by Gerald Lynch
“And I believe Freud said there are no accidents.”
“He’d have made one helluva traffic cop.”
She muffled a giggle against the edge of her hand.
He tingled. Her easy shift to a tone of ironic formality promised much for a partnership. He’d always had that with Frank — another thing that had changed these past two days. But he was deceiving himself: how could he ever be partners with this sharp young woman? Was his head that full of laundry soap and female sweat? If he didn’t wise up, he’d be Frank’s patsy again, as when he’d taken the fall on the Widower. Frank’s and Ertelle’s. Yes.
But no wonder she admired Kelly. They were both as tricky to get hold of as straightening out a wire clothes hanger. So clever, this Brigid Ertelle, that she wasted energy hiding it. Kelly called all such problems “gender issues.” But that sexist excuse for non-achievement had long since passed its sell-by date. The issue is character. Brigid’s here to learn? Then he’d teach her to unlearn the stupid self-effacement. Or he’d do so if he had the time, which he hadn’t. Because she had to go.
Brigid had been lying to him; their partnership was founded on a lie. She and Frank were the true partners in this DeLint case. Frank’s recent calls to his pager had come from within Omphalos. Brigid had not been dropped off just now, as she’d lied. And she’d probably not hidden this coin on her own initiative. Go, she had to.
In the near future, my immortal soul will loathe me unconditionally.
Then don’t do it! Invite her loyalty, give her a chance.
“Have you ever met Kelly?”
“When I was at police college in Aylmer, she came and spoke to us about opportunities for women and LGBTCQIs in law enforcement. She was very impressive.”
“She still is.”
“Now that I think of it, someone did ask during the Q and A if she was related to the famous Detective Kevin Beldon.”
Kevin snorted and his head tipped backwards — his thrust pelvis may have touched her shoulder blade! Had that been an accident, Herr Doktor? Stand down, old man!
“Did she deny the connection?” He snickered, thereby teaching his temporary protégé how to behave like a self-effacing fool. “But while doing your courses at the college, you learned that the great detective was Assistant Crown Prosecutor Kelly Beldon’s father, and then forgot it? Sergeant Ertelle, I’m disappointed.”
She took him seriously. “What? No way! She sidestepped the question about you. I was intrigued when I saw her name on the prioritized list of DeLint contacts MYCROFT drew up. I wanted to make sure it was the same person. That’s why I viewed this vid twice. There’s, uh, nothing else relevant on it, like I said. And I know Kelly’s name is on the priority list only because she once worked here on an important case.”
Kevin nodded at the monitor: “And there she is again, highlighted in the large shadow cast by DeLint, thank you, Brigid. Good work.” But he held her: “Don’t leave just yet, please.”
He would also hold the face now framed on the monitor, that fiercely independent, intensely petitioning face. At thirty it was still the same face he’d always noticed with a secret smile when hurrying out to work. It seemed he’d always been brushing past her darkening small face, past the proffering hands that would be holding out a piece of coloured construction paper, sometimes with a poem on it in kid’s printing, usually about Kelly and him, the great Detective Beldon. They’d be waiting on his desk when he got home late. Were there fewer criminals in the world because of the time he’d spent sending them to jail? Yes, he had to believe, fewer. But what crimes of the heart had he committed in their stead?
He roused himself. Once again he had work to do. He really was getting too old for police work. Or he was getting sentimental, the aging man’s Achilles’ heel — estrogen strikes back.
Ertelle said, “The name Beldon rings another bell, if you’ll pardon the pun. Someone else…?”
“My father was an Irish Jew, my mother Ottawa Valley Irish. That’s why racist Otto Parizeau is out of his mind spreading rumours that I’m the bigot. How could I be?” What the hell are you going on about now?
“Kevin, I don’t think racists and bigots work logically from sound premises through syllogism. Wait, I know — Trixie Beldon! My first mystery books! My Nana left them to me in her will, all those old colourful board covers! She became my dearest imaginary friend for a spell, Trixie Beldon, nurtured my secret fantasy to become a detective. My-my, how the mind and the world do conspire.”
