Children in the Morning

by Anne Emery

  “It could happen at any time. People don’t realize that. We do anything to really piss the Yanks off, they’re over the border in minutes. We’re a bunch of unreliable commies, far as they’re concerned. The only reason they tolerate us is that we lie down for them and enjoy it. The minute we stop playing that role, the minute, say, the NDP gets in and tries to curb foreign takeovers of our industry, bingo! We’re Guatemala, United Fruit Company is pissed, and the democratically elected government of Canada is overthrown. Think Iran 1953, think Guatemala 1954, think Chile 1973, and all the other legitimate governments that were overthrown and replaced with torture states friendly to the U.S. of A. The list goes on and on. But here’s the difference: it won’t be the usual American practice of engineering a coup and installing a friendly puppet.”

  Gordo made his hands and feet jerk up and down spasmodically as if on strings, to the delight of his young audience. “Yes, sir, Billy Bob, we’ll mow down those protesters in the name of freedom. No, sir, Bobby Joe, we won’t nationalize Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Then the puppet collapsed on the bed.

  He roused himself again and said: “No, they won’t stop at that with us. It will be the tanks rolling in, it will be an invasion, an occupation, and they’ll never leave. We’ll simply be annexed as part of the U.S.A. Canada will cease to exist as a country. I’ve got my ticket to the Netherlands for the day they move in. How about you guys?”

  The kids were staring at him, wide-eyed.

  We heard heels tapping smartly on tile, and looked up to see Mrs. Robertson, who was nearly frantic as she surveyed the party in her brother-in-law’s den.

  “Gordon! Richard has responsibilities upstairs this evening. Reverend! Mr. Collins! Don’t let my husband’s . . . sibling detain you here in this . . . this . . . My heavens! We’re serving pad Thai upstairs. Please join us. It’s the newest thing!”

  “Ah, we’re grand here, Mrs. Robertson,” Burke replied. “No worries. We’ll be joining you anon.”

  “I don’t believe this!” she wailed as she turned away.

  “Are you enjoying your time here, Gordo?” I asked when she had stalked up the stairs.

  “I enjoy my time everywhere, Monty. And I certainly enjoy the company of young Dickie here.”

  “I hope you stay forever, Gordo!”

  “I hope so, too,” Brennan muttered just loud enough for me to hear. I concurred.

  “Monty Collins!” Gordo exclaimed. “I just realized who you are. You represented Beau Delaney. Good job, congratulations! Beau’s my lawyer, has been for years. I was entangled in some nasty legal proceedings; he represented me.”

  “What was the trouble?”

  “I used to own a house, and there was an oil spill. Actually, years of leakage that I didn’t know about. And it contaminated the neighbours’ properties, and there was a hundred thousand dollars in clean-up costs, and the neighbours sued me, and I sued the oil company and the distributor, and I had to sue my own insurance company. It went on for years. I lost my house, and there were judgments against me. Hence my inability to become a responsible property owner again. None of this was Beau’s fault. The cards were stacked against us. He got me out of some other scrapes, no problem. Great guy, great lawyer.

  “Except the time he left me stranded. It was after the oil spill litigation, and all the parties were fighting over legal costs. I stood to lose, big time. Again. We were in Beau’s office getting ready for the hearing. But he forgot about an appointment he had in Toronto. A conference. He remembered quick enough when his secretary came in. ‘Dr. Brayer’s office on the line for you, Beau.’ Beau looked as if he’d got caught coming out of the shitter with his pants down. He must have thought I knew who this guy was, the doctor. Well-known, I guess, on the subject of psychopaths. Shows up every once in a while apparently as a talking head with Mansbridge on CBC. But I’d never heard of him. So Delaney had to fly out on the next flight, and I had to go to court on my own. He told me to get an adjournment till he came back, but I decided to wing it. Bad idea. I got nailed for contempt of court when I called the judge a tool of the insurance industry and a lackey for big oil. I ended up in jail for two nights. What the hell, it happens. I rag Beau about it whenever I see him, but it’s my fault, not his. And he did appeal the costs ruling, so it wasn’t as bad as it was going to be.

