Just outside Barrie he pulled over to the side of the highway and leaned his forehead into the steering wheel. A squadron of eighteen-wheelers roared past, rocking him like a child as he choked back his sobs, tears staining his pant-legs. The only thing that revived him was the thought of more drink waiting at home. Normally a draft or two would have stood him in good stead at a local pub, but the thought that he might not be able to stop there, coupled with the fear of getting stranded in Barrie, held sway. So there was hope, was how he saw it. If he still had priorities on where he would and would not allow himself to get pissed-drunk, there was still a little humanity left.
By the time he turned in his driveway, his mind had re-focused on Craig Killingworth’s disappearance. It was an excuse, he knew, to keep from thinking about his mother’s death. He dropped his bag in the hall and went upstairs to wash his face, marvelling at the yellow and purple stain spreading beneath the skin on the right side. In the kitchen, he cracked the ice tray against the counter, splashed a healthy hit of Scotch into a glass, filled a plastic bag with the rest of the ice, and went to the living room. There, holding the bag to his face, he spread the file and photos on the floor like a mad haberdasher’s shop. He had a case to finish.
The whiskey brought clarity to his thinking. It helped him concentrate as it dulled the ache in his head and the pain in his heart. As he drank, he contemplated the code that might or might not unlock the past: a missing bicycle, a ferry captain who said he saw Craig Killingworth crossing just one way. All this time Dan had imagined a clean break or, at worst, death by mishap somewhere down the highway. But the lost portion of the file and the missing bicycle had entwined in his mind. It seemed as though they’d been telling him something different. He just wished he knew what.
He picked up Craig Killingworth’s photograph, trying to read into its depths. No smiles were always the hardest to interpret. Sadness or just a lack of expression? Cheese or no cheese? There was a shot of Killingworth with his sons, the dolphin-like Thom, already beautiful, and the darker, thought-ravaged features of the slightly older Theodore. Ted. Even here, Craig Killingworth’s upturned mouth was hard to press into service as a smile. What lay hidden behind those eyes? What held back the joy he might have felt at being with his boys?
A final shot showed the interior of what looked a lot like the stables Dan had explored behind the summerhouse the day before the wedding. Killingworth’s trim figure was outfitted in jodhpurs and sport-shirt, collar turned up. He held a grooming brush in one hand; his other lay on the waxy brown flank of a gelding. Here, at last, he exhibited what looked like the ghost of a smile.
“Where did you go?” Dan spoke to the empty room. “And why does your family not want you found?”
A man had disappeared, leaving behind a wife and two sons. How had he not cared enough to come back? Suicide was one possible answer. For a moment, Dan pictured himself up on Lake on the Mountain. He saw himself grasping the oars as the rowboat slid over the surface of the lake. It just plunges, Thom had said. Whatever was below lay so deep it might never be found.
He moved the pictures and file memos around, rearranging the pieces of the puzzle to make them fit. They stubbornly resisted interpretation. He reached for the bottle — empty. There was another in the kitchen, but when he tried to pour from it, it flew from his hands, smashing on the tiles. He picked up the larger pieces, cutting his fingers. Blood trailed across the floor. He cursed the perversity of inanimate objects and wiped his bloodied hand on a dishtowel.
Did he really prefer being drunk? What a pathetic statement that made. More important, what to do about it? Why did despair always look so much better through the prism of a filled glass? Drink went into the body, through the mouth and down the throat, then on to the underbelly and, eventually, it left in a wash of fine yellow spray. And that was it for all that alcohol, pricey or not. Time to refill your glass and get on with your life. But the despair stayed, seeming to need no entry or exit, no replenishing, like mercury or some other poison that sickened without killing. Ingested by accident or by design, once in and never to leave. To rot your guts and muddle your mind till you were long past having a mind. What was it about the barrel’s bottom that looked so good from the inside? Because surely it was hell from the outside, judging by the looks others gave you when you were down there.
