by Gerald Lynch
“Kevin, MYCROFT’s bots will know that’s been removed, when, and by whom. MYCROFT will recommend you as a candidate for bike patrol, if not as a murder suspect. Put it back now.”
“Sergeant Ertelle, MYCROFT does not confront me.”
“A big joke, eh? Look, I really can’t see the relevance of some nut’s ghostwritten company bio when the murder weapon’s lying right there! You’re risking our careers. Put it back, Kevin.”
“The relevance? Sergeant Ertelle, like I said: mad McNicol believed his book caused DeLint to kill himself. Don’t focus exclusively on the murder weapon. Why are you resisting me in this, Brigid?” He looked more quizzical than worried. “For that matter, why was Frank so eager to make McNicol the prime? He alarmed me. His usual method is to contradict everything I suggest, which has always worked for us. A devil’s advocate kind of thing.”
“Whatever the hell that is.” Ertelle blushed a touch. “Okay-okay: but read it quickly then put it back. I do have to notify Chief Thu now. I do still have a career to think about.”
“There’s too much to read here, I’m a very slow reader, and I’m expecting the cavalry to come charging up the street at any moment with or without your having notified them. Listen, Brigid: if even a tenth of this is reliable…” He patted the plastic envelope, tugged more tightly the thread securing its flap, and set it on the desk.
“I won’t confront you on this either, Kevin. But tell me: a moment ago, when you were casing this room like your very own Kevin-scan, was that factioning?”
“Who knows? The middle corkboard’s the only one on hooks, there’s white dust on its top edge, see? Drywall chalk. It sat on the floor as it is now while the hole was made.” He picked it up and blew off some of the dust, replaced it.
“And now you’ve tampered further!”
“Look, I’m taking this back to Omphalos with me. Someone will have reported the gunshot, the whole MYCROFT show will be here any second. Take Frank out of scan range, keep your back to the scanners, and tell him the truth about what I’ve done. It will take a while for marvellous MYCROFT to be deployed and, despite your faith, there’s a good chance this missing evidence will not be discovered immediately. MYCROFT’ll first get a cyber hard-on for the murder weapon. When the missing evidence is discovered, play dumb. Frank should be a help there, if my suspicions are correct. I’ll see you back at the operations room.”
“I’ll do as you say, partner, though it’ll make me accessory, but only if you promise never to keep developments from me again. Such as: what suspicions?”
He looked at her levelly. “There’s no time now. But you can trust me, partner.”
She turned aside from his emphasis, saved by the distant sound of sirens like a mosquito disturbing sleep. The whooping increased, came wailing like a needy baby in the night (the one in her recurrent dreams).
He was out the front door, striding along the sidewalk, then speeding away in the maroon Crown Vic; when sirens bansheed the corner and his rear-view showed a swarm of flashing lights, he cut up the first side street.
DeLint, dead Don McNicol, and a hidden accomplice in Anna Kynder. If not silly McNicol’s manuscript, then McNicol himself the Jekyll-Hyde murderer. Kynder would have to be the one to provide the identity of the Widower, and Kevin’s money was now all-in on the late Eugene DeLint himself. But he still needed material proof, that was the law.
He threw back his head and laughed aloud at the grey cloth roof. Oh, he’d soon have irrefutable proof for Judge Johnson Mender, undeniable evidence that Omphalos had housed the Widower! Auntie Anna Kynder would have used McNicol to murder the Widower — DeLint! Who had somehow betrayed her! Whatever! He had them all now, he’d got the whole rotten world up his snout!
His anticipation was as promising as the eyeful of changed sky above, where a strafing of cirrus cloud promised an end to the drought. The weather was turning too at long last. Yes!
Just the proximity of the cloudy plastic envelope excited him, and he patted it like a pleasing pup. God bless you, Don McNicol, author, for commending this good book into the hands of your servant and redeemer, Detective Inspector Kevin Beldon. But whoever you were, Mr. McNicol, you were not the Widower. You were the writing hand, the scribe, the pointing finger. He rubbed the envelope’s pimply texture, undid the red string and slid his hand under the flap, palpated the meaty manuscript. What a way to get even! McNicol, you loser you! You beautiful loser!
