Needles

by William Deverell

  Giulente squinted at the subpoena. “I don’t know nothing about it, Mr. Harrison. Jimmy Fat used to come in here, is all. What do you drink?”

  “Rye. Whatever you got. Bar rye, water on the side. Sit down, Alice.”

  She did, and Giulente went for the drink. Carson leaned on her elbows, her face in her hands, and gave the policeman her big, winning, number-one smile. “You wear that ugly scowl just for work, or does it sit there on your face all the time?”

  “What’s the story?”

  “Gee, well, you know, I was told by Mr. Smythe-Baldwin that I don’t have to say a goddamn thing to you.” But she was still smiling.

  “You’re going to be a witness, hey?”

  “Yep. I got me one of them things you gave to Joey.” Giulente brought the drink and quickly edged off. “But I like to be open,” she said. “I got nothing to hide.”

  “So I noticed.”

  “Yeah, it gets cold if you don’t move around a lot.” She winked. “Well, okay, December third, a Saturday night. The place was pretty full, like it is tonight. Dr. Au was here until about nine-thirty, had steak and lobster. Nice man, big tipper, sharp dresser, very dis-tang-way and charming. You should try it sometime, detective. He sat with Ev Cudlipp back here in one of these booths. Let’s see — other side of the room, about third down. Ev had a steak. Always a big T-bone. They were here three hours. Ev checked the time with me when they left. Woops.”

  Carson had knocked over the water-on-the-side, and it slopped off the table onto Harrison’s lap.

  “My, I’m careless. Dear, dear.” She leaned over with a serviette and rubbed his legs near the crotch. Smoldering, Harrison pushed her hand away hard.

  “Get off, lady, get . . . God damn!” His head was red from neck to pate with anger and embarrassment. She shrugged, gave him a teasing sad look, and walked away. Harrison rose to go to the washroom and clean up. He would talk to Giulente, then go home to bed. The hell with it.

  A hand took him by the shoulder, and he wheeled about, ready to plow the trespasser.

  “Detective Harrison? I’m Superintendent Charrington, RCMP. I was told I could find you here. I want to introduce you to Jess Flaherty, from Washington.”

  Before going to Tann’s house, Cobb had cooked up a big shot with the last of his dope, deciding to defer until the morrow the problem of how to handle going without. If he could handle it at all. It would be a very damn cold turkey in the morning. But tonight he wanted to be straight enough to relax and enjoy the friendly company of Ms. Jennifer Tann. And so far, he had done just that. She really could cook Moo Goo Gai Pan, as advertised. There had also been almond cookies from her oven that crumbled lightly in the mouth. The talk tonight had been warm and lively. With unspoken suggestions of intimacy. Okay. But what came after? Was he to seduce — or, in more liberated fashion, allow himself to be seduced?

  He rummaged through his musty old library of sexual prowess, failed to find an appropriate source of material, and decided to sit back in a stuffed chair — Tann was perched like a swallow on a large, inviting chesterfield — filled his pipe with pungent tobacco, and tried to centre himself, whatever that involved, by studying the outlines of the large mandala on her window.

  Tann looked balefully at his pipe and the creased leather pouch from which he was pulling pinches of shredded tobacco. “Why don’t we try putting something in your pipe that smells a little sweeter?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon. This is a fine blend of old Virginia inner tube.”

  Tann went to her bedroom and returned with a silver jewellery box. “Now we’ll get rid of all this goat dung in here,” she said, plucking the unlit pipe from his mouth, dumping the tobacco, and fitting a copper screen into the bowl. She removed a cube of hashish from the silver box, warmed it with a match, and crumbled a bit into the pipe. “Afghani black. Super stone.”

  Cobb looked at her evenly, without a trace of a smile. “Won’t this lead to harder stuff?”

  “You’re too much. Just relax and don’t get uptight. You may not get stoned the first time. I didn’t the first time I smoked dope. Or at least I thought I didn’t. Getting stoned is a sort of learned response.”

  “I won’t lose control and start attacking you like some wild animal?”