  “But enough about that, eh, Dick? Time to dip into the news files?”

  “Yeah!”

  “What’ll it be today? How about ‘Wedding cake icing protruding from buttocks our first clue, police say, after arrest of man in fairy-tale wedding fiasco’? Or ‘Granny gulps her dentures’?”

  “Granny and the false teeth! Read that one. You guys are going to love this,” Richard said to Normie and Ian.

  Gordo reached down behind his bed and pulled up a binder. He opened it and displayed a collection of news items. “Here we go: Granny gulps her dentures in whoopee cushion scare. By Crandall McIntosh, the Halifax Daily News.

  An eight-year-old prankster’s practical joke nearly turned into tragedy when he placed a whoopee cushion beneath the padding of his great-grandmother’s rocking chair, then watched in stunned horror as the shocked eighty-two-year-old woman swallowed the upper plate of her dentures, nearly choking to death. “We thought it would be a riot to put a whoopee cushion on Granny’s chair,” says the boy’s father, thirty-seven-year-old Jeffrey Berg. “She’s pulled many a practical joke on us in her time, so we figured turnabout was fair play. We never dreamed she’d be so startled that she’d swallow her choppers.”

  It wasn’t just the kids who enjoyed a good laugh over the story.

  “Now I see where Richard gets his sense of the absurd,” I said to Gordo.

  “What would he do without me?”

  Gordo said it lightly, but the eyes behind the rimless glasses radiated a shrewd intelligence. He had his shtick and he knew exactly what he was doing — as a rabble-rouser, and as an uncle.

  Burke and I left him to it. We went upstairs and endured the remainder of the party with the other guests. Murdoch Robertson had excused himself shortly after his arrival, saying he had work to do. When it was time to go, Lois decreed that Richard was to stand at the door and shake hands with everyone as they went out.

  “Ask yer man to come see me about teaching a class or two at the school,” Brennan said to him.

  “My dad?”

  “Your uncle.”

  Richard blinked. “Really?”

  “Sure. A couple of history classes is what I have in mind.”

  “But I thought all that stuff was, you know, just Gordo’s stories.”

  “Sadly, no. It’s the history of our times. Oh, and tell him not to arrive at the school with a big, fat spliff in his mouth.”

  “Uh . . .” Richard’s face turned pink.

  “Can you arrange that for me?”

  “Yeah! For sure!” The little boy beamed as his mother, unaware, scowled from the sidelines.

  Brennan gave Richard a little salute, I collected Normie, and we took our leave of The Olde Carriageway.

  Chapter 17

  (Monty)

  But it was back to business the next morning. Brennan’s story about someone selling access to the Delaney family had gone in one of my ears and out the other the first time I had heard it. With so much else happening, I had just let it go. Then, with Delaney’s acquittal, it had faded from my consciousness. But after the squalid scene in the church parking lot, I wanted to know what was going on. The Crown had just under two weeks to appeal, and I would be on edge till the deadline was safely behind us. I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more to the Delaney saga than I had been led to believe, and if there was bad news out there, I wanted to be prepared for it. I called Brennan after I saw a number of clients in my office. He came over, and we directed our minds to the Delaney family access scam.

  “Fill me in
on this poor little Cody,” I said.

  “Cody was one of the two boys who followed the Delaney kids to the choir school and demanded their money back. Turned out of course that the Delaney kids knew nothing about the scheme. Anyway, I spoke to the two lads, Cody and Mitchell, and got their contact information. They had each paid one hundred fifty dollars to somebody claiming he represented the Delaney family. Fifty was for a promised ride in the Mercedes van. One hundred was supposed to get them an interview with the aim of, well, becoming part of the family. Whoever cooked up this plan convinced the boys that they had a chance to join the family as foster children. Seeing what young Cody has for a family life, it’s little wonder they jumped at it. Mike O’Flaherty was on the phone all morning with social workers. He learned that Cody’s mother is a hooker. Well, we gathered that, didn’t we? She lives on and off with that individual, that pimp, who wreaked such havoc that night. He beats her, of course, and beats the young fellow. The mother does nothing to stop it, as we saw for ourselves. In fact, she sticks up for the boyfriend. At the expense of the child and anyone who tries to help. We witnessed that first-hand.”

