“Really?” I said. I opened up the box and took it out. Yeah, there it was, about the size of a deck of playing cards. I’m kind of a nut for that sort of thing. I recognized it as an old Russian model.
“Weird,” I said.
“Anything else?” Dean asked.
“Yeah, there was one last thing. Apparently a couple of days before Brucie died, he’d called up our cleaning lady. He was desperate, kept asking her about a black box.”
“A black box?”
“Yes, where’s the black box? He said it was under his bed but now it was gone.”
“And she didn’t know what he was talking about?”
“No,” Jay said. “Neither do I.”
“Hmm,” Dean said.
We put down our little coffee cups and stood up.
“I’m going to go check the bedroom,” Dean said.
“I’ll wait down for you here,” Jay said, and looked back out the window at that big yard, the pool, the volleyball net sagging in on itself. All that stuff. Funny how empty the things money can buy seem when the things it can’t are gone.
6
Dean went into Brucie’s room and stood holding the door until I came inside, and then he shut it behind me. It was unsaid but understood that my permission to be in the room with him was conditional on my shutting up and staying out of his way.
Maybe it’s time to make something clear: Dean was a sickeningly good detective. It wasn’t that he figured things out quickly. It was the exact opposite. It was that he steadily, deliberately didn’t figure things out.
We always rush to make up a story to explain the world around us. Why we broke up with a girl, why we don’t quit our job, why the other driver on the 401 is the dickhead, and not us. And pretty soon you stop seeing with your eyes the stuff that doesn’t fit in with the story you made up in your head.
Dean didn’t do that. He stripped away every story, every theory, every explanation, like layers of paint, until eventually the thing itself stood naked before him. He wasn’t an easy guy to fool, our Dean. You should have seen him in California. It was epic.
“Hmm,” Dean said, as he stood in the centre of the room with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted at a slight angle. “Hmm, hmm, hmm.”
Big room, as you’d expect for an only child with a rich dad. The ceiling slanted down at an angle and the room itself was irregular. The bed was tucked in the corner in sort of a nook. Childish posters were on the wall, illustrations from Treasure Island and Robin Hood. A shelf of books (mostly comics collected in trade paperback form) stood next to a sturdy, expensive desk (antique maybe) bearing a sleek fire-engine-red laptop, as well as boxes of pencil crayons, brushes, paper and other artistic supplies and stacks of sketches of superheroes.
A picture of Brucie and Jay was on one of the shelves. I went over and picked it up. The kid looked like his dad, same sloped shoulders, husky physique, shy smile. He was taller though, broader, and had a terrible haircut. A big, goofy kid.
“Can you put that back please?” Dean asked.
I did and retreated back to the door.
Dean turned on the laptop and was confronted with a request for a password. He grunted.
“Can you take this in to someone and see if they can figure out how to get past this?”
“No problem,” I said.
“You might have to do the same thing with the phone.”
“I can but try,” I said.
Dean carefully began to search the room. He started with the bed, pulling back the sheets and carefully checking the mattress. He looked at everything on the shelves, turning them over in his hands, sometimes even holding them up to his nose. That careful, present, look in his face. Under the bed he discovered a little filing system, which kept him busy for a while.
I knew it would bug him but I was getting restless so I started looking around. I opened the closet door. It was a big one – a walk in – but Brucie hadn’t been a clothes guy. Half of the stuff on the hangers seemed to be old Halloween costumes. About seven or eight long rectangular boxes were sitting on the floor. I opened one, and saw that it was full of comic books, each one in a little sealed plastic bag with a cardboard backing. I flipped through them. They were organized alphabetically. Avengers, Black Panther, Captain America, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four. And that was just Marvel. Another box I opened had DC: Aquaman, Batman, Detective Comics, Flash and Green Lantern.