  “I should be so lucky.” She lit up, then puffed hard for a few seconds to get a good burn, then passed the pipe to Cobb. He took a draw on it, then blew the smoke out.

  “Aw, Jesus,” she said, “don’t you go to the movies?”

  “I guess I blew it.”

  She snorted. “Take it in your lungs and hold it.”

  Cobb did it straight the next time, sucking the sweet smoke into his lungs.

  They passed the pipe until it burned out. Cannabis always made Cobb garrulous. “Well, here I am,” he said, “a fusty old conservative lawyer sitting in a hippie pad consuming illicit narcotics with a young lady who obviously subscribes to all sorts of kinky radical ideas.” Tann by now was stretched lengthwise on the chesterfield, her bare feet on its arm, her skirt hem somewhere above her knees — and inching, it seemed, gradually higher — her hands behind her head. She was smiling, glowing. Cobb kept on. “What work of Satan has so corrupted my stern soul that I indulge in such evil practice? Sitting here in a drug-maddened state. A beautiful woman — with a pair of amazing legs — lying near me, close enough to touch.”

  “Yeah, but I notice you haven’t.” True enough. He didn’t quite know why.

  They looked hard at each other, then suddenly Tann blinked, shook her head, smoothed her skirt down, and rose from the chesterfield.

  “Don’t leave,” Cobb said. “I get suicidal on drugs.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to bury you in the back yard with the others.” Her voice came from behind him, where her stereo was set up. She was giggling lightly. Cobb loved the sound. It reminded him of temple bells.

  “Your smiling hostess even bought a record for the occasion. You’re into Mozart, right?” From the speakers there was suddenly pouring the opening bars of the clarinet concerto. “I didn’t have the faintest idea. If you can’t dance to it, I don’t know it.”

  “Groovy,” Cobb said, deadpan. The music was swirling magically in his head.

  “Did you get off?” she asked, returning to her chesterfield.

  “Can’t feel a thing. I was hoping I’d be able to start acting weird. So now what do we do?”

  She curled her legs under her and sat like a nesting swan. She gave him an innocent leer. “You know, I like you, Mr. Cobb.”

  “That’s one of us. A tie isn’t bad.”

  “Ego needs a little tune-up. Come on. Give. What’s with you?”

  “Usual criminal-lawyer mix of drive, bullshit, and childhood trauma. None of it can be changed now. Too late. I’m thirty-eight years old.”

  “Built-in excuse.”

  “I lack ambition.”

  “Good.”

  “So my wife doesn’t love me.”

  “Her problem.”

  Cobb studied her. There seemed to be a gentle kind of aura surrounding her person. He wanted to touch her, but felt strapped to his seat. “I won’t shatter your simple-hearted illusions by throwing my history up all over your rug.”

  “Let’s hear about it.”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “I’ve been prying. Nobody talks. An enigma. I love enigmas. I want to get inside you, Foster.”

  “What?”

  “Your head. Your head.”

  “No trespassing. I’ve got it mined.”

  “Come on.”

  Uncharacteristically, he found his tongue starting to ramble. “My father died in the bush when I was six. He was a high faller, and went down with the top fifty feet of a Douglas fir. He died with his spurs on, as the story goes. I have no memory of him save as a tall man
, dirty with sawdust, forever in a bathtub. He made up fairy stories and sat by my bed and enthralled me with them. I was alone. No brothers or sisters. My mother was a teacher, and encouraged me to read a lot. She’s dead now, too. I think I caused her heart attack.”

  “So he’s left holding a big bag of guilt. How did you kill your mother?”

  He shrugged. “I had some trouble. Anyway, I’ll skip a couple of chapters. I worked nights to go to school and get my degrees. I ran a pool hall.”

  “A pool hall? A pool hall? You?”

  “If my office goes broke, I can hustle a living. Anyway, it turned out I was smart, won scholarships, got a law degree, got to be good at what I do.”

  “Aw, you’re not telling me anything. What do you like? What do you dislike?”