The expression on Ked’s face was pure disgust. His son turned and went into the kitchen without a word. Dan glanced around. It was morning, but still early by the feel of it. He lay stretched on the living room floor like a schoolboy after pulling an all-nighter, the contents of Craig Killingworth’s missing person report strewn around him. He sat up. His eyelids felt as though they’d been peeled back with a can opener. His reading glasses lay on the floor beneath him, road-kill written all over them. He coughed and gasped at the pain searing his lungs. Obviously it hadn’t been an easy landing.
Dan picked his way out to the kitchen where Ked had begun cleaning up. Glass glittered in the morning light. A bloodied tea towel lay in the middle of the floor. He might have believed the place had been broken into if he hadn’t recalled searching for the third bottle of Scotch in his upstairs office drawer.
“I would’ve cleaned up. I wasn’t expecting you home till later,” Dan offered.
“I live here too, you know.”
It wasn’t a question so much as a flat statement asserting some sort of right which Dan was having trouble figuring out at the moment.
“I know that. I’ve never questioned it.”
Ked turned, his eyes hard. “You’re always telling me how to behave and not to fuck up my life. Now it’s my turn.” He was trembling. “I don’t want a drunk for a father.”
Dan could see the fear in his son’s face. But he saw something else — something he recognized. He’d felt it himself enough times facing his own father in moments that had bordered on hatred. He saw determination hidden behind those disapproving eyes.
“Is that what you think I am?” Dan said slowly.
Ked nodded, taking quick breaths through his nose.
“I know I drink a lot,” Dan said. “But I’m not a drunk.”
“So you say.” Ked stood there staring at him. “So you say, Dad. But I’ve seen you passed out enough times to know you have a problem.”
“I like to drink. I don’t think I have a problem,” Dan said, trying to smile despite the pain. For a moment, he wondered if he really did have a problem.
“Then prove it.” Ked’s eyes challenged him. “I’m asking you not to have another drink for the next six months.”
Dan scratched behind one ear. “That’s pretty drastic.”
“Walk the talk, Dad. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? So walk the talk.”
Dan looked around at the mess on the floor then up at this son of his, half-grown, but maybe knowing better than he had at that age. He studied the features of the boy’s face. Somehow what was awkward in Dan had come out strong in Ked. He was becoming a handsome young man.
“Did something happen while you were away visiting Aunt Marge?”
Dan nodded slowly, calling to mind the conversation with his aunt as she lay in bed pulling on her oxygen. He moistened his lips. “Yeah. I guess it did.”
Ked wiped back a tear. “Is that what set you off drinking again?”
Dan hated the disapproval on his son’s face. “I don’t really feel up to discussing it, Ked. Maybe later.”
“Six months, Dad.”
Dan started to motion with his hands, but Ked cut him off. “If you don’t agree, I’m going to move out of here and go live with Mom.”
Dan paused to take stock of the situation. His son was a meltdown waiting to happen. “Is that what you want?” he said softly. “Do you want to live with your mother?”
“No! I want to live here with you!” he said. “But if you can’t … can’t just....” The tears started flowing, cutting off the sentence.
“All right,” Dan said quietly. �
�All right. I agree.”
Ked looked up and sniffled. “You agree not to drink for six months — starting today?”
“Yes. I agree not to drink for six months.”
Ked’s stance relaxed a little. “Okay.”
Dan wanted to say something to lighten the situation. “But your Uncle Donny’s going to kill me when I tell him I can’t even have a beer with him.…”
“No, he’s not.” Ked shook his head. “I already talked to him. He agrees with me. You’ve got to stop.”
Six months. Surely there would be any number of valid reasons not to keep the promise. Like right now, Dan thought. A drink would have gone a long way toward making his hangover just a little more bearable. How was he going to concentrate at work when it got really stressful? Sometimes things brooded on the horizon for hours waiting for a trigger, lying there inert then overtaking him all at once, unleashing their fury like a sudden storm. The searing, sizzling, electric dazzle of it. A desert rock, a splash of water, high noon. The pressure could build for hours, but all it took was one flashpoint to unleash his desire for a drink, and it all came crashing down. Leaving him exhausted, deflated, defeated. Disgusted with having lost control over himself once again.