One of the boxes was a little bigger and heavier than the others. The comic books inside were in hard plastic containers that were sealed shut. They made a clacking noise as I flipped through them. Each one had a label at the top, usually coloured blue, although a few were yellow or purple. The letters “CQC” were in the middle of the label, along with a bar code and a serial number, while a number between 1.0 and 9.9 was on the left and a hologram was on the right. These comics seemed older, like from the 70s and 80s. They were organized by date, instead of by name, and they were mostly issues of Amazing Spider-man.
The last box was empty, which struck me as odd. It had a title (Detective Comics #66) and a grade (9.0) but the seal had been broken and the comic was missing.
“Dean,” I said, “check this out and tell me what you think.”
I thought Dean sighed a little, but it could have been my imagination. He came over and asked: “What have you got?”
“Look,” I said.
He studied the empty box. “What is this?”
“I don’t know. Looks like Brucie was a comic guy. Big collection. Most of his comics are in plastic bags, but some of the older ones are in these fancy boxes. This one was empty.”
“Good catch,” Dean said.
Dean and I searched the room down to every last detail but we didn’t find anything else of interest. I took the computer and Dean took some stuff from the file organizer, receipts and phone bills and such, but that was it.
Jay was still down in the solarium.
“We’re going to go check out the bridge,” Dean said.
“Okay,” Jay said.
“Do you know Brucie’s computer and phone passwords?”
“His computer, no,” Jay said. “The phone is 7844.”
Dean wrote that down. “One last thing. Do you know anything about this?” Dean said, and showed him the empty box.
Jay took it in his hands.
“That’s odd,” Jay said. “This is mine. Or at least, I think it is. I don’t remember it being a 9. Brucie must have taken it from my collection downstairs. I wonder why it’s out of the box.”
“Can we check?” Dean asked.
So we went downstairs. The basement was semi-furnished, with foosball and air hockey tables. There were boxes and boxes of comic books, some in plastic sleeves, but most in clear plastic CQC cases. Jay flicked through them and found his copy of Detective Comics #66, the cover showing Batman on a tightrope while Robin hung from the hands of a giant clock. A man in a fedora was shooting a pistol at Batman from a rooftop. The words “Meet Two-Face” were printed at the top of the page.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “See, look at this. My copy is only 6.5. I wonder where Brucie got that box from. That’s probably about a $5,000 comic. I didn’t see anything about comics on his most recent credit card statement.”
“We’ll take a look at some of his older statements and be in touch,” Dean said. “Thanks Jay.”
7
We took a short stroll down the leaf-lined street to the bridge. A raised sidewalk was on either side of the road, and good thing too, because the cars drove by awfully fast for a residential street. A thick concrete railing, about four feet high, separated us from the drop. Every ten feet or so there was a pillar that leaned away from the bridge at a bit of an angle.
We both looked down. It was odd to see the tops of trees.
“About 50 or 60 yards I guess,” Dean said.
“You wouldn’t necessarily die from that, would you?”
“No,” Dean said, “but you easily could.
It depends how you land. I’ve heard that anything over 30 feet is 50/50.”
The Don River runs like a scar across the east side of the city, and sends up forested tendrils into different neighborhoods. Toronto isn’t exactly nature tourist heaven, not like Calgary, or even Montreal, but it’s criss-crossed by a lot of ravines, and there are plenty of nice parks. They aren’t nicely manicured like Central Park or anything; they still feel a little wild. On a good day you might see a deer.
“Let’s go down there and take a quick look,” Dean said.
So, we headed back off the bridge and navigated our way down the steep slope, using the tree roots that stuck out of the ground like rungs or steps, and trying not to slip on the slick dirt. At the bottom it was dark and cold. The light filtered through the branches at a steep angle.
We didn’t find anything of course, no dark patch on the ground or crucial little piece of evidence. Just the smell of urine and the usual graffiti, tags made in spray paint, so-and-so sucks cock.
“Hmm,” Dean said.
We took the path back up into the sunlight.
“Ok,” Dean said. “You busy tomorrow?”
