by Gerald Lynch
“Oh,” Larry drawled mockingly. “So that’s what this is all about? Big brave Lorne Thorpe ran to the police just because we told him to stop spreading dirty stories about Gary and me? Gimme a break, please.”
Encouraged by Larry’s bravado in the face of the law, Gary brightened. He rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder and looked out at us: “A break, yeah.”
“Who told you those, uh, dirty stories?” Kevin asked.
Larry’s mouth was opening —
“You liars!” I cried. “You were ready to sic your thugs on me because I brought in Bob Browne to do the playground work! You two have been cheating Troutstream on construction projects for years!”
I just caught Kevin’s half-turned pained face, as though he were dealing with his own Jake.
“Nobody calls my brother a liar!” shouted Gary.
“Oh, yeah? Well, I just did and he is and so are you!”
Larry had the presence of mind, I’m ashamed to say, to raise his arm as a restraining barrier to Gary.
Kevin held his hand up backwards, palm facing me. “Please, let’s try to behave like reasonable men… Thank you. Okay, it wasn’t the playground contract. Then what were the rumours? Who was their source? Those are the only things I need you to answer and then we’ll be gone.”
“What?” (That again was shameless I.)
Larry’s face showed some rapid consideration of options, his eyes shifting, then settling. “Follow me into the mess.”
“What mess?” Kevin said, his head pulling back. “Oh, yeah, sure.”
We followed them into the darkly shining kitchen, where everything was black wood and brass polished to a mirroring sheen. Gary sat on a stool at the huge black-granite-topped island, but seeing that Larry wasn’t going to take the other seat, he stood again.
Larry sneered at me past Kevin’s shoulder and spoke normally: “Okay then, short and sweet. Your new partner there has been telling everybody that we stole money building the Troutstream Community Centre. If you want to come into our home office, Detective, I can show you that we did that job at a fairly large loss. Or, if you have to, you can ask Debbie Carswell, chair of the TCA. We’d rather not publicize our pro bono work, and that was part of our agreement with Debbie.”
Kevin looked at me: “Dr. Thorpe?”
“I never said that about them embezzling TCA funds. I’ve heard the rumour, but I’ve never repeated it. Besides, Detective, I’m not the one who should be defending himself here!”
Larry looked at Gary, who was awkwardly trying to look casual, leaning on one hand on the island. “Tell the detective what else Lorne Thorpe’s been saying, Gary.”
Gary blushed. “That’s right, Lorne Thorpe’s been saying that we’re a couple of homos with a taste for little boys. It sickens us, Larry and me, even to have to imagine dirty thoughts like that.”
“What!” (I again.) “Who told you that? I’ve never said anything like that! It was Bob Browne told you, wasn’t it?”
Larry looked smug. “Just like we thought. His little friend is in on it too. That dwarf has even been poisoning the children against us. And Gary and me love kids — in a perfectly healthy way, I mean.”
“Who told you all this?” Kevin asked.
“We have our sources, Detective Beldon, which we don’t care to…divulge, as I’m sure you as a detective can appreciate.”
Kevin had taken out his notebook. “No, I cannot appreciate that. And you’d better reveal your source to me right fucking now, buddy, or I’m arresting you both for threatening Dr. Thorpe. And that’s just the beginning. You’ve as much as confessed that a lot of your company’s machinery is illegally imported from the States. On top of which, boys, what you’re actually obstructing here is an investigation into child-abduction and soliciting a minor for the purposes of sex. You have the right to remain —”
Gary’s voice quavered: “Larry?”
Larry tamped down Gary with air-patting palms: “Don’t worry, my brother, we’ve done nothing wrong. We’re not the ones spreading slanderous rumours. The duty on the crane is merely deferred. Our accountant can fix that. And we are not the ones lending our fancy-schmancy Cadillacs to coworkers so they can seduce and abuse helpless young girls! Oh yes, Detective, it’s all the radio’s talking about. What about that?”