  “As did Normie.”

  Burke closed his eyes. He put his hands to his temples and massaged them. He let out a loud, exasperated sigh, then resumed speaking: “Anyway, not surprisingly, Mike learned that Cody has been taken into care.”

  I nodded. That was inevitable. “And we’ll all be called as witnesses when the guy goes to court for assault causing bodily harm.”

  “Good,” he said. “Monty, have you ever heard of psychosocial dwarfism?”

  “I have. Also called psychogenic dwarfism. It occurs in children who are so deprived of love and nurturing that they actually fail to thrive and grow.”

  “Mike was wondering whether that might be the case with Cody. He’s thirteen years old. Only looks about ten.”

  “Could well be.”

  “I still want to make sure he’s reimbursed for the money he paid out.”

  “It will have to go to the Department of Community Services now that he’s a ward of the state.”

  “Be that as it may, I’d like to arrange it. There’s also the other young fellow, Mitchell.”

  “You know where he lives?”

  “I have his phone number.”

  “Give him a call. I assume he’ll remember your voice. How many Irishmen would he have spoken to recently?”

  “How many Irishmen have promised him money in the bank?”

  “Exactly. Go ahead.”

  Burke punched in the number. “Hello. Would Mitchell be there, please?” He waited. “All right. I’ll try another time. Could you tell him Father Burke called? What’s that? Oh.” He put his hand over the receiver. “Someone said he’s not there. Now, a second later, he is.”

  “Typical. The first response is always to claim the person’s not home.”

  He took his hand off the mouthpiece and waited. “Ah. Mitchell. It’s yourself. Good. This is Father Burke, from the choir school. That’s right, and that’s why I’m calling you. We could do that today.” Burke looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded. “No, I’m not bullshitting you. I promised, didn’t I? No police. What? No, I’ll be taking care of Cody separately. If you can meet me at the choir school within the hour, we can set up that account today. Fifteen minutes? Even better. See you there.”

  So Brennan and I made our way to the corner of Morris and Byrne streets to await Mitchell’s arrival. When he came, there were two of them. Were we going to be the next victims of a shakedown? Brennan greeted the younger boy. He was bigger than Cody, but he looked to be around the same age, thirteen or so, and hardship was stamped into his face already. The other guy was considerably bigger, and older, probably fifteen or sixteen. He, too, had been down a long, hard road.

  “Who would this be now?” Brennan asked.

  Mitchell replied: “This here’s Kyle. It happened to him, too.”

  “How many people were victims of this scam?” I asked. I refrained from asking whether they were now running a scam of their own.

  They looked at me without speaking. Brennan said to the big guy, Kyle: “This is Mr. Collins. Tell us your story.”

  “You’re the lawyer, right? That did the court case for Delaney?”

  I said I was.

  “Okay, so Corbo told me he could get the keys to the Mercedes and —”

  “Hold it a sec,” I said. “Who’s Corbo?”

  “Corbett.”

  Of course. The foster son who didn’t work out. “Okay, go on.”

  “He said we could take the Merc for a ride some night when Delaney was asleep.”

  “I see. Did he make any other kind of offer to you?”

  “No, he didn’t say nothin’ else. Like, he told Mitchell and Cody they could move into Delaney’s house with his wife and kids. He didn’t try that with me. I woulda known it was bullshit.”

  Mitchell looked down at his feet.

  “Excuse me!” I turned at the sound of a woman’s voice. She was coming towards us on Morris Street with a little curly-haired boy in a stroller. When she got past us, she lifted him out and gave him a loud kiss on his cheek. He giggled and she did it again, then placed him gently on the sidewalk. “You come with Mummy to Daddy’s office. We’ll both push the stroller, and you can walk in and show Daddy that his little boy can walk now. He’ll be so excited he won’t be able to do his work! Go ahead, darling, keep walking.”

