Striking Out

by Alison Gordon

  “God’s Law does not commit acts of vandalism,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure. But in case one of God’s more misguided servants lost his or her head for a minute, I wonder if you could ask him or her if he or she had any dealings with the homeless woman who has now gone missing.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Reverend Ken said, then turned away and joined the picket line again. No sticking around to save my soul this time.

  “If anyone wants to talk to me,” I called after him, “I’m at number 86. Across the street. Leave a note if I’m not in.”

  A few of them looked furtively at me, then resumed their head-bowed procession. Reverend Ken was leading them in prayer.

  Then I went to my car, which I had been forced to leave on the street while the laneway was closed. I had a ticket for parking without a permit. The homicide guys probably tipped off the green hornets.

  There was no traffic downtown. The weekly exodus to cottage country every summer turns Toronto into a ghost city, where tourists have a hard time finding anyone to give them directions to the Eaton Centre. I even found a parking spot on the street.

  Andy was pacing around in his bathrobe when I got to his room. A wheelchair was parked beside the door and all his belongings were piled on the bed.

  I went in and handed him the gym bag with his clothes.

  “About time,” he grumbled. “Are those my clothes?”

  He opened the bag and looked inside.

  “Lovely to see you, too,” I said.

  He pulled out his jeans and a sports shirt and threw them on the bed, then began to put on his underpants and socks.

  “Thanks,” he said, absentmindedly. “Pack that stuff on the bed. My toilet kit’s in the bathroom.”

  “Yes, massa.”

  He didn’t notice. I went and got his things, checked the little locker for forgotten items, and put his books, cards, and cribbage board in the bag with the rest of the stuff.

  “Any prescriptions to fill?”

  “I’ve got some for pain pills, but I won’t need them.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, under my breath. In the meantime, he was in obvious pain just trying to lean over to tie his shoes. I went to help him.

  “I can do it,” he snapped.

  “Fine. Get in the chair. I’ll just roll you down and park you in the lobby, then come around for you in the car.”

  “Forget the wheelchair,” he said.

  “They don’t let you leave on your own feet,” I said. “They don’t want you to fall and break your leg in the lobby, one, because they’re afraid you’ll sue, and two, in your case, they want to make sure they’re rid of you. Get in the chair.”

  I wheeled him past the nursing station, where they bid him a pleasant enough farewell, considering the trouble he’d been.

  While we were waiting for the elevator, Dr. Griffith and his entourage came around the corner. They stopped to say goodbye.

  “Take care of yourself,” the doctor said to Andy, then turned to me.

  “I’ve already explained to him that he’ll be convalescing for six to eight weeks. Try to make sure he rests at least every afternoon for a while. But there’s no need to baby him otherwise. He can start light exercise right away.”

  “It will be hard to stop him.”

  The elevator door opened, and Andy wheeled himself on, cutting the doctor short. I shook Griffith’s hand and thanked him before following.

  When the elevator got to the main floor, I left Andy where he was and stomped off, telling him to meet me at the door. One of the other passengers, no doubt astonished by my rudeness, pushed the wheelchair off.

  Once in the car, Andy filled the silence, prattling on about how happy he was to be out of there. I grunted replies.

  “What’s the problem?” he finally asked.

  “What was it Louis Armstrong said when someone asked him to explain jazz? If you’ve got to ask, you’ll never understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Later,” I said, parking illegally in front of the drugstore around the corner from our house. “I’ll just get your prescription filled.”

  “I told you, I won’t need it.”

  “Way things are going, I might.” I said.

  When I came out of the store, Andy had turned the radio on. We didn’t speak.

  I pulled the Citroën up onto the sidewalk in front of the house.

  “Can you manage?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll get you settled, then put the car away.”

  “I’m fine,” he snapped.

  Once inside, though, he accepted my help, and by the time we were halfway up the stairs, I could feel his weight on my shoulder.

  “Haven’t done stairs in a while.” he laughed.

  I left him on the couch, brought his bag into the hall, then parked the car. When I got back inside, he was in the kitchen. The kettle was on.

  “I thought a cup of tea might be nice,” he said. “Like my mother says, cheery.”

  “We can use all the cheer we can get.” I said.

  “Touché.”

  I smiled in spite of myself.

  “Nothing like a spot of tea to ward off rude assholes,” he tried.

  “Nothing like.”

  I moved away and went to the stove.

  “Are you sure you don’t want coffee?”

  “You mean coffee, tea, or me?”

  I looked at him, surprised.

  “The doctor talked about bed rest.” he shrugged. “We could probably both use some. Not to mention the light exercise.”

  I turned off the flame under the kettle and followed him down the hall.

  Chapter 27

  “It’s fine, really.”

  I was talking to Andy’s back, and I was lying. He knew it.

  “A week ago you were practically dead.” I went on. “You can’t expect to be back to normal this quickly.”