Kevin tapped his notebook. “Settle down, Mr. Lewis.” I could see he was disappointed. “Is that your final word on who told you that rumours were being spread about the Lewis brothers?”
“Yes,” said brave Larry. “Are we under arrest?”
Kevin drew his left hand from forehead to crown — a bad sign with him, I already recognized — pinched his nose and held it for a moment. “Yes. You’re going to have to go with my man for questioning.”
“And if we refuse?”
“Refuse? It’s not an offer.” Kevin flapped his warrant: “And I have this. I call in the big boys and we take this love boat of yours apart till we find whatever you’re hiding.”
“Do we need a lawyer?”
“Be my guest.
Another standoff.
Kevin spoke into his cell: “Frank, take Mr. Larry and Gary Lewis down to the boiler room — I mean, down to HQ.”
“The boiler room, Larry?” Gary again sounded on the verge of tears. “Can’t we take our own truck?”
Kevin pursed his lips till he’d controlled himself, then shook his head: “No.”
Frank, a husky Asian in a tight black suit, let himself in the front door. Kevin stepped alongside me and, concealed from the Lewises, exchanged murmurs and eyebrow-jigging looks with his partner.
Kevin turned back to the Lewises. “Would you please go and wait down by Sergeant Thu’s unmarked police car? He’ll be with you shortly.”
Gary echoed, “Sergeant? Why is the car unmarked, Larry?”
When the door closed behind them, Kevin said, “Thanks, Frank. They’ll be all right. I just hope I don’t get busted off the force altogether for this put-on.”
“Put-on?” I said. “What put-on?”
Frank Thu blew air, glanced at me disapprovingly, looked at the floor, shook his head. “Kevin, do you know what you’re doing here? You’d better tie this all together or you are in deep shit. Wait, I don’t care what you’re doing here. What am I doing here?”
“Please, Frank. Just drive them around for a while, pass the detention centre slowly a couple of times. Be the good cop, see if you can find out who’s been telling them rumours about Dr. Thorpe here. Pretend you have a call from me, then bring them back here and tell them not to leave town or something, that you’ll try to fix it so they’re kept out of it, if they keep quiet. No bad publicity for their business. I’ll pray they don’t call their lawyer. Let me know if you find out anything at all.”
Frank spoke with drawled irony: “Oh, is that all?”
He drew himself up as he left the house. At his car he officiously clamped a hand on Gary’s head as he put him in the back seat after Larry. He turned his back to the car and comically made big eyes. He got in and drove off.
Watching after them, Kevin absently tapped me on the shoulder with his warrant, handed it to me and walked ahead to his car. It was a brochure from the Museum of Science and Technology.
On the front walk he stared across his car.
“Lorne, I’m very disappointed in you. You were no help at all back there. It was a big mistake bringing you, my big mistake. But I believed they knew you and didn’t like you, that they might just have feared you knew something about them. I’d wanted your presence to have a quietly intimidating effect, with the emphasis on quietly.”
“I’m sorry, but what did I do wrong?”
He turned on me: “What’d you do wrong? You lost it. If you’d kept your big mouth shut like I ordered you and not got them all riled up, we might have learned something right off
. My edge was surprise and you blew it!”
We sat in his car with its cold odour of cigarette…or cigar smoke. I let him settle.
“You believe that pair?”
He breathed deeply once and looked across the steering wheel. “I believe them. I’ve run quick checks on all your committee friends. Twin Bros. Builders does a lot a charity work in Troutstream. There never was any conflict of interest on their part. Bob Browne’s not been paid because there is no money. It was all spent on the community centre, some labour but mostly materials. No one spent TCA money dishonestly, and certainly no one embezzled funds. Why that Debbie Carswell and the treasurer guy Baumhauser allowed you to bring Browne in to do work that couldn’t be paid for is beyond me. Panicked over the arsenic scare, so ready to lie and cheat? Maybe. I’d hoped the Lewises could shed some light on what’s going on.”
“Then what the hell are we doing here?”