He turned right at King Edward and was soon back on Laurier, but he continued past Omphalos to Metcalfe and the heart of downtown, where he turned left towards his apartment. The shirt was again pasted to his back, and when he reached for the envelope the cloth again came unstuck with a sound like yet another peeling skin.
Chapter 12
He had gathered a small audience, just enough to obstruct the walkway to Kevin’s apartment building. He really was the very worst street performer, was Pant-O-Mime. What real mime would do heat exhaustion, as Pants was doing now, by hand-trowelling real sweat from his brow and flinging it to the sidewalk?
Pant-O-Mime, who lived in the basement apartment, spotted Kevin. He immediately puffed out his cheeks and chest and, with elbows akimbo, pranced bowlegged around him. People laughed. Pant-O-Mime had been leading a tenants’ delegation to have their building air conditioned. He needed unanimity, and Kevin was the lone holdout.
Kevin halted and spoke lowly through his teeth. “That’s me all right, Pants, you’ve got Kevin Beldon to a T.” He held the envelope more tightly. He had no time for this.
Pant-O-Mime stayed beside him along the walkway, rocking like a muscle-bound midget, overcoming Kevin’s repeated attempts at brush-off. Kevin said loudly for those gathered, “Really, Mr. Mime, I don’t have time right now for one of our little talks.” No one laughed.
Heading him off, Pant-O-Mime blocked his way. With palms patting the air he made to settle Kevin, to make him wait and watch. He finger-combed the sides of his lank hair with both hands, extended his neck as if putting his face to something, then pinched out the chest of his striped black-and-white T-shirt with both hands, shook it and smiled like someone enjoying cool air. Then he did wilting in heat. Then the whole cooling routine again.
Of course: the air conditioning. Not bad, for Pant-O-Mime. Kevin smirked, shook his head and pointed forcibly at the entrance beyond, back at his own chest, pointed again, then swept the unmoving mime aside.
But Pant-O-Mime circumvented and blocked him yet again. He made a big lip, pulled down his face like a velvet clown’s, and steepled his pleading hands on his chest.
Someone, not a tenant, called, “C’mon, old dude, give the clown some coin too.”
“I am not a clown, I am a m —”
“Look, he’s choking the clown!”
“Let go of him, dude!”
It wasn’t the order made Kevin toss the mime aside; it was shock and shame. He had only ever used physical force when restraining a dangerous suspect or in self-defence. And here he’d put a chokehold on a smaller and weaker man, an innocent man. Some of the audience were fellow tenants, and a couple — old dude — were the squeegee street kids from the day before. Shit. But McNicol’s book promised the answer, material evidence, and he was dying for privacy. McNicol had died for this manuscript.
Up the stairs three at a time. Again in a sweat he was at the maple table. His heart fluttered — No, it was the pager again. He touched a forefinger to it and felt the clamouring for attention, fished it out and checked the display: Omphalos, Frank. Can these pagers be traced? Of course. Read.
He lit a Panters but didn’t inhale deeply, taking his self-teasing time. He removed McNicol’s manuscript and read the title page, taking it in for the first time:
EUGENE DELINT/OMPHALOS:
A POST-APOCALYPTIC FAIRY TALE
And his heart nudged towards sinking.
He fanned the pag
es. DeLint’s fine handwritten notes glossed the beginning of each chapter. As they did the Prologue:
Don, I suggest we begin in medias res, as t’were, with a prologue portraying what was for me and Mother the happiest day of her too-brief life. I refer of course to her marriage five years ago on that lovely and gorgeous day at the arboretum of the Experimental Farm. IGNORE INCIDENT WITH BULL. I imply a prologue entitled “Bells are Ringing for Gene and his Gal,” because of my and Mother’s lifelong interest in musical theatre. I gave the bride away, as you must remember, if only nominally!…
Kevin had to look away, with one word expanding gaseously in his mind: Shit!
Then followed the surreal story, told not in Eugene DeLint’s but McNicol’s only slightly less fusty voice, as if he were mocking DeLint or, more likely for a lackey, inadvertently imitating him. The prologue, like all subsequent chapters, began with its own title — “Shovelling Trouble” — followed by a condensed description of its contents, as in one of those eighteenth-century novels Kevin remembered from an English elective in satiric fiction.