  “Next you’ll tell me I’ll look back at this and laugh.” he muttered into his pillow.

  “Well, you will.” I said. “If you weren’t such a prune you’d be laughing now.”

  “Are you laughing?”

  “I would be, if I didn’t think it would get me in deep shit.”

  He rolled over, sighed, and put his hand to my cheek.

  “Go ahead, laugh.” he said, smiling wearily. “Laugh at the crippled gallant officer, struck down in his prime, wounded in ways incurable by modern medicine. See if I care.”

  “As T.C. would say, ‘Yeah, right.’ You going to stay in bed for a while?”

  “I guess.”

  “Yell if you want anything. I’ll be upstairs in my study.”

  “You working?”

  “I promised Jake a column for Sunday. I might as well get it out of the way. Sleep. I’ll wake you for lunch.”

  When I got to the study, I phoned Moira Bell at SisterLink.

  “I’m not asking if Maggie’s been in,” I said, quickly, when I reached her. “I just have some information for you.”

  “I know. The police were here this morning,” she said. “I gather they want her to help with their inquiries, as the saying goes. We weren’t able to tell them anything, either.”

  I told her what I knew and we agreed to keep in touch.

  I called the NOW number again, and listened to the familiar recording and left another message.

  I looked up the number for the NOW editorial office. The young woman who answered told me there was no direct way to get in contact with a person who had placed an ad.

  “Can I find out if he called in and picked up the message?”

  “Can’t help you there,” she said.

  “Is there anyone who could?”

  “Moment, please.”<
br />
  I was disconnected. Cursing, I punched redial. This time, a man answered who managed to connect me with the woman in charge of the classified ads. She was marginally more helpful, once I explained I wasn’t some lust-crazed reader looking to get in direct touch with one of her kinkier advertisers.

  “So what happens? When I place an ad, I get a number to call for messages?”

  “And an access code.”

  “Can anyone else get at them?”

  “Not without your access code.”

  “What about you? Can’t people in the office get at them?”

  “Well, I guess we could. But we don’t.”

  “Never?”

  “There might be exceptions,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’d have to check, but we’re pretty strict.”

  “What if the client forgets his access code?”

  “If he knew his own phone number, which is what we use for identification, there shouldn’t be any problem.”

  “Do you ever get ads placed from out of town?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you check for me if an ad from last week was local or out of town?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give out that information.”

  I argued with her for about five minutes, but she wouldn’t budge. I gave up. There were other ways.

  A few years before, Tanya Lowell, a reporter from NOW, had done a remarkably good piece on women sportswriters, considering how often that ground has been dug up. I checked the masthead and found that she was still there, as a contributing editor.

  Journalists are like pack rats. I never throw anything away, just in case it becomes useful someday. I had stashed Tanya’s home number in the media directory of my computer, and it still worked. She agreed to meet me for a drink later in the day. She had to go into the office, anyway, which was on the Danforth.

  Then I managed to cobble together eight hundred words for Sunday’s paper by calling a couple of the Titan minor league teams. Attendance was up. I talked to the top triple-A pitcher, who gave me some good quotes about his frustration about the strike, which was going to mess up his expected September call-up. The piece wasn’t going to win any awards, but at least it was an original take on the whole situation.

  Andy and I spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden. T.C. and Sally joined us for a welcome-home lunch. She brought champagne and I made a big salad. Then Andy read and dozed on a lawn chair while I continued my battle against the weeds, which always end up being the healthiest plants in my garden.

  At 4:30, I showered, dressed, woke Andy up long enough to get him settled on the couch, and walked to Allen’s Restaurant across from the NOW office.

  Tanya was waiting for me in a booth along the side wall, an intense, angular young woman, dressed in a black T-shirt, army-surplus shorts, and black lace-up boots, smoking a menthol cigarette hungrily. I apologized for being late.

  “I was early,” she said, lighting a fresh cigarette off her first. “I had to get out of the office. Did you see the piece I did this week? About those God’s Law loonies?”

  “Tell me about it. They’re picketing my block.”

  She blew smoke and laughed.

  “Then you can imagine the messages I had waiting for me.”

  A waiter in a white shirt and a tie with most of the Marx brothers on it stood by the booth as if he were rehearsing for the role of a butler in a British farce. He probably was. Half the waiters in the place seemed to be actors between engagements.

  “May I offer a libation?”

  “The usual,” Tanya said, barely looking up.

  “Something cold,” I said. “Beer. Do you have Upper Canada Lager on draught?”

  “Of course,” he said, inclined his shaved head slightly, then turned smartly on his heel and went to the bar.

  “I’ve had a couple of run-ins with Reverend Ken,” I said. “In fact, he may be tied in with the situation I want to talk to you about.”

  I told her about Maggie’s disappearance, and the subsequent discovery of the body, as well as my theory about the NOW ad.

  “If I could find out who placed the ad, I might be able to figure out why she ran. It might not even be connected to the death in the laneway.”