“Trixie Beldon? Never heard of her, no relation. So you have two Beldons to thank for your vocation.”
“Three Beldons, actually.”
He hurried: “Let’s get back to work, Sergeant Ertelle, if you want to make detective inspector.”
It had been her further shift to the more gentle irony, if irony at all, that disturbed him, and made him regret again what he must do. And again he was aware of her body, so close she was almost cocking her head back against his belly. But that wasn’t it, or mainly it. She was so unlike any of the few women he really knew, this Sergeant Brigid Ertelle. She was not at all like soft Cynthia (or not with him anyway). Maybe a little bit like cracking Nora Goldstein. She was like Kelly, yes, but only physically and in age. He focused on the monitor, which was filled by Kelly’s leaner face. And Brigid wasn’t nearly as pretty as Kelly.
“This event was how long ago?” she asked. “What a beauty. Takes after her mother, I assume?”
He exhaled a snort. “Seven years ago. Now listen up: you’d never know it but DeLint is actually thanking Kelly and her supervisor for saving him and Omphalos in that sexual-harassment suit.”
“Kevin, please, I mean it, I’d really rather not listen to any more DeLint. Like I said, I’ve already re-viewed this vid myself. There’s nothing relevant. Instead of watching it again, why don’t we just ask MYCROFT to run VERABELS on it; that way get the relevant information and MYCROFT’s estimate of reliability?”
“What, run a virtual lie detector on DeLint’s running hymn of undiluted bullshit? MYCROFT would pull a virtual hernia, we’d have to get the scanbots to knit it a truss.”
She laughed, and did touch his churning stomach with the crown of her head. “Lie detector? Surely you’re not comparing a VERABELS’ analysis to —”
“Be quiet, please, and listen, Brigid, and watch again, and again and again and again. That’s detective work, that’s the only secret, and it beats factioning ten ways to hell.”
Without looking, he carefully reached across her and wagged his forefinger at a virtual key. She registered the dexterity, and thought: He also wants to watch me watching this. Hmmm…
The isolated shot fades from Kelly to a view of Eugene DeLint. He’s sitting at a table on a stage, between Don McNicol and an older woman with longish platinum hair, Anna Kynder. The camera work is professional, smoothly mixing wide pans of the crowded Omphalos complement, medium shots of the threesome up front, frequent tight shots of DeLint, and occasional medium frames of Kelly Beldon and the legal-team leader sitting at a smaller table off to the left side of the stage. Kelly and her supervisor wear the regulation Omphalos dark pantsuit, but on Kelly it was like trying to disguise a bright light: she radiates vitality like a child in fever.
The shot cuts to an old woman sitting towards the right front of the stage, to DeLint’s left. She’s dressed darkly and wears an old-fashioned pillbox hat with veil. She sits rigidly on an antique red-velvet Queen Anne chair with brown wooden armrests, leans slightly forward, resting her elbows on the curled front of the armrests and covering with both hands the silver knob of a ramrod cane between her shamelessly spread knees. She contrasts DeLint, in that she looks as thin and hard as the dark rod she holds. Rather than cutting away cleanly, the view loops amateurishly, as if she’d shaken that rod at the videographer. But it had taken only a glance.
“Mother DeLint,” said Kevin
. “The only recording of her ever. DeLint’s desk holo is actually taken from this very vid. Back then, had she been a man, she could have owned the whole global show.”
Mostly the vid shows DeLint, now standing awkwardly at a lectern whose front displays the Omphalos image (cupped hands holding a plump heart). He fidgets from foot to foot, sweats, and glances frequently at Mother. The only sound is his enhanced voice oozing in TRUAUD, like warm spittle-breath in an uncomfortable ear:
…You see, Anna, he says, looking back briefly at the matronly secretary who’d sat on his left, I am not going to hide any secrets around here anymore, peut-être, s’il vous plait, but come right out and share with our whole bilingual Omphalos family most of the truth now that some of it can be told. Mais oui! Much of what was preponderantly done by way of managing damage control on this case was done fairly competently by Mrs. Kynder. He laughs back at her derisively. No-no, Auntie Anna, like me, you’re just going to have to sit still and take fulsome compliments! Uh, d’accord? Audience laughter, probably augmented, and undoubtedly at DeLint.
