Dooley Takes
the Fall
by Norah McClintock
Copyright © 2007 Norah McClintock
Published in the United States in 2008
EPub edition copyright © August 2011
5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of Red Deer Press or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5, fax (416) 868-1621.
By purchasing this e-book you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any unauthorized information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Red Deer Press.
Published by Red Deer Press
A Fitzhenry & Whiteside Company
195 Allstate Parkway,
Markham, ON L3R 4T8
www.reddeerpress.com
Edited for the Press by Peter Carver
Cover design by Jacquie Morris
Text design by Dean Pickup
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McClintock, Norah
Dooley takes the fall / Norah McClintock.
ISBN 978-0-88995-403-8
eISBN 978-1-55244-295-1
I. Title.
PS8575.C62D66 2007 jC813’.54 C2007-905343-2
Nobody told me there’d be days like these.
– John Lennon
Hey, Mickey, I’m with you. F.Y.L.
One
Dooley was looking down at the kid sprawled on the asphalt path in the ravine when two things happened. First, Dooley’s pager vibrated. Dooley knew without checking that it was his uncle trying to reach him. Second, a boy maybe twelve years old, on a bike, stopped next to Dooley, looked at the kid lying on the pavement and said, “Is he dead?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Dooley said. In fact, he was sure of it. The moon was bright and the kid had landed in a half-circle of light cast on the ground by a lamp on one of the utility poles above him. Dooley squatted down. There was no air going into or coming out of the lungs of the kid on the pavement. Also, the kid’s open eyes were staring at nothing, and his head was twisted, as if he had turned to look at something just before he made contact with the hard surface of the path. Plus there was blood and other stuff—Dooley didn’t want to think about what it was—leaking out of the kid. He glanced up at the boy on the bike and wondered what, if anything, he had seen. “You have a phone on you?” Dooley said, standing up again.
The boy shook his head. So far he hadn’t taken his eyes off the dead kid. Who could blame him? Dooley couldn’t look away either. He still couldn’t believe what had happened.
“You know where there’s a pay phone?” Dooley said. The boy on the bike didn’t answer. “There’s one up there,” Dooley said. He pointed to a bridge maybe half a kilometer south of where he and the boy were standing. There were pay phones on either end of it. Dooley saw them every time he crossed the bridge. Both of them had signs on them with the phone number of a distress center—the idea was that people should drop a quarter before they dropped themselves off the bridge. The phones were there even though no one could jump off that bridge anymore. The city had put up a suicide screen. If you were desperate to end it all, you had to move your action a little north or a little south to one of the other, smaller bridges and walkways over the ravine. There were plenty of them—like the one the dead kid had gone off. “Go and call 911,” Dooley told the boy on the bike. “Tell them someone went off a bridge and it looks like he’s dead. Okay?”
“Why don’t you do it?” the boy on the bike said. Dooley had thought that he might.
“Because if he’s really dead”—which he was, there was no doubt about it—“the cops are going to treat this as a crime scene,” Dooley said.
That got the boy’s attention. He looked away from the dead kid for the first time.
“You mean someone killed him?” he said, sounding impressed.
“I mean the cops are going to want to investigate, which means we should protect the scene from anyone disturbing it,” Dooley said. The kid’s eyes widened at the word “we.” “The way we do that is I stay down here and make sure no one comes along and touches anything, and you go up there and call 911.” The boy didn’t seem to like the way Dooley had assigned responsibilities. “You have to come right back after you make the call,” Dooley said. “The cops are going to want to talk to you. They’re going to want a statement from you.”
“Yeah?” the boy on the bike said, excited now.
“Yeah,” Dooley said. “You think you can handle that?”
“You know it,” the boy said. Dooley guessed he hadn’t had much to do with cops. If he had, he wouldn’t be so enthusiastic. The boy mounted his bike and started pedaling toward the path that led up the side of the ravine.
Dooley looked down at the kid on the asphalt. With his staring eyes and twisted head and all that blood, the kid looked pretty bad. Dooley could feel himself starting to shake. He’d seen a lot of things, but he’d never seen anything like this. He drew in a deep breath and told himself to get a grip. The kid wasn’t a real person anymore. He didn’t even look like a real person. He looked more like a wax dummy in a House of Horrors. Dooley wondered what the kid had been thinking on the way down. He knew he should feel sorry for the kid, but the truth was, he didn’t. What goes around comes around, he thought.
Dooley felt like an idiot having to tell the first cop that showed up, “I gotta get to a phone and call home right away.” But he did it anyway because, if worst came to worst, the cop would be able to tell Dooley’s uncle that Dooley had tried.
Dooley was pretty sure he recognized the cop and just as sure the cop recognized him, especially after the cop said, “First, you tell me what you know about this. Then we’ll see about a phone call.”