“I was wrong about the Lewises, but we need to know who told them you were spreading the stories that made them threaten you last night. Debbie Carswell? Maybe, but a long shot. Art Foster? A longer shot. Alice Pepper-Pottersfield? A pop gun. Frank Baumhauser? He will bear some further checking. But my hunch is Bob Browne, and I now strongly suspect that he’s working with someone.”
“You found out something about Bob?”
“Very little, and that makes me all the more suspicious. He’s American, here less than a year. Worked for a few landscape outfits, got laid off. Started his own company only six months ago, a mess, receivership already, empty office at an industrial-park address, repo people hot after his one big piece of equipment. Has lived in a series of fleabags, Lowertown, but I don’t know exactly where he’s currently holed up. I have an idea how to find out though.”
“The accent’s faked.”
“What accent?”
“He sounds, I dunno, German some times, other times like an American southerner, and once a touch British, Cockney I’d say.”
“He has moved around a lot, but only three times outside the U.S., Germany briefly, yes, England for an even shorter time.”
He fished a thin yellow tin from his shirt pocket and held it thoughtfully. The cover showed a big cat and the word “Panters.” Small cigars.
Settled some, he mused: “Debbie Carswell has the profile of a shit-disturber from way back, though nothing criminal. And then there’s your special friend, Alice Pepper-Pottersfield. But there’s even less on her than on Bob Browne. I do wonder most about your Frank, the Baumhauser guy. He spends his every free minute surfing porno sites and emailing his mother.”
“Frank Baumhauser? No. Alice? Don’t forget — she’s the one warned me about the Lewises and told me about the man in the van accosting Shawn.”
“I remember.”
“Debbie? I’d bet my own house she’s got nothing to do with it.”
“I’m ruling no one out, Lorne. Did Mizz P-P say if the white van had a logo?”
“No.”
“Find out. Describe the Twin Bros. Builders’ logo for her. Sometimes you have to, uh, enable a memory, but if she saw a truck, the picture’s in her head somewhere.” He tapped the cigar tin on the steering wheel and stared at it contemplatively for a while longer. “I’m not ready to give up on the Lewis boys just yet and I suspect they’ve used muscle before to get their way. They certainly don’t like you.” He smiled and returned the tin to his shirt pocket. “Though there does seem to be a long line forming under that banner.”
“I’ll have to ask Debbie Carswell how to get in touch with Alice. Like I said, it’s the immigration thing with Alice Pepper-Pottersfield. But…Kevin, you’ve been acting awfully pissed about something, ever since Owen announced the arrest of the Market Slasher. Is it my interfering and bungling? What gives?”
“Never mind about that. I don’t want to alarm you further, Lorne, but I’m worried our man has found that abducting children and returning them unharmed doesn’t turn his crank anymore. Shawn’s been missing longer than the others.”
His cell played the “charge” tune of sports events. He snorted at its display — “HQ, big Slasher news” — and tossed it into the back seat, where it played “Charge” intermittently and persistently.
He said, “So his thrills need to escalate. Where is Bob Browne?”
“You don’t seem too thrilled that a serial killer of defenceless women has been arrested?”
“None of my business.” He was being resentfully breezy. “I never believed for an instant that Dr. Foster was the Market Slasher. I have not been assigned to that investigation. I need to know where Bob Browne lives.”
“Foster knows, or could know from his contact, or the friend of his contact.”
“And Foster’s under arrest. How convenient for Mr. Browne. You’re visiting Foster first thing tomorrow, Lorne, right?”
“I’ll talk with Foster tomorrow morning. Okay, you could be right about Bob Browne. Bob could be the source of the lies told to the Lewises. He’s pissed at me now because he’s not been paid and he thinks I’ve been making fun of him, so he’s turning the Lewises even more against me than they were.”
“The Lewises don’t seem to like him much either. But go on. How does Foster’s arrest come into it?”
“Foster and I both know Bob more than he wants to be known. Bob figured out an ingenious way to discredit Foster with the girl and implicate me with my Caddy. I don’t know, but if I’m right, we might never see Bob Browne again.”