“You mean Sunday? I’m watching football. “
“Okay, Monday.”
“Right now, everything is clear.”
“Well, I’m pretty jammed. How about this. Take a look at the credit card and bank statements and do a recon. See if you can figure out what all those charges are, and see if you can find when and where he bought that comic. Take a look at his phone. See who he was calling and who was calling him. And try to get into his computer. Hopefully he saved all his Facebook and email passwords. If not, I don’t know. Maybe we can use the death certificate to get that info from someone.”
“Yeah, we can figure that out,” I said.
“I’m pretty busy at work, whatever Jay says, but let’s plan to talk to the cop on Monday night. Sound good?”
“Great,” I said.
“Okay,” Dean said. “Let’s go home for dinner.”
8
Dean had a great house at Bloor and Jane, not far from the subway, with a lawn and a garden and everything.
“How’d you afford this? I asked.
“My wife paid for it,” he said
And then we opened the front door and Dean’s wife came up to meet us.
“Terrell! How nice to see you!”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was no reason to be surprised. Dean had worked for years in the adult film industry; it was not particularly surprising that he’d married a porn star. And Tina (who I’d actually only met once before) was a very wonderful person. Good looking too, with wide hips and big boobs and platinum blond hair. She was a bit heavier than when I’d seen her all those years ago, but she was over forty now. She still looked great.
It’s hard for me to really remember what my initial impression was. I was surprised, definitely. And I was happy too. Like I said, Tina was one of those people who seem to have an inexhaustible store of kindness, who really thought the best of everyone. I think I remember feeling like maybe that was a great match, Dean with his inner darkness and his history of substance abuse, but being such a smart and great guy, with this nice person to understand him, to baby him, even.
But although I can’t be sure, I think I remember being uneasy about it too. Was there something maybe a bit off about it? Dean, smart and cynical and sort of, I don’t know, not all that lusty, with this big beautiful porn star, who although not a bimbo, necessarily, is maybe not really what you’d call an intellectual?
I’m not sure though. Maybe that’s just hindsight. Maybe that’s just me trying to make myself feel better about how things went down.
“Tina!” I said. “Holy shit!”
We embraced and I came inside.
“I haven’t seen you in eight years,” she said in her high, airy voice. “Crazy that you moved here too!”
“It’s a small world,” I said.
I was re-introduced to Krystal, now a teenager (which made me feel old) and I was respectfully shown baby Joseph, who was upstairs slumbering in his crib. That one was Dean’s I gathered.
I sat in the back yard on an aluminum chair and drank a glass of wine with Dean.
“Don’t talk about the detective work,” he said. “I’m going to tell her. Just not tonight.”
“Okay.”
I was taking a sip of wine as Tina brought out a tray of hors d’oeuvres.
“Man,” I said. “This wine is great. Was it expensive?”
“Eight bucks a bottle,” Dean said.
“Isn’t he awful?” Tina said. “He gets me all the time.”
“Well, I like it,” I said, and attacked the guacamole.
“Dean won’t let me buy anything expensive unless I can tell the difference in a blind taste test.”
“Harsh,” I said. “Wait, no. Now that I think of it, that’s pretty fair.”
“Exactly!” Dean said.
“Terrell,” she said, and leaned forward to slap my knee. “You’re not helping.”
“Blind experiments are the foundation of science,” Dean said. “If a company is testing a drug, they give half the patients sugar pills, and they don’t even tell the doctors which pills are real. But when a reviewer reviews a book, you can bet he knows who wrote it. When someone drinks wine, you can bet they know how much it cost or what picture it has on the label.”
I noticed that Dean had already drunk half of his glass of wine. He took up the bottle and I thought he was going to refill his glass, but instead, he topped up Tina and I, even though we’d hardly drunk anything.
“I don’t mind paying for anything if I can genuinely tell the difference,” Dean said. “But it has to be for what’s in the bottle, not what’s on it.”
“It’s not even your money,” Tina said.