Dooley wished for the millionth time that he had a cell phone. But all he had was a dumb-ass, out-of-date pager that his uncle had given him with the following instruction: “I page you, I expect you to call me inside of ten minutes.” He hadn’t said, “Or else,” but it was understood. Boy, was it understood. By the time the cops arrived, Dooley’s uncle’s first page was thirty minutes old, the second fifteen minutes old, and Dooley was picturing his uncle pacing up and down, maybe in the kitchen, maybe in the living room, definitely muttering under his breath.
Dooley looked at the cop, who walked with a swagger and who Dooley bet was one of those guys who go into policing just so he could carry a gun. He thought about his uncle, who was probably beyond pissed off that Dooley hadn’t answered either of the pages by now. But what else could he have done? Left the boy on the bike alone to report a dead body after the boy had got a good look at Dooley standing over the corpse and could give the cops a description? Dooley could just imagine what the cops would make of that. Then there was the movement he had caught out of the corner of his eye: someone, it looked like, rounding the corner north of where Dooley was now. Who was that,
and had that person seen anything? Besides, Dooley was about fifty percent sure that his uncle, who was a retired cop, would have approved of what Dooley was on the record as having done. Still, Dooley imagined his uncle saying, “If that kid could make one phone call, he could make two. It never occurred to you to get him to call me and tell me where you were?” Well, sure it had. But by then it was too late; the kid had already reached the edge of the ravine and was pushing his bike up, up, up to the bridge.
Dooley thought about asking the cop again, explaining the situation. But he decided, no, he didn’t want to come off sounding like he was begging for a favor. He would take his chances with his uncle when the time came.
The cop told Dooley to stay put and not touch anything, and then he went to talk to his partner, who was with the kid on the bike. Dooley wondered what the kid had told the cops. The cop was back a few minutes later and pulled out a notebook.
“Okay,” he said. “Name.”
“Ryan Dooley.”
“Age?” the cop said, wanting to find out where Dooley fit under the Criminal Code.
“Seventeen.”
The cop looked annoyed. Dooley figured he’d been hoping to hear eighteen. Eighteen made it easy. Seventeen made it YCJA.
“Address,” the cop said, and then asked him again a minute later, after Dooley had already told him, checking, Dooley knew, to see if Dooley was spinning him one. Dooley repeated what he had already said.
“ID?”
Right. That should have been maybe the second question the cop asked. He was watching closely now to see what Dooley would do or say, still probably hoping to catch Dooley out.
Dooley produced what he had, which was his school ID, his health card, his transit card, and, just for fun, his library card. Three out of four had his picture on them along with his name. One had his birth date on it. None had his address on it. The cop took a long time to make a note of everything. Then he handed the ID back to Dooley and said, “What can you tell me about what happened here?”
Cops just naturally made Dooley nervous. They made his mouth go dry and made him wish for something, anything, to take the edge off. But down here in the ravine in the middle of the night there was nothing he could do about that. He drew in a breath, long but shallow so that maybe the cop wouldn’t notice, and answered the cop’s question.
Two
Another cop showed up, this one in plainclothes, from the homicide squad. He spoke for a few minutes with the uniformed cop. Then he came over to Dooley and introduced himself: Detective Graff. He said the same thing the other cop had said: “What can you tell me about what happened here?”
Dooley repeated what he had told the patrol officer—that he had been on his way home from work, which was more or less true.
The homicide cop looked around the ravine before turning back to Dooley.
“Where do you work?” he said.
Dooley said, “At a video store.” He told the homicide cop which one.
“When did you get off work?” the homicide cop said.
“Nine o’clock,” Dooley said. He’d got off two hours earlier than he was supposed to because it was a slow night and because Kevin, the shift manager, was such a brown-noser that he always clocked someone off early when things were slow, to save the eight bucks an hour the store would otherwise have had to shell out in wages and to make himself look like up-and-coming management material. Dooley didn’t care. Time off was time off.
The homicide cop looked at his notebook. He said, “It wouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes to walk from where you work to where you live. What did you do between the time you got off work and the time you found the body?”
“I took a walk,” Dooley said. Because he had got off two hours early, and because his uncle wasn’t expecting him home until eleven-thirty, and because he was tired—boy, was he tired—of having to be every place exactly on time just to prove to everyone that he wasn’t a total fuck-up anymore, Dooley had decided not to go straight home. He’d taken a detour instead.
“Where’d you walk?”
“Down here,” Dooley said. “In the ravine.”
The homicide cop glanced around. “In the dark?” he said.
“There are some lights along the path,” Dooley said, “and up there.” He nodded to the bridge overhead. It used to be a railway bridge. Now it was a footpath and bike trail. “And it’s a full moon.” He thought about that for a moment. “Hey, maybe that’s why it happened.”