Ertelle, still sitting, raised surrendering hands. “That’s it, Kevin! I’m dead serious now: I cannot take any more of him! He makes me…I dunno. He makes me wanna transgender or something!”
Kevin’s laughter jerked him, but he settled seriously. “This isn’t for fun, Sergeant Ertelle. Quiet, listen, watch. Or wait: remove all audio add-ons. I prefer to watch this clown cook in his own juices without benefit of canned laughter.”
She mumbled, “Canned laughter? Do you mean scale back TRUAUD atmospherics?”
“I mean cut them completely. Have you noticed how DeLint never speaks a sentence that doesn’t include a flattering reference to himself?”
“You think, Detective Inspector Beldon? The big boy says I-I-I so often you’d think he was bending over on the poop deck for a visit from the rear admiral.”
Kevin startled her, and himself, with a roaring belly laugh. This time when he settled, he felt yet worse for his resolve to send her away. She was just warming up. They were.
With fingers briefly crosshatching at her breastbone, Ertelle signed to MYCROFT. When the audio resumed it was only DeLint’s adenoidal voice, working its self-unctuous charm.
A really good writer — I forget whom presently, and who cares — but someone once said that Omphalos is a finishing school for narcissists. Irregardless, Mrs. Kynder, I feel quite privileged to work alongside you. As must Don McNicol, whom I must thank pretty equally for all his assiduous work. When people work this heroically as part of a true team effort, I should always signal them out individually for thanks. So thanks, to you both together, I say, on behalf of our Omphalos family, each and every one and all. Tout le monde! Mais oui!
Turning his face aside to the right and fully extending his arms forward, DeLint leads the applause like a chef flattening rancid beef patties at the farthest possible remove.
Boom boom boom.
DeLint glances anxiously to his left, then faces front and, looking slightly upwards, with right forefinger makes the throat-cutting gesture.
“What was that noise?” Ertelle said. “It’s not atmospherics, not now. Gee, did someone actually take a shot at him?”
“My money’s on Mother DeLint thumping her cane on her own little wooden platform, and not in appreciation but as signal to her boy to get on with it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t.”
I, of course, was in a totally hands-off mode throughout this sordid and unjust ordeal, which, as I’d been urging all along it would turn out eventually, was something very much a tempest in a teepee — à bientôt! His head wobbles in a tight shot on the flaccid face, and there’s very little applause, despite Don McNicol’s cheerleading efforts.
Kevin thought again of McNicol: Too much the toady to be a murderer.
In fact, except for my frank and open conversations with Don and Anna in private, in which I may have insinuated a key procedural suggestion or two — DeLint makes his rolled-eyes face, tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth in impish knowing — I was totally incommunicado, until the decision was handed down by our friend, the imminently prescient Judge Mender, and I was recalled back to resume communicating directly on important matters.
Boom boom boom.
Without glancing down, Kevin reached in front of Ertelle and wagged a forefinger at control-pause on the holo pad. “Who did he say?”
“Johnson Mender, His Honour Judge Johnson Mender. Why —”
“What about our friend?”
“Yes, that is a bit —”
“Just checking, thank you. Resume.”
At that point, of course, I felt no restraints whatsoever about saying my piece, which is just my job, and despite my position as founder, president and CEO, no more than any other little man’s opinion. So, in consequence, before I turn with remarkable heartfelt thanks to Omphalos’s chief legal counsel and division leader, Ms. Brenda Farina, I want first to effulge a flattering spotlight on one of our new family members here at Omphalos, assistant to Ms. Farina, Ms. Kelly Beldon, QC. Comme ça!
With lifting right hand like launching a butterfly, DeLint signals Kelly to rise.
Real applause, some wolf whistles, and a full shot of Kelly standing from her seat like a torch held aloft. Displaying none of the awkwardness that such moments can occasion even in smooth operators, she smiles tightly, nods and sits, somewhat primly. No matter her self-possession, DeLint carries on as if she’d done a pratfall.