  “I don’t like bad manners, loud mouths, plastic, television. Except the odd hockey or football game. Let’s see. This is hard . . .”

  With Tann prodding him, he carried on, offering scattered clues, but steering clear of things he felt ashamed of: the robbery, his jail term, junk. His marriage.

  After a while there was a silence, and Cobb found himself studying her. She was an Oriental Mona Lisa, her expression quietly asking the important questions. He suddenly felt uncomfortable.

  “I feel guilty about this,” he said.

  “About what? The wife?”

  “That’s part. Other things.”

  “Why don’t you take all that smelly guilt out and bury it? It makes great fertilizer.” She reached over and touched his arm, and the unburied guilt churned within him.

  They smoked some more hashish.

  “And what,” he asked, “should I know about you?”

  “Well, I, in contrast to the simpering, guilt-ridden lump who sits here beside me, am fascinating. I am twenty-four years old, charming, self-reliant, smart, keen of eye, sharp of tongue, very snoopy, kind of pleasant to look at, if you dig the slant eyes. I’ve been through the whole radical trip. I like honesty, and I like being high. I’m capable of a lot of affection and love. If you lack that sort of thing. Which I suspect you do. Goddamnit, Foster.” And she stood up, went to him, and kissed him on the mouth.

  She held herself to him for a long time. He was filled with the smell and touch of her, and there was a hunger for her that enveloped him. But he withdrew from her and stood up, breathing heavily.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Something bite you?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Something bit me. I can’t deal with you now. Yet. I feel like a hypocrite.” He felt edgy, prickly inside, and he knew a narcotic hunger had begun working at him. And somehow he could not face Jennifer Tann with that fact.

  She stood up and touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

  There was perspiration on his forehead. “Yeah.” Then: “No. Oh, God, I don’t know what to do. I’m fucked.”

  “What?”

  He spread his hands in front of him as if groping for words. “I . . . I have a problem.”

  “A what?”

  “Jenn, I’m . . .”

  “For God’s sake, Foster.”

  “I’m wired.”

  “Wh-a-a-t?”

  “I’m wired. Wired on junk.” A panic had begun to seize him. “I’ve been doing four, five caps a day, and I’ve got no more fucking junk, and I don’t know what to do or where to go. I don’t know how to get any more, and I don’t know how to quit.” He had gone to the closet and was putting on his coat. His face was white. “And I’m going to blow this trial.” He went to the door. “I’m sorry, you don’t need this.”

  “Oh, God, Foster.” She had a hand on her mouth, and her eyes were wide.

  “I’m sorry, I’ll make the evening up to you. If I can.” Stoned on hashish and suffering heroin withdrawal, he felt as if everything was rolling around him.

  “Oh, please stay,” she whispered.

  “I can’t.” And he went out the door.

  Jennifer Tann stood at the doorway biting her lip while tears came.

  For a long while he drove without direction, haphazardly, through the streets of the East End, then into the old city, into Gastown, and parked. He sat for several minutes, trying to settle the flutters of panic that radiated through him. Then he got out and walked to the harbor and stared across the inlet. A pale yellow moon had risen and was climbing over the North Shore mountains, and it lit the snow fields on top of them. A few tugs and small boats were working their way across the inlet, and their lights glistened on the water. Cobb looked down, over the edge of the dock, and the water below him was black and littered with flotsam.

  He closed his eyes and hunched his body tightly together. Then quickly turned about and walked some more.

  He found himself drifting toward the Corner.

  And after several minutes he was there, among the other junkies, looking into their sad and frightened eyes as they drifted from doorway to doorway or sat huddled on steps. He walked, looking for faces . . . for whom? Who could he find here?

  Then there was a dark figure beside him. “Hey, Mr. Cobb, this isn’t your part of town. Doing some slumming?” He was a young policeman.

  Cobb managed a smile. “No,” he said, “I’m just passing through.”

  “Not so safe around here. Never know when some junkie will come at you with a knife.” The policeman insisted on walking with Cobb a ways, and Cobb found himself back in his car.