“I love it,” I declared as I took a handful of stuffed mushrooms. “I love it. I’m going to start doing that.”
We chatted for a while, about how we liked Toronto, about people we used to know in California. Dean had a fancy charcoal barbeque with a separate container for woodchips and he was smoking an amazing-looking fish with the head still on. Eventually, the baby monitor started making noise and Tina left us.
“Seriously Dean,” I said, “you’ve got it made here.”
I looked around, admiring the spacious lawn, the beautiful flowers, the mature trees with their thick trunks and heavy branches. There was even a little Zen garden in the corner.
“Yeah, not bad,” Dean said.
“I’m so happy for you,” I said. And I swear, I meant it. “I was so worried about you when we split up. You didn’t look good.”
“Well,” Dean said, “Tina really helped me turn it around. I was a good ways into NA when we started seeing each other. Then she helped me get through law school. I mean, I used my own money, but she supported me.”
“Why’d you come up to Canada?”
“We both agreed it would be best if we got a change.”
“Right,” I said. I knew what he was talking about.
“The opportunity came up with Jay to come to Stewarts. I don’t think I’ll make partner but after a few years I should be able to get a good in-house job, or go to a smaller firm. Tina has a fair bit of money socked away. If we live off my salary for the next twenty years we’ll be able to retire comfortably enough.”
“Great,” I said.
“What about you? Dean asked. “How’d you end up here?”
“Well, I moved here, then I met a girl, and we got married so I wouldn’t have to go back to the States. I started doing the private eye thing. Then I got divorced.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Well, what can you do? I’m okay with it, but she still hates me. I wish we could just talk. I think about her sometimes.”
Dean didn’t pry. He just swirled the rest of his wine around in his glass and stared at it like he was panning for gold. Eventually, after some
careful consideration, he filled it halfway up.
“Two bottles in the house?”
“Yeah. Only one if we don’t have guests. If we don’t finish before I go to bed, I pour whatever’s left down the drain. Otherwise it talks to me all night.”
“Can people bring more booze with them? Say I want some gin?”
“Yes, but you have to take it with you when you leave.”
“What if I stay over?”
“It goes down the sink.”
“What if it’s that expensive gin? Bombay Sapphire?”
“The sink.”
“Harsh,” I said.
“Also. Before you are allowed to buy expensive gin, you have to be able to distinguish it from Beefeater in a blind taste test.”
I laughed. There was a comfortable pause. Then I asked:
“Dean, are you sure you’re okay with this detective thing?”
For a minute, he didn’t respond.
“Like the booze thing, right?” I said. “If you thought it would mess you up, you’d say no, right?”
Dean drank half of his glass of wine in one gulp, and gasped for breath a little, like a diver surfacing.
“I think it’ll be okay,” he said finally, which, of course, wasn’t what I’d asked him.
9
On Sunday the Saints destroyed Chicago and it was good. I snacked on carrot sticks and hit the gym for the first time in five weeks. That was good too. Monday morning I drove into work feeling at peace with myself and the world. At my desk I sipped my coffee at my desk, and perused the Globe and Mail website.
I don’t normally click on the business tab, but something guided my fingers there. And then bam!
OSC BROADENS INVESTIGATION TO INCLUDE EDENFREE BOARD LAWYER
Jason Goldstein of Stewart Brubaker questioned by OSC
“Holy shit,” I said.
I read the first few lines of the article.
Following public outcry after the production of a controversial legal opinion, the OSC has included prominent corporate lawyer Jay Goldstein in its broadening investigation into the initial public offering of Edenfree.
The release of confidential e-mails showed that Royal Toronto Bank, who underwrote the IPO, believed the stock was significantly overvalued. Wes Nolan, a member of Edenfree’s board, has also admitted that he believed that the shares were overvalued, but relied upon a legal opinion, provided by Goldstein, that he did not need to divulge his belief as it was not a “material fact.”
The Black Box: A novel Page 3