He tried his best to speed-read. Mother’s wedding ends disastrously, if comically enough, when a bellowing prize bull escapes from a nearby pen and Eugene DeLint risks his life to guard his eighty-five-year-old mother. Disobedient McNicol reflects on the danger:
…Omphalos could and would continue had Eugene DeLint been gored to death, of that I never feared. There was always some one plotting against him, and mayhap that certain some one would recognize one’s true worth, unlike DeLint himself?
Good, something at least. DeLint had had a singular adversary: not someone, but some one, and a certain some one. And McNicol had known of this plotter against DeLint. But Anna Kynder’s name was nowhere yet.
…Be that as it may, DeLint’s mature political adventures are a tale we must take up in later chapters. For the present, keep this image in mind: Huge Gene in baby-blue tux curled foetally below the swagged member and speed-bag nutsack of el toro loco.
Poor demented Don McNicol. But who wouldn’t have been so after years of close quarters with a disease like Eugene DeLint? Could he count on even a tenth of truth in this? Shouldn’t he be questioning Anna Kynder herself right now? And after Kynder, that Jake Shercock, who might well be the only other Omphalos employee, and suspect, worth talking to?
Kevin fingered the pager and the touch made it buzz against the tabletop. It was warmer too, working overtime. He picked it up and checked the display: Omphalos. Frank? Or Ertelle? Ertelle and Frank? Sad to contemplate again.
Reluctantly he sped up, scanning for recognizable names… But McNicol emerged more and more as a certifiable lunatic. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
He raised his head and looked outside. The air had changed, the shadowy light glowed with an aquarium tint. Clouds? Could the drought really be about to break? Or was it just the light dying? He shivered in the weird crepuscular atmosphere. This is what it’s like to be dying.
Head down, he must quickly determine if McNicol’s manuscript is of any use. Chapter One was titled “Eugene DeLint: The Early Years.” That sounded weirdly déjà vu-ish.
…whereupon a desperate Mother DeLint, fearing that her ambitions for herself via her spawn would be hampered by his growing reputation as a “sissy” forcibly mates her Eugene with the daughter of a Rockcliffe scion, quite literally coupling the innocent girl and the drugged Huge-teen, like some Studhorse Woman bringing a broken filly to crushing bay; a pregnancy ensues and Huge-teen is spirited off to New England. (Open parenthesis for a prayer: Dear spawn of the Spawn, wherever thou mayst be, whether dying in a gutter of poetic justice or slouching through some Nevada desert towards Las Vegas to be reborn, return now and un-man thy beastly pater.)…
DeLint had a bastard son? Un-man, that’s something, like decapitate. Go!
…whereupon Mother DeLint, who has loudly been raising the profile of the local United Way subsidiary food bank, the re-christened Omphalos, is appointed to the headship of United Way Canada; Mother starves her tens of thousands, after which there is no more United Way or Canada Food Bank, only Omphalos; Huge Gene is recalled from Ivy; soon there is no more Department of National Defence building on Laurier Avenue, only Omphalos; Mother’s pet shrink, Dr. Ewan Randome, is spirited out of Haiti just as President-elect Amtide’s forces are commencing the Baby Doc War-Crime Tribunals (that is, just prior to Amtide’s assassination) and becomes first Division Head appointee at the all-new restructured Omphalos; Jake Shercock oversees the fitting of a faux copper dome on Omphalos; a new DeLint mansion, Casa DeLint II, rises in Rockcliffe on the bank of the Ottawa River. Mother has arrived, docking with Huge Gene in tow.
He fanned faster, farther ahead, skimming only chapter summaries, searching like a laser for one word: Widower.
…Supreme Court of Canada rules against Omphalos in Omphalos vs. Montreal’s Sisters of Mercy Hospice; Court is vilified by local Macro, two vacancies ensue on Supreme Court; bright new legal eagle Kelly Beldon comes on board; again charges of sexual interference are brought against Omphalos, Eugene DeLint, and even Dr. Ewan Randome; DeLint is but a pube away from conviction; case dismissed; Kelly Beldon becomes only female ever to secure DeLint’s special favour, the little trick.