  He pressed his hand to his head. He knew he should not go to Deborah. He had used her as a crutch when he wasn’t using smack. But he needed a crutch now. Badly. Some help to get through the weekend. If he could just hang on for a few days . . . Maybe. With her help . . .

  He began to drive.

  He found the Lions Gate Bridge and followed the Upper Levels Highway toward Horseshoe Bay, then north to Squamish, toward Garibaldi Park and the Whistler ski complex. Highway 99 branched from the freeway and clove to the mountain cliffs along Howe Sound into the Squamish Valley. The moon sent a dancing bar of light across the saltchuck, and Cobb felt the sadness and the pull of the moon. Headlights of approaching vehicles loomed and floated past him. It would be nearly three a.m. when he arrived at the condominium, but Deborah would wake up for him. He would prepare a plate of cheese and wheat thins — one of their traditional bedtime snacks — and would talk to her, unburden himself, tell her the heroin thing was over, and tell her . . . what? What about the marriage? He had struggled with that since his visit to the psychiatrist. It had to be worked out. Or the needle would kill him.

  The road now turned away from the ocean and climbed slowly up the valley of the Cheakamus River. Patches of snow glowed in the moonlight alongside the road. In the Whistler Valley, the air was crisp, and the moon was a pale lamp that showed white secrets to fields and trees and snow-capped cabins.

  Cobb’s Volvo crunched into the driveway leading to a cluster of skiers’ condominiums. The owners’ parking lot was in the back, but he left his car near the front door in the visitors’ area. When he turned his engine off he was drawn into the pervading silence of a still, windless night. The mountain air was not suffused with dampness, like the air near the ocean, but was crisp and allowed the stars to sparkle. He was wearing shoes with leather soles, and walked gently to keep his footing.

  When he got to the door, he found it unlocked, and he felt an icy prickling. Deborah was cautious when alone, afraid of intruders — her practice was always to lock the door before retiring.

  As Cobb stepped into the front hallway, he saw that there was soft light coming from the living room. There was a murmuring. Then he realized it was the shadowy light from the black-and-white television, and the voices were speaking lines in a late movie. (If she had been watching the late show, she should have been sitting there, on the sofa which faced the set. But no one was there.) To Cobb’s right was the kitchen area, and he could see th
at it was in good order.

  Cobb stepped quietly into the living room to turn the television set off. He noticed some clothing on the sofa. A blouse. Hers.

  There was light from a small wall lamp set outside the bedroom door. That door was ajar.

  He looked inside. He could see the heavy quilt bunched about her on the bed.

  He relaxed. She was snoring loudly. Cobb thought that unusual, but charming.

  Maybe the edginess he had felt was just the withdrawal. There was nothing out of place.

  He moved to the head of the bed and reached down and pulled the quilt from over her head, which was buried. It was the head of Ed Santorini he first saw. With Deborah’s head somewhat lower on his shoulder. Her red hair spilled softly over Santorini’s chest.

  A bottle of Veuve Clicquot stood beside the bedside table, with two empty glasses, some cheese and wheat thins. He saw Santorini’s clothing then, on a chair, piled there with her slacks and underclothes.

  The snoring stopped, and there was a shock of silence. Santorini’s eyes opened. Those eyes fastened on the form of Foster Cobb standing above him, and they fixed hard on Cobb’s face, not moving from it. Santorini’s face was blank, without expression, although his lips slowly parted.

  There was a taut electrical energy in the room, and the power of it must have awakened Deborah. Her eyes did not quickly focus, and the first messages that went to her brain spoke of a dark figure hovering above her in the dimness.

  “Burglar!” she screamed. “Eddie, a burglar!”

  Santorini still did not move.

  Recognizing her husband, Deborah bolted up, pulling up the quilt to hide her nakedness.

  “Oh, God, you scared me,” she said, breathing heavily. Her face was a wild mix of feeling.

  Cobb felt the pain coming hard, in great surging waves. “If I had known you were fucking tonight, I would have knocked,” he said. Then he turned around.

  As he went to the front door, he heard her call: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And he heard the sounds of her crying.