“Good. Keep that head clear, Lorne, you’ve got a good one and I need it. No more booze. We need Foster’s contact for Bob Browne.”
He squinted across the steering wheel, then frowned. “What a pair of creeps, those Lewises. They could be our bad boys yet, even in cahoots with Bob Browne or Art Foster, faking their dislike of Browne.”
He started the car. By the time we were swooping along Piscator Drive again, to the tinny “Charge” tune continuously now from the rear seat, Detective Beldon was back in his professional zone. In my driveway he said, “Visit Art Foster in the morning. I’ll meet you there. Keep it together, Dr. Thorpe. No more booze: for Shawn’s sake, for your family’s sake, for the sake of Troutstream’s children, for your own sake and for my sake. Got it?”
I stood staring after the Crown Vic. Fuck you and your badge. I need a drink.
A crow cawed, strangely deepening the usual suburban silence.
The woofer thumped from on high. I’d take the stairs three at a time, pick up his player and smash it to smithereens on the floor!… But glancing down the hallway I noticed parts of Veronica showing disjointedly through the bevelled glass of the French door to the kitchen. I blinked hard. How would I manage my drink now?…
Enter ranting (thank you, Mr. Shakespeare): “I cannot take it any more!” I shouted bursting through the spring-hinged door.
“Hi, Dad.”
Shawn smiled thinly at me from the table, her hair matted and face dust-streaked, with a big red tumbler of some drink before her.
Veronica didn’t turn from the sink. She wasn’t washing up, just staring out the window. I looked too: frantic squirrels hanging upside down trying to solve the latest bird feeders, birds frantically attacking them and other birds, chaos, the cedar hedge beyond, dull green, brown in patches, holes everywhere. The kitchen tilted like the Krazy Kitchen.
“She just walked in.”
Chapter 12
As instructed by Detective Beldon on the phone — who couldn’t desist cursing himself out for not having answered his cell in the car — we bundled Shawn off for the legally requisite physical exam at CHEO. When we pulled into my parking spot, I bumped the wall again, not joltingly as before, just gently, as often happens when gauging distance in such underground lighting. We were in Veronica’s Golf, since my vintage Caddy was now impounded.
Otherwise, I knew what it meant to be overwhelmed by
joy. As did Veronica, I was sure.
I glanced in the rear-view: “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
Sitting behind her mother, Shawn kept her face averted. “Nothing’s wrong with me! I don’t even know why we’re here! I told you: nothing happened. I don’t want a doctor looking at me! Mo-om? …”
“I meant only from the bumping of the car, sweetheart. Still, you won’t tell us anything that happened. Your mother and I were worried sick. For starters, where did the man with the dog take you for the past two days?”
Only continuing silence. I was suddenly conscious of how buried we were down there in subterranean dimness, with the concrete mountain of the hospital on top of us. The most minor tectonic event and we could be crushed, buried alive.
Veronica was staring straight ahead. “Not now,” she said through her teeth.
Instead of meeting the two of them at the rear of the car, I again went to the white wall where my name was printed boldly. I saw the hairline crack running up right from the spot where the Golf had hit four days before, right between the o and r of THORPE. I bent to it.
Veronica was at my shoulder. “What are you doing now? We want to get this over with quickly and get home. Owen’s alone and don’t think he’s not been worried sick too. This is no time to be buffing up your name plate.”
My fingertips hovered at the crack, which I lost…then found again. “Fine by me. Achieve closure, let the healing process begin.” I straightened.
“Leave it to you to joke at a time like this.” She really was hissing.
“But I wasn’t joking!”
“Bullshit.”
Very un-Veronica-like. She was under a ton of stress, I guessed.
When Veronica and I returned to the small room, Shawn was dressed and perched on the high examination table, her dirty bare feet dangling way off the floor. Though it was typically cold in the hospital, her hair was still pasted to her head in places. She sniffled and snorted — not crying, her ragweed allergy — and looked down at herself dejectedly.