Obviously he was going to have plenty to do to redeem himself in Ked’s eyes. How had the father-son equation got so turned around?
Dan went back out to the scramble of photographs and documents spread across his rug. He gathered up the pieces and left the file on the dining room table. He dialled Donny’s number. Better to confront the beast sooner than later. Donny picked up.
“Et tu, Brute?” Dan said.
“Then fall, Caesar.” Donny blew a well-considered breath across the line. “I’m sorry, but I agree with your son. Just be glad we spared you the video cameras and the weeping host and the public intervention on television. But if you’re thinking about not living up to your promise, I wouldn’t do it.”
“No?”
“You sure like to make ’em suffer, don’t you?”
Dan said nothing.
“Word of advice, Danny? Don’t disappoint your son. He’s very vulnerable right now. It’s bad enough you didn’t believe his stories about nicking junk at school, but this might do some permanent damage to your relationship if you’re not careful.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. And that’s why I’m telling you myself.”
“I hear you. Thanks.”
Dan went upstairs to the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and stood in the shower under the cold water until it hurt. Whatever good it might do to punish himself for what had happened to his mother and whatever had or had not happened in his life, unlike his own father, Dan didn’t intend to hurt anyone else with it. Ked least of all. It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself and get on with things. If what he’d learned in Sudbury could give him anything, then it could give him that.
Twenty-Two
Now Playing
The day for the planned porn sequel had arrived. Hardly the final instalment of Lord of the Rings or even The Godfather Part III, but still, Dan wasn’t about to miss the premiere of Richard Philips’s latest. He walked along the eastern perimeters of the Danforth, silently studying the words raised a head above the sidewalk: Zam-Zam Beauty School, Pro-Tax Accounting, Yummy Delicious Good Food. Hand-painted signs on plywood with lights affixed bore the perennial optimism of the eternally down-at-heel. He paused when he came to the Islamic-Christian Friendship Society. Was there any cause more hopeless at the moment? What well-meaning but futile urge lay behind the establishment of such a thing?
High over the rundown storefronts, a militant billboard proclaimed to the faithful that “You Deserve A Better Life.” A message of salvation from an organization claiming to be “Debt Counsellors Since 1966.” Dan imagined the first hopefuls lining up for the offer of a better life all those years ago. Had they achieved a better life or anything remotely like it? Was there someone even now passing by and looking up, thankful that a similar moment had saved him from a life of perpetual misery all those years ago? Or had those first clients just bumped through life from one misery to another and died eventually, the only end to debt they’d ever had?
Dan chose Yummy Delicious Good Food for a vantage point — half because he felt sorry for the place and half because it looked a step or two up from the donut shop on the opposite corner. Besides, it had its own soundtrack: Hank Williams Jr.’s “Hey, Good Lookin’” blared from tinny loudspeakers with its invitation to cook something up together. For all intents and purposes, it was as though the fifties never ended. A quick glance around the brown-on-orange interior with its garish lime green tablecloths and the display of yesterday’s tea biscuits and revamped muffins under fingerprint-marred glass sent a further message that no one cared about the food any more than they were concerned with interior design or current music trends.
A tiny man whose chin seemed glued to his chest pivoted to regard the newcomer. Dan tried not to stare before realizing he was the one being stared at. To the man’s left sat a wreck with a bloated face and swollen nose. Her drink-inflamed skin looked as though it couldn’t decide where to settle, a herd of nomadic goats roaming across her cheeks. Another poor thing sat wistfully in the window wearing a yellow cardigan with a rose scarf tied neatly around her throat. Her idea of a bit of bright or just a subconscious urge to leave it all behind, like Isadora, with a quick jaunt in a Bugatti? Dan felt himself a relative beauty here. Lonely, sad, and unwanted — he called them the Eleanor Rigbys, friendless by chance or maybe even by design. Then again, who needed the grief that friendship brought? They were the city’s detritus, its social castaways.