  The waiter came back with my beer and a frosty Martini for Tanya. It looked tempting.

  “Have you told all this to the police?” Tanya asked, after he left. “I’m sure they could get the info from the paper.”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose. But the cops I’ve been talking to are after Maggie, and I think she’ll need some help.”

  “Why do you want to help her?”

  “For one thing, she’s made friends with some kids I’m very fond of, and they’re really worried about her. I want to give them a hand.”

  “But she could be a murderer.”

  “For the moment, I can’t believe she is. If she did do it, I’m not about to hide her out or anything. But I’m afraid she might be in danger, and I’d like to find her.”

  “I’m not sure if I could get at the information.”

  “All I need is the name and address of the person who put the ad in. The phone number. And, if possible, any of the messages on the tape. If I knew who else replied, it could tell me more who might have sold her out.”

  “It’s a good story,” she admitted. “Especially if there’s a God’s Law tie-in. I’d love to get something on those guys.”

  “And if you help me, I can make sure you get the information first,” I said, knowing the way to a journalist’s heart. I felt a pang of disloyalty to the Planet, but not enough to stop.

  Tanya looked at me for a minute, considering. Then she stubbed her cigarette, ate the olive from her empty Martini glass, and got up from the table.

  “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I ordered another round in her absence, and watched the people gradually filling up the bar area. Allen’s seems to be world headquarters for guys with grey ponytails.

  Tanya was back in ten minutes, looking conspiratorial. She sat down, took a folded piece of paper out of her shorts pocket, and slid it across the table.

  I unfolded it to find a name—T. R. Keenan—and a phone number.

  “I called the number,” Tanya said. “It’s a private eye’s office. I got a machine but didn’t leave a message.”

  “That’s great. I’ll try it in the morning. What about the messages?”

  “The guy who can tell me how to get at them is gone for the weekend. I’ll have to talk to him Monday.”

  She agreed to call me as soon as she had something. We chatted about other things long enough for me to finish my beer, then I left her to the grey ponytails and headed for home.

  Chapter 28

  Sunday was quiet. I left a message for the private eye first thing in the morning, but he didn’t call back. Sally and I convinced T.C. and his friends to leave the sleuthing to the police. Andy and I went for a walk in the afternoon, but stayed out of laneways.

  “You’re just asking for trouble,” he said, when I suggested we go look at the crime scene, which was no longer off-limits. “For yourself, and, may I remind you, for me.”

  “Let’s go where Maggie was, then. You can look at the blood. The guy got stabbed. Maybe it is his after all.”

  “Walt Stimac is in charge,” he said. “Can’t you just enjoy a beautiful afternoon?”

  I gave in, in the end. We went and had a coffee under the awning of the sidewalk patio of one of the Greek restaurants and watched the parade go by: stern-faced mothers in their Sunday finery keeping their eyes on their teenaged daughters; young men leaning on muscle cars, talking sports and eyeing the same daughters; old men arguing in Greek, no doubt fighting ancient political battles; rollerbladers weaving in and out through the cro
wds; middle-aged yuppie dads with babies in chest-packs, wives in Birkenstocks, and dogs wearing bandannas. The Danforth on a summer Sunday afternoon is as far from the old Toronto the Good and Boring as it is possible to get without an airline ticket.

  “Isn’t this better than playing detective?” Andy asked. I had to admit he was right.

  “I can’t remember the last time we’ve been able to hang out on a summer weekend,” I said. “No ballgames, no road trips. I could get used to this.”

  “You’d go nuts,” he said. “I give your mellow mood about another week.”

  “You’re probably right. Anyway, if the strike doesn’t get resolved soon, they’ll send me off somewhere. I might as well enjoy this while I can.”

  We stayed out for a couple of hours, until Andy got tired. The walk home was slow, and as soon as we got there, he downed a couple of Tylenol 3s. The pain put him in a bad mood again, so I retreated to my study.

  The phone rang at about seven, when I was thinking of starting dinner. It was Janet Sachs.

  “I just got a call from Maggie,” she said.

  “Did she tell you where she is?”

  “She wouldn’t say. I told her the police wanted to talk to her and she just hung up.”

  “Well, at least we know she’s alive.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “You should probably call the police.”

  “But I’ve got nothing to tell them.”

  “They’ll want to know she’s still around.”

  “But I don’t want to betray her. You don’t think she did it, do you?”

  “I don’t know. You know her better than I do.”

  “Not really. I just gave her a roof to sleep under.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “They might put a tap on my line or something, and trace her if she calls again.”

  “They might.”

  “Listen, forget we had this conversation, all right?”

  “What conversation?”

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I hear anything more.”

  I hung up and went downstairs to check on Andy. He was sound asleep in bed, with Elwy curled up in the crook of his knees. I closed the door, then went back to my study. I was sitting there staring at the wall half an hour later when Andy called up the stairs to me.