“What do you mean?” the homicide cop said.
Dooley was sorry he’d said that last part. He should have known better. When you’re dealing with cops, the less you say, the better. The homicide cop was waiting for him to answer.
“I mean, people do weird shit when there’s a full moon, right? That’s where the word lunatic comes from. From the word for moon.”
The homicide cop just looked at him.
“So you were walking along this path?” he said. “From which direction?”
“From there,” Dooley said, pointing north. He told the homicide cop that he’d been on the path that ran through the ravine, alongside the river. He’d just been moseying along, enjoying the quiet and the solitude—well, except for the odd pedestrian, usually of the deranged variety. Like the old guy wearing a couple of overcoats one on top of the other and pushing a supermarket cart with a squeaky wheel and filled with what looked like bags of trash but was probably all of the guy’s earthly possessions. Or like the woman who had big, rectangular painted-on Groucho Marx eyebrows—swear to God—so that Dooley did a double take when he saw her. There were a few other types down there, too, like that bunch of teenaged kids he’d passed who were smoking up under a tree. Dooley had sniffed the air hard as he went by. Talk about memories. But he didn’t tell the homicide cop that.
He said he’d been maybe half a kilometer north of the old railroad bridge when he looked up.
“What made you look up?” the homicide cop said.
Dooley shrugged. “I don’t know.” And it was true. He hadn’t looked up for any particular reason except that it was a nice night with a clear sky and a full moon and for once he had no worries. No pressing ones, anyway. “I just looked up and I saw someone take a header off the bridge.”
He and the homicide cop both looked up at the bridge again.
“Go on,” the homicide cop said.
Dooley said that from where he was, he couldn’t tell if the person was male or female, let alone young or old or in between. He just saw that it was a person—at least, it looked like a person.
“It really surprised me,” Dooley said. In fact, it had stopped him in his tracks. He’d shaken his head and thought to himself, Nah, it couldn’t be. His eyes must be playing tricks on him. I mean, what are the chances, right? But even while he was thinking that, he was on the move again, not moseying anymore, but hurrying, walking fast, then jogging, then pushing it harder still, running toward the bridge, thinking about what he had seen, wondering if it was possible to survive a fall—a jump?—like that.
He told the homicide cop that it must have taken him a couple of minutes to reach the spot. He said that when he got there, he could see that the kid was dead. The homicide cop’s eyes were hard on him.
“Did you touch him?” he said.
“Well, yeah,” Dooley said. “I wanted to see, you know, if he was alive or dead or what, so I touched him here.” He pressed a couple of fingers against the side of his own neck to show the homicide cop what he meant. “I felt for a pulse.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went up the path a little ways, to see if there was anyone else around, someone else who had seen what had happened or someone who had a cell phone and could call 911.”
“And did you see anyone else?” the homicide cop said.
“Just the kid on the bike. He came along a few minutes later.”
“And that’s it?”
Instead of answering right away, Dooley hesitated.
Big mistake. For sure the homicide cop would consider that suspicious. So Dooley said, “I think I might have seen someone up there.” He pointed at a curve in the path about twenty meters north. “Maybe whoever it was passed by here. Did anyone else call it in?”
Of course the homicide cop didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “This person you think you saw, can you describe him?”
Dooley said, “No.” He said he only saw the person out of the corner of his eye because by then he was fixated on the body.
The homicide cop asked Dooley if he knew the dead kid.
Dooley hesitated again. He didn’t like the way the homicide cop kept his eyes on him and never once looked away, like he thought that if he did, he might miss the one thing that would let him nail Dooley. That was the problem with cops—well, one of the problems. They were just naturally suspicious. They didn’t trust anyone except maybe other cops.
“Do you know the kid?” the homicide cop said again.
Dooley wanted to say no. He wanted to tell the cop that there was absolutely no connection between the dead kid and himself. But then what would happen? So he said, “I think he goes to my school.”
“You think?” the homicide cop said.
“Well, he looked pretty bad when I got to him,” Dooley said. “And it’s my first year at the school. It’s only been a couple of weeks. But I think I’ve seen him around.” What the hell. Dooley didn’t have a high opinion of most cops, but these homicide guys had a reputation. They knew how to ask questions, and they knew who to ask. So Dooley added, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I have.” He wondered if he should say more, but decided against it for the time being. You can always add things, but you can never take them back.
The homicide cop took note of Dooley’s shift from tentative hesitation to possible certainty.
“You know his name?”
Dooley shook his head. “I think it’s Emerson,” he said. “Or Everett. Something like that. He’s not in any of my classes. I’ve just seen him around.”
Dooley Takes the Fall Page 1