While others his age were moving in droves to Parkdale, awed to find drunks and crack addicts huddled on their doorsteps as though that constituted a more resonant form of city life, Dan had moved to Leslieville. Parkdale was for the middle-class kids who’d never experienced life outside the suburbs. Con artists went there to practise scams that were old in the forties and left feeling sad and somehow ashamed — something about children and candy. At least the rich kids knew better. Some days it seemed the city was filled with a million voyeurs. All audience and no show. Yet compared to this ’hood, even Parkdale seemed a buggy ride in Chelsea. But Dan had begun in the east and in the east he would stay.
He sat and watched the entrance to Moonlight Videos. Daylight was beginning to fade. No one came or went by the front door. After a half-hour, he began to wonder if the shoot had been cancelled. Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to him that even a minor operation like Moonlight Videos might have a stage door. A private entrance for the artistes. He finished his coffee — surprisingly good for the looks of the place — and left.
A halo of lamplights brought the sky down low, making the street look like the backdrop to a Victorian melodrama. Pigeons cooed restlessly in the twilight. He crossed the road, eyes peeled for anything showing in the upstairs window; there was no sign of life.
He turned into a back alley, trying to decide which of the broken down doorways hidden by cast-off sofas, disintegrating cardboard boxes, and bags of rotting garbage belonged to Moonlight Videos. He was in luck. A hand-written note beckoned over a buzzer that glowed faintly in the semi-dark. He pressed the buzzer and heard the automated click. He entered and climbed two flights of dimly lit stairs with a single entrance at the top. He knocked and opened the door.
A wiry man with a clipboard glanced up. “Hi — come on in.” He looked Dan over, his face registering interest. “You’re just in time. You’re a top, right? I told them I needed a top.”
Dan looked over the man’s shoulder and spotted his prey in jeans and a tank-top among the handful of people in the room. Dan pointed him out. “Sorry to spoil your party, but I’m here to take that boy with me.”
“Oh.” The man’s face tightened. “You his father?”
“No.”
“Who are you then? I’ve got an ID card that says h
e’s eighteen.”
“And I’ve got a court order that says he’s a juvenile. Want to see it?” Dan offered the paper to the man, whose face turned the colour of ash.
“What the fuck’s going on here?” And in came the Man in the Moon himself: a short, smudge-faced gump puffing on a cigar, as pocked and cratered as the dead rock itself. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Dan Sharp — private investigations. You own this place?”
The man’s bravado faltered and died. “I’m Dave Henigar. Yes, this is my operation.” He paused. “Are you a cop?”
Dan shook his head. “I said ‘private.’ But I’ve got a piece of paper saying I can take that boy” — he pointed at Richard — “with me when I leave.”
The hard look on Henigar’s face returned, a barely contained fury that proclaimed him a force to be reckoned with. Without the court document, Dan wouldn’t want to be confronting this man. He waved the letter under his nose. The offer to peruse it was turned down again.
“Believe me,” Dan said. “You’re better off if I take him off your hands, but I’ll call in help from the police if I have to.”
The man looked over at Richard. Ash fell from his cigar. “He’s just partying with us.”
“He made a movie for you last month,” Dan said.
The man’s eyes flashed venom. He barked at Richard. “You — kid! Get over here. Now!”
Richard scrambled toward them and stood there nervously.
“This guy says you’re underage. That true?”
The boy’s eyes flickered at Dan. “No.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” the man growled.
“I’m not — I’m eighteen. My name’s Lester Higgins.”
“His name is Richard Philips,” Dan told the fat man. “He turned fifteen last month and he ran away from home in July.” Dan waved the paper at Richard, and for once someone took it. “Is that you?”
Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 28