  The little fellow wore a grin from ear to ear; he looked as if he’d won the Nobel Prize. Proudly, he toddled along the street, one hand on the side of the stroller, savouring every step. His mum beamed as she walked at his side.

  Mitchell didn’t look up.

  I turned my attention to Kyle: “How much money did Corbett demand in return for a joyride in the Mercedes?”

  I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “Seventy-five bucks,” he said.

  That could have been the truth, if the other boys were charged fifty to ride in the Mercedes minibus with Delaney at the wheel. The joyride with Corbett at the controls would have fetched a higher price. And this guy did not claim he was charged the extra amount for possible admittance to the Delaney household.

  “When did this happen?”

  Kyle and Mitchell looked at each other. Mitchell said: “After school started, right?”

  “Yeah, it was when the leaves were red and starting to come off the trees, ’cause I thought I might be able to earn the money by raking leaves for people. But everybody I asked said no. Anyway, it was last fall.”

  “Why wait till now to try to get the money back?”

  Kyle shrugged, then said: “Corbett was like ‘Don’t sweat it’ when I saw him downtown in the wintertime. He said he’d get hold of the car in the spring.”

  “I seen him, too,” said Mitchell, “and he told me some of the Delaneys’ kids would be moving out, so there’d be room for new kids in the house. And then when . . .”

  “When what?”

  “When the mother got killed, I said to Corbett ‘We won’t be able to go there now ’cause she died,’ and he said ‘Don’t worry about it. He’ll get a new one.’”

  “Who would get a new what?”

  Mitchell hesitated for a beat before replying: “Delaney would get a new woman.” His voice went up in volume when he added: “She was almost, like, Corbett’s mother, and he didn’t give a shit!”

  We were all silent as we thought that over.

  Then Burke spoke up: “All right. Mr. Collins and I will take you fellows to the nearest bank, and set up accounts for you.”

  “You’re bullshitting us, right?” Kyle asked.

  “No. Let’s take a walk. First bank we see, in we go.”

  So that’s what we did. Burke and I split the cost of repaying the boys for Corbett Reeves’s fraud,
and we put the money in accounts in the names of the two young boys. They said thanks. Burke urged them, for what it was worth, to save the money or at least use it wisely.

  “Don’t be spendin’ it like a pair of drunken gobshites! Oh, and if your mothers see your passbooks and have any questions about all this, get them to call me at St. Bernadette’s. I’ll assure them it’s all legitimate.”

  I wanted to know a bit more about Corbett Reeves before we let them go. Mitchell said he had met Corbett hanging out on the street somewhere, and the conversations about the Delaney family developed after that. The older guy, Kyle, seemed to know more. They were both anxious to get going, and I told Mitchell he could go. Brennan left with him. But I asked Kyle to stay for a minute and fill me in.

  “I met Corbo in Shelburne.” The Shelburne Youth Centre in southwestern Nova Scotia. A detention centre for young offenders.

  “When was that?”

  “A few years ago, I dunno. I was, like, thirteen. Corbo woulda been twelve, I guess, ’cause as soon as he was old enough that they could put him in there, he was in there. Cops had just been waiting for him to come of age. So anyway that’s where I met him. This old lady used to come and visit him sometimes, bring him stuff to eat. These meat pies she used to make for him.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Some relative. I think her name was Mrs. Victory. Or Vickery. Something like that. She used to drive all the way to Shelburne from someplace in the Valley, where she lived. Probably took her hours and hours to get there in this old shitbox of a car. He used to joke about what a bad driver she was, because he lived with her sometimes, and she’d take him out in the car, and she’d drive really slow and she was half blind. So Corbo would laugh about her and her meat pies. He wouldn’t even eat them, said they tasted like roadkill, and said how funny it would be if the old lady got killed in a car crash when she was bringing him a pie, and she’d be roadkill too, and somebody would make a pie out of her. Sick, eh? Like, she must have really loved him, and all he did was laugh about her behind her back, and he couldn’t care less if she died.