Kelly! Now sit still now! Maintenant! You’re just going to have to learn just like I did to sit still and take justifiably fulsome compliments!
Tight shot on Kelly’s face: pinch-lipped, eyes flashing sufferance of a fool.
Grow up, Kelly!
Widespread laughter, which Kevin heard again as at DeLint. The shot cuts to a pan of the front row alongside Mother DeLint, where no one is laughing. Kevin again reached and froze the frame.
“What now?” Ertelle risked. “Do you even need me sitting here?”
“Middle of the first row.”
Her fingers flicked in the air and the monitor showed three people.
“Like I’ve been saying, this MYCROFT has über-sensitive vocal command,” she sang sotto voce. “If you’d just learn the prefixes.”
“The middle man, balding, headshot only. And I am neither signing further to the mute MYCROFT nor singing to it, not after what we just learned about its hacking hocking super-learner algorithms.”
Ertelle guffawed appreciatively.
The man is more bald than balding, with thin reminders of thicker times brushed past his ears. Like feathers, Kevin thought. Half-plucked: the dead-alive eyes of the condemned. Because someone — DeLint of course — already owns him, poor Dr. Randome. In close-up, the shining dome reflects the bright lights at the front of the room, though that forehead would be high even under a moptop. And those eyes, washed-out blue eyes, heavily lashed, set a little too close, so a bit beady. The nose is fine and aquiline, the lips full, the pointy chin cleft. Such a head, Kevin smiled, still serves in sci-fi vids to represent extraterrestrial intelligence.
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t recognize Dr. Ewan Randome?” His conspiracy antennae were quivering again.
“Oh, yeah, the guy who owns the whole first floor…Psychiatric Wellness, right?”
“Dr. Randome is also named repeatedly in the sexual-harassment case this vid sideshow’s all about, but only because it was part of his job to give — on Mother LeLint’s orders — an orientation course for all new Omphalos personnel. He does top MYCROFT’s list of DeLint’s most significant contacts. And you say you already screened this coin, twice?”
“You don’t have to shout in my ear…sir. I confess: for a would-be detective I have a lousy memory sometimes.”
“Get up.”
She was genuinely upset. And he was upset she was upset. She stood away from the terminal, he took her seat. Warm, funky.
“Granted, you’d never know the reason for this farce, going from anything DeLint has said. But seven years ago this case came close to blowing the doors right off Omphalos. Not long afterwards, Kelly’s supervisor was sent to Africa, the New Republic of Congo. She died there in an Ebola outbreak that was well underway before she arrived. Kelly was offered her position, but left Omphalos instead.”
“And we’re interested in Dr. Randome because…?”
“Because of what he knows. He received his graduate training in psychiatry at Edinburgh, returned to Haiti and had to work under the rule of Duvalier Jr., the so-called Baby Doc. Randome was permitted to operate his own private clinic, first in Port-au-Prince, then in Santo Domingo. He gained his reputation for using the Macro and subliminal techniques in the mass treatment of carcinophobia. DeLint and his mother regularly vacationed in the D-R, where they had connections to the Duvaliers. Mother DeLint instantly recognized what Dr. Randome could do for Omphalos.”
Kevin made a steeple of his hands and contemplated the face of the younger Dr. Randome. After a minute, without looking down again, he signalled a small degree of zoom-out, then fluttered three fingers so that the shot retreated in hops.
Brigid Ertelle frowned again at his dexterity, made a puckered mouth and turned away.
“Ertelle?”
Like a summoned spirit she was instantly back at his left shoulder. He stood and she again took the seat without being told.
“I remembered I don’t know the signing for the latest REIMAGINE. In the closing pan, freeze on my say-so. I want the back rows.”
She carefully steepled her splayed fingers, which flexed as the vid resumed. O Canada was playing and everybody was standing and singing. DeLint was featured with an inappropriate pledge-of-allegiance hand over his heart, his lips moving too rapidly for the melody, more like someone cursing or praying impatiently, always glancing only to his left. A final slow pan of the audience: upwards of a thousand people in the auditorium, which took up the whole fifteenth floor, OMREC; at the back, under a balcony overhang, the last few rows comprised an indistinct dark mass.