Turning the following pages slowly, running his forefinger down their centre, Kevin spotted his surname again, read… But found nothing he didn’t already know or suspect. Kelly had been there for little more than a year; McNicol accurately described her role in the sexual harassment case. But McNicol’s envy of anybody who won DeLint’s favour distorted whatever he reported. His inevitable hatred of Kelly, whom he took to calling “the little Beldon trick,” was incommensurate with her brief tenure at Omphalos. Kevin spotted his own Christian name:
…It would seem the little Beldon trick is the daughter of the great detective, Kevin Beldon. It would seem too that Dr. Randome has been successful in convincing Eugene to keep the slut at our beck and call. Thus Eugene makes overmuch of the little trick’s contribution to the defence, thereby downplaying one’s own titanic input. All DeLint’s boys, whom I regularly recruited from the ranks, go on to bigger things, as t’were, once he’s had his way with them, as doubtless will the little Beldon trick soon be gone.
More, McNicol! More on the little Beldon trick and less on yourself, you twittering prick!
Eugene talks now of when she’ll be Chief Crown Prosecutor and what that will mean for operations. I think the little Beldon trick knew something about what had really been going on with Eugene and the “finds,” and that she convinced Dr. Randome to convince Eugene to let her leave Omphalos after only one year. Of course, after the dismissal of charges, Omphalos’s Chief Legal Counsel, the slut’s boss, was immediately “disappeared” (in true voodoo fashion) and the little Beldon trick assumed the position for a short time. Note to self: more research on the Trick’s brief tenure as Head Legal Honcho.
She had been?
The trick is a quick study. But surely if anyone is to be rewarded for service to DeLint-Omphalos, it should be I. I am the one who, after all, above all…
And on he goes about himself. But Kelly had to get Dr. Randome’s help just to get out from under DeLint’s thumb? Mea culpa, mea culpa. It had been my lack of attention to her career that delivered her into the clutches of that pig DeLint. Mea maxima culpa.
But what could any of this be worth as evidence? Nothing, and more nothing.
…DeLint’s need for new fair-haired boys diminishes and disappears; since Mother’s death, his “mature” Hugeness seems satisfied with power; but who knew what they were getting up to in the Dome, DeLint’s Button; he and Ewan are arguing constantly. Huge Gene can still fly into a rage with Ewan, like a fat weaning cherub whose soother is pulled. A search warrant is being heard in court, and the little Beldon trick, not so little any more, is actually prosecuting the Crown’s case; her great detective daddy is trying to ob
tain a search warrant against Omphalos! There is much talk in the media these past months of the so-called “Widower” serial murders, which Great Detective Daddy is failing to solve, but of course. I mean, how could he? Then the little Beldon trick brought her mother in to beg Eugene to help the bitch’s brother cur out of some sort of recurrent trouble.
Kevin’s face prickled, burned; he must think of his heart.
Mom returned by herself, and the little Beldon trick came storming into Eugene’s office — as only the trick is permitted — and began screaming at the old girl, who was drunk as a sailor, then at Eugene, then Eugene started screaming, and Ewan appeared from above on the stairway to hell with the dopey Bill himself in tow and settled and soothed everyone, as is the good doctor’s wont. It is my personal belief that Ewan has been treating this Billy boy, and doubtless the old lady too, or soon will be! The search warrant is thrown out by our old friend Judge Mender. And, talk of your synchronic events — no more Widower deaths! Gee. But I have wandered again from my subject. How might I tell Eugene how I’ve always felt?…
He touched the hot pager. He would now give years of his life to have it be an official communicator, so he might call Kelly and have his questions answered. He could try the bud again, but that would be too risky. Besides, Omphalos was now paging continuously. He would finish with McNicol’s dementia and risk calling Kelly again from a public communicator, encrypted scram-nine.
But Cynthia at Omphalos and begging DeLint for help with Bill?… Yet it made sense, if sick sense. Even Dr. Randome’s treating them made sense. The whole family was sick at the time. Why hadn’t Kelly told him? Why hadn’t Ewan? Did the principle of patient confidentiality trump this desperate madness? Dear God, were they all being manipulated by DeLint, the Widower?