it. Fake a shrug and a smile, and apologize unconvincingly

  I was hot-headed, and while I’m a small guy, I was whiplash strong back then, muscles like wire rope under my skin from part-time stock work, unloading semi-trailers of canned goods one case at a time, bringing them on a hand truck into the back of the store, and then going back for another.

  No forklifts or hydraulics then. Not like now. Now the stock guys can be oblivious fourteen-year-olds with no hard muscles at all and just a little fuzz on their upper lips.

  Back when I started, it was the kind of job that meant you never had to look inside
a gym unless you were a boxer, because when you were done for the day, the only thing you wanted to be lifting was a drink. Talk to me about how easy a job it is when you’ve unloaded more canned tomato soup than you could eat in an entire year of lunchtimes. And it didn’t matter if you had anything going on upstairs or not — it didn’t matter if you didn’t think about anything ever — because you weren’t hired for the thinking, just the lifting, and all that mattered was how much and how fast.

  “Strong back, weak mind, get the job done” — I had a manager who said that right to my face, said that was the only kind of employee he wanted.

  So I’m sure I could have popped Tom one, easy. And taken him down, too, probably with the first punch. He wound up in a job with the city, but not outside: one of those inside jobs where the closest thing to heavy lifting was making sure that all the filing cabinet drawers were closed at the end of the day.

  But I’m more patient than someone who just goes over and pops a guy in the mouth. You probably wouldn’t believe it, but I am.

  Unless I’m pushed.

  Later on, when our wives got to know each other better, the Quintons would ask us over all the time, and I bet that Ev Quinton thought we were the best of friends.

  That was back when you could sit around all night playing cards and smoking cigarettes, talking the whole time, just four people and a few drinks and the kinds of snacks you pour straight out of a bag, just chips and pretzels and maybe nuts. Bridge mix, those strange chocolates where it’s impossible to know what kind you’ve got until you put it in your mouth — and then it’s impolite to spit the whole darned thing back into your hand when it turns out to be a kind you don’t like.

  For a while, Tom was teaching in the trade school, and believe it or not, he’d started smoking a pipe around the same time, like he was suddenly a university professor or something. When it wasn’t his turn to deal, he’d be turning that pipe upside down and rapping it off the ashtray, poking around inside to clean it out, and then packing it tight with loose pipe tobacco all over again before lighting a match and sucking the flame right straight down into the bowl.

  It always looked like a lot of work for very little return — it seemed like he’d hardly get the thing lit and have a couple of puffs before it was time to tap it all out again, and start back up with the scrape, scrape, scrape. Like an old car you spend more time fixing than driving, and what’s the use of that?

  The pipe smelled better than cigars, but not much. Like a mixture of tobacco and rubber bands. Get him started on it, though, and he’d launch into some great long lecture on how they go about picking and curing tobacco, about the small yellow leaves at the bottom of the stalks that they call suckers, the ones that have to be picked off and thrown away, and about how you can tell when a pipe tobacco is high-quality, even if it smells just like burning cabbage. Truth is, he was packed tight, just like his pipe, but he was stuffed with a whole bunch of useless information that was supposed to make you think he was something special.

  They had a small square table for cards, their dining room table, really, but with the centre leaf taken out, and I swear that Tom liked to play cards because his knees were so close to Mary’s. His knees poked in there close enough to feel the heat of her, radiating out from her skin.

  The worst part was that he thought he could keep it all out of sight. He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d give you a nudge with his knee while you were bent down fixing the snow blower and say, “Mary — she must be a hell of a ride, hey?” Nothing like that. Nothing that you could take on, just one time, and straighten up for good. But obvious enough.

  With the table shrunk down, it was like their entire dining room was larger somehow, or else it was like we were four kids playing at being adults, the walls too far back and the whole space just wrong. Alice in Wonderland, but with our legs and arms stretched to where they shouldn’t rightly be. Ev would be running back and forth, filling the bowls and getting more drinks, and Tom would be doing his best to look down Mary’s shirt with me sitting right there, alternating between seething rage and absolute cold.

  Of course Mary knew all about it — women always know more about where your eyes are than you think they do — and afterwards, when we were back home, she’d tell me not to get so worked up, that “there’s a difference between window shopping and actually buying.”

  I’d swear I’d never go back there, but then Ev would call Mary, and it always seemed to turn out that there was another Friday night, another hard lungful of pipe smoke, and that same carefully painted dining room with a small wallpaper border pasted around the top edge of the walls, like someone had taken a child’s dollhouse dining room and forced it to grow up in a way it was never meant to do.

  Ev was the only reason we ever went back.

  You know paperwhites? Those bulbs you can buy already forced up and growing for Christmas, small daffodils that come out all expectant and face-up like someone’s lied and told them spring’s just around the corner? And then they always end up dead once the season’s over, never any smarter and having lived their whole lives as someone’s instant accessory. But when they burst open, they’re fully involved.

  Sometimes, you talk to someone, and it’s like every word tells you that there’s more to them than you ever expected. They open up and expand somehow, because they’re really way more complex than you’d ever expected, petal after layered petal.

  With Tom, it was the absolute opposite. It was like every word confirmed your worst fears about how shallow he actually could be, and then he’d go ahead and show you there was even less.

  On top of everything else, Tom couldn’t stand not having done the most or the largest or the fastest.

  Start talking about fishing and he’d have to tell you about a trip he’d taken years ago “up on the Labrador,” and he could look at you bald-facedly and say something as stupid as, “The fish we caught were so big that we had to let them all go, because landing them would have meant sinking the canoe — that’s how big they were.”

  Or cars — I had a big-engine Ford for a while, good and fast and always hungry for more gas, but any time I raised the topic of cars, Tom would remember a big-block Chevy that he’d had until the police had ordered him to take it right off the road. “Too much power for a street car,” he’d say, claiming to have juiced it up right there in his driveway with nothing more than common sense, copper tubing, and a old handbook on turbocharging a Datsun. “Simple,” he’d say, like that was enough to serve as proof.

  Get a rose to finally grow in our backyard, despite the St. John’s climate, and he’d remember the time he’d had a greenhouse, and kept his roses blooming right into December and beyond and how, that year, they gave bouquets for Christmas all over the neighbourhood, and all the women for blocks around were delighted.

  I was supposed to just go along with it, no matter how outlandish it was. Never call him on it.

  Because if I did, guaranteed, he’d find a way to turn it around so that he was really talking about something different and just barely possible — and he’d stick his chin out and dare me to call him out again. After the first few times, I realized it just wasn’t worth pointing out what a blowhard he really was.

  Really, I couldn’t be bothered to keep going, but Mary made me.

  “We just have to visit for a while,” she’d say. “Ev has to put up with it all the time.” She called Tom’s behaviour “compensating,” and then smiled when I pretended I had no idea what she was talking about.

  But that didn’t mean I had to tolerate him looking at Mary like that all the time. And giving him a good talking-to — or a knock in the head — was obviously out of the question, was obviously the kind of thing that would make Mary look at me that way she did, with that sort of half-crushed, half-hopeless look she must have started practising when she was about six years old.

  I call that look “cosmic disappoint
ment” now, now that she’s not here to turn it on me.

  Tom, with all the things he said he’d seen and done, well, it turned out there was a thing or two he couldn’t handle anyone else knowing about. A thing like the single prescription label I found on the floor in the store, right there with his name and the dosage and everything, the name of the drug so familiar I didn’t even need to go on the Internet to know exactly what his embarrassing little problem was.

  Then it was as simple as letting him know what I knew, without ever letting on how I knew. Just dropped it on him one day, slid it in half-apologetically like Ev had let it slip to Mary or something. Big strong Tom — not strong everywhere. Child’s play, really.

  And after that, every time I came out the front door and he was outside, all I had to do was give him a little wave, look into his eyes, and wait for him to break it off and turn away.

  Ev’s invitations to play cards dried up, but I don’t think that was her idea.

  Eventually, their house sold, but I heard they didn’t make much money off it, even though they’d had the place for years and did a fair amount of fixing up in that time, too.

  It sat empty over there for a while, everything looking all closed up like it was turned in on itself, and the weeds started pushing up tall through the little strip of garden they’d always had.

  Their daffodils keep coming up in the same row every year, though, just the way the bulbs were planted. Stupid damned daffodils, they don’t really have a clue about anything, do they?

  I feel sorry for Ev. A life sentence she probably didn’t deserve. Probably still listening to him banging that stupid pipe in the ashtray, too.

  Chapter 17

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) will hold a press conference at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, December 20, to provide media with an update on progress in an ongoing investigation. Media are requested to be at RNC Headquarters and set up no later than 1:45 p.m.